3Q: Lesley Millar-Nicholson on MIT’s Technology Licensing Office

When MIT engineers and scientists invent a new technology they think could find a foothold in the commercial marketplace, they come to the Technology Licensing Office (TLO). The office is responsible for all things related to MIT intellectual property. The TLO receives approximately 800 invention declarations each year. From those, TLO officers file 400 to 500 patent applications with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and they receive a green light for 200 to 300 of them. What’s more, the TLO manages a portfolio of over 2,500 already U.S.-issued patents and 1,500 pending U.S. patents for the Institute, as well as a myriad of foreign patents.

“That means there’s an awful lot of work going on,” says Lesley Millar-Nicholson, who, after 10 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, became the director of the TLO in July 2016. Millar-Nicholson sat down with the School of Engineering to demystify the role of the TLO, explain when scientists and engineers should use the office’s expertise, and describe the TLO’s strategy of patience for investing in new technologies.

Q: How does the TLO fit into MIT’s mission and innovation ecosystem?

A: One of MIT’s goals is to have global impact through research. Our part of that mission is to get technologies that arise from research into the hands of people who are going to develop them further, and hopefully, have an impact in society — whether it’s new vaccines, new types of technology for clean air or clean water, and so on.

Our role is a laundry list of things that aren’t exactly self-evident from our name. In general, we are receiving inventions, ascertaining with inventors whether there is something that may be commercialized, protecting the inventions by working through the U.S .Patent and Trademark Office to get patents issued, finding licensees — startups or other companies — negotiating the licenses, and if they create revenue, receiving consideration for the license, distributing that revenue back to inventors, academic departments, labs, and centers across MIT. Licensing is just one part of the complex operation of managing what is effectively one of the most prolific academic intellectual-property centers in the world. 

Other, less obvious, activities include: working with researchers to enable them to transfer or receive materials from other academic or commercial entities, negotiating complex intellectual property [IP] terms in sponsored research or strategic engagements with corporations — such as the recent MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. We provide advice and guidance for researchers wishing to make their work available via open source licenses. We also manage the MIT trademark and use of name by third parties. We work alongside innovation and entrepreneurship programs such as Sandbox and the Deshpande Center to ascertain IP ownership, or licensing needs. Our licensing officers make presentations across campus about IP, commercialization and strategic licensing topics. We welcome engagement with the MIT community to help advance knowledge and innovation.

Q: When is something really an invention?

A: There are four tests in the USPTO. Very basically they are: Is it patentable subject matter? (Certain things cannot be patented, for example laws of nature.) Then, is it new or novel? As in, is it known to the public already, and is it nonobvious? That means, is it something truly beyond the state of the art in an existing patent or known technology? Lastly, does the technology have ‘utility,’ does it provide some benefit and functionality? There are other questions we will ask of the inventors as we go through the disclosure process with them, but if we are seeking a patent these are some of the fundamental questions that will be asked. Note that we also we manage non-patentable technologies, such as copyright through open source and other licensing agreements.

MIT researchers who think that they have something which has potential for impact in the world, should come to see us if they’re ready to publish or present their work, or if they have any question about whether they should disclose information about their research — even if it’s just an abstract on the web or a social media site. Do come and talk to us. Publishing without protecting the invention means we might lose certain patent rights, which may be important for commercialization in the future.  We have a simple invention disclosure process, which is completely online.

Q: What strategy does the TLO use to be successful?

A: We have to ‘keep the faith.’ The technologies we see are very early-stage, and it takes a lot of time and other investment — venture capital, for example — from others to fully develop a technology into a product or service. We, meaning MIT, invest in the technologies that are disclosed to us by devoting time and funding to getting the appropriate IP protection and finding licensees. The patent costs run upwards of $40,000 per U.S. patent, from filing through issuance and over its 20-year life.

