Cell Rover: Exploring and augmenting the inner world of the cell

Researchers at the MIT Media Lab have designed a miniature antenna that can operate wirelessly inside of a living cell, opening up possibilities in medical diagnostics and treatment and other scientific processes because of the antenna’s potential for monitoring and even directing cellular activity in real-time.

“The most exciting aspect of this research is we are able to create cyborgs at a cellular scale,” says Deblina Sarkar, assistant professor and AT&T Career Development Chair at the MIT Media Lab and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek Lab. “We are able to fuse the versatility of information technology at the level of cells, the building blocks of biology.”

A paper describing the research was published today in the journal Nature Communications.

The technology, named Cell Rover by the researchers, represents the first demonstration of an antenna that can operate inside a cell and is compatible with 3D biological systems. Typical bioelectronic interfaces, Sarkar says, are millimeters or even centimeters in size, and are not only highly invasive but also fail to provide the resolution needed to interact with single cells wirelessly — especially considering that changes to even one cell can affect a whole organism.

The antenna developed by Sarkar’s team is much smaller than a cell. In fact, in the team’s research with oocyte cells, the antenna represented less than .05 percent of the cell volume, putting it well below a size that would intrude upon and damage the cell.

Finding a way to build an antenna of that size to work inside a cell was a key challenge.

This is because conventional antennas need to be comparable in size to the wavelength of the electromagnetic waves they transmit and receive. Such wavelengths are very large — they represent the velocity of light divided by the wave frequency. At the same time, increasing the frequency in order to reduce that ratio and the size of the antenna is counterproductive because high frequencies produce heat damaging to living tissue.

The antenna developed by the Media Lab researchers converts electromagnetic waves into acoustic waves, whose wavelengths are five orders of magnitude smaller — representing the velocity of sound divided by the wave frequency — than those of the electromagnetic waves.

This conversion from electromagnetic to acoustic waves is accomplished by fabricating the miniature antennas using material that is referred to as magnetostrictive. When a magnetic field is applied to the antenna, powering and activating it, magnetic domains within the magnetostrictive material align to the field, creating strain in the material, the way metal bits woven into a piece of cloth could react to a strong magnet, causing the cloth to contort.

When an alternating magnetic field is applied to the antenna, the varying strain and stress (pressure) produced in the material is what creates the acoustic waves in the antenna, says Baju Joy, a student in Sarkar's lab and the lead author of this work. "We have also developed a novel strategy using a non-uniform magnetic field to introduce the rovers into the cells," Joy adds.

Configured in this way, the antenna could be used to explore the fundamentals of biology as natural processes occur, Sarkar says. Instead of destroying cells to examine their cytoplasm as is typically done, the Cell Rover could monitor the development or division of a cell, detecting different chemicals and biomolecules such as enzymes, or physical changes such as in cell pressure — all in real-time and in vivo.

Materials such as polymers that undergo change in mass or stress in response to chemical or biomolecular changes — already used in medical and other research — could be integrated with the operation of the Cell Rover, according to the researchers. Such an integration could provide insights not afforded by the current observational techniques that involve destruction of the cell.

With such capabilities, the Cell Rovers could be valuable in cancer and neurodegenerative disease research, for example. As Sarkar explains, the technology could be used to detect and monitor biochemical and electrical changes associated with the disease over its progression in individual cells. Applied in the field of drug discovery, the technology could illuminate the reactions of live cells to different drugs.

Because of the sophistication and scale of nanoelectronic devices such as transistors and switches — “representing five decades of tremendous advancements in the field of information technology,” Sarkar says — the Cell Rover, with its mini antenna, could carry out functions ranging all the way to intracellular computing and information processing for autonomous exploration and modulation of the cell. The research demonstrated that multiple Cell Rovers can be engaged, even within a single cell, to communicate among themselves and outside of the cells.

“The Cell Rover is an innovative concept as it can embed sensing, communication and information technology inside a living cell,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “This opens up unprecedented opportunities for extremely precise diagnostics, therapeutics, and drug discovery, as well as creating a new direction at intersection between biology and electronic devices.”

The researchers named their intracellular antenna technology Cell Rover to invoke, like that of a Mars rover, its mission to explore a new frontier.

“You can think of the Cell Rover,” says Sarkar, “as being on an expedition, exploring the inner world of the cell.”

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Peter Shor wins Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

Peter Shor, the Morss Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, has been named a recipient of the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. He shares the $3 million prize with three others for “foundational work in the field of quantum information”: David Deutsch at the University of Oxford, Charles Bennett at IBM Research, and Gilles Brassard of the University of Montreal.

In announcing the award, the Breakthrough Prize Foundation highlighted Shor’s contributions to the quantum information field, including the eponymous Shor’s algorithm for factoring extremely large numbers, and for an algorithm to correct errors in quantum computers.

“These ideas not only paved the way for today’s fast-developing quantum computers; they are now also at the frontiers of fundamental physics, especially in the study of metrology — the science of measurement — and of quantum gravity,” the award announcement reads.

