The pace of technological innovation continues accelerating, disrupting industries as diverse as healthcare, transportation, education, finance, mining, food, and retail, challenging companies to reinvent themselves to stay relevant and productive. What are leading sources of disruption to our status quo, and how can we be better prepared to turn challenge and disruption into opportunity and advantage? Join the 2016 MIT Research and Development Conference to explore some of the latest disruptions emerging from MIT labs and hear from the researchers, entrepreneurs, and executives leading disruption today.
• Energy • Bioinspired Materials • Future of Autonomy • Advanced Manufacturing • Frugal Innovation • Internet of Things • Brains, Minds and Machines
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.
MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte takes you on a journey through the last 30 years of tech. The consummate predictor highlights interfaces and innovations he foresaw in the 1970s and 1980s that were scoffed at then but are ubiquitous today. And he leaves you with one last (absurd? brilliant?) prediction for the coming 30 years.
Professor of Media Technology Chairman Emeritus, MIT Media Laboratory Chairman, One Laptop per Child (OLPC) MIT Media Laboratory
The co-founder of the MIT Media Laboratory and an MIT graduate, Media Laboratory Chairman Emeritus Nicholas Negroponte has been an MIT faculty member since 1966. He was the founder of MIT's pioneering Architecture Machine Group, a combination lab and think tank responsible for many radically new approaches to the human-computer interface. In 1995, he published the New York Times bestseller Being Digital, which has been translated into over 40 languages. In the private sector, Negroponte serves on the board of directors for Motorola, Inc., and as a special general partner in a venture capital firm focusing on technologies for information and entertainment. He was a founder of WiReD magazine and has been an "angel investor" for over 40 start-ups, including three in China. Negroponte helped to establish, and serves as chairman of, the 2B1 Foundation, an organization dedicated to bringing computer access to children in the most remote and poorest parts of the world. He is chairman of One Laptop per Child (OLPC), a non-profit organization created by faculty members from the MIT Media Lab to design, manufacture, and distribute the $100 Laptop.
Over the past 100 years, The Boeing Company has introduced some of the most awe-inspiring innovations that mankind has ever seen, such as the B-47 Stratojet bomber aircraft, the Space Shuttle, and the 747 and 787 jetliners. To ensure its second century is even better than its first, Boeing is following a highly integrated R&D strategy, in order to ensure technologies are ready when needed and maximize the company’s return on its R&D investment. In this presentation, Dr. Greg Hyslop, chief technology officer of Boeing, will explain this strategy.
Dr. Greg Hyslop is the chief technology officer of The Boeing Company and senior vice president of Boeing Engineering, Test & Technology. Hyslop oversees the development and implementation of the enterprise technology investment strategy, and his portfolio of responsibilities includes the companywide Boeing Engineering function; Boeing Research & Technology (BR&T), the company’s advanced central research and development organization; and Boeing Test & Evaluation (BT&E), the team that verifies and validates Boeing’s commercial and defense products.
In his role leading the Engineering function, which includes more than 50,000 engineers around the world, Hyslop partners with the Engineering leaders for Boeing business units to ensure One Boeing solutions that support programs across the enterprise. He also plays a key role in decisions that affect the technical integrity of Boeing products, services and processes.
Hyslop reports to Boeing Chairman, President and CEO Dennis Muilenburg and is a member of the company’s Executive Council.
Previously, Hyslop was the vice president and general manager of BR&T, leading a team of nearly 4,000 engineers, scientists, technicians and technologists who create and collaborate with R&D partners around the world to provide innovative system solutions and technologies to solve the aerospace industry’s toughest challenges. Named to this position in February 2013, Hyslop had oversight of operations at five research centers in the U.S. including Alabama, California, Missouri, South Carolina and Washington, as well as six research centers in Australia, Brazil, China, Europe, India and Russia.
Prior to his BR&T role, Hyslop served as vice president and general manager of Boeing Strategic Missile & Defense Systems (SM&DS) for four years. He led the SM&DS team to deliver integrated solutions for missile defense, strategic missile systems as well as several directed energy technologies and systems.
Hyslop also has held Boeing leadership posts with the Ground-based Midcourse Defense program, Airborne Laser program and Special Projects-Dallas. In addition, he supported a number of cruise missile programs including Tomahawk, Harpoon, Standoff Land Attack Missile (SLAM) and Standoff Land Attack Missile – Expanded Response (SLAM-ER) since joining the McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company, now part of Boeing, in 1982 as a guidance and control engineer.
Hyslop is a member of the Aeronautics Committee of the NASA Advisory Council. He has a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering and a Master of Science degree in mathematics from the University of Nebraska, where he currently serves as a member of the university’s Engineering College Advisory Board. Hyslop also has a Doctor of Science degree in systems science and mathematics from Washington University in St. Louis, where he served as an adjunct professor.
One of the critical challenges for R&D leaders, and corporate leaders emphasizing growth through innovation is to develop the relevant internal expertise to move ideas from the earliest stages of development through to impact on the economy. Traditional functional approaches emphasize deep levels of technical competence with the R&D function, interacting (through cross-functional teams), with marketing and manufacturing expertise as technologies move to market. However experience from entrepreneurial start-ups suggest a different process that relies more on the engagement throughout the idea to impact journey for technical professionals. This is certainly an important aspiration for millennials when they seek employment opportunities. This talk with explore these changing dynamics, and the implications for education – both within universities and inside corporations as technical professionals expand their knowledge base beyond their traditional disciplines.
Associate Dean For Innovation Co-Director MIT Innovation Initiative William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship Faculty Director Legatum Center MIT Sloan School of Management
Professor Fiona Murray is the Associate Dean of Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, William Porter (1967) Professor of Entrepreneurship. She is the Co-Director of MIT’s Initiative for Innovation and also an associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
She is an international expert on the transformation of investments in scientific and technical innovation into innovation-based entrepreneurship that drives jobs, wealth creation, and regional prosperity. She has a special interest in entrepreneurship, the commercialization of science and the economics of entrepreneurship and innovation. She has done extensive work with entrepreneurs, governments, large corporations and philanthropists designing and evaluating the policies and programs that shape vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems: prizes competitions, accelerators, patent licensing rules and proof of concept funding programs.
A former scientist trained at Harvard University and the University of Oxford, Murray has taught and published extensively on fostering cultures that bridge scientific innovation and entrepreneurship, building effective entrepreneurial strategies for science-based businesses (in biotech and biomedical companies and recently, clean energy), and evaluating the commercial potential of novel scientific ideas. Closely tied to real world problems, Fiona works with public policy makers and entrepreneurs designing and evaluating the policies and programs that shape vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystems: prizes competitions, accelerators, patent licensing rules and proof of concept funding programs. She also works with large global corporations who seek to leverage the ideas of a wide range of internal scientists as well as external entrepreneurs through novel programs such as prize competitions. Her recent engagements have focused on relationships that span the public and private sectors. She is particularly interested in new emerging organizational arrangements for the effective commercialization of science, including public-private partnerships, not-for-profits, venture philanthropy, and university-initiated seed funding and innovation-focused competitions and prizes.
