MIT Data Center Day

Jonathan (“Jonny”) Rosenfeld leads the FundamentalAI group at MIT FutureTech — focusing on the fundamental safety and performance limits of deep learning and AGI, their attainment, and predictability.

Dr. Rosenfeld’s interests lie at the intersection of fundamental science and large-scale impact across Academia and Industry. In industry, he has directed large-scale research and development teams, including hundreds of engineers, across disciplines including AI, genomics, physics, and information theory; and currently leads efforts at the intersection of AI and stem cell biology as Co-Founder and CTO of somite.ai. In 2019, at MIT, he was among the pioneers of Deep Learning scaling laws, which have underpinned fundamental progress in the field (and hypothesized these to be exponentially suboptimal). His work twice received the Israeli Defense Prize, akin to the USA's Medal of Freedom.

He holds five degrees: a Ph.D. and MSc in CS from MIT; a BA in Physics, BSc in EE, and an MBA from the Technion.

William D. Oliver is jointly appointed the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He serves as the Director of the Center for Quantum Engineering and as Associate Director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He is a Principal Investigator in the Engineering Quantum Systems Group at MIT campus. He provides programmatic and technical leadership targeting the development of quantum and classical high-performance computing technologies. Will’s research interests include the materials growth, fabrication, design, and measurement of superconducting qubits, as well as the development of cryogenic packaging and control electronics involving cryogenic CMOS and single-flux quantum digital logic.

From 2003-2023, Will also worked at Lincoln Laboratory — most recently as a Laboratory Fellow (2017-2023) — with the Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems Group. Over those 20 years, Will was instrumental in growing the quantum group to its present levels. In February 2023, Will stepped down from this position, due to a perceived organizational conflict of interest with his outside professional activities. Nonetheless, he and the EQuS group maintain a strong collaborative relationship with the Laboratory.

Will is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Physical Society (APS), and a Senior Member of the IEEE. He serves on the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee, the US Committee for Superconducting Electronics, and is an IEEE Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC) Board Member.

Will received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, his M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and B.A. in Japanese from the University of Rochester (NY).

Saurabh Amin’s research focuses on the design and control of infrastructure systems through the use of game theory and network optimization. His group works in three main areas: (1) resilient network control, (2) information systems and incentive design, and (3) optimal resource allocation in large-scale infrastructure systems. By addressing critical questions in highway transportation, electric power distribution, and urban water networks, the group develops new theories and design tools to improve the performance of essential infrastructure systems in the face of both stochastic and adversarial disruptions.

The group’s research agenda centers on designing network monitoring and control algorithms, as well as economic incentive schemes, that enable infrastructure users and operators to make optimal decisions under uncertainty. This agenda is advanced through an approach that: (i) models cyber-physical interactions in infrastructures and evaluates their vulnerabilities; (ii) develops tools to detect and respond to both local and network-level failures; and (iii) designs incentive schemes that enhance aggregate levels of public good while accounting for dependencies and private information among strategic entities.

Christoph Reinhart is a building scientist and architectural educator working in the field of sustainable building design and environmental modeling. At MIT, he is leading the Sustainable Design Lab (SDL), an inter-disciplinary group with a grounding in architecture that develops design workflows, planning tools, and metrics to evaluate the environmental performance of buildings and neighborhoods. He is also a managing member of Solemma, a technology company and Harvard University spinoff, and served as strategic development advisor and cofounder for MIT spinoff mapdwell until it joined Palmetto Clean Technology in 2021. Products originating from SDL and Solemma are used in practice and education in over 90 countries.

Before joining MIT in 2012, Christoph led the sustainable design concentration area at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where the student forum voted him the 2009 Teacher of the Year for the Department of Architecture. From 1997 to 2008, Christoph had worked as a staff scientist at the National Research Council of Canada and the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems in Germany. He has authored over 160 peer-reviewed scientific articles, including two textbooks on daylighting and seven book chapters. His work has been supported by a variety of organizations, from the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, and the Governments of Canada, Germany, Kuwait, and Portugal to Autodesk, Exelon, Kalwall, Philips, Saint Gobain, Shell, and United Technology Corporation.