“I’m very grateful to see the prize going to quantum information and quantum computation theory this year,” Shor commented to MIT News. “My three co-winners were the most influential people in founding this field. I consider them friends, and they all clearly deserve it.”

In addition, an MIT alumnus, Daniel A. Spielman PhD ’95, has won the 2023 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics for “contributions to theoretical computer science and mathematics, including to spectral graph theory, the Kadison-Singer problem, numerical linear algebra, optimization, and coding theory.”

“I am ecstatic to see both Peter Shor and Dan Spielman be recognized with Breakthrough Prizes in Fundamental Physics and Mathematics, respectively,” says Michel Goemans, the RSA Professor and head of MIT’s Department of Mathematics.  “Both would have been natural nominees of the Breakthrough Prize in Theoretical Computer Science, if such a prize existed. Peter and Dan are PhD graduates of our math department, both have held tenured appointments in our department and have been members of the theory group at CSAIL, and both have received the same prizes. It is a testimony of the importance of theoretical computer science across disciplines, in particular mathematics and physics.”

Quantum seeds

The first seeds of quantum computing’s potential were planted through the early algorithms derived by Deutsch, Bennett, Brassard, and Shor.  

In the early 1980s, Deutsch began thinking of problems whose solutions could be sped up using quantum algorithms — formulas that were derived using the laws of quantum mechanics, rather than classical physics. He was the first to develop a quantum algorithm that could solve a simple, albeit contrived, problem far more efficiently than a classical algorithm.

Meanwhile, Bennett and Brassard were also looking for uses of quantum information. In 1984, they developed the first quantum cryptography protocol, BB84. They put forth the idea that two distant parties could agree on a secret encryption key, which would be secure against eavesdroppers, based on a strange quantum principle in which the value of the encryption key would instantly be disturbed and therefore unreadable when measured.

Their work demonstrated the first practical application of quantum information theory. It was also Shor’s first introduction to the field. The mathematician was working at AT&T Bell Labs at the time, and Bennett came to give a talk on his new quantum key encryption system. “Their work inspired me to do a little thinking and research on quantum information,” Shor recalls. “But I didn’t really get anywhere at the time.”

A decade later, in 1994, Shor introduced his own landmark algorithm. Shor’s algorithm describes how a sufficiently large quantum computer could efficiently factorize extremely large numbers — a task that would take more than the age of the universe for the most powerful classical supercomputer to solve.

Most data encryption schemes today rely on the difficulty of factorization to keep information secure. Shor’s algorithm was the first to show that, in theory, a quantum system could break through most modern data security walls. To do this practically, however, would require a system of many precisely controlled quantum bits. Even then, scientists assumed that the tiniest noise in the environment would disrupt the delicate qubits, and set off a ripple of errors in their calculations that could not be corrected without further disturbing the qubits.

“When I first came up with this factoring algorithm, people thought it would remain theoretical forever because there was this argument that you could not correct errors on a quantum computer,” Shor says.

Shortly thereafter, in 1995, Shor worked out another algorithm, this time on quantum error correction, which showed that errors in a quantum system could in fact be isolated and fixed without disturbing the qubit itself, thereby leaving the quantum computation intact. The vision of a practical quantum computer became immediately tangible.

“With these two bombshell contributions, Peter set the stage for quantum computing to become the huge field that it is now,” says Alan Guth, the Victor F. Weisskopf Professor of Physics at MIT, who as a former recipient of the Breakthrough Prize, was the one who called Shor to deliver the news of this year’s award.

“It was a real pleasure for me to be able to tell him that he is one of the winners,” Guth says. “His algorithms took the world by surprise, and ignited the field of quantum computing. And despite his spectacular contributions, Peter continues to be a warm, friendly, smiling colleague to all around him.”

“Peter is a wonderful colleague and is totally unique,” adds Goemans. “His thought process seems to parallel the quantum algorithms he designs and invents: Out of entangled ideas and a superposition of states, a brilliant solution often emerges in a Eureka moment!”

“One of the best things about MIT is that we have great students,” says Shor, who earned a PhD in applied mathematics from MIT in 1985. He then spent one year as a postdoc at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute before moving on to work at AT&T Bell Labs, where he developed Shor’s algorithm. In 2003, he returned to MIT, where he has continued his research and teaching for the past 20 years.

Today, he is working to formulate a theory of quantum information, which would describe how data can be stored and transmitted, using the principles of quantum physics. Will there come a day when quantum computers are advanced enough to break through our classical security systems?

“In five or 10 years, we could be at the start of a Moore’s Law, where quantum computers will steadily improve every few years,” Shor predicts. “I suspect they’ll improve fast enough that within two or three decades we will get quantum computers that can do useful stuff. Hopefully by the time quantum computers are that large, we’ll be using different crypto systems that aren’t susceptible to quantum computers.”

Shor credits his father with fostering his early interest in mathematics. As a young boy, would flip through his father’s issues of Scientific American, to find his favorite section.

