Researchers find explanation for interacting giant, hidden ocean waves

In certain parts of the ocean, towering, slow-motion rollercoasters called internal tides trundle along for miles, rising and falling for hundreds of feet in the ocean’s interior while making barely a ripple at the surface. These giant, hidden swells are responsible for alternately drawing warm surface waters down to the deep ocean and pulling marine nutrients up from the abyss.

Internal tides are generated in part by differences in water density, and created along continental shelf breaks, where a shallow seafloor suddenly drops off like a cliff, creating a setting where lighter water meets denser seas. In such regions, tides on the surface produce oscillating, vertical currents, which in turn generate waves below the surface, at the interface between warmer, shallow water, and colder, deeper water. These subsurface waves are called “internal tides,” as they are “internal” to the ocean and travel at the same frequency as surface tides. Internal tides are largely calm in some regions but can become chaotic near shelf breaks, where scientists have been unable to predict their paths.

Now for the first time, ocean engineers and scientists from MIT, the University of Minnesota at Duluth (UMD), and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have accurately simulated the motion of internal tides along a shelf break called the Middle Atlantic Bight — a region off the coast of the eastern U.S. that stretches from Cape Cod in Massachusetts to Cape Hatteras in North Carolina. They found that the tides’ chaotic patterns there could be explained by two oceanic “structures”: the ocean front at the shelf break itself, and the Gulf Stream — a powerful Atlantic current that flows some 250 miles south of the shelf break.  

From the simulations, the team observed that both the shelf break and the Gulf Stream can act as massive oceanic walls, between which internal tides ricochet at angles and speeds that the scientists can now predict.

The researchers have published their findings in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans and the Journal of Physical Oceanography. The team includes Samuel Kelly, an assistant professor at UMD who was a postdoc at MIT for this research; Pierre Lermusiaux, an associate professor of mechanical engineering and ocean science and engineering at MIT; Tim Duda, a senior scientist at WHOI; and Patrick Haley, a research scientist at MIT.

Lermusiaux says the team’s simulations of internal tides could help to improve sonar communications and predict ecosystems and fishery populations, as well as protect offshore oil rigs and provide a better understanding of the ocean’s role in a changing climate.

“Internal tides are a big chunk of energy that’s input to the ocean’s interior from the common [surface] tides,” he explains. “If you know how that energy is dissipated and where it goes, you can provide better predictions and better understand the ocean and climate in general.”

“Dead calm”

The effects of internal waves were first reported in the late 1800s, when Norwegian sailors, attempting to navigate a fjord, experienced a strange phenomenon: Even though the water’s surface appeared calm, their ship seemed to strongly resist sailing forward — a phenomenon later dubbed “dead water.”

“It would be dead calm in the water, and you’d turn your ship on but it wouldn’t move,” Lermusiaux says. “Why? Because the ship is generating internal waves because of the density difference between the light water on top and the salty water on the bottom in the fjord, that keep you in place.”

Since then, scientists have found that surface tides, just like internal tides, are generated by the cyclical, gravitational pull of the sun and the moon, and travel between density-varying mediums. Surface waves travel at the boundary between the ocean and the air, while internal waves and internal tides flow between water layers of varying density.

“What people didn’t really know was, why can those internal tides be so variable and intermittent?” Duda says.

Following the tide

In the summer of 2006, oceanographers embarked on a large-scale scientific cruise, named “Shallow Water ’06,” to generate a detailed picture of how sound waves travel through complex coastal waters, specifically along part of the Middle Atlantic Bight region. The experiment confirmed that internal tides stemmed from the region’s shelf break at predictable intervals. Puzzlingly, the experiment also showed that internal tides arrived back at the shelf break at unpredictable times and locations.

“One would think if they were all generated at the shelf break, they would be more or less uniform, in and out,” Lermusiaux says.

To solve this puzzle, Lermusiaux, Haley, and their colleagues incorporated data from the 2006 cruise into hydrodynamic simulations to represent tides in a realistic ocean environment. These data-driven simulations included not only tides but also “background structures,” such as density gradients, eddies, and currents such as the Gulf Stream, with which tides might interact.

