Practical parallelism

The chips in most modern desktop computers have four “cores,” or processing units, which can run different computational tasks in parallel. But the chips of the future could have dozens or even hundreds of cores, and taking advantage of all that parallelism is a stiff challenge.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory have developed a new system that not only makes parallel programs run much more efficiently but also makes them easier to code.

In tests on a set of benchmark algorithms that are standard in the field, the researchers’ new system frequently enabled more than 10-fold speedups over existing systems that adopt the same parallelism strategy, with a maximum of 88-fold.

For instance, algorithms for solving an important problem called max flow have proven very difficult to parallelize. After decades of research, the best parallel implementation of one common max-flow algorithm achieves only an eightfold speedup when it’s run on 256 parallel processors. With the researchers’ new system, the improvement is 322-fold — and the program required only one-third as much code.

The new system, dubbed Fractal, achieves those speedups through a parallelism strategy known as speculative execution.

“In a conventional parallel program, you need to divide your work into tasks,” says Daniel Sanchez, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and senior author on the new paper. “But because these tasks are operating on shared data, you need to introduce some synchronization to ensure that the data dependencies that these tasks have are respected. From the mid-90s to the late 2000s, there were multiple waves of research in what we call speculative architectures. What these systems do is execute these different chunks in parallel, and if they detect a conflict, they abort and roll back one of them.”

Constantly aborting computations before they complete would not be a very efficient parallelization strategy. But for many applications, aborted computations are rare enough that they end up squandering less time than the complicated checks and updates required to synchronize tasks in more conventional parallel schemes. Last year, Sanchez’s group reported a system, called Swarm, that extended speculative parallelism to an important class of computational problems that involve searching data structures known as graphs.

Irreducible atoms

Research on speculative architectures, however, has often run aground on the problem of “atomicity.” Like all parallel architectures, speculative architectures require the programmer to divide programs into tasks that can run simultaneously. But with speculative architectures, each such task is “atomic,” meaning that it should seem to execute as a single whole. Typically, each atomic task is assigned to a separate processing unit, where it effectively runs in isolation.

Atomic tasks are often fairly substantial. The task of booking an airline flight online, for instance, consists of many separate operations, but they have to be treated as an atomic unit. It wouldn’t do, for instance, for the program to offer a plane seat to one customer and then offer it to another because the first customer hasn’t finished paying yet.

With speculative execution, large atomic tasks introduce two inefficiencies. The first is that, if the task has to abort, it might do so only after chewing up a lot of computational cycles. Aborting smaller tasks wastes less time.

The other is that a large atomic task may have internal subroutines that could be parallelized efficiently. But because the task is isolated on its own processing unit, those subroutines have to be executed serially, squandering opportunities for performance improvements.

Fractal — which Sanchez developed together with MIT graduate students Suvinay Subramanian, Mark Jeffrey, Maleen Abeydeera, Hyun Ryong Lee, and Victor A. Ying, and with Joel Emer, a professor of the practice and senior distinguished research scientist at the chip manufacturer NVidia — solves both of these problems. The researchers, who are all with MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, describe the system in a paper they presented this week at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture.

With Fractal, a programmer adds a line of code to each subroutine within an atomic task that can be executed in parallel. This will typically increase the length of the serial version of a program by a few percent, whereas an implementation that explicitly synchronizes parallel tasks will often increase it by 300 or 400 percent. Circuits hardwired into the Fractal chip then handle the parallelization.

Time chains

The key to the system is a slight modification of a circuit already found in Swarm, the researchers’ earlier speculative-execution system. Swarm was designed to enforce some notion of sequential order in parallel programs. Every task executed in Swarm receives a time stamp, and if two tasks attempt to access the same memory location, the one with the later time stamp is aborted and re-executed.

Fractal, too assigns each atomic task its own time stamp. But if an atomic task has a parallelizable subroutine, the subroutine’s time stamp includes that of the task that spawned it. And if the subroutine, in turn, has a parallelizable subroutine, the second subroutine’s time stamp includes that of the first, and so on. In this way, the ordering of the subroutines preserves the ordering of the atomic tasks.

As tasks spawn subroutines that spawn subroutines and so on, the concatenated time stamps can become too long for the specialized circuits that store them. In those cases, however, Fractal simply moves the front of the time-stamp train into storage. This means that Fractal is always working only on the lowest-level, finest-grained tasks it has yet identified, avoiding the problem of aborting large, high-level atomic tasks.

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Tiny “motors” are driven by light

Science fiction is full of fanciful devices that allow light to interact forcefully with matter, from light sabers to photon-drive rockets. In recent years, science has begun to catch up; some results hint at interesting real-world interactions between light and matter at atomic scales, and researchers have produced devices such as optical tractor beams, tweezers, and vortex beams.

Now, a team at MIT and elsewhere has pushed through another boundary in the quest for such exotic contraptions, by creating in simulations the first system in which particles —  ranging from roughly molecule- to bacteria-sized — can be manipulated by a beam of ordinary light rather than the expensive specialized light sources required by other systems. The findings are reported today in the journal Science Advances, by MIT postdocs Ognjen Ilic PhD ’15, Ido Kaminer, and Bo Zhen; professor of physics Marin Soljačić; and two others.

Most research that attempts to manipulate matter with light, whether by pushing away individual atoms or small particles, attracting them, or spinning them around, involves the use of sophisticated laser beams or other specialized equipment that severely limits the kinds of uses of such systems can be applied to. “Our approach is to look at whether we can get all these interesting mechanical effects, but with very simple light,” Ilic says.

The team decided to work on engineering the particles themselves, rather than the light beams, to get them to respond to ordinary light in particular ways. As their initial test, the researchers created simulated asymmetrical particles, called Janus (two-faced) particles, just a micrometer in diameter — one-hundredth the width of a human hair. These tiny spheres were composed of a silica core coated on side with a thin layer of gold.

When exposed to a beam of light, the two-sided configuration of these particles causes an interaction that shifts their axes of symmetry relative to the orientation of the beam, the researchers found. At the same time, this interaction creates forces that set the particles spinning uniformly. Multiple particles can all be affected at once by the same beam. And the rate of spin can be changed by just changing the color of the light.

The same kind of system, the researchers, say, could be applied to producing different kinds of manipulations, such as moving the positions of the particles. Ultimately, this new principle might be applied to moving particles around inside a body, using light to control their position and activity, for new medical treatments. It might also find uses in optically based nanomachinery.

About the growing number of approaches to controlling interactions between light and material objects, Kaminer says, “I think about this as a new tool in the arsenal, and a very significant one.”

Ilic says the study “enables dynamics that may not be achieved by the conventional approach of shaping the beam of light,” and could make possible a wide range of applications that are hard to foresee at this point. For example, in many potential applications, such as biological uses, nanoparticles may be moving in an incredibly complex, changing environment that would distort and scatter the beams needed for other kinds of particle manipulation. But these conditions would not matter to the simple light beams needed to activate the team’s asymmetric particles.

“Because our approach does not require shaping of the light field, a single beam of light can simultaneously actuate a large number of particles,” Ilic says. “Achieving this type of behavior would be of considerable interest to the community of scientists studying optical manipulation of nanoparticles and molecular machines.” Kaminer adds, “There’s an advantage in controlling large numbers of particles at once. It’s a unique opportunity we have here.”

Soljačić says this work fits into the area of topological physics, a burgeoning area of research that also led to last year’s Nobel Prize in physics. Most such work, though, has been focused on fairly specialized conditions that can exist in certain exotic materials called periodic media. “In contrast, our work investigates topological phenomena in particles,” he says.

And this is just the start, the team suggests. This initial set of simulations only addressed the effects with a very simple two-sided particle. “I think the most exciting thing for us,” Kaminer says, “is there’s an enormous field of opportunities here. With such a simple particle showing such complex dynamics,” he says, it’s hard to imagine what will be possible “with an enormous range of particles and shapes and structures we can explore.”

“Topology has been found to be a powerful tool in describing a select few physical systems,” says Mikael Rechtsman, an assistant professor of physics at Penn State who was not involved in this work. “Whenever a system can be described by a topological number, it is necessarily highly insensitive to imperfections that are present under realistic conditions. Soljačić's group has managed to find yet another important physical system in which this topological robustness can play a role, namely the control and manipulation of nanoparticles with light. Specifically, they have found that certain particles’ rotational states can be ‘topologically protected’ to be highly stable in the presence of a laser beam propagating through the system. This could potentially have importance for trapping and probing individual viruses and DNA, for example.”

The team also included Owen Miller at Yale University and Hrvoje Buljan at the University of Zagreb, in Croatia. The work was supported by the U.S. Army Research Office through the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, the National Science Foundation, and the European Research Council. 

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Online program wins engineering education award

In collaboration with Boeing and edX, MIT has been honored with the 2017 Excellence in Engineering Education Collaboration Award by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE).

The team was chosen for its design and development of a new four-course online professional certification program called Architecture and Systems Engineering: Models and Methods to Manage Complex Systems. The curriculum explores state-of-the-art practices in systems engineering and also demonstrates the value of models in enhancing system engineering functions and augmenting tasks with quantitative analysis.

The program launched last September and ran through March. Nine faculty members from MIT and more than 25 industry experts from Boeing, NASA, IBM, Apple, General Electric, General Motors, and other companies developed content for the courses. More than 1,600 professionals passed the four courses and earned a certificate in the first run of the program. Currently in its second run, the program is now accepting enrollments for September.

