MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences welcomes six new faculty

Interim Dean Agustín Rayo and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences recently welcomed the newest members of the MIT SHASS faculty. The six new faculty for Fall 2021 bring an array of research interests and domain knowledge to MIT, including: ethical questions about misinformation and lying; macroeconomics; economic theory; transnational power and civic media; the literature and thought of East Asia; and the politics of trade.

Ian Ball joins the Department of Economics as an assistant professor, having studied mathematics at Stanford University and pursuing advanced degrees in economics at Yale University, where he earned his doctorate in economics in 2020. Ball’s research focuses on economic theory, particularly information and mechanism design.

Sam Berstler is the newest member of the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy faculty. Berstler comes to MIT from Princeton University, where she was a postdoc, after completing her PhD at Yale. Her recent academic work investigates the structure, function, and ethics of insincere conversations. She recently co-organized the interdisciplinary Revisiting the Common Ground Conference, which brought together philosophers, cognitive scientists, and linguists to address foundational issues in the study of conversation.

Wiebke Denecke is already a familiar face in the MIT Literature Section; she served as a visiting professor before joining the department this year as a professor. Her research and teaching encompass classical literature and thought of China, Japan, and Korea; comparative studies of East Asia and the pre-modern world; world literature; and the politics of cultural heritage and memory. Prior to MIT she held appointments at Barnard College/Columbia University and at Boston University, and visiting professor appointments at Doshisha University (Kyoto) and Korea University (Seoul). Denecke is the general editor of "The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature" and the East Asia editor of "The Norton Anthology of World Literature." She earned her PhD at Harvard University after completing her BA and MA at the University of Göttingen in her native Germany.

Mariya Grinberg is a new assistant professor in the Department of Political Science. Her research interests include: why states trade with their enemies; how time and uncertainty shape nations’ strategic decisions; and the process of state decline. She earned a PhD from the University of Chicago in 2019, and has been a postdoc at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and at the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth University.

Christian Wolf joins the Department of Economics as a new assistant professor this semester. His research includes macroeconomics, monetary economics, and time series econometrics. He arrives at MIT from a fellowship at University of Chicago following an MA and PhD in economics from Princeton University. He also currently serves as a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Sulafa Zidani enters the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing program as an assistant professor of global civic media. Having worked as a teacher, research assistant, and translator in Palestine, Israel, China, and the United States, Zidani earned her PhD at the Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California, where she was also a founding member of the Critical Mediations graduate student conference. Her academic work focuses on the social, political, and cultural dynamics in which technology operates and the role tech plays in transnational power.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3AA493P

Glass blowing adapts to Covid-19 protocols

Team-based, hands-on activities at MIT have been seriously challenged by the Covid pandemic. This has certainly been true for the W. David Kingery Ceramics and Glass Lab at MIT, where students work in close proximity learning the ancient craft of glass blowing. Practices long considered normal — like sharing blowpipes — suddenly became off-limits in the context of a highly transmissible and health-threatening virus.

In September 2020, the Glass Lab received permission to restart limited operations. No students would be in the lab, and only a few senior instructors were granted access for the purpose of blowing 2,000 glass pumpkins for the annual (and now iconic) MIT Great Glass Pumpkin Patch fundraiser. In order to accomplish this, a new, safer, Covid-compliant way of blowing glass had to be invented.

Contrary to popular belief, it takes very little air pressure to inflate a glass bubble. The glass only needs to be hot enough to move. In fact, the typical glass blower generates no more than 4 to 6 pounds per square inch while mouth-blowing.

Since all workstations in the lab are equipped with compressed air, it was not difficult to design and install a system whereby the glass blower, wearing a mask at all times, could introduce air into the end of a blow pipe through a hose, using a pneumatic foot pedal to start and stop inflation. It’s a simple, yet very effective, solution.

