Preliminary reports examine options for MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

MIT has issued a set of reports today outlining its progress developing the essential elements of the new MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing.   

The reports summarize the efforts of five working groups which, over the last few months, have been studying ideas and options for the college, including its structure, curriculum, faculty appointment and hiring practices, social responsibilities, and computing infrastructure. The working groups have been informed by a series of community forums; further feedback from the MIT community is now sought in response to the reports.

The Institute announced in October 2018 the creation of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, which represents the biggest institutional change to MIT since 1950. MIT is largely structured around five broad-reaching schools that are the Institute’s main sites for undergraduate and graduate education, and research.

In response to the pervasiveness of computing in society and academic inquiry, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing will serve as a campus-wide “bridge” across disciplines. It will advance research in computing and computer science — especially in artificial intelligence — and enhance our understanding of the social and ethical implications of technology.

Working on solutions

The working groups consist of over 100 MIT faculty, students, and staff, and have been in operation since February, with the help of community input and a campus-wide Idea Bank. The groups each submitted separate reports last week.

The working group co-chairs are also part of a steering committee which is helping guide the formation of the new college and has convened frequently in recent months to examine overlapping areas of interest among the groups. Steering committee members also include MIT Provost Martin A. Schmidt, Dean of Engineering Anantha Chandrakasan, and Faculty Chair Susan Silbey.

“I wish to express my deep appreciation to the Steering Committee and to all of the members of the working groups for their dedicated work during the last several months, especially knowing that they had a great deal of territory to cover during a relatively short span of time,” said Schmidt in an email sent to the MIT community today. “We are extremely grateful for their efforts.”

Each working group evaluated multiple, often overlapping ideas about the Schwarzman College of Computing. These working group reports do not represent a series of final decisions about the college; rather, they detail important organizational options, often weighing pros and cons of particular ideas.

The Working Group on Organizational Structure was chaired by Asu Ozdaglar, head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Engineering, and Nelson Repenning, associate dean of leadership and special projects and the Sloan School of Management Distinguished Professor of System Dynamics and Organization Studies.

The group evaluated the best organizational structure for the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing in light of the existing strengths of computing research in EECS and the overall needs of MIT’s five schools: the School of Engineering; the School of Science; the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences; the School of Architecture and Planning; and the Sloan School of Management.

The working group discussed a structure in which all five schools work to create interdisciplinary core course offerings in the new college. Another key issue the group has been examining is the relationship between the college and EECS. Additionally, the group outlined several ways that faculty can be affiliated with the college while continuing as members of their own departments and programs.

The Faculty Appointments Working Group was co-chaired by Eran Ben-Joseph, head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and William Freeman, the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of Electrical Engineering.

The group examined options concerning four related topics: types of faculty appointments, hiring models, faculty rights and responsibilities, and faculty mentoring handbooks. Many faculty hires could be joint appointments, the group proposed, with teaching and research in both the new college and existing departments; the college’s hiring process could also allow for a significant portion of new faculty to have this kind of multidisciplinary status.

If this approach is followed, the working group suggested, joint-faculty roles, rights and obligations need to be well-defined — including research expectations and teaching commitments — and guidelines for faculty mentoring should be established in advance.

The Working Group on Curriculum and Degrees was co-chaired by Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Troy Van Voorhis, the Haslam and Dewey Professor of Chemistry.

Proposals from this group include ways to encourage more undergraduates to complete the flexible computer science minor or to pursue “threads” — sets of coursework similar to minors — enhancing computing studies within their own majors. MIT might continue to expand joint degrees or even more-encompassing double majors, and might consider establishing a General Institute Requirement in computing. The group also examined graduate education and developed ideas about graduate degrees and certificates in computation, as well as the expansion of joint graduate degrees that include computing. The group also outlined a variety of ways new curriculum development may occur.

The Working Group on the Social Implications and Responsibilities of Computing was co-chaired by Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and a professor of political science, and Julie Shah, an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and head of the Interactive Robotics Group in CSAIL.

Broadly, the working group examined how best to incorporate social and ethical considerations into the college’s fabric — including education, research, and external engagement. On the education front, the group examined how that stand-alone classes about ethics and social responsibility could be woven into the college curriculum. They also evaluated how smaller educational units about social issues could be incorporated within other classes. The group also proposed new ideas about including an ethics dimension in research and extracurricular learning — such as leveraging MIT’s UROP program or mentored projects to provide a strong grounding in ethics-focused work.

The Working Group on College Infrastructure was co-chaired by Benoit Forget, an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, and Nicholas Roy, a professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a member of CSAIL.   

This working group took particularly in-depth look at MIT’s future needs in the area of computing infrastructure. The group suggested that MIT’s future computing infrastructure is unlikely to be optimized around a single model of computing access, given the diversity of research projects and needs on campus. In general, the group suggested that support for a renewed computing infrastructure and improved data management should be a high priority for the college, and might include expanded student training and increased professional staffing in computing.

The way forward

Members of the MIT community are encouraged to examine the latest reports and offer input about the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

“I invite you to review these preliminary reports and provide us with your feedback, Schmidt said in his letter to the community, adding: “I look forward to further opportunities for community involvement in the early phases and continuing development of our new college.”

He noted that community input will be collected until June 28, after which the final reports will be posted.

The official launch of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing will occur this fall, with the full development of the college occurring over a period of several years. MIT aims to add 50 full-time faculty to the college and jointly with departments across MIT over a five-year period. The Institute has also identified the location for a new building for the college, on the site of 44 Vassar Street, between Massachusetts Avenue and Main Street, and aims to open the new facility by late 2022.

In February, MIT announced the appointment of Dan Huttenlocher SM ’84 PhD ’88 as the first dean of the college. Huttenlocher will begin the new post this summer.

The MIT Schwarzman College of Computing is being supported by a $1 billion commitment for new research and education in computing, the biggest investment of its kind by a U.S. academic institution. The core support for the new college comes from a $350 million foundational gift from Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Blackstone, the global asset management and financial services firm.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2Msg92I

Autonomous boats can target and latch onto each other

The city of Amsterdam envisions a future where fleets of autonomous boats cruise its many canals to transport goods and people, collect trash, or self-assemble into floating stages and bridges. To further that vision, MIT researchers have given new capabilities to their fleet of robotic boats — which are being developed as part of an ongoing project — that lets them target and clasp onto each other, and keep trying if they fail.