When we file a patent, it takes at least two to three years to get it issued through the USPTO. A company might license it, but then it might take five to 10 years before a company actually makes products and creates revenue. So, that’s seven to 13 years from the first time the invention was disclosed to us to the point a company licensing the technology might be revenue positive. Those companies that do make revenue are still in the minority. Companies may fail, or technologies fail for all sorts of reasons.

However, that's why MIT built this ecosystem, to provide more opportunities for success for more companies willing to invest in MIT research. We have the luxury of having tremendous support from the administration and an appropriate budget to patent the technology. That's also why The Engine exists: patient capital, to recognize that there are technologies that are going to take a lot longer to develop which need longer-term support. 

One of the recent standout examples we point to is digital TV. MIT enabled digital television through a significant number of patents that just expired. These patents brought a large revenue stream to MIT, and made a tremendous impact. What’s interesting is the length of time it took for the market to adopt the technology and ultimately to derive revenue, some of which was returned to MIT in the form of royalties: The original disclosure was made to the TLO in 1989, and MIT received 85 its its total licensing revenue between 2006 and 2014.

We play the long game here. We have to efficiently protect MIT’s intellectual property. We don’t play for revenue, we play for impact. We work closely with faculty and researchers to understand how their ideas might be commercialized, sometimes in markets that don’t exist yet. No crystal ball. Just pragmatism and patience.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2fUhUGk

MIT Professional Education launches Digital Plus

MIT Professional Education is launching Digital Plus Programs, an innovative, collaborative learning portfolio of courses that allows organizations to enhance the skills of their employees by bringing cohorts together to learn and work through a combination of project-based challenges and exercises designed by MIT faculty experts. 

The programs create a learning environment that is personal and highly effective for individuals, while offering organizations insights on participant engagement and outcomes. MIT Professional Education leverages some of the world's most advanced online platforms, which use a variety of collaborative tools in order to meet the needs of individual and corporate participants. 

These six- to 10-week courses deploy a variety of design and teaching modalities that range from interactive online to in-person sessions in order to impart leading-edge content and practices that are highly relevant to professionals across all industries. The courses include embedded group-based projects, challenges and learning activities, enabling knowledge-sharing, networking, and innovation.

"With the introduction of Digital Plus Programs, we have adapted the pedagogy of instruction to take full advantage of advances in collaborative learning tools,” says Bhaskar Pant, executive director at MIT Professional Education. "Collaborative online and blended learning have consistently shown to produce the most effective learning outcomes for today’s highly time-constrained technical professionals. That, combined with courses addressing the most high-demand technical and non-technical topics of the day, should garner significant interest from individuals and organizations around the world.”

The first Digital Plus Programs course, The Intersection of Leadership and Innovation, begins with a live, virtual kick-off session. It empowers technical leaders with self-awareness and creativity to drive innovation in their teams, culture, and organizations toward the goal of improving performance and competitive positioning. 

This course is being delivered in collaboration with Cahoot Learning, which offers an online learning environment designed to accommodate multiple, global cohorts. Some advanced features and functionalities of the platform include: 

• collaboration and live communication capabilities;
• responsive and mobile-friendly with social and multimedia integration tools;
• customizable assessments and reflection activities; and
• real-time engagement analytics for tracking individual and group progress.

MIT Professional Education is also developing two new dual-track Digital Plus professional certificate programs: "Leading in the Transformative Era" focuses on the business impact of key trends in the fourth industrial revolution, while "Strategic Leadership and Innovation" develops skills needed to build high-performing teams and cultures with greater capacity for successful innovation

Each certificate path requires participants to complete four required courses, including the program’s debut course: "The Intersection of Leadership and Innovation," which kicks off by selective invitation on Monday, Oct. 30.

Digital Plus Programs integrate blended learning to MIT Professional Education's digital portfolio, which was founded in the fall of 2013. Since that time, approximately 30,000 participants from more than 150 countries have enrolled in the Institute's professional online courses to gain crucial knowledge from leading MIT faculty to help advance their careers and bolster their companies’ performance.

