School of Science professors granted tenure

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

This year’s newly-tenured professors are:

Mircea Dincă, associate professor in the Department of Chemistry, addresses research challenges related to the storage and consumption of energy and global environmental concerns through the synthesis and characterization of new inorganic and organic materials. His work has applications in heterogeneous catalysis, energy conversion and storage, chemical sensing, gas separation, and water-based technologies including adsorption heat pumps and water production and purification. By designing and synthesizing new materials, Dincă aims to learn more about fundamental processes such as electron and ion transport through ordered solids, the reactivity and electrochemistry of low-coordinate metal ions in porous crystals, the effects of conformational changes on the electronic properties of molecules, and the behavior of materials at the interface with solid-state devices.

Dincă earned a BS in chemistry at Princeton University and a PhD in inorganic chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley. Following a postdoc appointment at MIT in the Department of Chemistry, he joined its faculty in 2010. Among Dincă’s awards and honors are an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Camille Dreyfus Teacher-Scholar Award, and the Alan T. Waterman Award

Liang Fu, the Lawrence C. (1944) and Sarah W. Biedenharn Career Development Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics, is interested in novel topological phases of matter and their experimental realizations. He works on the theory of topological insulators and topological superconductors, with a focus on predicting and proposing their material realizations and experimental signatures. He is also interested in potential applications of topological materials, ranging from tunable electronics and spintronics, to quantum computation.

Fu obtained a BS in physics from the University of Science and Technology of China and a PhD in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. Following an appointment as a Junior Fellow at Harvard University, he joined the MIT faculty in 2012. Fu is the recipient of a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering and the New Horizons in Physics Prize.

Jeff Gore, associate professor in the Department of Physics, uses experimentally-tractable microcosms such as bacterial communities to explore the physics of complex living systems, examining how interactions between individuals drives the evolution and ecology of communities. Gore’s primary areas of research include the behavior of populations near tipping points that lead to collapse, the evolution of cooperative behaviors within a species or community, and the determining factors for multi-species diversity within a community.

Gore received a BS in physics, mathematics, economics, and electrical engineering from MIT and a PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to MIT as a Pappalardo Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Physics and subsequently joined the faculty in 2010. Gore’s awards and honors include an Allen Distinguished Investigator Award, an NIH Director's New Innovator Award, and a National Science Foundtion CAREER Award.

Jeremiah Johnson, the Firmenich Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry, designs macromolecules and their syntheses to address problems in chemistry, medicine, biology, energy, and polymer physics. Johnson works with a range of materials and applications, including nano-scale, brush-arm star polymer architectures for in vivo drug delivery, imaging, and self-assembly; hydrogels for the analysis of how molecular network defects impact mechanics; and polymers for surface functionalization and energy storage.

Johnson completed a BS in biomedical engineering and chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis and a PhD in chemistry at Columbia University. Following an appointment as a Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Scholar at the Caltech, Johnson joined the MIT faculty in 2011. Johnson is the recipient of several awards including an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award.

Brad Pentelute, the Pfizer-Laubach Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry, modifies naturally occurring proteins to enhance their therapeutic properties for human medicine, focusing on the use of cysteine arylation to generate abiotic macromolecular proteins, the precision delivery of biomolecules into cells, and the development of fast flow platforms to rapidly produce polypeptides.

Pentelute earned a BS in chemistry and a BA in psychology at the University of Southern California, followed by a PhD in organic chemistry at the University of Chicago. After a postdoc fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Pentelute joined the MIT faculty in 2011. His awards and honors include an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, a Novartis Early Career Award, and an Amgen Young Investigator Award.

Jesse Thaler, associate professor of physics, is a theoretical particle physicist whose research focus is the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment at CERN. Thaler aims to maximize the discovery potential of the LHC by applying theoretical insights from quantum field theory. He is particularly interested in novel methods to test the properties of dark matter at the LHC and beyond, as well as the theoretical structures and experimental signatures of supersymmetry. Thaler also develops new methods to characterize jets, which are collimated sprays of particles that are copiously produced at the LHC. These techniques exploit the substructure of jets to enhance the search for new physics as well as to illuminate the structure of the standard model itself.

Thaler received his PhD in physics from Harvard University and his BS in mathematics and physics from Brown University. After a fellowship at the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science at the University of California at Berkeley, he joined the MIT faculty in the Department of Physics in 2010. His awards and honors include an Early Career Research Award from the U.S. Department of Energy, a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers from the White House, an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and an MIT Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award.

