When masks reveal

A Covid-19 mask is typically seen as a form of protection. But what if our masks became opportunities for exposure — the physical expression of our thoughts, preoccupations, and the way we relate to the turbulence of the outside world?

That was the challenge faced by MIT undergraduate students assigned to design a mask that reflected individual and collective experiences during the pandemic. As part of the interdisciplinary course 4.302 (Foundations in Art, Design and Spatial Practices: Design and Scarcity), run by the MIT Future Heritage Lab and the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), the assignment was inspired by the global Co-MASK project initiated by the course’s professor, Azra Akšamija, a faculty member in the Department of Architecture. Whereas Co-MASK focuses on designing do-it-yourself fabric face-coverings for protection from Covid-19, the students were encouraged to envisage a mask that would serve as a physical extension of the mind and the body — a site of exchange and a way of relating to a larger community.

The personal and the planetary

The “Design and Scarcity” course introduces theoretical and practical tools for art and design in fragile environments — an expression of the ethos of ACT, which highlights the importance of artistic methods for experimental problem-solving and rigorous critical practice. Supported by the MIT Alumni Class Fund for undergraduate curriculum, this class was developed by Akšamija as the residential version of her Design & Scarcity MITx course, the first online hands-on art and design course at MIT. 

The students interpreted the idea of fragility in diverse ways. While reflecting on personal experiences of isolation during the pandemic, the process of designing the masks became a means of empathically connecting with contemporary global movements and shared traumas. In their engagement with issues such as racial discrimination, migrant exploitation, and ecological damage, the masks are manifestations of the concerns that pervade the student experience and their priorities as designers. The project addresses the fragility of environments at multiple scales; from the personal to the political to the planetary — and right down to the scale of the virus itself, which is simultaneously fighting for its own survival.

This expansive scope mirrors the aspirations of the Co-MASK project, which is intended to be borderless and multilingual. “The Co-MASK designs created by the students indicate one of the central needs that Covid-19 pandemic made evident for us all,” says Akšamija. “That we — humans and non-humans — need to come together in a new way and demonstrate solidarity with the most vulnerable in our planetary community.”

Reinterpreting shelter

The work of several of the students engages critically with the question of shelter and the protection of individuals and communities.

“American Dream,” a mask designed by Diego Yañez-Laguna, a second-year undergraduate art and design major, addresses the plight of migrants held at borders. “The goal of this mask is to show how the immigrant experience in the United States is far from the American Dream,” explains Yañez-Laguna. “That message of opportunity and welcome is represented by visual references to the Statue of Liberty — but the corruption of these ideals is shown through the use of barbed wire, which represents a history of mistreatment, scare tactics against migrants, and an obsession with borders and division.”

Caleb Amanfu, a fourth-year undergraduate double-majoring in architecture and mechanical engineering, chose to use a bandage as the primary material for his mask, “Seen” — a representation of societal repression. “This mask is trying to call to attention the feeling of being seen and not heard while calling into question the systems and societal situations that cause those experiences to persist,” says Amanfu. “This mask, like the systems themselves, is preventing the user from speaking up while simultaneously ‘suffocating’ them under the problems they are trying to speak out against.”

For Janice Tjan, a third-year undergraduate double-majoring in mechanical engineering and art and design, the project was an opportunity to give voice to the experiences of homeless children during the pandemic. “Blazon Mask” is designed to bring the inside out, providing a site for the wearer to self-advocate and display their anxieties. “The contrasting colors, rudimentary stitching, and scout-like badges contribute to a loud look and a youthful attitude,” says Tjan. “These masks are made from recycled cotton fabric (old T-shirts and bedsheets), which adds to their bricolage appearance and amplifies the creative voice of the maker.”

Mind and material

The students were tasked with investigating the social, environmental, and technological implications of specific materials — materials that also offered an outlet for psychological expression.  

Felix Li, a second-year undergraduate art and design major, titled his mask “Resonant when Struck,” evoking both the materiality of porcelain and the sound of breakage. “For as long as I can remember,” he says, “I’ve used the same set of cheap Chinese supermarket porcelain bowls and plates. These fragile but strong ceramic vessels are a monument to my heritage, my parents, my Asian identity. The shattered and scattered form reflects the collective pain and grief across the AAPI [Asian American and Pacific Islander] community.”

Eva Smerekanych, a second-year undergraduate architecture major, sculpted her mask, “Clean,” from polymer clay to represent how eating disorders might be exacerbated during a period of isolation. “Polymer clay is a soft, waxy medium with the unique trait of remaining malleable over long periods of time,” she says. “As such, this medium provokes a sense of uncertainty about the future. Will it crack? Will it get warped? Squished? Stretched? This uncertainty mirrors the uncertainty that triggers many to develop eating disorders.”

The guiding theme of scarcity prompted many to investigate the environmental cost of their chosen material, a point powerfully communicated by “Ocean Blues,” a mask designed by Izzi Waitz, a second-year undergraduate architecture major. Made by knitting together 10 single-use synthetic blue masks, her mask evokes the sight of plastic caught in a fishing net. “An abundance of masks, gloves, hand-sanitizer bottles, and other forms of Covid waste are pouring into our oceans and landfills,” says Waitz. “These synthetic materials, with a lifespan of 450 years, pose a large threat to marine life.”

Open futures

The students’ masks demonstrate how an artistic environment for research and learning can expand conventional approaches to design. The culture of experimentation fostered by ACT opens new ways of confronting contemporary critical issues — but it also makes space for personal expressions of fragility and vulnerability, feelings which can be the source of transformative creativity.

The project’s negotiation between the public and the private will be further amplified at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition Venice Architecture Biennale 2021, where the masks of Akšamija and her students will be on view in the “Future Assembly” collective exhibition in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. The Future Assembly is a reflection on the past 75 years of UN multilateralism, inviting Biennale contributors to envisage new approaches to impactful collaboration, and to imagine how a future multilateralism can expand beyond the human-centric worldview to become a more-than-human assembly. 

As one of this year’s exhibitors, Akšamija invited her students to portray the Covid-19 virus as a stakeholder in the Future Assembly. Given the fact that the virus survives and mutates through human transmission, the form of the mask represents a shelter for human beings and a threat to the virus’ survival. Yet the masks designed by the students also express the instinctual needs that the pandemic has made so apparent: the necessity for strength, inspiration, and hope for the future at a time that calls for resilience and resourcefulness. By redefining the personal in terms of the collective, these masks reveal the central paradox of the pandemic: the virus that divides us has also exposed the fact of our infinite interconnection.

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Taking an indirect path into a bright future

Matthew Johnston was a physics senior looking to postpone his entry into adulting. He had an intense four years at MIT; when he wasn’t in class, he was playing baseball and working various tech development gigs.

Johnston had led the MIT Engineers baseball team to a conference championship, becoming the first player in his team’s history to be named a three-time Google Cloud Academic All-American. He put an exclamation mark on his career by hitting four home runs in his final game. 

Johnston also developed a novel method of producing solar devices as a researcher with GridEdge Solar at MIT, and worked on a tax-loss harvesting research project as an intern at Impact Labs in San Francisco, California. As he contemplated post-graduation life, he liked the idea of gaining new experiences before committing to a company.

Remotely Down Under

MISTI-Australia matched him with an internship at Sydney-based Okra Solar, which manufactures smart solar charge controllers in Shenzhen, China, to help power off-the-grid remote villages in Southeast Asian countries such as Cambodia and the Philippines, as well as in Nigeria. 

“I felt that I had so much more to learn before committing to a full-time job, and I wanted to see the world,” he says. “Working an internship for Okra in Sydney seemed like it would be the perfect buffer between university life and life in the real world. If all went well, maybe I would end up living in Sydney a while longer.”

After graduating in May 2020 with a BS in physics, a minor in computer science, and a concentration in philosophy, he prepared to live in Sydney, with the possibility of travel to Shenzhen, when he received a familiar pitch: a curveball. 

Like everyone else, he had hoped that the pandemic would wind down before his Down Under move, but when that didn’t happen, he pivoted to sharing a place with friends in Southern California, where they could hike and camp in nearby Sequoia National Park when they weren’t working remotely.

On Okra’s software team, he focused on data science to streamline the maintenance and improve the reliability of Okra’s solar energy systems. However, his remote status didn’t mesh with an ongoing project to identify remote villages without grid access. So, he launched his own data project: designing a model to identify shaded solar panels based on their daily power output. That project was placed on hold until they could get more reliable data, but he gained experience setting up machine-learning problems as he developed a pipeline to retrieve, process, and load the data to train the model.

“This project helped me understand that most of the effort in a data science problem goes into sourcing and processing the data. Unfortunately, it seemed that it was just a bit too early for the model to perform accurately.”

Team-powered engine

Coordinating with a team of 23 people from more than 10 unique cultures, scattered across 11 countries in different time zones, presented yet another challenge. He responded by developing a productive workflow by leaving questions in his code reviews that would be answered by the next morning.

“Working remotely is ultimately a bigger barrier to team cohesion than productivity,” he says. He overcame that hurdle as well; the Aussie team took a liking to him and nicknamed him Jonno. “They’re an awesome group to be around and aren’t afraid to laugh at themselves.”   