Courses offered through Digital Plus Programs can be run for large groups of employees from the same organization on a stand-alone basis, or as part of a multi-part custom program taught on the MIT campus.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2y08srm

Media Lab team tops Fragile Families Challenge

A team of researchers from the Human Dynamics research group at the MIT Media Lab has won first place in three categories in the Fragile Families Challenge (FFC). The contest is based on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, which followed thousands of American families for more than 15 years, collecting information about the children, their parents, their schools, and their overall environments.

FFC participants were challenged to use this information in a new way. With all the background data from birth to age nine, as well as some training data from age 15, they were tasked with accurately predicting outcomes in the following  six key categories:

• Grade point average (academic achievement) of the children
• Grit (passion and perseverance) of the children
• Material hardship of the household (a measure of extreme poverty)
• Eviction of the families (for not paying the rent or mortgage)
• Layoff of the caregiver
• Job training (if the primary caregiver would participate in a job skills program)

Computation-plus-social science approach

More than 150 teams from around the world submitted over 3,000 predictive models. The Media Lab’s Human Dynamics team, under the supervision of the group’s director, Alex "Sandy" Pentland, was the only team to win in more than one category, raking first in predicting GPA, grit, and layoffs. The team also placed second in predicting job training participation, eighth in material hardship, and 10th in the eviction category.

“The fact that the Human Dynamics gang did such a super job is a testimony to the anti-disciplinary, computation-plus-social science approach we take,” Pentland says. “It shows the potential for this sort of computational social science to help forge a brighter future for underprivileged kids.”

Led by graduate student Abdullah Almaatouq, the team also included Eaman Jahani, Daniel Rigobon, Yoshihiko Suhara, Khaled Al-Ghoneim, Abdulla Alhajri, Abdulaziz Alghunaim, and Alfredo Morales-Guzman. They used ensemble methods in machine learning, combined with information-theoretic approaches and substantive knowledge of social science, to produce their winning model.

Expanding the range of social science

Almaatouq says that his team’s entry, along with many others submitted to the challenge, can offer a new way to improve surveys in the future and expand the range of social science theories.

“Also, these submissions can highlight potential targets for policy intervention in efforts to improve the lives of disadvantaged children in the U.S.,” he says. “For example, I learned through the challenge that eviction is a natural target for policy intervention, but it has been challenging to pinpoint the causal impacts of eviction on children.”

As part of their prize, the team will speak at the Fragile Families Challenge scientific workshop, which will take place in mid-November at Princeton University. The challenge is based at Princeton's Bendheim-Thoman Center for Research on Child Wellbeing.

“We were very impressed with the contribution that Abdullah and his colleagues made to the Fragile Families Challenge,” says Matthew J. Salganik, a professor in Princeton’s department of sociology and a co-organizer of the FCC. “They were able to combine ideas from social science and data science in a new way, and the resulting performance was amazing. My colleagues and I are very excited for them to present their approach at our upcoming scientific workshop.”

Mass collaboration

In an interview when the FFC launched in March this year, another organizer, Ian Lundberg, explained that the central goal is to “use machine learning methods for mass collaboration in the service of qualitative interviews.”

“By combining ideas from social science and data science, we can, together, help address important scientific and social problems,” says Lundberg, a graduate student in the Princeton University Office of Population Research. “And we expect that through a mass collaboration we will accomplish things that none of us could accomplish individually. This project will demonstrate a new way of doing scientific research.”

Almaatouq says the challege “doesn't end here” for the MIT Human Dynamics team. He and his fellow researchers will submit a paper on their winning FFC model for a special issue of Socius, the open-access journal published by the American Sociological Association. They’ll also contribute as co-authors to the collective paper on the overall results of the Fragile Families Challenge.

The Human Dynamics team also plans to use the data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study for future research and to further investigate the limits of predictability of its outcomes, he says.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2y0Bg3b

Nuclear and present danger

Rising tensions between the U.S. and North Korea have an unsettling chance of escalating, MIT security experts said at a public forum on Tuesday — but are also manageable given the right approach by U.S. leaders.

