The 2017 MIT Japan Conference will feature future trends of research at MIT and highlight advances in key areas, including advanced materials, electronics, information technology, chemical engineering, as well as other topics. Attendees will have the opportunity for continued in-depth discussions with faculty speakers during both lunch and an evening networking reception.
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.
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.
Whereas today's mainstream Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research addresses functional concerns – the needs of users, practical applications, and usability evaluation – Tangible Bits and Radical Atoms are driven by vision. This is because today's technologies will become obsolete in one year, and today's applications will be replaced in 10 years, but true visions – we believe – can last longer than 100 years.
Tangible Bits seeks to realize seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment by giving physical form to digital information, making bits directly manipulable and perceptible. Our goal is to invent new design media for artistic expression as well as for scientific analysis, taking advantage of the richness of human senses and skills – as developed through our lifetime of interaction with the physical world.
Radical Atoms takes a leap beyond Tangible Bits by assuming a hypothetical generation of materials that can change form and properties dynamically, becoming as reconfigurable as pixels on a screen. Radical Atoms is the future material that can transform its’ shape, conform to constraints, and inform the users of their affordances. Radical Atoms is a vision for the future of human-material interaction, in which all digital information has a physical manifestation so that we can interact directly with it.
I will present the trajectory of our vision-driven design research from Tangible Bits towards Radical Atoms, and a variety of interaction design projects that were presented and exhibited in Arts, Design, and Science communities.
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.
As a strategy to save the cost of expensive substrates in semiconductor processing, the technique called “layer-transfer” has been developed. In order to achieve real cost-reduction via the “layer-transfer”, the following needs to be insured: (1) Reusability of the expensive substrate, (2) Minimal substrate refurbishment step after the layer release, (3) Fast release rate, and (4) Precise control of a released interface. Although a number of layer transfer methods have been developed including chemical lift-off, optical lift-off, and mechanical lift-off, none of those three methods fully satisfies conditions listed above. In this talk, we will discuss our recent development in a “graphene-based layer-transfer” process that could fully satisfy the above requirements, where epitaxial graphene can serve as a universal seed layer to grow single-crystalline GaN, III-V, II-VI and IV semiconductor films and a release layer that allows precise and repeatable release at the graphene surface. We will further discuss about cost-effective, defect-free heterointergration of semiconductors using graphene-based layer transfers.
Lastly, I will introduce our new research activities in developing advanced RRAM devices. Resistive switching devices have attracted tremendous attention due to their high endurance, sub-nanosecond switching, long retention, scalability, low power consumption, and CMOS compatibility. RRAMs have also emerged as a promising candidate for non-Von Neumann computing architectures based on neuromorphic and machine learning systems to deal with “big data” problems such as pattern recognition from large amounts of data sets. However, currently reported RRAM devices have not shown uniform switching behaviors across the devices with high on-off ratio which holds up commercialization of RRAM-based data storages as well as demonstration of large-scale neuromorphic functions. Recently, we redesigned RRAM devices and this new device structure exhibits most of functions required for large-array memories and neuromorphic computing, which are (1) excellent retention with high endurance, (2) excellent device uniformity, (3) high on/off current ratio, and (4) current suppression in low voltage regime. I will discuss about the characterization results of this new RRAM device.
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.
Visual object detection and recognition are needed for a wide range of applications including robotics/drones, self-driving cars, smart Internet of Things, and portable/wearable electronics. For many of these applications, local embedded processing is preferred due to privacy or latency concerns. In this talk, we will describe how joint algorithm and hardware design can be used to reduce the energy consumption of object detection and recognition while delivering real-time and robust performance. We will discuss several energy-efficient techniques that exploit sparsity, reduce data movement and storage costs, and show how they can be applied to popular forms of object detection and recognition, including those that use deep convolutional neural nets (CNNs). We will present results from recently fabricated ASICs (including our deep CNN accelerator named “Eyeriss” which is 10x more energy efficient than a mobile GPU) that demonstrate these techniques in real-time computer vision systems.
John Roberts has been Executive Director of MIT Corporate Relations (Interim) since February 2022. He obtained his Ph.D. in organic chemistry at MIT and returned to the university after a 20-year career in the pharmaceutical industry, joining the MIT Industrial Liaison Program (ILP) in 2013. Prior to his return, John worked at small, medium, and large companies, holding positions that allowed him to exploit his passions in synthetic chemistry, project leadership, and alliance management while growing his responsibilities for managing others, ultimately as a department head. As a program director at MIT, John built a portfolio of ILP member companies, mostly in the pharmaceutical industry and headquartered in Japan, connecting them to engagement opportunities in the MIT community. Soon after returning to MIT, John began to lead a group of program directors with a combined portfolio of 60-80 global companies. In his current role, John oversees MIT Corporate Relations which houses ILP and MIT Startup Exchange.
Coventry Associates - Holosonics - TagUp - Yaxa - Poly6 - Diamond Nanotechnologies - Akselos
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.
Xuanhe Zhao is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. The mission of Zhao Lab is to advance science and technology between humans and machines to address grand societal challenges in health and sustainability. A major current focus is the study and development of soft materials and systems. Dr. Zhao has won early career awards from NSF, ONR, ASME, SES, AVS, Adhesion Society, JAM, EML, and Materials Today. He has been a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher since 2018. Bioadhesive ultrasound, based on Zhao Lab’s work published in Science, was named one of TIME Magazine's Best Inventions of the year in 2022. SanaHeal Inc., based on Zhao Lab’s work published in Nature, was awarded the 2023 Nature Spinoff Prize. Over ten patents from Zhao Lab have been licensed by companies and have contributed to FDA-approved and widely-used medical devices.
