A serious plea for playful design

In 2010, the city of Rio de Janeiro opened its Operations Center, a high-tech command post centralizing the activities of 30 agencies. With its banks of monitors looming over rows of employees, the center brings flows of information to city leaders regarding crime, traffic, and emergency preparedness, among other things, to help officials anticipate and solve problems.

That’s one vision of technology and urban life. Another, quite different vision of deploying technology debuted in Rio six years later, at architect Guto Requena’s Dancing Pavilion, built for the 2016 summer Olympics. The pavilion had a dance floor, banks of mirrors rotating in response to people’s movement, and lighting that changed according to the activity levels in the building. The goal was to enhance sociality and spontaneity.

Between these two alternate applications of large-scale technology in public places, MIT urban studies researchers Fabio Duarte and Ricardo Alvarez have a clear favorite: the Dancing Pavilion, and its ever-evolving interplay of people and the built environment, as opposed to the deployment of technology as a tracking tool monitoring urban systems.

“There is this notion of an optimal city where everything works perfectly well, where everything can be not only planned but also predicted,” Duarte says. “But in reality you cannot predict everything that happens. We should not remove from urban life the serendipity, all the things that happen by chance. Surprise is important for urban life.”

Now Duarte and Alvarez, researchers in MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, have written a book making the case for using high-tech tools to enhance playfulness and creativity in urban environments. The book, “Urban Play: Make-Believe, Technology, and Space,” is being published this month by the MIT Press.

“The argument of the book is, we can use technology to bring back serendipity and fantasy in the design of cities,” says Duarte, a lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and a principal research scientist at MIT’s Senseable Cities Lab. “We are not putting technology aside. We can sustain the openness of urban life through technology.”

In the book, Duarte and Alvarez discuss multiple ways technology can make cities more playful places. Some cities, they observe, have play as a main rationale and express this through creative large-scale design — think Las Vegas, Orlando, or even Dubai, places designed around leisure.

“Nobody moves to a city because it has the optimal public transportation system,” says Alvarez, who is a postdoc at the Senseable City Lab. “So [the question] is, how do you use technology to create spaces that resonate emotionally? Because that’s where people want to live, that’s where people want to go.”

Both Disneyland and Disney World, as Duarte and Alvarez detail in the book, embraced experimentalism in design and a belief that technology could create new urban forms — think of the Disney monorails, Tomorrowland, or Epcot.

“Walt Disney was deeply into city-making and tried to present future ways of living,” Alvarez says. “The original EPCOT Center wasn’t going to be a theme park. It was going to be a prototype city. At some point he saw very clearly that his vision, whether we like it or not, was resonating with people. Some architects may call it artifice or kitsch, but the fact of the matter is, people flock to these places. They use technology for purposes of pleasure and fun and storytelling.”

In another vein, the authors suggest that video games have much to offer in urban design, as the industry has developed increasingly sophisticated urban simulations across dozens of games in recent decades.

“The video game industry is similar to architecture and urban planning, in that they both create interactive spaces,” Alvarez observes. “Through time, [game developers] have learned a lot from architecture and planning. But in the virtual world they also have a lot more freedom to experiment, to take concepts and explore them to their ultimate form.”

Moreover, Alvarez notes, “What the gaming industry does is bring people and testers a lot earlier in the design stage. You get feedback from people and inject that into the design process. This is a very common process in the video game world that the planning and architecture fields could benefit from.”

The authors also suggest that virtual reality could emerge as a more robust design tool than people realize, by offering alternate perspectives to designers. A child, as they note in the book, views a playground in a park from a different than an adult does; virtual reality might similarly help some designers see space in new ways.

“Virtual reality is powerful for its perspective,” Duarte says. “Once you see this type of representation, you can start playing with the world in this way. When I can change completely how I perceive the world through this technology, how can I design the world differently?”

Duarte and Alvarez believe their ideas have received a fair hearing from urbanists and designers as they have been working on the book, and hope it will be read by people with an array of interests. Richard Florida, a university professor at the University of Toronto, has called the new work “a guidebook for getting us and our cities out of our regimented rut and a manifesto for building better cities and a better way of life.”

For their part, Duarte and Alvarez acknowledge that new technology is necessary to make urban infrastructure and system work well. But they hope it is viewed as a means of not only achieving efficiency but realizing urban vitality.

“Let’s try to use technology, not to try to predict the future, or create an optimized reality, but to explore different possibilities of living,” Duarte says. “I think we now have the chance to create new possibilities all the time.”

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3 Questions: Peko Hosoi on the data-driven reasoning behind MIT’s Covid-19 policies for the fall

As students, faculty, and staff prepare for a full return to the MIT campus in the weeks ahead, procedures for entering buildings, navigating classrooms and labs, and interacting with friends and colleagues will likely take some getting used to.

The Institute recently reinforced its policies for indoor masking and has also continued to require regular testing for people who live, work, or study on campus — procedures that apply to both vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals. Vaccination is required for all students, faculty, and staff on campus unless a medical or religious exemption is granted.

