New facilities will keep Lincoln Laboratory at the forefront of advanced prototyping

In 1951, the Department of Defense (DoD) needed a homeland air defense system. To develop one, they partnered with MIT to create Lincoln Laboratory, the federally-funded research and development center, where the nation’s first air defense system, SAGE, was successfully prototyped.

In the nearly 70 years since then, the laboratory has continued to innovate technology for the nation — radars, imagers, lasers, and microelectronics that are key to modern defense systems. As technology has progressed, however, some Lincoln Laboratory facilities have not: The original 1950s buildings still make up nearly half the square footage of the laboratory.

In 2014, the DoD acknowledged a critical need for facility modernizations following seven years of independent third-party and government studies. As a result, Lincoln Laboratory and the DoD developed a phased facility modernization plan that will allow the laboratory to continue to field state-of-the-art capabilities to address national security needs. The first building will replace critical, yet aging, labs with a new Compound Semiconductor Laboratory and Microsystem Integration Facility (CSL-MIF). The second building will replace aging and distributed prototyping spaces with a modern Engineering Prototyping Facility (EPF).

In 2017, $40 million of military construction funding was appropriated for the planning and design of the two buildings. Construction of the CSL-MIF will be completed with $90 million of funding from the fiscal year 2019 Consolidated Appropriations Act and an additional $135 million of funding from the fiscal year 2020 President’s Budget Request. The EPF construction funds are programmed in fiscal year 2022.

“This funding will allow Lincoln Laboratory to modernize and improve their facilities, giving some of the best minds and talent confronting our nation’s most complex technological challenges a modern, state-of-the-art laboratory in which to work,” former Massachusetts Congresswoman Niki Tsongas stated in a press release in 2016 when initial funding was announced.

Craig Keast, the associate head of the Advanced Technology Division, which will oversee the CSL-MIF facility, says that the project “will provide a state-of-the-art advanced electronics research and prototyping facility targeted at developing and demonstrating complex electronic prototypes suitable for integration into ground, airborne, and spaceborne demonstration systems of interest to the DoD.”

The design plans include approximately 150,000 square feet of new cleanroom space, where scientists and engineers can grow non-silicon-based semiconductor material, package optics, assemble focal plane arrays, and mount complex semiconductor devices. These electronic and photonic devices will be joined with micromechanical components in the microsystem integration facility, resulting in prototypes of complete systems. Technologies of focus will include focal plane arrays for wide-area surveillance, high-energy lasers for optical communications in space, qubit integration technology for quantum computers, and 3D imaging systems for missile defense, among several other key projects.

The CSL-MIF will complement Lincoln Laboratory’s existing silicon-based Microelectronics Laboratory (ML), which is regarded as the government’s best microelectronics facility.

“The combination of the CSL-MIF and ML facilities along with the laboratory’s excellent research staff, and their deep understanding of the broader DoD mission space, will provide the DoD with its premier advanced electronics research and prototyping capability,” Keast adds “and help ensure the DoD’s continued superiority in this core technology area.”

The CSL-MIF construction contract is scheduled to be awarded in September by the Army Corps of Engineers. It will be built on Hanscom Air Force Base, where Lincoln Laboratory’s 1.75 million-square-foot main campus is housed.

The second building of the facility modernization plan, the EPF, will be constructed beginning in 2022. This facility will consolidate distributed engineering spaces and clean rooms and enhance the high-bay prototyping capabilities of the laboratory. A third phase of the plan is in the early stages of concept development and will modernize the remaining aging parts of the laboratory over the next 30 years.

“Modern purpose-built facilities are critical for leading-edge research,” says Scott Anderson, the assistant director for operations at Lincoln Laboratory. “The CSL-MIF and the EPF projects are critical steps in rehabilitating the MIT Lincoln Laboratory complex. MIT Lincoln Laboratory has effectively advanced technology for national security in key mission areas for nearly 70 years, and these facilities will allow that to continue for next 50.”