One year and 2,000 pumpkins later, lab members have worked out the kinks and are confident that its alternative inflation system is a safe and effective teaching tool, as a new beginning glass blowing class begins this fall.

For MIT community members, the Great Glass Pumpkin Patch sale will both in-person (on Kresge Oval) and online at mitglasslab.org on Sept. 24-25.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3i3rdRb

MIT, US Space Force to explore opportunities for research and workforce development

Advancing human understanding and exploration in space is a long-standing pursuit of researchers and students at MIT. For the U.S. military, space technologies and discovery have wide-ranging implications on national security. With that history and context in mind, the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) hosted an on-campus event on Aug. 31, marking a new research engagement between MIT and the United States Space Force (USSF) to explore mutual interests and identify opportunities in research and education.

As global access to space increases, so does the need to protect the systems in Earth orbit that power much of the technology modern society relies on, such as GPS, telecommunication, and more.

"This engagement will lead to exciting advances in space systems and technology through research, a diverse educational pipeline of students who become guardians, and so much more. The sky is not our limit as we pursue these mutual interests together," says Daniel Hastings, associate dean of engineering for diversity, equity, and inclusion, head of AeroAstro, and Cecil and Ida Green Education Professor. "This marks an exciting first step to apply our commitment to technical excellence and our passion for space to contribute to national security. This new arrangement is a win-win for all of us — for AeroAstro, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the U.S. Space Force."

Gen. John W. "Jay" Raymond, chief of space operations for the USSF, met with Hastings, members of AeroAstro faculty, representatives of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and MIT Provost Martin Schmidt to discuss the importance of space as a domain for national defense, the USSF's newly-created University Partnership Program, and MIT's ongoing interest in space research, education, and innovation. During the event, Raymond and Schmidt signed a memorandum of understanding between MIT and the USSF to explore opportunities for engagement.

"MIT's relationship with the military is a fundamental element of its history," said Schmidt during his opening remarks. "While the challenges and technologies have changed over time, MIT's commitment to military research partnerships has not. Our work together has helped to keep America safe while holding to the Institute's core mission and values."

When the USSF was established as an independent military branch in late 2019, one of the highest priorities was building out the workforce to carry out its strategic mission. But to meet the complex, highly technical challenges inherent to the space environment, the guardians — military and civilian employees of the Space Force — that comprise their workforce would require specialized education and training to operate in a science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)-focused domain.

To address this need, the USSF created the University Partnership Program, which aims "to recruit, educate, develop, and retain a competent, diverse, and inclusive workforce who possess the technical expertise to develop, field, and operate the world's most advanced systems," according to USSF promotional material. MIT is one of 11 academic institutions from around the country selected for the inaugural cohort of participants in the program based on the quality of STEM degree offerings and space-related research programs; a strong ROTC presence; a diverse student population; and degrees and programming designed to support military veterans and their families.

In addition to AeroAstro, MIT is a hub for space-relevant research and education. Lincoln Laboratory, a Department of Defense federally-funded research and development center, is outfitted with secure facilities to support classified projects. In addition, the Center for International Studies has a policy-related Security Studies Program. The Institute's culture of interdisciplinary collaboration also creates the opportunity to leverage expertise in a wide range of relevant fields such as computer science, communications, cybersecurity, nuclear science, materials science, design, and artificial intelligence.

"We are trying to custom-build the first new military service since 1947 when the Air Force became independent from the Army. We knew we needed to up our STEM focus, and in my opinion, there is no better place to do that than MIT," said Raymond. "We look forward to exploring this relationship together, and we can't thank MIT enough for what this collaboration is going to mean to us in the future."

To conclude his visit, Raymond met with cadets from the MIT Air Force Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) and spoke with them about his career and his personal experience in the ROTC. He also fielded questions about leadership and the challenges and opportunities of building a new branch of the military.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3EOSu3s

Shaping the future of work

If you had told MIT professor Tom Kochan 10 years ago that teaching online courses would forever change his outlook on education, he’d have said, “I don’t think so.”