These and other policies adopted by MIT to control the spread of Covid-19 have been informed by modeling efforts from a volunteer group of MIT faculty, students, and postdocs. The collaboration, dubbed Isolat, was co-founded by Anette “Peko” Hosoi, the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and associate dean in the School of Engineering.

The group, which is organized through MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), has run numerous models to show how measures such as mask wearing, testing, ventilation, and quarantining could affect Covid-19’s spread. These models have helped to shape MIT’s Covid-19 policies throughout the pandemic, including its procedures for returning to campus this fall.

Hosoi spoke with MIT News about the data-backed reasoning behind some of these procedures, including indoor masking and regular testing, and how a “generous community” will help MIT safely weather the virus and its variants.

Q: Take us through how you have been modeling Covid-19 and its variants, in regard to helping MIT shape its Covid policies. What’s the approach you’ve taken, and why?

A: The approach we’re taking uses a simple counting exercise developed in IDSS to estimate the balance of testing, masking, and vaccination that is required to keep the virus in check. The underlying objective is to find infected people faster, on average, than they can infect others, which is captured in a simple algebraic expression. Our objective can be accomplished either by speeding up the rate of finding infected people (i.e. increasing testing frequency) or slowing down the rate of infection (i.e. increasing masking and vaccination) or by a combination of both. To give you a sense of the numbers, balances for different levels of testing are shown in the chart below for a vaccine efficacy of 67 percent and a contagious period of 18 days (which are the CDC’s latest parameters for the Delta variant).

The vertical axis shows the now-famous reproduction number R₀, i.e. the average number of people that one infected person will infect throughout the course of their illness. These R₀ are averages for the population, and in specific circumstances the spreading could be more than that.

Each blue line represents a different testing frequency: Below the line, the virus is controlled; above the line, it spreads. For example, the dotted blue line shows the boundary if we rely solely on vaccination with no testing. In that case, even if everyone is vaccinated, we can only control up to an R₀ of about 3.  Unfortunately, the CDC places R₀ of the Delta variant somewhere between 5 and 9, so vaccination alone is insufficient to control the spread. (As an aside, this also means that given the efficacy estimates for the current vaccines, herd immunity is not possible.)

Next consider the dashed blue line, which represents the stability boundary if we test everyone once per week. If our vaccination rate is greater than about 90 percent, testing one time per week can control even the CDC’s most pessimistic estimate for the Delta variant’s R₀.

Q: In returning to campus over the next few weeks, indoor masking and regular testing are required of every MIT community member, even those who are vaccinated. What in your modeling has shown that each of these policies is necessary?

A: Given that the chart above shows that vaccination and weekly testing are sufficient to control the virus, one should certainly ask “Why have we reinstated indoor masking?” The answer is related to the fact that, as a university, our population turns over once a year; every September we bring in a few thousand new people. Those people are coming from all over the world, and some of them may not have had the opportunity to get vaccinated yet. The good news is that MIT Medical has vaccines and will be administering them to any unvaccinated students as soon as they arrive; the bad news is that, as we all know, it takes three to five weeks for resistance to build up, depending on the vaccine. This means that we should think of August and September as a transition period during which the vaccination rates may fluctuate as new people arrive. 

The other revelation that has informed our policies for September is the recent report from the CDC that infected vaccinated people carry roughly the same viral load as unvaccinated infected people. This suggests that vaccinated people — although they are highly unlikely to get seriously ill — are a consequential part of the transmission chain and can pass the virus along to others. So, in order to avoid giving the virus to people who are not yet fully vaccinated during the transition period, we all need to exercise a little extra care to give the newly vaccinated time for their immune systems to ramp up. 

Q: As the fall progresses, what signs are you looking for that might shift decisions on masking and testing on campus?

A: Eventually we will have to shift responsibility toward individuals rather than institutions, and allow people to make decisions about masks and testing based on their own risk tolerance. The success of the vaccines in suppressing severe illness will enable us to shift to a position in which our objective is not necessarily to control the spread of the virus, but rather to reduce the risk of serious outcomes to an acceptable level. There are many people who believe we need to make this adjustment and wean ourselves off pandemic living. They are right; we cannot continue like this forever. However, we have not played all our cards yet, and, in my opinion, we need to carefully consider what’s left in our hand before we abdicate institutional responsibility.

The final ace we have to play is vaccinating kids. It is important to remember that we have many people in our community with kids who are too young to be vaccinated and, understandably, those parents do not want to bring Covid home to their children. Furthermore, our campus is not just a workplace; it is also home to thousands of people, some of whom have children living in our residences or attending an MIT childcare center. Given that context, and the high probability that a vaccine will be approved for children in the near future, it is my belief that our community has the empathy and fortitude to try to keep the virus in check until parents have the option to protect their children with vaccines. 