Matthew Vander Heiden is the Eisen and Chang Career Development Associate Professor in the Department of Biology. His laboratory is studying how mammalian cell metabolism is adapted to support function, with a particular focus on the role metabolism plays in cancer. He uses mouse models to study how changes in metabolism impact all aspects of cancer progression with a goal of finding novel ways to exploit altered metabolism to help patients.

Vander Heiden earned a BS, an MD, and a PhD from the University of Chicago, and completed his clinical training in internal medicine and medical oncology at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. After postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School, Vander Heiden joined the faculty of the MIT Department of Biology and the Koch Institute in 2010. Among Vander Heiden’s awards and honors include a Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Sciences, a Damon Runyon-Rachleff Innovation Award, a Stand Up To Cancer Innovative Research Grant, and being named a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Faculty Scholar.

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How J-PAL thinks globally and acts locally

It is a huge question in development economics: If a program yields good results in one country, will it work in another? Does a vaccination policy in India translate to Africa? Does a teen-pregnancy prevention program in Kenya work in Rwanda?

And: Why or why not?

Leaders of MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), one of world’s foremost centers for antipoverty research, have developed their own formal framework for thinking about this vexing question, over the last several years. Now, in a new article, two J-PAL directors have unveiled the lab’s approach.

“At J-PAL, we spend a lot of time talking with policymakers and giving advice, but we’d never really written [this] down in a systematic way,” says Rachel Glennerster, the executive director of J-PAL and a co-author of the new article. “This is a framework that can be used by other people who want to do this kind of work.”

Co-author Mary Ann Bates, the deputy executive director of J-PAL North America, says the new paper is a response to years of queries: “One of the most frequent questions that we get at J-PAL is a version of, ‘So a program worked in one place. Is it likely to work in my context?’”

The J-PAL method of operation, it turns out, is less about replicating bottom-line results of programs down to the last decimal point than it is about understanding the mechanisms that make programs successful.

“If you completely replicated a program, you wouldn’t expect to have identical results in a different place,” Glennerster says.

But if the general conditions that make a program work in one place hold elsewhere, then a J-PAL-style antipoverty program can get traction more widely.   

The paper, “The Generalizability Puzzle,” appears in the summer 2017 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review, and sets out four basic steps that the lab’s researchers use when thinking about replicating or scaling up an antipoverty program in a new setting.

Four easy pieces

Founded in 2003 by MIT economists Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee, and Sendhil Mullainathan (who is now at Harvard University), J-PAL has become the most high-profile academic enterprise of its kind. The lab incorporates a broad network of scholars dedicated to field experiments — randomized controlled trials, or RCTs — evaluating the effectiveness of antipoverty programs.

J-PAL works extensively with governments, NGOs, and international development groups to implement and evaulate programs. In the past, J-PAL experiments have demonstrated new methods of improving anything from vaccination rates, to school attendance, to safe water use. Glennerster helped establish Deworm the World, based on J-PAL research, a nonprofit that provides deworming pills to 150 million children a year.

And as Glennerster notes, “There is huge interest in the policy world in trying to better use the results of research.” Here, then, are the four steps J-PAL recommends when considering if an antipoverty program would translate to a new setting:

Step one: What are the components of the theory behind the program?

In India, a local J-PAL program providing a small incentive to parents — a couple of pounds of lentils — led to a massive increase in child immunizations, from 6 percent to 39 percent. The theory behind the program rests on a few assumptions: that parents are not inherently opposed to immunizing their children; that people respond to modest incentives; that people will procrastinate on important tasks; and that in some parts of India, lentils are a good incentive mechanism.

To think about how well a program would translate to another location, break down the larger action into these kinds of smaller components, and see if the program would still be viable, even in parallel form, the authors advise.

“If you use lentils to incentive people to get immunized, you wouldn’t get much of an effect in Boston,” Glennerster observes. “They are a very desirable thing in this bit of India where we were working, though.”

Step two: Does that theory apply to local conditions?

In Kenya, one J-PAL experiment produced a successful program to prevent teenage pregnancies by informing adolescent girls about the risks of contracting HIV from older men — 28 percent of whom had HIV in the district where the original intervention took place. This turned out to be a considerable deterrent for the girls who participated in education programs about their own risks.

J-PAL researchers subsequently considered trying out the program in Rwanda, too. But then they conducted surveys and discovered something quite different about the local conditions. Female students estimated that over 20 percent of Rwandan men in their 20s were HIV-positive, whereas only 1.7 percent actually are. As a result, the J-PAL researchers recommended against replicating the program in Rwanda. Because the students were dramatically over-estimating local HIV rates, highlighting the actual rates in an information campaign might have led to an increase in risky behavior.

