Connecting through conversation

Last year, during a reception on campus, MIT senior Joshua Charles Woodard was introduced to Claire Conceison, the Quanta Professor of Chinese Culture and professor of theater arts. The two proceeded to have a conversation in Mandarin, Woodard’s minor, which ended with an on-the-spot invitation for Woodard to visit Shanghai and study Beijing opera for two weeks with a small group of her students.

Woodard savored the experience and, as he now considers a career in diplomacy and East Asian affairs, still marvels at how one discussion had such a significant impact on his world view and his plans for the future.

The story may not be surprising to those who know Woodard, however, because striking up conversations to share different perspectives is one of his many pastimes. Whether making friends in foreign countries, discussing Institute policies as a member of the eight-student advisory cabinet convened by MIT President L. Rafael Reif, or serving as co-chair of the student community and living group Chocolate City, Woodard is always up for a discussion that leads to learning.

He dreams of a “willingness to connect the dots,” for people to acknowledge commonalities between different cultures despite nationalistic identities in an increasingly globalized world. “If I don’t reach across the aisle,” he says, “No one is going to.”

Exposing kids to STEM

Long before he set his eyes on policy and diplomacy, Woodard, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago, envisioned a future in engineering at MIT.

Childhood experiences with LEGO robotics and Northwestern University game design courses gave Woodard a foundation in STEM. By the time he was in the seventh grade, he knew he wanted to attend MIT for engineering.

However, he acknowledges most students from his community don’t have those childhood experiences that enable them to have similar goals. “I had a chance that others didn’t have,” he says, “Anybody can do what I’ve done, but it’s only a matter of exposure and getting to [students] early.”

While a junior at MIT, the mechanical engineering major worked on making those opportunities more available to underrepresented minorities, by co-founding the MIT BoSTEM Scholars Academy. The four-week summer program gives high school students valuable experiences in STEM and aims to put them on the path to MIT and other universities. Woodard worked with his co-founder Javier Weddington to raise $18,000 to fund the program, which debuted the summer of 2017 and will continue in the coming summers.

An expanding worldview

When Woodard was 16, he visited Paris on a school field trip. While he was purchasing items at a grocery store, a store employee complained to him about having to learn English to accommodate American tourists. The critique went further, and Woodard listened.

For Woodard, the experience was “a pretty direct challenge to my world views [as an American], and the starting point for me to form a framework for how to study the world.”

When he meets someone with a different cultural view, he opts to share his perspective with them and also listen to theirs. As an example, he describes his thought process when meeting someone who may not understand the meaning of the Black Lives Matter movement: “You have a set of experiences that didn’t expose you to this. If me taking half an hour to explain it to you can change your worldview so you can help someone else in the future, then it’s worth my time,” he says.

During orientation for the class of 2021, Woodard gave a speech to the incoming class about the impact personal experiences can have on the MIT community. He told a story about the frustration he felt when multiple Black Lives Matter posters on campus were vandalized, but how caring gestures from others reminded him of the value of openly discussing personal and controversial issues. At the end of his speech, Woodard urged students to “open your minds and hearts so you can learn from the world” and ultimately better their communities.

Chocolate City, a New House dorm community of current and former MIT students who share common backgrounds, interests, ethnicities, and experiences, further drives Woodard’s passion for conversation and leadership.

Chocolate City encourages its members to use their experiences to benefit the people from their cultural communities. As co-chair, Woodard spearheaded local outreach initiatives, led the efforts to work with the Institute’s administration to preserve the group’s on-campus housing, and encouraged members to engage in leadership positions throughout campus.

Along with the other students who made up the Presidential Advisory Cabinet, Woodard discussed with President Reif a wide range of issues affecting the MIT student body, from the current political climate, to campus infrastructure, to issues of particular importance to MIT communities of color such as recruitment and retention of faculty from underrepresented minority groups.

Diplomat in the making

Woodard’s affinity for connecting with others should serve him well in his area of interest after graduation, which is diplomacy and East Asian affairs, perhaps through work with the State Department. 

Describing his belief that all human beings share a common set of values and desires, Woodard says, “That’s the type of mentality you’d have to have in foreign diplomacy.” After graduating from MIT, he hopes to continue to learn about the United States’s impact on developed and developing countries.

Woodard’s minor is Mandarin, which he says he chose over other languages due to China’s explosive economic growth and investment in America’s infrastructure.

During his Mandarin class, he “can learn about culture and learn about the world,” he says. He enjoys taking part in discussions on topics ranging from China’s one-child policy, to tiger moms, to Chinese internet censorship.

However, for Woodard, Mandarin is just the beginning.

“I want to know four languages by the time I’m 30: English, Chinese, Arabic, and Spanish. In that order,” he says.

Shutterbug

Woodard’s skills with both people and cameras also led him to launch his own photography business, JC Woodard Photography, during his first year at MIT. Since then, he has taken photos for sororities, fraternities, MIT events, as well as professional headshots for the MIT community. Most recently, he covered comedian Hasan Minhaj’s performance at MIT’s Fall Festival this past September.

“It’s exciting to capture people in moments of emotion,” he says. “Preserving the moment is so cool.”

He suspects his photography skill benefits from his personality. “I don’t know how not to smile, so I’m really personable,” he says, “If you give me a camera, I’m like ‘Hey! Give me a smile, let’s take a picture!’”

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Promise seen in possible treatment for autism spectrum disorder

Human chromosome 16p11.2 deletion syndrome is caused by the absence of about 27 genes on chromosome 16. This deletion is characterized by intellectual disability; impaired language, communication, and socialization skills; and autism spectrum disorder or ASD.

Research from the laboratories of Mark Bear at MIT and Jacqueline Crawley at the University of California at Davis, has identified a potential therapeutic for ASD. Researchers found that R-Baclofen reverses cognitive deficits and improves social interactions in two lines of 16p11.2 deletion mice.

The findings, published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, have the potential to treat humans with 16p11.2 deletion syndrome and ASD.

“Our collaborative teams found that treatment with the drug R-baclofen improved scores on several learning and memory tasks, and on a standard assay of social behavior, in 16p11.2 mutant mice,” says Crawley, co-senior author of the paper along with Bear.

“This unique corroboration of findings by two independent labs, using two distinct lines of mice with the same mutation, increases confidence that R-baclofen may be an effective pharmacological treatment for some of the symptoms of human 16p11.2 deletion syndrome, including intellectual impairment and autism,” she says.

“These findings are particularly exciting on two fronts,” says Bear, who is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience at MIT. “First, the results show that diverse genetic causes of intellectual disability and autism may converge on a limited number of pathophysiological processes that can be ameliorated pharmacologically. Thus, a treatment for one genetically defined disorder may be beneficial for another with phenotypic overlap. Second, R-Baclofen has a well-understood safety profile and is well-tolerated in children and adults, making clinical studies feasible in the near future.”

Growing knowledge about genetic mutations in people with autism is enabling researchers to evaluate hypothesis-driven pharmacological interventions in terms of their ability to reverse the biological and behavioral consequence of specific mutations that cause autism. One of the genes in the 16p11.2 deletion region regulates the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA. Researchers tested the hypothesis that increasing GABA neurotransmission using R-baclofen, which binds to GABA-B receptors, could reverse analogous behavioral symptoms in a mouse model of 16p11.2 deletion syndrome.

In the current paper, researchers report the results of animal model studies using two independently derived lines of mutant mice, each missing a chromosomal region analogous to human 16p11.2. Normal and mutant mice at both labs were tested after receiving R-baclofen in their drinking water on three tasks: novel object recognition, object location memory, and contextual recognition learning and memory. In addition, R-baclofen treated mutant mice scored better after treatment on each cognitive task than the untreated mutant mice. R-baclofen also increased scores on a standard assay of mouse social behaviors — male-female reciprocal social interactions — in the 16p11.2 mutant mice.

This study suggests that R-baclofen should be explored for the treatment of cognitive phenotypes in affected humans.

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Twelve from MIT honored by the American Physical Society

Twelve members of the MIT community are among those recently honored with prizes and fellowships by the American Physical Society (APS). The awardees include faculty, students, and alumni from the departments of Physics, Chemistry, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Chemical Engineering.

As the leading membership organization for physicists from academia, industry, and the national laboratories, the APS recognizes work deemed by outstanding by leading researchers in the field worldwide.

Each year, no more than one half of 1 percent of the society membership is recognized by their peers for election as fellows. The 2017 MIT APS fellows include:

R. Scott Kemp, associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, has been named a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS). Nominated by the Forum on Physics and Society, Kemp was cited, “[f]or innovative applications of physics to arms control verification, and pivotal scientific contributions to nuclear nonproliferation diplomacy and the understanding of technology-policy interactions in international security.”

Pedro M. Reis, Gilbert W. Winslow Career Development Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was elected an APS fellow for his “contributions to the field of extreme mechanics, including elastic instabilities and geometrical nonlinearities.” He was also a 2017 recipient of an APS Early Career Award for this seminal research in soft matter.

Earlier in the year, three members of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) High-Energy-Density Physics Division — including division head and Senior Research Scientist Richard Petrasso, Senior Research Scientist Chikang Li, and Research Scientist Fredrick Seguin — were honored with the APS John Dawson Award for Excellence in Plasma Physics Research.