“For companies engaged in the development of complex systems, the ability to track the architecture over time is a core competence,” says Bruce Cameron, director of the System Architecture Lab at MIT and faculty director of the program. “As the complexity of the products we produce today increases, engineers face critical challenges managing these systems in the rapidly evolving environment around them. This program prepares the workforce to better face these challenges.”

The program is delivered on the edX platform, with integrated peer-to-peer assessments, group projects, discussion forums, polls, and surveys. In course feedback on the program, more than 93 percent of survey respondents rated the instructors and materials as “good,” “very good,” or “excellent”.

“For my client base, time is the most valuable asset they have. More than money,” explains Michael Fletcher, president of Fletcher Martin Corporation, who earned his professional certificate in March. “When you have a project that's squished into 20 weeks from planning to final completion and there’s a change, a ripple effect happens. Finding ways to minimize that ripple effect and conserve time and money is invaluable. [This program] really built a structured way of thinking that I didn't have before, and brought up a whole new set of ideas. I can't wait to get some models built.”

The development of the program can be traced back to the Space Act Agreement of 2016, when Boeing and NASA joined forces to strengthen engineering and technical leadership capabilities in the United States through innovative educational initiatives. They enlisted MIT and edX to help them create the program. MIT then built a consortium to inform the design of the program, which includes General Electric, Raytheon, Ford, MITRE, and General Motors.

“This partnership with MIT, edX, and NASA blends the expertise of industry, government, and a world-class academic institution to provide a unique educational experience in systems engineering, an area of critical importance to Boeing,” said Greg Hyslop, Boeing's chief technology officer and senior vice president of Engineering, Test and Technology. “That’s a win-win-win for all of us involved, and for the future of aerospace innovation as it’s now applied to learning.”

To earn a certificate, students must complete four courses: Architecture of Complex Systems; Models in Engineering; Model-Based Systems Engineering: Documentation and Analysis; and Quantitative Methods in Systems Engineering. Upon completion, participants are expected to understand and analyze complex systems, perform model management, frame systems architecture as a series of decisions, articulate the benefits and challenges of model-based systems engineering, and demonstrate a comprehensive knowledge of the key aspects of systems engineering.

“The market already offers many educational opportunities around specific tools and new modeling languages. We wanted to offer an overview on why and when to use the tools, in a format that fits into 4-5 hours per week to be compatible with a full-time job,” Cameron says. “The great challenge of system engineering is to foster communication across disciplines — this program builds in a variety of domain examples. ”

Lectures include architectural representations ranging from electrical layout to CAD drawings to functional block diagrams. “That spread is very intentional from our perspective,” Cameron says.

Anant Agarwal, the CEO of edX and an MIT professor, says the success of the program “is a result of edX, MIT, and Boeing’s, combined commitment to providing flexible, highly-engaging digital offerings for professional education at scale and at a fraction of the traditional cost.”

“Together, we are reinventing the way that practicing engineers of hugely complex systems gain access to the new thinking, processes, and tools that help them become more efficient,” Agarwal says.

ASEE, the award sponsor, created the Excellence in Engineering Education Collaboration Awards to demonstrate best practices in collaboration that enhance engineering education. The award competition is open to all ASEE Corporate Member Council organizations for their development of collegiate-level education programs and pre-college programs that generate curiosity and engage students in STEM education.

The award was presented at the 2017 ASEE Annual Conference in Columbus, Ohio, during the Industry Day Plenary Session on June 27.

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MIT team races to second in electric car competition

There comes a time in a team's life when it's impossible not to break into a grin. Which is what the MIT Motorsports team did when they snagged a Second Place Overall Spirit of Excellence Award at the Society of Automotive Engineers' Formula SAE Electric competition in Lincoln, Nebraska.

The team earned high finishes in four different categories at the June 24 event, which is part of the SAE Collegiate Design Series. They placed second in the category of Endurance, third in Autocross, third in Skid-Pad, and fifth in Acceleraton. In the Endurance category — which tests acceleration, speed, handling, dynamics, efficiency, and reliability over a 22-kilometer course — the MIT Motorsports team had the fastest lap at 83.7 seconds and overall finished just 17 seconds behind the winners, Penn Electric Racing from the University of Pennsylvania. 

“This has been one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done, and I couldn’t be happier with the results,” team captain Luis Mora said in an email to current and past team members.

MacGyver-style fixes, same-day delivery of key components

The team encountered multiple challenges leading up to the competition.  

Upon arrival in Lincoln, the early-arriving team members discovered that a battery pack contactor had a stripped stud and was unusable. The only replacement contactor was back at the shop at MIT. That left one option: Team member and junior Cameron Ordone drove to the shop, found contactors, tested their resistors, and delivered them to Area 51 CNC shop manager and team advisor Pat McAtamney just minutes before his flight boarded at Logan Airport.

But that wasn't the only problem that required a last-minute fix. First, the vehicle’s front wing did not meet the contest's rules and required modifications. Then a pedal box tab on the frame had a catastrophic mechanical failure during the braking test, so the team had to weld on a sturdier tab and undergo another inspection in order to compete in the day’s events.

“Luis’ leadership of the team was crucial. He made good decisions and stuck by them,” McAtamney said.

Smiling inside the helmet

The team's seniors played a significant role in the group's success. Now graduates, some of them have accepted positions with General Motors and SpaceX and had worked on three consecutive MIT Motorsports electric vehicles. The seniors, Mora said, “rebuilt the team, and now it is our turn to make sure the team progresses forward.”

Senior Will Harvey, who drove the car in the competition, was understandably pleased with the outcome.

“Nothing in the classroom can prepare you for the disappointment of a little water ruining a year of work,” he said, referring to the 2016 competition when the team had issues with the rain test that prevented them from competing in the Endurance category. “But when you turn the final corner and see the checkered flag in a car that you built with 25 friends, you just have to smile a bit inside the helmet.”

When you’re in competition, everything matters, McAtmaney said.

“If we can turn third places into firsts or second places, and do better at Autocross [a one-lap manuvering competition that determines the starting order for the Endurance event], then the team has a good chance of winning next year.”

Junior Cheyenne Hua, the newly-appointed team captain for the upcoming year, said the team's second-place finish this year “proved that we were good.”

“But there is still work to be done before we become exceptional,” she said.

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Letter regarding The Engine Working Groups preliminary report

The following email was sent today to the MIT community by Provost Martin A. Schmidt.

To members of the MIT community:

In December 2016, I charged The Engine Working Groups to guide the development of Institute policies and procedures for engaging with The Engine. The Engine, a new external innovation accelerator, was launched by MIT to help start-ups pursuing capital- and time-intensive technologies access patient capital, workspaces, equipment, and services needed to bring solutions from inception to the marketplace. Sixty-two members of the MIT community, including faculty, students, postdocs, and staff, participated in this effort. 

Professor Anantha P. Chandrakasan has led The Engine Working Groups effort and also heads The Engine Advisory Committee, which includes the Working Groups chairs, Vice President and General Counsel Mark DiVincenzo, Executive Director of the Industrial Performance Center Elisabeth Reynolds, and Senior Director for Institute Affairs Glen Comiso.

I now write to share the preliminary report of the Working Groups and to seek your input. Please submit any comments, questions, and suggestions to theenginewg@mit.edu. A final report will be released in early fall.

The Working Groups focused on five areas of MIT engagement with The Engine:

• New Models for Technology Licensing — Chair: Professor Timothy Swager
• Facilities Access — Chair: Professor Martin Culpepper
• Conflict of Interest — Chair: Professor Klavs Jensen
• Visas for MIT Entrepreneurs — Chair: Professor Dick Yue
• MIT’s Innovation Ecosystem — Co-Chairs: Professors Fiona Murray and Vladimir Bulović

This preliminary report is the product of six months of campus-wide engagement, discussions, research, and analysis by the Working Groups. The Advisory Committee submitted the preliminary report to me, Vice President for Research Maria Zuber, and Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz. 

The next step is to collect comments from the community and, after reviewing and incorporating this input, to deliver a final report in early fall and finalize an implementation plan. Finally, while the focus of this report is MIT’s engagement with The Engine, many of the recommendations will enhance overall innovation at the Institute.

I am grateful to Professor Chandrakasan, the chairs of the Working Groups, the Advisory Committee, and the Working Group members for their expertise, time, and service. I am eager to see how these ideas will allow MIT, along with entities such as The Engine, to help young companies develop innovations that positively transform society and help create a better world.

Sincerely,
Martin A. Schmidt

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Bolstering public support for state-level renewable energy policies

Since the 1980s, the United States has often been a world leader in supporting renewable energy technologies at the state and federal level. Thirty-seven states have enacted binding or voluntary renewable portfolio standards (RPS) requiring that a portion of the electricity mix come from renewable sources by a given date. But since 2011, adoption of such standards has slowed, and in the past several years there have been many attempts — some of them successful — to weaken, freeze, or repeal renewable energy laws.

Given the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, increased federal investment in renewable energy is unlikely for the foreseeable future. As a result, state-level renewable energy policies will likely be central to driving new deployment. Past research has shown that public opinion plays a crucial role in facilitating a political consensus around new policies in U.S. states. If that’s true for renewable energy policies, then people’s views may have a major influence on future actions taken by their states. 

