Turning particle detectors into weapons detectors

Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) graduate student Jayson Vavrek got his start in high-energy particle physics looking for the smallest forms of matter in the universe. Now at MIT, he uses the same tools and principles to verify nuclear weapons.

The system Vavrek is developing with his advisor, NSE Assistant Professor Areg Danagoulian, is called physical cryptography. It’s designed to precisely identify a nuclear warhead, but without revealing the weapon’s inner-workings. The goal is to allow inspectors to verify that actual nuclear weapons are being marked for disposal during a disarmament process without revealing the weapons’ internal secrets.

The work is being done in MIT’s Laboratory of Nuclear Security and Policy (LNSP), a collection of experts in physics, nuclear engineering, and public policy. “We have great people who I can talk to about anything, from nitty-gritty physics details to the loftier goals of getting this implemented in the political future,” says Vavrek.

As an undergraduate in physics at the University of Alberta in Canada, Vavrek studied particle physics, the kind of work that led to the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. But Vavrek also had a chance to work on a more practical project that involved looking for neutrino emissions from nuclear reactors as a way to detect nuclear material. Neutrinos can’t be shielded, says Vavrek, “So they’re an obvious signal.”

He used a detector called a liquid scintillator that detects high-energy charged particles. When neutrinos pass through the detector, their interactions create charged particles as a by-product that can be measured. “I found it interesting because it was using all the same tools as pure particle physics, but in an applied sense,” Vavrek says.

When it came time to apply to graduate school, Vavrek wasn’t sure he wanted to pursue particle physics. Experiments in this field often involve thousands of collaborators. “The chance to contribute something meaningful is really small,” he says.

But when he came across the MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, he remembered his project working with neutrinos and thought that a more applied path might be a good fit. “The skills weren’t all that different,” he says.

On day one of his arrival at MIT in 2014, he began work on physical cryptography. The research aims to develop a technology which would enable an inspector overseeing a treaty-driven nuclear weapons dismantlement process to authenticate a weapon with confidence yet still have no access to the classified information about that weapon’s design. Current arms reduction treaties are hampered by the absence of such technology. 

The concept that Vavrek is researching involves shooting beams of photons through a weapon, producing a signal that is highly sensitive to the weapon’s makeup. Instead of being measured directly, however, the signal undergoes physical encryption first. The transmitted beam interacts with special materials called encrypting foils that produce a secondary, encrypted signal for detectors to measure. 

Different materials create different encryptions, and it is impossible to decode the signal without knowing the composition of the foil materials. As a result, the foils act as virtual “notches” on a cryptographic “key.” 

During an inspection, an inspector needs only to determine if the encrypted signal from a weapon undergoing verification matches that from another, previously authenticated weapon. 

One of Vavrek’s goals is to determine whether or not it would be possible for a weapon owner to trick the system. A hoax would allow a weapons owner to dismantle fake weapons while claiming that they are compliant with the treaty.

Vavrek has to rely on his own creativity and the expertise of his advisor to simulate potential hoaxes because almost all nuclear weapons specifications are classified. He was able to run simulations using a simplified model of a nuclear weapon from the open literature. He also simulated potential hoaxes involving substitutions and rearrangements of weapons materials in ways intended to produce the same foil as a real weapon. As predicted, his skills from particle physics transferred over seamlessly. “Literally,” he says. “It’s the same simulation software we used in pure particle physics.”

Vavrek is still working on simulations, and he is also working to determine the system’s probability of producing false positives or false negatives or if it could leak information. Within the next year or so, Vavrek hopes to collaborate with the United States National Labs, which have access to weapons grade material. 

Looking back on his decision to apply physics to real-world problems, Vavrek is satisfied. He’s already published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences as one of four equally contributing authors. “I’m happy with the contribution I’ve been able to make,” he says.

