Conference Details - Agenda

Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber — these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. In the face of the platform revolution, assumptions about operations, finance, strategy, and innovation all change. Exploring the what, how, and why of this revolution reveals the strategies behind some of today’s rising platforms and explains how entrepreneurs and traditional companies — in businesses as diverse as shoes, spices, dating, energy, home appliances, and education — can thrive in this new world.

Resource scarcity, flattening yields, changing climate, and booming urban populations impose increasing limits on current food systems. The MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture Initiative is committed to driving a paradigm shift to computationally-based food systems that address environmental, economic, and social challenges. The next agricultural revolution now taking root harnesses the power of distributed food-computing across a global network of innovators and producers to foster an agile, open, and responsive food future.

Developments in urban transportation today — Uber, Lyft, Zipcar, BMW’s DriveNow — have implications that reach far beyond the experiences of individual passengers and drivers. Changing customer attitudes and behaviors are creating new opportunities and new threats in the mobility sector and in every sector it touches, from retail and communications to manufacturing and energy. To thrive in this space, industry incumbents need to understand the importance of being a proactive disruptor, rather than waiting to be overtaken by disruption.

As the backbone of many public transit systems, railway infrastructure creates opportunities to foster social engagement and spur regional economic growth. In addition to operating trains, JR East also manages station space utilization and administers a micropayment business. Diversifying into these ventures in the face of rapidly changing markets has been accomplished through innovations in management and technology. Ongoing demographic and globalization trends demand continued sustainable innovation in transportation in order to grow the company, improve customer satisfaction, and increase social impact.

ILP members, many of them Fortune 1000 companies, increasingly want to meet with MIT startups, to scout, to discuss, to partner, to invest, and more. Responding to that need, ILP’s Startup Initiative will boost our current database of near 1000 MIT startups. Going forward, the intent is to provide a web platform to gather real time developments, advertise opportunities and do more but also better matching. We are currently seeking feedback from the wider MIT innovation ecosystem on how we should proceed. There will be a stand at the Startup Exhibit where we can take questions and you can give your input. We're looking for input from both MIT startups and ILP members.

Click here to apply for the exhibit.

2015 Startup Exhibitors
Advanced Silicon Group
Astra IDentity, Inc.
Belleds Technologies
Composable Analytics, Inc.
Coventry Associates, Inc
Dacuda
DropWise Technologies Corp.
Energy Compression Inc.
EntraTympanic, LLC
Gigavation Incorporated
Holosonics
Identified Technologies
Luminoso
PathMaker Neurosystems, Inc.
Shortlist
TransitX
XMicrobial

The CyberSecurity threat has been increasingly steadily for several years. Everyone by now is aware that cyber attacks can be used to steal data, identities and money. But cyber attacks also pose a threat to the security of critical computing systems and can effect critical infrastructure including the physical world of industrial control systems, power grid, etc.

Most people tend to regard this as an inevitable consequence of the complexity of computer systems. But it is worth asking how we got to where we are today. The architecture of our current computer systems (software and hardware) is grounded in the engineering tradeoffs of a different time, when computing resources were scarce and systems were not connected to one another. But today’s environment is the exact opposite. Computing resources are abundant and the fact that all machines are connected enables attacks by anybody located anywhere.

It there makes sense to dedicate some of today’s abundant computer resources to solving security problems through architectures that guarantee security even when programmer’s make mistakes. This can be done through architectural innovation at many levels: hardware architectures, software architectures and novel cryptography. I’ll elaborate on these points and describe several projects at CSAIL that illustrate the approach.

The mission of the Internet Policy Research Initiative is to work with policy makers and technologists to increase the trustworthiness and effectiveness of interconnected digital systems. We will accomplish this through engineering and public policy research, education and engagement.

In our increasingly connected digital world, cybersecurity threats are proliferating, causing new risks in domains as diverse as armed conflict, commercial activity, the conduct of democracy, and individuals' private lives. Even though the private sector as a critical role in cybersecurity, in the end, we look to governments ensure that such large-scale risks are mitigated. Indeed, there is no shortage of public policy action.

With the generous support of the Hewlett Foundation, MIT has created the Internet Policy Research Initiative to bring together the best of MIT’s engineering, social science, and management insight to this most vexing challenge. Our goal is helping guide governments and private sector institutions around the world in framing sustainable, effective Internet and cybersecurity policy.

