MIT AgeLab Presents: An Introduction to Disruptive Demographics

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:14 GMT

In Part I of this series, Dr. Joseph Coughlin of the MIT AgeLab is featured in an interview conducted by Rohit Sakhuja of WMBR MIT Radio's Paradigm Shifts program. Check back soon for Part II: Envisioning Retirement Tomorrow. To learn more about the research of the MIT AgeLab, please visit http://agelab.mit.edu/ To learn more about the Paradigm Shifts radio program, please visit http://www.paradigmshiftsradio.com/

Shannon Roberts Presents CityBrowser Voice Navigation System

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:14 GMT

Shannon Roberts, MIT Class of 2009, describes a joint project she worked on with the MIT AgeLab, New England University Transportation Center and MIT's CSAIL Laboratory. CityBrowser is an in-vehicle navigation system with which the user interacts with via voice recognition, iDrive system and in-vehicle display. This research was made possible by the US Department of Transportation and BMW.

MIT AgeLab Presents: Envisioning Retirement Tomorrow

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:13 GMT

In Part II of this series, Dr. Joseph Coughlin of the MIT AgeLab is featured in an interview conducted by Rohit Sakhuja on WMBR MIT Radio's Paradigm Shifts program. Check back soon for Part III: The Future of Financial Services. To learn more about the research of the MIT AgeLab, please visit http://agelab.mit.edu/ To learn more about the Paradigm Shifts radio program, please visit http://www.paradigmshiftsradio.com/

MIT AgeLab Presents: The Future of Financial Services

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:13 GMT

In Part III of this series, Dr. Joseph Coughlin of the MIT AgeLab is featured in an interview conducted by Rohit Sakhuja on WMBR MIT Radio's Paradigm Shifts program. Check back soon for Part IV: The Business of Retirement Living. To learn more about the research of the MIT AgeLab, please visit http://agelab.mit.edu/ To learn more about the Paradigm Shifts radio program, please visit http://www.paradigmshiftsradio.com/

MIT AgeLab Presents: The Business of Retirement Living

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:12 GMT

In Part IV of this series, Dr. Joseph Coughlin of the MIT AgeLab is featured in an interview conducted by Rohit Sakhuja on WMBR MIT Radio's Paradigm Shifts program. Check back soon for Part V: Saving for Greater Longevity. To learn more about the research of the MIT AgeLab, please visit http://agelab.mit.edu/ To learn more about the Paradigm Shifts radio program, please visit http://www.paradigmshiftsradio.com/

Moving Miss Daisy: How the MIT AgeLab and New England UTC installed a VW Bug in a 2nd floor lab

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:12 GMT

In 2001, the AgeLab and New England UTC endeavored to move a VW Bug, to be used as a driving simulator named Ms. Daisy, into its second story lab. Here's how it happened. Available in 480p - Click for better quality.

The MIT AgeLab and New England UTC's AwareCar

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:12 GMT

The MIT AgeLab and New England University Transportation Center have developed the AwareCar to better understand driver state, the role of health & wellness, and in-vehicle systems as a means to improve driver performance across the lifespan.

MIT AgeLab: Housing for a Lifetime

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:11 GMT

The MIT AgeLab and The Hartford Advance 50 Team present Shaping Life Tomorrow: A Conversation on the Future of Aging, Business and Innovation. Shaping Life Tomorrow is a forum for business leaders, advocates, practitioners and researchers in the domains of transportation, social media, housing and health to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that an aging population presents to business and to government. This event marked a 10 year relationship between the MIT AgeLab and The Hartford Advance 50 Team that focuses on research to improve the quality of life of older adults and their families. Part 1 of 4. Stay tuned for Part 2 coming very soon! http://agelab.mit.edu http://hartfordauto.thehartford.com/Safe-Driving/Expertise-On-Getting-Older/

FutureCast: Joe Coughlin interviews Scott Belcher of ITS America

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:10 GMT

President and CEO of ITS America Scott Belcher discusses the politics of older drivers with AgeLab's Joe Coughlin. The interview was part of the symposium Convergent Opportunities or Collision Course? Older Drivers, New Technology & Well-Being Behind the Wheel, hosted by AgeLab and the New England University Transportation Center.

FutureCast: Joe Coughlin speaks with AARP's Elinor Ginzler

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:10 GMT

AgeLab's Joe Coughlin interviews AARP's Elinor Ginzler, who discusses the changing lifestyles of baby boomers. This discussion is part of the AgeLab and New England University Transportation Center's symposium, Convergent Opportunities or Collision Course? Older Drivers, New Technology & Well-Being Behind the Wheel. More information can be found at agelab.mit.edu/driverwell-being

MIT AgeLab: Joseph Coughlin interviews Jeff Taylor of EONS.com

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:10 GMT

The MIT AgeLab and The Hartford Advance 50 Team present Shaping Life Tomorrow: A Conversation on the Future of Aging, Business and Innovation. Shaping Life Tomorrow is a forum for business leaders, advocates, practitioners and researchers in the domains of transportation, social media, housing and health to discuss some of the challenges and opportunities that an aging population presents to business and to government. This event marked a 10 year relationship between the MIT AgeLab and The Hartford Advance 50 Team that focuses on research to improve the quality of life of older adults and their families. Part 2 of 4. Stay tuned for Part 3 coming very soon! http://agelab.mit.edu http://hartfordauto.thehartford.com/Safe-Driving/Expertise-On-Getting-Older/

FutureCast: Donald Fisher discusses new findings in older driver behavior

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:09 GMT

Univ. Massachusetts and New England University Transportation Center researcher Donald Fisher speaks with Joe Coughlin, New England UTC Director, about his team's research into older driver behavior. The interview was part of the New England UTC and AgeLab hosted symposium, Convergent Opportunities or Collision Course? Older Drivers, New Technology and Well-Being Behind The Wheel.

FutureCast: Philipp Osl on housing options for older adults

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 15:30:09 GMT

AgeLab researcher Philipp Osl discusses current options in older adult housing while giving insights into trends and future needs.