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LA UNVERSIDAD DE WASHINGTON ESTÁ DESARROLLANDO UNA NUEVA GAMA DE SENSORES ESTRUCTURALES

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Q&A: How Twitter explains the 2016 election

During an intense U.S. presidential campaign, millions of people are chatting about the election every day on Twitter. MIT is studying them. More precisely, the Laboratory for Social Machines, part of the MIT Media Lab, has launched a project called the Electome that charts Twitter in unique detail. Now the project has joined forces with the Commission on Presidential Debates — the first debate is tonight — to provide journalists with a “dashboard” summarizing Twitter use during the debates. MIT News talked to three key Electome researchers about their work: Deb Roy, director of the Laboratory for Social Machines and chief media scientist for Twitter; William Powers, long-time journalist, author, and now research scientist for the Electome project; and Russell Stevens, deployment lead for the Electome project. This interview has been edited for length. 

Q: What is the Electome and how does it work?

Deb Roy: It begins with taking two data sources: 30 English news sources and the fire hose of tweets from Twitter. We designed machine-learning algorithms that classify both the news stories and the tweets according to a taxonomy of topics on the U.S. election. It’s creating an organized view of how those two streams intersect or diverge, if there are systematic differences of news coverage versus what’s being discussed on Twitter. The overall goal here is to leverage this social signal, which is now of central importance in this election cycle, and systematically understand that signal’s relationship to the news media, and ideally create some sort of feedback loop.

William Powers: The debate commission is trying to solve this same problem. There is this new public sphere with all these voices, and yet it’s very hard to get your arms around it, precisely because there are so many voices. We had a long conversation [with the commission] over the winter and [then] built this dashboard.

Q: In that case, how would you like to have journalists use this tool during the debates?

Russell Stevens: We prefer it to be used as a bit of a step-back machine. We’re working to provide this data in almost real-time, but we’ve thought from the beginning it works better with a little perspective about how the conversation changed because of the debates. We would like journalists to use this to think about what the candidates talked about during the debates and how people in the wilds of Twitter have responded to that in their own conversations — to see how that discussion has changed.

Q: During the campaign as a whole, what are some cases in which the conversation on Twitter has diverged notably from mainstream news media coverage or public perception of the issues?

Roy: During the vice-presidential selection process there was a two-week period [when] a third of all stories across all leading news sources were about [that process]. In the same two-week period, we found about 3 percent of tweets were about the vice-presidential issue. The journalists were literally an order of magnitude more interested than the millions of people on Twitter.

Stevens: Ethics — which is how we [classify topics such as] email and campaign finance — has been covered much more in the media than it’s been talked about [on Twitter]. That is a pretty clear trend from early on. … We [also] found how much the election is not about “the economy, stupid,” in the classic [Bill] Clinton phrase. Issues like national security, foreign policy, immigration, guns, and racial issues are being spoken about [more], relative to economic issues, the budget, taxation, jobs, and even income inequality.

Roy: A search of the term “birther” [shows] a spike [in tweets] when Trump held a press conference [on the subject]. What’s interesting here, from our automatic coding, is that the majority of the spike comes from race-related tweets. It makes it quantifiable what the reaction is. … Although Trump is careful not to talk about President Obama’s birth place in racial terms, the public reaction to his comments on Twitter is overwhelmingly racial.

Q: Are there any other surprises about the election you’ve seen due to the Electome project?

Stevens: There’s a very interesting gender breakdown in terms of who’s been tweeting about the election, and it’s running very strongly male. What would classically be considered social issues within the election … is very strongly dominated by racial issues, immigration, and guns, and the two gender-oriented issues of LGBT issues and abortion rights have indexed very, very low relative to the other issues. It’s interesting, although I think we have to be careful about attributing causality to this.

