The 21st century restarted in 2021, with companies that effectively implemented digital transformation thriving during the worldwide pandemic. Digital transformation has reduced disruptions in business, across all industries, with new digital technologies and strategies continuing to emerge faster than ever, and MIT has been no exception to this uninterrupted innovation.
The annual MIT Digital Technology and Strategy Conference explores the latest research from across the Institute and its potential impact across industries. The conference highlights MIT's cutting-edge research in areas such as digital platforms, data monetization, quantum computing, digital materials, wireless and satellite communications, human-computer interactions, ML and data science in process automation, formal models for design reuse decisions, digital innovation, and more.
Join MIT faculty, MIT Startup Exchange startups, and industry executives as they discuss their latest innovations, meant to be practical and actionable solutions to accelerate real-world innovation and industry success. The program also offers networking opportunities with top MIT researchers and industry executives.
Registration is closed - onsite registration will be available
REGISTRATION FEE
Visiting MIT: https://www.mit.edu/visitmit/
Where to Stay: https://institute-events.mit.edu/visit/where-to-stay
Registration Questions: ocrevents@mit.edu
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.
Cusumano specializes in strategy, product development, and entrepreneurship in software, automobiles, and consumer electronics. He is a graduate of Princeton (A.B.) and Harvard (Ph.D.) as well as comnpleted two Fulbright Fellowships and a Japan Foundation Fellowship for research in Japan and a two-year postdoctoral fellowship in Production and Operations Management at Harvard Business School. He has been a Special Vice President and Dean at Tokyo University of Science, where he founded the Tokyo Entrepreneurship & Innovation Center. At MIT Sloan, he has recently taught classes on Platform Strategy & Entrepreneurship as well as Strategy and the CEO. He has published 14 books and more than 120 articles. His latest books are The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power (2019, with A. Gawer and D. Yoffie) and Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs (2015, with D. Yoffie, translated into 18 languages).
This talk will review and extend key findings from a recent book, The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power (Harper Business, 2019) by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, and David B. Yoffie. Digital platforms are businesses that connect two or more market actors, with supply or demand driven at least in part by network effects. They are at the core of the most valuable technology companies in the world. The talk will explain how these digital platforms differ from conventional product or service businesses, how they differ among themselves, and why some markets produce spectacular winner-take-all-or-most outcomes while others result in financial losses. We will also consider emerging platforms powered by new enabling technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, gene editing, and quantum computing.
Barbara joined MIT Sloan in June 2013 to serve as a Principal Research Scientist at the MIT Sloan Center for Information Systems Research (CISR). MIT CISR was established in 1974 as a non-profit research group, and it currently is funded by 85 corporate sponsors and patrons. The center undertakes practical research on how firms generate business value from digitization. Barbara’s work focuses on how organizations effectively deliver value from their information assets.
Prior to MIT CISR, Barbara was a tenured faculty member at the University of Virginia (UVA) where she taught undergraduate and graduate courses in data management, business analytics, and IT strategy. She is a two-time recipient of the UVA All-University Teaching Award (2002, 2010), which recognizes teaching excellence in professors, particularly those who inspire and motivate students. This honor is especially meaningful to Barbara because she earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia.
Since the mid–90’s, Barbara has deeply explored data warehousing, business intelligence, analytics, big data, and AI. Her research ranges from large-scale surveys and meta-analyses to lab experiments and in-depth case studies. Five of her cases have placed in the Society for Information Management Paper Awards competition: First American Corporation (1999), Owens and Minor (2000), Continental Airlines (2004), Sprint (2008), and BBVA (2018). Barbara is a leading academic scholar, publishing in such journals as Information Systems Research; MIT Sloan Management Review; MIS Quarterly; and MIS Quarterly Executive. She presents her work globally to academic and business audiences.
Barbara serves as associate editor of the Business Intelligence Journal, research fellow of The Data Warehousing Institute, and fellow of the Teradata University Network. In 2017, Barbara was awarded the Teradata University Network Hugh J. Watson Award for her contributions to the data and analytics academic community via the Teradata University Network. She is the author of two leading systems analysis and design textbooks, published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. She is married and blessed with two daughters.