Darwin and Lincoln Birthday Forum

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:30:07 GMT

Marking the birthday of two champions of human equality, both born on Feb. 12, 1809

Networks Understanding Networks, Pt. 10: Nicholas Christakis

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 18:13:52 GMT

The Evolutionary Significance of Human Social Networks — Nicholas Christakis

Take a Spin on the Centrifuge (MIT Engineering K-12 Video Pilot)

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 19:33:46 GMT

This video uses Man-Vehicle Lab's human centrifuge to discuss centripetal force and countermeasures for astronaut bone and muscle loss in space. It shows the mathematics required to calculate centripetal force, and performs an experiment on the centrifuge with an "astronaut."

Rethinking Climate Change: The Past 150 Years and the Next 100 Years

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 04:00:00 GMT

04/21/2011 4:00 PM Wong AuditoriumJohn Reilly, Co"director of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change; Senior Lecturer, Sloan School of Management ; Kerry Emanuel, '76, PhD '78, Professor of Atmospheric Science; Ronald Prinn, SCD '71, TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Chris Knittel, William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy Economics, MIT Sloan; School of Management ; Ernest Moniz, Director, MIT Energy Initiative; Sarah Slaughter, 82, SM'87, PhD 91, Associate Director for Buildings & Infrastructure, MIT Energy InitiativeDescription: At a time of great political paralysis around climate change internationally -- and apparent backtracking by American politicians and the public on the science of global warming itself -- there are "reasons to rethink our approach," says moderator John Reilly. He hopes to "create a civil discourse that helps us understand better the varied concerns of people on the topic." Panelists sketch the past, present and future of climate change. Kerry Emanuel reviews the science of climate change, noting that the greenhouse effect discovery dates back to the 18th century, and that by the end of the 19th, scientists had already begun worrying that consumption of fossil fuel and the accompanying release of CO2 would lead to an increase in surface temperatures of 5-6 degrees C. Modern science with its ice core measurements has tracked dramatic temperature changes on earth over tens of millions of years. But the last 100 years have been unprecedented, with the famous hockey stick illustration capturing the connection between human industry and increased CO2 release. When scientists run some models forward, they show temperature increases ranging from 1.5 to 4çC. While these projections contain uncertainty, says Emmanuel, "this does not mean we should do nothing." Diverse climate change reconstructions agree: the warmest years of the past century were 1998, 2005 and 2010. "This is happening in real"time," says Ronald Prinn, and whether or not "Florida has a cold winter," warming is occurring "at a rate that should worry us all." The amount of heat the earth absorbs is simply much greater than it can bounce back into space, courtesy of greenhouse gas already accumulated in the atmosphere, and increasingly, by the secondary impacts of climate change such as the melting of ice sheets. At MIT, Prinn's group runs models that factor in clouds, ocean mixing, and varying levels of greenhouse gas emissions. In a "business as usual" model, with no real efforts to rein in fossil fuel use, Prinn puts the risk of a temperature increase higher than 4çC at 85%. If we manage to stabilize CO2 emissions at 550 parts per million (we're at 472 today), there is still a 25% chance of getting greater than 2çC change. Prinn worries about the instability of the arctic tundra and permafrost, which stores 200 times the amount of current human emissions in carbon, as well as the acidification of oceans, placing plankton, basis of all ocean life, at risk. Against this bleak backdrop, MIT newcomer Chris Knittel describes the policy options for tackling climate change. He acknowledges the "dismal and frustrating science" of environmental economics, which had counted on the equivalent of a carbon tax to discourage carbon emissions, only to meet a wall of political rejection. Carbon pricing lowers demand for the fuel intensive products that matter the most in climate change, and whether in the form of cap and trade, or a direct tax, also spurs technologies aimed at fuel efficiency or encouraging alternative fuels. The nation's fuel standards, set to rise to 35.5 mpg by 2016 are modest, believes Knittel, and subsidies seem to encourage carbon intensive activities rather than reducing them (nb:corn and cellulosic ethanol). States like California are more ambitious, but recent court rulings blocked its cap and trade policy "for environmental justice reasons." "The question is whether we can substantially decrease energy and carbon intensity while accommodating economic growth," says Ernest Moniz. New technologies that emerge must drive the cost of carbon "very, very low" if they are to make a major impact. With cheap coal the primary fuel generating electricity in the U.S., Moniz offers a "Michelin guide type rating" of possible alternative, 'carbon"free' fuels: At the top are renewables such as solar; nuclear; and coal with capture and sequestration. Natural gas doesn't really figure, since it does not wean society effectively from carbon. Moniz believes the best fuel technologies require substantial innovations to bring down their prices. The nuclear industry may want to try small modular reactors of 50"300 megawatts, rather than the 1600 megawatt behemoths that after Fukushima, are even more controversial. Carbon capture and sequestration will require brand new approaches and full"scale testing. Moniz believes solar technology is making the most rapid progress, specifically in silicon photovoltaics, courtesy in part of work in novel materials at MIT. Also, the "global, peanut"sized industry" of batteries may play a "huge role in transforming the picture" of electric vehicles, possibly making them economically feasible in a decade." Sarah Slaughter believes the incredible challenge of climate change might make possible wholesale transformation of infrastructure, energy, and other resource systems. She cites New York City's planning efforts to adapt to sea level rise, which would likely flood the sewer system. All communities must think ahead, for hurricanes, or other disasters likely to flow from warming, but rather than replicate what exists today, says Slaughter, planners should focus on "building the world we want to live in." MIT and its partners around the world hope to develop "ground breaking technologies" to help transform communities and make them safer, and healthier. Slaughter envisions solutions such as district"wide heating and cooling, and describes a system introduced in Kenya that converts agricultural waste into fuel for cooking food. "There is an opportunity to do things right as we move forward," she concludes. About the Speaker(s): Energy, environmental, and agricultural economist John Reilly focuses on understanding the role of human activities as a contributor to global environmental change and the effects of environmental change on society and the economy. A key element of his work is the integration of economic models of the global economy as it represents human activity with models of biophysical systems including the ocean, atmosphere, and terrestrial vegetation. By understanding the complex interactions of human society with our planet, the goal is to aid in the design of policies that can effectively limit the contribution of human activity to environmental change, to facilitate adaptation to unavoidable change, and to understand the consequences of the deployment of large scale energy systems that will be needed to meet growing energy needs.Host(s): School of Science, MIT Energy Initiative

