MIT Latest News

Subscribe to MIT Latest News feed
MIT News is dedicated to communicating to the media and the public the news and achievements of the students, faculty, staff and the greater MIT community.
Updated: 12 hours 59 min ago

3 Questions: Wiebke Denecke on a landmark project for Chinese literature

Fri, 12/01/2023 - 12:00am

Nuns writing fine poetry. Centuries-old joke books. An epic travelogue ending with a visit to Genghis Khan. These are just a few things readers can experience through the new Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature, published by Oxford University Press.

The series is modeled on the Loeb Classical Library, which debuted in 1912 and features about 500 titles of Greek and Roman literature, in their distinctive red and green covers. The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature series is starting with five titles, under the supervision of founding editor-in-chief Wiebke Denecke, the S. C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language and Culture in MIT’s literature section. The aim is to bring these classic texts, from the first millennium BCE through the early 20th century, to the world, in engaging bilingual editions. There will be four more new titles next year, with dozens lined up after that.

The series benefactors are Oscar Liu-Chien Tang and Agnes Hsin Mei Hsu-Tang, whose family has also been MIT benefactors and has a notable record of philanthropy for institutions and programs in the arts, humanities, and education. MIT News talked with Denecke about the ambitious new book series.

Q: What is the Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature?

A: This is a library of classical Chinese literature, covering three millennia, from what is now China and from many other places. Just as Latin was the lingua franca in Europe, classical Chinese was the lingua franca of writers in East Asia, so we include authors from Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. The editions are bilingual, Chinese on one side of the page and English on the other.

It belongs to a certain type of project that you could call endowed bilingual libraries. This started 100 years ago with the Loeb Classical Library of classic Greco-Roman literature. A decade ago, the Murty Classical Library of India was launched, and now here we have a new library of classical Chinese literature. It is a great moment for world literature.

We publish translations that are both solidly scholarly and eminently readable. Our associate editor is Lucas Klein, who has a vision of literary magic that makes words sparkle — it’s something he has really emphasized.

Our donors, Agnes Hsin Mei Hsu-Tang and Oscar Liu-Chien Tang, are particularly interesting. Agnes Hsu-Tang is the descendant of Xu Guangqi, who was co-translator with Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit missionary in the 17th century, of Euclid’s “Elements.” Agnes has another great ancestor, Ji Yun, who compiled one of the greatest encyclopedias of the world, in the 18th century. It’s not just somebody from the Chinese world supporting this, but there’s a family lineage of translating knowledge onto a global stage, a symbol of East-West cultural exchange.

Q: What can we discover, or rediscover, about Chinese-language literature through this library?

A: I think it’s an important moment for the humanities generally. The Loeb Library was established when James Loeb himself said the humanities were being neglected more than at any time since perhaps the Middle Ages. Overall, we have a three-pronged strategy: First, we try to make the canonical new. Then we go beyond what anglophone readers might have heard about Chinese literature. For instance, we have three joke collections, in “The Misadventures of Master Mugwort.” In China, joke collections were very popular, and there’s a lot of political satire in there. But there is a common prejudice that China lacks satirical literature. Third, the series emphasizes that there is more than 2,000 years of common cultural heritage in East Asia. That’s a real message right there.

We publish works that are very surprising, such as “An Anthology of Poetry by Buddhist Nuns of Late Imperial China.” Many of these are first translations. We wanted a voice of the female experience, often in very precarious times. Some nuns were from elite ranks and had lost their husbands. Others were orphaned. It’s a real archaeology of female voices.

It's a very good antidote to the idea that nuns were confined. Quite to the contrary, they made relationships they never could have in a household. They were writing poetry and painting, and it’s very empowering. One such example is Shangjian Huizong’s 17th-century poem, “Village Life.” Her husband died in prison, and she wrote three volumes of poetry, including these lines:

“Living here impoverished / I’ve lost all taste for ornaments … / The face of the woman in my mirror / is a flower that knows emptiness”

So what is amazing here? Obviously as a nun she was impoverished. The ornaments are hair ornaments, and it goes with a literary tradition in China to write about women in a boudoir — usually written by males, but here the boudoir implies self-reflectivity. The flower is a natural ornament; it also knows that emptiness accompanies the idea of enlightenment, in the Buddhist sense. So, she turns around boudoir imagery, saying she realizes in the symbolic mirror that she has gained enlightenment. These lines have incredible literary value.

Q: Another one of the first five volumes is “Daoist Master Changchun’s Journey to the West,” a firsthand account of a visit to Genghis Khan by a Chinese traveling party on a long diplomatic trip. Surely there are not many texts like this. What is it about?

A: This is written by a disciple of a Daoist patriarch who was summoned by Genghis Khan in the 1220s, when the Mongols were rushing through the continent. They basically emerged from nowhere, didn’t have a lot of history or writing behind them, and shaped world history. There are so few eyewitness sources, it’s amazing to have a travelogue with so much detail. It’s also made special by all the poetry in it, which in the Chinese tradition was always the main medium of experiencing reality and expressing it.

In this text, poetry becomes a way to cope with this travel experience: You start in China, go to Central Asia, like to the city of Samarkind, and encounter different people, different plants, Islam, sweet melons, and people drinking from glass vessels never seen in China. It’s a way to familiarize and exoticize at the same time. And the writer observes a person — we know today it’s a muezzin — lead in “petitioning heaven” for the Muslim prayer. This is an encounter with Islam, though he doesn’t have a real concept of that.

On the other hand, Genghis Khan is intensely interested in the Dao — or at least that’s how it’s depicted. The first three times they meet, the conversation is always about the Dao. The Chinese want to believe the other side is interested in them. Finally, this is also hagiographic text, a sacred eulogy of this patriarch, and it’s a process of getting political capital out of the connections with Genghis Khan.

Through all of this, we are really trying to develop what we call the Hsu-Tang Library style: smartly scholarly, where you feel there’s something gained in translation.

Burchard Scholars gather to network, connect, and learn

Fri, 12/01/2023 - 12:00am

The Burchard Scholars Program pairs expert faculty with promising MIT sophomores and juniors who have demonstrated excellence in the humanities, arts, or social sciences. Launched in 1986, the program continues to demonstrate the importance of an integrated approach to scholarship and education. 

Administered by the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), the program features a series of dinner discussions between student participants and experts and thought leaders from across SHASS disciplines. The scholars, with the support of guest speakers and faculty fellows, develop respectful and adaptable approaches to engaging in complex intellectual discussions. The program is named in honor of John Ely Burchard, former dean of SHASS.

MIT students chosen to be Burchard Scholars are consistently among finalists for RhodesMarshall, and other major scholarships and fellowships.

About 35 MIT undergraduates are selected each year for the competitive program. Each cohort of scholars participate for one calendar year, from February through December.

Willow Huang, a biological engineering major, just wrapped a year as a Burchard Scholar, and calls it a valuable experience. “I'm glad I applied,” she says. “We had thought-provoking talks over the course of the year.” 

Huang also praises the program for helping her improve her comprehension and communication skills. 

“These will undoubtedly help me in my career,” she says. “Attaining a level of knowledge in fields like art, history, and literature is an essential part of our education, as it broadens our perspective and helps us make more sense of things like cultural phenomena and political issues.”

Margery Resnick, a professor of literature and women’s and gender studies, is the Burchard Scholars program director. Resnick launched the faculty fellows component of the scholars program 15 years ago.

“These faculty members provide a consistent presence at the Burchards, since they attend the dinners and events and get to know the students well,” she says.

The faculty fellows, chosen by the dean, select the Burchard class and help create a valuable support system for students.

“By the end of the Burchard year, students know a range of faculty, not only the fellows, but also the speakers who come from different programs in the school,” Resnick says. “Most importantly, over the course of the year, students get to know each other and the faculty fellows well.”

The final Burchard Scholars dinner of 2023 was held Nov. 1 at Catalyst restaurant in Cambridge.

Before the dinners, faculty mix with students and come to know each other beyond the classroom. The faculty fellows then sit among the students, and, over dinner, exchange ideas based on the presentation.

“Conversations over dinner are lively, fun and engaging,” Resnick says.

“The scholars represent a diverse swath of studies across the Institute,” she adds, “But all are curious about fields other than their own.” 

Martin Beraja, the dinner’s guest on Nov. 1, is an MIT economist who studies the role of government policy in stabilizing business cycles and responding to the challenges posed by new digital and automation technologies. He presented “Artificial Intelligence and Governments: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly” during the Burchard Scholars dinner.

The variety of presentation topics is a highlight for students chosen to be part of this year’s Burchard Scholars class.

“We'll move our world forward by combining disciplines, not by staying in silos,” math and computer science major Laker Newhouse said after the dinner. “With highly capable AI on the horizon, it is important to build diverse, broad coalitions to secure a bright future.”

Benjamin Lou, a double major in math and physics and a philosophy minor, speaks highly of the opportunity to explore ideas outside his academic area. “Burchard shows other SHASS disciplines are valuable,” he notes.

Senior Iana Ferguson, a physics major, enjoyed this year’s dinner series. “It’s a setting where you hear topics you wouldn’t otherwise get,” she says. “Connecting disciplines has value outside physics.”