“Martin Gardner had a column, ‘Mathematical Games,’ which was really amazing,” Shor recalls. “It was sometimes a puzzle, sometimes a report on a new discovery in mathematics, and it was often at a level that I could understand. I looked forward to reading it every month, and that was something that turned me onto math early on.”

Beautiful breakthroughs

Daniel Spielman, this year’s recipient of the Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics, received a PhD in applied mathematics at MIT in 1995, for which he was advised by Michael Sipser, the Donner Professor of Mathematics and former dean of the MIT School of Science. Spielman then joined the math department and was on the MIT faculty until 2005, before moving on to Yale University, where he is currently the Sterling Professor of Computer Science, Mathematics, Statistics and Data Science.

Spielman specializes in the design and analysis of algorithms, many of which have yielded insights “not only for mathematics, but for highly practical problems in computing, signal processing, engineering, and even the design of clinical trials,” notes the Breakthrough Foundation in their announcement today.

“Dan has made a number of important and beautiful breakthroughs over the years, from expander-based error-correcting codes, to the smoothed analysis of algorithms, or spectral sparsifications of graphs, all characterized by innovative mathematics,” says Goemans.

Among numerous discoveries, Spielman is best known for solving the Kadison-Singer problem, which for decades was thought to be unsolvable. The problem can be interpreted as posing a fundamental question for quantum physics: In a quantum system, can new information be deciphered, if only some of the system’s properties are observed or measured? The answer, most mathematicians agreed, was no.

Over decades, the Kadison-Singer problem was reformulated and shown to be equivalent to problems across a wide range of mathematical fields. And in 2013, Spielman and his colleagues resolved one of these equivalent formulations involving linear algebra and matrices, proving the answer to be yes — indeed, it was possible to determine a quantum system’s sum from its parts.

The Breakthrough Prizes are a set of international awards that recognize the achievements of scientists in three categories — fundamental physics, mathematics, and life sciences. The prizes were founded by Sergey Brin; Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg; Julia and Yuri Milne; and Anne Wojcicki, and have been sponsored by foundations established by them. The 2023 prizes will be presented at a gala award ceremony, and prize recipients will take part in lectures and discussions.

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Six Lincoln Laboratory inventions win 2022 R&D 100 Awards

Six technologies developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory are among this year's R&D 100 Award winners. The awards recognize the 100 most significant innovations that have transitioned to use or been made available for sale or license in the past year.

R&D World magazine manages the awards program, which has run annually since 1963. The worldwide competition, dubbed the "Oscars of Innovation," is judged by a panel of science and technology experts and industry professionals.

Lincoln Laboratory's awardees represent a range of research and development areas. One technology is a revolutionary hurricane-tracking satellite. Another is a quiet propeller design for small commercial drones, and one is a system that can prevent drone collisions in the national airspace. Two awardees are tackling problems of technology overcrowding: one by allowing different devices to simultaneously use the same radio frequency band, and another by keeping densely packed electronics cool. And finally, a cybersecurity tool is recognized for its ability to prevent a pervasive type of cyberattack.

"Our R&D 100 Awards represent a major accomplishment for transitioning technology outside of the laboratory. We are very proud of everyone involved in this groundbreaking work," says Eric Evans, the director of Lincoln Laboratory.

Airborne Collision Avoidance System sXu

Today, small drones, or uncrewed aircraft systems (sUAS), are generally not authorized to fly in the U.S. National Airspace System. U.S. law requires all air vehicles to be able to see and remain clear of conflicting air traffic — and sUAS have neither a pilot on board nor a technical solution to meet this requirement. Lincoln Laboratory developed the Airborne Collision Avoidance System sXu (ACAS sXu) to enable unrestricted sUAS operation in the national airspace. The system allows sUAS to detect and track other nearby aircraft, and then automatically maneuvers the sUAS away from those aircraft to avoid a potential mid-air collision (or alerts its ground operator to make such a maneuver). ACAS sXu can be installed on the sUAS or employed as a remote service, and is adaptable across the wide range of sUAS vehicle types. The ACAS sXu design standard was finalized in 2022, and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is developing policy and procedures to approve use of this system.

Lincoln Laboratory shares this award with its collaborators on the technology: the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, MITRE, and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.

Constrained Communications and Radar Dual-Use

Radar and wireless communications systems typically operate in separate radio frequency (RF) bands to avoid cross-interference. However, today’s abundance of wireless devices is crowding the RF spectrum — a problem that is leading researchers to explore ways for technologies to share the same RF bands to free up space.

The Constrained Communications and Radar Dual-Use (CONCORD) technology enables such band sharing. CONCORD is a method of designing waveforms that can perform both radar and communications tasks simultaneously, with the same transmitter and receiver. This method allows a system designer to unify the hardware used for these tasks, simplifying a system's design and lowering costs. CONCORD has applications for any military or commercial systems that need to sense objects with radar and send out data, such as airborne radar imaging systems or self-driving cars. 

Embedded microjet cooling for high-power electronics

Electronics are becoming smaller and more powerful. These increased power densities are approaching the limit of what conventional thermal architectures can manage. Electronics designers are thus looking for new cooling solutions to meet performance requirements and reduce energy costs.