After a short time on the faculty of Oxford University’s Said Business School, Murray joined MIT Sloan where she is now Faculty Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. In this role, Fiona works on the design and delivery of entrepreneurship education at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She teaches the “Innovation Teams” course, which assembles teams of students from across MIT to learn the process of technology commercialization, with a focus on evaluating a technology’s potential for significant commercial and social impact. She has recently started the REAL course – Regional Entrepreneurial Acceleration Lab - which gives students practical and academic insights into the design and development of entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world. These courses encourage cross-campus collaborations that move scientific discoveries closer towards marketable products and allow for students from different stakeholder perspectives to understand the broader entrepreneurial ecosystem. She also has a particular interest in the entrepreneurial education of scientists and engineers, and in the role of women in entrepreneurship and commercialization of science.
Fiona has spoken at events worldwide about building entrepreneurial capacity built upon the engine of scientific research. She also speaks in academic and policy settings on innovation and intellectual property in the scientific community. She has been published in a wide range of journals, including Science, Nature, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Biotechnology, American Journal of Sociology, Research Policy, Organization Science, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization.
Murray has served on the faculty at MIT Sloan since 1999. In 2006 she was promoted to Associate Professor in the Technological Innovation & Entrepreneurship Strategic Management Group and in 2009 became Faculty Director of the Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Previously, Murray held positions at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, the Asian Development Bank, and United Nations Environment Program in Kenya.
Murray received her BA ’89 and MA ‘90 from the University of Oxford in Chemistry. She subsequently moved to the United States and earned an AM ’92 and PhD ’96 from Harvard University in Applied Sciences. She serves on the Prime Minister’s Council on Science and Technology in the United Kingdom.
Speakers: Jon Garrity, co-founder, TagUp (STEX25) Alex Gruzen, CEO, Witricity David S. Lashmore, PhD., CEO, American Boronite Corporation Todd Mostak, CEO & founder, MapD Alfonso Perez, Chairman & Founder, New Valence Robotics (NV Bots)
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.
The Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) cultivates and supports research partnerships between MIT undergraduates and faculty. One of the earliest programs of its kind in the United States, MIT’s UROP invites undergraduates to participate in research as the junior colleagues of Institute faculty. The late Margaret L. A. MacVicar, Professor of Physical Science and Dean for Undergraduate Education, created MIT’s UROP in 1969, inspired by Edwin H. Land. Land, the inventor of instant photography, believed in the power of learning by doing.
UROP offers the chance to work on cutting edge research—whether you join established research projects or pursue your own ideas. As UROPers, undergraduates participate in each phase of standard research activity: developing research plans, writing proposals, conducting research, analyzing data and presenting research results in oral and written form.
MIT students use their UROP experiences to become familiar with the faculty, learn about potential majors, and investigate areas of interest. UROPers gain practical skills and knowledge they eventually apply to careers after graduation or as graduate students. Most importantly, they become involved in exciting research!
UROP projects take place during the academic year, as well as over the summer, and research can be done in any academic department or interdisciplinary laboratory. Projects can last for an entire semester, and many continue for a year or more.
Once you have found the UROP project that is right for you, you need to decide what form of compensation you hope to receive.
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.
2016 Startup Exhibitors 510 Nano Accion Systems (STEX25) Aerva American Boronite Corporation BioBright (STEX25) CAD Nexus Composable Analytics Gamalon (STEX25) Lexumo (STEX25) Lunar Station New Valence Robotics (NV Bots) MapD Speedy Packets TagUp (STEX25) TransitX Witricity
With ~70 new reactors under construction worldwide, the nuclear industry is currently experiencing moderate growth. However, a much greater expansion is needed if nuclear is to play a significant role in combating climate change. The challenges hindering further growth of nuclear energy utilization include: (i) the high capital cost (3-4 billion dollars per 1000 MWe of installed capacity) and long lead time (5-7 years) required to build new plants; (ii) the negative perception about safety of nuclear plants in the public and governments of some (but not all) countries; (iii) the scarcity of sites suitable for nuclear plants (NIMBY syndrome); (iv) an inherent inability of nuclear plants to adapt to changes in market conditions (merchant vs. regulated) and/or mode of operation (load follow vs. baseload); and (v) the concerns about disposal of nuclear spent fuel.
If these challenges are properly addressed, there are major opportunities for nuclear to reduce carbon emissions worldwide and conquer new markets; for example, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) has estimated that 150-200 nuclear plants, each generating 1000 MWe, would be needed to generate enough electricity to enable conversion of the whole fleet of passenger cars and light trucks in the U.S. to plug-in hybrids, thus effectively ridding the U.S. of its dependence on oil, and drastically reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Nuclear heat can also be used to convert biomass to biofuel: if all liquid fuel used for transportation in the U.S. came from biomass (e.g., corn, potato waste), the energy required from nuclear plants (in the form of low temperature steam) would be about 260 GWt. Similar figures (properly scaled) apply to most other major industrial and developing countries worldwide.
MIT has launched an ambitious R&D initiative which will be supported by 100s of millions of dollars primarily from the private sector, to develop low-carbon energy technologies, including nuclear fission and fusion. We present here a comprehensive vision to make nuclear fission the world’s primary energy source by 2050. It involves a mix of existing and new reactor technologies, such as LWRs and liquid-salt cooled reactors, as well as innovations in construction, delivery and safety of nuclear plants (e.g. via shipyard construction and ocean siting), daily and seasonal energy storage schemes (e.g. firebrick, underground rock), synthetic fuel production (e.g. via new electro-catalytic processes that turn seawater into fuel!), and new fuel cycle solutions (e.g. deep boreholes) that will resolve societal concerns about the environmental sustainability of nuclear energy.
TEPCO Professor and Associate Department Head, Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) Director, Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems (CANES) - MITEI Low-Carbon Energy Center Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow MIT Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering
Jacopo Buongiorno is the TEPCO Professor and Associate Department Head of Nuclear Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in thermo-fluids engineering and nuclear reactor engineering. Jacopo has published over 70 journal articles in the areas of reactor safety and design, two-phase flow and heat transfer, and nanofluid technology. For his research work and his teaching at MIT he won several awards, including, recently, the Ruth and Joel Spira Award (MIT, 2015), and the Landis Young Member Engineering Achievement Award (American Nuclear Society, 2011). He is the Director of the Center for Advanced Energy Systems (CANES), which is one of eight Low-Carbon-Energy Centers (LCEC) of the MIT Energy initiative (MITEI). Jacopo is a consultant for the nuclear industry in the area of reactor thermal-hydraulics, and a member of the Accrediting Board of the National Academy of Nuclear Training. He is also a member of the American Nuclear Society (and served on its Special Committee on Fukushima in 2011-2012), the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and a participant in the Defense Science Study Group (2014-2015).