A mineral produced by plate tectonics has a global cooling effect, study finds

Thu, 11/30/2023 - 11:00am

MIT geologists have found that a clay mineral on the seafloor, called smectite, has a surprisingly powerful ability to sequester carbon over millions of years.

Under a microscope, a single grain of the clay resembles the folds of an accordion. These folds are known to be effective traps for organic carbon.

Now, the MIT team has shown that the carbon-trapping clays are a product of plate tectonics: When oceanic crust crushes against a continental plate, it can bring rocks to the surface that, over time, can weather into minerals including smectite. Eventually, the clay sediment settles back in the ocean, where the minerals trap bits of dead organisms in their microscopic folds. This keeps the organic carbon from being consumed by microbes and expelled back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide.

Over millions of years, smectite can have a global effect, helping to cool the entire planet. Through a series of analyses, the researchers showed that smectite was likely produced after several major tectonic events over the last 500 million years. During each tectonic event, the clays trapped enough carbon to cool the Earth and induce the subsequent ice age.

The findings are the first to show that plate tectonics can trigger ice ages through the production of carbon-trapping smectite.

These clays can be found in certain tectonically active regions today, and the scientists believe that smectite continues to sequester carbon, providing a natural, albeit slow-acting, buffer against humans’ climate-warming activities.

“The influence of these unassuming clay minerals has wide-ranging implications for the habitability of planets,” says Joshua Murray, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. “There may even be a modern application for these clays in offsetting some of the carbon that humanity has placed into the atmosphere.”

Murray and Oliver Jagoutz, professor of geology at MIT, have published their findings today in Nature Geoscience.

A clear and present clay

The new study follows up on the team’s previous work, which showed that each of the Earth’s major ice ages was likely triggered by a tectonic event in the tropics. The researchers found that each of these tectonic events exposed ocean rocks called ophiolites to the atmosphere. They put forth the idea that, when a tectonic collision occurs in a tropical region, ophiolites can undergo certain weathering effects, such as exposure to wind, rain, and chemical interactions, that transform the rocks into various minerals, including clays.

“Those clay minerals, depending on the kinds you create, influence the climate in different ways,” Murray explains.

At the time, it was unclear which minerals could come out of this weathering effect, and whether and how these minerals could directly contribute to cooling the planet. So, while it appeared there was a link between plate tectonics and ice ages, the exact mechanism by which one could trigger the other was still in question.

With the new study, the team looked to see whether their proposed tectonic tropical weathering process would produce carbon-trapping minerals, and in quantities that would be sufficient to trigger a global ice age.

The team first looked through the geologic literature and compiled data on the ways in which major magmatic minerals weather over time, and on the types of clay minerals this weathering can produce. They then worked these measurements into a weathering simulation of different rock types that are known to be exposed in tectonic collisions.

“Then we look at what happens to these rock types when they break down due to weathering and the influence of a tropical environment, and what minerals form as a result,” Jagoutz says.

Next, they plugged each weathered, “end-product” mineral into a simulation of the Earth’s carbon cycle to see what effect a given mineral might have, either in interacting with organic carbon, such as bits of dead organisms, or with inorganic, in the form of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

From these analyses, one mineral had a clear presence and effect: smectite. Not only was the clay a naturally weathered product of tropical tectonics, it was also highly effective at trapping organic carbon. In theory, smectite seemed like a solid connection between tectonics and ice ages.

But were enough of the clays actually present to trigger the previous four ice ages? Ideally, researchers should confirm this by finding smectite in ancient rock layers dating back to each global cooling period.

“Unfortunately, as clays are buried by other sediments, they get cooked a bit, so we can’t measure them directly,” Murray says. “But we can look for their fingerprints.”

A slow build

The team reasoned that, as smectites are a product of ophiolites, these ocean rocks also bear characteristic elements such as nickel and chromium, which would be preserved in ancient sediments. If smectites were present in the past, nickel and chromium should be as well.

To test this idea, the team looked through a database containing thousands of oceanic sedimentary rocks that were deposited over the last 500 million years. Over this time period, the Earth experienced four separate ice ages. Looking at rocks around each of these periods, the researchers observed large spikes of nickel and chromium, and inferred from this that smectite must also have been present.

By their estimates, the clay mineral could have increased the preservation of organic carbon by less than one-tenth of a percent. In absolute terms, this is a miniscule amount. But over millions of years, they calculated that the clay’s accumulated, sequestered carbon was enough to trigger each of the four major ice ages.

“We found that you really don’t need much of this material to have a huge effect on the climate,” Jagoutz says.

“These clays also have probably contributed some of the Earth’s cooling in the last 3 to 5 million years, before humans got involved,” Murray adds. “In the absence of humans, these clays are probably making a difference to the climate. It’s just such a slow process.”

“Jagoutz and Murray’s work is a nice demonstration of how important it is to consider all biotic and physical components of the global carbon cycle,” says Lee Kump, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University, who was not involved with the study. “Feedbacks among all these components control atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations on all time scales, from the annual rise and fall of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to the swings from icehouse to greenhouse over millions of years.”

Could smectites be harnessed intentionally to further bring down the world’s carbon emissions? Murray sees some potential, for instance to shore up carbon reservoirs such as regions of permafrost. Warming temperatures are predicted to melt permafrost and expose long-buried organic carbon. If smectites could be applied to these regions, the clays could prevent this exposed carbon from escaping into and further warming the atmosphere.

“If you want to understand how nature works, you have to understand it on the mineral and grain scale,” Jagoutz says. “And this is also the way forward for us to find solutions for this climatic catastrophe. If you study these natural processes, there’s a good chance you will stumble on something that will be actually useful.”

This research was funded, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

A new optimization framework for robot motion planning

Thu, 11/30/2023 - 9:00am

It isn’t easy for a robot to find its way out of a maze. Picture the machines trying to traverse a kid’s playroom to reach the kitchen, with miscellaneous toys scattered across the floor and furniture blocking some potential paths. This messy labyrinth requires the robot to calculate the most optimal journey to its destination, without crashing into any obstacles. What is the bot to do?

MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers’ “Graphs of Convex Sets (GCS) Trajectory Optimization” algorithm presents a scalable, collision-free motion planning system for these robotic navigational needs. The approach marries graph search (a method for finding discrete paths in a network) and convex optimization (an efficient method for optimizing continuous variables so that a given cost is minimized), and can quickly find paths through maze-like environments while simultaneously optimizing the trajectory of the robot. GCS can map out collision-free trajectories in as many as 14 dimensions (and potentially more), with the aim of improving how machines work in tandem in warehouses, libraries, and households.

The CSAIL-led project consistently finds shorter paths in less time than comparable planners, showing GCS’ capability to efficiently plan in complex environments. In demos, the system skillfully guided two robotic arms holding a mug around a shelf while optimizing for the shortest time and path. The duo’s synchronized motion resembled a partner dance routine, swaying around the bookcase’s edges without dropping objects. In subsequent setups, the researchers removed the shelves, and the robots swapped the positions of spray paints and handed each other a sugar box. 

The success of these real-world tests shows the potential of the algorithm to aid in domains like manufacturing, where two robotic arms working in tandem could bring down an item from a shelf. Similarly, that duo could assist in putting books away in a household or library, avoiding the other objects nearby. While problems of this nature were previously tackled with sampling-based algorithms, which can struggle in high-dimensional spaces, GCS uses fast convex optimization and can efficiently coordinate the work of multiple robots.

“Robots excel at repetitive, preplanned motions in applications such as automotive manufacturing or electronics assembly but struggle with real-time motion generation in novel environments or tasks. Previous state-of-the-art motion planning methods employ a ‘hub and spoke’ approach, using precomputed graphs of a finite number of fixed configurations, which are known to be safe. During operation, the robot must strictly adhere to this roadmap, often leading to inefficient robot movements. Motion planning using Graph-of-Convex-Sets (GCS) enables robots to easily adapt to different configurations within precomputed convex regions  allowing the robot to ‘round the corner’ as it makes its motion plans. By doing so, GCS allows the robot to rapidly compute plans within safe regions very efficiently using convex optimization. This paper presents a novel approach that has the potential to dramatically enhance the speed and efficiency of robot motions and their ability to adapt to novel environments,” says David M.S. Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Dexai Robotics. 

GCS also thrived in simulation demos, where the team considered how a quadrotor could fly through a building without crashing into trees or failing to enter doors and windows at the correct angle. The algorithm optimized the path around the obstacles while simultaneously considering the rich dynamics of the quadrotor.

The recipe behind the MIT team’s success involves the marriage of two key ingredients: graph search and convex optimization. The first element of GCS searches graphs by exploring their nodes, calculating different properties at each one to find hidden patterns and identify the shortest path to reach the target. Much like the graph search algorithms used for distance calculation in Google Maps, GCS creates different trajectories to reach each point on its course toward its destination.

By blending graph search and convex optimization, GCS can find paths through intricate environments and simultaneously optimize the robot trajectory. GCS executes this goal by graphing different points in its surrounding area and then calculating how to reach each one on the way to its final destination. This trajectory accounts for different angles to ensure the robot avoids colliding with the edges of its obstacles. The resulting motion plan enables machines to squeeze by potential hurdles, precisely maneuvering through each turn the same way a driver avoids accidents on a narrow street.

