Faces of MIT: Abisola Okuk

Senior staff accountant Abisola Okuk’s role has changed a lot since she first came to MIT back in 2014. She started in the Media Lab as an administrative assistant, then moved to the MIT Sloan School of Management’s external relations team, and is now senior staff accountant in the Office of the Vice President for Finance (VPF). Over that time, she’s discovered an interest in finance and developed new skills to advance her career.

“After six years at the Media Lab, I found the flame of my interest in finance and realized I wanted to pursue a career in that space,” says Okuk, who works in accounts receivable with VPF. “My growth came from working hard, gaining new skills, and looking out for opportunities. I like that I’m able to work collaboratively with an amazing team and contribute to the Institute’s mission. It gives me a sense of fulfillment.”

Outside of MIT, Okuk jokes that she also listens to music for a living.

“I’m Nigerian, so that’s my heritage,” Okuk says. “I listen to a lot of Nigerian music. I’ll just window shop at the mall and listen to music all day.”

Okuk also enjoys cooking. If it were up to her, she’d cook primarily Nigerian food, but her 10-year-old daughter is lobbying for American dishes more these days.

“Now I’m finding myself cooking all kinds of things I wouldn’t normally cook,” she says. “But I like to cook when I’m in the mood. It calms me down.”

Outside of the food, Okuk says Boston reminds her a lot of Lagos, the Nigerian city where she grew up.

“It’s similar because of the fusion of cultures,” Okuk says. “There’s also the lively and vibrant nightlife, and there’s a huge Nigerian community in Boston that I feel really connected to. The one problem is I’ve been here for 15 years and I still don’t like the cold!”

Weather permitting, the thing Okuk looks forward to most when she’s on MIT’s campus is grabbing lunch with colleagues. That gets to one of the main reasons Okuk says she’s stayed at MIT for so long: the people.

“At the Media Lab, the people in the research group I was working with, the Lifelong Kindergarten Group, were really kind,” Okuk says. “Three or four years later, I’m still touched by how supportive they were, how they listened, how they cared. In general, I find the culture at MIT very supportive. Everyone wants to help you understand and contribute. I’ve stayed at MIT because it gives me a sense of belonging and a sense of community.”

Soundbytes

Q: If someone was about to start working at MIT, what advice would you give them?

Okuk: Be focused. There’s a lot of opportunity at MIT. Also build and nurture relationships. Don’t lose touch with people when you move departments. I’d also say do your job and more. It’s one thing to fulfill your job description; it’s another thing to go the extra mile. Don’t just do things because you’re told to. Do things because you identify a need and address it. And finally, ensure you have a life outside of work! Work is great, but it’s good to have balance.

Q: What’s your favorite time of year at MIT and why?

Okuk: Holiday season, for many reasons. It’s an opportunity to share gifts, share food and laughter, and to reflect. I like to look back on what worked, what didn’t work, and just take a step back during that time of year.

Q: What is your favorite way to spend a weekend?

Okuk: Weekends are my down time. I catch up on chores. I also use the weekend to spend quality time with my daughter. We’ll do an activity together, like cooking together or just watching a show. It’s a time to bond. We also go to church on Sundays. And I spend time with my Nigerian community and other friends — Nigerians can really party, you know!

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Tiny magnetic beads produce an optical signal that could be used to quickly detect pathogens

Getting results from a blood test can take anywhere from one day to a week, depending on what a test is targeting. The same goes for tests of water pollution and food contamination. And in most cases, the wait time has to do with time-consuming steps in sample processing and analysis.

Now, MIT engineers have identified a new optical signature in a widely used class of magnetic beads, which could be used to quickly detect contaminants in a variety of diagnostic tests. For example, the team showed the signature could be used to detect signs of the food contaminant Salmonella.

The so-called Dynabeads are microscopic magnetic beads that can be coated with antibodies that bind to target molecules, such as a specific pathogen. Dynabeads are typically used in experiments in which they are mixed into solutions to capture molecules of interest. But from there, scientists have to take additional, time-consuming steps to confirm that the molecules are indeed present and bound to the beads.

The MIT team found a faster way to confirm the presence of Dynabead-bound pathogens, using optics, specifically, Raman spectroscopy. This optical technique identifies specific molecules based on their “Raman signature,” or the unique way in which a molecule scatters light.