Other recent APS award winners include:

Aram W. Harrow ’01, PhD ’05, an associate professor of physics and research in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, received the 2018 Rolf Landauer and Charles H. Bennett Award in Quantum Computing for his “outstanding accomplishments in the mathematics of quantum information, and the development of new algorithmic primitives for quantum computers.” A faculty member of the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics since 2013, Harrow focuses on theoretical aspects of quantum computing and quantum information. In quantum information theory, he invented the concepts of “coherent classical communication” and “entanglement spread.” In 2009, Harrow received an Outstanding Referee Award from the APS.

Benjamin J.P. Jones PhD ’15, an assistant professor of physics at the University of Texas at Arlington, received the 2017 Mitsuyoshi Tanaka Dissertation Award in Experimental Particle Physics for his thesis in the field of experimental neutrino physics, “Sterile Neutrinos in Cold Climates.” Jones earned his PhD under the supervision of Professor Janet Conrad in the Department of Physics and the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, and received the Department of Physics’ 2015 Martin Deutsch Award for Excellence in Experimental Particle Physics.

Calvin Leung, a first-year PhD student in the Department of Physics, is a co-recipient of the 2017 LeRoy Apker Award, for his work as an undergraduate at Harvey Mudd College on the “development and experimental implementation of astronomical random number generators for loophole-free tests of Bell’s inequality and other applications in quantum fundamentals, astrophysics, and tests of general relativity.” Leung currently holds a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship and is also the recipient of the 2016 Astronaut Scholarship, the Louise and Graydon Bell Prize, the Mindlin Prize, and the Alfred B. Focke Award.

Ian Moult PhD ’16 received the 2017 J.J. and Noriko Sakurai Dissertation Award in Theoretical Particle Physics for his work “inventing powerful new observables for tagging boosted bosons, for developing new quantum field theory techniques for jet substructure calculations, and for devising new helicity operator methods to improve precision Higgs boson studies at the Large Hadron Collider.” Moult earned his PhD under the supervision of Professor Iain Stewart in the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics and received the Department of Physics’ 2015 Andrew M. Lockett Memorial Fund Award for his graduate research. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of California at Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Keith A. Nelson, Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry, was a co-recipient of the 2018 Frank Isakson Prize for Optical Effects in Solids for his “pioneering contributions to the development and application of ultra-fast optical spectroscopy to condensed matter systems, and providing insight into lattice dynamics, structural phase transitions, and the non-equilibrium control of solids.” Nelson is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Optical Society of America, and the American Physical Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has received the Coblentz, Lippincott, Zewail, and Bomem-Michelson awards.

Bradley D. Olsen ’03, Paul M. Cook Career Development Professor of Chemical Engineering, was awarded the 2018 John H. Dillon Medal for his work “significantly expanding our understanding of the physics of polymers, including the self-assembly of block copolymers incorporating a fully folded protein, the influence of polymer shape on diffusion; for engineering novel gels; and for updating the theory of the modulus of a network.” Olsen’s previous honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, the DuPont Young Professor Award and the Allan P. Colburn Award; he was named a Kavli Foundation Emerging Leader in Chemistry in 2017.

Jonathan Loren Ouellet, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT working in the Professor Lindley Winslow’s group in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, received the 2017 Dissertation Award in Nuclear Physics for “his outstanding contributions to the search for neutrinoless double beta decay of 130Te, and setting a new limit on its decay half-life, at the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events in Gran Sasso, Italy.” At MIT, he has recently begun working on a new cryogenic-based axion dark matter search, called ABRACADABRA.

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Raising awareness of domestic and partner violence

While MIT's Violence Prevention and Response (VPR) program stages special events and communications to mark the 30th annual National Domestic Violence Awareness Month, VPR staff work year-round to educate students, faculty, and staff on sexual assault, dating and domestic violence, harassment, and stalking, and to support community members who are victims.

“A month of awareness activities in October help VPR and student allies advance conversations about topics like intimate partner violence,” says Kelley Adams, assistant dean and director of VPR in the Division of Student Life. “But, it’s important to remember that making significant progress on prevention requires ongoing efforts that continue well after awareness months have passed.”

MIT Vice President Suzy Nelson, the dean for student life, says the Institute's VPR team members “are caring, compassionate, and conscientious, and always willing to help students and other community members who are experiencing violence in their relationships, or feeling threatened or intimidated.”

“The activities of VPR and student allies send powerful messages that intimate partner violence is never OK at MIT or anywhere else,” Nelsons says.

Staff are available by appointment during working hours, or anytime through VPR’s 24-hour hotline at 617-253-2300.

According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), one in three women and one in four men have been victims of physical violence at the hands of an intimate partner in their lifetimes. Likewise, one in seven women and one in 18 men have been stalked by an intimate partner. Annually, more than 10 million women and men in the U.S. are physically abused by an intimate partner.

This month, VPR posted NCADV data on social media, accompanied by reminders that VPR supports any community member who has been affected — directly or indirectly — by relationship violence. Through the end of October, MIT hosts the Silent Witness Project, a striking visual display of life-sized silhouettes that tell the stories of domestic violence homicide victims. This international initiative started in 1990 when a group of women artists, writers, and women’s organizations in Minnesota used silhouettes to tell the stories of 26 women who died in acts of domestic violence. A 27th silhouette was added to signify women who died by the hand of a husband, ex-husband, partner, or acquaintance, but whose deaths were unsolved or ruled accidental. The Silent Witness project will be on the first floor of the Stratton Student Center (Building W20) until Nov. 3.

Domestic Violence Awareness Month is happening at a remarkable time. The #metoo social media campaign was created 10 years ago to help people understand the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault in society, but has seen a resurgence recently. Many victims have embraced #metoo, while others have chosen not to share their experiences.

“It is important to acknowledge people may have a wide range of reactions to #metoo, ranging from anger and frustration to validation and feeling less alone,” Adams says. “The decision to speak out about one’s own experiences of harassment or assault is a personal one.”

Nonetheless, sexual and relationship violence remain serious and widespread issues.

“Sexual assault and sexual harassment happen to people of all identities and in a range of circumstances, from intimate settings to the workplace,” Adams says. “We hope that the information VPR shared in October will encourage anyone at MIT who has experienced partner violence to reach out to us. We are here to help anyone who needs it.”

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Mars city living: Designing for the Red Planet

How will people live on Mars? An MIT team developed a design concept addressing this question as part of Mars City Design 2017, an international competition focused on sustainable cities on Mars to be built in the next century.

MIT’s winning urban design, titled Redwood Forest, creates domes or tree habitats that can each house up to 50 people. The domes provide open, public spaces containing plants and abundant water, which would be harvested from the northern plains of Mars. The tree habitats sit atop a network of underground tunnels, or roots, providing access to private spaces and easy, shirt-sleeve transportation to the other tree habitants in the community of 10,000. In addition to connectivity, the roots offer residents protection from cosmic radiation, micrometeorite impacts, and extreme thermal variations.

MIT postdoc Valentina Sumini and Assistant Professor Caitlin Mueller, who teaches in both departments of Architecture and Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), led the interdisciplinary team effort, which included nine MIT students from different departments and research groups.

Sumini describes the project’s design fundamentals and forest metaphor: “On Mars, our city will physically and functionally mimic a forest, using local Martian resources such as ice and water, regolith (or soil), and sun to support life. Designing a forest also symbolizes the potential for outward growth as nature spreads across the Martian landscape. Each tree habitat incorporates a branching structural system and an inflated membrane enclosure, anchored by tunneling roots. The design of a habitat can be generated using a computational form-finding and structural optimization workflow developed by the team. The design workflow is parametric, which means that each habitat is unique and contributes to a diverse forest of urban spaces.”

The team aims to build a comfortable environment for inhabitants while using location and system architecture focused on sustainability, a critical component for any Mars community.

Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics doctoral student George Lordos MBA '00, who was responsible for the system architecture of Redwood Forest, pointed out the central role of water in building vibrant communities on Mars:

“Every tree habitat in Redwood Forest will collect energy from the sun and use it to process and transport the water throughout the tree, and every tree is designed as a water-rich environment,” says Lordos. “Water fills the soft cells inside the dome providing protection from radiation, helps manage heat loads, and supplies hydroponic farms for growing fish and greens. Solar panels produce energy to split the stored water for the production of rocket fuel, oxygen, and for charging hydrogen fuel cells, which are necessary to power long-range vehicles as well as provide backup energy storage in case of dust storms.”

Many of the features of the design could be also useful on Earth, the designers say. Electric vehicles traveling in underground multi-level networks could help ease congested American cities. The tree habitat design could create living and working spaces in harsh environments, such as high latitudes, deserts and the sea floor. Hydroponic gardening beneath cities could provide fresh fish, fruits, and vegetables with lower land and transportation costs.

The MIT team also includes AeroAstro PhD students Samuel Wald, Matthew Moraguez, and Alejandro Trujillo; architecture PhD student Alpha Arsano SM '17 and research fellow Kam-Ming Mark Tam MEng '15; integrated design and management program graduate students Meghan Maupin and John Stillman; and civil and environmental engineering undergraduate student Zoe Lallas.

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Remembering and honoring the life of undergraduate Henoch Argaw

In the 3rd grade, Henoch Argaw began tutoring his fellow students at Southeast Christian Academy Elementary School in Colorado.