About a quarter of Amsterdam’s surface area is water, with 165 canals winding alongside busy city streets. Several years ago, MIT and the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions (AMS Institute) teamed up on the “Roboat” project. The idea is to build a fleet of autonomous robotic boats — rectangular hulls equipped with sensors, thrusters, microcontrollers, GPS modules, cameras, and other hardware — that provides intelligent mobility on water to relieve congestion in the city’s busy streets.

One of project’s objectives is to create roboat units that provide on-demand transporation on waterways. Another objective is using the roboat units to automatically form “pop-up” structures, such as foot bridges, performance stages, or even food markets. The structures could then automatically disassemble at set times and reform into target structures for different activities. Additionally, the roboat units could be used as agile sensors to gather data on the city’s infrastructure, and air and water quality, among other things.

In 2016, MIT researchers tested a roboat prototype that cruised around Amsterdam’s canals, moving forward, backward, and laterally along a preprogrammed path. Last year, researchers designed low-cost, 3-D-printed, one-quarter scale versions of the boats, which were more efficient and agile, and came equipped with advanced trajectory-tracking algorithms. 

In a paper presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the researchers describe roboat units that can now identify and connect to docking stations. Control algorithms guide the roboats to the target, where they automatically connect to a customized latching mechanism with millimeter precision. Moreover, the roboat notices if it has missed the connection, backs up, and tries again.

The researchers tested the latching technique in a swimming pool at MIT and in the Charles River, where waters are rougher. In both instances, the roboat units were usually able to successfully connect in about 10 seconds, starting from around 1 meter away, or they succeeded after a few failed attempts. In Amsterdam, the system could be especially useful for overnight garbage collection. Roboat units could sail around a canal, locate and latch onto platforms holding trash containers, and haul them back to collection facilities.

“In Amsterdam, canals were once used for transportation and other things the roads are now used for. Roads near canals are now very congested — and have noise and pollution — so the city wants to add more functionality back to the canals,” says first author Luis Mateos, a graduate student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and a researcher in the MIT Senseable City Lab. “Self-driving technologies can save time, costs and energy, and improve the city moving forward.”

“The aim is to use roboat units to bring new capabilities to life on the water,” adds co-author Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “The new latching mechanism is very important for creating pop-up structures. Roboat does not need latching for autonomous transporation on water, but you need the latching to create any structure, whether it’s mobile or fixed.”

Joining Mateos on the paper are: Wei Wang, a joint postdoc in CSAIL and the Senseable City Lab; Banti Gheneti, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Fabio Duarte, a DUSP and Senseable City Lab research scientist; and Carlo Ratti, director of the Senseable City Lab and a principal investigator and professor of the practice in DUSP.

Making the connection

Each roboat is equipped with latching mechanisms, including ball and socket components, on its front, back, and sides. The ball component resembles a badminton shuttlecock — a cone-shaped, rubber body with a metal ball at the end. The socket component is a wide funnel that guides the ball component into a receptor. Inside the funnel, a laser beam acts like a security system that detects when the ball crosses into the receptor. That activates a mechanism with three arms that closes around and captures the ball, while also sending a feedback signal to both roboats that the connection is complete.

On the software side, the roboats run on custom computer vision and control techniques. Each roboat has a LIDAR system and camera, so they can autonomously move from point to point around the canals. Each docking station — typically an unmoving roboat — has a sheet of paper imprinted with an augmented reality tag, called an AprilTag, which resembles a simplified QR code. Commonly used for robotic applications, AprilTags enable robots to detect and compute their precise 3-D position and orientation relative to the tag.

Both the AprilTags and cameras are located in the same locations in center of the roboats. When a traveling roboat is roughly one or two meters away from the stationary AprilTag, the roboat calculates its position and orientation to the tag. Typically, this would generate a 3-D map for boat motion, including roll, pitch, and yaw (left and right). But an algorithm strips away everything except yaw. This produces an easy-to-compute 2-D plane that measures the roboat camera’s distance away and distance left and right of the tag. Using that information, the roboat steers itself toward the tag. By keeping the camera and tag perfectly aligned, the roboat is able to precisely connect.

The funnel compensates for any misalignment in the roboat’s pitch (rocking up and down) and heave (vertical up and down), as canal waves are relatively small. If, however, the roboat goes beyond its calculated distance, and doesn’t receive a feedback signal from the laser beam, it knows it has missed. “In challenging waters, sometimes roboat units at the current one-quarter scale, are not strong enough to overcome wind gusts or heavy water currents,” Mateos says. “A logic component on the roboat says, ‘You missed, so back up, recalculate your position, and try again.’”

Future iterations

The researchers are now designing roboat units roughly four times the size of the current iterations, so they’ll be more stable on water. Mateos is also working on an update to the funnel that includes tentacle-like rubber grippers that tighten around the pin — like a squid grasping its prey. That could help give the roboat units more control when, say, they’re towing platforms or other roboats through narrow canals.

In the works is also a system that displays the AprilTags on an LCD monitor that changes codes to signal multiple roboat units to assemble in a given order. At first, all roboat units will be given a code to stay exactly a meter apart. Then, the code changes to direct the first roboat to latch. After, the screen switches codes to order the next roboat to latch, and so on. “It’s like the telephone game. The changing code passes a message to one roboat at a time, and that message tells them what to do,” Mateos says.

Darwin Caldwell, the research director of Advanced Robotics at the Italian Institute of Technology, envisions even more possible applications for the autonomous latching capability. “I can certainly see this type of autonomous docking being of use in many areas of robotic ‘refuelling’ and docking … beyond aquatic/naval systems,” he says, “including inflight refuelling, space docking, cargo container handling, [and] robot in-house recharging.”

