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.
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.
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.
Global demand for materials is immense and rapidly growing; extraction and processing of materials accounts for more than one-third of global carbon flows for human-related activities, on the order of 5.5 Gigatons/year. Direct materials production represents approximately 7% of total US energy consumption. This talk will describe the development of analytical and computational tools that consider the economic and environmental impacts of design, systems, and process choices relevant to materials use. The speaker will describe approaches to assessing the environmental and economic impact of materials and processes as early in their development as possible. The work described leverages information along the development trajectory including data mining of literature about laboratory synthesis, creating techno-economic models of protyping and scaled manufacturing as well as assessing macroeconomic implications on materials markets particularly for the case of substitution and shifts in recycling. The presentation will also describe an example on beneficial use of industrial byproducts in the built environment.
While trillions of sensors that will soon connected to the “Internet of Everything” (IoE) promise to transform our lives, they simultaneously pose major obstacles, which we are already encountering today. The massive amount of generated raw data (i.e., the “data deluge”) is quickly exceeding computing capabilities, and cannot be overcome by isolated improvements in sensors, transistors, memories, or architectures alone. Rather, an end-to-end approach is needed, whereby the unique benefits of new emerging nanotechnologies – for sensors, memories, and transistors – are exploited to realize new system architectures that are not possible with today’s technologies. However, emerging nanomaterials and nanodevices suffer from significant imperfections and variations. Thus, realizing working circuits, let alone transformative nanosystems, has been infeasible. In this talk, I present a path towards realizing these future systems in the near-term, and show how based on the progress of several emerging nanotechnologies (carbon nanotubes for logic, non-volatile memories for data storage, and new materials for sensing), we can begin realizing these systems today. As a case-study, I will discuss how by leveraging emerging nanotechnologies, we have realized the first monolithically-integrated three-dimensional (3D) nanosystem architectures with vertically-integrated layers of logic, memory, and sensing circuits. With dense and fine-grained connectivity between millions of on-chip sensors, data storage, and embedded computation, such nanosystems can capture terabytes of data from the outside world every second, and produce “processed information” by performing in-situ classification of the sensor data using on-chip accelerators. As a demonstration, we tailor a demo system for gas classification, for real-time health monitoring from breath.
The utility of carbon nanomaterials is highly dependent upon the precision upon which they can be assembled and functionalized. New methods enable high impact applications in sensing, mechanical, membrane, and energy storage/conversion. Approaches to the formation of functional assemblies of carbon nanotubes will be described that involved the non-covalent immobilization of the materials into functional assemblies. In a non-covalent method, no direct chemical bonds are made to the carbon nanotubes, thereby leaving their electronic properties intact. New covalent connections to the graphene surfaces (sidewalls) of the carbon nanotubes will also be discussed and how these materials can serve to modify their electronic properties for devices as well as hard wire functional assemblies to the carbon nanotubes to provide interactions with chemicals (sensors) or electrocatalysis (energy conversion). Many of these methods are also applicable to the functionalization of graphite to create new forms of graphene. We will also show how high purity graphene can be produced in using new scalable electrochemical methods.
We are in the process of transitioning to a new economy where highly complex, custom products are manufactured on demand by automated manufacturing systems. For example, 3D printers are revolutionizing production of metal parts in aerospace, automotive, and medical industries. Manufacturing electronics on flexible substrates opens the door to a whole new range of products for consumer electronics and medical diagnostics. In this talk, I will show that computation is an integral component of modern design and manufacturing. I will demonstrate how computational tools allow creating digital materials with precisely controlled physical properties and how these digital materials are used to automatically synthesize product designs with desired specifications. I will also show how computational tools enable real-time, closed-feedback loop in additive manufacturing systems to improve their reliability and to fabricate complex products with integrated electronics.