The MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems is an interdisciplinary research laboratory of MIT, working on research in the areas of communications, control, and signal processing combining faculty from the School of Engineering, the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, the Department of Mathematics and the MIT Sloan School of Management. The lab is located in the Dreyfoos Tower of the Stata Center and shares some research duties with MITs Lincoln Lab and the independent Charles Stark Draper Laboratory. The current acting director is Prof. Alan S. Willsky.
The Laboratory traces its beginnings to the MIT Servomechanics Laboratory, where much work on guidance systems and early computation was done during World War II.
Affectionately called LIDS, the laboratory has hosted several luminaries over the years, such as Claude Shannon and David Forney.
Famous quotes containing the words mit, laboratory, information, decision and/or systems:
“This summertime must be forgot
MIt will be, if we would or not....”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“With all of its bad influences, T.V. is not to be feared.... It can be a fairly safe laboratory for confronting, seeing through, and thus being immunized against unhealthy values so as to be “in the world but not of it.””
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)
“I am the very pattern of a modern Major-Gineral,
I’ve information vegetable, animal, and mineral;
I know the kings of England, and I quote the fights historical,
From Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical;”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“A good decision is based on knowledge and not on numbers.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“The only people who treasure systems are those whom the whole truth evades, who want to catch it by the tail. A system is just like truth’s tail, but the truth is like a lizard. It will leave the tail in your hand and escape; it knows that it will soon grow another tail.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)