2017 MIT Information and Communication Technologies Conference

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.

John Williams holds a BA in Physics from Oxford University, a MS in Physics from UCLA, and a Ph.D. in Numerical Methods from University of Wales, Swansea. His research focuses on the application of large-scale computation to problems in cyber-physical security and energy. He is director of MIT’s Geospatial Data Center and from 2006-2012, was Director of the MIT Auto-ID Laboratory, where the Internet of Things was invented. He is author or co-author of over 250 journal and conference papers, as well as the books on Rock Mechanics and RFID Technology. He contributed to the 2013 report for the UK Office for Science Foresight Project- The Future of Manufacturing. Alongside Bill Gates and Larry Ellison, he was named as one of the 50 most powerful people in Computer Networks. He consults to companies including Accenture, Schlumberger, Shell, Total, Exxon, SAP Research, Microsoft Research, Kajima Corp, US Lincoln Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, Motorola, Phillip-Morris Inc., Ford Motor Company, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, Total, and ARAMCO. His international collaborations include Oxford and Cambridge Universities, HKUST, KACST, Alfaisal University, PolyU Hong Kong, Imperial College of Science and Technology UK, Malaysia University of Science and Technology (MUST), and Masdar Institute of Science and Technology Abu Dhabi. He organized the first Cyber-Physical Security Conference in the UK (2011), and along with Dr. Sanchez, he runs the MIT Applied Cyber Security Professional Education summer course. At MIT, he teaches courses Architecting Software Systems (MIT 1.125) and Engineering Computation and Data Science (MIT 1.00/1.001). .

In data engineering and data science, early work included simulation of Ford's global network, and analysis of SAP smart grid billing system. For Altria, he analyzed the performance of item level tagging and also their implementation of an anti-counterfeiting system using the Electronic Product Code (EPC)

In password security, Dr. Williams was a PI that developed the algorithms for a negative password authentication system for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency.

Dr. Williams advises companies in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.

Dr. Williams affiliations include:

• MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
• MIT Center for Computational Science and Engineering (CCSE)
• MIT Geospatial Data Center (GDC)
• MIT Auto-ID Laboratory
• MIT Center for Complex Engineering Systems (CCES)
• MIT Consortium for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (IC3)

Christian's main areas of interest are the economics of entrepreneurship, innovation, and scientific productivity.

His research focuses on crowdfunding and online entrepreneurial finance, blockchain technology, digital currencies, how proximity affects the recombination of ideas, the adoption of technology standards, science and technology interactions.

Christian is one of the principal investigators of the MIT Digital Currencies Research Study, which gave access to all MIT undergraduate students to a digital currency in the Fall of 2014. He is also involved in the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy and the recently launched Digital Currency Initiative.

He holds a PhD from the University of Toronto (Rotman School of Management), and MSc (summa cum laude) in Economics and Management of New Technologies from Bocconi University, Milan. In 2009-10 he was a visiting student at Harvard University.

His work has been featured in Nature, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, WIRED, NPR, Forbes, Bloomberg, the Chicago Tribute, the Boston Globe, and VICE news among others.

He has presented his research at a variety of institutions including Harvard University, MIT, Yale University, London Business School, New York University, UC Berkeley, the Federal Reserve Bank, the US Treasury, the World Bank, and the White House OSTP.

Bhaskar Pant is the Executive Director of MIT Professional Education, the arm of MIT that provides technical professionals a gateway to MIT expertise via education courses and programs designed for them. More than 1,500 professionals from over sixty countries arrive on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, every summer to attend courses of a diverse set of technical disciplines. In addition, over 10,000 professionals worldwide are now attending MIT’s online professional courses that include topics such as Big Data. MIT Professional Education is also offering select MIT courses in locations in Asia, Latin America, and Europe

Prior to joining MIT, Mr. Pant held several leadership positions such as serving as Managing Director, Asia Pacific, for the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the world’s foremost academic testing organization headquartered in Princeton, N.J. As managing director, he was responsible for overseeing the company’s English language testing operations throughout Asia. This included the opening of a subsidiary in China that administered the TOEIC English proficiency test for engineers and other working professionals in the nation.

