3 Questions: Daniel Auguste on why “successful entrepreneurs don’t fall from the sky”

A lack of access to critical resources has prevented many middle- and low-income entrepreneurs from starting successful businesses, economic sociologist Daniel Auguste told an MIT audience in a Feb. 9 presentation on barriers to entrepreneurship in under-resourced communities of America.

That’s a fundamental problem because entrepreneurship is one of society’s most significant pathways to economic security and building intergenerational wealth, according to Auguste, who is an MLK Visiting Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management for the 2022-2023 academic year.

MIT News sat down with Auguste, who is also an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University and a faculty affiliate at the Social Policy Institute at Washington University, to discuss the implications of his work and how he hopes it changes things from a policy perspective.

Q: What would you consider the core focus areas and goals of your research?

A: I study the root causes and consequences of social inequalities. In doing that, I focus on the structural barriers to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success, considering the extent to which economic inequality undermines entrepreneurship development and success, and innovation.

What I’m trying to do is influence policies that could create a more shared economic prosperity by tapping into the full entrepreneurial potential of our society. I believe there’s a lot of untapped potential.

I’m trying to get policymakers and the academic community to understand that successful entrepreneurs emerge from a context, and the opportunity structure of that context shapes the likelihood of entrepreneurial entry, the type of entry, and the potential for success. If resources are unequally distributed by gender, race, and class, different groups will have different entrepreneurial outcomes. So, I want to show entrepreneurship as a contextual activity.

Q: What has your research on entrepreneurship among middle- and lower-income households found?

A: Some of my findings are that entrepreneurship can actually be a sign of economic insecurity, not because the founders aren’t entrepreneurial or creative, but because of the context — because they don’t have necessary resources, like the wealth endowment, access to credit, or the networks, to launch successful businesses. It shows that having a good job with benefits like insurance and a pension could be a better way for low-resource communities to achieve social mobility. But it’s a Catch-22 because successful entrepreneurship is a better way to build intergenerational wealth than simply working for a firm.

Focusing on race, Black entrepreneurs are at the lower end of the education strata and there are fewer successful Black entrepreneurs. It’s also a wealth story because in order to be successful you need resources. Wealth gives you the luxury to fail in entrepreneurship. That’s important because entrepreneurship is very risky and you’re often learning as you go. If you fail and now can’t afford to not pay your rent, it’s about survival. Ultimately, if your network, like family and friends, are low-resource, and your community is low-resource, it’s difficult to support high-growth entrepreneurial or innovative activities.

After college you might need a job to support your parents, as opposed to your parents supporting you in the early stages of the entrepreneurial process — when personal capital is really important. Basically, Blacks more often face financial instability, and it leads to racial disparities in business creation and success. It shows that entrepreneurship may not be a path to social mobility for everyone because of the structure of opportunity and lack of resources in certain communities.

There are still going to be entrepreneurs in those communities, but they are going to be survivalist, necessity-driven entrepreneurs using it as an alternative to unemployment or underemployment until they get a better option. You wouldn’t want to create an economy on these entrepreneurs. You couldn’t sustain an innovative economy based on survivalist entrepreneurs, but extreme wealth and income inequality increase the proportion of entrepreneurs who are basically using it as a survival mechanism.

Q: How do you hope your research informs discussions about how to address inequality and economic mobility?

A: I hope to promote in policy discussions the idea that working to reduce economic inequality is actually working to unlock the entrepreneurial and innovative potential of society. I hope to highlight that entrepreneurship is not currently a viable path to economic mobility for everyone because of the resource constraints of many communities.

Policy makers should understand that successful entrepreneurs don’t fall from the sky or happen by accident. We get them because of investment in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. It matters what families and communities from which they emerge. The resource endowment of these families shapes the entrepreneurial potential of these people and therefore of the economy. We can change entrepreneurial outcomes by investing in these low-resource communities, by doing things like improving access to financial capital and home ownership, and starting to see entrepreneurs as people that emerge from a community.

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Hari Balakrishnan awarded Marconi Prize

The 2023 Marconi Prize has been awarded to Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu Professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

The Marconi Prize, widely considered to be the top honor within the field of communications technology, is given annually to “innovators who have made significant contributions to increasing digital inclusivity through the advancement of information and communications technology.”

“Hari’s unique contributions have shaped the course of research and discovery in multiple fields, saved lives, and enabled users to have better experiences with network-based services,” says Vint Cerf, chair of the Marconi Society and 1998 Marconi Fellow. “His focus on scientific excellence that creates positive impact at scale, along with his humanitarian contributions, makes him a perfect choice for the Marconi Prize.”

Balakrishnan's research has focused on improving the reliability, performance, and efficiency of computer systems, with special emphasis on networking, mobile computing, and distributed systems. Currently, his research focuses on networking, sensing, and perception for sensor-equipped mobile devices connected to edge and cloud services, and on designing architectures for more resilient networked systems. 

His research in networking has led to better communication protocols for mobile devices communicating over the internet, such as the techniques he developed to understand and improve the performance of data transport over wireless networks. He has made significant contributions to network congestion control, overlay and peer-to-peer networks, robust routing, and internet architecture, developing methods that have found their way into several commercial products and network standards. He has also developed new ways to improve the reliability and performance of large-scale distributed systems, which are computer systems with multiple independent components that work together on a shared goal.

Between 1999 and 2004, Balakrishnan led the development of Cricket, an indoor location system using a novel approach to distance estimation using ultrasonic and radio signals. Starting in 2004, collaborating with Sam Madden, he led a group that developed the CarTel mobile sensing system by instrumenting vehicles with mobile sensors to measure road and driving conditions. In 2010, he co-founded Cambridge Mobile Telematics (CMT) based on the findings of the CarTel project. CMT provides a platform to make driving safer using myriad techniques including mobile sensing, signal processing, machine learning, and behavioral science.The platform measures and improves driving behavior to reduce risk, automates roadside assistance with proactive crash detection, and creates a connected insurance claims process. CMT is today the world's largest telematics service provider, serving millions of users in 18 countries. 

Balakrishnan received his PhD in 1998 from the University of California at Berkeley’s Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department, which named him a distinguished alumnus in 2021. He also earned a BTech in 1993 from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras, which named him a distinguished alumnus in 2013. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2015 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. Balakrishnan’s honors include the IEEE Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award (2021), fellow of the ACM (2008), fellow of the IEEE (2020), Sloan Fellow (2002), and the ACM dissertation award (1998). He has received several best-paper awards including the IEEE Bennett paper prize (2004) and six “Test of Time” or “Hall of Fame” awards for papers with long-term impact from ACM SIGCOMM (2011), SIGOPS (2015), SIGMOD (2016), SIGMOBILE (2017, 2018), and SenSys (2019). In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious Infosys Prize in Engineering and Computer Science, and in 2021, he was awarded the SIGCOMM Lifetime Achievement Award.

Balakrishnan has also been honored for excellence in research and teaching at MIT with the Harold E. Edgerton faculty achievement award (2003), the HKN best instructor award (2018), the Jamieson award (2012), the Junior Bose teaching award (2002), and the Spira teaching award (2001). He has graduated nearly 30 PhD students and 10 postdocs who currently innovate at many of the most prestigious universities and companies in the world.

Balakrishnan joins a long list of Marconi Prize recipients with strong connections to MIT, including Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Bob Gallager, James Killian (MIT's 10th president and the first Marconi Prize recipient in 1975), David Forney, Tom Leighton, Bob Metcalfe, and Ron Rivest.

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Report: CHIPS Act just the first step in addressing threats to US leadership in advanced computing

When Liu He, a Chinese economist, politician, and "chip czar," was tapped to lead the charge in a chipmaking arms race with the United States, his message lingered in the air, leaving behind a dewy glaze of tension: “For our country, technology is not just for growth… it is a matter of survival.”

Once upon a time, the United States’ early technological prowess positioned the nation to outpace foreign rivals and cultivate a competitive advantage for domestic businesses. Yet, 30 years later, America’s lead in advanced computing is continuing to wane. What happened?

A new report from an MIT researcher and two colleagues sheds light on the decline in U.S. leadership. The scientists looked at high-level measures to examine the shrinkage: overall capabilities, supercomputers, applied algorithms, and semiconductor manufacturing. Through their analysis, they found that not only has China closed the computing gap with the U.S., but nearly 80 percent of American leaders in the field believe that their Chinese competitors are improving capabilities faster — which, the team says, suggests a “broad threat to US competitiveness.”

To delve deeply into the fray, the scientists conducted the Advanced Computing Users Survey, sampling 120 top-tier organizations, including universities, national labs, federal agencies, and industry. The team estimates that this group comprises one-third and one-half of all the most significant computing users in the United States.

“Advanced computing is crucial to scientific improvement, economic growth and the competitiveness of U.S. companies,” says Neil Thompson, director of the FutureTech Research Project at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), who helped lead the study.

