Boeing will be Kendall Square Initiative’s first major tenant

Boeing, the world’s largest aerospace company, will soon become part of the MIT/Kendall Square innovation fabric. The company has agreed to lease approximately 100,000 square feet at MIT’s building to be developed at 314 Main St., in the heart of Kendall Square in Cambridge.

The agreement makes Boeing the first major tenant to commit to MIT’s Kendall Square Initiative, which includes six sites slated for housing, retail, research and development, office, academic, and open space uses. The building at 314 Main St. (“Site 5” on the map above) is located between the MBTA Red Line station and the Kendall Hotel. Boeing is expected to occupy its new space by the end of 2020.

“Our focus on advancing the Kendall Square innovation ecosystem includes a deep and historic understanding of what we call the ‘power of proximity’ to address pressing global challenges,” MIT Executive Vice President and Treasurer Israel Ruiz says. “MIT’s president, L. Rafael Reif, has made clear his objective of reducing the time it takes to move ideas from the classroom and lab out to the market. The power of proximity is a dynamic that propels this concept forward: Just as pharmaceutical, biotech, and tech sector scientists in Kendall Square work closely with their nearby MIT colleagues, Boeing and MIT researchers will be able to strengthen their collaborative ties to further chart the course of the aerospace industry.”

Boeing was founded in 1916 — the same year that MIT moved to Cambridge — and marked its recent centennial in a spirit similar to the Institute’s 100-year celebration in 2016, with special events, community activities, and commemorations. That period also represents a century-long research relationship between Boeing and MIT that has helped to advance the global aerospace industry.

Some of Boeing’s founding leaders, as well as engineers, executives, Boeing Technical Fellows, and student interns, are MIT alumni.

Earlier this year, Boeing announced that it will serve as the lead donor for MIT’s $18 million project to replace its 80-year-old Wright Brothers Wind Tunnel. This pledge will help to create, at MIT, the world’s most advanced academic wind tunnel.

In 2017, Boeing acquired MIT spinout Aurora Flight Sciences, which develops advanced aerospace platforms and autonomous systems. Its primary research and development center is located at 90 Broadway in Kendall Square. In the new facility at 314 Main St., Boeing will establish the Aerospace and Autonomy Center, which will focus on advancing enabling technologies for autonomous aircraft.

“Boeing is leading the development of new autonomous vehicles and future transportation systems that will bring flight closer to home,” says Greg Hyslop, Boeing chief technology officer. “By investing in this new research facility, we are creating a hub where our engineers can collaborate with other Boeing engineers and research partners around the world and leverage the Cambridge innovation ecosystem.”

“It’s fitting that Boeing will join the Kendall/MIT innovation family,” MIT Provost Martin Schmidt says. “Our research interests have been intertwined for over 100 years, and we’ve worked together to advance world-changing aerospace technologies and systems. MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics is the oldest program of its kind in the United States, and excels at its mission of developing new air transportation concepts, autonomous systems, and small satellites through an intensive focus on cutting-edge education and research. Boeing’s presence will create an unprecedented opportunity for new synergies in this industry.”

The current appearance of the 314 Main St. site belies its future active presence in Kendall Square. The building’s foundation and basement level — which will house loading infrastructure, storage and mechanical space, and bicycle parking — is currently in construction. Adjacent to those functions is an underground parking garage, a network of newly placed utilities, and water and sewer infrastructure. Vertical construction of the building should begin in September.

At 250 feet high, the new 17-floor building will accommodate additional commercial tenants, as well as the MIT Museum, which will occupy over 57,000 square feet on the building’s ground, second, and third floors. The ground floor is designed to feature retail and restaurant uses, including the entrance to the new home for the MIT Press Bookstore.

“Boeing will be a great addition to the Kendall Square innovation ecosystem, “ says Steve Marsh, managing director of MIT’s real estate group. “Boeing has chosen to locate at the new gateway to MIT’s campus being developed above the Kendall MBTA station. This is as close to MIT’s campus as industry innovators can physically get, and that helps promote important collaborations.”

On the other side of the MBTA station, MIT’s new graduate residence hall (“Site 4” on the map above) is already going up. The Institute decided to lead with that 450-unit facility in response to community interest in expanding on-campus housing inventory for graduate students. That building will also serve to shape the East Campus gateway by creating new homes for MIT’s Admissions Office, an innovation and entrepreneurship hub, a childcare center, active retail concepts, and the MIT Forum, which will provide shared space for community programming.

Tying these buildings together will be an outdoor space well over two acres. The area will feature a combination of hard and soft landscape treatments accompanied by art installations, interactive science experiments, inventions, and other engaging and surprising elements showcasing MIT’s innovative and welcoming spirit. The Institute has recently hired Jessie Schlosser Smith as its new director of open space programming; she is already beginning to collaborate with faculty, students, staff, and members of the Cambridge community to envision memorable programming for the outdoor spaces.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2AtNynT

Inventing future fabrics

A T-shirt that can change color to complement your mood (and help you pare down your wardrobe). An apron that transforms into a dress and has interchangeable pockets with high-tech functionality. These are the forward-looking concepts presented by a group of three students from MIT and three students from the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), making practical use of the latest active textile technologies.

For the first FIT/MIT Summer Workshop, held over two weeks in June, the six students spent one week at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts and one week at FIT in New York City to explore and develop clothing concepts using advanced functional materials that incorporate 3-D printing or advanced knitting technologies. The workshop was held collaboratively with Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA), a Cambridge-based national nonprofit enabling a manufacturing-based transformation of traditional fibers, yarns, and textiles into highly sophisticated integrated and networked devices and systems.

Personal identity

Veronica Apsan, of Park Ridge, New Jersey, a 2018 FIT graduate who majored in fashion design, and Erika Anderson of Carlsbad, California, a rising MIT senior who is studying mechanical engineering with a minor in design, conceived a T-shirt that can change color.

“We were really interested in color and how it affects people’s moods and how they feel,” said Anderson. “Color and clothing are part of a person’s identity and how they want to portray that to the world.” Anderson and Apsan started with a color-changing filament that they 3D-printed into modular components. From there, they moved on to hollow fibers that can be filled with an ink that changes color when an electrical current is sent through it.

“Many people own basic clothing or similar shirts and pants in different colors,” Anderson explained. “This takes up a lot of closet space and costs a lot of money.” A large wardrobe is also not environmentally friendly. With a T-shirt that can change color, a person could radically pare down how many garments they buy and throw out.

The four other students in the workshop combined their ideas into a single wearable concept. David Merchan, of Bow, New Hampshire, a rising MIT senior double majoring in materials science and engineering and physics; Melanie Wong of Queens, New York, a rising senior at FIT majoring in fashion design; Calvin Zhong '18, of Manhattan, a recent MIT graduate who double majored in architecture and comparative media studies; and Jesse Doherty, an FIT rising senior majoring in fashion design, created a double-layer knit laboratory apron with reflective zippers that transforms into a dress or bag and has interchangeable pockets with customizable technological functions. For example, one pocket could have an energy socket that wirelessly charges a phone, while another could act as a hand sanitizer by working into the fiber antimicrobial chemicals or ultraviolet LEDs. The apron/dress itself could also be infused with conductive fibers that cool or warm the wearer.

“You could imagine that a lab tech would have different needs than a doctor, who would have different needs than a DIY hobbyist or a shop manager,” explained Zhong.

3-D-printed mesh

Using 3-D printing, the students knit an open, fully twistable weave mesh for their apron/dress. Once the soluble supports were removed in a chemical bath, the mesh moved in every direction because of the flexible fiber. “The same structure in different materials would behave differently,” noted Doherty.

In addition to conceiving their projects, the students had a packed schedule of workshops, talks, and site visits. While at MIT, they learned about bringing their ideas to market through an intensive entrepreneurship boot camp. They also attended an AFFOA member networking event at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, where Apsan said she and Anderson received positive feedback about their ideas. “The fact that someone in the industry who is working on textiles is thinking the same thing was so awesome to hear,” she said. During their week at FIT, the students visited WGSN, a leading fashion trend, forecast, and analysis service, and met with Gabi Asfour, founder and creative director at threeASFOUR, a clothing design brand, about incorporating 3-D-printed parts into garments. MIT and FIT faculty mentors assisted the students throughout the two weeks.

“We believe this is the future, so we want you all to be involved and help make it happen,” AFFOA Chief Executive Officer Yoel Fink told the group.

Inspiring collaboration

Gregory C. Rutledge, lead principal investigator for MIT in AFFOA and the Lammot du Pont Professor in Chemical Engineering, commented, "It is exciting to see what happens when students from different fields of engineering and design, but with a common interest in advanced fibers and fabrics, come together and engage with new kinds of materials and manufacturing techniques. The collaboration and creativity is inspiring.”

“Combining the talents and skills of FIT and MIT is truly the future,” said Apsan as the two-week workshop wrapped up.

“This workshop validates the benefits of bringing FIT and MIT students together. For this specific workshop, the students explored the possibilities of advanced knitting and 3-D printing,” said Joanne Arbuckle, deputy to the president for industry partnerships and collaborative programs at FIT. “As the fashion industry becomes more and more dependent on advanced textiles, students who have the experience this workshop has provided will prove to be the industry’s next leaders.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2M9Ltil

Featured video: If the spacesuit fits

Movement really moves Richard Fineman, a fourth-year PhD student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. Using wearable sensors and a range of complex modeling tools, Fineman is able to measure and understand a body in motion in unprecedented ways. He is using what he’s learning to advance human health and medicine, as well as astronaut garb.

