Using robotics to supercharge health care

Since its founding in 1998, Vecna Technologies has developed a number of ways to help hospitals care for patients. The company has produced intake systems to respond to Covid-19 patient surges, prediction systems to manage health complications in maternity wards, and telepresence robots that have allowed sick people to stay connected with friends and loved ones.

The differences among those products have also led to a number of transformations and spinoffs, including material handling company Vecna Robotics and the health care nonprofit VecnaCares. Vecna Technologies co-founders Deborah Noel Theobald ’95 and Daniel Theobald ’95, SM ’98 say each of those pivots has been driven by a desire to build a robotics company that makes a positive impact on the world.

“We knew we wanted to do robotics and do something good in the world,” Deborah says of the team’s mindset. “We founded Vecna thinking, ‘How can these new web technologies influence and improve health care?’ That’s the arc MIT set me on and something I’ve been excited to pursue ever since.”

“A fun ride”

As a child, Deborah Theobald wanted to be an astronaut. The desire led her to MIT, which had one of the few aerospace engineering programs for undergraduates. She got interested in the health care industry while studying the health effects of long-term space exploration with Professor Dava Newman, the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics at MIT who is now also the director of the Media Lab.

Deborah also met Daniel Theobald at MIT. Daniel had been building robots since he was a child and was majoring in mechanical engineering.

The two began thinking about starting a company, and Daniel even applied to the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition (then the $10K) with a rough idea for a robotics company.

For their master’s degrees, Deborah went to the University of Maryland to continue studying health effects in space, while Daniel stayed at MIT, working on several robotics projects. When Daniel graduated in 1998, Vecna was born.

From day one, the company had a policy of paying employees to spend 10 percent of their work week doing community service.

“We found that our focus on giving back benefited the business in so many ways that it was absolutely, unambiguously the right thing to do,” Daniel says. “For one, it was a self-filtering mechanism. People joined Vecna who believed in giving back and wanted to be part of something that was socially responsible. And we found those are also the people that make amazing employees.”

The founders got their first big break with a government contract to build a health care portal that allowed patients, managers, and providers to communicate and share documents. The contract also provided flexibility for the founders to explore other avenues for the business.

The pair went on to earn a number of government grants for one-off projects, some of which blossomed into successful commercial products. Another grant tasked them with building models to help hospitals predict and manage hospital acquired infections (HAIs), which kill tens of thousands of people in the U.S. each year. The resulting tool ended up being deployed in about 100 hospitals.

“At the time, people were using spreadsheets to pull in data from different systems … and trying to comprehend what kind of infection it was,” Deborah says, noting that doctors usually start infected patients on general antibiotics before they can classify the disease. “Our tool allowed them to pull that information together faster, reducing their stay in hospitals — and all the trauma and pain that goes with that — by weeks.”

The company’s next product was a patient registration system that used kiosks to streamline patient intake at hospitals. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Vecna turned the platform into a text-based check-in service for clinics. The service is being used by thousands of hospitals today.

Subsequent mobile versions of that system have been used to deliver medication, allow doctors to hold virtual consultations, and even help immunocompromised students to attend school virtually and avoid isolation.

Vecna’s emphasis on community service led the team to explore ways to apply the company’s technologies in low-resource settings, leading to the creation of the company’s nonprofit arm, VecnaCares.

In 2014, VecnaCares brought their VGo mobile robot to Liberia and Sierra Leone to help with the Ebola response, allowing doctors to see patients without going through a time-consuming decontamination process. The company’s patient intake software was also used to register and manage patients with Ebola and other diseases.

VecnaCares has since partnered with groups including the International Rescue Committee, the International Committee of the Red Cross, International Medical Corp, and the Special Olympics for a variety of projects. It’s also honed its algorithms to help low-resource hospitals manage staff shortages in maternity wards, helping nurses focus their attention on the babies and mothers most at risk of complications.

“One of the places we’re deployed has 10,000 births a year, so at any one time there may be 40 women laboring in that hospital, which has one operating room for all C-sections,” Deborah explains. “Our tool can intake women, do an assessment, and notify clinicians if someone’s high risk and needs checking-in on. It leads to better outcomes and helps manage some of the complications that have led to a high rate of infant and maternal mortality in these areas.”

After years of robot development and commercialization, the founders decided their robots may be better suited for warehouses than health care. In 2017, Daniel spun out Vecna Robotics to focus exclusively on robotics for industrial settings like manufacturing, logistics, and order fulfillment.