Thompson, who is also a principal investigator at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, wrote the paper with Chad Evans, executive vice president and secretary and treasurer to the board at the Council on Competitiveness, and Daniel Armbrust, who is the co-founder, initial CEO, and member of the board of directors at Silicon Catalyst and former president of SEMATECH, the semiconductor consortium that developed industry roadmaps.

The semiconductor, supercomputer, and algorithm bonanza

Supercomputers — the room-sized, “giant calculators” of the hardware world — are an industry no longer dominated by the United States. Through 2015, about half of the most powerful computers were sitting firmly in the U.S., and China was growing slowly from a very slow base. But in the past six years, China has swiftly caught up, reaching near parity with America.

This disappearing lead matters. Eighty-four percent of U.S. survey respondents said they’re computationally constrained in running essential programs. “This result was telling, given who our respondents are: the vanguard of American research enterprises and academic institutions with privileged access to advanced national supercomputing resources,” says Thompson. 

With regards to advanced algorithms, historically, the U.S. has fronted the charge, with two-thirds of all significant improvements dominated by U.S.-born inventors. But in recent decades, U.S. dominance in algorithms has relied on bringing in foreign talent to work in the U.S., which the researchers say is now in jeopardy. China has outpaced the U.S. and many other countries in churning out PhDs in STEM fields since 2007, with one report postulating a near-distant future (2025) where China will be home to nearly twice as many PhDs than in the U.S. China’s rise in algorithms can also be seen with the “Gordon Bell Prize,” an achievement for outstanding work in harnessing the power of supercomputers in varied applications. U.S. winners historically dominated the prize, but China has now equaled or surpassed Americans’ performance in the past five years.

While the researchers note the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 is a critical step in re-establishing the foundation of success for advanced computing, they propose recommendations to the U.S. Office of Science and Technology Policy. 

First, they suggest democratizing access to U.S. supercomputing by building more mid-tier systems that push boundaries for many users, as well as building tools so users scaling up computations can have less up-front resource investment. They also recommend increasing the pool of innovators by funding many more electrical engineers and computer scientists being trained with longer-term US residency incentives and scholarships. Finally, in addition to this new framework, the scientists urge taking advantage of what already exists, via providing the private sector access to experimentation with high-performance computing through supercomputing sites in academia and national labs.

All that and a bag of chips

Computing improvements depend on continuous advances in transistor density and performance, but creating robust, new chips necessitate a harmonious blend of design and manufacturing.

Over the last six years, China was not known as the savants of noteworthy chips. In fact, in the past five decades, the U.S. designed most of them. But this changed in the past six years when China created the HiSilicon Kirin 9000, propelling itself to the international frontier. This success was mainly obtained through partnerships with leading global chip designers that began in the 2000s. Now, China now has 14 companies among the world’s top 50 fabless designers. A decade ago, there was only one. 

Competitive semiconductor manufacturing has been more mixed, where U.S.-led policies and internal execution issues have slowed China’s rise, but as of July 2022, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) has evidence of 7 nanometer logic, which was not expected until much later. However, with extreme ultraviolet export restrictions, progress below 7 nm means domestic technology development would be expensive. Currently, China is only at parity or better in two out of 12 segments of the semiconductor supply chain. Still, with government policy and investments, the team expects a whopping increase to seven segments in 10 years. So, for the moment, the U.S. retains leadership in hardware manufacturing, but with fewer dimensions of advantage.

The authors recommend that the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy work with key national agencies, such as the U.S. Department of Defense, U.S. Department of Energy, and the National Science Foundation, to define initiatives to build the hardware and software systems needed for important computing paradigms and workloads critical for economic and security goals. “It is crucial that American enterprises can get the benefit of faster computers,” says Thompson.  “With Moore’s Law slowing down, the best way to do this is to create a portfolio of specialized chips (or “accelerators”) that are customized to our needs.”

The scientists further believe that to lead the next generation of computing, four areas must be addressed. First, by issuing grand challenges to the CHIPS Act National Semiconductor Technology Center, researchers and startups would be motivated to invest in research and development and to seek startup capital for new technologies in areas such as spintronics, neuromorphics, optical and quantum computing, and optical interconnect fabrics. By supporting allies in passing similar acts, overall investment in these technologies would increase, and supply chains would become more aligned and secure. Establishing test beds for researchers to test algorithms on new computing architectures and hardware would provide an essential platform for innovation and discovery. Finally, planning for post-exascale systems that achieve higher levels of performance through next-generation advances would ensure that current commercial technologies don’t limit future computing systems.

“The advanced computing landscape is in rapid flux — technologically, economically, and politically, with both new opportunities for innovation and rising global rivalries,” says Daniel Reed, Presidential Professor and professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at the University of Utah. “The transformational insights from both deep learning and computational modeling depend on both continued semiconductor advances and their instantiation in leading edge, large-scale computing systems — hyperscale clouds and high-performance computing systems. Although the U.S. has historically led the world in both advanced semiconductors and high-performance computing, other nations have recognized that these capabilities are integral to 21st century economic competitiveness and national security, and they are investing heavily.”

The research was funded, in part, through Thompson's grant from Good Ventures, which supports his FutureTech Research Group. The paper is being published by the Georgetown Public Policy Review.

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New purification method could make protein drugs cheaper

One of the most expensive steps in manufacturing protein drugs such as antibodies or insulin is the purification step: isolating the protein from the bioreactor used to produce it. This step can account for up to half of the total cost of manufacturing a protein.

In an effort to help reduce those costs, MIT engineers have devised a new way to perform this kind of purification. Their approach, which uses specialized nanoparticles to rapidly crystallize proteins, could help to make protein drugs more affordable and accessible, especially in developing countries.

“This work uses bioconjugate-functionalized nanoparticles to act as templates for enhancing protein crystal formation at low concentrations,” says Kripa Varanasi, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study. “The goal is to reduce the cost so that this kind of drug manufacturing becomes affordable in the developing world.”

The researchers demonstrated that their approach can be used to crystallize lysozyme (an antimicrobial enzyme) and insulin. They believe it could also be applied to many other useful proteins, including antibody drugs and vaccines.

MIT graduate student Caroline McCue is the lead author of the study, which appears today in the journal ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. Henri-Louis Girard PhD ’20 is also an author of the paper.

Protein purification

Antibodies and other protein drugs are part of a growing class of drugs known as biologics, which also include molecules such as DNA and RNA, as well as cell-based therapies. Most protein drugs are produced by living cells such as yeast in large bioreactors.

Once these proteins are generated, they have to be isolated from the reactor, which is usually done through a process called chromatography. Chromatography, which separates proteins based on their size, requires specialized materials that make the process very expensive.

Varanasi and his colleagues decided to try a different approach, based on protein crystallization. Researchers often crystallize proteins to study their structures, but the process is considered too slow for industrial use and doesn’t work well at low concentrations of protein. To overcome those obstacles, Varanasi’s lab set out to use nanoscale structures to speed up the crystallization.

In previous work, the lab has used nanoscale features to create materials that repel water or to modify interfaces for injecting highly viscous biologic drugs. In this case, the researchers wanted to adapt nanoparticles so that they could locally increase the concentration of protein at the surface and also provide a template that would allow the proteins to align correctly and form crystals.

To create the surface they needed, the researchers coated gold nanoparticles with molecules called bioconjugates — materials that can help form links between other molecules. For this study, the researchers used bioconjugates called maleimide and NHS, which are commonly used for tagging proteins for study or attaching protein drugs to drug-delivering nanoparticles.

When solutions of proteins are exposed to these coated nanoparticles, the proteins accumulate at the surface and bind to the bioconjugates. Furthermore, the bioconjugates compel the proteins to align themselves with a specific orientation, creating a scaffold for additional proteins to come along and join the crystal.

The researchers demonstrated their approach with lysozyme, an enzyme whose crystallization properties have been well studied, and insulin. They say it could also be applied to many other proteins.

“This is a general approach that could be scaled to other systems as well. If you know the protein structure that you’re trying to crystallize, you can then add the right bioconjugates that will force this process to happen,” Varanasi says.

Rapid crystallization

In their studies with lysozyme and insulin, the researchers found that crystallization occurred much faster when the proteins were exposed to the bioconjugate-coated nanoparticles, compared to bare nanoparticles or no nanoparticles. With the coated particles, the researchers saw a sevenfold reduction in the induction time — how long it takes for crystals to begin forming — and a threefold increase in the nucleation rate, which is how quickly the crystals grow once started.

“Even at low protein concentrations, we see a lot more crystals forming with these bioconjugate-functionalized nanoparticles,” McCue says. “The functionalized nanoparticles reduce the induction time so much because these bioconjugates are providing a specific site for the proteins to bind. And because the proteins are aligned, they can form a crystal faster.”

