Learning words from pictures

Speech recognition systems, such as those that convert speech to text on cellphones, are generally the result of machine learning. A computer pores through thousands or even millions of audio files and their transcriptions, and learns which acoustic features correspond to which typed words.

But transcribing recordings is costly, time-consuming work, which has limited speech recognition to a small subset of languages spoken in wealthy nations.

At the Neural Information Processing Systems conference this week, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are presenting a new approach to training speech-recognition systems that doesn’t depend on transcription. Instead, their system analyzes correspondences between images and spoken descriptions of those images, as captured in a large collection of audio recordings. The system then learns which acoustic features of the recordings correlate with which image characteristics.

“The goal of this work is to try to get the machine to learn language more like the way humans do,” says Jim Glass, a senior research scientist at CSAIL and a co-author on the paper describing the new system. “The current methods that people use to train up speech recognizers are very supervised. You get an utterance, and you’re told what’s said. And you do this for a large body of data.

“Big advances have been made — Siri, Google — but it’s expensive to get those annotations, and people have thus focused on, really, the major languages of the world. There are 7,000 languages, and I think less than 2 percent have ASR [automatic speech recognition] capability, and probably nothing is going to be done to address the others. So if you’re trying to think about how technology can be beneficial for society at large, it’s interesting to think about what we need to do to change the current situation. And the approach we’ve been taking through the years is looking at what we can learn with less supervision.”

Joining Glass on the paper are first author David Harwath, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT; and Antonio Torralba, an EECS professor.

Visual semantics

The version of the system reported in the new paper doesn’t correlate recorded speech with written text; instead, it correlates speech with groups of thematically related images. But that correlation could serve as the basis for others.

If, for instance, an utterance is associated with a particular class of images, and the images have text terms associated with them, it should be possible to find a likely transcription of the utterance, all without human intervention. Similarly, a class of images with associated text terms in different languages could provide a way to do automatic translation.

Conversely, text terms associated with similar clusters of images, such as, say, “storm” and “clouds,”  could be inferred to have related meanings. Because the system in some sense learns words’ meanings — the images associated with them — and not just their sounds, it has a wider range of potential applications than a standard speech recognition system.

To test their system, the researchers used a database of 1,000 images, each of which had a recording of a free-form verbal description associated with it. They would feed their system one of the recordings and ask it to retrieve the 10 images that best matched it. That set of 10 images would contain the correct one 31 percent of the time.

“I always emphasize that we're just taking baby steps here and have a long way to go,” Glass says. “But it’s an encouraging start.”

The researchers trained their system on images from a huge database built by Torralba; Aude Oliva, a principal research scientist at CSAIL; and their students. Through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing site, they hired people to describe the images verbally, using whatever phrasing came to mind, for about 10 to 20 seconds.

For an initial demonstration of the researchers’ approach, that kind of tailored data was necessary to ensure good results. But the ultimate aim is to train the system using digital video, with minimal human involvement. “I think this will extrapolate naturally to video,” Glass says.

Merging modalities

To build their system, the researchers used neural networks, machine-learning systems that approximately mimic the structure of the brain. Neural networks are composed of processing nodes that, like individual neurons, are capable of only very simple computations but are connected to each other in dense networks. Data is fed to a network’s input nodes, which modify it and feed it to other nodes, which modify it and feed it to still other nodes, and so on. When a neural network is being trained, it constantly modifies the operations executed by its nodes in order to improve its performance on a specified task.

The researchers’ network is, in effect, two separate networks: one that takes images as input and one that takes spectrograms, which represent audio signals as changes of amplitude, over time, in their component frequencies. The output of the top layer of each network is a 1,024-dimensional vector — a sequence of 1,024 numbers.

The final node in the network takes the dot product of the two vectors. That is, it multiplies the corresponding terms in the vectors together and adds them all up to produce a single number. During training, the networks had to try to maximize the dot product when the audio signal corresponded to an image and minimize it when it didn’t.

For every spectrogram that the researchers’ system analyzes, it can identify the points at which the dot-product peaks. In experiments, those peaks reliably picked out words that provided accurate image labels — “baseball,” for instance, in a photo of a baseball pitcher in action, or “grassy” and “field” for an image of a grassy field.

