Streamlining data collection for improved salmon population management

Sara Beery came to MIT as an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) eager to focus on ecological challenges. She has fashioned her research career around the opportunity to apply her expertise in computer vision, machine learning, and data science to tackle real-world issues in conservation and sustainability. Beery was drawn to the Institute’s commitment to “computing for the planet,” and set out to bring her methods to global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring.

In the Pacific Northwest, salmon have a disproportionate impact on the health of their ecosystems, and their complex reproductive needs have attracted Beery’s attention. Each year, millions of salmon embark on a migration to spawn. Their journey begins in freshwater stream beds where the eggs hatch. Young salmon fry (newly hatched salmon) make their way to the ocean, where they spend several years maturing to adulthood. As adults, the salmon return to the streams where they were born in order to spawn, ensuring the continuation of their species by depositing their eggs in the gravel of the stream beds. Both male and female salmon die shortly after supplying the river habitat with the next generation of salmon. 

Throughout their migration, salmon support a wide range of organisms in the ecosystems they pass through. For example, salmon bring nutrients like carbon and nitrogen from the ocean upriver, enhancing their availability to those ecosystems. In addition, salmon are key to many predator-prey relationships: They serve as a food source for various predators, such as bears, wolves, and birds, while helping to control other populations, like insects, through predation. After they die from spawning, the decomposing salmon carcasses also replenish valuable nutrients to the surrounding ecosystem. The migration of salmon not only sustains their own species but plays a critical role in the overall health of the rivers and oceans they inhabit. 

At the same time, salmon populations play an important role both economically and culturally in the region. Commercial and recreational salmon fisheries contribute significantly to the local economy. And for many Indigenous peoples in the Pacific northwest, salmon hold notable cultural value, as they have been central to their diets, traditions, and ceremonies. 

Monitoring salmon migration

Increased human activity, including overfishing and hydropower development, together with habitat loss and climate change, have had a significant impact on salmon populations in the region. As a result, effective monitoring and management of salmon fisheries is important to ensure balance among competing ecological, cultural, and human interests. Accurately counting salmon during their seasonal migration to their natal river to spawn is essential in order to track threatened populations, assess the success of recovery strategies, guide fishing season regulations, and support the management of both commercial and recreational fisheries. Precise population data help decision-makers employ the best strategies to safeguard the health of the ecosystem while accommodating human needs. Monitoring salmon migration is a labor-intensive and inefficient undertaking.

Beery is currently leading a research project that aims to streamline salmon monitoring using cutting-edge computer vision methods. This project fits within Beery’s broader research interest, which focuses on the interdisciplinary space between artificial intelligence, the natural world, and sustainability. Its relevance to fisheries management made it a good fit for funding from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). Beery’s 2023 J-WAFS seed grant was the first research funding she was awarded since joining the MIT faculty.  

Historically, monitoring efforts relied on humans to manually count salmon from riverbanks using eyesight. In the past few decades, underwater sonar systems have been implemented to aid in counting the salmon. These sonar systems are essentially underwater video cameras, but they differ in that they use acoustics instead of light sensors to capture the presence of a fish. Use of this method requires people to set up a tent alongside the river to count salmon based on the output of a sonar camera that is hooked up to a laptop. While this system is an improvement to the original method of monitoring salmon by eyesight, it still relies significantly on human effort and is an arduous and time-consuming process. 

Automating salmon monitoring is necessary for better management of salmon fisheries. “We need these technological tools,” says Beery. “We can’t keep up with the demand of monitoring and understanding and studying these really complex ecosystems that we work in without some form of automation.”

In order to automate counting of migrating salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest, the project team, including Justin Kay, a PhD student in EECS, has been collecting data in the form of videos from sonar cameras at different rivers. The team annotates a subset of the data to train the computer vision system to autonomously detect and count the fish as they migrate. Kay describes the process of how the model counts each migrating fish: “The computer vision algorithm is designed to locate a fish in the frame, draw a box around it, and then track it over time. If a fish is detected on one side of the screen and leaves on the other side of the screen, then we count it as moving upstream.” On rivers where the team has created training data for the system, it has produced strong results, with only 3 to 5 percent counting error. This is well below the target that the team and partnering stakeholders set of no more than a 10 percent counting error. 

Testing and deployment: Balancing human effort and use of automation

The researchers’ technology is being deployed to monitor the migration of salmon on the newly restored Klamath River. Four dams on the river were recently demolished, making it the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. The dams came down after a more than 20-year-long campaign to remove them, which was led by Klamath tribes, in collaboration with scientists, environmental organizations, and commercial fishermen. After the removal of the dams, 240 miles of the river now flow freely and nearly 800 square miles of habitat are accessible to salmon. Beery notes the almost immediate regeneration of salmon populations in the Klamath River: “I think it was within eight days of the dam coming down, they started seeing salmon actually migrate upriver beyond the dam.” In a collaboration with California Trout, the team is currently processing new data to adapt and create a customized model that can then be deployed to help count the newly migrating salmon.

One challenge with the system revolves around training the model to accurately count the fish in unfamiliar environments with variations such as riverbed features, water clarity, and lighting conditions. These factors can significantly alter how the fish appear on the output of a sonar camera and confuse the computer model. When deployed in new rivers where no data have been collected before, like the Klamath, the performance of the system degrades and the margin of error increases substantially to 15-20 percent. 

The researchers constructed an automatic adaptation algorithm within the system to overcome this challenge and create a scalable system that can be deployed to any site without human intervention. This self-initializing technology works to automatically calibrate to the new conditions and environment to accurately count the migrating fish. In testing, the automatic adaptation algorithm was able to reduce the counting error down to the 10 to 15 percent range. The improvement in counting error with the self-initializing function means that the technology is closer to being deployable to new locations without much additional human effort. 

Enabling real-time management with the “Fishbox”

Another challenge faced by the research team was the development of an efficient data infrastructure. In order to run the computer vision system, the video produced by sonar cameras must be delivered via the cloud or by manually mailing hard drives from a river site to the lab. These methods have notable drawbacks: a cloud-based approach is limited due to lack of internet connectivity in remote river site locations, and shipping the data introduces problems of delay. 