“We’ve sort of done four different growths and exits,” Deborah explains. “It’s been a fun ride.”

Continuing to innovate

As it nears the 25th anniversary of its founding, Vecna Technologies is far from finished. Its leaders believe the firm’s products and expertise can play a significant role in the burgeoning home health care and extended care industries, helping patients stay out of hospitals while remaining safe.

“As we look at the aging population, that burden of care is really going to fall on family members as well as [health care organizations],” Deborah says. “I’d love to be able to provide better tools for them to care for loved ones, which is often unpaid and unrecognized.”

Later this year, the company will release an inexpensive home care robot that can move autonomously or by remote control to help care for people struggling with diseases like Alzheimer’s. The robots will be part of Vecna’s “Be There Network” that health care providers can use to provide care for large numbers of patients despite staff shortages.

“Now you can see and hear and feel like you’re actually there to more seamlessly interact with the environment,” Deborah says. “We see that as the wave of the future now that people have begun to embrace telepresence. There are so many uses for this robot. People keep coming up with more ideas as they catch the vision.”

No matter what the future holds for Vecna — whose motto is “Better technology, better world” — the founders say the company will continue exploring new applications where its technologies could make a real difference in people’s lives.

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Residential scholars enrich the on-campus living experience

Imagine living and sharing your passions with hundreds of MIT students while experiencing the fun and singular energy of living in an on-campus residence. Sound fun? Welcome to the Residential Scholars Program.

The program is managed by the Office of Residential Education in the Division of Student Life (DSL), which is committed to developing welcoming, safe, and inclusive living and learning communities. “Programs like the Residential Scholars foster intellectual, physical, spiritual, and personal development by connecting students and community members who bring new perspectives on life, art, and careers to campus through diverse and enriching experiential learning opportunities in the unique and exciting culture that is MIT,” says Judy Robinson, senior associate dean for residential education and executive director for DSL strategic initiatives.

There are four residential scholars at MIT — one in New Vassar, one in International House, and two in Simmons Hall. They hail from all over the world and bring unique experiences that aid the development of community and individual student growth within their residence halls.

Andrea Bolnick from Johannesburg, South Africa, saw the opportunity to become a residential scholar in New Vassar House as a way to immerse herself in MIT and interact with students. She is also the managing director of Ikhayalami Development Services and visiting scholar at the Leventhal Center for Applied Urbanism.

This semester, Bolnick plans to show the sci-fi film “District 9” about apartheid in South Africa and bring in someone to speak about emerging financial trends.

She and her 5-year-old daughter enjoy meeting students, especially at dinnertime. “I think the students are amazing. Most of them play sports, are active, and are sociable and appear light-hearted — this is quite extraordinary considering that they are also so smart,” says Bolnick.

Jeff Behrens grew up in Framingham, Massachusetts, and is the CEO of LabShares Newton, a biotech incubator. Like Bolnick, he finds that working with MIT students is the best perk of being a residential scholar.

“Getting to know some of the students and renewing our optimism in the leaders and innovators of the future has been the best part of the role. I’ve enjoyed setting up small, intimate events where you can talk in more detail to a few students. It’s well worth it!” says Behrens.

Behrens held a resume review session and also invited MIT alums Dan Nussbaum ’85, SM ’88, PhD ’93, a former member of the MIT Blackjack team, and Warren Katz ’86, a software entrepreneur, to speak on separate occasions.

From Sao Paulo, Brazil, Hannah Arcuschin Machado is an MIT SPURS fellow who applied for the role so she could become immersed in MIT's community and exchange knowledge and experience with students.

Machado quickly engaged New House residents by offering Portuguese-speaking brunches and dinners. She also invited residents to watch World Cup matches together.

“This spring, I will offer a workshop to fix the abandoned bikes in the New House Bike Park and transform them into shared bikes for the collective use of everyone — since you can bike almost everywhere in Cambridge. There is a New House undergrad resident that is excited by this idea and plans to create a GPS system to locate the bikes and manage their use,” she says.

Charles Evavold and his partner Isabella Fraschilla are both from Georgia and work in the Cambridge area. Evavold runs a research lab as a principal investigator and fellow of the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard. Fraschilla is a postdoc at MIT studying cancer biology at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

As the residential scholars in Simmons Hall, they both have enjoyed getting to know MIT students on a personal level and are grateful to be immersed in the MIT community.