“I think you can get inadvertent war,” said Jim Walsh, a senior research associate in MIT’s Security Studies Program (SSP) and a nuclear security expert who has visited North Korea in the past. “It’s still an unlikely event,” he added. However, he also stated, “I would remind you that improbable events do happen. … I am more worried than I have been before.”

To keep the situation under control, the panel of three nuclear-security scholars said, the U.S. would do well to seek further diplomatic talks with North Korea. The U.S. should also reconcile itself to the fact that North Korea does have nuclear weapons and, for a variety of reasons, it must not expect China to address the situation decisively. 

“We should certainly be talking to them,” said Walsh, who, like others on the panel, believes that North Korea’s nuclear capacity is almost certainly here to stay.

“The bad news is that denuclearization is a fantasy,” said Vipin Narang, an associate professor of political science at MIT, who has written extensively about North Korea’s nuclear program and gave a summary of the country’s current capabilities. “The good news is, deterrence can work.”

Meanwhile China — who some U.S. leaders, including President Donald J. Trump, have sometimes cited as a key actor in this scenario, given its political alignment with North Korea — seems unwilling to play a larger role in the current state of affairs.

“I think China believes that the North Koreans are developing nuclear weapons for perfectly [logical] reasons,” said Taylor Fravel, an associate professor of political science at MIT and interim director of MIT’s Center for International Studies (CIS). Fravel, a leading expert on China’s foreign-policy conflicts, added that Chinese leaders, who maintain their own nuclear arsenal, likely view North Korea’s weapons as “an insurance policy, one they [China] can see in their own history.”

The event drew a crowd of at least 225 people, packing a lecture hall in MIT’s Building 34. The three panelists all delivered prepared remarks and responded to a series of audience questions. The discussion was part of the CIS Starr Forum, a series of public discussions on world politics.  

North Korea: New arsenal, familiar strategy

Narang gave the audience an overview of which types of missiles and nuclear payloads North Korea has developed, based on the best public knowledge available. North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has publicly announced a lengthy series of tests over the course of 2017.  

“He acquired nuclear weapons to avoid a U.S.-led regime change,” Narang said, adding that the North Korean strategy is “risky, but it’s not irrational.”

Indeed, Narang emphasized, the North Korean nuclear strategy is precisely the same one used by Pakistan and, to a large degree, NATO forces during the Cold War. North Korea has seemingly developed short-range missiles capable of delivering nuclear bombs, and as of this summer, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) capable of reaching North America.

Both types of missiles are necessary for North Korea to achieve a kind of mutual deterrence with the U.S., Narang pointed out. That is, if North Korea only had shorter-range missiles and used them to deliver a nuclear bomb in, for instance, a conflict with South Korea, then South Korea’s allies — namely, the U.S. — could respond by essentially wiping out North Korea in retaliation.

However, the presence of North Korean ICBMs that could deliver nuclear weapons to North America stands as a deterrent to such a U.S. reply, hypothetically.

“That’s why the ICBM is so important” to North Korea, Narang pointed out, adding that North Korea can now “put the U.S. homeland at risk.”

On the other hand, Narang pointed out, the U.S. has experience and know-how at maintaining forms of equilibrium among nuclear powers with the same sets of capabilities — not only the former Soviet Union and Russia, but more recently, Pakistan, among other cases.

So: What should be done?

That leaves open the matter of what the U.S. should be doing, specifically. For starters, Narang said, “We need to tighten our message and be consistent and coherent.”

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, he pointed out, have both publicly stated that regime change in North Korea is not a U.S. goal. According to the terms of nuclear logic, that should settle the situation somewhat. However, Trump has used more belligerent language, both in a recent speech at the United Nations and in his Twitter messages.

“Why would Kim think we might attack him? Because we keep saying that over and over again,” Walsh said.

Additionally, Narang stated, the U.S. should almost certainly not attempt a military attack on North Korean military sites in an attempt to eliminate its weapons program, due partly to the extreme difficulty of identifying and hitting every relevant site.

