Firebricks offer low-cost storage for carbon-free energy

Firebricks, designed to withstand high heat, have been part of our technological arsenal for at least three millennia, since the era of the Hittites. Now, a proposal from MIT researchers shows this ancient invention could play a key role in enabling the world to switch away from fossil fuels and rely instead on carbon-free energy sources.

The researchers’ idea is to make use of excess electricity produced when demand is low — for example, from wind farms when strong winds are blowing at night — by using electric resistance heaters, which convert electricity into heat. These devices would use the excess electricity to heat up a large mass of firebricks, which can retain the heat for long periods if they are enclosed in an insulated casing. At a later time, the heat could be used directly for industrial processes, or it could feed generators that convert it back to electricity when the power is needed.

The technology itself is old, but its potential usefulness is a new phenomenon, brought about by the rapid rise of intermittent renewable energy sources, and the peculiarities of the way electricity prices are set. Technologically, the system “could have been developed in the 1920s, but there was no market for it then,” says Charles Forsberg, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering and lead author of a research paper describing the plan, that appears this week in the Electricity Journal.

Forsberg points out that the demand for industrial heat in the U.S. and most industrialized regions is actually larger than the total demand for electricity. And unlike the demand for electricity, which varies greatly and often unpredictably, the demand for industrial heat is constant and can make use of an extra heat source whenever it’s available, providing an almost limitless market for the heat provided by this firebrick-based system.

The system, which Forsberg calls FIRES (for FIrebrick Resistance-heated Energy Storage), would in effect raise the minimum price of electricity on the utilities market, which currently can plunge to almost zero at times of high production, such as the middle of a sunny day when solar plant outputs are at their peak.

Electricity prices are determined a day in advance, with a separate price for each one-hour segment of the day. This is done through an auction system between the producers and the distributors of power. Distributors determine how much power they expect to need during each hour, and suppliers bid based on their expected costs for producing that power. Depending on the needs at a given time, these prices can be low, if only baseload natural gas plants are needed, for example, or they can be much higher if the demand requires use of much more expensive “peaking” power plants. At the end of each auction, the distributors figure out how many of the bids will be needed to meet the projected demand, and the price to be paid to all of the suppliers is then determined by the highest-priced bid of all those accepted for that hour.

But that system can lead to odd outcomes when power that is very cheap to produce — solar, wind and nuclear power, whose actual operating costs are vanishingly small — can supply enough to meet the demand. Then, the price the suppliers get for the power can be close to zero, rendering the plants uneconomical.

But by diverting much of that excess output into thermal storage by heating a large mass of firebrick, then selling that heat directly or using it to drive turbines and produce power later when it’s needed, FIRES could essentially set a lower limit on the market price for electricity, which would likely be about the price of natural gas. That, in turn, could help to make more carbon-free power sources, such as solar, wind, and nuclear, more profitable and thus encourage their expansion.

The collapse of electricity prices due to expansion of nonfossil energy is already happening and will continue to increase as renewable energy installations increase. “In electricity markets such as Iowa, California, and Germany, the price of electricity drops to near zero at times of high wind or solar output,” Forsberg says. Once the amount of generating capacity provided by solar power reaches about 15 percent of the total generating mix, or when wind power reaches 30 percent of the total, building such installations can become unprofitable unless there is a sufficient storage capacity to absorb the excess for later use.

At present, the options for storing excess electricity are essentially limited to batteries or pumped hydroelectric systems. By contrast, the low-tech firebrick thermal storage system would cost anywhere from one-tenth to one-fortieth as much as either of those options, Forsberg says.

Firebrick itself is just a variant of ordinary bricks, made from clays that are capable of withstanding much higher temperatures, ranging up to 1,600 degrees Celsius or more. Virtually dirt cheap to produce — clay is, after all, just a particular kind of dirt — such high-temperature bricks have been found in archeological sites dating back to around 3,500 years ago, such as in iron-smelting kilns built by the Hittites in what is now Turkey. The fact that these bricks have survived until now testifies to their durability.

