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: 4 hours 30 min ago

A passion for innovation and education

Thu, 02/15/2024 - 2:40pm

Imagine you were planning a trek across Death Valley. Would you be better off setting out on foot with just a bottle of water in your hand, or in a vehicle loaded with supplies and a full tank of gas?

That’s one of the metaphors Leon Sandler uses to describe the work of the Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation — giving MIT researchers and aspiring entrepreneurs the tools they need to successfully spin out their technologies and have an impact on the greater world.

As executive director of the center, Sandler has been at the heart of helping teams pack those figurative vehicles. Now, after 18 years of guiding hundreds of MIT researchers, he is retiring from the role.

“I have had great fun, learned a lot, and met wonderful and interesting people,” Sandler says. “Interacting with MIT faculty and students and watching them learn and grow has been one of the most satisfying experiences of my life.”

The Deshpande Center was founded in 2002 to support faculty as they move their research out of the lab. Its motto, “From innovation to impact,” describes the center itself as well as its mission. Some 550 researchers have benefited from the center’s program, which provides funding and mentoring to projects that have the potential to spin out. More than 50 of those projects have gone on to become startup companies.

“Those companies have made a difference in a wide array of areas, from health care to energy to environment to communications,” Sandler says.

For example: There’s Taris Bio, which developed a drug delivery platform to treat bladder cancer and sold it to Johnson & Johnson. Early results from clinical trials appear promising, and last December, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration designated it as a Breakthrough Device.

There’s Eta Devices, which early in 2023 sold its handset chip business to electronics manufacturer Murata. The technology is reducing power consumption in hundreds of millions of mobile phones.

And there’s the rapidly expanding Gradient, which 10 years after its founding is cleaning wastewater in more than 33 countries. Last spring it was valued at over $1 billion.

Faculty director Angela Koehler, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble Professor in Cancer Research, is herself a former grantee, having spun out a novel cancer therapy into Kronos Bio with help from Sandler and the center. He has also spoken to her undergraduate courses over the years, and his dedication to educating others stands out, she says.

“He is passionate about innovation and entrepreneurship and genuinely cares about both finding the right marketplace for technologies while educating the next generation,” Koehler says. “My colleagues really respect Leon as an educator.

“I just think that Leon is one of the most delightful, funny, and genuine characters that I have come across … He also knows how to throw a good party!”

Setting a mission

Back in 2006, Sandler didn’t expect to stay with the Deshpande Center for long. A startup CEO with a background in chemical engineering, he had been helping entrepreneurs through MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service. When he learned Deshpande was seeking its second executive director, he thought it would be interesting work for a couple of years.

But before long he was hooked, and a couple of years turned into 18.

“I like interacting with people and building relationships, learning about a wide range of topics, and intellectual stimulation and challenge. This job has provided all of them,” Sandler says. “The people and relationships — very bright, very interesting people — I learn from all of them.”

The education works both ways. Sandler came to the Deshpande Center with a strong resume including senior management positions at Texas Instruments, Eastman Kodak, and Digital Equipment before turning to startups and business consulting. He willingly shares his experiences and lessons learned.

Still, he is an engineer first. Sandler often advises anyone starting a new venture — project teams, visitors, colleagues — to start from the essentials. “The question is: What is the problem you’re trying to solve?” he will often say.

That was in essence the first question he asked upon joining the center, determining the mission and core customer base. The answer: advancing MIT research to the point where it could spin out of MIT, attract outside funding, and have an impact on the world.

Unlike other innovation and entrepreneurship programs on campus that guide students, the Deshpande Center focuses on serving faculty members, along with their graduate and postdoc research teams. It accomplishes this by providing grants, but more importantly, mentoring to help projects hoping to form startups.

We also discovered that we have a secondary mission of educating faculty and their graduate students on how to commercialize MIT research. They learn by doing,” says Sandler.

A critical part of the Deshpande Center’s success is its corps of volunteer mentors. These mentors, known as catalysts, are as diverse in their technical and industry expertise as the projects that come through the center.

Roughly 25 percent of the projects supported by the center have turned into startups so far, with more on the horizon. Others have made an impact through licensing to existing companies. While some technologies don’t spin out, the researchers still make positive strides. 

“The teams all learn a tremendous amount about the process and about markets and customers.  Some have come back to the Deshpande Center for subsequent projects that have spun out, and others have spun out new research without coming back to us,” Sandler says.

Reflecting on the Deshpande Center’s success over the years, Sandler points to the focus on that core mission and dedication to faculty. Although the staff has historically been small, just three or four people, with the aid of the outstanding mentor corps the center has had a huge impact.

Above all, the relationships forged along the way have been the most satisfying aspect of the job, Sandler says. That includes faculty, mentors, students, and people in different industries or from around the globe seeking to learn more about the center. And after more than 800 grantee project update meetings, he can truly be said to have drunk from the proverbial MIT fire hose.

“It’s been very intellectually stimulating, and I learned so much about so many areas from all the experts, continuously learning for 18 years,” says Sandler.

Even as he prepares for retirement, Sandler is continuing to educate. Over the next few months he will be sticking around the center in an advisory role to help the next executive director into the role.

Sandler is packing a less-figurative vehicle now, loading his own car up with golf clubs and hiking gear. He’s looking forward to spending more time outdoors.

He also offers general advice for faculty, staff and students: Keep learning.

“Read very broadly, well outside of your domain of expertise and comfort zone, and continue to learn,” Sandler advises. “Think critically and apply common sense, yet be open to think ‘out of the box’ and try new approaches.

“Time is your scarcest asset. Spend it on what is meaningful to you. Care about people and behave decently — it will make you feel a lot better.”

With just a little electricity, MIT researchers boost common catalytic reactions

Thu, 02/15/2024 - 2:00pm

A simple technique that uses small amounts of energy could boost the efficiency of some key chemical processing reactions, by up to a factor of 100,000, MIT researchers report. These reactions are at the heart of petrochemical processing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, and many other industrial chemical processes.

The surprising findings are reported today in the journal Science, in a paper by MIT graduate student Karl Westendorff, professors Yogesh Surendranath and Yuriy Roman-Leshkov, and two others.

“The results are really striking,” says Surendranath, a professor of chemistry and chemical engineering. Rate increases of that magnitude have been seen before but in a different class of catalytic reactions known as redox half-reactions, which involve the gain or loss of an electron. The dramatically increased rates reported in the new study “have never been observed for reactions that don’t involve oxidation or reduction,” he says.

The non-redox chemical reactions studied by the MIT team are catalyzed by acids. “If you’re a first-year chemistry student, probably the first type of catalyst you learn about is an acid catalyst,” Surendranath says. There are many hundreds of such acid-catalyzed reactions, “and they’re super important in everything from processing petrochemical feedstocks to making commodity chemicals to doing transformations in pharmaceutical products. The list goes on and on.”

“These reactions are key to making many products we use daily,” adds Roman-Leshkov, a professor of chemical engineering and chemistry.

But the people who study redox half-reactions, also known as electrochemical reactions, are part of an entirely different research community than those studying non-redox chemical reactions, known as thermochemical reactions. As a result, even though the technique used in the new study, which involves applying a small external voltage, was well-known in the electrochemical research community, it had not been systematically applied to acid-catalyzed thermochemical reactions.

People working on thermochemical catalysis, Surendranath says, “usually don’t consider” the role of the electrochemical potential at the catalyst surface, “and they often don’t have good ways of measuring it. And what this study tells us is that relatively small changes, on the order of a few hundred millivolts, can have huge impacts — orders of magnitude changes in the rates of catalyzed reactions at those surfaces.”

“This overlooked parameter of surface potential is something we should pay a lot of attention to because it can have a really, really outsized effect,” he says. “It changes the paradigm of how we think about catalysis.”

Chemists traditionally think about surface catalysis based on the chemical binding energy of molecules to active sites on the surface, which influences the amount of energy needed for the reaction, he says. But the new findings show that the electrostatic environment is “equally important in defining the rate of the reaction.”

The team has already filed a provisional patent application on parts of the process and is working on ways to apply the findings to specific chemical processes. Westendorff says their findings suggest that “we should design and develop different types of reactors to take advantage of this sort of strategy. And we’re working right now on scaling up these systems.”

While their experiments so far were done with a two-dimensional planar electrode, most industrial reactions are run in three-dimensional vessels filled with powders. Catalysts are distributed through those powders, providing a lot more surface area for the reactions to take place. “We’re looking at how catalysis is currently done in industry and how we can design systems that take advantage of the already existing infrastructure,” Westendorff says.

Surendranath adds that these new findings “raise tantalizing possibilities: Is this a more general phenomenon? Does electrochemical potential play a key role in other reaction classes as well? In our mind, this reshapes how we think about designing catalysts and promoting their reactivity.”

Roman-Leshkov adds that “traditionally people who work in thermochemical catalysis would not associate these reactions with electrochemical processes at all. However, introducing this perspective to the community will redefine how we can integrate electrochemical characteristics into thermochemical catalysis. It will have a big impact on the community in general.”

While there has typically been little interaction between electrochemical and thermochemical catalysis researchers, Surendranath says, “this study shows the community that there’s really a blurring of the line between the two, and that there is a huge opportunity in cross-fertilization between these two communities.”

Westerndorff adds that to make it work, “you have to design a system that’s pretty unconventional to either community to isolate this effect.” And that helps explain why such a dramatic effect had never been seen before. He notes that even their paper’s editor asked them why this effect hadn’t been reported before. The answer has to do with “how disparate those two ideologies were before this,” he says. “It’s not just that people don’t really talk to each other. There are deep methodological differences between how the two communities conduct experiments. And this work is really, we think, a great step toward bridging the two.”

In practice, the findings could lead to far more efficient production of a wide variety of chemical materials, the team says. “You get orders of magnitude changes in rate with very little energy input,” Surendranath says. “That’s what’s amazing about it.”

The findings, he says, “build a more holistic picture of how catalytic reactions at interfaces work, irrespective of whether you’re going to bin them into the category of electrochemical reactions or thermochemical reactions.” He adds that “it’s rare that you find something that could really revise our foundational understanding of surface catalytic reactions in general. We’re very excited.”

“This research is of the highest quality,” says Costas Vayenas, a professor of engineering at the university of Patras, in Greece, who was not associated with the study. The work “is very promising for practical applications, particularly since it extends previous related work in redox catalytic systems,” he says.

The team included MIT postdoc Max Hulsey PhD ’22 and graduate student Thejas Wesley PhD ’23, and was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research and the U.S. Department of Energy Basic Energy Sciences.

MIT researchers remotely map crops, field by field

Thu, 02/15/2024 - 12:00am

Crop maps help scientists and policymakers track global food supplies and estimate how they might shift with climate change and growing populations. But getting accurate maps of the types of crops that are grown from farm to farm often requires on-the-ground surveys that only a handful of countries have the resources to maintain.

Now, MIT engineers have developed a method to quickly and accurately label and map crop types without requiring in-person assessments of every single farm. The team’s method uses a combination of Google Street View images, machine learning, and satellite data to automatically determine the crops grown throughout a region, from one fraction of an acre to the next. 

The researchers used the technique to automatically generate the first nationwide crop map of Thailand — a smallholder country where small, independent farms make up the predominant form of agriculture. The team created a border-to-border map of Thailand’s four major crops — rice, cassava, sugarcane, and maize — and determined which of the four types was grown, at every 10 meters, and without gaps, across the entire country. The resulting map achieved an accuracy of 93 percent, which the researchers say is comparable to on-the-ground mapping efforts in high-income, big-farm countries.

The team is applying their mapping technique to other countries such as India, where small farms sustain most of the population but the type of crops grown from farm to farm has historically been poorly recorded.

“It’s a longstanding gap in knowledge about what is grown around the world,” says Sherrie Wang, the d’Arbeloff Career Development Assistant Professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). “The final goal is to understand agricultural outcomes like yield, and how to farm more sustainably. One of the key preliminary steps is to map what is even being grown — the more granularly you can map, the more questions you can answer.”