“That’s not just a matter of sitting and scratching our heads, wondering,” Bates says. “That was targeted information that could be gathered that got right at the heart of the question of whether this intervention would be likely to work in a new context.”

And as Bates emphasizes, it was not necessary to replicate the entire experiment to make an assessment about the program’s adaptability. 

Step three: How strong is the evidence that the desired behavioral change will occur?

Consider again programs trying to get people to invest time and money in preventive medicine, whether through vaccinations, additional visits to medical clinics, or other means. Researchers have gathered evidence that people in many countries ignore preventative health care,  making this a good issue to tackle globally.

“People’s unwillingness to pay much for preventative health is something you find all around the world,” Glennerster says. “People are surprisingly unwilling to invest in preventative health, and small barriers can prevent them from taking up otherwise good options.”

Moreover, Glennerster emphasizes, the evidence for this does not have to be derived from RCTs performed by groups such as J-PAL. The weightier the evidence of a generalized problem, the more likely it is that some variation of a program will apply in new settings.

Step four: What is the evidence that the implementation process can be carried out well?

This last point requires very solid on-the-gound knowledge about the locale where an antipoverty program may be carried out: Are there functional institutions that can do the nuts-and-bolts program work?

“Even if a program may be based on a well-validated view of human behavior, you’ve got to know about the local context, about people’s ability to deliver it,” Glennerster says. “And that’s going to be very specific. Is the government or NGO good at implementing things?”

Don’t just replicate

Through all these points, at least one larger theme emerges: People are people, wherever they may live, and human nature is fairly consistent around the globe. Thus, as Bates and Glennerster write in the paper, “underlying human behaviors are more likely to generalize than specific programs.”

That means researchers and antipoverty leaders should think carefully about the core behavioral mechanisms within programs, and about how to adapt existing programs to novel settings. People need water and want good education, from continent to continent; the best way to deliver clean water and quality education may differ.

Bates and Glennerster say they have received a generally positive reception when presenting the J-PAL framework — Glennerster has presented it at the World Bank, among other places — and they hope the new article will gain traction in the community of antipoverty leaders.

“It’s not that nobody’s thought of this before,” Glennerster says. “I think what people have found useful is us providing a clear step-by-step process. It just gives people a clearer framework.”

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Play Labs announces first class of VR/AR/playful startups and demo session

Play Labs @ MIT, a summer accelerator hosted at the MIT Game Lab, has announced the first batch of startups that have been admitted to the program. This first cohort will meet from June to August, and a demonstration session will take place on Aug. 15 at 6 p.m. at MIT in Room 10-250.

The overall focus of the accelerator is on startups that employ “playful tech” in a variety of industries. The first batch of startups was selected with a concentration on virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), as well as online gaming and esports.

The first batch consists of startups spanning a wide breadth of categories, including: VR pets and games (2 startups); VR business applications (2 startups); AR/mixed reality applications and tools (2 startups); VR/VRWeb/360 development tech (3 startups); esports (2 startups); machine vision and deep learning (2 startups); and online games (2 startups).

“We are excited at the quality and breadth of startups that we have in our first batch,” says Rizwan Virk, executive director of Play Labs @ MIT. “Being on campus at MIT gave us access to many innovative entrepreneurs and technologies, and while we had many applicants, the startups we selected in this first class represent the best applications of playful technology. I’m personally inspired to help the next group of MIT startups go on to great success.”

“The inaugural class began with teams of creative, passionate and determined people,” says Tuff Yen, president of Seraph Group and partner at Play Labs @ MIT. “This is history in the making.”

The startups in the first cohort include:

• Coresights, which provides evidence-based training to improve wellness and enhance resilience. The platform combines virtual and augmented reality technologies with clinical-grade wearables to make training engaging and capture real-time data.

• Datavized, which brings another dimension to enterprise and big data with 3-D visualization. Combining the immersive power of virtual reality with the seamless delivery of the mobile web, the software enables cross platform collaboration and enhanced decision making.

• Empathy Box: a company that aims at revolutionizing immersive storytelling. It is the first project by Empathy Box is Myth Machine, a first-person mystery-adventure set in the weird, magical world of tech startups.

• Escape Labs, which uses innovative technology to create augmented reality and mixed reality (AR/MR) experiences for escape rooms, team-building exercises, and room-scale puzzles. The startup's goal is to transform the ordinary physical space into a high-quality 4-D experience using holographic content.