An important evolution in the provision and consumption of electricity services is underway. Technological advances in information and communication technologies, demand response, distributed generation, energy storage, and advanced power electronics and control devices are creating new options for the provision of electricity services. A framework for proactive regulatory reform is needed to enable the efficient evolution of the power system, including improvements to the pricing of electricity services, incentives for distribution utilities, power sector structure, and electricity market design. With this framework in place, myriad consumers and producers of electricity services can make efficient choices based on accurate incentives reflecting the economic value of these services and their own diverse personal preferences.
Visiting Professor of Applied Economics, MIT Sloan School of Management Professor and Director of the BP Chair on Energy and Sustainability, Comillas University, Spain
MS and PhD in Electrical Engineering from MIT, and Electrical Engineer from Comillas University in Madrid, Spain. Since 2008 visiting professor at the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (MIT, Boston, USA). Co-Director of the MIT Low Carbon Center on Electric Power Systems. Professor and Director of the BP Chair on Sustainable Development at Comillas University, Madrid, Spain, and founder and director for 11 years of its Institute for Research in Technology (IIT). Professor and Director of Training at the Florence School of Regulation in the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Life member of the Spanish Royal Academy of Engineering and Fellow of IEEE. Commissioner at the Spanish Electricity Regulatory Commission (1995-2000). Independent Member of the Single Electricity Market Committee of Ireland (2007-2012). Member of the Board of Appeal of the Agency for the Coordination of Energy Regulators (ACER) in the EU (2011-2016). Review editor of the 5th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Consultant and lecturer in more than 35 countries. Author and editor of several books, more than 200 papers, principal investigator in about 100 research projects and supervisor of 35 doctoral theses and more than 100 master theses. His current areas of research are future trends in energy regulation, strategic issues in universal energy access, and operation and planning of power systems with a strong presence of renewable generation and other decentralized resources.
A new generation of HTS superconducting technology makes feasible fusion magnet coils that can more than double the magnetic field strength compared to present superconductor technology. This doubling of field quadruples the magnetic pressure, and by consequence the amount of fusion power produced per volume is increased by a factor of 16. This presents a quantum leap in the ability of fusion energy to be feasible in small scale device, while simultaneously making it economically competitive against present energy sources. These superconductors are also in the form of flexible high-strength tapes, which can provide demountable joints for the coils, realizing a highly modular design and simplified nuclear technology for fusion devices, further increasing their attractiveness. The high magnetic field accessed by HTS is illuminating a faster, more effective path to fusion energy. We will describe two devices, SPARC and ARC, which demonstrate an accelerated pathway to fusion energy through the use of technology advances that retire programmatic risks up front at small cost.
Dennis Whyte is a recognized leader in the field of fusion research using the magnetic confinement of plasmas for energy production on a faster, smaller, and more innovative path. Dennis is a Fellow of the American Physical Society, has over 300 publications, and is heavily involved as an educator. He is widely recognized for his themes of innovation and the need for speed and economic viability in fusion. He has served on panels for the National Academies, the U.S. government, and the Royal Society. As director of Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) he presents the Center’s vision to peer institutions and recruits faculty and scientists to the team. The core of the SPARC project was formed over eight years ago during a design course led by Dennis to challenge assumptions in fusion. Many of the ideas underpinning the high-field approach — including the use of HTS for high-field, demountable magnets, liquid blankets, and ARC — have been conceived of or significantly advanced in these courses. Dennis’ leadership as director of PSFC has been a key enabler for the SPARC project, providing the stature necessary to bring the institutional and outside support to the project.
What if we could design materials that integrate powerful concepts of living organisms – self-organization, the ability to self-heal, tunability, and an amazing flexibility to create astounding material properties from abundant and inexpensive raw materials? This talk will present a review of bottom-up analysis and design of materials for various purposes – as structural materials such as bone in our body or for lightweight composites, for applications as coatings, and as multifunctional sensors to measure small changes in humidity, temperature or stress. These new materials are designed from the bottom up and through a close coupling of experiment and powerful computation as we assemble structures, atom by atom. Materiomics investigates the material properties of natural and synthetic materials by examining fundamental links between processes, structures and properties at multiple scales, from nano to macro, by using systematic experimental, theoretical or computational methods. We review case studies of joint experimental-computational work of biomimetic materials design, manufacturing and testing for the development of strong, tough and smart mutable materials for applications as protective coatings, cables and structural materials. We outline challenges and opportunities for technological innovation for biomaterials and beyond, exploiting novel concepts of mathematics based on category theory, which leads to a new way to organize hierarchical structure-property information. Altogether, the use of a new paradigm to design materials from the bottom up plays a critical role in advanced manufacturing, providing flexibility, tailorability and efficiency.
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.
The way proteins and other biomolecules move, with some regions remaining nearly stationary and others fluctuating rapidly, is central to their function in biology. In fact, all biological events are mediated by molecular motions of this kind. This principle is widely accepted, but is not generally exploited in the design of materials that interact with the body. This deficiency is due to the experimental challenges associated with performing dynamics measurements on the appropriate, sub-nanometer, length scales. In our laboratory, we develop novel dynamics characterization techniques that we use to look inside soft nanomaterials on sub-nanometer length scales. This capability allows us to reveal a view of the dynamic microstructure of an entire class of materials. This capability has significant potential implications in biomedical technologies ranging from tissue engineering and regenerative medicine to drug design and delivery.
John Chipman Career Development Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Julia Ortony joins the Department of Materials Science and Engineering faculty in January 2016. She earned her B.S. in chemistry at the University of Minnesota and her Ph.D. in materials chemistry at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Professor Ortony’s research interests consist of two main thrusts: (1) The design and optimization of soft materials with nanoscale structure for important new technologies, and (2) The development of advanced instrumentation for measuring conformational and water dynamics analogous to molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. Professor Ortony's group (which is scheduled to start up in late fall of 2015) will combine these two efforts to investigate technologies ranging from energy to biological materials with special consideration paid to molecular motion.
Growing evidence supports a critical role of metal-coordination complex crosslinking in soft biological material properties such as underwater adhesion and self-healing. Given their exploitation in such desirable material applications in nature, bio-inspired metal-coordinate complex crosslinking no doubt provides unique possibilities to further advance synthetic polymer materials engineering. Using bio-inspired metal-binding polymers, initial efforts to mimic these material properties have shown promise. In addition, novel opportunities for new fundamental insights on how hierarchical polymer network mechanics can be strongly coupled to supramolecular crosslink dynamics are also emerging. Early lessons from studies of these hierarchical chemo-mechanical couplings will be presented.
Henry L Doherty Assistant Professor in Ocean Utilization MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Niels Holten-Andersen, an Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, joined the MIT faculty in September 2012. He holds the B.Sc. in Biology from the University of Copenhagen, the B.Sc.Hon. in Molecular Biology from the University of Canterbury, the M.Sc. in Cell Biology from the University of Copenhagen, and the Ph.D. in Biomolecular Science and Engineering from the University of California-Santa Barbara. He was previously a post-doc at the University of Chicago; his work on cross-linking, self-healing soft matter, and bio-inspired materials will help to move the department in bold new directions.
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.
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.
