Keeping up with today’s rapidly changing technology landscape in the digital age means constantly asking, What’s next? Getting ahead means asking what’s after that: What’s on the horizon — and what’s just over it?
The annual MIT Information & Communication Technologies Conference explores the latest ICT research from across the Institute and its potential impact across industries. This year’s conference includes sessions on Artificial Intelligence, Cybersecurity, and the Future of Work. The program will feature presentations by MIT faculty, technology demonstrations by MIT-connected startups, and opportunities for networking with MIT researchers and top executives.
Karl Koster is the Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations. MIT Corporate Relations includes the MIT Industrial Liaison Program and MIT Startup Exchange.
In that capacity, Koster and his staff work with the leadership of MIT and senior corporate executives to design and implement strategies for fostering corporate partnerships with the Institute. Koster and his team have also worked to identify and design a number of major international programs for MIT, which have been characterized by the establishment of strong, programmatic linkages among universities, industry, and governments. Most recently these efforts have been extended to engage the surrounding innovation ecosystem, including its vibrant startup and small company community, into MIT's global corporate and university networks.
Koster is also the Director of Alliance Management in the Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT). OSATT was launched in Fall 2019 as part of a plan to reinvent MIT’s research administration infrastructure. OSATT develops agreements that facilitate MIT projects, programs and consortia with industrial, nonprofit, and international sponsors, partners and collaborators.
He is past chairman of the University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), an organization that seeks to enhance the value of collaborative partnerships between universities and corporations.
He graduated from Brown University with a BA in geology and economics, and received an MS from MIT Sloan School of Management. Prior to returning to MIT, Koster worked as a management consultant in Europe, Latin America, and the United States on projects for private and public sector organizations.
Dr. Rong is Director of Corporate Relations at MIT. He currently supervises a group of ILP officers who promote and manage the interactions and relationships between the research at MIT and companies worldwide, particularly in greater China and extended Asian countries, to help them stay abreast of the latest developments in technology and business practices.
Previously, Dr. Rong founded IKA, LLC. He has led corporate development and product innovation, and provided strategic advices to companies in corporate strategy, IT leadership, digital transformation, AI, enterprise content management, and customer relationship. He held senior roles in Harte-Hanks and Vignette Corporation. He held an EU postdoctoral research fellowship in the University of Edinburgh in Scotland where he started global collaborative research.
Dr. Rong is on the board of multiple organizations, including 128CUTE since 2005 and MIT Sloan Alumni Association of Boston from 2009 to 2012. He chaired MIT Sloan CIO Symposium from 2009-2011. He is a senior expert invited by international organizations.
Dr. Rong holds a M.B.A. in global and innovation leadership from the MIT Sloan School of Management and Ph.D in numerical computing from University of Guelph in Canada.
This talk will discuss the critical role of mapping and localization in the development of self-driving cars and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). After a discussion of some of the recent amazing progress and open technical challenges in the development of self-driving vehicles, we will discuss the past, present and future of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) in robotics. We will review the history of SLAM research and will discuss some of the major challenges in SLAM, including choosing a map representation, developing algorithms for efficient state estimation, and solving for data association and loop closure. We will describe some of the challenges using SLAM for AUVs, and we will also present recent results on object-based mapping in dynamic environments and real-time dense mapping using RGB-D cameras.
Joint work with Sudeep Pillai, Tom Whelan, Michael Kaess, John McDonald, Hordur Johannsson, Maurice Fallon, David Rosen, Ross Finman, Paul Huang, Liam Paull, Nick Wang, and Dehann Fourie.
Samuel C Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering Associate Head for Research, Mechanical Engineering Co-Director, Ford-MIT Alliance MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
John J. Leonard is Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering and Associate Department Head for Research in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. He is also a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His research addresses the problems of navigation and mapping for autonomous mobile robots and underwater vehicles. He holds the degrees of B.S.E.E. in Electrical Engineering and Science from the University of Pennsylvania (1987) and D.Phil. in Engineering Science from the University of Oxford (1994). He was team leader for MIT's DARPA Urban Challenge team, which was one of eleven teams to qualify for the Urban Challenge final event and one of six teams to complete the race. He is the recipient of an NSF Career Award (1998) and the King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Transactions on Robotics Paper Award (2006). He is an IEEE Fellow (2014).