Investments in our Future: Exploring Space through Innovation and Technology

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 04:00:00 GMT

04/20/2011 4:00 PM 26"100Dr. Robert D. Braun, Chief Technologist, NASADescription: "I don't remember Apollo at all," confesses Robert Braun, NASA's chief technologist. "I feel really bad about it." Nevertheless, he has spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the mission to the moon, and its significance not just for space exploration, but for the nation's innovative edge and economy. Braun wonders, "What is my generation's space race?." Braun offers not one but a handful of "game"changing civil space possibilities" that he feels certain could be accomplished in his lifetime. These include an asteroid defense system, forecasting major storms in time to move entire populations out of harm's way; and finding life in space. Braun notes that many others embrace these "lofty goals," but that NASA has been hampered in approaching them by a lack of investment in technology. When Braun first graduated from Penn State decades ago, he worked on "human to Mars" programs. There were huge technological obstacles then that persist today. Says Braun, "We need a series of technological advances crossing multiple disciplines to make a human Mars mission feasible." The recently minted NASA Space Technology Program (STP), under Braun's wing, intends to seed R&D ventures -- whether in early stage innovation, experimentation or pilot demonstrations -- that may ultimately solve the kinds of problems hampering human space exploration. The program will also yield numerous other benefits, Braun predicts, in many other areas of science and engineering. These investments in disruptive technologies will pay off in turn by creating spinoff high tech industries, spurring new jobs, economic growth and global competitiveness. Initial STP R&D money is headed for the International Space Station, which offers unique opportunities to explore long"term human degradation in space, water reclamation, and human"robot collaborations. Other projects include different kinds of space telescopes that could be assembled in space. STP hopes to nurture many ideas, selecting the most promising for larger investment and potential mission status. But the R&D itself "will pay large dividends for scientists," he promises. As evidence, Braun points to NASA"spawned technology that has proved useful if not essential on our home planet: spacecraft tracking the Gulf oil spill; the capsule used to rescue Chilean miners trapped underground; protective armor for police and firefighters; nutritional supplements in baby formula. "Down"to"earth applications help us, and also create jobs, companies, products, and stimulate the economy," says Braun. The Apollo program was "actually all about technological leadership," he concludes, and "that's what it's still all about today." About the Speaker(s): Robert D. Braun was named NASA Chief Technologist by NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden on Feb. 3, 2010. Braun serves as the principal advisor and advocate on matters concerning agency"wide technology policy and programs. Braun has more than 20 years experience performing design and analysis of planetary exploration systems as a member of the technical staff at NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research has focused on systems' aspects of planetary exploration, where he contributed to the design, development, test and operation of several robotic space flight systems. Braun was a member of the Mars Pathfinder design and landing operations team from 1992 to 1997 and has been part of development teams for the Mars Microprobe, Mars Sample Return and Mars Surveyor 2001 projects. He also has provided independent assessment and served on NASA review boards for the Mars Polar Lander, Mars Odyssey, Mars Exploration Rover, Phoenix Mars Scout, Genesis, and Mars Science Laboratory flight projects. Braun joined the Georgia Institute of Technology in Oct 2003. At Georgia Tech, he led a research and educational program focused on the design of advanced flight systems and technologies for planetary exploration. Recent research projects included the development of entry, descent and landing concepts and technologies for human Mars exploration. Host(s): School of Engineering, Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium

Air Pollution Trends and Impacts: Assessing Transportation in Context of Global Change

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 04:00:00 GMT

03/29/2011 4:00 PM Noelle Eckley Selin, Assistant Professor; Engineering Systems Division; Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary SciencesDescription: It is a complicated matter mapping the movement of pollution in the atmosphere, but Noelle Eckley Selin models not just the chemistry of the atmosphere as it absorbs emissions and responds to climate change, but its potential impact over time on human health and world economies. She takes a systems approach "to understanding how past, present and future human activities influence pollution, and its impact." Her goal: to provide good science for policy decisions. Selin notes the dominating contribution of motor vehicles to air pollution. Something like 56% of nitrous oxides (NOx) flow from cars and trucks, and more from construction, lawn and garden equipment. These gases form smog and ozone, which constitute a major threat to human health, in the form of increased cases of asthma and cardiovascular disease, she says. The EPA has "ratcheted down" its allowance of permissible NOx emissions, and for particulates, but, Selin says, recent health research "suggests there is no threshold for ozone damages beyond background level." Pollution impact of these gases is a moving target not just in health research, but also around climate change, where ozone and particulates are known "climate forcers." However, says Selin, the feedbacks between climate and emissions are quite complicated, and "a policy win on climate doesn't necessarily mean a win on air pollution." To help achieve "win"win scenarios" addressing both air pollution and climate, Selin and her colleagues are hard at work on a battery of studies that couple methodologies, modeling air pollution impacts on the economy ("looking at how economic activities and choices influence pollution controls;" projecting health effects of ozone and particulates concentrations in 16 global regions; and the negative economic impacts resulting from pollution related health issues. Unlike other work that focuses on running scenarios focused on single topics, Selin says, "We're taking multiple models, to give more of a range of expected outcomes. We're developing ways to deal with scale, uncertainty, and computational issues." Integrating models from the social sciences and atmospheric sciences, and factoring in uncertainties, Selin's group hopes to offer reasonably accurate pictures of impacts globally through mid"century. Studies focused on Europe show economic and health costs of air pollution in the hundreds of billions of dollars, with damages steadily accumulating. Pollution hampers economic growth, and mortality rises as well worldwide. Conversely, vehicle pollution controls, muzzling emissions, can keep economies moving. About the Speaker(s): Noelle Eckley Selin uses atmospheric chemistry modeling to inform decision"making strategies on climate change, and air and mercury pollution. She received her Ph.D. in 2007 from Harvard University in Earth and Planetary Sciences. Prior to that, she was a research associate with the Initiative on Science and Technology for Sustainability at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She has also been a visiting researcher at the European Environment Agency in Copenhagen, Denmark, and have worked on chemicals issues at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.Host(s): School of Engineering, Transportation@MIT