GCS was initially proposed in a 2021 paper as a mathematical framework for finding shortest paths in graphs where traversing an edge required solving a convex optimization problem. Moving precisely across each vertex in large graphs and high-dimensional spaces, GCS had clear potential in robotic motion planning. In a follow-up paper, sixth-year MIT PhD student Tobia Marcucci and his team developed an algorithm applying their framework to complex planning problems for robots moving in high-dimensional spaces. The 2023 article was featured on the cover of Science Robotics last week, while the group’s initial work has been accepted for publication in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics’ (SIAM) Journal on Optimization.

While the algorithm excels at navigating through tight spaces without collisions, there is still room to grow. The CSAIL team notes that GCS could eventually help with more involved problems where robots have to make contact with their environment, such as pushing or sliding objects out of the way. The team is also exploring applications of GCS trajectory optimization to robot task and motion planning.

“I’m very excited about this application of GCS to motion planning. But this is just the beginning. This framework is deeply connected to many core results in optimization, control, and machine learning, giving us new leverage on problems that are simultaneously continuous and combinatorial,” says Russ Tedrake, MIT professor, CSAIL principal investigator, and co-author on a new paper about the work. “There is a lot more work to do!” 

Marcucci and Tedrake wrote the paper alongside former CSAIL graduate research assistant Mark Petersen; MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), CSAIL, and aeronautics and astronautics graduate student David von Wrangel SB ’23. The more general Graph of Convex Sets framework was developed by Marcucci and Tedrake in collaboration with Jack Umenberger, a former postdoc at MIT CSAIL, and Pablo Parrilo, a professor of EECS at MIT. The group’s work was supported, in part, by Amazon.com Services, the Department of Defense’s National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Office of Naval Research.

Immune action at a distance

Thu, 11/30/2023 - 9:00am

For most metastatic cancer types, there are no reliably effective treatments. Therapies may slow the growth of tumors, but they will not eradicate them. Occasionally, however, treating a tumor in one location will cause untreated tumors elsewhere in the body to shrink or even regress completely — a dramatic but exceedingly rare phenomenon known as the abscopal effect.

Cancer researchers have sought methods to induce the abscopal effect by design. The abscopal effect is thought to arise when dead or damaged tumor cells release antigens that teach some types of immune cells to recognize and attack other and even distant cancer cells. Essentially, the treated tumor behaves like a personalized cancer vaccine that incites the immune system to attack metastasized tumors. The advent of cancer immunoadjuvants, which enhance and sustain the activity of tumor-targeting immune cells, has been a key to unlocking the abscopal effect, at least in the laboratory setting. 

In the clinic, success has proven more elusive. Since immunotherapies can lead to serious toxicities if administered through the bloodstream, they must be delivered directly to the tumor — often by injection. It is difficult for clinicians to target injections precisely to the tumor and impossible to confirm delivery. Once injected, immunostimulatory drugs quickly leak out of the tumor before they have had a chance to take full effect.

MIT researchers, together with colleagues from Mass General Brigham, have developed a polymer gel delivery system that could help translate the promise of the abscopal effect into the clinic. The gel, visible with a CT scanner or ultrasound, solidifies after injection, where it remains in the tumor to release drugs at a controlled rate.

In a study published in Advanced Healthcare Materials, the team delivered the immune-stimulating drug imiquimod in combination with checkpoint blockade therapy to dual-tumor mouse models of colon and breast cancer, which showed improved survival as well as tumor regression in both treated and untreated tumors.

“The field has been seeking the ‘holy grail’ of the abscopal effect for the past 15 years,” says Giovanni Traverso, a senior author of the study, Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT. “Now, with drug-delivery materials better adapted for the clinic, it could be within reach.”

Traverso’s co-senior author is Umar Mahmood, director of the Center for Precision Imaging and chief of the Division of Nuclear Medicine and Molecular Imaging at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Avik Som, interventional and diagnostic radiology resident at MGH; Jan-Georg Rosenboom, senior postdoc in the Langer and Traverso labs at the Koch Institute; and  Eric Wehrenberg-Klee, director of the Center for Image-Guided Cancer Therapy and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, are co-lead authors. Robert Langer, David H. Koch Institute Professor, is also an author of the study.

Defining the problem

At MGH, clinicians saw that of 18 patients that were treated with an intratumoral injection of immunotherapy either just before or after undergoing a procedure known as cryoablation, one patient with metastatic melanoma showed a sustained abscopal effect. In cryoablation, a tumor is injected with freezing gas and then thawed out, with the hope of inducing a system-wide immune response to tumors.

The observation pointed to a promising avenue for achieving the abscopal effect for more patients, but a new tool was needed to address some of the realities of intratumoral injections in the clinic. In addition to the difficulties of delivering intratumoral injections for the clinician, these treatments are costly and infeasible for patients. Because tumors do not retain immunotherapies for long, patients require repeat injections — with sedation — over several days. The clinicians looked across the river to their MIT colleagues for help.

 “My clinical colleagues came to us with this very interesting problem, so we thought, how can we address this from our own chemical engineering perspective?” says Rosenboom.

The interdisciplinary team determined that the injected material would need to be liquid at room temperature during injection, and then solidify once inside the tumor to prevent leakage. For optimal drug delivery, the gel would need to carry a high concentration of drug in a small volume and then release its payload in a controlled fashion over several days. The team planned to add an iodinated and clinically approved contrast agent to make it visible with a CT scan to help clinicians confirm they have successfully injected the material. To help smooth the path of the platform to the clinic, the gel should be known to be safe and biocompatible and the immunotherapy it transports to have proven effectiveness.

“As a radiologist, I can see tumors under CT or ultrasound, but I can't see the drugs they are asking me to inject!” says Som. “That's why we designed a formulation for a promising immunoadjuvant that could be image guided by both modalities. This platform should hopefully realize the immense promise of personalized cancer vaccines.”

Adds Wehrenberg-Klee, “When developing new intratumoral immunotherapies, being able to confirm delivery into tumor is a critical variable. Intratumoral immunotherapy relies on the assumption that you are delivering therapy to tumor, but our clinical experience suggests this may not always be true. If we can see what we’ve injected, we can eliminate that concern.”

“As engineers, we needed to solve the problem of how to tune a polymer formulation to achieve injectability, solidification at body temperature, prolonged drug release, and visibility — all at the same time, all while these properties affect one another,” says Rosenboom. “That took us about four years to figure out.”

A solution gels

After investigating several polymers, the researchers found that a three-part polymer called PLGA-PEG-PLGA would help them balance the several competing features required of their platform. The polymer is thermosensitive. With slight changes to its molecular weight (size), it can be adjusted to be liquid at room temperature during injection and more viscous in the warmer environment of the tumor.

The polymer is also amphiphilic, with a PEG block that is attracted to water and two PLGA blocks that repel water, so that it forms a nanoparticle around the hydrophobic drug. Its amphiphilic properties allow its drug-release behaviors to be precisely tuned: the more hydrophobic the PLGA block, the slower the release. The formulation allowed a slowed drug release over four to five days, which was a timeframe previously reported to be effective when injected daily.

A similar version of the polymer has already been studied in clinical trials for delivering a type of chemotherapy, paclitaxel. However, in this scenario, the gel would transport imiquimod, an immunotherapy already approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) that is commonly used topically to treat basal cell carcinoma.

Once the gel had been tailored to meet their requirements, the team tested it in mouse models of colon and breast cancer that are usually resistant to immunotherapy. In combination with a type of immunotherapy called checkpoint blockade therapy, they used the platform to deliver imiquimod. Each mouse had two tumors of the same type, but only one tumor was treated. If both tumors regressed, then the researchers could confirm their platform could induce a system-wide immune response to tumors — the abscopal effect.

Overall, the combination of checkpoint blockade therapy and intratumorally delivered imiquimod resulted in improved survival in both colon and breast cancer models. The treatment resulted in an all-or-nothing response, with complete regression of both the treated and untreated tumors in the mice that did respond to therapy. For nonresponders, there was no regression in either tumor. The researchers also tested the combination therapy of gel-delivered imiquimod and checkpoint blockade therapy with and without cryoablation of the treated tumor and found that the two approaches gave similar results.

Because the platform is made from safe materials to deliver an already-approved drug, the team expects that the path to FDA approval will be significantly shorter than for completely novel platforms and therapies. The team is also working with industry partners to adapt the platform for treating other tumor types and to deliver other therapies.

This study was funded in part by a Philips RSNA Research Award, a Schlaeger Research Fellowship, a postdoctoral fellowship from the Ludwig Center at the Koch Institute, and grants from Boston Scientific, the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and the National Cancer Institute.

With a quantum “squeeze,” clocks could keep even more precise time, MIT researchers propose

Thu, 11/30/2023 - 12:00am

The practice of keeping time hinges on stable oscillations. In a grandfather clock, the length of a second is marked by a single swing of the pendulum. In a digital watch, the vibrations of a quartz crystal mark much smaller fractions of time. And in atomic clocks, the world’s state-of-the-art timekeepers, the oscillations of a laser beam stimulate atoms to vibrate at 9.2 billion times per second. These smallest, most stable divisions of time set the timing for today’s satellite communications, GPS systems, and financial markets.

A clock’s stability depends on the noise in its environment. A slight wind can throw a pendulum’s swing out of sync. And heat can disrupt the oscillations of atoms in an atomic clock. Eliminating such environmental effects can improve a clock’s precision. But only by so much.