For the past three years, MIT Associate Professor Christopher Warshaw of the Department of Political Science and Leah Stokes SM ’15, PhD ’15, now an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara, have been examining the interaction between public opinion and renewable energy policymaking. First, is there evidence that public opinion and energy policy align within a particular state? And second, what determines that public opinion? For example, can the design of a given RPS policy or how it’s presented to the public — that is, how it’s portrayed or framed — increase or decrease support for the policy?

Now, an analysis by Warshaw and Stokes finds that state legislators are, in fact, broadly responsive to public opinion in this policy arena. And based on data from a public opinion survey, the researchers offer practical advice on how to bolster public support for renewable policies. Their findings are published today in the journal Nature Energy.

Public opinion and renewable energy policy, state by state 

To begin investigating their questions, Warshaw and Stokes turned to data gathered by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, a major survey supported by 56 universities, including MIT, that has its origins in a survey first funded by the MIT Energy Initiative a decade ago. In the 2014 cooperative survey, 56,200 people were asked whether they supported an RPS policy that “requires the use of a minimum amount of renewable fuels (wind, solar, and hydroelectric) in the generation of electricity, even if electricity prices increase a little.”

Using the 2014 survey data, Warshaw and Stokes explored the relationship between public opinion and policy on a state-by-state basis. Their analysis showed that in most states a majority of the public supports renewable energy requirements — although frequently by a narrow margin. In addition, public support within each state is strongly correlated with the RPS policy now in effect. Thirty-seven states plus the District of Columbia have RPS policies that are congruent with the views of a majority of their citizens, leaving only 13 that don’t. All 13 states where more than 60 percent of the public supports an RPS have a binding RPS policy, with varying levels of ambitiousness. As public support drops close to or below 50 percent, states are much less likely to have a binding RPS.

“Overall, these findings suggest that state legislators are broadly responsive to public opinion on this issue,” says Warshaw. “If public support for renewable energy policies increased, we could expect to see more renewable energy laws.” 

A new experiment 

In other areas of policymaking, research has shown that exactly how a policy is designed and presented can significantly impact whether the public supports or opposes it. Thus, it’s possible that certain details of RPS policies could be swaying public opinion. “We needed to gauge how the design and framing of renewable energy policies may affect people’s support for them across the states,” says Warshaw. He and Stokes set out to design a survey experiment that would give them insight into what drives people’s opinions of renewable energy policies. 

They knew many factors could influence support for an RPS policy — from possible changes in electric bills to impacts on employment opportunities. A simple survey experiment might involve randomizing one such attribute at a time. For example, one group could be told that the new policy will increase residential electric bills, and the group’s response could then be compared to that of a control group that receives no information about added costs. 

But the attributes of interest here are independent — they have no impact on one another — so the researchers could investigate all of them simultaneously. With this approach, the effects of the different attributes are all measured on the same scale. When the results are in, it’s easy to see which factors are most important and warrant special attention or concern. 

In the new survey, all recipients received a central statement posing the possibility of the recipient’s state adopting a new RPS bill requiring that the state meet 35 percent of its electricity needs with renewable energy sources by the year 2025. Along with that description, they received a variety of additional statements about specific attributes of the bill, randomly distributed among the survey recipients. For each attribute, some (randomly selected) people received no added information, thereby serving as the control group in the experiment. 

Warshaw and Stokes received replies from about 2,500 respondents. They then performed a statistical analysis on all the data to determine how much information on each of the attributes changed people’s views of the basic RPS policy from those of the control group. 

Economic incentives — costs and jobs 

The results show that an increase in residential energy costs has a far greater impact on the outcome than any of the other attributes. Adding $2 to an electricity bill decreased support for an RPS policy by about 6 percent, while a $10 increase decreased support by fully 13 percent. Those changes are large enough to flip majority public opinion within some states from supporting to opposing RPS policies. In the $2 case, 13 states shifted from supporting to opposing; in the $10 case, 33 states moved to the opposing side. 

The possible impact on jobs is another big factor — one that can push support either way. Being told that the bill won’t create any jobs prompted 3.2 percent of respondents to oppose the bill. With that change, five states flipped from majority support to majority opposition. On the other hand, learning that the RPS policy will probably create several thousand jobs caused 7 percent of respondents to support the bill, a change that flipped eight states from majority opposition to majority support. “So if people think these policies will create a lot of jobs, public support increases enough to lead almost every state — except possibly the most conservative ones — to support RPS policies,” Stokes notes. 

The results provide some interesting clues about what people believe now. For example, the response to added costs suggests that many people think renewables won’t — or shouldn’t — cost them anything extra. The prospect of a $2 increase in their electricity bill prompts a shift toward opposition. If people started out thinking renewable standards would cost them something, adding just $2 to the bill probably wouldn’t have elicited such a change. 

The negative response to learning that the new policy will bring no extra jobs conveys a different message. “It may suggest that in the absence of any added information, people think the new bill will lead to a small increase in jobs — which frankly is generally about right,” says Warshaw. Once again, the experiment uncovered starting assumptions that people may have — perhaps without knowing it.

Environmental impacts 

Another reason to support using renewable energy may be the promise of environmental benefits. The survey tested that idea by telling some respondents that increasing renewable energy will reduce harmful air pollution in their state, including toxins such as mercury. Learning that air pollution will go down brings almost as large a response as learning that employment will go up: 6.7 percent of people move to the supporting side. “So emphasizing either job creation or air quality benefits could cause eight of the 10 states where a majority now opposes RPS bills — and where RPS policies largely do not exist — to flip to a majority in support,” says Stokes. 

Interestingly, linking RPS policies to climate change had no impact on public support. The survey included various statements about the effects of RPS policies on greenhouse gas emissions and about whether or not supporters and opponents believe climate change to be a serious problem. While the added information increased support slightly, the change wasn’t large enough to be statistically significant. 

Warshaw believes that the lack of impact isn’t because people don’t know or care about climate change. “I think it’s because they already have a pretty strong view on the connection between renewable energy policies and climate change,” he says. “Their view is already baked in, so you can’t frame the question in a way that triggers a change.” 

Partisan support 

One more factor of interest is the role played by elites in U.S. political parties. Some research suggests that partisanship isn’t important for energy policy, even though it has been shown to influence public support in other policy domains. So the researchers added some partisan cues. 

They found that when people were told that Democratic legislators support the RPS policy, public support increased by 2.4 percent, and three states flipped from majority opposition to majority support. When respondents were told that Republican legislators support it, public support increased by 5.5 percent, and seven states flip to majority support. Interestingly, the results show that if an elite affiliated with one political party supports the RPS policy, there is no statistically significant decrease in support by respondents affiliated with the other party. 

Warshaw believes that support by partisan elites can have a big impact in part because people’s views on renewable energy “aren’t super-strongly formed,” he says. “On policies they don’t know much about, people look to their elected officials to tell them what the right thing to believe is. There’s considerable political science evidence that that’s true.” 

Stokes notes that while none of the statements relating to climate change seemed to influence public opinion in the survey, in the absence of a coherent federal policy, state-level RPS policies may actually prove the most effective means of securing climate benefits. That prospect underscores the need for continuing public engagement during the decades-long process of weaning the U.S. energy system off fossil fuels. 

This research was supported by the MIT Energy Initiative Seed Fund Program. While at MIT, Leah Stokes was a 2010-2011 Siemens-MIT Energy Fellow and a 2013-2014 Martin Family Sustainability Fellow. Logistical support was provided by the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab.

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J-PAL North America partners with local governments to tackle homelessness and reduce incarceration

J-PAL North America, a research center at MIT, announced today that it will partner with three city and county governments to evaluate promising solutions to homelessness and other important policy challenges facing state and local governments in the U.S. The City of Baltimore, Maryland; King County, Washington; and Santa Clara County, California, will work with J-PAL North America staff and leading academic researchers to test programs designed to help vulnerable individuals find and keep housing and to reduce jail time and recidivism for low-level offenders.

“We’re excited to partner with Baltimore, King County, and Santa Clara County as they take on some of the most important policy issues facing state and local leaders,” says Melissa Kearney, professor of economics at the University of Maryland, non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and co-chair of the J-PAL State and Local Innovation Initiative. “Through rigorous research, we can help governments identify the most effective and cost-effective solutions to these challenges.”

“The goal of this initiative is to give government leaders tools to better understand the impact of their policies and programs,” adds Jonathan Guryan, initiative co-chair and associate professor of human development and social policy and economics in the School of Education and Social Policy and Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. “We hope that these partnerships will help these governments make better informed decisions and ultimately improve the lives of the people they serve.”

Baltimore’s Mayor’s Office of Human Services is partnering with J-PAL North America to test innovative approaches to reducing homelessness among unaccompanied youth. Baltimore has seen a 21 percent rise in the number of homeless young people aged 18 to 24 in the last three years, and the city’s few programs designed for unaccompanied youth are at full capacity. As the city works to increase investment to prevent youth homelessness, it’s critical that new resources are directed toward the most effective interventions. To that end, the Mayor’s Office of Human Services will partner with J-PAL North America to develop an evaluation of housing and supportive services for homeless youth, with the goal of reducing the length of time youth are homeless and helping them achieve long-term stability and independence.

