Mentorship programs for underrepresented applicants strive to increase graduate diversity at MIT

Graduate students from a range of departments and programs at MIT have launched application assistance programs targeting student applicants from underrepresented backgrounds. 

The Graduate Application Assistance Programs (GAAPs) are run by volunteer graduate students and recent alumni dedicated to increasing diversity in their programs. Last year, GAAP mentors reached out to as many as 1,000 MIT applicants from underrepresented backgrounds, applicants who identified as LGBTQ+, and those with non-traditional academic backgrounds. 

“Over the past two years, GAAPs have seen rapid growth, not only across graduate departments but also in the number of prospective students served,” notes Noelle Wakefield, assistant director of the MIT Summer Research Program and Diversity Initiatives in the Office of Graduate Education.

Applicants and their mentors work closely together through the fall semester to refine key application materials, such as personal and research statements, in order to improve the graduate school application experience and outcomes. As the application deadline approaches, GAAPs also offer webinars and other group interactions to help participants put the finishing touches on their application materials.

“GAAP programs are a great first step toward providing the mentorship necessary for students to feel empowered and confident about their graduate admissions journey — particularly those historically underrepresented in graduate education,” says Wakefield. 

The lack of diversity among graduate students has been a persistent problem at MIT and other institutions for many years. Of the 6,893 enrolled graduate students at MIT, only 946 are from underrepresented groups and only 2,578 are women, according to the MIT Registrar. 

“Promoting diversity and equity at MIT means supporting underrepresented individuals during the application process,” says Mason Ng, a GAAP organizer in physics. GAAP organizers are motivated to make sure that all underrepresented applicants have access to the resources they need during their application journey. “While we desire GAAP participants to join MIT, we want all participants to thrive and to be scientifically productive in a doctoral program, no matter where they end up,” Ng says.

Mentors in GAAP who are current doctoral students or recent alumni at MIT are given comprehensive training by experts from their respective departments. They are also coached by the School of Engineering Communication Lab and faculty members on their department's Graduate Admissions Committee. 

"During my graduate school application, I was fortunate to receive feedback from several advisors and friends who had gone through the process,” says Viraat Goel, a GAAP organizer and mentor in biological engineering.  “This guidance was essential, and helped me express my research interests better." 

After the application cycle was over, Goel’s mentee shared that they found it very valuable to hear about the department, get feedback on application materials, and generally discuss graduate school with a current graduate student. This experience is not unique. “The impact on prospective students is a real testament to the dedication of the student volunteers,” praises Wakefield.

GAAP programs are continually collecting data to understand their impacts and strategizing how best to improve outreach to underrepresented students. In addition, GAAP programs receive support from the Office of Graduate Education, School of Engineering Communication Lab, Institute Community & Equity Office, and General Counsel. 

"I think GAAP is a great resource for departments seeking to increase the number of underrepresented applicants," says Michael Liu Happ, a GAAP organizer in brain and cognitive sciences. “Mentors not only help applicants express themselves in the best way possible, but also try to share the tacit practical knowledge involved in the application process.”

Eligible applicants can sign up for the GAAP programs of the departments to which they wish to apply.

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Diagnosing cancer with a barcode-inspired test

As Dana Al-Sulaiman peers into a microscope, a row of dots appears on a slide. These dots can help provide a cancer diagnosis. Al-Sulaiman was inspired by barcodes found on consumer products.

“I got the idea from my PhD supervisor, who said, ‘in the future you’ll be able to scan a diagnostic test like you’re scanning a barcode.’ I initially thought it was the far future, but it’s closer than I thought,” says Al-Sulaiman, who recently completed a postdoctoral year through MIT’s Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women. The fellowship program brings Saudi Arabian women scientists to MIT each year to collaborate with MIT faculty on research.

The current widely used techniques for cancer diagnosis, prognosis, and monitoring are either late-stage, inaccurate, or invasive. In contrast, Al-Sulaiman’s barcode-inspired method uses widely available materials to translate the results of liquid samples, such as urine or blood, into simple-to-read patterns.

Just as nasal swabs and liquid biopsies have allowed for widespread public screening in the fight against Covid-19, Al-Sulaiman believes simplifying cancer detection techniques can lead to cancer screening on a large scale, as well as non-invasive monitoring of disease progression and response to therapy. An affordable and easy-to-use tool like the barcode-inspired cancer diagnostic test could significantly increase life expectancies around the world, especially in countries with limited access to medical care.

Helping others with medical devices

Al-Sulaiman’s interest in making health care more accessible was inspired by spending her childhood summers visiting her great aunt’s pediatric clinic in Saudi Arabia.