As a lifelong athlete, Fineman has always been interested in biomechanics and human motion. In his work, he is “able to evaluate whether a patient is at risk for falling” by using cameras and computers to gather position and movement data. Subjects in the lab are fitted with wearable sensors and asked to complete certain tasks. Their movements are tracked and captured and the resulting data is processed and analyzed to help define models that can “determine whether or not someone is at high versus low fall risk,” he explains.

Fineman’s work measuring movement here on Earth piqued his curiosity about human bodies in motion in other environments. “How does human motion change in altered gravity environments?” he asks. “I think about how spacesuits are these big bulky objects. … Each suit has to be fit to the human, but we don’t really have objective ways to determine how well the suit fits.”

Luckily, Fineman is a member of Assistant Professor Leia Stirling's group in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, where he was able to step into a space suit himself to experiment. Using his wearable sensors, Fineman was able to come up with techniques to evaluate and improve the way the space suit fits on the human.

Submitted by: Carolyn Blais | Video by: Lillie Paquette | 2 min, 11 sec

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2mVsNI2

Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab welcomes initial members

In its first year, the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) has welcomed a diverse group of organizations as members, including leading universities, major non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and top companies. J-WEL, launched in May of last year, promotes excellence and transformation in global education across the lifespan of the learner, through collaboratives at the pK-12, higher education, and workplace learning levels.

The pK-12 Collaborative, under the direction of professors Angela Belcher and Eric Klopfer, has a growing list of members including the Hong Kong-based nonprofit Catalyst Education Lab, Save the Children, educational technology company EnglishHelper (United States), Australia’s Queensland University of Technology (QUT), and the Wadah Foundation (Indonesia).

The Higher Education Collaborative, led by faculty director Professor Hazel Sive, has been joined by members from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. These include Ahmadu Bello University (Nigeria), Covenant University (Nigeria), Seikei University (Japan), Universidad de los Andes (Colombia), Universidad Mayor (Chile), University of São Paulo (Brazil), and the University of The Bahamas.

Members joining the Workplace Learning Collaborative, which is led by MIT Sloan School of Management Principal Research Scientist George Westerman, include Intelligent Machines Lab and UBS.

“The high caliber of the organizations that have joined J-WEL, and the speed with which they have come on board, is testament to the impact that J-WEL has made in such a short space of time,” says Fady Jameel, president of Community Jameel International, the social enterprise organization that co-founded J-WEL with MIT in 2017. “The different members will bring wide-ranging insights to the table at the pulsating meetings of J-WEL Weeks and other events — but they are unified by their commitment to discovering and sharing innovative approaches to learning, and applying them in the real world.”

J-WEL promotes excellence and transformation in education at MIT and globally by engaging with educators, technologists, policymakers, societal leaders, employers, and employees. Through online and in-person collaborations, workshops, research, and information-sharing events, J-WEL member organizations work with MIT faculty and staff to address global opportunities for scalable change in education. J-WEL shares MIT’s “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”) approach, entrepreneurial spirit, and insights into digital learning, artificial intelligence, learning sciences, and other fields that are disrupting the education and training landscape as well as offering new opportunities to transform teaching and learning.

“Each collaborative is taking a unique approach to engaging with its members to define and explore educational challenges and opportunities that can have global impact,” says M.S. Vijay Kumar, associate dean for digital learning and J-WEL’s executive director, in discussing J-WEL’s first year. “We’re thrilled to have this remarkable group of organizations working with us.”

Professor Sylvio Canuto, University of São Paulo’s research provost and membership coordinator, describes his university’s motivation for involvement: “USP has joined J-WEL due to MIT's long history of excellence and due to the great opportunities that arise from being part of a global program that aims to tackle the great challenge of enhancing education.”

J-WEL supports educational research and innovation by MIT faculty and staff through grants and collaborative projects with J-WEL members. J-WEL engages MIT students through volunteer opportunities at J-WEL events and through the J-WEL Global Ambassadors program, which offers MIT students the opportunity to work on meaningful education projects across the globe.

J-WEL is an initiative of MIT and Community Jameel, the social enterprise organization founded by MIT alumnus Mohammed Jameel '78. Community Jameel was established in 2003 to continue the Jameel family's tradition of supporting the community, a tradition started in the 1940s by the late Abdul Latif Jameel, founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel business, who throughout his life helped tens of thousands of disadvantaged people in the fields of health care, education, and improving livelihoods. Today, Community Jameel is dedicated to supporting social and economic sustainability across the Middle East and beyond through a range of initiatives including J-WEL and two other labs at MIT: the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and the Abdul Latif Jameel World Water and Food Security Lab (J-WAFS).

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2OvgsXu

China could face deadly heat waves due to climate change

A region that holds one of the biggest concentrations of people on Earth could be pushing against the boundaries of habitability by the latter part of this century, a new study shows.

Research has shown that beyond a certain threshold of temperature and humidity, a person cannot survive unprotected in the open for extended periods — as, for example, farmers must do. Now, a new MIT study shows that unless drastic measures are taken to limit climate-changing emissions, China’s most populous and agriculturally important region could face such deadly conditions repeatedly, suffering the most damaging heat effects, at least as far as human life is concerned, of any place on the planet.

The study shows that the risk of deadly heat waves is significantly increased because of intensive irrigation in this relatively dry but highly fertile region, known as the North China Plain — a region whose role in that country is comparable to that of the Midwest in the U.S. That increased vulnerability to heat arises because the irrigation exposes more water to evaporation, leading to higher humidity in the air than would otherwise be present and exacerbating the physiological stresses of the temperature.

The new findings, by Elfatih Eltahir at MIT and Suchul Kang at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, are reported in the journal Nature Communications. The study is the third in a set; the previous two projected increases of deadly heat waves in the Persian Gulf area and in South Asia. While the earlier studies found serious looming risks, the new findings show that the North China Plain, or NCP, faces the greatest risks to human life from rising temperatures, of any location on Earth.

“The response is significantly larger than the corresponsing response in the other two regions,” says Eltahir, who is the the Breene M. Kerr Professor of Hydrology and Climate and Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The three regions the researchers studied were picked because past records indicate that combined temperature and humidity levels reached greater extremes there than on any other land masses. Although some risk factors are clear — low-lying valleys and proximity to warm seas or oceans — “we don’t have a general quantitative theory through which we could have predicted” the location of these global hotspots, he explains. When looking empirically at past climate data, “Asia is what stands out,” he says.

Although the Persian Gulf study found some even greater temperature extremes, those were confined to the area over the water of the Gulf itself, not over the land. In the case of the North China Plain, “This is where people live,” Eltahir says.

The key index for determining survivability in hot weather, Eltahir explains, involves the combination of heat and humidity, as determined by a measurement called the wet-bulb temperature. It is measured by literally wrapping wet cloth around the bulb (or sensor) of a thermometer, so that evaporation of the water can cool the bulb. At 100 percent humidity, with no evaporation possible, the wet-bulb temperature equals the actual temperature.

This measurement reflects the effect of temperature extremes on a person in the open, which depends on the body’s ability to shed heat through the evaporation of sweat from the skin. At a wet-bulb temperature of 35 degrees Celsius (95 F), a healthy person may not be able to survive outdoors for more than six hours, research has shown. The new study shows that under business-as-usual scenarios for greenhouse gas emissions, that threshold will be reached several times in the NCP region between 2070 and 2100.

“This spot is just going to be the hottest spot for deadly heat waves in the future, especially under climate change,” Eltahir says. And signs of that future have already begun: There has been a substantial increase in extreme heat waves in the NCP already in the last 50 years, the study shows. Warming in this region over that period has been nearly double the global average — 0.24 degrees Celsius per decade versus 0.13. In 2013, extreme heat waves in the region persisted for up to 50 days, and maximum temperatures topped 38 C in places. Major heat waves occurred in 2006 and 2013, breaking records. Shanghai, East China’s largest city, broke a 141-year temperature record in 2013, and dozens died.

To arrive at their projections, Eltahir and Kang ran detailed climate model simulations of the NCP area — which covers about 4,000 square kilometers — for the past 30 years. They then selected only the models that did the best job of matching the actual observed conditions of the past period, and used those models to project the future climate over 30 years at the end of this century. They used two different future scenarios: business as usual, with no new efforts to reduce emissions; and moderate reductions in emissions, using standard scenarios developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Each version was run two different ways: one including the effects of irrigation, and one with no irrigation.

One of the surprising findings was the significant contribution by irrigation to the problem — on average, adding about a half-degree Celsius to the overall warming in the region that would occur otherwise. That’s because, even though extra moisture in the air produces some local cooling effect at ground level, this is more than offset by the added physiological stress imposed by the higher humidity, and by the fact that extra water vapor — itself a powerful greenhouse gas — contributes to an overall warming of the air mass.

“Irrigation exacerbates the impact of climate change,” Eltahir says. In fact, the researchers report, the combined effect, as projected by the models, is a bit greater the sum of the individual impacts of irrigation or climate change alone, for reasons that will require further research.