Wang, along with MIT graduate student Jordi Laguarta Soler and Thomas Friedel of the agtech company PEAT GmbH, will present a paper detailing their mapping method later this month at the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Ground truth

Smallholder farms are often run by a single family or farmer, who subsist on the crops and livestock that they raise. It’s estimated that smallholder farms support two-thirds of the world’s rural population and produce 80 percent of the world’s food. Keeping tabs on what is grown and where is essential to tracking and forecasting food supplies around the world. But the majority of these small farms are in low to middle-income countries, where few resources are devoted to keeping track of individual farms’ crop types and yields.

Crop mapping efforts are mainly carried out in high-income regions such as the United States and Europe, where government agricultural agencies oversee crop surveys and send assessors to farms to label crops from field to field. These “ground truth” labels are then fed into machine-learning models that make connections between the ground labels of actual crops and satellite signals of the same fields. They then label and map wider swaths of farmland that assessors don’t cover but that satellites automatically do.

“What’s lacking in low- and middle-income countries is this ground label that we can associate with satellite signals,” Laguarta Soler says. “Getting these ground truths to train a model in the first place has been limited in most of the world.”

The team realized that, while many developing countries do not have the resources to maintain crop surveys, they could potentially use another source of ground data: roadside imagery, captured by services such as Google Street View and Mapillary, which send cars throughout a region to take continuous 360-degree images with dashcams and rooftop cameras.

In recent years, such services have been able to access low- and middle-income countries. While the goal of these services is not specifically to capture images of crops, the MIT team saw that they could search the roadside images to identify crops.

Cropped image

In their new study, the researchers worked with Google Street View (GSV) images taken throughout Thailand — a country that the service has recently imaged fairly thoroughly, and which consists predominantly of smallholder farms.

Starting with over 200,000 GSV images randomly sampled across Thailand, the team filtered out images that depicted buildings, trees, and general vegetation. About 81,000 images were crop-related. They set aside 2,000 of these, which they sent to an agronomist, who determined and labeled each crop type by eye. They then trained a convolutional neural network to automatically generate crop labels for the other 79,000 images, using various training methods, including iNaturalist — a web-based crowdsourced  biodiversity database, and GPT-4V, a “multimodal large language model” that enables a user to input an image and ask the model to identify what the image is depicting. For each of the 81,000 images, the model generated a label of one of four crops that the image was likely depicting — rice, maize, sugarcane, or cassava.

The researchers then paired each labeled image with the corresponding satellite data taken of the same location throughout a single growing season. These satellite data include measurements across multiple wavelengths, such as a location’s greenness and its reflectivity (which can be a sign of water). 

“Each type of crop has a certain signature across these different bands, which changes throughout a growing season,” Laguarta Soler notes.

The team trained a second model to make associations between a location’s satellite data and its corresponding crop label. They then used this model to process satellite data taken of the rest of the country, where crop labels were not generated or available. From the associations that the model learned, it then assigned crop labels across Thailand, generating a country-wide map of crop types, at a resolution of 10 square meters.

This first-of-its-kind crop map included locations corresponding to the 2,000 GSV images that the researchers originally set aside, that were labeled by arborists. These human-labeled images were used to validate the map’s labels, and when the team looked to see whether the map’s labels matched the expert, “gold standard” labels, it did so 93 percent of the time.

“In the U.S., we’re also looking at over 90 percent accuracy, whereas with previous work in India, we’ve only seen 75 percent because ground labels are limited,” Wang says. “Now we can create these labels in a cheap and automated way.”

The researchers are moving to map crops across India, where roadside images via Google Street View and other services have recently become available.

“There are over 150 million smallholder farmers in India,” Wang says. “India is covered in agriculture, almost wall-to-wall farms, but very small farms, and historically it’s been very difficult to create maps of India because there are very sparse ground labels.”

The team is working to generate crop maps in India, which could be used to inform policies having to do with assessing and bolstering yields, as global temperatures and populations rise.

“What would be interesting would be to create these maps over time,” Wang says. “Then you could start to see trends, and we can try to relate those things to anything like changes in climate and policies.”

3 Questions: Why study theater in a German language class?

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 3:55pm

Emily Goodling is a lecturer in German in Global Languages at MIT. She teaches class 21G.411 (Conflict, Contest, Controversy: A Literary Investigation of German Politics), a new course offered last fall. Goodling developed the course with the help of an MIT Global Languages Consortium for Language Teaching and Learning (CLTL) Innovation in Language Pedagogy grant in summer 2023. With the support of an Artists in the Classroom grant from the Council for the Arts at MIT, she hosted virtual presentations to her class by Stas Zhyrkov, a displaced Ukrainian theater maker working in Germany, and Christoph Buchegger, a young artistic production manager at Berlin’s Schaubühne theater. Here, she discusses the impetus for designing this class as well as its outcomes.

Q: Why study theater in a German language class?

A: Theater is incredibly effective in the second-language classroom, and I’ve found that it is also of particular interest to our students. At MIT, we use the “communicative approach” — that is, we focus on using language in real-life situations as opposed to rote memorization of grammar or vocabulary. And what is theater? It’s communication, dialogue. In live theater, or even while watching a recording of live theater, not only are you hearing a conversation, but you're also observing things like gesture, intonation, and the melody of a spoken language in real-time. This is an incredibly helpful model for students who are learning a language.

Also, this theater is deeply intercultural in nature. Particularly over the last decade or so, some main-stage, state-funded theaters in Germany have broken down borders to bring new voices to the stage, and are expanding the idea of what German theater — and Germany itself — is and can be. This richness, I think, resonates with the diverse and international student body in my classes every day. These works also feel very urgent: They rest on the foundation of a long tradition in Germany of political theater that has been used as a nation-building or nation-critiquing exercise. This theater poses big questions: What does it mean to be German? Who or what is German? How can we understand German history? Bringing those questions to light through real people on a live stage immediately ups the level of intensity.

Q: You were in Germany last summer doing research. What did you discover?

A: I went to Berlin to look for materials on Germany's political and artistic response to the war in Ukraine. I saw street art, posters, talks, films, and museum installations. But one theater piece really stood out to me, and I knew I wanted to bring it to my students at MIT: “Sich waffnend gegen eine See von Plagen,” by Ukrainian director Stas Zhyrkov, at the Schaubühne theater. The name of the play in English is from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy: “to take arms against a sea of troubles.” Thanks to the generosity of the folks at the Schaubühne, I was able to get a filmed version of the production as well as the text, and I hired a young Ukrainian woman in Cambridge to translate the Ukrainian sections of the play into English — of course, my students read the German sections in German! I told them, “You're holding in your hands a piece of art that no other students anywhere are looking at right now. It's just you guys.” It felt like such a privilege to be able to look at the production together.

I was able to arrange for Stas Zhyrkov to give a virtual presentation to my class. He introduced himself and the project, and then there was just a really free-floating dialogue between him and the students. He was so articulate, candid, and generous, although the conversation was also very heavy at times: This is a person from a country that is actively at war, and that war has had enormous personal, political, artistic, and professional consequences in his life. He talked about losing members of his theater ensemble back in Kiev, and about the decision that artists had to make when the war started: “Do I take up arms and go to the front lines? Or do I continue making art, potentially outside of Ukraine?” He spoke about his own decision to leave and make theater about the situation from outside the country. The fraught nature of that decision, and the pain that accompanied it — I think this is what we all took away from that conversation. I asked him about how he envisions making theater in Ukraine when the war is over. He said that he sees theater as a means of coming to terms with what happened, an art form that can propose a kind of psychological way forward for the country. But he realizes that back home he may not be seen as a hero, because he chose to leave.

I also organized a virtual conversation with Christoph Buchegger, who is the artistic production manager for the Schaubühne and also has ties to Broadway and U.S. theater in general. With him, we explored the differences between the German and American theater scenes: On the German stage, for instance, audiences aren’t going to see comedy or entertainment — as Christoph said, sometimes their lighter pieces don’t sell well at all! Instead, audiences want to see complex, jarring, and difficult pieces, even in traditional, state-funded institutions that have been around for hundreds of years. Because these theaters receive so much external funding, in contrast to most U.S. institutions, there isn't so much pressure to sell tickets, or even to be pleasing to an audience. In fact it's often the opposite: Directors desire to challenge — and sometimes even be aggressive towards — the people who are sitting in the seats. It's an entirely different orientation. In my seminar, students explored many different genres of political art, from visual forms of propaganda to poetry and film, but theater always seemed to provoke the strongest reactions; Christoph’s contextualization helped explain why.

Q: How did you help your students tackle the material?

A: This is an upper-level German course. The earlier levels are more focused on using cultural content to give students an explicit foundation in German grammar and vocabulary, and introduce them to some key cultural discussions and topics. My class is focused on using cultural content to dig deep into politico-artistic moments from the past century of German history — while of course still honing students’ communicative and grammatical skills! To that end, I provided students with scaffolding activities to help them approach such complex works. This gave them both the necessary vocabulary and grammar as well as a sense of their historical, political, and cultural background. In class, however, my primary goal was making space for informed, rigorous, open-ended discussion. I was just blown away by the students and the level of the dialogues we were able to have; it was an honor to get to talk about these materials with such open-minded and curious individuals. They brought their own backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives to these materials in ways that really opened my eyes.

Anantha Chandrakasan named MIT’s inaugural chief innovation and strategy officer

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 3:00pm

Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has been named as MIT’s first chief innovation and strategy officer, effective immediately. He will continue to serve as dean of engineering, a role he has held since 2017.

As chief innovation and strategy officer, Chandrakasan will work closely with MIT President Sally Kornbluth to advance the ambitious agenda that she has laid out in the first year of her presidency. He will collaborate with key stakeholders across MIT, as well as external partners, to launch initiatives and new collaborations in support of these strategic priorities.

“I was immediately impressed by Anantha’s can-do attitude and his clear interest in working with us to develop and advance our priorities for the Institute," President Kornbluth says. "With his signature energy, creativity, and enthusiasm, he has a gift for organizing complex initiatives and ideas and making sure they move forward with alacrity. Combined with his strategic insight, deep knowledge across many subject areas, and terrific record in raising funds for important ideas, Anantha is uniquely suited to serve MIT in this new role, and I’m delighted he has agreed to take it on.”

In his new role, Chandrakasan will help develop and implement plans to advance research, education, and innovation in areas that President Kornbluth has identified as her top priorities — such as climate change and sustainability, artificial intelligence, and the life sciences. He will also play a leading role in efforts to secure the resources needed for MIT researchers to pursue bold work in these key areas.

“I am thrilled and honored to help advance President Kornbluth’s vision for MIT in this new role,” Chandrakasan says. “Working closely with faculty, staff, and students across the Institute, I am excited to help shape and launch initiatives that will accelerate research and innovation on some of the world’s most urgent needs. My hope is to enable our researchers with the support, resources, and infrastructure they need to maximize the impact of their work.”

Working closely with MIT’s existing programs in entrepreneurship, Chandrakasan will develop strategies to accelerate innovation across the Institute. These efforts will aim to grow and support these programs, while identifying new opportunities to support student and faculty entrepreneurs and maximize their impact.

In addition to examining ways to advance research, entrepreneurship, and collaborations, Chandrakasan will work with Provost Cynthia Barnhart and Chancellor Melissa Nobles to advance new educational initiatives. This will include developing new programs and tracks to optimize students’ preparation for a variety of career paths.

“In many ways, this role is a natural extension of the significant work Anantha has already been doing to help shape strategic priorities on an Institute level,” Barnhart says. “All of MIT stands to benefit from his extensive experience launching and building new programs and initiatives.”