“My aunt, Dr. Farida Alsulayman, was one of the first Saudi Arabian women to go abroad to study and the first Saudi female pediatrician” she says, “her approach still inspires a lot of her patients.”

Her aunt suffered from life-long back pain as the result of a childhood injury. While going on rounds together, Al-Sulaiman saw how that experience and the treatments she endured as a child impacted the way she spoke to her patients.

“My aunt made sure she was explaining the illnesses to the children in a way they could understand, not only the parents. The way that she would explain complex medical terms in simple language stood out to me,” she adds.

Inspired by her aunt, Al-Sulaiman might have gone on to become a pediatrician herself, but an internship with a local doctor while attending high school in Canada gave her a new vision. “I learned from him that you can create medical devices that can help many people at a time,” says Al-Sulaiman. “I realized I could use engineering and science to help a larger group of people, especially resource or location-limited people.”

Al-Sulaiman’s shift to bioengineering took her to the UK for a master's in biomedical engineering from Imperial College London. During her undergraduate research, Al-Sulaiman learned that early disease detection can not only increase patient survival but also reduce the economic burden associated with cancer treatment. This inspired her to investigate earlier and simpler cancer detection methods. Winning the Imperial College President’s PhD Scholarship allowed her pursue this dream, focusing on bioengineering hydrogel-based biosensors for cancer diagnostics.

A cheaper, less-invasive diagnosis

In fall 2020, the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women (IBK) brought Al-Sulaiman to MIT as a postdoc. 

“The IBK fellowship gave me the chance to try tackling the same problems from a different angle,” says Al-Sulaiman. Joining Professor Patrick Doyle’s lab in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering gave Al-Sulaiman the chance to learn a new set of skills. “I was interested in microfluidics-based technologies because they offer control at the size scale relevant to biological systems, and because smaller means cheaper these days.”

Going cheaper is important to Al-Sulaiman, since her aim is to detect much better biomarkers for cancer using technologies that are less invasive, widely available, and cost-effective even in low-income settings. The cancer detection platform inspired by barcodes satisfies all three goals and is one of several diagnostic tests Al-Sulaiman has worked on. The tests she has developed are all based on the detection of cancer-specific microRNA in cancer patients’ samples.

“There is a whole panel of microRNAs that gets dysregulated with every cancer type,” explains Al-Sulaiman. This creates a unique microRNA expression in the patient’s blood, spelling out what type of cancer the patient has. The barcode diagnostic turns the amounts of different microRNAs in a patient sample into a bright fluorescent signal on a pattern of dots. Just like a barcode, each line of dots encodes for a different cancer biomarker, so the combined information from all the lines, so-called “multiplexing,” gives more accurate clinicopathological information. This tool can be designed such that only one sample is needed to test for many types of cancer.

On a Zoom webinar near the end of her time at MIT this spring, Al-Sulaiman demonstrated how a standard microscope can be configured and designed to fabricate such a diagnostic test. The materials used for creating these tests include affordable and biocompatible polymers called hydrogels patterned on fibrous substrates like those we use in everyday life, including glass fiber, silk, and paper.

“We used a very elegant technique called projection lithography to create microscopic sensing dots with defined shapes and sizes. The same way one can stamp any shape on a piece of paper, UV light through a microscope can ‘stamp’ or create spots of hydrogels on many kinds of materials,” explains Al-Sulaiman. At every level the test has been designed for simple communication, just like Al-Sulaiman learned from her aunt.

Al-Sulaiman also focused on communication skills during her postdoc with Doyle through the IBK fellowship. “Pat has a history of successful entrepreneurship and startup development,” says Al-Sulaiman of her time with the Doyle group. “I wanted to learn that from him.” She also learned how to pitch to investors and communicate to lay audiences through MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation.

While at MIT, Al-Sulaiman participated in the Kaufman Teaching Certificate Program through MIT’s Teaching + Learning Center. These entrepreneurial and teaching skills will be put to use when Al-Sulaiman develops her own research group this fall, as a faculty member at one of Saudi Arabia’s premier research institutions, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST).

“Family has always been a source of great inspiration and strength,” says Al-Sulaiman of the decision to take the position at KAUST. “Although I consider myself a global citizen, I have a big proportion of my family that is from that region, so I wanted to be closer to family and I wanted to bring what I learned home to give back to my community.”

“It’s normal to see a female scientist”

As one of only a handful of Saudi nationals with faculty appointments at KAUST, Al-Sulaiman is in a unique position to build the type of inclusive research culture she wants to develop in her lab.

