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Faster, Smarter, Greener: The Future of the Car and Urban Mobility

To support societal demands for mobility fluidity, co-existing with a sustainable planet, mobility systems for a digitally powered society must be efficient and innovation friendly. Efficiency requires intelligent use of assets and aggressive use of best technology, while consumers expect freedom in personal choices as well as fairness. Future society will demand Connected, Heterogeneous, Intelligent, and Personalized (CHIP) mobility. We propose a framework where Heterogeneous transportation modes are Connected both digitally and physically, and Intelligent apps can access data on usage, congestion, prices, and weather, for example, and enable real time and Personalized travel planning throughout a city, whether a traveler wants to optimize time, cost, carbon footprint or touristic aesthetics. This framework proposes that urban planners create policies to support such a vision and that the traditional auto industry is likely to enjoy a less dominant role in architecting mobility frameworks. Governments and city administrations will be joined by traditional auto industry players as well as a range of new-generation entrepreneurs and investors, technology startups, and app developers, all of which have contributions to make in redefining future mobility.

2017 MIT Research and Development Conference

The Civic Supermind

The innovation economy has profoundly transformed politics, economics, and society, yet its effects have only just begun to manifest in the physical space of cities. Although innovation holds the promise of addressing many challenges of a globalized, urbanized, and climate-changed planet, the present trends in city-technology and city-making demonstrate how this can also threaten regulation and policy, exacerbate economic inequality, and fray the social fabric of place. Matthew Claudel explores these opportunities and frictions. Atomization, distributed networks, and real-time platform markets have opened new territory for urban technology and city-making – what could be thought of as The Civic Supermind. This is an approach to urban technology that encompasses place-based modes of social organization; innovation in policy, regulation, and codes; and the creation of new place-based capital structures. It connects technology to people in place.

2018 MIT Information and Communication Technologies Conference

Panel Discussion: Policies, economics, business models and technologies for mobility of the future

Moderator: Venkat Sumantran
Panelists: Jim Womack, Valerie Karplus, Carlos Lima Azevedo

2017 MIT Research and Development Conference

Structural biopolymers – using Nature’s building blocks as an inspiration for advanced manufacturing

Structural biopolymers are materials engineered by Nature as building blocks of living matter. These materials have unique and compelling properties that allow for their assembly and degradation with minimal energy requirements as well as their performance at the biotic/abiotic interface. By combining basic material principles with advanced fabrication techniques, it is possible to define new strategies to drive the assembly of structural biopolymers in advanced materials with unconventional forms and functions such as edible coating for perishable food, inkjet prints of silk fibroin that change in color in the presence of bacteria, three dimensional monoliths that can be heated by exposure to infrared light and flexible keratin-made photonic crystals.

2017 MIT Research and Development Conference

Semiconductor quantum technologies for communications and computing

The Internet is among the most significant inventions of the 20th Century. We are now poised for the development of a quantum internet to exchange quantum information and distribute entanglement among quantum computers that could be great distances apart. This kind of quantum internet would have a range of applications that aren’t possible in a classical world, including long-distance unconditionally-secure communication, precision sensing and navigation, and distributed quantum computing. But we still need to develop or perfect many types of components and protocols to build such a quantum internet. This talk will consider some of these components, including quantum memories based on atomic defects in semiconductors, circuits for manipulating single electronic and nuclear spins, efficient spin-photon interfaces, and photonic integrated circuits. The talk will also provide an overview of quantum communications protocols that are now running in a Boston-area quantum network.

2017 MIT Research and Development Conference

Data Ownership Impact on Privacy and Security

2017 MIT Research and Development Conference

Internet Governance and Culture

Hardly a week goes by without a report about another cyberattack. With almost every major organization having been victim, including most government organizations, such as Equifax, Target, Sony, NSA, and the US Office of Personnel Management, you might ask: "Why are these problems not being fixed? Who is in charge here?" The answer is that nobody is in charge, and that is the secret of the Intenet's success. The governance structure of the Internet is bottom-up, not top-down. However, certain sorts of problems are hard to solve in a bottom-up governance regime. In this session we will discuss the history of Internet governance, different points of view about the future of Internet governance, and how different aspects of cyber-security depend on different actors for their solution. We will use a case study of a current security challenge to illustrate how problems get solved in a fluid space of governance organizations.

2017 MIT Research and Development Conference

MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative: moving forward with industry

A sustainable world requires the capacity and support of industry locally, nationally, and internationally. Director John Fernandez will describe the activities of the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). As an effort focused on solutions to environmental challenges including the consequences of climate change, Fernandez will describe the multi-disicplinary and multi-faceted work of researchers, students, staff and alumni supported through the ESI.

2017 MIT Research and Development Conference

The Business Opportunity of Sustainability-Oriented Innovation

How do we sustainably feed 11 billion people? How do we electrify the world while stopping climate change? Tackling these generational challenges will require innovation in technology, business model, and market infrastructure: the greatest R&D opportunity of all time. Jason Jay, Senior Lecturer and Director of the Sustainability Initiative at MIT Sloan, will share his approach to Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI): a way to create successful businesses that help humans and nature thrive for generations to come.

2017 MIT Research and Development Conference

Cybersecurity Impacts on International Trade

Governments have reportedly arranged to incorporate various forms of spyware and malware in Internet-connected products. In response, some countries have denied entry or imposed restrictions on imported products with such potential risks. But this raises many policy issues, including (1) what is a questionable country (and is it OK if an “ally” spies on us?), (2) what products are of most concern, (3) assuming such restrictions quickly become worldwide policies with retaliations, what might be the long-term impact on international trade and the global economy as Internet-connected products proliferate, and (4) what voluntary standards could be put in place to lower the risk of trade wars? These issues need to be rigorously studied in advance of policy makers making quick decisions – in some crisis condition – without understanding the impacts and consequences.

2017 MIT Research and Development Conference