In recent years, great strides have been made to scale and automate Big Data collection, storage, and processing, but deriving real insight through relational and semantic data analysis still requires time-consuming guesswork and human intuition. Now, novel approaches designed across domains (education, medicine, energy, and others) have helped identify foundational issues in general data analysis, providing the basis for developing a “Data Science Machine,” an automated system for generating predictive models from raw data.
Principal Research Scientist MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Kalyan is a principal research scientist in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS, MIT). Previously he was a research scientist at CSAIL (CSAIL, MIT). His primary research interests are in machine learning and building large scale statistical models that enable discovery from large amounts of data. His research is at the intersection of big data, machine learning, and data science. He directs a research group called Data to AI in the new MIT Institute for Data Systems and Society (IDSS). The group is interested in big data science and machine learning, and is focused on how to solve foundational issues preventing artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions from reaching their full potential for societal applications.
The emergence of large networked systems has brought about new challenges to researchers and practitioners alike. While such systems perform well under normal operations, they can exhibit fragility in response to certain disruptions that may lead to catastrophic cascades of failures. This phenomenon, referred to as systemic risk, emphasizes the role of the system interconnection in causing such, possibly rare, events. The flash crash of 2010, the financial crisis of 2008, the New England power outage of 2003, or simply extensive delays in air travel, are just a few of many examples of fragility and systemic risk present in complex interconnected systems. The term fragility is used in this context to highlight the system's closeness to failure. Notions of failure include large amplification of local disturbances (or shocks), instability, or a substantial increase in the probability of extreme events. Cascaded failures, or systemic risk, fit under this umbrella and focus on local failures synchronizing to cause a breakdown in the network. Many abstracted models from transportation, finance, or the power grid fit this framework well. The important issue here is to relate fragility to the size and characteristics of a network for certain types of local interactions. In this talk, we will discuss risk and efficiency in these systems and provide some constructive examples and highlight important research directions.
Principal Research Scientist MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS)
Sarah Williams is currently an Associate Professor of Technology and Urban Planning. She also is Director of the Civic Data Design Lab at MIT's School of Architecture and Planning. The Civic Data Design Lab works with data, maps, and mobile technologies to develop interactive design and communication strategies that expose urban policy issues to broader audiences.
Trained as a Geographer (Clark University), Landscape Architect (University of Pennsylvania), and Urban Planner (MIT), Williams's work combines geographic analysis and design. Williams is most well known for her work as part of the Million Dollar Blocks team which highlighted the cost of incarceration, Digital Matatus which developed the first data set on a informal transit system searchable in Google Maps, and a more a recent project that uses social media data to understand housing vacancy and Ghost Cities in China.
Williams' design work has been widely exhibited including work in the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City. Prior to MIT, she was Co-Director of the Spatial Information Design Lab at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Williams has won numerous awards including being named top 25 planners in the technology and 2012 Game Changer by Metropolis Magazine. Her work is currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Seoul Biennale Cities Exhibition in Korea.
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.
Exhibitors Cogito Dimagi Equota Energy Foxtrot Systems Holosonics Humanyze Luminoso New Valence Robotics Point.io Simply XML Smartvid.io Tenacity Tulip Intefaces Uplevel Security Yaxa
Trond heads up the Startup Initiative at MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP), facilitating productive relationships between industry and MIT’s startup ecosystem. He is a former Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Trond is a serial entrepreneur with Scandinavian roots, and is currently the Founder of Yegii, Inc., the insight network, and Managing Director of Tautec Consulting.
Trond is a leading expert on technology development across industries such as IT, Energy, and Healthcare. His knowledge spans entrepreneurship, strategy frameworks, policy making, action learning, virtual teamwork, knowledge management, standardization, and e-government. He wrote the book Leadership From Below (2008). Trond speaks six languages and is a frequent public speaker on business, technology, and wine.