As dean of engineering since 2017, Chandrakasan has implemented a variety of interdisciplinary programs, creating new models for how academia and industry can work together to accelerate the pace of research. This has resulted in the launch of initiatives including the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT-Takeda Program, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative, the MIT Mobility Initiative, the MIT Quest for Intelligence, the MIT AI Hardware Program, the MIT-Northpond Program, the MIT Faculty Founder Initiative, and the MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellows Program.

Chandrakasan has also played a role as dean in establishing a variety of initiatives beyond the School of Engineering. He was instrumental in the 2018 founding of the Schwarzman College of Computing, the most significant structural change to MIT in nearly 70 years. He also has served in leadership roles on MIT Fast Forward, an Institute-wide plan for addressing climate change; as the inaugural chair of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health; and as the co-chair of the academic workstream for MIT’s Task Force 2021. Before becoming dean, Chandrakasan led an Institute-wide working group to guide the development of policies and procedures related to MIT’s 2016 launch of The Engine, and also served on The Engine’s inaugural board.

Chandrakasan has focused as dean on fostering a sense of community within MIT’s largest school. He has launched several programs to give students and staff a more active role in shaping the initiatives and operations of the school, including the Staff Advice & Implementation Committee, the undergraduate Student Advisory Group, the Graduate Student Advisory Group (GradSage), the Gender Equity Committee, and the MIT School of Engineering Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Engineering Excellence. Working closely with GradSage, Chandrakasan has also played a role in establishing the Daniel J. Riccio Graduate Engineering Leadership Program.

Prior to becoming dean in 2017, Chandrakasan served for six years as head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), MIT’s largest academic department. As department head, he led the development of initiatives that continue to have an impact across MIT. He created Rising Stars in EECS, an academic career workshop that rotates amongst various universities and has become a model for similar efforts in other disciplines. Under his leadership, EECS also launched the SuperUROP program as well as Start6, which has since become StartMIT, a program supporting students interested in entrepreneurship.

A new test could predict how heart attack patients will respond to mechanical pumps

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 2:00pm

Every year, around 50,000 people in the United States experience cardiogenic shock — a life-threatening condition, usually caused by a severe heart attack, in which the heart can’t pump enough blood for the body’s needs.

Many of these patients end up receiving help from a mechanical pump that can temporarily help the heart pump blood until it recovers enough to function on its own. However, in nearly half of these patients, the extra help leads to an imbalance between the left and right ventricles, which can pose danger to the patient.

In a new study, MIT researchers have discovered why that imbalance occurs, and identified factors that make it more likely. They also developed a test that doctors could use to determine whether this dysfunction will occur in a particular patient, which could give doctors more confidence when deciding whether to use these pumps, known as ventricular assist devices (VADs).

“As we improve the mechanistic understanding of how these technologies interact with the native physiology, we can improve device utility. And if we have more algorithms and metrics-based guidance, that will ease use for clinicians. This will both improve outcomes across these patients and increase use of these devices more broadly,” says Kimberly Lamberti, an MIT graduate student and the lead author of the study.

Elazer Edelman, the Edward J. Poitras Professor in Medical Engineering and Science and the director of MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), is the senior author of the paper, which appears today in Science Translational Medicine. Steven Keller, an assistant professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, is also an author of the paper.

Edelman notes that “the beauty of this study is that it uses pathophysiologic insight and advanced computational analyses to provide clinicians with straightforward guidelines as to how to deal with the exploding use of these valuable mechanical devices. We use these devices increasingly in our sickest patients and now have greater strategies as to how to optimize their utility.”

Imbalance in the heart

To treat patients who are experiencing cardiogenic shock, a percutaneous VAD can be inserted through the arteries until it is positioned across the aortic valve, where it helps to pump blood out of the left ventricle. The left ventricle is responsible for pumping blood to most of the organs of the body, while the right ventricle pumps blood to the lungs.

In most cases, the device may be removed after a week or so, once the heart is able to pump on its own. While effective for many patients, in some people the devices can disrupt the coordination and balance between the right and left ventricles, which contract and relax synchronously. Studies have found that this disruption occurs in up to 43 percent of patients who receive VADs.

“The left and right ventricles are highly coupled, so as the device disrupts flow through the system, that can unmask or induce right heart failure in many patients,” Lamberti says. “Across the field it’s well-known that this is a concern, but the mechanism that’s creating that is unclear, and there are limited metrics to predict which patients will experience it.”

In this study, the researchers wanted to figure out why this failure occurs, and come up with a way to help doctors predict whether it will happen for a given patient. If doctors knew that the right heart would also need support, they could implant another VAD that helps the right ventricle.

“What we were trying to do with this study was predict any issues earlier in the patient’s course, so that action can be taken before that extreme state of failure has been reached,” Lamberti says.

To do that, the researchers studied the devices in an animal model of heart failure. A VAD was implanted in the left ventricle of each animal, and the researchers analyzed several different metrics of heart function as the pumping speed of the device was increased and decreased.

The researchers found that the most important factor in how the right ventricle responded to VAD implantation was how well the pulmonary vascular system — the network of vessels that carries blood between the heart and lungs — adapted to changes in blood volume and flow induced by the VAD.

This system was best able to handle that extra flow if it could adjust its resistance (the slowing of steady blood flow through the vessels) and compliance (the slowing of large pulses of blood volume into the vessels).

“We found that in the healthy state, compliance and resistance could change pretty rapidly to accommodate the changes in volume due to the device. But with progressive disease, that ability to adapt becomes diminished,” Lamberti says.

A dynamic test

The researchers also showed that measuring this pulmonary vascular compliance and its adaptability could offer a way to predict how a patient will respond to left ventricle assistance. Using a dataset of eight patients who had received a left VAD, the researchers found that those measurements correlated with the right heart state, therefore predicting how well the patients adapted to the device, validating the findings from the animal study.

To do this test, doctors would need to implant the device as usual and then ramp up the speed while measuring the compliance of the pulmonary vascular system. The researchers determined a metric that can assess this compliance by using just the VAD itself and a pulmonary artery catheter that is commonly implanted in these patients.

“We created this way to dynamically test the system while simultaneously maintaining support of the heart,” Lamberti says. “Once the device is initiated, this quick test could be run, which would inform clinicians of whether the patient might need right heart support.”

The researchers now hope to expand these findings with additional animal studies and continue collaboration with manufacturers of these devices in the future, in hopes of running clinical studies to evaluate whether this test would provide information that would be valuable for doctors.

“Right now, there are few metrics being used to predict device tolerance. Device selection and decision-making is most often based on experiential evidence from the physicians at each institution. Having this understanding will hopefully allow physicians to determine which patients will be intolerant to device support and provide guidance for how to best treat each patient based on right heart state,” Lamberti says.

The research was funded by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute; the National Institute of General Medical Sciences; and Abiomed.

Using AI to discover stiff and tough microstructures

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 11:40am

Every time you smoothly drive from point A to point B, you're not just enjoying the convenience of your car, but also the sophisticated engineering that makes it safe and reliable. Beyond its comfort and protective features lies a lesser-known yet crucial aspect: the expertly optimized mechanical performance of microstructured materials. These materials, integral yet often unacknowledged, are what fortify your vehicle, ensuring durability and strength on every journey. 

Luckily, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) scientists have thought about this for you. A team of researchers moved beyond traditional trial-and-error methods to create materials with extraordinary performance through computational design. Their new system integrates physical experiments, physics-based simulations, and neural networks to navigate the discrepancies often found between theoretical models and practical results. One of the most striking outcomes: the discovery of microstructured composites — used in everything from cars to airplanes — that are much tougher and durable, with an optimal balance of stiffness and toughness. 

“Composite design and fabrication is fundamental to engineering. The implications of our work will hopefully extend far beyond the realm of solid mechanics. Our methodology provides a blueprint for a computational design that can be adapted to diverse fields such as polymer chemistry, fluid dynamics, meteorology, and even robotics,” says Beichen Li, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science, CSAIL affiliate, and lead researcher on the project.

An open-access paper on the work was published in Science Advances earlier this month.

In the vibrant world of materials science, atoms and molecules are like tiny architects, constantly collaborating to build the future of everything. Still, each element must find its perfect partner, and in this case, the focus was on finding a balance between two critical properties of materials: stiffness and toughness. Their method involved a large design space of two types of base materials — one hard and brittle, the other soft and ductile — to explore various spatial arrangements to discover optimal microstructures.

A key innovation in their approach was the use of neural networks as surrogate models for the simulations, reducing the time and resources needed for material design. “This evolutionary algorithm, accelerated by neural networks, guides our exploration, allowing us to find the best-performing samples efficiently,” says Li. 

Magical microstructures 

The research team started their process by crafting 3D printed photopolymers, roughly the size of a smartphone but slimmer, and adding a small notch and a triangular cut to each. After a specialized ultraviolet light treatment, the samples were evaluated using a standard testing machine — the Instron 5984 —  for tensile testing to gauge strength and flexibility.

Simultaneously, the study melded physical trials with sophisticated simulations. Using a high-performance computing framework, the team could predict and refine the material characteristics before even creating them. The biggest feat, they said, was in the nuanced technique of binding different materials at a microscopic scale — a method involving an intricate pattern of minuscule droplets that fused rigid and pliant substances, striking the right balance between strength and flexibility. The simulations closely matched physical testing results, validating the overall effectiveness. 

Rounding the system out was their “Neural-Network Accelerated Multi-Objective Optimization” (NMO) algorithm, for navigating the complex design landscape of microstructures, unveiling configurations that exhibited near-optimal mechanical attributes. The workflow operates like a self-correcting mechanism, continually refining predictions to align closer with reality. 

However, the journey hasn't been without challenges. Li highlights the difficulties in maintaining consistency in 3D printing and integrating neural network predictions, simulations, and real-world experiments into an efficient pipeline. 

As for the next steps, the team is focused on making the process more usable and scalable. Li foresees a future where labs are fully automated, minimizing human supervision and maximizing efficiency. "Our goal is to see everything, from fabrication to testing and computation, automated in an integrated lab setup," Li concludes.

Joining Li on the paper are senior author and MIT Professor Wojciech Matusik, as well as Pohang University of Science and Technology Associate Professor Tae-Hyun Oh and MIT CSAIL affiliates Bolei Deng, a former postdoc and now assistant professor at Georgia Tech; Wan Shou, a former postdoc and now assistant professor at University of Arkansas; Yuanming Hu MS ’18 PhD ’21; Yiyue Luo MS ’20; and Liang Shi, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science. The group’s research was supported, in part, by Baden Aniline and Soda Factory (BASF).

3 Questions: Paloma Duong on the complexities of Cuban culture

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 12:00am

As a state run by a Communist Party, Cuba appears set apart from many of its neighbors in the Americas. One thing lost as a result, to a large extent, is a nuanced understanding of the perspectives of Cuban citizens. MIT’s Paloma Duong, an associate professor in the program in Comparative Media Studies/Writing, has helped fill this void with a new book that closely examines contemporary media — especially online communities and music — to look at what Cubans think about the contemporary world and what outsiders think about Cuba. The book, “Portable Postsocialisms: New Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History,” has just been published by the University of Texas Press. MIT News spoke with Duong about her work.

Q: What is the book about?

A: The book looks at a specific moment in Cuban history, the first two decades of the 21st century, as a case study of the relationship between culture, politics, and emergent media technologies. This is a greater moment of access to the internet and digital media technologies. The 1990s are known as the “Special Period” in Cuba, a decade of economic collapse and disorientation. Yet while the turn of the 21st century is this moment of profound change, images of a Cuba frozen in time endure.

One of the book’s focal points is to delve into the cultural and political discourses of change and continuity produced in this new media context. What is this telling us about Cubans’ experience of postsocialism — that is, the moment when the old referents of socialism still exist in everyday experience but socialism as a radical project of social transformation no longer appears as a viable collective goal? And, in turn, what can this tell us about the more general global experience concerning the demise of and desire for socialist utopias in this time period?