• Esports One, a revolutionary esports company, comprised of esportspedia, one of the largest esports information resources in the world, and providing an advanced computer vision and real-time data analysis platform for esports

• Hidden Switch, which is developing a digital card battler, Spellsource, whose new gameplay lets you connect with the biggest stars in esports. Based on research at the MIT Media Lab, its mission is to make everybody part of a great player's journey.

• Minda Labs, which offers virtual reality diversity training to companies that are looking for fresh, research-driven approaches to improving company culture. The startup's game simulations help employees build empathy and communication skills through practice and feedback from peers.

• RidgeLine, which creates RoVR, the first realistic VR dog simulator that allows players to give tummy rubs to, dress up, and take care of a virtual best canine friend.

• SavvyStat, specializing in deep learning and predictive tools and dashboards for managing virtual economies and virtual goods.

• Team Future, which creates Black Hat Cooperative, an award-winning stealth game that pits a player and an ally against robot agents that seek to remove the player from the system.

• Total Respawn, which creates real-life shooter games for action sports arenas with augmented reality. The startup's product lineup aims to feature experiences from shooting one's way out of a zombie apocalypse to a military-themed "laser tag on steroids."

• VRemedy, which creates new, empowering locomotion for VR. The MIT startup is focused on mitigating nausea through movement design and training sequences that are specialized to teach motion in the most comfortable manner. Providing development tools alongside a “VR motion acclimation” app will allow developers to provide new levels of immersion for users prone to motion sickness.

• Wonda VR, which develops intuitive tools to turn 360-degree videos into engaging VR experiences. It provides a simple drag-and-drop interface and a one-click publishing solution that puts the power of experiential storytelling in the hands of every video creator.

The Play Labs @ MIT demo session will be open to investors, members of the MIT community, and the general public. In addition to the physical event, the session, beginning at 6 p.m. on Aug. 15, will be streamed live via playlabs.tv.

Play Labs is an incubator/accelerator at MIT that invests and mentors startups utilizing playful technology in a variety of industries. Play Labs is run by by Bayview Labs and its executive director, Rizwan Virk '92, a Silicon Valley angel investor, advisor, and mentor, in conjunction with the Seraph Group, a seed-stage venture capital investment firm founded by Tuff Yen.

Ludus, the MIT Center for Games, Learning, and Playful Media, coordinates the efforts of MIT labs and research groups exploring games and play with a community of member practitioners. Research groups include the MIT Game Lab; the Education Arcade; the Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory; the Trope Tank; the Creative Communities Initiative; and the Open Documentary Lab.

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Computer system predicts products of chemical reactions

When organic chemists identify a useful chemical compound — a new drug, for instance — it’s up to chemical engineers to determine how to mass-produce it.

There could be 100 different sequences of reactions that yield the same end product. But some of them use cheaper reagents and lower temperatures than others, and perhaps most importantly, some are much easier to run continuously, with technicians occasionally topping up reagents in different reaction chambers.

Historically, determining the most efficient and cost-effective way to produce a given molecule has been as much art as science. But MIT researchers are trying to put this process on a more secure empirical footing, with a computer system that’s trained on thousands of examples of experimental reactions and that learns to predict what a reaction’s major products will be.

The researchers’ work appears in the American Chemical Society’s journal Central Science. Like all machine-learning systems, theirs presents its results in terms of probabilities. In tests, the system was able to predict a reaction’s major product 72 percent of the time; 87 percent of the time, it ranked the major product among its three most likely results.

“There’s clearly a lot understood about reactions today,” says Klavs Jensen, the Warren K. Lewis Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and one of four senior authors on the paper, “but it's a highly evolved, acquired skill to look at a molecule and decide how you’re going to synthesize it from starting materials.”

With the new work, Jensen says, “the vision is that you’ll be able to walk up to a system and say, ‘I want to make this molecule.’ The software will tell you the route you should make it from, and the machine will make it.”

With a 72 percent chance of identifying a reaction’s chief product, the system is not yet ready to anchor the type of completely automated chemical synthesis that Jensen envisions. But it could help chemical engineers more quickly converge on the best sequence of reactions — and possibly suggest sequences that they might not otherwise have investigated.