“KAUST is so international and multicultural, you feel like you’re living in a global community,” says Al-Sulaiman. The main research interest for her lab will be designing and developing biosensing technologies and materials for health-care applications, cancer, neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s, and skin diseases. She hopes to collaborate with researchers across all disciplines whose research also aims to impact people’s health care.

Reflecting back on her time at MIT, Al-Sulaiman says, “One of the important things I took away from my time at MIT, especially during the peak of the Covid crisis, is that persistence and passion are key factors for driving research, and that for a successful lab, students and postdocs must be able to communicate easily and effectively. Creating that environment is going to be key for me.”

Al-Sulaiman’s vision of living out her great aunt’s legacy extends to her whole community. She plans to demonstrate science experiments at local schools to help inspired young people to join the scientific community.

“I’m hoping to create an image in young people’s minds that it’s normal to see a female scientist or engineer,” she adds.

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Task Force 2021 and Beyond submits final “blueprints for building a better MIT”

A task force charged with reimagining the future of MIT has released its final report, 18 months after it began work in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic. The report, from Task Force 2021 and Beyond, offers 17 recommendations to strengthen and streamline MIT, and make the Institute more successful across its teaching, research, and innovation endeavors.

President L. Rafael Reif, who charged the task force in May 2020, shared its final report today with a letter to the MIT community.

“The report captures a remarkable range of practical ideas, presented along with detailed plans for implementation,” Reif wrote. “After so many months of uncertainty and exceptional effort, perseverance and a roller coaster of hope, I am tremendously grateful to everyone who contributed to the task force ­report — and I am excited about drawing on this work to build a better MIT.”

Led by co-chairs Rick Danheiser and Sanjay Sarma, over 200 MIT faculty, staff, and students have participated in the task force’s 18 months of work. In establishing the group, President Reif called upon its members to “help us imagine an MIT that is better, safer, more flexible, more effective, more efficient, more sustainable, more inclusive, more equitable, more affordable, and more financially resilient in the long term, while sustaining the Institute’s distinctive values and culture and its dynamic approach to education, research, and innovation.”

He also articulated the power of harnessing wisdom from across the Institute: “In short — by drawing on expertise and experience from across the community — Task Force 2021 is charged with developing the blueprints for building a better MIT.”

Impacts across the MIT community

The ideas contained in the task force’s wide-ranging final report touch upon the MIT experience of all members of the community. The report makes a variety of proposals, including:

• For undergraduates, an education tuned to the times: The report calls for a systematic reconsideration of aspects of what MIT teaches, and how; added focus on social equity and civic responsibility in MIT’s curriculum and experiential learning; extended educational experiences off-campus; and professional academic advisors, in addition to faculty.
• For graduate students, improvements in advising and mentoring, and opportunities for professional development and better preparation for their careers.
• For all staff, including postdocs, research scientists, and instructional staff, improved career prospects and job satisfaction through strengthened career development programs and pathways, with emphasis on upward mobility.
• For faculty, removal of significant sources of frustration and pressure by dealing with the problems of research funding “underrecovery” and the high cost of supporting their graduate students.

The task force’s report offers recommendations to extend the benefits of higher education to learners of all ages around the world by exploring the creation of new credentials; it also considers the Institute’s changing needs for space, including campus meeting spaces, flex spaces, shared research space, and future expansion of lab space.

“Many of the recommendations are aimed at adapting the Institute to thrive in the landscape of the ‘new normal’ developing in the wake of the Covid-19 global pandemic,” the report notes. “However, other recommendations address longstanding issues, in some cases issues that have been recognized for many years. [Each component of the task force] was simply charged with making recommendations for ‘building a better MIT,’ so it is natural that they focused on issues beyond those that emerged only due to Covid.”

The path of Task Force 2021

President Reif established the task force in May 2020, with a charge to “explore how MIT might invent a thriving new future.” At the time — shortly after most faculty, staff, and students had left campus due to the pandemic — the task force’s work was intended primarily to help position MIT for a “new normal,” in a world radically changed by Covid-19.

However, the news several weeks ago of the unexpectedly strong recent performance of MIT’s endowment — which saw a 55.5 percent return in the year that ended on June 30 — presents opportunities to advance a range of clear community priorities, including those outlined by Task Force 2021.  

In addition to a providing a substantive list of recommendations, the task force’s report suggests routes to implementation, and assigns one or more senior leaders or faculty governance committees with oversight, for every idea presented. Those who have been assigned these responsibilities are named in the report’s appendix.