The research was funded by the AMS Institute and the City of Amsterdam.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2QL6DGB

Protecting our energy infrastructure from cyberattack

Almost every day, news headlines announce another security breach and the theft of credit card numbers and other personal information. While having one’s credit card stolen can be annoying and unsettling, a far more significant, yet less recognized, concern is the security of physical infrastructure, including energy systems.

“With a credit card theft, you might have to pay $50 and get a new credit card,” says Stuart Madnick, the John Norris Maguire Professor of Information Technologies at the Sloan School of Management, a professor of engineering systems at the School of Engineering, and founding director of the Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan consortium. “But with infrastructure attacks, real physical damage can occur, and recovery can take weeks or months.”

A few examples demonstrate the threat. In 2008, an alleged cyberattack blew up an oil pipeline in Turkey, shutting it down for three weeks; in 2009, the malicious Stuxnet computer worm destroyed hundreds of Iranian centrifuges, disrupting that country’s nuclear fuel enrichment program; and in 2015, an attack brought down a section of the Ukrainian power grid — for just six hours, but substations on the grid had to be operated manually for months.

According to Madnick, for adversaries to mount a successful attack, they must have the capability, the opportunity, and the motivation. In recent incidents, all three factors have aligned, and attackers have crippled major physical systems.

“The good news is that, at least in the United States, we haven’t really experienced that yet,” says Madnick. But he believes that “it’s only motivation that’s lacking.” Given sufficient motivation, attackers anywhere in the world could, for example, bring down some or all of the nation’s interconnected power grid or stop the flow of natural gas through the country’s 2.4 million miles of pipeline. And while emergency facilities and fuel supplies may keep things running for a few days, it’s likely to take far longer than that to repair systems that attackers have damaged or blown up.

“Those are massive impacts that would affect our day-to-day life,” says Madnick. “And it’s not on most people’s radar. But just hoping that it won’t happen is not exactly a safe way to go about life.” He firmly believes that “the worst is yet to come.”

The challenge for industry

Ensuring the cybersecurity of energy systems is a growing challenge. Why? Today’s industrial facilities rely extensively on software for plant control, rather than on traditional electro-mechanical devices. In some cases, even functions critical for ensuring safety are almost entirely implemented in software. In a typical industrial facility, dozens of programmable computing systems distributed throughout the plant provide local control of processes — for example, maintaining the water-level in a boiler at a certain setpoint. Those devices all interact with a higher-level “supervisory” system that enables operators to control the local systems and overall plant operation, either on-site or remotely. In most facilities, these programmable computing systems do not require any authentication for settings to be altered. Given this setup, a cyberattacker who gains access to the software in either the local or the supervisory system can cause damage or disruption of service.

The traditional approach used to protect critical control systems is to “air-gap” them — that is, separate them from the public internet so that intruders can’t reach them. But in today’s world of high connectivity, an air-gap no longer guarantees security. For example, companies often hire independent contractors or vendors to maintain and monitor specialized equipment in their facilities. To perform those tasks, the contractor or vendor needs access to real-time operational data — information that’s generally transmitted over the internet. In addition, legitimate business needs, such as transferring files and updating software, require the use of USB sticks, which can inadvertently jeopardize the integrity of the air-gap, leaving a plant vulnerable to cyberattack.

Looking for vulnerabilities

Companies actively work to tighten up their security — but typically only after some incident has occurred. “So we tend to be looking through the rear-view mirror,” says Madnick. He stresses the need to identify and mitigate the vulnerabilities of a system before a problem arises.

The traditional method of identifying cyber-vulnerabilities is to create an inventory of all the components, examine each one to identify any vulnerabilities, mitigate those vulnerabilities, and then aggregate the results to secure the overall system. But that approach relies on two key simplifying assumptions, says Shaharyar Khan, a fellow of the MIT System Design and Management program. It assumes that events always run in a single, linear direction, so one event causes another event, which causes another event, and so on, without feedback loops or interactions to complicate the sequence. And it assumes that understanding the behavior of each component in isolation is sufficient to predict the behavior of the overall system.

But those assumptions don’t hold for complex systems — and modern control systems in energy facilities are extremely complex, software-intensive, and made up of highly coupled components that interact in many ways. As a result, says Khan, “the overall system exhibits behaviors that the individual components do not” — a property known in systems theory as emergence. “We consider safety and security to be emergent properties of systems,” says Khan. The challenge is therefore to control the emergent behavior of the system by defining new constraints, a task that requires understanding how all the interacting factors at work — from people to equipment to external regulations and more — ultimately impact system safety.

To develop an analytical tool up to that challenge, Madnick, Khan, and James L. Kirtley Jr., a professor of electrical engineering, turned first to a methodology called System Theoretic Accident Model and Process, which was developed more than 15 years ago by MIT Professor Nancy Leveson of aeronautics and astronautics. With that work as a foundation, they developed “Cybersafety,” an analytical method specifically tailored for cybersecurity analysis of complex industrial control systems.

To apply the Cybersafety procedure to a facility, an analyst begins by answering the following questions:

• What is the main purpose of the system being analyzed; that is, what do you need to protect? Answering that question may sound straightforward, but Madnick notes, “Surprisingly, when we ask companies what their ‘crown jewels’ are, they often have trouble identifying them.”

• Given that main purpose, what’s the worst that could happen to the system? Defining the main purpose and the worst possible losses is key to understanding the goal of the analysis and the best allocation of resources for mitigation.

• What are key hazards that could lead to that loss? As a simple example, having wet stairs in a facility is a hazard; having someone fall down the stairs and break an ankle is a loss.

• Who or what controls that hazard? In the above example, the first step is to determine who or what controls the state of the stairs. The next step is to ask, Who or what controls that controller? And then, Who or what controls that controller? Answering that question recursively and mapping the feedback loops among the various controllers yields a hierarchical control structure responsible for maintaining the state of the stairs in an acceptable condition.

Given the full control structure, the next step is to ask: What control actions might be taken by a controller that would be unsafe given the state of the system? For example, if an attacker corrupts feedback from a key sensor, a controller will not know the actual state of the system and therefore may take an incorrect action, or may take the correct action but at the wrong time or in the wrong order — any of which would lead to damage.