The bottom line, as the researchers write in the paper, is the importance of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in order to reduce the likelihood of such extreme conditions. They conclude, “China is currently the largest contributor to the emissions of greenhouse gases, with potentially serious implications to its own population: Continuation of the current pattern of global emissions may limit habitability of the most populous region of the most populous country on Earth.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2OrkxMt

Q&A: Anne McCants on "Waves of Globalization," the 2018 World Economic History Congress at MIT

Approximately 1,500 economic, business, and social historians are gathering at MIT this week to discuss globalization, inequality, economic growth, and the changing role of technology. They are convening from around the world for the International Economic History Association's 18th World Economic History Congress — the first to be held in North America in the 50 years since 1968.

The event features talks from leading thinkers, including Thomas Piketty, author of the best-selling "Capital in the Twenty-First Century," who taught in the MIT Department of Economics from 1993 to 1995 and has returned to MIT as a visiting professor; Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin, author of "Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women;" Oxford University historian Jane Humphries, author of "Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution;" and MIT’s own Peter Temin, author of "The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy."

MIT professor of history Anne McCants, who was instrumental in bringing the conference to MIT, is the current vice president of the International Economic History Association (IEHA), the chair of this year's congress, and will serve as the next president of the IEHA. She recently shared her perspectives on the 2018 gathering with the communications team in the Dean's Office of MIT's School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.
                          
Q. Why is this conference a significant event for MIT?

A. The congress highlights the Institute’s commitment to the principles of international scholarly cooperation and open intellectual exchange. It also gives MIT the opportunity to highlight for the world the quality of its social science and humanistic research programs, as well as its commitment to the incorporation of the human sciences into its engineering and natural sciences curriculum.
 
Q. The 2018 conference topic is “Waves of Globalization.” Can you share why the research of economic historians is so important to understanding the impact of globalization on different institutions and regions?

A. When the theme of this year’s meeting was selected almost four years ago, globalization was the topic on everyone’s mind. Largely, the mood was celebratory. Economic historians then were asking: When did globalization begin and where? In general, they were not asking not whether globalization represented progress; that was largely taken to be true.

Everyone recognized that large-scale change is disruptive and can bring uneven benefits, but the basic assumption was that greater global integration of factor markets, consumer markets, financial markets, and the marketplace of ideas would bring enough prosperity overall that the bumps could be evened out by local political fixes.

So far, that has not proved to be the case. While the wealth effects of globalization have been real enough, the local distributional fixes seem to have been very uneven in their effectiveness. As a result, the political world looks very different today than it did just a few years ago, even if the fundamentals of the international economy have not changed much.

This strikes me as exactly the moment when the work of economic historians is of greatest importance. We have something useful to say about what the disruptions of previous “waves of globalization” have looked like and how social and political communities have resolved the disruptions of those episodes. Many of those resolutions were violent, but not all. So, there are important lessons for us to learn from those episodes, and opportunities to thoughtfully attempt to do better — especially if we take as a goal minimizing violence and human suffering.

First, however, we have to understand that this is not the first time that the forces of interconnection have altered people’s way of life in one place or another; far from it. The work of economic historians is valuable because they theorize about why events unfold as they do and speculate on how they might do so again in the future. But, significantly, economic historians also uncover the events themselves, often identifying totally unexpected phenomena in the many kinds of archives left by the past, be they written, material, artistic, biological, or even geologic.

If we don’t know what happened in the past, we are hard-pressed to understand usefully what we see in the present. Everything appears perpetually new, surprising, and often deeply unsettling. The consequences of taking such a blind path forward are rarely felicitous.

Q. What kinds of useful insights might this conference provide for addressing today’s top challenges?

A. From my survey of the agenda, I think the big topics are likely to be the costs and benefits of global interactions of all kinds; the pressing need for further development of nations that are home to the so-called “bottom billion” (the world’s poorest billion people); the sources of inequality in outcomes as well as opportunities; and the connections between political processes and the economy. These are, of course, also the most pressing issues of our time. So, the research presented at the congress will speak in the most direct way possible to the questions the whole world is asking at this moment. My great hope is that we can communicate the results of that research in a way that the world can hear.
 
Q. In what ways will the conference highlight new research techniques and the ways technology is changing the field of economic history? Any examples of exciting new work that will be unveiled?
 
A. The most evident way that new research techniques will be unveiled at the congress will be in the projects that rely on the various big data sources that have been in development in economics and also history over the past several years. The digitization of an increasing number of archives, and the application of data-mining tools, have opened up whole new avenues of investigation that were simply not possible before.

It will be interesting to see what kinds of surprises they will bring, and whether those surprises prove to upend well-established narratives about the past, or theories about how that past evolved. I’m excited by the possibilities here, but I also think the jury is still out.

Data-mining techniques can allow us to see patterns invisible to the naked-eye as it were; but they might also tempt us to look for answers only in the places where the data exist to be mined at all — leading us like the proverbial drunk to look for our keys under the streetlight rather than where they were actually dropped.

Interview prepared by SHASS Communications
Editorial team: Kathryn O'Neill, Emily Hiestand

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2v2Q1jN

The price of the pledge

On first glance, it could be a tall order for Turkey to fulfill its Paris Agreement pledge, which targets a reduction in the nation’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 21 percent below business-as-usual levels by 2030. Fossil fuels comprise nearly all of Turkey’s energy mix, and low-carbon options have not yet gained traction. Wind and solar accounts for about 5 percent of energy generation and nuclear power plants are only in the planning stages.

That means meeting Turkey’s Paris commitment will require a dramatic shift to low-carbon energy sources, but how much of a toll might such a transition take on the nation’s economy?

To address this question systematically, a team of researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change developed a computational general equilibrium (CGE) model of the Turkish economy, TR-EDGE. Unlike similar CGE models, TR-EDGE includes a detailed representation of the energy-intensive electricity sector. The team’s analysis appears in the journal Energy Policy.

“When the role of the power sector in decarbonizing an economy is taken into account, the TR-EDGE model enables researchers to more precisely estimate the economic impact of different climate policies in Turkey by capturing important characteristics of separate generation technologies and the intermittent nature of renewable power,” says Bora Kat, lead author of the study and a former Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the Joint Program who now serves on the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey.

Using the model, Kat and his collaborators — Joint Program Deputy Director Sergey Paltsev and Research Scientist Mei Yuan analyzed four different scenarios: business-as-usual (BAU), which incorporates the government’s current plans for a nuclear program and tariff-funded renewables initiative; no-nuclear (NoN), which assumes no nuclear program; and the combination of each of those two scenarios with a national emissions trading policy.

The results show that a national emissions trading market would at once incent GHG emissions reductions and mitigate negative impacts on economic growth. Absent an emissions trading policy, fossil fuels — oil, natural gas, and coal — continue to comprise nearly all of Turkey’s primary energy mix in 2030. Implementing an emissions trading policy eliminates carbon-intensive coal-fired power generation by 2030 in both BAU and NoN scenarios. Keeping a nuclear program reduces GHG emissions by about 3 percent more than scrapping it (NoN), while lowering the price of carbon from $70 per metric ton of carbon dioxide to $50.

Based on these results, fulfilling Turkey’s Paris pledge would cost the economy about 0.8 (with nuclear) to 1.1 percent of its GDP by 2030.

“The results show that the targets that Turkey envisioned for the Paris Agreement are reachable at a modest economic cost,” says Kat. “However, our estimates do not account for economic co-benefits of GHG emission reductions or the risks associated with nuclear power plants. Further research may include incorporating such factors in a more detailed analysis.”

The study’s approach of modeling the electric power sector in detail could be applied in assessing the likely national economic impact of other countries’ Paris climate commitments.

“At the Joint Program we have developed a global energy-economic modeling expertise that is extremely informative for understanding long-term energy and emission trends,” says co-author Sergey Paltsev. “Our new focus on using the lessons learned from our global modeling to create detailed country-specific models is equally important for helping decision-makers to design efficient policies for emissions mitigation.”

“We are especially happy when we can help to train local experts, as in the case of Turkey, who return to their home institutions and increase their country’s capabilities to perform their own world-class economic analysis,” Paltsev says.

The research was made possible by funding from the Turkish Fulbright Commission (Visiting Scholar Program) and the Joint Program’s consortium of sponsors.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2mSiRyN

Senior Vice President and Corporation Secretary Greg Morgan to retire

After 12 years of service at MIT, Senior Vice President and Secretary of the MIT Corporation R. Gregory Morgan will step down at the end of this year, President L. Rafael Reif announced today in a letter to members of the MIT community. He will be succeeded by Suzanne Glassburn, who has been an attorney in MIT’s Office of the General Counsel (OGC) since 2008.

“Since I took office and long before, Greg has been among my closest and most trusted advisors,” Reif said in his letter. He pointed out that Morgan’s duties have covered a wide swath: “His vital work includes serving as chief of staff — coordinating the efforts of MIT’s senior leadership, the MIT Corporation, its Executive Committee and the overall administration, raising our sights and making us all more effective.”

Morgan came to MIT in January 2007 at the request of then-president Susan Hockfield, to be MIT’s first general counsel and create for the first time a unified in-house legal team for the Institute. Together with then-Deputy General Counsel Mark DiVincenzo, he quickly established the OGC by bringing together MIT’s internal legal talent and then steadily built the team by attracting other highly qualified attorneys to MIT from top law firms.

