Foreign policy advice: Don’t look back

President Joe Biden’s administration represents a fresh start for the U.S. in foreign affairs. But as experts observed at an online MIT panel on Wednesday, the U.S. cannot just reset foreign policy to the last time Biden worked in the White House, as vice-president in the Obama administration. Too many things have changed, too dramatically, in the last four years.

“You can’t rewind the clock at a time when, frankly, great power rivalry is higher than it ever was,” said Shivshankar Menon, an Indian diplomat who previously served as the country’s national security adviser and as the foreign secretary in India’s Ministry of External Affairs.

Regarding China, similarly, the Biden administration “can’t simply revert to Obama era or Obama administration policies,” said Paul Heer, a former career officer in the CIA, where he was an East Asia specialist. “The region has changed dramatically in the past four years … in ways that will require new strategies and tactics, and frankly probably some reassessment of U.S. interests and goals and aspirations in the region.”

The event, “President Biden’s Foreign Policy Challenges: Views from Abroad,” was hosted online by MIT on Wednesday, covering topics from basic diplomacy to public health, nuclear security, immigration, technology policy, and more.

The discussion was the latest installment of MIT’s Starr Forum, a series of events on global affairs sponsored by the Starr Foundation of New York. Richard Samuels, the Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS), moderated the event.

“Most of our national attention has focused on things domestic in the United States,” said Samuels. “Covid, inequality, insurrection, impeachment, a whole raft of critical issues. It’s a very full plate. And of course in the meantime the world has not stood still, either. Foreign affairs never stopped being [important].”

Four MIT fellowship holders

The four panelists at Wednesday’s event all spent a year at MIT in the past, as

Robert E. Wilhelm Fellows at CIS. The fellowship is filled annually by one person who has held senior positions in public life.

Lourdes Melgar SM ’88, PhD ’92, Mexico’s former deputy secretary of energy for hydrocarbons and under-secretary for electricity, said she would welcome the end of “Mexico-bashing” by a U.S. president, and anticipated a more “orderly approach” to policymaking. Among other changes, Biden has already ordered a halt to construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

And yet, Melgar noted, “the task ahead is daunting” for Mexico and much of Central America, due to the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic. “The economic impact is setting the region back at least over a decade,” she said. Moreover, she added, current Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who has a different political orientation than Biden, may resist any U.S. initiatives about anticorruption policy, transparency, or election results that he perceives as being too intrusive. Melgar also forecast that “Mexico will not be a partner” on climate agreements. So, while relations may normalize, productive mutual projects could be hard to realize.

Regarding Israel, another important U.S. partner, the policy objectives are also relatively clear, but the prospects for cooperation and progress are more hazy, said Naomi Chazan — a professor emerita of political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a former legislator in Israel’s Knesset, as well as the inaugural Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow at CIS during the 2004-05 academic year.

Chazan listed three main policy concerns for the Biden administration: sustaining solid relations with Israel, reviving the 2015 U.S.-Iran nuclear treaty, and working on the Palestinian question. In the first case, Chazan said, Biden has a “real and proven record of support for Israel,” but propsects for broad cooperation with Israel’s right-wing government may be limited. On the Palestinian issue, the Biden administration is already restoring relations with Palestinian leaders, a step toward seeking a two-state solution to the conflict.

Rebuilding the Iran nuclear deal, which significantly cut Iran’s nuclear capabilities, may prove toughest of all. Israel opposed any deal with Iran, and former President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the deal in 2018. Biden “clearly wants to reexamine the deal,” Chazan said, but doing so would complicate U.S. relations.

“This is one issue where the path is very confrontational. It will be very difficult for Biden to deal with this challenge,” Chazan said.

India and China

At a glance, India might seem to be yet another country with a right-leaning populist leader — Narendra Modi — who was aligned with Trump and would be at odds with Biden. However, Menon suggested, the Modi-Trump relationship was fairly “transactional” in nature and focused on defense issues. The possibility of cooperation now, he added, is quite reasonable.

“From Delhi, at least, the view is of hope, of broadening relations and moving away from some of the unpredictability” of the past four years, Menon said. “Today we enter the Biden administration, the Biden era, with U.S.-India relations in good shape.”

Still, Menon added, “the issues are not so simple” here, and include India’s worsening relations with China, climate change, and economic issues. Then too, Menon added, “Global health is the other area where, frankly, both countries should do much more” together. In short, the U.S. and India might be able to work together broadly, but this would often involve massive global issues, not strictly bilateral matters.

In China, by contrast, circumstances are quite different after four years of trade battles between the Trump administration and Chinese leaders.

“With regard to East Asia, I think President Biden has a lot of repair and restoration work to do in that region,” said Heer, whose service included a stint as the national intelligence officer for East Asia in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He added: “In my view, the Trump presidency has seriously degraded the U.S. role in the region. Although Beijing shares a lot of the responsibility here, I think Trump helped Beijing to escalate the most hostile and confrontational U.S.-China relationship we’ve seen really in 50 years.”

By contrast, Heer said, “I think that Biden is going to revive a more pragmatic, more attentive, and more realistic posture toward the Asia-Pacific.”

Even so, Heer added, the Biden administration is not likely to simply start reversing all of Trump’s China policies; China does have an authoritarian model of governance that the U.S. opposes. Thus, although the U.S. may cooperate with China on climate and global health, “They’re not going to do so at the expense of confronting China on many other issues,” he added.

Across the board, then, the Biden administration faces tasks ranging from reviving relationships with traditional partners, restoring agreements forged in the Obama administration, and tackling our ongoing global crises. It might seem a daunting to-do list, but Heer, for one, was relatively sanguine about the path forward.

“I think the Biden team is fully aware of the nature and the scope of the challenge,” Heer said. “At this point, I’m optimistic.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3pwZ7zA

Our gut-brain connection

In many ways, our brain and our digestive tract are deeply connected. Feeling nervous may lead to physical pain in the stomach, while hunger signals from the gut make us feel irritable. Recent studies have even suggested that the bacteria living in our gut can influence some neurological diseases.

Modeling these complex interactions in animals such as mice is difficult to do, because their physiology is very different from humans’. To help researchers better understand the gut-brain axis, MIT researchers have developed an “organs-on-a-chip” system that replicates interactions between the brain, liver, and colon.

Using that system, the researchers were able to model the influence that microbes living in the gut have on both healthy brain tissue and tissue samples derived from patients with Parkinson’s disease. They found that short-chain fatty acids, which are produced by microbes in the gut and are transported to the brain, can have very different effects on healthy and diseased brain cells.

“While short-chain fatty acids are largely beneficial to human health, we observed that under certain conditions they can further exacerbate certain brain pathologies, such as protein misfolding and neuronal death, related to Parkinson’s disease,” says Martin Trapecar, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the study.

Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation and a professor of biological engineering and mechanical engineering, and Rudolf Jaenisch, an MIT professor of biology and a member of MIT’s Whitehead Institute for Medical Research, are the senior authors of the paper, which appears today in Science Advances.

The gut-brain connection

For several years, Griffith’s lab has been developing microphysiological systems — small devices that can be used to grow engineered tissue models of different organs, connected by microfluidic channels. In some cases, these models can offer more accurate information on human disease than animal models can, Griffith says.

In a paper published last year, Griffith and Trapecar used a microphysiological system to model interactions between the liver and the colon. In that study, they found that short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), molecules produced by microbes in the gut, can worsen autoimmune inflammation associated with ulcerative colitis under certain conditions. SCFAs, which include butyrate, propionate, and acetate, can also have beneficial effects on tissues, including increased immune tolerance, and they account for about 10 percent of the energy that we get from food.

In the new study, the MIT team decided to add the brain and circulating immune cells to their multiorgan system. The brain has many interactions with the digestive tract, which can occur via the enteric nervous system or through the circulation of immune cells, nutrients, and hormones between organs.

Several years ago, Sarkis Mazmanian, a professor of microbiology at Caltech, discovered a connection between SCFAs and Parkinson’s disease in mice. He showed that SCFAs, which are produced by bacteria as they consume undigested fiber in the gut, sped up the progression of the disease, while mice raised in a germ-free environment were slower to develop the disease.

Griffith and Trapecar decided to further explore Mazmanian’s findings, using their microphysiological model. To do that, they teamed up with Jaenisch’s lab at the Whitehead Institute. Jaenisch had previously developed a way to transform fibroblast cells from Parkinson’s patients into pluripotent stem cells, which can then be induced to differentiate into different types of brain cells — neurons, astrocytes, and microglia.

More than 80 percent of Parkinson’s cases cannot be linked to a specific gene mutation, but the rest do have a genetic cause. The cells that the MIT researchers used for their Parkinson’s model carry a mutation that causes accumulation of a protein called alpha synuclein, which damages neurons and causes inflammation in brain cells. Jaenisch’s lab has also generated brain cells that have this mutation corrected but are otherwise genetically identical and from the same patient as the diseased cells.