​In addition, the team used machine learning to analyze thousands of images of crystals. “Protein crystallization is a stochastic process, so we needed to have a huge dataset to be able to really measure whether our approach was improving the induction time and nucleation rate of crystallization. With so many images to process, machine learning is the best way to be able to determine when crystals are forming in each image without having to go through and manually count each one,” McCue says. 

This project is part of a Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation effort to make biologic drugs, such as prophylactic antibodies that have been shown to prevent malaria in clinical trials, more widely available in developing nations.

The MIT team is now working on scaling up the process so that it could be used in an industrial bioreactor, and demonstrating that it can work with monoclonal antibodies, vaccines, and other useful proteins.

“If we can make it easier to manufacture these proteins anywhere, then everyone in the world can benefit,” Varanasi says. “We are not saying that this is going to be solved tomorrow because of us, but this is a small step that can contribute to that mission.”

In addition to the Gates Foundation, the research was partly funded by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.

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Phiala Shanahan is seeking fundamental answers about our physical world

In 2010, Phiala Shanahan was an undergraduate at the University of Adelaide, wrapping up a degree in computational physics, when she heard of an unexpected discovery in particle physics. The news had nothing to do with any of the rare, exotic particles that physicists were searching for at the time. Rather, the revelation revolved around the mundane, ubiquitous proton.

That year, scientists had measured the proton’s radius and discovered that the particle was ever so slightly smaller than what previous experiments had reported. This new measurement threw into question what physicists had assumed was well-understood: What exactly was the size of the proton?

What would then be coined the “proton radius puzzle” immediately drew Shanahan’s interest, prompting a more fundamental question: What else don’t we know about this seemingly straightforward particle?

“Protons and neutrons make up 99 percent of visible matter in the universe,” she says. “I assumed that, just like the mass of the proton is known very precisely, the size would be too. That was one moment fairly early on when I realized, there really are fundamental questions that we still have no answers to.”

The proton puzzle was one impetus that propelled Shanahan to pursue theoretical particle and nuclear physics. Today, she is the Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor of Physics at MIT, having recently received tenure at the Institute.

In her research, she seeks a fundamental understanding of our physical world. Using the equations of the Standard Model of Physics as her guide, she is looking for fundamental bridges — concrete, mathematical connections between the behavior of elementary particles, such as the quarks and gluons within a single proton, and the interactions between multiple protons, which coalesce into the visible matter we see around us.

Tracing these fundamental connections will ultimately help physicists recognize breaks in our understanding, such as instances when a proton interacts with dark matter, which is thought to make up 85 percent of the total mass in the universe and for which the Standard Model — our best representation of our physical understanding — has no explanation.

“We are trying to understand how you can bridge understanding from our most fundamental theory — this beautiful predictive theory of fundamental particles — all the way up to nuclear physics,” Shanahan says.

Up for a challenge

Shanahan was born in Sydney, Australia, and spent most of her childhood and early education in the suburbs of Adelaide, where she earned a scholarship to attend an all-girls school. She quickly took to studying math and science, learning new languages, and playing a variety of instruments.

“At the time, I don’t think you could’ve picked me for a scientist rather than a musician or a linguist,” she says.

After high school, Shanahan stayed local, attending the University of Adelaide, where she took classes in Latin and ancient Greek, and played in a cover band on the weekends. She also pursued a bachelor’s degree in high-performance computational physics, which she chose almost as a personal challenge.

“It was the hardest degree to get into at the time, and I thought, ‘I want something challenging,’” she recalls.

Her interest in physics began to crystallize after hearing of the proton radius puzzle one day in a research seminar. She also discovered that she enjoyed research, after accepting an offer to work as a summer assistant in the lab of her undergraduate advisor, Anthony Thomas, who specialized in nuclear physics. She continued working with Thomas through graduate school, also at the University of Adelaide, where she earned a PhD in theoretical nuclear physics.

“I’d already been caught by this idea that we didn’t know nearly as much about the proton as I thought, so my PhD was about understanding in great detail the structure of the proton and what we could add to that understanding,” Shanahan says.

A direct trace

After finishing her education in Australia, Shanahan looked to take her next step, outside the country. With funds from a traveling fellowship, she planned out a two-month tour of physics departments and facilities across Europe and the United States, including at MIT. The experience was a whirlwind, as Shanahan was introduced at every stop to new ideas and avenues of research.

“The mind expansion was really exciting,” she says.

When she came home to Australia, she found she was keen to keep on the research track, and to live abroad. Soon, she packed her bags for a postdoc position in MIT’s Department of Physics. She arrived at the Institute in 2015 and spent the next two years researching the interactions of gluons, the elementary, force-carrying particles that bind to quarks to form a proton.

“It’s very difficult to measure experimentally certain aspects of the gluon structure of a proton,” Shanahan says. “I wanted to see what we could calculate, which at the time was quite a new thing.”

Until then, Shanahan considered herself a mostly “pen-and-paper” theorist. But she wanted to see how far the behavior of gluons — interactions known as quantum chromodynamics — could be directly traced using the equations of the Standard Model. To do so would require large-scale numerical calculations, and she found herself learning a new set of computational tools and exploring ways to search for fundamental interactions among gluons using machine learning — a novel approach that Shanahan was one of the first to adopt, and which she continues to pursue today.

A creative space

After finishing her postdoc, she spent a year as a faculty member at the College of William and Mary and as a senior staff scientist at the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility before returning to MIT in 2018 as an assistant professor in the Center for Theoretical Physics. Before she put down campus roots, Shanahan spent the fall semester at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Ontario, Canada, as part of a fellowship that supports female physicists. The program provided food and board for fellows, and also delivered meals to their offices — all with the goal of freeing the physicists to focus on their work.

“That program really gave me the launchpad for what became my research agenda as a new faculty member,” she says. “It all started from that quiet time where I could actually think for hours at a time. That was incredibly valuable, and it gave me the space to be creative.”

At MIT, she continues to study the equations of the Standard Model to understand the quantum dynamics of gluons and quarks, and the structure of the proton, as well as the interactions that underpin nuclear physics, and what the fundamental behavior of certain nuclei can tell us about the conditions of the early universe.

She is also focusing on nuclei that are used in dark matter experiments, and is looking to map out the space of nuclear interactions that can be explained concretely through the Standard Model. Any interactions outside of this fundamentally derived space could then be a sign of dark matter or other phenomena beyond what the Standard Model can explain.

“Now my research group is going in all sorts of directions,” she says. “We are using every tool at our disposal, from pen-and-paper calculations, to designing and running new algorithms on supercomputers, to really understand new aspects of the structure and interactions of the matter that makes up our universe.”

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MIT-Takeda Program heads into fourth year with crop of 10 new projects

In 2020, the School of Engineering and Takeda Pharmaceutical Company launched the MIT-Takeda Program, which aims to leverage the experience of both entities to solve problems at the intersection of health care, medicine, and artificial intelligence. Since the program began, teams have devised mechanisms to reduce manufacturing time for certain pharmaceutical products, submitted a patent application, and streamlined literature reviews enough to save eight months of time and cost.  

Now, the program is headed into its fourth year, supporting 10 teams in its second round of projects. Projects selected for the program span the entirety of the biopharmaceutical industry, from drug development to commercial and manufacturing.

“The research projects in the second round of funding have the potential to lead to transformative breakthroughs in health care,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and co-chair of the MIT-Takeda Program. “These cross-disciplinary teams are working to improve the lives and outcomes of patients everywhere.”

The program was formed to merge Takeda’s expertise in the biopharmaceutical industry with MIT’s deep experience at the vanguard of artificial intelligence and machine learning (ML) research.  

“The objective of the program is to take the expertise from MIT, at the edge of innovation in the AI space, and to combine that with the problems and the challenges that we see in drug research and development,” says Simon Davies, the executive director of the MIT-Takeda Program and Takeda’s global head of statistical and quantitative sciences. The beauty of this collaboration, Davies adds, is that it allowed Takeda to take important problems and data to MIT researchers, whose advanced modeling or methodology could help solve them.

In Round 1 of the program, one project led by scientists and engineers at MIT and Takeda researched speech-related biomarkers for frontotemporal dementia. They used machine learning and AI to find potential signs of disease based on a patient’s speech alone.

Previously, identifying these biomarkers would have required more invasive procedures, like magnetic resonance imaging. Speech, on the other hand, is cheap and easy to collect. In the first two years of their research, the team, which included Jim Glass, a senior research scientist in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and Brian Tracey, director, statistics at Takeda, was able to show that there is a potential voice signal for people with frontotemporal dementia.

“That is very important to us because before we run any trial, we need to figure out how we can actually measure the disease in the population that we are targeting” says Marco Vilela, an associate director of statistics-quantitative sciences at Takeda working on the project. “We would like to not only differentiate subjects that have the disease from people that don't have the disease, but also track the disease progression based purely on the voice of the individuals.”