“The recommendations operate on a variety of timelines: Some are already well on their way to implementation; others may take years to realize,” the report notes. “The different proposals of the task force require varying resources: Some are relatively inexpensive while others will require a more substantial financial investment.”

Highlights in five critical areas

The report’s top-level recommendations span five key areas. They aim to:

1. Rethink how and where we work, leveraging what we have learned about remote working and revamping our employee development and spaces. Specific recommendations include:

• Developing detailed guidance, tools, and policies to support new ways of working at the Institute, helping teams plan and implement flexible work arrangements;
• Strengthening career development programs for staff, creating a more comprehensive and integrated approach for enhancing skills, upward mobility, learning resources, and opportunities; and
• Considering our changing needs for space, including campus meeting spaces, flex spaces, shared research space, and future expansion of lab space.

2. Broaden the scope and intensity of MIT’s holistic learning and support, developing in each member of the MIT community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively. Specific recommendations include:

• Implementing a stronger undergraduate advising structure, where students are supported by professional advisors;
• Developing a set of professional and personal development requirements that all graduate students must fulfill beyond their technical training and discipline degree requirements;
• Developing a strategic plan to improve graduate advising and mentoring; and
• Expanding opportunities for postdocs, research scientists, and instructional staff, including more structured review and feedback and more granular career progression for research scientists, and a review of career advancement for instructional staff.

3. Review our academic programs in light of changes in the backgrounds and interests of our students, the evolution of new educational technology, and the increasing importance of lifelong learning. Specific recommendations include:

• Launching a review of the undergraduate academic program to consider improvements in the General Institute Requirements, with a focus on both curriculum and pedagogy;
• Considering changes to undergraduate and graduate living and learning by leveraging technology, promoting interactive classrooms, and extending off-campus educational experiences for MIT undergraduates; investing in community-building events and spaces; and creating education sabbaticals to support new initiatives;
• Exploring new credentials to address challenges such as access and affordability for learners of all ages, and examining potential MIT offerings in online and on-site continuing education; and
• Promoting collaborations internally and with industrial sponsors, and enhancing training for researchers engaging in international activities.

4. Articulate and fulfill our public responsibilities and imbue our values and ideals more fully in our community and culture and in the education of our students. Specific recommendations include:

• Supporting MIT’s five-year Strategic Action Plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion;
• Strengthening our network of underrepresented and minority researchers by reviewing broadly our admissions and hiring decisions, building community and mentorship, and enhancing supporting infrastructure; and
• Imbuing social equity and civic responsibility into our curriculum and experiential learning, creating an ad hoc committee to stimulate and evaluate experiments, developing a fundraising plan to meet rising student demand for learning and internships in these areas, and developing a Community and Nonprofit Liaison Program.

5. Modernize our data, systems, processes, and financial models, and address research “deferred maintenance,” in order to serve future economic realities, our evolving needs, and new opportunities in the 21st century. Specific recommendations include:

• Addressing issues with regard to graduate student funding, to make MIT competitive with our peers in terms of research costs and to ensure that graduate students receive adequate support;
• Developing a robust and transparent approach for future funding of underrecovery, via an Underrecovery Solutions Commission, a no-hassle pilot, and a five-year plan to regularize underrecovery funding; and
• Creating a cross-campus “One Agile Team” unit to shepherd strategic improvements to existing business practices and systems, as well as to provide support to new strategic initiatives.

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Networking on a global scale

While international travel continues to be limited in much of the world, MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) sought to capitalize on the increased digital connectivity brought about by the pandemic by developing cutting-edge virtual programs designed to allow students to be exposed to international education and build connections around the world.

MISTI is MIT's flagship international education program, with internship and research opportunities spanning more than 25 countries across six continents. In a typical year, MISTI facilitates over 1,200 in-person student placements around the world. While the pandemic paused travel, programs doubled down on their commitment to creating connections between MIT and the global community.

MIT-India Program Manager Nureen Das and MIT-UK Program Manager Stephen Barnes came together to create the TATA-MISTI Career Conversations Series, a weekly virtual lunch meeting between current MIT students and top executives from the industries of electric vehicles, the digital economy, and telecommunications. MIT-India's long-time intern host, the TATA Group, was a partner in the development of the series, and many of their executives attended as speakers for the sessions.

When it came to developing a virtual summer program, identifying an ideal host partner from one of MISTI's many programs was paramount. “TATA has traditionally been a very strong partner for the MIT-India program, but they also have lots of activity and work in the UK, so we thought this overlap would be a great way to engage students and constituents at TATA alike, as well as bringing in exciting UK partner organizations,” says Barnes.