Bearing in mind that children constitute an unprotected portion of our population, let me return to the original question and speculate on the fate of masks and testing in the fall. Regarding testing, the analysis suggests that we cannot give that up entirely if we would like to control the spread of the virus. Second, control of the virus is not the only benefit we get from testing. It also gives us situational awareness, serves as an early warning beacon, and provides information that individual members of the community can use as they make decisions about their own risk budget. Personally, I’ve been testing for a year now and I find it easy and reassuring. Honestly, it’s nice to know that I’m Covid-free before I see friends (outside!) or go home to my family.

Regarding masks, there is always uncertainty around whether a new variant will arise or whether vaccine efficacy will fade, but, given the current parameters and our analysis, my hope is that we will be in a position to provide some relief on the mask mandate once the incoming members of our population have been fully vaccinated. I also suspect that whenever the mask mandate is lifted, masks are not likely to go away. There are certainly situations in which I will continue to wear a mask regardless of the mandate, and many in our community will continue to feel safer wearing masks even when they are not required.

I believe that we are a generous community and that we will be willing to take precautions to help keep each other healthy. The students who were on campus last year did an outstanding job, and they have given me a tremendous amount of faith that we can be considerate and good to one another even in extremely trying times.

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School of Science welcomes new faculty

This fall, MIT welcomes new faculty members — five assistant professors and two tenured professors — to the departments of Biology; Chemistry; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; and Physics.

A physicist, Soonwon Choi is interested in dynamical phenomena that occur in strongly interacting quantum many-body systems far from equilibrium and designing their applications for quantum information science. He takes a variety of interdisciplinary approaches from analytic theory and numerical computations to collaborations on experiments with controlled quantum degrees of freedom. Recently, Choi’s research has encompassed studying the phenomenon of a phase transition in the dynamics of quantum entanglement and information, drawing on machine learning to introduce a quantum convolutional neural network that can recognize quantum states associated with a one-dimensional symmetry-protected topological phase, and exploring a range of quantum applications of the nitrogen-vacancy color center of diamond.

After completing his undergraduate study in physics at Caltech in 2012, Choi received his PhD degree in physics from Harvard University in 2018. He then worked as a Miller Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California at Berkeley before joining the Department of Physics and the Center for Theoretical Physics as an assistant professor in July 2021.

Olivia Corradin investigates how genetic variants contribute to disease. She focuses on non-coding DNA variants — changes in DNA sequence that can alter the regulation of gene expression — to gain insight into pathogenesis. With her novel outside-variant approach, Corradin’s lab singled out a type of brain cell involved in multiple sclerosis, increasing total heritability identified by three- to five-fold. A recipient of the Avenir Award through the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award Program, Corradin also scrutinizes how genetic and epigenetic variation influence susceptibility to substance abuse disorders. These critical insights into multiple sclerosis, opioid use disorder, and other diseases have the potential to improve risk assessment, diagnosis, treatment, and preventative care for patients.

Corradin completed a bachelor’s degree in biochemistry from Marquette University in 2010 and a PhD in genetics from Case Western Reserve University in 2016. A Whitehead Institute Fellow since 2016, she also became an institute member in July 2021. The Department of Biology welcomes Corradin as an assistant professor.

Arlene Fiore seeks to understand processes that control two-way interactions between air pollutants and the climate system, as well as the sensitivity of atmospheric chemistry to different chemical, physical, and biological sources and sinks at scales ranging from urban to global and daily to decadal. Combining chemistry-climate models and observations from ground, airborne, and satellite platforms, Fiore has identified global dimensions to ground-level ozone smog and particulate haze that arise from linkages with the climate system, global atmospheric composition, and the terrestrial biosphere. She also investigates regional meteorology and climate feedbacks due to aerosols versus greenhouse gases, future air pollution responses to climate change, and drivers of atmospheric oxidizing capacity. A new research direction involves using chemistry-climate model ensemble simulations to identify imprints of climate variability on observational records of trace gases in the troposphere.

After earning a bachelor’s degree and PhD from Harvard University, Fiore held a research scientist position at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and was appointed as an associate professor with tenure at Columbia University in 2011. Over the last decade, she has worked with air and health management partners to develop applications of satellite and other Earth science datasets to address their emerging needs. Fiore’s honors include the American Geophysical Union (AGU) James R. Holton Junior Scientist Award, Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (the highest honor bestowed by the United States government on outstanding scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers), and AGU’s James B. Macelwane Medal. The Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences welcomes Fiore as the first Peter H. Stone and Paola Malanotte Stone Professor.

With a background in magnetism, Danna Freedman leverages inorganic chemistry to solve problems in physics. Within this paradigm, she is creating the next generation of materials for quantum information by designing spin-based quantum bits, or qubits, based in molecules. These molecular qubits can be precisely controlled, opening the door for advances in quantum computation, sensing, and more. She also harnesses high pressure to synthesize new emergent materials, exploring the possibilities of intermetallic compounds and solid-state bonding. Among other innovations, Freedman has realized millisecond coherence times in molecular qubits, created a molecular analogue of an NV center featuring optical read-out of spin, and discovered the first iron-bismuth binary compound.