The researchers found that Dynabeads have an unusually strong Raman signature that can be easily detected, much like a fluorescent tag. This signature, they found, can act as a “reporter.” If detected, the signal can serve as a quick confirmation, within less than an hour, that a target pathogen is indeed present in a given sample. The team is currently working to develop a portable device for quickly detecting a range of bacterial pathogens, and has reported their results today in a special issue of the Journal of Raman Spectroscopy.

“This technique would be useful in a situation where a doctor is trying to narrow down the source of an infection in order to better inform antibiotic prescription, as well as for the detection of known pathogens in food and water,” says study co-author Marissa McDonald, a graduate student in the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology. “Additionally, we hope this approach will eventually lead to expanded access to advanced diagnostics in resource-limited environments.”

Study co-authors at MIT include Postdoctoral Associate Jongwan Lee; Visiting Scholar Nikiwe Mhlanga; Research Scientist Jeon Woong Kang; Tata Professor Rohit Karnik, who is also the associate director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab; and Assistant Professor Loza Tadesse of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Oil and water

Looking for diseased cells and pathogens in fluid samples is an exercise in patience.

“It’s kind of a needle-in-a-haystack problem,” Tadesse says.

The numbers present are so small that they must be grown in controlled environments to sufficient numbers, and their cultures stained, then studied under a microscope. The entire process can take several days to a week to yield a confident positive or negative result.

Both Karnik and Tadesse’s labs have independently been developing techniques to speed up various parts of the pathogen testing process and make the process portable, using Dynabeads.

Dynabeads are commercially available microscopic beads made from a magnetic iron core and a polymer shell that can be coated with antibodies. The surface antibodies act as hooks to bind specific target molecules. When mixed with a fluid, such as a vial of blood or water, any molecules present will glom onto the Dynabeads. Using a magnet, scientists can gently coax the beads to the bottom of a vial and filter them out of a solution. Karnik’s lab is investigating ways to then further separate the beads into those that are bound to a target molecule, and those that are not. “Still, the challenge is, how do we know that we have what we’re looking for?” Tadesse says.

The beads themselves are not visible by eye. That’s where Tadesse’s work comes in. Her lab uses Raman spectroscopy as a way to “fingerprint” pathogens. She has found that different cell types scatter light in unique ways that can be used as a signature to identify them.

In the team’s new work, she and her colleagues found that Dynabeads also have a unique and strong Raman signature that can act as a surprisingly clear beacon.

“We were initially seeking to identify the signatures of bacteria, but the signature of the Dynabeads was actually very strong,” Tadesse says. “We realized this signal could be a means of reporting to you whether you have that bacteria or not.”

Testing beacon

As a practical demonstration, the researchers mixed Dynabeads into vials of water contaminated with Salmonella. They then magnetically isolated these beads onto microscope slides and measured the way light scattered through the fluid when exposed to laser light. Within half a second, they quickly detected the Dynabeads’ Raman signature — a confirmation that bound Dynabeads, and by inference, Salmonella, were present in the fluid.

“This is something that can be used to rapidly give a positive or negative answer: Is there a contaminant or not?” Tadesse says. “Because even a handful of pathogens can cause clinical symptoms.”

The team’s new technique is significantly faster than conventional methods and uses elements that could be adapted into smaller, more portable forms — a goal that the researchers are currently working toward. The approach is also highly versatile.

“Salmonella is the proof of concept,” Tadesse says. “You could purchase Dynabeads with E.coli antibodies, and the same thing would happen: It would bind to the bacteria, and we’d be able to detect the Dynabead signature because the signal is super strong.”

The team is particularly keen to apply the test to conditions such as sepsis, where time is of the essence, and where pathogens that trigger the condition are not rapidly detected using conventional lab tests.

“There are a lot cases, like in sepsis, where pathogenic cells cannot always be grown on a plate,” says Lee, a member of Karnik’s lab. “In that case, our technique could rapidly detect these pathogens.”

This research was supported, in part, by the MIT Laser Biomedical Research Center, the National Cancer Institute, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab at MIT.

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How to help high schoolers prepare for the rise of artificial intelligence

Should artificial intelligence be allowed to make care decisions for patients? Though the future of AI may conjure up doomsday visions of robots and computers intent on rendering human existence superfluous, the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic) addressed questions surrounding the use of AI in health through their inaugural summer program focused on educating high school students. 

The Jameel Clinic Summer Program, which took place July 10-21, accepted a total of 51 students from primarily Boston-area schools, with a commitment to reaching students from diverse backgrounds.  