Nowadays, by varying the chemical composition of the clay, firebrick can be made with a variety of properties. For example, bricks to be placed in the center of the assemblage could have high thermal conductivity, so that they can easily take in heat from the resistance heaters. These bricks could easily give up that heat to cold air being blown through the mass to carry away the heat for industrial use. But the bricks used for the outer parts of the structure could have very low thermal conductivity, thus creating an insulating shell to help retain the heat of the central stack.

The current limit on FIRES is the resistance heaters. Existing low-cost, reliable heaters only go to about 850 C. Ultimately, Forsberg suggests, the bricks themselves could be made electrically conductive, so that they could act as low-cost resistance heaters on their own, both producing and storing the heat. A promising material for these firebricks is silicon carbide, which is already produced at massive scales for uses such as sandpaper. China currently produces about a million tons of it per year, Forsberg says.

Turning that heat back into electricity is a bigger technical challenge, so that would likely be a next-generation version of the FIRES system, he says. That’s because producing electricity with the conventional turbines used for natural gas power plants requires a much higher temperature. While industrial process heat is viable at about 800 C, he says, the turbines need compressed air heated to at least 1,600 C. Ordinary resistance heaters can’t go that high, and such systems will also need an enclosing pressure vessel to handle the needed air pressure. But the advantage would be great: Doubling the operating temperature would cut in half the cost of the heat produced, Forsberg says.

The next step, Forsberg says, will be to set up some full-scale prototype units to prove the principles in real-world conditions, something he expects will happen by 2020. “We’re finding the right customers for those initial units,” he says, which would probably be a company such as an ethanol refinery, which uses a lot of heat, located near a sizable wind-turbine installation.

“I believe that FIRES is an innovative approach to solve a real power grid problem,” says Regis Matzie, the now-retired Chief Technical Officer at Westinghouse Electric, who was not involved in this work. The way prices for electricity are determined in this country produces a “skewed electricity market [that] produces low or even negative market prices when a significant fraction of electrical energy on the grid is provided by renewables,” he says. “A very positive way to correct this trend would be to deploy an economical way of storing the energy generated during low electricity market prices, e.g., when the renewables are generating a large amount of electricity, and then releasing this stored energy when the market prices are high… FIRES provides a potentially economic way to do this, but would probably need a demonstration to establish the operability and the economics.”

The research team included MIT graduate students Daniel Stack, Daniel Curtis, Geoffrey Haratyk, and recent graduate Nestor Sepulveda MS ’14.

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How retractions hurt scientists’ credibility

Life scientists who have published papers that are retracted by journals subsequently suffer a 10 percent drop in citations of their remaining work, compared to similar but unaffected scientists, according to a new study by MIT researchers.

Examining hundreds of cases over a 30-year period, the research quantifies the extent that one discredited study — whether an act of malfeasance or a sloppy piece of research — has on the overall reputation of academic scientists.

“The question we’re asking is: Do retractions trigger, at an individual level, something like an infection mechanism, where the retracted author is being punished and discredited for being dishonest or just incompetent?” says Alessandro Bonatti, an associate professor at the MIT Sloan School of Mangement and a co-author of a new paper detailing the study. “We find that yes, there is such a mechanism in place, and it operates through citations.”

The study also finds that, in cases of clear misconduct, high-profile scientists who have a paper retracted experience an even larger drop — 20 percent — in the citations of their additional work.

The study adds to a growing literature on retractions and related problems in science, and suggests that the system of peer-review, while not perfect, does give people in the scientific community room to change their preferences about the quality of work presented to them.

As the authors write in the paper, the academic process of peer review may not provide “the optimal incentive system” in every regard, but the results do run against the “narrative that regards peer review as fundamentally undermined by … forms of misconduct.”

The paper, “The career effects of scandal: Evidence from scientific retractions,” has just been published online by the journal Research Policy, and will appear in a print edition as well. The authors are Bonatti; Pierre Azoulay, the International Programs Professor of Management at MIT Sloan, who is the corresponding author; and Joshua L. Krieger PhD ’17, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, who worked on the project while completing his doctorate at MIT.