Trond was a Strategy/business development executive at Oracle Corp. (2008-12), and a policy maker in the EU (2004-8) where he built the ePractice.eu web platform with 120,000 members. He has worked with multinational companies, with mid-caps and startups in Brazil, China, Colombia, France, Indonesia, Norway, the UK, and the US. He has a PhD in Multidisciplinary Technology Studies from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.
Hardly a week goes by without a report about another cyberattack. With almost every major organization having been victim, including most government organizations, such Target, Sony, NSA, US Office of Personnel Management, why would you expect your organization to be immune? By many projections, the worse is yet to come. Although much progress is being made in improving hardware and software, studies have reported that between 50-70% of all cyberattacks are aided or abetted by insiders (usually unintentionally), so understanding the cybersecurity governance and organizational culture is increasingly important. In this session, we will discuss the managerial, organizational, and strategic aspects of cybersecurity with an emphasis on the protection of the nation's critical infrastructure.
Dr. Madnick involvement in cybersecurity research goes back to 1979, when he co-authored the book Computer Security. Currently, he heads Cybersecurity at MIT Sloan: the Interdisciplinary Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity, formerly (IC)3.
Dr. Madnick holds a Ph.D. in computer science from MIT and has been an MIT faculty member since 1972. He served as the head of MIT's Information Technologies Group in the Sloan School of Management for more than 20 years. He is the author or co-author of more than 400 books, articles and reports. Besides cybersecurity, his other research interests include Big Data, semantic connectivity, database technology, software project management and the strategic use of information technology.
Dr. Madnick has been active in industry as a developer of IBM's VM/370 operating system and Lockheed's DIALOG system. He has served as a consultant to major corporations and has been the co-founder of five high-tech firms and currently operates the 14th-century Langley Castle Hotel in England.
Senior Research Scientist Co-Director, MIT Communications Futures Program (CFP) MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
David Clark is a Senior Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where he has worked since receiving his Ph.D. there in 1973. Since the mid 70s, Dr. Clark has been leading the development of the Internet; from 1981-1989 he acted as Chief Protocol Architect in this development and chaired the Internet Activities Board. His current research looks at re-definition of the architectural underpinnings of the Internet and the relation of technology and architecture to economic, societal and policy considerations. He is helping the U.S. National Science foundation organize their Future Internet Design program. Dr. Clark is past chairman of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Academies and has contributed to a number of studies on the societal and policy impact of computer communications. He is co-director of the MIT Communications Futures Program, a project for industry collaboration and coordination along the communications value chain.
Research Scientist MIT Sloan School of Management
Dr. Mohammad Jalali (also known as 'MJ') is a research scientist at MIT Sloan School of Management. MJ is interested in simulation and model estimation methodologies, and the applications of dynamic modeling for organizational cybersecurity and complex sociotechnical problems. He is currently working on the measurement of security perceptions in a wide range of organizations, as well as development of a cybersecurity simulation-based game for educational and experimental purposes. MJ is a former consultant at the World Bank and a former researcher at the U.S. Department of Energy. He is also the recipient of the 2015 Dana Meadows Award, the 2015 WINFORMS Student Excellence Award, and the 2014 Lupina Young Researcher Award. For more information, check out MJ's website at: Jalali.mit.edu.
Uplevel Security Enterprises invest millions in preventing and detecting cyber attacks but have limited technology capabilities for responding to attacks. Their current security infrastructure applies sophisticated algorithms to network and endpoint data to identify potentially malicious activity. However, the output of these appliances is an alert - an isolated data point without any surrounding context. Incident responders need to go through a manual, time-consuming process to reconstruct the original context and understand how an alert relates to their historical data and external threat intelligence. Uplevel automates incident response by applying graph theory to the technical artifacts of cyberattacks. This allows organizations to reduce response times and increase the efficiency of their analysts, thereby reducing their overall exposure risk.