“The City of Baltimore is thrilled to be selected as a partner city for the J-PAL State and Local Innovation Initiative,” said Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh. “This opportunity to work with top experts and researchers will put Baltimore at the forefront of national efforts to develop evidence-based services and interventions for unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness. Over the past two years, we’ve worked to better serve homeless youth by conducting counts and surveys, investing in new housing opportunities and streamlining our systems of care. We look forward to working with J-PAL to evaluate what approaches are working best and build on our success.”

King County’s Department of Community and Human Services will partner with J-PAL North America to develop evaluations of two important programs — one aimed at preventing and reducing homelessness and another geared towards decreasing jail time and reducing recidivism for low-level offenders. The county’s Department of Community and Human Services coordinates services with community-based agencies to reach the region’s most vulnerable populations, such as people experiencing homelessness, mental illness, and substance use disorders. King County will partner with J-PAL North America and the Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities (LEO) to develop an evaluation of the Youth and Family Homelessness Prevention Initiative, which provides flexible funding and case management to families and unaccompanied youth. King County will also partner with J-PAL North America and LEO to evaluate the effectiveness of the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program, a pre-booking diversion program that redirects low-level offenders engaged in drug or prostitution activity to case management and community services.

“King County is continually improving our evidence-based policymaking to achieve better outcomes for our residents,” said King County Executive Dow Constantine. “I am thrilled King County was selected for J-PAL's State and Local Innovation Initiative. This partnership will allow us to better evaluate our homelessness prevention efforts and reduce involvement in our criminal justice system. We look forward to working with Notre Dame's Lab for Economic Opportunities and learning from other jurisdictions and J-PAL's network.”

Santa Clara County’s Office of Supportive Housing will partner with J-PAL North America to develop an evaluation of potential solutions to address homelessness among single adults. Despite its affluence, Santa Clara County has one of the largest homeless populations in the country, numbering 6,556 individuals in 2015 — 70 percent of whom have been found to be living in unsheltered conditions such as on the streets, under bridges, in cars, or in abandoned buildings. The county’s Office of Supportive Housing leads efforts to supply affordable housing for extremely low-income and special-needs households. Through a partnership with J-PAL North America and LEO, Santa Clara aims to build needed evidence of the impact of its housing interventions, not only on homelessness but also on public health and criminal justice outcomes, with the ultimate goal of ending homelessness within five years.

“Our partnership with the University of Notre Dame and MIT demonstrates our ongoing commitment to implementing the most cost-effective and evidence-based solutions to reducing homelessness in Santa Clara County,” says Ky Lee, director of Santa Clara’s Office of Supportive Housing.

All of these programs are expected to attract more applicants than they can serve. This creates an opportunity to assign slots to the program randomly, which is seen as a fair way to allocate scarce resources and allows researchers to rigorously evaluate the program.

“We were impressed by the strong commitment of the leaders in these governments to using data and rigorous evaluations to inform their policy decisions,” says Mary Ann Bates, deputy executive director of J-PAL North America and initiative co-chair. “Together with the other applicants to this initiative, these leaders represent an important movement toward evidence-based policymaking in the United States.”

The three jurisdictions will join five governments selected last year in the inaugural round of the J-PAL State and Local Innovation Initiative: Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Puerto Rico, Rochester, and South Carolina. This initiative supports state and local governments in generating new and widely applicable lessons about which social programs work, which work best, and why. These government partners and J-PAL North America are working to bridge the gap between academia and policy, and translate research into action that has a real impact on people’s lives.

For more information, contact initiative manager Julia Chabrier. To learn more, or to sign up to receive updates on the J-PAL State and Local Innovation Initiative, visit http://ift.tt/1I2hzTW.

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Peering into neural networks

Neural networks, which learn to perform computational tasks by analyzing large sets of training data, are responsible for today’s best-performing artificial intelligence systems, from speech recognition systems, to automatic translators, to self-driving cars.

But neural nets are black boxes. Once they’ve been trained, even their designers rarely have any idea what they’re doing — what data elements they’re processing and how.

Two years ago, a team of computer-vision researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) described a method for peering into the black box of a neural net trained to identify visual scenes. The method provided some interesting insights, but it required data to be sent to human reviewers recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing service.

At this year’s Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference, CSAIL researchers will present a fully automated version of the same system. Where the previous paper reported the analysis of one type of neural network trained to perform one task, the new paper reports the analysis of four types of neural networks trained to perform more than 20 tasks, including recognizing scenes and objects, colorizing grey images, and solving puzzles. Some of the new networks are so large that analyzing any one of them would have been cost-prohibitive under the old method.

The researchers also conducted several sets of experiments on their networks that not only shed light on the nature of several computer-vision and computational-photography algorithms, but could also provide some evidence about the organization of the human brain.

Neural networks are so called because they loosely resemble the human nervous system, with large numbers of fairly simple but densely connected information-processing “nodes.” Like neurons, a neural net’s nodes receive information signals from their neighbors and then either “fire” — emitting their own signals — or don’t. And as with neurons, the strength of a node’s firing response can vary.

In both the new paper and the earlier one, the MIT researchers doctored neural networks trained to perform computer vision tasks so that they disclosed the strength with which individual nodes fired in response to different input images. Then they selected the 10 input images that provoked the strongest response from each node.

In the earlier paper, the researchers sent the images to workers recruited through Mechanical Turk, who were asked to identify what the images had in common. In the new paper, they use a computer system instead.

“We catalogued 1,100 visual concepts — things like the color green, or a swirly texture, or wood material, or a human face, or a bicycle wheel, or a snowy mountaintop,” says David Bau, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and one of the paper’s two first authors. “We drew on several data sets that other people had developed, and merged them into a broadly and densely labeled data set of visual concepts. It’s got many, many labels, and for each label we know which pixels in which image correspond to that label.”

The paper’s other authors are Bolei Zhou, co-first author and fellow graduate student; Antonio Torralba, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science; Aude Oliva, CSAIL principal research scientist; and Aditya Khosla, who earned his PhD as a member of Torralba’s group and is now the chief technology officer of the medical-computing company PathAI.

The researchers also knew which pixels of which images corresponded to a given network node’s strongest responses. Today’s neural nets are organized into layers. Data are fed into the lowest layer, which processes them and passes them to the next layer, and so on. With visual data, the input images are broken into small chunks, and each chunk is fed to a separate input node.

For every strong response from a high-level node in one of their networks, the researchers could trace back the firing patterns that led to it, and thus identify the specific image pixels it was responding to. Because their system could frequently identify labels that corresponded to the precise pixel clusters that provoked a strong response from a given node, it could characterize the node’s behavior with great specificity.

The researchers organized the visual concepts in their database into a hierarchy. Each level of the hierarchy incorporates concepts from the level below, beginning with colors and working upward through textures, materials, parts, objects, and scenes. Typically, lower layers of a neural network would fire in response to simpler visual properties — such as colors and textures — and higher layers would fire in response to more complex properties.

But the hierarchy also allowed the researchers to quantify the emphasis that networks trained to perform different tasks placed on different visual properties. For instance, a network trained to colorize black-and-white images devoted a large majority of its nodes to recognizing textures. Another network, when trained to track objects across several frames of video, devoted a higher percentage of its nodes to scene recognition than it did when trained to recognize scenes; in that case, many of its nodes were in fact dedicated to object detection.

One of the researchers’ experiments could conceivably shed light on a vexed question in neuroscience. Research involving human subjects with electrodes implanted in their brains to control severe neurological disorders has seemed to suggest that individual neurons in the brain fire in response to specific visual stimuli. This hypothesis, originally called the grandmother-neuron hypothesis, is more familiar to a recent generation of neuroscientists as the Jennifer-Aniston-neuron hypothesis, after the discovery that several neurological patients had neurons that appeared to respond only to depictions of particular Hollywood celebrities.

Many neuroscientists dispute this interpretation. They argue that shifting constellations of neurons, rather than individual neurons, anchor sensory discriminations in the brain. Thus, the so-called Jennifer Aniston neuron is merely one of many neurons that collectively fire in response to images of Jennifer Aniston. And it’s probably part of many other constellations that fire in response to stimuli that haven’t been tested yet.

Because their new analytic technique is fully automated, the MIT researchers were able to test whether something similar takes place in a neural network trained to recognize visual scenes. In addition to identifying individual network nodes that were tuned to particular visual concepts, they also considered randomly selected combinations of nodes. Combinations of nodes, however, picked out far fewer visual concepts than individual nodes did — roughly 80 percent fewer.

“To my eye, this is suggesting that neural networks are actually trying to approximate getting a grandmother neuron,” Bau says. “They’re not trying to just smear the idea of grandmother all over the place. They’re trying to assign it to a neuron. It’s this interesting hint of this structure that most people don’t believe is that simple.”

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West Garage scheduled to close September 2017

On Sept. 15, 2017, the West Garage (W45), located on Vassar Street across from the Johnson Athletic Center and Steinbrenner Stadium, is scheduled to close in preparation for the construction of a new undergraduate residence hall on the site. The garage is expected to remain available on a limited basis through mid-November for special events and athletic events. In late fall and early winter, the construction project team will conduct exploratory work and will prepare the structure for demolition, which is slated to take place in early 2018.

To accommodate MIT permit holders who currently use the roughly 370 parking spaces in the West Garage, the Parking and Transportation Office has developed a solution based on assigning permit holders to other parking areas on campus and incorporating a new Attendant Assist parking program at Stata Garage.