The program, which split students up into two cohorts of 25 students for each week, had core offerings including courses like “Intro to Python,” “Intro to Clinical AI,” and “Intro to Drug Discovery” while also facilitating trips to various local institutions such as the Museum of Science Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, and Amgen. 

“Organizing this boot camp had a personal significance to me. When my family immigrated to Israel, it was tough — my parents and I worked minimum wage jobs to survive,” School of Engineering Distinguished Professor and Jameel Clinic AI faculty lead Regina Barzilay recalls. “Going to university transformed my life. Many of the students in the program have similar backgrounds. I hope that exposing them to exciting science at MIT will open new opportunities for them.” 

“I’m not supposed to be here today,” stated Collin Stultz, the Nina T. and Robert H. Rubin Professor at MIT and Jameel Clinic principal investigator, on becoming both a computer scientist and cardiologist. In his lecture, Stultz spoke of the hardships his parents endured after immigrating to New York from Jamaica. He emphasized that he and his family members had never thought to apply to schools like Harvard University, thinking of it as a school for “people like the Kennedys” until Stultz got the idea to apply from a classmate who was planning to apply.  

“It is my hope that the interactions between students in the Jameel Clinic Summer Program and MIT faculty will highlight the wealth of opportunities available at the intersection of computer science and medicine,” Stultz says. 

As a result of a generous gift from Joseph Bates and Kristin Loeffler through their AI for Humanity Foundation, the Jameel Clinic was able to offer the summer program at no cost and reduce the financial barriers for students from under-resourced backgrounds. Bates shared that at the age of 13 he was discovered by a psychology professor at Johns Hopkins University and became the first teenager to enter the university. “I had been doing an adequate, but not good, job in a dangerous Baltimore City public junior high school,” Bates says. “Being at Hopkins was wonderful, socially and intellectually, and it led me to a computer science PhD at Cornell University, then CS professor at Carnegie Mellon University. Someone taking an interest really mattered, and it changed my life.” 

According to the National Science Foundation, the U.S. STEM workforce gradually diversified between 2011 and 2021, with increased representation of women and underrepresented students of color. But in the college-educated workforce, a 2021 report showed that just 16 percent of engineers were women and 16 percent of underrepresented students of color — Hispanic, Black, and American Indian or Indigenous Alaskan individuals — were employed in science and engineering occupations with at least a bachelor’s degree. 

Angely Mejia Martinez, a rising junior at Chelsea High School and aspiring doctor, highlighted Jameel Clinic chair and MIT Institute Professor Phillip Sharp’s talk as one of her favorites. Sharp spoke about growing up on a small farm in rural Kentucky before setting off on his career in science, which eventually led to his 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. “I really got inspired by that because when I was little, many people would say ‘I don’t think you can do this,’ and I was always like ‘I can do this,’” Martinez says. “I think I can achieve anything I set my mind into.” 

“It was very surreal because I didn’t think I’d be here,” Priyani Rawal, a rising junior studying information technology at Essex North Shore Agricultural and Technical School, says. Rawal’s favorite class was Barzilay’s Intro to AI/ML lecture. “I was so amazed by what we were learning ... it made me inspired to go into [the machine learning] field.” 

Adam Nouri, a rising senior at Pioneer Charter School II, signed up for the program after receiving an email from his computer science teacher. Before applying, Nouri had considered enrolling in a summer course for programming at Bunker Hill Community College, an option typically offered at no cost to Pioneer students. However, Nouri quickly realized that free enrollment was only available during the school year and says it would have cost around $800 for him to enroll in the summer. If he hadn’t gotten into the Jameel Clinic Summer Program, Nouri believes he would have continued working at his part-time service job for the rest of the summer while trying to code a game or build a computer with his friends in his free time. “When I got into the [Jameel Clinic Summer Program], I was actually really excited,” Nouri recalls. “Now I feel like I have a clearer path I want to pursue.” 

As part of their final group project presentations given on the last day of the program, students were assigned AI tools used in clinical settings or drug discovery, like PathAI or AlphaFold2, and asked to explain their assigned tool along with its potential benefits and risks to a target audience of their choice. 

“There is a heavy emphasis placed not only on innovation in science, health care and technology, but also on collaboration across disciplines,” Jay Ananth, a rising junior at Troy High School, says. “During the summer program, I was taught AI and health care not as a high school student, but as a peer — a fellow researcher — who has the ability to innovate and make a change.” 