Soon, Jonno was helping the service delivery team efficiently diagnose and resolve real issues in the field using sensor data. By automating the maintenance process in this way, Okra makes it possible for energy companies to deploy and manage last-mile energy projects at scale. Several months later, when he began contributing to the firmware team, he also took on the project of calculating a battery’s state of charge, with the goal to open-source a robust and reliable algorithm.

“Matt excelled despite the circumstance,” says Okra Solar co-founder and CEO Afnan Hannan. “Matt contributed to developing Okra’s automated field alerts system that monitors the health and performance of Okra's solar systems, which are deployed across Southeast Asia and Africa. Additionally, Matt led the development of a state-of-the-art Kalman filter-based online state-of-charge (SoC) algorithm. This included research, prototyping, developing back-testing infrastructure, and finally implementing and deploying the solution on Okra’s microcontroller. An accurate and stable SoC has been a vital part of Okra’s cutting-edge Battery Sharing feature, for which we have Matt to thank.” 

Full power

After six months, Johnston joined Okra full time in January, moving to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to join some of the team in person and immerse himself into firmware and data science. In the short term, the goal is to electrify villages to provide access to much cheaper and more accessible energy.

“Previously, the only way many of these villages could access electricity was by charging a car battery using a diesel generator,” he says. “This process is very expensive, and it is impossible to charge many batteries simultaneously. In contrast, Okra provides, cheap, accessible, and renewable energy for the entire village.”

For Johnston to see an Okra project firsthand, some villages are a 30-minute boat ride from their nearest town. He and others travel there to demonstrate small appliances that many in the world take for granted, such as using an electric blender to make a smoothie.

“It’s really amazing to see how hard-to-reach these villages are and how much electricity can help them,” says Johnston. “Something as simple as using a rice cooker instead of a wood fire can save a family countless hours of chopping wood. It also helps us think about how we can improve our product, both for the users and the energy companies.”   

“In the long term, the vision is that by providing electricity, we can introduce the possibility of online education and more productive uses of power, allowing these communities to join the modern economy.”

While getting to Phnom Penh was a challenge, he credits MIT for hitting yet another home run.

“I think two of the biggest things I learned from both baseball and physics were how to learn challenging things and how to overcome failure. It takes persistence to keep digging for more information and practicing what you've already failed, and this same way of thinking has helped me to develop my professional skills. At the same time, I am grateful for the time I spent studying philosophy. Thinking deeply about what might lead to a meaningful life for myself and for others has led me to stumble upon opportunities like this one.”

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Phonon catalysis could lead to a new field

Batteries and fuel cells often rely on a process known as ion diffusion to function. In ion diffusion, ionized atoms move through solid materials, similar to the process of water being absorbed by rice when cooked. Just like cooking rice, ion diffusion is incredibly temperature-dependent and requires high temperatures to happen fast.

This temperature dependence can be limiting, as the materials used in some systems like fuel cells need to withstand high temperatures sometimes in excess of 1,000 degrees Celsius. In a new study, a team of researchers at MIT and the University of Muenster in Germany showed a new effect, where ion diffusion is enhanced while the material remains cold, by only exciting a select number of vibrations known as phonons. This new approach — which the team refers to as “phonon catalysis” — could lead to an entirely new field of research. Their work was published in Cell Reports Physical Science.

In the study, the research team used a computational model to determine which vibrations actually caused ions to move during ion diffusion. Rather than increasing the temperature of the entire material, they increased the temperature of just those specific vibrations in a process they refer to as targeted phonon excitation.

“We only heated up the vibrations that matter, and in doing so we were able to show that you could keep the material cold, but have it behave just like it's very hot,” says Asegun Henry, professor of mechanical engineering and co-author of the study.

This ability to keep materials cool during ion diffusion could have a wide range of applications. In the example of fuel cells, if the entire cell doesn’t need to be exposed to extremely high temperatures engineers could use cheaper materials to build them. This would lower the cost of fuel cells and would help them last longer — solving the issue of the short lifetime of many fuel cells.

The process could also have implications for lithium-ion batteries.

“Discovering new ion conductors is critical to advance lithium batteries, and opportunities include enabling the use of lithium metal, which can potentially double the energy of lithium-ion batteries. Unfortunately, the fundamental understanding of ion conduction is lacking,” adds Yang Shao-Horn, W.M. Keck Professor of Energy and co-author.

This new work builds upon her previous research, specifically the work of Sokseiha Muy PhD ’18 on design principles for ion conductors, which shows lowering phonon energy in structures reduces the barrier for ion diffusion and potentially increases ion conductivity. Kiarash Gordiz, a postdoc working jointly with Henry’s Atomistic Simulation and Energy Research Group and Shao-Horn’s Electrochemical Energy Laboratory, wondered if they could combine Shao-Horn’s research on ion conduction with Henry’s research on heat transfer.

“Using Professor Shao-Horn’s previous work on ion conductors as a starting point, we set out to determine exactly which phonon modes are contributing to ion diffusion,” says Gordiz.

Henry, Gordiz, and their team used a model for lithium phosphate, which is often found in lithium-ion batteries. Using a computational method known as normal mode analysis, along with nudged elastic-band calculations and molecular dynamics simulations, the research group quantitatively computed how much each phonon contributes to the ion diffusion process in lithium phosphate.

Armed with this knowledge, researchers could use lasers to selectively excite or heat up specific phonons, rather than exposing the entire material to high temperatures. This method could open up a new world of possibilities.

The dawn of a new field

Henry believes this method could lead to the creation of a new research field — one he refers to as “phonon catalysis.” While the new work focuses specifically on ion diffusion, Henry sees applications in chemical reactions, phase transformations, and other temperature-dependent phenomena.

“Our group is fascinated by the idea that you may be able to catalyze all kinds of things now that we have the technique to figure out which phonons matter,” says Henry. “All of these reactions that usually require extreme temperatures could now happen at room temperature.”

Henry and his team have begun exploring potential applications for phonon catalysis. Gordiz has been looking at using the method for lithium superionic conductors, which could be used in clean energy storage. The team is also considering applications such as a room-temperature superconductor and even the creation of diamonds, which require extremely high pressure and temperatures that could be triggered at much lower temperatures through phonon catalysis.

“This idea of selective excitation, focusing only on the parts that you need rather than everything, could be a very big kind of paradigm shift for how we operate things,” says Henry. “We need to start thinking of temperature as a spectrum and not just a single number.”

The researchers plan to show more examples of targeted phonon excitation working in different materials. Moving forward, they hope to demonstrate their computational model works experimentally in these materials. 

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Artificial intelligence system could help counter the spread of disinformation

Disinformation campaigns are not new — think of wartime propaganda used to sway public opinion against an enemy. What is new, however, is the use of the internet and social media to spread these campaigns. The spread of disinformation via social media has the power to change elections, strengthen conspiracy theories, and sow discord.

Steven Smith, a staff member from MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Artificial Intelligence Software Architectures and Algorithms Group, is part of a team that set out to better understand these campaigns by launching the Reconnaissance of Influence Operations (RIO) program. Their goal was to create a system that would automatically detect disinformation narratives as well as those individuals who are spreading the narratives within social media networks. Earlier this year, the team published a paper on their work in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and they received an R&D 100 award last fall.

The project originated in 2014 when Smith and colleagues were studying how malicious groups could exploit social media. They noticed increased and unusual activity in social media data from accounts that had the appearance of pushing pro-Russian narratives.

"We were kind of scratching our heads," Smith says of the data. So the team applied for internal funding through the laboratory’s Technology Office and launched the program in order to study whether similar techniques would be used in the 2017 French elections.

In the 30 days leading up to the election, the RIO team collected real-time social media data to search for and analyze the spread of disinformation. In total, they compiled 28 million Twitter posts from 1 million accounts. Then, using the RIO system, they were able to detect disinformation accounts with 96 percent precision.

What makes the RIO system unique is that it combines multiple analytics techniques in order to create a comprehensive view of where and how the disinformation narratives are spreading.

"If you are trying to answer the question of who is influential on a social network, traditionally, people look at activity counts," says Edward Kao, who is another member of the research team. On Twitter, for example, analysts would consider the number of tweets and retweets. "What we found is that in many cases this is not sufficient. It doesn’t actually tell you the impact of the accounts on the social network."

As part of Kao’s PhD work in the laboratory’s Lincoln Scholars program, a tuition fellowship program, he developed a statistical approach — now used in RIO — to help determine not only whether a social media account is spreading disinformation but also how much the account causes the network as a whole to change and amplify the message.

Erika Mackin, another research team member, also applied a new machine learning approach that helps RIO to classify these accounts by looking into data related to behaviors such as whether the account interacts with foreign media and what languages it uses. This approach allows RIO to detect hostile accounts that are active in diverse campaigns, ranging from the 2017 French presidential elections to the spread of Covid-19 disinformation.

Another unique aspect of RIO is that it can detect and quantify the impact of accounts operated by both bots and humans, whereas most automated systems in use today detect bots only. RIO also has the ability to help those using the system to forecast how different countermeasures might halt the spread of a particular disinformation campaign.

The team envisions RIO being used by both government and industry as well as beyond social media and in the realm of traditional media such as newspapers and television. Currently, they are working with West Point student Joseph Schlessinger, who is also a graduate student at MIT and a military fellow at Lincoln Laboratory, to understand how narratives spread across European media outlets. A new follow-on program is also underway to dive into the cognitive aspects of influence operations and how individual attitudes and behaviors are affected by disinformation.

“Defending against disinformation is not only a matter of national security, but also about protecting democracy,” says Kao.