Griffith and Trapecar first studied these two sets of brain cells in microphysiological systems that were not connected to any other tissues, and found that the Parkinson’s cells showed more inflammation than the healthy, corrected cells. The Parkinson’s cells also had impairments in their ability to metabolize lipids and cholesterol.

Opposite effects

The researchers then connected the brain cells to tissue models of the colon and liver, using channels that allow immune cells and nutrients, including SCFAs, to flow between them. They found that for healthy brain cells, being exposed to SCFAs is beneficial, and helps them to mature. However, when brain cells derived from Parkinson’s patients were exposed to SCFAs, the beneficial effects disappeared. Instead, the cells experienced higher levels of protein misfolding and cell death.

These effects were seen even when immune cells were removed from the system, leading the researchers to hypothesize that the effects are mediated by changes to lipid metabolism.

“It seems that short-chain fatty acids can be linked to neurodegenerative diseases by affecting lipid metabolism rather than directly affecting a certain immune cell population,” Trapecar says. “Now the goal for us is to try to understand this.”

The researchers also plan to model other types of neurological diseases that may be influenced by the gut microbiome. The findings offer support for the idea that human tissue models could yield information that animal models cannot, Griffith says. She is now working on a new version of the model that will include micro blood vessels connecting different tissue types, allowing researchers to study how blood flow between tissues influences them.

“We should be really pushing development of these, because it is important to start bringing more human features into our models,” Griffith says. “We have been able to start getting insights into the human condition that are hard to get from mice.”

The research was funded by DARPA, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute, and the Army Research Office Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/36orrfP

Sarah Williams named director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism

The MIT School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) has announced the appointment of Sarah Williams, associate professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), as director of the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism (LCAU). Her new role became effective on Jan. 1.

Williams says she has always felt deeply connected to the center, which was established shortly before she joined the SA+P faculty in 2014. She combines her training in data science, urban design and planning, and landscape architecture to create communication strategies that expose urban policy issues to create civic change. She calls the process "Data Action," which is also the title of her recent book published by MIT Press (2020).

At MIT, she directs the Civic Data Design Lab and chaired the Institute’s new undergraduate program in urban science. Her design work exposes policy issues to people beyond the walls of academia and has been widely exhibited, including work in the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Venice Biennale, and the Cooper Hewitt Museum. “My designs open up the insights of data to the public, allowing them to use it to advocate for change,” she says.

“This is an exciting opportunity,” says Williams. “What’s great about the center is that it is a laboratory that brings together the creativity and entrepreneurship of diverse disciplines to reinvent city design and policy. I can’t wait to be part of expanding its horizons, especially at a time when cities face so many challenges.” 

Williams’s education, experience, and academic work is uniquely suited to the multidisciplinary, multifaceted LCAU. A geography and history major at Clark University, Williams pursued her interest in people and places, developing geographic information systems software and analysis at the start of her career. An interest in art and design led her to study landscape architecture. Realizing that her impact on cities and spaces could be amplified with an understanding of urban planning, she earned her master's degree in city planning at MIT.

“Moving from software engineering to architecture might sound like a big change, but I was just pursuing the things that I loved,” she says. “In the process, I created a unique interdisciplinary field. I believe this type of cross-fertilization is essential for innovation. In my case, I use the power of design to communicate complex issues important to society.”

“Sarah’s work on civic engagement through urban technologies and on racial justice puts her at the forefront of urban thinking and action today,” says SA+P Dean Hashim Sarkis. “Her research and teaching embody the highest of the center’s values: Norman Leventhal’s civicness, a deep interest in collaboration between the private and public sectors, and excellence in urban design, technology, and sustainability.”

Since its establishment in 2013, the LCAU has sought to define the field of advanced urbanism, integrating research on urban design with processes of urbanization and urban culture to meet the contemporary challenges facing the world’s cities. Drawing on MIT’s deep engagement with urban design and planning, architecture, and transportation, the center coordinates multidisciplinary, multifaceted approaches to advance the understanding of cities and propose new forms and systems for urban communities.

The LCAU has tackled challenges ranging from urban resiliency in Boston to urban storm water wetland design in New York to the future of suburbia and affordable housing globally. In her new role, Williams replaces co-directors Alan Berger, professor of landscape architecture and urban design, and James Wescoat, professor emeritus of landscape architecture in the Department of Architecture.

The center was named in honor of Norman B. Leventhal '38, a visionary developer and philanthropist at the center of Boston’s postwar revival. A vital member of the MIT community for three-quarters of a century, Norman Leventhal died in 2015.

“Alan Berger and Jim Wescoat have strongly positioned the LCAU to take up the wide-ranging urban challenges of our time,” says Alan Leventhal, chair and CEO of Beacon Capital Partners. “Building on this foundation, Sarah Williams brings a multidisciplinary, data-informed approach that I’m sure will generate further groundbreaking and impactful research on cities.”

Williams says she wants LCAU to feel like an inclusive space where people can experiment on interdisciplinary work.

“During my early career, I had the unique opportunity to work in an environment that cultivated interdisciplinary research, and it allows me to develop new methods and my own niche,” she says. “The center should be this experimental ground where faculty, students, and practitioners can come together to forge new solutions for some of the biggest problems cities face today. It’s what I always wanted as a student, and I am excited to help create it as a faculty member.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3pxVVUf

How will Covid-19 ultimately impact climate change?

Business closures. Travel restrictions. Working and learning from home. These and other dramatic responses to Covid-19 have caused sharp reductions in economic activity — and associated fossil fuel consumption — around the world. As a result, many nations are reporting significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions for the year 2020, edging them a bit closer to meeting the initial emissions targets to which they committed under the Paris Agreement on climate change. While the pandemic may have accelerated progress toward these targets over the past year, will that trend continue through this decade and beyond? 

According to a new study in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the answer to that question will depend, in part, on the pandemic’s long-term effect on economic activity and energy use around the world. To assess that impact, the study’s co-authors, all researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, compared two estimates of global economic activity through 2035: one projecting economic recession and recovery from Covid-19, the other forecasting economic growth had Covid-19 not occurred.

Assuming a return to pre-pandemic levels of employment by 2035, the study finds that Covid-19 produces a steep, 8.2 percent reduction in global gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020, but only a 2 percent reduction in 2035. Assuming that Paris Agreement national climate targets through 2030 are fulfilled despite economic disruption, the lower GDP numbers result in a 3.4 percent reduction in annual greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, but only a 1 percent reduction in 2030.

The researchers also note that while various structural changes in the economy that may result from the pandemic (e.g., less air travel, commuting, and commercial activity at brick-and-mortar shops and restaurants, as well as lingering effects of larger government deficits) could reduce emissions further, these post-pandemic reductions would pale in comparison to those observed in 2020. In any case, they are unlikely to contribute substantially to global efforts to meet the long-term climate goals of the Paris Agreement.

“Our projections of global economic activity with and without the pandemic show only a small impact of Covid-19 on emissions in 2030 and beyond,” says MIT Joint Program Co-Director Emeritus John Reilly, the study’s lead author. “While pandemic-induced economic shocks will likely have little direct effect on long-term emissions, they may well have a significant indirect effect on the level of investment that nations are willing to commit to meet or beat their Paris emissions targets.” 

The study shows that reduced economic activity resulting from Covid-19 lowers the cost of meeting these targets, making such commitments more politically palatable. Moreover, fiscal stimulus measures to accelerate economic recovery present an opportunity for major investments in emissions reduction efforts. Keeping global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius — the central goal of the Paris Agreement — will require further commitment and action by countries worldwide to reduce emissions. 

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3r5I3kK

MIT developing framework for Covid-19 vaccinations on campus

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts has approved MIT’s request to serve as an employer-based distributor of the Covid-19 vaccine.

The designation means that as sufficient doses of the vaccine become available over the coming months, the Institute will be in a position to vaccinate some 50,000 MIT students, employees, affiliates, and their dependents — regardless of whether MIT Medical is their primary care provider.

MIT brings to this effort its long track record running one of the largest flu vaccination clinics in New England, as well as its recent experience administering regular Covid-19 tests to thousands of members of the MIT community. This expertise will allow MIT Medical to help relieve pressure on local hospitals, health systems, medical offices, and other entities that are expected to play a leading role in vaccinating millions of residents of the Boston area.

​​“All of us are craving the ordinary, wonderful sense of human connection,” President L. Rafael Reif says. “Imagine the wonderful day when you can stop wearing a mask, or see other people’s smiles, or go to a concert, or watch your favorite team play in person, or gather with friends and family at a favorite restaurant for a celebratory meal. We are on the path to that day — provided that we all take the steps necessary to keep ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nation healthy and safe. One vital step on the path is vaccination. So I am extremely pleased that the state has granted MIT this status.”

