William Oliver appointed to Lincoln Laboratory Fellow and associate director of MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics

William D. Oliver of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems Group was appointed to Laboratory Fellow at Lincoln Laboratory and associate director of the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE).

"I am honored to have been appointed to Lincoln Laboratory Fellow and associate director of the RLE,” Oliver said. "We have built a fantastic team that includes members from Lincoln Laboratory and MIT campus, and I look forward to developing new opportunities and interactions in the field of quantum engineering across the Laboratory, the RLE, and the new MIT.nano fabrication facility.”

The Laboratory Fellow position recognizes the laboratory’s strongest technical talent for outstanding contributions to laboratory and national-level programs over many years. Oliver has demonstrated sustained, outstanding technical achievement in quantum information science, superconducting electronics, and complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) technology operated at cryogenic temperatures. Oliver’s primary responsibility within RLE will be to lead a broad range of quantum information science (QIS) research and development activities. He will also serve as the liaison for technical collaboration between RLE and Lincoln Laboratory.

Since joining the laboratory in 2003, Oliver has been strongly engaged in research and development both at the laboratory and on the MIT campus. At the laboratory, he has led the development of several quantum and classical information processing technologies. In parallel, he has led collaborative efforts in the Orlando Group at MIT to advance the scientific understanding of superconducting quantum bits (qubits) through widely recognized, seminal experiments that leverage the laboratory’s strong engineering expertise. Together, these projects have resulted in more than 50 scientific papers in high-profile journals and many invited talks at domestic and international conferences. In conjunction with this work, Oliver has cosupervised 9 postdocs and 11 students. Because of these contributions and collaborations, Oliver was appointed a professor of the practice in the MIT Department of Physics in July 2015.

Over many years, Oliver has identified key research directions across the full breadth of technology needed to accomplish large-scale QIS demonstrations, and his technical leadership established much of the laboratory’s early QIS research portfolio. Oliver’s primary focus has been in the area of superconducting quantum computing, where he has advanced the state of the art for the design, fabrication, and measurement of qubits in experiments performed at millikelvin temperatures. Oliver was responsible for launching two companion cryogenic electronics program areas important for future QIS demonstrations and for other U.S. Department of Defense advanced computing and imager applications. As part of this work, he laid the foundation for the laboratory to develop the world’s most advanced fabrication process for superconducting circuits. Oliver also performed the early proof-of-concept simulations and demonstrations for developing and optimizing CMOS technology for cryogenic operation.

Oliver received a BS degree in electrical engineering (EE) and a BA degree in Japanese from the University of Rochester. He performed thesis work on superconducting circuits at the University of Rochester and during an internship at Nagoya University in Japan. He received his MS degree in EE from MIT, working with Tod Machover at the MIT Media Lab, and a PhD degree in EE from Stanford University for work on quantum noise and electron entanglement with Professor Yoshihisa Yamamoto.

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MIT researchers create new form of matter

MIT physicists have created a new form of matter, a supersolid, which combines the properties of solids with those of superfluids.

By using lasers to manipulate a superfluid gas known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, the team was able to coax the condensate into a quantum phase of matter that has a rigid structure — like a solid — and can flow without viscosity — a key characteristic of a superfluid. Studies into this apparently contradictory phase of matter could yield deeper insights into superfluids and superconductors, which are important for improvements in technologies such as superconducting magnets and sensors, as well as efficient energy transport. The researchers report their results this week in the journal Nature.

“It is counterintuitive to have a material which combines superfluidity and solidity,” says team leader Wolfgang Ketterle, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics at MIT. “If your coffee was superfluid and you stirred it, it would continue to spin around forever.”  

Physicists had predicted the possibility of supersolids but had not observed them in the lab. They theorized that solid helium could become superfluid if helium atoms could move around in a solid crystal of helium, effectively becoming a supersolid. However, the experimental proof remained elusive.

The team used a combination of laser cooling and evaporative cooling methods, originally co-developed by Ketterle, to cool atoms of sodium to nanokelvin temperatures. Atoms of sodium are known as bosons, for their even number of nucleons and electrons. When cooled to near absolute zero, bosons form a superfluid state of dilute gas, called a Bose-Einstein condensate, or BEC. 