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Center for Environmental Health Sciences announces 2019 call for pilot project proposals

The MIT Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS), an interdisciplinary research center funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), is inviting MIT faculty and research staff with principal investigator privileges to submit applications for funding of pilot projects related to environmental health.

Funding for pilot projects will support either basic or translational research. Those interested are encouraged to read the NIEHS strategic plan to gain understanding of the types of projects center plans to fund.

Preference is given to projects that address the NIEHS Strategic Goals. The center anticipates funding of $25,000 in direct costs for each project. The center encourages applications from junior faculty, any faculty member wishing to branch into new areas of environmental health research, and faculty who are involved in interdisciplinary environmental health collaborations — for example between engineers and scientists. Projects can be anywhere on the spectrum between basic sciences and clinical translation. In all cases, the trajectory to human application must be clear and feasible.

Translational pilot projects will be evaluated separately from those in the basic sciences. These projects are funded through the generosity of Vilma and Lionel Kinney, and are named in honor of Theron G. Randolph, a pioneer in the fields of environmental and natural products medicine. 

The pilot project program seeks to:

• provide initial support for new investigators to establish research in the area of environmental health;
• stimulate investigators from diverse fields of endeavor to apply their expertise to environmental health research;
• encourage and foster multi-disciplinary research collaborations; and
• provide an opportunity for investigators to move their basic research to the translational level.

Applicants should submit a four-page research plan that outlines the specific aims and research strategy (i.e. significant, innovation, and approach), indicating in the project title whether it is a basic research or translational research pilot project.

In addition, applications should also include a detailed budget form, budget justification, and a biographical sketch using the NIH PHS398 forms. Please note that travel for scientific conferences and meetings are unallowable costs.

Questions regarding the application process or proposal ideas should be directed to Professor Jacquin C. Niles, director; or John M. Essigmann, deputy director.

Deadline for the call is April 30, with an anticipated start date of July 1. Completed applications should be submitted via email to Amanda Tat, administrative officer of the CEHS.

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Machine learning moves popular data elements into a bucket of their own

If you look under the hood of the internet, you’ll find lots of gears churning along that make it all possible.

For example, take a company like AT&T. They have to intimately understand what internet data are going where so that they can better accommodate different levels of usage. But it isn’t practical to precisely monitor every packet of data, because companies simply don’t have unlimited amounts of storage space. (Researchers actually call this the “Britney Spears problem,” named for search engines’ long-running efforts to tally trending topics.)

Because of this, tech companies use special algorithms to roughly estimate the amount of traffic heading to different IP addresses. Traditional frequency-estimation algorithms involve “hashing,” or randomly splitting items into different buckets. But this approach discounts the fact that there are patterns that can be uncovered in high volumes of data, like why one IP address tends to generate more internet traffic than another.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have devised a new way to find such patterns using machine learning.

Their system uses a neural network to automatically predict if a specific element will appear frequently in a data stream. If it does, it’s placed in a separate bucket of so-called “heavy hitters” to focus on; if it doesn’t, it’s handled via hashing.

“It’s like a triage situation in an emergency room, where we prioritize the biggest problems before getting to the smaller ones,” says MIT Professor Piotr Indyk, co-author of a new paper about the system that will be presented in May at the International Conference on Learning Representations in New Orleans, Louisiana. “By learning the properties of heavy hitters as they come in, we can do frequency-estimation much more efficiently and with much less error.”

In tests, Indyk’s team showed that their learning-based approach had upwards of 57 percent fewer errors for estimating the amount of internet traffic in a network, and upwards of 71 percent fewer errors for estimating the number of queries for a given search term.

The team calls their system “LearnedSketch,” because they view it as a method of “sketching” the data in a data stream more efficiently. To their knowledge, it’s the world’s first machine learning-based approach for not just frequency-estimation itself, but for a broader class of so-called “streaming” algorithms that are used in everything from security systems to natural language processing.