After completing more than 2,500 simulations of the Middle Atlantic Bight region, they observed that internal tides generated close to the shelf break seemed to flow out toward the ocean, only to bounce back once they reached the Gulf Stream. As the Gulf Stream meandered, the exact direction and location of the internal tides became more variable.

"Looking at the initial plots from the simulations, it was obvious that some type of interaction was happening between the internal tide and Gulf Stream,” Kelly says. “But the simulations could produce a huge number of complicated interactions and there are lots of theories for different types of interactions. So we started testing different theories.”

Terms of agreement

The researchers sought to find mathematical equations that would describe the underlying fluid dynamics that they observed in their simulations. To do this, they started with an existing equation that characterizes the behavior of internal tides but involves an idealized scenario, with limited interactions with other features. The team added new “interaction terms,” or factors, into the equations that described the dynamics of the Gulf Stream and the shelf break front, which they derived from their data-driven simulations.

“It was really exciting when we wrote down a set of slightly idealized equations and saw that the internal tides extracted from the complex simulations were obeying almost the exact same equations," Kelly says.

The match between their simulations and equations indicated to the researchers that the Gulf Stream and the shelf break front were indeed influencing the behavior of the internal tides. With this knowledge, they were able to accurately predict the speed and arrival times of internal waves at the shelf break, by first predicting the strength and position of the Gulf Stream over time. They also showed that the strength of the shelf break front alters the speed and arrival times of internal tides.

The team is currently applying their simulations to oceanic regions around Martha’s Vineyard, the Pacific Islands, and Australia, where internal tides are highly variable and their behavior can have a large role in shaping marine ecosystems and mediating the effects of climate change.

“Our work shows that, with data-driven simulations, you can find and add missing terms, and really explain the ocean’s interactions,” Lermusiaux says. “If you look at ocean or atmospheric sciences today, understanding interactions of features is where big questions are.”

This research was funded in part by the Office of Naval Research and the National Science Foundation.

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Barnhart, Stuopis establish medical leave and hospitalization policy review committee

Responding to one of the key recommendations from last spring’s Committee on Academic Performance’s (CAP) report on undergraduate withdrawal and readmissions practices, Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart and Medical Director Cecilia Stuopis have established a committee to review MIT’s medical leave and hospitalization practices and policies for undergraduate and graduate students. This action is one in a series of recent steps the administration has taken to implement the CAP’s recommendations to strengthen the leave and return system for students.

In the charge to the committee, Barnhart and Stuopis wrote, “While MIT has policies and procedures for involuntary medical leave for both undergraduate and graduate students, they are intended to be used only as a last resort. The CAP learned, however, that the specter of an involuntary medical leave creates anxiety in many students.”

Calling this a “clear and pressing issue for the community at large,” Barnhart and Stuopis have tapped Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences professors Rebecca Saxe and Laura Schulz to co-chair the committee of faculty, students, and staff. The committee will consider whether current policies adequately express the approach MIT should follow for students who present a danger to themselves, to the community, or who otherwise are not able to participate in campus life due to mental or physical health issues; whether the implementation of the current policies are adequate and clear; and, if necessary, the committee will make recommendations for improvements.

Barnhart and Stuopis’ charge also requests that the committee consider what practices the Institute should implement to “minimize uncertainty, fear, and distrust” surrounding the hospitalization process and “what procedures are in place, or should be in place, to ensure that students who are hospitalized are supported by MIT.”

The committee’s report is expected in the upcoming spring semester. The full membership list is available here.

“When we were approached about chairing this committee, we were obviously interested because this is such an important topic,” Saxe and Schulz said. “However, we did not accept until we had spoken with a number of administrators around MIT to ensure that there was a true openness to change. What we heard was that people wanted an honest assessment of MIT’s hospitalization and medical leave policies, and that there was political will to revise our practices. We are excited to have such a great committee, and welcome everyone's input into how to tackle this hard problem.”

Saxe and Schulz convened the committee for the first time last week, and have a series of fall meetings scheduled. Additionally, they will be holding two community conversations — one for undergraduates, the other for graduate students — in order for students to share their insights on the current policies.