Based on the now-deeper understanding of the system, the analyst next hypothesizes a series of loss scenarios stemming from unsafe control actions and examines how the various controllers might interact to issue an unsafe command. “At each level of the analysis, we try to identify constraints on the process being controlled that, if violated, would result in the system moving into an unsafe state,” says Khan. For example, one constraint could dictate that the steam pressure inside a boiler must not exceed a certain upper bound to prevent the boiler from bursting due to over-pressure.

“By continually refining those constraints as we progress through the analysis, we are able to define new requirements that will ensure the safety and security of the overall system,” he says. “Then we can identify practical steps for enforcing adherence to those constraints through system design, processes and procedures, or social controls such as company culture, regulatory requirements, or insurance incentives.”

Case studies

To demonstrate the capabilities of Cybersafety analysis, Khan selected a 20-megawatt, gas turbine power plant — a small facility that has all the elements of a full-scale power plant on the grid. In one analysis, he examined the control system for the gas turbine, focusing in particular on how the software controlling the fuel-control valve could be altered to cause system-level losses.

Performing the Cybersafety analysis yielded several turbine-related loss scenarios involving fires or explosions, catastrophic equipment failure, and ultimately the inability to generate power.

For example, in one scenario, the attacker disables the turbine’s digital protection system and alters the logic in the software that controls the fuel-control valve to keep the valve open when it should be closed, stopping fuel from flowing into the turbine. If the turbine is then suddenly disconnected from the grid, it will begin to spin faster than its design limit and will break apart, damaging nearby equipment and harming workers in the area.

The Cybersafety analysis uncovered the source of that vulnerability: An updated version of the control system had eliminated a backup mechanical bolt assembly that ensured turbine “over-speed” protection. Instead, over-speed protection was implemented entirely in software.

That change made sense from a business perspective. A mechanical device requires regular maintenance and testing, and those tests subject the turbine to such extreme stresses that it sometimes fails. However, given the importance of cybersecurity, it might be wise to bring back the mechanical bolt as a standalone safety device — or at least to consider standalone electronic over-speed protection schemes as a final line of defense.

Another case study focused on systems used to deliver chilled water and air conditioning to the buildings being served. Once again, the Cybersafety analysis revealed multiple loss scenarios; in this case, most had one cause in common: the use of variable frequency drives (VFDs) to adjust the speed of motors that drive water pumps and compressors.

Like all motors, the motor driving the chiller’s compressor has certain critical speeds at which mechanical resonance occurs, causing excessive vibration. VFDs are typically programmed to skip over those critical speeds during motor startup. But some VFDs are programmable over the network. Thus, an attacker can query a VFD for the critical speed of the attached motor and then command it to drive the motor at that dangerous speed, permanently damaging it.

“This is a simple kind of an attack; it doesn’t require a lot of sophistication,” says Khan. “But it could be launched and could cause catastrophic damage.” He cites earlier work performed by Matthew Angle ’07, MEng ’11, PhD ’16, in collaboration with Madnick and Kirtley. As part of a 2017 study of cyberattacks on industrial control systems, Angle built a lab-scale motor test kit equipped with a complete VFD with computer code familiar to the researchers. By simply altering a few key lines of code, they caused capacitors in the VFD to explode, sending smoke billowing out into the courtyard behind their MIT lab. In an industrial setting with full-sized VFDs, a similar cyberattack could cause significant structural damage and potentially harm personnel.

Given such possibilities, the research team recommends that companies carefully consider the “functionality” of the equipment in their system. Many times, plant personnel are not even aware of the capabilities that their equipment offers. For example, they may not realize that a VFD driving a motor in their plant can be made to operate in reverse direction by a small change in the computer code controlling it — a clear cyber-vulnerability. Removing that vulnerability would require using a VFD with less functionality. “Good engineering to remove such vulnerabilities can sometimes be mistakenly characterized as a move backwards, but it may be necessary to improve a plant’s security posture,” says Khan. A full Cybersafety analysis of a system will not only highlight such issues, but also guide the strategic placement of analog sensors and other redundant feedback loops that will increase the resiliency of system operation.

Addressing the challenge

Throughout their cybersecurity research, Khan, Madnick, and their colleagues have found that vulnerabilities can often be traced to human behavior, as well as management decisions. In one case, a company had included the default passcode for its equipment in the operator’s manual, publicly available on the internet. Other cases involved operators connecting USB drives and personal laptops directly into the plant network, thereby breaching the air-gap and even introducing malware into the plant control system.

In one case, an overnight worker downloaded movies onto a plant computer using a USB stick. But often such actions were taken as part of desperate attempts to get a currently shut-down plant back up and running. “In the grand scheme of priorities, I understand that focusing on getting the plant running again is part of the culture,” says Madnick. “Unfortunately, the things people do in order to keep their plant running sometimes puts the plant at an even greater risk.”

Enabling a new culture and mindset requires a serious commitment to cybersecurity up the management chain. Mitigation strategies are likely to call for reengineering the control system, buying new equipment, or making changes in processes and procedures that might incur extra costs. Given what’s at stake, management must not only approve such investments, but also instill a sense of urgency in their organizations to identify vulnerabilities and eliminate or mitigate them.

Based on their studies, the researchers conclude that it’s impossible to guarantee that an industrial control system will never have its network defenses breached. “Therefore, the system must be designed so that it’s resilient against the effects of an attack,” says Khan. “Cybersafety analysis is a powerful method because it generates a whole set of requirements — not just technical but also organizational, logistical, and procedural — that can improve the resilience of any complex energy system against a cyberattack.”

This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, the MIT Energy Initiative Seed Fund Program, and members of the Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan consortium. More information and the latest publications can be found at cams.mit.edu.

This article appears in the Spring 2019 issue of Energy Futures, the magazine of the MIT Energy Initiative.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2ERL95T

Q&A: David Hardt on teaching the principles of manufacturing

The past four decades have been transformative for manufacturing. An explosive growth of new technologies has revolutionized how products are made and distributed. In the 1980s, the steep rise in Japanese manufacturing reshaped the global market. Advances in the fields of automation, robotics, and factory systems have drastically altered the landscape of the traditional factory floor. David Hardt, the Ralph E. and Eloise F. Cross Professor in Manufacturing, has had a front-row seat to these radical changes.