Christoph’s work has been recognized with various awards, among them a Fraunhofer Bessel Prize by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (2018), the IBPSA-USA Distinguished Achievement Award (2016), a Star of Building in Science award by Buildings4Change magazine (2013), and seven best paper awards. Mapdwell has been recognized with FastCompany’s Design by Innovation 2015 award for Data Visualization as well as a Sustainia 100 award. Christoph is a physicist by training and holds a doctorate in architecture from the Technical University of Karlsruhe.

Dr. Hamed Okhravi is a senior staff member in the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group, where he leads programs and conducts research in the area of systems security. His research interests include cybersecurity, science of security, security evaluation, and operating systems. He is the recipient of the Stratus Award for Cloud Computing (2020), two R&D 100 Awards (2020 and 2018), MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Best Invention Award (2019), MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Team Award (2015), National Security Agency's 3rd Annual Best Scientific Cybersecurity Paper Competition Award (2015), and MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s Early Career Technical Achievement Award (2014) for his research.  

He is an associate editor of the IEEE Security & Privacy journal. He has also served twice as the program chair for the ACM Moving Target Defense (MTD) workshop, the poster chair of the IEEE SecDev Conference, and a guest editor of the IEEE Security & Privacy – Special Issue on Hacking without Humans. In addition, he has served on the steering committee of the ACM MTD workshop, and as a program committee member for many academic conferences and workshops including NDSS, USENIX Security, ACM CCS, RAID, AsiaCCS, IEEE DAC, IEEE SecDev, IEEE/ACM ICCAD, MILCOM, and ACNS, among others. He has also served on the National Science Foundation's Panel for the Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace program.

Okhravi actively contributes to various national, Laboratory, and division-level strategic planning activities, and has led the development of multiple national-level R&D roadmaps. He has also led the development of multiple systems security technologies that have successfully transitioned outside and inside Lincoln Laboratory. His work has resulted in multiple U.S. patents and numerous publications in top-tier venues.

Okhravi’s current focus is researching and developing a Resilient Mission Computer, a new computer system design in which important security properties are inherent and multiple large classes of vulnerabilities are prevented by design.

Okhravi earned his MS and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2006 and 2010, respectively.

Morgan Andreae is the executive director of MITEI’s Future Energy Systems Center. Prior to joining MITEI, Andreae was the executive director of technology and innovation at Cummins where he led teams in the development of new battery, fuel cell, electrolyzer, and electric traction technologies. Over the course of his career Andreae has held a variety of roles in technology development, strategy, and product development, with a consistent focus on bringing more sustainable technology to market. Andreae holds over 25 patents on diesel, hybrid-electric, and electric powertrain technology. He has a PhD in mechanical engineering from MIT, a Masters and Bachelors in engineering from Dartmouth College, and a Bachelors in history from Haverford College.

Michael Casey is a senior advisor at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative and a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. He and his colleagues are seeking to build awareness around digital currencies and their underlying blockchain technology, helping shape scholarship around the topic and exploring dedicated research projects that use this emerging technology to achieve social impact goals.

Before joining MIT, Michael was a senior columnist covering global finance at The Wall Street Journal, where he culminated a two-decade career in print journalism that spanned various roles and stints on five continents. He also hosted online TV shows for WSJ Live and frequently appeared on various networks as a commentator, including CNBC, CNN, Fox Business, and the BBC. He recently revived his involvement with media, taking on a role as Chairman of the Advisory Board at blockchain news outlet CoinDesk and this year founded his own media company, Streambed Media, which focuses on themes of innovation and society.

Michael is the author of five books on the digital economy and Internet culture. In 2015, he and co-author Paul Vigna published the critically acclaimed The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order and three years later published its sequel, The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything. He has also collaborated with documentary filmmakers on the same topic and is frequently called on to speak about these issues at conferences and other public events.