“He told me and Sehin [his mother] that he was writing a math instruction book,” recalls Neway Argaw, his father. “By that time, he was already attending 5th grade [level] math and science courses.” Their son continued tutoring all the way through high school and also took up a related pursuit, refereeing and coaching youth soccer for the Colorado Storm and other Colorado soccer clubs. He was also a competitive chess player and played the trumpet since 4th grade.

Mustafa Amjad, a student at University of Pennsylvania who met Argaw when he was attending the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) Jordan program, writes: “He was always willing to help and offer his advice whenever I needed it and I was truly inspired by the breadth of his knowledge.”

Argaw, a second-year undergraduate who passed away unexpectedly in late September, inspired countless others during his time at MIT and elsewhere. He was 19 years old. A resident of East Campus, Argaw was pursuing one of the Institute’s newest majors, 6-14 (Computer Science, Economics and Data Science) in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). The major was a perfect fit, as he had been enamored of complex analysis from an early age.

In middle school, Argaw’s proclivity for math and science garnered him a presidential award for education excellence, and he went on to attend and win numerous STEM competitions prior to coming to MIT. “For two consecutive years he was the highest scorer in his middle-school math competition and highest among all 7th and 8th grade students from across his school district,” his father says.

His close friend, Benjamin Farnsworth, writes that he and Argaw formed a bond over being the only two 6th graders in Algebra 1 class — but also notes his broader interests and playful humor: “I remember countless hours playing Mario Hoops on our Nintendo DSs and practicing musical duets. One time, we went to preform 'Ode to Joy' for the school talent show, and we accidentally repeated it at separate times. The result: We both burst out in laughter for a good two minutes, to our embarrassment. Every time we heard 'Ode to Joy' after that, we couldn't help but smile.”

As with mathematics, music and languages came easily to Argaw. Born in Tampere, Finland, he was fluent or near-fluent in Amharic, Arabic, Mandarin and English. Argaw shared on a personal profile page that he had “learned a substantial amount of Arabic … after starting with barely any knowledge of the language” during an internship this past summer at liwwa, Inc., a peer-to-peer lending company in Amman, Jordan. Ahmed Moor, co-founder and CEO of the firm writes, “He had an easy and generous way of grinning at you; it always brightened my day. I'm grateful for the short time I had with him. The pain of his loss goes deep, but the joy of having known him goes deeper.”

Argaw’s ability to weave together his interests was impressive, as demonstrated in 2013 when he designed and developed a mobile app for Chinese language flashcards. To do so, all he had to do was master programming from scratch. Likewise, he applied his mathematical gifts to economic issues, first as a summer E2 (Engineering Experience at MIT) participant, where he focused on trading, optimization, and portfolio management; and later as an undergraduate researcher at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative, creating an open-source solution for private cryptocurrency transactions. His most recent project included developing an artificial poker player/robot that won him and his partner $500 in a competition with more than 40 other competitors. This past spring Argaw also won the final project award for course 6.S08 (Interconnected Embedded Systems).

Beyond academics, he belonged to Sigma Alpha Epsilon, served as an officer for the MIT Club Sports Council, treasurer of the MIT Ethiopian-Eritrean Student Association (MIT-EESA), and participated in numerous campus activities, including the MIT Taekwondo Club, the Bitcoin Club, and the Skydiving Club. His many interests were a reflection of his multifaceted personality, as underscored by a eulogy given by Argaw’s cousin: “Henoch was more than just his academic achievements… more than his comprehensive abilities and it should be the last thing to define him. … I’m not going to miss Henoch the student, I am going to miss Henoch the human being.”

Moreover, his sister Peniel adds, “Henoch had many more attributes than just being smart, he had a genuine care and kindness for others. Whether he had a huge assignment due the next day or not, Henoch would always be there for the people he loved. He knew the true meaning of putting others before himself, which continues to inspire me to this day.”

Argaw’s mother calls him her “trophy,” celebrating his generosity, his firm ethical principles, such as always standing for the truth, and his dedication to reading the Bible. “As many said, Henoch was very smart but what surprised me was how he could teach himself anything from scratch, from tying a cravat to day-to-day things like cooking to sophisticated things like programming and stock analysis.” Moreover, rather than complaining about uncomfortable situations, she adds, he always made the best use of his circumstances. “He had so many questions still unanswered. I know he will get all the answers in Heaven.”

On his LinkedIn profile, Argaw described himself and his hopes as both practical and philosophical, writing: “Since a very young age software, computers, and the internet have been critically important to me as a clear display of how humanity can shape the world around it to pursue its desire and its higher purpose. … I would like to further my studies in artificial intelligence and also work to produce a product in AI that will allow people to walk further in their journey — discovering more than anyone prior had imagined.”

A campus memorial service will be held on Saturday, Nov. 4 from 4 to 5 p.m. in the MIT Chapel.

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How impatience guides financial behavior

Imagine you are receiving a refund payment from the federal government. Are you going to spend it right away or save the money? Is that decision based on your short-term finances? Or does it hinge on whether you identify yourself as a “spender” or a “saver” more generally?

A new study by an MIT economist sheds more light on the quirks of people’s actions in such cases and suggests that, in addition to immediate financial needs, persistent behavioral characteristics play a key role in even short-term pocketbook decisions.

The study examines the 2008 economic stimulus payments the U.S. federal government sent to households across the nation. The study’s rather nuanced findings indicate that while people do “smooth” their consumption by spending or saving money based on their own liquidity — as canonical economic theory holds — some longer-term factors are at play as well.

For starters, other things being equal, lower historical incomes, not just short-term fluctuations in income, match a greater tendency to spend money right away. Beyond that, people who describe themselves as habitual “spenders” will plow through newfound money more quickly. This adds credence to the idea that larger behavioral tendencies, not just rational calculations, help drive financial decisions.

So while material needs matter, self-assessments about being “savers” or “spenders” do “a phenomenally good job of separating those who save from those who don’t,” says Jonathan Parker, the MIT economist who authored the study. “It’s a question about impatience. Are you someone who is impatient? If you get ‘yes’ for that answer, those are the spenders.”

The study bears on larger matters of both personal finance and tax policy, since the distribution of tax refunds by income bracket, for example, is tied to their overall economic impact. Like other research, the study shows that people lacking considerable income or wealth are more likely to spend such refunds more quickly.

“It does suggest that lower-income, lower-liquidity folks tend to tie their consumer demand very much to income,” says Parker, the Robert C. Merton Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

The paper, “Why Don’t Households Smooth Consumption? Evidence from a $25 Million Experiment,” appears this month in the latest issue of the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics.

Spend now: Three times as much, in fact

To conduct the study, Parker took advantage of a quirk in the 2008 stimulus. The federal government sent the payments to households on a schedule determined by the last two digits of the recipients’ social security number, something that is unrelated to financial circumstances or personal characteristics. Therefore the timing of the receipt of payments — and the subsequent spending that resulted — was effectively random.

All told, the study encompasses about 29,000 households actively participating in the Nielsen Consumer Panel, an ongoing survey that measures spending habits and household characteristics across the U.S. The average payment was around $900 per household.

On one level, the research reinforces the idea that basic financial need drives a certain portion of the household spending. On average, household spending on household goods rose by 10 percent the first week after the payment arrived, and by roughly 5 percent over the first four weeks. But households with low liquidity, which comprised 36 percent of those surveyed, spent more than three times as much of the money in the first week and more than twice as much of the payment in the first four weeks.

“There are people who have persistently lower incomes and lower liquidity, who spend this money when it arrives,” Parker says. Historical income performance was also bound up in this response. As Parker writes in the paper, “low income in 2006 is as good as” liquidity status at the same time, when it comes to “separating the households who spent from those who did not.”

Meanwhile, self-conception and long-run spending habits also influenced outcomes considerably, adding a wrinkle to existing models of household behavior in these circumstances. Parker’s research found that those who describe themselves as people who prefer to “spend now” rather than “save for the future” had a threefold increase in spending. 

“I think it suggests to me there is a lot of heterogeneity on the preference side and the behavior side,” Parker says. “Despite the first-order importance of the financial variable in separating people, there’s also a lot of evidence that preferences matter a lot.”

Or, as he adds, “my findings are consistent with a reasonably simple model in which people with different degrees of impatience try to maintain a stable standard of living but face limits on low-cost borrowing. For the range of differences in behavior that I uncover, so-called behavioral modeling assumptions are second order.”

Research implications

The income distribution of any federal income tax cut or refund is an inherently political matter, and the outcome of current efforts in Washington to pass new tax legislation is uncertain. But regardless of policy outcomes, economists can continue to adjust their own models of consumer behavior based on new empirical findings.

Such models can also better inform the scoring of tax changes, as well as other models of policy, such as those used by the Federal Reserve to characterize how households respond to movements in interest rates.

In this vein, Parker’s study joins a growing body of literature (including some of his own previous work) that modifies the most streamlined models in which people smooth out consumption in anticipation of drops or increases in income — and instead accounts for the bumps and jolts in spending that the data reveals.

“We think that people try to maintain a reasonably stable standard of living,” Parker says. And yet, he notes, people “do an awful lot of spending when money shows up.”