The group is now broadening the scope of its research and building on its work in the first round of the program to enter Round 2, which features a crop of 10 new projects and two continuing projects. In Round 2, the biomarker group’s biomarker research will expand speech analysis to a wider variety of diseases, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. Vilela and Glass, are leading the team in its second round.

Those involved in the program, like Glass and Vilela, say the collaboration has been a mutually beneficial one. Takeda, a global pharmaceutical company based in Japan with labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has access to data and scientists who specialize in numerous diseases, patient diagnoses, and treatment. MIT brings aboard world-class scientists and engineers studying AI and ML across a diverse range of fields.

Faculty from all across MIT, including the departments of Biology, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Chemical Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Mechanical Mngineering, as well as the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and MIT Sloan School of Management, work on the program’s research projects. The program puts those researchers — and their skill sets — on the same team, working toward a shared objective to help patients.  

“This is the best kind of collaboration, is to actually have researchers on both sides working actively together on a common problem, common dataset, common models,” says Glass. “I tend to think that the more people that are thinking about the problem, the better.”

Although speech is relatively simple data to gather, large, analyzable datasets are not always easy to find. Takeda assisted Glass’s project during Round 1 of the program by offering researchers access to a wider range of datasets than they would have otherwise been able to obtain.

“Our work with Takeda has definitely given us more access than we would have if we were just trying to find health-related datasets that are publicly available. There aren’t a lot of them,” says R’mani Symon Haulcy, an MIT PhD candidate in electrical engineering and computer science and a Takeda Fellow who is working on the project.

Meanwhile, MIT researchers helped Takeda by providing the expertise to develop advanced modeling tools for big, complex data.

“The business problem that we had requires some really sophisticated and advanced modeling techniques that within Takeda we didn't necessarily have the expertise to build,” says Davies. “MIT and the program has brought that to the table, to allow us to develop algorithmic approaches to complex problems.”

Ultimately, the program, Davies says, has been educational on both sides — providing participants at Takeda with knowledge of how much AI can accomplish in the industry and offering MIT researchers insight into how industry develops and commercializes new drugs, as well as how academic research can translate to very real problems related to human health.

“Meaningful progress of AI and ML in biopharmaceutical applications has been relatively slow. But I think the MIT-Takeda Program has really shown that we and the industry can be successful in the space and in optimizing the likelihood of success of bringing medicines to patients faster and doing it more efficiently,” says Davies. “We're just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we can all do using AI and ML more broadly. I think that's a super-exciting place for us to be … to really drive this to be a much more organic part of what we do each and every day across the industry for patients to benefit.”

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Illuminating the successes and struggles of MIT Black history

When Victor Ransom ’42 arrived at MIT from New York City in 1941, he discovered a campus electrified by the war effort. People scurried between what he described as MIT’s “massive, unsympathetic buildings” as the campus underwent a transformation that took on new urgency after the attacks on Pearl Harbor that December.

During his sophomore year, Ransom took leave from MIT and joined the Tuskegee Airmen, a group of Black pilots who later earned accolades for their performance in combat. But the airmen experienced racism and segregation during the war. In 1945 Ransom, along with a number of other MIT alumni, took part in protests against the discrimination they faced.

Ransom finished his MIT studies after the war and moved to Virginia to work for NACA, the predecessor to NASA, joining a growing group of Black MIT alumni, faculty, and students who would play a vital role in the U.S. space program. NACA paid for Ransom’s graduate studies, but the nearby University of Virginia would not accept Black students, leading him to move to Cleveland, Ohio, where he attended Case Western Reserve University. Despite the hurdles he faced, Ransom would go on to have a successful career at the renowned Bell Laboratories and in the communications industry.

Ransom’s story is one of the many rich histories highlighted by the MIT Black History Project, an ongoing effort to research and tell the stories of MIT’s Black community that first began in 1995. Sponsored by the Office of the Provost, the project has uncovered more than 150 years of the Black experience at MIT.

“This important work illustrates a more complete telling of the MIT story and provides a platform to reflect on and share some of the Institute’s untold stories,” says Provost Cynthia Barnhart.

The project is led by founder and director Clarence Williams SM ’94, who is also an adjunct professor emeritus at MIT and former special assistant to the president.

“The mission of the project, in my view, is to highlight the achievements that these people have made,” Williams says. “We’re trying to document the role and presence of Black students, faculty, and administrators, and to celebrate their significant role in MIT’s history. Their experience is a model that we should use to continue the progress we’ve made.”

Ransom’s story intersects with a number of influential events in MIT’s history, but it is only one perspective in a diverse array of Black experiences captured by the project. The project’s organizers seek to broaden that perspective through a dedicated page on their website, where people are invited to share their own pieces of MIT Black history and contribute to research efforts.

“A vision for the project is that it become more of a collective enterprise — that students, faculty, administrators, and staff contribute through collaborative annotation and citizen archiving,” says Nelly Rosario ’94, an associate professor at Williams College who serves as the project’s assistant director of writing. “There is no single Black history. There is no single history of anything.”

The project takes shape

Williams dates the origins of the Black History Project to 1972, when a group of Black MIT students led by Shirley Jackson ’68, PhD ’73 demanded the Institute do more to increase the number of students, faculty, and administrators of color. That year, Williams was appointed assistant dean of MIT’s graduate school. He went on to serve in a number of positions over the next three decades as he worked to increase support for students of color at MIT.

After receiving support from Institute leadership, Williams officially launched the MIT Black History Project in 1995.

“We’re helping the Institute understand the atmosphere that increased the number of underrepresented minority students, faculty, and administrators in our institution,” Williams says, noting there’s still work to be done to attract and support students from diverse backgrounds. “This history puts that progress into context. Seeing is believing, and it will help us and other Institutions understand MIT’s model.”

Research has involved working with Institute Archives, MIT Libraries, and the MIT Museum as well as gleaning information from reports, newspapers, memoirs, and novels.

“It’s not research centered on any one particular archive,” Rosario says. “Something mentioned on social media might help us make unexpected connections. Using diverse sources, I try to fill in missing qualitative and quantitative data. The research has to be creative and curiosity-driven. You have to take leaps and go in counterintuitive directions.”

The archive on the project’s website is organized into eras, with stories focused around specific subjects like NASA, the Tuskegee Airmen, and the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. at MIT. Visitors to the website, which was redesigned in 2018 by developers who also worked on the website of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, can sort publications based on timeframe, type of MIT affiliation, researcher, and more.

“As a writer, I think about how different combinations of artifacts tell specific stories,” Rosario says. “There are infinite ways of recombining and thinking about the information revealed by these artifacts in various contexts. That’s something we hope people can contribute: stories that aren’t already known or apparent.”

Fellow member of the founding group Robert Dunbar has been working to put together films and other presentations based on the stories collected.

Other efforts include expanding on research initiated by course 21H.SO1 (MIT and Slavery), administering the MIT MLK Visiting Professor and Scholars Program website, engaging in various Black Alumni/ae of MIT (BAMIT) endeavors, and presenting at events hosted by entities such as MIT Club of Texas and MIT Haystack Observatory.

“Having direct access to Clarence and his work on the Black History Project were essential onboarding tools for me,” says John Dozier, the Institute Community and Equity Officer, who started at MIT in March 2020. “I came to the Institute with very little experience or knowledge of MIT’s history. Clarence and Nelly’s work bring us stories, perspectives, and details that you just can’t find any other way.”

More recently, organizers curated audio clips from Williams’s 2001 book, “Technology and the Dream,” for an MIT Museum exhibit featuring interviews with Black alumni, faculty, and administrators, along with corresponding pictures and short biographies. The interactive exhibit will be on display for at least another year in the museum.

“While a portion of the interviews Clarence had conducted had been transcribed and published, no one had actually listened to the tapes since a few transcribers did it,” MIT Museum Director of Collections Deborah Douglas explains. “What we learned is that despite being similar to the transcripts, it was a revelation to hear the voices. What’s not in the transcripts is the laughter, the emotion, the asides that get made. It offered a brand new set of insights into this collection that dates back 30 years.”

Weaving history into the present

The project’s organizers say they’ve gotten extremely positive feedback from people who have gone through the stories and learned something or related on a personal level.

“We’ve had almost a million visitors to our website, so it’s clear the world is interested in what MIT is doing in this arena,” Williams says.

Rosario calls her work on the project a “labor of love” as she and other members of the team conduct research on the side of full-time jobs. She hopes future work will be guided by the curiosities and interests of the MIT community.

“We’re not personally on campus, so it’s important to go beyond archival research and engage current students, faculty, and administrators in this conversation,” Rosario says. “Rather than simply document the past, we hope the project will help activate new questions about the MIT Black experience at present.”

Indeed, Rosario says unraveling the threads of history could hold the most value for future generations.

“It’s important to see ourselves as part of a continuous thread,” Rosario says, “to be able to reach back and anchor ourselves for what’s here and what’s coming.”    