Previously, Mr. Pant led the global corporate training arm of the World Learning Graduate Institute in Vermont and held senior management positions at media and media technology companies such as Sony Corporation and Turner Broadcasting/CNN. Mr. Pant was the first President of Turner Broadcasting’s subsidiary in India.

Mr. Pant holds an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Rochester and a graduate degree in communications and management from Indiana University in Bloomington. Besides managing MIT Professional Education, Mr. Pant teaches intercultural communication to engineering students at MIT and management students at the Harvard University Extension School.

Bruna Braga serves as the Partnerships Manager at Solve. In this capacity, Bruna leads fundraising and partnership efforts, developing and managing relationships with sponsors and partners to contribute to the advancement of Solve’s mission of solving the world’s biggest challenges through collaboration. Bruna also oversees the relationships between Solve and its advisors and other members of the MIT community. Prior to joining Solve, Bruna served as an International Manager at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), where she worked on CGI’s expansion into Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. She holds an MS in Marketing from New York University, where she graduated with distinction, and a BA in Business Administration from the Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo - Fundação Getulio Vargas (EAESP-FGV) in São Paulo, Brazil. Bruna is fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Sertac Karaman is the director of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, and an associate professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. His research areas are robotics and control theory, particularly the applications of probability theory, stochastic processes, stochastic geometry, formal methods, and optimization for the design and analysis of high-performance cyber-physical systems. The applications of this research include driverless cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, distributed aerial surveillance systems, air traffic control, and certification and verification of control systems software. Karaman received a PhD in electrical engineering and computer science and an SM in mechanical engineering from MIT and BS degrees in mechanical engineering and in computer engineering from the Istanbul Technical University.

Vivienne Sze is an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at MIT. She works on computing systems that enable energy-efficient machine learning, computer vision, and video compression/processing for a wide range of applications, including autonomous navigation, digital health, and the internet of things. She is widely recognized for her leading work in these areas and has received many awards, including the AFOSR and DARPA Young Faculty Award, the Edgerton Faculty Award, several faculty awards from Google, Facebook, and Qualcomm, the 2018 Symposium on VLSI Circuits Best Student Paper Award, the 2017 CICC Outstanding Invited Paper Award, and the 2016 IEEE Micro Top Picks Award. As a member of the JCT-VC team, she received the Primetime Engineering Emmy Award for the development of the HEVC video compression standard.  She is a co-editor of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC): Algorithms and Architectures (Springer, 2014) and co-author of Efficient Processing of Deep Neural Networks (Synthesis Lectures on Computer Architecture, Morgan Claypool, 2020). For more information about Prof. Sze’s research, please visit http://sze.mit.edu. 

As executive director, April Julich Perez oversees the MISTI country programs, seed funds and partnerships that create opportunities for MIT students and faculty to learn and collaborate abroad.

Julich Perez has worked on the editorial support staff of the International Herald Tribune and the parisavenue.com division of Le Figaro in France, and in Boston as Assistant Cultural Attachée for the French Consulate. Prior to joining MISTI in 2005, she was Program Associate in MIT's Office of the Arts.

While completing a BA in French at the University of Nebraska, Julich Perez earned certificates in European studies and French linguistics from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and the Center for Applied Linguistics in Besançon, France. She holds an MA in French Cultural Studies from Columbia University.

Julich Perez serves on the policies and procedures group of MIT's International Coordinating Committee. She participated in MIT's Leader to Leader program and is a recipient of the MIT Excellence Award.

A member of NAFSA, the Association of International Educators, Julich Perez authored a case study about MIT's pioneering international education model in the NAFSA publication "Internships, Service Learning & Volunteering Abroad." She has spoken about MISTI at venues such as the American Society for Engineering Education International Forum, the Annual Colloquium on International Engineering Education and the Global Internship Conference.