Celebrating Science and Engineering Breakthroughs IV

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 04:00:00 GMT

03/29/2011 3:30 PM KresgeKatrin Wehrheim, Associate Professor of Mathematics, MIT; Sallie Chisholm, Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Professor of Biology, MIT; Nancy Kanwisher, '80, PhD '86, Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MITDescription: The wind"up session of this multi"part symposium on women at MIT brings together brains and brine -- two researchers' pioneering work in neuroscience and ocean microbes. In 1985, Sallie (Penny) Chisholm discovered Prochlorococcus, a "tiny, round, green thing that's not so beautiful but extraordinary." Lined up, 100 of these sub"micron size phytoplankton come to the width of a human hair, and they turn out to be the most abundant photosynthetic cell on the planet. There are so many Prochlorococcus distributed through global oceans that their accumulated weight would amount to one billion people. Most important, life as we know it would not be possible without these (and other) photosynthetic ocean creatures, which produce a large share of the planet's oxygen. Chisholm has spent more than two decades devoted to in"depth study of Prochlorococcus, which even as a single species presents many "ecotypes." Some fare better in great depths, far from the sun, others closer to the surface. Research has verified 12 genetically different strains of Prochlorococcus occupying different ocean niches _ and given that there are 1027 cells in the wild, many more genomes are literally floating around. Chisholm ultimately wants to understand why certain types of Prochlorococcus appear in particular ecosystems, and not in others. For instance, Prochlorococcus follow the Gulf Stream, but "disappear near Massachusetts." With faster gene sequencing, Chisholm and colleagues have been sampling seawater from around the world for Prochlorococcus, hoping to understand better the reasons for their diversity, and how they fit into the larger physical and chemical systems of the oceans. Nancy Kanwisher approaches fundamental questions involving the nature of the human mind using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), which enables investigation of both structure and function of the brain. In particular, Kanwisher has been exploring whether the brain features regions specialized for specific purposes. Her studies have turned up several such areas: the fusiform face area of the brain, responsible only for face recognition; the parahippocampal place area, a region that responds to images of places or scenes; and the "third and most disreputable region," the extrastriate body area, which responds to pictures of bodies, body parts _ whether stick figures or silhouettes. These regions are found in the architecture of all normal human brains, Kanwisher says, and their existence raises additional questions that she and other researchers are pursuing. For instance, to learn when these areas become wired in the brain, Kanwisher scanned children. She learned that kids as young as five years showed the same face recognition brain activity as adults. There is evidence "implicating genes" in face recognition. But there is a role for experience as well. Although there is a brain region that responds strongly to visual words and letter strings, the "selectivity of the region" depends on an individual's history (such as familiarity with written characters from specific languages). Kanwisher concludes that while there are some "highly specialized bits" of the mind/brain made up of specialized components, "these may be relatively rare, and there is probably lots of general purpose machinery." About the Speaker(s): From 2007 to 2010, Katrin Wehrheim served as assistant professor of math at MIT. She received the B.S. equiv. in mathematics and physics from the University of Hamburg in 1995, and the Diploma in physics from Imperial College in 1996. She completed the Ph.D. in mathematics at ETH Z orich in 2002. Wehrheim's thesis was awarded the ETH Medal. She continued at ETH Z orich as a postdoctoral fellow, 2002"03, before going to Princeton University as instructor, 2003"04. She was a member of Institute of Advanced Studies, 2004"06 and fellow at Princeton, 2005"06. Wehrheim's research interests include problems in gauge theory and symplectic topology and PDEs, in particular the relations of gauge theoretic and symplectic Floer theories.Host(s): Office of the President, MIT150 Inventional Wisdom

Paradigm Shifts: From Biology to Technology to Medical Applications

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 04:00:00 GMT

03/16/2011 1:30 PM KresgeRichard O. Hynes, PhD '71, Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research, Department of Biology; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Eric S. Lander, Professor of Biology ; Founding Director, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Member, Whitehead Institute; Lee Hood, Affiliate Professor of Immunology, University of Washington; President, Institute of Systems Biology; Susan L. Lindquist, Professor of Biology, MITDescription: After years of working out the genetic and molecular machinery of cancer, scientists are gaining significant ground on the disease, and are on the verge of a new generation of diagnostic and therapeutic approaches. Three researchers who have spearheaded this biomedical revolution describe how increasingly fast and cost"effective technology has helped make sense of ever"growing data on different cancers, offering 'big picture' views that may lead not merely to more effective treatments, but to an entirely new kind of medical care. When exposed to environmental stress such as high temperatures, cells in all organisms respond with proteins called heat shock factors (HSFs), and endure all sorts of damage. Years ago, Susan Lindquist speculated that the stress response, an "ancient survival pathway," might have something to do with cancer. She set this work aside, until she was "enticed" by MIT and its multidisciplinary and computational approach to the disease. In recent studies, Lindquist has learned that a central protein, HSF1, promotes malignancy in many ways. She tested different strains of cancer cells from many MIT labs, and found that "cancer is aided and abetted by the stress response." In human breast cancer cells, for example, "the more deranged and metastatic and oncogenic the cell line is, the more it seems to depend on stress response," Lindquist says. Conversely, knocking out HSF1 can protect against cancer growth. With the help of the Broad Institute and its screening technology, Lindquist has explored 350 thousand compounds to see whether they inhibit or potentiate HSF1, and turned up herbal remedies that interfere with the stress response and slow the advance of some cancers. Only recently has it been possible to step back and get the big picture on cancer, says Eric Lander. This increasingly comprehensive perspective comes courtesy of Lander's own enterprises, including the Human Genome Project (1990"2003), and relentlessly improving DNA sequencing technology. MIT's own sequencing output has grown from 70 billion bases per year in 1999 to 125 billion bases, with the cost down 100 thousand fold _ "a stunning pace," concludes Lander, with major implications for cancer research. Lander has launched a cancer genome atlas that will assemble from hundreds of thousands of patient samples of normal and cancerous DNA, and permit the analysis of important cancer cell lines. He envisions the capacity to "knock out every gene in the genome" to build cellular models in order to predict "how a tumor will become resistant to drugs. "It's already time to start asking what is the standard of care for cancer patients," says Lander. "It should be soon for anybody that I loved that they could have this information." Leroy Hood figures he has participated in four paradigm changes in biomedical science, and is leading the charge on the fifth: the drive toward P4 medicine (for "predictive, preventive, personalized and participatory"). Hood was behind the automated DNA sequencer that made the Human Genome Project a reality, and has subsequently developed other devices for translating RNA, protein and other biological information. He says he came to realize that "cross"disciplinary biology was essential for the future," accompanied by a systems approach to disease. Hood imagines patients someday "surrounded by a cloud of virtual data points," which may be distilled to render "simple hypotheses about health and disease." With medicine increasingly an informational science, researchers will be able to map diseases as networks perturbed by precisely delineated genetic or environmental factors. Hood is developing a blood diagnostics system for detecting different types of disease, and developing genomes of families to track genes coding for these diseases. The ultimate goal: creating individualized patient "data spaces" in order to "deal with disease in powerful new ways," and to shift the future focus toward wellness. About the Speaker(s): Richard Hynes received his B.A. in biochemistry from the University of Cambridge, U.K., and his Ph.D. in biology from MIT. After postdoctoral work at the Imperial Cancer Research Fund in London, where he initiated his work on cell adhesion, he returned to MIT as a faculty member. Hynes is a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He has received the Gairdner Foundation International Award for achievement in medical science and recently served as president of the American Society for Cell Biology.Host(s): Office of the President, MIT150 Inventional Wisdom