“Because the general counsel role was new for MIT, there was some skepticism at first, but Greg’s effectiveness quickly dispelled those doubts,” says MIT President Emerita Susan Hockfield. “His ability to listen astutely, his breadth of curiosity, and his tenacity at solving hard problems made him an invaluable thought partner, to me and to individuals across the Institute. We were incredibly fortunate to have Greg navigate the transition to the ‘Office of the General Counsel’ model, which continues to serve MIT so well.”

Before coming to MIT, Morgan was co-managing partner of the prominent law firm of Munger, Tolles and Olson, where he had practiced law since 1981, with clients including Berkshire Hathaway and its chair Warren Buffett. A graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, he had clerked for Judge J. Edward Lumbard of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, as well as for Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. of the U.S. Supreme Court.

At MIT, Morgan has played an important role in shaping the framework for several major new Institute initiatives, first as vice president and general counsel, and since 2015 in his present role. This work included setting the terms of MIT’s involvement in the creation of new universities in other countries, including the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) in Russia. He also played a key role in the launch of the online education platforms MITx and edX and in the transition of the Broad Institute into a free-standing, self-governed entity that remains tightly coupled to MIT.

President Reif, in his letter to members of the MIT community, praised Morgan’s abilities, saying “he has served the MIT community with extraordinary dedication, working at the highest levels, often behind the scenes, and around the clock. From helping to respond to terrible crises like the Boston Marathon bombing and the tragic impact on our campus, to the essential work of MIT’s governance, over and over I have counted on his rare scope and sensitivity to get things right.”

Recognizing that MIT students often need independent legal advice, Morgan was instrumental in creating a series of law clinics for students, to help them deal with matters such as the legal questions involved in creating new startup companies based on their research, or other legal issues relating to intellectual property or cybersecurity. He forged an agreement with the Boston University Law School, which agreed to provide law students to staff the clinics. The clinics are now offered weekly during the academic year and have seen steadily rising demand from students for their services. “It’s an educational experience for both the MIT students as clients and the BU students as lawyers,” Morgan says.

Morgan will continue his role at MIT until the end of 2018, and starting in September he will overlap with Glassburn in order to ensure a smooth transition. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next,” he adds, but he says he wants to “rediscover and reinvent,” and find out where his curiosity takes him.

Glassburn, one of Morgan’s early hires for the office, will conclude her work as an attorney for MIT as she assumes her new position. She joined MIT’s OGC in April 2008 after 17 years at the Boston-based law firm Nutter, McClennen and Fish, where she had been a partner since 1999.

“Through her deep understanding of MIT’s academic and research transactional needs, her ability to identify the core needs of each party and bring them to agreement, and her wise counsel to her OGC colleagues, Suzanne has been a tremendous asset to our office, and to the Institute,” says Vice President and General Counsel Mark DiVincenzo. “Though I will miss her representing MIT as a lawyer in the OGC, I have every confidence that the skills and qualities she has mastered in her legal role at the Institute will serve Suzanne very well in her new role.”

A graduate of Vanderbilt University and the University of Pennsylvania Law School, she handled a wide variety of subjects in her law practice, including mergers and acquisitions and intellectual property, and was co-chair of the firm’s Emerging Companies Group. But, after her years at the law firm, she came to a conclusion: “Where I’d really like to work is at a university.” Though she enjoyed her work, “I wanted something that excited me more,” she recalls, and MIT seemed the perfect fit.

In her years at the Institute, Glassburn says, she has had the good fortune to work on a number of projects that support President Reif’s agenda, including the establishment of MITx and edX; the launch of the Quest for Intelligence, an initiative focused on human and machine intelligence; and the creation of The Engine, a venture to support “tough-tech” companies at work on transformative ideas. 

She has also worked closely on several of the Institute’s significant initiatives, including the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab; the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America (AFFOA) public-private partnership, established with support from the U.S. Department of Defense; and a number of international collaborations that led to new universities — Skoltech in Russia, the Singapore University of Technology and Design, and the Masdar Institute (now Khalifa University) in Abu Dhabi.

“The most exciting and interesting part of my career has been the time I’ve spent at MIT,” Glassburn says. Among other things, it has given her the chance to work with many amazing people on interesting and challenging projects, she says, and “in this new role, I’ll have an even greater opportunity” to collaborate with such talented people.

In taking on her new position, Glassburn says, “I’m looking forward to expanding the range of issues I get to work on,” including work on major issues such as “the future of education, the future of work, and the future of the environment. … I’m excited to have a more direct impact on what the Institute is trying to achieve.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2Aoz0pp

Featured video: Reshaping the Arab world through science and technology

The mission of the MIT Arab Students’ Organization lies in building cultural, academic, and industrial bridges between MIT and the Arab world. The student-led group aims to create a platform for Arab scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs to express their ideas, and a place for the MIT community to engage with the Arab world through various events and initiatives.

This spring, the ASO held its first Arab Science and Technology conference, where leaders and innovators from across the globe gathered to discuss issues relating to education, technology, and entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa.

“I think it’s very useful to be able to listen to [different] perspectives and learn from their experiences,” says Safa Jabri, rising senior in mechanical engineering.

Submitted by: Arab Students' Organization | Video by: ASO | 1 min, 41 sec

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2OlPfGJ

Department of Mechanical Engineering announces new leadership team

Evelyn Wang, the Gail E. Kendall Professor, who began her role as head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) on July 1, has announced that Pierre Lermusiaux, professor of mechanical engineering and ocean science and engineering, and Rohit Karnik, associate professor of mechanical engineering, will join her on the department’s leadership team. Lermusiaux will serve as associate department head for operations and Karnik will be the associate department head for education.

“I am delighted to welcome Pierre and Rohit to the department’s leadership team,” says Wang. “They have both made substantial contributions to the department and are well-suited to ensure that it continues to thrive.”

Pierre Lermusiaux, associate department head for operations

Pierre Lermusiaux has been instrumental in developing MechE’s strategic plan over the past several years. In 2015, with Evelyn Wang, he was co-chair of the mechanical engineering strategic planning committee. They were responsible for interviewing individuals across the MechE community, determining priority “grand challenge” research areas, investigating new educational models, and developing mechanisms to enhance community and departmental operations. The resulting strategic plan will inform the future of MechE for years to come. 

“Pierre is an asset to our department,” adds Wang. “I look forward to working with him to lead our department toward new research frontiers and cutting-edge discoveries.”

Lermusiaux joined MIT as associate professor in 2007 after serving as a research associate at Harvard University, where he also received his PhD. He is an internationally recognized thought leader at the intersection of ocean modeling and observing. He has developed new uncertainty quantification and data assimilation methods. His research has improved real-time data-driven ocean modeling and has had important implications for marine industries, fisheries, energy, security, and our understanding of human impact on the ocean’s health.

Lermusiaux’s talent as an educator has been recognized with the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Teaching Excellence. He has been the chair of the graduate admissions committee since 2014. He has served on many MechE and institute committees and is also active in MIT-Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Program committees.

“Working for the department, from our graduate admission to the strategic planning with Evelyn, has been a pleasure,” says Lermusiaux. “I am thrilled to be continuing such contributions as associate department head for research and operations. I look forward to developing and implementing strategies and initiatives that help our department grow and thrive.”

Lermusiaux succeeds Evelyn Wang, who previously served as associate department head for operations under the former department head Gang Chen.

Rohit Karnik, associate department head for education

Over the past two years, Rohit Karnik has taken an active role in shaping the educational experience at MechE. As the undergraduate officer, he has overseen the operations of the department’s undergraduate office and chaired the undergraduate programs committee. This position has afforded Karnik the opportunity to evaluate and refine the department’s course offerings each year and work closely with undergraduate students to provide the best education.

“Rohit is a model citizen and has provided dedicated service to our department,” says Wang. “I look forward to working with him to create new education initiatives and continue to provide a world-class education for our students.”

Prior to joining MIT as a postdoc in 2006, Karnik received his PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. In 2006, he joined the faculty as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering. He is recognized as a leader in the field of micro-and-nanofluidics and has made a number of seminal contributions in the fundamental understanding of nanoscale fluid transport. He has been recognized by an National Science Foundation CAREER Award and a Department of Energy Early Career Award.

Karnik’s dedication to his students have been recognized by the Keenan Award for Innovation in Education and the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Teaching Excellence. He has also served on the graduate admissions committee and various faculty search committees.

“It is a tremendous honor and responsibility to take this position in the top mechanical engineering department in the world,” says Karnik. “I will strive to ensure that we maintain excellence in mechanical engineering education and adapt to the changing times to offer strong and comprehensive degree programs and the best possible experience for our students.”

Karnik succeeds Professor John Brisson who previously served as associate department head for education.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2LQFT42

Seth Mnookin brings bestselling author’s touch to teaching science journalism

As an undergraduate, Seth Mnookin went through five or six different majors before finally settling on history and science — an apt combination for someone who would end up heading MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, as he does now. But there was a long road in between these endpoints.

“I didn’t think I had the skills to be a bench scientist,” Mnookin recalls, “but science was something that fascinated me.” At the same time, he says, “I knew since high school that I wanted to be a journalist.”

At Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts, he worked on the school paper, where he says he learned more from the paper’s advisor, Helen Smith, than he has “from any other person.” Smith imparted to her students the importance of attention to detail, Mnookin recalls, by “treating our paper as if it was The New York Times. … She really laid the foundations [and showed] that being a reporter gave you a way to go anywhere, talk to anyone.”