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School of Science presents 2023 Infinite Expansion Awards

The MIT School of Science has announced seven postdocs and research scientists as recipients of the 2023 Infinite Expansion Award. Nominated by their peers and mentors, the awardees are recognized not only for their exceptional science, but for mentoring and advising junior colleagues, supporting educational programs, working with the MIT Postdoctoral Association, or contributing some other way to the Institute.

The 2023 Infinite Expansion award winners in the School of Science are:

• Nat Clarke, a postdoc in the Department of Biology, nominated by Professor Adam Martin;

• Christopher Cueva, a research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences nominated by assistant professor and McGovern Institute for Brain Research associate investigator Guangyu Robert Yang;

• Michael Fausnaugh, a research scientist in the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, nominated by Senior Research Scientist George Ricker;

• Gareth Izon, a postdoc in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences nominated by Professor Roger Summons;

• Kyle Jenks, a postdoc in the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, nominated by professor and Picower Institute investigator Mriganka Sur;

• Vignesh Palani, a postdoc in the Department of Chemistry, nominated by Assistant Professor Alison Wendlandt; and

• Matheus Victor, a postdoc in the Picower Institute, nominated by professor and Picower Institute director Li-Huei Tsai.

A monetary award is granted to recipients, and a celebratory reception will be held for the winners this spring with family, friends, nominators, and recipients of the Infinite Expansion Award.

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3 Questions: The power of music in advancing social justice

It Must Be Now! is an initiative created in response to the racial reckoning of 2020. Multiple events for the MIT community were held throughout 2021 and 2022, leading to an historic multidisciplinary concert in Kresge Auditorium in May 2022, featuring new works by composers Terri Lyne Carrington, Braxton Cook, and Sean Jones, whose creations touched on the themes of racial justice. Some 150 student musicians and guest artists including turntablists, vocalists, spoken word artists, a dancer, and the renowned visual artist and filmmaker Mickalene Thomas also took part.

Frederick Harris Jr., senior lecturer in music at MIT and music director of the MIT Wind Ensemble and MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, initiated and leads the It Must Be Now! project, which is produced by MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST) and MIT Music and Theater Arts. Here, Harris discusses the project and describes how music can serve to advance social justice.

Q: Why is music such a powerful vehicle for storytelling around topics of social justice?

A: Music goes straight to the heart. It communicates with nuance and visceral impact. It can be overt and ambiguous. It’s an incredible vehicle for freedom of expression, providing performers and listeners the opportunity for reflection, contemplation, joy, and celebration.

It has long been a prime force in telling the stories of the plight of Black Americans and other marginalized populations as well as celebrating their vast contributions. Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, and many other major jazz artists have long addressed racial issues through their music and words. Today, new generations of musicians continue to sing and play their own experiences.

The universality of music moves us — emotionally and physically — in unique ways.

It has the power to expand, challenge, and change the way we see the world.

Q: You created the It Must Be Now! initiative. What has been the impact on campus?

A: Our six community events began deep conversations on topics like the common struggles, inherent truths, and sheer resilience of Black women, and Pangea (an ancient supercontinent) as an Afro-futurism vehicle, probing whether a more geographically linked world might make a difference in human relationships. The ideas and dialogues these events initiated created a rare space for students to explore their critical and creative thinking skills on matters of inequity and social justice.

The It Must Be Now! concert held in May 2022 embodied the themes of these events with the world premieres of compositions by leading musicians Terri Lyne Carrington, Braxton Cook, and Sean Jones. The 150 student musicians featured in the concert were a major part of how these celebrated artists told their stories. I think the experience gave all of us the courage to be better storytellers ourselves, finding our voices to keep the mission of human betterment in our lives.

The multidisciplinary concept of It Must Be Now! — bringing together instrumental ensembles, vocalists, spoken word, turntablists, a dancer, and the renowned visual artist and filmmaker, Mickalene Thomas — gave the MIT community a response to the recent racial reckoning that reflected the magnitude and urgency of the situation. And it demonstrated the emotional power possible when bringing together all of these elements in one setting.

Q: What would you hope to see as next steps for It Must Be Now! and for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts at MIT?

A: Change requires a sustained effort. I think we need platforms for multitudes of voices from MIT and beyond our campus to embrace hard conversations about inequity and racism. And we need to continue to acknowledge and celebrate the lives and cultural contributions of those who have endured injustices historically and those who experience it today.

It Must Be Now! should provide more opportunities for students to expresses themselves and to use the storytelling power of the arts to draw attention to what is and isn’t working on campus. And students and administrative leaders need to be in regular dialog for mapping the future. Bringing DEI leaders to campus from K-12 education, other universities, government, and corporations will also help form a bridge to change.

If we can connect awareness and education to transformative actions and practices, MIT has a greater chance of making a difference in campus culture and being a leader in advancing DEI issues.

After the It Must Be Now! concert, Terri Lyne Carrington noted: “MIT has been in the forefront of moving the world forward in many ways, and it’s exciting to see new possibilities and potential from the Institution on this frontier as well. Change must be now. Justice must be now.”

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Comedy meets mathematics in a new opera at MIT

Over the course of her career, the composer Elena Ruehr has found inspiration in very different writers and very different worlds. She has, for example, set poems by Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes to music.

Her latest project, “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage,” recently premiered at MIT and marks another stylistic turn. And as with many artistic projects, the initial spark was serendipitous.

Victorian scientific mavens

Ruehr, a senior lecturer in MIT Music and Theater Arts and a celebrated, versatile composer, was listening to National Public Radio while making dinner when she heard an interview with Sydney Padua, the author of a graphic novel imagining the 19th-century English prodigies Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage as crime-fighting sleuths — the book is subtitled “The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer.”

Ruehr’s ears immediately pricked up. One reason is that Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, and Ruehr has a particular interest in the famous Romantic poet. “Our family is famous for making things up, so you have to take this with a grain of salt,” she says, laughing, “but there’s a story that we are descendants of Lord Byron through an illegitimate child he had with a maid.”

Lovelace was also a fascinating figure: She was a brilliant mathematician who collaborated with Babbage, a polymathic scientist credited for being one of the creators of the modern concept of computers. Ruehr bought Padua’s book, loved it, and decided to adapt it into an opera in collaboration with the renowned librettist Royce Vavrek, the winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music for “Angel’s Bone” (with the composer Du Yun). 

Now Ruehr and Vavrek’s piece has finally premiered, about eight years after chancing on that radio show. That the project came to fruition at MIT — where it received a 2022-23 Visiting Artist Grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), from the 2022-23 Ida Ely Rubin Visiting Artist Fund — felt entirely natural to Ruehr, and not simply because she has been teaching there since 1992. “Some of the students know this book and love it — they would get it for Christmas,” she says. “I really wanted the opera to be produced at MIT because it seems to be such an important MIT kind of subject.”

Finding partners

In order to get this unconventional project off the ground, Ruehr knew she would need unconventional collaborators, so she approached the Boston-based Guerilla Opera and its artistic director, Aliana de la Guardia — who was not familiar with the main protagonists.

“I'm not a math person, so I had no idea of either Lovelace or Babbage,” de la Guardia says. “What drew me to this opera is that it is not a ‘biopic opera,’ but it takes these two real characters and then it's like, ‘What if everything just turned crazy?’ We see mathematics used in a whimsical way, like the old cartoon ‘Donald in Mathmagic Land.’” 

Ruehr wrote with the Guerilla Opera musicians in mind, so her piece uses a violin, cello, clarinet, and percussion, along with four singers (including de la Guardia and Aaron Engebreth as the title characters). But of course, this modest size also is a practical asset. “That's a very lean opera — it's only got eight people — which is great because it’s hard to raise money for modern opera, so you want to make it very easy to produce,” Ruehr says.

Steampunk meets whimsy

This does not mean that the work thinks small, however. Musically ambitious, “The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage” lands in the blurry area between musical theater and opera, with Ruehr putting her own spin on the steampunk aesthetic that is very present in the source material. “To me, steampunk combines the old and the new, so that's how I approached it,” she says. “I wanted to have a structural and musical style that was a little bit like Rossini — the most popular opera composer at the time of Lovelace and Babbage — but then have a layer of modernism on top of it.”

It is not a coincidence that Rossini was a master of comic opera, or that de la Guardia mentioned whimsy, because the new project is faithful to the graphic novel’s rambunctious spirit and is not afraid of levity. Ruehr points out that while contemporary classical music has evolved and is now more approachable than it might have been 20 to 50 years ago, “the humor factor is very rare, and I don't understand why. Some of the smartest people on the planet are comedians,” she adds, “and I don't understand why humor isn't as artistically valued as anything else.” 