Yaxa According to 2015 Verizon Data Breach Investigative Report (DBIR), 95% of the breaches happen due to stolen user credentials. When legitimate user’s login credentials gets stolen, imposters (malicious outsiders) using these stolen credentials pose as insiders. Yaxa’s in-line software appliance protects enterprise’s critical data center assets and web applications in real-time from such insider threats. Yaxa’s unique user data access fingerprint approach not only detects such bad users but also takes automatic enforcement action as per configured IT policy instead of generating an alert. Real-time imposter and malicious user detection, coupled with automatic enforcement results in huge savings in investigation time and cost reduction while improving risk posture for an organization.
Encryption as a means of data control (privacy and security):
For a long time, interaction on Web has been less private or secure than many end-users expect and prefer. Now, however, the widespread deployment of encryption helps us to change that.
* Making encryption widespread. For years we have known how to do encryption, but it wasn't widely used, because it wasn't part of overall system design. In response, particularly as we've become aware of capabilities for network-scale monitoring, standards groups including IETF and W3C have worked to encrypt more of those network connections at the protocol and API-design phase, and to make it easier to deploy and use encrypted protocols such as HTTPS. Encryption won't necessarily stop a targeted attack (attackers can often break end-user systems where they can't brute-force break the encryption), but it raises the effort required for surveillance and forces transparency on other network participants who want to see or shape traffic.
* Secure authentication. Too many of our "secure" communications are protected by weak password mechanisms, leaving users open to password database breaches and phishing attacks. Strong new authentication mechanisms, being worked on for web-wide standards, can replace the password; helping users and applications to secure accounts more effectively. Strong secure authentication will enable users to manage their personal interactions and data privacy, as well as securing commercial data exchange.
Alex "Sandy" Pentland directs MIT's Connection Science initiative and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program and is a founding member of advisory boards for the World Economic Forum, AT&T, Telefonica, United Nations, and Nissan. He previously helped create and direct MIT's Media Laboratory, the Media Lab Asia laboratories at the Indian Institutes of Technology, and Strong Hospital's Center for Future Health.
Forbes magazine declared Pentland "one of the seven most powerful data scientists in the world," along with the founders of Google and the CTO of the United States. Pentland is among the most-cited computational scientists in the world, and a pioneer in big data analytics, computational social science, organizational engineering, and wearable computing. His research has been featured in Nature, Science, the World Economic Forum, and Harvard Business Review, as well as being the focus of TV features including "Nova" and "Scientific American Frontiers." His most recent books are Social Physics, and Trust :: Data.
Interesting experiences include winning the DARPA 40th Anniversary of the Internet Grand Challenge, dining with British Royalty and the President of India, staging fashion shows in Paris, Tokyo, and New York, and developing a method for counting beavers from space.
Policy Counsel and Technology & Society Domain Lead World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
Wendy Seltzer is Policy Counsel and Technology & Society Domain Lead at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), where she leads work on privacy, security, web payments, and social web standards. As a visiting Fellow with Yale Law School's Information Society Project, she researches openness in intellectual property, innovation, privacy, and free expression online. As a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, bringing transparency to online takedown demands. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Tor Project, promoting privacy and anonymity research, education, and technology; the World Wide Web Foundation, U.S., dedicated to achieving a world in which all people can use the Web to communicate, collaborate and innovate freely. She seeks to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation and communication.
Wendy has been a Fellow with Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and the University of Colorado's Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship in Boulder. She has taught Intellectual Property, Internet Law, Antitrust, Copyright, and Information Privacy at American University Washington College of Law, Northeastern Law School, and Brooklyn Law School and was a Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute, teaching a joint course with the Said Business School, Media Strategies for a Networked World. Previously, she was a staff attorney with online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and First Amendment issues, and a litigator with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel.
Wendy speaks and writes on copyright, trademark, patent, open source, privacy and the public interest online. She has an A.B. from Harvard College and J.D. from Harvard Law School, and occasionally takes a break from legal code to program (Perl and MythTV).
Principal Research Scientist MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Daniel Weitzner is the Director of the MIT CSAIL Decentralized Information Group and teaches Internet public policy in MIT’s Computer Science Department. His research includes development of accountable systems architectures to enable the Web to be more responsive to policy requirements.