Ketterle co-discovered BECs — a discovery for which he was recognized with the 2001 Nobel Prize in physics.

“The challenge was now to add something to the BEC to make sure it developed a shape or form beyond the shape of the ‘atom trap,’ which is the defining characteristic of a solid,” explains Ketterle.

Flipping the spin, finding the stripes

To create the supersolid state, the team manipulated the motion of the atoms of the BEC using laser beams, introducing “spin-orbit coupling.”

In their ultrahigh-vacuum chamber, the team used an initial set of lasers to convert half of the condensate’s atoms to a different quantum state, or spin, essentially creating a mixture of two Bose-Einstein condensates. Additional laser beams then transferred atoms between the two condensates, called a “spin flip.”

“These extra lasers gave the ‘spin-flipped’ atoms an extra kick to realize the spin-orbit coupling,” Ketterle says.

Physicists had predicted that a spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate would be a supersolid due to a spontaneous “density modulation.” Like a crystalline solid, the density of a supersolid is no longer constant and instead has a ripple or wave-like pattern called the “stripe phase.” 

“The hardest part was to observe this density modulation,” says Junru Li, an MIT graduate student who worked on the discovery. This observation was accomplished with another laser, the beam of which was diffracted by the density modulation. “The recipe for the supersolid is really simple,” Li adds, “but it was a big challenge to precisely align all the laser beams and to get everything stable to observe the stripe phase.”

Mapping out what is possible in nature

Currently, the supersolid only exists at extremely low temperatures under ultrahigh-vacuum conditions. Going forward, the team plans to carry out further experiments on supersolids and spin-orbit coupling, characterizing and understanding the properties of the new form of matter they created.

“With our cold atoms, we are mapping out what is possible in nature,” explains Ketterle. “Now that we have experimentally proven that the theories predicting supersolids are correct, we hope to inspire further research, possibly with unanticipated results.”

Several research groups were working on realizing the first supersolid. In the same issue of Nature, a group in Switzerland reported an alternative way of turning a Bose-Einstein condensate into a supersolid with the help of mirrors, which collected laser light scattering by the atoms. “The simultaneous realization by two groups shows how big the interest is in this new form of matter,” says Ketterle.

Ketterle’s team members include graduate students Junru Li, Boris Shteynas, Furkan Çağrı Top, and Wujie Huang; undergraduate Sean Burchesky; and postdocs Jeongwon Lee and Alan O. Jamison, all of whom are associates at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics.

This research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office for Scientific Research, and the Army Research Office.

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Printing data-driven wearables that mimic nature

School of Architecture and Planning lecturer Jessica Rosekrantz’s career in design began somewhat as an accident and was sparked by a random comment by a graduate classmate at the Harvard University School of Design.

“I was making a lot of complex laser-cut models that sort of looked like cellular patterns you might see in biology,” says Rosenkrantz '05. “And one of the pieces that I had laser-cut was sort of curled up on my desk — it was actually a failed piece of garbage from an architecture model. But someone walked up to me and said, ‘Hey, is that a bracelet?’”

The conversation ignited an idea in Rosenkrantz that she could apply many of the large-scale architectural theories she learned at MIT and Harvard into tangible consumer products like art, jewelry, and housewares. That idea would evolve into Nervous System, a Somerville, Massachusetts-based generative design studio that she co-founded.

“Nervous System has a somewhat unusual design process where we actually don’t directly design anything,” she says. “We don’t draw, we don’t sculpt, and we don’t model. We write computer programs based on processes in nature that generate form and pattern, and use those to grow or generate series of objects, which can be digitally fabricated.”

The processes-in-nature aspect of Nervous System developed during Rosenkrantz’s time as a biology major at MIT. A double major, she also earned an undergraduate degree at MIT in architecture.