In ongoing work, the researchers have refined the system so that it can pick out spectrograms of individual words and identify just those regions of an image that correspond to them.

“Possibly, a baby learns to speak from its perception of the environment, a large part of which may be visual,” says Lin-shan Lee, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at National Taiwan University. “Today, machines have started to mimic such a learning process. This work is one of the earliest efforts in this direction, and I was really impressed when I first learned of it.”

“Perhaps even more exciting is just the question of how much we can learn with deep neural networks,” adds Karen Livescu, an assistant professor at the Toyota Technological Institute at the University of Chicago. “The more the research community does with them, the more we realize that they can learn a lot from big piles of data. But it is hard to label big piles of data, so it's really exciting that in this work, Harwath et al. are able to learn from unlabeled data. I am really curious to see how far they can take that.”

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Professor Emeritus Bruce Mazlish, pioneer in the field of psychohistory, dies at 93

Bruce Mazlish, a highly regarded historian who served as a professor of history at MIT for more than 50 years, died of natural causes on Nov. 27. He was 93 years old.

A winner of the prestigious Toynbee Prize, which recognizes social scientists for significant academic and public contributions to humanity, Mazlish published numerous influential volumes in the course of his career, including "The Western Intellectual Tradition: From Leonardo to Hegel" (Harper Bros, 1960), which is still used in college courses today.

Mazlish pioneered the field of psychohistory, along with historians such as Erik Erikson, in volumes including "James and John Stuart Mill: Father and Son in the 19th Century" (Basic Books, 1975). Over more than five decades as a scholar, he published more than two dozen volumes of history and was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on Sept. 15, 1923, Mazlish attended Boys High School and graduated from Columbia University in 1940. During World War II, he served in the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the modern Central Intelligence Agency, and he later returned to Columbia to earn his PhD in European studies.

After spells as a journalist and then a high school teacher, Mazlish joined the faculty of the University of Maine in Brunswick, before coming to MIT in 1955. He subsequently spent the rest of his professional life at the Institute, retiring in 2003. Courses he taught include “Marx, Darwin, and Freud,” “Modernity, Post-modernity and Capitalism,” and “The New Global History.”

Mazlish’s first book, "The Western Intellectual Tradition," co-authored with British mathematician Jacob Bronowski, argued that the foundations for modern science can be found in a set of insights initially made during the Renaissance. This and other of Mazlish’s volumes found a broad and enthusiastic general readership. His well-known profile of President Richard Nixon, "In Search of Nixon," which was published just a month before the Watergate revelations, remains widely read to this day.

In the late 1980s, Mazlish began to explore post-WWII globalization, examining the idea of humanity from an historical and interdisciplinary perspective. Out of this came, among other things, the New Global History Initiative, launched in the early 2000s with the goal of reimagining the study of history in a more pluralistic, multicultural age.

Mazlish is survived by his wife, Neva Goodwin, of Cambridge, Massachusetts; his sister, Elaine Wyden, of Westport, Connecticut; and a former wife, Anne Mazlish, of Mount Desert, Maine. His first marriage was to Constance Shaw, who passed away in 1993. He is also survived by his four children, Cordelia Savala and Peter Shaw Mazlish of Atlanta, Georgia; Anthony Mazliish of Chevy Chase, Maryland; and Jared Mazlish of Burlington, Vermont; as well as two stepchildren and six grandchildren.

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Arthur Kaledin, professor emeritus of history and American studies, dies at 86

Arthur D. Kaledin, professor emeritus of history and American studies, died on Saturday, Nov. 27, at the age of 86 at Massachusetts General Hospital, surrounded by family and close friends.

Kaledin graduated from Harvard University in 1952, and following several years in the U.S. Army — during which he sustained an injury that led him to walk with a cane thereafter — he returned to Harvard, where he received his PhD in 1964. Kaledin subsequently joined what was then called the Humanities Department at MIT, and went on to teach several generations of students at the Institute.

Reflecting on his former colleague, MIT Associate Provost and Ford International Professor of History Philip S. Khoury said, “Arthur was a splendid colleague and a dedicated teacher who thrived in the small seminar settings that MIT provides students for their humanities courses."