From 20011-2012, Weitzner was the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Internet Policy in the White House. He led initiatives on privacy, cybersecurity, Internet copyright, and trade policies promoting the free flow of information,. He was responsible for the Obama Administration’s Consumer Privacy Bill of Rights and the OECD Internet Policymaking Principles.
Weitzner has been a leader in the development of Internet public policy from its inception, making fundamental contributions to the successful fight for strong online free expression protection in the United States Supreme Court, and for laws that control government surveillance of email and web browsing data.
Weitzner is a founder of the Center for Democracy and Technology, led the World Wide Wed Consortium’s public policy activities, and was Deputy Policy Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. In 2012 he was named to the Newsweek/Daily Beast Digital Power Index as a top ‘Navigator’ of global Internet public policy and in 2013 he received the International Association of Privacy Professional’s Leadership Award.
Manager, Corporate Relations MIT Industrial Liaison Program
Dr. Kenneth A. Goldman joined the MIT Industrial Liaison Program in 1988, managing a diverse portfolio of mostly European memberships, and concentrating in telecommunications and high technology. Before then he worked at Project Athena, MIT's experiment in distributed educational computing, where he organized and managed the visitor and demonstration facility.
Dr. Goldman has special responsibility for relations with the MIT Media Laboratory, the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, and the Department of Political Science.
Until recently he was manager of the Communications, Information Technology and Financial Services Industry group of Corporate Relations. He speaks fluent Italian, Russian and Serbocroatian, and some French and Spanish. He has studied many other languages. He has travelled extensively throughout both Eastern and Western Europe and lived in Belgrade for several years.
After completing a doctoral degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures, applying information technology to analyze Serbocroatian oral epic, Dr. Goldman worked for several years in the Division of Research at the Harvard Business School, in the Program for Industry and Company Analysis. Following that he worked for Compulex, Inc. of Lowell, MA, which produced multilingual word processing systems, where he was hired as manager of documentation and training, and then assumed responsibility for customer support, product design and product management. He then worked in a number of positions in the software industry before coming to Project Athena.
This talk will begin by looking at predictions from the past about the future of work. Then it will focus on a promising new way to predict how work will be organized in the future: by thinking about how to create more intelligent organizations. Examples to be described include: studies of why some groups are smarter than others, studies of how people and machines together can do better than either alone, and ways to harness the collective intelligence of thousands of people to solve complex problems like climate change.
Patrick J McGovern (1959) Professor of Management Founding Director, Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) MIT Sloan School of Management
Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. At MIT, he is also a Professor of Information Technology and a Professor of Work and Organizational Studies. Previously, he was the founder and director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on “Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century.” Professor Malone teaches classes on organizational design, information technology, and leadership, and his research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.
For example, Professor Malone predicted, in an article published in 1987, many of the major developments in electronic business over the following 25 years, including electronic buying and selling for many kinds of products. Then, in 2004, Professor Malone summarized two decades of his research in his critically acclaimed book The Future of Work. His newest book, Superminds, appeared in May 2018. Professor Malone has also published over 100 articles, research papers, and book chapters; he is an inventor with 11 patents; and he is the co-editor of four books.
Malone has been a cofounder of four software companies and has consulted and served as a board member for a number of other organizations. His background includes work as a research scientist at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), a Ph.D. from Stanford University, an honorary doctorate from the University of Zurich, and degrees in applied mathematics, engineering, and psychology.
Recent advances in artificial intelligence and robotics are reshaping our thinking about the likely trajectory of occupational change and employment growth. Understanding the evolving relationship between computer capability and human skill demands requires confronting historical thinking about machine displacement of human labor and considering the contemporary incarnation of this displacement: the simultaneous growth of high-education, high-wage and low-education, low-wages jobs.
David Autor is Ford Professor in the MIT Department of Economics. His scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes.
Autor has received numerous awards for both his scholarship—the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions in the field of Labor Economics, the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship—and for his teaching, including the MIT MacVicar Faculty Fellowship.
In 2017, Autor was recognized by Bloomberg as one of the 50 people who defined global business. In March of 2019, he was christened "Twerpy MIT Economist, David Autor" by John Oliver, host of Last Week Tonight, during a segment on automation and employment. Autor is currently determining how to merchandise this title.