In research terms, Parker says, one contribution of the study is to “cleanly identify and connect differences in spending behavior across people, to measureable differences in people,” such as their self-conceptions as “spenders” or “savers.” He hopes his work will pave the way for improved mathematical models of “consumption and savings and borrowing decisions that incorporate, in a simple yet rigorous way, these differences in behavior.”

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Faster big-data analysis

We live in the age of big data, but most of that data is “sparse.” Imagine, for instance, a massive table that mapped all of Amazon’s customers against all of its products, with a “1” for each product a given customer bought and a “0” otherwise. The table would be mostly zeroes.

With sparse data, analytic algorithms end up doing a lot of addition and multiplication by zero, which is wasted computation. Programmers get around this by writing custom code to avoid zero entries, but that code is complex, and it generally applies only to a narrow range of problems.

At the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity (SPLASH), researchers from MIT, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, and Adobe Research recently presented a new system that automatically produces code optimized for sparse data.

That code offers a 100-fold speedup over existing, non-optimized software packages. And its performance is comparable to that of meticulously hand-optimized code for specific sparse-data operations, while requiring far less work on the programmer’s part.

The system is called Taco, for tensor algebra compiler. In computer-science parlance, a data structure like the Amazon table is called a “matrix,” and a tensor is just a higher-dimensional analogue of a matrix. If that Amazon table also mapped customers and products against the customers’ product ratings on the Amazon site and the words used in their product reviews, the result would be a four-dimensional tensor.

“Sparse representations have been there for more than 60 years,” says Saman Amarasinghe, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and senior author on the new paper. “But nobody knew how to generate code for them automatically. People figured out a few very specific operations — sparse matrix-vector multiply, sparse matrix-vector multiply plus a vector, sparse matrix-matrix multiply, sparse matrix-matrix-matrix multiply. The biggest contribution we make is the ability to generate code for any tensor-algebra expression when the matrices are sparse.”

Joining Amarasinghe on the paper are first author Fredrik Kjolstad, an MIT graduate student in EECS; Stephen Chou, also a graduate student in EECS; David Lugato of the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission; and Shoaib Kamil of Adobe Research.

Custom kernels

In recent years, the mathematical manipulation of tensors — tensor algebra — has become crucial to not only big-data analysis but machine learning, too. And it’s been a staple of scientific research since Einstein’s time.

Traditionally, to handle tensor algebra, mathematics software has decomposed tensor operations into their constituent parts. So, for instance, if a computation required two tensors to be multiplied and then added to a third, the software would run its standard tensor multiplication routine on the first two tensors, store the result, and then run its standard tensor addition routine.

In the age of big data, however, this approach is too time-consuming. For efficient operation on massive data sets, Kjolstad explains, every sequence of tensor operations requires its own “kernel,” or computational template.

“If you do it in one kernel, you can do it all at once, and you can make it go faster, instead of having to put the output in memory and then read it back in so that you can add it to something else,” Kjolstad says. “You can just do it in the same loop.”

Computer science researchers have developed kernels for some of the tensor operations most common in machine learning and big-data analytics, such as those enumerated by Amarasinghe. But the number of possible kernels is infinite: The kernel for adding together three tensors, for instance, is different from the kernel for adding together four, and the kernel for adding three three-dimensional tensors is different from the kernel for adding three four-dimensional tensors.

Many tensor operations involve multiplying an entry from one tensor with one from another. If either entry is zero, so is their product, and programs for manipulating large, sparse matrices can waste a huge amount of time adding and multiplying zeroes.

Hand-optimized code for sparse tensors identifies zero entries and streamlines operations involving them — either carrying forward the nonzero entries in additions or omitting multiplications entirely. This makes tensor manipulations much faster, but it requires the programmer to do a lot more work.

The code for multiplying two matrices — a simple type of tensor, with only two dimensions, like a table — might, for instance, take 12 lines if the matrix is full (meaning that none of the entries can be omitted). But if the matrix is sparse, the same operation can require 100 lines of code or more, to track omissions and elisions.

Enter Taco

Taco adds all that extra code automatically. The programmer simply specifies the size of a tensor, whether it’s full or sparse, and the location of the file from which it should import its values. For any given operation on two tensors, Taco builds a hierarchical map that indicates, first, which paired entries from both tensors are nonzero and, then, which entries from each tensor are paired with zeroes. All pairs of zeroes it simply discards.

Taco also uses an efficient indexing scheme to store only the nonzero values of sparse tensors. With zero entries included, a publicly released tensor from Amazon, which maps customer ID numbers against purchases and descriptive terms culled from reviews, takes up 107 exabytes of data, or roughly 10 times the estimated storage capacity of all of Google’s servers. But using the Taco compression scheme, it takes up only 13 gigabytes — small enough to fit on a smartphone.

“Many research groups over the last two decades have attempted to solve the compiler-optimization and code-generation problem for sparse-matrix computations but made little progress,” says Saday Sadayappan, a professor of computer science and engineering at Ohio State University, who was not involved in the research. “The recent developments from Fred and Saman represent a fundamental breakthrough on this long-standing open problem.”

“Their compiler now enables application developers to specify very complex sparse matrix or tensor computations in a very easy and convenient high-level notation, from which the compiler automatically generates very efficient code,” he continues. “For several sparse computations, the generated code from the compiler has been shown to be comparable or better than painstakingly developed manual implementations. This has the potential to be a real game-changer. It is one of the most exciting advances in recent times in the area of compiler optimization.”

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MIT-Haiti, Google team up to boost education in Kreyòl

In recent years, MIT scholars have helped develop a whole lexicon of science and math terms for use in Haiti’s Kreyòl language. Now a collaboration with Google is making those terms readily available to anyone — an important step in the expansion of Haitian Kreyòl for education purposes.

The new project, centered around the MIT-Haiti Initiative, has been launched as part of an enhancement to the Google Translate program. Now anyone using Google Translate can find an extensive set of Kreyòl terms, including recent coinages, in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines.

“In the past five or six years, we’ve witnessed quite a paradigm shift in the way people in Haiti talk about and use Kreyòl,” says Michel DeGraff, a professor of linguistics at MIT and director of the MIT-Haiti Initiative. “Having Google Translate on board is going to be another source of intellectual, cultural, economic, and political capital for Kreyòl,” he notes, adding that the project will aid “anyone in the world now, if someone is interested in producing text in Kreyòl from any language.”

The concept behind the project is straightforward. In Haiti, most education, especially technical education, traditionally has been conducted in French, even though Kreyòl is the native language of virtually all Haitian citizens. DeGraff, a native of Haiti, has long believed that Kreyòl should be a more central part of Haitian classroom education, and that native Kreyòl speakers would fare better academically and socioeconomically if it were.

In 2013, MIT and Haiti signed a joint initiative to promote education in Kreyòl, in coordination with several Haitian universities and educational institutions. DeGraff has said that the project is intended to help Kreyòl-speaking students “build a solid foundation in their own language,” by using Kreyòl to translate digital learning tools for STEM topics and to develop related educational resources, including lesson plans, learning modules, evaluation instruments, and more.

As part of the project, DeGraff and other colleagues in the MIT-Haiti Initiative, including STEM-focused faculty in Haiti, have developed new STEM-oriented coinages in Kreyòl, to help extend the scope of the language in technical fields.

For instance, consider the English word “torque,” meaning the rotational force applied to an object. Paul Belony, the leader of the physics team for the MIT-Haiti Initiative, came up with a new translation of it in Kreyòl: the word “tòday,” taken from the Kreyòl verb, “tòde,” which refers to wringing out wet clothes, in the process of washing them. The wringing action is a visual example of torque in action, and the term derives from a verb that is common knowledge in Haiti.

“It’s a new technical term,” DeGraff says. “It’s not at all what’s used in French for ‘torque,’ but it creates an image all Haitians will know, and then once you go into the physics of it, you can explain it in a way that makes sense.”

Another example involves translating the English word “likelihood.” Although often used as a colloquial synonym for “probability,” it does not have the same technical meaning in math. In an effort to avoid this kind of confusion in Kreyòl, MIT-Haiti scholars have tried new terms for “likelihood,” currently using the Kreyòl word “panchan” (which translates as “leaning”), a suggestion made by Haitian psychologist and statistician Serge Madhere.

To be sure, as MIT mathematics lecturer and MIT-Haiti member Jeremy Orloff observes, “the final Kreyòl term has not been fixed.” Still, he adds, when a new word for “likelihood” does become settled in Kreyòl, it figures to be “a big improvement on the unhelpful legacy from French or English,” which will help to avoid the conflation of “likelihood” and “probablility.”

Those are precisely the new kinds of word that appear in the lexicon available through Google Translate. And while those terms are now being used in education programs within Haiti, their integration into Google’s powerful translation tool means they “will be re-usable by anyone with an interest in producing Kreyòl materials,” as DeGraff puts it.

The collaboration between MIT-Haiti and Google is also an important step forward, as DeGraff sees it, in terms of adding new stakeholders to the project of disseminating Kreyòl widely.

“It sends a message that we can no longer be stopped by this belief that Kreyòl is not for science,” DeGraff says. “That’s the key, because we feel we are at this tipping point where more and more people are accepting the language, at the highest levels of science and math education, and most everywhere else in Haitian society, and even outside Haiti — for example, right here in Boston where a new dual language program in English and Kreyòl is being launched by the Boston Public Schools system.”