While human tissues are mostly soft, wet and bioactive; machines are commonly hard, dry and biologically inert. Bridging human-machine interfaces is of imminent importance in addressing grand challenges in health, security, sustainability and joy of living facing our society in the 21st century. However, designing human-machine interfaces is extremely challenging, due to the fundamentally contradictory properties of human and machine. At MIT SAMs Lab, we propose to use tough bioactive hydrogels to bridge human-machine interfaces. On one side, bioactive hydrogels with similar physiological properties as tissues can naturally integrate with human body, playing functions such as scaffolds, catheters, drug reservoirs, and wearable devices. On the other side, the hydrogels embedded with electronic and mechanical components can control and response to external devices and signals. In the talk, I will first present a bioinspired approach and a general framework to design bioactive and robust hydrogels as the matrices for human-machine interfaces. I will then discuss large-scale manufacturing strategies to fabricate robust and bioactive hydrogels and hydrogel electronics and machines, including 3D printing. Prototypes including smart hydrogel band-aids, hydrogel robots and hydrogel circuits will be further demonstrated.
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.
In this talk, I will present an analyst-in-the-loop security system, where analyst intuition is put together with state-of-the-art machine learning to build an end-to-end active learning system. With evolving attacks, we need a system that can continuously collect analyst input, incorporate the input and learn/adapt models that can mimic analysts. We will explore what kind of input from analysts is needed, how models can be learnt and adapted, how to utilize analyst time effectively and how to measure efficacy of such systems. Our system, called AI2, has four key features: a big data behavioral analytics platform, an ensemble of outlier detection methods, a mechanism to obtain feedback from security analysts, and a supervised learning module. When these four components are run in conjunction on a daily basis and are compared to an unsupervised outlier detection method, detection rate improves by an average of 3.41×, and false positives are reduced five fold.
Eugene Bell Career Development Associate Professor of Tissue Engineering MIT Department of Biological Engineering
The Ribbeck Lab focuses its research on basic mechanisms by which mucus barriers exclude, or allow, passage of different molecules and pathogens, and the mechanisms pathogens have evolved to penetrate mucus barriers. Ribbeck hopes to provide the foundation for a theoretical framework that captures general principles governing selectivity in mucus, and likely other biological hydrogels, such as the extracellular matrix and bacterial biofilms.
The goal of our research is to elucidate the mechanisms that govern selective filtering by mucus, an important biological gel, which coats all wet epithelia in our body. Mucus has critical, but poorly understood, biological functions in protecting tissues from attack by pathogens, and facilitating transport of particulate material. I will present our strategies to determine the characteristics that distinguish molecules that permeate, versus molecules that are rejected by, the mucus barrier. Specifically, I will discuss a suite of methods and conceptual tools to characterize passive transport and active migration of diverse particles and microbes, and to elucidate the relationship between a particle's biochemical properties, and its mobility across mucus. Our goal is to provide the foundation for a theoretical framework that captures general principles governing selectivity in mucus, and likely also in other biological hydrogels such as the extracellular matrix, nuclear pores, and bacterial biofilms. Our work may also be the basis for the reconstitution of synthetic gels that mimic the basic selective properties of biological gel-based barriers.
Prof. Antoine Allanore has more than a decade of experience in the field of chemical metallurgy. Since 2004, as R&D engineer at ArcelorMittal in France, then at MIT since 2010, he has developed several alternative processes for metal extraction that adopt green chemistry principles. He co-founded Boston Electrometallurgical Corporation (BEMC) to engineer the large-scale development of such approaches. In 2012, he was appointed the T.B. King Assistant Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science & Engineering at MIT, where his research group aims at developing sustainable materials extraction and manufacturing processes. His group has proposed a novel approach to investigate and control water/mineral interactions in soils using microfluidics (Word Congress on Soils Science, Korea, 2014, PLOSOne, 2015). Focusing on mining and processing of unconventional resources (Journal of the Total Environment, 2015, Green Chemistry 2015), he invented a waste-free process to produce a potassium fertilizer from earth-abundant raw materials. The product has been designed to suit tropical soils and has succeeded crop-tests. It is now under field evaluation in Brazil (16th World Fertilizer Congress, Rio, 2014). He teaches thermodynamics and sustainable chemical metallurgy at both the undergraduate and graduate level. He was awarded the DeNora Prize in 2012 and the Early Career Faculty Fellow award in 2015, both from TMS (The Minerals, Metals & Materials Society).
The demand for materials, particularly minerals and metals, has experienced an exceptional growth in the last decades. In parallel, the capital and environmental costs of the corresponding technologies have reached levels that are unsustainable for most countries. Increasing environmental awareness, increasing availability of clean electricity, and the foreseen global population increase are setting the stage for novel processes that match the expectations from society. In this context, recent research and development results pertinent to sustainable metal and materials extraction are presented, including oxides and sulfides processing.
Dr. Ornatowski is currently a Senior Director in the Office of Corporate Relations (OCR) at MIT and the Director, MIT-ILP, Japan. He works with various companies in the automotive, electronics and materials industries. Prior to joining MIT, he worked as a consultant in the Boston area with Standard and Poor's DRI and Harbor Research.
Previously he spent nine years with General Electric, where he held various management positions in business development, strategic planning and marketing in the U.S. and Asia and worked with several of GE's technology-focused businesses. Dr. Ornatowski began his professional career as a management consultant working with the Tokyo office of the Boston Consulting Group.
In addition to his corporate experience, Dr. Ornatowski has taught at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Boston University, and Trinity College. He has also published articles in the Sloan Management Review, Far Eastern Economic Review, The Journal of the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, and the Journal of Socio-Economics. He is fluent in Japanese, having lived and worked in Japan a total of 12 years, and has worked extensively with Asian and European companies as well.