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3 Questions: Caroline White-Nockleby on the socio-environmental complexities of renewable energy

Caroline White-Nockleby is a PhD student in MIT’s doctoral program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society (HASTS), which is co-sponsored by the History and Anthropology sections, and the Program in Science, Technology and Society (STS). White-Nockleby's research centers on the shifting supply chains of renewable energy infrastructures. In particular, she is interested in the interfaces between policymaking, social dynamics, and tech innovations in the sourcing, manufacture, and implementation of energy storage technologies. She received a BA in geosciences and American studies from Williams College and an MPhil in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge, England. MIT SHASS Communications spoke with her for the series Solving Climate: Humanistic Perspectives from MIT about the perspectives her field and research bring to addressing the climate crisis. 
 
Q: How has research from the HASTS doctoral program shaped your understanding of global climate change and its myriad ecological and social impacts?

A: MIT HASTS alum Candis Callison [PhD ’10], now an anthropologist and professor of journalism, wrote her first book, “How Climate Change Comes to Matter” about the different discursive frameworks — what she terms “vernaculars” — through which scientists, journalists, Indigenous communities, sustainable investment firms, and evangelical Christian environmental organizations understand climate change.

Through ethnographic research, Callison shows that although these understandings were grounded in a shared set of facts, each drew from different cultural and ethical frameworks. These variations could silo conversations, even as they illustrated the pluralities of the climate crisis by highlighting different challenges and compelling different actions.

HASTS faculty member and environmental historian Megan Black, an associate professor in the MIT History Section, is currently researching the history of the first Landsat satellites launched in the 1970s. The technical capacities of Landsat’s visualization mechanisms were influenced by the political context of the Cold War. Black’s investigation has revealed, among other findings, that Landsat’s imaging devices were particularly well-suited to surfacing geological features and thus to minerals exploration, which was a key application of Landsat data in its inaugural decade. The historical context of the satellite’s initial design has thus shaped — and limited — the information accessible to the many investigations that today use early Landsat imagery as a vital indicator of decadal-scale environmental changes. 

Climate change is not only a scientific and technological matter, but also a social, political, and historical one. It stems from centuries of uneven geographies of energy extraction and distribution; related historical and geographical processes today distribute climate vulnerabilities unevenly across places and people.

The dimensions of today’s promising interventions have, in turn, been configured by past funding and research agendas — and the many technologies employed have a wide variety of implications for equity, ethics, and justice. The parameters of public opinion and policy debate on the nature and risks of climate change, as well as its conceivable solutions, are similarly shaped by socio-historical contexts.

MIT's Program in History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society (HASTS) supports research that attends to the social and historical facets of climate change. Just as importantly, the HASTS program equips scholars with the tools to develop nuanced understandings of the scientific and technological mechanisms of its causes, impacts, and proposed solutions. Such technical and social attunement makes the program well-situated — perhaps particularly so — to unravel the myriad social and ecological dimensions of the climate crisis.

Q: Technology offers hope for addressing climate change, and it also presents challenges. The renewable energy industry, for example, relies on the mining of lithium and other metals — a process that is itself damaging to the environment. What has your research revealed about the trade-offs humanity is facing in its efforts to combat global climate change, and, how would you suggest we begin to grapple with such trade-offs?

A: Renewable energy can sometimes be positioned as immaterial and inherently redistributive. In some sense these characterizations arise from physical qualities: the sun and wind don’t require extraction, won’t run out, and are distributed across space.

Yet renewable energy must be collected, stored, and transported; it requires financing, metals extraction, and the processing of decommissioned materials. Energy access, mining, and waste deposition are material, geographically situated dynamics. Not everyone stands to benefit equally from renewable energy's financial and environmental potentials, and not everyone will be equally exposed to its socio-environmental impacts.

The distribution of burdens is in some cases already mapping onto existing inequities in power and privilege, disproportionately impacting BIPOC [Black, Indigenous, and people of color] and low-income individuals, as well as communities in the Global South — often in locales also on the front lines of climate change or other forms of environmental injustice.

None of these challenges should stall renewable energy implementation; renewables are an absolutely crucial part of climate mitigation and can also increase climate resilience and reduce environmental contamination, among other co-benefits.

Moreover, neither the parameters of these challenges nor the potential interventions are clear-cut. Minerals extraction is key for many local economies.

Different metals also have distinct environmental and social footprints. Cobalt mining, which takes place largely in the Democratic Republic of the Congo under environmentally and economically precarious conditions, poses different socio-ecological challenges than copper extraction, which takes place around the world, primarily at large scales via increasingly remote methods. Lithium, meanwhile, can be found in salt flats, igneous rocks, geothermal fluids, and clays, each of which requires different mining techniques.

Minimizing the localized burdens of renewable energy implementation will be complex. Here at MIT, researchers are working on technical approaches to develop less-intensive forms of mining, novel battery chemistries, robust energy storage technologies, recycling mechanisms, and policies to extend energy access. Just as important, I think, is understanding the historical processes through which the benefits and burdens of different energies have been distributed — and ensuring that the ethical frameworks by which current and future projects might be mapped and evaluated are sufficiently nuanced.

I’m still in the planning phase of my own research, but I hope it will help surface, and offer tools with which to think through, some of these socio-environmental complexities.

Q: In confronting an issue as formidable as climate change, what gives you hope?
   
A: In college I did an interview project to learn about collaborations between student environmental groups and a local church to address climate change. Toward the end of each interview, I found myself coming back to the same question: What gives you energy in your work on climate change? What keeps you going?

The question wasn’t strictly necessary for my project; I was asking, mostly, for myself. Climate change can be truly overwhelming, in part because it so dramatically dwarfs the scope, in space and in time, of a single human life. It is also complex — intertwined with so many different ways of knowing the world.

My interviewees gave different answers. Some told me they were careful to mentally segment the issue so as to keep “climate change,” as a paralyzing totality, from sapping a sense of purpose from their daily research or advocacy endeavors. Others I spoke with took the opposite approach, conceptually linking their own efforts — which could feel insufficiently quotidian — to a sense of the broader stakes. But almost everyone I talked to highlighted the importance of being part of a community — of engaging in and through collaborative efforts.

That’s what gives me hope as well: people working together to address climate change in ways that attend to both its scientific and its social complexities. Intersections between climate change and social justice like the Sunrise Movement or the Climate Justice Alliance give me hope.

Climate-related collaborations are also happening all across MIT; I find the initiatives that have emerged from the Climate Grand Challenges process particularly inspirational. In STS, individuals such as HASTS alum Sara Wylie [PhD ’11], who has researched the impacts of hydraulic fracturing, have built deep relationships with the communities they work within, leveraging their research to support relevant climate justice initiatives.

For my part, I’ve been energized by my involvement in a project led by MIT MLK Scholar Luis G. Murillo [former minister of environment and sustainable development in Colombia] that convenes policymakers, community advocates, and researchers to advance initiatives that foment racial justice, conservation, climate mitigation, and peace.

Prepared by MIT SHASS Communications
Series editor and designer: Emily Hiestand
Co-editor: Kathryn O'Neill

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How metals work together to weaken hardy nitrogen-nitrogen bonds

Nitrogen, an element that is essential for all living cells, makes up about 78 percent of Earth’s atmosphere. However, most organisms cannot make use of this nitrogen until it is converted into ammonia. Until humans invented industrial processes for ammonia synthesis, almost all ammonia on the planet was generated by microbes using nitrogenases, the only enzymes that can break the nitrogen-nitrogen bond found in gaseous dinitrogen, or N₂.

These enzymes contain clusters of metal and sulfur atoms that help perform this critical reaction, but the mechanism of how they do so is not well-understood. For the first time, MIT chemists have now determined the structure of a complex that forms when N₂ binds to these clusters, and they discovered that the clusters are able to weaken the nitrogen-nitrogen bond to a surprising extent.

“This study enables us to gain insights into the mechanism that allows you to activate this really inert molecule, which has a very strong bond that is difficult to break,” says Daniel Suess, the Class of ’48 Career Development Assistant Professor of Chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the study.

Alex McSkimming, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Tulane University, is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Nature Chemistry.

Nitrogen fixation

Nitrogen is a critical component of proteins, DNA, and other biological molecules. To extract nitrogen from the atmosphere, early microbes evolved nitrogenases, which convert nitrogen gas to ammonia (NH₃) through a process called nitrogen fixation. Cells can then use this ammonia to build more complex nitrogen-containing compounds.

“The ability to access fixed nitrogen on large scales has been instrumental in enabling the proliferation of life,” Suess says. “Dinitrogen has a really strong bond and is really unreactive, so chemists basically consider it an inert molecule. It’s a puzzle that life had to figure out: how to convert this inert molecule into useful chemical species.”

All nitrogenases contain a cluster of iron and sulfur atoms, and some of them also include molybdenum. Dinitrogen is believed to bind to these clusters to initiate the conversion to ammonia. However, the nature of this interaction is unclear, and until now, scientists had not been able to characterize N₂ binding to an iron-sulfur cluster.

To shed light on how nitrogenases bind N₂, chemists have designed simpler versions of iron-sulfur clusters that they can use to model the naturally occurring clusters. The most active nitrogenase uses an iron-sulfur cluster with seven iron atoms, nine sulfur atoms, a molybdenum atom, and a carbon atom. For this study, the MIT team created one that has three iron atoms, four sulfur atoms, a molybdenum atom, and no carbon.