Hardt SM ’75, PhD ’78 joined the faculty in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) in 1979 and later served as director of the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing for nine years. A leading expert in manufacturing process control, Hardt pioneered new equipment and control techniques in fields such as gas metal arc welding, metal forming in the aerospace industry, and micro-fluidic device manufacture.

Hardt was also involved with the initiation and management of the  “Leaders for Manufacturing” (now LGO) program, a collaboration between the MIT Sloan School of Management and the School of Engineering, serving as engineering co-director for four years. From this and his MechE work, he noticed that MIT’s degree programs weren’t adequately preparing engineering students for careers in manufacturing. In 2010, he helped develop MIT’s master of engineering in advanced manufacturing and design (MEngM), a yearlong program that prepares graduate students to be engineering leaders in manufacturing.

Last year, Hardt and colleagues like Sanja Sarma, vice president for open learning, took lessons from the MEngM degree and launched the MITx Micromasters Program in Principles of Manufacturing, on online program about the fundamentals of manufacturing as developed in the MEngM.

Q: How did you decide to spend your career focusing on manufacturing?

A: Well, when I got to MIT I was enamored with biomedical engineering. I studied muscle-force control during walking for my PhD. By the time I graduated, the market was oversaturated and no one was interested in hiring a biomedical engineer. So I took a postdoctoral role in manufacturing at MIT. I had studied control and dynamics in graduate school and started thinking of ways I could apply that to manufacturing. That’s when I took the theme of process control and ran with it. In the parlance of controls, I was expanding the control to include the whole manufacturing process — not just the machine itself.

Q: In the 40 years since you joined the faculty, what has been the biggest change you’ve seen in manufacturing?

A: The level of sophistication has been one of the biggest changes. Manufacturing has become such a highly refined activity globally. Look at any modern manufacturing operation and it has to be one of the most complex technical systems there are on earth.

It used to be that with enough labor, some skill, space, and time, you could make anything and make a profit. But the standards manufacturers are now held to are extremely high. You can’t make something with poor quality and high cost and get away with it anymore. Consumers’ expectations have really upped the ante.

Q: Rethinking how manufacturing is taught has been a theme throughout your career. How did the MEngM program initially come to fruition?

A: I started collaborating more with colleagues from Sloan School of Management, as well as managers and operating engineers in industry. It gave me more of a ground truth in what was important in manufacturing. That opened my eyes and in some of the classes I was teaching, I shifted from a purely mechanical engineering approach to a broader, more pragmatic approach that took into account what was really happening in industry.

When the [Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology] began in 1998, we knew we wanted to collaborate with researchers in Singapore on manufacturing. We developed a novel professional manufacturing degree program in Singapore. For five years, we ran it from a distance. It was a roaring success, so we realized that there was an opportunity to start a similar program right here at MIT, and launched the MEngM program. For our students, it’s like a capstone degree. Undergraduate manufacturing classes just scratch the surface — the MEngM really educates students in the theory and practice of manufacturing.

Q: How did you use the lessons you’ve learned from the MEngM program to shape the MITx Micromasters Program in Principles of Manufacturing?

A: There are four core classes in the MEngM program that we started calling the "principles of manufacturing." We realized that teaching those classes as a unit would provide great utility on their own. Someone working in industry who has a mechanical engineering background could take those classes and it would greatly enhance their ability to work in manufacturing and design. So, along with my colleagues Jung-Hoon Chun, Stephen Graves, Duane Boning, Stan Gershwin, Jose Pacheco, and John Liu, I worked with Professor Sanjay Sarma and the MIT edX team to put together eight online courses on manufacturing process control, manufacturing systems, management in engineering, and supply chains for manufacturing. The courses are taught by a seasoned team of faculty from MIT MechE, MIT Leaders for Global Operations Program, and Sloan School of Management.

Q: What are you hoping students will take away from the Micromasters Program?

A: Everybody knows that the biggest hurdle in manufacturing is the conversion from a groundbreaking idea to actual production. We hope that the program can help professionals across industry surmount that hurdle. Our first year of the program just launched in March 2018, and we have had students from all across the world at varying levels in their career. Our first Micromasters credential should be awarded this fall, and we hope to admit some of them to the MEngM. I’m looking forward to hearing more from them about how they plan to implement the skills they learned through the program throughout their careers.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2ESGOzp

The tenured engineers of 2019

The School of Engineering has announced that 17 members of its faculty have been granted tenure by MIT.

“The tenured faculty in this year’s cohort are a true inspiration,” said Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering. “They have shown exceptional dedication to research and teaching, and their innovative work has greatly advanced their fields.”

This year’s newly tenured associate professors are:

Antoine Allanore, in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, develops more sustainable technologies and strategies for mining, metal extraction, and manufacturing, including novel methods of fertilizer production.

Saurabh Amin, in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, focuses on the design and implementation of network inspection and control algorithms for improving the resilience of large-scale critical infrastructures, such as transportation systems and water and energy distribution networks, against cyber-physical security attacks and natural events.

Emilio Baglietto, in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, uses computational modeling to characterize and predict the underlying heat-transfer processes in nuclear reactors, including turbulence modeling, unsteady flow phenomena, multiphase flow, and boiling.

Paul Blainey, the Karl Van Tassel (1925) Career Development Professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, integrates microfluidic, optical, and molecular tools for application in biology and medicine across a range of scales.

Kerri Cahoy, the Rockwell International Career Development Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, develops nanosatellites that demonstrate weather sensing using microwave radiometers and GPS radio occultation receivers, high data-rate laser communications with precision time transfer, and active optical imaging systems using MEMS deformable mirrors for exoplanet exploration applications. 

Juejun Hu, in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, focuses on novel materials and devices to exploit interactions of light with matter, with applications in on-chip sensing and spectroscopy, flexible and polymer photonics, and optics for solar energy.

Sertac Karaman, the Class of 1948 Career Development Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, studies robotics, control theory, and the application of probability theory, stochastic processes, and optimization for cyber-physical systems such as driverless cars and drones.