Lincoln Laboratory's embedded microjet cooling technology uses arrays of micron-scale fluid jets to cool high-power devices. These arrays are small enough to be embedded directly into the device at the chip level. This integration allows fluid to flow directly up to the electronics' semiconductor substrate, delivering an order-of-magnitude improvement in heat transfer over heat sinks or cold plates that pass cooling fluid parallel to the substrate. The microjets can be fabricated from low-cost materials, such as silicon or plastics, and can be mass produced with existing foundry tools. An MIT spinoff company, JETCOOL Technologies Inc., is commercializing this technology.

Toroidal propeller

Anyone who has encountered a small hobby drone flying nearby has likely noticed the high-pitched buzz of its propellers. Experiments by NASA have shown that humans find this sound to be more annoying than any other vehicle noise. If drones are to be accepted for wider use, such as for package delivery, they’ll likely need to be quieter.

Lincoln Laboratory's toroidal propeller is significantly quieter than common multirotor propellers, while producing comparable thrust. The toroidal propeller consists of looped blades, in which the tip of a leading propeller blade is curved back into its trailing propeller blade. This closed structure minimizes the strength of trailing tip vortices and increases the overall stiffness of the propeller, both of which reduce its noise; it is also less likely than conventional propellers to catch on or cut objects in its path. The propeller can be 3D printed and customized to a range of vehicles, making it suitable as a drop-in replacement on current drones.

Timely Address Space Randomization

Timely Address Space Randomization (TASR) addresses the problem of memory corruption, one of today's most prevalent cyber vulnerabilities. Hackers who launch memory corruption attacks can gain control of or steal data from millions of computers at once because the memory structures in these systems all look alike. TASR prevents such attacks by automatically shuffling, or re-randomizing, the location of code in memory.

TASR improves upon an existing solution deployed in most modern operating systems, called address space layout randomization (ASLR), which uses a similar premise of randomizing memory layout. The problem with ASLR is that it randomizes memory just once, and attackers have worked around that solution by using "information-leakage attacks" to force an application to reveal how its memory has been randomized. TASR is the first technology to mitigate such attacks by randomizing layout every time it observes an output from an application. TASR is compatible with existing cyber infrastructure and incurs a very low overhead. InfoSiftr, a cloud development company, has licensed TASR.

TROPICS Pathfinder satellite

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the frequency and intensity of hurricanes are expected to rise throughout this century. To provide scientists with more data over the Earth's tropical belt where these storms form, Lincoln Laboratory conceived of the TROPICS mission. TROPICS is a constellation of small satellites, called CubeSats, that will work together to provide global, rapid-revisit views of tropical storms. The TROPICS Pathfinder satellite was launched in 2021 as the first in this constellation.

Aboard the satellite is a microwave sounder, a sensor that produces high-resolution, 3D images of the temperature and water vapor content of the Earth's atmosphere along with estimates of precipitation intensity. The microwave sounder measurements are ingested into numerical weather models to produce a forecast (and provide the greatest contribution to reducing forecast error of all ingested data types). The greatest technical challenge in developing the TROPICS Pathfinder was the miniaturization of the sensor. Over the past 10 years, Lincoln Laboratory incrementally shrank the sensor from the size of a washing machine to that of a coffee cup, enabling its use on CubeSats. This R&D 100 Award is shared with NASA and Blue Canyon Technologies.

Technology transfer

Since 2010, Lincoln Laboratory has received 81 R&D 100 Awards. The awards recognize the laboratory's transfer of unclassified technologies to industry and government. Each year, many technology transitions also occur for classified projects. This transfer of technology is central to the laboratory's role as a federally funded research and development center.

The 2022 award recipients will be honored at a banquet in Coronado, California, on Nov. 17.

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Empowering Cambridge youth through data activism

For over 40 years, the Mayor's Summer Youth Employment Program (MSYEP, or the Mayor’s Program) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been providing teenagers with their first work experience, but 2022 brought a new offering. Collaborating with MIT’s Personal Robots research group (PRG) and Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE) this summer, MSYEP created a STEAM-focused learning site at the Institute. Eleven students joined the program to learn coding and programming skills through the lens of “Data Activism.”

MSYEP’s partnership with MIT provides an opportunity for Cambridge high schoolers to gain exposure to more pathways for their future careers and education. The Mayor’s Program aims to respect students’ time and show the value of their work, so participants are compensated with an hourly wage as they learn workforce skills at MSYEP worksites. In conjunction with two ongoing research studies at MIT, PRG and RAISE developed the six-week Data Activism curriculum to equip students with critical-thinking skills so they feel prepared to utilize data science to challenge social injustice and empower their community.

Rohan Kundargi, K-12 Community Outreach Administrator for MIT Office of Government and Community Relations (OGCR), says, “I see this as a model for a new type of partnership between MIT and Cambridge MSYEP. Specifically, an MIT research project that involves students from Cambridge getting paid to learn, research, and develop their own skills!”