A new MIT study finds that even if all noise from the outside world is eliminated, the stability of clocks, laser beams, and other oscillators would still be vulnerable to quantum mechanical effects. The precision of oscillators would ultimately be limited by quantum noise.

But in theory, there’s a way to push past this quantum limit. In their study, the researchers also show that by manipulating, or “squeezing,” the states that contribute to quantum noise, the stability of an oscillator could be improved, even past its quantum limit.

“What we’ve shown is, there’s actually a limit to how stable oscillators like lasers and clocks can be, that’s set not just by their environment, but by the fact that quantum mechanics forces them to shake around a little bit,” says Vivishek Sudhir, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “Then, we’ve shown that there are ways you can even get around this quantum mechanical shaking. But you have to be more clever than just isolating the thing from its environment. You have to play with the quantum states themselves.”

The team is working on an experimental test of their theory. If they can demonstrate that they can manipulate the quantum states in an oscillating system, the researchers envision that clocks, lasers, and other oscillators could be tuned to super-quantum precision. These systems could then be used to track infinitesimally small differences in time, such as the fluctuations of a single qubit in a quantum computer or the presence of a dark matter particle flitting between detectors.

“We plan to demonstrate several instances of lasers with quantum-enhanced timekeeping ability over the next several years,” says Hudson Loughlin, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Physics. “We hope that our recent theoretical developments and upcoming experiments will advance our fundamental ability to keep time accurately, and enable new revolutionary technologies.”

Loughlin and Sudhir detail their work in an open-access paper published in the journal Nature Communications.

Laser precision

In studying the stability of oscillators, the researchers looked first to the laser — an optical oscillator that produces a wave-like beam of highly synchronized photons. The invention of the laser is largely credited to physicists Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes, who coined the name from its descriptive acronym: light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

A laser’s design centers on a “lasing medium” — a collection of atoms, usually embedded in glass or crystals. In the earliest lasers, a flash tube surrounding the lasing medium would stimulate electrons in the atoms to jump up in energy. When the electrons relax back to lower energy, they give off some radiation in the form of a photon. Two mirrors, on either end of the lasing medium, reflect the emitted photon back into the atoms to stimulate more electrons, and produce more photons. One mirror, together with the lasing medium, acts as an “amplifier” to boost the production of photons, while the second mirror is partially transmissive and acts as a “coupler” to extract some photons out as a concentrated beam of laser light.

Since the invention of the laser, Schawlow and Townes put forth a hypothesis that a laser’s stability should be limited by quantum noise. Others have since tested their hypothesis by modeling the microscopic features of a laser. Through very specific calculations, they showed that indeed, imperceptible, quantum interactions among the laser’s photons and atoms could limit the stability of their oscillations.

“But this work had to do with extremely detailed, delicate calculations, such that the limit was understood, but only for a specific kind of laser,” Sudhir notes. “We wanted to enormously simplify this, to understand lasers and a wide range of oscillators."

Putting the “squeeze” on

Rather than focus on a laser’s physical intricacies, the team looked to simplify the problem.

“When an electrical engineer thinks of making an oscillator, they take an amplifier, and they feed the output of the amplifier into its own input,” Sudhir explains. “It’s like a snake eating its own tail. It’s an extremely liberating way of thinking. You don’t need to know the nitty gritty of a laser. Instead, you have an abstract picture, not just of a laser, but of all oscillators.”

In their study, the team drew up a simplified representation of a laser-like oscillator. Their model consists of an amplifier (such as a laser’s atoms), a delay line (for instance, the time it takes light to travel between a laser’s mirrors), and a coupler (such as a partially reflective mirror).

The team then wrote down the equations of physics that describe the system’s behavior, and carried out calculations to see where in the system quantum noise would arise.

“By abstracting this problem to a simple oscillator, we can pinpoint where quantum fluctuations come into the system, and they come in in two places: the amplifier and the coupler that allows us to get a signal out of the oscillator,” Loughlin says. “If we know those two things, we know what the quantum limit on that oscillator’s stability is.”

Sudhir says scientists can use the equations they lay out in their study to calculate the quantum limit in their own oscillators.

What’s more, the team showed that this quantum limit might be overcome, if quantum noise in one of the two sources could be “squeezed.” Quantum squeezing is the idea of minimizing quantum fluctuations in one aspect of a system at the expense of proportionally increasing fluctuations in another aspect. The effect is similar to squeezing air from one part of a balloon into another.

In the case of a laser, the team found that if quantum fluctuations in the coupler were squeezed, it could improve the precision, or the timing of oscillations, in the outgoing laser beam, even as noise in the laser’s power would increase as a result.

“When you find some quantum mechanical limit, there’s always some question of how malleable is that limit?” Sudhir says. “Is it really a hard stop, or is there still some juice you can extract by manipulating some quantum mechanics? In this case, we find that there is, which is a result that is applicable to a huge class of oscillators.”

This research is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.

Q&A: Phillip Sharp and Amy Brand on the future of open-access publishing

Thu, 11/30/2023 - 12:00am

Providing open access to scholarly publications is a long-running issue with new developments on the horizon. Last year, the U.S. federal government’s Office of Science and Technology Policy mandated that starting in 2026 publishers must provide open access to publications stemming from federal funding. That provides more impetus for the open-access movement in academia.

Meanwhile, other trends are changing academic publishing, including consolidation of journal titles and provision of access by having authors (and their home institutions) pay for publication costs. With these developments unfolding, a group of MIT scholars is releasing a new white paper about academic open-access publishing. The paper gathers information, identifies outstanding questions, and calls for further research and data to inform policy on the subject.

The group was chaired by Institute Professor Emeritus Phillip A. Sharp, of the Department of Biology and Koch Institute of Integrative Cancer Research, who co-authored the report along with William B. Bonvillian, senior director of special projects at MIT Open Learning; Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research; Barbara Imperiali, the Class of 1922 Professor of Biology; David R. Karger, professor of electrical engineering; Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga, professor of science, technology, and society; Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press; Nick Lindsay, director for journals and open access at MIT Press; and Michael Stebbins of Science Advisors, LLC.

MIT News spoke with Sharp and Brand about the state of open-access publishing.

Q: What are the key benefits of open access, as you see it?

Amy Brand: As an academic publisher running the MIT Press, we have embraced open access in both books and journals for a long time because it is our mission to support our authors and get their research out into the world. Whether it’s completely removing paywalls and barriers, or keeping prices low, we do whatever we can to disseminate the content that we publish. Even before we were talking about federal policies, this was a priority at the MIT Press.

Phillip Sharp: As a scientist, I’m interested in having my research make the largest impact it can, to help solve some of the challenges of society. And open access, making research available to people around the world, is an important aspect of that. But the quality of research is dependent upon peer review. So, I think open access policies need to be considered and promoted in the context of a very valuable and vigorous peer-review publication process.

Q: What are the key elements of this report?

Brand: The first part of the report is a history of open access, and the second part is a list of questions driving toward evidence-based policy. On the one hand, there are questions such as: How does policy impact the day-to-day work of researchers and their students? What are the impacts on the lab? Other questions have to do with the impacts on the publishing industry. One reason I was invested in doing this is concerns about the impact on nonprofit publishers, on university presses, on scientific societies that publish. Some of the questions we raise have to do with understanding the impact on smaller, nonprofit publishers and ultimately knowing how to protect their viability.

Sharp: The current policies for open access being required by OSTP’s Nelson Memo dramatically change who is paying for publication, where the resources come from for publication. It puts a lot of emphasis on the research institute or other sources to cover that. And that raises another issue in open access: Will this limit publications from researchers at institutes that cannot afford the charge? The scientific community is very international, and the impact of science in many countries is incredibly important. So dealing with the [impact of] open access is something that needs to be developed with evidence and policy.

The report notes that if open access was covered by an institution for all publications at $3,000 per article, MIT’s total cost would be $25 million per year. That’s going to be a challenge. And if it’s a challenge for MIT, it’s going to be an enormous challenge in a number of other places.

Q: What are some additional points about open access that we should keep in mind?

Brand: The Nelson Memo also provides that self-archiving is one of the ways to comply with the policy — which means authors can take an earlier version of an article and put it in an institutional repository. Here at MIT we have the DSpace repository that contains many of the papers that faculty publish. The economics of that are very different, and it’s also a little unclear how that’s going to play out. We recently saw one scientific society decide to implement a charge around that, something the community has never seen before.

But as we essentially have a system that already creates incentives for publishers to increase these article processing charges, the publication charges, there are a lot of questions about how publishers who do high-quality peer review will be sustained, and where that money is going to come from.

Sharp: When you come to the data side of the issue, it’s complicated because of the value of the data itself. It’s important that data is collected and has metadata about the research process that’s been made available to others. It’s also time to talk about this in the academic community.

Q: The report makes clear that there are multiple trends here: consolidation in for-profit publishing, growth of open-access publications, fiscal pressure on university libraries, and now the federal mandate. Complicated as the present may be, it does seem that MIT wants to look ahead on this issue.

Brand: I do think in the publishing community, and certainly in the university press community, we’ve been way out in front on this for a while, and with some of the business models we helped implement and test and create, we’re finding other publishers are following suit and they are interested. But right now, with the new federal policy, most publishers have no choice but to begin asking: What does sustainable high-quality publishing mean if, as a publisher, I have to distribute all or some of this content in open digital form?