R. Scott Kemp, the Class of 1943 Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, combines physics, politics, and history to identify options for addressing nuclear weapons and energy. He investigates technical threats to nuclear-deterrence stability and the information theory of treaty verification; he is also developing technical tools for reconstructing the histories of secret nuclear-weapon programs.

Aleksander Mądry, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, investigates topics ranging from developing new algorithms using continuous optimization, to combining theoretical and empirical insights, to building a more principled and thorough understanding of key machine learning tools. A major theme of his research is rethinking machine learning from the perspective of security and robustness.

Frances Ross, the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, performs research on nanostructures using transmission electron microscopes that allow researchers to see, in real-time, how structures form and develop in response to changes in temperature, environment, and other variables. Understanding crystal growth at the nanoscale is helpful in creating precisely controlled materials for applications in microelectronics and energy conversion and storage.

Daniel Sanchez, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, works on computer architecture and computer systems, with an emphasis on large-scale multi-core processors, scalable and efficient memory hierarchies, architectures with quality-of-service guarantees, and scalable runtimes and schedulers.

Themistoklis Sapsis, the Doherty Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, develops analytical, computational, and data-driven methods for the probabilistic prediction and quantification of extreme events in high-dimensional nonlinear systems such as turbulent fluid flows and nonlinear mechanical systems.

Julie Shah, the Boeing Career Development Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, develops innovative computational models and algorithms expanding the use of human cognitive models for artificial intelligence. Her research has produced novel forms of human-machine teaming in manufacturing assembly lines, healthcare applications, transportation, and defense.

Hadley Sikes, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, employs biomolecular engineering and knowledge of reaction networks to detect epigenetic modifications that can guide cancer treatment, induce oxidant-specific perturbations in tumors for therapeutic benefit, and improve signaling reactions and assay formats used in medical diagnostics.

William Tisdale, the ARCO Career Development Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, works on energy transport in nanomaterials, nonlinear spectroscopy, and spectroscopic imaging to better understand and control the mechanisms by which excitons, free charges, heat, and reactive chemical species are converted to more useful forms of energy, and on leveraging this understanding to guide materials design and process optimization.

Virginia Vassilevska Williams, the Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, applies combinatorial and graph theoretic tools to develop efficient algorithms for matrix multiplication, shortest paths, and a variety of other fundamental problems. Her recent research is centered on proving tight relationships between seemingly different computational problems. She is also interested in computational social choice issues, such as making elections computationally resistant to manipulation.

Amos Winter, the Tata Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, focuses on connections between mechanical design theory and user-centered product design to create simple, elegant technological solutions for applications in medical devices, water purification, agriculture, automotive, and other technologies used in highly constrained environments.

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2wxvSTt

A 3-D printer powered by machine vision and artificial intelligence

Objects made with 3-D printing can be lighter, stronger, and more complex than those produced through traditional manufacturing methods. But several technical challenges must be overcome before 3-D printing transforms the production of most devices.

Commercially available printers generally offer only high speed, high precision, or high-quality materials. Rarely do they offer all three, limiting their usefulness as a manufacturing tool. Today, 3-D printing is used mainly for prototyping and low-volume production of specialized parts.

Now Inkbit, a startup out of MIT, is working to bring all of the benefits of 3-D printing to a slew of products that have never been printed before — and it’s aiming to do so at volumes that would radically disrupt production processes in a variety of industries.

The company is accomplishing this by pairing its multimaterial inkjet 3-D printer with machine-vision and machine-learning systems. The vision system comprehensively scans each layer of the object as it’s being printed to correct errors in real-time, while the machine-learning system uses that information to predict the warping behavior of materials and make more accurate final products.

“The company was born out of the idea of endowing a 3-D printer with eyes and brains,” says Inkbit co-founder and CEO Davide Marini PhD ’03.

That idea unlocks a range of applications for Inkbit’s machine. The company says it can print more flexible materials much more accurately than other printers. If an object, including a computer chip or other electronic component, is placed on the print area, the machine can precisely print materials around it. And when an object is complete, the machine keeps a digital replica that can be used for quality assurance.

Inkbit is still an early-stage company. It currently has one operational production-grade printer. But it will begin selling printed products later this year, starting with a pilot with Johnson and Johnson, before selling its printers next year. If Inkbit can leverage current interest from companies that sell medical devices, consumer products, and automotive components, its machines will be playing a leading production role in a host of multi-billion-dollar markets in the next few years, from dental aligners to industrial tooling and sleep apnea masks.

“Everyone knows the advantages of 3-D printing are enormous,” Marini says. “But most people are experiencing problems adopting it. The technology just isn’t there yet. Our machine is the first one that can learn the properties of a material and predict its behavior. I believe it will be transformative, because it will enable anyone to go from an idea to a usable product extremely quickly. It opens up business opportunities for everyone.”

A printer with potential

Some of the hardest materials to print today are also the most commonly used in current manufacturing processes. That includes rubber-like materials such as silicone, and high-temperature materials such as epoxy, which are often used for insulating electronics and in a variety of consumer, health, and industrial products.

These materials are usually difficult to print, leading to uneven distribution and print process failures like clogging. They also tend to shrink or round at the edges over time. Inkbit co-founders Wojciech Matusik, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, Javier Ramos BS ’12 SM ’14, Wenshou Wang, and Kiril Vidimče SM ’14 have been working on these problems for years in Matusik’s Computational Fabrications Group within the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

In 2015, the co-founders were among a group of researchers that created a relatively low-cost, precise 3-D printer that could print a record 10 materials at once by leveraging machine vision. The feat got the attention of many large companies interested in transitioning production to 3-D printing, and the following year the four engineers received support from the Deshpande Center to commercialize their idea of joining machine vision with 3-D printing.

At MIT, Matusik’s research group used a simple 3-D scanner to track its machine’s progress. For Inkbit’s first printer, the founders wanted to dramatically improve “the eyes” of their machine. They decided to use an optical coherence tomography (OCT) scanner, which uses long wavelengths of light to see through the surface of materials and scan layers of material at a resolution the fraction of the width of a human hair.