Artistically spurred by MIT

For Ruehr, teaching at MIT has played a central role in the evolution of her own music, and she is both challenged and spurred by her students. “They want to know, ‘How is it that we hear sound and we have an emotional response?’” she says. “They're not going to say, ‘That sounds like Mozart so it's good.’ They're going to say, ‘Why does it work?’ I realized that I could bang my head against the wall trying to make something complicated and it would never satisfy them because they would get it instantly,” she continues. “But to write something that engaged them emotionally, that was a little bit of a challenge. There are dance numbers in my piece, a sense of rhythm that's kind of more regular than a lot of modern music because I'm trying to appeal to that emotional response.”

While “Lovelace and Babbage” is an engaging, approachable piece, it does not sacrifice musical sophistication. “I do not think that accessible means dumbed down — I take a stand about that,” Ruehr says. “I actually think that accessible and intelligent and smart is very possible, and it is my mission as an artist.”

The production was presented by CAST, MIT Music and Theater Arts, and Guerilla Opera. Additional project development support was received from the Council for the Arts at MIT and the DeFlorez Fund for Humor.

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MIT wins 83rd Putnam Mathematical Competition, sweeps top five spots for third consecutive year

The MIT math dynasty continues to break records for its performance in the annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. For the third year in a row, MIT students corralled all five of the top Putnam Fellow spots, and for the fourth time in as many years, won the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize for the top-scoring woman. In total, a striking 70 out of this year’s top 100 test-takers were MIT students, including 21 of the top 25.

In its 83rd year, the Putnam Competition is the premier mathematical competition for undergraduate students in the United States and Canada and is administered by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). The intense six-hour exam, which features 12 proof-based math problems, was taken by 3,415 students from 456 institutions on Dec. 3, 2022. Results were announced last week.

Top honors

This year's Putnam Fellows are first-years Papon Lapate and Luke Robitaille, second-year Brian Liu, junior Mingyang Deng, and senior Daniel Zhu. Each Putnam Fellow is awarded $2,500. Zhu has placed as a fellow every year that he has competed in the exam.

The 2022 Putnam Team from MIT is (in alphabetical order) Deng, Robitaille, and Zhu. Teams are composed of the three top scorers from each participating institution. This is the MIT team’s seventh first-place win in the past nine competitions. This year, Harvard University came in second, and Stanford University third. The MIT Department of Mathematics is awarded $25,000 for being the top team, and each team member is awarded $1,000. 

Junior Binwei Yan, who finished in the top 16, received the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, which includes a $1,000 award. She is the sixth MIT student to receive this honor since the award began in 1992, and the fourth in a row for MIT.

MIT students also dominated the rest of the scoreboard: nine of the next 11 (each awarded $1,000), seven of the next nine (each awarded $250), and 49 of the 75 honorable mention rankings. 

Of test-takers ranked 101-200, there were 28 MIT students, and from 201-500, 47 were from MIT. In total, 145 MIT students placed in the top 500.

“Our students' outstanding performance on the Putnam is a testament to their dedication and hard work,” says Yufei Zhao, associate professor of mathematics, who prepares a group of first-year students for the competition through his Putnam Seminar. “The results of the Putnam are a source of pride for our institution and a reflection of the exceptional talent of our students.”

This year, about 180 MIT students took the exam, which consists of 12 problems worth 10 points each. The top score was 101 out of 120 points, but the average score was approximately 8.2; the median score was one. 

“For all those who did not perform as they hoped, please remember Pierre de Coubertin's quote: ‘The most important thing is not winning but taking part!,’” says math department head Michel Goemans, the RSA Professor of Mathematics.

A full list of the rankings and names of the students can be found on the Putnam website.

Putnam alumni

About half of the top scorers are alumni of the MIT Math PRIMES (Program for Research in Mathematics, Engineering and Science) high school outreach program. This list includes Liu, Robitaille, and Zhu, five of the next top 11, and three out of the next nine winners, along with many of the students receiving honorable mentions.

“Every year, I see familiar names of former PRIMES students among Putnam winners,” says Pavel Etingof, a math professor who is also PRIMES’ chief research advisor. “For the second year in a row, three out of five Putnam Fellows are PRIMES alumni, all of them from MIT. PRIMES truly serves as a pipeline of mathematical talent for MIT!”

In the history of the Putnam Competition, only eight students have become Putnam Fellows all four years that they've participated, including three from MIT and a Harvard student who is now a math professor at MIT, Bjorn Poonen. Only 24 other students in the contest's history are three-time Putnam Fellows; Zhu joins six other former MIT students, including Zhao ’10, PhD ’15, who earned this honor. (Zhu was ineligible to try for four, due to the pandemic’s pause on the 2020 competition.)

Other MIT math professors who were Putnam Fellows include Davesh Maulik, Peter Shor, and David Vogan PhD ’76. One of the contributors to the competition’s problems included former Putnam coach and MIT math emeritus professor Richard Stanley, the founder of MIT’s Putnam Seminar.

MIT’s 2019 top scorers made Putnam history when all five Putnam Fellows were from one institution for the first time. The competition was founded in 1927 by Elizabeth Lowell Putnam in memory of her husband William Lowell Putnam and has been offered annually since 1938, administered by the MMA.

“No matter how well a student performs in the competition, the experience of engaging intensely with challenging problems develops the student's mathematical power and creativity,” says Putnam Mathematical Competition Director Daniel Ullman. “Kudos to every participant!”

Adds MAA Executive Director Michael Pearson, “The future of mathematics is bright because of these students, and we look forward to their continued success.”

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How MIT helped young Roxbury photographers of the 1960s turn pro

Fifty years ago, Roxbury was the poorest neighborhood in Boston, just as it is now. Back then, its predominantly Black residents lived with intense and open racism. Hundreds of Roxbury buildings had been knocked down for a highway that was never built, leaving vacant lots. Nationally, the Vietnam War and the Black Power movement were at their peaks. In this turbulent time, "a lot of people were trying to make decisions about what they were going to do with their lives, and I was one of them," recalls Hakim Raquib.

One day, as he came downstairs from the Bay State Banner community newspaper in the heart of Roxbury, a chance encounter changed Raquib's life. He ran into a friend, Wesley Williams, who showed him the busy studio on the ground floor that was home to the Roxbury Photographers Training Program (RPTP).

Launched by MIT's Creative Photography Laboratory, the RPTP aimed to teach young Roxbury residents how to become professional photographers. Raquib signed on and started on that track, launching a distinguished career in commercial and artistic photography and education that continues today.

"Once I walked through the door of the RPTP, I never turned back," he says. "I owe the program a great deal. And I say that because without it, I don't believe I would have experienced what I have thus far in my life. The camera was truly a vehicle for me to see the world in many different ways."

MIT instructors and, even more so, other students in the program "taught me basically how to see," says John Posey, another RPTP alum. "It really marked me for my life."

Today, early works by Posey and Raquib are among those from RPTP on display as part of "To Look and Learn: The Creative Photography Laboratory at MIT," an exhibition on view at the MIT Museum.

Going pro in the community

Founded in 1965 by the prominent photographer and educator Minor White, the Creative Photography Laboratory (CPL) itself pursued a very different mission than its RPTP offshoot, says Gary Van Zante, curator of the photography collections at the MIT Museum. CPL was an academic entity at MIT, but "it was not intended to teach students how to become professional photographers," he says. "It was intended to teach them to learn to look and understand the world through photography."

CPL faculty George Thomas and Gus Kayafas started RPTP in 1968, the year of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination and the riots across the United States that followed. It was one of many community initiatives that MIT began during that era, says Van Zante.

The university has few records about how RPTP was founded, but the goal was to offer a professional opportunity track for young people of color in an era when it was often difficult for them to find a profession, he says. The studio in the heart of Roxbury included a darkroom and a gallery. Students were well supplied with film and photographic equipment, with support from Polaroid Corporation.

Planning the MIT Museum’s CPL exhibition during the Covid-19 pandemic, Van Zante uncovered more of the program’s history by contacting and interviewing surviving MIT instructors and former RPTP students. Many of these alumni went on to successful careers in photography, and often education as well. As Van Zante and his museum colleagues learned more about RPTP, they decided it should be represented in the CPL exhibition.

Showing the surviving images

But presenting RPTP in an exhibition on photography raised one big problem: The Roxbury students retained little or nothing of their works created all those decades ago. "We were putting the exhibition together from fragments," Van Zante remarks.

Fortunately, Posey held onto negatives from his Around the Block collection, which could be printed in very high quality for the exhibition. These are images he shot on the Roxbury street. The most famous, with an early title of "Survival," was of a man sleeping on a stoop. He was experiencing homelessness, part of the street scene, and Posey photographed him that way.

Raquib still owned "Bolero," a closeup of the face of a young girl in a drum-and-bugle corps that was playing Ravel's orchestral work. "I wanted to make a powerful statement," he says. "This young child's eyes in the beauty of their dark skin, coming out of blackness. It gave me great delight in making that print." This image was the first to prove to Raquib that he could say what he wanted to say in a photo.