Undergraduates are invited to join committee members Tamar Weseley, Taylor Sutton — both MIT seniors — and Saxe on Monday, Oct. 3 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in Room 4-370.

Graduate students are encouraged to join graduate student committee members Joy Louveau and Kyle Kotowick and Professor Tamar Schapiro on Tuesday, Oct. 4 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in Room 4-370.

Saxe and Schulz have also set up two other platforms for community feedback to inform the committee’s final report: a survey open to all MIT community members who have thoughts to add, and especially those who have had experience with current medical leave and hospitalization practices. The survey will be open through Oct. 31. The committee will also be accepting public comments via hospitalizationfeedback@mit.edu throughout the fall semester.

Barnhart and Stuopis’ work to set up this new committee represents just one of the action steps the Institute has taken in recent months to respond to the CAP report’s recommendations. The following progress has been made:

• A new flexible "leave of absence" category with fewer administrative requirements has been established so that students can depart for a variety of educational, professional, or wellness reasons. Thirty-four students have requested this new type of leave for the current semester.
• Terminology changes from “withdrawal and readmission” to “leave and return” are complete and leave letters from Student Support Services (S3) are now more supportive in tone and include a concrete action plan, a list of key supportive contacts, and clear expectations for what is required in order for students to return from a leave. Expectations for coursework while on leave are only set by S3 after consultation with the CAP.
• CAP is now the sole decision-maker for return requests, ensuring that S3 can fulfill its core mission of providing support, advice, and guidance to students. And, in an early indication that the CAP is adhering to a key report principle that MIT should help all students who wish to return from a leave and earn a degree to do so, a record high percentage (98 percent) of return requests were granted during the most recent review process.
• All students who returned to MIT from a leave this fall and requested on-campus housing were given offers for on-campus room assignments.

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Engineer, explain thyself

A graduate student doing research on materials for circuit design might not share lab space with someone working on machine learning, but they still have a shared need: to explain what they’re working on to other people. Whether it’s to their advisor, a room full of their peers, a startup accelerator, a project’s funders, or Uncle Frank — at some point everyone who does research is faced with an audience.

And so here comes CommKit, a new online resource poised to make the lives of engineering graduate students easier. Launched on Sept. 22, the CommKit is a website that provides discipline-specific aid to those seeking writing, speaking, and visual design support on a tight deadline. Designed for engineers by engineers — specifically, 50 graduate students who have been working as department- and area-based peer coaches at the MIT Communication Lab — the CommKit was designed to demystify effective scientific communication.

Like most good ideas at MIT, the one for CommKit started with students. While doing peer coaching sessions, graduate students Diana Chien and Scott Olesen, discovered themselves answering many of the same questions, or providing many of the same examples and templates, over and over again. “I remember how overwhelmed I felt as an early graduate student writing abstracts and fellowships,” says Chien. “I googled frantically for support, but the advice I found was scattered randomly and rarely relevant to my field.”

Chien and Olesen approached Jaime Goldstein, who directs the Communication Lab (or Comm Lab), about developing a solution to the need for a consistent go-to resource. The resulting website is organized first by department, and then by communication task — such as poster, grant application, manuscript, or oral presentation. Each task page includes quick tips, structural diagrams, and annotated field-specific examples. “We’re scientists and engineers,” Olesen says. “We thought like scientists and engineers when making the CommKit.”

Enthusiasm about the CommKit, and the Comm Lab’s peer coaching model, is already getting attention beyond campus. “Effectively communicating technical information is a key determinant of the success of students and postdocs at Caltech,” says Trity Pourbahrami, from the Caltech Engineering and Applied Science Division. “I’ve been delighted to connect with the MIT Communication Lab community and look forward to sharing the CommKit with the Caltech community.”

Goldstein, who has directed the Comm Lab since its inception in 2012, says the development of an online resource marks an innovative step forward. The site will continue to evolve, she adds, just as the Comm Lab’s programming has changed and broadened over time so that it could serve more students and be more effective.