Michael has written three other books: The Social Organism: A Radical Understanding of Social Media to Transform Your Business and Life, which he co-wrote with social media entrepreneur Oliver Luckett, The Unfair Trade: How our Broken Global Financial System Destroys the Middle Class, an analysis of the global dimensions of the 2008 financial crisis, and Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image, about the famous photo of Ernesto "Che" Guevara by Alberto Korda.

A native of Perth, Australia, Michael is a graduate of the University of Western in Australia and has higher degrees from Cornell University and Curtin University.

Tricia Wang is a globally recognized technology and strategy expert who helps organizations future-proof themselves at the intersection of AI, data, and human insight. She is the CEO of the Advanced AI Society, an industry association uniting leading innovators to prove, pilot, and promote open, trustworthy AI infrastructure across every layer of the tech stack. Tricia brings over two decades of experience advising Fortune 500 companies like Google, Spotify, and P&G on data strategy, digital transformation, and responsible AI deployment.

Long before today’s AI boom, Tricia foresaw the rise of machine intelligence and the dangers of misusing it. As an ethnographer embedded inside Nokia during its decline, she saw how over-reliance on dashboards and KPIs blinded leadership to shifting customer needs. From this experience, she coined the term quantification bias—the tendency to favor what’s measurable over what matters—and introduced thick data to describe the human context that big data often misses.

Her TED talk brought these concepts to a global audience, making the case that the best way to future-proof an organization is to stay deeply connected to customers. In today’s era of generative AI, the quantification bias is even harder to detect, and ignoring thick data is even riskier.

To address this, Tricia founded Sudden Compass, a consultancy that helped companies integrate thick data into decision-making and build the internal governance and change systems to act on it. Her work proved that data transformation—and now AI transformation—isn’t just about technology. It’s about leadership, alignment, and strategic clarity.

Tricia has deep international experience, from building innovation labs in China to designing data equity initiatives in South America. She co-founded Crypto Research and Design Lab with the World Economic Forum as a partner, which was acquired by Crypto Council for Innovation.

She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and is affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, Data & Society, the Atlantic Council, and the US-Japan Leadership Program. She’s a Global Expert at Singularity University and a sought-after speaker on AI, data, tech ethics, and organizational strategy.

Tricia’s cross-sector path from enterprises to non-profits, from space science to grassroots media, from global tech ethnography to decentralized AI, reflects a lifelong commitment to making complex systems more accountable to the people they affect. Her work is grounded in one belief: technology must serve human dignity, not erode it.

Leon Glicksman, Professor of Building Technology and Mechanical Engineering, works on research and consulting related to energy-efficient building components and design, natural ventilation, sustainable design for developing countries, and design tools.

He founded and was head of MIT’s Building Technology Program in the Department of Architecture for 22 years. He has worked on research and consulting related to energy-efficient building components and design, indoor airflow and indoor air quality.  Basic studies were carried out to improve thermal insulation for buildings during the period when CFCs were removed from insulation. Research has developed aerogel insulations that promise to be as much as four times more efficient than present insulations.  Glicksman was a founding member of the MIT Energy Initiative and co-chaired a task force to promote energy efficient measures for the MIT campus and to develop the next generation of technologies for buildings. Another research project included software tools for automatic identification of major faults in commercial building HVAC systems. The work identified faults that caused as much as one half million dollars a year in operating faults in a single building on the MIT campus. Several MIT BT students have founded a company to commercialize the tool and now have systems installed on most MIT buildings, as well as operations across the US and Europe.

Experiments and CFD simulations are being used to develop system performance evaluation and design guidelines for displacement ventilation and natural ventilation in US and foreign buildings. This included a study of the application of natural ventilation to buildings to improve indoor air quality and reduce energy use for air conditioning that was jointly carried out over five years with Cambridge University. Research was carried out with a major developer in Japan to design natural ventilation for new office buildings in central Tokyo. Design tools have been developed that can be used to predict natural ventilation flows, comfort level and energy efficiency in new building designs. These tools are more easily used by designers and engineers during the early conceptual stage of the building design. Recent research is focused on understanding the spread of Covid aerosols in classrooms based on CFD simulations.