MIT is one of several area universities to receive state approval to vaccinate its own campus community. This designation does not preclude members of the MIT community from seeking vaccinations elsewhere; indeed, MIT Medical continues to urge members of the community who can more quickly obtain a Covid-19 vaccine elsewhere to do so. Individuals who receive the vaccine in the near term will need to continue wearing masks and engaging in social distancing until enough citizens have been vaccinated to arrest the community spread of Covid-19.

“The speed of this vaccine’s development was due to the sharing of research on a scale never attempted before — with every study and every phase of every trial carefully reviewed by a safety board and the FDA,” says Cecilia Stuopis, medical director of MIT Medical. “The process was transparent and rigorous throughout, with continual oversight and expert approval.”

Phases of the vaccine roll-out

MIT Medical has already offered vaccinations to all Institute employees who qualified under Phase 1 of the framework established by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Under Phase 1, MIT Medical administered the vaccine to roughly 700 individuals categorized by Massachusetts as top-priority recipients. Those recipients, vaccinated starting Dec. 28, included frontline, public-facing, or essential employees of MIT Medical, MIT Police, and MIT EMS, as well as Broad Institute employees involved in processing Covid-19 tests for MIT and scores of other institutions across New England.

Starting on Monday, Feb. 1, Massachusetts enters Phase 2 of the vaccine rollout plan. Looking ahead to the much broader vaccinations that will occur once Massachusetts enters Phase 3 (expected in April and beyond), the Institute has established a Vaccine Planning Team (VPT). Chaired by Vice Chancellor Ian Waitz, the VPT includes representatives from MIT Medical, MIT Emergency Management, MIT Human Resources, and from the offices of the Provost, General Counsel, Vice President for Research, and Vice President for Communications.

This group will make recommendations on priorities and protocols to guide MIT’s approach to vaccinating the many members of the MIT community who will be eligible under the state’s rollout guidelines. These recommendations will be sent for decisions to MIT’s Covid Decision Team, a group of senior Institute leaders established last year to guide MIT’s actions in response to Covid-19, and to President Reif.

MIT will share more information in the coming weeks on how it will prioritize and manage Covid-19 vaccinations within its community.

What happens next

To help make the most efficient use of any vaccine received by MIT Medical, next week the Institute will send all members of our community a link to preregister for the vaccine. This electronic form will allow individuals (including current employees, current students, and those in Covid Pass with current access to campus) to indicate whether they want to get the vaccine at MIT; provide basic demographic information needed to match them to the state’s rollout groups; and indicate their readiness to receive the vaccine once their group is eligible, including if they want to be on a standby list. Individuals may input the same information for household family members and dependents who may wish to get the vaccine at MIT.

Responses to the form are nonbinding, meaning they may be updated later. This information will be kept private — not shared beyond those who need it for operational purposes — and will help MIT Medical most efficiently allocate its limited doses of the vaccine, which must be used within hours of a vial being opened.

In the coming days, additional details on this prevaccination registration process will come in an email to all members of the community.

MIT’s stance on the Covid-19 vaccine

MIT does not currently expect to require that any members of our community receive a Covid-19 vaccine — but the leaders of the Institute and MIT Medical are encouraging vaccination in the strongest possible terms. These campus leaders, as well as the nation’s top medical experts, believe that the vaccine represents the best way for individuals to keep themselves, their families, and their communities safe from Covid-19.

“I plan to be vaccinated as soon I can, and I am urging everyone at MIT and well beyond to get themselves vaccinated at their first opportunity,” says Institute Professor and Nobel laureate Phillip Sharp, whose pioneering research in the 1970s helped pave the way for today’s generation of mRNA vaccines. “These vaccines have been shown to reduce the risk of infection and the severity of infection. They have been produced in record time, some by local biotechnology firms with strong connections to MIT, and they are triumphs of biomedical research. Getting vaccinated is a simple step to protect yourself, and if we all do it, it will make it possible to get back to the way of life we miss so much — to work side-by-side with colleagues and students, to hug our friends, and more.”

Elazer Edelman, the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science, director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, adds: “Our MIT community is unlike any other. Our friends and colleagues are on the front lines of providing medical care, devising new strategies for treating those who are stricken, and protecting the world around us. The world has been waiting for a vaccine for almost a year, understanding that it is only through global immunization that we can provide universal protection. Now that MIT and others have contributed to making vaccination a reality, we all have an obligation to use it as soon as possible. In this way, we simultaneously honor health care providers, scientists, and our community.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/36ooXhF

Connecting machines in remote regions

On Nov. 26, seven fishermen aboard a small fishing boat off the coast of Maharashtra in western India were struck with panic when their vessel was damaged and began to sink. The panic was warranted: The boat was too far from shore to radio for help.

Tens of thousands of fishermen find themselves in a similar situation around the world every year. Globally, the vast majority of small, deep-sea fishing vessels do their work totally disconnected, leaving them vulnerable to storms and other disasters.

At the root of the problem is the high cost of satellite connectivity in areas like oceans, forests, and mountains, which make up the majority of the Earth’s landmass. Now the startup Skylo, co-founded by Parth Trivedi SM ’14, is offering the ability to communicate with satellites from anywhere on the planet for less than 10 dollars a month.

Skylo’s team has developed a new antenna and communication protocol that allows machines, sensors, and other devices to efficiently transmit data to the geostationary satellites already deployed in space. The company says its technology enables satellite communications at less than 5 percent of the cost of existing solutions and could bring an “internet of things” revolution in the world’s most remote regions.

With the Skylo Hub, which resembles a modem and contains the company’s proprietary antennae, deep-sea fishermen can go from being isolated and vulnerable to having the ability to send out emergency communications, receive storm alerts, and even sell their catch before they return to port. Farmers in remote regions can get real-time data on weather forecasts, soil content, and crop health. Truck drivers and fleet operators that were previously invisible for large stretches of their journeys can be precisely located and their cargo monitored.

Skylo is currently being used on trucks, fishing vessels, tractors, and train coaches across India and its surrounding oceans as part of a partnership with the country’s government-owned telecommunications provider. Later this year, the company’s leadership team is planning to expand to other regions of the world.

As for the fishermen in the sinking ship, their screams were heard by another small boat that happened to be piloting Skylo’s two-way communication technology. They sent an emergency alert to the Maharashtra Coastal Security, who got the sinking boat’s exact location and was able to make a rescue. According to Trivedi, who is also the company’s CEO, it was the third boat Skylo helped save in 2020.

A powerful project

Trivedi worked on new approaches to sustainable innovation in aviation as a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. He calls his time at MIT “the most exciting of my life.”

“MIT really shaped the way I think and allowed me to break down extremely complex problems in space and other subjects into first principles,” Trivedi says.

Trivedi also developed algorithms to determine the optimal use of land by analyzing satellite data, helping him appreciate how disparate data sources “can be used to create rich insights.”

Trivedi was pursuing his MBA at Stanford University when he began exploring the business opportunity in the difference between the kinds of data humans and machines send and receive from satellites.

“If I just want to send a heartbeat from a tractor, I shouldn’t have to pay the same rate I’m paying for broadband service from a cruise ship, which is exactly how it is today, unfortunately,” Trivedi says.

Trivedi and his research collaborators proposed a different kind of network that would leverage narrowband communication protocols, which can send data over long distances more efficiently than broadband and are already used between connected devices on Earth. The system would work with the geostationary satellites already in space and use specialized antennae made from cellular components, dramatically reducing hardware costs for customers.

In 2017, Trivedi founded Skylo with three members of his research team, but the founders stayed off the public radar as they developed Skylo’s technology and established partnerships with satellite companies.

In January of 2020, Skylo raised $103 million to commercially deploy its technology, beginning trials with public and private companies in India in sectors including fishing, farming, logistics, and railways.

As Trivedi spoke with potential customers about how they could use the technology, the massive array of use cases they came up with helped him appreciate how impactful Skylo’s network could be.

Fulfilling the promise of IoT

As part of Skylo’s early work with the Indian government, the company helped the election commission collect votes from remote villages, a process Trivedi says can require officials to hike for three days on unmotorable roads.

In the northeast Indian region of Shella, polling stations used Skylo to communicate directly with election headquarters. Under the more efficient system, officials were able to securely coordinate and manage their on-ground operations in remote villages that were previously unconnected.

Newfound satellite connectivity will also be critical for health care operations in remote regions, and Trivedi says Skylo has already developed a data interface for tracking the temperature of Covid-19 vaccines as they’re transported.

Skylo’s team is focused on selling commercially in India right now, but Trivedi says the only thing preventing the company from expanding is that each country has different requirements for selling satellite services. The company, headquartered in the U.S., also has offices in India, Israel, and Finland.