Started initially as a cocurricular support program within the Department of Biological Engineering, the Comm Lab has since expanded to include the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Broad Institute. This semester, the program is working with the Sandbox Innovation Program to develop expertise, and coaches, to support students with an interest in innovation.

Each time the program expands to a new department or field, Goldstein adds coaches and content so the program is always immediately relevant for the students it’s there to serve. “Communications can be a very broad topic, but students don’t experience it that way,” Goldstein says. “For them — and for the Comm Lab coaches — it’s about specific tasks, projects, and skills. Students crave help improving things like fellowship applications, grant proposals, and posters, so that’s where we focus our efforts.”  

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Study: Low-emissions vehicles are less expensive overall

You might think cars with low carbon emissions are expensive. Think again. A newly-published study by MIT researchers shows that when operating and maintenance costs are included in a vehicle’s price, autos emitting less carbon are among the market’s least expensive options, on a per-mile basis.

“If you look in aggregate at the most popular vehicles on the market today, one doesn’t have to pay more for a lower carbon-emitting vehicle,” says Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Associate Professor in Energy Studies at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) at MIT, and the study’s senior author. “In fact, the group of vehicles at the lower end of costs are also at the lowest end of emissions, even across a diverse set of alternative and conventional engines.”

The study also evaluates the U.S. automotive fleet — as represented by these 125 model types — against emissions-reduction targets the U.S. has set for the years from 2030 to 2050. Overall, the research finds, the average carbon intensity of vehicles that consumers bought in 2014 is more than 50 percent higher than the level it must meet to help reach the 2030 target. However, the lowest-emissions autos have surpassed the 2030 target.

“Most hybrids and electric vehicles on the road today meet the 2030 target, even with today’s electricity supply mix,” Trancik observes.

The new paper, “Personal Vehicles Evaluated against Climate Change Mitigation Targets,” is being published in the latest issue of the journal Environmental Science and Technology. The research group is also releasing the results in the form of an app that consumers can use to evaluate any or all of the 125 vehicle types.

“Private citizens are the investors that will ultimately decide whether a clean-energy transition occurs in personal transportation. It’s important to consider the problem from the viewpoint of consumers on the ground,” Trancik says. “The goal here is to bring this information on the performance of cars to people’s fingertips, to empower them with the information needed to make emission- and energy-saving choices.”

Along with Trancik, the authors of the study are Marco Miotti, a doctoral student in IDSS; Geoffrey Supran PhD '16, recent graduate in MIT's Department of Materials Science and Engineering and now a postdoc in IDSS; and Ella Kim, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

The 60-percent solution

Transportation accounts for about 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the driving-intensive U.S., and about 13 percent of emissions worldwide. Within the transportation sector, light-duty vehicles (LDVs) — passenger cars, and trucks with 12 seats or fewer that meet certain weight measurements — account for about 60 percent of emissions.

In order to estimate the cost of the vehicles, the researchers accounted for both the sticker price and the operating costs over the vehicle lifetime. When estimating emissions, the calculations included emissions from each vehicle’s operations and the emissions stemming from manufacturing it, and producing its fuel.

The study takes a further step in calculating how far along today’s passenger-vehicle fleet is in relation to the pledged U.S. emissions reductions goals. To do so, the researchers looked at overall amount of reduction needed in the 2030-2050 time period, the fraction of it likely to come from LDVs, and incorporated the total distance these vehicles are estimated to travel in those years.

“To enable a fair comparison between cars of all technologies, we include all emissions coming from the fuel, electricity, and vehicle production supply chains,” Miotti says.

The researchers’ chart yields some clear trends among the vehicles. Smaller hybrids and electric vehicles such as the Toyota Prius and Nissan Leaf fare very well and are among the cheapest per mile driven. Small combustion-engine cars are also low in cost, but emit up to 40 percent more greenhouse gases than their hybrid and electric counterparts. The Chevrolet Suburban, by contrast, is among the most expensive and highest-emitting popular vehicles. Luxury sedans such as the Mercedes E350, the study found, are the one vehicle that is more expensive per mile than the Suburban, but emits about two-thirds as much carbon.