“I majored in biology because I was fascinated by how forms in nature emerge,” she says. “How we go from a single cell to an extremely complex, functional organism. That’s the most sophisticated technology that we have on the planet. Our design process of creating systems that grow and evolve, rather than creating static designs, is something that is central to what we do.”

Nervous System’s portfolio includes commissioned work like custom jewelry and furniture and larger projects such as building facades and creating 3-D printing generators for Google’s Advanced Technology and Projects group. They recently collaborated with New Balance to help reinvent the running shoe and develop a customized, 3-D-printed midsole.

“For New Balance, we explored how to create a variable-response cushioning midsole,” she says. “We were really inspired by forms in nature that you specifically see in bones and wood. So you have cellular structures, which very efficiently fill space and create strong forms but uses very minimal amount of material.”

She hopes Nervous System can continue to do larger work on an architectural scale while also collaborating with a science and biology organizations that pursue work on a cellular level.

“All of our projects are sort of united by a singular, sort of, methodology in how we work, which is in creating these sort of generative computeRor systems,” she says. “So everything, whether it’s a piece of jewelry or a building or a 3-D-printed human tissue, is all generated using the same logic and workflow.”

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Women of NASA LEGO set blasts off

For years, Maia Weinstock, the deputy editor of MIT News, has been creating miniature LEGO figurines to honor and promote such scientists and engineers as MIT Institute Professor Emerita Mildred Dresselhaus, Vice President for Research Maria T. Zuber, and Department of Chemical Engineering head Paula Hammond, the David H. Koch Chair Professor in Engineering. The figures are Weinstock’s playful way of boosting the visibility of scientists, in particular the work of female scientists.

Now, a set of LEGOs Weinstock created celebrating the history of women at NASA is about to blast off. On Tuesday, LEGO announced that Weinstock’s project, which spotlights five women who made historic contributions to the U.S. space program, has been selected to become an official LEGO set.

“What a wonderful way to celebrate the scientific achievements of these five pioneering women,” says Zuber, the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics and the first woman to lead a NASA planetary mission. “And I’m thrilled with the message that these LEGOs will send to girls — that they, too, can pursue their passions in science, technology, engineering, and math, and help make a better world.”

Last summer Weinstock submitted her concept, dubbed the Women of NASA, to LEGO Ideas, a platform that allows people around the world to propose new ideas for LEGO concepts. After a public voting period, during which Weinstock’s set received 10,000 votes in 15 days, her project underwent an official LEGO review.

Weinstock was inspired to create the set by her love of space and NASA, and her desire to showcase the contributions that women have made over the years to the field of space exploration. Above all, she hopes the set will help encourage more young girls to pursue STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math).

“I hope that ‘Women of NASA’ will be one little extra brick in the wall of trying to improve how women are perceived and shown in books, toys, and family programming,” Weinstock explains. “Anything I can do to help make sure girls understand that they can and should be interested in the sciences, engineering, and math, that is my goal. At the end of the day, that’s why I am doing this.”

The set depicts five trailblazers in NASA’s history: Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist who led the development of software for the Apollo missions while at MIT; Mae Jemison, who became the first African-American woman in space in 1992; Katherine Johnson, known for calculating and verifying trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo programs; Sally Ride, who became the first American woman in space in 1983; and astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, one of the first female executives at NASA, who was instrumental in the planning of the Hubble Space Telescope.

Weinstock explains that she wanted the set to feature “a very diverse group of women in terms of what they did, in terms of their fields at NASA, in terms of their cultural backgrounds, and also in terms of their age. Some are shown as younger, but I made sure I had one shown as older. Also, most of the women in the set are known for their work in the space flight program at NASA, but I wanted to give a shout out to the astronomy program as well.”

Weinstock began creating LEGO figures back in 2009, when she constructed a LEGO likeness for her friend Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist known for her imaging work on the Voyager and Cassini missions. After sharing an image of Porco’s LEGO figurine on Twitter, Weinstock received an outpouring of positive feedback and was inspired to create more figures in an effort to help promote the work of living scientists.