The MIT-Haiti Initiative has received funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation, MIT, the Wade Foundation, and the Open Society Foundation. Since the initiative’s inception in 2010, partner institutions in Haiti have included the Kreyòl  Kominotè Matènwa, the State University of Haiti, Université Caraïbe, École Supérieure d’Infotronique d’Haïti, Université Quisqueya, NATCOM, the Foundation for Knowledge and Liberty, Haiti’s Ministry of National Education and Professional Training, Haiti’s Prime Minister’s Office, the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, and Sûrtab.

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MIT research laid groundwork for promising Alzheimer’s-fighting drink

Much of Professor Emeritus Richard Wurtman’s career in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences revolved around developing new treatments for diseases and conditions by modifying chemicals produced in the brain.

Since coming to MIT in 1970, Wurtman and his research group have generated more than 1,000 research articles and 200 patents, laying the groundwork for numerous successful medical products.

For example, the 3 million people in the United States who take melatonin as a sleeping aid are using a product that derives from research in Wurtman’s lab. “I’m very interested in using basic knowledge to ameliorate the human condition, to make living better,” says Wurtman, who is also a medical doctor.

Now a nutrient mix based on essential research contributions by Wurtman has shown promise in treating the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new clinical trial funded by the European Union.

In the mid-2000s, Wurtman developed a nutrient cocktail aimed at treating what he considers “the root cause” of Alzheimer’s: loss of brain synapses. The mixture increases production of new synapses and restores connectivity between brain regions, improving memory and other cognitive functions. A French company then combined this research with a multinutrient it was developing along with the LipiDiDiet consortium — a European collaboration of 16 universities and research centers — to create a drink, called Souvenaid, for Alzheimer’s patients.

Over the years, Souvenaid has been the focus on several clinical trials to validate its efficacy. The mixture is not yet available in the United States, but it is being sold as a “medical food” — a category of regulated and safe foods that are designed for dietary management of diseases — in a number of countries across the globe.

In the new clinical trial, published in today’s issue of Lancet Neurology, patients with prodromal Alzheimer’s — the predementia stage of Alzheimer’s with mild symptoms — were given either Souvenaid or a placebo. Compared to people who drank the placebo, patients who drank Souvenaid throughout the trial showed less worsening in everyday cognitive and functional performance and significantly less atrophy of the hippocampus, which is caused early in Alzheimer’s by brain tissue loss.

“It feels like science-fiction, where you can take a drink of Souvenaid and you get more synapses … for improved cognitive function,” Wurtman says. “But it works.”

The co-authors of the study are from the University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio University Hospital, Karolinska Institutet and Karolinska University Hospital, the University of Masstricht, the VU University Medical Centre, Pentara Corporation, the University of Gothenburg, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, and Saarland University and the LipiDiDiet study group.

Making Souvenaid

Souvenaid’s popularity may be on the rise today, but the product would not be possible without years of MIT research, Wurtman says.

In the mid-2000s, Wurtman’s research led him to seek the mechanisms behind the body’s production of phosphatides, a class of lipids that, along with proteins, form biological membranes. Production of these phosphatides, Wurtman discovered, depends on a set of nutrient precursors.

Specifically, Wurtman homed in on three naturally occurring dietary compounds: choline, uridine, and the omega-3 fatty acid DHA. Choline is found in meats, nuts, and eggs. Fish, flaxseeds, and certain meats contain omega-3 fatty acids. Uridine is mostly produced in the liver.

All those compounds taken simultaneously boost production of phosphatides, encouraging membrane development, which is critical in creating new synapses. Knowing that Alzheimer’s-affected brains continuously lose synapses, Wurtman patented the work through MIT’s Technology Licensing Office in hopes of using some version of the cocktail to treat Alzheimer’s and any disease that leads to loss of synapses.

Then, in 2003, Wurtman presented the work at a meeting in Europe. Attending the event was a representative from Nutricia — a unit of Danone, a French company known as Dannon in the United States — which was experienced in making medical foods. Wurtman was invited to the company’s headquarters, where a deal was hashed out to combine Wurtman’s findings with a multinutrient the company was working on to create a new treatment for Alzheimer’s.

By 2008, Danone had licensed the patent and Souvenaid was already a product. But Wurtman and several graduate students continued basic research behind Souvenaid, which gave the product a boost. “We were much more able to do the basic research at MIT,” Wurtman says. “As soon as we found something in the research, we’d patent it. We never had the lag time. If you work in entrepreneurship and innovation that lag time could be the downfall of a prospective product.”

Among the group’s key discoveries was the finding that Souvenaid boosted the number of structures called dendritic spines, found in brain cells. When spines from one neuron contact another, a synapse is formed.

A 2010 study detailing those findings in Alzheimer’s and Dementia indicated that Souvenaid improved verbal memory in patients with mild Alzheimer’s. A 2012 study published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease confirmed and expanded these findings. Over six months, patients with mild Alzheimer’s were given Souvenaid or a placebo. Patients taking the placebo deteriorated in their verbal-memory performance in the final three months of the study, while the Souvenaid patients continued to improve. Both trials were conducted by Philip Scheltens of the Alzheimer Center of the VU University Medical Centre in Amsterdam.

Future of Souvenaid

In the new clinical trial by the LipiDiDiet consortium, researchers conducted a 24-month trial, where more than 300 patients with prodromal Alzheimer’s were randomly assigned Souvenaid or a placebo. The patients taking Souvenaid showed about 45 percent less cognitive decline than people taking the placebo, according to a measure known as the clinical dementia rating sum of boxes.

But the surprising finding, Wurtman says, is that the patients taking Souvenaid showed a substantial reduction is the loss of hippocampal volume. In early stages of Alzheimer’s, the hippocampus — which plays an important role in memory — shrinks as tissue is destroyed. But rates of deterioration for those taking Souvenaid were about 26 percent lower than the control group.

“That’s remarkable,” Wurtman says. “I never would have guessed that something like that could happen. But if you suppress the loss of the hippocampus, it makes sense that you’d have better retention of cognitive function.”

The results indicate that Souvenaid may be able to slow or stop full progression of very early Alzheimer’s into full-blown Alzheimer’s, Wurtman says.

With this new study, Wurtman has high hopes for Souvenaid. First, he says the findings could encourage more researchers to view synapse restoration as a treatment for Alzheimer’s, which isn’t a popular area of study. Most research today, he says, focuses on reducing the accumulation of amyloid plaques or minimizing damage caused by toxic metabolites in Alzheimer’s-affected brains.

“Everyone who writes about Alzheimer’s knows there’s a synapse deficiency, and this impairs connections between brain regions,” he says. “Even if the amyloid or another problem gets solved, one way or another, you’ll have to replace these synapses.”

Wurtman also hopes the study will “catalyze the rapid appearance of Souvenaid in the American market” and become a very early treatment for suspected Alzheimer’s patients. Several potential biomarkers are being studied as indicators of early Alzheimer’s. But it’s somewhat useless to detect these biomarkers if nothing can be done about the disease at that point, Wurtman says. With Souvenaid, he says, that can change.

“Most people don’t do a biomarker test, because … there’s been nowhere to go from there. Now, it will be possible, I believe, for a doctor to tell a patient that, even though they have early Alzheimer’s, they can take Souvenaid chronically to suppress the development of the disease.”

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Mens et Manus America examines election integrity

Various concerns about the security of U.S. elections have arisen over the past two decades, some more significant than others. While many studies have shown that voter fraud, for instance, is vanishingly rare in the U.S., what about the state of electoral administration, lost votes, and cyberattacks? On Oct. 16, two experts teamed up at MIT to share insights from their research on what is and isn't working in America's electoral system.

"Data, Technology, and the Integrity of Elections," the first talk in this year's Mens et Manus America series, featured presentations by Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science at MIT, and Eitan D. Hersh, an associate professor of political science at Tufts University and author of "Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters" (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

The good news  

The twin presentations, which drew about 80 attendees to Room E51-345, revealed that while the system of counting and collecting votes is much improved since the problematic presidential election of 2000, significant challenges remain.

"In 2016, the process of running the election was as good as its been in two decades or longer, and I stand by that despite what you've read in the news," said Stewart, a founding member of the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP), an interdisciplinary initiative founded to address the voting machine problems that came to light during Florida's 2000 election recount.

In fact, Stewart said, the number of votes lost during collection and counting has been cut in half since 2000. "A lot of good things have happened," he said, outlining several improvements that emerged from the VTP's work — including better voting machines, modernized registration systems, and an increase in the professionalization of election administration.

The challenges 

"We grew up worried about the problems of the 1890s," he said, noting that the theft of ballot boxes was once a main electoral concern in the United States. "Now we have new problems."

These include the risk of cyberattacks, such as Russia's apparent efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. Stewart remarked that while it's unclear how much impact Russia's actions had on the election's outcome, the fact that such a threat exists a problem in itself. "From my perspective, what we can't measure might hurt us," he said. "One of the critical issues is how to make those problems that may be emerging measurable."

Reports that Russia used Facebook ads and Twitter posts to influence the 2016 election also raise new questions about what forces are working to sway voters and how — a topic Hersh illuminated in his remarks.

An expert in public policy and voter targeting, Hersh explained how political campaigns use publicly accessible data, such as voter registration records and census data, to market their candidates to specific audiences.