Technology Day 2001 - "Origins and Beyond: Our Place in the Cosmos"

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 16:31:21 GMT

The 2001 MIT Technology Day takse place on June 9, 2001, on the theme "Origins and Beyond: Our Place in the Cosmos." Featured speakers include Eric S. Lander, "The Human Genome and Beyond;" Claude R. Canizares, "The Origin of the Universe;" Maria T. Zuber, "Probing the Origin of the Planets from Spacecraft; " Charles R. Marshall, "On Palaeontology."The event is chaired by MIT President Charles M. Vest. [T10276, T10278, T10280]

The Fruits of Diversity

Mon, 14 Feb 2011 17:44:20 GMT

MIT150 Symposium
Human Diversity and Social Order Forum Series

Fruits of Diversity is a celebration of the enrichment of language and the arts when diverse cultures come to know and appreciate one another. New forms of architecture, visual arts, and music express their synthesis in wonderful, non-verbal ways.

Chair
Adèle Naudé Santos - Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning

Speakers
Elliot Bostwick Davis - John Moors Cabot Chair of the Art of the Americas Department at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA)
Walter Hood - Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, University of California
Donal Fox - Artist, Music and Theater Arts Section; MLK Visiting Scholar, MIT

Gaza in Crisis

Fri, 21 Jan 2011 05:00:00 GMT

01/21/2011 4:00 PM Wong AuditoriumNoam Chomsky, Institute Professor, MIT; Nancy Murray, Co"founder and President, Gaza Mental Health FoundationDescription: Two speakers steeped in the ongoing crisis of the Middle East describe abominable conditions for Palestinians living inside Gaza, which has been blockaded by Israel since 2007. They demand urgent action for civilian victims, and condemn both the Israeli and U.S. governments for pursuing policies of "genocide." An impassioned Nancy Murray details daily life inside what has become a 26"mile"long prison, and Noam Chomsky offers background on how this zone of misery came into being, with withering words for those he labels perpetrators. Murray asks us to imagine living "in a territory which over the past four years has served as a kind of laboratory to find the breaking point of human beings." Israel has deliberately worked to keep Gaza functioning at the lowest level possible, preventing Palestinians from repairing their war"torn water and sewer infrastructure, and severely limiting food supplies -- literally controlling calorie intake, says Murray. Israel has also blocked the reconstruction of hospitals and clinics to tend to those wounded by war, or suffering mental health trauma from years of harassment. She cites a 2006 study showing that 98% of Gaza children had been subject to violence, tear gas, or home searches. In a long"term, calculated effort to strangle economic development, Israel has also deprived fishermen of the right to safe maritime areas, and declared the small patches of arable land "to be a no"go zone," targeting farmers and children attempting to attend school nearby. The education system has also been hard hit, with schools in disrepair, and children "using old shipping containers as classrooms." If the future looks grim now, Murray believes there is worse to come, with Israel preparing for another round of war, capping "a six decade" long project of destroying resistance to oppression." There is no surprise for Noam Chomsky in the tightening vise around Gaza. It is of a piece with years of Israeli disregard for human rights and international law, he argues. The blockade, which began soon after Hamas won the 2006 Palestinian election, is but the latest episode in a history of betrayal, oppression and outright annihilation. Beginning in 1948 and the formation of Israel to 1967 and beyond, the Palestinians have been systematically humiliated and degraded. In spite of efforts by the U.N., and rulings by other international institutions, says Chomsky, Israel, with the backing of the U.S., has been intent on preventing a Palestinian state, and breaking the will of Palestinians. The 1987 Palestinian uprising goaded the Israelis, who since then have made merely a show of peace talks and increased the pace of their settlements on former Palestinian land. Last May, Israel attacked a ship attempting to break the blockade, killing nine people, and though there was an "international outcry," says Chomsky, Israel continued its siege, decried by Amnesty International and other human rights groups. The change in U.S. administration made no difference, he says. "The U.S. exerts no pressure, but participates actively and crucially in these crimes. The roadblock to peace remains." About the Speaker(s): Nancy Murray has worked as a teacher, scholar and social activist in Great Britain and Kenya as well as the United States. After teaching for seven years in the University of Nairobi, she directed a nation"wide program to combat racism in the media at London's Institute of Race Relations. As founder (in 1987) and director of the ACLU of Massachusetts Bill of Rights Education Project, she has encouraged teachers, students and the general public to work for a future in which civil liberties and civil rights will be safeguarded and enlarged. She co"founded and directed Project HIP"HOP (Highways into the Past: History, Organizing and Power), and over an eight"year period took high school students South and to South Africa to explore the history of the civil rights movement and struggle against apartheid. Her publications include an innovative curriculum for schools entitled Rights Matter: the Story of the Bill of Rights. Murray holds a B.A. from Harvard University, and a B.Phil. and Ph.D. in Modern History from Oxford University. Noam Chomsky has written and lectured widely on linguistics, philosophy, intellectual history, international affairs and U.S. foreign policy. Most recently, with Ilan Papp_ he has completed Gaza in Crisis (Haymarket Books, 2010). Other examples of his prolific work include: The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory; Aspects of the Theory of Syntax; Language and Mind; American Power and the New Mandarins; Reflections on Language; Rules and Representations; Knowledge of Language; The Culture of Terrorism; Manufacturing Consent (with E.S. Herman); Understanding Power; Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance; and most recently, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post"9/11 World, (with David Barsamian). Chomsky received his Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He then came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics. During the years 1958 to 1959 Chomsky was in residence at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In the spring of 1969 he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford; in January 1970 he delivered the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at Cambridge University; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi, and in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, among many others. Chomsky has received honorary degrees from universities around the world, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Science. Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for International StudiesTape #: T10535

