In London, a celebration of MIT’s innovative spirit and growing european community

On Jan. 13, more than 360 MIT alumni and friends gathered at London’s Institution of Engineering and Technology on the Thames River, joining MIT President L. Rafael Reif and other guests from MIT. The event was part of MIT's Better World event series, which highlights ground-breaking work by MIT students, faculty, and researchers, and the recently launched MIT Campaign for a Better World.

The evening’s program began with a performance by Tanya Goldhaber ’10, a lead strategist for BT Global Services and an accomplished concert violinist. Goldhaber, whose parents met as students when they both played in the MIT Symphony Orchestra, studied mechanical engineering and music at MIT. Next, Ramzi Y. Rishani ’87, founder, co-chief executive officer, and chief investment officer of Longview Partners in London, introduced President Reif and offered a warm welcome to all attendees.

In his opening remarks, President Reif continued the theme of music. “As [Goldhaber] just reminded us, the success of MIT depends on deep creative harmonies. The harmony between science and art, between exploration and making, between analysis and invention.” He added that the evening’s speakers — Julia Sun ’15, Fiona Murray, and Caleb Harper MA ’14 — were examples of such creative harmonies at work. 

When Julia Sun moved from her small town in Wisconsin to the MIT campus, she felt “like a nanoparticle,” but she soon discovered like-minded friends, mentors, and a passion for high-risk, high-reward work. Today, Sun designs nanotechnologies for neuroscience as a Fulbright scholar and PhD candidate in bioengineering at Imperial College London. “MIT empowered me to go places and make things I never knew existed,” she said.

Fiona Murray, associate dean for innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, co-director of the MIT Innovation Initiative, and the William Porter Professor of Entrepreneurship, has devoted her career to studying the process of innovation, how “innovation ecosystems” function, and how they can be made stronger. “At MIT,” she said, “we believe it is our duty to advocate for the conditions that drive innovation … and it is our responsibility to train our students to be the next generation of global innovators."

Caleb Harper directs the Open Agriculture Initiative at the MIT Media Lab and spends his days in what he calls “the Nerd Farm.” Harper’s team is working to solve some of the toughest challenges in agriculture, such as creating mobile climates for optimal crop-growing, anywhere on the planet. As a graduate student at MIT, and today as a Media Lab investigator, MIT’s culture of inquiry has allowed Harper to “think without limit” and ask provocative questions such as, “[I]f you don’t like the climate you have, [can you] build a new one?” or “What if there were a billion more farmers?” He hopes that his work at MIT will enable future farmers and MIT researchers to continue asking, “What if?”

President Reif ended the program by reflecting on the urgent issues that Sun, Murray, Harper, and many others at MIT are addressing in their work — in human health, the global economy, and the world’s food supply. “To the people of MIT,” he observed,” humanity’s urgent challenges are invitations to action.” The Campaign for a Better World offers everyone in the MIT community a chance to be part of the solutions to those challenges.

“Many of you here have joined in this work already, and I thank you. I promise that your investment will bring huge benefits to society, and that we will make you proud.”

The Better World series continues with events in Tel Aviv on Jan. 22, Los Angeles on Feb. 7, Mexico City on March 23, and Washington on April 13.

Please visit http://ift.tt/2eOlax5 for details and to learn more about the MIT Campaign for a Better World. 

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Projecting food, water, energy, climate and other global changes

"Mapping out a low-carbon future"

"Water scarcity, air pollution, and climate change"

"Projecting the impacts of land-use change"

These recent headlines reflect the breadth of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change. They draw attention not only to climate change, a topic with which the Joint Program has been associated for more than 25 years, but also to changes in energy consumption, water availability, air quality, and land use. While the Joint Program’s overarching purpose — combining scientific research with policy analysis to provide decision-makers with independent, integrative assessments of the impacts of global change and how best to respond — has remained steadfast since its inception in 1991, its research portfolio has expanded considerably in recent years. As a result, the program has redefined its work in terms of seven research focus areas and four research tools.

The seven research focus areas include food, water and forestry; infrastructure and air pollution; natural ecosystems; energy; Earth system science; climate policy; and regional analysis for the Americas, Asia, Europe and Africa. The four research tools consist of analytical methods to quantify risk at global and regional scales and three Joint Program models covering the Earth system (the MIT Earth System Model or MESM), human system (the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis, or EPPA model) and a global framework (the Integrated Global System Modeling, or IGSM, framework) that simulates the interplay between Earth and human systems.