One challenge in trying to mimic the natural binding of dinitrogen to the iron-sulfur cluster is that when the clusters are in a solution, they can react with themselves instead of binding substrates such as dinitrogen. To overcome that, Suess and his students created a protective environment around the cluster by attaching chemical groups called ligands.

The researchers attached one ligand to each of the metal atoms except for one iron atom, which is where N₂ binds to the cluster. These ligands prevent unwanted reactions and allow dinitrogen to enter the cluster and bind to one of the iron atoms. Once this binding occurred, the researchers were able to determine the structure of the complex using X-ray crystallography and other techniques.

They also found that the triple bond between the two nitrogen atoms of N₂ is weakened to a surprising extent. This weakening occurs when the iron atoms transfer much of their electron density to the nitrogen-nitrogen bond, which makes the bond much less stable.

Cluster cooperation

Another surprising finding was that all of the metal atoms in the cluster contribute to this electron transfer, not only the iron atom to which the dinitrogen is bound.

“That suggests that these clusters can electronically cooperate to activate this inert bond,” Suess says. “The nitrogen-nitrogen bond can be weakened by iron atoms that wouldn’t otherwise weaken it. Because they’re in a cluster, they can do it cooperatively.”

The findings represent “a significant milestone in iron-sulfur cluster chemistry,” says Theodore Betley, chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, who was not involved in the study.

“Although the nitrogenase enzymes known to fix atmospheric nitrogen are composed of fused iron-sulfur clusters, synthetic chemists have never, until now, been able to demonstrate dinitrogen uptake using synthetic analogues,” Betley says. “This work is a major advance for the iron-sulfur cluster community and bioinorganic chemists at large. More than anything, this advance has shown that iron-sulfur clusters have a rich reaction chemistry yet to be discovered.”

The researchers’ findings also confirmed that simpler versions of the iron-sulfur cluster, such as those they created for this study, can effectively weaken the nitrogen-nitrogen bond. The earliest microbes to develop the ability to fix nitrogen may have evolved similar types of simple clusters, Suess says.

Suess and his students are now working on ways to study how the more complex, naturally occurring versions of iron-sulfur clusters interact with dinitrogen.

The research was funded by the MIT Research Support Committee Fund.

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Searching for truth in data from authoritarian regimes

Like most scientists, Minh Trinh has long been preoccupied with trying to understand his surroundings. For Trinh, this curiosity has been directed at the most impactful, yet elusive, force in his early life — the one-party Vietnamese government. Under the Communist Party of Vietnam, many of the decisions that impacted Trinh’s life were made behind closed doors.

Moving from Hanoi to Singapore for high school and seeing two different one-party systems sparked his initial questions. Trinh then went on to pursue a BA from Harvard University, which would introduce him to the contrasting government of the U.S. Suddenly, Trinh saw how politics could have an enormous impact on human rights and well-being. 

“Through my undergrad classes, I was introduced to many different international case studies. It helped me realize the need for action sometimes pushes people to settle for easy answers when searching for ways to improve the livelihoods of their fellow citizens,” Trinh says. “I grew very interested in first trying to figure out what is going on around us and how confident we can be about our knowledge.”

In 2015, after his junior year of college, Trinh took a gap year and worked at the Electoral Integrity Project in Sydney, Australia. The job required him to apply quantitative methods to analyze perceptions of electoral integrity. Over time, he became increasingly interested in working with data, and returned to Harvard to complete a dual BA and MA in statistics. “When I did my undergrad, we compared a few case studies that gave theoretical reasons for a certain outcome. The thing I didn’t find very fulfilling is that I never knew if A explicitly caused B,” explains Trinh.

“What attracts me to quantitative methods is that it allows you to establish a more principled way to deal with the confounding nature of relationships. That being said, quantitative data can not go without qualitative data, which provides the intuition for us understand what our numbers mean in real life.”

After completing his MA, Trinh was certain that he enjoyed academia, and decided to apply to PhD programs for political science. When he was accepted to multiple programs, he took his statistical skills and applied them to making a personal life decision: “I entered all the criteria I wanted [in a school] into a spreadsheet, scored them, and hid the averaged total to not bias myself until I had gone through them all,” he jokes. “The close-knit community and methodologically informed research made MIT come out on top.”

Investigating statistical misreporting

Today, Trinh’s dissertation is focused on analyzing reporting relationships between local governments and the central government of Vietnam. Since the country is an authoritarian regime, most data collection is delegated to local governments to keep information internal. The central government collects statistics to measure local governments’ performance, which it claims will promote productivity and growth.

However, Trinh’s research has revealed a different story. “Instead of performance indicators encouraging better work, they have instead encouraged people to lie more,” explains Trinh. “This happens because provincial governments are being evaluated on the very data they collect. It leaves them with both the capacity and the incentive to misreport data.”

Through his calculations, Trinh has found that the total GDP reported by each province adds up to an amount far greater than the central government’s estimate. “The reports have been shown to be mathematically impossible. The top officials are looking below and know that someone must be lying, but they can’t tell which ones or by how much,” Trinh says. “Without statistics, they can’t hold provinces accountable and deliver a punishment or reward. The whole system of accountability no longer works.”

Trinh has also looked into alternative methods the central government uses to create transparency. One strategy is to create conflicting goals for local officials, making the benefits of lying unclear. “In Vietnam, the central government picks a number of election candidates they want to see win the seats from each province,” Trinh explains. “From there, the central government has two goals: get their candidates elected and measure [those candidates’] level of popularity across the country.”

Provincial governments are tasked with running the elections and executing the central government’s goals. They must decide whether they want to keep electoral manipulation low on election day to accurately measure popularity, or manipulate results to ensure the centrally preferred candidate gets the job. “So, because the right task is no longer straightforward, the central government views the outcome as a more reliable signal,” says Trinh. “This creative method is not particularly efficient, but it is a way around the issue of misreporting.”   

Finding truth through transparency

As he wraps up his dissertation, advised by Ford Professor of Political Science Lily Tsai, Trinh has concluded there are two major obstacles the Vietnamese government must overcome to achieve more accurate data collection. “First, the government must allow information to be collected by independent planners who can guarantee safety and transparency. Next, the government must show it can be accountable to its citizens and do good things with the information,” he says. “It’s a two-way street.”

Outside of his own research, Trinh is part of the MIT Governance Lab, an initiative to bridge the gap between citizens and government. The group focuses on creating discussions and activities that highlight the important ethical questions behind their work. Throughout his project, Trinh has relied on his weekly GOV/LAB discussions to guide his research. “With some findings, given the kind of regimes I research, it is not clear whether I should share them and help give the government more information. It might be used to punish people, which can be very problematic,” says Trinh. “These are questions we have to deal with all the time.”

While these ethical dilemmas may appear inconclusive, Trinh believes with enough data, there can be an answer. He hopes to continue in academia and pave the way for other researchers seeking to answer tough questions. “My dream is to be the person generating cutting-edge knowledge that changes the shape of what we know about politics,” says Trinh.

“In the social sciences, since there’s so many variables, there’s a tendency for people to dismiss things and say the answer can’t be found. That things are too subjective to be conclusive. But I believe there is a degree of universal truth and objective knowledge. If you have the right tools and push hard enough to get there — it’s possible.”

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Mastering online learning to level up

A number of pervasive myths surround online learning: that it’s isolating, that the quality of instruction is innately lower than in an in-person classroom, or that it’s only for those who can’t succeed in traditional educational settings.

Abigael Bamgboye, an accomplished and highly self-motivated university graduate who just completed the MITx MicroMasters Data and Economic Development Policy (DEDP) program, gives the lie to all these myths.

Instead of feeling isolated, Bamgboye connected with communities of learners around the world. Instead of experiencing a watered-down version of graduate studies, she discovered a challenging and rewarding introduction to masters-level work in a field that interests her deeply, and that will help inform her future career. And far from pursuing online study as an alternative to traditional higher education, this recent graduate of Imperial College London’s Materials Science program used her MicroMasters experience to add to her record of high achievement. 

The program also helped her reconnect with MIT: Bamgboye spent a semester studying in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering in 2019 as part of an academic exchange. Indeed, it was during Bamgboye’s time at MIT that the MicroMasters program first drew her interest. While taking an introduction to international development class at the MIT D-Lab, she was introduced to the work of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) and was impressed to find a research center of its scope attached to a university. She was also excited to discover that J-PAL, which houses the DEDP (Data, Economics, and Development Policy) MicroMasters program, could offer her opportunities to stay engaged with MIT after her semester-long exchange had ended. “I thought, ‘Wow, not only is it a fantastic way for me to expand my learning, but it’s something I could potentially do remotely across the school year,’” she says. “Plus, there’s the opportunity to come back to campus and do things there.”

Once enrolled in the DEDP program, Bamgboye immediately realized she had gone up a step in the intensity of her studies, particularly compared to her undergraduate work. “You’re learning so much in a short period of time,” she says. “In a [UK] undergraduate degree, you learn a foundational skill set over two years [before specializing in a third or fourth year], while in the MicroMasters, if you take courses concurrently, you’re potentially learning the foundational skill set over three to six months.”