Lesley Millar-Nicholson is the Executive Director of MIT’s Technology Licensing Office (TLO) and was part of the Founding Leadership team of MIT Office of Strategic Alliances and Technology Transfer (OSATT) formed in 2019. As TLO Executive Director, she leads a team of technology transfer professionals. Together, they manage MIT’s intellectual assets and technology transfer process involving over 11,000 unique pending and issued US and foreign patents, and hundreds of copyright and open source assets. The team engages broadly with stakeholders to facilitate engagements leading to licenses for qualified third parties to deliver on the TLO mission to have impact through technology commercialization.

Prior to arriving in Cambridge Ms. Millar-Nicholson had served for ten years as Director of the Office of Technology Management (OTM) at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign.

Ms. Millar-Nicholson is a past President Board of Governors of Certified Licensing Professionals Inc, a member of AUTM and the Licensing Executive Society, and a past Board Member of Cambridge Enterprise, UK. A native of Scotland, Ms. Millar-Nicholson has a B.Ed., M.Ed., MBA and is a Certified Licensing Professional.

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.

Marcus Dahllöf leads MIT Startup Exchange, which facilitates connections between MIT-connected startups and corporate members of the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP). Dahllöf manages networking events, workshops, the STEX25 accelerator, opportunity postings, and helps define the strategic direction of MIT Startup Exchange. He is a two-time tech entrepreneur (one exit in cybersecurity), and has previously held roles in finance, software engineering, corporate strategy, and business development at emerging tech companies and Fortune 100 corporations in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe. Marcus was a member of the Swedish national rowing team and he is a mentor at the MIT Venture Mentoring Service.

Zen Chu serves as Faculty Director of MIT's Hacking Medicine Initiative, and is a Senior Lecturer in Healthcare Innovation for both the MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology program.

In partnership with Professors Martha Gray and Bill Aulet, Zen created and directs HST.978 MIT Healthcare Ventures, a graduate course that teaches entrepreneurship, business models, and venture creation around technology that can transform healthcare. Zen actively consults companies in pharma, health tech, and healthcare systems struggling to adapt to global digital healthcare transformation and emerging markets.

As managing director of Accelerated Medical Ventures, Zen specializes in building early-stage medical technology and healthcare service companies, usually serving as cofounder and first investor. AMV’s portfolio spans Boston, Silicon Valley, and China, including PillPack.com, Call9.com, Figure1.com, NuRx.com, 3D-Matrix Medical [JASDAQ: 7777], Sofi.com, Curoverse Genomics (acq Veritas Genomics), BitGym.com, DirectDermatology.com, and a few companies still in stealth mode.

Alongside MIT professors Shuguang Zhang, Alex Rich, Alan Grodzinsky, and Bob Langer, Zen cofounded and served as ceo for 3D-Matrix Medical Inc., a venture-backed MIT regenerative medicine company with a successful IPO in 2011. 3D-Matrix has wound-healing and drug-delivery products on the market outside of the US and multiple human clinical trials in process.

He has managed and led new ventures for Harvard Medical School, Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Bioengineering, NetVentures, and Hewlett-Packard. Zen earned a BS in biomedical/electrical engineering from Southern Methodist University and an MBA from Yale University. He is married to Katie Rae, a serial entreprenuer and CEO of MIT's Engine Fund. They are raising three aspiring entrepreneurs in Brookline, MA. 

Ayesha N. Khalid is a practicing sinus surgeon and Clinical Instructor at Harvard Medical School with 15 years experience in the healthcare industry. As an ear, nose and throat surgeon, Ayesha pioneered groundbreaking research in sinus inflammation and clinical outcomes in sinus disease.