Since she built her first figurine, Weinstock has created LEGOs for a number of celebrated scientists and engineers, including primatologist Jane Goodall, oceanographer Sylvia Earle, physicist Stephen Hawking, and a number of MIT faculty members such as Ernest Moniz, professor of physics and special advisor to the president, and Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

“Being immortalized in LEGO is probably the coolest thing that has ever happened to me,” Bhatia says. “I hope it makes lots of little tinkerers dream about being engineers at MIT someday.”

Weinstock explains that she chose LEGOs as her medium as she feels “there is a childlike wonder to playing with a toy that you can make in people’s likeness.”

“One major goal for me is to get the public to recognize the history of women in the STEM fields. I’m hopeful that with this set more people will come to know these women,” Weinstock says. “Part of it is knowing these specific five women, but also part of it is setting an example. It’s really important to set an example for girls, as well as for boys, to normalize and make plain that women are expected to be in these fields and that it’s not strange or unusual.”

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The corporate debt trap

The debt levels of large companies just before the Great Recession of 2007-2009 are strongly linked to local unemployment spikes during that time, a novel study co-authored by an MIT professor finds — adding another dimension to our picture of the recent economic crisis. 

“We found that companies with high leverage around 2006 ended up laying off more people,” says Xavier Giroud, the Ford International Career Development Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management and co-author of a paper detailing the study’s results. “Companies with a lot of debt may have no other option. That can potentially exacerbate a crisis.”

The study takes a unique, granular look at firm-by-firm financial and employment data as well as county-by-county housing data across the U.S.

The research is unorthodox because much of the discussion and analysis of the recession has focused on the rising levels of household debt in the U.S. In the early 2000s, with incomes stagnant for many Americans but housing prices rising, people often borrowed against their home equity to finance spending — then saw their home values crash. That badly hurt consumer spending, or demand, which slowed the overall economy.

But Giroud says that is only one element of the economic situation that we should consider. “The general belief is that what really mattered was household leverage,” he observes. “Households got too much debt, and when the crisis started, there was no coming back. And that was a very important driver of the crisis. But nobody has really thought about firm leverage.”

A striking top-line result from the study shows the contrast between a firm at the 90th percentile of the “leverage distribution” — that is, one carrying a lot of debt — versus a firm at the 10th percentile of the leverage distribution. The firm at the 90th percentile, the researchers found, has three times as much “elasticity of employment” as the less-indebted firm, meaning it laid off three times more employees in response to the drop in consumer demand that was induced by falling housing prices.

The paper, “Firm Leverage, Consumer Demand, and Unemployment During the Great Recession,” appears in the latest issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Holger Mueller, the Nomura Professor of Finance at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, is Giroud’s co-author.

Firm by firm, county by county

To conduct the study, the researchers used employment data at the business level from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database; business balance sheet and income data from Compustat, the financial database company; and county-level house price data from Zillow, the online real estate listings firm. 

While the names of the specific firms in the Census Bureau data cannot be released, typical companies companies in the study would be, say, large chain retailers or chain restaurants, which employ people across the country.

Giroud and Mueller examined the records of roughly 2,800 firms that operated about 284,000 local establishments or branches of their enterprises. The total number of employees at those firms, nationwide, was a little over 11 million, on the eve of the recession.

While sorting the firms according to debt levels, the researchers also looked at county-by-county and zip code-by-zip code housing prices. The employment losses were bigger in regions that experienced a larger drop in housing prices, as those areas had a larger drop in consumer demand. This approach enabled the scholars to study the varying responses of firms with high leverage and low leverage, because, as Giroud says, “We can compare the employment losses at two establishments that are at the same location — and hence are subject to the same drop in consumer demand — where one of them belongs to a high-leverage firm, while the other [establishment] does not.”

Giroud adds that the paper is not critiquing companies for taking on larger amounts of debt in and of itself: “We’re not really taking a stand about how they ended up having more debt than other companies.” It may be, he adds, that in 2006, at the onset of the economic dropoff, more heavily leveraged companies had solid business plans but bad timing. That led creditors to tighten lending to those firms, leading to layoffs.