“Denuclearization by force is a very risky proposition and it’s not an experiment we want to run,” Narang said.

Walsh added that he was “not a big believer that sanctions are going to solve this problem,” given North Korea’s current capabilities, and Fravel emphasized that China is also not likely to be interested in having regime change occur in North Korea. Among other reaons, he noted, “the collapse of any more communist countries would be a great concern for China.”

Instead, Walsh and Narang concluded, further talks with North Korea might help limit the extent of North Korea’s arsenal and reduce the possibility that U.S.-led military exercises around the Korean peninsula could trigger a military incident that escalates to nuclear use — which, the scholars observed, seems by far the most likely route to a catastrophic exchange between the countries.

“Giving up on denuclearization doesn’t mean you give up on nonproliferation,” Narang said.

However, observers have concerns about many types of things that could unsettle the situation in North Korea. Scott Sagan, a Stanford University professor and leading nuclear-security expert who was in the audience for the event, pointed out during the question-and-answer period that false news reports circulated last weekend, stating that the U.S. was advising nonessential personnel to depart the Korean peninsula. That kind of report, Sagan noted, could be mistakenly interpreted as a prelude to military action. 

“I’m worried about this, even though I think it is unlikely,” Sagan said. And, as Walsh added, “Certain leaders in the world pay more attention to news reports than to their advisors.”

With so many unresolved issues at stake, Walsh said, “That uncertainty makes me nervous, and gnaws at me.”  

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2fKNsLl

Probing the behavior of an international bully

Although she grew up in a family of Communist Party stalwarts, Ketian Vivian Zhang never felt entirely at home in China’s patriotic education system.

“I learned that the world was less black and white than the party made it out to be,” says Zhang, a doctoral student in political science. By the time she was in high school, she was actively seeking alternative perspectives on China and its role in the world.

This search led to study abroad — first at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and then at MIT, where she has been studying international relations and comparative politics. More specifically, Zhang researches the strategies China has deployed since 1990 to achieve its ends in the world. The culmination of this work will be a dissertation provocatively titled “Calculating Bully — Explaining Chinese Coercion.”

By coercion, Zhang means the array of methods China employs to make other nations comply with its wishes in geopolitical and economic spheres. While other nations practice this form of statecraft, her research reveals some uniquely Chinese approaches.

“China’s choice of tools tends to be non-militarized,” Zhang says, especially in historical contrast with other rising powers. “They prefer to use economic and diplomatic sticks.”

She has also learned that China will resort to coercion only in very specific circumstances. 

“China carefully balances between the costs and benefits of coercion,” she believes. “The benefit is credibility — appearing strong in front of other countries — and the costs involve economic vulnerability, such as loss of market access or materials, as well as geopolitical backlash, in the form of military or other forms of retaliation.”

Her research investigates episodes of coercion, including those that involve Taiwan, Tibet, and territorial disputes. She takes particular interest in the South China Sea, a body of water that has sparked conflicts among China, Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and others.

In a 2012 episode, Zhang reports that “China used bananas to advance its national security interests,” placing a quarantine on this fruit from the Philippines. “They wanted the Philippines to feel pain, and it worked, with the Philippines acquiescing to Chinese control of a block in the South China Sea.”

For Zhang, this case embodies the Chinese proverb, “You can kill a chicken to scare the monkey,” she says. The show of economic force against the Philippines scares Malaysia and Vietnam, and “sends a signal to the outside world, including the U.S,. that China is strong, and should not be messed with.”

Zhang views China’s use of timing, targets, and tools of coercion as “very rational and logical.” Her case studies demonstrate a clear pattern, she says. “China resorts to coercion when the credibility benefit is high and economic vulnerability cost is low, and refrains from military coercion when the geopolitical backlash cost is high.”