Instead of relying on these methods, the team has implemented a power-efficient computer, coined the “Fishbox,” that can be used in the field to perform the processing. The Fishbox consists of a small, lightweight computer with optimized software that fishery managers can plug into their existing laptops and sonar cameras. The system is then capable of running salmon counting models directly at the sonar sites without the need for internet connectivity. This allows managers to make hour-by-hour decisions, supporting more responsive, real-time management of salmon populations.

Community development

The team is also working to bring a community together around monitoring for salmon fisheries management in the Pacific Northwest. “It’s just pretty exciting to have stakeholders who are enthusiastic about getting access to [our technology] as we get it to work and having a tighter integration and collaboration with them,” says Beery. “I think particularly when you’re working on food and water systems, you need direct collaboration to help facilitate impact, because you're ensuring that what you develop is actually serving the needs of the people and organizations that you are helping to support.”

This past June, Beery’s lab organized a workshop in Seattle that convened nongovernmental organizations, tribes, and state and federal departments of fish and wildlife to discuss the use of automated sonar systems to monitor and manage salmon populations. Kay notes that the workshop was an “awesome opportunity to have everybody sharing different ways that they're using sonar and thinking about how the automated methods that we’re building could fit into that workflow.” The discussion continues now via a shared Slack channel created by the team, with over 50 participants. Convening this group is a significant achievement, as many of these organizations would not otherwise have had an opportunity to come together and collaborate. 

Looking forward

As the team continues to tune the computer vision system, refine their technology, and engage with diverse stakeholders — from Indigenous communities to fishery managers — the project is poised to make significant improvements to the efficiency and accuracy of salmon monitoring and management in the region. And as Beery advances the work of her MIT group, the J-WAFS seed grant is helping to keep challenges such as fisheries management in her sights.  

“The fact that the J-WAFS seed grant existed here at MIT enabled us to continue to work on this project when we moved here,” comments Beery, adding “it also expanded the scope of the project and allowed us to maintain active collaboration on what I think is a really important and impactful project.” 

As J-WAFS marks its 10th anniversary this year, the program aims to continue supporting and encouraging MIT faculty to pursue innovative projects that aim to advance knowledge and create practical solutions with real-world impacts on global water and food system challenges. 

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Seeking climate connections among the oceans’ smallest organisms

Andrew Babbin tries to pack light for work trips. Along with the travel essentials, though, he also brings a roll each of electrical tape, duct tape, lab tape, a pack of cable ties, and some bungee cords.

“It’s my MacGyver kit: You never know when you have to rig something on the fly in the field or fix a broken bag,” Babbin says.

The trips Babbin takes are far out to sea, on month-long cruises, where he works to sample waters off the Pacific coast and out in the open ocean. In remote locations, repair essentials often come in handy, as when Babbin had to zip-tie a wrench to a sampling device to help it sink through an icy Antarctic lake.

Babbin is an oceanographer and marine biogeochemist who studies marine microbes and the ways in which they control the cycling of nitrogen between the ocean and the atmosphere. This exchange helps maintain healthy ocean ecosystems and supports the ocean’s capacity to store carbon.

By combining measurements that he takes in the ocean with experiments in his MIT lab, Babbin is working to understand the connections between microbes and ocean nitrogen, which could in turn help scientists identify ways to maintain the ocean’s health and productivity. His work has taken him to many coastal and open-ocean regions around the globe.

“You really become an oceanographer and an Earth scientist to see the world,” says Babbin, who recently earned tenure as the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. “We embrace the diversity of places and cultures on this planet. To see just a small fraction of that is special.”

A powerful cycle

The ocean has been a constant presence for Babbin since childhood. His family is from Monmouth County, New Jersey, where he and his twin sister grew up playing along the Jersey shore. When they were teenagers, their parents took the kids on family cruise vacations.

“I always loved being on the water,” he says. “My favorite parts of any of those cruises were the days at sea, where you were just in the middle of some ocean basin with water all around you.”

In school, Babbin gravitated to the sciences, and chemistry in particular. After high school, he attended Columbia University, where a visit to the school’s Earth and environmental engineering department catalyzed a realization.

“For me, it was always this excitement about the water and about chemistry, and it was this pop of, ‘Oh wow, it doesn’t have to be one or the other,’” Babbin says.

He chose to major in Earth and environmental engineering, with a concentration in water resources and climate risks. After graduating in 2008, Babbin returned to his home state, where he attended Princeton University and set a course for a PhD in geosciences, with a focus on chemical oceanography and environmental microbiology. His advisor, oceanographer Bess Ward, took Babbin on as a member of her research group and invited him on several month-long cruises to various parts of the eastern tropical Pacific.

“I still remember that first trip,” Babbin recalls. “It was a whirlwind. Everyone else had been to sea a gazillion times and was loading the boat and strapping things down, and I had no idea of anything. And within a few hours, I was doing an experiment as the ship rocked back and forth!”

Babbin learned to deploy sampling cannisters overboard, then haul them back up and analyze the seawater inside for signs of nitrogen — an essential nutrient for all living things on Earth.

As it turns out, the plants and animals that depend on nitrogen to survive are unable to take it up from the atmosphere themselves. They require a sort of go-between, in the form of microbes that “fix” nitrogen, converting it from nitrogen gas to more digestible forms. In the ocean, this nitrogen fixation is done by highly specialized microbial species, which work to make nitrogen available to phytoplankton — microscopic plant-like organisms that are the foundation of the marine food chain. Phytoplankton are also a main route by which the ocean absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Microorganisms may also use these biologically available forms of nitrogen for energy under certain conditions, returning nitrogen to the atmosphere. These microbes can also release a byproduct of nitrous oxide, which is a potent greenhouse gas that also can catalyze ozone loss in the stratosphere.

Through his graduate work, at sea and in the lab, Babbin became fascinated with the cycling of nitrogen and the role that nitrogen-fixing microbes play in supporting the ocean’s ecosystems and the climate overall. A balance of nitrogen inputs and outputs sustains phytoplankton and maintains the ocean’s ability to soak up carbon dioxide.