“Most of our work will fall in more than one of these broad categories, and likely several of them,” says Joint Program Co-Director John Reilly. “As we accept the reality of global environmental change and the Earth as a system that’s continuously impacted by human activity, our research must become more granular. This granularity is intended to enable decision-makers to more easily develop effective strategies to limit our impact on the environment and adapt to unavoidable changes.”

Toward that end, the Joint Program has developed a new website that places these categories front and center. The new globalchange.mit.edu enables visitors to learn about advances the program is making in its seven core research focus areas and in the development of four main research tools used to project changes in those seven areas.

While the homepage highlights the breadth of the program’s research portfolio, the landing pages for the seven research focus areas and four research tools showcase the depth of the program’s work. Each landing page includes an introduction to the topic; the latest publications, news, and media coverage; active research projects; and researchers associated with the research focus area or tool.

Visitors may also access reverse-chronological-order displays of all Joint Program and peer-reviewed research publications; signature publications — the program’s triennial Global Changes newsletter and annual Food, Water, Energy and Climate Outlook; and other news, media, and event coverage.

“We believe this new website will allow both the public and our research sponsors to find what they are looking for more quickly, and to better recognize the variety of studies undertaken by our researchers,” says Reilly.

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MIT, Conservation International announce collaboration on climate adaptation and mitigation

MIT and Conservation International (CI) will participate in a multiyear collaboration to develop and advance nature-based solutions to global climate change, through research, education, and outreach efforts, the organizations announced today.

The collaboration brings together MIT’s technical, scientific, and engineering expertise with Conservation International’s expansive environmental programs, to look for ways that forests, coastal ecosystems, and urban areas can be managed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change.

The collaboration launches today with a one-day hackathon at MIT that invites participants to team up on ideation and early-state design of nature-based, technologically savvy solutions to climate challenges in developing world communities. The collaboration will involve MIT students in CI’s international fieldwork and will initially include four joint research projects in which scientists will focus directly on climate challenges already having an impact in places such as the Philippines and the Amazon Basin.

The collaboration was established by MIT’s Office of the Vice President for Research and will be managed by MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). ESI Director John E. Fernández, a professor of building technology in the Department of Architecture, says the collaboration is unique in its focus on “surprising, novel, and untested applications of science and engineering in the field of conservation.” MIT President L. Rafael Reif is also a member of CI’s board of directors

“We feel there is significant potential value in linking different disciplines and perspectives, for example engineering with ecology, while leveraging advances in big-data analysis, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to address the priorities and goals of conservation in ways that may not have been considered before this,” Fernández says.

“CI is thrilled to be part of this pioneering collaboration with the world’s premier scientific and engineering institute for research and learning,” says Daniela Raik, senior vice president and managing director at Conservation International. “Together we can design and implement innovative solutions to real-world challenges around the globe.”

MIT and CI began exploring a potential collaboration last year, with two key workshops held April 25 and July 26 that brought together MIT faculty and staff and the scientific leadership of Conservation International. At the meetings, participants discussed ways to use science and engineering to unlock the full potential of natural systems in storing climate-warming carbon emissions and helping communities adapt to climate change’s impacts, such as flooding and food insecurity.

“Nature plays a critical role in helping society offset the impacts of climate change,” says Raik. “For instance, tropical forests and other ecosystems can provide at least 30 percent of the mitigation needed to achieve the 2 or 1.5 degree [Celsius] targets that were set in the Paris Agreement last year.”

The groups agreed to focus their efforts on the interface between human activity and natural systems, as an important source of solutions to address climate change. CI has worked at this human-nature interface for decades, says Fernández, in multiple field offices that develop conservation plans in the context of local governmental, economic, social, and cultural systems.

“At the core of MIT’s climate action plan is the idea that we can have a much bigger real-world impact if we engage with other organizations, and this collaboration with Conservation International exemplifies that idea,” says Maria T. Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research. “Together, our goal is to move from education and research to the implementation of solutions that harness nature to both mitigate climate change and help communities around the world prepare for its impacts.” 

The MIT-CI collaboration will include new educational and outreach activities. For MIT students, that could mean traveling to CI field sites in the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Oceanscape to do hands-on work on local environmental projects alongside local stakeholders. A Student Action Corps will provide students with opportunities to engage public audiences on climate issues and solutions through blog posts, op-eds, and other digital and print communications.

