The remarkable progression of innovations that imbue machines with human and superhuman capabilities is generating significant uncertainty and deep anxiety about the future of work. Whether and how our current period of technological disruption differs from prior industrial epochs is a source of vigorous debate. But there is no question that we face an urgent sense of collective concern about how to harness these technological innovations for social benefit. To meet this challenge, the Institute launched the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future in spring 2018.
The ever-increasing demand for mobile and wireless data has placed a huge strain on today’s WiFi and cellular networks. Millimeter wave frequency bands address this problem by offering multi-GHz of unlicensed bandwidth – 200 times more than the bandwidth allocated to today’s WiFi and cellular networks. In this talk, I describe the opportunities and challenges brought in by this technology, and its applications in enabling untethered virtual reality headsets and high throughput multi-media applications.
While Artificial Intelligence studies how intelligent decision making can be produced by machines, Extended Intelligence instead focuses on how people, augmented with smart technologies, may achieve optimal performance and well-being. These augmentations allow for cognitive enhancements via wearables to amplify and assist with things like memory, attention, decision-making, learning, and communication. Pattie Maes will present her work on these smart systems that can closely integrate with people to support their behavior and decision making.
MIT’s Collective Intelligence Design Lab (CIDL) helps groups design innovative new kinds of collectively intelligent systems (superminds) to solve important problems. This panel will bring together leaders from the organizations affiliated with the CIDL to describe their experience with the process. Moderated by Thomas Malone, Founding Director of the Center for Collective Intelligence, the panel includes representatives from Deloitte, Takeda, and MIT.
Vladimir Bulovic will provide an overview role of MIT.nano in supporting research, innovation, and corporate engagement in the area of Human and Technology Collaboration.
- FGC Plasma: Better combustion for energy, aerospace, and national security - Augmental Technologies: Teeth & tongue gestures for seamless hands-free interaction - IndustrialML: Factory productivity through machine learning - Realtime Robotics: Accelerated and continuous collision-free motion planning
- blkSAIL: Marine autonomy as a service - JETCOOL: Cooling for high power electronics - Leela AI: Enabling robots to operate autonomously in unpredictable environments - robonity: Applied planetary robotics & AI for smarter agriculture
The MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative was founded in 2014 and charged by MIT President L. Rafael Reif with leading the Institute’s “drive to increase fundamental knowledge and accelerate progress towards solutions around environment, climate, and human society.” Director Fernandez will describe the work of the ESI and highlight the ways in which industry plays a critical role in a productive, sustainable and humane future for people and the planet.
Delayed optimization of environmental metrics in material design and industrial practice can lead to costly redesign and remediation needs. Higher-throughput environmental assessment tools and predictive strategies may help guide design for more economically and environmentally sustainable industrial process and practices. Plata will discuss specific examples from oil and gas development, nanomaterial synthesis, and recent efforts in improved polymers and plastics for environmental compatibility.
In this talk, I will quantify the energy storage requirements of various electrification and decarbonization scenarios. Through solving data-informed optimization models, key technological innovation opportunities will be revealed, spanning hardware, software, and business models.
An increasing body of evidence demonstrates that there is a direct correlation between global warming and the release of heavy metals into drinking and crop water supplies, and water security remains a pressing sustainability challenge in developing nations. We present a pathway to obtain ultra-stable nanofibers assembled from small molecules in water which rival the mechanical properties of nature's stiffest materials. We then decorate the surface of these nanofibers with efficient heavy metal chelators and demonstrate orders of magnitude improvement over macroscopic alternatives in use today, offering a way to miniaturize water treatment while overcoming several complications of existing strategies.