“Some of the really pressing questions in ocean biogeochemistry pertain to this cycling of nitrogen,” Babbin says. “Understanding the ways in which this one element cycles through the ocean, and how it is central to ecosystem health and the planet’s climate, has been really powerful.”

In the lab and out to sea

After completing his PhD in 2014, Babbin arrived at MIT as a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

“My first feeling when I came here was, wow, this really is a nerd’s playground,” Babbin says. “I embraced being part of a culture where we seek to understand the world better, while also doing the things we really want to do.”

In 2017, he accepted a faculty position in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. He set up his laboratory space, painted in his favorite brilliant orange, on the top floor of the Green Building.

His group uses 3D printers to fabricate microfluidic devices in which they reproduce the conditions of the ocean environment and study microbe metabolism and its effects on marine chemistry. In the field, Babbin has led research expeditions to the Galapagos Islands and parts of the eastern Pacific, where he has collected and analyzed samples of air and water for signs of nitrogen transformations and microbial activity. His new measuring station in the Galapagos is able to infer marine emissions of nitrous oxide across a large swath of the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean. His group has also sailed to southern Cuba, where the researchers studied interactions of microbes in coral reefs.

Most recently, Babbin traveled to Antarctica, where he set up camp next to frozen lakes and plumbed for samples of pristine ice water that he will analyze for genetic remnants of ancient microbes. Such preserved bacterial DNA could help scientists understand how microbes evolved and influenced the Earth’s climate over billions of years.

“Microbes are the terraformers,” Babbin notes. “They have been, since life evolved more than 3 billion years ago. We have to think about how they shape the natural world and how they will respond to the Anthropocene as humans monkey with the planet ourselves.”

Collective action

Babbin is now charting new research directions. In addition to his work at sea and in the lab, he is venturing into engineering, with a new project to design denitrifying capsules. While nitrogen is an essential nutrient for maintaining a marine ecosystem, too much nitrogen, such as from fertilizer that runs off into lakes and streams, can generate blooms of toxic algae. Babbin is looking to design eco-friendly capsules that scrub excess anthropogenic nitrogen from local waterways. 

He’s also beginning the process of designing a new sensor to measure low-oxygen concentrations in the ocean. As the planet warms, the oceans are losing oxygen, creating “dead zones” where fish cannot survive. While others including Babbin have tried to map these oxygen minimum zones, or OMZs, they have done so sporadically, by dropping sensors into the ocean over limited range, depth, and times. Babbin’s sensors could potentially provide a more complete map of OMZs, as they would be deployed on wide-ranging, deep-diving, and naturally propulsive vehicles: sharks.

“We want to measure oxygen. Sharks need oxygen. And if you look at where the sharks don’t go, you might have a sense of where the oxygen is not,” says Babbin, who is working with marine biologists on ways to tag sharks with oxygen sensors. “A number of these large pelagic fish move up and down the water column frequently, so you can map the depth to which they dive to, and infer something about the behavior. And my suggestion is, you might also infer something about the ocean’s chemistry.”

When he reflects on what stimulates new ideas and research directions, Babbin credits working with others, in his own group and across MIT.

“My best thoughts come from this collective action,” Babbin says. “Particularly because we all have different upbringings and approach things from a different perspective.”

He’s bringing this collaborative spirit to his new role, as a mission director for MIT’s Climate Project. Along with Jesse Kroll, who is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and of chemical engineering, Babbin co-leads one of the project’s six missions: Restoring the Atmosphere, Protecting the Land and Oceans. Babbin and Kroll are planning a number of workshops across campus that they hope will generate new connections, and spark new ideas, particularly around ways to evaluate the effectiveness of different climate mitigation strategies and better assess the impacts of climate on society.

“One area we want to promote is thinking of climate science and climate interventions as two sides of the same coin,” Babbin says. “There’s so much action that’s trying to be catalyzed. But we want it to be the best action. Because we really have one shot at doing this. Time is of the essence.”

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David McGee named head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

David McGee, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at MIT, was recently appointed head of the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), effective Jan. 15. He assumes the role from Professor Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences, who led the department for 13 years.

McGee specializes in applying isotope geochemistry and geochronology to reconstruct Earth’s climate history, helping to ground-truth our understanding of how the climate system responds during periods of rapid change. He has also been instrumental in the growth of the department’s community and culture, having served as EAPS associate department head since 2020.

“David is an amazing researcher who brings crucial, data-based insights to aid our response to climate change,” says dean of the School of Science and the Curtis (1963) and Kathleen Marble Professor of Astrophysics Nergis Mavalvala. “He is also a committed and caring educator, providing extraordinary investment in his students’ learning experiences, and through his direction of Terrascope, one of our unique first-year learning communities focused on generating solutions to sustainability challenges.”   

“I am energized by the incredible EAPS community, by Rob’s leadership over the last 13 years, and by President Kornbluth’s call for MIT to innovate effective and wise responses to climate change,” says McGee. “EAPS has a unique role in this time of reckoning with planetary boundaries — our collective path forward needs to be guided by a deep understanding of the Earth system and a clear sense of our place in the universe.”

McGee’s research seeks to understand the Earth system’s response to past climate changes. Using geochemical analysis and uranium-series dating, McGee and his group investigate stalagmites, ancient lake deposits, and deep-sea sediments from field sites around the world to trace patterns of wind and precipitation, water availability in drylands, and permafrost stability through space and time. Armed with precise chronologies, he aims to shed light on drivers of historical hydroclimatic shifts and provide quantitative tests of climate model performance.

Beyond research, McGee has helped shape numerous Institute initiatives focused on environment, climate, and sustainability, including serving on the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Faculty Steering Committee and the faculty advisory board for the MIT Environment and Sustainability Minor.

McGee also co-chaired MIT's Climate Education Working Group, one of three working groups established under the Institute's Fast Forward climate action plan. The group identified opportunities to strengthen climate- and sustainability-related education at the Institute, from curricular offerings to experiential learning opportunities and beyond.