Of Kaledin’s "Tocqueville and His America: A Darker Horizon" (Yale University Press, 2011), a much-admired biography of French diplomat and political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville, Professor Stanley Katz, a historian and legal scholar at Princeton University said, “Kaledin teases out the ambiguities and complexities of Tocqueville’s life with astonishing perspicuity, offering a subtle and complex analysis.” 

In his 2011 story about "Tocqueville and His America," MIT News writer Peter Dizikes recounts a conversation with Kaledin about his book: "'Tocqueville saw cultural and social tendencies that he thought would weaken American democracy,’ Kaledin said….[His] apprehensions, in Kaledin’s view, largely focused on the problems a democratic culture might pose for democratic politics. For instance, Kaledin says, Tocqueville thought ‘populism would gradually lead to an anti-intellectual culture and to mediocrity in political leadership.’ Tocqueville was also, Kaledin says, uneasy with the extent to which American culture 'heavily emphasized material values over all others.'"

Remembering Kaledin’s devotion to teaching, Professor Jeffrey Ravel, current head of the MIT History section, said, “Arthur was a fiercely principled teacher. In the classroom he challenged MIT undergraduates to think about the political and moral implications of the technologies they were creating. His contributions to the formation of the great engineers, scientists, scholars, and world citizens we educate at MIT will not easily be replicated.”

Scores of MIT graduates will remember Kaledin for his accessibility and warmth — among them the many students who, when they could not travel home for the holiday, were invited to join the Kaledin family for Thanksgiving, as well as students in Kaledin’s freshman seminars, who enjoyed his tradition of an annual class lunch at Mary Chung’s restaurant, where the proprietor invariably greeted Kaledin with “Good to see you again, Professor!”

Kaledin's early Army injury eventually led to his use of a wheelchair in later years, a fact that did nothing to dampen his love of life. He is survived by his former wife, Eugenia (Oster) Kaledin, of Lexington, Massachusetts; two sons, Nicholas, of New York City, and Jonathan, of Princeton, New Jersey; a daughter, Elizabeth, of New York City; and seven grandchildren.

Kaledin will long be remembered for his sustained contributions to MIT and to the humanities generally. Family and friends note that he will particularly be missed for his wit and wisdom, his huge heart, his conversation and wide-ranging interests, and how engaged and doting he was as a father and grandfather.

Private services are planned.
 

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In London, extending MIT’s entrepreneurial ecosystem

In Lagos, Nigeria, a man straddles a motorcycle. He speeds off into the sprawling network of streets in Africa’s largest city to deliver a package.

The biker is a delivery driver for MAX, a fledgling Nigerian startup that is trying to solve the problem of so-called “last-mile delivery.” How do you pick up and deliver packages or food in an efficient way in a city where many people don’t have an address?

MAX has built a mobile and web platform for deliveries, not unlike the system used by Uber and other on-demand services. It seeks goal-driven, customer service-oriented drivers, offers no-interest loans so drivers can own their motorcycles, provides a training program, and gives drivers a smartphone.

Then the drivers — 30 of them so far, all of whom are “champions” in MAX parlance — head out on deliveries. They geotag the location of customers using the company’s app, creating an address that can be used for future drop-offs.

“We are not the first company to try to tackle this problem in Lagos or on the continent,” says Adetayo Bamiduro­ MBA ’15, co-founder of MAX. “We’re the first company to think about it this way. The problem we’re solving requires a very detailed systematic approach. We’re not just building logistics. We’re not just building retail.”

“If you look at our systematic diagram, you can see how all of these factors together are driving the growth of the entire platform,” he said. “And that’s something you learn at MIT.”

Bamiduro believes he can expand MAX across Africa. He is building a retail component that will allow people to shop locally through the MAX app. MAX, of course, will then deliver the purchase.

This month, the young entrepreneur will travel to London to tell MAX’s story — how it was conceived, how it was built, how it can scale — and to meet with investors, government officials, entrepreneurs, and professors at an MIT conference on entrepreneurship and finance in the developing world.