For her doctoral research, Zhang has assembled an extensive database of cases of Chinese coercion, built on interviews with Chinese officials and an examination of primary source documents in central and provincial government offices. For this kind of unique access, Zhang has leveraged her connections and deep knowledge of how government there works.

“Everything functions at a very personal level in China,” she says. “It’s who you know, even in academic work.”

What Zhang brings to this work is not just connections, but a singular vantage point, the result of studying her nation of origin, both up close and at a distance. She can scrutinize China’s actions in the world simultaneously as a foreigner and as an insider. In some ways, this is an ideal outcome for Zhang, who once imagined working for the diplomatic service.

“When I was 13, I read a biography of [former U.S. Secretary of State] Condoleeza Rice, and my dream job was to work in the foreign ministry,” she recalls. “But I was disillusioned after learning that girls were not welcome in the ministry, and I decided that studying international relations should be my goal.”

After she realized she would have a better window on this subject outside of China, Zhang left Zheijiang University after two years and completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. There she acquired her first uncensored view of the world she had left, as well as an understanding of misconceptions Americans hold about China. She began to feel “broad interest — a real passion” for improving U.S.-China relations.

During a stint in Washington, at the Institute for Policy Studies, Zhang researched U.S. military posture in the Pacific, and met officials from the Department of Defense. “I got interested in the high politics of things,” she says. She was drawn to graduate school at MIT, with such Asia and security studies scholars as M. Taylor Fravel and Stephen Van Evera, spotting the opportunity to dig deep into the “intersections between international economics, diplomacy, and security.”

Zhang hopes her work will contribute not just to policy debate but to policy action. “Understanding the logic of China’s behavior on the current stage will help us make accurate predictions about what they will do, and anticipate important questions about war and peace,” she says.

When she is not researching or teaching about such weighty matters, Zhang runs 10K road races along the Charles River, and reads. “I like Jane Austen, as well as books about magical things, like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, who never dies,” she says. “These worlds are very far away from the worlds of gunpowder and nuclear arms that I live in every day.”

After she receives her degree this coming June, Zhang aims to find an academic position in which she can advance her current research, engage students as a teacher and mentor, and continue to draw on her unique perspectives as a Chinese citizen with a deep connection to the United States.  

“I can serve as a bridge between the two nations, someone who can be relevant and helpful both to the U.S. and China,” she says. “What I want to do is show each side that its picture of the other should be much more complicated and nuanced.”

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2fR2EtR

Q&A: Respecting employees with disabilities

October is recognized as National Disability Employment Awareness Month. To help all MIT community members become more aware of our colleagues with disabilities, Pauline Dowell and Nico Lang recently spoke with MIT Human Resources (HR) about their experiences.

Dowell is an administrative assistant in HR and has been at MIT for four years. She is legally blind. Lang is an HR administrator with the Office for the Vice President of Finance and recently marked her fifth year at the Institute. She describes herself as a little person.

Q: What would you like people to know about having a disability and working at MIT?

Dowell: It can be difficult for me, but I always had to keep up with my siblings so I learned some adaptions. I memorize my surroundings because I don’t use a cane inside. When I first started working here, people made assumptions. They didn’t know what I use to get through the day — like an audible reader. It might take me a little longer to do the work, but it doesn’t mean I can’t do the work as accurately.

I work so hard at trying to be normal. When we first moved into our new office, I bumped into stuff. When my vision declined rapidly in the last few years, my eye doctor suggested I should get mobility training and learn braille. Braille isn’t very helpful on campus because there are no standards for its placement. It should be consistent — depending on where it’s located, it can be too high or too low. How do people find it? 

Lang: I’ve been lucky enough to work in three DLCs [departments, labs, centers]. People have a habit of overcompensating. Before I started at MIT, I had meetings with folks about what I would need to navigate my new office. Someone even suggested getting me a robot to help with my filing and reaching things up high. Now, a robot would have been great, but all I really needed was a simple step stool.