Serena Hu, a rising junior at Lincoln Sudbury High School, felt less uncertainty about her future after attending the program. “I always wanted to try new things so that I could find something that I love to do, but I can pretty confidently say that I found it here,” Hu says. “They’re not just teaching you the material — they’re also inspiring you.” 

The Jameel Clinic Summer Program was organized by Ignacio Fuentes, Alex Ouyang, and Marinalva Smith. Maggie Wang, Antonella Catanzaro, and Ciarra Brodie helped to oversee and contribute to the success of the program. Instructors included Pulkit Agrawal, Sharifa Alghowinem, Shrooq Alsenan, Manisha Bahl, Regina Barzilay, Rebecca Boiarsky, Felix Faltings, Florian Fintelmann, Marzyeh Ghassemi, Susan Hockfield, Insoo Hyun, Noah Jones, Ila Kumar, Peter Mikhael, Carles Monterrubio, Tiffany Pereira Portela, Phillip Sharp, Hannes Stärk, Vinith Suriyakumar, Oliver Thiel, Randi Williams, Jeremy Wohlwend, and Rachel Wu.

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Supporting sustainability, digital health, and the future of work

The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative for Industry and Technology has selected three new research projects that will receive support from the initiative. The research projects aim to accelerate progress in meeting complex societal needs through new business convergence insights in technology and innovation.

Established in MIT’s School of Engineering and now in its third year, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative is furthering its mission to bring together technological experts from across business and academia to share insights and learn from one another. Recently, Thomas W. Malone, the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management, joined the initiative as its first-ever faculty lead. The research projects relate to three of the initiative’s key focus areas: sustainability, digital health, and the future of work.

“The solutions these research teams are developing have the potential to have tremendous impact,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “They embody the initiative’s focus on advancing data-driven research that addresses technology and industry convergence.”

“The convergence of science and technology driven by advancements in generative AI, digital twins, quantum computing, and other technologies makes this an especially exciting time for Accenture and MIT to be undertaking this joint research,” says Kenneth Munie, senior managing director at Accenture Strategy, Life Sciences. “Our three new research projects focusing on sustainability, digital health, and the future of work have the potential to help guide and shape future innovations that will benefit the way we work and live.”

The MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative charter project researchers are described below.

Accelerating the journey to net zero with industrial clusters

Jessika Trancik is a professor at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Trancik’s research examines the dynamic costs, performance, and environmental impacts of energy systems to inform climate policy and accelerate beneficial and equitable technology innovation. Trancik’s project aims to identify how industrial clusters can enable companies to derive greater value from decarbonization, potentially making companies more willing to invest in the clean energy transition.

To meet the ambitious climate goals that have been set by countries around the world, rising greenhouse gas emissions trends must be rapidly reversed. Industrial clusters — geographically co-located or otherwise-aligned groups of companies representing one or more industries — account for a significant portion of greenhouse gas emissions globally. With major energy consumers “clustered” in proximity, industrial clusters provide a potential platform to scale low-carbon solutions by enabling the aggregation of demand and the coordinated investment in physical energy supply infrastructure.

In addition to Trancik, the research team working on this project will include Aliza Khurram, a postdoc in IDSS; Micah Ziegler, an IDSS research scientist; Melissa Stark, global energy transition services lead at Accenture; Laura Sanderfer, strategy consulting manager at Accenture; and Maria De Miguel, strategy senior analyst at Accenture.

Eliminating childhood obesity

Anette "Peko" Hosoi is the Neil and Jane Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering. A common theme in her work is the fundamental study of shape, kinematic, and rheological optimization of biological systems with applications to the emergent field of soft robotics. Her project will use both data from existing studies and synthetic data to create a return-on-investment (ROI) calculator for childhood obesity interventions so that companies can identify earlier returns on their investment beyond reduced health-care costs.

Childhood obesity is too prevalent to be solved by a single company, industry, drug, application, or program. In addition to the physical and emotional impact on children, society bears a cost through excess health care spending, lost workforce productivity, poor school performance, and increased family trauma. Meaningful solutions require multiple organizations, representing different parts of society, working together with a common understanding of the problem, the economic benefits, and the return on investment. ROI is particularly difficult to defend for any single organization because investment and return can be separated by many years and involve asymmetric investments, returns, and allocation of risk. Hosoi’s project will consider the incentives for a particular entity to invest in programs in order to reduce childhood obesity.