Today, Kochan has come around entirely to the power of thoughtfully constructed online learning experiences after spending six years creating and refining successive iterations of Shaping the Work of the Future, an MITx course that has influenced not only a global audience of tens of thousands of enrollees, but also changed Kochan’s approach to teaching residential courses for MIT Sloan School of Management MBA students. “I’ve learned so much about how to teach to a larger audience, and to learn from them, as they contribute to the discussions and respond to the materials, and how they share their own experiences in the workforces,” he says.

Kochan, the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management and co-director for the MIT Institute for Work and Employment Research, had no interest in teaching online when MIT first began developing massive open online courses (MOOCs) in 2011. The classroom veteran and MIT faculty member since 1980 began to think differently when he realized the platform’s power to take new knowledge out of the ivory tower and into the minds and hands of learners everywhere. He recalls, “I felt that we had a message to deliver to a larger audience out there, who aren’t in our MIT classes, people who are in the workforce and experience these changes.”

New perspectives on globalization, technology, and policy helped widen the scope of the course’s audience. The syllabus has evolved continually, keeping pace with rapid changes in the workplace over the last decade. Now the course, which is being archived after a hugely successful six-year run, has informed the new edition of Kochan’s book, “Shaping the Future of Work: A Handbook for Action and a New Social Contract,” published by Routledge.

Adapting to a changing world

The original run of the course used the previous edition of the book (co-authored with Lee Dyer, professor emeritus of human resource studies at Cornell University) as a core text. First published in 2015, the textbook was based on a course Kochan had taught at MIT Sloan. Over time, however, Kochan found that not only did the book need to be updated to reflect technological and societal changes, but also that the course’s students themselves were influencing how he thought about the course material. The latest edition of the book encompasses the breadth and depth of the MITx course’s global learning community, incorporating materials, examples, and results from MOOC learners throughout the book.

“Updating the book was really fun,” says Kochan. “It gave us a chance to show what we were learning from our students as well as from the ideas emerging in our MIT Task Force on Work of the Future.”

The new edition also includes a new chapter, “The New Social Contract,” which Kochan and Dyer drafted with learners in the 2020 Shaping the Work of the Future MITx course. This contract outlines responsibilities and duties of four sectors — education, labor, business, and government — in creating a thriving, dynamic, and equitable workforce. Government, for example, must raise minimum wages to a livable standard and provide subsidies and access to higher education for all; education in its turn must incorporate technical literacy and apprenticeship opportunities into its curricula. Labor must work with employers to represent the interests of the workforce and bring technology into the workplace in a way that enhances human work. Corporate leaders should prioritize funding for lifelong employee learning.

It’s a significant change in scope from the original book, and from the original MOOC, which Kochan says was aimed at young people first entering the job market. But over time, the course began to attract a much more diverse range of ages and experience than originally anticipated, including teachers and mid-career professionals. New technology became a regular source of debate, causing Kochan and his team to adapt the course to keep pace with industry innovations.

A community of learning

For Kochan, another key evolution of the course came with the addition of co-instructor Meghan Perdue in 2019, whom he describes as a “true partner.” Perdue first approached Kochan after he gave a presentation to the MITx Digital Learning Lab, where Perdue is a scientist. She had taken the course and shared her ideas with Kochan, who was so impressed that he asked her to review the syllabus as a whole and tell him what she’d change.

“We rewrote 90 percent of the course for the 2019 edition,” Perdue recalls. The changes seemed to resonate. “Learners really loved this class,” she says, describing how participants would “stick around,” remaining active on the discussion forums, adding hundreds of comments to posts, and responding to each other well after the course had ended.