Education and outreach activities will also include guest lectures at MIT by CI scientists as well as other shared teaching opportunities; postdoctoral fellowships; workshops for researchers from developing countries; class materials for K-12 students; crowdsourcing contests powered by MIT’s Climate CoLab platform; annual symposia; and a joint, web-based public portal on nature-based solutions to climate mitigation and adaptation.

The first research projects planned for the MIT-CI collaboration will pair ongoing CI field office work with extensions of studies already underway by MIT researchers. In one project, for instance, Heidi M. Nepf, the Donald and Martha Harleman Professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, will work with CI scientists to further develop a model of mangrove strength and the effects of wave drag and turbulence on key plants. While mangrove forests could be used as important “green infrastructure” to protect coastal areas, governments and engineers have been slow to adopt their conservation and management without more data on how mangroves could best be deployed to protect communities from severe flooding and erosion.

The Nepf lab will develop and test its model through CI’s field offices in the Visayas region of the central Philippines, the site of severe damage by Typhoon Haiyan in 2013. CI is already working with the national and local governments on mangrove forest restoration in the area.

"I am excited to work with Dr. Emily Pidgeon at CI, who is an international leader and advocate in coastal zone conservation for carbon mitigation and natural coastal defense,” Nepf says. “The MIT-CI collaboration will greatly expand the reach of my research with Dr. Maria Maza, facilitating better design of natural defense and more precise evaluation of carbon sequestration for proposed mangrove restoration projects.”

Altogether, planned MIT-CI research projects will involve numerous departments, labs, and programs at MIT, and will explore topics including the use of sensors to monitor natural resources; the social, economic, and environmental impact of climate adaptation efforts in developing countries; and how natural ecosystems provide for urban needs.

The new collaboration also supports MIT’s five-year Plan for Action on Climate Change, especially with regard to the plan’s goal of engaging with other organizations to advance research into solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change, Fernández says. “We see this collaboration as a way to bring the deep expertise in engineering and other fields at MIT to opportunities for nature-based solutions to climate change that may not have been part of the MIT community’s focus before this.”

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Smart city fixtures

Equipped with high-tech versions of common city fixtures — namely, smart benches and digital information signs — and fueled by a “deploy or die” attitude, MIT Media Lab spinout Changing Environments is hoping to accelerate the development of “smart” cities that use technology to solve urban challenges.

“The idea is to bring simple technologies to the streets,” says CEO Sandra Richter, a former Media Lab researcher who co-founded the startup with Nan Zhao, a Media Lab PhD student, and Jutta Friedrichs, a Harvard University graduate. “When it comes to smart cities, there’s been a lot of talking, but not a lot of doing. If you don’t want this [smart city] concept to die, you need to bring real-world examples to the places where we live, work, and play.”

The women-founded startup is the brains behind the Soofa Benches that have cropped up around Boston and Cambridge, including on MIT’s campus. The benches contain an embedded charging station powered by a mini solar panel, with two USB ports for plugging in mobile devices. They also connect to wireless networks.

First installed in Boston in June 2014, the benches are now in 65 cities across 23 U.S. states, including in New York; Washington; Los Angeles; Boulder, Colorado; Oklahoma City; and Austin, Texas. Cities in Canada, Costa Rica, Saudi Arabia, and Germany have adopted the benches as well. The startup also sells a Soofa charging station independently, which can be integrated into existing city infrastructure.

Recently, Changing Environments starting deploying its second solar-powered product, the Soofa Sign, in Metro Boston spots including in Kendall Square in Cambridge, Samuel Adams Park in Boston, and Porter Square in Cambridge and Somerville. Each sign has apps installed that display public transit times, weather, and events, among other information. This month, the startup will select three additional cities where it will pilot the Soofa Sign.

Each Soofa product comes equipped with sensors that gather pedestrian-traffic data for cities, and can be considered part of the “internet of things” (IoT), in which many kinds of everyday devices are wirelessly connected and exchange data. This data can be used by cities to make decisions about funding city developments, events, and other initiatives that impact the public.

Deploy or die

Richter and Zhao came together in the Media Lab after realizing they shared similar interests in developing “persuasive” technologies that helped people live healthier and more sustainably.