First retraction, then decline

The study looks at a large group of scientists who published papers, from 1977 until 2007, that were later retracted, and compares the citation rates of all their published works to the citation rates of a related group of scientists who never had papers retracted.

There are 376 scientists in the study who have had papers retracted and have collectively authored a total of 23,630 published papers in their careers. The control group of scientists without retractions includes 759 authors with a total of 46,538 published papers to their names.

There are two large methodological keys to the study. First, the control group of scientists was built by identifying researchers who had published papers in the same journal issues, and on similar topics, as the papers that were later retracted. This allowed the MIT researchers to be confident that they were studying two groups of scientists who were largely similar and could be expected to generate similar citation rates for their work.

Second, the 10 percent decline in citations is specifically measured against the “normal” trajectory of citations over time experienced by authors who have never had retractions. That is, academic papers generally do have a typical decline in citations over time. But the citation rates of still-valid papers published by researchers who subsequently had retractions dropped by 10 percent when compared to the expected long-term decline in citations rates that already exists.

“If you look at the time trend of citations to these papers, nothing [unusual] is happening until there is a retraction,” Bonatti explains. “That’s exactly what we’re picking up. It’s not that these are old papers that are getting obsolete, and people are citing newer stuff.”

Instead, Bonatti adds, “Our data is consistent with a learning story.” That is, the scientific community is reacting to new information, in the form of retractions, and re-adjusts its view about the value of the body of work of certain scholars, based on that.

“The mighty fall further”

The pattern the researchers discovered doubles when there is clear scientific misconduct, which is often announced by the journal making the retraction. As the researchers found, misconduct produces a subset of cases where the citation rates of other papers drop 20 percent, among scientists who had been among the top quartile of their peers in terms of citations.

“Once you’re looking at retractions that involve misconduct, those are pretty good signs that something bad happened,” Bonatti observes. “So when the signal is very clear, it doesn’t matter how famous you were to begin with, you’re going to be discredited. … The mighty fall further, because they were standing taller to begin with.”

The current study builds on prior work by Azoulay and Krieger, who in 2014 published a paper, along with two other co-authors, showing that retracted papers produced a 6 percent decline in citations for nonretracted papers in the same subfield of research.

As the scholars acknowledge, the new paper leaves open a number of related questions about retraction policy and the effects of retractions. Many journals publish retractions that present ambiguity about the reasons for their action, leaving outside observers unclear about the precise nature of the problem.

Moreover, as the authors write, they still “cannot say anything definitive” about the theoretical gains researchers receive from publishing dubious work; the study of retractions depends on suspect work being identified. It thus remains unclear how frequently scientists may be getting away with work that deserves retraction.

The research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation.

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MIT Theater Arts: The next act

In 1597, when the Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s lease expired on their theater building in Shoreditch, a suburb of London, the company dismantled the structure, timber by timber, and moved it across the Thames to Bankside — where they rebuilt it into London’s renowned Globe Theatre.

While theater practitioners rarely have to take building construction into their own hands quite so literally, there are advantages when they have an active role in creating their performance spaces.

The recently completed MIT theater and performing arts building (W97), which enters into full operation this fall, benefited greatly from a close creative relationship between the architects (designLAB), the MIT Facilities team, and the MIT Theater Arts faculty, notably Norton Award-winning director of design Sara Brown, and Obie-winning director Jay Scheib, a professor of theater known for his genre-defying productions.  

A free, vast, and variable space

Of transforming an aging warehouse at 345 Vassar Street into an ingenious 25,000-square-foot performing arts building, Brown says, “We were inspired by spaces that prioritize and expose the activities of making theater over spaces that camouflage, decorate, or hide those works.”

Scheib adds, “The form of our new building has entirely followed its function.” For example, the team designed the main theater as an unadorned, tech-friendly black box that can accommodate diverse productions and styles of stagecraft, an approach that recalls architect and theatre designer Adolphe Appia’s vision for “a free, vast, and variable space.”

