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The future of business is swarm business – whether it’s at Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, or Apple, it’s not about being a fearless leader, but about creating a swarm that works together in collective consciousness to create great things that change the world. In Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs), small teams of intrinsically motivated people enabled by the Internet work together to invent something radically new. A successful swarm channels the competitive energies of all stakeholders towards collaboration. I also propose a collaboration scorecard made up of seven key variables – “honest signals” – indicative of creative swarms, drawn from hundreds of industry projects. The “seven honest signals of collaboration” are “strong leadership”, “balanced contribution”, “rotating leadership”, “responsiveness”, “honest sentiment”, “shared context”, and “social capital”. I will illustrate these “honest signals of collaboration” using numerous industry examples ranging from startups to innovation teams at the R&D departments of Fortune 500 firms to teams of Healthcare researchers and patients.

Electric fields can be a useful tool in the interrogation and genetic manipulation of cells. With respect to bacteria, the cell envelope is critical for understanding important physiological behaviors, such as extracellular electron transfer (EET) and antibiotic uptake. Through EET, microbes can transport electrons from their interior to external insoluble electron acceptors (e.g. metal oxides or electrodes in an electrochemical cell), which has attracted tremendous attention due to potential applications in environmental remediation and energy conversion. In this talk, we will present how bacterial envelope phenotypes such as EET can be quantified by cell surface polarizability, a dielectric property that can be measured using microfluidic dielectrophoresis. Next, we will discuss work in our laboratory to use very high electric fields (~10 kV/cm) in microfluidic devices to enable high throughput delivery of nucleic acids to bacterial populations. Results of this work hold exciting promise for rapid screening of bacterial envelope phenotypes and for accelerating genetic engineering of bacteria for industrial applications. Lastly, we will present recent efforts by a company spun out of the Buie Laboratory, Kytopen, which is leveraging the electroporation work to enable scalable non-viral transfection of mammalian cells. Applications of this work include adoptive cell therapies such as CAR-T, which are currently plagued by high costs and manufacturing issues.

smart cities. These systems work continuously to enable the essential services such as water, gas, and electricity. They utilize diverse components organized as physical networks, and operated through heterogeneous and connected cyber elements. Many service utilities routinely face reliability concerns due to aging infrastructure, and lack the operational readiness that is needed to respond failures caused by natural disasters. Moreover, recent incidents have demonstrated that malicious entities can disrupt or gain control of these systems by exploiting cyber insecurities and/or physical faults. Indeed, sophisticated cyber intrusions and a number of successful physical attacks all confirm the insufficiency of the existing protection solutions. Such incidents can result in huge economic losses, and also pose threat to human lives. Since resiliency was not considered at the design stage of existing infrastructure systems, they continue to face significant risks from natural disasters and security attacks.

This talk is motivated by the need for a foundational approach for strategic security planning and operational response design, so that our infrastructure systems can better withstand, recover from, and adapt to both random and adversarial disruptions. The main agenda is to discuss how recently developed secure and distributed algorithms for network sensing and control can be implemented in practice to improve the resilience of large-scale infrastructure systems. These algorithms use ideas from control theory and large-scale optimization, along with game-theoretic analysis of strategic interaction between network operators and attackers. Through real-world case studies, we demonstrate that our algorithms can provide substantial improvements in strategic inspection and operational response capabilities of electricity and natural gas utilities facing risks of correlated disruptions.

MIT Startup Exchange actively promotes collaboration and partnerships between MIT-connected startups and industry. Qualified startups are those founded and/or led by MIT faculty, staff, or alumni, or are based on MIT-licensed technology. Industry participants are principally members of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP).

MIT Startup Exchange is a community of over 1,800 MIT-connected startups with roots across MIT departments, labs and centers; it hosts a robust schedule of startup workshops and showcases, and facilitates networking and introductions between startups and corporate executives.

STEX25 is a startup accelerator within MIT Startup Exchange, featuring 25 “industry ready” startups that have proven to be exceptional with early use cases, clients, demos, or partnerships, and are poised for significant growth. STEX25 startups receive promotion, travel, and advisory support, and are prioritized for meetings with ILP’s 260 member companies.

MIT Startup Exchange and ILP are integrated programs of MIT Corporate Relations.

Molecular self-assembly provides promising nanomaterials because they are water-processable, the constituent molecules are modular and scalable, and their surfaces can be easily functionalized. However, supramolecular nanomaterials generally exhibit high molecular exchange rates, hydrolytic degradation, and other instabilities that preclude their use in the demanding environments or the solid state. Here I introduce a new self-assembled nanofiber platform, recently developed in our lab, that exhibits unprecedented mechanical strength and dramatically reduced dynamic instabilities. The nanofibers have widths less than 6 nm, length of many microns, and pristine internal molecular order. In this talk, I will discuss the design and characterization of this platform and the possible new application space that is enabled by such enhanced stability.