LearnedSketch could help tech companies more effectively crunch all kinds of meaningful data, from trending topics on Twitter to spikes in web traffic that might suggest future distributed denial-of-service attacks. E-commerce companies could use it to improve product recommendations: If LearnedSketch found that customers tend to do more comparative shopping for household electronics than for toys, it could automatically devote more resources to ensuring the accuracy of its frequency counts for electronics.

“We’re all familiar with consumer-facing applications of machine learning like natural language processing and speech translation,” says Sergei Vassilvitskii, a computer scientist who studies algorithmic machine learning and was not involved in the project. “This line of work, on the other hand, is an exciting example of how to use machine learning to improve the core computing system itself.”

What’s also surprising about LearnedSketch is that, as it learns how to count items, the structure it learns can be generalized even to unseen items. For example, to predict which internet connections have the most traffic, the model learns to cluster different connections by the prefix of their destination IP. This is because places that generate large traffic, like big companies and universities, tend to share a particular prefix.

“We combine the model with classical algorithms so that our algorithm inherits worst-case guarantees from the classical algorithms naturally,” says PhD student Chen-Yu Hsu, co-author of the new paper. “These kinds of results show that machine learning is very much an approach that could be used alongside the classic algorithmic paradigms like ‘divide and conquer’ and dynamic programming.”

Indyk and Hsu co-wrote the paper with PhD student Ali Vakilian and MIT Professor Dina Katabi.

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Professor Emeritus T. Francis Ogilvie, former ocean engineering department head, dies at 89

Thomas (T.) Francis Ogilvie, professor emeritus of ocean engineering, passed away on March 30, at the age of 89. Ogilvie dedicated most of his career to improving how ocean engineering and naval architecture programs educated students. He served as department head for MIT’s Department of Ocean Engineering — then known as Course 13 — from 1982 to 1994.

Born in Atlantic City in 1929, Ogilvie was surrounded by ocean and boats throughout his childhood. Despite his fascination with boats, he developed an aversion to the water that surrounded him due to a dislike of getting wet. At just 16, Ogilvie enrolled in Cornell University where he studied physics. While at Cornell, he was also appointed to the position of campanologist — or bell-ringer. As bell-ringer, he would climb Cornell’s bell tower and move huge levers to sound the bells over campus, serving as an alarm clock for his fellow students.

After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in physics from Cornell, Ogilvie realized that he could study boats without getting wet. In 1951, he took a job as a physicist at the U.S. Navy’s David Taylor Model Basin (DTMB) in Maryland. While at DTMB, Ogilvie conducted research on the dynamic response of ship structures to explosive loading. He later moved on to study the wave dynamics of ships, submarines, and hydrofoils. During this time, the U.S. Navy acknowledged Ogilvie’s important contributions with a Meritorious Public Service Award in 1955.

Ogilvie received his master’s degree in aeronautical engineering from the University of Maryland in 1957. Three years later, he received his PhD in engineering science from the University of California at Berkeley. After receiving his doctorate, Ogilvie moved to London for eighteen months where he served as a Liaison Scientist for the Office of Naval Research. Upon returning to the U.S., he worked at DTMB for three more years.

In 1967, Ogilvie transitioned into a career in academia. He acted as associate professor of naval architecture and marine engineering at The University of Michigan, where he also taught fluid mechanics. He was eventually named chairman of the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the University of Michigan.

As chairman, Ogilvie made substantial changes to the department. He was responsible for a total restructuring of the undergraduate curriculum and helped develop their graduate program. Thanks in large part to his ability to garner donations from both industry and alumni, Ogilvie was responsible for the modernization of the department’s experimental facilities and the construction of a new building to house the department.

In 1981, he resigned from his role at the University of Michigan, and in 1982 he arrived at MIT as professor and department head of ocean engineering. He served as department head for 12 years.

As with his time in Michigan, Ogilvie made a number of substantial changes to MIT’s Department of Ocean Engineering. He revised the undergraduate program — now known as Course 2-OE — and helped launch several new laboratories. One of the most impactful changes he made as department head was integrating MIT’s Naval Construction and Engineering Program into MIT’s School of Engineering.