That question also requires a look at how global narratives and images about Cuba circulate. The symbolic weight of Cuba as the last bastion of socialism, as inspiration or cautionary tale existing outside of historical time, is one of them. I examine Cuba as a traveling media object invested with competing political desires. Even during the Prohibition Era in the U.S. you can already hear and see Cuba as a provider of transgressive desires to the American imagination in songs and advertising from that time.

Top-down narratives are routinely imposed on Cubans, either by their own government or by foreign observers exoticizing Cubans. I wanted to understand how Cubans were narrating their own experience of change. But I also wanted to recognize the international impact of the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and account for how its global constituents experienced its denouement. 

Q: The book looks at Cuban culture with reference to music, fashion, online communities, and more. Why did you decide to explore all these cultural artifacts?

A: Because I was looking at both Cubans’ accounts of postsocialism, and at Cuba as an object of imagination traveling around the world, it seemed to me impossible to just choose one medium. The way we construct our images of the world, and ourselves, is intrinsically multimedia. We don’t just get all our information from literature, or film, or news media alone. Instead, I focus on specific narratives and images of change — of womanhood, of economic reform, of Internet access, and so on — looking at how they are reproduced or contested across media practices and cultural objects.

I use the term “portable” in different ways to describe these operations. A song, for instance, can be portable in many ways. Digital and especially streaming media open new circuits of music exchange and consumption. But the aesthetic experience of a song is itself a portable one; it lingers and remains with you. And whether analyzing songs, advertising, memes, or more, I study objects and practices that allow us to see the double status of Cuba, as a symbol and as an experience.

In this sense the book is about Cuba, but it is also about ourselves. We tend to look at Cuba through a Cold War framework that casts the country as an exception with respect to former socialist countries, to Latin America, to the capitalist world. But what happens if we look at Cuba as [also] participating in that world, not as an exception but as a particular experience of broader transformations? I’m not saying Cuba is the same as everywhere else. But the premise of the book is that Cuba is not an exceptional place outside of history. In fact, I argue that the narrative of its exceptionality is the key to understanding our shared historical moment and the political dimensions of our cultural and media practices.

Q: How would you say this approach sits with reference to other studies of modern Cuba?

A: There are other, more traditional scholarly ways of looking at Cuba. Some perspectives emphasize the liberal individual confronting an authoritarian state, foregrounding repression and censorship. Others focus instead on the Cuban nation-state as resisting global markets and transnational capital.

There are merits to these perspectives. But when only those perspectives predominate we miss the ways in which both the state and markets might dispossess everyday citizens. In looking at the cultural responses of people, you see citizens picking up on the fact that the global markets are leaving them behind, that the state is leaving them behind. They are not getting either what the state promises, which is social welfare, or what the markets promise, which is upward mobility. The book shows how abandoning Cold War frameworks of analysis, and how taking into account the ways in which cultural and media practices shape our political experiences, can offer a new understanding of Cuba but also of our own global present.

Anushree Chaudhuri: Involving local communities in renewable energy planning

Wed, 02/14/2024 - 12:00am

Anushree Chaudhuri has a history of making bold decisions. In fifth grade, she biked across her home state of California with little prior experience. In her first year at MIT, she advocated for student recommendations in the preparation of the Institute’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade. And recently, she led a field research project throughout California to document the perspectives of rural and Indigenous populations affected by climate change and clean energy projects.

“It doesn’t matter who you are or how young you are, you can get involved with something and inspire others to do so,” the senior says.

Initially a materials science and engineering major, Chaudhuri was quickly drawn to environmental policy issues and later decided to double-major in urban studies and planning and in economics. Chaudhuri will receive her bachelor’s degrees this month, followed by a master’s degree in city planning in the spring.

The importance of community engagement in policymaking has become one of Chaudhuri’s core interests. A 2024 Marshall Scholar, she is headed to the U.K. next year to pursue a PhD related to environment and development. She hopes to build on her work in California and continue to bring attention to impacts that energy transitions can have on local communities, which tend to be rural and low-income. Addressing resistance to these projects can be challenging, but “ignoring it leaves these communities in the dust and widens the urban-rural divide,” she says.

Silliness and sustainability 

Chaudhuri classifies her many activities into two groups: those that help her unwind, like her living community, Conner Two, and those that require intensive deliberation, like her sustainability-related organizing.

Conner Two, in the Burton-Conner residence hall, is where Chaudhuri feels most at home on campus. She describes the group’s activities as “silly” and emphasizes their love of jokes, even in the floor’s nickname, “the British Floor,” which is intentionally absurd, as the residents are rarely British.

Chaudhuri’s first involvement with sustainability issues on campus was during the preparation of MIT’s Fast Forward Climate Action Plan in the 2020-2021 academic year. As a co-lead of one of several student working groups, she helped organize key discussions between the administration, climate experts, and student government to push for six main goals in the plan, including an ethical investing framework. Being involved with a significant student movement so early on in her undergraduate career was a learning opportunity for Chaudhuri and impressed upon her that young people can play critical roles in making far-reaching structural changes.

The experience also made her realize how many organizations on campus shared similar goals even if their perspectives varied, and she saw the potential for more synergy among them.

Chaudhuri went on to co-lead the Student Sustainability Coalition to help build community across the sustainability-related organizations on campus and create a centralized system that would make it easier for outsiders and group members to access information and work together. Through the coalition, students have collaborated on efforts including campus events, and off-campus matters such as the Cambridge Green New Deal hearings.

Another benefit to such a network: It creates a support system that recognizes even small-scale victories. “Community is so important to avoid burnout when you’re working on something that can be very frustrating and an uphill battle like negotiating with leadership or seeking policy changes,” Chaudhuri says.

Fieldwork

For the past year, Chaudhuri has been doing independent research in California with the support of several advisory organizations to host conversations with groups affected by renewable energy projects, which, as she has documented, are often concentrated in rural, low-income, and Indigenous communities. The introduction of renewable energy facilities, such as wind and solar farms, can perpetuate existing inequities if they ignore serious community concerns, Chaudhuri says.

As state or federal policymakers and private developers carry out the permitting process for these projects, “they can repeat histories of extraction, sometimes infringing on the rights of a local or Tribal government to decide what happens with their land,” she says.

In her site visits, she is documenting community opposition to controversial solar and wind proposals and collecting oral histories. Doing fieldwork for the first time as an outsider was difficult for Chaudhuri, as she dealt with distrust, unpredictability, and needing to be completely flexible for her sources. “A lot of it was just being willing to drop everything and go and be a little bit adventurous and take some risks,” she says.

Role models and reading

Chaudhuri is quick to credit many of the role models and other formative influences in her life.

After working on the Climate Action Plan, Chaudhuri attended a public narrative workshop at Harvard University led by Marshall Ganz, a grassroots community organizer who worked with Cesar Chavez and on the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. “That was a big inspiration and kind of shaped how I viewed leadership in, for example, campus advocacy, but also in other projects and internships.”

Reading has also influenced Chaudhuri’s perspective on community organizing, “After the Climate Action Plan campaign, I realized that a lot of what made the campaign successful or not could track well with organizing and social change theories, and histories of social movements. So, that was a good experience for me, being able to critically reflect on it and tie it into these other things I was learning about.”

Since beginning her studies at MIT, Chaudhuri has become especially interested in social theory and political philosophy, starting with ancient forms of Western and Eastern ethic, and up to 20th and 21st century philosophers who inspire her. Chaudhuri cites Amartya Sen and Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò as particularly influential. “I think [they’ve] provided a really compelling framework to guide a lot of my own values,” she says.

Another role model is Brenda Mallory, the current chair of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, who Chaudhuri was grateful to meet at the United Nations COP27 Climate Conference. As an intern at the U.S. Department of Energy, Chaudhuri worked within a team on implementing the federal administration’s Justice40 initiative, which commits 40 percent of federal climate investments to disadvantaged communities. This initiative was largely directed by Mallory, and Chaudhuri admires how Mallory was able to make an impact at different levels of government through her leadership. Chaudhuri hopes to follow in Mallory’s footsteps someday, as a public official committed to just policies and programs.

 “Good leaders are those who empower good leadership in others,” Chaudhuri says.

Robert Langer receives Dr. Paul Janssen Award

Tue, 02/13/2024 - 5:10pm

MIT Institute Professor Robert S. Langer was recently honored with the 2023 Dr. Paul Janssen Award for his groundbreaking work in designing novel drug delivery systems that can deliver medications continuously, precisely, and at controlled rates over extended periods. Langer’s pioneering research into biomedical compounds for drug delivery and tissue engineering has impacted a wide range of medical technologies, including anticancer therapy, vaccine development (including the Covid-19 vaccine), gene therapy, and more.

Given annually by Johnson & Johnson, the Dr. Paul Janssen Award recognizes “the most passionate and creative scientist or group of scientists in basic or clinical research, whose achievements have made or have strong potential to make a measurable impact on human health.” Langer accepted the award during a virtual symposium on Feb. 8.

Robert Langer is one of MIT's nine current Institute Professors, the highest honor that can be awarded to a faculty member. His patents have licensed or sub-licensed to over 400 companies, and he is a co-founder of a number of companies, including Moderna. His over 220 awards include both the United States National Medal of Science and the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation (he is one of three living individuals to have received both of these honors), the Charles Stark Draper Prize (often called the Nobel Prize of engineering), the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, Albany Medical Center Prize, Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Kyoto Prize, Wolf Prize for Chemistry, Millennium Technology Prize, Priestley Medal, Gairdner Prize, Hoover Medal, Dreyfus Prize in Chemical Sciences, BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine, and the Balzan Prize. He has been elected to the National Academy of Inventors, and is one of only 25 people who have been elected to all three national academies — Engineering, Science, and Medicine.

The Langer Laboratory works at the interface of biotechnology and materials science to address a wide range of problems in human health. A major focus is the study and development of materials such as polymers and lipids to deliver drugs, particularly genetically engineered proteins and DNA and RNA, continuously at controlled rates for prolonged periods of time. In addition, his lab is developing drugs that specifically inhibit the process of neovascularization that is critical to several disease processes, without interfering with existing blood vessels. The lab has also been involved in creating approaches to engineer new tissues, such as the synthetization of new systems to be used in mammalian cell transplants to create liver, cartilage, pancreas, and nerves. The lab is also developing new approaches to improve health in the developing world including new methods of vaccination and providing better nutrition.

For all humankind

Tue, 02/13/2024 - 4:55pm

Can a government promote morality? How much trust should people place in their government?

Such fundamental questions of political philosophy and ethics intrigue Leela Fredlund, a senior majoring in political science and physics. She has parsed these topics in ancient Greek texts, interrogated them in formal classroom recitations, and debated them informally with student friends. But for Fredlund, there is perhaps no better venue for exploring these classic problems than space.

“I realized that I could raise very interesting questions at the intersection of astronomy and political science,” says Fredlund. Through undergraduate projects at MIT and at institutions such as NASA, Fredlund has been focused on the ways governments are shaping humanity’s expanding ventures off planet.

“Do we believe governments have our best interests at heart?” she asks. “Space feels like a very obvious frontier to test that question.”

Ethics rules

When Fredlund arrived at MIT from her surfside California hometown, she had already decided to double major in science (chemistry, at that time) and philosophy. “In high school, I was very interested in thinking through my own political beliefs,” she recalls. “I was really worried that at a STEM school like MIT I wouldn’t have a forum for the kinds of discussions I found important.”

In Concourse, a first-year learning community, she found a base. “Concourse requires a course called Becoming Human: Ancient Greek Perspectives on the Good Life (CC.110), where we study ancient Greek political philosophy through introductory ethics texts by Aristotle and Plato,” she says. “We had incredible debates about applying the concepts we were learning to our daily lives and to modern political issues; my moral code shifted as a result of the class and I really felt like I was just benefiting as a person from it.”