For example, some state registration forms ask voters to identify their race and some do not — a difference that prompts different campaign strategies, Hersh said. "If you are a campaign and you don't know individually who is black, you have to go to black neighborhoods. If you do know individually, you can go to black homes in mixed neighborhoods," Hersh said.

How influences on the electoral system are changing

While Hersh didn't take a stand on the value of these divergent strategies, he, like Stewart, emphasized the importance of understanding the influences on the system and how they are changing. For example, in the realm of voter influence, Hersh said he expects an expanded role for such internet giants as Facebook and Google, which collect reams of data about their users.

"Now you have companies that have better information than the government," Hersh said, which means that corporate policies will begin to play a role in what data campaigns use. For example, Hersh said, "Google has more rules about lying in ads than the government does."

The rise of corporate data in the political process

Political uses will also raise new issues for companies — such as whether to allow political actors to hide their identity, a concern that doesn't arise with commercial advertisers, Hersh said. "I think the big question going forward is how much these companies care about targeting people for political campaigns rather than commercial purposes."

Regardless of what campaigns attempt, however, Hersh said the evidence indicates that campaigns are ultimately more successful at influencing turnout that in winning over voters. "Mobilization targeting is pretty effective," he said. "But convincing someone to change their mind? There's little evidence any of that works. It's extraordinarily hard to persuade someone."
 
MIT's Mens et Manus America Initiative explores the social, political, and economic challenges currently facing the United States. The nonpartisan initiative is co-sponsored by the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management, and is co-directed by Agustín Rayo, professor of philosophy and associate dean of SHASS, and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, the Alvin J. Siteman (1948) Professor of Entrepreneurship and Strategy and deputy dean of MIT Sloan.

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High School teams awarded 2017-18 Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam grant for invention projects

The Lemelson-MIT Program has announced the 2017-2018 InvenTeams, 15 teams of high school students nationwide, each receiving up to $10,000 in grant funding to solve open-ended problems they’ve recognized from their local communities. Two examples of the types of technological solutions to problems InvenTeams are creating include reducing the population of mosquitoes due to flooding after hurricanes and ways of preventing biodiesel fuel from gelling at lower temperatures so that it will be a viable alternative to fossil fuel in more geographies. 

The InvenTeam initiative, now in its 15th year, inspires youth to invent technological solutions to real-world problems of their own choosing. The 2017-2018 InvenTeams are comprised of students, teachers and community mentors that will pursue year-long invention projects. The InvenTeam initiative engages students in creative thinking, problem-solving and hands-on learning opportunities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). InvenTeams apply their learnings and experiences to build an invention that will be showcased at EurekaFest at MIT in June 2018, and after a mid-grant technical review within their home community in February 2018.

"My experience as a student member of the 2012 Northeast High School InvenTeam was extremely inspiring,” said Clara Mabour, now a biology teacher at her alma mater, Northeast High School in Oakland Park, Florida. “InvenTeams gave me an inventive spirit. I graduated [from college] with a degree in environmental science with a focus on water because of my InvenTeam project. I’m now leading my first team of students through their own InvenTeam experience. I want to inspire my students and teach biology in the hands-on approach I learned through InvenTeams because I believe it’s the most effective form of teaching.” 

“It is exciting to see an InvenTeam alumna come back to apply for an InvenTeam grant as an educator,” said Leigh Estabrooks, invention education officer at the Lemelson-MIT Program. “It’s truly rewarding to see the inventive mindset that the InvenTeam initiative instilled in Clara as well as in other students. Invention starts with finding a good problem to solve. Young people who find a problem that is meaningful to them will work long and hard with their team to build a working prototype. This passion and perseverance encourages them to lead inventive lives beyond the grant year.”

The InvenTeams are located in 12 different states, with the state of Hawaii receiving its first InvenTeam grant. The invention projects were selected by a respected panel from the Cambridge and Boston area consisting of university professors, inventors, entrepreneurs, intellectual property lawyers, industry professionals, and college students. The team projects address problems that affect their local community, family members, classmates or a community connection. 

Solving problems in their community

• Bayonne High School (Bayonne, New Jersey): System to remotely monitor water quality for the Newark, New Jersey Shipping Channel
• Kealakehe High School (Kailua-Kona, Hawaii): Detection and alert system for the blood alcohol content of drivers
• Northeast High School (Oakland Park, Florida): Device to deter mosquitoes from laying eggs in standing water
• American Passage at Maria Regina High School (Hartsdale, New York): Device worn by pedestrians to alert drivers of their presence
• Battle Creek Math and Science Center (Battle Creek, Michigan): Device to detect and alert drivers of deer in roadways

Solving problems for family members/classmates

• Garey High School (Pomona, California): Device to monitor and trim toe nails for people with diabetic neuropathy
• Chattahoochee High School (Johns Creek, Gerogia): Device to adapt manual wheelchairs for difficult terrain
• Dublin High School (Dublin, California): Device allowing people in wheelchairs to participate in ball sports
• Dayton High School (Dayton, Oregon): System to monitor and automate home chicken coops
• SOAR Early College High School (Lancaster, California): System to alert college students of potential dangers in their proximity

Solving problems for community connections

• Frederick County Career and Technology Center (Frederick, Maryland): System to remediate well water for Melka Olba School in rural Ethiopia
• Fairview High School (Fairview, Pennsylvania): System comprised of a stethoscope and self-cleaning carrying case for clinical settings
• Energy Institute High School (Houston, Texas): Device to prevent biodiesel from gelling at low temperatures
• Tesla Engineering Charter School (Appleton, Wisconsin): System to process sustainable cooking fuel for the Village of Hope in Zambia
• St. Vrain Valley Schools Innovation Center (Longmont, Colorado): System to alert first responders of people in distress in areas without cell phone reception

Calling all young inventors!

The Lemelson-MIT InvenTeam application for the 2018-2019 school year is now available a http://ift.tt/1Fw9Jmx. Teams of high school students, teachers, and mentors are encouraged to apply now through April 9, 2018.

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Crowdsourcing big-data analysis

In the analysis of big data sets, the first step is usually the identification of “features” — data points with particular predictive power or analytic utility. Choosing features usually requires some human intuition. For instance, a sales database might contain revenues and date ranges, but it might take a human to recognize that average revenues — revenues divided by the sizes of the ranges — is the really useful metric.

MIT researchers have developed a new collaboration tool, dubbed FeatureHub, intended to make feature identification more efficient and effective. With FeatureHub, data scientists and experts on particular topics could log on to a central site and spend an hour or two reviewing a problem and proposing features. Software then tests myriad combinations of features against target data, to determine which are most useful for a given predictive task.

In tests, the researchers recruited 32 analysts with data science experience, who spent five hours each with the system, familiarizing themselves with it and using it to propose candidate features for each of two data-science problems.

The predictive models produced by the system were tested against those submitted to a data-science competition called Kaggle. The Kaggle entries had been scored on a 100-point scale, and the FeatureHub models were within three and five points of the winning entries for the two problems.

But where the top-scoring entries were the result of weeks or even months of work, the FeatureHub entries were produced in a matter of days. And while 32 collaborators on a single data science project is a lot by today’s standards, Micah Smith, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science who helped lead the project, has much larger ambitions.

FeatureHub — like its name — was inspired by GitHub, an online repository of open-source programming projects, some of which have drawn thousands of contributors. Smith hopes that FeatureHub might someday attain a similar scale.

“I do hope that we can facilitate having thousands of people working on a single solution for predicting where traffic accidents are most likely to strike in New York City or predicting which patients in a hospital are most likely to require some medical intervention,” he says. “I think that the concept of massive and open data science can be really leveraged for areas where there’s a strong social impact but not necessarily a single profit-making or government organization that is coordinating responses.”

Smith and his colleagues presented a paper describing FeatureHub at the IEEE International Conference on Data Science and Advanced Analytics. His coauthors on the paper are his thesis advisor, Kalyan Veeramachaneni, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and Roy Wedge, who began working with Veeramachaneni’s group as an MIT undergraduate and is now a software engineer at Feature Labs, a data science company based on the group’s work.

FeatureHub’s user interface is built on top of a common data-analysis software suite called the Jupyter Notebook, and the evaluation of feature sets is performed by standard machine-learning software packages. Features must be written in the Python programming language, but their design has to follow a template that intentionally keeps the syntax simple. A typical feature might require between five and 10 lines of code.

The MIT researchers wrote code that mediates between the other software packages and manages data, pooling features submitted by many different users and tracking those collections of features that perform best on particular data analysis tasks.

In the past, Veeramachaneni’s group has developed software that automatically generates features by inferring relationships between data from the manner in which they’re organized. When that organizational information is missing, however, the approach is less effective.

Still, Smith imagines, automatic feature synthesis could be used in conjunction with FeatureHub, getting projects started before volunteers have begun to contribute to them, saving the grunt work of enumerating the obvious features, and augmenting the best-performing sets of features contributed by humans.

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Yo-Yo Ma to deliver spring 2018 Compton Lecture

President L. Rafael Reif announced today that cellist Yo-Yo Ma will visit the MIT campus on Monday, March 19, to deliver the spring 2018 Karl Taylor Compton Lecture.