Commenting on the building, MIT President L. Rafael Reif says, “Like the main group buildings at the heart of campus, W97 embodies and encourages MIT’s signature openness, flexibility, and boldness. With a focus on making and creating, on fearless exploration and hands-on problem solving, the students and faculty of MIT's Theater Arts community pursue their aspirations with mind, hand, heart, body, and soul. I am delighted that at last they have a space that lives up to the quality of their creativity.”

Exponential growth

The urgent need for a new, purpose-built theater space became clear when MIT Theater’s home in the 19th century Rinaldi tile factory had to be demolished as the Kendall Square redevelopment began in 2016. “Rinaldi had become a space that we could use to prototype new works and push forward the development of MIT’s theater program,” Scheib says. Other functions of the theater program were scattered around campus — in Kresge Auditorium, the Walker Memorial, and Buildings 4 and 10.

W97 both replaces the Rinaldi facilities and consolidates all the other theater activities under one roof. Like earlier arts buildings on campus, including the Wiesner Building, Kresge, and the Media Lab, W97 signifies the Institute’s strong commitment to the arts as an integral mode of exploration and discovery.

The building also arrives at a time when MIT Theater Arts is experiencing exponential growth in stature, scope, and student engagement. Student enrollment has doubled since 2012, with more than 800 undergrads now taking theater classes each academic year. An SB in theater was added in 2015 to give the most engaged students a broad foundation in theoretical and practical studies as well as intensive practice in performance and design. “The program has grown into a magnet for talent and innovation, whose reputation extends far beyond the campus,” Scheib says.

MIT students value theater for many reasons, not least for its incomparable lens on the human world, and for its time-honored ability to help students discover their own voices and views, and how to express them well. MIT Theater is also renowned for experiences that develop skills in creative collaboration and risk-taking that are valuable in any field.

This current flourishing rests on a solid legacy that began with student-driven performances in the early days of the Institute and continued to expand throughout the 20th century. By the 1990s, word of MIT’s enterprising theatrical work had made its way to the Royal Shakespeare Company, whose leadership saw MIT Theater as a lab for formulating plays dealing with science and cultural transformation.

Similarly, MIT’s theater faculty — all practicing artists in demand around the globe — engage their students in the process of developing new works to be performed on the world’s leading stages. Of the program’s burgeoning range and popularity, senior lecturer Anna Kohler says: “It’s very exciting — and it’s a huge responsibility. We really needed this building to lift MIT Theater into the 21st century.”

A building for makers

The new building contains a 180-seat, two-story blackbox performance space, rehearsal spaces, costume and scene design shops, dressing rooms, and spaces for study, offices, and exhibitions. Studios are fitted with lighting grids and ample power for technical classes and to enable experiments with theater technologies. “The new facility gives students access to more industry-standard situations,” Scheib says. “Now when they take our design classes and our tech classes, it will be hands-on and at scale.”

Brown adds, “Many theaters are built from the audience perspective, but this building is also built from the maker perspective. For example, the scene shop has natural light, the costume shop has natural light — even the green room has natural light. The act of making is considered and highlighted throughout the building.”

MIT’s maker culture is also reflected in the building’s sturdy, serviceable materials, which convey a nothing-is-precious character that is conducive to experimenting. Sacrificial floors and layers of plywood on the walls can be peeled away with wear and tear.

Form follows philosophy

The space also speaks to the Theater Arts faculty’s priorities and vision for the program. “There’s a distinct performance philosophy behind this building’s flexibility,” says Scheib, who is known for integrating design and performance. “I tend to believe that all the elements in a performance need to operate as equals. Choreography, spoken text, music, scenery — each thing on stage needs to be as important as the performer in order to create a complete image or experience.”

For instance, rather than an enclosed technical booth, there is a gallery above the stage, which puts the crew in the same space with the main action. Brown observes, “That reflects our approach to theater. We don’t want the technicians tucked away; to adequately run sound, you have to hear it live.”

Kohler, who will direct the inaugural production in W97 — a performance of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Everybody,” based on the medieval morality play “Everyman” — says the new building’s flexible space is essential, given the theater faculty’s adventurous and diverse approaches to performance. “The space is multipurpose because we encompass many kinds of theater ideas.”