Becoming Human proved pivotal to Fredlund’s academic evolution. She signed up as a teaching assistant for the class, a gig that she maintained through her senior year, and found a close mentor in its instructor, Senior Lecturer Linda R. Rabieh. By her first-year spring, Fredlund knew she would major in political science. “I really liked the idea of this smaller department that would be like Concourse,” she says. “I believed that political science would offer a community that cared a lot about ethical questions and would be a space where I could have my beliefs challenged, think about issues that I hadn't thought a lot about before, potentially change my mind on some of the big questions, and generally expand my horizons.”

Firmly rooted in political science, Fredlund sought a path to marry it somehow with her other major, now physics. The answer emerged for her in sophomore year, in class 17.801 (Political Science Scope and Methods). “I remembered when I was much younger I thought I would grow up and become an astronaut, and became very interested in astronomy and space travel,” she says. “It was easy to get back into those subjects, and so I began to dig into questions related to space policy, space tourism, and exploitation of resources on other planets.”

Fredlund’s year-long project for 17.801, a 600-participant survey experiment, probed public perspectives on space development, especially attitudes toward government versus private initiatives. Her study yielded a number of novel findings: Respondents overwhelmingly supported a major expansion of ambitious, government-backed space missions, such as Mars exploration, to “push the frontiers of human capability,” says Fredlund. “It felt like a space race sentiment.” Her survey also revealed a preference for NASA collaborations with friendly nations like the U.K., rather than private companies.

“We hold governments to a different moral standard than individuals, so a private-sector space company directing exploration or resource extraction space missions might put its commercial ambitions and goals first,” she says.

Making Mars accessible

Fredlund found the ethical problems entailed in space development endlessly fascinating. To solidify her technical understanding of the subject, she took as many astronomy and astrophysics classes as her schedule would allow. She also landed a series of internships relevant to her interests.

Over summer 2022, she worked at NASA researching the kind and location of facilities needed to receive Mars samples after the mission’s planned return to Earth in the 2030s. Fredlund found herself confronting the kinds of big questions she most likes.

“I was working with the European Space Agency to see who legally owns the samples we get back from Mars, which is a super interesting question because there is no precedent,” she says. “The Outer Space Treaty, which was made in the ’60s, had not planned for an international collaboration that would bring treasures back from another planet.”

Last summer and during senior year, Fredlund interned for the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs, researching issues of accessibility in the space sector, seeking out promising new technologies that might permit physically and mentally disabled persons to participate in the space sector. “I met scientists who are trying to make the International Space Station accessible to people with auditory and visual deficits,” she says. This goal resonates for Fredlund, who has been highly engaged in the MIT Panhellenic Council to make campus Greek life more inclusive to diverse communities.

International space law

Fredlund’s post-MIT plans are rapidly falling into place. “I spent a lot of time talking to NASA’s legal and international relations teams, who are like diplomats to the European Space Agency,” she says. “They are savvy about working with other countries in space development.” Through this exposure, “I became very interested in the international law side of space questions,” says Fredlund. “I would like to help ensure we continue to operate in good faith, and that people prioritize the science in international collaborations.”

In the next two years, Fredlund aims to cement her technical background by earning a master’s degree in astronomy or astrophysics. Then she heads to Harvard Law School. After that, she imagines herself at the United Nations or NASA, interpreting international law, trying to ensure that the space sector remains a place for fair and truly cooperative ventures.

“The space sector is developing so quickly, I’m not entirely sure what the big questions will be six years from now,” says Fredlund. “There is a lot of uncertainty and I think uncertainty is exciting.”

Local journalism is a critical “gate” to engage Americans on climate change

Tue, 02/13/2024 - 4:35pm

Last year, Pew Research Center data revealed that only 37 percent of Americans said addressing climate change should be a top priority for the president and Congress. Furthermore, climate change was ranked 17th out of 21 national issues included in a Pew survey

But in reality, it’s not that Americans don’t care about climate change, says celebrated climate scientist and communicator MIT Professor Katharine Hayhoe. It’s that they don’t know that they already do. 

To get Americans to care about climate change, she adds, it’s imperative to guide them to their gate. At first, it might not be clear where that gate is. But it exists. 

That message was threaded through the Connecting with Americans on Climate Change webinar last fall, which featured a discussion with Hayhoe and the five journalists who made up the 2023 cohort of the MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship. Hayhoe referred to a “gate” as a conversational entry point about climate impacts and solutions. The catch? It doesn’t have to be climate-specific. Instead, it can focus on the things that people already hold close to their heart.

“If you show people … whether it’s a military veteran or a parent or a fiscal conservative or somebody who is in a rural farming area or somebody who loves kayaking or birds or who just loves their kids … how they’re the perfect person to care [about climate change], then it actually enhances their identity to advocate for and adopt climate solutions,” said Hayhoe. “It makes them a better parent, a more frugal fiscal conservative, somebody who’s more invested in the security of their country. It actually enhances who they already are instead of trying to turn them into someone else.”

The MIT Environmental Solutions Journalism Fellowship provides financial and technical support to journalists dedicated to connecting local stories to broader climate contexts, especially in parts of the country where climate change is disputed or underreported. 

Climate journalism is typically limited to larger national news outlets that have the resources to employ dedicated climate reporters. And since many local papers are already struggling — with the country on track to lose a third of its papers by the end of next year, leaving over 50 percent of counties in the United States with just one or no local news outlets — local climate beats can be neglected. This makes the work executed by the ESI’s fellows all the more imperative. Because for many Americans, the relevance of these stories to their own community is their gate to climate action. 

“This is the only climate journalism fellowship that focuses exclusively on local storytelling,” says Laur Hesse Fisher, program director at MIT ESI and founder of the fellowship. “It’s a model for engaging some of the hardest audiences to reach: people who don’t think they care much about climate change. These talented journalists tell powerful, impactful stories that resonate directly with these audiences.”

From March to June, the second cohort of ESI Journalism Fellows pursued local, high-impact climate reporting in Montana, Arizona, Maine, West Virginia, and Kentucky. 

Collectively, their 26 stories had over 70,000 direct visits on their host outlets’ websites as of August 2023, gaining hundreds of responses from local voters, lawmakers, and citizen groups. Even though they targeted local audiences, they also had national appeal, as they were republished by 46 outlets — including Vox, Grist, WNYC, WBUR, the NPR homepage, and three separate stories on NPR’s “Here & Now” program, which is broadcast by 45 additional partner radio stations across the country — with a collective reach in the hundreds of thousands. 

Micah Drew published an eight-part series in The Flathead Beacon titled, “Montana’s Climate Change Lawsuit.” It followed a landmark case of 16 young people in Montana suing the state for violating their right to a “clean and healthful environment.” Of the plaintiffs, Drew said, “They were able to articulate very clearly what they’ve seen, what they’ve lived through in a pretty short amount of life. Some of them talked about wildfires — which we have a lot of here in Montana — and [how] wildfire smoke has canceled soccer games at the high school level. It cancels cross-country practice; it cancels sporting events. I mean, that’s a whole section of your livelihood when you’re that young that’s now being affected.”

Joan Meiners is a climate news reporter for the Arizona Republic. Her five-part series was situated at the intersection of Phoenix’s extreme heat and housing crises. “I found that we are building three times more sprawling, single-family detached homes … as the number of apartment building units,” she says. “And with an affordability crisis, with a climate crisis, we really need to rethink that. The good news, which I also found through research for this series … is that Arizona doesn’t have a statewide building code, so each municipality decides on what they’re going to require builders to follow … and there’s a lot that different municipalities can do just by showing up to their city council meetings [and] revising the building codes.”

For The Maine Monitor, freelance journalist Annie Ropeik generated a four-part series, called “Hooked on Heating Oil,” on how Maine came to rely on oil for home heating more than any other state. When asked about solutions, Ropeik says, “Access to fossil fuel alternatives was really the central equity issue that I was looking at in my project, beyond just, ‘Maine is really relying on heating oil, that obviously has climate impacts, it’s really expensive.’ What does that mean for people in different financial situations, and what does that access to solutions look like for those different communities? What are the barriers there and how can we address those?”

Energy and environment reporter Mike Tony created a four-part series in The Charleston Gazette-Mail on West Virginia’s flood vulnerabilities and the state’s lack of climate action. On connecting with audiences, Tony says, “The idea was to pick a topic like flooding that really affects the whole state, and from there, use that as a sort of an inroad to collect perspectives from West Virginians on how it’s affecting them. And then use that as a springboard to scrutinizing the climate politics that are precluding more aggressive action.”

Finally, Ryan Van Velzer, Louisville Public Media’s energy and environment reporter, covered the decline of Kentucky’s fossil fuel industry and offered solutions for a sustainable future in a four-part series titled, “Coal’s Dying Light.” For him, it was “really difficult to convince people that climate change is real when the economy is fundamentally intertwined with fossil fuels. To a lot of these people, climate change, and the changes necessary to mitigate climate change, can cause real and perceived economic harm to these communities.” 

With these projects in mind, someone’s gate to caring about climate change is probably nearby — in their own home, community, or greater region. 

It’s likely closer than they think. 

To learn more about the next fellowship cohort — which will support projects that report on climate solutions being implemented locally and how they reduce emissions while simultaneously solving pertinent local issues — sign up for the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative newsletter. Questions about the fellowship can be directed to Laur Hesse Fisher at climate@mit.edu.

Study measures the psychological toll of wildfires

Tue, 02/13/2024 - 12:00am

Wildfires in Southeast Asia significantly affect peoples’ moods, especially if the fires originate outside a person’s own country, according to a new study.

The study, which measures sentiment by analyzing large amounts of social media data, helps show the psychological toll of wildfires that result in substantial air pollution, at a time when such fires are becoming a high-profile marker of climate change.  

“It has a substantial negative impact on people’s subjective well-being,” says Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the results. “This is a big effect.”

The magnitude of the effect is about the same as another shift uncovered through large-scale studies of sentiment expressed online: When the weekend ends and the work week starts, people’s online postings reflect a sharp drop in mood. The new study finds that daily exposure to typical wildfire smoke levels in the region produces an equivalently large change in sentiment.

“People feel anxious or sad when they have to go to work on Monday, and what we find with the fires is that this is, in fact, comparable to a Sunday-to-Monday sentiment drop,” says co-author Rui Du, a former MIT postdoct who is now an economist at Oklahoma State University.

The paper, “Transboundary Vegetation Fire Smoke and Expressed Sentiment: Evidence from Twitter,” has been published online in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management.

The authors are Zheng, who is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability in the Center for Real Estate and the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT; Du, an assistant professor of economics at Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business; Ajkel Mino, of the Department of Data Science and Knowledge Engineering at Maastricht University; and Jianghao Wang, of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The research is based on an examination of the events of 2019 in Southeast Asia, in which a huge series of Indonesian wildfires, seemingly related to climate change and deforestation for the palm oil industry, produced a massive amount of haze in the region. The air-quality problems affected seven countries: Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.

To conduct the study, the scholars produced a large-scale analysis of postings from 2019 on X (formerly known as Twitter) to sample public sentiment. The study involved 1,270,927 tweets from 378,300 users who agreed to have their locations made available. The researchers compiled the data with a web crawler program and multilingual natural language processing applications that review the content of tweets and rate them in affective terms based on the vocabulary used. They also used satellite data from NASA and NOAA to create a map of wildfires and haze over time, linking that to the social media data.

Using this method creates an advantage that regular public-opinion polling does not have: It creates a measurement of mood that is effectively a real-time metric rather than an after-the-fact assessment. Moreover, substantial wind shifts in the region at the time in 2019 essentially randomize which countries were exposed to more haze at various points, making the results less likely to be influenced by other factors.

The researchers also made a point to disentangle the sentiment change due to wildfire smoke and that due to other factors. After all, people experience mood changes all the time from various natural and socioeconomic events. Wildfires may be correlated with some of them, which makes it hard to tease out the singular effect of the smoke. By comparing only the difference in exposure to wildfire smoke, blown in by wind, within the same locations over time, this study is able to isolate the impact of local wildfire haze on mood, filtering out nonpollution influences.