As a healthcare innovation specialist, Ayesha completed an MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management focused on Global Leadership and Innovation. During her tenure at Sloan, Ayesha assessed mechanisms to increase adoption of adaptive clinical trials at academic medical centers. She joined MIT H@cking Medicine and helped organize several innovation events in Boston, BIO 2014, and in Doha, Qatar. Ayesha co-founded the Hacking Medicine Institute to engage stakeholders interested in compelling conversations to accelerate paradigm shifts in healthcare service delivery.

Ayesha firmly believes that disruptive innovation in healthcare requires collaboration, not competition. In her recent TedXBeaconStreet, Ayesha asks us to suspend our belief that a systemic view will add back “health” and “care” to a broken system. Ayesha uses her systems-thinking lens to re-energize the doctor-patient relationship and accelerate the effective usage of digital health technologies. Ayesha has worked as a strategic consultant in the private equity space digital and currently serves as medical affairs director for the vertigo program at Castle Creek Pharma.

Ayesha completed her medical school and surgical residency at the Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine, her surgical fellowship at the Oregon Health and Sciences University in Portland, Oregon. She lives in Boston with her husband, an intensive care physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, and her three children who are innovators in their own right.

Prof. Jeehwan Kim's group at MIT focuses on innovations in nanotechnology for next generation computing and electronics. Prof. Kim joined MIT in September 2015. Before joining MIT, he was a Research Staff Member at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY since 2008 right after his Ph.D. He worked on next generation CMOS and energy materials/devices at IBM. Prof. Kim is a recipient of 20 IBM high value invention achievement awards. In 2012, he was appointed a “Master Inventor” of IBM in recognition of his active intellectual property generation and commercialization of his research. After joining MIT, he continuously worked nanotechnology for advanced electronics/photonics. As its recognition, he received LAM Research foundation Award, IBM Faculty Award, DARPA Young Faculty Award, and DARPA Director’s Fellowship. He is an inventor of > 200 issued/pending US patents and an author of > 50 articles in peer-reviewed journals. He currently serves as Associate Editor of Science Advances, AAAS. He received his B.S. from Hongik University, his M.S. from Seoul National University, and his Ph.D. from UCLA, all of them in Materials Science.

Geoffrey Parker is a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College where he also serves as Director of the Master of Engineering Management Program. In addition, he is a research fellow at MIT’s Initiative for the Digital Economy where he leads platform industry research studies and co-chairs the annual MIT Platform Strategy Summit. Prior to joining Dartmouth, Parker was a professor of business at Tulane University. He received a B.S.E. from Princeton and M.S. and Ph.D. from MIT. Parker has made significant contributions to the field of network economics and strategy as co-developer of the theory of “two-sided” markets. He is co-author of the book “Platform Revolution.” His current research includes studies of platform business strategy, data governance, smart cities and energy systems, financial services, and electronic healthcare record systems. Parker’s research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, the Sloan Foundation, the states of Louisiana and New York, and numerous corporations.  He serves or has served as department editor and associate editor at multiple journals and as a National Science Foundation panelist. Parker won the Thinkers50 2019 Digital Thinking Award, along with Marshall Van Alstyne, for the concepts of the inverted firm, two-sided markets, and how firms can adapt and thrive in a platform economy. In Spring 2020, he was elected as a Fellow of the Production and Operations Management Society. In Fall 2020 he joined the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Advanced Manufacturing and Production. Parker is a frequent keynote speaker and advises senior leaders on their organizations’ platform strategies. Before attending MIT, he held positions in engineering and finance at GE Semiconductor and GE Healthcare. Additional information can be found at ggparker.net, @g2parker, and Stern Strategy Group.