“Broadly speaking, two-thirds of landmass is unconnected or under-connected,” Trivedi says. “That’s because when you’re building a telecom network, you’re trying to connect 99 percent of populations as opposed to connecting geography, so machines get left out. Skylo is mobilizing data from places and equipment and machines that were never connected before, that were in geographies that could not have been affordably connected before.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3osidWh

Robust artificial intelligence tools to predict future cancer

To catch cancer earlier, we need to predict who is going to get it in the future. The complex nature of forecasting risk has been bolstered by artificial intelligence (AI) tools, but the adoption of AI in medicine has been limited by poor performance on new patient populations and neglect to racial minorities. 

Two years ago, a team of scientists from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Jameel Clinic (J-Clinic) demonstrated a deep learning system to predict cancer risk using just a patient’s mammogram. The model showed significant promise and even improved inclusivity: It was equally accurate for both white and Black women, which is especially important given that Black women are 43 percent more likely to die from breast cancer. 

But to integrate image-based risk models into clinical care and make them widely available, the researchers say the models needed both algorithmic improvements and large-scale validation across several hospitals to prove their robustness. 

To that end, they tailored their new “Mirai” algorithm to capture the unique requirements of risk modeling. Mirai jointly models a patient’s risk across multiple future time points, and can optionally benefit from clinical risk factors such as age or family history, if they are available. The algorithm is also designed to produce predictions that are consistent across minor variances in clinical environments, like the choice of mammography machine.  

The team trained Mirai on the same dataset of over 200,000 exams from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) from their prior work, and validated it on test sets from MGH, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan. Mirai is now installed at MGH, and the team’s collaborators are actively working on integrating the model into care. 

Mirai was significantly more accurate than prior methods in predicting cancer risk and identifying high-risk groups across all three datasets. When comparing high-risk cohorts on the MGH test set, the team found that their model identified nearly two times more future cancer diagnoses compared the current clinical standard, the Tyrer-Cuzick model. Mirai was similarly accurate across patients of different races, age groups, and breast density categories in the MGH test set, and across different cancer subtypes in the Karolinska test set. 

“Improved breast cancer risk models enable targeted screening strategies that achieve earlier detection, and less screening harm than existing guidelines,” says Adam Yala, CSAIL PhD student and lead author on a paper about Mirai that was published this week in Science Translational Medicine. “Our goal is to make these advances part of the standard of care. We are partnering with clinicians from Novant Health in North Carolina, Emory in Georgia, Maccabi in Israel, TecSalud in Mexico, Apollo in India, and Barretos in Brazil to further validate the model on diverse populations and study how to best clinically implement it.” 

How it works 

Despite the wide adoption of breast cancer screening, the researchers say the practice is riddled with controversy: More-aggressive screening strategies aim to maximize the benefits of early detection, whereas less-frequent screenings aim to reduce false positives, anxiety, and costs for those who will never even develop breast cancer.  

Current clinical guidelines use risk models to determine which patients should be recommended for supplemental imaging and MRI. Some guidelines use risk models with just age to determine if, and how often, a woman should get screened; others combine multiple factors related to age, hormones, genetics, and breast density to determine further testing. Despite decades of effort, the accuracy of risk models used in clinical practice remains modest.  

Recently, deep learning mammography-based risk models have shown promising performance. To bring this technology to the clinic, the team identified three innovations they believe are critical for risk modeling: jointly modeling time, the optional use of non-image risk factors, and methods to ensure consistent performance across clinical settings. 

1. Time

Inherent to risk modeling is learning from patients with different amounts of follow-up, and assessing risk at different time points: this can determine how often they get screened, whether they should have supplemental imaging, or even consider preventive treatments. 

Although it’s possible to train separate models to assess risk for each time point, this approach can result in risk assessments that don’t make sense — like predicting that a patient has a higher risk of developing cancer within two years than they do within five years. To address this, the team designed their model to predict risk at all time points simultaneously, by using a tool called an “additive-hazard layer.” 

The additive-hazard layer works as follows: Their network predicts a patient’s risk at a time point, such as five years, as an extension of their risk at the previous time point, such as four years. In doing so, their model can learn from data with variable amounts of follow-up, and then produce self-consistent risk assessments. 

2. Non-image risk factors

While this method primarily focuses on mammograms, the team wanted to also use non-image risk factors such as age and hormonal factors if they were available — but not require them at the time of the test. One approach would be to add these factors as an input to the model with the image, but this design would prevent the majority of hospitals (such as Karolinska and CGMH), which don’t have this infrastructure, from using the model. 

For Mirai to benefit from risk factors without requiring them, the network predicts that information at training time, and if it's not there, it can use its own predictive version. Mammograms are rich sources of health information, and so many traditional risk factors such as age and menopausal status can be easily predicted from their imaging. As a result of this design, the same model could be used by any clinic globally, and if they have that additional information, they can use it. 

3. Consistent performance across clinical environments

To incorporate deep-learning risk models into clinical guidelines, the models must perform consistently across diverse clinical environments, and its predictions cannot be affected by minor variations like which machine the mammogram was taken on. Even across a single hospital, the scientists found that standard training did not produce consistent predictions before and after a change in mammography machines, as the algorithm could learn to rely on different cues specific to the environment. To de-bias the model, the team used an adversarial scheme where the model specifically learns mammogram representations that are invariant to the source clinical environment, to produce consistent predictions. 

To further test these updates across diverse clinical settings, the scientists evaluated Mirai on new test sets from Karolinska in Sweden and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taiwan, and found it obtained consistent performance. The team also analyzed the model’s performance across races, ages, and breast density categories in the MGH test set, and across cancer subtypes on the Karolinska dataset, and found it performed similarly across all subgroups. 

“African-American women continue to present with breast cancer at younger ages, and often at later stages,” says Salewai Oseni, a breast surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital who was not involved with the work. “This, coupled with the higher instance of triple-negative breast cancer in this group, has resulted in increased breast cancer mortality. This study demonstrates the development of a risk model whose prediction has notable accuracy across race. The opportunity for its use clinically is high.” 

Here's how Mirai works: 

1. The mammogram image is put through something called an "image encoder."

2. Each image representation, as well as which view it came from, is aggregated with other images from other views to obtain a representation of the entire mammogram.

3. With the mammogram, a patient's traditional risk factors are predicted using a Tyrer-Cuzick model (age, weight, hormonal factors). If unavailable, predicted values are used. 

4. With this information, the additive-hazard layer predicts a patient’s risk for each year over the next five years. 

Improving Mirai 

Although the current model doesn’t look at any of the patient’s previous imaging results, changes in imaging over time contain a wealth of information. In the future the team aims to create methods that can effectively utilize a patient's full imaging history.

In a similar fashion, the team notes that the model could be further improved by utilizing “tomosynthesis,” an X-ray technique for screening asymptomatic cancer patients. Beyond improving accuracy, additional research is required to determine how to adapt image-based risk models to different mammography devices with limited data. 

“We know MRI can catch cancers earlier than mammography, and that earlier detection improves patient outcomes,” says Yala. “But for patients at low risk of cancer, the risk of false-positives can outweigh the benefits. With improved risk models, we can design more nuanced risk-screening guidelines that offer more sensitive screening, like MRI, to patients who will develop cancer, to get better outcomes while reducing unnecessary screening and over-treatment for the rest.” 

“We’re both excited and humbled to ask the question if this AI system will work for African-American populations,” says Judy Gichoya, MD, MS and assistant professor of interventional radiology and informatics at Emory University, who was not involved with the work. “We’re extensively studying this question, and how to detect failure.” 

Yala wrote the paper on Mirai alongside MIT research specialist Peter G. Mikhael, radiologist Fredrik Strand of Karolinska University Hospital, Gigin Lin of Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, Associate Professor Kevin Smith of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Professor Yung-Liang Wan of Chang Gung University, Leslie Lamb of MGH, Kevin Hughes of MGH, senior author and Harvard Medical School Professor Constance Lehman of MGH, and senior author and MIT Professor Regina Barzilay. 

The work was supported by grants from Susan G Komen, Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Quanta Computing, and the MIT Jameel Clinic. It was also supported by Chang Gung Medical Foundation Grant, and by Stockholm Läns Landsting HMT Grant. 
 

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3t8DNT2

A high-resolution glimpse of gene expression in cells

Using a novel technique for expanding tissue, MIT and Harvard Medical School researchers have devised a way to label individual molecules of messenger RNA within a tissue sample and then sequence the RNA.

This approach offers a unique snapshot of which genes are being expressed in different parts of a cell, and could allow scientists to learn much more about how gene expression is influenced by a cell’s location or its interactions with nearby cells. The technique could also be useful for mapping cells in the brain or other tissues and classifying them according to their function.

“Gene expression is one of the most fundamental processes in all of biology, and it plays roles in all biological processes, both healthy and disease-related. However, you need to know more than just whether a gene is on or off,” says Ed Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology and a professor of biological engineering, media arts and sciences, and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “You want to know where the gene products are located. You care what cell types they’re in, which individual cells they play roles in, and even which parts of cells they work in.”