Sharp: The purpose of this report is to stimulate that conversation: more numbers, every bit of evidence. Communities have been responsible for the quality of science in different disciplines, and sharing the repsonsbility of peer review is something that motivates a lot of engagement. Sustaining that is important for the discipline. Without that sustainability, there will be slower progress in science, in my opinion.

What does the future hold for generative AI?

Wed, 11/29/2023 - 4:00pm

Speaking at the “Generative AI: Shaping the Future” symposium on Nov. 28, the kickoff event of MIT’s Generative AI Week, keynote speaker and iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks warned attendees against uncritically overestimating the capabilities of this emerging technology, which underpins increasingly powerful tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard.

“Hype leads to hubris, and hubris leads to conceit, and conceit leads to failure,” cautioned Brooks, who is also a professor emeritus at MIT, a former director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and founder of Robust.AI.

“No one technology has ever surpassed everything else,” he added.

The symposium, which drew hundreds of attendees from academia and industry to the Institute’s Kresge Auditorium, was laced with messages of hope about the opportunities generative AI offers for making the world a better place, including through art and creativity, interspersed with cautionary tales about what could go wrong if these AI tools are not developed responsibly.

Generative AI is a term to describe machine-learning models that learn to generate new material that looks like the data they were trained on. These models have exhibited some incredible capabilities, such as the ability to produce human-like creative writing, translate languages, generate functional computer code, or craft realistic images from text prompts.

In her opening remarks to launch the symposium, MIT President Sally Kornbluth highlighted several projects faculty and students have undertaken to use generative AI to make a positive impact in the world. For example, the work of the Axim Collaborative, an online education initiative launched by MIT and Harvard, includes exploring the educational aspects of generative AI to help underserved students.

The Institute also recently announced seed grants for 27 interdisciplinary faculty research projects centered on how AI will transform people’s lives across society.

In hosting Generative AI Week, MIT hopes to not only showcase this type of innovation, but also generate “collaborative collisions” among attendees, Kornbluth said.

Collaboration involving academics, policymakers, and industry will be critical if we are to safely integrate a rapidly evolving technology like generative AI in ways that are humane and help humans solve problems, she told the audience.

“I honestly cannot think of a challenge more closely aligned with MIT’s mission. It is a profound responsibility, but I have every confidence that we can face it, if we face it head on and if we face it as a community,” she said.

While generative AI holds the potential to help solve some of the planet’s most pressing problems, the emergence of these powerful machine learning models has blurred the distinction between science fiction and reality, said CSAIL Director Daniela Rus in her opening remarks. It is no longer a question of whether we can make machines that produce new content, she said, but how we can use these tools to enhance businesses and ensure sustainability. 

“Today, we will discuss the possibility of a future where generative AI does not just exist as a technological marvel, but stands as a source of hope and a force for good,” said Rus, who is also the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

But before the discussion dove deeply into the capabilities of generative AI, attendees were first asked to ponder their humanity, as MIT Professor Joshua Bennett read an original poem.

Bennett, a professor in the MIT Literature Section and Distinguished Chair of the Humanities, was asked to write a poem about what it means to be human, and drew inspiration from his daughter, who was born three weeks ago.

The poem told of his experiences as a boy watching Star Trek with his father and touched on the importance of passing traditions down to the next generation.

In his keynote remarks, Brooks set out to unpack some of the deep, scientific questions surrounding generative AI, as well as explore what the technology can tell us about ourselves.

To begin, he sought to dispel some of the mystery swirling around generative AI tools like ChatGPT by explaining the basics of how this large language model works. ChatGPT, for instance, generates text one word at a time by determining what the next word should be in the context of what it has already written. While a human might write a story by thinking about entire phrases, ChatGPT only focuses on the next word, Brooks explained.

ChatGPT 3.5 is built on a machine-learning model that has 175 billion parameters and has been exposed to billions of pages of text on the web during training. (The newest iteration, ChatGPT 4, is even larger.) It learns correlations between words in this massive corpus of text and uses this knowledge to propose what word might come next when given a prompt.

The model has demonstrated some incredible capabilities, such as the ability to write a sonnet about robots in the style of Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 18. During his talk, Brooks showcased the sonnet he asked ChatGPT to write side-by-side with his own sonnet.

But while researchers still don’t fully understand exactly how these models work, Brooks assured the audience that generative AI’s seemingly incredible capabilities are not magic, and it doesn’t mean these models can do anything.

His biggest fears about generative AI don’t revolve around models that could someday surpass human intelligence. Rather, he is most worried about researchers who may throw away decades of excellent work that was nearing a breakthrough, just to jump on shiny new advancements in generative AI; venture capital firms that blindly swarm toward technologies that can yield the highest margins; or the possibility that a whole generation of engineers will forget about other forms of software and AI.

At the end of the day, those who believe generative AI can solve the world’s problems and those who believe it will only generate new problems have at least one thing in common: Both groups tend to overestimate the technology, he said.

“What is the conceit with generative AI? The conceit is that it is somehow going to lead to artificial general intelligence. By itself, it is not,” Brooks said.

Following Brooks’ presentation, a group of MIT faculty spoke about their work using generative AI and participated in a panel discussion about future advances, important but underexplored research topics, and the challenges of AI regulation and policy.

The panel consisted of Jacob Andreas, an associate professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of CSAIL; Antonio Torralba, the Delta Electronics Professor of EECS and a member of CSAIL; Ev Fedorenko, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT; and Armando Solar-Lezama, a Distinguished Professor of Computing and associate director of CSAIL. It was moderated by William T. Freeman, the Thomas and Gerd Perkins Professor of EECS and a member of CSAIL.

The panelists discussed several potential future research directions around generative AI, including the possibility of integrating perceptual systems, drawing on human senses like touch and smell, rather than focusing primarily on language and images. The researchers also spoke about the importance of engaging with policymakers and the public to ensure generative AI tools are produced and deployed responsibly.

“One of the big risks with generative AI today is the risk of digital snake oil. There is a big risk of a lot of products going out that claim to do miraculous things but in the long run could be very harmful,” Solar-Lezama said.

The morning session concluded with an excerpt from the 1925 science fiction novel “Metropolis,” read by senior Joy Ma, a physics and theater arts major, followed by a roundtable discussion on the future of generative AI. The discussion included Joshua Tenenbaum, a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of CSAIL; Dina Katabi, the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor in EECS and a principal investigator in CSAIL and the MIT Jameel Clinic; and Max Tegmark, professor of physics; and was moderated by Daniela Rus.

One focus of the discussion was the possibility of developing generative AI models that can go beyond what we can do as humans, such as tools that can sense someone’s emotions by using electromagnetic signals to understand how a person’s breathing and heart rate are changing.

But one key to integrating AI like this into the real world safely is to ensure that we can trust it, Tegmark said. If we know an AI tool will meet the specifications we insist on, then “we no longer have to be afraid of building really powerful systems that go out and do things for us in the world,” he said.

Pushing the frontiers of art and technology with generative AI

Wed, 11/29/2023 - 4:00pm

Many people are scrambling to predict how AI will impact society. But living in a world of ubiquitous computing has already changed us in ways we might not fully appreciate. Generative AI-aided art — like all art — can be a powerful tool to visualize those changes, broaden our perceptions, and inspire us all.

That was the message of a keynote talk by artist Refik Anadol on the first day of MIT’s Generative AI Week. Anadol walked the audience through his studio’s body of work, which includes public art displays and other digital creations that visualize human and machine intelligence around the world.

“I’m inspired by the idea of how our perceptions of physical and virtual worlds are transforming us,” Anadol explained to a packed Kresge Auditorium.

The presentation was part of a full day of events that also included panels on generative AI’s potential applications and impact on society, with opening presentations from iRobot founder Rodney Brooks and MIT President Sally Kornbluth. The goal of the week of events is to bring together MIT’s community to spotlight insights from MIT’s researchers, stimulate thoughtful analysis, and engage in critical dialogues on the implications and possibilities of generative AI. Other days feature symposia on generative AI and education, creativity, and commerce.

Anadol’s work uses generative AI-based aesthetics on top of data from things like real-time weather data, changing climates and landscapes, historic architecture, and more. Some of his projects even incorporate AI-generated smells. A growing portion of Anadol’s work uses generative AI to visualize data and the physical world in new ways and change people’s perspectives of their surroundings and themselves. Part of that work leverages hallucinations — or creations by machines that are often a source of frustration for computer scientists.

“It’s really inspiring to see how we can reconstruct this information through AI’s hallucinations to compose a new form of art-making and space-making,” Anadol said.

For one of Anadol’s projects, he combined a dataset of approximately 100 million images of coral reefs with generative AI and visual art techniques to show vibrant, morphing coral images based on actual corals found in nature. The project sought to raise awareness of climate change by emphasizing the importance of coral preservation.

Another project Anadol discussed used real-time climate data in Barcelona to generate an array of digital patterns that were projected onto the famous Casa Batlló created by renowned architect Antoni Gaudí. The display was later sold as a nonfungible digital token, or NFT, with a portion of proceeds donated to institutions that work with neurodiverse adults and children.

“I believe light, data, and AI, when connected, can create a new form of architecture, which I call sensing architecture,” Anadol explained.