Cross-Cambridge collaboration

Cambridge’s Office of Workforce Development initially contacted MIT OGCR about hosting a potential MSYEP worksite that taught Cambridge teens how to code. When Kundargi reached out to MIT pK-12 collaborators, MIT PRG’s graduate research assistant Raechel Walker proposed the Data Activism curriculum. Walker defines “data activism” as utilizing data, computing, and art to analyze how power operates in the world, challenge power, and empathize with people who are oppressed.

Walker says, “I wanted students to feel empowered to incorporate their own expertise, talents, and interests into every activity. In order for students to fully embrace their academic abilities, they must remain comfortable with bringing their full selves into data activism.”

As Kundargi and Walker recruited students for the Data Activism learning site, they wanted to make sure the cohort of students — the majority of whom are individuals of color — felt represented at MIT and felt they had the agency for their voice to be heard. “The pioneers in this field are people who look like them,” Walker says, speaking of well-known data activists Timnit Gebru, Rediet Abebe, and Joy Buolamwini.

When the program began this summer, some of the students were not aware of the ways data science and artificial intelligence exacerbate systemic oppression in society, or some of the tools currently being used to mitigate those societal harms. As a result, Walker says, the students wanted to learn more about discriminatory design in every aspect of life. They were also interested in creating responsible machine learning algorithms and AI fairness metrics.

A different side of STEAM

The development and execution of the Data Activism curriculum contributed to Walker’s and postdoc Xiaoxue Du’s respective research at PRG. Walker is studying AI education, specifically creating and teaching data activism curricula for minoritized communities. Du’s research explores processes, assessments, and curriculum design that prepares educators to use, adapt, and integrate AI literacy curricula. Additionally, her research targets how to leverage more opportunities for students with diverse learning needs.

The Data Activism curriculum utilizes a “libertatory computing” framework, a term Walker coined in her position paper with Professor Cynthia Breazeal, director of MIT RAISE, dean for digital learning, and head of PRG, and Eman Sherif, a then-undergraduate researcher from University of California at San Diego, titled “Liberty Computing for African American Students.” This framework ensures that students, especially minoritized students, acquire a sound racial identity, critical consciousness, collective obligation, liberation centered academic/achievement identity, as well as the activism skills to use computing to transform a multi-layered system of barriers in which racism persists. Walker says, “We encouraged students to demonstrate competency in every pillar because all of the pillars are interconnected and build upon each other.”

Walker developed a series of interactive coding and project-based activities that focused on understanding systemic racism, utilizing data science to analyze systemic oppression, data drawing, responsible machine learning, how racism can be embedded into AI, and different AI fairness metrics.

This was the students’ first time learning how to create data visualizations using the programming language Python and the data analysis tool Pandas. In one project meant to examine how different systems of oppression can affect different aspects of students’ own identities, students created datasets with data from their respective intersectional identities. Another activity highlighted African American achievements, where students analyzed two datasets about African American scientists, activists, artists, scholars, and athletes. Using the data visualizations, students then created zines about the African Americans who inspired them.

RAISE hired Olivia Dias, Sophia Brady, Lina Henriquez, and Zeynep Yalcin through the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) and PRG hired freelancer Matt Taylor to work with Walker on developing the curriculum and designing interdisciplinary experience projects. Walker and the four undergraduate researchers constructed an intersectional data analysis activity about different examples of systemic oppression. PRG also hired three high school students to test activities and offer insights about making the curriculum engaging for program participants. Throughout the program, the Data Activism team taught students in small groups, continually asked students how to improve each activity, and structured each lesson based on the students’ interests. Walker says Dias, Brady, Henriquez, and Yalcin were invaluable to cultivating a supportive classroom environment and helping students complete their projects.

Student Nina says, “It’s opened my eyes to a different side of STEM. I didn’t know what ‘data’ meant before this program, or how intersectionality can affect AI and data.” Before MSYEP, Nina took Intro to Computer Science and AP Computer Science, but she has been coding since Girls Who Code first sparked her interest in middle school. “The community was really nice. I could talk with other girls. I saw there needs to be more women in STEM, especially in coding.” Now she’s interested in applying to colleges with strong computer science programs so she can pursue a coding-related career.

From MYSEP to the mayor’s office

Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui visited the Data Activism learning site on Aug. 9, accompanied by Breazeal. A graduate of MSYEP herself, Siddiqui says, “Through hands-on learning through computer programming, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School students have the unique opportunity to see themselves as data scientists. Students were able learn ways to combat discrimination that occurs through artificial intelligence.” In an Instagram post, Siddiqui also said, "I had a blast visiting the students and learning about their projects."

Students worked on an activity that asked them to envision how data science might be used to support marginalized communities. They transformed their answers into block-printed T-shirt designs, carving pictures of their hopes into rubber block stamps. Some students focused on the importance of data privacy, like Jacob T., who drew a birdcage to represent data stored and locked away by third party apps. He says, “I want to open that cage and restore my data to myself and see what can be done with it.”