A spring-loaded box designed to safely contain and deploy tiny spacecraft as stowaways on expensive rockets drove a paradigm shift in the satellite industry. For over a decade, this simple innovation, the CubeSat Deployer, has slashed the cost of access to space, enabled rapid innovation and miniaturization of space technology, and upended an industry once legendary for its reliance on heritage and risk-aversion. Constellations of over a hundred small satellites are being fielded, replenished quarterly with advanced units. They currently require dozens of ground stations on Earth. Trailblazing efforts are underway to automate spacecraft operations and data recovery, moving decision-making processes from humans on the ground to intelligent onboard algorithms, networking with crosslinks between space nodes to optimize observations, reduce latency, and improve robustness.
Kerri Cahoy is an Associate Professor of AeroAstro at MIT. Cahoy received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA, in 2000, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA, in 2002 and 2008, respectively. Cahoy currently is the Co-Director of the Small Satellite Center, and leads the Space Telecommunications, Astronomy, and Radiation (STAR) Laboratory. Cahoy's research focuses include nanosatellite atmospheric sensing, optical communications, and exoplanet technology demonstration missions.
This talk will describe recent progress on planning and control of autonomous systems operating in dynamic environments, with an emphasis on addressing the planning challenges faced on various timescales. For example, autonomous robotic agents need to plan/execute safe paths and avoid imminent collisions given noisy sensory information (short timescale), interact with other dynamic agents whose intents are typically not known (medium timescale), and perform complex cooperative tasks given imperfect models and knowledge of the environment (long timescale). These planning tasks are often constrained to be done using onboard computation and perception, which typically adds significant complexity to the system. The talk will highlight several recently developed solutions to these challenges that have been implemented to demonstrate high-speed acrobatic flight of a quadrotor in unknown, cluttered environments, autonomous navigation of a ground vehicle in complex indoor environments alongside pedestrians, and real-time cooperative multiagent planning with an onboard deep learning-based perception system.
Jonathan P. How is the Richard C. Maclaurin Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received a B.A.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1987, and his S.M. and Ph.D. from MIT in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Prior to joining MIT in 2000, he was an assistant professor at Stanford University. He was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Control Systems Magazine (2015-19) and was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control System Society in 2019. His research focuses on robust planning and learning under uncertainty, with an emphasis on multiagent systems. He is a Fellow of IEEE and AIAA and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2021.
Recent technological advances in legged robots are opening up a new era of mobile robotics. In particular, legged robots have a great potential to help disaster situations or elderly care services. Whereas manufacturing robots are designed for maximum stiffness, allowing for accurate and rapid position tracking without contact, mobile robots have a different set of hardware/software design requirements including dynamic physical interactions with environments. Events such as the Fukushima power plant explosion highlight the need for robots that can traverse various terrains and perform dynamic physical tasks in unpredictable environments, where robots need to possess compliance that allows for impact mitigation as well as high force capability. The talk will discuss the new mobile robot design paradigm focusing on the actuator characteristics and the impulse planning algorithms. As a successful embodiment of such paradigm, the talk will introduce the constituent technologies of the MIT Cheetah. Currently, the MIT cheetah is capable of running up to 13mph with an efficiency rivaling animals and capable of jumping over an 18-inch-high obstacle autonomously.
Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Sangbae Kim, is the director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. His research focuses on the bio-inspired robot design by extracting principles from animals. Kim's achievements on bio-inspired robot development include the world's first directional adhesive inspired from gecko lizards, and a climbing robot, Stickybot, that utilizes the directional adhesives to climb smooth surfaces featured in TIME's best inventions in 2006. Recent achievement includes the development of the MIT Cheetah capable of stable outdoor running up to 13mph and jumping over any obstacles autonomously. This achievement was covered by more than 200 media articles. He is a recipient of best paper award from International Conference on Robotics and Automation (2007), King-Sun Fu Memorial Transactions on Robotics (2008) and IEEE/ASME transactions on mechatronics (2016), DARPA Young Faculty Award (2013), NSF CAREER award (2014), and Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching (2015).
Three trends are changing how unmanned underwater and surface vehicles are viewed and used by the science, DoD and industry. First, the improvement in the cost/performance ratio means these systems are no longer exclusive to larger organizations. Second, the vehicles themselves are smaller, easier to use and deploying them no longer requires access to an expensive research vessel. The third trend is that acoustic communication in the sub-surface domain opens the door for collaboration between vehicles to perhaps observe larger areas in less time, and to use multiple vehicles to sense phenomena not easily sensed with a single vehicle. These trends present a research challenge in the autonomy algorithms needed to reach the potential of unmanned marine systems. The challenge concerns the algorithms themselves, which need to accommodate the collaborative, adaptive, long-term missions of ocean observation. It also concerns the nature in which autonomy algorithms and sofware are developed across the rapidly growing and distributed science community putting these systems to work.
Michael Benjamin is a research scientist in the Center for Ocean Engineering, a part of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is also a member of the Laboratory for Autonomous Marine Sensing Systems and the Marine Robotics Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Until December 2010, he was with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport Rhode Island.
Benjamin's work is focussed on algorithms and software for autonomous marine vehicles, some of which are shown to the right. In 2007 he founded moos-ivp.org at MIT, hosting the MOOS-IvP open source project in marine autonomy software. A key part of this project is the use of a behavior based architecture for autonomous decision-making using multi-objective optimization with interval programming for reconciling competing behaviors. This work is driven by the belief that multi-objective optimization is a fundamental component of robust decision-making. Formulating a decision-making problem into distinct specialized components also promotes the development of an autonomous system with contributions from varied developers and organizations. It also allows for a system comprised of public open source general-purpose code alongside non-public specialized code.
Manufacturing and production of invented products have been demonstrated as key to a sustained innovation ecosystem. Here, we will discuss recent analysis of local, regional, and national activities that support manufacturing innovation and workforce development. This includes U.S. efforts including the National Network for Manufacturing Innovation and Advanced Technological Education programs that can reduce the barrier to commercialization of new and important technologies, as well as contrasting efforts in other regions of the world.
Prof. Van Vliet earned her Sc.B. in Materials Science & Engineering from Brown University (1998) and her PhD in Materials Science & Engineering from MIT (2002). At MIT, Van Vliet was a National Defense Science & Engineering Graduate Fellow, was President of the Graduate Materials Council, and won the MRS Gold Medal for her thesis research. Her MIT thesis work with Prof. Subra Suresh established the experimental and computational basis for predicting homogeneous nucleation of dislocations (plasticity carrying defects) in crystalline metals. She then conducted postdoctoral research with Dr. Marsha Moses at Boston Children’s Hospital, where she developed new experimental approaches to measure the effects of mechanical strain on cells that comprise blood vessels.