“What we are seeing from our estimates is really just the pure causal effect of the transboundary wildfire smoke,” Du says.

The study also revealed that people living near international borders are much more likely to be upset when affected by wildfire smoke that comes from a neighboring country. When similar conditions originate in their own country, there is a considerably more muted reaction.

“Notably, individuals do not seem to respond to domestically produced fire plumes,” the authors write in the paper. The small size of many countries in the region, coupled with a fire-prone climate, make this an ongoing source of concern, however.

“In Southeast Asia this is really a big problem, with small countries clustered together,” Zheng observes.

Zheng also co-authored a 2022 study using a related methodology to study the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the moods of residents in about 100 countries. In that case, the research showed that the global pandemic depressed sentiment about 4.7 times as much as the normal Sunday-to-Monday shift.

“There was a huge toll of Covid on people’s sentiment, and while the impact of the wildfires was about one-fifth of Covid, that’s still quite large,” Du says.

In policy terms, Zheng suggests that the global implications of cross-border smoke pollution could give countries a shared incentive to cooperate further. If one country’s fires become another country’s problem, they may all have reason to limit them. Scientists warn of a rising number of wildfires globally, fueled by climate change conditions in which more fires can proliferate, posing a persistent threat across societies.

“If they don’t work on this collaboratively, it could be damaging to everyone,” Zheng says.

The research at MIT was supported, in part, by the MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab. Jianghao Wang was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

A new way to let AI chatbots converse all day without crashing

Tue, 02/13/2024 - 12:00am

When a human-AI conversation involves many rounds of continuous dialogue, the powerful large language machine-learning models that drive chatbots like ChatGPT sometimes start to collapse, causing the bots’ performance to rapidly deteriorate.

A team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has pinpointed a surprising cause of this problem and developed a simple solution that enables a chatbot to maintain a nonstop conversation without crashing or slowing down.

Their method involves a tweak to the key-value cache (which is like a conversation memory) at the core of many large language models. In some methods, when this cache needs to hold more information than it has capacity for, the first pieces of data are bumped out. This can cause the model to fail.

By ensuring that these first few data points remain in memory, the researchers’ method allows a chatbot to keep chatting no matter how long the conversation goes.

The method, called StreamingLLM, enables a model to remain efficient even when a conversation stretches on for more than 4 million words. When compared to another method that avoids crashing by constantly recomputing part of the past conversations, StreamingLLM performed more than 22 times faster.

This could allow a chatbot to conduct long conversations throughout the workday without needing to be continually rebooted, enabling efficient AI assistants for tasks like copywriting, editing, or generating code.

“Now, with this method, we can persistently deploy these large language models. By making a chatbot that we can always chat with, and that can always respond to us based on our recent conversations, we could use these chatbots in some new applications,” says Guangxuan Xiao, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on StreamingLLM.

Xiao’s co-authors include his advisor, Song Han, an associate professor in EECS, a member of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and a distinguished scientist of NVIDIA; as well as Yuandong Tian, a research scientist at Meta AI; Beidi Chen, an assistant professor at Carnegie Mellon University; and senior author Mike Lewis, a research scientist at Meta AI. The work will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.

A puzzling phenomenon

Large language models encode data, like words in a user query, into representations called tokens. Many models employ what is known as an attention mechanism that uses these tokens to generate new text.

Typically, an AI chatbot writes new text based on text it has just seen, so it stores recent tokens in memory, called a KV Cache, to use later. The attention mechanism builds a grid that includes all tokens in the cache, an “attention map” that maps out how strongly each token, or word, relates to each other token.

Understanding these relationships is one feature that enables large language models to generate human-like text.

But when the cache gets very large, the attention map can become even more massive, which slows down computation.

Also, if encoding content requires more tokens than the cache can hold, the model’s performance drops. For instance, one popular model can store 4,096 tokens, yet there are about 10,000 tokens in an academic paper.

To get around these problems, researchers employ a “sliding cache” that bumps out the oldest tokens to add new tokens. However, the model’s performance often plummets as soon as that first token is evicted, rapidly reducing the quality of newly generated words.

In this new paper, researchers realized that if they keep the first token in the sliding cache, the model will maintain its performance even when the cache size is exceeded.

But this didn’t make any sense. The first word in a novel likely has nothing to do with the last word, so why would the first word be so important for the model to generate the newest word?

In their new paper, the researchers also uncovered the cause of this phenomenon.

Attention sinks

Some models use a Softmax operation in their attention mechanism, which assigns a score to each token that represents how much it relates to each other token. The Softmax operation requires all attention scores to sum up to 1. Since most tokens aren’t strongly related, their attention scores are very low. The model dumps any remaining attention score in the first token.

The researchers call this first token an “attention sink.”

“We need an attention sink, and the model decides to use the first token as the attention sink because it is globally visible — every other token can see it. We found that we must always keep the attention sink in the cache to maintain the model dynamics,” Han says. 

In building StreamingLLM, the researchers discovered that having four attention sink tokens at the beginning of the sliding cache leads to optimal performance.

They also found that the positional encoding of each token must stay the same, even as new tokens are added and others are bumped out. If token 5 is bumped out, token 6 must stay encoded as 6, even though it is now the fifth token in the cache.

By combining these two ideas, they enabled StreamingLLM to maintain a continuous conversation while outperforming a popular method that uses recomputation.

For instance, when the cache has 256 tokens, the recomputation method takes 63 milliseconds to decode a new token, while StreamingLLM takes 31 milliseconds. However, if the cache size grows to 4,096 tokens, recomputation requires 1,411 milliseconds for a new token, while StreamingLLM needs just 65 milliseconds.

“The innovative approach of StreamingLLM, centered around the attention sink mechanism, ensures stable memory usage and performance, even when processing texts up to 4 million tokens in length,” says Yang You, a presidential young professor of computer science at the National University of Singapore, who was not involved with this work. “This capability is not just impressive; it's transformative, enabling StreamingLLM to be applied across a wide array of AI applications. The performance and versatility of StreamingLLM mark it as a highly promising technology, poised to revolutionize how we approach AI-driven generation applications.”

Tianqi Chen, an assistant professor in the machine learning and computer science departments at Carnegie Mellon University who also was not involved with this research, agreed, saying “Streaming LLM enables the smooth extension of the conversation length of large language models. We have been using it to enable the deployment of Mistral models on iPhones with great success.”

The researchers also explored the use of attention sinks during model training by prepending several placeholder tokens in all training samples.

They found that training with attention sinks allowed a model to maintain performance with only one attention sink in its cache, rather than the four that are usually required to stabilize a pretrained model’s performance. 

But while StreamingLLM enables a model to conduct a continuous conversation, the model cannot remember words that aren’t stored in the cache. In the future, the researchers plan to target this limitation by investigating methods to retrieve tokens that have been evicted or enable the model to memorize previous conversations.

StreamingLLM has been incorporated into NVIDIA's large language model optimization library, TensorRT-LLM.

This work is funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT Science Hub, and the U.S. National Science Foundation.

MIT community members elected to the National Academy of Engineering for 2024

Mon, 02/12/2024 - 5:10pm

Two MIT faculty, a principal staff member of MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and 13 additional alumni are among the 114 new members and 21 international members elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) on Feb. 6.

One of the highest professional distinctions for engineers, membership to the NAE is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to "engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature" and to "the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education."

The three MIT electees this year include:

Marc Baldo, the Dugald C. Jackson Professor in Electrical Engineering in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, was honored for efficient light-emitting diodes for the modern display industry. Baldo conducts research in the areas of light-emitting devices and solar cells, electrical and exciton transport in organic materials, exciton fission and fusion, chemical sensors, and spintronics.

Jacopo Buongiorno, the Tokyo Electric Power Company Professor in Nuclear Engineering in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES), and director of science and technology of the MIT Nuclear Reactor Laboratory, was honored for his work on nuclear reactor safety, advanced nuclear power development, and community outreach. He has published over 100 journal articles on reactor safety and design, two-phase flow and heat transfer, and nanofluid technology.

Hsiao-hua K. Burke, a principal staff member in the Air, Missile, and Maritime Defense Technology Division at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, was honored for technology and leadership in remote sensing techniques and systems for ballistic missile defense and space systems. Burke has held several leadership positions since joining the lab in 1981 and helped to support the development of integrated ballistic missile defense systems for the Missile Defense Agency, air defense systems for the Navy, and prototype sensor development and data exploitation for intelligence programs. For her involvement with the Lincoln Laboratory Technical Women’s Network, Burke received a 2010 MIT Excellence Award for Fostering Diversity and Inclusion.

Thirteen additional alumni were elected to the National Academy of Engineering this year. They are: Nancy Lynn Allbritton PhD ’87; Antonio Conejo MS ’87; Shanhui Fan PhD ’97; Dario Gil SM ’00, PhD ’03; Gargi Maheshwari PhD ’99; Daniel A. Nolasco SM ’01; Constantinos Pantelides SM ’83; Maureen Fahey Reitman ’90, SCD ’93; Admiral John Michael Richardson EE ’89, Eng ’89, SM ’89; Raj N. Singh ScD ’73; Sven Treitel ’53, SM ’55, PhD ’58; Steven D. Weiner SM ’00; and Jeannette M. Wing ’78, SM ’79, PhD ’83.

“I offer heartfelt congratulations to Marc, Jacopo, Hsiao-hua, and the 13 MIT alumni elected to the National Academy of Engineering this year. This well-deserved recognition is a testament to the substantial impact of their contributions across fields,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, the dean of the MIT School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Including this year’s inductees, 172 members of the National Academy of Engineering are current or retired members of the MIT faculty and staff, or members of the MIT Corporation.

Pat McAtamney: Empowering student-led engineering teams

Mon, 02/12/2024 - 3:45pm

At the Open House for the Edgerton Center Clubs and team this past fall, MIT Technical Instructor Pat McAtamney cheerfully grilled hundreds of hot dogs and burgers for a long line of hungry students outside his shop in Building N51. “They ate every single burger. I didn’t even get one,” he laughs. His continuous smile throughout the event underscored his wholehearted dedication to his pivotal role in guiding the Solar Electric Vehicle Team, Motorsports team, and other Edgerton Center teams in design and fabrication. Additionally, McAtamney oversees operations in the N51 garage's machine shop.

McAtamney came to MIT in 2002, having worked as a research machinist on NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, on space shuttle radar systems, and in the biomedical industry. He was a technical instructor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, teaching 2.008 (Design and Manufacturing II) for 11 years before he took over management of the Edgerton Center’s N51 Garage. But his dedication extends far beyond the expectations of a shop manager.

A home where everyone can thrive

The N51 Garage, nicknamed “Area 51” has advanced tooling that includes CNC lathes and milling machines, an injection molding machine, and a water jet cutter — all making it possible for teams to create almost any part they need. The garage is filled with notes and memorabilia left behind to inspire current students.

When McAtamney first inherited the shop in 2013, he says, “There were hardly any women.” McAtamney made a point to encourage women students to join teams and run for leadership positions. One of these students, Cheyenne Hua ’19, enthuses, “As a freshman I had no idea how to do anything in the shop, and Pat took me under his wing and taught me how to turn a wheel hub on the lathe during IAP. He gave me confidence that I could hold my own in this world, being a city kid with almost no hands-on experience, and after that my education really took off.” 

Once women were in leadership positions, a snowball effect took place, and female membership jumped to about 50%. McAtamney noticed that with more female captains, communication improved and teams scored higher at competitions. “I think there's a big correlation between more communication on the teams that have been brought on by female membership and the success of the teams,” he says. Most recently, the Solar Electric Vehicle Team won the American Solar Challenge two years in a row with a majority of women in leadership roles.