Humanyze was born out of a passion for helping organization by uncovering and understanding communication networks. Our social sensing and analytics platform, developed at MIT, enables companies to quantify social interactions that were previously unmeasurable using cutting edge technology. This information can be leveraged to enhance teamwork and employee engagement, improve processes, and plan for growth.
Tenacity is a cloud application that improves call center employees’ lives. Armed with social data, Tenacity uses interpersonal influence to build better teams, a humane workplace, and emotionally resilient workers. The upshot for employers? Tenacity gets their people to show up more, produce more, and quit less. The company was spun out of the Human Dynamics lab at the MIT's Media Lab.
Computer Science rests on an unphysical division between the description of a computation and its implementation. Many issues in computing, including its scalability, efficiency, and security, arise at that interface. I will introduce alternative approaches to aligning the representations of hardware and software, and explore some of the social and economic implications of programming atoms as well as bits.
Prof. Neil Gershenfeld is the Director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, where his unique laboratory is breaking down boundaries between the digital and physical worlds, from pioneering quantum computing to digital fabrication to the Internet of Things. Technology from his lab has been seen and used in settings including New York's Museum of Modern Art and rural Indian villages, the White House and the World Economic Forum, inner-city community centers and automobile safety systems, Las Vegas shows and Sami herds. He is the author of numerous technical publications, patents, and books including Designing Reality, Fab, When Things Start To Think, The Nature of Mathematical Modeling, and The Physics of Information Technology, and has been featured in media such as The New York Times, The Economist, NPR, CNN, and PBS. He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, has been named one of Scientific American's 50 leaders in science and technology, as one of 40 Modern-Day Leonardos by the Museum of Science and Industry, one of Popular Mechanic's 25 Makers, has been selected as a CNN/Time/Fortune Principal Voice, and by Prospect/Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 public intellectuals. He's been called the intellectual father of the maker movement, founding a growing global network of over two thousand fab labs in 125 countries that provide widespread access to prototype tools for personal fabrication, directing the Fab Academy for distributed research and education in the principles and practices of digital fabrication, and chairing the Fab Foundation. He is a co-founder of the Interspecies Internet and of the Science and Entertainment Exchange. Dr. Gershenfeld has a BA in Physics with High Honors from Swarthmore College, a Ph.D. in Applied Physics from Cornell University, honorary doctorates from Swarthmore College, Strathclyde University and the University of Antwerp, was a Junior Fellow of the Harvard University Society of Fellows, and a member of the research staff at Bell Labs.
Imagine if our environment helped us to be more productive, to learn the most from our social interactions, and to inspire us when we felt stuck. The Responsive Environments Group at the MIT Media Lab develops systems that connect ubiquitous sensors and computers through the IoT, allowing us to analyze and control networked devices and make them work in concert. The resulting interface can be considered an effective extension of the human nervous system, leveraging approaches including wearable electronics, sensor networks, and the discovery of latent dimensions in user preference for the design of intuitive lighting interfaces.
Postdoctoral Associate MIT Program in Media Arts and Sciences
Nan Zhao is a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT Media Lab, where she works on interfaces and devices that enable sustainable behavior while also improving user experience and allow self-expression. Her work spans indoor lighting design to smart urban furniture, and borrows from a variety of fields, including psychology, sensor technologies, and wearable computing technology.
Nan is also co-founder of Changing Environments Inc, a venture backed start-up developing technology for smarter cities. CE's first product Soofa, a solar charging bench for public spaces, has received love and support from around the world.
Before joining the Media Lab, Nan conducted research in smart grid and vehicle-to-grid technology. As a fellow of RWE AG, a leading electricity and gas company in Germany, she was closely involved in the development and kick-off of a smart grid project in collaboration with IBM. She is a graduate in Electrical Engineering from RWTH Aachen University in Germany.
Nan Zhao’s work has been covered by Reuters, Spiegel, FAZ, The Boston Globe, CNN, MIT News, Engadget, and others.