Companies today are starting to walk the talk when it comes to treating data like a strategic firm asset—they are hiring chief data officers, and rolling out data literacy programs. Yet, to maximize returns from data monetization companies need their people to engage with and experience data firsthand. In this session, Dr. Wixom will share key insights from her research on data monetization to describe what data capabilities distinguish top performing firms; how they optimize data monetization initiatives; and how they motivate pervasive data use.
Learn more about Data Monetization Strategy: Creating Value Through Data online short course from the MIT Sloan School of Management, guided by renowned Faculty Director Dr. Barbara Wixom.
MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Markus J. Buehler, Jerry McAfee Professor of Engineering at MIT, is a leading researcher in materials science and the mechanics of natural and biological protein materials. Markus' expertise spans large-scale atomistic modeling, the interaction of chemistry and mechanics, and the development of multiscale simulation tools. He recently co-developed a method that uses artificial intelligence to generate new protein designs with specific strengths, mimicking natural materials like silk. This approach, which uses computer simulations for testing, allows the creation of proteins with desired mechanical properties, such as strength and flexibility, beyond what is naturally available. Markus earned a Ph.D. at the Max Planck Institute for Metals Research at the University of Stuttgart and held post-doctoral appointments at both Caltech and MIT.
Digital materials are designed through an integrated approach of large-scale computational modeling, material informatics, and artificial intelligence/machine learning to optimize and leverage novel smart material manufacturing through the use of nanotechnology and additive manufacturing, and bio-inspired methods. In this talk we show how we fabricate innovative materials from the molecular scale upwards, with built-in intelligence and novel properties, while sourced from sustainable resources, and breaking the barrier between living and non-living systems. This integrated materiomic approach is revolutionizing the way we design and use materials, and has the potential to impact many industries, as we harness data-driven modeling and manufacturing across domains and applications.
MIT Startup Exchange actively promotes collaboration and partnerships between over 1,500 MIT-connected startups and over 230 corporates that are members of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP). We host a robust schedule of events and facilitate networking and introduction opportunities year round. Qualified startups are those founded and/or led by MIT faculty, staff, or alumni, or are based on MIT-licensed technology. MIT Startup Exchange and ILP are integrated programs of MIT Corporate Relations. STEX25 is a startup accelerator within MIT Startup Exchange, featuring 25 “industry-ready” startups that have proven to be exceptional with early use cases, clients, demos, or partnerships, and are poised for significant growth.
1) Mobi Systems: Solving seemingly intractable human problems for travel, transport and hospitality
2) Manus Robotics:Wearable technologies for empowering independent and functional living
3) Cerebri AI : Powering the personalized enterprise from real-time data to insights to actions
4) Everactive: Always on sensing, no batteries required
5) Meter: Low cost industrial computed tomography
6) Leela AI: Machine vision that understands what it sees
7) Riff Analytics: AI feedback for conversational & collaborative dynamics
8) Fathom Data: Simplifying access to bioprocessing data
9) Jaxon: Automating the process of training AI
10) Prescient Devices: Low-code edge-to-cloud data solutions
Peng Yu is the co-founder and CTO of Mobi Systems. Peng did his PhD in the Model-based Embedded and Robotics Systems group at CSAIL. His research focuses on planning under uncertain conditions, and has worked on applications to autonomous vehicles for deep-sea exploration with WHOI, robotic air taxis with Boeing and intelligent transportation for our cities with Toyota. As the CTO of Mobi he is responsible for the development of the Multi-Activity Planning and Scheduling (MAPS) platform, creating good itinerary and resource allocation solutions for service providers and end-users in the travel and transportation space.
Dr. Faye Wu (S.B. '09, S.M. '12, Ph.D. '17) is the CTO and a co-founder of Manus Robotics, a wearable technology startup dedicated to improving human capabilities. While at MIT, Faye researched medical device design, instrumentation, robotics control, and machine learning. The team she led, developing a device to help those with macular degeneration see more clearly, was selected as a winner of the IDEAS Global Challenge and a finalist of the World Technology Awards. She also invented the Supernumerary Robotic Fingers, a wrist-mounted robot that assists hemiplegic patients with activities of daily living, which prompted the founding of Manus Robotics. Besides overseeing the R&D efforts at Manus, Faye has led the team to win various awards and recognitions, including receiving an NSF Small Business Innovation Research grant and being selected as a finalist of the 2021 MassChallenge Houston cohort.