Many students wanted to see more representation in both the media they consume and across various professional fields. Nina talked about the importance of representation in media and how that could contribute to greater representation in the tech industry, while Kiki talked about encouraging more women to pursue STEM fields. Jesmin said, “I wanted to show that data science is accessible to everyone, no matter their origin or language you speak. I wrote ‘hello’ in Bangla, Arabic, and English, because I speak all three languages and they all resonate with me.”

“Overall, I hope the students continue to use their data activism skills to re-envision a society that supports marginalized groups,” says Walker. “Moreover, I hope they are empowered to become data scientists and understand how their race can be a positive part of their identity.”

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Visualizing migration stories

On July 27, 2020, 51 people migrating to the United States were found dead in an overheated trailer near the Mexican border. Understanding why migrants willingly take such risks is the topic of a recent exhibition and report, co-authored by researchers at MIT’s Civic Data Design Lab (CDDL). The research has been used by the U.S. Senate and the United Nations to develop new policies to address the challenges, dangers, and opportunities presented by migration in the Americas.

To illustrate these motivations and risks, researchers at CDDL have designed an exhibition featuring digital and physical visualizations that encourage visitors to engage with migrants’ experiences more fully. “Distance Unknown” made its debut at the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) executive board meeting in Rome earlier this summer, with plans for additional exhibition stops over the next year.

The exhibition is inspired by the 2021 report about migration, co-authored by CDDL, that highlighted economic distress as the main factor pushing migrants from Central America to the United States. The report’s findings were cited in a January 2022 letter from 35 U.S. senators to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken (who leads the Biden administration’s migration task force) that advocated for addressing humanitarian needs in Central America. In June, the United States joined 20 countries in issuing the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, which proposed expanded legal avenues to migration.

“This exhibition takes a unique approach to visualizing migration stories by humanizing the data. Visitors to the exhibition can see the data in aggregate, but then they can dive deeper and learn migrants’ individual motivations,” says Sarah Williams, associate professor of technology and urban planning, director of the Civic Data Design Lab and the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism, and the lead designer of the exhibition.

The data for the exhibition were taken from a survey of over 5,000 people in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras conducted by the WFP and analyzed in the subsequent report. The report showed that approximately 43 percent of people surveyed in 2021 were considering migrating in the prior year, compared to 8 percent in 2019 — a change that comes after nearly two years of impacts from a global pandemic and as food insecurity dramatically increased in that region. Survey respondents cited low wages, unemployment, and minimal income levels as factors increasing their desire to migrate — ahead of reasons such as violence or natural disasters. 

On the wall of the exhibition is a vibrant tapestry made of paper currency woven by 13 Latin American immigrants. Approximately 15-by-8 feet, this physical data visualization explains the root causes of migration from Central America documented by CDDL research. Each bill in the tapestry represents one migrant; visitors are invited to take a piece of the tapestry and scan it at a touch-screen station, where the story of that migrant appears. This allows visitors to dive deeper into the causes of migration by learning more about why an individual migrant family in the study left home, their household circumstances, and their personal stories.

Another feature of the exhibition is an interactive map that allows visitors to explore the journeys and barriers that migrants face along the way. Created from a unique dataset collected by researchers from internet hotspots along the migration trail, the data showed that migrants from 43 countries (some as distant as China and Afghanistan) used this Latin American trail. The map highlights the Darien Gap region of Central America, one of the most dangerous and costly migration routes. The area is remote, without roads, and consists of swamps and dense jungle.

The intense multimedia exhibition demonstrates the approach that Williams takes with her research. “One of the exciting features of the exhibition is that it shows that artistic forms of data visualization start new conversations, which create the dialogue necessary for policy change. We couldn't be more thrilled with the way the exhibition helped influence the hearts and minds of people who have the political will to impact policy,” says Williams.

In his opening remarks to the exhibition, David Beasley, executive director of WFP, explained that “when people have to migrate because they have no choice, it creates political problems on all sides,” and emphasized the importance of proposing solutions. Citing the 2021 report, Beasley noted that migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras collectively spent $2.2 billion to migrate to the United States in 2021, which is comparable to what their respective governments spend on primary education.

The WFP hopes to bring the exhibition to other locations, including Washington, Geneva, New York, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Panama.

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Between two universes

When Mohammad Javad Khojasteh arrived at MIT’s Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) in 2020 to begin his postdoc appointment, he was introduced to an entirely new universe. The domain he knew best could be explained by “classical” physics that predicts the behavior of ordinary objects with near-perfect accuracy (think Newton’s three laws of motion). But this new universe was governed by bizarre laws that can produce unpredictable results while operating at scales typically smaller than an atom.

“The rules of quantum mechanics are counterintuitive and seem very strange when you first start to learn them,” Khojasteh says. “But the more you know, the clearer it becomes that the underlying logic is extremely elegant.”

As a member of Professor Moe Win’s lab, called the Wireless Information and Network Sciences Laboratory, or WINS Lab, Khojasteh’s job is to straddle both the classical and quantum realms, in order to improve state-of-the-art communication, sensing, and computational capabilities.