“Watching the transition from new social groups to established friend groups over the course of the semester has been wonderful,” says Evavold. Fraschilla adds, “Through a resume workshop and informal conversations, I have found many students have humanities and artistic talents beyond my assumption of stellar STEM skills.”

The two have joined study breaks and cake decorating and plant potting events. They hope to host a movie night and an ice-skating event this semester.

All of the scholars agree that meeting and reaching out to students early in the semester is the key to success for future residential scholars. The group has also found it helpful to bounce ideas off of each other and meet for lunch or coffee on occasion. They will continue to cultivate and facilitate opportunities for learning that promote creative thinking, leadership, citizenship, inclusion, and a commitment to lifelong learning and, of course, fun.

Email the Residential Scholars Program to learn more or to apply when positions become available.

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3 Questions: Sulafa Zidani on tech, culture, and a critical transnational perspective

Sulafa Zidani is an assistant professor in the Comparative Media Studies Program whose work focuses on digital culture: the social, political, and cultural dynamics in which technology operates and the role it plays in transnational power. She is working on her first book, which focuses on multilinguistic memes and centers the creators of these memes. By looking into the lives and work of these global meme makers, the book tells the story of globalization in the digital era as it is expressed through untranslatability, feelings, and humor.

Zidani spoke with SHASS Communications about her research and her experience at MIT.

Q: The intersections of the technological and the creative are central to your work. How does the interdisciplinary nature of an MIT education lend itself to this kind of humanistic and technological thinking?

A: This is my second year at MIT, and in that time I have I seen how aligned MIT’s educational approach here is with my work. Studying technology and culture from a critical transnational perspective, I believe it is crucial to be part of conversations that cross between disciplines and departments, conversations where the designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs of tomorrow are learning critical perspectives and confronting ethical dilemmas. MIT is the place where these conversations are taking place. I have students in fields ranging from business to engineering, biology, to astrophysics. Together, we examine some of the urgent questions our society is facing: What characterizes online cultures today? How did we get to this place where misinformation and racism spread widely online? What makes some online spaces more connective or more divisive?

One of the aspects I appreciate the most in MIT education is the push for thinking about solutions. When confronting difficult questions, it is understandable that many of us get stuck in the challenges of the present. Yet, MIT students demonstrate in my class that they have a forward-looking approach that continually returns to questions like: How do we make things better? How do we create better content or invent better technology without replicating existing problems? In this way, MIT is a great place to enhance prolific thinking around technology and culture.

Q: Online civic engagement is a central part of so many people’s political experience and exposure — and you examine this engagement on a transnational scale! How do you approach online fieldwork, especially engagement on issues that rely on local nuances and humor, remixed with transnational culture? How are various kinds of power at play in those exchanges?

A: In my work on transnational online civic engagement, context is key. Oftentimes in research, when we scale up to large datasets or transnational case studies, we compromise on a deep and intimate knowledge of the data. In my work, I maintain a global scale while also centering knowledge of the context that the data is stemming from. I research internet content in languages that I speak, from places in which I have lived, and cultures which I know through my heritage knowledge, lived experience, and my education.

Context helps us understand research data better. For example, in my paper on mashup and remix culture in the Middle East, I examine memes and videos in Arabic. My understanding of the language and culture helps me identify what hides between the lines, that might be based on the accent being used, terms that are specific to a region, to a generation, or to a subculture, and the political backdrop that online content might be conversing with. This is especially important in humor, which relies on unstated aspects to provoke laughter.

Another reason that context is central in my work is because symbols we use in one place might not hold the same meaning in a different context. One example which demonstrates this difference is the image of Pepe the Frog, which I discuss in an interview with journalist Nancy Guan. In the context of the U.S., the image of Pepe the Frog is mostly used in misogynist and antisemitic alt-right memes. However, in Hong Kong, the face of Pepe the Frog shows up in memes, graffiti, and protest signs as a representation of pro-democracy activists.

Researching everyday communication is fascinating. To truly understand power in these kinds of mundane-yet-creative forms of content, especially to understand the nuance around them, we must spend time getting to know the history that led to them and the events and culture occurring around them.

Q: You’ve written on decolonizing syllabi in media, communications, and cultural studies. What does that process of inclusive pedagogy look like in the classroom? What has been your experience of bringing that pedagogy to MIT?