Powers: I have three surprises. One is the changing nature of influence. If Twitter is some kind of indicator of where influence is going in the digital world, [then] people who are not famous [according to conventional terms] are having influence. Second, as a long-time Washington journalist, the prominence from early 2015 of foreign policy and national security was a surprise to me. Third, it is interesting in the data to see the way events outside the election bubble change what’s happening in the election bubble. We did an analysis of the Orlando massacre, and the election issues that were affected —  guns, immigration, LGBT, terrorism — took a big jump [in volume of Twitter discussion]. The membrane between politics and the rest of the world is, in a way, more permeable than we had thought.

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From engineer to urban planner

Billy Ndengeyingoma’s time at MIT has been marked by transitions. He has moved from one continent to another, from an undergraduate program to a master’s, and from a civil engineering specialty to urban planning.

Yet no matter what is happening in his life, he has learned to always make time for self-reflection. This practice has helped him discover a great deal about himself, and has pushed him to think deeply about the impact he wants to have on the world.  

Navigating dual cultures

Ndengeyingoma, who grew up in Kigali, Rwanda, always thought he might go to the United States for college. (His brother and sister both completed master’s degrees in Atlanta.) After overhearing a conversation with a family friend whose son had attended MIT, he decided to apply.

Ndengeyingoma’s first introduction to MIT was through International Orientation, where he and the other international students learned about U.S. culture. For Ndengeyingoma, the transition process ended up being easier than he expected.

“People have their different ways of adapting,” says Ndengeyingoma. “And mine was approaching all the people from the international community and trying to figure things out together, like how to catch a train, and all these very basic things, but also reaching out to the American students, who were very open, to talk about the culture and the way things work here.”

Ndengeyingoma ended up with a unique opportunity to reflect on his undergraduate years and his experience navigating two different cultures when he was asked to participate in a documentary, “One Day I Too Go Fly,” produced by Arthur Musah ’04, MEng ’05 (who was also an international student).

The documentary, which will be released in 2017, follows Ndengeyingoma and three of his African classmates throughout their undergraduate years. Musah even took a trip to each student’s home country. For Ndengeyingoma, the film provided a much-needed opportunity to slow down and take the time to digest everything that was happening to him.  

“In hindsight it was a great experience to be part of because it forced me to be reflective and introspective about my own experience, and about how these cultural negotiations and all of the different forces that affected me are changing my worldview,” says Ndengeyingoma. “And how my own ego and person have changed and are evolving throughout the years.”

A path to urban planning

Academically, Ndengeyingoma’s undergraduate years at MIT were a time of figuring out what exactly he wanted to do. After deciding to major in civil engineering, he began dabbling in materials science.

As part of MIT’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), Ndengeyingoma spent a semester working in the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics, led by McAfee Professor of Engineering Markus Buehler, where he used computer simulations to see how graphene is deformed by water.

Ndengeyingoma also spent a summer in France, through the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), working with a different category of emerging materials: silica aerogels.

“They're very, very light materials, and they're extremely porous,” says Ndengeyingoma, who worked on adapting a general equation that describes how porous materials absorb fluids, to the irregular porosity of silica aerogels.  

However, the biggest shift in Ndengeyingoma’s academic interests happened right before his senior year, during an internship with an architecture firm called MASS Design Group. Ndengeyingoma spent the summer analyzing the affordable housing market in Kigali, focusing on parameters such as land, infrastructure, construction, building materials, and architecture.

The experience was Ndengeyingoma’s first exposure to urban planning and helped him see how well-designed housing can empower people and improve their lives.  

“Housing has a huge value in securing people's right to a city and making sure that they feel dignified by living where they live and that their housing has a clear connection to their already established social networks, and also to the broader city itself,” explains Ndengeyingoma.  

Ndengeyingoma realized that as an urban planner he would be able to incorporate a strong sense of social responsibility into his work, and that fall he applied to MIT’s master’s program in city planning, in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

The power of housing design

When Ndengeyingoma returned home to Kigali the summer after completing his undergraduate degree, he decided to start considering his city through the lens of urban planning.

“I realized that I hadn't made enough critical observations of my own city and my own living environment,” he says. “And I thought a great medium to do that and start to explore my own city was through photography.”