Mnookin pursued a dual history and science major as an undergraduate at Harvard University, which, he says, “allowed me to focus on science through a humanities lens.” That combination worked well for him, leading to a career as a writer for prestigious publications and eventually to penning award-winning books including “The Panic Virus,” about the erroneous belief that vaccines contributed to a rise in autism cases.

It wasn’t all science along the way, though. “I didn’t do anything with my degree for about 15 years,” Mnookin says. Instead, he covered very different topics, including the amazing rise of the Red Sox to win their first World Series in nearly a century, in his book “Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top.” Earlier, he wrote about journalism, in his 2004 book “Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media,” which was named by The Washington Post as a best book of the year.

Mnookin started his journalism career as a freelance rock and jazz critic before joining The Palm Beach Post in Florida as a crime and metro reporter in 1997. In 1999 he moved to New York City, where he covered City Hall for The Forward, a Jewish weekly newspaper. The following year, he was hired by Brill’s Content to cover the 2000 presidential campaign.

He describes that campaign as a great introduction to political coverage, which found him riding on press planes with people who had been covering politics since John F. Kennedy’s campaign and later the Watergate scandal. “It was an incredible experience,” he recalls. Among other things, “I got to interview [Bill] Clinton in the Oval Office.”

After Brill’s Content closed shortly after Sept. 11, Mnookin was hired as a senior writer at Newsweek, where he covered the media.

Soon, a series of scandals rocked the journalism world, involving plagiarism and falsified interviews with people who turned out not to exist. Jayson Blair at The New York Times, for example, was found to have invented sources for numerous stories. “I had been skeptical” about the leadership at the Times in those days, he says, and that led to his first book, “Hard News,” which was an account of those events.

After that project, as he was wondering about what to write as a second book project, “a fortuitous confluence of events” led Mnookin to follow the progress of a new young general manager: local boy Theo Epstein, who had taken over at the Red Sox, vowing that “this is the year they’re going to win” after having failed to win a World Series since 1918.

“I spent a year living with the team,” Mnookin says, a period that included the amazing come-from-behind win of the 2004 series. The book came out in the summer of 2006 and made the Times best-seller list in its first week. The fact that the book did so well, Mnookin says, had “less to do with me, and more about the fact that people like to read about winning sports teams.” The success of that book, he says, “gave me more freedom to choose what’s next.”

He had previously interviewed for science writing positions, including at The Wall Street Journal, and “I knew that was something I wanted to get back into.” He started looking into what was then heating up as an intense controversy: the now thoroughly debunked notion that vaccines were contributing to a rise in autism rates. That became the subject of his next book, “The Panic Virus,” which he says took him longer to write and required more discipline than anything he had done before.

He says the reason he finds writing about science so attractive, compared to, say, music, which he also loves to write about, is that “science was a difficult type of challenge. It pushes me to constantly go out of my comfort zone. You’re always learning about new things, and I think that’s the coolest part about being a journalist.”

Mnookin joined MIT in 2011, first as a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Science Writing. The following year, he was hired as an assistant professor and became the program's co-director. In 2016 he became the director of that program and and the following year was promoted to professor of science writing in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. “What we do here is a little bit different” than at many other journalism schools, he says, stressing the importance of providing students with real-world journalistic experiences and giving them the hands-on knowledge that he says is indispensable in today’s journalism world.

These days, with newspapers declining and fewer entry-level jobs in the business, he says, “it’s much more difficult to just pop in and learn on the job — to understand what the null principle is, or to get a study and immediately focus on what the shortcomings are, [or to ask,] ‘is the sample size sufficient for the conclusions the authors claim?’ That kind of stuff can be pretty difficult to learn on the job.”

Since he’s been the director, the science writing program has added some new modules to its curriculum every year, he says, including one on podcasting and another on data journalism. “We want to constantly update ourselves,” including finding more ways to help fund students’ learning and find them employment opportunities.

Mnookin has also been collaborating with Deborah Blum, director of MIT’s Knight Science Journalism Fellowship Program, to find ways for the two programs to work together. Each year, four students from the graduate program work as editorial interns for Undark, a magazine Blum runs out of the Knight program. The students also write profiles of all Knight fellows each year as a way for the two groups to get to know each other.

In addition to his academic work, Mnookin has met with MIT students struggling with drug-use issues, and has served as a resource for Student Support Services. He's motivated by personal experiences with drug-use disorders, which stretched from high school through his mid-twenties. “I almost died as a result of heroin dependency,” he says.

Outside of MIT, Mnookin spends his free time with his wife Sara and their two children, Max and Eliza. They love music and go to a lot of concerts together, says Mnookin, who also enjoys playing the mandolin.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2AezQVL

How to improve critical hurricane-related supply chains

Researchers from the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab have released a new report on critical supply chains during hurricanes and how they might be better managed in future U.S. disasters. 

The report summarizes the lab’s December 2017 roundtable, “Supply Chain Resilience: Restoring Business Operations Following a Hurricane,” which convened 40 supply chain leaders from both the public and private sectors to discuss the challenges brought on by the record-breaking 2017 hurricane season. The discussion addressed how better information sharing and resource coordination could accelerate the restoration of business operations serving disaster-affected populations.

The discussions revealed potential opportunities for improvement, especially in the realm of business-government coordination. For example, pre-crisis supply chain mapping and post-crisis visibility may enable better management of resources. In cases where detailed real-time data is impractical, aggregate indicators and sentinel data sources could provide timely, actionable insights. Better relationships among businesses and the many government agencies in all levels of jurisdictions could improve coordination in a crisis. Although the future of disasters may be dynamic and unbounded, research, development, and rehearsal of resilience strategies can help mitigate the black swans to come.

MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab Director Jarrod Goentzel released the report to coincide with the start of the new FEMA-sponsored Post-hurricane Supply Chain Adaptability Study. The study, led by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine looks at issues related to the resilience of supply chains during disasters to better understand how supply and demand networks react to severe disruptions, including the role of logistics management in preparing for and responding to extreme events.

Goentzel will lead a team to analyze private sector supply chain capabilities for critical commodities.

“This is a great opportunity to continue the learning from recent events and further develop ideas that surfaced at this roundtable,” he says.

Those ideas focus on the transport of food, fuel, water, pharmaceutical supplies, and medical equipment to affected communities, and how data gathering, analysis, communication, and prioritization can be improved. 

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2LolCqh

CSAIL launches new initiative for financial technology

Recent advances in automating and digitizing financial services has largely changed how we use technology to make fiscal decisions. As infrastructure and operations are changing rapidly — recent reports show $31 billion was invested in the sector in 2017 — reinventing global financial technology poses many challenges and potential rewards.

To address these issues, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) recently launched a research-industry collaboration focused on creating financial technologies that will be able to open up new business models, gain new data insights, and improve security.

The initiative will span topics that include artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, blockchain foundation and applications, machine learning, multi-party computation for superior security and privacy, data management and analytics, natural language processing, and cyber-risk management, among others.

MIT professors Andrew Lo, Silvio Micali, and Shafi Goldwasser are leading the new initiative, which is called FinTech@CSAIL. A select group of companies, including ANT Financial, Citi, London Stock Exchange Group, Nasdaq, Ripple, Ryan LLC, and State Street, will work with CSAIL researchers to inform new lines of impactful research and develop innovative real-world applications.

“A financial company’s success in this sector is built on trust, security, value, and efficiency,” says FinTech Executive Director Lori Glover. “FinTech holds promise not only for verified transaction systems such as blockchain, but also for technologies involving AI, security, data analytics, trust verification, risk management and privacy advances as well.”

CSAIL researchers will focus on several key areas across the lab, including cybersecurity and secure computation, natural language processing, robotics, and replacement technologies and legacy systems.

Lo, Micali, and Goldwasser are guiding the effort with a unique combined expertise focused on economics, computer science and cybersecurity.

Lo’s research centers on using computational tools to make better financial decisions, including financial engineering and risk management, trading technology and market microstructure, as well as creating computational models for individual risk preferences, financial markets, and intelligence.

During his remarks at the Wednesday launch event, Lo talked about the interplay of finance and technology and how they have impacted the way that AI systems are used.

Specifically, he discussed early efforts in AI that focused on very specific problems and tasks, like playing chess, and how they aimed to covered as many different scenarios for each problem as possible. He said that this approach was a timely and expensive endeavour that was ineffective for financial models.

“We’ve largely moved away from AI as expert systems to simple algorithms and more complex data, which is much closer to real human intelligence,” Lo said. “We need theories and algorithms on how people actually behave, and larger datasets where we can find meaningful trends and patterns. Unless we truly understand human behavior, we won’t we be able to make financial technologies that work.”

Micali and Goldwasser, who are both focused on security, have pioneered research at the foundation of current and emerging fintech innovations. Both are winners of the A.C.M. Turing Award, often described as “the Nobel of computing.”

Micali and Goldwasser’s research efforts focus on enhancing information security and the privacy and correctness of computation and data. They have been instrumental in developing systems like zero-knowledge proofs (methods for authentication that don’t require passwords), and secure multi-party computation, which are both used in many cybersecurity systems and financial applications.