Richter studied in the Changing Places group led by Principal Research Scientist Kent Larson, where she designed technologies and apps that encouraged people to bike more, use electric cars, and maintain other healthy practices. (Richter was named one of the most creative people in business by Fast Company in 2013 for her work at the lab.) Zhao, a student in the Responsive Environments group led by Joseph Paradiso, the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Professor in Media Arts and Sciences, develops technologies that help people save energy by using less light. The startup’s name, in fact, is a combination of the two group names.

Many of Richter and Zhao’s projects centered on building for smart cities, in which IoT devices would collect data to help improve efficiency of services and meet residents’ needs. As a side project, in 2013, they decided to build an IoT fixture that could be easily deployed in urban areas and would benefit the public.

“And what is better than a park bench?” Richter says. “It’s something we have all around the globe, has existed for centuries, and is a place for people to connect with each other. For us, that was the ideal platform to start introducing sensors into the public environment.”

From there, things moved quickly. Influenced by the Media Lab’s oft-repeated motto, “deploy or die,” Richter and Zhao, then joined by Friedrichs, developed a concrete prototype of the current Soofa Bench model, “every now and then turning the Media Lab into a concrete mess,” Richter says, laughing.

Thanks to a meeting facilitated by Larson with Boston’s Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, the first Soofa Bench prototype was installed in Titus Sparrow Park in June 2014. One week after, Richter took the prototype to the first White House Maker’s Faire, where she sat down with then-President Barack Obama to discuss the bench and the future of smart cities.

Upon returning to Boston, the three co-founders embarked on a “crazy summer where everything happened,” Zhao says.

Verizon and Cisco — which invests in IoT technologies — had funded the students to develop more Soofa Benches. But the students didn’t even have a company bank account. “So literally a couple days before Cisco transferred money, we said, ‘Alright, we need to start a company,’” Richter says.

Naming themselves Changing Environments, the students cranked out about 10 benches in the Media Lab as part of a pilot launch for spots in the Boston Common, the Rose Kennedy Greenway, and other Boston locations. In mid-2015, Changing Environments opened headquarters in East Cambridge and brought its first commercial Soofa Bench to Central Square, in Cambridge, before spreading to dozens of other U.S. and international cities.

An icon for IoT

Today, the Soofa Benches are certainly seeing use. Charging activity is tracked at headquarters where, in a lighthearted competition, the office has a “bench leadership board” with benches that see the most charging activity. Currently holding the top spot is “Amelia,” the startup’s first commercial bench in Cambridge’s Central Square, with 1,817 total hours charged over a total of 3,571 charging sessions, as of mid-January. (Soofa encourages cities to name each bench to keep things amusing and engaging.)

Benches in Harvard Square and on the Rose Kennedy Greenway have logged around 2,500 charging sessions. Some newly installed benches in New York City, which were just implemented in May 2016, already have more than 2,000 sessions charged.

On the back end, Soofa fixtures collect valuable data for the city governments that purchase them. The sensors count the wireless signals emitted from pedestrians’ mobile devices and assign an activity level for the location. Cities can use Soofa software to check if activity was high or low in certain areas at certain times. A city may note, for instance, that a certain event drew a big crowd and may decide to host similar events.

More broadly, Richter says, installing Soofa Benches — often a publicized event — can open discussions about smart cities. When benches are installed in a new city, the mayor or other city official usually meets the co-founders at the bench to discuss the technology and its benefits and limitations. In that way, Soofa serves as “an icon for internet of things in cities,” Richter says.

The MIT connection

Now a thriving startup, Changing Environments owes some of its success to MIT’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, the co-founders say, including an early investment from the Media Lab’s E14 Fund, which provides stipends, mentoring, introductions to investors, and basic legal and accounting services to recent MIT graduates such as Richter.

The E14 Fund, Richter says, gave her a great “runway” for transitioning from student to entrepreneur. “It’s like you’re still under the wing of the lab, but you’re just learning how to fly,” she says.

The newly deployed Soofa Sign, Richter adds, came about through a collaboration with MIT spinout E Ink — which invented electronic ink for e-readers and other devices — that was initiated by Joi Ito, director of the Media Lab. “It’s beautiful to see two MIT companies working together to push the envelope on a product,” Richter says.

This winter, MIT professors also helped the startup recruit interns for the Institute’s Independent Activities Period. And mentors still offer advice when needed. “It’s been great to continue the relationship with professors, students, and the MIT community as a whole,” Richter says.