In April 2023, the working group hosted the MIT Symposium for Advancing Climate Education, featuring talks by McGee and others on how colleges and universities can innovate and help students develop the skills, capacities, and perspectives they’ll need to live, lead, and thrive in a world being remade by the accelerating climate crisis.

“David is reimagining MIT undergraduate education to include meaningful collaborations with communities outside of MIT, teaching students that scientific discovery is important, but not always enough to make impact for society,” says van der Hilst. “He will help shape the future of the department with this vital perspective.”

From the start of his career, McGee has been dedicated to sharing his love of exploration with students. He earned a master’s degree in teaching and spent seven years as a teacher in middle school and high school classrooms before earning his PhD in Earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University. He joined the MIT faculty in 2012, and in 2018 received the Excellence in Mentoring Award from MIT’s Undergraduate Advising and Academic Programming office. In 2015, he became the director of MIT’s Terrascope first-year learning community.

“David's exemplary teaching in Terrascope comes through his understanding that effective solutions must be found where science intersects with community engagement to forge ethical paths forward,” adds van der Hilst. In 2023, for his work with Terrascope, McGee received the school’s highest award, the School of Science Teaching Prize. In 2022, he was named a Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow, the highest teaching honor at MIT.

As associate department head, McGee worked alongside van der Hilst and student leaders to promote EAPS community engagement, improve internal supports and reporting structures, and bolster opportunities for students to pursue advanced degrees and STEM careers.

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Study in India shows kids use different math skills at work vs. school

In India, many kids who work in retail markets have good math skills: They can quickly perform a range of calculations to complete transactions. But as a new study shows, these kids often perform much worse on the same kinds of problems as they are taught in the classroom. This happens even though many of these students still attend school or attended school through 7th or 8th grades.

Conversely, the study also finds, Indian students who are still enrolled in school and don’t have jobs do better on school-type math problems, but they often fare poorly at the kinds of problems that occur in marketplaces.

Overall, both the “market kids” and the “school kids” struggle with the approach the other group is proficient in, raising questions about how to help both groups learn math more comprehensively.

“For the school kids, they do worse when you go from an abstract problem to a concrete problem,” says MIT economist Esther Duflo, co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s results. “For the market kids, it’s the opposite.”

Indeed, the kids with jobs who are also in school “underperform despite being extraordinarily good at mental math,” says Abhijit Banerjee an MIT economist and another co-author of the paper. “That for me was always the revelation, that the one doesn’t translate into the other.”

The paper, “Children’s arithmetic skills do not transfer between applied and academic math,” is published today in Nature. The authors are Banerjee, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT; Swati Bhattacharjee of the newspaper Ananda Bazar Patrika, in Kolkata, India; Raghabendra Chattopadhyay of the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata; Duflo, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at MIT; Alejandro J. Ganimian, a professor of applied psychology and economics at New York University; Kailash Rajaha, a doctoral candidate in economics at MIT; and Elizabeth S. Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard University.

Duflo and Banerjee shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019 and are co-founders of MIT’s Jameel Abdul Lateef Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a global leader in development economics.

Three experiments

The study consists largely of three data-collection exercises with some embedded experiments. The first one shows that 201 kids working in markets in Kolkata do have good math skills. For instance, a researcher, posing as an ordinary shopper, would ask for the cost of 800 grams of potatoes sold at 20 rupees per kilogram, then ask for the cost of 1.4 kilograms of onions sold at 15 rupees per kilo. They would request the combined answer — 37 rupees —  then hand the market worker a 200 rupee note and collect 163 rupees back. All told, the kids working in markets correctly solved this kind of problem from 95 to 98 percent of the time by the second try.

However, when the working children were pulled aside (with their parents’ permission) and given a standardized Indian national math test, just 32 percent could correctly divide a three-digit number by a one-digit number, and just 54 percent could correctly subtract a two-digit number from another two-digit number two times. Clearly, the kids’ skills were not yielding classroom results.

The researchers then conducted a second study with 400 kids working in markets in Delhi, which replicated the results: Working kids had a strong ability to handle market transactions, but only about 15 percent of the ones also in school were at average proficiency in math.

In the second study, the researchers also asked the reverse question: How do students doing well in school fare at market math problems? Here, with 200 students from 17 Delhi schools who do not work in markets, they found that 96 percent of the students could solve typical problems with a pencil, paper, unlimited time, and one opportunity to self-correct. But when the students had to solve the problems in a make-believe “market” setting, that figure dropped to just 60 percent. The students had unlimited time and access to paper and pencil, so that figure may actually overestimate how they would fare in a market.

Finally, in a third study, conducted in Delhi with over 200 kids, the researchers compared the performances of both “market” and “school” kids again on numerous math problems in varying conditions. While 85 percent of the working kids got the right answer to a market transaction problem, only 10 percent of nonworking kids correctly answered a question of similar difficulty, when faced with limited time and with no aids like pencil and paper. However, given the same division and subtraction problems, but with pencil and paper, 59 percent of nonmarket kids got them right, compared to 45 percent of market kids.

To further evaluate market kids and school kids on a level playing field, the researchers then presented each group with a word problem about a boy going to the market and buying two vegetables. Roughly one-third of the market kids were able to solve this without any aid, while fewer than 1 percent of the school kids did.

Why might the performance of the nonworking students decline when given a problem in market conditions?

“They learned an algorithm but didn’t understand it,” Banerjee says.

Meanwhile, the market kids seemed to use certain tactics to handle retail transactions. For one thing, they appear to use rounding well. Take a problem like 43 times 11. To handle that intuitively, you might multiply 43 times 10, and then add 43, for the final answer of 473. This appears to be what they are doing.

“The market kids are able to exploit base 10, so they do better on base 10 problems,” Duflo says. “The school kids have no idea. It makes no difference to them. The market kids may have additional tricks of this sort that we did not see.” On the other hand, the school kids had a better grasp of formal written methods of divison, subtraction, and more.