Growing up in Iran, Khojasteh knew he wanted to be a scientist from an early age. In high school, he became captivated by physics in particular. He was a first-generation college graduate, earning a dual bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering and math from Sharif University of Technology, before completing his PhD in electrical and computer engineering at University of California at San Diego (UCSD). There, he worked at the intersection of robotics and machine learning, developing tools to protect against cyber threats as well as learning-enabled planning algorithms for autonomous robots to operate safely in changing real-world scenarios. After graduating from UCSD in 2019, he remembers calling home to share the good news: “Mom, I’m officially a doctor now.”

After a stint at Caltech, where Khojasteh collaborated with NASA researchers to develop planning and control algorithms to improve off-road autonomous driving and build robots for life-detection missions on other planets, Khojasteh moved across the country to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to join LIDS and the WINS Lab.

“LIDS has always been at the center of the decision-making and information science field,” he says. “As an undergraduate, and later as a PhD student, I remember reading papers and textbooks by LIDS professors, so getting the chance to collaborate with these renowned researchers during my postdoc has been really exciting. LIDS is such an interesting and vibrant environment.”

Until this point, Khojasteh had focused primarily on classical systems such as autonomous vehicles, although he’d always maintained a keen interest in quantum systems. In the WINS Lab, he could finally focus on both pursuits in tandem.

There’s a quantum revolution on the horizon, he explains, that will transform the way devices perform sensing, computation, and communications tasks. Problems that take classical computers years to solve will be child’s play for the large-scale quantum computers slated to come online in the next few decades. For example, these new-wave quantum computers will allow biologists and chemists to better simulate molecular interactions to design new drugs — and even help engineers to design better batteries. These machines will also leverage the laws of quantum physics to advance medical research and clinical care.

In Khojasteh’s words: “This quantum revolution will change lives and help us to better understand the world around us.”

Because he was still so new to the field of quantum mechanics when he arrived in the WINS Lab, Khojasteh began by reading and discussing related papers with his lab mates to get up to speed. In the meantime, he started working on a project related to classical systems, helping robots to navigate while keeping their locations secret to thwart potential security breaches.

As Khojasteh began to master the rules of the quantum universe, he took on a second project that has since become his main endeavor, aimed at developing data-driven techniques to control the basic units of information that feed quantum computers.

While classical computers store information as electrical pulses that represent ones and zeroes called “bits,” quantum computers use quantum bits, or “qubits,” which might typically be subatomic particles. Based on their unique quantum mechanical properties, qubits can represent additional values besides just 0 or 1: They can also represent both 0 and 1 at the same time in different weights (a phenomenon known as superposition that can lead to computational advantages). However, because the dynamics of quantum systems are so difficult to predict, controlling the state of these qubits is no easy feat. While traditional approaches rely on manually designed models, Khojasteh’s method utilizes a hierarchical design that layers exploratory control, quantum tomography, Hamiltonian learning, and data-driven control techniques to more precisely tune the dynamics of these qubits, allowing quantum computers to operate more efficiently.

“I’ve learned so much from Professor Win,” Khojasteh says. “There are very few research groups with a foot in both classical and quantum physics, so working in his lab has been an amazing opportunity.”

With roughly a year left in his postdoc appointment, Khojasteh has begun considering his next career steps. He plans to apply to research scientist jobs in industry, as well as faculty positions. Becoming a professor would allow him to continue teaching, which he’s enjoyed immensely during his time at LIDS. In addition to serving as a teaching assistant, he has also volunteered for MIT’s Summer Research Program (MSRP), which empowers students from historically underrepresented groups in science to become researchers. Khojasteh mentored one MSRP student for over a year, and the two even co-authored a study together.

Whether he pursues a career in academia or industry, Khojasteh aims to continue performing fundamental research in quantum systems. His interdisciplinary background in physics, mathematics, engineering, robotics, machine learning, and quantum mechanics has endowed him with a multifaceted perspective, which he applies to every research problem he encounters.

“I’m somebody who enjoys crossing the imaginary boundaries between the fields and trying different methods to address a research question,” he says. “Everyone at LIDS also really values this interdisciplinary approach, which gives them a broad vision to conduct really interesting research and solve important problems.”

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Getting innovative products to rural communities

Universities like MIT have produced a number of innovative products for people in low-resource communities around the world. But in order for those products to make an impact, they have to be manufactured at scale, get through local supply chains, and, most importantly, make enough of an impression that people actually want to buy them.

All of those challenges can erode the economics of deploying new products and ultimately limit their adoption. For the last 11 years, the MIT spinout Essmart has been helping new products reach consumers by partnering with the small retail shops that form the backbone of rural economies across the globe.

The company, which currently works with nearly 5,000 retail shops around India, offers a catalogue of more than 400 products to shop owners. Essmart offers products that improve the lives of buyers, whether by increasing crop yields, improving air quality, or boosting the efficiency of their work. Agricultural tools make up the bulk of Essmart’s products, but the company’s catalogues also feature things like clean cookstoves and solar lighting.