A: My approach to inclusive pedagogy is centered around embracing differences, which I interpret as inviting our differences into the classroom rather than pushing them out in favor of consensus. In the first few weeks of class, as everyone is getting to know one another better, I pay special attention to the knowledge and experience that students already have. I then guide students to connect concepts to their existing knowledge, be that their life experience or knowledge they acquired in other classes. I’ve found that this method enriches our class discussions and leads to a deeper understanding of the course material.

In terms of pedagogy, working with MIT students has been an intellectual delight. I am regularly amazed at the variety of skills students bring to the class and their eagerness to engage in discussion. Students add in perspectives based on their interests, their majors and minors, and their desired career paths. They do this by raising questions that concern them, like “How do we build a better social media environment?” and by sharing their experiences being part of social movements or fan cultures. Since I aim to bring a global and critical perspective into my classes, MIT’s diverse student body means that students can also add some contextual knowledge or draw our attention to important relevant events taking place in other places around the world. 

Many media studies courses, especially foundational and introductory courses, have traditionally favored perspectives that center what we call the “Western” world, especially scholarship produced by white European and North American men. Such syllabi present this type of knowledge as the canon, which then puts knowledge produced by women, Indigenous people, Black people, and other people of color — both in and outside of “the West” — as less important. Many academics have tried to address this by adding one week in their syllabus with readings from underrepresented perspectives, but I think this type of solution can cement the view of these perspectives as marginal. I have written more about this in my article in Media, Culture & Society where I suggest actual strategies for creating more inclusive syllabi and classrooms.

While one syllabus or one class cannot alone rid us of the shadows of colonialism that we have inherited in higher education, I believe that centering our students is a great place to start.

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MIT researchers develop an AI model that can detect future lung cancer risk

The name Sybil has its origins in the oracles of Ancient Greece, also known as sibyls: feminine figures who were relied upon to relay divine knowledge of the unseen and the omnipotent past, present, and future. Now, the name has been excavated from antiquity and bestowed on an artificial intelligence tool for lung cancer risk assessment being developed by researchers at MIT's Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, Mass General Cancer Center (MGCC), and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital (CGMH).

Lung cancer is the No. 1 deadliest cancer in the world, resulting in 1.7 million deaths worldwide in 2020, killing more people than the next three deadliest cancers combined. 

"It’s the biggest cancer killer because it’s relatively common and relatively hard to treat, especially once it has reached an advanced stage,” says Florian Fintelmann, MGCC thoracic interventional radiologist and coauthor on the new work. “In this case, it’s important to know that if you detect lung cancer early, the long-term outcome is significantly better. Your five-year survival rate is closer to 70 percent, whereas if you detect it when it’s advanced, the five-year survival rate is just short of 10 percent.” 

Although there has been a surge in new therapies introduced to combat lung cancer in recent years, the majority of patients with lung cancer still succumb to the disease. Low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scans of the lung are currently the most common way patients are screened for lung cancer with the hope of finding it in the earliest stages, when it can still be surgically removed. Sybil takes the screening a step further, analyzing the LDCT image data without the assistance of a radiologist to predict the risk of a patient developing a future lung cancer within six years.

In their new paper published in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, Jameel Clinic, MGCC, and CGMH researchers demonstrated that Sybil obtained C-indices of 0.75, 0.81, and 0.80 over the course of six years from diverse sets of lung LDCT scans taken from the National Lung Cancer Screening Trial (NLST), Mass General Hospital (MGH), and CGMH, respectively — models achieving a C-index score over 0.7 are considered good and over 0.8 is considered strong. The ROC-AUCs for one-year prediction using Sybil scored even higher, ranging from 0.86 to 0.94, with 1.00 being the highest score possible. 

Despite its success, the 3D nature of lung CT scans made Sybil a challenge to build. Co-first-author Peter Mikhael, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science, and affiliate of Jameel Clinic and the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), likened the process to “trying to find a needle in a haystack.” The imaging data used to train Sybil was largely absent of any signs of cancer because early-stage lung cancer occupies small portions of the lung — just a fraction of the hundreds of thousands of pixels making up each CT scan. Denser portions of lung tissue are known as lung nodules, and while they have the potential to be cancerous, most are not, and can occur from healed infections or airborne irritants.  

To ensure that Sybil would be able to accurately assess cancer risk, Fintelmann and his team labeled hundreds of CT scans with visible cancerous tumors that would be used to train Sybil before testing the model on CT scans without discernible signs of cancer. 