Freedman received her bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, then conducted postdoctoral research at MIT before joining the faculty at Northwestern University as an assistant professor in 2012, earning an NSF CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry, and more. She was promoted to associate professor in 2018 and full professor with tenure in 2020. Freedman returns to MIT as the Frederick George Keyes Professor of Chemistry.

Kristin Knouse PhD ’17 aims to understand how tissues sense and respond to damage, with the goal of developing new approaches for regenerative medicine. She focuses on the mammalian liver — which has the unique ability to completely regenerate itself — to ask how organisms react to organ injury, how certain cells retain the ability to grow and divide while others do not, and what genes regulate this process. Knouse creates innovative tools, such as a genome-wide CRISPR screening within a living mouse, to examine liver regeneration from the level of a single-cell to the whole organism. 

Knouse received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Duke University in 2010 and then enrolled in the Harvard and MIT MD-PhD Program, where she earned a PhD through the MIT Department of Biology in 2016 and an MD through the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology in 2018. In 2018, she established her independent laboratory at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and was honored with the NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. Knouse joins the Department of Biology and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research as an assistant professor. 

Lina Necib PhD ’17 is an astroparticle physicist exploring the origin of dark matter through a combination of simulations and observational data that correlate the dynamics of dark matter with that of the stars in the Milky Way. She has investigated the local dynamic structures in the solar neighborhood using the Gaia satellite, contributed to building a catalog of local accreted stars using machine learning techniques, and discovered a new stream called Nyx, after the Greek goddess of the night. Necib is interested in employing Gaia in conjunction with other spectroscopic surveys to understand the dark matter profile in the local solar neighborhood, the center of the galaxy, and in dwarf galaxies.

After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics from Boston University in 2012 and a PhD in theoretical physics from MIT in 2017, Necib was a Sherman Fairchild Fellow at Caltech, a Presidential Fellow at the University of California at Irvine, and a fellow in theoretical astrophysics at Carnegie Observatories. She returns to MIT as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and a member of the MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

Andrew Vanderburg studies exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars other than the sun. Conducting astronomical observations from Earth as well as space, he develops cutting-edge methods to learn about planets outside of our solar system. Recently, he has leveraged machine learning to optimize searches and identify planets that were missed by previous techniques. With collaborators, he discovered the eighth planet in the Kepler-90 solar system, a Jupiter-like planet with unexpectedly close orbiting planets, and rocky bodies disintegrating near a white dwarf, providing confirmation of a theory that such stars may accumulate debris from their planetary systems.

Vanderburg received a bachelor’s degree in physics and astrophysics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2013 and a PhD in Astronomy from Harvard University in 2017. Afterward, Vanderburg moved to the University of Texas at Austin as a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow, then to the University of Wisconsin at Madison as a faculty member. He joins MIT as an assistant professor in the Department of Physics and a member of the Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research.

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Climate and sustainability classes expand at MIT

In fall 2019, a new class, 6.S898/12.S992 (Climate Change Seminar), arrived at MIT. It was, at the time, the only course in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) to tackle the science of climate change. The class covered climate models and simulations alongside atmospheric science, policy, and economics.

Ron Rivest, MIT Institute Professor of Computer Science, was one of the class’s three instructors, with Alan Edelman of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and John Fernández of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. “Computer scientists have much to contribute to climate science,” Rivest says. “In particular, the modeling and simulation of climate can benefit from advances in computer science.”

Rivest is one of many MIT faculty members who have been working in recent years to bring topics in climate, sustainability, and the environment to students in a growing variety of fields. And students have said they want this trend to continue.

“Sustainability is something that touches all disciplines,” says Megan Xu, a rising senior in biological engineering and advisory chair of the Undergraduate Association Sustainability Committee. “As students who have grown up knowing that climate change is real and witnessed climate disaster after disaster, we know this is a huge problem that needs to be addressed by our generation.”

Expanding the course catalog

As education program manager at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, Sarah Meyers has repeatedly had a hand in launching new sustainability classes. She has steered grant money to faculty, brought together instructors, and helped design syllabi — all in the service of giving MIT students the same world-class education in climate and sustainability that they get in science and engineering.

Her work has given Meyers a bird’s-eye view of MIT’s course offerings in this area. By her count, there are now over 120 undergraduate classes, across 23 academic departments, that teach climate, environment, and sustainability principles.

“Educating the next generation is the most important way that MIT can have an impact on the world’s environmental challenges,” she says. “MIT students are going to be leaders in their fields, whatever they may be. If they really understand sustainable design practices, if they can balance the needs of all stakeholders to make ethical decisions, then that actually changes the way our world operates and can move humanity towards a more sustainable future.”