Going farther in school

The findings raise a significant point about students skills and academic progress. While it is a good thing that the kids with market jobs are proficient at generating rapid answers, it would likely be better for the long-term futures if they also did well in school and wound up with a high school degree or better. Finding a way to cross the divide between informal and formal ways of tackling math problems, then, could notably help some Indian children.

The fact that such a divide exists, meanwhile, suggests some new approaches could be tried in the classroom.

Banerjee, for one, suspects that part of the issue is a classroom process making it seem as if there is only one true route to funding an arithmetic answer. Instead, he believes, following the work of co-author Spelke, that helping students reason their way to an approximation of the right answer can help them truly get a handle on what is needed to solve these types of problems.

Even so, Duflo adds, “We don’t want to blame the teachers. It’s not their fault. They are given a strict curriculum to follow, and strict methods to follow.”

That still leaves open the question of what to change, in concrete classroom terms. That topic, it happens, is something the research group is in the process of weighing, as they consider new experiments that might address it directly. The current finding, however, makes clear progress would be useful.

“These findings highlight the importance of educational curricula that bridge the gap between intuitive and formal mathematics,” the authors state in the paper.

Support for the research was provided, in part, by the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab’s Post-Primary Education Initiative, the Foundation Blaise Pascal, and the AXA Research Fund. 

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Physicists measure a key aspect of superconductivity in “magic-angle” graphene

Superconducting materials are similar to the carpool lane in a congested interstate. Like commuters who ride together, electrons that pair up can bypass the regular traffic, moving through the material with zero friction.

But just as with carpools, how easily electron pairs can flow depends on a number of conditions, including the density of pairs that are moving through the material. This “superfluid stiffness,” or the ease with which a current of electron pairs can flow, is a key measure of a material’s superconductivity.

Physicists at MIT and Harvard University have now directly measured superfluid stiffness for the first time in “magic-angle” graphene — materials that are made from two or more atomically thin sheets of graphene twisted with respect to each other at just the right angle to enable a host of exceptional properties, including unconventional superconductivity.

This superconductivity makes magic-angle graphene a promising building block for future quantum-computing devices, but exactly how the material superconducts is not well-understood. Knowing the material’s superfluid stiffness will help scientists identify the mechanism of superconductivity in magic-angle graphene.

The team’s measurements suggest that magic-angle graphene’s superconductivity is primarily governed by quantum geometry, which refers to the conceptual “shape” of quantum states that can exist in a given material.

The results, which are reported today in the journal Nature, represent the first time scientists have directly measured superfluid stiffness in a two-dimensional material. To do so, the team developed a new experimental method which can now be used to make similar measurements of other two-dimensional superconducting materials.

“There’s a whole family of 2D superconductors that is waiting to be probed, and we are really just scratching the surface,” says study co-lead author Joel Wang, a research scientist in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE).

The study’s co-authors from MIT’s main campus and MIT Lincoln Laboratory include co-lead author and former RLE postdoc Miuko Tanaka as well as Thao Dinh, Daniel Rodan-Legrain, Sameia Zaman, Max Hays, Bharath Kannan, Aziza Almanakly, David Kim, Bethany Niedzielski, Kyle Serniak, Mollie Schwartz, Jeffrey Grover, Terry Orlando, Simon Gustavsson, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, and William D. Oliver, along with Kenji Watanabe and Takashi Taniguchi of the National Institute for Materials Science in Japan.

Magic resonance

Since its first isolation and characterization in 2004, graphene has proven to be a wonder substance of sorts. The material is effectively a single, atom-thin sheet of graphite consisting of a precise, chicken-wire lattice of carbon atoms. This simple configuration can exhibit a host of superlative qualities in terms of graphene’s strength, durability, and ability to conduct electricity and heat.

In 2018, Jarillo-Herrero and colleagues discovered that when two graphene sheets are stacked on top of each other, at a precise “magic” angle, the twisted structure — now known as magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene, or MATBG — exhibits entirely new properties, including superconductivity, in which electrons pair up, rather than repelling each other as they do in everyday materials. These so-called Cooper pairs can form a superfluid, with the potential to superconduct, meaning they could move through a material as an effortless, friction-free current.

“But even though Cooper pairs have no resistance, you have to apply some push, in the form of an electric field, to get the current to move,” Wang explains. “Superfluid stiffness refers to how easy it is to get these particles to move, in order to drive superconductivity.”

Today, scientists can measure superfluid stiffness in superconducting materials through methods that generally involve placing a material in a microwave resonator — a device which has a characteristic resonance frequency at which an electrical signal will oscillate, at microwave frequencies, much like a vibrating violin string. If a superconducting material is placed within a microwave resonator, it can change the device’s resonance frequency, and in particular, its “kinetic inductance,” by an amount that scientists can directly relate to the material’s superfluid stiffness.

However, to date, such approaches have only been compatible with large, thick material samples. The MIT team realized that to measure superfluid stiffness in atomically thin materials like MATBG would require a new approach.

“Compared to MATBG, the typical superconductor that is probed using resonators is 10 to 100 times thicker and larger in area,” Wang says. “We weren’t sure if such a tiny material would generate any measurable inductance at all.”

A captured signal

The challenge to measuring superfluid stiffness in MATBG has to do with attaching the supremely delicate material to the surface of the microwave resonator as seamlessly as possible.

“To make this work, you want to make an ideally lossless — i.e., superconducting — contact between the two materials,” Wang explains. “Otherwise, the microwave signal you send in will be degraded or even just bounce back instead of going into your target material.”

Will Oliver’s group at MIT has been developing techniques to precisely connect extremely delicate, two-dimensional materials, with the goal of building new types of quantum bits for future quantum-computing devices. For their new study, Tanaka, Wang, and their colleagues applied these techniques to seamlessly connect a tiny sample of MATBG to the end of an aluminum microwave resonator. To do so, the group first used conventional methods to assemble MATBG, then sandwiched the structure between two insulating layers of hexagonal boron nitride, to help maintain MATBG’s atomic structure and properties.

“Aluminum is a material we use regularly in our superconducting quantum computing research, for example, aluminum resonators to read out aluminum quantum bits (qubits),” Oliver explains. “So, we thought, why not make most of the resonator from aluminum, which is relatively straightforward for us, and then add a little MATBG to the end of it? It turned out to be a good idea.”