Research on energy-efficient urban housing for China was carried out with MIT and Chinese colleagues for five years and is summarized in a book he coauthored.  Research was focused on design tools and optimum control for hybrid natural ventilation/ mechanical cooling with design collaborations for several new buildings in three areas of China. There has been an ongoing program in India to develop passive designs using ventilation and night cooling for new housing for low-income families in Gujarat. Working with a NGO, small scale demonstration buildings as well as new single and multi-story buildings have been constructed and are being evaluated. These are also being used to evaluate different roof systems with double skin vents and thermal mass. Research is also underway to develop a novel low-cost evaporative cooling system to preserve farm produce in East Africa and in India. 

Glicksman is a consultant to numerous agencies and companies, most recently the World Bank, He has been awarded the ASME Melville Medal and the ASME Heat Transfer Memorial Award. He is a fellow of the ASME and ASHRAE.  He is the author of more than two hundred articles published in refereed journals or proceedings and two books.

Dr. Vijay Gadepally is a member of the senior staff in the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. In this role, he works closely with the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Gadepally's research interests include high-performance computing applications in artificial intelligence, machine learning, graph algorithms, and data management.

Gadepally holds a BTech degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur and MSc and PhD degrees in electrical and computer engineering from The Ohio State University, where he received an Outstanding Graduate Student Award in 2011. In 2016, Gadepally received an MIT Lincoln Laboratory Early Career Technical Achievement Award. In 2017, he was named to the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association International's inaugural 40 Under 40 list, which recognizes individuals for their innovation in applying information technology to R&D involving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

Tim Carr is Director of Business Development, Commercial & Industrial at VEIR, where he leads customer relationships and go-to-market strategy for VEIR’s superconducting power delivery solutions. He works with commercial and industrial clients facing rising power density challenges in data center and infrastructure environments. 

Before joining VEIR, Tim was Senior Vice President of Business Development at Dynamic Energy, where he oversaw national sales efforts and launched new product offerings. He brings over 15 years of experience in energy infrastructure sales and project development, with clients including JPMorgan Chase, Kingspan, and Lowe’s. Tim has a strong background in sales leadership, financial modeling, and project management, as well as prior experience in global metals trading and international business. He holds a Bachelor of Arts, Summa Cum Laude, from the University at Albany (SUNY). 

Cory is Director of Business Development & Strategy at Sublime Systems, where he leads commercial partnerships with developers and corporations across the many sectors that use concrete. He designed and negotiated the first-ever cement purchase agreement with Microsoft. Previously, he worked at Google X and IBM, where he managed global engineering and design teams that built solutions for investor-owned utilities. Cory holds an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, an MS in Energy Systems from Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability, and a BS in Economics and International Affairs from American University.

Nir Shavit received B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in 1984 and 1986, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1990. Shavit is a co-author of the book The Art of Multiprocessor Programming. He is a recipient of the 2004 Gödel Prize in theoretical computer science for his work on applying tools from algebraic topology to model shared memory computability and of the 2012 Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for the introduction of Software Transactional Memory. For many years his main interests were techniques for designing, implementing, and reasoning about multiprocessor algorithms. These days he is interested in understanding the relationship between deep learning and how neural tissue computes and is part of an effort to do so by extracting connectivity maps of brain, a field called connectomics. Nir is the principal investigator of the Multiprocessor Algorithmics Group and the Computational Connectomics Group.

Kevin Bradshaw is responsible for developing market-leading products and services to ensure a resilient future for our data center clients.

Since joining the company in 1986 as loss prevention consultant in Dallas, Texas, USA, Bradshaw has served in many engineering and operations roles, including vice president, operations manager, Forest Products and Latin America; senior vice president, Western division, Frisco, Texas, USA, and most recently, senior vice president, chief innovation officer, FM Inno Ventures.

Bradshaw holds a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from Texas Tech University, Lubbock, Texas, USA.