(IC)³ is focused on addressing the managerial, organizational, and strategic aspects of cybersecurity with an emphasis on the protection of the nation's critical infrastructure. This is particularly important because: (1) according to various reports, between 50-70% of all cyberattacks are aided or abetted by insiders (usually unintentionally), so understanding the organization issues is increasingly important and (2) although a lot of attention has been directed at protecting Information Technology (IT) systems, we have seen how many have been penetrated (Target, Sony, US Office of Personnel Management), yet our critical infrastructure (computer-control electric grids, autonomous cars, Internet of Things) are even more at risk and must less intensely studied. In this session, examples of (IC)³ research will be presented.

Security is becoming an increasingly important issue for companies, especially given hacks of major corporations. With increased spending in security, it is important to identify and solve these pain points for companies. To help with this, we started a summer program for early stage security startups called Cybersecurity Factory. The goal of the program is to encourage students to commercialize research ideas. Last year, our program was done in collaboration with Highland Capital Partners, and we had two teams. In our talk, we will go into some details about our program and our experience last summer. We will talk about lessons that we learned from running this program and how it will shape our program next year. We will also talk about how running this program has shaped our views on the security industry.

The proliferation of digital devices and the telecommunication networks are impacting how we manage and experience our cities. So too, the proliferation of big data is availing a new, high resolution understanding of human society. These technologies have and will impact how individuals experience and move through the city. We ask how these technological trends impact the everyday individuals and what opportunities exist in the future “senseable” city.

We will discuss the promise of AVs for urban mobility applications, and also outline key technical challenges that stand in the way of large-scale deployment. Specifically, problems related to mapping and decision making will be discussed, as well as difficulties arising from mobility-on-demand applications.

Is travel a mundane daily chore or does it have a higher meaning attached to it? This talk examines human emotions associated with travel behavior, including car pride, car dependence, implicit social bias in mode choice, and emotional experience of travel. It brings psychology, sociology and neuroscience to the study of emerging mobility technologies and business models, and explores the behavioral foundation for the future of urban mobility.

This lecture will detail the creation of ultrasensitive sensors based on electronically active conjugated polymers (CPs) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs). A central concept that a single nano- or molecular-wire spanning between two electrodes would create an exceptional sensor if binding of a molecule of interest to it would block all electronic transport. The use of molecular electronic circuits to give signal gain is not limited to electrical transport and CP-based fluorescent sensors can provide untratrace detection of chemical vapors via amplification resulting from exciton migration. Nanowire networks of CNTs provide for a practical approximation to the single nanowire scheme. These methods include abrasion deposition and selectivity is generated by covalent and/or non-covalent binding selectors/receptors to the carbon nanotubes. Sensors for a variety of materials and cross-reactive sensor arrays will be described. The use of carbon nanotube based gas sensors for the detection of ethylene and other gases relevant to agricultural and food production/storage/transportation are being specifically targeted and can be used to create systems that increase production, manage inventories, and minimize losses.

One solution to the food challenge is the intensification of crop production in the Global South, where the lack of cost-effective fertilizers currently lead to low yield and a depletion of soils from their essential nutrients. This situation is particularly alarming for potassium (K). Southern hemisphere countries largely depend on potassium fertilizers produced from potash mined in northern hemisphere countries, and on products designed for the northern hemisphere soils. Our laboratory, in collaboration with a mining company and agronomist experts in tropical soil, has developed a novel process to transform K-feldspar, an abundant raw material, into a new fertilizing product. This cost-driven development offers an alternative K source that can be mined, transformed and produced in tropical regions, for tropical soils. Such developments are particularly important for Brazil, China or India, where the development of conventional potash is currently cost-prohibitive.

The current food industry that supports modern society is based on agricultural products, whereas the continuously growing demand for quality food from an increasing global population challenges the sustainability of the current food supply chain. In this talk, I will cover several recent technological developments in the area of synthetic biology, which will potentially revolutionize the future of food industry. By understanding the composition of natural food at super-high resolution as well as the metabolic pathways by which each ingredient molecule is biosynthesized in its natural host, we will be able to engineer quality food from synthetic and sustainable sources.

Foodborne illness takes over 3000 lives and hospitalizes about 48 million people a year in the US according to the CDC. The occurrence of pathogenic food illnesses in the US, from bacteria such as listeria and salmonella, is flat in spite of considerable efforts to reduce pathogens in our food. Traditionally, microbiologists and epidemiologists have led the effort to reduce pathogens in food. The food system is a complex socio-technical system, and System Engineering approaches can create new insights to improve food system safety performance. This talk will show how System Engineering tools, such as STAMP developed here at MIT, are applied to the food safety system. The insights from these analyses promise to reduce the occurrence of poor food safety decision-making in food firms. The results may be generalized to any system with the potential for low frequency-high impact events.