“From his performances and recordings, the world knows Yo-Yo Ma for his brilliance as an artist,” Reif said. “However, I am especially thrilled to welcome him back to campus next spring so he can share with our students his passionate curiosity and deep commitment to making a better world. By reaching across boundaries of cultures and disciplines, he builds the kind of unexpected creative connections that resonate deeply with the MIT community. I am delighted that he will deliver the Institute’s best-known and most prestigious invited lectureship.”

The Karl Taylor Compton Lecture Series was established in 1957 to honor the late Karl Taylor Compton, who served as president of MIT from 1930 to 1948 and as chair of the MIT Corporation from 1948 to 1954. The lecture series is intended to give the MIT community direct contact with the important ideas of our times and with people who have contributed much to modern thought.

Yo-Yo Ma was born in Paris in 1955 and began to study the cello with his father at age four. Having moved with his family to the United States at age 7, he studied at the Julliard School and later at Harvard University, from which he graduated in 1976. Perhaps the most celebrated cellist of his generation, Ma is a prolific performer and teacher, having recorded more than 100 albums, given thousands of live performances and master classes, and served as artistic advisor or consultant to organizations such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and Carnegie Hall.

His numerous awards include the Avery Fisher Prize (1978), the Glenn Gould Prize (1999), the National Medal of the Arts (2001), the Dan David Prize (2006), the Leonie Sonning Music Prize (2006), the World Economic Forum’s Crystal Award (2008), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2010), the Polar Music Prize (2012), and the Vilcek Prize in Contemporary Music (2013). In addition, Ma was appointed a CultureConnect Ambassador by the U.S. Department of State in 2002 and currently serves as a United Nations Messenger of Peace. His work provides opportunities for music to be experienced within communities, with a special commitment to programs that introduce children to music and its creation.

The breadth of activity and accolades in Ma’s long career stem from ferocious curiosity and delight in the global multitude of musical forms beyond the Western classical canon. Ma continues to explore music as what he terms “a means of communication and as a vehicle for the migration of ideas across a range of cultures throughout the world.” He’s known for commissioning new works, particularly in connection with Silkroad, the nonprofit organization he founded in 1998 to foster radical cultural collaboration toward a more hopeful world.

“When I think of Yo-Yo Ma, I do so in at least two ways: He’s the world’s leading cellist and the world’s leading ambassador for the performing arts through Silkroad, a project that works to transcend cultural boundaries via the shared experience of music,” said Associate Provost Philip S. Khoury, chair of the Compton Lectures Advisory Committee. “More than that, Mr. Ma is our Cambridge neighbor. It is a phenomenal privilege to welcome him to the MIT stage.”

All members of the MIT community are invited to attend Compton lectures. The timing, venue, and format of Ma’s lecture will be announced in the spring 2018 semester. Registration via MIT certificates will be required.

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3-D-printed device builds better nanofibers

Meshes made from fibers with nanometer-scale diameters have a wide range of potential applications, including tissue engineering, water filtration, solar cells, and even body armor. But their commercialization has been hampered by inefficient manufacturing techniques.

In the latest issue of the journal Nanotechnology, MIT researchers describe a new device for producing nanofiber meshes, which matches the production rate and power efficiency of its best-performing predecessor — but significantly reduces variation in the fibers’ diameters, an important consideration in most applications.

But whereas the predecessor device, from the same MIT group, was etched into silicon through a complex process that required an airlocked “clean room,” the new device was built using a $3,500 commercial 3-D printer. The work thus points toward nanofiber manufacture that is not only more reliable but also much cheaper.

The new device consists of an array of small nozzles through which a fluid containing particles of a polymer are pumped. As such, it is what’s known as a microfluidic device.

“My personal opinion is that in the next few years, nobody is going to be doing microfluidics in the clean room,” says Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories and senior author on the new paper. “There’s no reason to do so. 3-D printing is a technology that can do it so much better — with better choice of materials, with the possibility to really make the structure that you would like to make. When you go to the clean room, many times you sacrifice the geometry you want to make. And the second problem is that it is incredibly expensive.”

Velásquez-García is joined on the paper by two postdocs in his group, Erika García-López and Daniel Olvera-Trejo. Both received their PhDs from Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico and worked with Velásquez-García through MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey’s nanotech research partnership.

Hollowed out

Nanofibers are useful for any application that benefits from a high ratio of surface area to volume — such as solar cells, which try to maximize exposure to sunlight, or fuel cell electrodes, which catalyze reactions at their surfaces. Nanofibers can also yield materials that are permeable only at very small scales, such as water filters, or that are remarkably tough for their weight, such as body armor.

Most such applications depend on fibers with regular diameters. “The performance of the fibers strongly depends on their diameter,” Velásquez-García says. “If you have a significant spread, what that really means is that only a few percent are really working. Example: You have a filter, and the filter has pores between 50 nanometers and 1 micron. That’s really a 1-micron filter.”

Because the group’s earlier device was etched in silicon, it was “externally fed,” meaning that an electric field drew a polymer solution up the sides of the individual emitters. The fluid flow was regulated by rectangular columns etched into the sides of the emitters, but it was still erratic enough to yield fibers of irregular diameter.

The new emitters, by contrast, are “internally fed”: They have holes bored through them, and hydraulic pressure pushes fluid into the bores until they’re filled. Only then does an electric field draw the fluid out into tiny fibers.

Beneath the emitters, the channels that feed the bores are wrapped into coils, and they gradually taper along their length. That taper is key to regulating the diameter of the nanofibers, and it would be virtually impossible to achieve with clean-room microfabrication techniques. “Microfabrication is really meant to make straight cuts,” Velásquez-García says.

Fast iteration

In the new device, the nozzles are arranged into two rows, which are slightly offset from each other. That’s because the device was engineered to demonstrate aligned nanofibers — nanofibers that preserve their relative position as they’re collected by a rotating drum. Aligned nanofibers are particularly useful in some applications, such as tissue scaffolding. For applications in which unaligned fibers are adequate, the nozzles could be arranged in a grid, increasing output rate.

Besides cost and design flexibility, Velásquez-García says, another advantage of 3-D printing is the ability to rapidly test and revise designs. With his group’s microfabricated devices, he says, it typically takes two years to go from theoretical modeling to a published paper, and in the interim, he and his colleagues might be able to test two or three variations on their basic design. With the new device, he says, the process took closer to a year, and they were able to test 70 iterations of the design.

“A way to deterministically engineer the position and size of electrospun fibers allows you to start to think about being able to control mechanical properties of materials that are made from these fibers. It allows you to think about preferential cell growth along particular directions in the fibers — lots of good potential opportunities there,” says Mark Allen, the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in electrical and systems engineering and mechanical engineering and applied mechanics. “I anticipate that somebody’s going to take this technology and use it in very creative ways. If you have the need for this type of deterministically engineered fiber network, I think it’s a very elegant way to achieve that goal.”

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Cambridge-MIT Exchange: Celebrating 16 years of transforming student lives

“CME was born of a sense that MIT and Cambridge undergraduates had something to teach each other and something to learn from each other.”

These remarks, penned by Dan Hastings, were shared last month by Melanie Parker at a celebration marking the end of the Cambridge-MIT Exchange (CME) program. Hastings, who was not able to attend the event, supported the program during his tenure as dean for undergraduate education. Parker is the executive director for MIT Global Education and Career Development (GECD), the office that managed CME.

CME began in 2001 as a part of a larger research collaboration between Cambridge University, England, and MIT. The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI) funded the exchange in its initial years and was an ambitious endeavor aimed at developing a more competitive, entrepreneurial United Kingdom with partners in industry and a £65 million investment from the British government. CMI enabled an exchange not only of students between campuses, but also faculty and programs.

When CMI ended, CME persisted, with 14 MIT departments continuing to exchange juniors with undergraduates from Cambridge for a full year. “One testament to the value of this interaction is that CME continued long after the parent program CMI ended,” Hastings says.

In 2010, economic downturn drove Cambridge to terminate central-level funding for the program, which then shrank in number of students and departments. But corporate sponsorship from British Petroleum allowed the program to continue, and eventually re-expand. By law UK students studying abroad for the whole academic year only pay their home university 15 percent of their tuition. For CME, BP paid Cambridge the difference.

When BP decided to terminate their support last year, the 2016-17 academic year became CME’s last.

During CME’s 16-year history, 829 students from MIT and the University of Cambridge taught and learned from each other.

“For some the effect was remarkable, transformational, even life-changing,” says Professor Richard Prager, head of Cambridge’s School of Technology and key supporter of the program in the UK. Many alumni of the program concur; at CME’s closing celebration, some spoke of the program’s impact on their lives, while others sent in testimonials and reflections compiled into a video.

“CME absolutely shaped who I am as a person,” says Rachel Kolesnikov-Lindsey '09, MEng '10, now an officer in the U.S. Air Force Space Command. Many program alumni say the experience influenced their career choices — and some even met their spouse while abroad. “It’s been ten years,” adds Lucy Wu '09, “and I know that [CME] is something I will continue to benefit from for the rest of my life.”

The academic differences between the two universities offered opportunities to come at course material in new ways. As Meghan Kenny '13 puts it, “I re-learned how to think.”  

In addition to the effects that CME had on its participants, the program had a lasting impact on both campuses.

“I recall vividly a meeting … [where] one of the Cambridge dons asserted that undergraduates could not be involved in research,” Hastings says. “We countered that not only could undergraduates be involved but we were doing it with UROP [MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program], and they often made valuable contributions to the work of the faculty.”