Jensen is joined on the paper by first author Connor Coley, a graduate student in chemical engineering; William Green, the Hoyt C. Hottel Professor of Chemical Engineering, who, with Jensen, co-advises Coley; Regina Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; and Tommi Jaakkola, the Thomas Siebel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Acting locally

A single organic molecule can consist of dozens and even hundreds of atoms. But a reaction between two such molecules might involve only two or three atoms, which break their existing chemical bonds and form new ones. Thousands of reactions between hundreds of different reagents will often boil down to a single, shared reaction between the same pair of “reaction sites.”

A large organic molecule, however, might have multiple reaction sites, and when it meets another large organic molecule, only one of the several possible reactions between them will actually take place. This is what makes automatic reaction-prediction so tricky.

In the past, chemists have built computer models that characterize reactions in terms of interactions at reaction sites. But they frequently require the enumeration of exceptions, which have to be researched independently and coded by hand. The model might declare, for instance, that if molecule A has reaction site X, and molecule B has reaction site Y, then X and Y will react to form group Z — unless molecule A also has reaction sites P, Q, R, S, T, U, or V.

It’s not uncommon for a single model to require more than a dozen enumerated exceptions. And discovering these exceptions in the scientific literature and adding them to the models is a laborious task, which has limited the models’ utility.

One of the chief goals of the MIT researchers’ new system is to circumvent this arduous process. Coley and his co-authors began with 15,000 empirically observed reactions reported in U.S. patent filings. However, because the machine-learning system had to learn what reactions wouldn’t occur, as well as those that would, examples of successful reactions weren’t enough.

Negative examples

So for every pair of molecules in one of the listed reactions, Coley also generated a battery of additional possible products, based on the molecules’ reaction sites. He then fed descriptions of reactions, together with his artificially expanded lists of possible products, to an artificial intelligence system known as a neural network, which was tasked with ranking the possible products in order of likelihood.

From this training, the network essentially learned a hierarchy of reactions — which interactions at what reaction sites tend to take precedence over which others — without the laborious human annotation.

Other characteristics of a molecule can affect its reactivity. The atoms at a given reaction site may, for instance, have different charge distributions, depending on what other atoms are around them. And the physical shape of a molecule can render a reaction site difficult to access. So the MIT researchers’ model also includes numerical measures of both these features.

According to Richard Robinson, a chemical-technologies researcher at the drug company Novartis, the MIT researchers’ system “offers a different approach to machine learning within the field of targeted synthesis, which in the future could transform the practice of experimental design to targeted molecules.”

“Currently we rely heavily on our own retrosynthetic training, which is aligned with our own personal experiences and augmented with reaction-database search engines,” Robinson says. “This serves us well but often still results in a significant failure rate. Even highly experienced chemists are often surprised. If you were to add up all the cumulative synthesis failures as an industry, this would likely relate to a significant time and cost investment. What if we could improve our success rate?”

The MIT researchers, Robinson says, “have cleverly demonstrated a novel approach to achieve higher predictive reaction performance over conventional approaches. By augmenting the reported literature with negative reaction examples, the data set has more value.”

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Q&A: Running a company in an era of “crazy technological progress”

How do ongoing advances in technology affect business management? That’s the question the prolific writing duo of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee pose in their new book, “Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing our Digital Future,” being published on June 27 by W.W. Norton. Brynjolfsson, the Schussel Family Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and McAfee, co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and a principal research scientist at MIT Sloan, also collaborated in 2014 on “The Second Machine Age,” another exploration of the changes digital innovation is bringing to the workplace. McAfee recently talked to MIT News about “Machine, Platform, Crowd.”

Q: What is your new book about?

A: “Machine, Platform, Crowd” is the answer to a question: How should I think differently about running my organization in this era of crazy technological progress? We need to rethink the balance between the work that we ask human minds to do in organizations, and the work we give to machines. We need to rethink whether you have a product orientation or a platform orientation. And we need to rethink the core of an organization, if there are literally these hundreds of millions of strangers out there across the internet who you can tap into.

Q: What’s different now compared to past moments of technological change?

A: Within the past five years, 10 years easily, at least two really fundamental things have happened. First of all, artifical intelligence started meeting its expectations and even exceeding them. We weren’t expecting that, and it’s pretty remarkable. The machines are much more capable. The second thing is, in the era of the smartphone, we have gone from a globe that was pretty disconnected, to having that same human population for the first time deeply interconnected through powerful devices, which are each about as powerful as all the computers collectively on campus when I was an undergraduate at MIT in the ’80s. Those are both legitimately new things.

Q: I know you’ve mentioned the rise of machines that can win at the game of Go as one instance of these advances. What are some of your favorite examples of machines, platforms, and crowds at work now?