“We believe in transferring technology to society, which is a value of not only fintech but CSAIL as well,” said Micali. “As this sector rapidly matures, we need to make technologies that can keep up with that pace.”

FinTech@CSAIL builds on the lab's other initiatives, which include Cybersecurity@CSAIL and SystemsThatLearn@CSAIL.

“With a legacy that dates back to the originators of artificial intelligence and many computational techniques in use today, CSAIL is at the leading edge of research and new technologies that can benefit the entire financial ecosystem,” said Lo.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2va0XLG

MIT launches new homepage and daily email

Vice President for Communications Nate Nickerson today shared the following.

To the members of the MIT community and friends of MIT:

Today, MIT launches a redesigned homepage and a new daily email newsletter. What follows are a few notes on what we’ve done, and why.

The homepage we replace has given good service to the Institute. Since its launch in 2009, it has maintained a straightforward and uncommon aesthetic: a single “Spotlight” image surrounded by links to sites from around MIT. (And that basic approach had been established years before.) The page has been well-liked and well-used.

But research of our audiences showed us that it was time to make some changes. First, we wanted to transform the Search function. We sought not just to make it perform better (it’s both highly used and a frequent source of frustration, we learned), but also to make it say something about MIT: that we prize utility, practicality, serendipity, exploration, and fun. What you see here is just a beginning; we will be eager over time to find new ways to make Search satisfy and delight our visitors.

If the left side the new homepage is devoted to utility and self-guided journeys, the right side offers a daily glimpse of the culture and output of MIT. Here we have preserved the daily Spotlight — which we now summarize in brief, bold type that itself (through hyperlinks) serves as a jumping-off point to other destinations at MIT.

We also wanted to clean up the navigation structure: The old homepage exposed both too much and too little, our research showed. After determining how our audiences classify different kinds of information about MIT,  we created a navigation system of secondary landing pages linked to from the top of the homepage — places designed to orient visitors and get them where they want to go.

In all of this, we required a site that would work well on mobile devices, meet the highest standards of accessibility, and be “light” enough to function usefully in a world of highly variable levels of bandwidth and processing power.

The homepage you see today, then, aims to honor but also improve upon MIT’s long-distinctive approach to a homepage.

The new MIT Daily email complements that effort. Building on the weekly MIT News email that was begun in 2009 — and to which tens of thousands of people beyond the MIT community now subscribe — the new Daily (plus a redesigned Weekly) aims to give the MIT community and our friends outside a regular dose of the Institute’s news and culture: You’ll find a diverse menu of content that changes every day. We’ll do our best to keep these emails varied and surprising, and we’ll feature their content on the homepage under the “Recommended today” list of links.

Over the course of this journey, the creative input we received from the MIT community was an embarrassment of riches. Communications colleagues from across MIT put their mark on the work. The Admissions Office partnered with us from the beginning, lending us their high degree of creativity and their deep understanding of current and prospective students. MIT’s senior leadership improved our thinking with energy and encouragement — and in user testing, the Institute’s brilliant students and alumni helped us see things in new ways. Finally, hats off to the creative agency Upstatement, which helped us to be as bold as we were careful. Thank you, all!

I hope you’ll enjoy these new products. I welcome your feedback on the homepage and on the Daily.

Yours truly,

Nate Nickerson
Vice President for Communications, MIT

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2mEoFvM

Seth Mnookin brings bestselling author’s touch to teaching science journalism

Text

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2OdWdxr

3Q: Richard Milner on a new U.S. particle accelerator

The case for an ambitious new particle accelerator to be built in the United States has just gotten a major boost.

Today, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine have endorsed the development of the Electron Ion Collider, or EIC. The proposed facility, consisting of two intersecting accelerators, would smash together beams of protons and electrons traveling at nearly the speed of light. In the aftermath of each collision, scientists should see “snapshots” of the particles’ inner structures, much like a CT scan for atoms. From these images, scientists hope to piece together a multidimensional picture, with unprecedented depth and clarity, of the quarks and gluons that bind together protons and all the visible matter in the universe.

The EIC, if built, would significantly advance the field of quantum chromodynamics, which seeks to answer fundamental questions in physics, such as how quarks and gluons produce the strong force — the “glue” that holds all matter together. If constructed, the EIC would be the largest accelerator facility in the U.S. and, worldwide, second only to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. MIT physicists, including Richard Milner, professor of physics at MIT, have been involved from the beginning in making the case for the EIC.

MIT News checked in with Milner, a member of MIT’s Center for Theoretical Physics and the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, about the need for a new particle collider and its prospects going forward.   

Q: Tell us a bit about the history of this design. What has it taken to make the case for this new particle accelerator?

A: The development of both the scientific and technical case for the EIC has been in progress for about two decades. With the development of quantum chromodynamics (QCD) in the 1970s by MIT physics Professor Frank Wilczek and others, nuclear physicists have long sought to bridge the gap between QCD and the successful theory of nuclei based on experimentally observable particles, where the fundamental constituents are the undetectable quarks and gluons.  

A high-energy collider with the ability to collide electrons with the full range of nuclei at high rates and to have the electrons and nucleons polarized was identified as the essential tool to construct this bridge. High-energy electron scattering from the proton was how quarks were experimentally discovered at SLAC in the late 1960s (by MIT physics faculty Henry Kendall and Jerome Friedman and colleagues), and it is the accepted technique to directly probe the fundamental quark and gluon structure of matter.

Significant initial impetus for the EIC came from nuclear physicists at the university user-facilities at the University of Indiana and MIT as well as from physicists seeking to understand the origin of the proton’s spin, at laboratories and universities in the U.S. and Europe. Over the last three long-range planning exercises by U.S. nuclear physicists in 2002, 2007, and 2015, the case for the EIC has matured and strengthened. After the 2007 exercise, the two U.S. flagship nuclear facilities, namely the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility at Jefferson Laboratory, took a leadership role in coordinating EIC activities across the broad U.S. QCD community. This led to the production in 2012 of a succinct summary of the science case, “Electron-Ion Collider: The Next QCD Frontier (Understanding the glue that binds us all).” 

The 2015 planning exercise established the EIC as the highest priority for new facility construction in U.S. nuclear physics after present commitments are fulfilled.    This led to the formation of a committee by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to assess the EIC science case. The NAS committee deliberated for about a year and the report has been publicly released this month.

Q: Give us an idea of how powerful this new collider will be and what kind of new interactions it will produce. What kinds of phenomena will it help to explain?

A: The EIC will be a powerful and unique new accelerator that will offer an unprecedented window into the fundamental structure of matter. The electron-ion collision rate at the EIC will be high, more than two orders of magnitude greater than was possible at the only previous electron-proton collider, namely HERA, which operated at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg, Germany, from 1992 to 2007.  With the EIC, physicists will be able to image the virtual quarks and gluons that make up protons, neutrons, and nuclei, with unprecedented spatial resolution and shutter speed. A goal is to provide images of the fundamental structure of the microcosm that can be appreciated broadly by humanity: to answer questions such as, what does a proton look like? And what does a nucleus look like?

There are three central scientific issues that can be addressed by an electron-ion collider. The first goal is to understand in detail the mechanisms within QCD by which the mass of protons and neutrons, and thus the mass of all the visible matter in the universe, is generated. The problem is that while gluons have no mass, and quarks are nearly massless, the protons and neutrons that contain them are heavy, making up most of the visible mass of the universe. The total mass of a nucleon is some 100 times greater than the mass of the various quarks it contains.

The second issue is to understand the origin of the intrinsic angular momentum, or spin, of nucleons, a fundamental property that underlies many practical applications, including magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). How the angular momentum, both intrinsic as well as orbital, of the internal quarks and gluons gives rise to the known nucleon spin is not understood. And thirdly, the nature of gluons in matter — that is, their arrangements or states — and the details of how they hold matter together, is not well-known. Gluons in matter are a little like dark matter in the universe: unseen but playing a crucial role. An electron-ion collider would potentially reveal new states resulting from the close packing of many gluons within nucleons and nuclei. These issues are fundamental to our understanding of the matter in the universe.

Q: What role will MIT have in this project going forward?

A: At present, more than a dozen MIT physics department faculty lead research groups in the Laboratory for Nuclear Science that work directly on understanding the fundamental structure of matter as described by QCD. It is the largest university-based group in the U.S. working on QCD. Theoretical research is focused at the Center for Theoretical Physics, and experimentalists rely heavily on the Bates Research and Engineering Center for technical support.

MIT theorists are carrying out important calculations using the world’s most powerful computers to understand fundamental aspects of QCD. MIT experimental physicists are conducting experiments at existing facilities, such as BNL, CERN, and Jefferson Laboratory, to reach new insight and to develop new techniques that will be used at the EIC. Further, R&D into new polarized sources, detectors, and innovative data-acquisition schemes by MIT scientists and engineers is in progress. It is anticipated that these efforts will ramp up as the realization of the EIC approaches. 

It is anticipated that the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science will initiate in the near future the official process for EIC by which the U.S. government approves, funds, and constructs new, large scientific facilities. Critical issues are the selection of the site for EIC and the participation of international users. An EIC user group has formed with the participation of more than 700 PhD scientists from over 160 laboratories and universities around the world. If the realization of EIC follows a schedule comparable to that of past large facilities, it should be doing science by about 2030. MIT has a long history of providing leadership in U.S. nuclear physics and will continue to play a significant role as we proceed along the path to EIC. 