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LEGO Foundation endows Media Lab fellowships in honor of Seymour Papert

The LEGO Foundation, a longtime supporter of the MIT Media Lab, has created a graduate student fellowship program in honor of founding lab faculty member Seymour Papert, who died on July 31 last year. At a Media Lab event today, celebrating Papert’s ideas and work, the LEGO Foundation announced that it is creating the LEGO Papert Fellowships. Each year the program will fund the work of three Media Lab graduate students who are working at the intersection of creativity, play, learning, and new technologies. The first LEGO Papert fellows will be named this September.

Papert was considered one of the world’s leading learning theorists and educational-technology visionaries. His constructionist theory emphasized that children learn most effectively when they are playfully engaged in constructing meaningful projects in the world.

“Seymour showed how programming is a very creative process, similar to building with LEGO bricks. Children put commands or bricks together, reflect and evaluate, modify their creation and try again. They find endless possibilities — and whatever they make, it’s right. Seymour’s strong and timeless ideas about children, play, experimentation and learning are still today at the very core of what we do at The LEGO Group,” says Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, The LEGO Group owner and member of the LEGO Foundation board. “Just as Seymour inspired us, it is important that we continue to bring his ideas forward so that others can be inspired by his work.”

Papert was among the first to recognize the revolutionary potential of computers in education, believing that computers could provide children with new opportunities for exploring, experimenting, and expressing themselves. In the late 1960s, he came up with the idea for Logo, the first programming language for children. Papert began collaborating with the Denmark-based LEGO Company in 1985, the same year the Media Lab was established. The LEGO Mindstorms robotics product, launched in 1998, was named in honor of his seminal 1980 book, “Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas.”

When the LEGO Company endowed a faculty chair at the Media Lab in 1989, Papert became the first LEGO Professor of Learning Research. When he retired from the lab, the name of the chair was expanded in his honor to the LEGO Papert Professorship.

“The Media Lab’s largest and longest corporate collaboration, uninterrupted for 32 years, has been with LEGO because both organizations openly advocate the value of play as foundational to how children learn learning itself,” says Nicholas Negroponte, founding director of the Media Lab.

The new LEGO Papert Fellowship program, funded with a $3 million endowment from the LEGO Foundation, will support the work of three Media Lab graduate students each year. The Media Lab will select fellows from its enrolled graduate students, choosing those whose research builds upon and extends Papert’s ideas. In order to maintain strong cultural diversity, the lab will select fellows annually from three different continents. The fellows will have regular interaction with the LEGO Foundation, LEGO Group, LEGO Education, and the company’s partner networks.

"In today’s fast-changing world, Seymour’s ideas about learning and education are more important and pertinent than ever before," says current LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research Mitchel Resnick, a former student and longtime collaborator of Papert. "The new LEGO Papert Fellowships will support the Media Lab’s continuing efforts to build on Seymour’s powerful ideas, opening new learning opportunities for children around the world." 

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What can we learn from lottery spending?

What can we learn from where people buy their lottery tickets — and how much they spend?

“City Digits: Local Lotto,” a project from the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT, is exploring this question with the help of Brooklyn high school students who live in low-income neighborhoods where lottery spending is significant.

“Through their participation in City Digits: Local Lotto, high school students have the opportunity to use data they gathered and explored as evidence to support and voice their ideas about the lottery and its impact on their neighborhoods,” says Sarah Williams, director of the Civic Design Data Lab and assistant professor of urban planning at MIT. “In today’s data-driven society, the ability to work with and analyze data will be an essential tool for these students when pursuing a variety of careers or social justice initiatives. And from transportation planning to allocation of health care funding, the ability to work with data has become essential to engage in civic policy making.”

Data visualizations, interviews with lottery ticket buyers and sellers, and other results of the project are on view at the Cooper Hewitt museum through Feb. 26, as part of the “By the People: Designing a Better America” exhibition.

The City Digits: Local Lotto project is an ongoing collaboration with Laurie Rubel, associate professor of secondary education at CUNY’s Brooklyn College, and the Center for Urban Pedagogy, a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization that uses the power of design and art to increase meaningful civic engagement. The project has two goals: to develop and pilot innovative tools to help improve data literacy for high school students and to educate them about issues that directly affect their communities; and to examine the economic effect of the state-sponsored lottery on low-income neighborhoods in New York City.