Dr. Alain Briancon MIT PhD ’86 is CTO of Cerebri AI and leads the design & development of the company’s flagship product – CVX 3, the industry’s leading real-time continuous intelligence platform featuring low-code data engineering and state-of-the-art AI models for propensity, affinity, commitment and actions. CVX 3 is built around one central premise – if a predictive data element in a time-series ( e.g. customer journey ) changes we should have new AI scores and actions incorporating these changes in less than a second. Alain has had 66 patents granted by the USPTO alone, and has extensive experience in big data, mobile systems and IoT. Alain has applied AI and data science in a wide range of applications predicting appliance failures, elections, food and diet management, and now real-time continuous intelligence. Alain’s favorite questions at Cerebri AI are “can we make it faster?” and “can we make it easier for the user?”. His favorite answer is "I don't know. What’s best in class?”.
In his current role, John is responsible for developing and driving partnership engagements with leading industrial equipment suppliers and service providers, and for the end-to-end development and deployment of Everactive’s partnership and ecosystem strategy. During his time with the company, he has helped drive its growth from Series A to Series C and 10 to 100 employees while holding various leadership roles, including the sales and people operations functions. Prior to Everactive, John worked in management consulting in Washington, D.C., supporting Fortune 100 healthcare and technology clients. John received his MBA from the University of Virginia’s Darden School, where he was a William Michael Shermet Scholar, and his BA, magna cum laude, from Colgate University. John and his wife, Emily, reside in Menlo Park, CA.
Eduardo is an engineer, product creator, and entrepreneur with experience transforming difficult to use hardware into accessible, affordable products. Eduardo is the co-founder and CEO of Meter. He splits his time between company headquarters in Cambridge, MA and the Meter satellite office in San Francisco, CA. Previously he led the engineering and product development efforts for the Fuse 1 at Formlabs. During graduate school he created PlantLink, an internet connected soil moisture monitoring platform for gardeners that was acquired by Scotts Miracle-Gro. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Baylor University and a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Dr. Cyrus Shaoul is an entrepreneur and computational psycholinguist with extensive experience in computational cognitive modeling. Dr. Shaoul was a co-founder and CTO of Digital Garage Inc until its IPO in 2001. He has deep experience with natural language models and machine learning techniques. He is a graduate of MIT (BSc) and the University of Alberta (MSc, Phd).
Beth Porter is cofounder and CEO of Riff Analytics, an AI startup out of MIT that measures conversational dynamics to help people build situational and social awareness, especially when they collaborate. Porter’s philosophy is that people learn best from each other, and learning fosters both personal growth and organizational innovation and change. She teaches IT Strategies to MBAs at Boston University, where her students work in small, peer learning groups throughout the course. Prior roles include VP Product for edX, VP Software Product Management for Pearson Education, and senior engineering and product management positions at Mathsoft and PTC.
Liz Maida is the co-founder and CEO of Fathom and was previously the co-founder and CEO of Uplevel Security (acquired by McAfee in 2019). Uplevel applied graph theory and machine learning to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of security operations teams. Prior to McAfee, Liz served in multiple executive roles at Akamai Technologies focused on technology strategy and new product development. Liz holds a BS from Princeton University and dual MS degrees from MIT. Her graduate school research examined the application of graph theory to network interconnection.
Scott is the Co-Founder/CEO of Jaxon, an AI-powered training workbench for building custom, domain-specific machine learning applications. Jaxon eliminates the biggest bottleneck in AI today by automating the process of labeling data, allowing data science teams to build fully-trained models in days vs months. Scott is a serial technologist and patented inventor with a penchant for pushing the envelope of innovation. Scott was a pioneer in the wireless imaging industry, having created one of the first systems able to send images and data to mobile devices for Federal, State, and Local First Responders. Just prior to Jaxon, Scott grew and sold a machine learning consulting firm to over 100 consultants called BigR.io. Scott holds a Bachelor of Science from Union College, an MBA from Northeastern University, and a Master of Science from the Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University with coursework performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Dr. Pablo Acosta is a senior technologist whose extensive and comprehensive experience includes challenging high-speed mixed-signal IC design, signal processing algorithms, EDA tool development, and authoring industry standards. Pablo’s multi-million-dollar products have been used in a broad range of sectors, including consumer, professional video, and networking. Pablo received a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has published several papers in peer-reviewed journals and is the principal inventor in four patents.