“It was presumably harder for them [highly-leveraged companies] to get more financing during the crisis, to keep their operations afloat, and there was just no way around the layoffs,” Giroud says.

Leverage beyond Wall Street

Giroud emphasizes that the firms in question are not financial firms, whose copious amounts of leverage have drawn major attention over the last decade. Investment banks such as Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns collapsed after borrowing heavily to make bets that did not pay off.

“We are only taking about nonfinancial firms,” Giroud says. “What we have been missing is the leverage of these nonfinancial firms. And this is where the paper comes in.”

And while an immense amount of debate has gone into determining the right policies to control the debt accumulated by investment banks, much less has been directed toward the large firms that employ many more people. Yet, as Giroud and Mueller write in the paper, “Our research suggests a possible role for employment policies that target firms directly besides conventional stimulus.”

At a minimum, Giroud adds, that means policymakers should have a growing awareness of the significance of balance-sheet issues when it comes to employment, especially during economic downturns.

“Policy options are always tricky to formulate,” Giroud says. “A lot of the time, people think big public firms will always be able to raise capital … but even those companies [can] be financially constrained. It is important that firms monitor their leverage ratios.”

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Dropbox founder drops by to inspire and spark collaboration

Like MIT’s campus computing environment, Athena, a pre-cloud solution for enabling files and applications to follow the user, Dropbox’s Drew Houston ’05 brings his alma mater everywhere he goes.

After earning his bachelor’s in electrical engineering and computer science, Houston’s frustration with the clunky need to carry portable USB drives drove him to partner with a fellow MIT student, Arash Ferdows, to develop an online solution — what would become Dropbox.

Dropbox, which now has over 500 million users, continues to adapt. The file-sharing company recently crossed the $1-billion threshold in annual subscription revenue. It's expanding its business model by selling at the corporate level — employees at companies with Dropbox can use, essentially, one big box.

True to his company’s goal of using technology to bring people (and files) together, Houston is keen to share his own wisdom with others, especially those at MIT. Houston gave the 2013 Commencement address, saying “The hardest-working people don't work hard because they're disciplined. They work hard because working on an exciting problem is fun.”

He has also been a guest speaker in ‘The Founder’s Journey,” a course designed to demystify entrepreneurship, and at the MIT Enterprise Forum Cambridge; a frequent and active participant in StartMIT, a workshop on entrepreneurship held over Independent Activities Period (IAP); and a staple of the MIT Better World tour, an alumni engagement event happening at cities all over the globe.

Houston stopped by MIT in February for the latest iteration of StartMIT to give a “fireside chat” about the early days of Dropbox, when it was run with a few of his friends from Course 6, and discussed the current challenges of the company: managing scale. His firm now employs over 1,000 people.

“With thousands of employees in the company, you need coordination, and it can become total chaos. Ultimately all the vectors need to point in the same direction,” he told students. It turns out that Dropbox’s new online collaboration suite, Paper, could play a key role in getting those vectors to line up, offering lessons to both those new to start-ups and more seasoned entrepreneurs.

The Department of Electrical Engineering and Science (EECS) caught up with Houston to ask him about his perspective on Paper, a new tool Dropbox created out of necessity, and the potential for artificial intelligence to improve how people and teams organize their work online.

Q. Why did you decide to create a new way to collaborate?

A. Keeping files in sync is a way to keep teams in sync — sharing info gets teams on the same page. But teams need a lot more than just shared files; they need a way of organizing their knowledge, which might even mean taking bits of useful information from different files and connecting them in new ways.

At Dropbox, we were using tools like Google Docs. And we found they were really good for some things: creating docs in real-time is super easy, collaborating, editing — that stuff was great. But the problem is after using them we'd end up with this static list of 100 documents and 20 different projects, and it wasn't very organized. The docs were self-contained and not connected.

The other half of the time, we were using wikis — which are good, because they're like the web: They're connected, they're public by default, so they become this home for your knowledge. But the editing experience is pretty limited. There's not a lot of formatting. You can't do much more than text.

One way or the other, we're like, "God! We're always compromising." But what if we had the best of both worlds?