Hosoi will be joined by graduate students Pragya Neupane and Rachael Kha, both of IDSS, as well a team from Accenture that includes Kenneth Munie, senior managing director at Accenture Strategy, Life Sciences; Kaveh Safavi, senior managing director in Accenture Health Industry; and Elizabeth Naik, global health and public service research lead.

Generating innovative organizational configurations and algorithms for dealing with the problem of post-pandemic employment

Thomas Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern (1959) Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. His research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology. Malone will be joined in this project by John Horton, the Richard S. Leghorn (1939) Career Development Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, whose research focuses on the intersection of labor economics, market design, and information systems. Malone and Horton’s project will look to reshape the future of work with the help of lessons learned in the wake of the pandemic.

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a major disrupter of work and employment, and it is not at all obvious how governments, businesses, and other organizations should manage the transition to a desirable state of employment as the pandemic recedes. Using natural language processing algorithms such as GPT-4, this project will look to identify new ways that companies can use AI to better match applicants to necessary jobs, create new types of jobs, assess skill training needed, and identify interventions to help include women and other groups whose employment was disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

In addition to Malone and Horton, the research team will include Rob Laubacher, associate director and research scientist at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, and Kathleen Kennedy, executive director at the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence and senior director at MIT Horizon. The team will also include Nitu Nivedita, managing director of artificial intelligence at Accenture, and Thomas Hancock, data science senior manager at Accenture.

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Dyanna Jaye: Bringing the urgency of organizing to climate policy

Growing up in the Tidewater region of Virginia, Dyanna Jaye had a front row seat to the climate crisis. She recalls beach stabilization efforts that pumped sand from the bottom of the ocean to the shore in response to rising sea levels. And every hurricane season, the streets would flood.

“I was thinking at a younger age about some pretty big questions,” says Jaye. “Can I call this place home for the rest of my life? Probably not. The changes that we will endure because of climate change will probably make the place where I grew up unlivable in my lifetime.”

Jaye attended the University of Virginia, where she studied environmental science and global development studies. She also started to get involved in organizing efforts around climate policy. The first campaign she was a part of aimed to retire UVA’s coal plant and move to more renewable energy.

“We didn’t really win, but I learned a lot in that first campaign,” she says.

Jaye went on to co-found the Sunrise Movement, which helped launch the Green New Deal as a framework for ambitious, holistic climate policy across the country.

Now pursuing a master’s in city planning at MIT, Jaye is seeking a deeper understanding of how to implement climate-conscious policy across all levels of government. She hopes to bring the lessons learned back to her home state.

“My goal is to make it back to Virginia and have a better of an idea of how to plan a multidecade transition that decarbonizes our economy while also building good jobs and protecting the fundamental things that we need in our life,” says Jaye. “Virginia was this place where I felt like I could see both ends of the climate crisis, and realized you need a holistic solution to address all aspects of this.”

A foundation in organizing

After graduating from the University of Virginia, Jaye led a delegation of young people from the U.S. to the United Nations to campaign for a global commitment to phase out fossil fuels and fund equitable climate solutions. At the time, the Paris climate agreement was being negotiated. Witnessing that process firsthand was eye-opening.

Jaye realized to push the U.S. forward in the fight against climate change, she needed to help build a nationwide movement that could push the federal government to enact ambitious policy. Along with six like-minded friends, Jaye co-founded the Sunrise Movement.

“It feels silly to say this now, but part of Sunrise was just to get climate change to be a more urgent issue, because at the time it was politically unpopular to even talk about it,” Jaye says. “The vision that became the Green New Deal was this plan to decarbonize our society within 10 years and bring all the benefits we can to build a stronger, more connected, and healthier society.”

Jaye describes her five years with Sunrise as a “wild whirlwind.” As the national organizing director, she worked on engagement strategies to recruit new people to the movement. Following a few key wins at the polls, Sunrise grew from a handful of chapters concentrated in swing states to over 500 chapters across the nation.

On the other side, crafting policy

Though she is no longer directly involved with the Sunrise Movement, Jaye has moved onto a different stage of the fight. For the final year of her master’s, she will be writing her thesis while working with the Massachusetts Office of Climate Innovation and Resilience. The office is newly established as of this year, evidence of the federal funding wins that Sunrise helped make possible.

“Transparently, we wanted to win a lot more,” says Jaye. “We had huge goals, but we did win a lot of things at the federal level. So, the time is now to get federal funding and move it through state implementation and planning, and it’s urgent.”