Some sustainability classes are established institutions at MIT. Success stories include 2.00A (Fundamentals of Engineering Design: Explore Space, Sea and Earth), a hands-on engineering class popular with first-year students; and 21W.775 (Writing About Nature and Environmental Issues), which has helped undergraduates fulfill their HASS-H (humanities distribution subject) and CI-H (Communication Intensive subject in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) graduation requirements for 15 years.

Expanding this list of classes is an institutional priority. In the recently released Climate Action Plan for the Decade, MIT pledged to recruit at least 20 additional faculty members who will teach climate-related classes.

“I think it's easy to find classes if you're looking for sustainability classes to take,” says Naomi Lutz, a senior in mechanical engineering who helped advise the MIT administration on education measures in the Climate Action Plan. “I usually scroll through the titles of the classes in courses 1, 2, 11, and 12 to see if any are of interest. I also have used the Environment & Sustainability Minor class list to look for sustainability-related classes to take.

“The coming years are critical for the future of our planet, so it's important that we all learn about sustainability and think about how to address it,” she adds.

Working with students’ schedules

Still, despite all this activity, climate and sustainability are not yet mainstream parts of an MIT education. Last year, a survey of over 800 MIT undergraduates, taken by the Undergraduate Association Sustainability Committee, found that only one in four had ever taken a class related to sustainability. But it doesn’t seem to be from lack of interest in the topic. More than half of those surveyed said that sustainability is a factor in their career planning, and almost 80 percent try to practice sustainability in their daily lives.

“I’ve often had conversations with students who were surprised to learn there are so many classes available,” says Meyers. “We do need to do a better job communicating about them, and making it as easy as possible to enroll.”

A recurring challenge is helping students fit sustainability into their plans for graduation, which are often tightly mapped-out.

“We each only have four years — around 32 to 40 classes — to absorb all that we can from this amazing place,” says Xu. “Many of these classes are mandated to be GIRs [General Institute Requirements] and major requirements. Many students recognize that sustainability is important, but might not have the time to devote an entire class to the topic if it would not count toward their requirements.”

This was a central focus for the students who were involved in forming education recommendations for the Climate Action Plan. “We propose that more sustainability-related courses or tracks are offered in the most common majors, especially in Course 6 [EECS],” says Lutz. “If students can fulfill major requirements while taking courses that address environmental problems, we believe more students will pursue research and careers related to sustainability.”

She also recommends that students look into the dozens of climate and sustainability classes that fulfill GIRs. “It’s really easy to take sustainability-related courses that fulfill HASS [Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences] requirements,” she says. For example, students can meet their HASS-S (social sciences sistribution subject) requirement by taking 21H.185 (Environment and History), or fulfill their HASS-A requirement with CMS.374 (Transmedia Art, Extraction and Environmental Justice).

Classes with impact

For those students who do seek out sustainability classes early in their MIT careers, the experience can shape their whole education.

“My first semester at MIT, I took Environment and History, co-taught by professors Susan Solomon and Harriet Ritvo,” says Xu. “It taught me that there is so much more involved than just science and hard facts to solving problems in sustainability and climate. I learned to look at problems with more of a focus on people, which has informed much of the extracurricular work that I’ve gone on to do at MIT.”

And the faculty, too, sometimes find that teaching in this area opens new doors for them. Rivest, who taught the climate change seminar in Course 6, is now working to build a simplified climate model with his co-instructor Alan Edelman, their teaching assistant Henri Drake, and Professor John Deutch of the Department of Chemistry, who joined the class as a guest lecturer. “I very much enjoyed meeting new colleagues from all around MIT,” Rivest says. “Teaching a class like this fosters connections between computer scientists and climate scientists.”

Which is why Meyers will continue helping to get these classes off the ground. “We know students think climate is a huge issue for their futures. We know faculty agree with them,” she says. “Everybody wants this to be part of an MIT education. The next step is to really reach out to students and departments to fill the classrooms. That’s the start of a virtuous cycle where enrollment drives more sustainability instruction in every part of MIT.”

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Maria Zuber on MIT’s Strategic Action Plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Work on MIT’s Strategic Action Plan for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion started last fall, and the plan’s first draft was released in late March 2020. Powered by inputs and feedback from three dozen community engagement sessions and a steady stream of email responses from students, staff, faculty, postdocs, alumni, and others, the plan is being revised and updated over the summer with hopes for a fall release. The development of the strategic plan is being led by Institute Community and Equity Officer John Dozier, along with Deputy ICEO Maryanne Kirkbride and Associate Provost Tim Jamison. 

In a recent conversation prepared for MIT News, Vice President for Research Maria Zuber described how she wants the plan to help MIT attract and support postdoctoral scholars from a broad range of backgrounds. Increasing diversity in this community, she notes, will have positive effects for all of academia.

Q: What are the opportunities and challenges specific to your role as vice president for research in trying to advance a strategic plan for diversity, equity, and inclusion at MIT?