One reason why I’m a member of MIT’s Disabilities Employee Resource Group is because there’s room for improvement. Even when I was trying to self-advocate, the responses from various offices didn’t seem in keeping with how we address other diversity issues. As an HR person, I get to see it … we’ve stumbled around disability awareness.

Q: What could be helpful for your MIT colleagues to do?

Dowell: I would like for my kind friends as well as strangers to not grab me. I was waiting at the T. Do you know the yellow bumps on the platform? They’re to guide blind people with canes or dogs. Well, one of my colleagues grabbed me and thought I was in danger. But you can’t react badly because you’re an ambassador for the blind community. You can’t react to every slight — or else you become “the grumpy blind person.” You have to find a line between reacting and educating. 

I’m independent and can do things by myself. I can’t drive a car, but I can drive a boat. [Dowell is a winner of the Robie Pierce One-Design Regatta, an annual regatta for sailors with disabilities co-hosted by the American Yacht Club.] In general, I’d ask my colleagues not to assume that I don’t know what I’m doing. And I love when people identify themselves before they say hello.

Lang: People are hesitant to ask questions. Instead of taking the initiative to do something, you can just ask … you’re not infringing on my privacy or making me feel uncomfortable. My advice would be to ask — as long as you are respectful and appropriate. I don’t need people to get in front of the issues for me.

If you’re unsure about how to refer to someone with a disability, ask them. For me, Nico is a good start. I use the term little person. Dwarf is a clinical term, while little person is more broad. It’s probably best to stick with the most general term.

Q: What do you like about working at MIT?

Dowell: I think it’s a really good atmosphere for people with disabilities. I don’t feel like I'm "less than." People have been really kind. The library has audible books. There’s an adaptation department, and lots of resources. 

Lang: There are a lot of things that I like about working at MIT. The collaborative, startup, hacker vibe that permeates the student side trickles right into the administration. There’s not one right way to do something — if you’re doing something different, you’re encouraged to share that info. You can make your own way. I like how transparent MIT is, that it leans in that direction. 

Q: Did you fill out the self-ID race, gender, disability, veteran status form on Atlas?

Dowell: I didn’t at first — but it’s better than not. It could set up a dialogue where we know people who need adaptations. It’s good to know that it’s official – that I might need help. I know it’s anonymous, but it’s good to know what people need.

Lang: I didn’t understand what it was used for. I thought I was doing myself a favor; I didn’t realize it was anonymous. But self-identifying is important because I want to be counted. And it’s important for MIT to have correct data on the disability community; right now we don’t have the data. Only good things can come with a better, clearer picture of who’s here.

Our community needs some education with what happens with the data and who sees it — it will provide MIT with the right info.

Q: What else would you like to share?

Dowell: I have a degree in art and studied painting after college with a master painter for nine years. As I was getting really good, I started to lose my vision. My brain is at ease doing pottery, art — my form of meditation. I’m learning a lot about graphic arts. My passion is learning about art and sailing.

Lang: I’ve never had a strong relationship with the disability advocacy community. I sort of struggle with how to decide how much of my identity is tied to that. I don’t want to judge anyone who feels differently, but that’s how it’s always been for me. My background is in theater and that phrase, “all the world’s a stage,” is very true for those with presenting disabilities. People notice I’m a little person before anything else. I have a profound relationship to my disability. I can’t get away from it. 

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2xRy7Rd

Maria Zuber: Golden Goose Awards illustrate virtues of basic research

The sixth annual Golden Goose Awards, announced Sept. 27, recognize three teams of scientists for pioneering work that was initially poorly understood or even ridiculed, but in time proved to be significant. The awards were bestowed at an evening ceremony that drew a throng of science fans and research advocates to the Library of Congress in Washington. Earlier in the day, MIT Vice President for Research Maria Zuber gave the keynote speech at an afternoon reception for the award winners in the U.S. Senate’s Kennedy Caucus Room.