The flexibility of the city planning program allows students to study theory while also putting that theory in practice in local government. Jaye’s thesis will focus on the best planning approach for full government strategy, informed by her work in the climate office. While previous climate policy focused purely on the environmental sector, effectively addressing climate change will take a multipronged approach touching every sector, from transportation to housing to energy distribution to food production.

“What’s really cool about being in the government right now in Massachusetts is getting to see a model as they’re trying to take climate from being an environmental priority to a number one, whole-of-government challenge,” says Jaye. “It’s an issue that’s embedded into every department and level of our government.”

As she finishes her master’s, Jaye is still keeping an eye toward home. While she isn’t in a rush to leave Massachusetts, she is always thinking about the lessons she’s learning can apply to Virginia. And by building skills in both planning and organizing, Jaye will be well-equipped to make an impact wherever she lands.

“I still feel very committed to community organizing. We’re living in a divided time where our democracy is being challenged, and organizing is what we need to do to respond to that,” says Jaye. “We also need a lot more people diving in on the work of policy and governance to determine how we transition our economy and our energy system, how are we going to go about doing something like that. Right now, I’m feeling excited to be on that side of the work.”

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Bringing sustainable and affordable electricity to all

When MIT electrical engineer Reja Amatya PhD ’12 arrived in Rwanda in 2015, she was whisked off to a village. She saw that diesel generators provided power to the local health center, bank, and shops, but like most of rural Rwanda, Karambi’s 200 homes did not have electricity. Amatya knew the hilly terrain would make it challenging to connect the village to high-voltage lines from the capital, Kigali, 50 kilometers away.

While many consider electricity a basic human right, there are places where people have never flipped a light switch. Among the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals is global access to affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy by 2030. Recently, the U.N. reported that progress in global electrification had slowed due to the challenge of reaching those hardest to reach.

Researchers from the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) and Comillas Pontifical University in Madrid created Waya Energy Inc., a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup commercializing MIT-developed planning and analysis software, to help governments determine the most cost-effective ways to provide electricity to all their citizens.

The researchers’ 2015 trip to Rwanda marked the beginning of four years of phone calls, Zoom meetings, and international travel to help the east African country — still reeling from the 1994 genocide that killed more than a million people — develop a national electrification strategy and extend its power infrastructure.

Amatya, Waya president and one of five Waya co-founders, knew that electrifying Karambi and the rest of the country would provide new opportunities for work, education, and connections — and the ability to charge cellphones, often an expensive and inconvenient undertaking.

To date, Waya — with funding from the Asian Development Bank, the African Development Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank for Latin America, and the World Bank — has helped governments develop electrification plans in 22 countries on almost every continent, including in refugee camps in sub-Saharan Africa’s Sahel and Chad regions, where violence has led to 3 million internally displaced people.

“With a modeling and visualization tool like ours, we are able to look at the entire spectrum of need and demand and say, ‘OK, what might be the most optimized solution?’” Amatya says.

More than 15 graduate students and researchers from MIT and Comillas contributed to the development of Waya’s software under the supervision of Robert Stoner, the interim director at MITEI, and Ignacio Pérez-Arriaga, a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management from Comillas. Pérez-Arriaga looks at how changing electricity use patterns have forced utilities worldwide to rethink antiquated business models.

The team’s Reference Electrification Model (REM) software pulls information from population density maps, satellite images, infrastructure data, and geospatial points of interest to determine where extending the grid will be most cost-effective and where other solutions would be more practical.

“I always say we are agnostic to the technology,” Amatya says. “Traditionally, the only way to provide long-term reliable access was through the grid, but that’s changing. In many developing countries, there are many more challenges for utilities to provide reliable service.”

Off-grid solutions

Waya co-founder Stoner, who is also the founding director of the MIT Tata Center for Technology and Design, recognized early on that connecting homes to existing infrastructure was not always economically feasible. What’s more, billions of people with grid connections had unreliable access due to uneven regulation and challenging terrain.

With Waya co-founders Andres Gonzalez-Garcia, a MITEI affiliate researcher, and Professor Fernando de Cuadra Garcia of Comillas, Pérez-Arriaga and Stoner led a team that developed a set of principles to guide universal regional electrification. Their approach — which they dubbed the Integrated Distribution Framework — incorporates elements of optimal planning as well as novel business models and regulation. Getting all three right is “necessary,” Stoner says, “if you want a viable long-term outcome.”