The revamped course also benefited from the involvement of Elisabeth Reynolds, executive director of MIT’s Task Force on the Work of the Future, who served as co-instructor for the course’s latest run. Findings from the Institute-wide, multi-year task force both informed and were informed by the conversations happening in Kochan’s course. Reynolds has since brought her expertise on workforce transformation to the White House: in March, she joined the Biden administration’s National Economic Council as special assistant to the president for manufacturing and economic development.

The timeliness of the subject matter helped build community. “A lot of people who were drawn to the topic were drawn to it with a sense of despair and anxiety,” Perdue says. “The course gave them a framework to think about their fears about the future, specifically for work and policy, in a way that they could understand, and had control over.”

"I have been inspired by the course to spend more time engaged in coaching and mentoring my staff; particularly those at the earliest stages of their careers,” said one learner from the 2020 course run. “Where I can, I will share some of course content and ideas. We need to build a generation of business leaders who see the world very differently. Who are purpose- and values-driven, yes. But most importantly who recognize those responsibilities begin close to home, in providing their people ‘decent jobs’ and human dignity."

After a hugely successful six-year run, Kochan has decided to archive the Shaping the Future of Work course. He plans next to develop a follow-up course aimed at worker representatives on what he calls the “front line” of new technologies who need to know not only about design and implementation, but also the decision-making around how these technologies are adapted. In the deeply collaborative vein of its predecessor, this course will be created in partnership with the labor movement, the AFL-CIO Technology Institute, and with an activist group.

It’s a perfect next act for a professor who is equal parts academic and advocate. As Perdue puts it, “Tom is an evangelist. He’s a man on a mission to change the world.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3lSiCC1

Sylvester James Gates Jr. ’73, PhD ’77 recounts storied career in research, teaching, and service

Sylvester James Gates Jr. ’73, PhD ’77 has often described progress on diversity, equity, and inclusion as occurring at “blazingly glacial” rates.

The reknowned theoretical physicist was the featured speaker for this year’s MIT Compton Lecture, and he spoke on Tuesday to an appreciative audience, gathered and masked, in Kresge Auditorium. During his address, he chronicled his 52-year career in research, teaching, and service. He also noted moments in history when progress toward advancing civil rights simultaneously surged forward and rolled back.

“Those of us who read history are not surprised by where we are now,” Gates said.

He noted that following the Civil War, between 1865 and 1876, African American representatives were elected for the first time to the U.S. Congress. But this democratic momentum was met with a racist backlash, and after 1876 fewer Black politicians were able to gain office.

Meanwhile, in the world of academia, 1876 also marked the year when the first African American scholar — Edward Alexander Bouchet — received a PhD from an American university. Bouchet happened to earn his PhD from Yale University, in physics.

“So, at the same time opportunities for democracy were closing here for people of the African diaspora, physics allowed people who looked like me to earn a doctorate,” Gates said.

Casting forward to the present day, he described the current political climate as “fraught” and filled with disagreement over “who should be the beneficiaries of democracy, and who should sustain their denigrations.” Amid all this political uncertainty, however, he said he sees signs of increasing academic opportunity. Gates, who is the son of a soldier who never had the chance to go to college, now has a son and daughter who are each pursuing graduate and postgraduate studies in physics.

In addressing the MIT audience, he hoped that “democracy itself, for all citizens of this country, will also be held dear, and we will fight for them as hard as we fight for our science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.”

Iron faith

Gates is the director of the Brown Theoretical Physics Center, the Ford Foundation Professor of Physics, an affiliate mathematics professor, and a faculty fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He is also the current president of the American Physical Society.

Prior to these appointments, Gates was a professor at the University of Maryland for 33 years. He has held a variety of positions in science and policy, and is the author of more than 200 research publications. He has appeared in a number of documentaries, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science, which was presented to him in 2013 by President Barack Obama.

In looking back at his career, Gates credited MIT as his “intellectual birthing ground,” where he earned two undergraduate degrees, in math and physics, and a PhD in physics.

“There is a saying that you can’t go home again. And yet today I must admit, I’ve been overwhelmed by the feeling of returning home,” Gates said.