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2JRB88N

Helping computers perceive human emotions

MIT Media Lab researchers have developed a machine-learning model that takes computers a step closer to interpreting our emotions as naturally as humans do.

In the growing field of “affective computing,” robots and computers are being developed to analyze facial expressions, interpret our emotions, and respond accordingly. Applications include, for instance, monitoring an individual’s health and well-being, gauging student interest in classrooms, helping diagnose signs of certain diseases, and developing helpful robot companions.

A challenge, however, is people express emotions quite differently, depending on many factors. General differences can be seen among cultures, genders, and age groups. But other differences are even more fine-grained: The time of day, how much you slept, or even your level of familiarity with a conversation partner leads to subtle variations in the way you express, say, happiness or sadness in a given moment.

Human brains instinctively catch these deviations, but machines struggle. Deep-learning techniques were developed in recent years to help catch the subtleties, but they’re still not as accurate or as adaptable across different populations as they could be.

The Media Lab researchers have developed a machine-learning model that outperforms traditional systems in capturing these small facial expression variations, to better gauge mood while training on thousands of images of faces. Moreover, by using a little extra training data, the model can be adapted to an entirely new group of people, with the same efficacy. The aim is to improve existing affective-computing technologies.

“This is an unobtrusive way to monitor our moods,” says Oggi Rudovic, a Media Lab researcher and co-author on a paper describing the model, which was presented last week at the Conference on Machine Learning and Data Mining. “If you want robots with social intelligence, you have to make them intelligently and naturally respond to our moods and emotions, more like humans.”

Co-authors on the paper are: first author Michael Feffer, an undergraduate student in electrical engineering and computer science; and Rosalind Picard, a professor of media arts and sciences and founding director of the Affective Computing research group.

Personalized experts

Traditional affective-computing models use a “one-size-fits-all” concept. They train on one set of images depicting various facial expressions, optimizing features — such as how a lip curls when smiling — and mapping those general feature optimizations across an entire set of new images.

The researchers, instead, combined a technique, called “mixture of experts” (MoE), with model personalization techniques, which helped mine more fine-grained facial-expression data from individuals. This is the first time these two techniques have been combined for affective computing, Rudovic says.

In MoEs, a number of neural network models, called “experts,” are each trained to specialize in a separate processing task and produce one output. The researchers also incorporated a “gating network,” which calculates probabilities of which expert will best detect moods of unseen subjects. “Basically the network can discern between individuals and say, ‘This is the right expert for the given image,’” Feffer says.

For their model, the researchers personalized the MoEs by matching each expert to one of 18 individual video recordings in the RECOLA database, a public database of people conversing on a video-chat platform designed for affective-computing applications. They trained the model using nine subjects and evaluated them on the other nine, with all videos broken down into individual frames.

Each expert, and the gating network, tracked facial expressions of each individual, with the help of a residual network (“ResNet”), a neural network used for object classification. In doing so, the model scored each frame based on level of valence (pleasant or unpleasant) and arousal (excitement) — commonly used metrics to encode different emotional states. Separately, six human experts labeled each frame for valence and arousal, based on a scale of -1 (low levels) to 1 (high levels), which the model also used to train.

The researchers then performed further model personalization, where they fed the trained model data from some frames of the remaining videos of subjects, and then tested the model on all unseen frames from those videos. Results showed that, with just 5 to 10 percent of data from the new population, the model outperformed traditional models by a large margin — meaning it scored valence and arousal on unseen images much closer to the interpretations of human experts.

This shows the potential of the models to adapt from population to population, or individual to individual, with very few data, Rudovic says. “That’s key,” he says. “When you have a new population, you have to have a way to account for shifting of data distribution [subtle facial variations]. Imagine a model set to analyze facial expressions in one culture that needs to be adapted for a different culture. Without accounting for this data shift, those models will underperform. But if you just sample a bit from a new culture to adapt our model, these models can do much better, especially on the individual level. This is where the importance of the model personalization can best be seen.”

Currently available data for such affective-computing research isn’t very diverse in skin colors, so the researchers’ training data were limited. But when such data become available, the model can be trained for use on more diverse populations. The next step, Feffer says, is to train the model on “a much bigger dataset with more diverse cultures.”

Better machine-human interactions

Another goal is to train the model to help computers and robots automatically learn from small amounts of changing data to more naturally detect how we feel and better serve human needs, the researchers say.

It could, for example, run in the background of a computer or mobile device to track a user’s video-based conversations and learn subtle facial expression changes under different contexts. “You can have things like smartphone apps or websites be able to tell how people are feeling and recommend ways to cope with stress or pain, and other things that are impacting their lives negatively,” Feffer says.

This could also be helpful in monitoring, say, depression or dementia, as people’s facial expressions tend to subtly change due to those conditions. “Being able to passively monitor our facial expressions,” Rudovic says, “we could over time be able to personalize these models to users and monitor how much deviations they have on daily basis — deviating from the average level of facial expressiveness — and use it for indicators of well-being and health.”

A promising application, Rudovic says, is human-robotic interactions, such as for personal robotics or robots used for educational purposes, where the robots need to adapt to assess the emotional states of many different people. One version, for instance, has been used in helping robots better interpret the moods of children with autism.

Roddy Cowie, professor emeritus of psychology at the Queen’s University Belfast and an affective computing scholar, says the MIT work “illustrates where we really are” in the field. “We are edging toward systems that can roughly place, from pictures of people’s faces, where they lie on scales from very positive to very negative, and very active to very passive,” he says. “It seems intuitive that the emotional signs one person gives are not the same as the signs another gives, and so it makes a lot of sense that emotion recognition works better when it is personalized. The method of personalizing reflects another intriguing point, that it is more effective to train multiple ‘experts,’ and aggregate their judgments, than to train a single super-expert. The two together make a satisfying package.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2mFHLl8

J. Meejin Yoon named dean of Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning

J. Meejin Yoon, professor and head of the Department of Architecture at MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, has been appointed the Gale and Ira Drukier Dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University. She will take up this new position on January 1, 2019. Andrew Scott, professor of architecture and urbanism, currently associate head of the department, has agreed serve as interim head starting August 15.

An architect, designer, and educator, Yoon joined the MIT faculty as assistant professor in 2001 and became department head in 2014. She is founding principal, with Eric Höweler, of Höweler + Yoon Architecture, a multidisciplinary architecture and design studio that has garnered international recognition for a wide range of built work.

Yoon’s designs have embraced technologies at multiple scales, from interactive wearables and landscapes to robotic fabrication of stone structures. Her pioneering interactive installation project for the Athens Olympics, White Noise White Light, was reinstalled on MIT’s campus for MIT President Susan Hockfield’s inauguration in 2005.

Eleven years later, Yoon was asked to design the Sean Collier Memorial at MIT to honor MIT police officer Sean Collier, killed in the line of duty. The memorial is an open vaulted stone structure at the corner of Vassar and Main Streets.

Among her current design projects are the Memorial for Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia, the future MIT Museum in Kendall Square, planned to open in 2020, and a 20-story multifamily residential tower in downtown Boston.

“Beyond her excellence and renown as a designer, educator, and administrator, Meejin brings rigor and dedication to everything she touches,” says Hashim Sarkis, dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. “Cornell is lucky to have her, to have her back, as we have been for the past 17 years. We will watch Cornell under her leadership with anticipation and with admiration.”

While leading the department, Yoon’s accomplishments included the establishment of a design minor open to all MIT undergraduates; the relaunch of the bachelor of science in art and design; and an increase in cross-disciplinary studios within the graduate program. In 2013, she received the Irwin Sizer Award for the Most Significant Improvement to MIT Education. Her popular course 4.110 / MAS.650 (Design Across Scales and Disciplines), co-taught with Neri Oxman, explores the relationships among science, technology, and design.

Yoon received a bachelor of architecture degree from Cornell and a master’s in architecture in urban design from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. She traveled to Korea under a Fulbright Fellowship after completing her studies.

Her design work, often operating at the intersection of architecture, technology, and public space, has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, the Vitra Design Museum in Germany, and the National Art Center in Japan.

She is the author of “Expanded Practice: Projects by Höweler + Yoon and MY Studio” (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009); “Public Works: Unsolicited Small Projects for the Big Dig” (MAP Book Publishers, 2008); and “Absence,” a World Trade Center Memorial artist book (Printed Matter and the Whitney Museum of Art, 2003).

Yoon’s research, teaching, and design work has been widely recognized for innovation and interdisciplinary reach, with honors including the 2016 ACADIA Teaching Award, the 2015 New Generation Design Leadership Award from Architectural Record, the Audi Urban Futures Award in 2012, the United States Artist Award in Architecture and Design in 2008, Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard Award in 2007, the Architecture League’s Emerging Voices Award in 2007, and the Rome Prize in Design in 2005.

“MIT’s ethos and commitment to applied knowledge for a better world has had a profound impact on me as an educator and as a designer,” says Yoon. “Design is an instrument for imagining and implementing change — social, cultural, technological, and environmental. During my time at MIT, it has been a privilege to work with such exceptional students and colleagues with these shared values. I look forward to the new challenges ahead and to advancing the principles I have learned here.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2v3EO1y

Environmental regulation in a polarized culture

With an affinity for environmental issues and a knack for analysis, MIT doctoral student Parrish Bergquist aims to clarify the ways in which changing political landscapes influence environmental policy outcomes.  