Ndengeyingoma focused on Nyamirambo, a neighborhood of small stores that lack the usual storefront display windows and instead are painted with colorful images that highlight the products they sell or the services they offer.

“It's just a rainbow of colors and it's really lively,” says Ndengeyingoma.

Back at MIT, Ndengeyingoma held a photo exhibition for students and faculty, which was the start of his involvement in an organization called UrbanAfrica. The group also organizes big events and invites interesting speakers to campus in an effort to engage students and faculty, and elevate the discussion about urbanism on the African continent.   

Now a year into his master’s degree, Ndengeyingoma has continued to focus on housing development in Africa through his research with the Resilient Cities Housing Initiative. Ndengeyingoma spent the last year assessing how successfully an informal housing settlement in Cape Town, South Africa was upgraded according to four main criteria for resilience: improving the economic livelihood of the residents, shielding the residents from environmental stresses and risks, providing tools to empower residents with self-governance, and offering secure land tenure.

“We had this year-long process of mainly looking at the literature but also making our own assumptions and understandings of how that process happened and how it could have happened better, and how resilience plays into all of it,” says Ndengeyingoma.

This past summer, Ndengeyingoma returned once again to Kigali, where he had his first exposure to the public sector when he co-conducted a workshop on the role of design in affordable housing, aimed at the Rwandan Housing Authority.

Ndengeyingoma then spent two months working with a nonprofit architecture firm called General Architecture Collaborative, where he went door to door gathering housing data in rural areas.

“When you're behind your computer, reading papers, it's really great to think about problems theoretically,” he says. “But when you go on the ground and you visit people's houses, and you ask them about their own aspirations, that makes a huge difference in the way you both perceive the problem and [seek] an inclusive solution for them.”

The dual experiences helped Ndengeyingoma realize that he would like to work in the public sector, not only because of the ethical responsibility he feels but because there is so much space for innovative solutions.

For Ndengeyingoma, working in Kigali has been especially meaningful because of what his city and his country has gone through over the past decades. Ndengeyingoma is too young to remember the Rwandan genocide — instead, he has watched his country go through a significant rebuilding phase in the years since. After completing his degree, Ndengeyingoma plans on returning to Rwanda, where he can put his urban planning skills to use shaping the continuing development of his country.  

“I had the chance to be in my city, be in a safe city that wasn't always that way, and I acknowledge the sacrifices that a lot of people had to make to ensure my own right to live in my city in a free environment,” says Ndengeyingoma. “I want to arm myself with the academic and professional tools to ensure people's right to stay in their city and have adequate housing in a space that they feel safe and proud to be in.”

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Lourdes Melgar SM '88, PhD '92 named a Wilhelm Fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies

Lourdes Melgar SM '88, PhD '92, Mexico’s former deputy secretary of energy for hydrocarbons, has been named a Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow at the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS). 

Melgar will be in residence at CIS for the 2016-2017 academic year, during which time she intends to write on Mexico’s energy reform and further research on women’s role in political and social transformation.

"It is an honor to welcome Lourdes back to MIT. She brings with her a prolific career of groundbreaking work in energy security and beyond," said Richard Samuels, director of the Center for International Studies and Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT. "Her time with us will enrich the center’s scholarship. We certainly hope she finds her time here equally rewarding."

Melgar earned her bachelor's from Mount Holyoke College and her MS and PhD, both in political science, from MIT. She would go on to play a key role in the design and implementation of Mexico’s historic energy reform.

Melgar's vision and leadership resulted in the inscription of key elements, including the electricity reform and the social component of the sustainability principle in the new regulatory framework. Her work has begun to transform Mexico’s energy sector into a modern and competitive environment aimed at enhancing energy security, developing regional value chains, and positioning Mexico as an energy hub. Mexico’s first oil contracts and transparent bidding process were designed under her leadership. Melgar has also been a member of the board of Petroleos Mexicanos, Mexico’s National Oil Company, and of Commision Federal de Electricidad, Mexico’s public utility company.