To Bamgboye’s mind, this intensity is all to the good, helping build learners’ confidence in the skills they’ve acquired: “By the time you get to the proctored exams, where you have to consolidate everything you’ve learned, you surprise yourself. And your understanding is boosted as things fall into place.” She was reminded of the “dense and challenging” MIT course content she encountered during her semester abroad, recalling how a high percentage of PhD students in one of her classes in the nuclear science and engineering department kept her studies rigorous. 

A global approach to life and learning

International cooperation is an integral part of Bamgboye’s raison d’être, as are the connections between science and human activity. “As a learner, I’m always curious to understand how the world works, or to gain a new perspective,” she says, noting that she sees “materials and science as a way of understanding the world, similar to the way some people see and use economics.” Her undergraduate major allowed her to combine interests across STEM disciplines, but also to ask far-reaching questions for the future of humankind: “Why do technologies work the way they do? How will they evolve to be more efficient, and less environmentally intensive? How can we use existing knowledge to help people?”

She describes discovering, as an undergraduate, “a passion for working on projects that use data to drive decision-making and ultimately impact people.” A natural communicator and networker, Bamgboye got involved in a variety of clubs and societies that allowed her to connect with those who shared her interests — she participated in Imperial College’s African Caribbean Society, and was elected vice president and eventually president of the school’s Materials Society — and also pursued opportunities to engage with a global audience, joining her school’s chapter of Enactus, an international social entrepreneurship society. While completing a series of internships across a variety of industries including banking, manufacturing engineering, and teaching, she discovered and deepened an overarching interest in organizations that “maximized opportunities for people and communities.”

It’s this commitment to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural cooperation that has inspired her to share her learning journey with others. Bamgboye has distilled wisdom accrued over more than 800 hours of online learning into a YouTube video sharing her keys to success. One of these keys is — unsurprisingly — creating and participating in a community of people who share your learning journey. “Learning is always more fun if you can engage in real-time conversation and ask insightful questions to TAs [teaching assistants], lecturers, and peers,” she says.

Bamgboye also finds ways to use and share her learning as part of her professional life. In her current role as an associate consultant at Bain & Company, she is able to devote 10 percent of her time to projects of her own choosing, focusing on social impact. She volunteers with various UK nonprofit organizations, helping them scale their reach and impact. Thanks to her DEDP training, “I’m already able to offer contextual examples of how different social programs have been able to validate and quantify which of their interventions are the most effective.”

She’s also using her foray into graduate studies as a springboard into new educational opportunities. Bamgboye has been accepted to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton Moelis Advanced Access MBA program, a deferred admission scheme that offers both undergraduate and full-time master’s students in their final year of study a guaranteed pathway to the Wharton MBA following two to four years of work experience. While at Wharton, Bamgboye plans to leverage the knowledge and skills gained during the MicroMasters in social-focused ventures.

“Ultimately, there are so many ways that the MicroMasters has enhanced my life,” she says, “from broadening my horizons, to equipping me with new skills, to providing me with the vocabulary and context to participate in conversations and activities that I am interested in.” Most importantly, she describes how completing the program helped her feel ready to tackle any educational or career challenge that comes her way: “Having done the MicroMasters, I now have a level of confidence I wouldn’t otherwise have had.”

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MIT baseball coach uses sensors, motion capture technology to teach pitching

The field of sports analytics is most known for assessing player and team performance during competition, but MIT Baseball’s pitching coach, Todd Carroll, is bringing a different kind of analytics to the practice field for his student athletes.

“A baseball player might practice a pitch 10,000 times before it becomes natural. Through technology, we can speed that process up,” Carroll said in a recent seminar organized by the MIT.nano Immersion Lab. “To help players improve athletically, without taking up that much time, and keep them healthy — that’s the goal.”

The virtual talk — “Pitching in baseball: Using scientific tools to visualize what we know and learn what we don't” — grew out of a new research collaboration between MIT Baseball, the MIT Clinical Research Center (CRC), and the Immersion Lab.

Carroll started with an explanation of how pitching has evolved over time and what specific skills coaches measure to help players perfect their throw. Then, he and Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) postdoc Praneeth Namburi used the Immersion Lab’s motion capture platform and wireless physiological sensors from the CRC to explore how biomechanical feedback and interactive visualization tools could change the future of sports.

Namburi stepped up to the (hypothetical) mound, with Carroll as his coach. By interfacing the physical and digital in real time, the two were able to assess Namburi’s pitches and make immediate adjustments that improved his athletic performance in one session.

Visualizing sports data

Stride length, pitcher extension, hip-shoulder separation, and ground force production are all measurable aspects of pitching, explained Carroll. The capabilities of the Immersion Lab allow for digital tracking and visualization of these skills. Wearing wireless sensors on his body, Namburi threw several pitches inside the lab. The sensors plot Namburi’s position and track his movements through space, as shown in the first part of the video below. Adding in the physiological measurements, the second clip shows the activity of his rotation muscles (in green), his acceleration through space (in blue), and the pressure, or ground force, produced by his foot (in red).

By reviewing the motion capture frames together, Carroll could show Namburi how to modify his posture to increase stride length and extend his hip-shoulder separation by holding his back foot on the ground. In this example, the technology betters the communication between coach and player, leading to more efficient improvements.

Assessing physiological measurements alongside the motion capture can also help decrease injuries. Carroll emphasized how this technology can help rehabbing players, teaching them to trust their body again. “That’s a big part of injury recovery, trusting the process. These students find comfort in the data and that allows them to push through.”

Following the training session, Namburi overlayed the motion capture from his first and last throw, comparing his posture, spine position, stride length, and feet position. A visual compilation of all his throws compared the trajectory of his wrist, showing that, over time, his movement became more consistent and more natural.

The seminar concluded with a live demonstration of a novice pitcher in the Immersion Lab following the advice of Coach Carroll via Zoom. “Two people who have never thrown a baseball before today, and we’re able to teach them remotely during a pandemic,” reflected Carroll. “That’s pretty cool.”

Afterward, Namburi answered questions about the ease of taking the physiological monitoring tools to the field and of being able to capture and measure the movements of multiple athletes at once.

Immersed in collaboration

The MIT.nano Immersion Lab’s new seminar series, IMMERSED, explores the possibilities enabled by technologies such as motion capture, virtual and augmented reality, photogrammetry, and related computational advances to gather, process, and interact with data from multiple modalities. The series highlights the capabilities available at the Immersion Lab, and the wide range of disciplines to which the tools and space can be applied.

“IMMERSED offers another avenue for any individual — scientists, artists, engineers, performers — to consider collaborative projects,” says Brian W. Anthony, MIT.nano associate director. “The series combines lectures with demonstrations and tutorials so more people can see the wide breadth of research possible at the lab.”

As a shared-access facility, MIT.nano’s Immersion Lab is open to researchers from any department, lab, or center at MIT, as well as external partners. Learn more about the Immersion Lab and how to become a user.

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Study reveals a universal travel pattern across four continents

What explains how often people travel to a particular place? Your intuition might suggest that distance is a key factor, but empirical evidence can help urban studies researchers answer the question more definitively.

A new paper by an MIT team, drawing on global data, finds that people visit places more frequently when they have to travel shorter distances to get there.

“What we have found is that there is a very clear inverse relationship between how far you go and how frequently you go there,” says Paolo Santi, a research scientist at the Senseable City Lab at MIT and a co-author of the new paper. “You only seldom go to faraway places, and usually you tend to visit places close to you more often. It tells us how we organize our lives.”

By examining cellphone data on four continents, the researchers were able to arrive at a distinctive new finding in the urban studies literature.

“We might shop every day at a bakery a few hundred meters away, but we’ll only go once a month to the fancy boutique miles away from our neighborhood. This kind of intuitive notion had never been empirically tested. When we did it we found an incredibly regular and robust law — which we have called the visitation law,” says Carlo Ratti, a co-author of the paper and director of the Senseable City Lab, which led the research project.

The paper, “The universal visitation law of human mobility,” is published today in Nature.

The paper is co-authored by Markus Schläpfer, a scholar in the Urban Complexity Project at the ETH Future Cities Lab in Singapore; Lei Dong, a researcher at Peking University in Beijing; Kevin O’Keeffe, a postdoc at the MIT Senseable City Lab; Santi, a research director at Istituto di Informatica e Telematica, CNR (the National Research Council of Italy); Michael Szell, an associate professor in Data Science at IT University of Copenhagen; Hadrien Salat of the Future Cities Laboratory, Singapore-ETH Centre; Samuel Anklesaria, a researcher at the MIT Senseable City Lab; Mohammad Vazifeh, a senior postdoc at the MIT Senseable City Lab; Ratti; and Geoffrey West, a professor at and former president of the Santa Fe Institute. Schläpfer, Dong, Santi, and Szell are also former members of the Senseable City Lab.

To conduct the study, the researchers used anonymized cellphone data from large communications providers to track the movement of people in the metro areas of Abidjan, Ivory Coast; Boston; Braga, Lisbon, and Porto, Portugal; Dakar, Senegal; and Singapore.

Cellphone data are ideal for this kind of study because they establish both the residence area of people and the destinations they travel to. In some cases, the researchers defined areas visited by using grid spaces as small as 500 square meters. Overall, the researchers charted over 8 billion location-indicating pieces of data generated by over 4 million people, charting movement for a period of months in each location.

And, in each case, from city to city, the same “inverse law” of visitation held up, with the charted data following a similar pattern: The frequency of visits declined over longer distances, and higher-density areas were filled with people who had, on aggregate, taken shorter trips. To the extent that there was some variation from this pattern, the largest deviations involved sites with atypical functions, such as ports and theme parks.