Ogilvie was beloved by his colleagues in ocean engineering at MIT. Upon stepping down as department head in 1994, he was honored with the launch of the T. Francis Ogilvie Young Investigator Lectureship in Ocean Engineering. The annual lectureship series was created in recognition of Ogilvie’s contributions to the field of ocean engineering and “with special gratitude for his commitment in mentoring and supporting young faculty and researchers.”

Throughout his career, Ogilvie was recognized with numerous awards and honors. He was invited to serve as visiting professor of naval architecture in Osaka University in Japan and honorary professor of mathematics in Manchester University in the U.K. He was a fellow and served on the executive committee of the Society of Naval Architects and Marine Engineers. In 1989, the society awarded him the William H. Webb Medal “for outstanding contributions to education in naval architecture, marine or ocean engineering.”

In 1996, the year he retired, Ogilvie also received an honorary doctorate from the National Technical University of Athens in celebration of his ship hydrodynamics research.

Ogilvie is survived his daughter, Nancy Ogilvie; his daughter, Beth Ogilvie, and her married partner, Susan Straghalis; and his son, Ken Ogilvie, and his wife, Sue Anderson. Donations may be made in Ogilvie’s name to the ACLU or the Alzheimer's Association.

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Squire Booker PhD ’94 to speak at 2019 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods and Degree Conferral Ceremony

Chancellor Cynthia Barnhart announced today that Squire J. Booker PhD ’94 will be the guest speaker at MIT’s 2019 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods and Degree Conferral Ceremony. Booker is the Evan Pugh Professor of chemistry and of biochemistry and molecular biology and Eberly Family Distinguished Chair in Science at Penn State University, and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

“Professor Booker is an outstanding researcher and educator who embodies the MIT mission of advancing knowledge for the betterment of humankind,” said Chancellor Barnhart, host of the ceremony, which will make its Killian Court debut this year. “As they begin a new chapter in their lives, our candidates will find lessons and inspiration in Professor Booker’s remarkable professional and personal story. It will be an honor to welcome him home to MIT, and thrilling to hear him speak from the storied Killian Court stage.”

The speaker selection process engages faculty and doctoral students to identify MIT alumni whose acumen, experience, and insight illuminate possible futures for new PhDs and ScDs. Eric Grimson, chancellor for academic advancement, chairs the Commencement Committee. “This is an especially exciting graduation for our doctoral candidates, as we confer their degrees together with their academic hoods for the first time,” he said. “We are exhilarated to welcome Professor Booker as our guest speaker on June 6.” 

Booker attended Austin College in Sherman, Texas, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and was a Minnie Stevens Piper Scholar. In the summer of 1986, he conducted research at MIT as a member of a cohort of six students who participated in the very first MIT Summer Research Program, which has now blossomed into an extensive program that welcomes approximately 40 interns from underrepresented backgrounds each year in a multitude of disciplines. He earned his doctoral degree in biochemistry at MIT in 1994, as well as a National Science Foundation–NATO Fellowship for postdoctoral studies at Université René Descartes in Paris, France. Honors continued in 1996 with a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellowship for study at the Institute for Enzyme Research at the University of Wisconsin.

A member of the Penn State faculty since 1999, Booker was the recipient of a 2002 National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award. In 2004, he visited the White House to receive the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers. The award, conferred by President George W. Bush, recognized Booker’s research on enzyme reactions — including his work on an enzyme involved in the synthesis of unusual fatty acids that are needed by the bacteria responsible for most cases of tuberculosis — and his leadership as an educator and mentor. In 2011, he received the American Chemical Society’s Arthur C. Cope Scholar Award, which is given “to recognize and encourage excellence in organic chemistry.”

Booker was promoted to associate professor at Penn State in 2005 and, in 2013, professor. In 2015, he was named an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a science philanthropy organization with the mission to advance biomedical research and science education for the benefit of humanity. He was appointed in 2017 to the Eberly Distinguished Chair in Science, one of the highest honors awarded to faculty members in the Penn State Eberly College of Science.