“The goal was to provide students with an opportunity to engage with industry leaders and hear their insights on trends and career advice from their respective sectors,” continues Das. "It turned out that the perfect intersection of these industries lay with TATA and MISTI's UK partners.”

Students from across campus were eager to get involved. “Being able to speak to industry leaders from different countries about the unique social and political issues they confront while developing new technology allows me to gain a less American-centric view of innovation, which I strive to do,” said political science sophomore Leela Fredlund. “I would like to get their advice on my future career path so that I can make the best possible decisions given the opportunities presented to me,” said electrical engineering and computer science sophomore Anish Ravichandran.

Each session was facilitated by a different group of students who were responsible for connecting with that week's speakers and developing a question-and-answer session. The program allowed the speakers to present an overview of their work, along with their own personal advice on career tips in today's industry. Speakers from the TATA Group (including TATA Motors, TATA Digital, TATA Consultancy Services, and TATA Communications), Arrival, Perlego, Bethnal Green Ventures, Mobilus Labs, and BT all offered unique in-the-field insights on how to begin careers in their industries.

Translating one's passion into a career path was a common theme among speakers. “Find what you're passionate about; otherwise, you're not going to have fun, and that's a problem,” said G. Napo Montano, vice president of mobile robotics at Arrival. Ankur Jindal, vice president and global head corporate venturing and innovation at TATA Communications, echoed Montano's thought with a small caveat, urging students to be passionate about what they do, but remain flexible to the way their career may take shape. He warned against the old model of the 10-year plan, noting the rapidly changing market. 

Another common theme in career tips was the importance of taking risks. “I'll say this very cliché, maybe 'Boomer statement,'” joked MIT alumnus Jordan McRae, now CEO and founder of Mobilus Labs. “Take as much risk as you can when you're young. I mean, you should always be taking risks throughout your life, but it's easier when you're younger and have less responsibility. So, take more.” Rajarshi Purkayastha, head of pre-sales at TATA Communications, added that if one doesn't take chances, their career will stall. Failure, he noted, is often something of which to be proud.

Speakers also offered advice and insight regarding networking. “Networking is awkward — everyone thinks so,” said Nelly Lavielle, portfolio manager at Bethnal Green Ventures. “But practice makes perfect,” she added. Honey Bajaj SM '17, head of customer experience and insights at Tata Digital, was optimistic. “Follow your heart, and just go to anybody. Everybody, I think, in the world is approachable,” said Bajaj.

Feedback from the students and speakers alike was overwhelmingly positive. “It helped me to develop a better picture of what different jobs look like,” said computation and cognition sophomore Simon Radhakrishnan. “Up until now, I basically only knew about research jobs and my parents' careers, and now I know more about the possibilities for me.”

“One of the biggest takeaways I had from this series on the sectors discussed is that innovation is driving all of them to change fundamentally and rapidly,” noted mechanical engineering junior Aljazzy Alahmadi.

Alumni were also in attendance at several of the sessions, and benefited from participating in the discussions. Bajaj, a graduate of the Integrated Design and Management program at the MIT Sloan School of Management, reflects upon how special it was to connect with current students at MIT. “It was nostalgic for me, from an alumni perspective. In the future, we could do a session with alumni and current student cohorts for specific industry areas.”

“As an alum working in finance, it was great to participate in the seminar series focused on ESG [environmental, social, and governance] innovations. Speakers and content were of uniformly high quality. Having students facilitate the sessions and asking thoughtful questions of industry leaders worked really well. The conversations were stimulating and engaging and provided excellent food for thought around the future of work,” reflects Archan Basu MBA '99. “Renewable energy and ESG investing are close to my heart and are rapidly gaining importance.”

“The MISTI Summer series was an excellent engagement between industry leaders and students at MIT,” adds Aparna Jain, talent and leadership general manager at Tata Group. “The speakers greatly enjoyed the interaction, incisive questions about innovation, ESG, and more. The students had done their research before the sessions, and it was a rich exchange. We look forward to many more throughout the year.”

As MISTI continues to straddle hybrid operations, programs remain committed to providing their students with enriching international experiences that allow them to explore academic and professional opportunities within an evolving global context. 

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Toward speech recognition for uncommon spoken languages

Automated speech-recognition technology has become more common with the popularity of virtual assistants like Siri, but many of these systems only perform well with the most widely spoken of the world’s roughly 7,000 languages.