MIT electrical engineering and computer science PhD student Jeremy Wohlwend, co-author of the paper and Jameel Clinic and CSAIL affiliate, was surprised by how highly Sybil scored despite the lack of any visible cancer. “We found that while we [as humans] couldn’t quite see where the cancer was, the model could still have some predictive power as to which lung would eventually develop cancer,” he recalls. “Knowing [Sybil] was able to highlight which side was the most likely side was really interesting to us.” 

Co-author Lecia V. Sequist, a medical oncologist, lung cancer expert, and director of the Center for Innovation in Early Cancer Detection at MGH, says the results the team achieved with Sybil are important “because lung cancer screening is not being deployed to its fullest potential in the U.S. or globally, and Sybil may be able to help us bridge this gap.”

Lung cancer screening programs are underdeveloped in regions of the United States hardest hit by lung cancer due to a variety of factors. These range from stigma against smokers to political and policy landscape factors like Medicaid expansion, which varies from state to state.

Moreover, many patients diagnosed with lung cancer today have either never smoked or are former smokers who quit over 15 ago — traits that make both groups ineligible for lung cancer CT screening in the United States. 

“Our training data consisted only of smokers because this was a necessary criterion for enrolling in the NLST,” Mikhael says. “In Taiwan, they screen nonsmokers, so our validation data is expected to contain people who didn’t smoke, and it was exciting to see Sybil generalize well to that population.” 

“An exciting next step in the research will be testing Sybil prospectively on people at risk for lung cancer who have not smoked or who quit decades ago,” says Sequist. “I treat such patients every day in my lung cancer clinic and it’s understandably hard for them to reconcile that they would not have been candidates to undergo screening. Perhaps that will change in the future.”

There is a growing population of patients with lung cancer who are categorized as nonsmokers. Women nonsmokers are more likely to be diagnosed with lung cancer than men who are nonsmokers. Globally, over 50 percent of women diagnosed with lung cancer are nonsmokers, compared to 15 to 20 percent of men.

MIT Professor Regina Barzilay, a paper co-author and the Jameel Clinic AI faculty lead, who is also a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, credits MIT and MGH’s joint efforts on Sybil to Sylvia, the sister to a close friend of Barzilay and one of Sequist’s patients. "Sylvia was young, healthy and athletic — she never smoked,” Barzilay recalls. “When she started coughing, neither her doctors nor her family initially suspected that the cause could be lung cancer. When Sylvia was finally diagnosed and met Dr. Sequist, the disease was too advanced to revert its course. When mourning Sylvia's death, we couldn't stop thinking how many other patients have similar trajectories.”

This work was supported by the Bridge Project, a partnership between the Koch Institute at MIT and the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center; the MIT Jameel Clinic; Quanta Computing; Stand Up To Cancer; the MGH Center for Innovation in Early Cancer Detection; the Bralower and Landry Families; Upstage Lung Cancer; and the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The Cancer Center of Linkou CGMH under Chang Gung Medical Foundation provided assistance with data collection and R. Yang, J. Song and their team (Quanta Computer Inc.) provided technical and computing support for analyzing the CGMH dataset. The authors thank the National Cancer Institute for access to NCI’s data collected by the National Lung Screening Trial, as well as patients who participated in the trial.

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How Huntington’s disease affects different neurons

In patients with Huntington’s disease, neurons in a part of the brain called the striatum are among the hardest-hit. Degeneration of these neurons contributes to patients’ loss of motor control, which is one of the major hallmarks of the disease.

Neuroscientists at MIT have now shown that two distinct cell populations in the striatum are affected differently by Huntington’s disease. They believe that neurodegeneration of one of these populations leads to motor impairments, while damage to the other population, located in structures called striosomes, may account for the mood disorders that are often see in the early stages of the disease.

“As many as 10 years ahead of the motor diagnosis, Huntington’s patients can experience mood disorders, and one possibility is that the striosomes might be involved in these,” says Ann Graybiel, an MIT Institute Professor, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and one of the senior authors of the study.

Using single-cell RNA sequencing to analyze the genes expressed in mouse models of Huntington’s disease and postmortem brain samples from Huntington’s patients, the researchers found that cells of the striosomes and another structure, the matrix, begin to lose their distinguishing features as the disease progresses. The researchers hope that their mapping of the striatum and how it is affected by Huntington’s could help lead to new treatments that target specific cells within the brain.

This kind of analysis could also shed light on other brain disorders that affect the striatum, such as Parkinson’s disease and autism spectrum disorder, the researchers say.