The first module from City Digits: Local Lotto was pilot tested twice in 2013 with 120 students from the Bushwick School for Social Justice. The centerpiece of the project website — and the Cooper Hewitt exhibition — is a colorful interactive map that helps users visualize geographic patterns in lottery spending.

The map allows users to toggle between income percentage spent on lottery, average winnings versus spending per store, and net gain or loss per store. Through a bold array of teal, purple, green, and pink, the map reveals that residents living under the poverty line spend a higher proportion of their income on lottery tickets than those in more affluent neighborhoods. This finding allowed students to conclude that the lottery is “a scam, because it targets low-income areas.”

Users also have the ability to toggle between “City Level,” which organizes information by neighborhood, and “Street Level,” which reveals lottery sales and prize amounts for every store in the city. Additionally, users can zoom in until every street is visible with specific markers for each store, showing that almost all stores take in more income from lottery ticket sales than they pay out in prize money.

The project afforded students the opportunity to think critically about the lottery at a variety of spatial scales, using mathematics to support their findings. Williams found that students learn best when facing a subject that is relevant to their lives. “Integrating real-world data into the classroom brings an added level of authenticity and civic awareness,” she says, “ultimately turning otherwise disconnected mathematical investigations into rich and connected learning experiences.”

The Local Lotto curriculum uses an interactive web tool to help students learn how to calculate the probability of winning a jackpot lottery game before conducting and collecting interviews of lottery players and retailers in their neighborhood. Students then analyze citywide and local-level lottery data obtained from the New York State Lottery Commission and public data from the 2010 Census, using an interactive map.

Lastly, students synthesize qualitative interview data with quantitative map data to formulate their own opinions about the lottery’s social impact. Students create multimedia narratives called "tours" using the web tool to present what they have learned. Developing the tours allows students to synthesize their data explorations and form opinions — an important component of data literacy.

“Local Lotto accomplished many things at once,” Williams says. “It collected and organized valuable data about the local lottery while also providing high school students with the unique opportunity to improve both their data literacy and understanding of social justice issues through a hands-on curriculum.”  

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SMART’s new innovation office to launch scientists from bench to business

In tandem with the Singapore’s government launch of SG-Innovate — the new agency that connects entrepreneurs with industry mentors, venture capitalists and research talent — Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) has launched its new SMART@SG-Innovate Office.

Housed within the SG-Innovate office, SMART’s new office is a physical extension of the SMART Innovation Center — an entity under the ambit of SMART that models the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT. The SMART Innovation Center aims to nurture scientists and engineers so that their innovations can be accelerated to commercialisation. The SMART Innovation Center offers two sets of innovation grants in the areas of physical and biological-oriented science and engineering sometimes called the deep sciences. As a leading innovation center with almost a decade of experience in training startups, SMART’s flagship programs include:

• SMART Catalyst, a network of trained people who are catalysts with domain knowledge in the deep sciences to help drive projects to company formation and commercial impact;
• SMART Bootcamp, a three-week entrepreneurship bootcamp for recipients of the SMART Innovation Grant, which teaches the fundamentals of venture building in the deep sciences; and
• SMART Fellowship, a program aimed primarily at postdocs in the deep sciences to develop a talent group of chief technology officers and chief science officers for deep science-based startup companies.

One of the successful firms that has gone through SMART's startup program include Visenti, a smart water analytics company that was recently acquired by water technology provider Xylem. 

“Singapore has a vibrant entrepreneurial scene which can be enabled further with a stronger ecosystem that ties in all parties at the different levels of innovation, and it is very encouraging that the government has taken the lead in making this a reality, with a strong focus on the finance, energy, and health sectors,” says Howard Califano, director of the SMART Innovation Center. “We are confident that SMART@SG-Innovate will be a critical node in the SG-Innovate network, serving as a platform for scientists, engineers, and researchers and its partners to co-create new solutions for Singapore and beyond.” 

Daniel Hastings, SMART CEO and director, says: “Propelling scientists and researchers from bench to business take a lot of gumption, tenacity and above all, a network and links to a strong ecosystem. SMART is committed to working in close collaboration with all stakeholders in this ecosystem to make innovative solutions a reality in Singapore and beyond. MIT wants to learn about innovation through the activities of SMART@SG-Innovate.”

The SMART Innovation Center is funded through SMART by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) program.

Officially launched by Singapore's Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam, SG-Innovate aims to take the Singapore startup ecosystem to the next level. To participate in any of the programmes, contact candy@smart.mit.edu.

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