Amatya says, “Initially, we designed REM to understand what the level of demand is in these countries with very rural and poor populations, and what the system should look like to serve it. We took a lot of that input into developing the model.” In 2019, Waya was created to commercialize the software and add consulting to the package of services the team provides.

Now, in addition to advising governments and regulators on how to expand existing grids, Waya proposes options such as a mini-grid, powered by renewables like wind, hydropower, or solar, to serve single villages or large-scale mini-grid solutions for larger areas. In some cases, an even more localized, scalable solution is a mesh grid, which might consist of a single solar panel for a few houses that, over time, can be expanded and ultimately connected to the main grid.

The REM software has been used to design off-grid systems for remote and mountainous regions in Uganda, Peru, Nigeria, Cambodia, Indonesia, India, and elsewhere. When Tata Power, India’s largest integrated power company, saw how well mini-grids would serve parts of east India, the company created a mini-grid division called Tata Renewables.

Amatya notes that the REM software enables her to come up with an entire national electrification plan from her workspace in Cambridge. But site visits and on-the-ground partners are critical in helping the Waya team understand existing systems, engage with clients to assess demand, and identify stakeholders. In Haiti, an energy consultant reported that the existing grid had typically been operational only six out of every 24 hours. In Karambi, University of Rwanda students surveyed the village’s 200 families and helped lead a community-wide meeting.

Waya connects with on-the-ground experts and agencies “who can engage directly with the government and other stakeholders, because many times those are the doors that we knock on,” Amatya says. “Local energy ministries, utilities, and regulators have to be open to regulatory change. They have to be open to working with financial institutions and new technology.”

The goals of regulators, energy providers, funding agencies, and government officials must align in real time “to provide reliable access to energy for a billion people,” she says.

Moving past challenges

Growing up in Kathmandu, Amatya used to travel to remote villages with her father, an electrical engineer who designed cable systems for landlines for Nepal Telecom. She remembers being fascinated by the high-voltage lines crisscrossing Nepal on these trips. Now, she points out utility poles to her children and explains how the distribution lines carry power from local substations to customers.

After majoring in engineering science and physics at Smith College, Amatya completed her PhD in electrical engineering at MIT in 2012. Within two years, she was traveling to off-grid communities in India as a research scientist exploring potential technologies for providing access. There were unexpected challenges: At the time, digitized geospatial data didn’t exist for many regions. In India in 2013, the team used phones to take pictures of paper maps spread out on tables. Team members now scour digital data available through Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and other sources for useful geographical information. 

It’s one thing to create a plan, Amatya says, but how it gets utilized and implemented becomes a big question. With all the players involved — funding agencies, elected officials, utilities, private companies, and regulators within the countries themselves — it’s sometimes hard to know who’s responsible for next steps.

“Besides providing technical expertise, our team engages with governments to, let’s say, develop a financial plan or an implementation plan,” she says. Ideally, Waya hopes to stay involved with each project long enough to ensure that its proposal becomes the national electrification strategy of the country. That’s no small feat, given the multiple players, the opaque nature of government, and the need to enact a regulatory framework where none may have existed.

For Rwanda, Waya identified areas without service, estimated future demand, and proposed the most cost-effective ways to meet that demand with a mix of grid and off-grid solutions. Based on the electrification plan developed by the Waya team, officials have said they hope to have the entire country electrified by 2024.

In 2017, by the time the team submitted its master plan, which included an off-grid solution for Karambi, Amatya was surprised to learn that electrification in the village had already occurred — an example, she says, of the challenging nature of local planning.

Perhaps because of Waya’s focus and outreach efforts, Karambi had become a priority. However it happened, Amatya is happy that Karambi’s 200 families finally have access to electricity.

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Speaking hypothetically

What’s the winning number for next week’s Mega Millions? If Julie knew the number, Leah would know the number.

But you know that neither person holds this precious secret — and not just because Mega Millions hasn’t been drawn yet. You know because you understand the implication of the sentence, even though it is free of any “not,” “no,” or other form of negation.

How you understand sentences like this — how you make what linguists call a “counterfactual inference” — is the fruit of a 30-year professional partnership between Kai von Fintel, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Linguistics, and Sabine Iatridou, the David W. Skinner Professor of Linguistics. Their new paper, “Prolegomena to a theory of X-marking,” published in Linguistics and Philosophy, offers a fresh take on one of the most distinctive properties of human language: our capacity to talk about hypotheticals, and on how and why the forms that are used in some such hypotheticals appear elsewhere in language with different results.