Myriam Heiman, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, and Manolis Kellis, a professor of computer science in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, are also senior authors of the study. Ayano Matsushima, a McGovern Institute research scientist, and Sergio Sebastian Pineda, an MIT graduate student, are the lead authors of the paper, which appears in Nature Communications.

Neuron vulnerability

Huntington’s disease leads to degeneration of brain structures called the basal ganglia, which are responsible for control of movement and also play roles in other behaviors, as well as emotions. For many years, Graybiel has been studying the striatum, a part of the basal ganglia that is involved in making decisions that require evaluating the outcomes of a particular action.

Many years ago, Graybiel discovered that the striatum is divided into striosomes, which are clusters of neurons, and the matrix, which surrounds the striosomes. She has also shown that striosomes are necessary for making decisions that require an anxiety-provoking cost-benefit analysis.

In a 2007 study, Richard Faull of the University of Auckland discovered that in postmortem brain tissue from Huntington’s patients, the striosomes showed a great deal of degeneration. Faull also found that while those patients were alive, many of them had shown signs of mood disorders such as depression before their motor symptoms developed.

To further explore the connections between the striatum and the mood and motor effects of Huntington’s, Graybiel teamed up with Kellis and Heiman to study the gene expression patterns of striosomal and matrix cells. To do that, the researchers used single-cell RNA sequencing to analyze human brain samples and brain tissue from two mouse models of Huntington’s disease.

Within the striatum, neurons can be classified as either D1 or D2 neurons. D1 neurons are involved in the “go” pathway, which initiates an action, and D2 neurons are part of the “no-go” pathway, which suppresses an action. D1 and D2 neurons can both be found within either the striosomes and the matrix.

The analysis of RNA expression in each of these types of cells revealed that striosomal neurons are harder hit by Huntington’s than matrix neurons. Furthermore, within the striosomes, D2 neurons are more vulnerable than D1.

The researchers also found that these four major cell types begin to lose their identifying molecular identities and become more difficult to distinguish from one another in Huntington’s disease. “Overall, the distinction between striosomes and matrix becomes really blurry,” Graybiel says.

Striosomal disorders

The findings suggest that damage to the striosomes, which are known to be involved in regulating mood, may be responsible for the mood disorders that strike Huntington’s patients in the early stages of the disease. Later on, degeneration of the matrix neurons likely contributes to the decline of motor function, the researchers say.

In future work, the researchers hope to explore how degeneration or abnormal gene expression in the striosomes may contribute to other brain disorders.

Previous research has shown that overactivity of striosomes can lead to the development of repetitive behaviors such as those seen in autism, obsessive compulsive disorder, and Tourette’s syndrome. In this study, at least one of the genes that the researchers discovered was overexpressed in the striosomes of Huntington’s brains is also linked to autism.

Additionally, many striosome neurons project to the part of the brain that is most affected by Parkinson’s disease (the substantia nigra, which produces most of the brain’s dopamine).

“There are many, many disorders that probably involve the striatum, and now, partly through transcriptomics, we’re working to understand how all of this could fit together,” Graybiel says.

The research was funded by the Saks Kavanaugh Foundation, the CHDI Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation, the Simons Foundation, the JPB Foundation, the Kristin R. Pressman and Jessica J. Pourian ’13 Fund, and Robert Buxton.

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3 Questions: Sulafa Zidani on tech, culture, and a critical transnational perspective

Sulafa Zidani is an assistant professor in the Comparative Media Studies Program whose work focuses on digital culture: the social, political, and cultural dynamics in which technology operates and the role it plays in transnational power. She is working on her first book, which focuses on multilinguistic memes and centers the creators of these memes. By looking into the lives and work of these global meme makers, the book tells the story of globalization in the digital era as it is expressed through untranslatability, feelings, and humor.

Zidani spoke with SHASS Communications about her research and her experience at MIT.

Q: The intersections of the technological and the creative are central to your work. How does the interdisciplinary nature of an MIT education lend itself to this kind of humanistic and technological thinking?

A: This is my second year at MIT, and in that time I have I seen how aligned MIT’s educational approach here is with my work. Studying technology and culture from a critical transnational perspective, I believe it is crucial to be part of conversations that cross between disciplines and departments, conversations where the designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs of tomorrow are learning critical perspectives and confronting ethical dilemmas. MIT is the place where these conversations are taking place. I have students in fields ranging from business to engineering, biology, to astrophysics. Together, we examine some of the urgent questions our society is facing: What characterizes online cultures today? How did we get to this place where misinformation and racism spread widely online? What makes some online spaces more connective or more divisive?