Permit renewal process opens June 30

On June 30, the parking permit renewal process will open for the 2017-2018 year. Permit holders who were assigned to the West Garage for the previous year will now be assigned to a new parking area. These parking areas will include Northwest, Northeast (Stata), Riverside, and North. When individuals log into the parking site through Atlas to renew their permits, the new assignments will already be entered into the system.

“The Parking and Transportation team has reviewed parking assignments carefully,” says Tom Giannino, operations manager for the Parking and Transportation Office. “For each individual, we assessed the proximity from parking area to office with the goal of minimizing walking distances as much as possible.”

Currently, West Garage is used frequently for athletic events and special events parking, and the garage will remain available for these uses through mid-November. Starting at the end of November, the Albany Garage will become the primary parking facility for athletic events and special events, supplemented by Northwest area lots.

Launching the Attendant Assist program at Stata Garage

With the goal of keeping parkers closer to their offices, the team is planning to increase the availability of parking in Stata Garage by introducing the Attendant Assist program. This program is being implemented at Stata to allow more parkers access to a centrally located garage.

Once the regular parking spaces in Stata are all full, parkers — with assistance from a customer service representative (CSR) and parking attendants — will be directed to park in aisle spaces and will leave their keys with the attendants. Keys will be stored in a locked box at each aisle, and attendants will move cars as needed to assist parkers moving in and out of spaces. The process will be overseen by an on-site supervisor.

During the recent renovation of Building E70 at 1 Broadway, the Attendant Assist program was employed successfully to manage parking spaces in the E70 garage and keep the garage available to parkers during construction. The program at Stata is expected to benefit from the experience of the team managing this solution.

Evolving commuter options for an evolving campus

As part of the Kendall Square project, a new underground parking garage is scheduled to open in 2020, adding 500 parking spaces back into the inventory. In the meantime, as MIT moves forward with enhancements to the campus to meet research and residential needs, the Parking and Transportation Office and Office of Campus Planning will continue to seek more options for members of the community as they navigate to and from the campus.

“Our goal is to ease the burden on our parkers as much as possible,” says John DiFava, director of campus services and chief of police at MIT. “We’re implementing a solution that has met with success elsewhere, and we will adapt the program once we observe how it is working for our community.”

This past year, the Parking and Transportation Office, in partnership with the MIT Office of Sustainability and the MIT Transit Lab, launched the Access MIT program, a suite of enhanced commuter benefits designed to encourage sustainable transportation practices. Access MIT makes it easier for MIT community members to seek lower-carbon transportation options, such as commuting by bike or via public transportation instead of by car, supporting MIT’s goal of reducing parking demand on campus 10 percent by 2018. The program provides eligible employees with benefits such as free MBTA subway and local bus passes, commuter rail subsidies, and subsidies for parking at MBTA stations. To date, Access MIT has succeeded in reducing parking demand on campus by almost 5 percent.

MIT individuals with questions about the parking program may contact the Parking and Transportation Office at mitparking@mit.edu or 617-258-6510.

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Rainer Weiss wins Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research

The 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research was awarded on June 14 to MIT Professor Emeritus Rainer Weiss and to Caltech physicists Kip S. Thorne and Barry C. Barish and the LIGO Scientific Collaboration.

Weiss was one of the inventors of the laser interferometer gravitational wave detector in the 1970s and co-founded with Thorne and the late Ronald Drever the National Science Foundation Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) project in the 1980s to detect gravitational waves. Astronomers had strong indirect evidence for gravitational waves from the measurements of a binary pulsar system between 1970 to 1990. But on Sept. 14, 2015, LIGO made the first direct detection of gravitational waves from the collision of two black holes.

The measurement came from Advanced LIGO, an upgraded version of LIGO’s two large interferometers at Hanford, Washington, and Livingston, Louisiana. Two other detections have been confirmed since then, with the most recent occurring on Jan. 4 of this year. The detections have confirmed Einstein's field equations in the limit of strong gravity and have opened a new field: gravitational wave astronomy.

In addition to receiving the 2017 Princess of Asturias Award for Technical and Scientific Research, Weiss’ contributions to the field for more than 40 years have resulted in numerous awards, including the 2016 Kavli Prize in Astrophysics, a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the 2016 Gruber Prize in Cosmology, and the Shaw Prize in Astronomy.

The Princess of Asturias Foundation presents the Asturias Awards for research and discoveries that "contribute to extolling and promoting those scientific, cultural, and humanistic values that form part of the universal heritage of humanity." Weiss and his team were chosen from a field of 39 candidates from 17 different countries. The awards will be presented this autumn in Oviedo, Spain, at a ceremony presided over by Queen Letizia Ortiz Rocasolano and King Felipe VI, the monarchs of Spain. Each awardee will receive a cash prize of 50,000 euros, a diploma, and an insignia. The winners will also receive a sculpture of Joan Miró, one of Spain’s most celebrated artists.

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Investigating the trap of unemployment

Sitting at a computer screen in a windowless office, a third-year MIT PhD economics student from Paris looks at the latest numbers on France’s unemployment rate. Although the office is located on MIT’s campus, Aicha Ben Dhia’s mind is thousands of miles away. She’s thinking about the people whose lives are reflected in those numbers, and trying to imagine the job search from their point of view.

This summer, Ben Dhia will travel to her home country to conduct field research and meet the people she often envisions while analyzing the data. Working with the French governmental agency Pôle Emploi, she will investigate how workers search for jobs and how employers search for workers. She is dedicated to understanding the practical challenges job seekers face and the consequences of those challenges for the national economy.

The unemployment rate in France is currently around 10 percent. Ben Dhia says that percentage doesn’t include the millions of part-time workers who are still job hunting and are registered with Pôle Emploi.

“It’s even worse for young people between the age of 15 and 24. This group’s unemployment rate is as high as 23 percent,” Ben Dhia says. “Another feature that makes it special in France is long-term unemployment. You have a lot of people in France that have been unemployed for more than a year.”

Tools for the hunt

In France, Ben Dhia says, there is a big push to send job seekers to training programs that can build on existing skills or help them learn new skills. She says it’s easy for economists and government agencies to offer training programs to job seekers and watch the unemployment rate needle bounce up or down. However, there are many other factors that contribute to the success of finding long-lasting employment.

Ben Dhia tries to see the situation from the job seeker’s perspective. Take, for example, a 50-year-old construction worker who has just been laid off.

“Is it better for me to change, to move from one region to another, or is it better for me to start this training program to make me a better construction worker?” she says. “Or is it better that I switch from this sector to a completely different one, like computers?”

Ben Dhia is hoping to discover an efficient way to sort job seekers so they can participate in the most helpful training programs. She is using statistical data and research to inform counselors and job seekers about the best options for securing long-term employment.

During the summer, Ben Dhia will be spending time in France to meet some of these individuals, ask them questions, and better understand the current process of job searching in France. She expects to learn about the underlying obstacles and challenges of an unemployed person in order to better develop strategies to help them find jobs.

Currently, she says, people go about the process in an ad hoc way. Job counselors meet hundreds of job seekers and usually can offer only 30 minutes of their time per person. Furthermore, job applicants may not receive substantial feedback from jobs they are rejected from, which could help them learn from the process. Ben Dhia believes the problems are compounded by job seekers who are paralyzed by their vulnerability. All of this can contribute to the country’s economy on a large scale.

“You have to build yourself,” Ben Dhia says. “And that’s very hard at a time when you’re at your lowest confidence. You doubt yourself very much, but because you have to be pushy and proactive, you have to make decisions to keep going.”

If there was a statistical method based on data that could direct job seekers to the right path, perhaps these challenges could be circumvented, according to Ben Dhia. She hopes to get a better understanding of what job seekers are up against by meeting them in person.

“One of the things I like the most is going to talk to people, a way to sympathize, and work with people,” Ben Dhia says. “I know I’m excited by data, but I think in terms of conceptual problems. Math is cleaner than economics, but I did not do economics to do theory. You want to go concrete and discover how [the problem you’re studying] happens.”

Finding economics

It wasn’t always clear to Ben Dhia that she would eventually study economics. After high school, she spent two years in a preparatory school with a concentration in mathematics and physics. Although her parents are researchers in math and engineering fields, she had always known she wanted to work in social sciences. When she was admitted to a distinguished university in Paris, École Normale Supérieure, which offers courses for a variety of disciplines, Ben Dhia was relieved.

“I was happy I didn’t get accepted into an engineering-only school, because I have two left hands and I’m way more interested in social sciences,” she says.

Her decision to come to MIT and pursue economics sprouted from a manual search through a large book containing alumni contact information. She emailed each alumnus that she thought had interesting background. The first person she met counseled her to challenge herself, try something different, and apply for schools in the U.S.

“Paris, I knew. Math, I knew. I wanted to be challenged with something new, and I wanted something with a social impact that had a math background,” Ben Dhia says.

When she first came to MIT, Ben Dhia was unsure about what area of economics she wanted to pursue. Under the supervision of Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics, Ben Dhia traveled to India to implement a project to increase immunization rates of infants in the state of Haryana. Even though the government provided free immunization for children in the state, only 50 percent of infants in Haryana were obtaining basic immunizations by the time they were 1 year old.

While in India, Aicha and her team were trying to scale up an earlier experiment that increased the baseline percentage threefold (from 6 to 18 percent), with a system to keep clinics regularly staffed with nurses and health center workers. After realizing that parents carried their children from distant villages to immunize their child for seemingly inconceivable long-term benefits, the researchers tried compensating visitors with a short-term benefit — a bag of lentils at the end of their visits. This increased the percentage of immunized children from 18 to 36 percent.