In her luncheon address, Zuber, who chairs the National Science Board, called the Golden Goose Awards “a chance every year to open our minds, shake off any cynicism, and remind ourselves of the enormous and often unpredictable promise of science.” She said the strong basic research system that supported the award-winning investigations did not come about by happenstance, but was deliberately built at the end of World War II. Leveraging the partnership between the government and universities that emerged during that war, this system was designed to support long-term work that fulfills two purposes:  stimulating the innovation that is the driver for much of our economic growth and, less tangibly, continually increasing our understanding of the world, so that we can always look forward to knowing things tomorrow that we don’t know today.

Zuber identified several ingredients that are needed if the U.S. research system is to remain healthy. One is a commitment to patience, a willingness to support research that may not pay off for many years. Another is money to invest — patiently — in research. A great pool of talent is also essential, drawing women and men from every segment of U.S. society while also attracting the best students and faculty from around the globe. A final ingredient, entwined with our democratic values, is freedom of inquiry.

“Science cannot prosper if researchers fear attack for honest work that leads to uncomfortable conclusions,” Zuber said. “Scientific results must always be open to question and probing, and society should always be able to discuss the ethical, social, and economic implications of scientific work. But researchers should not be expected to produce results that accord with any particular agenda.”

At the evening awards ceremony, six members of Congress pledged continued support for discovery-based research across all fields of science. Last among them was U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee, who originally conceived of the awards as a way to tell engaging stories that would capture the interest of his fellow policymakers.

Master of Ceremonies Frank Sesno then presented Golden Goose Awards to three teams of scientists.

Oregon State University chemist Kaichang Li was honored for the development of a new class of adhesives, a research journey which began when a colleague first showed him a clump of mussels on the Oregon coast. Li learned to duplicate the mussels’ properties in his laboratory, but he was discouraged by the cost of his new adhesives. A second inspiration while eating a lunch of tofu provided a solution — inexpensive soybeans could provide proteins from which Li could build similar adhesives. Soy-based adhesives have now displaced carcinogenic formaldehyde-based glues in 60 percent of the hardwood plywood panels manufactured in America.

Mycologist Joyce Longcore and Smithsonian National Zoo scientists Allan Pessier, Don Nichols, and Elaine Lamirande were honored for persistent detective work showing that an obscure class of fungi known as chytrids was killing amphibians around the world. An opportunity to participate in an National Science Foundation-funded research project inspired Longcore to earn a PhD and return to the lab bench after two decades away. Ten years later, when Nichols and colleagues suspected that a fungus was killing the zoo’s poison dart frogs, they went to Longcore. By then she was one of the world’s experts on chytrids — but neither she nor anyone else had seen them growing on live amphibians. Today we know that these fungal infections have the potential to move great distances rapidly, assisted by human activity. This work has led to changes in national and international policies on animal transport and helped to save iconic species from extinction. 

Fuzzy logic and fuzzy sets were the brainchild of MIT alumnus Lofti Zadeh SM ’46, who worked for many years as a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley. Zadeh proposed revolutionary concepts in 1965 to deal with the mathematics and logic of imprecise information. The mathematical community was skeptical at first. But fuzzy logic eventually took hold. Control systems in heating ventilation and air conditioning systems, autofocus cameras, health care devices, and subway systems rely on fuzzy logic to improve performance and efficiency. More than 16,000 patents and nearly 100,000 papers cite Zadeh’s seminal work. Zadeh, who died earlier this month at the age of 96, was represented at the events by his Berkeley colleague David Culler SM ’85, PhD ’89.

Sesno interviewed the awardees, drawing out more details of their achievements. Each followed the template Cesno offered for a good story — compelling characters overcoming obstacles. Collectively they illustrate the ingredients Zuber said were essential if the goose is to keep laying golden eggs. For example, basic research support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Smithsonian Institution, and the National Science Foundation enabled the prize-winning work. And, demonstrating the importance of a broad talent pool, the four men and two women honored are a diverse group of native-born citizens and immigrants. They come from and were educated in urban and rural areas across the U.S., from China, and from the former Soviet Union by way of Iran.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2yGSMH8