Additive manufacturing technologies, ranging from printing of low-cost electronics to automated assembly of large structures, promise to accelerate the scale-up of new products and reshape the constraints of supply chains. Toward this vision, I will first describe our research on high-resolution flexographic printing of electronic materials. Using nanoporous stamps comprising polymer-coated carbon nanotubes (CNTs) we achieve high-speed ultrathin micrometer-scale printing of colloidal inks, surpassing the resolution of industrial printing technologies by ~10-fold. Next, I will introduce a high-speed desktop extrusion 3D printing system, which was devised by first analyzing the performance of current systems and then inventing a printhead that can build handheld objects in 5-10 minutes. These and other projects in my research group share a common approach of identifying and overcoming rate- and scale-limiting phenomena, which often impede the translation of new materials and processes to market. In closing, I will introduce MIT’s 2.008x, the first massive open online course (MOOC) on manufacturing processes, and both on-campus and professional education programs focusing on additive manufacturing.
John Hart is Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is also the Director of the MIT Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity and the Center for Advanced Production Technologies. John’s. John’s research group focuses on the science and technology of production, including work on additive manufacturing, materials processing, automation, and computational methods. John has been recognized by awards from the United States NSF, ONR, AFOSR, DARPA, SME, and ASME, along with two R&D 100 awards. He has also received the MIT Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching in Mechanical Engineering and the MIT Keenan Award for Innovation in Undergraduate Education, for his leadership in undergraduate manufacturing education using new pedagogical models and digital resources. John is a co-founder of Desktop Metal and VulcanForms, and a Board Member of Carpenter Technology Corporation.
From flexible hybrid electronics, to integrated photonic devices, to functional fibers to smart manufacturing, the new U.S. Federal government institutes are advancing new manufacturing technologies and accelerating the pace of manufacturing innovation. This session will review MIT's involvement in these institutes and discuss opportunities for industry partners to participate in developing new products and capabilities.
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.
By collocating machines, support systems, inputs and outputs can be shared with the potential to reduce overall system cost thereby helping to enable adoption of environmentally friendly systems. In particular, the oceans represent a vast resource (and challenge) for humanity: Offshore wind turbines can harvest wind energy, and their base structures can also serve as platforms for aquaculture systems, uranium-from seawater harvesting systems, and wave energy systems. Solar PV and wind turbines whose excess feeds pumped storage hydropower systems collocated with reverse osmosis plants located near the ocean could provide all the power and fresh water for many coastal regions such as Los Angeles, Lima, Eilat/Aqaba, the eastern UAE, and northern Iran (including Tehran) for example.
Alexander Slocum is the Walter and Hazel May Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He has 130+ patents and has helped develop 12 products that have received R&D 100 awards for “one of the one hundred best new technical products of the year”. He has helped start several successful precision manufacturing equipment companies and has a passion for working with industry to solve real problems and identify fundamental research topics. For the past decade his prime focus has been on renewable energy systems.
Today, a rapidly changing technology landscape is reshaping the entire energy sector. Advances in areas ranging from solar photovoltaics and electrochemical storage, to digitization, sensing and data analytics are unlocking new means for energy service provision and yielding new commercial opportunities. The potential opportunities that accompany these dynamics are significant, ranging from greater customer engagement and value creation to enhanced energy service reliability and reduced carbon intensity. This talk will explore how the business of energy will change as the system evolves to take advantage of these new opportunities, and how barriers to this change need to be tackled in order to ensure the benefits of this transition are maximized.
Director of Research and Analytics (MITEI) MIT Energy Initiative
Dr. Francis O’Sullivan is Director of Research and Analysis at the MIT Energy Initiative, and a lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research interests span a range of topics related to energy technologies, policy and economics. His current research is focused on unconventional oil and gas resources, the energy-water nexus, and solar energy. He has extensive expertise regarding the production dynamics and associated economics of North America’s shale plays. His work also includes the study of global gas market dynamics and the LNG trade, and he is actively studying the implications for international energy markets of emerging unconventional hydrocarbon resource plays, particularly those in China and Australia.
He has written and spoken widely on these topics, and has made presentations to the President’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, the United States Environmental Protection Agency, the Brookings Institute, the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the National Governors’ Association, the National Association of Regulated Utility Commissioners, at CERAWeek, the American Physical Society, and to a range of other academic, policy and industry forums. He is an author of the 2011 MIT Future of Natural Gas Study, and a member of the MIT Future of Solar Energy study group. Dr. O’Sullivan is also an elected member of the National Academies’ Roundtable on Science and Technology for Sustainability.
Prior to joining MIT, Dr. O’Sullivan was a consultant with McKinsey & Company, where he worked extensively in the areas of economic, investment and risk analysis, strategic planning, and operations in the private equity, oil and gas, electric utility, and renewable energy sectors.
Dr. O’Sullivan received his Ph.D., E.E., and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his B.E. degree from the National University of Ireland, all in electrical engineering.
Doctoral Candidate MIT Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Lab
Natasha Wright (SM ’14) is a PhD candidate in GEAR Lab, working on village-scale desalination systems.
Professor Olivetti received a BS in engineering science from the University of Virginia in 2000, and a PhD in materials science and engineering from MIT in 2007. She spent her PhD program studying the electrochemistry of polymer and inorganic materials for electrodes in lithium-ion batteries. In 2014, she joined DMSE as an assistant professor. As an educator, Olivetti overhauled DMSE’s undergraduate curriculum and developed new courses, including one for the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Climate Scholars. She’s a member of the MIT Climate Nucleus and co-director of the MIT Climate & Sustainability Consortium.
Professor Elsa Olivetti’s research focuses on improving the environmental and economic sustainability of materials. Specifically, she develops analytical and computational models to provide early-stage information on the cost and environmental impact of materials. Professor Olivetti and her research-group colleagues work toward improving sustainability through increased use of recycled and renewable materials, recycling-friendly material design, and intelligent waste disposition. The Olivetti Group also focuses on understanding the implications of substitution, dematerialization, and waste mining on materials markets.
Class of 1942 Professor of Building Technology and Civil and Environmental Engineering Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow MIT Department of Architecture
Ochsendorf completed his S.B. in civil engineering and archaeology at Cornell University in 1996 and his S.M. in civil and environmental engineering at Princeton University in 1998. After obtaining his Ph.D. in engineering at Cambridge University in 2002, he joined MIT as an assistant professor of architecture, becoming an associate professor in 2007. In 2009, he began a joint appointment with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and in 2013 was named the Class of 1942 Professor in Architecture, with a joint appointment in civil and environmental engineering.
In 2008, Professor Ochsendorf won a MacArthur Fellowship, also known as a 'genius grant for "creativity, originality, and potential to make important contributions in the future!'
He and his students in the Building Technology Program have developed new methods for establishing the stability of ancient structures and designed several award-winning buildings in masonry. In fact, he and a group of students designed England's Pines Calyx dome, an energy-efficient structure built from local resources using a tile vaulting system patented in the 19th century by Spanish architect Rafael Guastavino. He led his students in the design of an ultra-low-carbon building in South Africa, the Mapungubwe Visitor's Center, which was named the World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival in 2009. As part of the Concrete Sustainability Hub at MIT, Ochsendorf directs the life cycle assessment (LCA) of buildings and infrastructure.
Ochsendorf directs the Guastavino Project at MIT, and has published a book: Guastavino Vaulting: The Art of Structural Tile (Architectural Press, 2010).