In a study appearing today in Science, the researchers showed that they could use this technique to locate and then sequence thousands of different messenger RNA molecules within the mouse brain and in human tumor samples.

The senior authors of the study are Boyden, an investigator at the MIT McGovern Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute; George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School; and Adam Marblestone, a former MIT research scientist. The paper’s lead authors are Shahar Alon, a former MIT postdoc who is now a senior lecturer at Bar-Ilan University; Daniel Goodwin, an MIT graduate student; Anubhav Sinha ’14 MNG ’15, an MIT graduate student; Asmamaw Wassie ’12, PhD ’19; and Fei Chen PhD ’17, who is an assistant professor of stem cell and regenerative biology at Harvard University and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Tissue expansion

The new sequencing technique builds on a method that Boyden’s group devised in 2015 for expanding tissue samples and then imaging them. By embedding water-absorbent polymers into a tissue sample, researchers can swell the tissue sample while keeping its overall organization intact. Using this approach, tissues can be expanded by a factor of 100 or more, allowing scientists to obtain very high-resolution images of the brain or other tissues using a regular light microscope.

In 2014, Church’s lab developed an RNA sequencing technique known as FISSEQ (fluorescent in situ sequencing), which allows thousands of mRNA molecules to be located and sequenced within cells grown in a lab dish. The Boyden and Church labs decided to join forces to combine tissue expansion and in situ RNA sequencing, creating a new technique they call expansion sequencing (ExSeq).

Expanding the tissue before performing RNA sequencing has two main benefits: It offers a higher-resolution look at the RNA in cells, and it makes it easier to sequence those RNA molecules. “When you separate these molecules in the expanding sample, and move them away from each other, that gives you more room to actually perform the chemical reactions of in situ sequencing,” Marblestone says.

Once the tissue is expanded, the researchers can label and sequence thousands of RNA molecules in a sample, at a resolution that allows them to pinpoint the molecules’ locations not only within cells but within specific compartments such as dendrites — the tiny extensions of neurons that receive communications from other neurons.

“We know that the location of RNA in these small regions is important for learning and memory, but until now, we didn't have any way to measure these locations because they are very small, on the order of nanometers,” Alon says.

Using an “untargeted” version of this technique, meaning that they are not looking for specific RNA sequences, the researchers can turn up thousands of different sequences. They estimate that in a given sample, they can sequence between 20 and 50 percent of all of the genes present.

In the mouse hippocampus, this technique yielded some surprising results. For one, the researchers found mRNA containing introns, which are sections of RNA that are normally edited out of mRNA in the nucleus, in dendrites. They also discovered mRNA molecules encoding transcription factors in the dendrites, which may help with novel forms of dendrite-to-nucleus communication.

“These are just examples of things that we never would have gone looking for intentionally, but now that we can sequence RNA exactly where it is in the neuron, we're able to explore a lot more biology,” Goodwin says.

Cellular interactions

The researchers also showed that they could explore gene expression in a more targeted way, looking for a specific set of RNA sequences that correspond to genes of interest. In the visual cortex of the mouse, the researchers used this approach to classify neurons into different types based on an analysis of 42 different genes that they express.

This technology could also be useful to analyze many other kinds of tissues, such as tumor biopsies. In this paper, the researchers studied breast cancer metastases, which contain many different cell types, including cancer cells and immune cells. The study revealed that these cell types can behave differently depending on their location within a tumor. For example, the researchers found that B cells that were near tumor cells expressed certain inflammatory genes at a higher level than B cells that were farther from tumor cells.

“The tumor microenvironment has been studied in many different contexts for a long time, but it’s been difficult to study it with any depth,” Sinha says. “A cancer biologist can give you a list of 20 or 30 marker genes that will identify most of the cell types in the tissue. Here, since we interrogated 297 different RNA transcripts in the sample, we can ask and answer more detailed questions about gene expression.”

The researchers now plan to further study the interactions between cancer cells and immune cells, as well as gene expression in the brain in healthy and disease states. They also plan to extend their techniques to allow them to map additional types of biomolecules, such as proteins, alongside RNA.

The research was funded, in part, by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, as well as by Lisa Yang, John Doerr, the Open Philanthropy Project, Cancer Research UK, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Human Cell Atlas pilot program, and HHMI.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3j2FRHJ

MIT convenes influential industry leaders in the fight against climate change

Launched today, the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC) convenes an alliance of leaders from a broad range of industries and aims to vastly accelerate large-scale, real-world implementation of solutions to address the threat of climate change. The MCSC unites similarly motivated, highly creative and influential companies to work with MIT to build a process, market, and ambitious implementation strategy for environmental innovation. 

The work of the consortium will involve a true cross-sector collaboration to meet the urgency of climate change. The MCSC will take positive action and foster the necessary collaboration to meet this challenge, with the intention of influencing efforts across industries. Through a unifying, deeply inclusive, global effort, the MCSC will strive to drive down costs, lower barriers to adoption of best-available technology and processes, speed retirement of carbon-intensive power generating and materials-producing equipment, direct investment where it will be most effective, and rapidly translate best practices from one industry to the next in an effort to deploy social and technological solutions at a pace more rapid than the planet’s intensifying crises.

“If we hope to decarbonize the economy, we must work with the companies that make the economy run. Drawing its members from a broad range of industries, the MCSC will convene an alliance of influential corporations motivated to work with MIT, and with each other, to pilot and deploy the solutions necessary to reach their own ambitious decarbonization commitments,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “By sharing solutions across companies and sectors, the consortium has the potential to vastly accelerate the implementation of large-scale, real-world solutions to help meet the global climate emergency. And as an Institute-wide effort, it will also complement MIT’s existing climate initiatives and make them more effective: Just as the Climate Grand Challenges effort is accelerating research on climate science and solutions, the consortium aims to accelerate the adoption of such solutions, at scale and across industries.”

Led by the MIT School of Engineering and engaging students, faculty, and researchers from across the entire Institute, the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium has called upon companies from a broad range of industries — from aviation to agriculture, consumer services to electronics, chemical production to textiles, and infrastructure to software — to roll up their sleeves and work closely with every corner of MIT.

“This new collaboration represents the incredible potential for academia and industry to work together on a shared mission to shape research, identify opportunities for innovation, and rapidly advance practical solutions with the sense of urgency needed to address our climate challenge. There are no bounds to what we can achieve together,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering, Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and chair of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium.

The inaugural members of the MCSC are companies with intricate supply chains that are among the best positioned to help lead the mission to solve the climate crisis. The inaugural member companies of the MCSC recognize the responsibility industry has in the rapid deployment of social and technology solutions. They represent the heart of global industry and have made a commitment to not only work with MIT but with one another, to tackle the climate challenge with the urgency required to realize their goals.

These industry leaders can both help inspire transformative change within their own sectors and demonstrate the value of working together, across sectors, at scale. The inaugural members of the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium are:

• Accenture is a global professional services company that delivers on the promise of technology and human ingenuity, which includes helping clients across 40 industries reach their sustainability goals by transitioning to low-carbon energy; reducing the carbon footprint of IT, cloud, and software; and designing and delivering net-zero, circular supply chains.
   
• Apple is a global leader in technology innovation, providing seamless experiences across Apple devices and empowering people with breakthrough services.
   
• Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company and leading provider of commercial airplanes, defense, space and security systems, and global services.
   
• Cargill is a global food manufacturer with the goal of nourishing the world in a safe, responsible, and sustainable way.
   
• Dow is a global manufacturer of innovative products that solve the materials science challenges of its customers and contribute to a more sustainable world. 
   
• IBM is a hybrid cloud platform and artificial intelligence company.
   
• Inditex is one of the world’s largest fashion retail groups with eight distinct brands focused on fitting its products to meet customer demands in a sustainable way through an integrated platform of physical and online stores.
   
• LafargeHolcim is the world's global leader in building materials and solutions at the forefront of sustainable construction.
   
• MathWorks develops mathematical computing software used to accelerate the pace of engineering and science.
   
• Nexplore (Hochtief) is an innovative company that develops technology solutions to digitize the infrastructure sector, using next-generation technologies including artificial intelligence, blockchain, computer vision, natural language processing, and internet of things. Nexplore was founded in 2018 by HOCHTIEF, one of the largest infrastructure construction groups worldwide.
   
• Rand-Whitney Containerboard (RWCB), a Kraft Group company, is a manufacturer of lightweight, high-performance recycled linerboard for corrugated containers, using the most environmentally sustainable production processes and methods.
   
• PepsiCo is a global food and beverage company that aims to use its scale, reach, and expertise to help build a more sustainable food system.
   
• Verizon is one of the world’s leading providers of technology, communications, information and entertainment products and services.