Because these systems largely don’t exist for less common languages, the millions of people who speak them are cut off from many technologies that rely on speech, from smart home devices to assistive technologies and translation services.

Recent advances have enabled machine learning models that can learn the world’s uncommon languages, which lack the large amount of transcribed speech needed to train algorithms. However, these solutions are often too complex and expensive to be applied widely.

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have now tackled this problem by developing a simple technique that reduces the complexity of an advanced speech-learning model, enabling it to run more efficiently and achieve higher performance.

Their technique involves removing unnecessary parts of a common, but complex, speech recognition model and then making minor adjustments so it can recognize a specific language. Because only small tweaks are needed once the larger model is cut down to size, it is much less expensive and time-consuming to teach this model an uncommon language.

This work could help level the playing field and bring automatic speech-recognition systems to many areas of the world where they have yet to be deployed. The systems are important in some academic environments, where they can assist students who are blind or have low vision, and are also being used to improve efficiency in health care settings through medical transcription and in the legal field through court reporting. Automatic speech-recognition can also help users learn new languages and improve their pronunciation skills. This technology could even be used to transcribe and document rare languages that are in danger of vanishing.  

“This is an important problem to solve because we have amazing technology in natural language processing and speech recognition, but taking the research in this direction will help us scale the technology to many more underexplored languages in the world,” says Cheng-I Jeff Lai, a PhD student in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and first author of the paper.

Lai wrote the paper with fellow MIT PhD students Alexander H. Liu, Yi-Lun Liao, Sameer Khurana, and Yung-Sung Chuang; his advisor and senior author James Glass, senior research scientist and head of the Spoken Language Systems Group in CSAIL; MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab research scientists Yang Zhang, Shiyu Chang, and Kaizhi Qian; and David Cox, the IBM director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. The research will be presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems in December.

Learning speech from audio

The researchers studied a powerful neural network that has been pretrained to learn basic speech from raw audio, called Wave2vec 2.0.

A neural network is a series of algorithms that can learn to recognize patterns in data; modeled loosely off the human brain, neural networks are arranged into layers of interconnected nodes that process data inputs.

Wave2vec 2.0 is a self-supervised learning model, so it learns to recognize a spoken language after it is fed a large amount of unlabeled speech. The training process only requires a few minutes of transcribed speech. This opens the door for speech recognition of uncommon languages that lack large amounts of transcribed speech, like Wolof, which is spoken by 5 million people in West Africa.

However, the neural network has about 300 million individual connections, so it requires a massive amount of computing power to train on a specific language.

The researchers set out to improve the efficiency of this network by pruning it. Just like a gardener cuts off superfluous branches, neural network pruning involves removing connections that aren’t necessary for a specific task, in this case, learning a language. Lai and his collaborators wanted to see how the pruning process would affect this model’s speech recognition performance.

After pruning the full neural network to create a smaller subnetwork, they trained the subnetwork with a small amount of labeled Spanish speech and then again with French speech, a process called finetuning.  

“We would expect these two models to be very different because they are finetuned for different languages. But the surprising part is that if we prune these models, they will end up with highly similar pruning patterns. For French and Spanish, they have 97 percent overlap,” Lai says.

They ran experiments using 10 languages, from Romance languages like Italian and Spanish to languages that have completely different alphabets, like Russian and Mandarin. The results were the same — the finetuned models all had a very large overlap.

A simple solution

Drawing on that unique finding, they developed a simple technique to improve the efficiency and boost the performance of the neural network, called PARP (Prune, Adjust, and Re-Prune).

In the first step, a pretrained speech recognition neural network like Wave2vec 2.0 is pruned by removing unnecessary connections. Then in the second step, the resulting subnetwork is adjusted for a specific language, and then pruned again. During this second step, connections that had been removed are allowed to grow back if they are important for that particular language.

Because connections are allowed to grow back during the second step, the model only needs to be finetuned once, rather than over multiple iterations, which vastly reduces the amount of computing power required.

Testing the technique

The researchers put PARP to the test against other common pruning techniques and found that it outperformed them all for speech recognition. It was especially effective when there was only a very small amount of transcribed speech to train on.

They also showed that PARP can create one smaller subnetwork that can be finetuned for 10 languages at once, eliminating the need to prune separate subnetworks for each language, which could also reduce the expense and time required to train these models.

Moving forward, the researchers would like to apply PARP to text-to-speech models and also see how their technique could improve the efficiency of other deep learning networks.