“To contact the MATBG, we etch it very sharply, like cutting through layers of a cake with a very sharp knife,” Wang says. “We expose a side of the freshly-cut MATBG, onto which we then deposit aluminum — the same material as the resonator — to make a good contact and form an aluminum lead.”

The researchers then connected the aluminum leads of the MATBG structure to the larger aluminum microwave resonator. They sent a microwave signal through the resonator and measured the resulting shift in its resonance frequency, from which they could infer the kinetic inductance of the MATBG.

When they converted the measured inductance to a value of superfluid stiffness, however, the researchers found that it was much larger than what conventional theories of superconductivity would have predicted. They had a hunch that the surplus had to do with MATBG’s quantum geometry — the way the quantum states of electrons correlate to one another.

“We saw a tenfold increase in superfluid stiffness compared to conventional expectations, with a temperature dependence consistent with what the theory of quantum geometry predicts,” Tanaka says. “This was a ‘smoking gun’ that pointed to the role of quantum geometry in governing superfluid stiffness in this two-dimensional material.”

“This work represents a great example of how one can use sophisticated quantum technology currently used in quantum circuits to investigate condensed matter systems consisting of strongly interacting particles,” adds Jarillo-Herrero.

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Office, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering.

A complementary study on magic-angle twisted trilayer graphene (MATTG), conducted by a collaboration between Philip Kim’s group at Harvard University and Jarillo-Herrero’s group at MIT appears in the same issue of Nature.

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Timeless virtues, new technologies

As the story goes, the Scottish inventor James Watt envisioned how steam engines should work on one day in 1765, when he was walking across Glasgow Green, a park in his hometown. Watt realized that putting a separate condenser in an engine would allow its main cylinder to remain hot, making the engine more efficient and compact than the huge steam engines then in existence.

And yet Watt, who had been pondering the problem for a while, needed a partnership with entrepreneur Matthew Boulton to get a practical product to market, starting in 1775 and becoming successful in later years.

“People still use this story of Watt’s ‘Eureka!’ moment, which Watt himself promoted later in his life,” says MIT Professor David Mindell, an engineer and historian of science and engineering. “But it took 20 years of hard labor, during which Watt struggled to support a family and had multiple failures, to get it out in the world. Multiple other inventions were required to achieve what we today call product-market fit.”

The full story of the steam engine, Mindell argues, is a classic case of what is today called “process innovation,” not just “product innovation.” Inventions are rarely fully-formed products, ready to change the world. Mostly, they need a constellation of improvements, and sustained persuasion, to become adopted into industrial systems.

What was true for Watt still holds, as Mindell’s body of work shows. Most technology-driven growth today comes from overlapping advances, when inventors and companies tweak and improve things over time. Now, Mindell explores those ideas in a forthcoming book, “The New Lunar Society: An Enlightenment Guide to the Next Industrial Revolution,” being published on Feb. 24 by the MIT Press. Mindell is professor of aeronautics and astronautics and the Dibner Professor of the History of Engineering and Manufacturing at MIT, where he has also co-founded the Work of the Future initiative.

“We’ve overemphasized product innovation, although we’re very good at it,” Mindell says. “But it’s become apparent that process innovation is just as important: how you improve the making, fixing, rebuilding, or upgrading of systems. These are deeply entangled. Manufacturing is part of process innovation.”

Today, with so many things being positioned as world-changing products, it may be especially important to notice that being adaptive and persistent is practically the essence of improvement.

“Young innovators don’t always realize that when their invention doesn’t work at first, they’re at the start of a process where they have to refine and engage, and find the right partners to grow,” Mindell says.

Manufacturing at home

The title of Mindell’s book refers to British Enlightenment thinkers and inventors — Watt was one of them — who used to meet in a group they called the Lunar Society, centered in Birmingham. This included pottery innovator Josiah Wedgewood; physician Erasmus Darwin; chemist Joseph Priestley; and Boulton, a metal manufacturer whose work and capital helped make Watt’s improved steam engine a reliable product. The book moves between chapters on the old Lunar Society and those on contemporary industrial systems, drawing parallels between then and now.

“The stories about the Lunar Society are models for the way people can go about their careers, engineering or otherwise, in a way they may not see in popular press about technology today,” Mindell says. “Everyone told Wedgwood he couldn’t compete with Chinese porcelain, yet he learned from the Lunar Society and built an English pottery industry that led the world.”

Applying the Lunar Society’s virtues to contemporary industry leads Mindell to a core set of ideas about technology. Research shows that design and manufacturing should be adjacent if possible, not outsourced globally, to accelerate learning and collaboration. The book also argues that technology should address human needs and that venture capital should focus more on industrial systems than it does. (Mindell has co-founded a firm, called Unless, that invests in companies by using venture financing structures better-suited to industrial transformation.)

In seeing a new industrialism taking shape, Mindell suggests that its future includes new ways of working, collaborating, and valuing knowledge throughout organizations, as well as more AI-based open-source tools for small and mid-size manufacturers. He also contends that a new industrialism should include greater emphasis on maintenance and repair work, which are valuable sources of knowledge about industrial devices and systems.

“We’ve undervalued how to keep things running, while simultaneously hollowing out the middle of the workforce,” he says. “And yet, operations and maintenance are sites of product innovation. Ask the person who fixes your car or dishwasher. They’ll tell you the strengths and weaknesses of every model.”

All told, “The sum total of this work, over time, amounts to a new industrialism if it elevates its cultural status into a movement that values the material basis of our lives and seeks to improve it, literally from the ground up,” Mindell writes in the book.

“The book doesn’t predict the future,” he says. “But rather it suggests how to talk about the future of industry with optimism and realism, as opposed to saying, this is the utopian future where machines do everything, and people just sit back in chairs with wires coming out of their heads.”

Work of the Future

“The New Lunar Society” is a concise book with expansive ideas. Mindell also devotes chapters to the convergence of the Industrial-era Enlightenment, the founding of the U.S., and the crucial role of industry in forming the republic.