The continuous studio 

While affording students greater access to space and equipment, W97 will also enable more collaborations and professional engagements. With a generous endowment from alumna Nancy Lukitsh that supports visiting theater artists and productions, MIT can now invite leading theater figures to campus to share their works and teach master classes.

MIT’s own theater faculty will also be able to develop more of their works on campus, involving MIT students in the process. The flexible facility allows for more theater research focused on experimental work, as well as providing the campus with new space for debates, exhibitions, conferences, and installations.

Beyond even these many new capacities, W97 is something more. The building is a manifestation of the MIT theater community’s belief in a large and animating idea that they call the continuous studio — a studio that supports the full spectrum of theater experience including theory, experimentation, innovation, and a sustained, creative practice. As Kohler puts it, “Beyond being a space where we can teach, experiment, and produce, this new building has given us a home for an idea — an idea of what theater can be.”

Story prepared by MIT SHASS Communications

Editorial Team: Sharon Lacey and Emily Hiestand

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MIT Summer Research Programs nurture tomorrow's scientists

Dozens of undergraduate students gather each year at the annual MIT Summer Research Program (MSRP) poster session to present the work they have completed over the course of the summer at MIT.

This year the poster session featured research from 37 undergraduates from MSRP General, 37 undergraduates from the MSRP Bio and Neuroscience cohort, and six students from the Emergent Behaviors of Integrated Cellular Systems (EBICS) program. These students came from institutions around the country to pursue research and explore departments across MIT.

Marking the conclusion of an immersive research experience, the poster session showed these 80 diverse students that they have at least one thing in common: They can make an impact in their respective research areas by proposing solutions to problems that have never been solved before.

Administered by the Office of Graduate Education, MSRP strives to expose high-achieving sophomores, juniors, and seniors to the academic world, to improve the research environment by increasing the number of underrepresented minorities and underserved students in scientific research, and to encourage students to apply for a graduate program at MIT.

MSRP began in 1986 with a handful of students and has blossomed into a phenomenal community of young researchers prepared to pursue advanced degrees. Students in MSRP are given the opportunity to see MIT in its fullest form by living on campus and working alongside graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, research scientists, and professors.

“From this experience, I now believe that I am revolutionary,” says Talia Thomas, from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. “I’m going to make it my mission to make sure that other people realize that they are revolutionary as well, and that they can realize their full potential.”

This year’s program spanned 10 weeks of intense research and personal development, with students diving into exciting work in electrical engineering and computer science, architecture, urban planning, and more. In addition to research, students attended weekly workshops featuring different aspects of the graduate journey, such as a “Life after the PhD” seminar with MSRP alumni and a “How to write the Statement of Objectives” workshop with Donald Asher, an expert in graduate admissions.

Other weekly events included a scientific communication class every Wednesday, group meetings led by MIT graduate students, and seminars featuring faculty, such as associate professor of mechanical engineering Cullen Buie. To build trust and foster friendships, almost every weekend included social outings, including a boat cruise on the Charles River, a day trip to Martha’s Vineyard, and a visit to a local amusement park.

As the students return home, they carry with them both new skills learned in their labs and inspiration that comes from finding people as driven to change the world as they are. Jumping into research headfirst is no easy task, but leaving with a better understanding of their fields and how to conduct research to better the world is well worth the challenge.

The student researchers now join the network of MSRP alumni, a community confident in its ability to bring diverse talent to research environments and make a positive impact in the world.

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Gregory Falco: Protecting urban infrastructure against cyberterrorism

While working for the global management consulting company Accenture, Gregory Falco discovered just how vulnerable the technologies underlying smart cities and the “internet of things” — everyday devices that are connected to the internet or a network — are to cyberterrorism attacks.

“What happened was, I was telling sheiks and government officials all around the world about how amazing the internet of things is and how it’s going to solve all their problems and solve sustainability issues and social problems,” Falco says. “And then they asked me, ‘Is it secure?’ I looked at the security guys and they said, ‘There’s no problem.’ And then I looked under the hood myself, and there was nothing going on there.”