The paper itself both measures the data and presents a model of movement, in which people seek out the closest locations that offer particular kinds of activity. Both of those buttress “central place theory,” an idea developed in the 1930s by German scholar Walter Christaller, which seeks to describe the location of cities and towns in terms of the functions they offer to people in a region.

The scholars note that the similarity in movement observed in very different urban areas helps reinforce the overall finding.

“This generalized behavior is not just something you observe in Boston,” Santi says. “From a scientific viewpoint, we are adding evidence about a generalized pattern of behavior.”

The researchers also hope the finding, and the methods behind it, can be usefully applied to urban planning. Santi suggests this type of study can help predict how substantial changes in the physical layout of a city will affect movement within it. The method also makes it possible to examine how changes in urban geography affect human movement over time.

“The visitation law could have many practical applications — from the design of new infrastructure to urban planning,” adds Ratti. “For instance, it could help implement the concept of the ‘Fifteen-Minute City,’ which aims to reorganize physical space around walkable neighborhoods and which has become very popular during the Covid-19 pandemic. Our law suggests that we can indeed capture a large fraction of all urban trips within a fifteen-minute radius, while leaving the rest — perhaps 10 percent — further away.”

Support for the research was provided by the National Science Foundation, the AT&T Foundation, the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), the MIT Center for Complex Engineering Systems, Audi Volkswagen, BBVA, Ericsson, Ferrovial, GE, the MIT Senseable City Lab Consortium, the John Templeton Foundation, the Eugene and Clare Thaw Charitable Trust, the U.S. Army Research Office Minerva program, the Singapore National Research Foundation, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

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Slender robotic finger senses buried items

Over the years, robots have gotten quite good at identifying objects — as long as they’re out in the open.

Discerning buried items in granular material like sand is a taller order. To do that, a robot would need fingers that were slender enough to penetrate the sand, mobile enough to wriggle free when sand grains jam, and sensitive enough to feel the detailed shape of the buried object.

MIT researchers have now designed a sharp-tipped robot finger equipped with tactile sensing to meet the challenge of identifying buried objects. In experiments, the aptly named Digger Finger was able to dig through granular media such as sand and rice, and it correctly sensed the shapes of submerged items it encountered. The researchers say the robot might one day perform various subterranean duties, such as finding buried cables or disarming buried bombs.

The research will be presented at the next International Symposium on Experimental Robotics. The study’s lead author is Radhen Patel, a postdoc in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Co-authors include CSAIL PhD student Branden Romero, Harvard University PhD student Nancy Ouyang, and Edward Adelson, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science in CSAIL and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Seeking to identify objects buried in granular material — sand, gravel, and other types of loosely packed particles — isn’t a brand new quest. Previously, researchers have used technologies that sense the subterranean from above, such as Ground Penetrating Radar or ultrasonic vibrations. But these techniques provide only a hazy view of submerged objects. They might struggle to differentiate rock from bone, for example.

“So, the idea is to make a finger that has a good sense of touch and can distinguish between the various things it’s feeling,” says Adelson. “That would be helpful if you’re trying to find and disable buried bombs, for example.” Making that idea a reality meant clearing a number of hurdles.

The team’s first challenge was a matter of form: The robotic finger had to be slender and sharp-tipped.

In prior work, the researchers had used a tactile sensor called GelSight. The sensor consisted of a clear gel covered with a reflective membrane that deformed when objects pressed against it. Behind the membrane were three colors of LED lights and a camera. The lights shone through the gel and onto the membrane, while the camera collected the membrane’s pattern of reflection. Computer vision algorithms then extracted the 3D shape of the contact area where the soft finger touched the object. The contraption provided an excellent sense of artificial touch, but it was inconveniently bulky.

For the Digger Finger, the researchers slimmed down their GelSight sensor in two main ways. First, they changed the shape to be a slender cylinder with a beveled tip. Next, they ditched two-thirds of the LED lights, using a combination of blue LEDs and colored fluorescent paint. “That saved a lot of complexity and space,” says Ouyang. “That’s how we were able to get it into such a compact form.” The final product featured a device whose tactile sensing membrane was about 2 square centimeters, similar to the tip of a finger.

With size sorted out, the researchers turned their attention to motion, mounting the finger on a robot arm and digging through fine-grained sand and coarse-grained rice. Granular media have a tendency to jam when numerous particles become locked in place. That makes it difficult to penetrate. So, the team added vibration to the Digger Finger’s capabilities and put it through a battery of tests.

“We wanted to see how mechanical vibrations aid in digging deeper and getting through jams,” says Patel. “We ran the vibrating motor at different operating voltages, which changes the amplitude and frequency of the vibrations.” They found that rapid vibrations helped “fluidize” the media, clearing jams and allowing for deeper burrowing — though this fluidizing effect was harder to achieve in sand than in rice.

They also tested various twisting motions in both the rice and sand. Sometimes, grains of each type of media would get stuck between the Digger-Finger’s tactile membrane and the buried object it was trying to sense. When this happened with rice, the trapped grains were large enough to completely obscure the shape of the object, though the occlusion could usually be cleared with a little robotic wiggling. Trapped sand was harder to clear, though the grains’ small size meant the Digger Finger could still sense the general contours of target object.

Patel says that operators will have to adjust the Digger Finger’s motion pattern for different settings “depending on the type of media and on the size and shape of the grains.” The team plans to keep exploring new motions to optimize the Digger Finger’s ability to navigate various media.

Adelson says the Digger Finger is part of a program extending the domains in which robotic touch can be used. Humans use their fingers amidst complex environments, whether fishing for a key in a pants pocket or feeling for a tumor during surgery. “As we get better at artificial touch, we want to be able to use it in situations when you’re surrounded by all kinds of distracting information,” says Adelson. “We want to be able to distinguish between the stuff that’s important and the stuff that’s not.”

Funding for this research was provided, in part, by the Toyota Research Institute through the Toyota-CSAIL Joint Research Center; the Office of Naval Research; and the Norwegian Research Council.

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MIT IDEAS celebrates 20 years of social innovation at MIT

Currently, less than 7 percent of high school graduates in the African nation of Eswatini proceed to higher education, according to a 2020 UNICEF study. This troubling fact led Thandolwethu Dlamini, a graduate student in MIT’s Technology and Policy Program, to found The Knowledge Institute (TKI), which earned a $20,000 grant at the 20th annual MIT IDEAS Social Innovation Awards on April 25. TKI is developing a mobile platform to simplify and streamline the college application process for high schoolers in Eswatini, Dlamini’s home country. Nearly 60 percent of Eswatini’s population lives below the poverty line and additional education could substantially improve the lives of many of the country’s young people. “This is an investment in the youth and in the future of Eswatini” said Dlamani upon receiving the award. “We are extremely grateful for IDEAS for believing in our project and helping us throughout the entire IDEAS program as we were refining everything.” 

IDEAS has been influencing the social innovation ecosystem at MIT for two decades and, like many of the teams that engage in the year-long program, has evolved significantly during that period. The most notable shift, led by Rebecca Obounou, PKG Center’s assistant dean for social innovation, has been transitioning the tone of IDEAS from a “competition” to a more collaborative “challenge.”

“The challenges that society faces today require collaborative frameworks over competitive ones,” Obounou says. “We de-emphasize competition to invite more people in. We de-emphasize 'winning' because it implies that there are losers. It's a win for the PKG center when we have the opportunity to support any student along their social change pathway. As a result, we see many MIT students and their teammates who would have otherwise typically identified as a social innovator or entrepreneur finally see their ability to make positive change! Our world's challenges cannot be solved alone by the subjective 'best' but rather the input of as many stakeholders as possible is imperative. I learned this concept early on as a young girl who grew up in the Haitian community, where the konbit philosophy was the many in which people survived and thrived. One key tenet of the konbit culture is community and a popular saying, 'With many hands, burdens are light.'"

However, even early iterations of IDEAS had a monumental impact on participants. Rebeca Hwang ’02, MNG ’03, the first IDEAS grantee in 2001, gave the keynote address at this year’s awards ceremony. “From the perspective of my life and the future career that I had after MIT IDEAS, it was a huge success because it did launch my thinking and my understanding of what it means to run successfully some of these projects that involved much more than technology,” said Hwang. “It has also broadened my empathy and my understanding of these target markets; that I could live with, in their community, and become much more sensitized to some of the education and awareness building and culture factors that make some of these projects successful.” 

Fifty percent of all IDEAS grantee projects are still active in some form, and it is common for those with connections to the IDEAS program, like Rebeca Hwang, to stay in touch or remain involved with the program. Other members of the “IDEAS village” come back year after year because the work of the student teams continues to inspire. A group of these volunteers (project reviewers, judges, and mentors) received special recognition this year for their many years of service.

“IDEAS is a team-based program because that reflects the reality of how real social change occurs,” says Jill Bassett, PKG Center associate dean and director. “Our diverse and talented reviewers, judges, and mentors are crucial to the development of our students’ projects. The connections our students build with these individuals often persist long after the challenge cycle has wrapped up.” 