Jeffrey Grossman will serve as director of the MCSC. Grossman is the Morton and Claire Goulder and Family Professor in Environmental Systems, head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow. Elsa Olivetti, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in Materials Science and Engineering, will serve as associate director. A steering committee comprised of faculty spanning all five of MIT’s schools and the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, will help to drive the work of the consortium.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2KVO7fZ

TESS discovers four exoplanets orbiting a nearby sun-like star

MIT researchers have discovered four new exoplanets orbiting a sun-like star just over 200 light-years from Earth. Because of the diversity of these planets and brightness of their star, this system could be an ideal target for atmospheric characterization with NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope. Tansu Daylan, a postdoc at the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, led the study published in The Astronomical Journal on Jan. 25.

With further study, says Daylan, this bright star and its many planets could be critical to understanding how planets take shape and evolve. “When it comes to characterizing planetary atmospheres around sun-like stars, this is likely one of the best targets we will ever get,” he says of the results he presented earlier in the month at the 237th meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Transit method

Daylan and his colleagues detected these planets with the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an MIT-led NASA mission. To identify exoplanets with TESS, researchers look for changes in the amount of light coming from a star. A small dip in a star’s light could mean that a planet has passed in front of it, blocking some of its light from reaching Earth. By measuring these transits, scientists can approximate the size of a planet, how long it takes to orbit its star, and whether it has other planetary neighbors. Combined with other observation methods, like measuring the gravitational effects a planet has on its host star, researchers can determine if a planet is rocky or gaseous, hot or cold, and even if it has a thick or thin atmosphere.

If light from a distant star passes through the atmosphere of an exoplanet on its way to Earth, certain wavelengths of light will get absorbed by the gases in that atmosphere. When the light reaches Earth, wavelengths of light corresponding to specific gases –– like water, carbon dioxide, or methane –– will be missing, informing scientists of the atmosphere’s composition. This can give astronomers vital information about a planet’s environment, evolution, and habitability. Although TESS can’t characterize atmospheres, the telescope is key in identifying which exoplanets should be prioritized for atmospheric study by other, higher-resolution telescopes like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope set to launch in fall 2021.

Using data from TESS as well as ground-based telescopes, Daylan determined that this star hosts a large, rocky inner planet, or super-Earth, and three gaseous outer planets just smaller than Neptune, known as sub-Neptunes. Compared to our own solar system, these planets live very close to their sun; their orbits range from 19 days to just under four days. This makes them blazing hot, their average surface temperatures ranging from 700 degrees Fahrenheit to 1,500 F.

Although this means the planets are unlikely to host life, it gives astronomers much more data to work with; a short orbit allows for more frequent transits and therefore more opportunities to examine the light passing through its atmosphere. However, there may also be yet undiscovered planets further out in this system, perhaps even in the star’s habitable zone. Recently, another research team used the CHaracterising Exoplanet Satellite (CHEOPS) to confirm a fifth planet, which takes 29 days to orbit the star.

The planets’ host star, TOI-1233, will provide ample light for future study, Daylan says. The star is similar in size and temperature to our own sun, but because it is relatively close to Earth, it appears very bright compared to other stars. From our view, it is the brightest known sun-like star and one of the brightest stars to harbor at least four transiting planets. This is helpful, because a brighter star gives astronomers more light to work with when characterizing its planets.

Stars with many exoplanets are particularly exciting to astronomers, because they open up new avenues for studying solar systems. “With multi-planetary systems, you’re kind of hitting the jackpot,” says Daylan. “The planets originate from the same disk of matter around the same star, but they end up being different planets with different atmospheres and different climates due to their different orbits. So, we would like to understand the fundamental processes of planet formation and evolution using this planetary system, which acts as a controlled experiment.”

TESS is a NASA Astrophysics Explorer mission led and operated by MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. Additional partners include Northrop Grumman, based in Falls Church, Virginia; NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley; the Center for Astrophysics - Harvard and Smithsonian in Cambridge; MIT Lincoln Laboratory; and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. More than a dozen universities, research institutes, and observatories worldwide are participants in the mission.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3pyKQm8

3 Questions: Ernest Moniz on the future of climate and energy under the Biden-Harris administration

Climate and energy are two key areas on the Biden-Harris Administration’s agenda. Here, Robert C. Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), asks Ernest J. Moniz — professor emeritus post-tenure, MITEI’s founding director, special advisor to MIT President Rafael Reif, and former U.S. Secretary of Energy — about key challenges and targets that the new administration should consider to accelerate significant progress in these areas.

Q: What are your initial thoughts on what the top priority items should be for the Biden-Harris administration?

A: First of all, I think we should start off by saying that it’s pretty clear that the president is going to move out smartly on energy and climate. His appointments speak volumes, starting out with John Kerry in this new international envoy position; with Gina McCarthy; Brian Deese in the White House; Jennifer Granholm as the secretary of energy, who, as the governor of Michigan, did a lot with renewables and transportation; and the choice of Janet Yellen in the treasury with her well-known commitment to carbon emissions pricing.

It’s pretty convincing that the Biden-Harris Administration is in fact going to carry through with their “whole of government” approach to addressing climate. Now, in terms of priorities going forward, I think it’s important to distinguish between the types of actions that he can take. Clearly, there will be a large package of executive actions that can be taken without Congress.

Frankly, some of those will be reversing what Trump rolled back. Some examples of rollback to Obama-Biden rules, possibly further strengthened under Biden-Harris, could include Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for auto efficiency and methane emissions rules.

There will also be a restart of some major Obama-Biden activities. One that I was very close to while energy secretary was energy efficiency standards. During the Obama period, the Department of Energy issued more than 50 energy-efficiency standards. We’re talking more than half a trillion dollars of consumer savings and about two to three gigatons of CO₂ avoided cumulatively to 2030. You’re going to see that come out like gangbusters, maybe even more aggressive than when we were in the Obama administration.

Rejoining the Paris Agreement is a no-brainer. Getting in as a notification on Day One, and then 30 days later we’re in. Now, what do you do with it? The very early announcement of John Kerry’s position as international climate envoy was a clear statement that we don’t want to just rejoin Paris, we want to re-establish a leadership position. Other countries haven’t taken a four-year vacation on this. They’ve been working hard at it. We have to earn our place back at the table. A major test in the next few months will be formulation of a much more aggressive nationally determined contribution for 2030 than that adopted for 2025 at the Paris climate meeting just over five years ago, while also describing a domestic program that can credibly reach the goal. It will be tough to thread this needle.

These are only a few highlights of things that will be reestablished, but there will also be some new elements as well. For example, I believe that he will order all the financial regulatory agencies to put corporate climate risk disclosures very high on the agenda, reinforcing what the private banks and investors do in terms of the environmental, social, and corporate governance movement. It’s going to be a major executive package that the administration can put in place.

Q: There have been a lot of interesting climate and energy experiments and aggressive programs at the state and regional levels around the country. What lessons can be learned from these examples and how can we take national legislative action that leverages what we have already learned?

A: Despite the newfound Democratic majority in the Senate, I don’t think we should be fooled into thinking that it’s going to be easy to get comprehensive legislation immediately. Frankly, there’s a lot of work to do in bringing the Democrats together in terms of what kinds of programs are actually needed. If we assume, and I do assume, that once again we will not have comprehensive legislation on matters such as significant carbon emissions pricing anytime soon, state and city leadership will continue to be very important because in these past few years, clearly states and cities have been the ones leading the charge, often with opposition of the federal government.

Moving forward, there will be synergy between what the states and cities and the administration want to do. One should not underestimate how that will free up a lot of state and city initiatives on the path to the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow in late 2021, reinforcing a magic year of repositioning America on climate and clean energy. For example, I’m expecting that the considerable number of net-zero declarations by cities and states (and companies too) will only be strengthened. Clearly, national comprehensive legislation is desired and will eventually be very important, but we’ve always emphasized that, even with national legislation, we should never lose sight of the fact that low-carbon solutions are fundamentally regional in nature. This is a key direction that the Biden-Harris administration can go in even without comprehensive legislation. Facilitating and encouraging these kinds of regionally focused solutions is the only way we’re going to reach the net-zero objective.

Going back to Congress, there are two areas that I feel are ripe for congressional bipartisan action: innovation and infrastructure. Innovation is where the Congress in the last four years has shown promising bipartisan support. This is the decade where we need supercharged innovation because if we don’t get that addressed in this decade, we’re not going to have the scale potential in the 2030s and ’40s that we’re going to need for the mid-century net-zero goal.

Congress knows that they cannot kick the can down the road any further on infrastructure. The money has to be found and that will include as an important subset, energy infrastructure. That will obviously include the electricity system, for example, but it will also include things such as the infrastructure that is needed for large-scale carbon management and the infrastructure for large-scale, multi-sectoral hydrogen development. With innovation and infrastructure, I do believe that we’ll be able to garner strong bipartisan support. Clearly once we get into more difficult areas, that may take more time.