Previously, Melgar was undersecretary for electricity and held various diplomatic positions. She was a member of Mexico's foreign service from 1997 to 2005.

In the academic realm, Melgar was founding director of the Center for Sustainability and Business at EGADE Business School of the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey. She has been a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy of the University of Texas. She has authored articles on energy security, transboundary reservoirs, sustainable development, and the transition to a low carbon economy.

Melgar is a national researcher of the Mexican Council for Science and Technology (CONACYT), a member of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, and president of the Mexican Chapter of the International Women’s Forum. She was recognized as the 2015 Mujer de Retos (translated as "Woman of Challenges"), and she has been awarded the Logro Energético Award and the Vasco de Quiroga Leadership Award, both in 2012.

A generous gift from Robert E. Wilhelm supports the CIS Wilhelm fellowship. The fellowship is awarded to individuals who have held senior positions in public life and is open, for example, to heads of non-profit agencies; senior officials at the U.S. State Department or other government agencies, including ambassadors; or senior officials from the UN or other multilateral agencies. Previous Wilhelm Fellows include: Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe; British Labour politician David Miliband; Ambassador Barbara Bodine; Admiral William Fallon, a former head of CENTCOM; and Yukio Okamoto, a former special advisor to the prime minister of Japan.

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3Q: Berhardt Trout on spurring innovation in drug manufacturing

When it comes to manufacturing drugs, they do make them like they used to. An April report from the Food and Drug Administration stated that today’s plants differ very little from those in the 1960s.

Bernhardt Trout would like to change that. The director of the Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing is a leading advocate for a more automated, flexible drug production process that allows quality checks (and changes) on the fly. The industry standard batch-based system is hindered by stops and starts, requiring, in some cases, multiple plants for each component of a drug. That approach can lead to delays, and potentially more expensive medicines at the pharmacy.

To push for progress, Trout, who holds the first Raymond F. Baddour (1949) Professorship of Chemical Engineering, is co-organizing the 2nd International Symposium on Continuous Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals (ISCMP) Sept. 26-27. Supported by the Continuous Manufacturing and Crystallisation Consortium (CMAC) and Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing, the symposium will bring together representatives from academia, industry, and regulators.

The School of Engineering asked Trout about his thoughts on how leading sectors can work together to spur innovation in pharmaceutical manufacturing.

Q: A recent drastic price increase for the EpiPen emergency allergy treatment has shown a spotlight on how medicines are priced and how the drug industry operates. With manufacturing advances, new technologies, and breakthroughs in chemical and biological engineering, why does drug manufacturing seem so out of kilter relative to other sectors?

A: I can answer from the technology standpoint, and in particular, from a manufacturing technology standpoint. The first thing to say is that it is very, very difficult to make breakthroughs in the pharmaceutical industry.

Human biology is extremely complicated, and fantastic new technologies that look promising for years and years can all of sudden fail. Thus, the true cost of a new product is not just the cost of that product, but of all of the failures along the way. Some of those failures are manufacturing failures, which can delay the launch of a product, and given the finite patent lifetime, increase the effective annual cost.

The wonderful thing about continuous manufacturing technologies is that they can help the industry as a whole cut costs.

Q: You are hosting the 2nd International Symposium on Continuous Manufacturing of Pharmaceuticals this week. What progress has been made since the last time you convened the event?

A: In two years, there have been several submissions to the FDA for continuous processes. These are not end-to-end processes, the ultimate vision, but substantial parts of the whole manufacturing process. Furthermore, the momentum in the industry for continuous manufacturing has increased, so we expect more and more submissions.

That the transition, however, has been slow, slower than we would have hoped. I think the industry has been very conservative about innovating in the manufacturing space.

Certainly, there are a number of reasons, including the very high cost of failure, lack of internal incentives in companies for manufacturing innovation, and regulatory issues.