Inclusion was ingrained into McAtamney’s life from a young age. Growing up with four sisters, he recalled, “My parents were very strict with how my two brothers and I treated my sisters. You respected them. My sister Jo-Ann played street hockey with us. She was a year younger than me, but she's playing street hockey with me and 10 of my friends, and if she wanted to play, she played.”

A culture of service and community

McAtamney gets out of the shop about twice a year to accompany students to competitions around the world, where students constantly surprise him — in a good way. “Don't ever underestimate the MIT student. They're always capable of surprising the heck out of you by doing something that you really didn't think they were going to do,” he says.

The motorsports competition of 2018 stands out in McAtamney’s mind as a time when the sportsmanship of his students surprised him.

Led by Hua, the motorsports team appeared to have won the race but was disqualified on a technicality when they exceeded the allowed power output by a couple of watts for a fraction of a second due to pressing the gas too quickly at the beginning of the race. “In my mind, they won,” McAtamney says with emotion. He offered to take the students out for a consolation dinner instead of attending the awards ceremony, but the students said they wanted to attend the ceremony. Watching them congratulate the winning team despite their disappointment filled him with pride.

McAtamney says that team members frequently venture off to help other teams solve an issue. “I've seen the battery lead for the MIT, either Solar Car or Motorsports, take off for the day and go help that team solve the problem. Or if we have spare parts that could fit one of their cars, they bring the parts over to that team and help them.” It’s no surprise that the Solar Car team also won the sportsmanship award at several competitions in a row.

Teams also gave back to the surrounding communities. At the 2015 World Solar Challenge in a remote mining town of Coober Pedy, Australia, the Solar Car team came across a jewelry store and discovered the store’s owner was struggling to get his 3D printer working. “What do you think happens in the store with an MIT student?” McAtamney asks. Students spent an hour fixing the printer and showing the shop owner how to use it.

The Socratic method

McAtamney’s teaching approach leads students to the answer by asking questions. His method aligns with Edgerton’s famous quote: “The trick to education is to not let them know they are learning something until it is too late.” Having students do everything themselves distinguishes MIT from many other institutions, whose competition teams are directed by faculty rather than the students themselves, and many parts are outsourced.

“It's very easy for a student to come to me and say, hey, Pat, these two pieces are supposed to press together. And I measure them and they should press, but they're not pressing. And I could tell them a solution. Well, you can take this one, throw it in the freezer, in five minutes, it's going to press together. But you tell them, hey, just go research the thermal expansion of material. And if they struggle to a point, then I'll sit there and discuss with them different things and kind of point them the way without actually saying: Put it in the darn freezer.”

McAtamney’s teaching has empowered students to solve complex problems on their own, preparing them for their careers as engineers. This intense discipline is the reason companies like Tesla and SpaceX frequent the garage to recruit their next engineers. Hua now works at SpaceX and is one of many alumni who still keeps in regular contact with McAtamney.

“Pat was and is the backbone of the student teams,” she says. “But he doesn't just run the shop, he really teaches us by letting us figure stuff out ourselves but is always there to guide. I would go so far as to say that what I learned from Pat is serving me just as well in my current structures engineer job at SpaceX as any of my coursework.”

Study: Global deforestation leads to more mercury pollution

Mon, 02/12/2024 - 12:00am

About 10 percent of human-made mercury emissions into the atmosphere each year are the result of global deforestation, according to a new MIT study.

The world’s vegetation, from the Amazon rainforest to the savannahs of sub-Saharan Africa, acts as a sink that removes the toxic pollutant from the air. However, if the current rate of deforestation remains unchanged or accelerates, the researchers estimate that net mercury emissions will keep increasing.

“We’ve been overlooking a significant source of mercury, especially in tropical regions,” says Ari Feinberg, a former postdoc in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and lead author of the study.

The researchers’ model shows that the Amazon rainforest plays a particularly important role as a mercury sink, contributing about 30 percent of the global land sink. Curbing Amazon deforestation could thus have a substantial impact on reducing mercury pollution.

The team also estimates that global reforestation efforts could increase annual mercury uptake by about 5 percent. While this is significant, the researchers emphasize that reforestation alone should not be a substitute for worldwide pollution control efforts.

“Countries have put a lot of effort into reducing mercury emissions, especially northern industrialized countries, and for very good reason. But 10 percent of the global anthropogenic source is substantial, and there is a potential for that to be even greater in the future. [Addressing these deforestation-related emissions] needs to be part of the solution,” says senior author Noelle Selin, a professor in IDSS and MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences.

Feinberg and Selin are joined on the paper by co-authors Martin Jiskra, a former Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow at the University of Basel; Pasquale Borrelli, a professor at Roma Tre University in Italy; and Jagannath Biswakarma, a postdoc at the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. The paper appears today in Environmental Science and Technology.

Modeling mercury

Over the past few decades, scientists have generally focused on studying deforestation as a source of global carbon dioxide emissions. Mercury, a trace element, hasn’t received the same attention, partly because the terrestrial biosphere’s role in the global mercury cycle has only recently been better quantified.

Plant leaves take up mercury from the atmosphere, in a similar way as they take up carbon dioxide. But unlike carbon dioxide, mercury doesn’t play an essential biological function for plants. Mercury largely stays within a leaf until it falls to the forest floor, where the mercury is absorbed by the soil.

Mercury becomes a serious concern for humans if it ends up in water bodies, where it can become methylated by microorganisms. Methylmercury, a potent neurotoxin, can be taken up by fish and bioaccumulated through the food chain. This can lead to risky levels of methylmercury in the fish humans eat.

“In soils, mercury is much more tightly bound than it would be if it were deposited in the ocean. The forests are doing a sort of ecosystem service, in that they are sequestering mercury for longer timescales,” says Feinberg, who is now a postdoc in the Blas Cabrera Institute of Physical Chemistry in Spain.

In this way, forests reduce the amount of toxic methylmercury in oceans.

Many studies of mercury focus on industrial sources, like burning fossil fuels, small-scale gold mining, and metal smelting. A global treaty, the 2013 Minamata Convention, calls on nations to reduce human-made emissions. However, it doesn’t directly consider impacts of deforestation.

The researchers launched their study to fill in that missing piece.

In past work, they had built a model to probe the role vegetation plays in mercury uptake. Using a series of land use change scenarios, they adjusted the model to quantify the role of deforestation.

Evaluating emissions

This chemical transport model tracks mercury from its emissions sources to where it is chemically transformed in the atmosphere and then ultimately to where it is deposited, mainly through rainfall or uptake into forest ecosystems.

They divided the Earth into eight regions and performed simulations to calculate deforestation emissions factors for each, considering elements like type and density of vegetation, mercury content in soils, and historical land use.

However, good data for some regions were hard to come by.

They lacked measurements from tropical Africa or Southeast Asia — two areas that experience heavy deforestation. To get around this gap, they used simpler, offline models to simulate hundreds of scenarios, which helped them improve their estimations of potential uncertainties.

They also developed a new formulation for mercury emissions from soil. This formulation captures the fact that deforestation reduces leaf area, which increases the amount of sunlight that hits the ground and accelerates the outgassing of mercury from soils.

The model divides the world into grid squares, each of which is a few hundred square kilometers. By changing land surface and vegetation parameters in certain squares to represent deforestation and reforestation scenarios, the researchers can capture impacts on the mercury cycle.

Overall, they found that about 200 tons of mercury are emitted to the atmosphere as the result of deforestation, or about 10 percent of total human-made emissions. But in tropical and sub-tropical countries, deforestation emissions represent a higher percentage of total emissions. For example, in Brazil deforestation emissions are 40 percent of total human-made emissions.

In addition, people often light fires to prepare tropical forested areas for agricultural activities, which causes more emissions by releasing mercury stored by vegetation.

“If deforestation was a country, it would be the second highest emitting country, after China, which emits around 500 tons of mercury a year,” Feinberg adds.

And since the Minamata Convention is now addressing primary mercury emissions, scientists can expect deforestation to become a larger fraction of human-made emissions in the future.

“Policies to protect forests or cut them down have unintended effects beyond their target. It is important to consider the fact that these are systems, and they involve human activities, and we need to understand them better in order to actually solve the problems that we know are out there,” Selin says.

By providing this first estimate, the team hopes to inspire more research in this area.

In the future, they want to incorporate more dynamic Earth system models into their analysis, which would enable them to interactively track mercury uptake and better model the timescale of vegetation regrowth.

“This paper represents an important advance in our understanding of global mercury cycling by quantifying a pathway that has long been suggested but not yet quantified. Much of our research to date has focused on primary anthropogenic emissions — those directly resulting from human activity via coal combustion or mercury-gold amalgam burning in artisanal and small-scale gold mining,” says Jackie Gerson, an assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Michigan State University, who was not involved with this research. “This research shows that deforestation can also result in substantial mercury emissions and needs to be considered both in terms of global mercury models and land management policies. It therefore has the potential to advance our field scientifically as well as to promote policies that reduce mercury emissions via deforestation.

This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Swiss National Science Foundation, and Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology.

MIT community members honored with 2024 Franklin Institute Awards

Fri, 02/09/2024 - 4:30pm

The Franklin Institute recently announced its 2024 cohort of award winners, as part of its bicentennial celebration. Since its inception, the Franklin Institute Awards Program has honored the most influential scientists, engineers, and inventors who have significantly advanced science and technology. It is one of the oldest comprehensive science awards in the world.

The 2024 honorees include Institute Professor and Vice Provost for Faculty Paula T. Hammond ’84 PhD ’93; Associate Professor Gabriela S. Schlau-Cohen; Research Affiliate Robert Metcalfe ’69; Mary Boyce SM ’84, PhD ’87; and Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94. All 2024 Franklin Institute Award Laureates will be celebrated in a ceremony on April 18 at the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial of the Franklin Institute.

Paula Hammond was awarded the 2024 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Chemistry, one of the oldest comprehensive science awards in the world. The award cites her “innovative methods to create novel materials one molecular layer at a time and for applying these materials to areas ranging from drug delivery to energy storage.” Hammond’s techniques for creating thin polymer films and other materials using layer-by-layer assembly is groundbreaking. They can be used to build polymers with highly controlled architectures by alternately exposing a surface to positively and negatively charged particles. Materials can then be designed for many different applications, including drug delivery, regenerative medicine, noninvasive imaging, and battery technologies. Hammond is the recipient of MIT’s 2023-24 Killian Award and, in 2021, was named an Institute Professor, MIT’s highest faculty honor. Hammond is one of only 25 people who have been elected to all three U.S. National Academies — Engineering, Science, and Medicine.

Gabriela Schlau-Cohen earned the Benjamin Franklin NextGen Award for “illuminating the fundamental chemical processes that protect plants from sun damage, uncovering novel approaches to increasing crop yields.” Schlau-Cohen combines tools from chemistry, optics, biology, and microscopy to develop new approaches to probe dynamics. Her group focuses on dynamics in membrane proteins, particularly photosynthetic light-harvesting systems that are of interest for sustainable energy applications. Following a postdoc at Stanford University, Schlau-Cohen joined the Department of Chemistry faculty in 2015. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical physics from Brown University in 2003 followed by a PhD in chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley.

Robert Metcalfe ’69, a research affiliate of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and MIT Corporation life member emeritus, won the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering for “his pioneering role in the design, development, and commercialization of Ethernet, an interface for networking and file sharing between computers.” MetCalfe is a graduate of MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and is a former president of the MIT Alumni Association.

Mary Boyce SM ’84, PhD ’87 won the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Mechanical Engineering for “transformative contributions to our understanding of the physical behavior of polymers, materials made of long chains of molecules, leading to innovative product development of rubber and other soft materials.” A longtime MIT faculty member and former head of MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, Boyce is currently a professor of mechanical engineering and provost emerita of Columbia University. 

Lisa Su ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’94, a graduate of MIT’s Department of EECS and the current president, CEO, and chair of AMD, won the Bower Award for Business Leadership for “her transformational leadership of AMD, a leader in high-performance and adaptive computing and one of the fastest growing semiconductor companies in the world.”