It's also one thing for tools to just be functional. What if they were also beautiful?

Look at this building [Houston waves his hand to indicate the unique heart of Building 32, the Ray and Maria Stata Center.] We spend so much time and money and thought on the design of our physical space — what about our collaborative work environment?

Q. What, exactly, is beautiful about Paper?

A. [Houston opens his laptop and pulls up Dropbox Paper.] This is how we run the company, really. [Houston has the dashboard interface up, where he can see his documents.] It's very simple. Look at what there isn't; there's not 10,000 buttons. [He clicks a plus sign that opens a new document. The placeholder text reads: Beautiful by default.] I can just add a couple things. [Houston types rapidly, creating a checkbox item]: “@Drew, remember to eat. [Houston selects a date on a mini-calendar that appears to the right]… By tomorrow.” [He laughs.] You can add a picture. You can share the document or send it. There are stickers. You have the formatting you would expect, but also emojis, code, LaTeX, tasks, tables. They're beautiful by default. You can embed stuff — Google Docs, GIFs, Dropbox files with previews, Spotify files, Soundcloud files, tweets, you can paste a URL. It's really awesome. And it's on your phone. There are updates, to-dos — so it gives me a feed of what's happening in my world.

Q. Paper also incorporates machine learning tricks. What does that mean practically? And where might it go from there?

A. When you zoom out more broadly [than a single document], there's just a lot of context that helps people figure out what's important, or how to prioritize or organize things. So, for example, you might be working on a Paper doc and based on the key words or various other signals, we can be, like, ‘Oh wait, here are a few suggestions for where you might want to put it, like your public folder.’ I think there're a lot of ways we can assist; instead of everyone having to be a librarian and file or tag things and make these connections manually, the algorithms can do a lot of the ranking the elements, and so on, a lot better. And that's throughout the product. It's a core part of the experience. 

Another area I'm very interested in is natural language processing. A lot of work, like when you're emailing or texting someone, or leaving a comment, is just unstructured text. But from that you can infer that there's actually structure, intent, meaning, and associations. For example, if I write “doc scanner,” that's not just a couple words; it's a feature with associations. And you should be able to query your team's knowledge and not have to worry about explicitly asking “Where are the specs for the doc scanner?”

Natural language processing could essentially ask, "Is this what you mean?" As you're trying to type in a query, it could assist you with automated suggestions: "Oh, are you looking for (this)?" Or "are you searching for something by (this person)?" Or "do you mean something that's part of this project?" Or "something before this date?" Those are just a couple of ways that [machine learning and automated assistance] could be applied, but there are, potentially, thousands. We're not very far along yet in true natural language understanding. But I think step one is just to get all the stuff into one place — doing some of that plumbing so you can do basic searches. 

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MIT students invited to participate in 2017 Student Quality of Life Survey

Vice President and Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson has invited all enrolled undergraduate and graduate students to share their thoughts on the MIT student experience by participating in the 2017 Student Quality of Life (SQL) survey.

“Wherever you are in your MIT journey — first-year to PhD — it’s really important to me and the Institute that your voice is heard,” Nelson wrote in a Feb. 21 email to students encouraging them to participate in the survey. “The survey was designed with input from students, faculty, and staff, and will help us understand what’s working, what needs improvement, and how the MIT student experience should evolve.”

The survey, which was administered for the first time in 2013, asks students to rate their MIT experience across several dimensions: overall satisfaction, workload, extracurricular activities, campus climate, health and well-being, and academic and residential spaces. Nelson noted in her email to students that the 2017 SQL follows up on questions asked in the 2013 SQL so that the administration can identify trends.

To thank students for participating, those who complete the survey will be entered into a drawing for two $500 gift cards (winner’s choice of American Express or Amazon) and 100 TechCash gift cards, each worth $100.

The survey will be open for about three weeks. Institutional Research expects to post the overall results to its website in April.

“I’ll write to you again when the data are compiled and available on the Institutional Research website. In the meantime, thanks for the time you take to tell us what’s on your mind. Your feedback will help MIT improve the student experience for years to come,” wrote Nelson.

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