“Our results show that popular alternative-technology cars such as the Nissan Leaf can already save a considerable amount of emissions today, while being quite affordable when operating costs are considered,” Miotti observes. “Notably, the benefit of the efficient electric powertrain far outweighs the added emissions of manufacturing a battery.”

Supran says that “there are a lot of myths floating around about hybrid and electric cars,” for example concerning the manufacture of those vehicles, or their reliance on conventional electricity sources. This often leads people to claim that “they’re no better than your average gasoline vehicle. Our study shows that’s just not true.”

The enduring popularity of trucks and SUVs, Supran adds, shows that “[w]e’ve got a long way to go. Obviously the best option is to use public transport and, when possible, to not drive at all. But for those who have to, hopefully our work can help inform a generation of more climate-conscious car buyers.”

Opportunities for decarbonization

To be sure, as Trancik notes, larger vehicles such as the Suburban may also be transporting more people around, and thus may fare better when measured on a per-passenger-mile basis. But a central aim of the study, she adds, is to let consumers access more data, from which they can make their own additional assessments about their vehicle needs.

“There are a lot of opportunities for decarbonization in the transportation sector,” Trancik says. “It’s fairly easy to buy a lower-emissions vehicle if you have easy access to this information.”

To reach a wider audience, the team developed an app with which people can look up their current car, or a car they are considering buying or leasing, and see how it performs in terms of costs and carbon emissions.

Vehicle costs and emissions also vary regionally, as the study notes. For instance: Western states draw from renewable energy sources (mostly solar and wind) to a greater extent than, say, states in the Midwest. On aggregate, therefore, plug-in electric vehicles will draw upon cleaner sources of electricity in the West than in the Midwest, and produce lower emissions overall.

On a national basis, though, the study reinforces the need to continue modernizing the country’s vehicle fleet and decarbonizing it in the next few decades. 

“To meet mid-century climate policy targets, what we would likely need to see is a near-complete electrification of vehicles within a few decades, alongside a decarbonization of electricity,” Trancik says.

Funding for the study was provided by The New England University Transportation Center at MIT, under a Department of Transportation grant; the Singapore National research Foundation through the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre; the Reed Foundation; and the MIT Leading Technology and Policy Initiative.

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Pinpointing a brain circuit that can keep fears at bay

People who are too frightened of flying to board an airplane, or too scared of spiders to venture into the basement, can seek a kind of treatment called exposure therapy. In a safe environment, they repeatedly face cues such as photos of planes or black widows, as a way to stamp out their fearful response — a process known as extinction.

Unfortunately, the effects of exposure therapy are not permanent, and many people experience a relapse. MIT scientists have now identified a way to enhance the long-term benefit of extinction in rats, offering a way to improve the therapy in people suffering from phobias and more complicated conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

Work conducted in the laboratory of Ki Goosens, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, has pinpointed a neural circuit that becomes active during exposure therapy in the rats. In a study published Sept. 27 in eLife, the researchers showed that they could stretch the therapy’s benefits for at least two months by boosting the circuit’s activity during treatment.

“When you give extinction training to humans or rats, and you wait long enough, you observe a phenomenon called spontaneous recovery, in which the fear that was originally learned comes back,” Goosens explains. “It’s one of the barriers to this type of therapy. You spend all this time going through it, but then it’s not a permanent fix for your problem.”

According to statistics from the National Institute of Mental Health, 18 percent of U.S. adults are diagnosed with a fear or anxiety disorder each year, with 22 percent of those patients experiencing severe symptoms.

How to quench a fear

The neural circuit identified by the scientists connects a part of the brain involved in fear memory, called the basolateral amygdala (BLA), with another region called the nucleus accumbens (NAc), that helps the brain process rewarding events. Goosens and her colleagues call it the BLA-NAc circuit.

Researchers have been considering a link between fear and reward for some time, Goosens says. “The amygdala is a part of the brain that is tightly linked with fear memory but it’s also been linked to positive reward learning as well, and the accumbens is a key reward area in the brain,” she explains. “What we’ve been thinking about is whether extinction is rewarding. When you’re expecting something bad and you don’t get it, does your brain treat that like it’s a good thing?”