“The only founding father who signed all of the critical documents in the founding of the country, Benjamin Franklin, was also the person who crystallized the modern science of electricity and deployed its first practical invention, the lightning rod,” Mindell says. “But there were multiple figures, including Thomas Jefferson and Paul Revere, who integrated the industrial Enlightenment with democracy. Industry has been core to American democracy from the beginning.”

Indeed, as Mindell emphasizes in the book, “industry,” beyond evoking smokestacks, has a human meaning: If you are hard-working, you are displaying industry. That meshes with the idea of persistently redeveloping an invention over time.

Despite the high regard Mindell holds for the Industrial Enlightenment, he recognizes that the era’s industrialization brought harsh working conditions, as well as environmental degradation. As one of the co-founders of MIT’s Work of the Future initiative, he argues that 21st-century industrialism needs to rethink some of its fundamentals.

“The ideals of [British] industrialization missed on the environment, and missed on labor,” Mindell says. “So at this point, how do we rethink industrial systems to do better?” Mindell argues that industry must power an economy that grows while decarbonizing.

After all, Mindell adds, “About 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions are from industrial sectors, and all of the potential solutions involve making lots of new stuff. Even if it’s just connectors and wire. We’re not going to decarbonize or address global supply chain crises by deindustrializing, we’re going to get there by reindustrializing.”

“The New Lunar Society” has received praise from technologists and other scholars. Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University who coined the term “Industrial Enlightenment,” has stated that Mindell “realizes that innovation requires a combination of knowing and making, mind and hand. … He has written a deeply original and insightful book.” Jeff Wilke SM ’93, a former CEO of Amazon’s consumer business, has said the book “argues compellingly that a thriving industrial base, adept at both product and process innovation, underpins a strong democracy.”

Mindell hopes the audience for the book will range from younger technologists to a general audience of anyone interested in the industrial future.

“I think about young people in industrial settings and want to help them see they’re part of a great tradition and are doing important things to change the world,” Mindell says. “There is a huge audience of people who are interested in technology but find overhyped language does not match their aspirations or personal experience. I’m trying to crystallize this new industrialism as a way of imagining and talking about the future.”

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Driving innovation, from Silicon Valley to Detroit

Across a career’s worth of pioneering product designs, Doug Field’s work has shaped the experience of anyone who’s ever used a MacBook Air, ridden a Segway, or driven a Tesla Model 3.

But his newest project is his most ambitious yet: reinventing the Ford automobile, one of the past century’s most iconic pieces of technology.

As Ford’s chief electric vehicle (EV), digital, and design officer, Field is tasked with leading the development of the company’s electric vehicles, while making new software platforms central to all Ford models.

To bring Ford Motor Co. into that digital and electric future, Field effectively has to lead a fast-moving startup inside the legacy carmaker. “It is incredibly hard, figuring out how to do ‘startups’ within large organizations,” he concedes.

If anyone can pull it off, it’s likely to be Field. Ever since his time in MIT’s Leaders for Global Operations (then known as “Leaders in Manufacturing”) program studying organizational behavior and strategy, Field has been fixated on creating the conditions that foster innovation.

“The natural state of an organization is to make it harder and harder to do those things: to innovate, to have small teams, to go against the grain,” he says. To overcome those forces, Field has become a master practitioner of the art of curating diverse, talented teams and helping them flourish inside of big, complex companies.

“It’s one thing to make a creative environment where you can come up with big ideas,” he says. “It’s another to create an execution-focused environment to crank things out. I became intrigued with, and have been for the rest of my career, this question of how can you have both work together?”

Three decades after his first stint as a development engineer at Ford Motor Co., Field now has a chance to marry the manufacturing muscle of Ford with the bold approach that helped him rethink Apple’s laptops and craft Tesla’s Model 3 sedan. His task is nothing less than rethinking how cars are made and operated, from the bottom up.

“If it’s only creative or execution, you’re not going to change the world,” he says. “If you want to have a huge impact, you need people to change the course you’re on, and you need people to build it.”

A passion for design

From a young age, Field had a fascination with automobiles. “I was definitely into cars and transportation more generally,” he says. “I thought of cars as the place where technology and art and human design came together — cars were where all my interests intersected.”

With a mother who was an artist and musician and an engineer father, Field credits his parents’ influence for his lifelong interest in both the aesthetic and technical elements of product design. “I think that’s why I’m drawn to autos — there’s very much an aesthetic aspect to the product,” he says. 

After earning a degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue University, Field took a job at Ford in 1987. The big Detroit automakers of that era excelled at mass-producing cars, but weren’t necessarily set up to encourage or reward innovative thinking. Field chafed at the “overstructured and bureaucratic” operational culture he encountered.

The experience was frustrating at times, but also valuable and clarifying. He realized that he “wanted to work with fast-moving, technology-based businesses.”

“My interest in advancing technical problem-solving didn’t have a place in the auto industry” at the time, he says. “I knew I wanted to work with passionate people and create something that didn’t exist, in an environment where talent and innovation were prized, where irreverence was an asset and not a liability. When I read about Silicon Valley, I loved the way they talked about things.”

During that time, Field took two years off to enroll in MIT’s LGO program, where he deepened his technical skills and encountered ideas about manufacturing processes and team-driven innovation that would serve him well in the years ahead.

“Some of core skill sets that I developed there were really, really important,” he says, “in the context of production lines and production processes.” He studied systems engineering and the use of Monte Carlo simulations to model complex manufacturing environments. During his internship with aerospace manufacturer Pratt & Whitney, he worked on automated design in computer-aided design (CAD) systems, long before those techniques became standard practice.

Another powerful tool he picked up was the science of probability and statistics, under the tutelage of MIT Professor Alvin Drake in his legendary course 6.041/6.431 (Probabilistic Systems Analysis). Field would go on to apply those insights not only to production processes, but also to characterizing variability in people’s aptitudes, working styles, and talents, in the service of building better, more innovative teams. And studying organizational strategy catalyzed his career-long interest in “ways to look at innovation as an outcome, rather than a random spark of genius.”