“It was fantastic to spend two months in India. Seeing how a project works in practice is very insightful and I learned a lot. More importantly I met incredible people and made great friends” Ben Dhia says.

A love of the outdoors

The year prior to starting graduate school at MIT, Ben Dhia explored other job opportunities. To help a friend, she wrote math lessons for a third-grade textbook that was distributed throughout Senegal. Another friend asked if she could consult on ideas for children’s toys that emphasize the value of trying over success. For half a year Ben Dhia also worked in a private equity investment firm in Senegal. Although she didn’t enjoy the negotiating aspect of the job, Ben Dhia was thankful for the opportunity.

“Working in a different environment, meeting different people, and working in Africa with Africans in a firm that had an exposure to other countries and very high work standards was a short, but very rich experience,” she says.

In Boston, Ben Dhia is physically active, swimming, running, hiking, and especially playing soccer. In France, she says it’s rare for women to play soccer, and as a kid she would play the sport with her brother. Here, whenever and wherever there’s enough grass, she loves to play.

Although Ben Dhia is uncertain about what she will want to do in the future or what kind of career she will have, she thinks a lot about going back to Europe, somewhere new but close to family. It’s clear that Ben Dhia lives for adventures and close relationships with other people.

Economics and statistics can be cold and technical but Ben Dhia’s work is balanced with her loves for travel, playing guitar in the French Alps, a good soccer match on a glossy grass field, her yearly trips to visit family in Tunisia, and the dinners she shares with friends while songs by Salif Keïta, an afro-pop singer-songwriter from Mali, play in the background.

On days when the weather is nice and she still has work to do, Ben Dhia can’t stand her windowless office. She grabs her stuff and searches for a new spot to make a temporary office.

“On sunny days like this, I cannot stay in my office. I look for sun and I look for windows,” she says.

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Kit Cummins awarded the American Chemical Society Pauling Medal

Department of Chemistry Professor Christopher (Kit) Cummins has been honored with the 2017 Linus Pauling Medal, in recognition of his unparalleled synthetic and mechanistic studies of early-transition metal complexes, including reaction discovery and exploratory methods of development to improve nitrogen and phosphorous utilization. Cummins, the Henry Dreyfus Professor of Chemistry, will be presented with the Pauling Medal at an award symposium this fall at Portland State University in Oregon.

"I was introduced to Pauling's hugely influential book 'The Nature of the Chemical Bond' as an undergraduate student at Cornell, where I had the incredible honor to meet Linus when he visited to reprise his Baker lectures from a half century earlier, out of which the book had grown,"  Cummins says. "It is like a dream come true for me to be selected to receive an award named for the human being who gave us so many of chemistry's central concepts. I will dedicate my award lecture to my fantastic students, past and present, for having embarked with me on a rich and still unfolding voyage of scientific discovery."

The Pauling Medal is sponsored jointly by the Portland, Puget Sound, and Oregon sections of the American Chemical Society. It is presented annually in recognition of outstanding achievement in chemistry in the spirit of, and in honor of, Linus Pauling, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 and the Nobel Prize for peace in 1962. Cummins joins several current members of the Department of Chemistry in being named a Linus Pauling Medal awardee, including Tim Swager (2016), Stephen Buchwald (2014), and Stephen Lippard (2009), as well as former department members Alexander Rich (1995) and John Waugh (1984).

Researchers in the Cummins Group are developing new methods of inorganic synthesis to address a variety of interesting questions. The activation of small molecules by transition-metal systems is a featured area, with ongoing work in the areas of synthetic nitrogen fixation, carbon dioxide reduction, and while phosphorus utilization. They are developing thermally activated molecular precursors to reactive small molecules or transient intermediates such as diphosphorus and phosphaethyne, molecules of astrophysical importance. Studies on supramolecular anion receptor host-guest chemistry inform their work on dioxygen electron transfer processes, which are germane to solar energy storage and approaches to improved metal-air battery technology. In addition, Cummins Group researchers work to develop new starting materials in phosphate chemistry including acid forms that provide a starting point for synthesizing new phosphate-based materials with applications in next-generation battery technologies and catalysis. Experimental studies are supplemented with quantum chemical investigations for analysis of chemical bonding, reaction mechanisms, and property predictions.

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Scientists produce dialysis membrane made from graphene

Dialysis, in the most general sense, is the process by which molecules filter out of one solution, by diffusing through a membrane, into a more dilute solution. Outside of hemodialysis, which removes waste from blood, scientists use dialysis to purify drugs, remove residue from chemical solutions, and isolate molecules for medical diagnosis, typically by allowing the materials to pass through a porous membrane.

Today’s commercial dialysis membranes separate molecules slowly, in part due to their makeup: They are relatively thick, and the pores that tunnel through such dense membranes do so in winding paths, making it difficult for target molecules to quickly pass through.

Now MIT engineers have fabricated a functional dialysis membrane from a sheet of graphene — a single layer of carbon atoms, linked end to end in hexagonal configuration like that of chicken wire. The graphene membrane, about the size of a fingernail, is less than 1 nanometer thick. (The thinnest existing memranes are about 20 nanometers thick.) The team’s membrane is able to filter out nanometer-sized molecules from aqueous solutions up to 10 times faster than state-of-the-art membranes, with the graphene itself being up to 100 times faster.

While graphene has largely been explored for applications in electronics, Piran Kidambi, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, says the team’s findings demonstrate that graphene may improve membrane technology, particularly for lab-scale separation processes and potentially for hemodialysis.

“Because graphene is so thin, diffusion across it will be extremely fast,” Kidambi says. “A molecule doesn’t have to do this tedious job of going through all these tortuous pores in a thick membrane before exiting the other side. Moving graphene into this regime of biological separation is very exciting.”

Kidambi is a lead author of a study reporting the technology, published today in Advanced Materials. Six co-authors are from MIT, including Rohit Karnik, associate professor of mechanical engineering, and Jing Kong, associate professor of electrical engineering.

Plugging graphene

To make the graphene membrane, the researchers first used a common technique called chemical vapor deposition to grow graphene on copper foil. They then carefully etched away the copper and transferred the graphene to a supporting sheet of polycarbonate, studded throughout with pores large enough to let through any molecules that have passed through the graphene. The polycarbonate acts as a scaffold, keeping the ultrathin graphene from curling up on itself.

The researchers looked to turn graphene into a molecularly selective sieve, letting through only molecules of a certain size. To do so, they created tiny pores in the material by exposing the structure to oxygen plasma, a process by which oxygen, pumped into a plasma chamber, can etch away at materials.

“By tuning the oxygen plasma conditions, we can control the density and size of pores we make, in the areas where the graphene is pristine,” Kidambi says. “What happens is, an oxygen radical comes to a carbon atom [in graphene] and rapidly reacts, and they both fly out as carbon dioxide.”

What is left is a tiny hole in the graphene, where a carbon atom once sat. Kidambi and his colleagues found that the longer graphene is exposed to oxygen plasma, the larger and more dense the pores will be. Relatively short exposure times, of about 45 to 60 seconds, generate very small pores.

Desirable defects

The researchers tested multiple graphene membranes with pores of varying sizes and distributions, placing each membrane in the middle of a diffusion chamber. They filled the chamber’s feed side with a solution containing various mixtures of molecules of different sizes, ranging from potassium chloride (0.66 nanometers wide) to vitamin B12 (1 to 1.5 nanometers) and lysozyme (4 nanometers), a protein found in egg white. The other side of the chamber was filled with a dilute solution.

The team then measured the flow of molecules as they diffused through each graphene membrane.

Membranes with very small pores let through potassium chloride but not larger molecules such as L-tryptophan, which measures only 0.2 nanometers wider. Membranes with larger pores let through correspondingly larger molecules.

The team carried out similar experiments with commercial dialysis membranes and found that, in comparison, the graphene membranes performed with higher “permeance,” filtering out the desired molecules up to 10 times faster.

Kidambi points out that the polycarbonate support is etched with pores that only take up 10 percent of its surface area, which limits the amount of desired molecules that ultimately pass through both layers.

“Only 10 percent of the membrane’s area is accessible, but even with that 10 percent, we’re able to do better than state-of-the-art,” Kidambi says.

To make the graphene membrane even better, the team plans to improve the polycarbonate support by etching more pores into the material to increase the membrane’s overall permeance. They are also working to further scale up the dimensions of the membrane, which currently measures 1 square centimeter. Further tuning the oxygen plasma process to create tailored pores will also improve a membrane’s performance — something that Kidambi points out would have vastly different consequences for graphene in electronics applications.

“What’s exciting is, what’s not great for the electronics field is actually perfect in this [membrane dialysis] field,” Kidambi says. “In electronics, you want to minimize defects. Here you want to make defects of the right size. It goes to show the end use of the technology dictates what you want in the technology. That’s the key.”

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy and a Lindemann Trust Fellowship.

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A new way of extracting copper

MIT researchers have identified the proper temperature and chemical mixture to selectively separate pure copper and other metallic trace elements from sulfur-based minerals using molten electrolysis. This one-step, environmentally friendly process simplifies metal production and eliminates the toxic byproducts such as sulfur dioxide.