Q: The increasing cost of health care is one of the major issues in the upcoming U.S. election. What advice would you give to the next president to spur advances?

A: I work with most of the largest pharmaceutical companies, and also medium-sized companies and startups. Across the board, I see very bright and dedicated people who care about helping others and want new therapies to keep coming out.

Similarly, the FDA, from bottom to top, has very bright and dedicated people who care in the same way. But the rate of innovation seems to be decelerating. For example, in terms of costs, pretty much everyone agrees that with existing technologies, continuous manufacturing could save 30 percent in manufacturing costs — and that’s without even the additional potential savings of new technologies. That is $60 billion per year savings in the United States alone.

Yet, if there are all of these good people and all of the potential savings, why is it so far from being exploited? The next president should go about regulatory reform and potentially create tax incentives for investing in innovation. Further, the president should actively work against the demonization of the industry by certain politicians. Yes, certain companies have made mistakes and done bad things, but that is true in many industries.

The industry as a whole provides great benefits to the country and the world. Let’s have the public and the pharma industry work together, not against each other. To accomplish that and unleash tremendous dormant potential would take bold, smart leadership.

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Sharing the excitement of mechanical engineering research

On a Friday afternoon in September, a small clutch of people are gathered around Anthony McDougal to hear him describe his research on the biological and mechanical processes behind the brilliant colors of the butterfly. McDougal, a graduate student in mechanical engineering, raises his voice to be heard over the crowd, and motions to the posters and exhibits behind him, including several live insects at various stages of development.

“And this is only the initial stages,” he says. “If you have additional questions, please get in touch,” he adds, distributing business cards before turning his attention to the next group approaching the exhibit.

Welcome to the third annual Mechanical Engineering Research Exhibition, or MERE, an event that showcases graduate student research projects in an atmosphere that student organizers bill as “casual and low-pressure — but nonetheless exciting!” Eighty participants representing all seven of the department’s key research areas were gathered under vaulted ceilings in Walker Memorial. More than 200 people, including many local-area alumni, came to take in the showcases, which also included projects from the department’s new student-run makerspace, Makerworks.

Crystal Owens and Hangbo Zhao, also graduate students in mechanical engineering, listened closely to McDougal’s presentation. People in their own lab are working with synthetic butterfly wings, they explained. “It is cool that his research group is looking at butterfly wings as they grow, and how that happens in the real world. What they learn can probably teach us about how we can do it in our lab,” said Owens, whose work in modular Lego-based microfluidics was on display earlier.

Nearby, graduate students Rebecca Zubajlo and Alex Benjamin explained their work involving a new diagnostic method for non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Zubajlo said she looks forward to MERE every year: “Mechanical engineering is just so huge. This is a good way to learn about what people are actually researching — to see it all under one roof,” she said.

MERE’s faculty advisor, Nicholas Xuanlai Fang, an associate professor in mechanical engineering, agrees. The high turnout helps students connect over shared interests, and it’s an important opportunity to provide incoming graduate students with a sense of what other people are up to, and what directions their own work could take. “We’ve seen research from large scale to very small scale. It is very diverse,” he said. “So far, so great.”

Sponsored by MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering and organized by the Graduate Association of Mechanical Engineers, the event also includes contests judged by students, postdocs, faculty, and alumni. This year’s keynote speaker was Jon Hirschtick ’83, MS ’86, founder and former CEO of Solidworks Corporation, the most popular 3-D design software in the world. He is also the founder of a new company, Onshape, the first and only full cloud 3-D computer-aided design system.

At another exhibit, MechE graduate student Moritz Graule described the use of electrostatic adhesion for the first ceiling landings of a robotic insect onto a broad set of materials, including glass, wood, and a leaf. This is a key step toward applications of flying robots — holding the potential to significantly improve their endurance, according to his research group. MERE, he said, offers a great opportunity to see what graduate students outside of his field are doing: “I really like to see so many people excited about their research.”

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