A: Go is my favorite example of the power of machines, because it was so unanticipated that we would have a digital Go champion in 2016 or 2017. The insiders thought if that ever happened it would happen much, much farther out in the future.

In our section on products and platforms, we talk about companies like ClassPass, which is trying to build a purely digital platform; they don’t own any assets, but they’re trying to provide a virtual, very broad gym membership, or exercise membership [by offering rates for an array of memberships]. So they’re putting a platform over the industry of spinning, yoga, pilates, kickboxing, things like that. And if you had asked me just a little while ago for an industry that would not be greatly affected by the digital transformation, I might have said group exercise: You get in the gym with other people and sweat and have a workout. But after working on the book, I think that the exercise industry is going to be changed a lot by platforms.

Finally, we came across a very interesting company called Quantopia that is trying to be essentially a crowdsourced quantitative trading hedge fund. That may sound ludicrous, except, as the founder of the company has said, it is extremely unlikely that all the world’s top algorithmic traders are employed by the [relative] handful of companies that have dominated this industry. So to test that theory, they’ve been holding contests for algorithmic trading. It turns out, lo and behold, most of the people who win those contests are not insiders in the finance industry and have never even worked in finance. It tells me that if you can tap into the crowd and find the right brains, all over the world, and get them involved in what you’re doing, the results are potentially tremendous.

Q: What’s the reaction to these ideas when you give talks about them?

A: The reception to these ideas is all over the map. It goes from outright skepticism to something a little more subtle, which is, “This is great and interesting, but it doesn’t apply to me.” I’ve come across a lot of that.

Q: Do you get pushback about your interpretation of the pace of innovation itself?

A: Yeah, it’s super-interesting. Inside the academic community and among economists there is a huge debate about how much innovation we’re actually seeing. The skeptics say, “Where is the productivity growth, if there’s so much innovation going on?” Or they say, “We had amazing periods of innovation in the past. Are we sure this one measures up?” And those are important debates to have. But in every other community I try to be part of, and that includes investors, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and executives in mainstream incumbent companies, I don’t hear any of that debate, or very little. What I hear instead is: “There’s a lot coming at us, and we need to get on top of it and make it work for us.”

When people say there’s nothing new under the sun, I find that really valuable, because if all you do is talk to technologists, you just get caught up in the hype. It’s almost inevitable. So I really value those discussions. But when I talk to almost anybody else, it’s something close to a foregone conclusion that we’re living in this remarkable era, and I happen to believe that as well. Not only can we sequence the genome, we can edit it with precision. If that’s not a big deal, then I don’t [know what is]. We only mention CRISPR briefly in the book, but the period that we’re in is one to me of monumental progress and innovation.

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Is the Pax Americana truly peaceful?

As series of widely-publicized statistics compiled by scholars suggests, warfare and violence have declined dramatically over the last seven decades — constituting a period that historian John Gaddis once termed “the long peace.” Rarely, it seems, have most people been able to live lives of such normalcy. Who would argue with the state of affairs that has produced such results?

John Dower would, for one.

Dower is the Ford International Professor of History, Emeritus, and has won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award as part of a career spent writing about topics such as the extreme brutality of World War II combat and the reconstruction of postwar Japan. Today, when he looks at matters of war and security, Dower is skeptical that we have made much progress since then.

“We’re in a perpetual cycle of violence in the name of preventing violence,” Dower says.

Now in Dower’s latest book, “The Violent American Century,” published this spring by Haymarket Books, he questions the foundation of the entire postwar order. As Dower sees it, there may be less warfare today, but our apparent U.S.-led calm is heavily based on a hyperactive militarism. And the vast superiority of American armed forces creates an inherent volatility, Dower thinks, because the U.S. expects to bend international affairs to its will, by virtue of sheer strength.

As such, Dower contends, the U.S. has mistakenly pursued an open-ended “war on terror,” supported too many proxy wars, and risked nuclear annihilation. Our postwar era of relative peace thus hinges in part on good fortune — in avoiding some accidental triggers of nuclear war, for instance — and may be more short-lived than some of us assume.

“The sense that we must always have a dominant military posture means we must always be pushing the frontiers of military technology,” Dower observes. “But that means we are always pushing the edge of greater and greater destructiveness.”

New kinds of war

Dower’s book is a reference to the famous phrase used by TIME magazine founder Henry Luce, who wrote in a 1941 anti-isolationism essay that we were living in “The American Century.”