Showcasing innovation-driven enterprises

The Dec. 13 conference is hosted by the MIT Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, where Bamiduro was a fellow in 2014-2015. Along with a Dec. 2 startup showcase by the MIT Startup Exchange and the MIT Industrial Liaison Program, it brackets a series of MIT gatherings in London this month. Together, the events demonstrate the facets of an innovation ecosystem unique to MIT, one where theory meets practice, where innovation-driven entrepreneurs are bringing new technologies from labs to markets, and where, very often, the drive for positive social impact is woven into companies’ operations from the outset.

The sort of ecosystem where a company like MAX is born.

“The theme that is embedded into the [Legatum] conference, that is very MIT, is this idea of MIT producing innovation-driven enterprises. Those lead to both social and economic impact around the world,” says Georgina Campbell Flatter, executive director of the Legatum Center. “Innovation-driven enterprises tend to lead to businesses that will scale. You can reach global markets eventually. You can provide thousands of jobs. Take Adetayo, he’s touching thousands of people’s lives through his business.”

In London, MIT will showcase this approach in five gatherings. Taken together, this series of unique offerings demonstrates how MIT functions not simply as a collection of individual units, centers, programs, and events, but as a facilitator and leader in global innovation and impact.

Dec. 2: MIT Startup Showcase London

More than a dozen MIT-affiliated startups will present at this event connecting industry leaders with innovative startups in enterprise information technology, data analytics, automation, security, and more. The showcase will include a keynote talk on innovation through analytics from MIT Sloan School of Management Professor Dimitris Bertsimas, who will also join a panel on managing innovation.

This is the third event of its kind for MIT Startup Exchange, which is led by former MIT Sloan lecturer Trond Undheim. The group chose London because it is a “global innovation capitol,” Undheim says.

Startups presenting “Lightning Talks” at the showcase all feature a technology innovation at their center. Tulip Interfaces, for example, is an internet of things platform company for the manufacturing sector. Luminoso is an artificial intelligence-equipped “deep analytics” company that helps clients like Autodesk and Sprint gain insight into customer sentiment and feedback.

Unlike startup incubators and accelerators, the MIT Startup Exchange does not mentor new entrepreneurs or teach them how to execute on a business plan. Instead, it connects mature startups with industry leaders for strategic partnerships, product development collaborations, new business lines, and new customers.

The Dec. 2 startup showcase is “focused on technology, but also on … interaction in the innovation community,” Undheim says.

Dec. 7-8: MIT Sloan Executive Board Meeting

Each of MIT Sloan’s four executive boards is led by a distinguished alumnus and composed of business, government, and academic leaders. The boards form a communication channel between the school and alumni and the wider world, both informing the work of the school and bringing new MIT research and discoveries from campus to the global community.

At this event, a meeting for the European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Executive Board, members will hear from MIT Sloan Dean David Schmittlein on the state of the school, receive an update about the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative, learn about new work from the school’s research centers, and join finance professors Antoinette Schoar and David Thesmar for a conversation about the Brexit decision by United Kingdom voters to leave the European Union.                 

Dec. 7-9: Visionary Investing Workshop

Part of MIT Sloan’s new Family Leaders with Purpose program, this workshop will help members of affluent families develop their skills around investing for both profit and purpose, regardless of where they are in their journey or their level of financial acumen. Family leaders cultivate and sharpen their own vision for doing good in a real-world interactive environment by accessing proprietary MIT tools, frameworks, and faculty.

SP Kothari is the program’s faculty director, supported by program co-heads David Shrier and Heidi Pickett.

“MIT Sloan is responding to feedback we’re getting directly from these families,” Kothari says. “They have a passion for solving some the world’s toughest problems. What they’re seeking are the tools and skills to find and evaluate viable opportunities, and to craft an action plan that multiple generations can rally around. MIT has a unique capability set in finance, innovation, and impact.”

The immersive three-day workshop includes MIT Sloan faculty presentations on the implications of Brexit on the U.K. financial sector, managing a portfolio in uncertain times, and managing for impact. A well-received feature of the workshop, which has been held three times before, is a forum for participants to interact with guest CEOs of startups, engaging in a series of hands-on learning sessions incorporating frameworks and tools to evaluate the enterprises.