In order to move from the current “illness”-driven model to a “wellness”-driven model in healthcare, one needs to build affordable, easily usable and mass deployable solutions. This is particularly true for developing countries like India where accessibility to Doctors, capacity of Doctors to handle enormous volume of patients and affordability of healthcare costs are of utmost importance, both in rural and urban scenarios. Lifestyle diseases and conditions like coronary artery disease (CAD), diabetes, hypertension and stroke account for a large number of deaths and disabilities and the numbers are constantly on the rise. In this talk we look at early detection and screening for lifestyle diseases using mobile phones and low-cost attachments to mobile phones followed by signal processing and machine learning based analytics. We also look at creating an affordable tele-home-care based rehabilitation therapy solution for stroke patients using Kinect to help in diagnosis, assessment and therapy compliance. We will present and end-to-end mobile and cloud based system architecture for creating the required solution followed by results on pilot studies done on patients in India and also on open datasets.
Dr Arpan Pal, Principal Scientist and Head of Research – TCS Innovation Labs, Kolkata, TCS Dr. Arpan Pal leads TCS’ research efforts in Cyber-Physical Systems and the Internet of Things. His research interests include Sensor Signal Processing and Informatics, Speech/Audio/Video/Image Processing, M2M communications, Mobile Phone Based Sensing and Interactive Television. He received his PhD from Aalborg University, Denmark and his B.Tech and M.Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India in Electronics and Telecommunications. He is an associate editor for ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing and IEEE Transactions on Emerging Topics in Computing.
Lack of electricity is one of the most pressing concerns in the developing world. Today, about 1 out of every 5 people, i.e. more than 1.3 billion people in the world, do not have access to electricity. This energy poverty affects important aspects of human life: health, education, and economic development.
Isolated grids with captive renewable generation, sometimes called microgrids, hold promise for rapidly expanding access to electricity in rural India. However the cost of designing, building, and operating such grids must be dramatically reduced for them to be widely deployed.
This project aims to enable microgrids to be built in a modular fashion from inexpensive, user-deployed “uLink” interface boxes. uLink grids can be expanded ad hoc to include additional homes, and the power delivered to each home can be increased to keep up with growing demand. The system is also being designed to be grid interactive, so uLink micro-grids can be subsumed into the grid to reach rural communities in the future.
Rajeev J. Ram has worked in the areas of physical optics and electronics for much of his career. In the early 1990’s, he developed the III‑V wafer bonding technology that led to record brightness light emitting devices at Hewlett-Packard Laboratory in Palo Alto. While at HP Labs, he worked on the first commercial deployment of surface emitting lasers. In the early 1990’s, he developed the first semiconductor laser without population inversion, semiconductor lasers that employ condensation of massive particles, and threshold-less lasers.
Since 1997, Ram has been on the Electrical Engineering faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. He has served on the Defense Sciences Research Council advising DARPA on new areas for investment and served as a Program Director at the newly founded Advanced Research Project Agency-Energy. At ARPA‑e, he managed a research portfolio exceeding $100M and consulted with the Office of Science and Technology Policy and the White House.
His group at MIT has developed record energy-efficient photonics for microprocessor systems, microfluidic systems for the control of cellular metabolism, and the first light-source with greater than 100% electrical-to-optical conversion efficiency. His group’s work on small-scale solar thermoelectric generation is being deployed for rural electrification in the developing world as SolSource and was recognized with the St. Andrews Prize for Energy and the Environment.
Ram holds degrees in Applied Physics from California Institute of Technology and Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Small and distributed computers have become an integral part of our lives. With the ubiquity of wireless connectivity they now recombine with our physical environment. Information about urban conditions can be captured in real-time, processed, and fed back into cities, enabling new ways to monitor, understand, and experience them.
We can synchronize transportation systems, allocate energy in a smarter way, reuse our waste optimally, or respond more rapidly to emergencies. More importantly, the citizen is in the center of this momentous change. When empowered by real-time information about what’s happening around us, our capacity to make smarter decisions and new types of contribution is greatly enhanced. Like the Internet, the networked city invites participation from individuals, organizations, companies, and governments to program and design the digital architectures that will craft our urban future.
In this talk, various projects carried out at the Senseable City Lab which explore this new condition will be discussed: real-time maps that use the digital exhaust of communication networks to describe urban mobility and environmental conditions, the flows of locatable trash, and a new modes of personal urban transport.
Assistant Director, Senseable City Lab MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Erin is responsible for strategic and operational leadership at the MIT Senseable City Lab (SCL), a multi-disciplinary research group of 40 people. Her primary responsibilities revolve around developing and maintaining partnerships between SCL and the cities, companies and foundations that support the group's research agenda. This work involves presentations of SCL's technical research portfolio to potential partners, both foreign and domestic, as well as contract negotiation and member stewardship.
The Senseable City Lab investigates how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale. The Lab's draws on diverse fields such as urban planning, design and engineering to analyze cities through the lenses of Big Data and IoT applications.
Among the Lab's partners are a group of corporations including; Uber, Audi and Philips, as well as cities such as; Amsterdam, Singapore, Dubai and Dallas. These entities, along with a dozen others, comprise a multi-million dollar per year research portfolio.
Once again, much like in 1994, the world is on the brink of a new worldwide platform. The core idea is simple and transformative, connecting the physical to the virtual, the Internet of Things (IOT). The first generation of IOT, done at MIT using RFID, focused on the world of retail and fast moving consumer goods (FMCG). The second generation, broadened the adoption and added a multitude of technologies. The third is leveraging cloud, machine learning, adding layers of integration and orchestration, and addressing security, data integrity, and distributed global transactions. Join us for a session on the evolution and next generation of the Internet of Things.
Dr. Abel Sanchez holds a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the Executive Director of MIT's Geospatial Data Center, architect of "The Internet of Things" global network, and architect of data analytics platforms for SAP, Ford, Johnson & Johnson, Accenture, Shell, Exxon Mobil, and Altria. In cyber security, Dr. Sanchez architected impact analysis of large-scale cyber attacks designing Cyber Ranges for the Department of Defense (DOD). In password security, Dr. Sanchez led the design of a password firewall (negative authentication) for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) agency. In machine learning, addressing fraud detection, Dr. Sanchez designed a situational awareness framework that exploits different perspectives of the same data and assigns risk scores to entities for Accenture. He led the design of a global data infrastructure simulator, modeling follow-the-sun engineering, to evaluate the impact of competing architectures on the performance, availability and reliability of the system for Ford Motor Company. He has been involved in developing E-Educational software for Microsoft via their I- Campus Program and with establishing the Accenture Technology Academy, an online resource for over 200,000 employees. He has 10 years of experience with learning management systems and has made deployments in America, Asia, and Europe. He teaches MIT courses on cybersecurity, engineering computation, and data science and has produced over 150 educational videos.
The Internet of Things has the potential to transform industries, but its rapid growth is constrained by resource use and fears about privacy and security. I will present a connectivity architecture capable of minimizing power and bandwidth use while improving security. This approach employs model-based “Data Proxies” and a “Cognitive Layer” capable of applying context information to estimate states from sparse input data.