Falco is currently transitioning into the third and final year of his PhD within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP). Currently, his is carrying out his research at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His focus is on cybersecurity for urban critical infrastructure, and the internet of things, or IoT, is at the center of his work. A washing machine, for example, that is connected to an app on its owner’s smartphone is considered part of the IoT. There are billions of IoT devices that don’t have traditional security software because they’re built with small amounts of memory and low-power processors. This makes these devices susceptible to cyberattacks and may provide a gate for hackers to breach other devices on the same network.

Falco’s concentration is on industrial controls and embedded systems such as automatic switches found in subway systems.

“If someone decides to figure out how to access a switch by hacking another access point that is communicating with that switch, then that subway is not going to stop, and people are going to die,” Falco says. “We rely on these systems for our life functions — critical infrastructure like electric grids, water grids, or transportation systems, but also our health care systems. Insulin pumps, for example, are now connected to your smartphone.”

Citing real-world examples, Falco notes that Russian hackers were able to take down the Ukrainian capital city’s electric grid, and that Iranian hackers interfered with the computer-guided controls of a small dam in Rye Brook, New York.

Falco aims to help combat potential cyberattacks through his research. One arm of his dissertation, which he is working on with renown negotiation Professor Lawrence Susskind, is aimed at conflict negotiation, and looks at how best to negotiate with cyberterrorists. Also, with CSAIL Principal Research Scientist Howard Shrobe, Falco seeks to determine the possibility of predicting which control-systems vulnerabilities could be exploited in critical urban infrastructure. The final branch of Falco’s dissertation is in collaboration with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has secured a contract to develop an artificial intelligence-powered automated attack generator that can identify all the possible ways someone could hack and destroy NASA’s systems.

“What I really intend to do for my PhD is something that is actionable to the communities I’m working with,” Falco says. “I don’t want to publish something in a book that will sit on a shelf where nobody would read it.”

“Not science fiction anymore”

Falco’s battle against cyberterrorism has also lead him to co-found NeuroMesh, a startup dedicated to protecting IoT devices by using the same techniques hackers use.

“The concept of my startup is, ‘Let’s use hacker tools to defeat hackers,’” Falco says. “If you don’t know how to break it, you don’t know how to fix it.”

One tool hackers use is called a botnet. Once botnets get on a device, they often kill off other malware on the device so that they use all the processing power on the device for themselves. Botnets also play “king of the hill” on the device, and don’t let other botnets latch on.

NeuroMesh uses a botnet’s features against itself to create a good botnet. By re-engineering the botnet, programmers can use them to defeat any kind of malware that comes onto a device.

“The benefit is also that when you look at securing IoT devices with low memory and low processing power, it’s impossible to put any security on them, but these botnets have no problem getting on there because they are so small,” Falco says.

Much like a vaccine protects against diseases, NeuroMesh applies a cyber vaccine to protect industrial devices from cyberattacks. And, by leveraging the bitcoin blockchain to update devices, NeuroMesh further fortifies the security system to block other malware from attacking vital IoT devices.

Recently, Falco and his team pitched their botnet vaccine at MIT’s $100K Accelerate competition and placed second. Falco’s infant son was in the audience while Falco was presenting how NeuroMesh’s technology could secure a baby monitor, as an example, from being hacked. The startup advanced to MIT’s prestigious 100K Launch startup competition, where they finished among the top eight competitors. NeuroMesh is now further developing its technology with the help of a grant from the Department of Energy, working with Stuart Madnick, who is the John Norris Maguire Professor at MIT, and Michael Siegel, a principal research scientist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

“Enemies are here. They are on our turf and in our wires. It’s not science fiction anymore,” Falco says. “We’re protecting against this. That’s what NeuroMesh is meant to do.”  

The human tornado

Falco’s abundant energy has led his family to call him “the tornado.”

“One-fourth of my mind is on my startup, one-fourth on finishing my dissertation, and other half is on my 11-month-old because he comes with me when my wife works,” Falco says. “He comes to all our venture capital meetings and my presentations. He’s always around and he’s generally very good.”