Hiroshi Ishii is the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. He was named Media Lab Associate Director in May 2008. He is the director of the Tangible Media Group, which he founded in 1995 to pursue new visions in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): "Tangible Bits” and "Radical Atoms.” Ishii and his team have presented their research at a variety of scientific, design, and artistic venues (including ACM SIGCHI, SIGGRAPH, Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, Milan Design Week, Cannes Lions Festival, Aspen Ideas Festival, Industrial Design Society of America, AIGA, Ars Electronica, Centre Pompidou, Victoria and Albert Museum and NTT ICC) emphasizing that the development of a vision requires the rigors of both scientific and artistic review. In 2006 Ishii was elected to the CHI Academy by ACM SIGCHI, and received the SIGCHI Lifetime Research Award in 2019.

Prior to joining the MIT Media Lab, from 1988-1994, Ishii led the CSCW research group at NTT Human Interface Laboratories Japan, where he and his team invented TeamWorkStation and ClearBoard.   

Thomas Hardjono is the CTO of MIT Connection Science and Engineering. He leads technical projects and initiatives around identity, security and privacy in emerging technologies such as IoT, smart contracts and blockchain systems, and engages industry partners and sponsors on these fronts. Thomas is also the technical director for the Internet Trust Consortium under MIT Connection Science that implements open source software based on cutting edge research at MIT. Prior to this Thomas was the Director of the MIT Kerberos Consortium, developing the famous MIT Kerberos authentication software currently used by millions of users around the world.

As an industry expert he has been active in the areas of security, applied cryptography and identity management for nearly two decades now, starting from the mid-1990s working in the emerging PKI industry as Principal Scientist at VeriSign, which became the largest PKI provider in the world. His work included devices certificates for DOCSIS cable modems, WiFi devices and the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) security hardware. He has led a number of key industry technical groups within the IETF, OASIS, Trusted Computing Group, Kantara and other organizations. At MIT Thomas has also been instrumental in the development of the OpenID-Connect 1.0 identity protocol (OIDC), standing-up the first OIDC service at a major university (oidc.mit.edu). Over the years he has published four books and over sixty technical papers in journals and at conferences. He holds 19 patents in the areas of security and cryptography. Thomas has a BSc degree in Computer Science with Honors from the University of Sydney, and PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of New South Wales in Australia.

Earl K. Miller is the Picower Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received his B.A. (summa cum laude, with honors) in Psychology from Kent State University in 1985. He received an M.A. (in 1987) and Ph.D. (in 1990) in Psychology and Neuroscience from Princeton University. Professor Miller was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor of Science, honoris causa) from Kent State University in 2020. Professor Miller studies the neural basis of executive brain functions, the ability to carry out goal-directed behavior using complex mental processes. Research topics include working memory, attention, decision-making and learning. The Miller Lab has shown how categories and concepts are learned, how multifunctional “mixed-selectivity” neurons endow the cortex with computational horsepower and flexibility, and how neural oscillations regulate neural communication and consciousness. This work has established a foundation upon which to construct more detailed, mechanistic accounts of cognition and its dysfunction in diseases such as autism, schizophrenia, and attention deficit disorder. Professor Miller is the recipient of a variety of awards and serves as editor, and on the editorial boards of, major journals in neuroscience, and on international advisory boards. His paper with Jonathan Cohen, (Miller and Cohen, 2001), which presented a new framework for understanding the prefrontal cortex, ranks fifth all-time in citations in neuroscience. 

Dina Katabi is the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the director of MIT’s Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing (Wireless@MIT). Katabi is also a MacArthur Fellow and a Member of the National Academy of Engineering. She received her PhD and MS from MIT and her BS from Damascus University. Katabi has received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award, the Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship, the Sloan Fellowship, the NBX Career Development chair, and the NSF CAREER award. Katabi's doctoral dissertation won an ACM Honorable Mention award and a Sprowls award for academic excellence. Further, her work was recognized by the IEEE William R. Bennett prize, three ACM SIGCOMM Best Paper awards, an NSDI Best Paper award, the SIGCOMM Test-of-Time award, and a TR10 award for her work on the sparse Fourier transform. Several start-ups have been spun out of Katabi's lab, such as PiCharging and Emerald.