In fact, his path to MIT started at home. When he was 4 years old, he remembers his father asking him and his three younger siblings a question: What college do you plan to attend? His father had spent his own childhood on a sugarcane farm, then worked in the U.S. army for 27 years, never having had the opportunity to attend college himself.

“But he had an iron faith that education was the way to make progress for our family,” Gates said.

Gates first learned of MIT when he was 14. He was watching a television show, with a character who happened to be an MIT student. It left such an impression that Gates declared to his father that MIT was the college he wanted to attend. But as he recalled, “that dream almost never happened.”

He spent his high school years in Orlando, Florida, where “traditions in the South were very much enforced.” As such, Gates attended an all-Black high school and experienced the realities of inequality in education when he and his friends started a chess team. When they visited other high schools for matches, he saw the quality of everything, from the facilities, to the desks, and even the books — especially the books — was better than at his own school.

“So I understood inequity, and how I was born into a country where things get stacked against you according to race,” Gates said.

This experience made him hesitate in applying to MIT. But his father, remembering Gates’ early declaration, insisted. When the acceptance letter came, it was his father who gave him the news, while sitting on the family’s rocking couch.

“He was vigorously going back and forth, back and forth, and he looked up and saw me, and he smiled the biggest smile,” Gates said. “And that was my introduction to MIT — that very personal welcoming from my father, that my dream could come true.”

STEM mecca

At MIT, Gates was one of the first to participate in Interphase, a program that still runs today and is designed to help ease students’ transition to MIT. His physics teacher in Interphase was Shirley Ann Jackson ’68, PhD ’73, who was the first African American woman to earn a PhD at MIT. He recalled going to see her about a less-than-stellar midterm.

“She said, ‘You know, Mr. Gates, your homework has been great, but this exam…’ And I blurted out, ‘But I want to be a physicist!’’ Gates said. “And I’ll never forget her response: ‘Oh, really?’”

This exchange, and Jackson’s continued support, spurred Gates on, even as the work “was harder than anything I had ever done before.” After earning two bachelor’s degrees in 1973, he returned to MIT for a PhD. His thesis advisor was James Edward Young, who in 1970 was the first African American to earn tenure in MIT’s physics department. Young gave Gates freedom to pick a thesis topic that no one knew anything about, and he chose supersymmetry. At his defense, Gates remembered committee member Ernest Moniz praising the exceptional thesis.

“And that was the kind of encouragement a kid who was first in his family to go to college, who winds up being at one of the toughest STEM meccas in the planet, needed to hear,” Gates said.

The confidence he gained at MIT helped Gates throughout his career, even as, later on, as a young assistant professor at the Institute, he struggled with the decision of whether to stay or go. At the time, he felt that MIT was not doing enough to promote and value diversity. After two years as a junior faculty member, he chose to leave, for the University of Maryland.

“I felt liberated, that I could do the physics I wanted to do,” Gates said. “And I had confidence, that MIT built in me, that I could do things that nobody else could do.”

That assurance pushed Gates on to other new and challenging roles, including as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).

“I’m a physicist — what do I know of policy at that level?” Gates recalled. “But I was not afraid of doing something I had never done before. MIT was in the back of my mind.”

Following his lecture, MIT President L. Rafael Reif asked Gates questions that had been submitted by audience members, including one seeking advice for faculty on what to look for in applicants to MIT. Gates, speaking from his experience, had this to offer:

“As scientists, when we make measurements, we have error bars, which is a reflection of how in the real world, we are imperfect,” Gates said. “So what I would say to faculty is, when you start looking at people and what they can contribute to our discipline, and you are using tools such as long tradition, and someone is telling you there are error bars in those tools, you are making a fatal mistake, and likely overlooking possible talent.”