As a high school student, Falco’s energy and excitement for engineering drove him to discover a new physics wave theory. Applying this to the tennis racket, he invented a new, control-enhanced method of stringing, with which he won various science competitions (and tennis matches). He used this knowledge to start a small business for stringing rackets. The thrill of business took him on a path to Cornell University’s School of Hotel Administration. After graduating early, Falco transitioned into the field of sustainability technology and energy systems, and returned to his engineering roots by earning his LEED AP (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) accreditation and a master’s degree in sustainability management from Columbia University.

His excitement followed him to Accenture, where he founded the smart cities division and eventually learned about the vulnerability of IoT devices. For the past three years, Falco has also been sharing his newfound knowledge about sustainability and computer science as an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

“My challenge is always to find these interdisciplinary holes because my background is so messed up. You can’t say, this guy is a computer scientist or he’s a business person or an environmental scientist because I’m all over the place,” he says.

That’s part of the reason why Falco enjoys taking care of his son, Milo, so much.

“He’s the most awesome thing ever. I see him learning and it’s really amazing,” Falco says. “Spending so much time with him is very fun. He does things that my wife gets frustrated at because he’s a ball of energy and all over the place — just like me.”

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Team gathers unprecedented data on atmosphere’s organic chemistry

For a few weeks over the summer in 2011, teams of scientists from around the world converged on a small patch of ponderosa pine forest in Colorado to carry out one of the most detailed, extended survey of atmospheric chemistry ever attempted in one place, in many cases using new measurement devices created especially for this project. Now, after years of analysis, their comprehensive synthesis of the findings have been released this week.

The teams, which included a group from MIT using a newly-developed device to identify and quantify compounds of carbon, reported their combined results in a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience. Jesse Kroll, MIT associate professor of civil and environmental engineering and of chemical engineering, and James Hunter, an MIT technical instructor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering who was a doctoral student in Kroll’s group at the time of the research, were senior author and lead author, respectively, of the 24 contributors to the report. Associate Professor Colette Heald of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering was also a co-author.

The organic (carbon-containing) compounds they studied in that patch of Colorado forest play a key role in atmospheric chemical processes that can affect air quality, the health of the ecosystem, and the climate itself. Yet many of these processes remain poorly understood in their real-world complexity, and they had never been so rigorously sampled, studied, and quantified in one place before.

“The goal was trying to understand the chemistry associated with organic particulate matter in a forested environment,” Kroll explains. “The various groups took a lot of different measurements using state-of-the-art instruments we each had developed.” In doing so, they were able to fill in significant gaps in the inventory of organic compounds in the atmosphere, finding that about a third of them were in the form of previously unmeasured semi-volatile and intermediate-volatility organic compounds (SVOCs and IVOCs).

“We’ve long suspected there were gaps in our measurements of carbon in the atmosphere,” Kroll says. “There seemed to be more aerosols than we can explain by measuring their precursors.”

The MIT team, as well as some of the other research groups, developed instruments that specifically targeted these hard-to-measure compounds, which Kroll describes as “still in the gas phase, but sticky.” Their stickiness makes it hard to get them through an inlet into a measuring device, but these compounds may play a significant role in the formation and alteration of aerosols, tiny airborne particles that can contribute to smog or to the nucleation of raindrops or ice crystals, affecting the Earth’s climate.

“Some of these instruments were used for the first time in this campaign,” Kroll says. When analyzing the results, which provided unprecedented measurements of the SVOCs and IVOCs, “we realized we had this data set that provided much more information on organic compounds than we ever had before. By bringing the data from all these instruments together into one combined dataset, we were able to describe the organic compounds in the atmosphere in a more comprehensive way than had ever been possible, to figure out what’s really going on.”

It’s a more complicated challenge than it might seem, the researchers point out. A very large number of different organic compounds are constantly being emitted by trees and other vegetation, which vary in their chemical composition, their physical properties, and their ability to react chemically with other compounds. As soon as they enter the air many of the compounds begin to oxidize, which exponentially increases their number and diversity.

The collaborative campaign to characterize the quantities and reactions of these different compounds took place in a section of the Manitou Experimental Forest Observatory in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Five different instruments were used to collect the data on organic compounds, and three of those had never been used before.

