2024 MIT Digital Technology & Strategy Conference - Welcome & Introductions

SPEAKER 1: Well, good morning and welcome. Every time I see that video, I'm always inspired and almost giddy that I'm the luckiest person here to be working in this ecosystem. I love what I do. And I'm so excited to welcome you here, to hear all the groundbreaking work that's going on at MIT.

Today's conference is going to be focusing on generative AI and how it will help reshape and reimagine business and business futures. With that, today's conference is going to have 12 different faculty members talking about their research, 6 industry panelists, and 11 startups. Moving on to, a lot of you may know about MIT. A lot of you may know something about MIT. I'm going to just give you a snapshot about, what is MIT?

MIT has 17,000-plus employees, has almost 1,100 faculty members, has almost 12,000 students, out of which 4,500 are undergraduates and 7,500 are graduate students. And 29% of the student body is international.

It comprises of five schools and one college. We have the School of Engineering, School of Science, School of Management, Sloan School, School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, and the College of Computing.

But what does it do? In terms of all these things comprised in terms of 65-plus, because we can never keep track of exactly how many they are, research labs, centers, and programs. $840 million on campus-sponsored research.

20% of those come from industry sponsors, and many of it comes from members of the ILP program. 592 US patents filed in '23, FY '23. 362 patents issued in FY '23. $40.2 million in licensing revenue. And 23 MIT companies started up using MIT intellectual property.

Of course, MIT is doing wonderful, groundbreaking research in many, many areas. But these are the three areas where our president is forging a path ahead for us to focus on changing world problems and us solving them. So that is climate and sustainability, life sciences, and AI.

How do we do this? We do it by innovating. We do it by our groundbreaking research, but innovation. And, of course, when you talk about innovation, innovation means different things to different people. But how do we define innovation?

We, at MIT, define innovation as the process of taking ideas from inception to impact. And the word "impact" is so important, and that's what we do every day. Each person at MIT, in our own ways, try to make ideas from inception to impact.

Now, what do we do? We are the Industry Liaison Program. And what do we do? We try to bridge the gap between industry and academic research at MIT.

And so how do we do it? We have the way of thinking about it in four brackets. One is research, innovation, students, and education. But how do we bridge those gaps is through understanding and learning for our ILP member companies and how they can learn about the cutting-edge research happening through webinars, conferences, through executive briefings, through professional education, through exec ed, and many other opportunities happening through open learning.

You can learn and discover problems or discover new ideas and opportunities. And we can facilitate that through faculty meetings, meetings with labs and centers, strategic executive education for your executive leaders, assistance with identification of opportunities for sponsored research, consortium membership, visiting scholars, and IP licensing.

And lastly, we do it by networking. And this is an opportunity where you can network with your colleagues, with MIT faculty, with MIT students. You can also network with startups in the MIT ecosystem and many more opportunities beyond that.

And I want to leave with a thank you. But at the same time, I want to also alert you to the fact that none of this happens with me standing up here. It starts with a lot of hard work from our teams.

And I just wanted to give a shout out to the events team sitting there, events and communication team. And also if you want to learn more about the ILP Program, many of our program directors are sitting amongst you in the audience and would be happy to answer any questions. Thank you so much. Enjoy.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 2: Thank you, [INAUDIBLE] for the wonderful introduction for MIT ecosystem and corporate relations, including the overview of this conference over the next couple of days. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to MIT. We are so excited to have you with us both in person and online.

Over these two days, MIT faculty members, industry leaders, entrepreneurs will share their insights on how emerging technologies, strategies, particularly generative AI, can help you drive your digital transformation or business transformation and shape the future of industry. I want to say this is a unique opportunity for you to engage, learn, and network.

For those who are here in person, you have a wonderful opportunity to connect with our faculty speakers through your program directors, to explore solutions to your specific challenges. And also, thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoy the conference.

During the Q&A, we will use Pigeonhole Live to submit questions and vote on questions that interest you. And the Pigeonhole Live information is on display on both sides. The passcode is 24digital. And for those who are online, you can also submit questions.