Dower does acknowledge that, by the basic numbers — compiled by many scholars and research groups such as the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, at Uppsala University in Sweden — we have been safer over the last 70-plus years. On the other hand, Dower adds, the end of World War II would make almost any security regime seem tranquil by contrast. At least 50 million people were killed in World War II, by most estimates; The Correlates of War Project, an academic research inquiry, estimates that over 2 million battle deaths have occurred in almost every decade since then.

“If you go back to World War II, when anywhere between 50 million to 80 million people were killed, of course we're not killing those numbers [of people] now,” says Dower, who also suggests such estimates are inherently imprecise.

The core of Dower’s critique concerns three types of U.S. military activity: proxy wars, the “war on terror,” and the buildup of its nuclear arsenal. In each case, Dower contends, U.S. activity has not simply had deterrent effects; it has also escalated violence or, in the case of the nuclear arms race, the potential consequences of warfare.

In the case of the Cold War-era proxy wars the U.S. led or backed, Dower contends in the book that those campaigns led to “unrestrained devastation” and the “unleashing of massive brute force” that we may still downplay. As he points out, during the Vietnam War, between 1965 and 1973, the U.S. dropped about 40 times the tonnage of bombs on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos than it dropped on Japan in World War II.

The U.S. decision to respond to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Dower thinks, led to a wide-ranging “war on terror” that constitutes a “new kind of war” that has proven to be hydra-headed and has underestimated the political and military resistance in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other parts of the Middle East.

“When we went into Iraq, with the ‘cakewalk’ rhetoric, with that came a real hubris and failure to look at human nature,” Dower says.

Meanwhile the development of nuclear arsenals, Dower observes, is potentially more lethal than anything else people have ever attempted. In the book, he notes both nuclear near-misses and the tendency of some military planners to regard nuclear weapons as “simply the high end of conventional weaponry” when they clearly are in a category by themselves.

“The nuclear arms race is terrifying,” Dower says. “It's a kind of terror, but built into that postwar system.”

All of this, Dower argues, should give people pause about an international edifice that rests so squarely on militarism. But, as he writes in the book, “The myth of exceptionalism still holds most Americans in its thrall.”

Personally pessimistic

To be sure, there are other perspectives on the post-World War II order that give more relative credit to the U.S., and especially its application of “soft power,” the web of diplomatic and economic relationships that help bind other countries in largely peaceful international relationships.

Still other scholarship emphasizes the role of the U.N., the European Union, NATO, and other oragnizations, in reducing intra-European warfare.

However, numerous prominent scholars find Dower’s new contribution to be valuable. Andrew Bacevich, a professor emeritus of international relations and history at Boston University and a leading commentator on American security strategy, calls Dower’s new book a “timely, compact, and utterly compelling exposé of the myriad contradictions besetting U.S. national security policy.”

Dower says his own experiences as a citizen have forged an intellectual habit of not giving his own country, however much he admires it in general, a free pass on security policy.

“I'm of the generation that was a young adult during the Vietnam war,” Dower explains. “The fire of those years burned a certain impression and way of thinking upon us, and that has influenced me in thinking about violence.”

That legacy, as well as the multitude of U.S. military engagements at the moment, Dower adds, leaves him skeptical that a new security paradigm will emerge any time soon.

“I’m very pessimistic at the moment,” Dower concludes.

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2rW1TQX

MIT Libraries staff honored with 2017 Infinite Mile Awards

The MIT Libraries honored the outstanding contributions of staff to the Institute at its Infinite Mile Awards ceremony on June 14. The libraries put their own unique spin on the MIT tradition with a nautical theme that infused everything from the remarks to the décor, and with a celebratory luncheon where staff members danced to music by the libraries' house band, Dewey and the Decimals.

Director Chris Bourg presented awards to individuals and teams in the categories listed below; award recipients are listed along with excerpts from the award presentations.

Community Building

Described as “the heart and soul of the department,” Julia Lanigan, collections and administrative assistant in the department of Scholarly Communications and Collections Strategy, was honored for bringing a commitment to community to everything she does. If there is an activity that involves bringing others together, she is likely to be a part of it: MIT Reads, the Libraries’ Committee for the Promotion of Diversity and Inclusion; the Collections Directorate Task Force for Diversity, Inclusion, and Social Justice; organizing a bookmobile to highlight the Black Lives Matter movement; or gathering library staff to participate in the Boston Women’s March. Colleagues recognized her genuine caring and devoted efforts to strengthen the organization.