Consider this slightly diverging alternative sentence: “If Julie knows the answer, Leah knows the answer.” No implication here that Julie and Leah do not know the answer. So how is it that we make the counterfactual inference for the first sentence but not the second?

To start, von Fintel and Iatridou explain that the first sentence has an extra past tense morpheme: both in the if-clause “if Julie knew” … and in the consequent clause “Leah would know” (linguists unpack the word “would” as “will + past tense”). Yet we don’t interpret this morpheme (a unit of language that is both meaningful and indivisible) as being about the actual past. For example, “If Julie knew the answer now, Leah would also know it right now” is not at all about the past, but still conveys the counterfactual inference.

Some languages, such as Hungarian, accomplish this by using a specialized morpheme that has no other function. Other languages use a morpheme or combination of morphemes that have other functions as well. As a unified name, von Fintel and Iatridou use the term “X-marking” for the marking on counterfactuals. “X stands for extra, an X factor that is mysterious,” says von Fintel.

“The paper offers a bold and groundbreaking way of re-framing a fascinating contrast that permeates how natural languages allow us to talk about hypothetical states of affairs,” confirms Magdalena Kaufmann, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Connecticut who was not involved in the work.

Beyond if/then

Extending the scope of their investigation, looking across many languages, the MIT team discovered that X-marking has at least two other functions. One is creating counterfactual wishes: “She wishes she had a brother now” clearly signals that she does not have a brother, even though the sentence is free of negation words. Note the X-marking, in the form of a non-temporally interpreted past morpheme, on “had a brother now.” Moreover, in other languages there’s no word “wish;” instead what is used is “want + X” (for example, in Greek, French, and several non-Indo-European languages).

But wait — there’s more. In many languages X-marking also serves to distinguish “must” from “ought” — i.e., separating the “strong” necessity of “must,” or “have to,” from the “weak” implication of “ought.” That is, many languages do not have a verb “ought,” but instead use “must + X.” In English, we might say “You ought to read the rest of this article, but you don’t have to.” Reporters in many other languages would say “You must + X read the rest of this article but you don’t have to.”

The fact that X-marking has these multiple functions in so many different languages says something deep about human language. “Unfortunately, what this is exactly we do not yet know,” the researchers acknowledge. “The point of this paper is to say look, why is there X-marking that can turn a conditional into a counterfactual, a strong necessity into a weak necessity, and a desire into unattainable desire?” says Iatridou. “What meaning are we going to give to X so that it can do these three different jobs?”

Remarks von Fintel, “This fairly particular phenomenon is widespread, and trying to understand and explain it is a real puzzle.”

“We look at similarities that cannot be explained as a result of language contact over the years,” says Iatridou. “Our premise is that if unrelated languages have something in common, that means something deep about how the human brain produces and codes meanings.”

Toward a unified theory of X-marking

With a cohort of graduate assistants and colleagues acting as “informants” — native speakers of other languages skilled in finding analogs to X-marking statements presented by von Fintel and Iatridou — the researchers hope to track their morphemes in more locations around the world. They have been working on a cluster of data in Turkish, Hindi, and Farsi, according to von Fintel — forays that may reveal new and unusual forms of X-marking.

Both researchers see this paper, decades in the making, as an invitation to fellow linguists to contribute to a unified theory of X-marking, “an area of language where humans move away from talking about the actual here-and-now and think about possibilities, necessities, and hypotheticals,” says von Fintel. “Thinking and communicating that allows us to get away from the present is absolutely essential.”

Their research is already making an impact. “If what I propose in my recent research about necessity modals in Brazilian Portuguese is on the right track, then certain instances of these modal verbs can be analyzed as X-marking,” says Marcelo Barra Ferreira, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of Sao Paolo, Brazil. “This is something which was not obvious to me before knowing their work.”

Kaufmann adds, “The paper is unparalleled in its combination of discussing previous theoretical research in the philosophical and linguistic literature, while also exploring the relevant contrasts in a significant number of related and unrelated languages. By overcoming the stifling traditional terminology, uncovering a fascinating and cross-linguistically stable pattern, and proposing ideas for a unified analysis, the paper has already begun to spur a wealth of new research and is certain to continue to do so.”

“We don’t have the final, complete theory, but we are hopefully presenting the right questions,” says Iatridou.

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