As living technologies proliferate, how do we ensure that communities—diverse socioeconomically, culturally, and creatively—are able to not only experience its benefits, but are also active participants and agents of change? What are some of the key elements that are enabling the expansion of biotechnology’s reach beyond ‘traditional’ academic, government, and corporate laboratories?
In this talk Professor David Kong will explore the growth of biotechnology in non-traditional spaces and the creative ecosystem that supports them, including open tools, virtual infrastructure for sharing, and new programs for learning and education. In addition he will share advances in open hardware, including the application of advanced digital fabrication technology to the production of bio-hardware. From ‘Metafluidics,’ to ‘How to Grow (Almost) Anything,’ a distributed biotechnology course that is helping to augment the existing network of over one thousand Fab Labs worldwide with community biology labs, to organizing the first ‘Global Community Biology Summit,’
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.
Moderator: Venkat Sumantran Panelists: Jim Womack, Valerie Karplus, Carlos Lima Azevedo
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.
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.
Data Ownership Impact on Privacy and Security
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.
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.
The impact of energy production in our lives stands in stark contrast to the speed, or lack thereof, in solving the most expensive and pervasive issues in energy production. Examples range from the continuing prevalence of fouling, which drains 0.25% of the GDP of developed countries, to the lack of ways to quantify damage to materials. The Mesoscale Nuclear Materials group at MIT (MIT-MNM) focuses on science-based solutions to these "dirty issues," combining branches of physics and engineering to produce industry-ready solutions in years, not decades. We will focus on three issues facing the nuclear industry as well as others: (1) The formation and prevention of CRUD in reactors, (2) rapid qualification of new materials during irradiation, and (3) the stored energy fingerprints of radiation damage as a new way to quantify damage to materials.
Many poor healthcare outcomes and the majority of wasted healthcare spending can be attributed to bad decision making. It is widely accepted that decision support systems are needed to address this issue, and that machine learning has a key role to play in constructing such systems. However, learning to predict the impact of care decisions is made challenging by the need to scale out to complex populations being managed for complex diseases across complex care networks. We will present some recent work that addresses these challenges.