Postdoc Sulata K. Sahu and PhD student Brian J. Chmielowiec ’12 decomposed sulfur-rich minerals into pure sulfur and extracted three different metals at very high purity: copper, molybdenum, and rhenium. They also quantified the amount of energy needed to run the extraction process.

An electrolysis cell is a closed circuit, like a battery, but instead of producing electrical energy, it consumes electrical energy to break apart compounds into their elements, for example, splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. Such electrolytic processes are the primary method of aluminum production and are used as the final step to remove impurities in copper production. Contrary to aluminum, however, there are no direct electrolytic decomposition processes for copper-containing sulfide minerals to produce liquid copper.

The MIT researchers found a promising method of forming liquid copper metal and sulfur gas in their cell from an electrolyte composed of barium sulfide, lanthanum sulfide, and copper sulfide, which yields greater than 99.9 percent pure copper. This purity is equivalent to the best current copper production methods. Their results are published in an Electrochimica Acta paper with senior author Antoine Allanore, assistant professor of metallurgy.

One-step process

“It is a one-step process, directly just decompose the sulfide to copper and sulfur. Other previous methods are multiple steps,” Sahu explains. “By adopting this process, we are aiming to reduce the cost.”

Copper is in increasing demand for use in electric vehicles, solar energy, consumer electronics and other energy efficiency targets. Most current copper extraction processes burn sulfide minerals in air, which produces sulfur dioxide, a harmful air pollutant that has to be captured and reprocessed, but the new method produces elemental sulfur, which can be safely reused, for example, in fertilizers. The researchers also used electrolysis to produce rhenium and molybdenum, which are often found in copper sulfides at very small levels.

The new work builds on a 2016 Journal of The Electrochemical Society paper offering proof of electrolytic extraction of copper authored by Samira Sokhanvaran, Sang-Kwon Lee, Guillaume Lambotte, and Allanore. They showed that addition of barium sulfide to a copper sulfide melt suppressed copper sulfide’s electrical conductivity enough to extract a small amount of pure copper from the high-temperature electrochemical cell operating at 1,105 degrees Celsius (2,021 Fahrenheit). Sokhanvaran is now a research scientist at Natural Resources Canada-Canmet Mining; Lee is a senior researcher at Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute; and Lambotte is now a senior research engineer at Boston Electrometallurgical Corp.

“This paper was the first one to show that you can use a mixture where presumably electronic conductivity dominates conduction, but there is not actually 100 percent. There is a tiny fraction that is ionic, which is good enough to make copper,” Allanore explains.

“The new paper shows that we can go further than that and almost make it fully ionic, that is reduce the share of electronic conductivity and therefore increase the efficiency to make metal,” Allanore says.

These sulfide minerals are compounds where the metal and the sulfur elements share electrons. In their molten state, copper ions are missing one electron, giving them a positive charge, while sulfur ions are carrying two extra electrons, giving them a negative charge. The desired reaction in an electrolysis cell is to form elemental atoms, by adding electrons to metals such as copper, and taking away electrons from sulfur. This happens when extra electrons are introduced to the system by the applied voltage. The metal ions are reacting at the cathode, a negatively charged electrode, where they gain electrons in a process called reduction; meanwhile, the negatively charged sulfur ions are reacting at the anode, a positively charged electrode, where they give up electrons in a process called oxidation.

In a cell that used only copper sulfide, for example, because of its high electronic conductivity, the extra electrons would simply flow through the electrolyte without interacting with the individual ions of copper and sulfur at the electrodes and no separation would occur. The Allanore Group researchers successfully identified other sulfide compounds that, when added to copper sulfide, change the behavior of the melt so that the ions, rather than electrons, become the primary charge carriers through the system and thus enable the desired chemical reactions. Technically speaking, the additives raise the bandgap of the copper sulfide so it is no longer electronically conductive, Chmielowiec explains. The fraction of the electrons engaging in the oxidation and reduction reactions, measured as a percentage of the total current, that is the total electron flow in the cell, is called its faradaic efficiency.

Doubling efficiency

The new work doubles the efficiency for electrolytic extraction of copper reported in the first paper, which was 28 percent with an electrolyte where only barium sulfide added to the copper sulfide, to 59 percent in the second paper with both lanthanum sulfide and barium sulfide added to the copper sulfide.

“Demonstrating that we can perform faradaic reactions in a liquid metal sulfide is novel and can open the door to study many different systems,” Chmielowiec says. “It works for more than just copper. We were able to make rhenium, and we were able to make molybdenum.” Rhenium and molybdenum are industrially important metals finding use in jet airplane engines, for example. The Allanore laboratory also used molten electrolysis to produce zinc, tin and silver, but lead, nickel and other metals are possible, he suggests.

The amount of energy required to run the separation process in an electrolysis cell is proportional to the faradaic efficiency and the cell voltage. For water, which was one of the first compounds to be separated by electrolysis, the minimum cell voltage, or decomposition energy, is 1.23 volts. Sahu and Chmielowiec identified the cell voltages in their cell as 0.06 volts for rhenium sulfide, 0.33 volts for molybdenum sulfide, and 0.45 volts for copper sulfide. “For most of our reactions, we apply 0.5 or 0.6 volts, so that the three sulfides are together reduced to metallic, rhenium, molybdenum and copper,” Sahu explains. At the cell operating temperature and at an applied potential of 0.5 to 0.6 volts, the system prefers to decompose those metals because the energy required to decompose both lanthanum sulfide — about 1.7 volts — and barium sulfide — about 1.9 volts — is comparatively much higher. Separate experiments also proved the ability to selectively reduce rhenium or molybdenum without reducing copper, based on their differing decomposition energies.

Industrial potential

Important strategic and commodity metals including, copper, zinc, lead, rhenium, and molybdenum are typically found in sulfide ores and less commonly in oxide-based ores, as is the case for aluminum. “What’s typically done is you burn those in air to remove the sulfur, but by doing that you make SO₂ [sulfur dioxide], and nobody is allowed to release that directly to air, so they have to capture it somehow. There are a lot of capital costs associated with capturing SO₂ and converting it to sulfuric acid,” Chmielowiec explains. 

The closest industrial process to the electrolytic copper extraction they hope to see is aluminum production by an electrolytic process known as Hall-Héroult process, which produces a pool of molten aluminum metal that can be continuously tapped. “The ideal is to run a continuous process,” Chmielowiec says. “So, in our case, you would maintain a constant level of liquid copper and then periodically tap that out of the electrolysis cell. A lot of engineering has gone into that for the aluminum industry, so we would hopefully piggyback off of that.”

Sahu and Chmielowiec conducted their experiments at 1,227 C, about 150 degrees Celsius above the melting point of copper. It is the temperature commonly used in industry for copper extraction.

Further improvements

Aluminum electrolysis systems run at 95 percent faradaic efficiency, so there is room for improvement from the researchers’ reported 59 percent efficiency. To improve their cell efficiency, Sahu says, they may need to modify the cell design to recover a larger amount of liquid copper. The electrolyte can also be further tuned, adding sulfides other than barium sulfide and lanthanum sulfide. “There is no one single solution that will let us do that. It will be an optimization to move it up to larger scale,” Chmielowiec says. That work continues.

Sahu, 34, received her PhD in chemistry from the University of Madras, in India. Chmielowiec, 27, a second-year doctoral student and a Salapatas Fellow in materials science and engineering, received his BS in chemical engineering at MIT in 2012 and an MS in chemical engineering from Caltech in 2014.

The work fits into the Allanore Group’s work on high-temperature molten materials, including recent breakthroughs in developing new formulas to predict semiconductivity in molten compounds and demonstrating a molten thermoelectric cell to produce electricity from industrial waste heat. The Allanore Group is seeking a patent on certain aspects of the extraction process.

Novel and significant work

“Using intelligent design of the process chemistry, these researchers have developed a very novel route for producing copper,” says Rohan Akolkar, the F. Alex Nason Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at Case Western Reserve University, who was not involved in this work. “The researchers have engineered a process that has many of the key ingredients — it's a cleaner, scalable, and simpler one-step process for producing copper from sulfide ore.”

“Technologically, the authors appreciate the need to make the process more efficient while preserving the intrinsic purity of the copper produced,” says Akolkar, who visited the Allanore lab late last year. “If the technology is developed further and its techno-economics look favorable, then it may provide a potential pathway for simpler and cleaner production of copper metal, which is important to many applications.” Akolkar notes that “the quality of this work is excellent. The Allanore research group at MIT is at the forefront when it comes to advancing molten salt electrolysis research.”

University of Rochester professor ofchemical engineering Jacob Jorné says, “Current extraction processes involve multiple steps and require high capital investment, thus costly improvements are prohibited. Direct electrolysis of the metal sulfide ores is also advantageous as it eliminates the formation of sulfur dioxide, an acid rain pollutant. “

“The electrochemistry and thermodynamics in molten salts are quite different than in aqueous [water-based] systems and the research of Allanore and his group demonstrates that a lot of good chemistry has been ignored in the past due to our slavish devotion to water,” Jorné suggests. “Direct electrolysis of metal ores opens the way to a metallurgical renaissance where new discoveries and processes can be implemented and can modernize the aging extraction industry and improve its energy efficiency. The new approach can be applied to other metals of high strategic importance such as the rare earth metals.”

This work was supported by Norco Conservation and the Office of Naval Research.