To find out if there was a specific brain circuit involved, the researchers first trained rats to fear a certain noise by pairing it with foot shock. They later gave the rats extinction training, during which the noise was presented in the absence of foot shock, and they looked at markers of neural activity in the brain. The results revealed the BLA-NAc reward circuit was recruited by the brain during exposure therapy, as the rats gave up their fear of the bad noise.

Once Goosens and her colleagues had identified the circuit, they looked for ways to boost its activity. First, they paired a sugary drink with the fear-related sound during extinction training, hoping to associate the sound with a reward. This type of training, called counterconditioning, associates fear-eliciting cues with rewarding events or memories, instead of with neutral events as in most extinction training.

Rats that received the counterconditioning were significantly less likely to spontaneously revert to their fearful states, compared to those that received regular extinction training for up to 55 days later, the scientists found.

They also found that the benefits of extinction could be prolonged with optogenetic stimulation, in which the circuit was genetically modified so that it could be stimulated directly with tiny bursts of light from an optical fiber.

The ongoing benefit that came from stimulating the circuit was one of the most surprising — and welcome — findings from the study, Goosens says. “The effect that we saw was one that really emerged months later, and we want to know what’s happening over those two months. What is the circuit doing to suppress the recovery of fear over that period of time? We still don’t understand what that is.”

Another interesting finding from the study was that the circuit was active during both fear learning and fear extinction, says lead author Susana Correia, a research scientist in the Goosens lab. “Understanding if these are molecularly different subcircuits within this projection could allow the development of a pharmaceutical approach to target the fear extinction pathway and to improve cognitive therapy,” Correia says.

Immediate and future impacts on therapy

Some therapists are already using counterconditioning in treating PTSD, and Goosens suggests that the rat study might encourage further exploration of this technique in human therapy.

And while it isn’t likely that humans will receive direct optogenetic therapy any time soon, Goosens says there is a benefit to knowing exactly which circuits are involved in extinction.

In neurofeedback studies, for instance, brain scan technologies such as fMRI or EEG could be used to help a patient learn to activate specific parts of their brain, including the BLA-NAc reward circuit, during exposure therapy.

Studies like this one, Goosens says, offer a “target for a personalized medicine approach where feedback is used during therapy to enhance the effectiveness of that therapy.”

Other MIT authors on the paper include technical assistant Anna McGrath, undergraduate Allison Lee, and McGovern principal investigator and Institute Professor Ann Graybiel.

The study was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and the National Institute of Mental Health.

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How data can help change the world

The vast amount of data generated daily across society is widely touted as a game-changer for research, technological innovation, and even policy making. But “big data will not change the world unless it’s collected and synthesized into tools that have a public benefit,” said Sarah Williams, an assistant professor of urban planning at MIT, in a panel discussion on the future of cities, at a conference convened last week by the Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS).

The ways in which data can be used to produce change was a common theme among speakers at the IDSS celebration, which focused on how the deluge of data being gathered in the big data era can be used to tackle society’s most pressing challenges.  The two-day event brought together experts from a variety of fields, including energy, health care, finance, urban planning, engineering, computer science, and political science. The lineup even featured one speaker who, MIT President L. Rafael Reif joked, “knows who will win the election in November.” That would be Nate Silver, founder and editor-in-chief of the political poll analysis website FiveThirtyEight.

The event participants had much to celebrate. Launched in July 2015, IDSS accomplished a number of milestones in its first year, including the introduction of a new undergraduate minor in statistics and data science, a new doctoral program in social engineering and systems, a professional education course in data science, and a center focused on statistics and data sciences.

The all-star speaker lineup at the event was a testament to IDSS’s ability to bring together “data scientists and systems engineers with experts in economics, finance, urban planning, energy, public health, political science, social networks, and more,” Reif said. He added that IDSS is “a unit that can magnify individual talents through collaborations, a unit that aspires to generate groundbreaking ways to understand society’s most difficult problems and lead us to badly needed solutions.”

At IDSS, researchers are focused on taking “an analytical, data-driven approach to problems,” said Munther Dahleh, director of IDSS and the William A. Coolidge Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We collect the data, we develop the models, and from these models we develop insights, policies, and decisions.”