A third project was sparked by Anadol’s experience watching his uncle struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. The experience led the artist to consider new ways of visualizing neurological data in a way that provokes fundamental questions about the human brain and mental health. Anadol later received permission from patients to use their datasets, collected by electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to create a multisensory, immersive art exhibit and to promote mental health through art.

“Our fundamental goal is to find dreams of reality and concepts of reality,” Anadol said. “It’s about trying to find new ways of speculating, and I think the future of imagination, with neural networks and the integration of materials, [offers] a lot of room for creatives to recombine and explore connections between humanity.”

Through each of the projects, Anadol seeks to enhance our ability to express ourselves and find meaning.

“I believe by using AI, whether generative or otherwise, we have the opportunity to find the language of humanity,” Anadol said.

Speaking in front of a large screen displaying each of the projects, Anadol’s presentation gave the audience vivid examples of how generative AI technology is changing the world of art. Speaking in roundtable discussions after the talk, MIT professors gave more examples of how the technology could transform other fields, from transportation and manufacturing to health care, finance, and music.

One of those presenters was Cathy Wu, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Wu described how generative AI could be used to create synthetic data to help prepare self-driving cars for rare events, better model traffic patterns, and improve zoning regulations to ease housing shortages.

In conducting her research, Wu said she was surprised to find so many promising applications for generative AI, and said she’s cautiously optimistic it will contribute to some of the transportation industry’s hardest problems.

“Longstanding issues are longstanding issues, and generative AI by itself will not move the needle, but it adds one very powerful tool to the toolbox,” Wu said. “I’m very encouraged that for some of these challenges, generative AI might just give us the push we need to make an impact.”

Another speaker was Marzyeh Ghassemi, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Ghassemi showed how some models can perpetuate unequal outcomes by recommending African Americans exhibiting violent behavior be sent to jail while recommending their white counterparts be sent to a hospital.

Still, Ghassemi showed that the way decision makers interact with models ultimately determines if they exacerbate biases.

“Maybe we can get to safe integration [of these tools] without perfect models, as some other industries like aviation have done,” Ghassemi said. “If we want to move forward with AI in health care, we need to recognize that this is an ongoing process and it’s going to require diverse data and [consideration of diverse] needs.”

All of the examples presented in the afternoon described a technology whose ultimate effect on society should be determined by the people it impacts most.

“The impact of bringing generative AI to different fields is captivating,” Anadol said toward the end of his presentation. “By co-creating with musicians, other artists, and the public, there’s a beautiful, positive future to explore.”

Everything, everywhere all at once

Wed, 11/29/2023 - 11:00am

The way Morgane König sees it, questioning how we came to be in the universe is one of the most fundamental parts of being human.

When she was 12 years old, König decided the place to find answers was in physics. A family friend was a physicist, and she attributed her interest in the field to him. But it wasn't until a trip back to her mother's home country of Côte d'Ivoire that König learned her penchant for the subject had started much younger. No one in Côte d'Ivoire was surprised she was pursuing physics — they told her she'd been peering upward at the stars since she was a small child, wondering how they all had come together. ­

That wonder never left her. “Everyone looks at the stars. Everyone looks at the moon. Everybody wonders about the universe,” says König. “I’m trying to understand it with math.”

König’s observations have led her to MIT, where in 2021 she continued studying theoretical cosmology as a postdoc with physicist and cosmologist Alan Guth and physicist and historian of science David Kaiser. Now, she is a member of MIT’s 2023-24 Martin Luther King (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program cohort, alongside 11 others. This year, members of the MLK Scholars are researching and teaching diverse subjects including documentary filmmaking, behavioral economics, and writing children’s books.

Once she was set on physics, König finished her undergraduate studies in 2012, double-majoring in mathematics and physics at Pierre and Marie Curie University in Paris.

Still compelled by questions about the universe, König narrowed in on cosmology, and graduated with her master’s degree from Pierre and Marie Curie in 2014. The way König describes it, cosmology is like archaeology, just up in space. While astronomers study galaxy formations and mutations — all of the stuff in the universe — cosmologists study everything about the universe, all at once.

“It’s a different scale, a different system,” says König. “Of course, you need to understand stars, galaxies, and how they work, but cosmologists study the universe and its origin and contents as a whole.”

From practice to theory

Throughout her studies, König said, she was often the only woman in the room. She wanted to pursue the theories behind cosmology but wasn’t encouraged to try. “You have to understand that being a woman in this field is super, incredibly difficult,” says König. “I told everyone I wanted to do theory, and they didn't believe in me. So many people told me not to do it.”

When König had the opportunity to pursue a PhD in observational cosmology in Marseille and Paris, she almost accepted. But she was more drawn to theory. When she was offered a spot with a little more freedom to study cosmology at the University of California at Davis, she took it. Alongside Professor Nemanja Kaloper, König dove into inflation theory, looking all the way back to the universe's beginning.

It is well-known that the universe is always expanding. Think about inflation as the precursor to that expansion — a quick and dramatic beginning, where the universe grew exponentially fast.

“Inflation is the moment in history that happened right after the beginning of the universe,” says König. “We're not talking about 1 second, not even a millisecond. We are talking 10 to the negative 32nd seconds.” In other words, it took 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,01 seconds for the universe to go from something minuscule to, well, everything. And today, the universe is only getting bigger.

Only a sliver of the universe’s composition is understandable using current technology — less than 5 percent of the universe is composed of matter we can see. Everything else is dark matter and dark energy.

For decades, cosmologists have been trying to excavate the universe’s mysterious past using photons, the tiny, particle form of light. Since light travels at a fixed speed, light emitted further back in the universe’s history, from objects that are now farther away from us due to the expansion of the universe, takes longer to reach Earth. “If you look at the sun — don’t do it! — but if you did, you’d actually be seeing it eight minutes in the past,” says König. As they carve their way through the universe, photons give cosmologists historical information, acting as messengers across time. But photons can only account for the luminous 4.9 percent of the universe. Everything else is dark.

Since dark matter doesn’t emit or reflect photons like luminous matter, researchers can’t see it. König likens dark matter to an invisible person wearing a tuxedo. She knows something is there because the tuxedo is dancing, swinging its arms and legs around. But she can’t see or study the person inside the suit using the technology at hand. Dark matter has stirred up countless theories, and König is interested in the methods behind those theories. She is asking: How do you study something dark when light particles are necessary for gathering historical information?

According to König and her MIT collaborators — Guth, the forerunner of inflation theory, and Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science — the answer might lie in gravitational waves. König is using her time at MIT to see if she can sidestep light particles entirely by using the ripples in spacetime called gravitational waves. These waves are caused by the collision of massive, dense stellar objects such as neutron stars. Gravitational waves also transmit information across the universe, in essence giving us a new sense, like hearing is to seeing. With data from instruments such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO) and NANOGrav, “not only can we look at it, now we can hear the cosmos, too,” she says.

Black in physics

Last year, König worked on two all-Black research teams with physicists Marcell Howard and Tatsuya Daniel. “We did great work together,” König says, but she points out how their small group was one of the largest all-Black theoretical physics research teams — ever. She emphasizes how they cultivated creativity and mentorship while doing highly technical science, producing two published papers (Elastic Scattering of Cosmological Gravitational Wave Backgrounds and An SZ-Like Effect on Cosmological Gravitational Wave Backgrounds).

Out of the 69,238 people who have earned doctorates in physics and astronomy since 1981, only 122 of them were Black women, according to the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics. When König finished her PhD in 2021, she became the first Black student at UC Davis to receive a PhD in physics and the ninth Black woman to ever complete a doctorate in theoretical physics in the United States.

This past October, in a presentation at MIT, König ended with an animated slide depicting a young Black girl sitting in a dark meadow, surrounded by warm lights and rustling grass. The girl was looking up at the stars, her eyes full of wonder. “I had to make this with AI,” says König. “I couldn't find an image online of a young Black girl looking up at the stars. So, I made one.”

In 2017, König went to Côte d'Ivoire, spending time teaching school children about physics and cosmology. “The room was full,” she says. Adults and students alike came to listen to her. Everyone wanted to learn, and everyone echoed the same questions about the universe as König did when she was younger. But, she says, “the difference between them and me is that I was given a chance to study this. I had access to people explaining how incredible and exciting physics is.”

König sees a stark disconnect between physics in Africa and physics everywhere else. She wants universities around the world to make connections with African universities, building efforts to encourage students of all backgrounds to pursue the field of physics.

König explains that ushering in more Black and African physicists means starting at the beginning and encouraging more undergraduates and young students to enter the field. “There is an enormous amount of talent and brilliance there,” König says. She sees an opportunity to connect with students across Africa, building the bridges needed to help everyone pursue the questions that keep them looking up at the stars.

While König loves her research, she knows theoretical cosmology has far to come to as a discipline. “There is so much room to grow in the field. It’s not all figured out.”

Five high schoolers awarded MIT OMEGA scholarships for intergenerational efforts

Wed, 11/29/2023 - 11:00am

The MIT AgeLab awards annual scholarships to high school students who lead or develop intergenerational programs — initiatives designed to bring together younger and older people — in their communities. On Sept. 29, five $5,000 OMEGA scholarships were given to high school students across the United States, with support from AARP Massachusetts. An additional $1,000 was awarded to each winning intergenerational program to help sustain and grow the students’ efforts.