One of the aspects I appreciate the most in MIT education is the push for thinking about solutions. When confronting difficult questions, it is understandable that many of us get stuck in the challenges of the present. Yet, MIT students demonstrate in my class that they have a forward-looking approach that continually returns to questions like: How do we make things better? How do we create better content or invent better technology without replicating existing problems? In this way, MIT is a great place to enhance prolific thinking around technology and culture.

Q: Online civic engagement is a central part of so many people’s political experience and exposure — and you examine this engagement on a transnational scale! How do you approach online fieldwork, especially engagement on issues that rely on local nuances and humor, remixed with transnational culture? How are various kinds of power at play in those exchanges?

A: In my work on transnational online civic engagement, context is key. Oftentimes in research, when we scale up to large datasets or transnational case studies, we compromise on a deep and intimate knowledge of the data. In my work, I maintain a global scale while also centering knowledge of the context that the data is stemming from. I research internet content in languages that I speak, from places in which I have lived, and cultures which I know through my heritage knowledge, lived experience, and my education.

Context helps us understand research data better. For example, in my paper on mashup and remix culture in the Middle East, I examine memes and videos in Arabic. My understanding of the language and culture helps me identify what hides between the lines, that might be based on the accent being used, terms that are specific to a region, to a generation, or to a subculture, and the political backdrop that online content might be conversing with. This is especially important in humor, which relies on unstated aspects to provoke laughter.

Another reason that context is central in my work is because symbols we use in one place might not hold the same meaning in a different context. One example which demonstrates this difference is the image of Pepe the Frog, which I discuss in an interview with journalist Nancy Guan. In the context of the U.S., the image of Pepe the Frog is mostly used in misogynist and antisemitic alt-right memes. However, in Hong Kong, the face of Pepe the Frog shows up in memes, graffiti, and protest signs as a representation of pro-democracy activists.

Researching everyday communication is fascinating. To truly understand power in these kinds of mundane-yet-creative forms of content, especially to understand the nuance around them, we must spend time getting to know the history that led to them and the events and culture occurring around them.

Q: You’ve written on decolonizing syllabi in media, communications, and cultural studies. What does that process of inclusive pedagogy look like in the classroom? What has been your experience of bringing that pedagogy to MIT?

A: My approach to inclusive pedagogy is centered around embracing differences, which I interpret as inviting our differences into the classroom rather than pushing them out in favor of consensus. In the first few weeks of class, as everyone is getting to know one another better, I pay special attention to the knowledge and experience that students already have. I then guide students to connect concepts to their existing knowledge, be that their life experience or knowledge they acquired in other classes. I’ve found that this method enriches our class discussions and leads to a deeper understanding of the course material.

In terms of pedagogy, working with MIT students has been an intellectual delight. I am regularly amazed at the variety of skills students bring to the class and their eagerness to engage in discussion. Students add in perspectives based on their interests, their majors and minors, and their desired career paths. They do this by raising questions that concern them, like “How do we build a better social media environment?” and by sharing their experiences being part of social movements or fan cultures. Since I aim to bring a global and critical perspective into my classes, MIT’s diverse student body means that students can also add some contextual knowledge or draw our attention to important relevant events taking place in other places around the world. 

Many media studies courses, especially foundational and introductory courses, have traditionally favored perspectives that center what we call the “Western” world, especially scholarship produced by white European and North American men. Such syllabi present this type of knowledge as the canon, which then puts knowledge produced by women, Indigenous people, Black people, and other people of color — both in and outside of “the West” — as less important. Many academics have tried to address this by adding one week in their syllabus with readings from underrepresented perspectives, but I think this type of solution can cement the view of these perspectives as marginal. I have written more about this in my article in Media, Culture & Society where I suggest actual strategies for creating more inclusive syllabi and classrooms.

While one syllabus or one class cannot alone rid us of the shadows of colonialism that we have inherited in higher education, I believe that centering our students is a great place to start.

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How to push, wiggle, or drill an object through sand

Pushing a shovel through snow, planting an umbrella on the beach, wading through a ball pit, and driving over gravel all have one thing in common: They all are exercises in intrusion, with an intruding object exerting some force to move through a soft and granular material.

Predicting what it takes to push through sand, gravel, or other soft media can help engineers drive a rover over Martian soil, anchor a ship in rough seas, and walk a robot through sand and mud. But modeling the forces involved in such processes is a huge computational challenge that often takes days to weeks to solve.