Participants are typically capable of investing a minimum of $10 million in direct deals each year, and attendees are expected from across Europe, Asia, and North America. Pickett said a goal of the program is to build a global community of like-minded families investing for profit and purpose in fields such as health, energy, environment, water, education, agriculture, finance, and real estate.

Dec. 12: MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program reunion

From Morocco, Al Madinah, Nova Scotia, Iceland, Singapore, and elsewhere, teams of government officials, investors, entrepreneurs, academics, and business leaders will meet to discuss how they are building local entrepreneurial ecosystems.

The gathering brings together participants in the MIT Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program, a two-year global executive education initiative designed to facilitate economic growth, social progress, and job creation in regions worldwide.

The program, known as MIT REAP, is in its fourth year. Nearly 30 teams from around the world have participated. Now, MIT is launching a Global Innovation Network, a group for MIT REAP alumni to network and facilitate connections, conversation, and support between the teams.

“We used to think of REAP as this two-year long program, but actually participants enjoy it so much they want to continue the relationship,” says Phil Budden, an MIT Sloan senior lecturer who teaches in the program and is its diplomatic adviser.

The afternoon meeting will include updates on MIT entrepreneurship activity, including MIT’s new technology and science incubator, called The Engine, and a new entrepreneurship and innovation minor, as well as updates from six of the teams on their work in the program, says Sarah Jane Maxted, executive director of the program.

“It will be a success if we give them a chance to share their experiences,” says Professor Fiona Murray, associate dean for innovation and co-director of the MIT Innovation Initiative. “For teams that are much further along — because they are now four years into this whole experience of developing and accelerating their ecosystems — we give them a chance to share with teams that joined REAP more recently. We'll know it's successful when we're really building those bridges across cohorts.”

Dec. 13: Accelerating Developing World Growth Through Entrepreneurship and Finance

“We don’t just want to have a conversation focused on U.S. investors and U.S. alumni,” says the Legatum Center’s Flatter.

So Flatter, MAX’s Bamiduro, and many others in the MIT, global investing, and developing world entrepreneurship communities will meet in London, due to its greater proximity to Africa and other developing world regions. As with the MIT Startup Exchange conference, entrepreneurs will be at the center of every discussion, presenting TED-style “Vision Talks” and joining investors and academics for panels covering seed stage capital, crowdfunding, and philanthropic capital, among other topics.

“Having that entrepreneur perspective just brings a different lens to the problem,” Flatter says. “When you bring together governments and corporations, and they have a conversation about entrepreneurship, they’re often talking about what they think is best based on secondary data. Don’t get me wrong — they’re often working on great things and working for a great cause. But when the entrepreneur is in the room, the conversation tends to be different. I think MIT brings that.”

The goal of the conference is to facilitate a conversation about funding mechanisms while showcasing and celebrating the entrepreneurs working in the developing world, Flatter says. Those funding mechanisms include equity crowdfunding, programming-related investments, grants and fellowships, and prize money from entrepreneurship competitions.

“Our mission is to foster broad-based prosperity around the world through entrepreneurship,” Flatter says. “One of the sticking points for early-stage entrepreneurs is how to raise the capital they need, and in the developing world it’s harder to raise capital because people are less willing to take risks. Traditional VCs and angels don’t tend to invest in emerging economies, but there are new funding mechanisms that our students and our alumni have found to be helpful.”

Entrepreneurs working in the developing world also face a unique set of ethical choices, as there can be few, if any, regulations governing minimum wage or health care coverage. In the way they structure their business operations, startup founders can choose to make a broader impact beyond simply offering a job or a needed service.

In providing drivers with no-interest loans to buy a motorcycle, for example, MAX is empowering the employees it relies on, Flatter says. Another MIT alumnus-founded startup appearing at the conference, Soko, relies on a “virtual factory” of independent jewelry makers around the developing world who retain 25 to 35 percent of the revenue generated when their products are sold to major retailers.

“At the core they are well-run businesses, for-profit businesses, but because of the principled entrepreneur leaders at the top they make business choices that are also ethical and ultimately have impact,” Flatter says.

A bias for action

Murray says the flurry of MIT innovation events in the city is distinguished by the way it brings so many different people together.