“There are increasing needs to put large deep-learning models on edge devices. Having more efficient models allows these models to be squeezed onto more primitive systems, like cell phones. Speech technology is very important for cell phones, for instance, but having a smaller model does not necessarily mean it is computing faster. We need additional technology to bring about faster computation, so there is still a long way to go,” Zhang says.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is changing the field of speech processing, so making SSL models smaller without degrading performance is a crucial research direction, says Hung-yi Lee, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering at National Taiwan University, who was not involved in this research.

“PARP trims the SSL models, and at the same time, surprisingly improves the recognition accuracy. Moreover, the paper shows there is a subnet in the SSL model, which is suitable for ASR tasks of many languages. This discovery will stimulate research on language/task agnostic network pruning. In other words, SSL models can be compressed while maintaining their performance on various tasks and languages,” he says.

This work is partially funded by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and the 5k Language Learning Project.

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Study links gene to cognitive resilience in the elderly

Many people develop Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia as they get older. However, others remain sharp well into old age, even if their brains show underlying signs of neurodegeneration.

Among these cognitively resilient people, researchers have identified education level and amount of time spent on intellectually stimulating activities as factors that help prevent dementia. A new study by MIT researchers shows that this kind of enrichment appears to activate a gene family called MEF2, which controls a genetic program in the brain that promotes resistance to cognitive decline.

The researchers observed this link between MEF2 and cognitive resilience in both humans and mice. The findings suggest that enhancing the activity of MEF2 or its targets might protect against age-related dementia.

“It’s increasingly understood that there are resilience factors that can protect the function of the brain,” says Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. “Understanding this resilience mechanism could be helpful when we think about therapeutic interventions or prevention of cognitive decline and neurodegeneration-associated dementia.”

Tsai is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Science Translational Medicine. The lead authors are recent MIT PhD recipient Scarlett Barker and MIT postdoctoral fellow and Boston Children’s Hospital physician Ravikiran (Ravi) Raju.

Protective effects

A large body of research suggests that environmental stimulation offers some protection against the effects of neurodegeneration. Studies have linked education level, type of job, number of languages spoken, and amount of time spent on activities such as reading and doing crossword puzzles to higher degrees of cognitive resilience.

The MIT team set out to try to figure how these environmental factors affect the brain at the neuronal level. They looked at human datasets and mouse models in parallel, and both tracks converged on MEF2 as a critical player.

MEF2 is a transcription factor that was originally identified as a factor important for cardiac muscle development, but later was discovered to play a role in neuron function and neurodevelopment. In two human datasets comprising slightly more than 1,000 people all together, the MIT team found that cognitive resilience was highly correlated with expression of MEF2 and many of the genes that it regulates.

Many of those genes encode ion channels, which control a neuron’s excitability, or how easily it fires an electrical impulse. The researchers also found, from a single-cell RNA-sequencing study of human brain cells, that MEF2 appears to be most active in a subpopulation of excitatory neurons in the prefrontal cortex of resilient individuals.

To study cognitive resilience in mice, the researchers compared mice who were raised in cages with no toys, and mice placed in a more stimulating environment with a running wheel and toys that were swapped out every few days. As they found in the human study, MEF2 was more active in the brains of the mice exposed to the enriched environment. These mice also performed better in learning and memory tasks.

When the researchers knocked out the gene for MEF2 in the frontal cortex, this blocked the mice’s ability to benefit from being raised in the enriched environment, and their neurons became abnormally excitable.

“This was particularly exciting as it suggested that MEF2 plays a role in determining overall cognitive potential in response to variables in the environment,” Raju says.

The researchers then explored whether MEF2 could reverse some of the symptoms of cognitive impairment in a mouse model that expresses a version of the tau protein that can form tangles in the brain and is linked with dementia. If these mice were engineered to overexpress MEF2 at a young age, they did not show the usual cognitive impairments produced by the tau protein later in life. In these mice, neurons overexpressing MEF2 were less excitable.

“A lot of human studies and mouse model studies of neurodegeneration have shown that the neurons become hyperexcitable in early stages of disease progression,” Raju says. “When we overexpressed MEF2 in a mouse model of neurodegeneration, we saw that it was able to prevent this hyperexcitability, which might explain why they performed cognitively better than control mice.”

Enhancing resilience

The findings suggest that enhancing MEF2 activity could help to protect against dementia; however, because MEF2 also affects other types of cells and cellular processes, more study is needed to make sure that activating it wouldn’t have adverse side effects, the researchers say.