This ultrasound sticker senses changing stiffness of deep internal organs

Fri, 02/09/2024 - 2:15pm

MIT engineers have developed a small ultrasound sticker that can monitor the stiffness of organs deep inside the body. The sticker, about the size of a postage stamp, can be worn on the skin and is designed to pick up on signs of disease, such as liver and kidney failure and the progression of solid tumors.

In an open-access study appearing today in Science Advances, the team reports that the sensor can send sound waves through the skin and into the body, where the waves reflect off internal organs and back out to the sticker. The pattern of the reflected waves can be read as a signature of organ rigidity, which the sticker can measure and track.

“When some organs undergo disease, they can stiffen over time,” says the senior author of the paper, Xuanhe Zhao, professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “With this wearable sticker, we can continuously monitor changes in rigidity over long periods of time, which is crucially important for early diagnosis of internal organ failure.”

The team has demonstrated that the sticker can continuously monitor the stiffness of organs over 48 hours and detect subtle changes that could signal the progression of disease. In preliminary experiments, the researchers found that the sticky sensor can detect early signs of acute liver failure in rats.

The engineers are working to adapt the design for use in humans. They envision that the sticker could be used in intensive care units (ICUs), where the low-profile sensors could continuously monitor patients who are recovering from organ transplants.

“We imagine that, just after a liver or kidney transplant, we could adhere this sticker to a patient and observe how the rigidity of the organ changes over days,” lead author Hsiao-Chuan Liu says. “If there is any early diagnosis of acute liver failure, doctors can immediately take action instead of waiting until the condition becomes severe.” Liu was a visiting scientist at MIT at the time of the study and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Southern California.

The study’s MIT co-authors include Xiaoyu Chen and Chonghe Wang, along with collaborators at USC.

Sensing wobbles

Like our muscles, the tissues and organs in our body stiffen as we age. With certain diseases, stiffening organs can become more pronounced, signaling a potentially precipitous health decline. Clinicians currently have ways to measure the stiffness of organs such as the kidneys and liver using ultrasound elastography — a technique similar to ultrasound imaging, in which a technician manipulates a handheld probe or wand over the skin. The probe sends sound waves through the body, which cause internal organs to vibrate slightly and send waves out in return. The probe senses an organ’s induced vibrations, and the pattern of the vibrations can be translated into how wobbly or stiff the organ must be.

Ultrasound elastography is typically used in the ICU to monitor patients who have recently undergone an organ transplant. Technicians periodically check in on a patient shortly after surgery to quickly probe the new organ and look for signs of stiffening and potential acute failure or rejection.

“After organ transplantation, the first 72 hours is most crucial in the ICU,” says another senior author, Qifa Zhou, a professor at USC. “With traditional ultrasound, you need to hold a probe to the body. But you can’t do this continuously over the long term. Doctors might miss a crucial moment and realize too late that the organ is failing.”

The team realized that they might be able to provide a more continuous, wearable alternative. Their solution expands on an ultrasound sticker they previously developed to image deep tissues and organs.

“Our imaging sticker picked up on longitudinal waves, whereas this time we wanted to pick up shear waves, which will tell you the rigidity of the organ,” Zhao explains.

Existing ultrasound elastrography probes measure shear waves, or an organ’s vibration in response to sonic impulses. The faster a shear wave travels in the organ, the stiffer the organ is interpreted to be. (Think of the bounce-back of a water balloon compared to a soccer ball.)

The team looked to miniaturize ultrasound elastography to fit on a stamp-sized sticker. They also aimed to retain the same sensitivity of commercial hand-held probes, which typically incorporate about 128 piezoelectric transducers, each of which transforms an incoming electric field into outgoing sound waves.

“We used advanced fabrication techniques to cut small transducers from high-quality piezoelectric materials that allowed us to design miniaturized ultrasound stickers,” Zhou says.

The researchers precisely fabricated 128 miniature transducers that they incorporated onto a 25-millimeter-square chip. They lined the chip’s underside with an adhesive made from hydrogel — a sticky and stretchy material that is a mixture of water and polymer, which allows sound waves to travel into and out of the device almost without loss.

In preliminary experiments, the team tested the stiffness-sensing sticker in rats. They found that the stickers were able to take continuous measurements of liver stiffness over 48 hours. From the sticker’s collected data, the researchers observed clear and early signs of acute liver failure, which they later confirmed with tissue samples.

“Once liver goes into failure, the organ will increase in rigidity by multiple times,” Liu notes.

“You can go from a healthy liver as wobbly as a soft-boiled egg, to a diseased liver that is more like a hard-boiled egg,” Zhao adds. “And this sticker can pick up on those differences deep inside the body and provide an alert when organ failure occurs.”

The team is working with clinicians to adapt the sticker for use in patients recovering from organ transplants in the ICU. In that scenario, they don’t anticipate much change to the sticker’s current design, as it can be stuck to a patient’s skin, and any sound waves that it sends and receives can be delivered and collected by electronics that connect to the sticker, similar to electrodes and EKG machines in a doctor’s office.

“The real beauty of this system is that since it is now wearable, it would allow low-weight, conformable, and sustained monitoring over time,” says Shrike Zhang, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and associate bioengineer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who was not involved with the study. “This would likely not only allow patients to suffer less while achieving prolonged, almost real-time monitoring of their disease progression, but also free trained hospital personnel to other important tasks.”

The researchers are also hoping to work the sticker into a more portable, self-enclosed version, where all its accompanying electronics and processing is miniaturized to fit into a slightly larger patch. Then, they envision that the sticker could be worn by patients at home, to continuously monitor conditions over longer periods, such as the progression of solid tumors, which are known to harden with severity.

“We believe this is a life-saving technology platform,” Zhao says. “In the future, we think that people can adhere a few stickers to their body to measure many vital signals, and image and track the health of major organs in the body.”

This work was supported, in part, by the National Institutes of Health.

MIT junior Justin Yu crashes “Tetris,” with thanks to the game’s recent “space race”

Fri, 02/09/2024 - 10:00am

Fans of classic “Tetris” have a lot to celebrate at the moment: On Dec. 21, 2023, player Willis Gibson (who plays under the handle BlueScuti) advanced so far into a game of “Tetris” that the game froze: a new achievement in the classic game, which is played on a Nintendo Entertainment System console. Gibson’s win made national headlines and a video of his shocked reaction to the game screen went immediately viral.

But alert readers of MIT News know about another player chasing the “game crash” — MIT junior Justin “Fractal” Yu, a computer science and engineering major from Dallas, Texas, whose win of the 2023 Classic Tetris World Championships last October made him the top-ranked player in the world.

In a recent interview, Yu revealed a fascinating “space race” behind the scenes of Gibson’s achievement: Not only were Yu and Gibson aware of each other’s attempts on the record, but they were in active competition at the time of the win. Topping it off, Yu revealed that he had successfully equaled Gibson's accomplishment on Jan. 3, becoming only the second person to ever crash “Tetris.” The livestream of Yu’s run has garnered over 600,000 views on YouTube, and an avalanche of congratulations from both well-wishers within the close-knit classic “Tetris” gaming community and casual observers who remember the game from their childhood. We sat down with Yu to hear his take on the competition that pushed both players to the limits of the game.

Q: Congratulations on hitting game crash! How long have you been working on this?

A: I think the real answer is: for five years, since I started playing the game. But after the world championships, I took a day to make a lot of offline attempts on my own, which got me to about 1,100 lines — or, about 70 percent of the way to game crash. After the semester finished and I had free time, I decided to go for this objective. So, I went home and started my very first streamed attempt, and not 10 minutes later I received word that a new player, BlueScuti, had broken a separate world record. I didn’t previously know that he was working on really long games, and he didn’t know that I was, but now we both were. So, we started talking afterwards, and decided, hey, we should make this a competition.

Q: Did anyone else know about this race?

A: This is one of the stories you won’t hear from the conventional news outlets, but we were both, I think, going at 100 percent because there was this threat of another skilled player who could get the achievement before you. I think the all-out press lasted about two days, but there is a point where I briefly took the record for highest score, and then died at about 1,400 lines because there was a level that was so incredibly dark that I felt as if I’d been blinded for a split second. The issue was entirely preventable. My family didn’t have a universal remote controller at home, so I couldn’t turn up my TV’s brightness settings to the maximum. The next day I went to Walmart and bought a universal remote, set up the monitor, and was warming up for my game … and that’s when I heard that BlueScuti was up to a thousand lines. And that’s the game where he got game crash. You can see my reaction in-game. I felt like the race was over before it began — but it was also some of the most intense, concentrated effort either of us have put into the game.

Q: So, this is a long-term pursuit that you’ve both been working toward for a while?

A: Yes, but we also play in many other modes and get better, so when we return to playing long games, we’ve made big strides. The thing about long games is that you are incentivized to play with as few risks as possible. However, now that the pressure is off to be the first person to get game crash, I may want to be the person to try for something different. On my stream, after I cooled down a bit, I gave a massive list of potential achievements — but I think the one which will be the most interesting is going beyond game crash. Both BlueScuti and I used very specific setups that are guaranteed to give us the crash at the same time; but there are situations that are also setups where, theoretically at least, you could get to level 255 and beyond.

Q: How would that happen?

A: The levels are stored in single bytes — so when you add one level beyond its capability, the game does not crash; rather, the counting mechanism for levels fails and the level returns to zero while your score remains as high as it was.

Q: Is this like the Y2K of “Tetris?”

A: Yes; essentially, the game wraps all the way back around to zero. But it’s very difficult, because starting at level 249, the game starts throwing everything at you. Every piece you place may represent a crash unless you go for some really insane movements. But we haven’t even gotten halfway to this point in the first place, so there’s a lot to do in the meantime.

Q: Why do you think all of these achievements are happening now? Do you think that BlueScuti’s game, as well as other milestones, are because of the rolling technique you described in our last chat?

A: It’s rolling; but it’s also the fact that we decided to go for this achievement! I think our community has had several people who are capable of doing this for over a year, but the idea of just playing for 40 minutes straight is not something most players like. So, it was the fact that two people at the same time decided to go for it and we started competing, and we have gotten the most media attention ever — now I think more of our top players will be inspired to try for things.

Q: Do you see the media attention as a positive for the community?

A: I think that remains to be seen. I’m not sure if “This game has finally been beaten” is the best message to new players, because it feels like, “We’ve finished up!” but I’m hoping to be proven wrong on that. There are still lots of other achievements to be chased. For instance, there’s the idea of “the perfect game of 'Tetris.'” So in a normal game, the maximum possible displayable core is 999,999. (Incidentally, there are two scores: 999,999 and a different, true score that goes into the millions. The game can’t display the true score, so streamers like me add it to our videos after the fact so you can see how we’re scoring after the max has been reached.)

People have been able to reach max score for decades, so it became a challenge to do as fast as possible. Tetrises — clearing four lines at once — give you the most score, but no one has ever been able to max out their score getting only Tetrises. It would require both near-flawless play and near-flawless luck to accompany the play. You’d only play on slower levels, but each move has to be perfect. In contrast, when going for long games, you play on faster levels, but you can make several moves which are “good enough.”

Q: BlueScuti is very young, just 13 years old. Is that typical of new players in this field?

A: He is slightly younger than what you’d expect. A lot of the biggest prodigies have been 13 or 14 when they started playing. I am pretty firmly on the older side of people who rank at a high level; it’s been that way for years. Playing consistently and improving technique is an investment of time and effort — it’s staying in shape! But I think the best thing about watching BlueScuti play is that it’s pretty clear he just really likes the game. That’s the true secret to us: You practice because you want to, and you get better because you want to; it doesn’t feel like work. That’s the goal you want to be reaching for. It could be “Tetris,” but it could be something else that you choose. If you find that pursuit, that’s a really good time.

Pages