MIT Communications Forum: Communications in Slow-Moving Crises

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 05:00:00 GMT

What's a journalist to do when a major story must be coaxed reluctantly into public view, or emerges on what seems like a geological time scale?

Toward Efficient Airport Operations

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 04:00:00 GMT

10/26/2010 4:00 PM 4"237Hamsa Balakrishnan, Asst Professor, Aero Astro and Engineering SystemsDescription: Few of us would elect to spend countless hours at the airport watching planes arrive, depart and sit at gates. But what constitutes a punishment for some actually energizes Hamsa Balakrishnan, whose research focuses on improving airport operations. Her goal is to make air travel more efficient, robust and green. Flying is quite frequently a trial these days, Balakrishnan acknowledges, with delays growing yearly, even during the recession when actual flights decreased. Congestion at the nation's busiest airports is primarily responsible for these delays, which produce billion"dollar losses for the airlines, environmental damage as idling planes burn millions of gallons of fuel, and untold aggravation for passengers. If gridlock at these airports is not addressed, these problems will only worsen, says Balakrishnan, with the projected doubling by 2025 of the nation's approximately 35 thousand daily flights. With a team of students, Balakrishnan has been analyzing airport operations. Air traffic controllers must routinely separate plane landings by a few minutes, and balance the need for safety with maximum efficiency. With departures, controllers attempt to respond to pilots on a first come, first served basis, but must pause for arrivals if runways are busy, and must juggle take"off order if planes are due at other airports. The current model for scheduling, called constrained position shifting, says Balakrishnan, has "been conjectured to have exponential computational complexity," and most important, does not seem the optimal method for controllers dealing with busy, real"time conditions. Balakrishnan has recently broken through conventional scheduling complexities. Her approach involves developing simple, practical algorithms that improve takeoff and landing efficiency while factoring in typical aircraft arrival and departure protocol, and weather, among other factors. She is now testing her own scheduling models at Boston's Logan Airport, at rush hour. So far, her team has achieved improvements in "runway throughput" equivalent to two"three extra flights per hour -- a 10"12% improvement in average flight delay. She is also working on reducing the amount of time planes spend waiting in departure queues burning fuel, a phenomenon resulting from saturation in ground traffic. In tests with Boston controllers, her team used color"coded cards to signal when planes should actually push back from the gate and fire up their engines. By manipulating pushback rates, says Balakrishnan, you can significantly decrease the amount of fuel burned, reducing CO2 and particulate release. Controllers also felt things "flowed better," she says. Next steps include a comprehensive evaluation of benefits, with an eye to developing "scalable control and optimization algorithms" for an increasingly busy aviation system. About the Speaker(s): Hamsa Balakrishnan received a B.Tech. in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2006. Between May and December 2006, she was a researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the NASA Ames Research Center. Her research interests address various aspects of air transportation systems, including algorithms for air traffic scheduling and routing, integrating weather forecasts into air traffic management and minimizing aviation"related emissions; air traffic surveillance algorithms; and mechanisms for the allocation of airport and airspace resources. She was a recipient of the NSF CAREER Award in 2008.Host(s): School of Engineering, Transportation@MIT

