He joined the faculty of the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, where he eventually became the Edwin Sibley Webster
professor Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department. Preceding this, he was associate director and Chief Operating Officer of the
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and principal of the Theory of Computation research group. He lists himself as faculty director of the MIT-Air Force AI Accelerator, which is designed to make fundamental advances in artificial intelligence to improve Department of the Air Force operations while also addressing broader societal needs. Leiserson received multiple research awards in 2013 and 2014 for the Cilk work (see below).
Akamai He was formerly director of research and director of system architecture for
Akamai Technologies in
Boston, a company that developed
content distribution networks in the late 1990s. The company grew out of the research made at M.I.T., and where his Ph.D. student Robert Blumofe was Executive Vice President.
Textbooks Leiserson coauthored the standard algorithms textbook
Introduction to Algorithms together with
Thomas H. Cormen,
Ronald L. Rivest, and
Clifford Stein. Leiserson mentions this was elected the "Best 1990 Professional and Scholarly Book in Computer Science and Data Processing" by the
Association of American Publishers. ==Awards and honors==