The Compton Lecture is an annual speaker series that features experts in a wide range of fields. The lecture was established in 1957 to honor Karl Taylor Compton, MIT’s ninth president and former chair of the MIT Corporation.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3kAJ6bV

New bionics center established at MIT with $24 million gift

A deepening understanding of the brain has created unprecedented opportunities to alleviate the challenges posed by disability. Scientists and engineers are taking design cues from biology itself to create revolutionary technologies that restore the function of bodies affected by injury, aging, or disease — from prosthetic limbs that effortlessly navigate tricky terrain to digital nervous systems that move the body after a spinal cord injury.

With the establishment of the new K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, MIT is pushing forward the development and deployment of enabling technologies that communicate directly with the nervous system to mitigate a broad range of disabilities. The center’s scientists, clinicians, and engineers will work together to create, test, and disseminate bionic technologies that integrate with both the body and mind.

The center is funded by a $24 million gift to MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research from philanthropist Lisa Yang, a former investment banker committed to advocacy for individuals with visible and invisible disabilities. Her previous gifts to MIT have also enabled the establishment of the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics in Neuroscience, Hock E. Tan and K. Lisa Yang Center for Autism Research, Y. Eva Tan Professorship in Neurotechnology, and the endowed K. Lisa Yang Post-Baccalaureate Program.

“The K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics will provide a dynamic hub for scientists, engineers, and designers across MIT to work together on revolutionary answers to the challenges of disability,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “With this visionary gift, Lisa Yang is unleashing a powerful collaborative strategy that will have broad impact across a large spectrum of human conditions — and she is sending a bright signal to the world that the lives of individuals who experience disability matter deeply.”

An interdisciplinary approach

To develop prosthetic limbs that move as the brain commands or optical devices that bypass an injured spinal cord to stimulate muscles, bionic developers must integrate knowledge from a diverse array of fields — from robotics and artificial intelligence to surgery, biomechanics, and design. The K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics will be deeply interdisciplinary, uniting experts from three MIT schools: Science, Engineering, and Architecture and Planning. With clinical and surgical collaborators at Harvard Medical School, the center will ensure that research advances are tested rapidly and reach people in need, including those in traditionally underserved communities.

To support ongoing efforts to move toward a future without disability, the center will also provide four endowed fellowships for MIT graduate students working in bionics or other research areas focused on improving the lives of individuals who experience disability.

“I am thrilled to support MIT on this major research effort to enable powerful new solutions that improve the quality of life for individuals who experience disability,” says Yang. “This new commitment extends my philanthropic investment into the realm of physical disabilities, and I look forward to the center’s positive impact on countless lives, here in the U.S. and abroad.”

The center will be led by Hugh Herr, a professor of media arts and sciences at MIT’s Media Lab, and Ed Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor of Neurotechnology in MIT's departments of Biological Engineering, Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Media Lab and an investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. 

A double amputee himself, Herr is a pioneer in the development of bionic limbs to improve mobility for those with physical disabilities.“The world profoundly needs relief from the disabilities imposed by today’s nonexistent or broken technologies. We must continually strive towards a technological future in which disability is no longer a common life experience,” says Herr. “I am thrilled that the Yang Center for Bionics will help to measurably improve the human experience for so many.”

Boyden, who is a renowned creator of tools to analyze and control the brain, will play a key role in merging bionics technologies with the nervous system. “The Yang Center for Bionics will be a research center unlike any other in the world,” he says. “A deep understanding of complex biological systems, coupled with rapid advances in human-machine bionic interfaces, mean we will soon have the capability to offer entirely new strategies for individuals who experience disability. It is an honor to be part of the center’s founding team.”

Center priorities

In its first four years, the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics will focus on developing and testing three bionic technologies: 

• digital nervous system, to eliminate movement disorders caused by spinal cord injuries using computer-controlled muscle activations to regulate limb movements while simultaneously stimulating spinal cord repair;
• brain-controlled limb exoskeletons, to assist weak muscles and enable natural movement for people affected by stroke or musculoskeletal disorders; and
• bionic limb reconstruction, to restore natural, brain-controlled movements as well as the sensation of touch and proprioception (awareness of position and movement) from bionic limbs.