Now, engineers at MIT and Georgia Tech have found a faster and simpler way to model intrusion through any soft, flowable material. Their new method quickly maps the forces it would take to push, wiggle, and drill an object through granular material in real-time. The method can apply to objects and grains of any size and shape, and does not require complex computational tools as other methods do.

“We now have a formula that can be very useful in settings where you have to check through lots of options as fast as possible,” says Ken Kamrin, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

“This is especially useful for applications such as real-time path-planning for vehicles traveling through vast deserts and other off-road terrains, that cannot wait for existing slower simulation methods to decide their path,” adds Shashank Agarwal SM ’19, PhD ’22.

Kamrin and Agarwal detail their new method in a study appearing this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study also includes Daniel I. Goldman, professor of physics at Georgia Tech.

A fluid connection

In order to know how much to push on an object to move it through sand, one could go grain by grain, using discrete element modeling, or DEM — an approach that systematically calculates each individual grain’s motion in response to a given force. DEM is precise but slow, and it can take weeks to fully solve a practical problem involving just a handful of sand. As a faster alternative, scientists can develop continuum models, which simulate granular behavior in generalized chunks, or grain groupings. This more simplified approach can still generate a detailed picture of how grains flow, in a way that can shave a weeks-long problem down to days or even hours.

“We wanted to see if we could do even better than that and cut that process down to seconds,” Agarwal says.

The team looked to previous work by Goldman. In 2014, he was studying how animals and robots move through dry, granular material such as sand and soil. In looking for ways to quantitatively describe their movements, he found he could do so with a quick relationship that was originally meant to describe fluid swimmers.

The formulation, Resistive Force Theory (RFT), works by considering an object’s surface as a collection of small plates. (Imagine representing a sphere as a soccer ball.) As an object moves through a fluid, each plate experiences a force, and RFT claims that the force on each plate depends only on its local orientation and movement. The equation takes all this into account, along with the fluid’s individual characteristics, to ultimately describe how the object as a whole moves through a fluid.

Surprisingly, Goldman found this simple approach was also accurate when applied to granular intrusion. Specifically, it predicted the forces lizards and snakes exert to slither through sand, as well as how small, legged robots walk over soil. The question, Kamrin says, was why?

“It was this weird mystery why this theory, which was originally derived for moving through viscous fluid, would even work at all in granular media, which has completely different flow behavior,” he says.

Kamrin took a closer look at the math and found a connection between RFT and a continuum model he had derived to describe granular flow. In other words, the physics checked out, and RFT could indeed be an accurate way to predict granular flow, in a simpler and faster way than conventional models. But there was one big limitation: The approach was mainly workable for two-dimensional problems.

To model intrusion using RFT, one needs to know what will happen if one moves a plate every which way possible — a task that is manageable in two dimensions, but not in three. The team then needed some shortcut to simplify 3D’s complexity.

Wacky twist

In their new study, the researchers adapted RFT to 3D by adding an extra ingredient to the equation. That ingredient is a plate’s twist angle, measuring how plate orientation changes as the entire object is rotated. When they incorporated this extra angle, in addition to a plate’s tilt and direction of motion, the team had enough information to define the force acting on the plate as it moves through a material in 3D. Importantly, by exploiting the connection to continuum modeling, the resulting 3D-RFT  is generalizable, and can be easily recalibrated to apply to many dry granular media on Earth, and even on other planetary bodies.
 

The researchers demonstrated the new method using a variety of three-dimensional objects, from simple cylinders and cubes to more complex bunny- and monkey-shaped geometries. They first tiled the objects, representing them each as a collection of hundreds to thousands of tiny plates. Then they applied the tweaked RFT formula to each individual plate and calculated the forces that would be needed over time to drill each plate, and ultimately the entire object, down through a bed of sand.

“For more wacky objects, like the bunny, you can imagine having to consistently shift your loads to keep drilling it straight down,” Kamrin says. “And our method can even predict those little wiggles, and the distribution of force all around the bunny, in less than a minute.”

The new approach provides a fast and accurate way to model granular intrusion, which can be applied to a host of practical problems, from driving a rover through Martian soil, to characterizing the movement of animals through sand, and even predicting what it would take to uproot a tree.

“Can I predict how hard it is to uproot natural plants? You might want to know, is this storm going to knock over this tree?” Kamrin says. “Here is a way to get an answer fast.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Army Research Office, the U.S. Army DEVCOM Ground Vehicle Systems Center, and NASA.

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