Bergquist’s path to doctoral research in the departments of Political Science and Urban Studies and Planning began well before she joined MIT. After graduating from the University of Virginia with a degree in American studies and English, the Birmingham, Alabama, native volunteered for two years with the U.S. Peace Corps in Honduras to study international development and policy. There, she gained a firsthand perspective on the impacts of global climate change.

“People in Honduras lived so much closer to environmental damage than we do in the U.S.,” Bergquist says. “Carbon emissions from developed countries were already starting to have an effect on [climate in that region]. ... It affects everybody.” During conversations with women and children, Bergquist learned that those who were tasked with fetching water had to walk even further with each trip to find clean water sources.  

“I was struck by the extent to which industrialization had caused problems that we in the United States have buffers against feeling every single day,” she says. Her experiences inspired her to pursue a career in environmental policy, which led her to earn a master’s degree in urban planning and environmental policy from the University of Michigan. “While I was there, I decided that research was what I was really excited about,” Bergquist says; her next move was to pursue a PhD. She hopes to “gain some traction on understanding the politics behind how environmental policy decisions are made.”

Bergquist was attracted to MIT for her doctoral studies because the Department of Urban Studies and Planning integrated the study of environmental problems with urban studies, and because of the Institute’s strong political science department. “My degree is interdepartmental,” Bergquist says. “I knew when I came in that I wanted to study politics and decision making, so I knew I wanted a school that had strong political science and planning departments.”

Challenging environments

For her dissertation, Bergquist studies the implications of political polarization on environmental politics in the United States. To do this, she uses a mixed-methods approach to examine different federal- and state-level policies.  

“One paper looks at whether or not elected officials from the different parties influence the way that environmental agencies enforce federal environmental laws like the Clean Air Act," Bergquist says. She examines other laws as well, such as the Clean Water Act, and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, through a similar lens.  

She also studies how environmental public opinions change on the state level over time, and whether they have an impact on actual policy decisions. To guide her research, Bergquist starts with a question: “Do legislators from different states vote in favor of environmental legislation based on what their constituents think?”

Today’s increasing political polarization introduces not only a new challenge, but another set of questions for Bergquist's research.  

“Scholars have argued that economic factors are more important than political parties and ideology in terms of shaping what states are doing for the environment,” Bergquist says. “But increasingly, every issue is really polarized across the parties — so are there places that are not as polarized for the environment now, and if so, why?”

Part of Bergquist’s research approach has been informed by courses she took early in her MIT career, including 17.150 (The American Political Economy in Comparative Perspective), taught by Kathleen Thelen, the Ford Professor of Political Science, and Devin Caughey, the Silverman Family Career Development Associate Professor of Political Science.  

“The readings we did were really great, and it was a chance to think through big ideas, like how politics is structured, how politics and the economy interact, and the way that political systems develop over time,” Bergquist says. “The course really shaped the way I think about my research.”

Mentorship has also been crucial to Bergquist’s development as a scholar. “I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to take courses, teach, and collaborate with some fantastic faculty members,” she notes. Describing her work with Chris Warshaw, one of her advisors, she says: “Collaborating with Chris on a research project has been a ton of fun. Also working with him on revising, submitting, and responding to reviews on our paper has been incredibly instructive.”  

Lending support

Bergquist also serves as a graduate resident tutor (GRT) at Simmons Hall, an undergraduate dorm at MIT.  

“When I started at MIT, I did not expect to be living in an undergraduate dorm again. But this will be my fifth year doing it,” she says with a laugh. “It's just a really awesome community, and it's been a great way for me to feel like so much more a part of the MIT community than I otherwise would have.”

Through her GRT program, Bergquist plans frequent events for her undergraduate cohorts to foster community and lend support. “I do try to make sure that [undergraduates] feel like I'm approachable and that they could come to me if they have something going on that they need to talk about,” she says.  

“I just love everything about it. I love the job and getting to know the students,” Bergquist says.  

When she's not at her desk or in the dorm, Bergquist is usually exploring the environment in yet another way, by spending time outside, running, climbing, or biking.  

Educating others

In the future, Bergquist hopes to continue her pursuit of academia by becoming a professor and continuing research. “I had always thought about teaching,” Bergquist says. “Part of the reason I majored in English was because I loved my English teacher in high school.”  

Bergquist says that her educational journey was strongly shaped by her teachers and professors, who eventually led her to political science and planning. “Discovering those disciplines was very important to my decision to pursue an academic career,” she explains.  

Through the course of her master’s degree program, her resolve to teach grew stronger: “I wanted to pursue my own creative and intellectual projects. You know who pursue their creative and intellectual projects and also teach? Professors!”  

Bergquist’s ultimate goal involves a combination of scholarship, teaching, relationship-building, and the outdoors.  

“I would love to get an academic job where I get to do impactful research with great colleagues and teach fantastic students,” she says. “But I recharge and refresh by spending time with people and staying active. My work is better and I’m happier when I have time to spend with the people that I care about and pursue the activities that I love to do. That’s the dream.” 

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2LG7sgw

Reveling in a complex, unknowable future

The inaugural Journal of Design and Science (JoDS) essay competition recently concluded with the announcement of 10 winners. Answering the call to create works in conversation with Media Lab Director Joi Ito’s manifesto “Resisting Reduction” and the articles on this theme published in the third issue of JoDS, the authors of the winning essays addressed topics including gender and power in the age of AI, the contributions social workers can make to data-based systems, and the fluid boundaries of non-communicable disease, among others.

Ito and MIT Press Director Amy Brand conceived of the competition as a way to support the free exchange of ideas, and more than 260 entrants answered the open call for submissions. Following a double-blind review and selection process, the judges decided to grant the maximum number of available prizes. Each winning essay entitles its authors to a $10,000 award funded by the Media Lab and the MIT Press Innovations Fund, which supports open access and experimental publishing projects.

"One of our primary goals with JoDS is to invite interaction between the sometimes siloed academic disciplines as well as those public intellectuals who don’t fit in a discipline," said Ito. "This contest was part of a larger effort to experiment with open access and open discourse in scholarly communication, and I'm very excited about the level of informed ideas and the delightful diversity the contest winners have brought to the conversation."

The 10 winning pieces are now published on the JoDS website under a Creative Commons license. In the coming months, they will go through further peer review and revision, and will finally be collected in an MIT Press book to be published in 2019. Proceeds from the sale of this volume will support open access publishing at the Institute.

“We are encouraged by the response to the competition and the range of perspectives that the entrants brought to bear in exploring the theme of Resisting Reduction across industries and schools of thought,” said Brand. “JoDS aims to bridge gaps between disciplines, and the winning essays will expand the conversations already taking place in the journal by generating further discussion and exchange.”

A joint venture of the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Press, the Journal of Design and Science is hosted on PubPub, an open-access, open-review, rapid-publication platform that invites lively discussions, unconventional formats, and widespread participation among members of many different communities. Readers are now able to enjoy and interact with the 10 winning essays:

• “The Wicked Queen’s Smart Mirror” by Snoweria Zhang. Zhang is currently a research fellow at the MIT Senseable City Lab.

• “Making Kin with the Machines” by Jason Edward Lewis, Noelani Arista, Archer Pechawis, and Suzanne Kite. Arista is assistant professor of Hawaiian and U.S. history at University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. Pechawis is a practicing artist with particular interest in the intersection of Plains Cree culture and digital technology. Kite — an Oglala Lakota performance artist, visual artist, and composer — is currently a PhD student at Concordia University.

• “Systems Seduction: The Aesthetics of Decentralization” by Gary Zhexi Zhang. Zhang is currently a graduate student in the Program in Art, Culture, and Technology at MIT.

• “Design Justice, AI, and Escape from the Matrix of Domination” by Sasha Costanza-Chock. Costanza-Chock is a scholar, activist, and media-maker who is currently associate professor of civic media at MIT.

• “Systems Justice” by Vafa Ghazavi. Ghazavi is a John Monash Scholar and doctoral student at the University of Oxford.

• “Myth and the Making of AI” by Kat Holmes and Molly McCue. Holmes is founder of Kata and design.co, complimentary ventures for advancing inclusion in product development and digital experiences. McCue is a writer, musician, and founder of a non-profit that helps artists and churches create together in new ways.

• “How to Become a Centaur” by Nicky Case. Case makes “explorable explanations” — games designed to explain complex issues, including The Evolution of Trust, Parable of the Polygons, A Better Ballot, and Fireflies.

• “What Social Work Got Right and Why it is Needed for our [Technology] Evolution” by Jaclyn Sawyer. Sawyer currently serves as the director of data services at Breaking Ground, a non-profit organization that provides homeless street outreach and housing opportunity.

• “Resisting Reduction: The Fluid Boundaries of Non-Communicable Disease” by Cathryn Klusmeier. Klusmeier graduated with distinction from the University of Oxford in 2018 with a master’s degree in medical anthropology and currently lives in Sitka, Alaska, working as a commercial salmon fisherwoman and writer.

• “The Truth Will Set Us Free: A Paradigm to End Reductionism According to Girls” by Heidi Therese Dangelmaier. Dangelmaier is an inventor, designer, scientist and founder of the growth and innovation firm, Girlapproved.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2Lhnf97