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Two MIT documentaries win New England Emmy Awards

On June 24, Boston-area journalists, videographers, and producers filled the halls of the Marriott Boston Copley Place for the 40th annual New England Emmy Awards. Staff from MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) and MIT Video Productions (MVP) occupied two full tables at the black-tie affair. By the end of the night, two golden statues joined them as both groups were awarded Emmys.

MechE’s multimedia specialist John Freidah was honored with a New England Emmy in the Health/Science Program/Special category for the film “Water is Life,” which chronicles PhD student Natasha Wright and Professor Amos Winter as they travel to India gathering research on how to design a low-cost desalination system for use in developing areas. The film was also recently honored with a 2017 National Edward R. Murrow Award — one of the most prestigious awards in journalism — as well as a 2017 Circle of Excellence Award from the The Council for Advancement and Support of Education (CASE).

Meanwhile, MVP’s Lawrence Gallagher, Joseph McMaster, and Jean Dunoyer received a New England Emmy in the Education/Schools category for their film “A Bold Move,” which recounts MIT’s relocation from Boston’s Back Bay to a swath of undeveloped land on the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The film is the first in a four-part series that commemorate MIT’s 100th year in Cambridge.

"Water Is Life"

As the camera pans over an aerial shot of a lake in India, a flock of white birds majestically flies by. Capturing this moment in the opening shot of “Water is Life” required a lot of patience and a little help from a new friend. Unable to bring a drone into India, the film’s producer, editor, and cinematographer, John Freidah, had to come up with another plan. During a conversation on a flight from Delhi to Hyderabad, Freidah befriended a passenger in his row. He mentioned his search for a drone operator to get the perfect birds-eye-view shot of India’s landscape. As luck would have it, the day before departing India, Freidah received an email from his new friend saying he new someone with a drone that he could use to film sweeping aerial shots.

Planning for “Water is Life” began months before Freidah flew to India, however. Interested in highlighting the important work done in Professor Amos Winter’s Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Lab, Freidah and his colleagues in the media team at MechE honed in on the research PhD student and Tata Fellow Natasha Wright was conducting on designing an affordable desalination system for use in rural India. With the generous support of Robert Stoner, deputy director of the MIT Energy Initiative and director of the Tata Center for Technology and Design, plans were arranged to film Winter and Wright in India.

“India is a beautiful and amazing country, which is rich in imagery. I felt lucky to film there,” Freidah says. “We were fortunate to have the aid of stakeholders — Jain Engineering and Tata Projects — who facilitated our visits to the local villages where they were struggling with clean drinking water.”

Visiting these villages and talking to end-users who would benefit from and potentially use a desalination system was a crucial component of Winter and Wright’s research. Capturing the daily challenges these villagers face on film brought another level of exposure to the work being done by GEAR and the Tata Center.

“Having John travel to India enabled us to tell the story of our research in much greater depth than we could on campus,” says Winter. By capturing the many angles of Winter and Wright’s story, “Water Is Life” aims to show people first-hand what a problem access to clean water is on a global scale, and how essential it is to support new research and technologies that hope to solve it.

“I really wanted to give the viewer a first-person experience — through the visuals,” Freidah explains. “I wanted it to be a visual journey, as if they were there — with sound and imagery — from honking horns on the street and rickshaws going by.”

"A Bold Move"

It’s hard to imagine a time when the banks of the Charles River in Cambridge weren’t adorned with MIT’s Great Dome, inter-connected buildings, and stately columns. MIT President Richard Cockburn Maclaurin’s aspiration to move the Institute from its overcrowded classrooms in Boston’s Back Bay to a plot of vacant land across the river in 1916 did more than shape the landscape around Kendall Square; it redefined MIT’s presence as a global pioneer in science and technology research. To celebrate the 1916 move to Cambridge, the program A Century in Cambridge was launched last year.

Well before the centennial fireworks exploded over Killian Court, Larry Gallagher, director of MVP, was approached by the Century in Cambridge Steering Committee. MVP was asked to produce a series of documentaries that explored MIT’s move to Cambridge in 1916 and other key aspects of the MIT experience that have helped shape MIT into what it is today. The first of this series, “A Bold Move,” chronicles the design and construction of MIT’s new campus, the whimsical celebrations commemorating the move, and the tragic and untimely passing of the man who orchestrated the entire process — President Maclaurin.

Capturing this period in MIT’s history required extensive research and the participation of faculty, staff, and historians well versed in the move to Cambridge. “We are deeply indebted to the faculty, staff, alumni, and members of the Cambridge community who so generously gave their time end expertise,” says producer and director Joe McMaster. “Without their insights, the film wouldn’t have successfully portrayed this moment in MIT’s history.”

In addition to interviewing those with extensive knowledge of the 2016 move, the MVP team had to dig deep into MIT’s robust archives. Thousands of photos from The MIT Museum, The Institute Archives, the Cambridge Historical Commission, and other sources were analyzed by McMaster and a team of research assistants. “I was amazed to see how thoroughly documented MIT’s history is in photographs — particularly everything to do with the move to Cambridge,” McMaster adds. “The whole affair seemed to be carried out with such a wonderful mixture of seriousness and whimsy, and I hoped the film would capture that feeling.”

Editor and co-producer Jean Dunoyer was tasked with weaving together the footage and photographs in a way that reflected this mixture of the silly and sacred. The imagery and footage was set to period music, to give viewers a feel for that particular era in history. In one of the concluding scenes, this period music is brought to life once more by MIT a capella group The Chorallaries. The group performs a haunting rendition of “Mother Tech,” a piece originally performed at the conclusion of the celebrations in 1916.

The entire Century in Cambridge documentary series was produced over the course of 18 months, with assistance from the Century in Cambridge Steering Committee and the generous support of Jane and Neil Papparlardo '64. The scope of “A Bold Move” required a massive collaboration across all of MVP. “This is indeed a huge collaborative effort for MVP,” says Gallagher. “Projects of this scope benefit from the contributions of the entire team, and for their work and talents to be recognized by their peers in the video production community with an Emmy is a great source of pride.” 

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MIT space hotel wins NASA graduate design competition

An interdisciplinary team of MIT graduate students representing five departments across the Institute was recently honored at NASA's Revolutionary Aerospace Systems Concepts-Academic Linkage Design Competition Forum. The challenge involved designing a commercially enabled habitable module for use in low Earth orbit that would be extensible for future use as a Mars transit vehicle. The team’s design won first place in the competition’s graduate division.

The MIT project — the Managed, Reconfigurable, In-space Nodal Assembly (MARINA) — was designed as a commercially owned and operated space station, featuring a luxury hotel as the primary anchor tenant and NASA as a temporary co-anchor tenant for 10 years. NASA’s estimated recurring costs, $360 million per year, represent an order of magnitude reduction from the current costs of maintaining and operating the International Space Station. Potential savings are approximately 16 percent of NASA’s overall budget — or around $3 billion per year.

MARINA team lead Matthew Moraguez, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of Professor Olivier L. de Weck’s Strategic Engineering Research Group (SERG), explained that MARINA’s key engineering innovations include extensions to the International Docking System Standard (IDSS) interface; modular architecture of the backbone of MARINA’s node modules; and a distribution of subsystem functions throughout the node modules.

“Modularized service racks connect any point on MARINA to any other point via the extended IDSS interface. This enables companies of all sizes to provide products and services in space to other companies, based on terms determined by the open market,” Moraguez said. “Together these decisions provide scalability, reliability, and efficient technology development benefits to MARINA and NASA.”

MARINA’s design also enables modules to be reused to create an interplanetary Mars transit vehicle that can enter Mars’ orbit, refuel from locally produced methane fuel, and return to Earth.

MARINA and SERG team member George Lordos MBA '00 is currently a graduate fellow in the MIT System Design and Management (SDM) Program, which is offered jointly by the MIT School of Engineering and the MIT Sloan School of Management. Lordos pointed out that MARINA’s engineering design innovations are critical enablers of its commercial viability, which rests on MARINA’s ability to give rise to a value-adding, competitive marketplace in low Earth orbit.

“Just like a yacht marina, MARINA can provide all essential services, including safe harbor, reliable power, clean water and air, and efficient logistics and maintenance,” said Lordos, who will enter the MIT aeronautics and astronautics doctoral program this fall. “This will facilitate design simplicity and savings in construction and operating costs of customer-owned modules. It will also incent customers to lease space inside and outside MARINA’s node modules and make MARINA a self-funded entity that is attractive to investors.”

Valentina Sumini, a postdoc at MIT, contributed to the architectural concept being used for MARINA and its space hotel, along with MARINA faculty advisor Assistant Professor Caitlin Mueller of MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning and Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“MARINA’s flagship anchor tenant, a luxury Earth-facing eight-room space hotel complete with bar, restaurant, and gym, will make orbital space holidays a reality,” said Sumini.

Other revenue-generating features include rental of serviced berths on external International Docking Adapter ports for customer-owned modules and rental of interior modularized rack space to smaller companies that provide contracted services to station occupants. These secondary activities may involve satellite repair, in-space fabrication, food production, and funded research.

Additional members of the MARINA team include: MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics graduate students and SERG members Alejandro Trujillo, Samuel Wald, and Johannes Norheim; MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering undergraduate Zoe Lallas; MIT School of Architecture and Planning graduate students Alpha Arsano and Anran Li; and MIT Integrated Design and Management Program graduate students Meghan Maupin and John Stillman.

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