“These events engage all the key ecosystem stakeholders,” she explains. “And I think that's something that MIT over the years has done extremely well. I'm not sure it has always been conscious about it. I think it has become more conscious. But now, in a sense, we're taking those same conversations [we host in Cambridge] to a different part of the world and saying ‘We want to have this conversation with you — risk capital providers, large corporations, policymakers, particularly focused on development, innovation, and entrepreneurship.’”

And the conversation won’t end in December. On January 13, MIT President L. Rafael Reif will visit London as part of MIT’s MIT Better World campaign, to discuss his vision for MIT’s future and for the MIT community worldwide. It’s a fitting follow-up to a series of events that demonstrates MIT’s singular impact on global innovation.

For his part, MAX’s Adetayo Bamiduro is looking forward to meeting other members of the MIT innovation ecosystem when he visits London for the Legatum Center event. He said his company would not exist today without his Legatum fellowship, which comes with $50,000 in tuition and a stipend and $10,000 in travel and prototyping grants.

“The cushion of the scholarship is a huge motivating factor for taking the plunge right out of school,” he says. “The entire MIT entrepreneurship ecosystem is very strong, it’s very powerful. The MIT environment is unique because you have management and execution skills that you learn. But you also learn engineering skills. We had the capability to build the system ourselves.”

“The MIT slogan — mind and hand — has really distinguished us,” Bamiduro said. And that ethos — the movement from idea to action, and from classrooms and labs into the world — is what MIT’s packed London agenda is all about.

For Bamiduro and his co-founder Chinedu Azodoh MFin ’15, that means not just having a new idea, and not just building MAX’s digital platform and executing its business plan. It also means learning to ride motorcycles, zipping into Lagos’ busy streets to make deliveries when needed.

That man hopping on a motorcycle to deliver a package to one of MAX’s customers? That’s the CEO.

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MIT Press Bookstore celebrates new home

On Wednesday, Nov. 16, MIT faculty and students, along with others in the Cambridge community, joined staff of the MIT Press to celebrate the grand opening of the MIT Press Bookstore's new location. The MIT Press Bookstore, which had been open on Main Street in Kendall Square since 1980, is now up and running in its new 2,350-square-foot location at 301 Massachusetts Ave.

The event featured a demonstration of the press's new Espresso Book Machine. The innovative machine combines several technologies into a single device which, when paired with a printer, can print, glue, and trim a perfect-bound paperback book, complete with a full-color cover, in about five minutes. Patrons explored the aisles of the new store, browsing a vast selection of titles on science, technology, art, and culture, as the Espresso Book Machine whirred at the back of the shop. Titles printed for the opening demonstration included a 1904 biography of MIT founder William Barton Rogers written by James P. Munroe, and several out-of-print books from the MIT Press archive.

MIT Press Director Amy Brand welcomed guests, remarking that the spacious new location will be instrumental in the press's aim to become "even more of a force for intellectual engagement in the community, and even more of an ambassador for the Institute, with many more author events on site. I foresee a very bright future for books and bookstores, for the MIT Press in particular, with its distinctive brand of activism and truth-telling in art, science, and scholarship."

MIT Libraries Director Chris Bourg stated that the joint mission of the press and libraries is to "provide high quality scholarship to all who need it." The bookstore has "been a beloved destination for the global community."

David Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society and author of 'Becoming MIT" (MIT Press 2010), said the press continues to produce "smart, engaging works at the cutting edge," and that the work of the press and bookstore is now "more important than ever."

The new location will greatly expand the reach of the bookstore in the community in Cambridge and beyond. The MIT Press Bookstore will be open Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. ­to 7 p.m. and on Saturday and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m. and features MIT Press titles and books of interest to the MIT community. Watch for some thought-provoking author events in the coming months.

Jay Keyser, professor of linguistics emeritus and editor of the Linguistics Inquiry Monograph Series, summed up the excitement and emotion of the evening by saying of the new bookstore, "Thank goodness it's here. Physical books unite body and soul."

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MIT announces MITx MicroMasters program in development economics, with path to full master’s degree

A new master’s degree in data, economics, and development policy (DEDP), announced today by MIT and offered by its renowned Department of Economics, represents a new path to earning an MIT master’s degree. The program is the first to be available solely to online learners who have earned another new credential, the MITx MicroMasters in DEDP, also announced today by the Institute.