A: As the vice president for research, I oversee a number of interdisciplinary labs and centers; I’m responsible for research administration and policy, including the terrific staff that ensures our research enterprise runs smoothly; and I oversee MIT Postdoctoral Services, which endeavors to improve the experiences of the 1,500 postdocs who come to MIT for advanced training and play a key role in the research community.

As I go about this work, the opportunity always comes back to a simple question: How can we best achieve MIT’s mission? Our mission says that we want everyone at MIT to have “the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.”

For that to happen, every member of the community needs to be able to take prudent risks, make mistakes, try new approaches to solving old problems, and bring their own unique perspectives to bear on hard questions. And there’s just no way that people will feel truly comfortable doing those things if they’re not sure they have a place here. If you’re not sure that you belong, then you’re more likely to keep your head down, avoid risk-taking, and go with the flow. That’s not optimal for anyone. To provide an environment where a diverse community of people can do its best, leading-edge work — that is an immense opportunity.

A challenge, and President Reif has pointed this out before, is MIT’s decentralized structure — it’s core to our culture and it’s a key ingredient in our success. But it also makes it harder to ensure that the experience is welcoming and equitable for everyone across campus. It’s a fact we need to contend with if we want a coordinated and consistent set of practices for attracting, retaining, and developing a diverse faculty and staff, including postdocs, across the Institute. I want to be clear that this is a challenge to be addressed — not an excuse for inaction.

Q: How do you think the plan will impact the lives of MIT community members, most especially postdocs?

A: Postdocs come to MIT from many different countries and backgrounds. No matter who they are or where they come from, we want them to feel supported to do their best work — scholarship that will advance their careers and help solve pressing challenges.

The most significant factor in the experience of postdocs at MIT is their relationship with their principal investigator. That’s why the strategic plan includes a focus on training and learning opportunities for PIs, so they can incorporate an understanding of the value of diversity, equity, and inclusion into their hiring and team-management practices. Understanding and helping to improve postdoctoral hiring practices will be an important area of focus for the director of diversity, equity, and inclusion in my office — a newly created role that we will fill in the coming months. We’re also working to improve our orientation and onboarding for postdocs, and to provide them with improved mentorship opportunities.

Finally, as I often say: “Show me your data.” If we really want to increase the number of postdocs from underrepresented groups, ensure a consistently productive experience for each of them, and set them on a path to career success no matter their background, then improvements to training for PIs or new onboarding programs is not enough. We also need more robust data collection and analysis so we can assess whether our efforts are having the intended effect and then hold ourselves accountable to ensure continued improvements.

Q: What do you think will be the most important outcome of the plan?

A: We will accelerate progress.

A personal mission of mine for many years has been to increase the representation of women in the sciences. When I first arrived at MIT, the proportion of women faculty in the School of Science was about 8 percent — and it had not changed for at least a decade. I went on to become the first woman to head a science department at MIT, and recent research has found that in my field, the geosciences, the proportion of women in faculty positions at 62 U.S. universities has been on the rise for two decades. But even today women account for just one in five full professors in the geosciences at those universities. That’s progress, but it’s not enough.

In some respects, our community of postdocs is wonderfully diverse. They come from all over the world, and there’s no question that the intellectual life of our campus benefits from that breadth of experiences and perspectives. In other respects, however, we have a lot of work to do. Our community of postdocs from the United States does not represent the diversity of the country as a whole. And since today’s postdocs are often tomorrow’s faculty members, this underrepresentation is perpetuated as people rise through academia’s ranks.

With focused resources, renewed accountability, enhanced expertise, and a whole-of-MIT approach, the most important outcome of this plan will be more progress, faster — the kind of progress that you can see and feel.

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Helping companies optimize their websites and mobile apps

Creating a good customer experience increasingly means creating a good digital experience. But metrics like pageviews and clicks offer limited insight into how much customers actually like a digital product.

That’s the problem the digital optimization company Amplitude is solving. Amplitude gives companies a clearer picture into how users interact with their digital products to help them understand exactly which features to promote or improve.

“It’s all about using product data to drive your business,” says Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates ’10, who co-founded the company with Curtis Liu ’10 and Stanford University graduate Jeffrey Wang. “Mobile apps and websites are really complex. The average app or website will have thousands of things you can do with it. The question is how you know which of those things are driving a great user experience and which parts are really frustrating for users.”

Amplitude’s database can gather millions of details about how users behave inside an app or website and allow customers to explore that information without needing data science degrees.

“It provides an interface for very easy, accessible ways of looking at your data, understanding your data, and asking questions of that data,” Skates says.

Amplitude, which recently announced it will be going public, is already helping 23 of the 100 largest companies in the U.S. Customers include media companies like NBC, tech companies like Twitter, and retail companies like Walmart.

“Our platform helps businesses understand how people are using their apps and websites so they can create better versions of their products,” Skates says. “It’s all about creating a really compelling product.”