The Energy/Climate-Change Challenge and the Role of Nuclear Energy in Meeting It

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:00:00 GMT

10/25/2010 4:00 PM Wong AuditoriumThe Honorable John P. Holdren, '65, SM '66, Director, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Executive Office of the PresidentDescription: In a meaty lecture that serves as a concise and comprehensive primer on the twin challenge of energy and environment, John Holdren lays out the difficult options for contending with a world rapidly overheating. "There is no question the world is growing hotter," says Holdren, "and we do have a pretty good handle on influences on climate that are changing the average temperature of the Earth," he says. Since the mid"19th century, there has been a 20"fold increase in the world's use of energy, the preponderance of which comes from burning fossil fuels. The U.S. is 82% dependent on these fuels, and the rest of the world is racing to catch up. If all nations continue business as usual, says Holdren, by 2030 energy use will increase by about 60% over 2005 levels, with fossil fuels comprising about 70% of world energy use. While there is legitimate concern about the economic, political and security risks of fossil fuel dependence, he says, CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions that result from fossil fuel combustion pose an immense, immediate threat to the planet. From urban and regional air pollution to massive wildfires and fierce storms that bring coastal inundation, dramatic climate disruption is upon us and demands action now. In order to avoid the biggest risks, such as a temperature increase of several degrees centigrade, we must "sharply change the ratio of energy used essentially immediately," Holdren says. But it would cost around $15 trillion to convert the world's fossil fuel dependent energy system into something less destructive, and this conversion would take too long, even if nations could agree on an alternative system. So we are confronted with striking a balance between mitigation and adaptation. Scientists think stabilizing CO2 emissions at 450 parts per million by 2030 might give humanity a shot at avoiding a planet with temperatures as high as those 30 million years ago (when crocodiles swam off Greenland and palm trees swayed in Wyoming). Looking to cut CO2 emissions drastically, the Obama Administration is intent on achieving changes in vehicle fuel efficiency, promoting public transportation and other measures. But realistically, adaptation must also come into play, including changes in agricultural practices, engineering defenses against rising coastal waters, and warding off tropical diseases. The longer we wait, says Holdren, the more expensive mitigation and adaptation become. The wrenching changes needed across the board to reach the ambitious goal of 450 ppm require "barrier"busting incentives," and cannot be accomplished without eliminating "perverse incentives" that encourage business as usual. Holdren believes carbon pricing is essential and inevitable, despite the current climate in Washington. Nuclear power has a critical role to play in this transformation -- including the elusive goal of fusion reactors -- but it must be part of a larger surge in R&D spending on new energy technology ($15 billion versus the current $4 billion per year). The political will to meet this challenge remains a sticking point, and so scientists must do a better job explaining climate change to people, says Holdren. Since there is no silver bullet for the problem, he concludes, "we have got to do it all. If you look at the magnitude of the challenge and the amount by which we must reduce the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions to useful energy supplied to the economy, we can leave no stone unturned, and that's what we're trying to get done." About the Speaker(s): John P. Holdren, President Obama's "Science Czar," previously served as Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy and Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, as well as professor in Harvard's Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Director of the independent, nonprofit Woods Hole Research Center. From 1973 to 1996 he was on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, where he co"founded and co"led the interdisciplinary graduate"degree program in energy and resources. Holdren holds advanced degrees in aerospace engineering and theoretical plasma physics from MIT and Stanford and has specialized in energy technology and policy, global climate change, and nuclear arms control and nonproliferation. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as foreign member of the Royal Society of London. A former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, his awards include a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship, the John Heinz Prize in Public Policy, the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, and the Volvo Environment Prize. He served from 1991 until 2005 as a member of the MacArthur Foundation's board of trustees.Host(s): School of Engineering, Nuclear Science and Engineering

Humanities in the Digital Age

Wed, 20 Oct 2010 04:00:00 GMT

Reports of the demise of the humanities are exaggerated, suggest these panelists, but there may be reason to fear its loss of relevance.

the human factor: Intro

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 20:38:16 GMT

Engineering Smarter Drivers

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 04:00:00 GMT

10/05/2010 4:00 PM 4"237Alex (Sandy) Pentland, PhD '82, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, and Director of Human Dynamics Research, MIT Media LabDescription: While automakers market increasingly intelligent cars, they may be missing the point. No matter how sophisticated the vehicle's brain, suggests Alex (Sandy) Pentland, the smartest element on the road is still the human driver. In search of safe, responsive vehicles, designers should not think of separate components -- machine and operator -- but rather, an integrated system comprised of two, complementary intelligences. Tackling this challenge involves analyzing human behavior -- not the traditional purview of engineers who "are scared off by the noise, the randomness of people." Pentland, on the other hand, has long explored human decision"making in a variety of settings, including car driving. Working with an automaker, he outfitted test vehicles with sensors on the steering wheel, brakes and elsewhere, to "determine predictive signals of driving." The sensors permitted the analysis of "clusters of behaviors," so Pentland could figure out with 95% accuracy "what people would do before they did it." From developing a model of the driver's behavior, he moved on to neighboring drivers' patterns, to paint a picture of road interactions and signaling. This research has resulted in a system now deployed in Nissan cars as a "safety shield" -- a computer brain that uses predictive knowledge to help "nudge back" a driver who may be straying into the wrong lane, or gently decelerate if the driver is speeding into the car ahead. Pentland's "general philosophy" about creating an interface between people and an intelligent vehicular system involves recognizing that the human is in charge, never the vehicle, lest "the human stop paying attention." It is about establishing a "joint control mode" so "car and human are cooperating" in a way that feels natural. Indeed, Pentland notes that there is evidence these sensor systems help people become better drivers. Beyond this basic work, Pentland is introducing robot "friends" into cars, to help guide a driver's attention in appropriate ways. He is also extending his intricate models of driving patterns toward better route navigation technology. Pentland builds traffic flow maps that are based on the "conditional dependence" among driving decisions made en route, which may prove extremely helpful in alerting drivers to construction obstacles or other hazards. He has also mapped mobility patterns of certain groups in a city, by monitoring taxi and cell phone use, and can predict where specific groups of people travel, shop and eat. This research could prove useful to urban planners laying out a public transportation grid, and someday, might help in making greener cities or battling epidemics. About the Speaker(s): Alex (Sandy) Pentland is a pioneer in wearable computers, health systems, smart environments, and technology for developing countries. He is a co"founder of the Wearable Computing research community, the Autonomous Mental Development research community, the Center for Future Health, and was the founding director of the Media Lab Asia. He was formerly the Academic Head of the MIT Media Laboratory. Pentland was chosen by Newsweek as one of the 100 Americans most likely to shape the next century. Host(s): School of Engineering, Transportation@MIT

Moving Ahead: Engineering Challenges of Deep Water Drilling and Future Oil Resource Recovery

