LIDS@80: A Celebration

As LIDS approaches its 80th anniversary, we are taking the opportunity to celebrate its community and accomplishments, reminisce about the good old times, and share insights and enthusiasm for the present and future.

Our celebration will feature a variety of talks and discussions about the past, present, and future of our field, with a focus on the LIDS community. It will also provide plenty of opportunities for alums to reconnect with each other, and to connect with current LIDS students, staff, and faculty.

LIDS, founded in 1940 as the Servomechanism Lab, is the oldest continuing lab at MIT. In its nearly eighty years of existence, the faculty, students, and researchers at LIDS have conducted important fundamental research, laying the foundations for technologies that have changed the world. Today LIDS remains as vibrant as ever. Many of the spectacular recent advances in data science and machine intelligence are all about systems that process information, and then make inferences and decisions. LIDS-type research provides much of the methodological core that underlies such developments, illustrating, once again, that despite tremendous changes in the technological landscape, many of the fundamental ideas and tools are timeless.

The LIDS@80 celebration will consist of four half-day sessions, focused on the following themes:

• Systems, Optimization, and Control
• Communications, Information Theory, and Networks
• From Data to Inference and Machine Learning
• Transitions

In addition, we will take the occasion to honor five distinguished colleagues for their significant and lasting impact on the field: Dimitri Bertsekas, Dave Forney, Bob Gallager, Sanjoy Mitter, and Alan Willsky.Organizing Committee
Sertac Karaman, Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MIT
Yury Polyanskiy, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Devavrat Shah, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Caroline Uhler, Henry L. and Grace Doherty Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
Eytan Modiano, Associate Director, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT
John Tsitsiklis, Director, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MITContact
All questions about the LIDS@80 celebration can be sent to lids80@mit.edu.