His "Bilquis," named for the Biblical Queen of Sheba, is an expression of African culture, with a woman wearing jewelry brought back from Kenya that sparkles in natural light from a window. "I wanted to keep that darkness, that mystery in the skin," he comments. "The eyes are a little bit different in that one; they are more mysterious; they don't pop out at you."

Omobowale Ayorinde's photos on display at the museum include a number of sensitive portraits of Nigerian workers from a trip there in 1969, such as "The Weaver’s Son." His Africa trip, inspired by an exploration of his own African roots, was also an opportunity to field-test the photographic skills he had learned at RPTP, as a trial run for professional practice, Van Zante says. In fact, Ayorinde developed a particular skill with portraiture at that early stage that remained important to his career work.

Polished for publication

With initial technical guidance from the MIT experts, and intense collaboration and constructive criticism with their peers, RPTP students rapidly gathered the expertise to capture striking images.

The instructors taught the use of light meters and the zone system (a technique to achieve the best possible exposures for each image) as well as how to develop film and print photos correctly. "We stayed in the darkroom all night long," Posey remembers. "We were there seven days a week."

"Of course, we were trying to break the rules, to make our own statements, but the instructors enhanced the quality of the work," says Raquib. "The most important thing for us was that we were always making prints. That was my biggest fun, printing."

While many students came and went, a core group was very serious and stayed with the program throughout. "Everybody was happy," he says. "It was restful, peaceful, but it was always busy. The camaraderie was unshakable. We grew together. "

Being downstairs from the Bay State Banner office proved to be a major benefit, because the students could work as press photographers, alongside journalists who would bring them on assignments.

Ayorinde, Posey, and Raquib also began taking fashion shots and selling them to magazines. Additionally, the book publishers who were then numerous in Boston began buying their shots of their community. "Nobody was getting the essence of, the sense of the community that we were providing," Raquib says. "I think we were responsible for changing the narrative in some way."

Public shows in RPTP's own gallery and elsewhere in Boston further broadened the impact of this generation of photographers.

At the time, the Roxbury community was neglected, discriminated against and given a great deal of bad ink in the media. "You don't particularly respect what people are saying about it or you," Raquib says. "You know there are good people in this community, beautiful people. And that was the option, to use the camera to show that. We were special, because we had cameras. and we knew that we could walk into most situations."

During that era, MIT often spun off its community initiatives with the expectation that they eventually would evolve into self-managed and self-funded efforts. That was the case with RPTP, and the university eventually withdrew from the program. The program's backers struggled to find new means of support, and the effort eventually closed. "I think MIT could have done more in sustaining the program a little bit longer," Raquib says.

But the RPTP program, he says, changed his life and many others for the better. And the Roxbury contingent achieved what CPL tried to teach in its academic courses back at MIT: to look and see and understand the world through photography.

"MIT gave us everything we needed to make it work, as far as equipment, as far as film, as far as the knowledge," Posey says. "Everything I do in life comes back to the program, as far as teaching me how to see the world around me and the world that's beyond."

Interviews for this story were conducted by Gary Van Zante, curator of architecture, design and photography, and others at the MIT Museum.

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Celebrating the high-speed photography of late MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton

A hummingbird mid-flight, a bullet piercing an apple, and a drop of milk forming a crown-like splash, are all images never seen by the human eye until the late MIT professor Harold “Doc” Edgerton captured them.

Having transformed the stroboscope from a laboratory instrument into an everyday device, he is considered the father of modern high-speed photography — affectionately known by his students and staff as “Doc,” and as “Papa Flash” by Jacques Cousteau and the crew of their vessel Calypso. Hundreds of Edgerton’s images and his fascinating notebooks are now on display via the Edgerton Digital Collections.

Last month, Edgerton Hall (Room 34-101) was filled with students and alumni to celebrate the work and legacy of the beloved MIT professor. People who worked closely with Edgerton, including Marty Klein '62 and Charlie Mazel SM '76, were in attendance. Over the course of the hour, Edgerton’s former teaching assistant and founding director of the MIT Edgerton Center, Professor J. Kim Vandiver SM '69, PhD '75, shared Edgerton’s legacy of photography, innovation, and mentorship.

Edgerton helped further many fields, from sports photography to side-scan sonar and marine archaeology to wartime night reconnaissance photography. He accompanied Jacques Cousteau on numerous marine expeditions and searched for shipwrecks both ancient and modern, and he developed 50,000 watt-second strobes used for nighttime aerial reconnaissance in support of the Normandy landings in June 1944.

Though Edgerton began his development of high-speed imaging technology for science and engineering purposes, many of his photos became acclaimed works of art and are found in collections around the world. He helped many students pursue their dreams, sometimes by simply supplying a workbench, tools, and a supportive atmosphere.

Vandiver told of his own high-speed, color schlieren photography project (a technique to photograph the flow of air around objects). With Edgerton’s support and mentorship, the photos Vandiver created captured vivid images of the hot air above a candle, ice cubes in water, and soap bubbles. These images also enjoyed wide circulation.  

At MIT, Edgerton was known not just for his photography but for his generous spirit and love of learning. The MIT Edgerton Center, founded by Vandiver in 1992, continues Edgerton’s legacy by providing hands-on learning opportunities for the MIT community and beyond. In 1985, Edgerton helped James Worden ’89 launch the Solar Electric Vehicle Team — the first of its kind in the country. The Edgerton Center adopted the team shortly after its founding in 1992 and has since grown to house a dozen student-led engineering teams. A welcoming space to all, a hallmark of the Edgerton Center is the high number of women on engineering teams and in leadership positions.

Toward the end of his talk, Vandiver quoted his mentor on encouraging the next generation of students in the STEAM disciplines — a mantra that underlies the MIT center that now bears his name. "The trick to education is not to let them know when they are learning something until it is too late," Edgerton had said. Vandiver added: "Show them the fun first, and then the rest is history."

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A new chip for decoding data transmissions demonstrates record-breaking energy efficiency

Imagine using an online banking app to deposit money into your account. Like all information sent over the internet, those communications could be corrupted by noise that inserts errors into the data.

To overcome this problem, senders encode data before they are transmitted, and then a receiver uses a decoding algorithm to correct errors and recover the original message. In some instances, data are received with reliability information that helps the decoder figure out which parts of a transmission are likely errors.

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have developed a decoder chip that employs a new statistical model to use this reliability information in a way that is much simpler and faster than conventional techniques.

Their chip uses a universal decoding algorithm the team previously developed, which can unravel any error correcting code. Typically, decoding hardware can only process one particular type of code. This new, universal decoder chip has broken the record for energy-efficient decoding, performing between 10 and 100 times better than other hardware.

This advance could enable mobile devices with fewer chips, since they would no longer need separate hardware for multiple codes. This would reduce the amount of material needed for fabrication, cutting costs and improving sustainability. By making the decoding process less energy intensive, the chip could also improve device performance and lengthen battery life. It could be especially useful for demanding applications like augmented and virtual reality and 5G networks.

“This is the first time anyone has broken below the 1 picojoule-per-bit barrier for decoding. That is roughly the same amount of energy you need to transmit a bit inside the system. It had been a big symbolic threshold, but it also changes the balance in the receiver of what might be the most pressing part from an energy perspective — we can move that away from the decoder to other elements,” says Muriel Médard, the School of Science NEC Professor of Software Science and Engineering, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a co-author of a paper presenting the new chip.

Médard’s co-authors include lead author Arslan Riaz, a graduate student at Boston University (BU); Rabia Tugce Yazicigil, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at BU; and Ken R. Duffy, then director of the Hamilton Institute at Maynooth University and now a professor at Northeastern University, as well as others from MIT, BU, and Maynooth University. The work is being presented at the International Solid-States Circuits Conference.

Smarter sorting

Digital data are transmitted over a network in the form of bits (0s and 1s). A sender encodes data by adding an error-correcting code, which is a redundant string of 0s and 1s that can be viewed as a hash. Information about this hash is held in a specific code book. A decoding algorithm at the receiver, designed for this particular code, uses its code book and the hash structure to retrieve the original information, which may have been jumbled by noise. Since each algorithm is code-specific, and most require dedicated hardware, a device would need many chips to decode different codes.

The researchers previously demonstrated GRAND (Guessing Random Additive Noise Decoding), a universal decoding algorithm that can crack any code. GRAND works by guessing the noise that affected the transmission, subtracting that noise pattern from the received data, and then checking what remains in a code book. It guesses a series of noise patterns in the order they are likely to occur.

Data are often received with reliability information, also called soft information, that helps a decoder figure out which pieces are errors. The new decoding chip, called ORBGRAND (Ordered Reliability Bits GRAND), uses this reliability information to sort data based on how likely each bit is to be an error.

But it isn’t as simple as ordering single bits. While the most unreliable bit might be the likeliest error, perhaps the third and fourth most unreliable bits together are as likely to be an error as the seventh-most unreliable bit. ORBGRAND uses a new statistical model that can sort bits in this fashion, considering that multiple bits together are as likely to be an error as some single bits.