Q: Many argue that clean power generation alone will not be enough to address the climate and energy crisis alone and that carbon removal technologies will prove to be essential get us there. This begs the question about what the Biden-Harris administration might do to address these areas. How could they incentivize carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration (CCUS) technology or carbon dioxide removal (CDR) to help make it more affordable and appealing for large scale implementation?

A: Some people argue against admitting that CDR should be part of the solution because it is interpreted as giving more life to fossil fuels. I think that’s completely the wrong way to look at it. The right way to look at it is to recognize net-zero economy-wide emissions as just one milestone on the way to net-negative emissions, and it’s a tautology that you can’t do net-negative if you don’t have negative carbon technologies. The more that one can develop, demonstrate and deploy these technologies now, the more we’re getting a leg up to the place where we really want to go in the future, and of course at the same time, it’s going to help us with the mitigation challenge along the path to net-zero.

We’ve been advancing quite strenuously this carbon dioxide removal agenda, and it’s getting a lot of traction. The energy bill that was attached to the Omnibus Appropriations Bill and signed by the former president on Dec. 21, 2020 provided a lot of support for these technologies. This includes the support of a broad research portfolio on the topic and also requires a cross-administration CDR committee. The energy bill also authorized six big CCUS demonstration projects. Moving those forward will be very important, but where I think the government has to come in in a new way is to also be looking at the simultaneous build-up of the infrastructure to service these areas.

In this decade, we could start with a set of discrete hubs to advance the infrastructure of CCUS, CDR, and hydrogen, and the federal government can play a huge role in getting that to happen in collaboration with cities, states, and regions nationwide.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/36lrbOI

“Liquid” machine-learning system adapts to changing conditions

MIT researchers have developed a type of neural network that learns on the job, not just during its training phase. These flexible algorithms, dubbed “liquid” networks, change their underlying equations to continuously adapt to new data inputs. The advance could aid decision making based on data streams that change over time, including those involved in medical diagnosis and autonomous driving.

“This is a way forward for the future of robot control, natural language processing, video processing — any form of time series data processing,” says Ramin Hasani, the study’s lead author. “The potential is really significant.”

The research will be presented at February’s AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence. In addition to Hasani, a postdoc in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT co-authors include Daniela Rus, CSAIL director and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and PhD student Alexander Amini. Other co-authors include Mathias Lechner of the Institute of Science and Technology Austria and Radu Grosu of the Vienna University of Technology.

Time series data are both ubiquitous and vital to our understanding the world, according to Hasani. “The real world is all about sequences. Even our perception — you’re not perceiving images, you’re perceiving sequences of images,” he says. “So, time series data actually create our reality.”

He points to video processing, financial data, and medical diagnostic applications as examples of time series that are central to society. The vicissitudes of these ever-changing data streams can be unpredictable. Yet analyzing these data in real time, and using them to anticipate future behavior, can boost the development of emerging technologies like self-driving cars. So Hasani built an algorithm fit for the task.

Hasani designed a neural network that can adapt to the variability of real-world systems. Neural networks are algorithms that recognize patterns by analyzing a set of “training” examples. They’re often said to mimic the processing pathways of the brain — Hasani drew inspiration directly from the microscopic nematode, C. elegans. “It only has 302 neurons in its nervous system,” he says, “yet it can generate unexpectedly complex dynamics.”

Hasani coded his neural network with careful attention to how C. elegans neurons activate and communicate with each other via electrical impulses. In the equations he used to structure his neural network, he allowed the parameters to change over time based on the results of a nested set of differential equations.

This flexibility is key. Most neural networks’ behavior is fixed after the training phase, which means they’re bad at adjusting to changes in the incoming data stream. Hasani says the fluidity of his “liquid” network makes it more resilient to unexpected or noisy data, like if heavy rain obscures the view of a camera on a self-driving car. “So, it’s more robust,” he says.

There’s another advantage of the network’s flexibility, he adds: “It’s more interpretable.”

Hasani says his liquid network skirts the inscrutability common to other neural networks. “Just changing the representation of a neuron,” which Hasani did with the differential equations, “you can really explore some degrees of complexity you couldn’t explore otherwise.” Thanks to Hasani’s small number of highly expressive neurons, it’s easier to peer into the “black box” of the network’s decision making and diagnose why the network made a certain characterization.

“The model itself is richer in terms of expressivity,” says Hasani. That could help engineers understand and improve the liquid network’s performance.

Hasani’s network excelled in a battery of tests. It edged out other state-of-the-art time series algorithms by a few percentage points in accurately predicting future values in datasets, ranging from atmospheric chemistry to traffic patterns. “In many applications, we see the performance is reliably high,” he says. Plus, the network’s small size meant it completed the tests without a steep computing cost. “Everyone talks about scaling up their network,” says Hasani. “We want to scale down, to have fewer but richer nodes.”

Hasani plans to keep improving the system and ready it for industrial application. “We have a provably more expressive neural network that is inspired by nature. But this is just the beginning of the process,” he says. “The obvious question is how do you extend this? We think this kind of network could be a key element of future intelligence systems.”

This research was funded, in part, by Boeing, the National Science Foundation, the Austrian Science Fund, and Electronic Components and Systems for European Leadership.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3ppKMVr

In praise of IAP

When Independent Activities Period (IAP) rolls around in January, it’s a welcome break from the daily grind of the semester — and not just for students. There’s only one problem, and it’s been that way since IAP began 50 years ago: deciding what to do. A stand-up comedy crash course or MIT Heavy Metal 101? Learning Estonian or making a pinball machine? In addition to academic subjects, the term is jam-packed with hundreds of workshops, events, lectures, recitals, competitions, classes, and other activities.

“One of the wonderful things about IAP for students — and it goes back to why it was created — is it allows undergraduates and graduate students an opportunity to spend time at MIT, or elsewhere, and not focus on their academic pursuit that brought them here,” says Elizabeth Cogliano Young, associate dean and director of the Office of the First Year. “Whether they are taking advantage of an IAP activity or not is kind of a moot point. It’s the fact that the month exists.”

In fact, IAP did not exist until 1971, when it was launched as an experiment. At the time, the Institute was in the midst of a period of educational innovation that produced novel programs like Interphase and the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Grading policies, the science General Institute Requirements curriculum, and the academic calendar were being re-examined, as well.

Senior faculty and administrators were particularly concerned that the academic calendar was causing undue stress for students. Fall semester finals took place after the holidays, so students had to spend their winter break studying, and the spring semester started shortly afterward. A committee tasked with considering calendar options proposed moving finals before the holidays and creating a January term that would allow “fallow time” for students. The faculty approved the proposal as a three-year experiment to begin in 1971. It was so successful that IAP was adopted as a permanent fixture in 1973 — and it has thrived in the past five decades.

Bucking tradition

From its inception, IAP has been open to the entire MIT community; anyone is welcome to propose almost any activity they wish. That’s given rise to a bevy of eclectic offerings over the years, from Palm Reading and Chili Chemistry to Yiddish Language and Culture and to How to Use a Slide Rule.

It has also enabled students to interact with faculty in less traditional ways. For 33 years, Professor Linn Hobbs shared his considerable wine expertise through In Vino Veritas, a wine-tasting class that was so popular it was oversubscribed every year, he says. Hobbs estimates that between 1982 and 2014, when he retired, he taught over 2,500 students.

The class met for three hours over the course of five evenings. Each time, students sampled 12 wines metered out in 30 milliliter increments (in beakers, naturally), supplemented by lots of crackers and Hobbs’s detailed lectures. Setting up and breaking down each class took hours, even with the help of several teaching assistants. Since the wines changed from year to year, he spent at least a month writing the tasting notes for the lectures each year, and countless hours securing the wine, especially older vintages.

“It was much more work than I would ever prepare for a whole semester subject,” recalls Hobbs, who is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Emeritus and an emeritus professor of nuclear engineering. The class was a labor of love, though — one that his students appreciated so much that he consistently received standing ovations at the last class.

Students enjoyed learning about the chemistry underlying the taste and smell of wine, he says. “It required them to be very analytical, finding out about structures and compositions and chemistries. If you apply that to something like wine, you’ll know much more than most people — even people that drink a lot of wine. That’s what I wanted to show students, that they had these wonderful innate abilities, and can use wine tasting as a wonderful entrée into a kind of other social world. What the students loved about it was they could bring their own skills to this and be successful at it.”

A forum for new ideas

Freed from the pace and rigor of the semester, students, faculty, and staff over the years used the “extra” term to explore, experiment, and cultivate new ideas. LeaderShape is a prime example. Created in 1995, the program is a multi-day intensive leadership retreat for students, facilitated by faculty and staff. And it’s fertile ground for thinking outside the box. Ideas that have bubbled up at LeaderShape have paved the way for new programs at MIT, such as First-Year Pre-Orientation Programs and varsity women's ice hockey.