OMEGA, which stands for Opportunities for Multigenerational Exchange, Growth, and Action, develops programming and offers scholarships to facilitate intergenerational connections between younger people and older adults in their communities.

The scholarships were awarded at a virtual ceremony hosted by the MIT AgeLab, with representatives from the AgeLab and AARP in attendance, along with the scholarship winners, their parents, program participants, and community partners.

“OMEGA is a reminder to all of us that there are new generations committed to intergenerational solutions, not only for the challenges of aging, but also for unlocking the opportunities of living longer,” says Michael E. Festa, state director of AARP Massachusetts.

Intergenerational programs help to strengthen social ties within communities and facilitate knowledge transfer between younger and older adults. Two of the winning programs for 2023, a book club focused on discussing feminist literature and a project uncovering the history of a historically Black neighborhood, focus on bringing together and centering the voices of historically marginalized communities.

The five scholarship winners and their winning programs are:

Hannah Paseltiner, currently a first-year student at the State University of New York at Binghamton, and a 2023 graduate of Clarkstown High School in New City, New York. Paseltiner founded the Elderly Allies Club, which works to build relationships between younger adults and communities of older people, including nursing homes and assisted living communities, in New City. The program partners with the Rockland County Village Community, a social and mutual support community for older adults. Members of the club make personal deliveries on behalf of nursing home residents, craft décor for assisted living communities, and organize “speed-dating” and storytelling events between younger and older adults.

Sarah Adams, currently a senior at East High School in Rochester, New York. Adams is a Youth History Ambassador for Clarissa Uprooted, a collaboration between the Center for Teen Empowerment and the Clarissa Street Reunion Committee. The project aims to preserve and transmit knowledge about the history of the Clarissa Street “village” in Rochester, New York, a historically Black neighborhood that was gutted by urban renewal policies in the 1950s and ’60s. Relying on the historical memory of older adults in the community, the initiative produced a documentary titled Clarissa Uprooted, and is developing a school curriculum to teach the history of the neighborhood to students in Monroe County.

India Ratha, currently a first-year student at Carleton College in Minnesota, and a 2023 graduate of Tech High School in St. Cloud, Minnesota. Ratha joined and later became an organizer of an initiative called Sounds of Sunday, which brings high school musicians into nursing homes for musical performances and intergenerational conversations. Sounds of Sunday has partnered with the Central Minnesota Council on Aging, as well as the Coalition to End Social Isolation and Loneliness for Central Minnesota.

Lorenzo Martinelli, currently a first-year student at the University of Chicago, and a 2023 graduate of Saint Xavier High School in Louisville, Kentucky. Martinelli is a co-founder of a program called Tandem, based in Louisville. Founded during the Covid-19 pandemic, when social isolation was a major challenge for people of all ages, Tandem facilitates ongoing friendships between older adults and high school students through 30-minute phone conversations. Over two-and-a-half years, the program has facilitated over 900 calls and 450 hours of deep conversation between pairs of older and younger adults.

Vienna Rivard, currently a first-year student at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and a 2023 graduate of Hopkinton High School in Massachusetts. Rivard founded an intergenerational feminist book club in her community in Hopkinton, connecting students with members of the Hopkinton’s Women’s Club. The group gathers students and older adults to engage in discussion about their readings, attend field trips to local historical museums, and share their past and present experiences as women. The group originally met over Zoom, before moving to community settings including the outdoors and local libraries.

The AgeLab’s OMEGA program works in a variety of ways with students to develop their intergenerational programs. The MIT AgeLab was created in 1999 within the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics to invent new ideas and creatively translate technologies into practical solutions that improve people's health and enable them to “do things” throughout their lifespan. Equal to the need for ideas and new technologies for older adults is the belief that innovations in how products are designed, services are delivered, or policies are implemented are of critical importance to our quality of life tomorrow.

Elly Nedivi receives 2023 Kreig Cortical Kudos Discoverer Award

Wed, 11/29/2023 - 11:00am

The Cajal Club has named Elly Nedivi, William R. and Linda R. Young Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, the 2023 recipient of the Krieg Cortical Kudos Discoverer Award.

The club’s award, first bestowed in 1987, honors outstanding established investigators studying the cerebral cortex, the brain’s outer layers where circuits of neurons enable functions ranging from sensory processing to cognition. These circuits can constantly remodel their connections to adapt the brain to experience, a phenomenon called plasticity, that underlies learning and memory.

With a focus on the visual cortex, Nedivi’s lab investigates the molecular and cellular mechanisms that enable plasticity in the developing and adult brain, including identification of the genes whose expression is involved, characterization of the cellular functions of the proteins those genes encode, and studies of synaptic and neuronal remodeling as it happens in live, behaving animals. To enable those observations, Nedivi and longtime collaborator Peter So, professor of mechanical engineering, have developed advanced microscopy systems that can image multiple components of neural connections in the cortex of live rodents.

In a message to Nedivi notifying her of the honor, Cajal Club president Leah Kurbitzer, professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis, said: “This award recognizes your outstanding and continuous contributions to our understanding of fundamental aspects of cortical connectivity in the mammalian brain, and the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying adult visual experience plasticity. Your work examining both the effects of visual experience manipulations and the functions of activity-induced candidate plasticity genes, by using advanced state-of-the-art in vivo multiphoton imaging technologies and sophisticated molecular genetic manipulations to expose fundamental mechanisms of brain plasticity, has made you a leader in the field, and an exceptional Krieg Cortical Discoverer award winner.”

Nedivi said she was honored to receive the award. The club conferred it Nov. 12 at its annual social during the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington.

“I am honored to be recognized with this award and to be following in the footsteps of many previous recipients whose work I admire and respect,” says Nedivi, a faculty member of MIT’s departments of Biology and of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.

Previous honorees with Picower Institute ties include Newton Professor of Neuroscience Mriganka Sur and Picower Institute Scientific Advisory Board member Carla Shatz, a professor at Stanford University. Nedivi’s former trainee Jerry Chen, now an associate professor at Boston University, and Sur’s former trainee Anna Majewska, now a professor at the University of Rochester, have each won Krieg Cortical Explorer awards, which are given to researchers at an earlier career stage.

A new way to see the activity inside a living cell

Tue, 11/28/2023 - 11:00am

Living cells are bombarded with many kinds of incoming molecular signal that influence their behavior. Being able to measure those signals and how cells respond to them through downstream molecular signaling networks could help scientists learn much more about how cells work, including what happens as they age or become diseased.

Right now, this kind of comprehensive study is not possible because current techniques for imaging cells are limited to just a handful of different molecule types within a cell at one time. However, MIT researchers have developed an alternative method that allows them to observe up to seven different molecules at a time, and potentially even more than that.

“There are many examples in biology where an event triggers a long downstream cascade of events, which then causes a specific cellular function,” says Edward Boyden, the Y. Eva Tan Professor in Neurotechnology. “How does that occur? It’s arguably one of the fundamental problems of biology, and so we wondered, could you simply watch it happen?”

The new approach makes use of green or red fluorescent molecules that flicker on and off at different rates. By imaging a cell over several seconds, minutes, or hours, and then extracting each of the fluorescent signals using a computational algorithm, the amount of each target protein can be tracked as it changes over time.

Boyden, who is also a professor of biological engineering and of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, and a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, as well as the co-director of the K. Lisa Yang Center for Bionics, is the senior author of the study, which appears today in Cell. MIT postdoc Yong Qian is the lead author of the paper.

Fluorescent signals

Labeling molecules inside cells with fluorescent proteins has allowed researchers to learn a great deal about the functions of many cellular molecules. This type of study is often done with green fluorescent protein (GFP), which was first deployed for imaging in the 1990s. Since then, several fluorescent proteins that glow in other colors have been developed for experimental use.

However, a typical light microscope can only distinguish two or three of these colors, allowing researchers only a tiny glimpse of the overall activity that is happening inside a cell. If they could track a greater number of labeled molecules, researchers could measure a brain cell’s response to different neurotransmitters during learning, for example, or investigate the signals that prompt a cancer cell to metastasize.

“Ideally, you would be able to watch the signals in a cell as they fluctuate in real time, and then you could understand how they relate to each other. That would tell you how the cell computes,” Boyden says. “The problem is that you can’t watch very many things at the same time.”

In 2020, Boyden’s lab developed a way to simultaneously image up to five different molecules within a cell, by targeting glowing reporters to distinct locations inside the cell. This approach, known as “spatial multiplexing,” allows researchers to distinguish signals for different molecules even though they may all be fluorescing the same color.

In the new study, the researchers took a different approach: Instead of distinguishing signals based on their physical location, they created fluorescent signals that vary over time. The technique relies on “switchable fluorophores” — fluorescent proteins that turn on and off at a specific rate. For this study, Boyden and his group members identified four green switchable fluorophores, and then engineered two more, all of which turn on and off at different rates. They also identified two red fluorescent proteins that switch at different rates, and engineered one additional red fluorophore.

Each of these switchable fluorophores can be used to label a different type of molecule within a living cell, such an enzyme, signaling protein, or part of the cell cytoskeleton. After imaging the cell for several minutes, hours, or even days, the researchers use a computational algorithm to pick out the specific signal from each fluorophore, analogous to how the human ear can pick out different frequencies of sound.