Earlier this year, IDEAS launched a limited-series podcast in honor of its 20th anniversary to celebrate the many faces of the program, featuring program alumni and community partners as guests. A group of 20 volunteer judges from around the world with a diverse set of backgrounds and expertise helped determine the allocation of four juried grant awards. Judging groups reviewed teams’ written proposals and participated in a round of virtual interviews the day before the award. The four juried grantee teams were:

• The Knowledge Institute (TKI) (Eswatini) is developing SaSa, a mobile-friendly web platform that will enable high school graduates to quickly and inexpensively apply for tertiary education. SaSa will increase successful application outcomes for low-income students and improve awareness of available higher education options with the ultimate aim of lifting young students out of poverty. ($20,000 grant)
• Kivuli (Kenya) offers a range of services that facilitate connections between Kenya’s "Jua Kali" informal manufacturing sector and the construction industry. Kivuli's business model is designed to support the long-term economic security of Jua Kali workers while pushing the Kenyan building sector toward more sustainable and locally-oriented practices. ($15,000 grant)
• Critical Healthcare Information Integration Network (CHIIN) (Nigeria) is a free SMS messaging system that provides validated medical information on context-relevant diseases to community health workers practicing in rural settings. CHIIN relies on SMS messaging to reach offline community health workers and empower them with insights needed to guide care decisions and ultimately improve patient outcomes. ($10,000 grant)
• Sustainable Sea (United States) is developing a machine-learning-based aquaculture monitoring and response system that uses microbiome data to predict and prevent disease. Seaweed aquaculture has the potential to feed the world, fight climate change, and restore the oceans, but the rapid growth of seaweed production is accelerating the spread of infectious diseases that harm the seaweed and lead to socioeconomic instability due to the loss of the farming income. The Sustainable Sea system will reduce livestock losses, lead to cost savings, and promote sustainable food production. ($7,500 grant)

Additionally, two IDEAS projects — Compass and Abrazar — received $2,500 “crowd favorite” awards by earning 786 and 544 (respectively) of the 3,702 total votes cast online for various IDEAS projects during the month preceding the awards.  

• Compass (Uganda): The Covid-19 crisis exposed the gap in access to modern health-tech tools, such as triaging websites or health-monitoring apps; homeless populations in particular generally do not have reliable internet access, although many have mobile phones with SMS capability. To address this problem, Compass aims to deploy a natural language processing-driven, HIPAA-compliant, mobile-based (mHealth) intervention in Uganda that triages Covid-19. The team is also expanding their platform to triage cancers and communicable diseases like HIV, tuberculosis, and malaria. 
• Abrazar (Argentina): Abrazar uses machine learning techniques to identify children exposed to violence, and in this way enables local governments to reach unprotected children. Its initial models suggest that around 70 percent of at-risk children could be identified, representing a 35-times improvement over the current level of detection.

All nineteen finalist teams received $1,000 for their commendable efforts in six different sectors across 17 different countries. Additionally, the finalists took part in a Tackling Social Change seminar series that featured presenters such as MIT Senior Lecturer and Director Jason Jay at the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative; the $100 million MacArthur Fellow, Community Solutions; Ingo Michelfelder, postdoc at Harvard Kennedy School Social Innovation + Change Initiative; MIT PhD candidate at History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society program and IDEAS graduate community fellow Rustam Khan; Dana François, program officer at the Kellogg Foundation; and Madeleine Avignon from COFHED, a community-development organization in rural Haiti. The seminars engaged the teams with applicable frameworks and intellectual discourse on the sometimes-nebulous field of social innovation. Juried grant recipients and finalists will spend the next year receiving additional mentoring support as they take their projects to the next level, working toward mutually beneficial goals with community partners.

As the awards event concluded, Rebecca Obounou drew upon the words of the PKG Center’s namesake and founder, MIT first lady emeritus Priscilla King Gray, to offer encouragement to all the finalists: “As a partner [to President Paul Gray] Priscilla found three things were necessary: 1) a sense of self, 2) a sense of humor, 3) a love of people.” Obounou shared. “These three items strike me as qualities that many of our social innovators might call on as they walk their paths. Your sense of self to understand your purpose, your values, and your principles, as you’ll have to call on them often as you face a varying world with unanticipated decisions and dynamics. A sense of humor to persevere when things don’t go exactly as you planned and the world is almost certainly going to serve you a lot of curveballs, and you might as well build fun into the process. And a love of people to engage the most proximally impacted and underserved stakeholders with empathy, kindness and a spirit of service.”

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MIT students and alumni “hack” Hong Kong Kowloon East

The year 2020 was undoubtedly a challenge for everyone. The pandemic generated vast negative impacts on the world on a physical, psychological, and emotional level: mobility was restricted; socialization was limited; economic and industrial progress were put on hold. Many industries and small independent business have suffered, and academia and research have also experienced many difficulties. The education of future generations may have transitioned online, but it limited in-person learning experiences and social growth.

On the collegiate level, first-year students were barred from anticipated campus learning and research, while seniors faced tremendous anxiety over the lack of face-to-face consultations and the uncertainty of their graduation. To meet the increasing desire to reconnect, the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node took on a new role: to expand the MIT Global Classroom initiative and breach the boundaries of learning via the collaboration of colleagues, students, and alumni across the globe.

Since its founding in 2016, the MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node has focused on cultivating the innovative and entrepreneurial capabilities of MIT students and Hong Kong university students. The collaboration with MIT alumni and students has contributed to the establishment of numerous landing programs around the globe. This accomplishment is best demonstrated by the success of the MIT Entrepreneurship and Maker Skills Integrator (MEMSI) and the MIT Entrepreneurship and FinTech Integrator (MEFTI).

In 2020, the node executed the Kowloon East Inclusive Innovation and Growth Project, which carried out smart city activities that would boost inclusion, innovation, and growth for the Hong Kong communities. The exchange of ideas between MIT students, faculty, researchers, and alumni, in collaboration with the rest of the Hong Kong community, revealed opportunities beyond Kowloon East in the neighboring cities in Pearl River Delta region. Some of these opportunities involved the production of internships and public engagement opportunities.

“Hacking” Kowloon East: activating technology for urban life

The MIT Hong Kong Innovation Node welcomed 2021 with an Independent Activities Period virtual site visit to Hong Kong in collaboration with the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. The two-week “hacking” series offered by Associate Professor Brent Ryan, head of the City Design and Development Group, altered the concept of smart cities by exploring how the current initiative in Kowloon East can be better leveraged by emerging digital technologies to connect residents to each other and enhance economic opportunities.

As a paradigm of high-density urbanism and the center of a wide variety of global and local challenges, Hong Kong provides an opportunity to rethink how physical spaces can be integrated with digital technologies for better synergy. “Hacking” series participants took advantage of this fact. Equal numbers of undergraduate student ambassadors were recruited from local universities, and paired with MIT students and Hong Kong-MIT graduate students who were based in Boston. Some of the project ideas focused on how to retail revitalization, how to promote health care and environment, and how to establish an overall human-centered urban design.

“Although I couldn't travel physically, special lectures from the domain experts and the student pairing system with HK student ambassadors helped me discover a specific problem I wanted to tackle,” says Younjae Oh, a second-year student of the master of science in architecture studies (design) program at MIT. She went on to state that the series “inspired creativity within the team and led us to make more insightful, considered decisions upon cultural awareness. What I have found valuable in this workshop is the extremity of engagement with the cross-cultural team.”

This blend of “Hacking” contributors collaborated in an open-ended structure where they proposed and developed reality-based projects to promote “smart, equitable urbanism” in the Kowloon East (Kwun Tong) neighborhood of Hong Kong. Queenie Kwan Li, a first-year master's student in the science in architecture studies (design) program at MIT, describes aspects of the program, mentioning, “Direct consultations with local and international domain experts lined up by the MIT Innovation Node immensely deepened my understanding of my home city’s development.” She adds, “It also gifted me a unique opportunity to relate my ongoing training at MIT for a potential impact in Hong Kong.”

Global classroom-in-action

Despite its progress in innovation, entrepreneurship, and smart city restructuring in this collaboration with the node, the pandemic highlighted an ongoing challenge of how the School of Architecture and Planning can offer a hybrid learning experience for a professional audience with mentorships and apprenticeships.

Architecture and urban design training emphasize the design studio culture of collective learning, which is vastly different from solo learning at home. This learning usually begins with a physical site visit: surveys, interviews, meeting and interacting with locals to obtain firsthand engagement experience. Under the experimentation of a hybrid format, the teaching team has to curate and piece fragments together to imitate refreshing local perspectives through tailored exercises using online interactions and team collaborations.

Although traveling experiences are always the best and most-direct ways to understand the benefits and deficits of an area, to appreciate the culture and customs, and to pinpoint challenges the locals face, it is easy to forget that people are the core, the identity of a place, when learning solely online. To make up for that deficit, the “Hacking” series invited the physical attendance of local and international members of the MIT alumni community with relevant domain expertise.

Sean Kwok ’01 says, “MIT graduates spanning five decades volunteered to teach and guide current students. In return, this workshop gave us, former MIT students, the rare opportunity to participate in the MIT academic life again, learn from our colleagues, and give back to the school at the same time.”

Some of the domain expertise included those with backgrounds in architecture, urban design and planning, real estate, mobility and transportation, public housing, workforce development, city science and urban analytics, art administration, and engineering. In fact, a total of 23 domain experts, local stakeholders, and eight mentors from various disciplines were physically involved in the program at the node’s headquarters in Hong Kong.