Data in the political process

The event opened with a panel discussion focused on the future of voting and elections. Charles Stewart, the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor in the MIT Department of Political Science, set the stage by noting the increasing role of data in the political process. Stewart, who co-directs the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, described how data is collected from voter registration files, campaigns and politicians, public opinion polls, campaign contribution records, and more. He added that many citizens might be surprised to learn that the identity of anyone who has registered to vote is public record, while the data and computer code in voting machines is not always available to the public or election officials.

“Interest in election data is not simply about choosing the best candidates or policies,” Stewart explained. “It’s also about who controls the data and how it is used.”

MIT alumna Kassia DeVorsey ’04, who worked for the Obama campaign and is now the chief analytics officer at the Messina Group and founder of Minerva Insights, explained that while previously only presidential campaigns invested in gathering and analyzing data, nowadays, “if you’re running for mayor in a small town, you’re thinking strategically about ‘how can I use data to best run my campaign.’” She noted that the voter-information data compiled by the Obama campaign was the team’s most valuable resource in trying to address and influence the electorate.

During his talk, Silver explained that FiveThirtyEight is empirically minded and draws from publicly available information to generate probabilistic election forecasts. As for the 2016 presidential election, the high number of undecided voters has introduced more volatility, according to Silver. “This year, even relatively minor events have produced a shift. Therefore the debates … can matter quite a bit,” he said.

Silver said that while the polls show Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is the favored candidate, the race has tightened and Republican nominee Donald Trump does have a chance to win. Based on the high level of uncertainty surrounding this year’s election, Silver said he and his colleagues are “urging caution. … You can build models and you can do the data science, but sometimes the conclusion can be: Be careful.”

Regarding the role of gender in the presidential election, DeVorsey described how during the 2008 election, the Obama campaign asked voters oblique questions about race, to try to gauge whether polling was capturing how racism might impact the election outcome. The Clinton campaign is probably trying a similar tactic, she suggested. Meanwhile, Silver questioned whether Clinton’s high unfavorability rating can be explained without reference to her gender, adding that he thinks “the sexism question is, frankly, badly understudied.”

Data-driven policy and financial risk

Beyond the use of data in elections, Alberto Abadie, a professor of economics at MIT, and Enrico Giovannini, a professor at the University of Rome Tor Vergata, explored how data can be used to drive policy. Abadie questioned whether automatic policymaking might be possible in the future, thanks to insights from data collection.

Giovannini urged the audience to use data to help transform policies, in order to improve people’s well being and encourage sustainable development. “We produce statistics because we believe facts can improve decision-making on many levels,” he explained. Giovannini also cautioned against potential pitfalls of relying too heavily on data, adding that policymakers need to use data to not just understand problems but also develop solutions.

Another difficulty of data collection, raised by Bengt Holmstrom, the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics, lies in financial risk, particularly in money markets. While there have been calls for increased transparency following the 2008 financial crisis, Holmstrom argued that in money markets, more transparency can lead to less liquidity. Unlike the stock market, “money markets are fundamentally information-sparse and opaque,” Holmstrom explained. In terms of managing systemic risk in money markets, he said “transparency is not likely to be the way unless you think that maybe will regulate the markets to be less liquid.”

Urban planning

One area where speakers called for greater transparency in the use of data is urban planning. A panel moderated by Williams examined how data can be used to make cities better places for people to live.

Panelists described how data can be used to alleviate congestion and noise, and also examined the ethical and privacy implications for residents in places where governments are collecting and analyzing data. 

During her talk, Williams displayed data visualizations her group created to illustrate the cost of incarceration in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The images exposed systemic issues in the neighborhood, including areas lacking services that could alleviate mass incarceration. The goal of her research, Williams explained, is to transform data sets “into visualizations that I hope expose urban policy issues.”

In addition to a panel discussion on social networks, the event also featured a panel discussion on the future of the electric grid, moderated by Robert Armstrong, director of the MIT Energy Initiative and the Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering; and a session on how data can be used to analyze our health, moderated by professor of computer science and engineering Peter Szolovits.

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