1) Mobi Systems; 2) Manus Robotics; 3) Cerebri AI; 4) Everactive; 5) Meter; 6) Leela AI; 7) Riff Analytics; 8) Fathom Data; 9) Jaxon; 10) Prescient Devices
Exhibit Only
11) Kebotix: New chemicals development at unprecedented speed
Dr. Anthony is Associate Director of MIT.nano, Faculty Lead for the Industry Immersion Program in Mechanical Engineering, and Co-Director of the MIT Clinical Research Center. With over 25 years’ experience in product realization—Dr. Anthony won an Emmy (from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) in broadcast technical innovation—Dr. Anthony designs instruments and techniques to monitor and control physical systems. His work involves systems analysis and design and calling upon mechanical, electrical, and optical engineering, along with computer science and optimization, to create solutions.
The focus of Dr. Anthony’s research is computational instrumentation—the design of instruments and techniques to measure and control complex physical systems. His research includes the development of instrumentation and measurement solutions for manufacturing systems and medical diagnostics and imaging systems. In addition to his academic work, he has extensive experience in market-driven technology innovation, product realization, and business entrepreneurship and commercialization at the intersection between information technology and advanced manufacturing. His teaching interests include the modelling of large-scale systems in a wide variety of decision-making domains and the development of optimization algorithms and software for analyzing and designing such systems. He has extensive experience in market-driven technology innovation as well as business entrepreneurship.
The availability of computation power has triggered a strong emphasis on control methods that utilize machine learning, especially deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We use deep reinforcement learning algorithms to learn models of, and to control, complex manufacturing processes without prior analytical or numerical models of the systems. We describe approaches for retrofitting onto existing systems and for deploying into new applications.
Leslie Owens is a Senior Lecturer in the Information Technology group and is also the Executive Director of the MIT Center for Information Systems Research (CISR).
Nipa is a global digital transformation leader helping clients transform their businesses through data analytics and artificial intelligence solutions. She is leading the Digital Intelligence team Globally for GHD for last two years. Her team’s expertise and contribution cover data & digital strategy, data collection, data management, drawing insights from data especially spatial data, predictive-prescriptive analytics, machine learning, and a productized solution – GHD.ai.
Nipa has proven expertise in enterprise-wide transformation with advanced data management and application of Analytics. She is adept at building large Global data, analytics, and data science teams – leading and inspiring teams to drive performance excellence. She has a track record of enabling her customers to generate significant revenue from application of statistical analysis, predictive modelling, machine learning, and monetization of data. She is an expert at communicating to business and technical audiences, relationship building, and presenting to large audiences.
Before joining GHD in June-2019, Nipa served as the leader of analytics in Dun & Bradstreet for ~20 years, and last 4 years as the Chief Analytics Officer. During that time, she focused primarily on Financial Services where much of the applied data science innovation was happening. She is bringing her experience and expertise from there to GHD sectors where the application of data science are varied and yields benefits for communities as well as businesses. She is inspired by the applications in sectors like Environment, Water, Infrastructure. Her team is collaborating with GHD engineers on projects on remediation of contaminated lands, reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, removing lead pipes from households in under-privileged communities, or solving clean drinking water scarcity problems.
Nipa considers herself incredibly lucky to be able to work in this converging digital space between analytics & technology. Her involvement started in this space long time ago when she worked for a defense lab (Sandia National Lab) and worked on the very first version of an artificial agent-based microsimulation model of the U.S. economy.
Nipa has a Ph.d. in Economics from SUNY Albany.
Paola Lucetti is an Information Technology Senior executive with extensive experience in strategy design, execution, and operations at a Fortune 100 global company.