Learning entrepreneurship

The founders say their years at MIT were among the best of their lives. Skates and Liu were undergraduates from 2006 to 2010. Skates majored in biological engineering while Liu majored in mathematics and electrical engineering and computer science. The two first met as opponents in MIT’s Battlecode competition, in which students use artificial intelligence algorithms to control teams of robots that compete in a strategy game against other teams. The following year they teamed up.

“There are a lot of parallels between what you’re trying to do in Battlecode and what you end up having to do in the early stages of a startup,” Liu says. “You have limited resources, limited time, and you’re trying to accomplish a goal. What we found is trying a lot of different things, putting our ideas out there and testing them with real data, really helped us focus on the things that actually mattered. That method of iteration and continual improvement set the foundation for how we approach building products and startups.”

Liu and Skates next participated in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition with an idea for a cloud-based music streaming service. After graduation, Skates began working in finance and Liu got a job at Google, but they continued pursuing startup ideas on the side, including a website that let alumni see where their classmates ended up and a marketplace for finding photographers.

A year after graduation, the founders decided to quit their jobs and work on a startup full time. Skates moved into Liu’s apartment in San Francisco, setting up a mattress on the floor, and they began working on a project that became Sonalight, a voice recognition app. As part of the project, the founders built an internal system to understand where users got stuck in the app and what features were used the most.

Despite getting over 100,000 downloads, the founders decided Sonalight was a little too early for its time and started thinking their analytics feature could be useful to other companies. They spoke with about 30 different product teams to learn more about what companies wanted from their digital analytics. Amplitude was officially founded in 2012.

Amplitude gathers fine details about digital product usage, parsing out individual features and actions to give customers a better view of how their products are being used. Using the data in Amplitude’s intuitive, no-code interface, customers can make strategic decisions like whether to launch a feature or change a distribution channel.

The platform is designed to ease the bottlenecks that arise when executives, product teams, salespeople, and marketers want to answer questions about customer experience or behavior but need the data science team to crunch the numbers for them.

“It’s a very collaborative interface to encourage customers to work together to understand how users are engaging with their apps,” Skates says.

Amplitude’s database also uses machine learning to segment users, predict user outcomes, and uncover novel correlations. Earlier this year, the company unveiled a service called Recommend that helps companies create personalized user experiences across their entire platform in minutes. The service goes beyond demographics to personalize customer experiences based on what users have done or seen before within the product.

“We’re very conscious on the privacy front,” Skates says. “A lot of analytics companies will resell your data to third parties or use it for advertising purposes. We don’t do any of that. We’re only here to provide product insights to our customers. We’re not using data to track you across the web. Everyone expects Netflix to use the data on what you’ve watched before to recommend what to watch next. That’s effectively what we’re helping other companies do.”

Optimizing digital experiences

The meditation app Calm is on a mission to help users build habits that improve their mental wellness. Using Amplitude, the company learned that users most often use the app to get better sleep and reduce stress. The insights helped Calm’s team double down on content geared toward those goals, launching “sleep stories” to help users unwind at the end of each day and adding content around anxiety relief and relaxation. Sleep stories are now Calm’s most popular type of content, and Calm has grown rapidly to millions of people around the world.

Calm’s story shows the power of letting user behavior drive product decisions. Amplitude has also helped the online fundraising site GoFundMe increase donations by showing users more compelling campaigns and the exercise bike company Peloton realize the importance of social features like leaderboards.

Moving forward, the founders believe Amplitude’s platform will continue helping companies adapt to an increasingly digital world in which users expect more compelling, personalized experiences.

“If you think about the online experience for companies today compared to 10 years ago, now [digital] is the main point of contact, whether you’re a media company streaming content, a retail company, or a finance company,” Skates says. “That’s only going to continue. That’s where we’re trying to help.”

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Laurence Young, professor emeritus of astronautics and renowned expert in bioastronautics, dies at 85

Laurence R. Young '57, SM '59, ScD '62, the Apollo Program Professor Emeritus of Astronautics and professor of health sciences and technology at MIT, died peacefully at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Aug. 4 after a long illness. He was 85.

A longtime member of the MIT community, Young was widely regarded for his pioneering role in the field of bioastronautics, the study of the impact of the space environment on living organisms, focusing in particular on the human factors of spaceflight. Many biological systems processes that comprise and govern the human body — from bones and muscles to cardiovascular regulation and sensory-motor control — depend on Earth's gravity to function properly. To protect astronauts from potentially negative effects of weightlessness, radiation, and psychological stress encountered in space, developing artificial life support systems for human protection is vital for future missions. 

Young joined the faculty in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) at MIT in 1962. There, he co-founded the Man-Vehicle Laboratory (now the Human-Systems Laboratory) with Y.T. Li to conduct his research on the visual and vestibular systems, visual-vestibular interaction, flight simulation, space motion sickness, and manual control and displays. 