According to a February 2018 announcement by Penn State, “Booker’s main research interests include deciphering the molecular details by which enzymes — a special class of proteins — catalyze reactions in the cell. He uses the insight gained to manipulate these reactions for various objectives, ranging from the production of biofuels to the development of antibacterial agents. His laboratory garnered international attention for elucidating a pathway by which disease-causing bacteria, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, evade entire classes of commonly used antibiotics.” Penn State further notes Booker’s acclaim for research on enzymes employing extremely reactive molecules, known as free radicals, to catalyze their reactions. He has published more than 100 scientific papers in journals, including Science, Nature Chemical Biology, the Journal of the American Chemical Society, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and he has served as guest editor for Current Opinion in Chemical Biology, Biochimica Biophysica Acta, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Journal of Biological Chemistry.

Booker is dedicated to mentoring rising scientists and to spurring students in underrepresented groups to consider STEM careers: To date, he has mentored 18 graduate students, nearly 50 undergraduate students, 16 postdocs and research scientists, and two high school students. “Squire Booker is not just a prolific and path-breaking researcher,” enthuses Professor Timothy Jamison, head of the Department of Chemistry, “his mentoring leadership is shaping the future of our field — and contributing to the pipeline of scholars in science. Moreover, I am grateful for his ongoing and invaluable service to our department and to MIT as a member of our Visiting Committee.”

Booker is past-chair of the Minority Affairs Committee of the American Society of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, and was co-organizer of the society’s 2016 annual meeting. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The 2019 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods and Degree Conferral Ceremony will take place on June 6 at 10 a.m. on Killian Court. The ceremony is open to family, friends, and mentors of doctoral candidates; no tickets are required.

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Advance boosts efficiency of flash storage in data centers

MIT researchers have designed a novel flash-storage system that could cut in half the energy and physical space required for one of the most expensive components of data centers: data storage.

Data centers are server farms that facilitate communication between users and web services, and are some of the most energy-consuming facilities in the world. In them, thousands of power-hungry servers store user data, and separate servers run app services that access that data. Other servers sometimes facilitate the computation between those two server clusters.

Most storage servers today use solid-state drives (SSDs), which use flash storage — electronically programmable and erasable memory microchips with no moving parts — to handle high-throughput data requests at high speeds. In a paper being presented at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, the researchers describe a new system called LightStore that modifies SSDs to connect directly to a data center’s network — without needing any other components — and to support computationally simpler and more efficient data-storage operations. Further software and hardware innovations seamlessly integrate the system into existing data center infrastructure.

In experiments, the researchers found a cluster of four LightStore units, called storage nodes, ran twice as efficiently as traditional storage servers, measured by the power consumption needed to field data requests. The cluster also required less than half the physical space occupied by existing servers.

The researchers broke down energy savings by individual data storage operations, as a way to better capture the system’s full energy savings. In “random writing” data, for instance, which is the most computationally intensive operation in flash memory, LightStore operated nearly eight times more efficiently than traditional servers.

The hope is that, one day, LightStore nodes could replace power-hungry servers in data centers. “We are replacing this architecture with a simpler, cheaper storage solution … that’s going to take half as much space and half the power, yet provide the same throughput capacity performance,” says co-author Arvind, the Johnson Professor in Computer Science Engineering and a researcher in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. “That will help you in operational expenditure, as it consumes less power, and capital expenditure, because energy savings in data centers translate directly to money savings.”

Joining Arvind on the paper are: first author Chanwoo Chung, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and graduate students Jinhyung Koo and Junsu Im, and Professor Sungjin Lee, all of the Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology (DGIST).

Adding “value” to flash

A major efficiency issue with today’s data centers is that the architecture hasn’t changed to accommodate flash storage. Years ago, data-storage servers consisted of relatively slow hard disks, along with lots of dynamic random-access memory circuits (DRAM) and central processing units (CPU) that help quickly process all the data pouring in from the app servers.