Having lived and worked in Italy, Switzerland, Spain, the Philippines, and the United States of America, Paola has more than twenty years of successful leadership roles in Information Technology in Europe, North America, Asia, and Global businesses across Procter & Gamble.
Paola has very strong experience in processes and technologies for Supply Chain, Research and Development, Marketing, and Sales. She has great passion for organization design and development, talent development, equality and inclusion.
She graduated Summa cum laude from the University of Florence, Italy, with a degree in Electronic Engineering, specializing in biomedicine. Paola also completed a one-year research thesis on commercial ultrasound machines used for 3D Doppler and published scientific articles on the topic.
Paola is currently the CIO for Procter & Gamble’s Global Grooming Sector which includes the biggest shaving brands in the world—Gillette, Venus, Braun, Joy, and The Art of Shaving—serving millions of consumers. Paola is accountable for the definition and the execution of holistic technology enabled capabilities required to support the growth of the Global Grooming Sector. She leads IT and Digital transformations to enable and amplify the Grooming business strategies.
Eric Bergemann is Senior Director of Executive Programs at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he oversees a portfolio of non-degree executive programs. He has worked with firms in the fields of energy, pharmaceuticals/life science, mobility, high technology, banking/finance, and consumer products. Bergemann is active in business development, and is the Executive Education capability development leader in Program & Instructional Design Methodology and Improvement. In 2009, he received the MIT Sloan Appreciation Team Award.
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.
George Westerman is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Founder of the Global Opportunity Forum (http://gof.mit.edu).
George’s work bridges the fields of executive leadership and technology strategy. During more than 20 years with MIT Sloan School of Management, he has written three award-winning books, including Leading Digital: Turning Technology Into Business Transformation. As a pioneering researcher on digital transformation, George has published papers in Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, and other top journals. He is now focused on helping employers, educators, and other groups to rethink the process of workforce learning around the world through the GOF and several research collaborations.
George is cochair of the MIT Sloan CIO Leadership Awards, a member of the Digital Strategy Roundtable for the US Library of Congress, and member of the Board of Directors for Workcred. He works frequently with senior management teams and industry groups around the world. Prior to earning a Doctorate from Harvard Business School, he gained more than 13 years of experience in product development and technology leadership roles.
Companies and researchers have been talking about digital transformation for many years. While not all are good at it yet, most understand the key concepts. But in leading digital transformation, much more is needed than just speaking the language -- or even just choosing and executing digital projects. A new wave of capability and change is now emerging as critical to success for companies and individuals. Drawing on more than ten years researching and working with executives on these topics, digital transformation pioneer George Westerman will share his latest insights on how to prepare your company for success in the coming years.
William D. Oliver is a Principal Investigator in the Engineering Quantum Systems Group (MIT campus) and the Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems Group (MIT Lincoln Laboratory). 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. Will is a Fellow of the American Physical Society; serves on the National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee and the US Committee for Superconducting Electronics; is an IEEE Applied Superconductivity Conference (ASC) Board Member; and is a member of IEEE, APS, Sigma Xi, Phi Beta Kappa, and Tau Beta Pi.
Will received his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the Stanford University, the SM in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a BS in Electrical Engineering and BA in Japanese from the University of Rochester (NY).
Quantum computers have the potential to solve complex problems in fields such as finance, material science, and pharmaceuticals. The race is on to build a universal fault tolerant quantum computer.
This talk will discuss the different ways you can build quantum computer, the promise, and the challenges facing quantum computing today.
Dr. John Chiaverini is a senior staff member in the Quantum Information and Integrated Nanosystems Group, pursuing research in quantum computing and sensing, precision measurement, and quantum simulation.
Most recently, Dr. Chiaverini co-led a team investigating limits to fidelity in trapped-ion quantum processing operations; such limits are due to noise from ion trap electrode surfaces. This experimental work was the first to suggest that the root cause of such noise may be non-material-specific adsorbates, rather than a source inherent to the particular electrode material used; this research has the potential to allow scaling of trapped-ion systems to higher speeds. Previously, while also at Lincoln Laboratory, Dr. Chiaverini developed a clean and rapid ion-loading technique, a stepping-stone toward large-scale trapped-ion processors. He has also investigated the applicability of quantum simulation to practical problems in quantum chemistry.