“If your car isn’t working, soft information might tell you that it is probably the battery. But if it isn’t the battery alone, maybe it is the battery and the alternator together that are causing the problem. This is how a rational person would troubleshoot — you’d say that it could actually be these two things together before going down the list to something that is much less likely,” Médard says.

This is a much more efficient approach than traditional decoders, which would instead look at the code structure and have a performance that is generally designed for the worst-case.

“With a traditional decoder, you’d pull out the blueprint of the car and examine each and every piece. You’ll find the problem, but it will take you a long time and you’ll get very frustrated,” Médard explains.

ORBGRAND stops sorting as soon as a code word is found, which is often very soon. The chip also employs parallelization, generating and testing multiple noise patterns simultaneously so it finds the code word faster. Because the decoder stops working once it finds the code word, its energy consumption stays low even though it runs multiple processes simultaneously.

Record-breaking efficiency

When they compared their approach to other chips, ORBGRAND decoded with maximum accuracy while consuming only 0.76 picojoules of energy per bit, breaking the previous performance record. ORBGRAND consumes between 10 and 100 times less energy than other devices.

One of the biggest challenges of developing the new chip came from this reduced energy consumption, Médard says. With ORBGRAND, generating noise sequences is now so energy-efficient that other processes the researchers hadn’t focused on before, like checking the code word in a code book, consume most of the effort.

“Now, this checking process, which is like turning on the car to see if it works, is the hardest part. So, we need to find more efficient ways to do that,” she says.

The team is also exploring ways to change the modulation of transmissions so they can take advantage of the improved efficiency of the ORBGRAND chip. They also plan to see how their technique could be utilized to more efficiently manage multiple transmissions that overlap.

The research is funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and Science Foundation Ireland.

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Studies of unusual brains reveal critical insights into brain organization, function

E.G. (a pseudonym) is an accomplished woman in her early 60s: She is a college graduate and has an advanced professional degree. She has a stellar vocabulary — in the 98th percentile, according to tests — and has mastered a foreign language (Russian) to the point that she sometimes dreams in it.

She also has, likely since birth, been missing her left temporal lobe, a part of the brain known to be critical for language.

In 2016, E.G. contacted McGovern Institute for Brain Research Investigator Evelina Fedorenko, who studies the computations and brain regions that underlie language processing, to see if her team might be interested in including her in their research.

“E.G. didn’t know about her missing temporal lobe until age 25, when she had a brain scan for an unrelated reason,” says Fedorenko, the Frederick A. (1971) and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Associate Professor of Neuroscience at MIT. “As with many cases of early brain damage, she had no linguistic or cognitive deficits, but brains like hers are invaluable for understanding how cognitive functions reorganize in the tissue that remains. I told her we definitely wanted to study her brain.”

Previous studies have shown that language processing relies on an interconnected network of frontal and temporal regions in the left hemisphere of the brain. E.G.’s unique brain presented an opportunity for Fedorenko’s team to explore how language develops in the absence of the temporal part of these core language regions.

Their results appeared recently in the journal Neuropsychologia. They found, for the first time, that temporal language regions appear to be critical for the emergence of frontal language regions in the same hemisphere — meaning, without a left temporal lobe, E.G.’s intact frontal lobe did not develop a capacity for language.

They also reveal much more: E.G.’s language system resides happily in her right hemisphere. “Our findings provide both visual and statistical proof of the brain’s remarkable plasticity, its ability to reorganize, in the face of extensive early damage,” says Greta Tuckute, a graduate student in the Fedorenko lab and first author of the paper.

In an introduction to the study, E.G. herself puts the social implications of the findings starkly. “Please do not call my brain abnormal, that creeps me out,” she writes. “My brain is atypical. If not for accidentally finding these differences, no one would pick me out of a crowd as likely to have these, or any other differences that make me unique.”

How we process language

The frontal and temporal lobes are part of the cerebrum, the largest part of the brain. The cerebrum controls many functions, including the five senses, language, working memory, personality, movement, learning, and reasoning. It is divided into two hemispheres, the left and the right, by a deep longitudinal fissure. The two hemispheres communicate via a thick bundle of nerve fibers called the corpus callosum. Each hemisphere comprises four main lobes — frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital. Core parts of the language network reside in the frontal and temporal lobes.

In most individuals, the language system develops in both the right and left hemispheres, with the left side dominant from an early age. The frontal lobe develops slower than the temporal lobe. Together, the interconnected frontal and temporal language areas enable us to understand and produce words, phrases, and sentences.

How, then, did E.G., with no left temporal lobe, come to speak, comprehend, and remember verbal information (even a foreign language) with such proficiency?

Simply put, the right hemisphere took over: “E.G. has a completely well-functioning neurotypical-like language system in her right hemisphere,” says Tuckute. “It is incredible that a person can use a single hemisphere — and the right hemisphere at that, which in most people is not the dominant hemisphere where language is processed — and be perfectly fine.”

Journey into E.G.’s brain

In the study, the researchers conducted two scans of E.G.’s brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), one in 2016 and one in 2019, and had her complete a range of behavioral tests. fMRI measures the level of blood oxygenation across the brain and can be used to make inferences about where neural activity is taking place. The researchers also scanned the brains of 151 “neurotypical” people. The large number of participants, combined with robust task paradigms and rigorous statistical analyses made it possible to draw conclusions from a single case such as E.G.

Fedorenko is a staunch advocate of the single case study approach — common in medicine, but not currently in neuroscience. “Unusual brains — and unusual individuals more broadly — can provide critical insights into brain organization and function that we simply cannot gain by looking at more typical brains.” Studying individual brains with fMRI, however, requires paradigms that work robustly at the single-brain level. This is not true of most paradigms used in the field, which require averaging many brains together to obtain an effect. Developing individual-level fMRI paradigms for language research has been the focus of Fedorenko’s early work, although the main reason for doing so had nothing to do with studying atypical brains: individual-level analyses are simply better — they are more sensitive and their results are more interpretable and meaningful.

“Looking at high-quality data in an individual participant versus looking at a group-level map is akin to using a high-precision microscope versus looking with a naked myopic eye, when all you see is a blur,” she wrote in an article published in Current Opinion in Behaviorial Sciences in 2021. Having developed and validated such paradigms, though, is now allowing Fedorenko and her group to probe interesting brains.

While in the scanner, each participant performed a task that Fedorenko began developing more than a decade ago. They were presented with a series of words that form real, meaningful sentences, and with a series of “non-words” — strings of letters that are pronounceable, but without meaning. In typical brains, language areas respond more strongly when participants read sentences compared to when they read non-word sequences.

Similarly, in response to the real sentences, the language regions in E.G.’s brain were bursting with activity while the left frontal lobe regions remained silent. In the neurotypical participants, the language regions in both the left and right frontal and temporal lobes lit up, with the left areas outshining the right.

“E.G. showed a very strong response in the right temporal and frontal regions that process language,” says Tuckute. “And if you look at the controls, whose language-dominant hemisphere is in the left, E.G.’s response in her right hemisphere was similar — or even higher — compared to theirs, just on the opposite side.”

Leaving no stone unturned, the researchers next asked whether the lack of language responses in E.G.’s left frontal lobe might be due to a general lack of response to cognitive tasks, rather than just to language. So they conducted a non-language, working-memory task: they had E.G. and the neurotypical participants perform arithmetic addition problems while in the scanner. In typical brains, this task elicits responses in frontal and parietal areas in both hemispheres.

Not only did regions of E.G.’s right frontal lobe light up in response to the task, those in her left frontal lobe did, too. “Both E.G.’s language-dominant (right) hemisphere, and her non-language-dominant (left) hemisphere, showed robust responses to this working-memory task,” says Tuckute. “So, yes, there’s definitely cognitive processing going on there. This selective lack of language responses in E.G.’s left frontal lobe led us to conclude that, for language, you need the temporal language region to ‘wire up’ the frontal language region.”

Next steps

In science, the answer to one question opens the door to untold more. “In E.G., language took over a large chunk of the right frontal and temporal lobes,” says Fedorenko. “So what happens to the functions that in neurotypical individuals generally live in the right hemisphere?”

Many of those, she says, are social functions. The team has already tested E.G. on social tasks and is currently exploring how those social functions cohabit with the language ones in her right hemisphere. How can they all fit? Do some of the social functions have to migrate to other parts of the brain? They are also working with E.G.’s family; they have now scanned E.G.’s three siblings (one of whom is missing most of her right temporal lobe; the other two are neurotypical) and her father (also neurotypical).

The project has now grown to include many other individuals with interesting brains, who contacted Fedorenko after some of this work was covered by news outlets. The Interesting Brains Project promises to provide unique insights into how our plastic brains reorganize and adapt to various circumstances.

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