This architecture facilitates data-informed design and pervasive sensing. I will show examples of how connected data may be used to identify and predict failures in automobiles, and briefly discuss how less costly connectivity might change other industries.
Postdoctoral Associate MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering
Josh Siegel is a postdoctoral associate in the Field Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and the founder of several automotive startups. He received his PhD in Mechanical Engineering for his work developing architectures for the Internet of Things and applying connected system data to predicting mechanical failures. While at MIT, Siegel ran the Entrepreneurs Club and led the Electric Vehicle Team.
Josh and his companies have been recognized with numerous accolades, such as the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, the MassIT Government Innovation Prize, the BMW Ideation Prize, the Soldier Design Competition’s Boeing Prize, and the Cloud, IoT, and M2M Hero of the Year Awards in the Innovation World Cup. He holds several patents, regularly publishes in academic conferences and journals, and his work has been featured in popular media including WIRED and the New York Times.
Today, Siegel continues to develop his secure and efficient architecture for the Internet of Things and is preparing to commercialize his research identifying vehicle failures using pervasively sensed data.
In the race to take the lead in the IIoT revolution, it is often forgotten that there is already a system in place, part of which will vigorously resist any change forced upon it. We believe that the first priority in the IIoT revolution should be to make this invisible part of the system, often referred to as a hidden factory, visible. From there, the creative elimination of these hidden factories will immediately result in an increase in a factory’s IQ, leading to more productive and safer operations.
In this talk, we will identify the key factors for making a successful IIoT transition. We will then show how these lessons are currently being applied at a US manufacturing company. We will also discuss how to develop an IIoT-friendly company culture that puts people first.
John Carrier is a senior lecturer in the System Dynamics Group at the MIT Sloan School of Management and Managing Director of 532 Partners. His expertise is in shaping the dynamics of operating environments to improve productivity, quality, safety, and morale simultaneously. He has helped companies save hundreds of millions of dollars by helping them find and eradicate the hidden systems lurking inside every operation. His current focus is to help prepare companies to compete in the new environment of Industry 4.0.
He has educated over five hundred top-level leaders in the MIT Sloan Executive Education program in Oil & Gas, petrochemicals, mining, and healthcare. When not teaching, he spends most of his time in the operating environment, working directly with the front line to deliver measurable results in less than sixty days.
Dr. Carrier holds a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Michigan, a Ph.D. in Control Systems from MIT, and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Paul has driven digital transformation within industrial operations for decades. He started his career at General Motors in the assembly division and has held P&L responsibility for facilities in all manufacturing modes. In the mid-90’s, Paul led the trend of deployment of technology within manufacturing as a senior consultant with one of the largest MES integration firms - concepts we now call the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT).
He served as CIO for a successful technology start-up and then joined Lighthammer Software as the director of performance solutions. Paul was the dynamic force behind the Perfect Plant initiatives at SAP, and led efforts in the area of advanced manufacturing and operations' mobility, as well as initiatives focused on digital transformation. He also served on the Board of Directors of the NAM.
As CIO of Advanced Manufacturing Strategy for GE, he focused on driving GE's brilliant factory strategy - using big data, software, sensors, controllers and robotics in combination with lean manufacturing techniques to increase productivity and deliver asset and operations optimization. He served as Site Leader of the Advanced Manufacturing and Software Technology Center in Michigan, one of GE's largest IT tech centers globally and a critical hub for IT and brilliant factory initiatives. Paul also sat on GE’s Supply Chain Council. At the AMSTC, he defined and deployed GE's Brilliant Factory Lab, an incubation and acceleration space for integrated, next-gen manufacturing solutions encompassing a wide variety of companies and technologies defining the IIoT ecosystem.
As Head of Manufacturing Industries for GE Digital, he drives the commercial strategy for Brilliant Manufacturing powered by the platform for the Industrial Internet, Predix.
Paul is often asked to speak on the topics of IIoT, advanced manufacturing trends and technologies as well as digital transformation.
The birth of artificial-intelligence research as an autonomous discipline is generally thought to have been the month long Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence in 1956, which convened 10 leading electrical engineers — including MIT’s Marvin Minsky and Claude Shannon — to discuss “how to make machines use language” and “form abstractions and concepts.”
The problem, of course, turned out to be much more difficult than AI’s pioneers had imagined. In recent years, by exploiting machine learning — in which computers learn to perform tasks from sets of training examples — artificial-intelligence researchers have built impressive systems. Two of my former postdocs — Demis Hassabis and Amnon Shashua — are behind the two main success stories of AI so far: AlphaGo bettering the best human players at Go and Mobileye leading the whole automotive industry towards vision-based autonomous driving. Some of the present excitement is due to realistic expectations for further progress. There is also a substantial amount of hype. A significant effort in publicly funded basic research is urgently needed to develop a true science of intelligence, as a scientific project and as the foundation for the engineering of tomorrow.
I will briefly review today’s engineering of intelligence and some of the mathematics underlying it. I will also sketch the vision of the NAS-funded, MIT-based Center for Brains, Minds and Machines which strives to make progress on the science of intelligence by combining machine learning and computer science with neuroscience and cognitive science.
Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior Director, Center for Brains, Minds and Machines(CBMM) Director, MIT Intelligence Initiative MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Tomaso A. Poggio, is the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Dept. of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT and the director of the new NSF Center for Brains, Minds and Machines at MIT of which MIT and Harvard are the main member Institutions. He is a member of both the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and of the McGovern Brain Institute. He is an honorary member of the Neuroscience Research Program, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Founding Fellow of AAAI and a founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Among other honors he received the Laurea Honoris Causa from the University of Pavia for the Volta Bicentennial, the 2003 Gabor Award, the Okawa Prize 2009, the AAAS Fellowship and the 2014 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience. He is one of the most cited computational scientists with contributions ranging from the biophysical and behavioral studies of the visual system to the computational analyses of vision and learning in humans and machines. With W. Reichardt he characterized quantitatively the visuo-motor control system in the fly. With D. Marr, he introduced the seminal idea of levels of analysis in computational neuroscience. He introduced regularization as a mathematical framework to approach the ill-posed problems of vision and the key problem of learning from data. In the last decade he has developed an influential hierarchical model of visual recognition in the visual cortex. The citation for the recent 2009 Okawa prize mentions his “…outstanding contributions to the establishment of computational neuroscience, and pioneering researches ranging from the biophysical and behavioral studies of the visual system to the computational analysis of vision and learning in humans and machines.” His research has always been interdisciplinary, between brains and computers. It is now focused on the mathematics of learning theory, the applications of learning techniques to computer vision and especially on computational neuroscience of the visual cortex. A former Corporate Fellow of Thinking Machines Corporation and a former director of PHZ Capital Partners, Inc., is a director of Mobileye and was involved in starting, or investing in, several other high tech companies including Arris Pharmaceutical, nFX, Imagen, Digital Persona and Deep Mind.