A fourth priority will be developing a mobile delivery system to ensure patients in medically underserved communities have access to prosthetic limb services. Investigators will field-test a system that uses a mobile clinic to conduct the medical imaging needed to design personalized, comfortable prosthetic limbs and to fit the prostheses to patients where they live. Investigators plan to initially bring this mobile delivery system to Sierra Leone, where thousands of people suffered amputations during the country’s 11-year civil war. While the population of persons with amputation continues to increase each year in Sierra Leone, today less than 10 percent of persons in need benefit from functional prostheses. Through the mobile delivery system, a key center objective is to scale up production and access of functional limb prostheses for Sierra Leoneans in dire need.

“The mobile prosthetics service fueled by the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at MIT is an innovative solution to a global problem,” says Julius Maada Bio, president of Sierra Leone. “I am proud that Sierra Leone will be the first site for deploying this state-of-the-art digital design and fabrication process. As leader of a government that promotes innovative technologies and prioritizes human capital development, I am overjoyed that this pilot project will give Sierra Leoneans (especially in rural areas) access to quality limb prostheses and thus improve their quality of life.”

Together, Herr and Boyden will launch research at the bionics center with three other MIT faculty: assistant professor of media arts and sciences Canan Dagdeviren, Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience Nancy Kanwisher, and David H. Koch (1962) Institute Professor Robert Langer. They will work closely with three clinical collaborators at Harvard Medical School: Marco Ferrone, an orthopedic surgeon; Matthew Carty, a plastic surgeon; and Nancy Oriol, Faculty Associate Dean for Community Engagement in Medical Education.

“Lisa Yang and I share a vision for a future in which each and every person in the world has the right to live without a debilitating disability if they so choose,” adds Herr. “The Yang Center will be a potent catalyst for true innovation and impact in the bionics space, and I am overjoyed to work with my colleagues at MIT, and our accomplished clinical partners at Harvard, to make important steps forward to help realize this vision.”

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3CJC5vD

Toward a smarter electronic health record

Electronic health records have been widely adopted with the hope they would save time and improve the quality of patient care. But due to fragmented interfaces and tedious data entry procedures, physicians often spend more time navigating these systems than they do interacting with patients.

Researchers at MIT and the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center are combining machine learning and human-computer interaction to create a better electronic health record (EHR). They developed MedKnowts, a system that unifies the processes of looking up medical records and documenting patient information into a single, interactive interface.

Driven by artificial intelligence, this “smart” EHR automatically displays customized, patient-specific medical records when a clinician needs them. MedKnowts also provides autocomplete for clinical terms and auto-populates fields with patient information to help doctors work more efficiently.

“In the origins of EHRs, there was this tremendous enthusiasm that getting all this information organized would be helpful to be able to track billing records, report statistics to the government, and provide data for scientific research. But few stopped to ask the deep questions around whether they would be of use for the clinician. I think a lot of clinicians feel they have had this burden of EHRs put on them for the benefit of bureaucracies and scientists and accountants. We came into this project asking how EHRs might actually benefit clinicians,” says David Karger, professor of computer science in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and senior author of the paper.

The research was co-authored by CSAIL graduate students Luke Murray, who is the lead author, Divya Gopinath, and Monica Agrawal. Other authors include Steven Horng, an emergency medicine attending physician and clinical lead for machine learning at the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and David Sontag, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of CSAIL and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science. It will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology next month.

A problem-oriented tool

To design an EHR that would benefit doctors, the researchers had to think like doctors.

They created a note-taking editor with a side panel that displays relevant information from the patient’s medical history. That historical information appears in the form of cards that are focused on particular problems or concepts.