Early on, IAP also provided a venue for pivotal conversations about the climate for women at MIT — and ultimately, measures to improve it. In January 1972, some students grew concerned upon hearing that the administration did not intend to fill an open position for an associate dean of students, which had been recently vacated by Emily Wick, then professor of food science and nutrition, who had served as an important ally for women within the administration. Wick joined then-professor (and, later, Institute Professor) Mildred Dresselhaus and Paula Stone ’72, SM ’73, PhD ’77 in planning an IAP seminar to discuss the students’ concerns.

About 100 women — a mix of students, faculty, staff, postdocs, alumni, and faculty wives — attended, along with two men, in a meeting that Dresselhaus later described as a “semi-riot.” The meeting gave birth to what became known as the MIT Women’s Forum, which continued to meet regularly, ultimately becoming a formal organization that lasted for decades. The forum’s advocacy sparked significant change at MIT, such as the creation of an ad hoc committee to review the environment for women, and the appointment of a new position: special assistant to the president and chancellor for women and work.

A hotbed of competition

IAP wouldn’t be IAP without the plethora of games, contests, and tournaments offered over the past 50 years. Paper airplane contests and College Bowl tournaments. Hearts and Mahjong tournaments. Iconic events like Bad Ideas Weekend, Battlecode, and the 6.270 Autonomous Robot Competition. And that’s just a cursory sampling.

The MIT Mystery Hunt has been an IAP staple for 41 years. Over the course of a weekend, dozens of student teams solve hundreds of puzzles that lead to a metapuzzle. Cracking the metapuzzle reveals the location of a coin hidden on campus. In addition, the winning team earns the privilege of creating the hunt the following year

For some, the competition is the stuff of legends. One MIT Admissions blogger, who at age 12 discovered the hunt on Wikipedia, recently wrote, “For the longest time, the only thing I knew about MIT was that it was the university that ran the Mystery Hunt, never mind the fact that it’s famous or whatever.” From then on he wanted to go to MIT “not to study or anything, but to participate in Mystery Hunt.”

Charmed, I’m sure

No tribute to IAP would be complete without a nod to Charm School. The idea was the brainchild of the late Dean for Academic Affairs Travis Merritt in 1993, as a way to help students master social graces.

Held on the afternoon of the last Friday of IAP, Charm School featured different stations where hundreds of students learned important life skills like bathroom etiquette, making small talk, table manners, how to ask for a date, how to tie a bow tie, and buttering up big shots. “It was a real hubbub, and people always seemed to be interested,” says Robert Dimmick, now retired from the MIT Alumni Association, who taught bow tie tying for 10 years. In some years, fashion police circulated among the hundreds of students, issuing citations for violations like “using both straps on a back pack” and being a “walking jewelry store.” 

Students collected charm credits at each station and the end of the afternoon they were awarded degrees in charm — six credits for a bachelor’s, eight for a master’s, and 12 for a ChD. Notable commencement speakers over the years included columnist Miss Manners (Judith Martin) in 1994 and the great-grandson of etiquette author Emily Post in 2004.

“Nobody at other colleges and universities had done anything like Charm School before,” recalls Dimmick, “so it got a lot of press.” In addition to the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, other news organizations featured Charm School as well, notably the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Scientific American, and the CBS “Sunday Morning” Show.

Unlimited possibilities (sort of)

Elizabeth Cogliano Young has had a window on IAP for 24 years now. Her office manages all the non-credit offerings, which involves reviewing hundreds of proposals submitted by students, faculty, and staff each year. She’s seen it all in that time. And that’s one of the great things about IAP, she says: Anyone can propose an activity that interests them. The sky is the limit — within reason, of course. Every few years, there’s an outlier, she says.

“We read each proposal before we approve it to make sure that no one is saying, “I want to brew beer in my bathtub, which is an actual thing that got submitted a number of years ago. We were like, ‘Yeah, you can’t do that. And telling us was probably not the smartest idea!’”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3cfRqtK

MIT alumni broaden access to student internships

Even before Covid-19, it was difficult for students to get internships that gave them hands-on experience in the industries they were interested in. That was especially true for students from low-income communities without the experience or network to get their foot in the door.

Now the startup Paragon One is expanding access to student employment opportunities by turning company projects into remote “externships” that dozens of students can take part in simultaneously. Paragon One handles student onboarding, training, and evaluation, while companies get the final product of their work.

“Our virtual platform takes care of the whole lifecycle of a work project, from the training to the workflow,” Paragon One co-founder and CEO Matt Wilkerson ’04, ’05 says. “We also have mentors who answer students’ questions on behalf of the company in addition to regular webinars with the company. The companies wouldn’t have time to do this stuff at a large scale, so we enable many more students to have these experiences.”

By giving students real work experiences to include on their resumes and reference in job interviews, Paragon One is solving what co-founders Wilkerson and Byron Hsu ’06, SM ’08 call the “chicken and egg job problem,” in which new graduates can’t get the jobs they want because they don’t already have experience in those positions.

To date, Paragon One has helped over 1,000 students — mostly college undergraduates but also high school and graduate students — gain work experience at companies including Hewlett Packard, Facebook, and Zillow.

Paragon One’s projects can give students experience in fields like marketing, product strategy, financial services, business development, data analytics, and more.

Now, with Covid-19 forcing more organizations to embrace remote work, Paragon One is in position to further broaden access to work opportunities that students of all backgrounds can benefit from.

Inspired by MIT

The inspiration for Paragon One came from an experience Wilkerson had during one of MIT’s Independent Activities Periods (IAPs), in which MIT students get four weeks to participate in an array of activities not necessarily related to their regular coursework.

Wilkerson participated in an IAP externship that paired MIT alumni at different companies with students interested in learning more about the company or industry.

In 2015, after reconnecting during a reunion at their MIT fraternity, Hsu and Wilkerson began exploring ways to help students land their first jobs. After first pursuing a career coaching platform and going through the Y-Combinator accelerator, they eventually pivoted to creating virtual externship opportunities in the middle of 2019.

Using tools like Zoom and Slack to facilitate early projects, the founders began building out their own tech platform to make it easier for students to collaborate and receive feedback. They also devoted considerable time to making training modules to help students get up to speed on projects quickly.

More broadly, the company’s platform offers what Hsu calls a “library of skills” to help them with things like conducting business research, creating compelling marketing materials, and working as part of a team.

Paragon One has also put an emphasis on providing students with mentorship and guidance. Each week, Paragon One’s managers hold a Zoom meeting with students to check in and give feedback. In between each Zoom meeting, students can ask questions through Paragon One’s platform. Managers also give comments and ratings as students submit their work into Paragon One’s platform. The data the company collects is used to identify top performers, as well as students in need of further assistance.

“We try to make our service scale as well as possible to give every student an outcome as if they were getting one-on-one attention,” Hsu says.

Students enter programs by filling out an application and ranking their top choices out of Paragon One’s list of opportunities. Companies start by selecting from a set of templates, and then meet with a Paragon One representative to customize their project and make sure it aligns with their goals. Hsu compares the meeting to an onboarding interview the company would have with a new intern — but in this case, Paragon One uses the information to create content that will onboard dozens of students at once.

Unlike traditional internships, Paragon One’s externships can run at any time of the year. The average program lasts six to eight weeks and includes about 50 students.

The company partners with institutions and universities, which sponsor students. Corporate clients may also pay Paragon One depending on their project and recruiting needs.

“A lot of companies are interested in this as a recruiting funnel, and there’s value in seeing someone work on a project for eight weeks that you wouldn’t be able to get in an interview,” Hsu says.

Helping students in a changing world

As the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted everyone’s plans in 2020, Paragon One’s virtual externships offered an attractive alternative to the traditional internships that were being cancelled in droves throughout the spring and summer. The founders say Paragon One has grown about 900 percent since February.

That growth has allowed the company to broaden its efforts to level the playing field for underprivileged students. Paragon One has partnered with nonprofit organizations like The Opportunity Network to onboard students from diverse backgrounds.

“If you’re at a school like MIT, you’re going to get more attention obviously,” Wilkerson says. “But if you don’t come from a target school, you don’t have the same access to good internships. Maybe you don’t have the money to pay the rent to go spend a summer in a city, or you want to explore something outside of your major but they won’t take you seriously. There’s a lot of challenges.”

Overall, the founders think Paragon One is on the right side of a number of trends, such as a growing appreciation for experiential learning and a push to better prepare college students for the workforce.

“If we can bring education together with hiring in a more targeted, flexible way, that’s super exciting for us,” Hsu says. “There’s a problem that needs to be solved around increasing the flexibility of the early career job market. I think that was always going to happen, but Covid-19 accelerated that trend. Moving forward, the world is never going to completely go back to what it was.” Paragon One is hoping to better prepare students for the jobs of the future.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/2LYabY7