Throughout the series, they shared their knowledge and experiences in a hybridized format so that non-Hong Kong-based members could also participate. Joel Austin Cunningham, a first-year master's student in the science in architecture studies (design) program at MIT, commends the “Hacking” series, stressing that it “addressed the unprecedented constraints of the coronavirus with an innovative educational solution … As architecture and urban planning students, we rely heavily upon active engagements with a project’s site, something which has been significantly constrained this academic year. The IAP workshop responded to this issue, through a multi-institutional collaboration which compensated for our inability to travel through active engagements with an array of local stakeholders and collaborators based in the city.”

Learning is a feedback loop — part of it is learned from the reconstruction of a previous experience, and part of it is constructed by us as we develop the learning experience together and assimilate new information, insights, and ideas from one another. As part of such interconnectedness, a human-centric approach, communication skills, cultural and moral values involve the inclusive diversity and empathy of everyone. 

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A searching discussion about being Asian American at MIT

A broad-ranging panel discussion on May 18 examined the complexities of Asian American and Pacific Islander identity and acceptance at MIT, while underscoring the need for collaborative work among groups to combat prejudice and create equity.

The online forum was held amid an ongoing string of violent assaults on Asian Americans in the U.S., which has raised public awareness about anti-Asian discrimination. But the forum — featuring faculty, students, and staff — made clear that anti-Asian American violence, stereotyping, and exclusion have long histories in the U.S.

Indeed, the event’s first segment, featuring presentations from three MIT faculty members, emphasized the importance of situating Asian American and Pacific Islander struggles in the context of systemic bias against many groups. That is both a better reading of history, the speakers suggested, and a more promising platform for allyship in activism.

“Sometimes it’s confusing for Asian Americans/AAPI to know where we belong,” said Emma Teng, a historian and the T.T. and Wei Fong Chao Professor of Asian Civilizations. “Sometimes we’re visible as minorities, and sometimes we’re not visible. … And that can lead to a lot of misunderstandings and lost opportunities for solidarity.”

The dangers of the “model minority” myth

Teng, author of the book, “Eurasian: Mixed Identities in the United States, China, and Hong Kong, 1842-1943,” focused her remarks on the dangers of the “model minority” myth — the idea that Asian Americans are a uniquely high-achieving and assimilated ethnic group. That idea, Teng observed, fails to account for the socioeconomic and cultural diversity of Asian Americans, and harms many ethnic groups, including Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.  

For one thing, the model minority myth can form a standard against which negative judgments of other minority groups are constructed. The concept also reduces attention to anti-Asian discrimination, Teng added, while at MIT the idea can burden students with “imposter syndrome” — a sense of not being worthy — and put undue pressure on them.

“I’ve heard students label themselves to me as a ‘bad Asian’ if they’re not breezing through all their classes,” Teng said. “Whereas in reality we all know that being an MIT student is enormously challenging for everybody, regardless of your background.”

Finally, Teng noted, the model minority myth contributes to the so-called “bamboo ceiling” in institutions, limiting opportunities for Asian Americans by linking them to qualities such as technical skills that are not associated with leadership.

“The ‘bamboo ceiling’ can, I think, be seen in many different kinds of contexts, where Asians are recognized as competent, intelligent, and high-achieving, but not possessing the social or leadership skills to be put in high leadership positions,” Teng said.

Against exceptionalism

Lily Tsai, the Ford Professor of Political Science and faculty chair-elect at the Institute, also suggested that notions of Asian American exceptionalism are problematic.

“There are these myths that focus on the internal and cultural sources of success, for Asian Americans as a model minority,” Tsai said, noting that such narratives “really shift attention away from external structural sources” of disadvantage for all people of color.

Asian Americans, Tsai added, “really need to fight the myth” that, as political scientist Claire Jean Kim has put it, “no amount of externally imposed hardship can keep a good minority down.” Focusing on Asian American achievement, in this sense, can both lead people to minimize the barriers to success facing all minority groups, and heighten an unjustified sense of difference among groups.

Tsai also suggested that “racial triangulation theory,” developed by Kim, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, is a helpful framework for understanding how the dynamics of stereotyping can work. Among three groups — whites, Blacks, and Asian Americans — people may cast whites and Asian Americans as being successful, thus marginalizing Blacks; at the same time, people may view whites and Blacks as “insiders” in America, with Asian Americans being cast as “perpetual foreigners.”

“It enables us to see how Asian Americans can be used as a wedge between whites and Blacks, and how there can be challenges to Asian American and Black solidarity,” Tsai said.

In his remarks, Craig Wilder, the Barton L. Weller Professor of History, emphasized the long history of violence against Asian Americans, dating to the 1800s.

“Going back to the 19th century, those campaigns of violence get so normalized in American history and so easily erased,” Wilder said, adding that in the U.S. there is a “cyclical rediscovery of American violence. We pretend somehow that we’ve forgotten that we have this deep, long history of violence.”

Wilder, author of the book “Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities,” about many universities’ deep ties to slavery, emphasized that academics have long been involved in acts of exclusion toward minority groups.

“American intellectuals from the 1820s … were central to providing a kind of intellectual and academic justification for campaigns of various communities against people of color, and campaigns against other religious groups,” said Wilder. Showing a picture of eugenicist Francis Galton, he added that “our institutions were in fact never innocent actors sitting in the backdrop of history.”

However, Wilder added, at MIT today, “We have a moment where we have to really think about how we hold ourselves accountable, and how these institutions today need not just to repair that past, but also to envision a future that’s far more democratic, far more inclusive, and far less divided.”

Strategies for action

The event, “Asian American Visibility and Intersectionality at MIT,” was introduced by Beatriz Cantada, director of engagement for diversity and inclusion in MIT’s Institute Community and Equity Office. The discussion was moderated by Christopher Capozzola, head of the MIT History section.

After the initial faculty presentations, the event featured a discussion among the faculty and three other participants, acting as interlocutors and commentators: Eesha Banerjee, a first-year student majoring in electrical engineering and computer science; Amelia Lee Dogan, a sophomore majoring in urban studies and planning with computer science and in American studies; and Rupinder Grewal, a conflict of interest officer in the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the lead for the Asian Pacific American Employee Resource Group at MIT.

Grewal queried Teng, for instance, about what approaches might help remove the “bamboo ceiling” from workplaces.

“What do we do about that?” Grewal asked. “How do we change the narrative? Where does the responsibility lie?”

Teng noted that research indicates Asian Americans incur a “penalty” in workplace terms when they act more assertively: “They’re expected to be competent, to be somewhat passive, and also to have a caretaking role for others. It’s not a simple solution by saying … ‘I’m an Asian American woman and I’m going to be assertive now.’” That said, she observed that Tsai herself had just broken through the bamboo ceiling, as the first Asian American woman and first person of East Asian descent to be elected chair of the MIT faculty.

A significant part of the discussion focused on solidarity among different interest groups. Banerjee, for one, asked the panel to comment on “the role of members of the Asian American community who might have more privilege socioeconomically, or in terms of representation, [in creating] Asian solidarity and centering the needs of other groups.”

Tsai, in reply, suggested that kind of support is crucial to effective political alliances. Some research, she noted, suggests that “all of us are best at advocating for groups that we are not a member of. I often think about that, because I want to be able to use my influence and political capital as effectively as possible. ... When you advocate on behalf of a group you are seen to be a member of, it is discredited, because it is seen as self-interest.”

As Teng suggested, however, there can be benefits to “disaggregating” the Asian American and Pacific Islander experience, and better understanding the trajectories of some students in relation to their particular ethnicities. Sometimes, she said, “I think we need to understand each group one by one, to understand the socioeconomic profile of the group.”

At the same time, Dogan noted, a willingness to engage in pan-Asian organizing may also reflect the political orientation of the participants: Some people may more readily view different subgroups of Asian Americans as being linked in a common effort, while others may be more particularist.

“I think there are a lot of struggles toward pan-Asian advocacy, and that’s a very deep conversation [regarding being] Asian American as a political identity versus an ethnic identity, and how we internally have our own struggles and regional conflicts,” Dogan said. “There are Asian Americans working toward that right now.”

“Imagine a world that can be different”

Banerjee and Wilder both observed that universities, imperfect though they may be, do offer unusual opportunities for dialogue, action, and progress.

“At MIT, solidarity is something we still do need to work toward,” Banerjee said. And yet, she noted, it does exist to an extent. As a result, one question is how students and others can move multiethnic organizing and awareness from campuses to the cities and towns around them: “The solidarity we build up here on the university level, how can that be translated, either in the Cambridge community or back home?”

For his part, Wilder noted, “One of the things that college campuses allow us to do is to imagine a world that can be different, [along with] using the skill sets that you learn on campus and taking them elsewhere.”

Certainly, Wilder added, “College campuses have a lot of housecleaning to do. We’re not, in fact, racially uncomplicated spaces. We actually have all of the same burdens that the greater society has. One of the things that we do have that’s different is the luxury of stepping back to think about how to wrestle with [existing] tensions. To recognize that they’re not easily solved.”

The event was organized and sponsored by MIT’s Institute Community and Equity Office; the African, Black, American, Caribbean Employee Resource Group; the Asian American Association; the Asian American Initiative; the Asian Pacific American Employee Resource Group; the Black Graduate Student Association; the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; MIT Global Languages; MIT History; the Department of Mechanical Engineering; the Office of Multicultural Programs; and the Undergraduate Association.

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