Today, however, hard disks have mostly been replaced with much faster flash drives. “People just plugged flash into where the hard disks used to be, without changing anything else,” Chung says. “If you can just connect flash drives directly to a network, you won’t need these expensive storage servers at all.”

For LightStore, the researchers first modified SSDs to be accessed in terms of “key-value pairs,” a very simple and efficient protocol for retrieving data. Basically, user requests appear as keys, like a string of numbers. Keys are sent to a server, which releases the data (value) associated with that key.

The concept is simple, but keys can be extremely large, so computing (searching and inserting) them solely in SSD requires a lot of computation power, which is used up by traditional “flash translation layer.” This fairly complex software runs on a separate module on a flash drive to manage and move around data. The researchers used certain data-structuring techniques to run this flash management software using only a fraction of computing power. In doing so, they offloaded the software entirely onto a tiny circuit in the flash drive that runs far more efficiently.

That offloading frees up separate CPUs already on the drive — which are designed to simplify and more quickly execute computation — to run custom LightStore software. This software uses data-structuring techniques to efficiently process key-value pair requests. Essentially, without changing the architecture, the researchers converted a traditional flash drive into a key-value drive. “So, we are adding this new feature for flash — but we are really adding nothing at all,” Arvind says.

Adapting and scaling

The challenge was then ensuring app servers could access data in LightStore nodes. In data centers, apps access data through a variety of structural protocols, such as file systems, databases, and other formats. Traditional storage servers run sophisticated software that provides the app servers access via all of these protocols. But this uses a good amount of computation energy and isn’t suitable to run on LightStore, which relies on limited computational resources.

The researchers designed very computationally light software, called an “adapter,” which translates all user requests from app services into key-value pairs. The adapters use mathematical functions to convert information about the requested data — such as commands from the specific protocols and identification numbers of the app server — into a key. It then sends that key to the appropriate LightStore node, which finds and releases the paired data. Because this software is computationally simpler, it can be installed directly onto app servers.

“Whatever data you access, we do some translation that tells me the key and the value associated with it. In doing so, I’m also taking some complexity away from the storage servers,” Arvind says.

One final innovation is that adding LightStore nodes to a cluster scales linearly with data throughput — the rate at which data can be processed. Traditionally, people stack SSDs in data centers to tackle higher throughput. But, while data storage capacity may grow, the throughput plateaus after only a few additional drives. In experiments, the researchers found that four LightStore nodes surpass throughput levels by the same amount of SSDs.

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With new Proto Ventures Program, MIT Innovation Initiative turns ideas into impact

Since its launch in 2013, the MIT Innovation Initiative has been the driving force behind several projects designed to support MIT’s entrepreneurial community — but the new Proto Ventures Program may be its most ambitious effort yet.

By bringing in domain experts to explore transformational technologies and pursue business opportunities with the campus community, the program gives MIT a new way to generate impactful companies that the Initiative’s leaders say is unlike anything else in higher education.

“Turning ideas into impact is a really big part of MIT, so enabling our community to do that more effectively has always been the core of the Innovation Initiative,” says Fiona Murray, co-director of the initiative and the William Porter Professor of Entrepreneurship.

The initiative, also known as MITii, launched the Proto Ventures Program to help fulfill its goals in the four core areas of education, translating ideas to impact, communication, and diversity.

“We try to be the tide that raises all ships of innovation at MIT, whether it be helping existing programs with resources or creating new programs where there are gaps,” MITii Executive Director Gene Keselman says.

A bold new step

The experts that will be hired for the Proto Ventures Program, referred to as venture builders, will match real-world problems with MIT’s unique landscape of innovation to build a “proto venture” within the Institute.

MITii’s leaders believe the venture builders’ freedom to explore the spectrum of needs in a given field and their ability to work with experts across MIT’s community will give them a clear perspective of business opportunities and allow them to harness MIT’s full breadth of brainpower, including faculty members, postdocs, and students at every level that are interested in helping out.