Dr. Chiaverini's doctoral research explored non-Newtonian gravity at small length scales and was based on a microcantilever Cavendish-style experiment. This work was one of the first to put stringent bounds on novel gravity effects at the 10–100 micron length scale. He did postdoctoral work at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)–Boulder, where he implemented quantum algorithms, such as quantum teleportation and the quantum Fourier transform, in systems of trapped ions, while also developing a novel surface-ion-trap technology for more straightforward microfabrication and integration. He then took a staff position in the Physics Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he further developed ion-trap integration technologies for quantum simulation before coming to Lincoln Laboratory.
Dr. Chiaverini has authored or coauthored numerous papers and delivered many invited conference and seminar presentations in the fields of trapped-ion quantum processing, precision measurement, micromechanical systems, and condensed-matter physics.
Dr. Chiaverini received a BS degree in physics from Case Western Reserve University, where he studied the experimental growth dynamics of solid helium crystals, and earned a PhD degree at Stanford University.
Single atomic ions, held and manipulated via electromagnetic fields, form a promising physical implementation of a quantum computer. These trapped ions embody ideal qubits, isolated from the environment such that they exhibit extremely long coherence times. To realize the promise of practical quantum computing, however, improved control technologies must be developed in order to allow low-error quantum logic operations on arrays of many ions. Chip-based trapping structures support the integration of optical and electronic devices that can lead to faster, more robust control of ion arrays. Exploring the interplay of these quantum and classical technologies and tackling the emerging engineering challenges of such systems can potentially enable novel sensing, computing, and scientific capabilities.
Nicholas Roy is the Bisplinghoff Professor of Aeronautics & Astronautics and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a B.Sc. in Physics and Cognitive Science an M.Sc. in Computer Science, both from McGill University. He received his Ph. D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003. He has made research contributions to planning under uncertainty, machine learning, human-computer interaction and aerial robotics. He founded and led Project Wing at Google [X] from 2012-2014. He is currently the Director of Quest Systems Engineering in MIT's Quest for Intelligence.
I will give an overview of the Quest for Intelligence, an initiative on campus designed to investigate the science and engineering of intelligence, how brains produce it and how it could be replicated in artificial systems. I will describe a vision of how new scientific hypotheses about the mechanisms of natural intelligence may lead to new state of the art abilities of artificial intelligence. I will do a deeper examination of one of the Quest's recently-started missions in embodied intelligence, and show how structured representations allow autonomous robots to learn to perform complex tasks.
Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems Editor-in-Chief of the journal Systems Engineering Executive Director, MIT Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) Study Co-Director, Center for Complex Engineering Systems at KACST and MIT Secretary and Treasurer, Council of Engineering Systems Universities (CESUN)
Prof. de Weck is an international leader in Systems Engineering research. He focuses on how complex man-made systems such as aircraft, spacecraft, automobiles, printers and critical infrastructures are designed, manufactured and operated and how they evolve over time. His main emphasis is on the strategic properties of these systems that have the potential to maximize lifecycle value. His group has developed quantitative methods and tools that explicitly consider manufacturability, flexibility, robustness, and sustainability among other characteristics. Significant results include the Adaptive Weighted Sum (AWS) method for resolving tradeoffs amongst competing objectives, the Delta-Design Structure Matrix (DDSM) for technology infusion analysis, Time-Expanded Decision Networks (TDN) and the SpaceNet and HabNet simulation environments. These methods have impacted complex systems in space exploration (NASA, JPL), oil and gas exploration (BP) as well as sophisticated electro-mechanical products (e.g. Xerox, Pratt & Whitney, GM, DARPA). He has authored two books and about 250 peer-reviewed papers to date. He is a Fellow of INCOSE and an Associate Fellow of AIAA. Since January 2013 he serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Systems Engineering. In 2006 he received the Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising followed by the 2010 Marion MacDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising and a 2012 AIAA Teaching Award. From 2008-2011 he served as Associate Director of the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) at MIT. From 2011 to 2013 he served as Executive Director of the MIT Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) project.