Katharine Dunn and Mikki Macdonald pulled off something amazing — and very MIT — when they led the libraries in the Crossing the Charles Parade and Competition in May 2016. As one nominee described, they were “cheerfully tireless in the effort to corral, create, and deliver an outstanding representation of the MIT Libraries spirit.” Dunn and Macdonald were honored for enlisting the aid of an artist to translate beautiful sketches into larger-than-life-sized props, coordinating a group of disparate volunteers, and leading a process that was a high-profile, high-energy, high-impact success. Their inclusive leadership, creativity, and enthusiasm in symbolically once again moving MIT across the Charles resulted in the libraries winning the Beaver Spirit Award for school spirit.

Innovation, Creativity, and Problem Solving

Web developer Matt Bernhardt’s approach to work consistently involves thoughtful solutions that directly tie back to user needs, whether those users are the MIT community or library staff. “He doggedly pursues solutions and often comes back with a variety of options that offer benefits that I hadn’t even considered,” said one nominator. Bernhardt was honored for generously sharing his knowledge and expertise, not just in everyday work and projects, but beyond his immediate circle to a vast sea of colleagues and collaborators. The libraries applauded his creativity, hard work, collegial spirit, and ability to anticipate problems and recognize opportunities to improve services.

Results, Outcome, and Productivity

Maps are everywhere: Google Maps, Google Earth, Mapquest, GIS. However, a lot of spatial information is only available on paper maps. Mary Jeanne Yuen, metadata production associate, helps others search the vast MIT Libraries map collections. She was recognized for taking great care in being detail oriented, thorough, and responsive, and for persistent efforts that have resulted in better access for library users. As one nominator said: “You can depend on her to produce fantastic work, whether it’s creating authority records or cataloging German topographic maps. You can also depend on her to crack you up with her dry, self-deprecating humor … she is authentic, hilarious, caring, and generous.”

Unsung Hero/Heroine

Judith Gallagher is the kind of person who works so smoothly behind the scenes that it would be easy for her to escape notice. Colleagues who work with her closely describe her as “meticulous,” “thoughtful,” “a superstar colleague,” and “genuinely caring and dedicated.” The financial and payroll associate is a treasure trove of information — about the libraries, the Institute, and procedures and policies — and is generous and patient in sharing that knowledge with others. Gallagher was honored for going above and beyond the call of duty and stepping in to help when her team was severely short-staffed due to illness, while still keeping up with her regular duties. She also takes pleasure in making other people's workday a little brighter.

Colleagues say Tim Rix exhibits three traits that make him outstanding specifically at his job and as a co-worker in general: direct and honest communication, empathy, and a systematic approach. The systems administrator was recognized for responding to challenges pragmatically and figuring out ways to make it work, even in suboptimal circumstances. Rix makes one's problems his problems and takes pleasure in helping his colleagues, sometimes with inadequate notice, sometimes stepping in when others are absent or unavailable, but always without fanfare.

Communication and Collaboration

The day after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, students mobilized in the lobby of Building 7, wrapping the large columns with paper and encouraging the MIT community to share their thoughts, hopes, and concerns. A large, cross-departmental team from the libraries, including Liz Andrews, Matt Bernhardt, Frances Botsford, Emily Crawford, Katherine Crowe, Myles Crowley, Darcy Duke, Nora Murphy, Kari Smith, and Chris Tanguay, then stepped up to acquire, preserve, and make these posters accessible. They planned how to move, store, and preserve the large posters — the biggest measuring 3.5 feet wide and 16 feet long. A video pan of each poster was shot, digital images were taken, transcription of the content was performed with extreme quality control, and a website was quickly created — all to help make the posters available to a wider audience and to preserve them in perpetuity.

Customer Service

The Library Storage Annex scanning team of Howard Martin and Allegra Zoller recieved the award for going the extra mile to implement a long-sought-after service for the Institute. In 2015, an MIT Libraries’ survey asked: “If you had $100 to spend, how would you allocate it to make the most positive impact on your research or coursework?” One of the top answers was to provide article and chapter scanning and delivery from on-campus collections. The unflappable, hard-working duo of Martin and Zoller worked with outside vendors to get new equipment and software, improved internal delivery processes, and trained staff in order to incorporate Scan and Deliver into the libraries’ suite of services. It now seamlessly provides PDFs of articles and book chapters from most of the libraries’ print collections, not just those in storage. Said one emeritus professor: “I thank you for what must have been a tremendous amount of work in setting it up. I intend to use it frequently.” 

de MIT News http://ift.tt/2sau2I8