“In a symphony orchestra, you have high-pitched instruments, like the flute, and low-pitched instruments, like a tuba. And in the middle are instruments like the trumpet. They all have different sounds, and our ear sorts them out,” Boyden says.

The mathematical technique that the researchers used to analyze the fluorophore signals is known as linear unmixing. This method can extract different fluorophore signals, similar to how the human ear uses a mathematical model known as a Fourier transform to extract different pitches from a piece of music.

Once this analysis is complete, the researchers can see when and where each of the fluorescently labeled molecules were found in the cell during the entire imaging period. The imaging itself can be done with a simple light microscope, with no specialized equipment required.

Biological phenomena

In this study, the researchers demonstrated their approach by labeling six different molecules involved in the cell division cycle, in mammalian cells. This allowed them to identify patterns in how the levels of enzymes called cyclin-dependent kinases change as a cell progresses through the cell cycle.

The researchers also showed that they could label other types of kinases, which are involved in nearly every aspect of cell signaling, as well as cell structures and organelles such as the cytoskeleton and mitochondria. In addition to their experiments using mammalian cells grown in a lab dish, the researchers showed that this technique could work in the brains of zebrafish larvae.

This method could be useful for observing how cells respond to any kind of input, such as nutrients, immune system factors, hormones, or neurotransmitters, according to the researchers. It could also be used to study how cells respond to changes in gene expression or genetic mutations. All of these factors play important roles in biological phenomena such as growth, aging, cancer, neurodegeneration, and memory formation.

“You could consider all of these phenomena to represent a general class of biological problem, where some short-term event — like eating a nutrient, learning something, or getting an infection — generates a long-term change,” Boyden says.

In addition to pursuing those types of studies, Boyden’s lab is also working on expanding the repertoire of switchable fluorophores so that they can study even more signals within a cell. They also hope to adapt the system so that it could be used in mouse models.

The research was funded by an Alana Fellowship, K. Lisa Yang, John Doerr, Jed McCaleb, James Fickel, Ashar Aziz, the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics at MIT, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Institutes of Health.

MIT’s Science Policy Initiative holds 13th annual Executive Visit Days

Tue, 11/28/2023 - 11:00am

From Oct. 23-24, a delegation consisting of 21 MIT students, one MIT postdoc, and four students from the University of the District of Columbia met in Washington for the MIT Science Policy Initiative’s Executive Visit Days (ExVD). Now in its 13th cycle, this trip offers a platform where university students and young researchers can connect with officials and scientists from different federal agencies, discuss issues related to science and technology policy, and learn about the role the federal government plays in addressing these issues.

The delegation visited seven different agencies, as well as the MIT Washington Office, where the group held virtual calls with personnel from the National Institutes of Health and the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health. Visits to the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy Office of Science, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Environmental Protection Agency, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration then followed over the course of two days. The series of meetings, facilitated by the MIT Science Policy Initiative (SPI), offered a window into the current activities of each agency and how individuals can engage with science policy through the lens of each particular agency.

The Science Policy Initiative is an organization of students and postdocs whose core goal is not only to grow interest at MIT and in the community at large in science policy, but also to facilitate the exchange of ideas between the policymakers of today and the scientists of tomorrow. One of the various trips organized by SPI every year, ExVD allows students to gain insight into the work of federal agencies, while also offering the chance to meet with representatives from these agencies, many of whom are MIT alumni, and discuss their paths toward careers in science policy. Additionally, ExVD serves as an opportunity for participants to network with students, postdocs, and professionals outside of their fields but united by common interests in science policy. 

“I believe it is critical for students with vital technical expertise to gain a sense of the realities of policymaking,” says Phillip Christoffersen, a PhD student researching AI in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and SPI ExVD 2023 chair. “Due to the many complexities of modern life, we are simultaneously reaching tipping points in many fields — AI, climate change, biotechnology, among many others. For this reason, science and science policy must increasingly move in lockstep for the good of society, and it falls on us as scientists-in-training to make that happen.”

One example of the delegation’s visits was to the White House OSTP, located directly next to the West Wing at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. This special agency of fewer than 200 staff, most of whom are either in rotation or on loan from other federal agencies, directly reports to the president on all matters related to science and policy. The atmosphere at the White House complex and the exchanges with Kei Koizumi, principal deputy director for policy at OSTP, deeply inspired the students and showcased the vast impact science can have on federal policy.

The overall sentiment among the ExVD participants has been that of reborn motivation, having become inspired to participate in policy matters, either as a portion of their graduate research or in their future career. The ExVD 2023 cohort is thankful to the MIT Washington office, whose generous support was crucial to making this trip a reality. Furthermore, the delegation thanks the MIT Science Policy Initiative’s leadership team for organizing this trip, enabling an extremely meaningful experience.

Serious play at the MIT Game Lab

Tue, 11/28/2023 - 12:00am

Students fill the glass-walled room and spill out into the common area. They gather around tables and desks cluttered with board games and game pieces. Along the far wall, large screens show students exploring the latest virtual reality experience alongside classmates reliving their favorite retro videogames.

Welcome to an open house of the MIT Game Lab, where play and experimentation are joined by serious inquiry about the gaming industry and its role in society.

In addition to its rollicking open houses, which take place at least once a semester, the Game Lab hosts public events, organizes research projects, and teaches courses through MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W).

The Game Lab’s work is designed to help students think critically about the games they’ve often been playing for years without considering the values they might project, and to prepare them to engage in thoughtful design practices themselves.

“Students come to the Game Lab because it sounds like fun, which is great, but they realize through our research that there’s also something really serious at work in games,” Game Lab Director and Professor T.L. Taylor says. “I think students often have this moment where they realize this thing they’ve been enjoying actually has a lot of stakes in it; these are things that really matter.”

The Game Lab analyzes the gaming industry and its impact, explores new technologies and formats, and creates games that tackle important issues. Many new games are tied to larger research projects.

“There’s a desire from our students to express themselves through games, whether that’s through making educational games or games with specific messages or lessons,” says Game Lab research scientist and lecturer Mikael Jakobsson. “Games are a big part of most people’s lives, so there’s a thirst among our students for not only learning how to make games, but also studying games as social and cultural artefacts.”

Through that research, students come to appreciate the impact of games on the world.

Game are hugely important in society and culture,” Taylor says. “We’re really trying to always think critically and productively about what we do with this powerful form of media and entertainment, and to think about games as a place in which imagination and stories about the world can be worked over and thought about.”

Learning to play

The MIT Game Lab was founded in cooperation with the Singapore government in 2006. Early on, it would host workshops on game design with students from Singapore in the summer, then conduct teaching and research with MIT students during the school year.

The Singapore collaboration ended in 2012, but the lab continued its work, often partnering with outside companies, private donors, and other groups around campus to explore the influence of games on different aspects of society.

In one project with the Samuel Tak Lee MIT Real Estate Entrepreneurship Lab, students designed a game to explore the basics of real estate development, including managing capital and debt and deciding what sorts of buildings to build and where.

The lab also does work with communities to help them think about civic engagement. It has held workshops around the world with local students and other community members to challenge them to think about issues in their societies through the lens of game design. One such collaboration led to the game Promesa, which Jakobsson created with Puerto Rican graphic artist Rosa Colón Guerra and the design collective Popcicleta to promote what the creators call a “countercolonialist” viewpoint in the context of a game about the island’s debt crisis.

Aside from making games, researchers also consider the influence of historically popular games.

“We’re not making games as much as studying them,” says junior Michelle Liang, who works at the Game Lab as an undergraduate researcher. “It’s so easy to detach entertainment as its own separate world, when in fact media is influenced by a lot of different factors and biases. A lot of the Game Lab’s work is geared toward enhancing that understanding.”

The Game Lab’s organizers say that work distinguishes them from other gaming-focused groups in academia, which often equip students with specific skills to get jobs in the videogame industry.

“We’re not a pipeline program to go work in the gaming industry,” Taylor explains. “Some students do go into the industry, but because we’re doing critical design practice, we’re approaching games with a much broader, critically inflective perspective by thinking about things like equity and representation.”

Liang hadn’t considered the role of games in social and political issues until she discovered the Game Lab. She immediately saw the Lab as a way to combine a number of things she was passionate about.

“It’s funny to talk about my job to people,” Liang says. “Even though we are the Institute of Technology, there’s so much more MIT has to offer.”

Changing the rules

Jakobsson says the perception of games as nothing more than entertainment has led to a lack of introspection.

“The gaming industry has been a bit of a boys club where a lot of social responsibility has been shirked because they say they’re just trying to have fun and don’t have to think about how it affects society,” Jakobsson says. “Now we’re dealing with a lot of the consequences from that mindset.”

For students, involvement in the Game Lab can mean conducting research, enrolling in one of its classes, or just stopping by an open house. Regardless of how they’re exposed to the lab’s work, Taylor hopes they leave with a deeper appreciation of the power of games in our society.

“Games are a hugely important media and entertainment space, but they’re also one of our most culturally relevant and politically active spaces,” Taylor says. “Media spaces are in part where we learn about the world, for good or ill, where we construct imaginaries of the world, where we think about other possibilities. Part of the mission of CMS/W in general is taking media spaces seriously, and games are an increasingly important part of that.”

Pages