Because OCT scanners are traditionally only used by ophthalmologists to examine below the surface of patients’ eyes, the only ones available were far too slow to scan each layer of a 3-D printed part — so Inkbit’s team “bit the bullet,” as Marini describes it, and built a custom OCT scanner he says is 100 times faster than anything else on the market today.

When a layer is printed and scanned, the company’s proprietary machine-vision and machine-learning systems automatically correct any errors in real-time and proactively compensate for the warping and shrinkage behavior of a fickle material. Those processes further expand the range of materials the company is able to print with by removing the rollers and scrapers used by some other printers to ensure precision, which tend to jam when used with difficult-to-print materials.

The system is designed to allow users to prototype and manufacture new objects on the same machine. Inkbit’s current industrial printer has 16 print heads to create multimaterial parts and a print block big enough to produce hundreds of thousands of fist-sized products each year (or smaller numbers of larger products). The machine’s contactless inkjet design means increasing the size of later iterations will be as simple as expanding the print block.

“Before, people could make prototypes with multimaterial printers, but they couldn’t really manufacture final parts,” Matusik says, noting that the postprocessing of Inkbit’s parts can be fully automated. “This is something that’s not possible using any other manufacturing methods.”

Inkbit's 3-D printer can produce multimaterial objects (like the pinch valve shown above) at high volumes. Courtesy of Inkbit

The novel capabilities of Inkbit’s machine mean that some of the materials the founders want to print with are not available, so the company has created some of its own chemistries to push the performance of their products to the limit. A proprietary system for mixing two materials just before printing will be available on the printers Inkbit ships next year. The two-part chemistry mixing system will allow the company to print a broader range of engineering-grade materials.

Johnson and Johnson, a strategic partner of Inkbit, is in the process of acquiring one of the first printers. The MIT Startup Exchange Accelerator (STEX25) has also been instrumental in exposing Inkbit to leading corporations such as Amgen, Asics, BAE Systems, Bosch, Chanel, Lockheed Martin, Medtronic, Novartis, and others.

Today, the founders spend a lot of their time educating product design teams that have never been able to 3-D print their products before — let alone incorporate electronic components into 3-D-printed parts.

It may be a while before designers and inventors take full advantage of the possibilities unlocked by integrated, multimaterial 3-D printing. But for now, Inkbit is working to ensure that, when that future comes, the most imaginative people will have a machine to work with.

“Some of this is so far ahead of its time,” Matusik says. “I think it will be really fascinating to see how people are going to use it for final products.”

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2Z6TI4M

Celebrating the Class of 2019 and CEE community

The Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering gathered recently to acknowledge the close of the academic year and celebrate the Class of 2019 and notable members of the CEE community. The annual event unites students, postdocs, faculty, and staff and is a great evening to reflect on the accomplishments of the year and show appreciation for the people who make CEE an outstanding department. 

The graduating seniors kicked off the event by presenting the findings of their capstone projects. The CEE capstone, a component of 1.013 (Senior Civil and Environmental Engineering Design), gives seniors the opportunity to work individually or in a pair in order to conduct engineering work with a real-world impact during the final semester of their MIT undergraduate career. 

The design-focused work was presented in the form of digital posters, which allowed the community to interact with each student, or pair, to learn about their projects, and for CEE faculty to evaluate and vote on the top three posters. Topics ranged from tackling climate change issues and nature-inspired materials to data analysis of transportation systems and computational toolkits for green-space design. Markus Buehler, head of CEE and McAfee Professor of Engineering, announced that first place was awarded to Apisada "Ju" Chulakadabba, while Tim Roberts earned runner-up and David Wu came in third place. 

Chulakadabba’s capstone project compared global climate models to the MIT regional climate model to examine projected climate-change impacts on hydrological cycles in China. The primary areas Chulakadabba focused on were the Yangtze River Basin, where the water supply is abundant, and the Yellow River Basin, where water is scarce. Her findings from the comparison provided the future trends of the hydrological processes in China, and also evaluated the performance of the selected models in the regions. Chulakadabba’s work suggests that there is an increase in annual precipitation, runoff, and evaporation trends; nevertheless, she emphasized that regardless of the potential increase in water availability, it is still important to have the Water Transfer Project as a backup plan. Chulakadabba stressed that based on her work, the project would be justified from an environmental engineering perspective. However, it is not financially sustainable. 

Shifting from environmental engineering challenges to nature-inspired materials, Tim Roberts presented his project on synthetic silk production — a promising, yet challenging, design issue. The current method occurs in live cells and can take up to five days without yielding the desired results. His project focused on designing a screening process using cell-free protein expression to assess the feasibility of producing proteins in live cell expression. 

Working with systems and data, David Wu's capstone project used data analysis to evaluate the effect that Red Sox baseball games have on congestion, specifically at the Kenmore MBTA stop in Boston. After games, there is a mass exodus of people attempting to utilize MBTA transportation, whereas at the beginning of games, fans' arrival times vary. Wu analyzed the MBTA data and examined how many people use the T to leave, and how travel times are affected. Using queuing theory and the given data, he created a queuing model to simulate station operations and estimate waiting times. Wu expressed that data is often limited, and it is beneficial to learn domain-specific concepts, such as queuing theory in terms of transportation, to gain invaluable insight that statistical models cannot provide, and to design more efficient transportation strategies. 

Following the capstone poster session was the presentation of the CEE awards. All recipients were nominated by both peers and advisors for being exemplary members of the community who represent the CEE mission, and significantly contribute to the department’s excellence, cutting-edge research, and education. “The awardees resemble the aspirations, values, and ideals of the MIT CEE department, recognize exceptional achievements and talents, and inspire others,” Buehler said in his opening remarks. 

The first portion of awards applauded undergraduates for their dedication to the department. This year, junior Zoe Lallas received the CEE Leadership and Community Award, which recognizes an undergraduate student who makes exemplary contributions to improve the CEE community, fosters excellence and diversity, and contributes to our inclusive culture. Lallas has served as the social chair for the CEE Student Association and has been involved with the First-Year Preorientation Program, serving as a mentor one year and a student organizer the next. 