“Normally, students or faculty have an idea for a business and they pitch that idea, then there’s a panel that decides on the ones they’ll bet on,” says MITii co-director Michael Cima, who is also the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering. “That’s a tried-and-true method for doing things. But there’s a whole other way, and that’s to start with a blank sheet and a problem area and ask, ‘What are the business opportunities?’”

The hope is that the program will allow MIT’s research community to consider commercial translation while also ensuring promising research fulfills its potential for impact.

“In many cases, the degree to which real-world problems match these research solutions depends on having a human agent in the system: The graduate student at the right time in their career or the faculty member knowing someone who can be the entrepreneur,” says Murray. “So the venture builder is a new kind of human agent who can have a broad understanding of a particular problem domain, and rather than being confined to a singular solution, they can explore the solution space and start to coalesce possible proto ventures in those areas.”

Cima says the program’s success will be measured not only by the number of companies it creates but also by the number of community members it engages around campus.

MITii has begun accepting applications for its first venture builder, who will work at the intersection of artificial intelligence and health care. This channel is a collaboration between the newly launched J-Clinic research program and the Deshpande Center at MIT. MITii will use the first venture builder channel as a pilot before expanding to other fields.

Tackling the right problems

Another major MITii priority is to ensure that MIT’s community of innovators and entrepreneurs is as inclusive as possible. Murray notes that while MIT has much to celebrate with its diverse community, there is still room to increase the number of women engaged in on-campus entrepreneurship activities, to experiment with what works to drive participation, and to build programs that can serve as best practice for universities around the world.

“Obviously there are women interested in translation [of research and technology to the private industry],” Cima says. “So what are the things preventing them from taking the next step? You could argue there’s no better place in the world to study that phenomenon than MIT, because you have many women who are very interested in entrepreneurship — so if you do some intervention, you could easily measure its effects. By the end of the fiscal year, we’ll have made progress there.”

MITii is also working to strengthen the Institute’s relationship with mission-oriented organizations that focus on major global challenges ranging from security and defense to child trafficking and climate change. Those efforts have also extended to include a new corporate partners program and a slew of new hackathons this year, including Hacking Emergency Response, Hacking for Freedom, and Tech for Truth.

“If our faculty and students are alone generating ideas, they’ll often focus on problems close to home, so [it’s] been powerful giving them an appetite to solve bigger, global problems,” Murray says. “One of the things we’re trying to do is create a channel to promote understanding of those problems on campus … especially mission-oriented problems.”

A track record of success

When Reif named Murray as one of MITii’s first co-directors with Professor Vladimir Bulovic, the first thing she worked on was establishing a new academic minor in entrepreneurship and innovation. Today, the program is designed to complement the interdisciplinary background of the students who enroll; faculty from the schools of engineering and management teach courses that blend hands-on, experiential projects with lectures and case studies. In its first full cycle ending in the 2017-2018 academic year, it was one of the top 10 minors awarded at MIT.

MITii has also sought to better organize MIT’s myriad entrepreneurial resources for students, publishing an online guide that maps over 85 resources within the innovation ecosystem, and hosting the first Innovation World’s Fair last year during Campus Preview Weekend.

Perhaps the most visible progress toward unifying MIT’s innovation resources has been the construction of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Hub at MIT. Located at the old MIT Press building in Kendall Square, the hub will soon be home to programs including MITii, MIT Sandbox, MIT I-Corps, the Venture Mentoring Service, the Legatum Center, and more. MITii has been responsible for determining the building’s tenants and figuring out how the various programs will work together.

“We know innovation happens when you have these serendipitous collisions, when people who understand problems and people who understand solutions come together,” Murray says. “That’s a physical space, but also a representation of a community growing around these support mechanisms.”

Notably, the MIT Admissions Office will also be in the building, making MIT’s innovation ecosystem part of the first impressions of thousands of new and prospective students each year.

For Cima, the new efforts including the Proto Ventures Program are about taking risks to drive MIT forward.

“We’re sticking our necks out a bit with this,” Cima says. “But MIT is not about incremental change.”

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