After shops place orders, Essmart arranges the sourcing of the products, shipping, and customer service. The company also uses a mobile platform to provide things like product training and marketing materials.

The goal is to make selling what the company calls “social livelihood products” as easy as selling a Coca-Cola.

“We’re opening up a channel for places that otherwise wouldn’t have access to these products even though nearby families could really benefit from them,” say Essmart co-founder Taylor Matthews MBA ’13, who founded the company with Diana Jue-Rajasingh ’09 SM ’12 and former D-Lab student and instructor Jackie Stenson. “It’s fantastic to see a company you spent countless hours and years working on having an impact.”

Forming a team

As an undergraduate, Stenson studied mechanical engineering at Harvard University, but she became enthralled with MIT D-Lab’s approach to innovating in low-resource settings and ended up cross-registering for two D-Lab courses and being advised for her undergraduate thesis by D-Lab founding director Amy Smith.

After graduation, to help decide what kinds of environments and technologies to work with, Stenson spent two years traveling down eastern Africa working on different projects. She developed water-related technologies with an international nonprofit in Ethiopia, promoted plastics recycling with a community group in Kenya, deployed bicycle-powered machinery with a social enterprise in Tanzania, distributed agricultural tools for a nongovernmental organization in Malawi, and studied bicycle ambulances for a trust fund in Zambia.

Her takeaway was that impactful technologies already exist in many low-resource communities, but their dissemination and adoption — and thus, their impact — was uneven and lacking.

The insight led her to Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, where she studied technology dissemination.

Stenson returned to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011. Shortly after her arrival, D-Lab lecturer Joost Bonsen connected her to Jue-Rajasingh, who was also studying the effects of new technologies on underserved communities as part of her master’s work at MIT.

“Joost said, ‘I have a co-founder for you,’” Stenson recalls. “It was the first time I had heard the word co-founder, and honestly it was the first time I had thought of being an entrepreneur.”

The founders partnered with Prashanth Venkataramana, who Stenson had met at Cambridge University, and later met Matthews at a pitch session hosted at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where Matthews was an MBA candidate.

The team used Essmart as a case study in several of Matthews’ courses and participated in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. After graduating they received support from the MIT IDEAS Competition and the D-Lab Scale Up Fellowships program to move to India and work on Essmart full time.

Stenson’s research indicated that the best way to get new products adopted in rural communities was through the relationships consumers already had with local shop owners.

“Local retail shops are prevalent everywhere in the world, they have incredibly strong, trust-based connections with customers, and they can be those agents of change in the communities showing people what’s new and worth getting,” Stenson says.

To start working with a new shop, Essmart’s sales representatives meet with the owners, learn about their stores, and suggest a good product to start with. Shops in Essmart’s network typically specialize in products related to agriculture, metal products such as pots and pans, electronics, and general hardware.

From there, shop owners learn how to use Essmart’s mobile platform, where they can place new orders, receive product demonstrations, get warranty information, and stay in touch with their sales representative.

Essmart monitors new products coming from places like MIT, Harvard University, and the Indian Institutes of Technology and ultimately sources products from spinout companies and nonprofits.

Selling innovative products involves more risk for shop owners because such products are usually more expensive and complex. If a shop owner were to start selling a solar-powered water pump, for instance, they’d need to be able to answer customer questions about how it should be used, why it’s worth the upfront investment, and what to do if it breaks or needs to be returned.

“If the shop owners can’t answer questions about a product, they’re not going to feel comfortable selling it,” Stenson explains.

An evolving model

The challenges caused by the Covid-19 pandemic turned into learning opportunities for Essmart’s team. They launched their mobile app for shop owners last year and have since used it to scale more quickly than ever before. In fact, some of Essmart’s fastest-growing months occurred during the early months of the pandemic.

“Now we can supplement in person interactions with tech, so initial onboarding and teaching can still happen in person to help overcome initial doubts or confusion, but then we can provide support through the platform,” Stenson says.

Earlier this year, Essmart announced a partnership with the global nonprofit One Acre Fund, which provides products and training to farmers around the world. Through the deal, Essmart expanded its operations to offer farmers in northern India a product catalogue that includes One Acre’s offerings such as seeds and fertilizers along with Essmart’s equipment.

In addition to extending its supply chain, Essmart is also helping to create new ways of designing and deploying products in low-resource settings. The company has run about a dozen studies that let organizations test product ideas with real consumers and decide between different technologies and features.

Stenson says Essmart’s work in that area will continue to grow.

“We want to be the single point of contact that connects rural markets with life-improving, livelihood-generating technologies,” Stenson says. “And we don’t want that connection to be one-way. We also want to explore partnerships to help bring information and goods back up through the supply chain, whether that’s market linkages or data on rural customer needs. If we can send that information back up the supply chain, engineers will design better products and funders will make better, more-informed decisions based on what the market actually wants. That’s the ultimate dream: to have rural customers’ voices be a bigger part of product conversations and decisions.”

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