Despite the progress, much remains to be done, the researchers say. While the field measurements provided a detailed profile of the amounts of different compounds over time, it could not identify the specific reactions and pathways that were transforming one set of compounds to another. That kind of analysis requires the direct study of the reactions in a controlled laboratory setting, and that kind of work is ongoing, in Kroll’s MIT lab and elsewhere.

Filling in all these details will make it possible to refine the accuracy of atmospheric models and help to assess such things as strategies to mitigate specific air pollution issues, from ozone to particulate matter, or to assess the sources and removal mechanisms of atmospheric components that affect Earth’s climate.

The measurement team included researchers from the University of Colorado, the California Air Resources Board, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Toronto, the University of Innsbruck in Austria, the National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Edmund Mach Foundation in Italy, Harvard University, the University of Montreal, Aerodyne Research, Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of California at Irvine, and the University of Washington. The work was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

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Two sciences tie the knot

Economics and computer science had always been on friendly terms at MIT. With the growth of cloud computing, e-commerce, machine learning, and online social networks, their relationship grew more serious. Now that these tools and applications have become ubiquitous and gone global, economics and computer science are taking their relationship to the next level.

Starting in the fall of 2017, the two academic departments will offer a joint major — Course 6-14: Computer Science, Economics, and Data Science — because elements of the two fields have become, well, inseparable. The new major aims to prepare students to think at the nexus of economics and computer science, so they can understand and design the kinds of systems that are coming to define modern life. Think Amazon, Uber, eBay, etc.

“This area is super-hot commercially,” says David Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics and associate head of the Department of Economics. “Hiring economists has become really prominent at tech companies because they’re filling market-design positions.”

Because these companies need analysts who can decide which objectives to maximize, what information and choices to offer, what rules to set, and so on, “companies are really looking for this skill set,” he says.

Asu Ozdaglar, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering and acting head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), says the fields had moved apart in decades prior, but “for the past 10 to 15 years, there’s been a convergence in research areas between economics and facets of computer science, such as optimization and networking.”

“Now, the motivating applications are so vivid, we have to rethink bringing the fields together,” she says.

MIT students agree. In a poll of the introductory economics course 14.01, which all students are required to take, faculty found that a whopping three-quarters of them were interested in the joint major, Ozdaglar says. She believes students are so intrigued because combining engineered systems and economics requires asking profoundly complex human questions, and then creating equally complex technical models to address them.

“If you’re thinking about humans making decisions in large-scale systems, you have to think about incentives,” she says. “How, for example, do you design rewards and costs so that people behave the way you desire?”

These issues will be familiar to any Uber user caught in a downpour. Suddenly, the cost of getting anywhere increases dramatically, which is also an incentive for Uber drivers to move toward the storm of demand. Surge pricing may be a scourge to customers, but it's also a way to match supply with demand — in this case, cars with riders.

The new major is designed to train students to become the unseen game-makers behind these types of virtual markets — people who can exert their skill by making it “blatantly obvious for people how to play, in accordance with the market designer’s goals,” says Costis Daskalakis, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering who is one of the faculty leads in the new major’s creation.

This combination of fields, Daskalakis points out, is hardly new. Many venerated economists were also early computer scientists, he says. John von Neumann, a pioneer of game theory, which uses mathematics to predict human behavior, was involved in one of the earliest articulations of the design for an electronic computer: the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) report published in 1945. Herb Simon, a key figure in the development of artificial intelligence, won both a Nobel Prize in economics in 1978 and the prestigious Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1975. 

Computer science and economics offer complementary tools, Daskalakis says. For example, a computer science technique like machine learning can reveal patterns in data coming from a social platform. But economics helps pull back the curtain of why such patterns emerge, he says, by offering theories of how people strategized for these patterns to arise.

“You can’t just be a plain economist in this environment, because we’re talking about massive amounts of data and systems implemented on computational platforms,” he says. The new major, he says, will give students a firm footing in both disciplines to create — and understand — virtual markets of the future.

Students should contact Anne Hunter in EECS and Eva Economou in the Department of Economics for more information about Course 6-14.

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