Sophomore Chelsea Watanabe won the Best Undergraduate Research Award, which honors excellence in any area of research by a CEE undergraduate student, carried out in the context of either an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program internship or through coursework, such as Traveling Research Environmental Experiences. Watanabe is known to be inspiring to work with due to her deep sense of curiosity and ambitious attitude. 

Senior Christine Langston won the Leo (Class of 1924) and Mary Grossman Award for her strong interest in transportation and impressive academic record. Langston has combined data from a variety of sources such as state and local transportation agencies, Google Maps, and Trip Advisor to measure and model travel patterns within cities. Langston is recognized for her passion and drive to improve transportation systems. 

Senior Tim Roberts earned the Juan Jose Hermosilla (1957) Prize for demonstrating exceptional talent and potential for future contributions at the intersection of mechanics, materials, structures, and design. Roberts was nominated for being well-rounded and for his many achievements in engineering. He is not only proficient in Spanish and Chinese, but he also performed research at several labs at MIT and completed an internship at a leading structural engineering company. Roberts’ colleagues speak highly of him, as he is known to be very humble and thoughtful, willing to go out of his way to help others. 

Senior Amber VanHemel was awarded the Paul Busch (1958) Prize, given to an undergraduate student in environmental science and engineering for academic achievement and contributions to the CEE community. VanHemel is recognized by her peers and professors as an exceptionally bright, hard-working, outgoing and ambitious scholar.

Achieving the Tucker-Voss award was MEng student Andrew Novillo, who completed his thesis in experimental testing of cast-metal connections for complex loading conditions designed with topology optimization. The award was established in memory of professors Ross R. Tucker and Walter C. Voss, who were the first two department heads of the now extinct Course 17 (Building Construction). When Course 17 merged with the Department of Civil Engineering in the 1950s, the Tucker-Voss award was established. Novillo earned this award for his use of innovative 3-D printing technology in his thesis, which demonstrated the promising future he will have in the field of building. 

Graduate student Hayley Gadol was awarded the Trond Kaalstad (Class of 1957) Fellowship, which recognizes an outstanding graduate student who has displayed leadership and/or contributed significantly to the well-being of the CEE community. Hayley took on the goal of improving graduate student life in the department and the Institute, serving as the head of CEE Student Graduate Committee and taking charge of organizing events for the community.

The Maseeh Annual Award for Excellence, which recognizes the most outstanding teaching assistant in the past academic year, was awarded to Hejian (Patrick) Zhu, who was an instructor for the subjects 1.361 (Advanced Soil Mechanics) and 1.364 (Advanced Geotechnical Engineering). Through his commitment as a teaching assistant, Patrick has proved to be passionate about helping others deepen their knowledge and understanding of geomechancial topics.

Receiving the Best Doctoral Thesis Award was Simone Cenci, who worked under the guidance of his advisor, Mitsui Career Development Assistant Professor in Contemporary Technology Serguei Saavedra. This award honors scholarly and academic excellence and a high level of distinction of a CEE graduate student in any area of research. Cenci produced eight impressive research papers, and has significantly contributed to the area of theoretical ecology by expanding concepts and tools that can get us closer to a better understanding and prediction of population dynamics. 

The CEE Postdoctoral Scholar Mentoring, Teaching and Excellence Award recognizes mentoring, teaching, and other exceptional contributions by a postdoc, emphasizing high potential for future contributions. Ehsan Haghighat received the award for his extraordinary teaching and generous mentorship, displaying strong research in computational mechanics and more. Ehsan excelled in this teaching role by demonstrating an outstanding ability to communicate knowledge effectively to the students, as well as earning top reviews in the student evaluations.

Two members of the CEE staff received the CEE Excellence Award, which recognizes staff for excellent contributions to the community, commitment to professionalism, dedication and best practices, and for fostering a culture of diversity, inclusiveness, and innovation. The first recipient was undergraduate academic assistant Sarah Smith. Smith was acknowledged for her ability to flawlessly handle every interaction with faculty and staff with a positive, respectful attitude and a smile. 

The second recipient of the CEE Excellence Award was research engineer John MacFarlane. MacFarlane is known to be a dedicated member of the department who is willing to help others, ensure safety within labs, and maintain a great attitude. Buehler noted that MacFarlane is known as a “the Life Saver” by the students, faculty, and staff. 

The department also presented faculty with three awards. The Samuel M. Seegal Prize, which honors faculty members for inspiring students to pursue and achieve excellence, was awarded to William E. Leonhard Professor Harry Hemond. The CEE community noticed Hemond for being a beloved teacher and mentor who leads by example, and who inspires students long after their time at MIT. A former student wrote in the nomination: “His mentorship shaped the scientist I am today, and I continuously strive to be as knowledgeable, thorough, and creative in my work as he is,” reflecting the great impact Hemond had on his students. 

Assistant Professor Lydia Bourouiba received the Ole Madsen Mentoring Award, which honors faculty members for conspicuous contributions to mentoring and educating CEE students outside the classroom, and inspiring them to pursue a career in the fields of civil and environmental engineering. Bourouiba teaches students the skills, qualities, and critical thinking required to succeed in their studies and research; more generally, she prepares them to be successful in their professional lives. One student wrote: “Her dedication and genuine care to the education, professional development, and well-being of her students and mentees are truly remarkable and extraordinary.”

Recognizing the most outstanding faculty member in the past academic year is the Maseeh Excellence in Teaching Award, which was presented to Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Career Development Assistant Professor Admir Masic. Masic stood out to his colleagues for his enthusiasm and energy for research that sparks the students’ interest in the challenge of learning. He is known by his students for his ability to make learning fun, engaging, and exciting. 

“The CEE awards ceremony this year highlighted the extraordinary members of the department who contribute to our overall success, and gave the Class of 2019 an opportunity to showcase all of the hard work they have put into their capstone projects. This event exemplifies how various people in the department, from staff to the students and faculty, come together to continue fulfilling our commitment to excellence and solving important societal problems in infrastructure and environment,” Buehler says. 

de MIT News http://bit.ly/2EOZaBu