“So many things I was lucky to be exposed to at MIT,” Field says, were “all building blocks, pieces of the puzzle, that helped me navigate through difficult situations later on.”

Learning while leading

After leaving Ford in 1993, Field worked at Johnson and Johnson Medical for three years in process development. There, he met Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who was working on a project called the iBOT, a gyroscopic powered wheelchair that could climb stairs.

When Kamen spun off Segway to develop a new personal mobility device using the same technology, Field became his first hire. He spent nearly a decade as the firm’s chief technology officer.

At Segway, Field’s interests in vehicles, technology, innovation, process, and human-centered design all came together.

“When I think about working now on electric cars, it was a real gift,” he says. The problems they tackled prefigured the ones he would grapple with later at Tesla and Ford. “Segway was very much a precursor to a modern EV. Completely software controlled, with higher-voltage batteries, redundant systems, traction control, brushless DC motors — it was basically a miniature Tesla in the year 2000.”

At Segway, Field assembled an “amazing” team of engineers and designers who were as passionate as he was about pushing the envelope. “Segway was the first place I was able to hand-pick every single person I worked with, define the culture, and define the mission.”

As he grew into this leadership role, he became equally engrossed with cracking another puzzle: “How do you prize people who don’t fit in?”

“Such a fundamental part of the fabric of Silicon Valley is the love of embracing talent over a traditional organization’s ways of measuring people,” he says. “If you want to innovate, you need to learn how to manage neurodivergence and a very different set of personalities than the people you find in large corporations.”

Field still keeps the base housing of a Segway in his office, as a reminder of what those kinds of teams — along with obsessive attention to detail — can achieve.

Before joining Apple in 2008, he showed that component, with its clean lines and every minuscule part in its place in one unified package, to his prospective new colleagues. “They were like, “OK, you’re one of us,’” he recalls.

He soon became vice president of hardware development for all Mac computers, leading the teams behind the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro and eventually overseeing more than 2,000 employees. “Making things really simple and really elegant, thinking about the product as an integrated whole, that really took me into Apple.”

The challenge of giving the MacBook Air its signature sleek and light profile is an example.

“The MacBook Air was the first high-volume consumer electronic product built out of a CNC-machined enclosure,” says Field. He worked with industrial design and technology teams to devise a way to make the laptop from one solid piece of aluminum and jettison two-thirds of the parts found in the iMac. “We had material cut away so that every single screw and piece of electronics sat down into it an integrated way. That’s how we got the product so small and slim.”

“When I interviewed with Jony Ive” — Apple’s legendary chief design officer — “he said your ability to zoom out and zoom in was the number one most important ability as a leader at Apple.” That meant zooming out to think about “the entire ethos of this product, and the way it will affect the world” and zooming all the way back in to obsess over, say, the physical shape of the laptop itself and what it feels like in a user’s hands.

“That thread of attention to detail, passion for product, design plus technology rolled directly into what I was doing at Tesla,” he says. When Field joined Tesla in 2013, he was drawn to the way the brash startup upended the approach to making cars. “Tesla was integrating digital technology into cars in a way nobody else was. They said, ‘We’re not a car company in Silicon Valley, we’re a Silicon Valley company and we happen to make cars.’”

Field assembled and led the team that produced the Model 3 sedan, Tesla’s most affordable vehicle, designed to have mass-market appeal.

That experience only reinforced the importance, and power, of zooming in and out as a designer — in a way that encompasses the bigger human resources picture.

“You have to have a broad sense of what you’re trying to accomplish and help people in the organization understand what it means to them,” he says. “You have to go across and understand operations enough to glue all of those (things) together — while still being great at and focused on something very, very deeply. That’s T-shaped leadership.”

He credits his time at LGO with providing the foundation for the “T-shaped leadership” he practices.

“An education like the one I got at MIT allowed me to keep moving that ‘T’, to focus really deep, learn a ton, teach as much as I can, and after something gets more mature, pull out and bed down into other areas where the organization needs to grow or where there’s a crisis.”

The power of marrying scale to a “startup mentality”

In 2018, Field returned to Apple as a vice president for special projects. “I left Tesla after Model 3 and Y started to ramp, as there were people better than me to run high-volume manufacturing,” he says. “I went back to Apple hoping what Tesla had learned would motivate Apple to get into a different market.”

That market was his early love: cars. Field quietly led a project to develop an electric vehicle at Apple for three years.

Then Ford CEO Jim Farley came calling. He persuaded Field to return to Ford in late 2021, partly by demonstrating how much things had changed since his first stint as the carmaker.

“Two things came through loud and clear,” Field says. “One was humility. ‘Our success is not assured.’” That attitude was strikingly different from Field’s early experience in Detroit, encountering managers who were resistant to change. “The other thing was urgency. Jim and Bill Ford said the exact same thing to me: ‘We have four or five years to completely remake this company.’”

“I said, ‘OK, if the top of company really believes that, then the auto industry may be ready for what I hope to offer.’”

So far, Field is energized and encouraged by the appetite for reinvention he’s encountered this time around at Ford.

“If you can combine what Ford does really well with what a Tesla or Rivian can do well, this is something to be reckoned with,” says Field. “Skunk works have become one of the fundamental tools of my career,” he says, using an industry term that describes a project pursued by a small, autonomous group of people within a larger organization.

Ford has been developing a new, lower-cost, software-enabled EV platform — running all of the car’s sensors and components from a central digital operating system — with a “skunk works” team for the past two years. The company plans to build new sedans, SUVs, and small pickups based on this new platform.

With other legacy carmakers like Volvo racing into the electric future and fierce competition from EV leaders Tesla and Rivian, Field and his colleagues have their work cut out for them.

If he succeeds, leveraging his decades of learning and leading from LGO to Silicon Valley, then his latest chapter could transform the way we all drive — and secure a spot for Ford at the front of the electric vehicle pack in the process.

“I’ve been lucky to feel over and over that what I’m doing right now — they are going to write a book about it,” say Field. “This is a big deal, for Ford and the U.S. auto industry, and for American industry, actually.”

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