Many recent successes in computer vision, machine learning and other areas of artificial intelligence have been driven by methods for sophisticated pattern recognition, such as deep neural networks. But human intelligence is more than just pattern recognition. In particular, it depends on a suite of cognitive capacities for modeling the world: for explaining and understanding what we see, imagining things we could see but haven’t yet, solving problems and planning actions to make these things real, and building new models as we learn more about the world. I will talk about how we are beginning to capture these distinctively human capacities in computational models using the tools of probabilistic programs and program induction, embedded in a Bayesian framework for inference from data. These models help to explain how humans can perceive rich three-dimensional structure in visual scenes and objects, perceive and predict objects' motion based on their intrinsic physical characteristics, and learn new visual object concepts from just one or a few examples.
Josh Tenenbaum and his colleagues in the Computational Cognitive Science group study one of the most basic and distinctively human aspects of cognition: the ability to learn so much about the world, rapidly and flexibly. Given just a few relevant experiences, even young children can infer the meaning of a new word, the hidden properties of an object or substance, or the existence of a new causal relation or social rule. These inferences go far beyond the data given: after seeing three or four examples of "horses", a two-year-old will confidently judge whether any new entity is a horse or not, and she will be mostly correct, except for the occasional donkey or camel.
We want to understand these everyday inductive leaps in computational terms. What is the underlying logic that supports reliable generalization from so little data? What are its cognitive and neural mechanisms, and how can we build more powerful learning machines based on the same principles?
These questions demand a multidisciplinary approach. Our group's research combines computational models (drawing chiefly on Bayesian statistics, probabilistic generative models, and probabilistic programming) with behavioral experiments in adults and children. Our models make strong quantitative predictions about behavior, but more importantly, they attempt to explain why cognition works, by viewing it as an approximation to ideal statistical inference given the structure of natural tasks and environments.
While core interests are in human learning and reasoning, we also work actively in machine learning and artificial intelligence. These two programs are inseparable: bringing machine-learning algorithms closer to the capacities of human learning should lead to more powerful AI systems as well as more powerful theoretical paradigms for understanding human cognition.
Current research in our group explores the computational basis of many aspects of human cognition: learning concepts, judging similarity, inferring causal connections, forming perceptual representations, learning word meanings and syntactic principles in natural language, noticing coincidences and predicting the future, inferring the mental states of other people, and constructing intuitive theories of core domains, such as intuitive physics, psychology, biology, or social structure.
Understanding the brain could lead to new kinds of computational algorithms and artificial intelligences, as well as treatments for intractable disorders that affect over a billion people worldwide. However, the brain is a very complex, densely wired circuit, and understanding how it works has remained elusive. In order to map how these circuits are organized, and control their complex dynamics, we are building new tools, which include methods for physically expanding brain circuits so that we can see their building blocks, as well as molecules that make neural circuits controllable by light. Through these tools we aim to enable the systematic analysis and repair of the brain.
Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences Associate Professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences Leader, Synthetic Neurobiology Group Co-Director, MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Investigator Paul Allen Distinguished Investigator MIT Media Lab
Ed Boyden is a professor of Biological Engineering and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the MIT Media Lab and the MIT McGovern Institute. He leads the Synthetic Neurobiology Group, which develops tools for analyzing and repairing complex biological systems such as the brain, and applies them systematically to reveal ground truth principles of biological function as well as to repair these systems. These technologies, created often in interdisciplinary collaborations, include expansion microscopy, which enables complex biological systems to be imaged with nanoscale precision, optogenetic tools, which enable the activation and silencing of neural activity with light, and optical, nanofabricated, and robotic interfaces that enable recording and control of neural dynamics. He has launched an award-winning series of classes at MIT that teach principles of neuroengineering, starting with basic principles of how to control and observe neural functions, and culminating with strategies for launching companies in the nascent neurotechnology space. He also co-directs the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, which aims to develop new tools to accelerate neuroscience progress.
Amongst other recognitions, he has received the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences (2016), the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award (2015), the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award (2015), the Carnegie Prize in Mind and Brain Sciences (2015), the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award (2013), the Grete Lundbeck Brain Prize (2013), the NIH Director's Pioneer Award (2013), the NIH Director's Transformative Research Award (twice, 2012 and 2013), and the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize (2011). He was also named to the World Economic Forum Young Scientist list (2013), the Technology Review World’s "Top 35 Innovators under Age 35" list (2006), and his work was included in Nature Methods "Method of the Year" in 2010.
His group has hosted hundreds of visitors to learn how to use new biotechnologies, and he also regularly teaches at summer courses and workshops in neuroscience, and delivers lectures to the broader public (e.g., TED (2011); World Economic Forum (2012, 2013, 2016)). Ed received his Ph.D. in neurosciences from Stanford University as a Hertz Fellow, where he discovered that the molecular mechanisms used to store a memory are determined by the content to be learned. Before that, he received three degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and physics from MIT. He has contributed to over 300 peer-reviewed papers, current or pending patents, and articles, and has given over 300 invited talks on his group's work.
These are exciting times. IBM's Jeopardy-playing system and Google's deep-learning demonstrations both plainly show that, as data -> infinity, machine-learning can produce systems that exhibit a measure of intelligence. But whatever they are, they are not us, because our intelligence is of a different kind. We learn even as data -> 1. We talk about what we are doing. We think about how we are thinking. And most importantly, we tell, listen to, learn from, and compose stories, and that separated us from other animals about 50,000 years ago; understanding how we do all that would have world-changing consequences, both philosophical an practical.
How close are we? Maybe at the same point aviation was in 1903 when the Wright flier flew 120 feet. That makes impact seem a long way off until we remember that airplanes were used to deliver mail and drop bombs fifteen years later.
Our analog to the flier is the Genesis System. I explain how it reads simple stories, answers questions, exhibits cultural bias, develops trait-driven expectations, retrieves precedents using concepts, teaches instructively, tells persuasively, and exhibits a degree of self-aware thinking.
Ford Professor of Engineering Margaret MacVicar Faculty Fellow MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Patrick H. Winston is Professor of Electrical Engineering and is also in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at MIT. He has been with CSAIL and before that the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory since 1967. He joined the faculty in 1970, and he was the Director of the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 1972 to 1997.
Professor Winston is particularly involved in the study of how vision, language, and motor faculties account for intelligence. He also works on applications of Artificial Intelligence that are enabled by learning, precedent-based reasoning, and common-sense problem solving.
Professor Winston is chairman and cofounder of Ascent Technology, Inc., a company that produces sophisticated scheduling, resource allocation, and schedule recovery applications, enabled by AI technology, and in use throughout the world in major airports and the Department of Defense.
Professor Winston was a member of the Naval Research Advisory Committee (NRAC) (1985–1990, 1994–2000) for which he served as Chair from 1997 to 2000. During his service on NRAC, he chaired several studies, including a study of how the Navy can best exploit the next generation of computer resources and a study of technology for reduced manning. He holds a Top Secret security clearance. Professor Winston is also a past president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence.
Professor Winston is working on a major new research and educational effort, the Human Intelligence Enterprise, which will bring together and focus research from several fields, including Computer Science, Systems Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, and Linguistics.