The MicroMasters program is open to anyone in the world. Its courses are offered online via edX by faculty based at MIT’s Department of Economics, widely recognized as the global center of research in development economics, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a world leader in policy-relevant research. Students who perform exceptionally well in the MicroMasters program in DEDP may be eligible to continue their education on campus at MIT, ultimately earning a master’s degree — the first to be offered by MIT’s Department of Economics. The MicroMasters program is now open for enrollment for courses beginning in February 2017; the DEDP master’s degree will launch in 2019.

Performance in the online MicroMasters in DEDP will be a key selection criterion for those students who complete this program and then apply to the MIT master’s program. Upon acceptance, these students’ online work will be converted to credit and they will come to MIT for a single semester to earn an accelerated master’s. In the summer following their semester in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they will also complete a capstone experience — consisting of an internship and corresponding project report — to apply the skills they have acquired. Through this unique “inverted” admissions process, the blended master’s program opens new doors for those seeking education at MIT.

“Policy makers, NGO activists, businesspeople, and in-development countries are increasingly aware of the importance of good data and rigorous evidence for designing and choosing policies and projects — and implementing them effectively,” says Esther Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics in the Department of Economics. “To become good producers and consumers of evidence, they need staff with a strong quantitative and analytical background. Today, few programs provide such training, and the available options are expensive and time-consuming. The blended master’s in DEDP, anchored at MIT, the home of J-PAL, is an ideal solution to this challenge.”

A program 15 years in the making

“The world of development policy has become more and more evidence-based over the past 10-15 years,” says professor of economics Ben Olken, who co-created the MicroMasters in DEDP program with Duflo and Ford Professor of Economics Abhijit Banerjee. “Development practitioners need to understand not just development issues, but how to analyze them rigorously using data. This program is designed to help fill that gap.”

This decade-and-a-half shift toward practical, empirical research and rigorous impact-evaluation methods aligns with the broader international development community’s focus on evidence-based policy and results-based development. Ever-evolving dynamics within developing countries, institutional challenges inherent in poverty, and the rising costs of economic intervention — which can run billions of dollars — have made development policy increasingly complex.

To navigate these new realities, the governments and organizations responsible for implementing poverty relief programs must build their capacity and capabilities. The MicroMasters program and master’s in DEDP help to answer this demand and strengthen local capacity to produce and understand empirical research.

“I’ve worked in government and international agencies, and know how important a thorough grounding in economics and data analysis is to good policymaking,” says Rachel Glennerster, executive director of J-PAL. “Our aim with this MicroMasters is to give people — wherever they are in the world — the skills they need to bring the best analytical tools and empirical evidence to bear to help solve the world’s most pressing problems."

A longtime advocate for reducing poverty through evidence-based policy, J-PAL is well-suited to collaborate on the new programs. The organization has developed customized training sessions for a wide range of groups, including the International Labor Organization, UNICEF India, and the government of Gabon.

A major step for MicroMasters

MIT launched the first MITx MicroMasters credential, the MicroMasters in supply chain management, in October 2015. Since then, over a dozen universities have adopted the MicroMasters model, which enables online learners to take a semester’s worth of master’s-level courses on the edX platform, then complete a master’s degree in an accelerated path on campus.

The MicroMasters in DEDP brings innovation one step further by offering a brand new pricing structure based solely on income. Students are charged a personalized course fee determined by their ability to pay, no matter where in the world they live. There are no formal prerequisites for enrolling in the MicroMasters, which removes a major barrier in access to education, and the number of courses a learner takes at one time is flexible as well.

The MicroMasters in DEDP equips students with the practical skills and theoretical knowledge to tackle some of the most pressing challenges facing developing countries and the world’s poor. Through five online courses and five in-person proctored exams at facilities around the globe, the MicroMasters in DEDP prepares learners to bring a data-driven perspective to development policy.

Students will acquire a theoretical foundation in microeconomics, probability, and statistics while gaining practical experience through exposure to real-life scenarios and step-by-step training on how to conduct randomized controlled evaluations, a method used by J-PAL affiliates to measure the impact of a policy or program. Learners will also develop the ability to carry out the economic analyses of programs, get involved in hands-on data analysis, and acquire key skills needed to run randomized evaluations in the field.

