Smarter Grids, Stronger Data Centers: Meeting the Next Power Challenge
Morgan Andreae Executive Director, Future Energy Systems Center and Eni-MIT Alliance, MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI)
The MIT ILP Lead Edge Webinar, Manufacturing and Supply Chain, explored critical challenges and emerging strategies shaping the sector’s future. Topics included managing supply chain risks, evaluating environmental impact scenarios, and leveraging AI and digitalization to improve operational efficiency and resilience. The webinar also addressed approaches to carbon footprint mitigation and the role of accurate carbon accounting in advancing sustainability objectives. Read the conference summary to explore the key takeaways from this engaging event.
Join the MIT ILP Leading Edge webinar, New technologies for improved mining operations, to explore how emerging technologies and automation are transforming the mining industry. Learn how the integration of data analytics and digital twins is advancing toward autonomous operations and real-time control systems powered by sensor data.
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In this talk, I will present an overview of my research in the past decade on large scale optimization for machine learning and collective behavior in networked,natural, engineering, and social systems. These collective phenomena include social aggregation phenomena as well as emergence of consensus, swarming, and synchronization in complex network of interacting dynamic systems such as mobile robots and sensors. A common underlying theme in this line of study is to understand how a desired global behavior can emerge from purely local interactions. The evolution of these ideas into social systems has lead to development of a new theory of collective decision making among people and organizations. Examples include participation decisions in uprisings, social cascades, investment decisions in public goods, and decision making in large organizations. I will investigate distributed strategies for information aggregation, social learning and detection problems in networked systems where heterogeneous agents with different observations (with varying quality and precision) coordinate to learn a true state (e.g., finding aggregate statistics or detecting faults and failure modes in spatially distributed wireless sensor networks, or deciding suitability of a political candidate, quality of a product, and forming opinions on social issues of the day in social networks) using a stream of private observations and interaction with neighboring agents. I will end the talk with a a new vision for research and graduate education at the interface of information and decision systems, data science and social sciences.
The MIT Center for Advanced Virtuality (MIT Virtuality for short) pioneers innovative experiences using technologies of virtuality — computing systems that construct imaginative experiences atop our physical world. Our approach to engineering and creative practices pushes the expressive potential of technologies of virtuality and simulates social and cognitive phenomena, while intrinsically considering their social and cultural impacts. This talk focuses on an important aspect of such technologies: virtual selves. Indeed nearly early everyone these days uses virtual identities, ranging from accounts for social media and online shopping to avatars in videogames or virtual reality. Given the widespread and growing use of such technologies, it is important to better understand their impacts and to establish innovative and best practices. In this talk, Harrell explores how our social identities are complicated by their intersection with extended reality technologies, videogames, social media, and related digital media forms. With an emphasis on equity, Harrell will explore how virtual identities both implement and transform persistent issues of class, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, and the dynamically construction social categories more generally.
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