Prager tells a similar story. “I remember being particularly grateful to two Cambridge students who went on the exchange. When they came back they used their added breadth of perspective to run focus groups and assemble a really useful body of constructive feedback on the Cambridge course. This information formed a key element of many changes that we worked on in subsequent years.”

MIT students also returned from Cambridge with a fresh perspective on the Institute. Malgorzata Hedderick, the associate dean for global education in GECD, oversaw CME for 11 years, and in her conversations with returned students, one theme is consistent: A year at Cambridge had a profound impact.

“Upon their return from Cambridge, MIT students often remarked that the CME experience made them stronger learners and prepared them better for graduate school,” Hedderick says. “Many of these students also stressed that the experience taught them a much better work-life balance. Others commented that at Cambridge for the first time they had a chance to leave the engineering bubble and discover that many of their Cambridge counterparts pursued literature, history of art or foreign languages as their actual profession and life’s vocation.”

Though no MIT and Cambridge students will exchange places this year, Global Education continues to help students find ways to go abroad. A research exchange with Imperial College London is being expanded to include more opportunities for semester study, and Independent Activities Period offerings taught by MIT faculty have continued to grow.

CME will not be soon forgotten, especially with program alumni like John Graham '16 leading alumni dialog with the University of Cambridge while still seeking new corporate sponsorship. Regardless of whether the exchange can be revived, new paths abroad will continue to appear, and future alumni will say of their time overseas what Cambridge undergrad Thomas Goldring says of his year here at MIT: “It completely changed my life.”

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Can artificial intelligence learn to scare us?

Just in time for Halloween, a research team from the MIT Media Lab’s Scalable Cooperation group has introduced Shelley: the world’s first artificial intelligence-human horror story collaboration.

Shelley, named for English writer Mary Shelley — best known as the author of "Frankenstein: or, the Modern Prometheus" — is a deep-learning powered artificial intelligence (AI) system that was trained on over 140,000 horror stories on Reddit’s infamous r/nosleep subreddit. She lives on Twitter, where every hour, @shelley_ai tweets out the beginning of a new horror story and the hashtag #yourturn to invite a human collaborator. Anyone is welcome to reply to the tweet with the next part of the story, then Shelley will reply again with the next part, and so on. The results are weird, fun, and unpredictable horror stories that represent both creativity and collaboration — traits that explore the limits of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

“Shelley is a combination of a multi-layer recurrent neural network and an online learning algorithm that learns from crowd’s feedback over time,” explains Pinar Yanardhag, the project’s lead researcher. “The more collaboration Shelley gets from people, the more and scarier stories she will write.”

Shelley starts stories based on the AI’s own learning dataset, but she responds directly to additions to the story from human contributors — which, in turn, adds to her knowledge base. Each completed story is then collected on the Shelley project website.

“Shelley’s creative mind has no boundaries,” the research team says. “She writes stories about a pregnant man who woke up in a hospital, a mouth on the floor with a calm smile, an entire haunted town, a faceless man on the mirror ... anything is possible!”

One final note on Shelley: The AI was trained on a subreddit filled with adult content, and the researchers have limited control over her — so parents beware.

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5 Tips for Evaluating an Engineering Firm Before You Join

Are you ready to grow as an engineering professional? If you’re thinking about switching  to a new firm, you’ll want to do your research to ensure you find a strong fit for both your talents and needs. There are a number of strategies you can use to learn about a firm’s brand, and its reputation in the marketplace. No matter what stage of your career you are in, these key strategies can help you evaluate a firm before you send in your résumé. What’s...

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How cities can fight climate change most effectively

What are the best ways for U.S. cities to combat climate change? A new study co-authored by an MIT professor indicates it will be easier for cities to reduce emissions coming from residential energy use rather than from local transportation — and this reduction will happen mostly thanks to better building practices, not greater housing density.

The study analyzes how extensively local planning policies could either complement the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan (CPP) of 2015 or compensate for its absence. The CPP is intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. In early 2016, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling halted the measure’s potential enactment; the legal case is unresolved and the Trump administration has announced it intends to unwind the CPP.   

“Our take-home message is that cities can do a lot at the local level with housing stock,” says David Hsu, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and one of three co-authors of a new paper detailing the study’s findings. However, he adds, “In transportation, cities can’t make up for the loss of a national strategy.”

The researchers also found that policies with the biggest local impact vary from city to city, with faster-growing Sun Belt cities such as Houston and Phoenix having the potential to enact a bigger reduction in residential emissions than older cities such as Boston or Philadelphia, which see less change in their housing stock.

“For some cities, some policies will clearly be more effective than others,” Hsu observes.

The paper, “Intersecting Residential and Transportation CO₂ Emissions,” appears online in the Journal of Planning Education and Research, with print publication forthcoming. Hsu’s co-authors are John D. Landis, a professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania, who is the corresponding author, and Erick Guerra, an assistant professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania.

Does the climate battle start at home?

To conduct the study, the researchers examined economic, environmental, and demographic data from 11 major U.S. cities, then developed models projecting emissions through the year 2030, based on a series of different policy scenarios.

For instance, to analyze ways of cutting emissions from residential energy by 2030, the researchers modeled a baseline scenario in which housing characteristics remained the same. They also modeled scenarios featuring a variety of changes, including the implementation of new energy-efficient construction standards, the building of more multifamily homes, and the retrofitting of homes to save energy.

Simply requiring newly built homes to be more energy efficient would reduce residential emissions by an average of 6 percent by 2030. But requiring existing homes to be retrofitted would yield a further 19 percent reduction of residential emission, on average, across the 11 cities.

Perhaps surprisingly, there was relatively less benefit from a scenario in which the number of newly built single-family homes was reduced by 25 percent by 2030 and replaced by multifamily buildings. This greater housing density “would have virtually no incremental benefit in terms of reduced residential energy use and CO₂ emissions,” as the paper states.

“Shifting people to multifamily buildings is what planners have always wanted to do, but that’s actually not as effective as most advocates would have thought,” Hsu says.

The main reason for this, the researchers find, is that as new homes become more energy-efficient, the energy-use differences between larger single-family homes and homes in multifamily dwellings will shrink, thus “reducing the energy and emissions benefits of any substituting attached homes for detached ones,” as the paper states. (The study did find that in Phoenix, one of the 11 cities examined, greater density would have a notable effect on emissions.)   

In any case, as Hsu notes, the impact of policies related to construction standards and retrofitting alone is significant: “You can do a lot of things at the local level to affect housing stock that are basically equivalent or even more aggressive than the Clean Power Plan.”

All told, housing accounts for about 20 percent of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. As the researchers state in the paper, the “full suite of residential energy conservation programs” could lower total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by nearly 12 percent compared to the “business-as-usual” projections for 2030, when coupled with the CPP, and by 9 percent even without implementation of the CPP.

Moving targets

On the transportation side, the researchers also modeled urban emissions growth through the year 2030. They again evaluated a baseline scenario in which current conditions essentially continue intact, as well as a handful of alternate scenarios in which total vehicle-miles traveled varies due to increased use of mass transit and changes in housing density.

The scholars also compared the effects of these local planning efforts to the reduction in emissions that would occur under the Obama administration’s plan to increase the fuel efficiency of the automobile fleet to 54.5 miles per gallon by the year 2027.

The study’s bottom-line finding is that, by 2030, a federal mandate increasing vehicle fuel efficiency to 54.5 miles per gallon would reduce auto-based emissions in the 11 cities by 38 percent, in the absence of any additional mass transit or density programs. That number would increase to 46 percent, on average, if the cities adopted robust transit and density policies. (The Trump administration has stated it will review and may possibly drop the existing fuel-efficiency plan.)

“The results for increasing the average fuel efficiency of the U.S. fleet are still stronger than what we can do on the planning side,” Hsu says. However, he notes, that is a relative outcome, and incremental emissions reductions from increased use of mass transit, among other things, may well be worth pursuing at the municipal level.

The 11 cities analyzed in the study are Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Seattle.

Your mileage may vary

As the researchers readily acknowledge, the study is based on modeling, and changing circumstances could alter their projections. For example, a rapid electrification of the automobile fleet, as the paper states, “could substantially reduce the amount of emissions” per vehicle-mile.

The paper also makes clear that the average effects found across the 11 cities vary considerably. Mandating that newly built homes be more energy efficient would reduce residential emissions by 10 to 13 percent in Houston and Phoenix, but only by 3 to 5 percent in slower-growing metro areas, including Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, and Philadelphia.

To be sure, the amount of emissions reduction possible in any urban area also depends on existing levels. Cleveland and Denver, which both rely heavily on coal-fired power plants, have the highest rates of emissions per units of energy produced; they produce 34.3 and 32.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions per million BTU (a standard unit of the heat required to raise water temperature), respectively.

Los Angeles, by contrast, produces only 10.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions per million BTU, making its energy use about one-third as carbon-intensive as that of Cleveland and Denver. Ultimately each metropolitan area, Hsu suggests, may have to find its own path toward a clean energy future.

“We’re trying to be hopeful,” Hsu says. “It’s really just [about] getting planners to think about what makes sense in their market. There’s not going to be a policy idea that works everywhere equally. … If you have a fixed amount of time and political capital and focus, you should do the most efficient thing.”

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