The MIT team now hopes to further investigate how MEF2 becomes activated by exposure to an enriching environment. They also plan to examine some of the effects of the other genes that MEF2 controls, beyond the ion channels they explored in this study. Such studies could help to reveal additional targets for drug treatments.

“You could potentially imagine a more targeted therapy by identifying a subset or a class of effectors that is critically important for inducing resilience and neuroprotection,” Raju says.

The research was funded by the Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research, the National Institute of Aging, the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund, and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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MIT collaborates with Biogen on three-year, $7 million initiative to address climate, health, and equity

MIT and Biogen have announced that they will collaborate with the goal to accelerate the science and action on climate change to improve human health. This collaboration is supported by a three-year, $7 million commitment from the company and the Biogen Foundation. The biotechnology company, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Kendall Square, discovers and develops therapies for people living with serious neurological diseases.

“We have long believed it is imperative for Biogen to make the fight against climate change central to our long-term corporate responsibility commitments. Through this collaboration with MIT, we aim to identify and share innovative climate solutions that will deliver co-benefits for both health and equity,” says Michel Vounatsos, CEO of Biogen. “We are also proud to support the MIT Museum, which promises to make world-class science and education accessible to all, and honor Biogen co-founder Phillip A. Sharp with a dedication inside the museum that recognizes his contributions to its development.”

Biogen and the Biogen Foundation are supporting research and programs across a range of areas at MIT.

Advancing climate, health, and equity

The first such effort involves new work within the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change to establish a state-of-the-art integrated model of climate and health aimed at identifying targets that deliver climate and health co-benefits.

“Evidence suggests that not all climate-related actions deliver equal health benefits, yet policymakers, planners, and stakeholders traditionally lack the tools to consider how decisions in one arena impact the other,” says C. Adam Schlosser, deputy director of the MIT Joint Program. “Biogen’s collaboration with the MIT Joint Program — and its support of a new distinguished Biogen Fellow who will develop the new climate/health model — will accelerate our efforts to provide decision-makers with these tools.”

Biogen is also supporting the MIT Technology and Policy Program’s Research to Policy Engagement Initiative to infuse human health as a key new consideration in decision-making on the best pathways forward to address the global climate crisis, and bridge the knowledge-to-action gap by connecting policymakers, researchers, and diverse stakeholders. As part of this work, Biogen is underwriting a distinguished Biogen Fellow to advance new research on climate, health, and equity.

“Our work with Biogen has allowed us to make progress on key questions that matter to human health and well-being under climate change,” says Noelle Eckley Selin, who directs the MIT Technology and Policy Program and is a professor in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “Further, their support of the Research to Policy Engagement Initiative helps all of our research become more effective in making change.”

In addition, Biogen has joined 13 other companies in the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), which is supporting faculty and student research and developing impact pathways that present a range of actionable steps that companies can take — within and across industries — to advance progress toward climate targets.

“Biogen joining the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium represents our commitment to working with member companies across a diverse range of industries, an approach that aims to drive changes swift and broad enough to match the scale of the climate challenge,” says Jeremy Gregory, executive director of the MCSC. “We are excited to welcome a member from the biotechnology space and look forward to harnessing Biogen’s perspectives as we continue to collaborate and work together with the MIT community in exciting and meaningful ways.”

Making world-class science and education available to MIT Museum visitors

Support from Biogen will honor Nobel laureate, MIT Institute professor, and Biogen co-founder Phillip A. Sharp with a named space inside the new Kendall Square location of the MIT Museum, set to open in spring 2022. Biogen also is supporting one of the museum’s opening exhibitions, “Essential MIT,” with a section focused on solving real-world problems such as climate change. It is also providing programmatic support for the museum’s Life Sciences Maker Engagement Program.

“Phil has provided fantastic support to the MIT Museum for more than a decade as an advisory board member and now as board chair, and he has been deeply involved in plans for the new museum at Kendall Square,” says John Durant, the Mark R. Epstein (Class of 1963) Director of the museum. “Seeing his name on the wall will be a constant reminder of his key role in this development, as well as a mark of our gratitude.”

Inspiring and empowering the next generation of scientists

Biogen funding is also being directed to engage the next generation of scientists through support for the Biogen-MIT Biotech in Action: Virtual Lab, a program designed to foster a love of science among diverse and under-served student populations.

Biogen’s support is part of its Healthy Climate, Healthy Lives initiative, a $250 million, 20-year commitment to eliminate fossil fuels across its operations and collaborate with renowned institutions to advance the science of climate and health and support under-served communities. Additional support is provided by the Biogen Foundation to further its long-standing focus on providing students with equitable access to outstanding science education.

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