"Larry was one of the first engineers to introduce math modeling techniques to aerospace-relevant areas of physiology and human factors. He knew that the quantitative approach would lead to new insights, so he started with eye movements and then moved on to perception," says Charles Oman, senior research engineer of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT and longtime colleague of Young. "I still remember in those days, some skeptics said perceptions were too complicated to model, but he proved them all wrong, and in the process, revolutionized the fields of vestibular physiology and flight simulation. His success and enthusiasm for his work were infectious."

Young was born in New York City on December 19, 1935 to Benjamin and Bess Young. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1952, Young received a BA from Amherst College in 1957; a certificate in applied mathematics from the Sorbonne, Paris as a French Government Fellow in 1958; BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering and an ScD in instrumentation from MIT in 1962.

Young's career extended beyond MIT to the national and international stage; he consulted with NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center on the Apollo project and later became a qualified payload specialist for the U.S. space shuttle's Spacelab biological laboratory in 1993. While he never flew a space mission, he served as backup crew (alternate payload specialist) on Spacelab Life Sciences-2 (STS-58) and was principal or co-investigator on seven shuttle missions conducting human orientation experiments.

Throughout various points during his career, Young held visiting professor positions at ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology); the Zurich Kantonsspital; the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers in Paris; the College de France, Paris; the Universite de Provence, Marseille; and Stanford University. Notably, Young also founded National Space Biomedical Research Institute, serving as director from 1997 to 2001.

Closer to home, Young served as director of the Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium; launched the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST) doctoral program in bioastronautics; and after retiring in 2013, remained active in AeroAstro, serving as a senior advisor lending his expertise on the department’s 2020 strategic plan committee. The MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) is HST’s home at MIT.

“Larry was amazing at everything he did — he loved MIT in practice and in concept, always promoting his students above himself and forever asking what would make our school better able to change the world. As founding member of HST and bedrock of IMES, his ideas have forever changed how we teach and how we bridge engineering and medicine,” says Elazer Edelman, the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science, director of IMES, and a practicing cardiologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “His scientific and educational reforms made the universe more accessible and our world safer and healthier, creating new communities of scholars, new fields of studies like biomedical engineering and new leaders. His life affected every living person and at the same time touched each of those he met personally on an individual level.”

In tandem with his extensive contributions to research, Young is remembered for the widespread dissemination of his knowledge through his impact as a teacher. Young mentored many colleagues when they were students, including (but not limited to) Oman, Edelman, and Professor David Mindell – with whom he would later develop the highly popular course STS.471J / 16.895J / ESD.30J (Engineering Apollo). Many of Young's mentees would become influential members of aerospace academia and industry in their own right; these include NASA astronaut and moonwalker Charlie Duke. 

"I literally can't count the thousands of students and alumni that Larry touched, myself among them. Recently, Larry led the charge to compose a handbook of bioastronautics, leaving us with the encyclopedic knowledge so future generations will continue with this work," says Dava Newman, the Apollo Professor of Astronautics, director of the MIT Media Lab, HST affiliate, and former Young mentee. "With all of the science we've learned and through all his years of mentoring, the moonshot Larry leaves with us is to never think about any constraints and boundaries, to literally always shoot for the moon, to Mars and beyond — that's the big dream that he inspired in me and all of his colleagues."

Throughout his career, Young received extensive recognition for his contributions, service, and leadership to the aerospace field. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a full member of the International Academy of Astronautics. He served on numerous academy committees and chaired NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts External Council. He held fellowships with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Biomedical Engineering Society, the American Institute of Medical and Biological Engineering, and the Explorers Club. In 1992, he was among the recipients recognized with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Jeffries Award "for outstanding contributions to space biology and medicine as a principal investigator on the Spacelab Life Sciences 1 mission." In 1995, NASA recognized his achievements with a Space Act Award for his development of an expert system for astronauts. In 1998, he received the prestigious Koetser Foundation Prize in Zurich for his contributions to neuroscience. In 2013, he received the Pioneer Award from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute. In 2018, he received the AIAA de Florez Award for Flight Simulation, and the Aerospace Medical Association's Professional Excellence Award for Lifetime Contributions. 

Outside of his career as an engineer, Young was an avid skier, which led him to become active in ski injury research. He was a director of the International Society for Skiing Safety and chaired the Ski Injury Statistics Subcommittee of the American Society for Testing and Materials Committee on Snow Skiing before being elected committee chair in 1987. He received the United States Ski Association Award of Merit and the Best Research Paper Award from the American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons.

In addition to countless alumni, colleagues, and friends, Young is survived by his beloved wife Vicki Goldberg; his sister Ellen Rosenberg; children Eliot Young SM ’87, SM ’90, ScD ’93; Leslie Young PhD ’94 and Robert Young; his first wife and the mother of his children Jody Williams; and grandchildren Joshua Young, Evan Young, David Young, Alexander Young, and Rachel Young.

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