For instance, if MedKnowts identifies the clinical term “diabetes” in the text as a clinician types, the system automatically displays a “diabetes card” containing medications, lab values, and snippets from past records that are relevant to diabetes treatment.

Most EHRs store historical information on separate pages and list medications or lab values alphabetically or chronologically, forcing the clinician to search through data to find the information they need, Murray says. MedKnowts only displays information relevant to the particular concept the clinician is writing about.

“This is a closer match to the way doctors think about information. A lot of times, doctors will do this subconsciously. They will look through a medications page and only focus on the medications that are relevant to the current conditions. We are helping to do that process automatically and hopefully move some things out of the doctor’s head so they have more time to think about the complex part, which is determining what is wrong with the patient and coming up with a treatment plan,” Murray says.

Pieces of interactive text called chips serve as links to related cards. As a physician types a note, the autocomplete system recognizes clinical terms, such as medications, lab values, or conditions, and transforms them into chips. Each chip is displayed as a word or phrase that has been highlighted in a certain color depending on its category (red for a medical condition, green for a medication, yellow for a procedure, etc.)

Through the use of autocomplete, structured data on the patient’s conditions, symptoms, and medication usage is collected with no additional effort from the physician.

Sontag says he hopes the advance will “change the paradigm of how to create large-scale health datasets for studying disease progression and assessing the real-world effectiveness of treatments.”

In practice

After a year-long iterative design process, the researchers tested MedKnowts by deploying the software in the emergency department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. They worked with an emergency physician and four hospital scribes who enter notes into the electronic health record.

Deploying the software in an emergency department, where doctors operate in a high-stress environment, involved a delicate balancing act, Agrawal says.

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was trying to get people to shift what they currently do. Doctors who have used the same system, and done the same dance of clicks so many times, form a sort of muscle memory. Whenever you are going to make a change, there is a question of is this worth it? And we definitely found that some features had greater usage than others,” she says.

The Covid-19 pandemic complicated the deployment, too. The researchers had been visiting the emergency department to get a sense of the workflow, but were forced to end those visits due to Covid-19 and were unable to be in the hospital while the system was being deployed.

Despite those initial challenges, MedKnowts became popular with the scribes over the course of the one-month deployment. They gave the system an average rating of 83.75 (out of 100) for usability.

Scribes found the autocomplete function especially useful for speeding up their work, according to survey results. Also, the color-coded chips helped them quickly scan notes for relevant information.

Those initial results are promising, but as the researchers consider the feedback and work on future iterations of MedKnowts, they plan to proceed with caution.

“What we are trying to do here is smooth the pathway for doctors and let them accelerate. There is some risk there. Part of the purpose of bureaucracy is to slow things down and make sure all the i’s are dotted and all the t’s are crossed. And if we have a computer dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s for doctors, that may actually be countering the goals of the bureaucracy, which is to force doctors to think twice before they make a decision. We have to be thinking about how to protect doctors and patients from the consequences of making the doctors more efficient,” Karger says.

A longer-term vision

The researchers plan to improve the machine learning algorithms that drive MedKnowts so the system can more effectively highlight parts of the medical record that are most relevant, Agrawal says.

They also want to consider the needs of different medical users. The researchers designed MedKnowts with an emergency department in mind — a setting where doctors are typically seeing patients for the first time. A primary care physician who knows their patients much better would likely have some different needs.

In the longer-term, the researchers envision creating an adaptive system that clinicians can contribute to. For example, perhaps a doctor realizes a certain cardiology term is missing from MedKnowts and adds that information to a card, which would update the system for all users.

The team is exploring commercialization as an avenue for further deployment.

“We want to build tools that let doctors create their own tools. We don’t expect doctors to learn to be programmers, but with the right support they might be able to radically customize whatever medical applications they are using to really suit their own needs and preferences,” Karger says.

This research was funded by the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health.

de MIT News https://ift.tt/3hWIIT6