“Students who earn the MicroMasters credential and master’s degree in DEDP will come out ready to be leaders in their field and to change the world,” says Duflo. “They’ll acquire the tools to be creative, analytical thinkers who will reinvent antipoverty policy. And they’ll gain the courage and skills to put all their ideas to the test, and fail, and try again until they succeed.”

“My ideal world is one where development practitioners come at whatever they are doing as a matter of solving a problem with the best tools, sharpest ideas, and the most sophisticated learning strategies available to them,” says Banerjee. “Poverty is a solvable problem, as long as we have the patience to keep trying and the will and the clarity to keep learning from our experience; I hope that this program will serve as a midwife to that process.”

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Design your own custom drone

This fall’s new Federal Aviation Administration regulations have made drone flight easier than ever for both companies and consumers. But what if the drones out on the market aren’t exactly what you want?

A new system from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is the first to allow users to design, simulate, and build their own custom drone. Users can change the size, shape, and structure of their drone based on the specific needs they have for payload, cost, flight time, battery usage, and other factors.

To demonstrate, researchers created a range of unusual-looking drones, including a five-rotor “pentacopter” and a rabbit-shaped “bunnycopter” with propellers of different sizes and rotors of different heights.

“This system opens up new possibilities for how drones look and function,” says MIT Professor Wojciech Matusik, who oversaw the project in CSAIL’s Computational Fabrication Group. “It’s no longer a one-size-fits-all approach for people who want to make and use drones for particular purposes.”

The interface lets users design drones with different propellers, rotors, and rods. It also provides guarantees that the drones it fabricates can take off, hover and land — which is no simple task considering the intricate technical trade-offs associated with drone weight, shape, and control.

“For example, adding more rotors generally lets you carry more weight, but you also need to think about how to balance the drone to make sure it doesn’t tip,” says PhD student Tao Du, who was first author on a related paper about the system. “Irregularly-shaped drones are very difficult to stabilize, which means that they require establishing very complex control parameters.”

Du and Matusik co-authored a paper with PhD student Adriana Schulz, postdoc Bo Zhu, and Assistant Professor Bernd Bickel of IST Austria. It will be presented next week at the annual SIGGRAPH Asia conference in Macao, China.

Today’s commercial drones only come in a small range of options, typically with an even number of rotors and upward-facing propellers. But there are many emerging use cases for other kinds of drones. For example, having an odd number of rotors might create a clearer view for a drone’s camera, or allow the drone to carry objects with unusual shapes.

Designing these less conventional drones, however, often requires expertise in multiple disciplines, including control systems, fabrication, and electronics.

“Developing multicopters like these that are actually flyable involves a lot of trial-and-error, tweaking the balance between all the propellers and rotors,” says Du. “It would be more or less impossible for an amateur user, especially one without any computer-science background.”

But the CSAIL group’s new system makes the process much easier. Users design drones by choosing from a database of parts and specifying their needs for things like payload, cost, and battery usage. The system computes the sizes of design elements like rod lengths and motor angles, and looks at metrics such as torque and thrust to determine whether the design will actually work. It also uses an “LQR controller” that takes information about a drone’s characteristics and surroundings to optimize its flight plan.

One of the project’s core challenges stemmed from the fact that a drone’s shape and structure (its “geometry”) is usually strongly tied to how it has been programmed to move (its “control”). To overcome this, researchers used what’s called an “alternating direction method,” which means that they reduced the number of variables by fixing some of them and optimizing the rest. This allowed the team to decouple the variables of geometry and control in a way that optimizes the drone’s performance.

“Once you decouple these variables, you turn a very complicated optimization problem into two easy sub-problems that we already have techniques for solving,” says Du. He envisions future versions of the system that could proactively give design suggestions, like recommending where a rotor should go to accommodate a desired payload.

“This is the first system in which users can interactively design a drone that incorporates both geometry and control,” says Nobuyuki Umetani, a research scientist at Autodesk, Inc., who was not involved in the paper. “This is very exciting work that has the potential to change the way people design.”

The project was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program.

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