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 04:00:00 GMT

09/28/2010 4:15 PM E14"674Andrew J. Whittle, ScD '87, Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Nancy Leveson, Professor, Aeronautics and Astronautics; Roland Pellenq, Visiting Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Kim Vandiver, Dean for Undergraduate Research & Professor, Mechanical EngineeringDescription: To keep up with demand, the oil industry ventures increasingly farther and deeper offshore, extracting resources as fast as possible in often hazardous conditions with newly minted technology. So to these panelists, the BP Deepwater Horizon accident did not come as a complete surprise. However, they view the disaster from distinctly different perspectives. "The same things happen all the time" in major accidents, states Nancy Leveson. There are flaws in the "safety culture" of the industry, including a sense that its enterprise is inherently "more risky" and accidents inevitable --"the price of production." Leveson notes that "being 35 thousand feet in the air in a metal cylinder is not a safe thing, but the commercial aerospace industry has made it safe." Industry leaders don't believe that safety pays and consequently they merely comply with regulations. Rather than seeking systemic fixes, they blame operator error or technical failure. Nevertheless, says Leveson, "Complex systems migrate toward states of high risk, so the oil industry should "must change its culture" and implement safeguards. "We can't make things perfectly safe but we can make them a lot safer than they are." Cement, used for thousands of years in construction, is only now revealing its secrets to scientists. Roland Pelenq is interested in how cement responds chemically, and at the atomic scale, to extremes in pressure and temperature, such as those found in the depths of offshore drilling sites. He speculates that mistakes in cement formulation might lead to calamitous structural flaws. A specific cement chemistry (calcium and silica primarily) determines the setting process. Ordinary cement grows from liquid to solid in 10 hours, as nano"sized bricks line up in layers. Oil well cement must be mixed with a different ratio of calcium and silica, or it won't cohere correctly when deep under water. Pelenq says, "If I'm a cement guy working for the oil industry, I want setting as fast as possible." The industry uses extra silica to speed up the process. But, suggests Pelenq, with the Deepwater Horizon well, "the setting process kinetics may not have worked." Kim Vandiver offers a brief tour of tension leg platforms, the highly complicated and enormous structures developed to get oil out of Gulf waters. While the "feet are quite elastic," says Vandiver, wave energy can lead to stress. This technology becomes really susceptible to vibration at depths of around a mile -- the kind of depth the Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling in. As the oil industry drills deeper, it means "from the point of view of production technology always operating on a frontier," says Vandiver. He is working on a dynamic absorber for tension leg platforms so they can take the stress of ocean current and pressure 6,000 feet down, much the way a tall building can be reinforced to withstand high winds. Vandiver comments that the relentless drive to extract oil as fast as possible from ever deeper water flows from our "insatiable demands on the product." He concludes, "To slow down the industry and make progress more carefully, practice more conservation." About the Speaker(s): Andrew Whittle received his B.Sc. 1981, from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, and his Sc.D. in 1987, from MIT. His research focuses on geotechnical engineering, constitutive models for geomaterials, analysis methods for foundations, excavations and tunnels,in situ test methods, and ground improvement. Whittle has received the J. James R. Croes Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers.Host(s): School of Science, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

Perspectives on the Unfolding Spill: Evidence of the Environmental Impacts of the Event

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 04:00:00 GMT

09/28/2010 1:30 PM E14"674Dr. Maria T. Zuber, E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, Head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT ; ; Eric Adams, Lecturer, Civil and Environmental Engineering; Elizabeth Kujawinski, Associate Scientist, Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, WHOI; Jerry Milgram, Professor Emeritus, Mechanical EngineeringDescription: While the government declared an end to the oil spill at the Macondo well on September 19, 2010, research into the causes and impacts of the Gulf disaster is ongoing. At the kickoff panel of a three"part symposium, three scientists discuss what they are learning about the disposition of the nearly 5 million gallons of oil, as well as gas and chemicals, injected into Gulf waters following the blowout. A decade ago, a group of oil companies, including BP, sponsored a series of controlled releases of oil and methane off the coast of Norway. Much of what we know about underwater spills comes from these studies, says Eric Adams, who "laments" the lack of follow up research into deeper waters. Scientists learned that the light gas "provided a buoyant engine for crude migration," and that as this oil mix gushed from the site of injection, it formed small droplets. The Gulf spill, like these studies, involved oil mixed with natural gas. Much of this oil was similarly atomized, suggests Adams, and reduced in size further by chemical dispersants. The resultant miniature droplets could take as long as a year to rise to the surface, and are deposited at different layers in the water. Adams and others hope to create models for how oil diffused into water around the Deepwater Horizon site, and how the particles disperse over time. Using an ultrahigh resolution mass spectrometer, Elizabeth Kujawinski has been sampling sea water at different distances from the well head to identify the presence of oil and dispersants. In particular, she wants to know how these components spread into Gulf waters. With help from the EPA, Kujawinski and her team learned the chemical signature of Corexit, the key dispersant used in the Gulf spill, where it was used heavily for the first time under water. She is busy "quantifying the molecule" in samples from various cruises, and comparing these samples to control batches of sea water. Says Kujawinski, "Our data is providing new insight into compounds that haven't been observed before" and making it possible to track dispersant chemicals, and oil, through the complex Gulf ecosystem in the months ahead. All those booms laid out to protect fragile wetlands looked like swimming noodles from the air, and may have had just about the same impact, suggests Jerry Milgram. These booms, with their underwater curtains and floating foam tops, permit oil to go under or over whenever the current gets too strong. Oil containment simply won't work against energetic wind and waves. Decades ago, Milgram attempted to design booms that rode the waves better in gently agitated seas, and he came up with oil collection gadgets as part of these devices. They were too expensive "and fell into disuse." Once the oil escapes, booms and skimmers are a waste of resources. Says Milgram, "When it comes to surface cleanup and open sea, use your money for something better." About the Speaker(s): Maria Zuber studies the structure and evolution of planets and has been an innovator in the application of spacecraft laser ranging and radio tracking systems to map the topography and gravity fields of the planets. Zuber has led or co"led spacecraft instrument investigations to the Moon and Mars, and she is involved in future missions to Mars, Mercury, and the asteroids Ceres and Vesta. The topographic map of Mars produced by her laser altimeter on the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft is the most accurate topography model for any planet, including Earth. Zuber received her B.A. in Astrophysics (honors) and Geology, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, her Sc.M. in Geophysics in 1983, and her Ph.D. in Geophysics in 1986, both from Brown University. Host(s): School of Science, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

Reclaiming the Moral Life of Philanthropy

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 04:00:00 GMT

09/27/2010 4:30 PM e14"633Gara LaMarche, President and CEO, The Atlantic PhilanthropiesDescription: Gara LaMarche believes the nation's charitable organizations have lost "moral clarity," growing more concerned with "the fix, the intervention, than about reasons for doing or caring about what is right." After many decades laboring in large, private foundations, LaMarche has an intimate perspective on this drift in philanthropic mission and practice. He draws several telling examples from his own experience. As head of the Texas Civil Liberties Union in the mid"1980s, LaMarche failed to sway diehard capital punishment legislators with the "traditional ACLU rights talk," which was viewed either as starry"eyed idealism or dangerous radicalism. He took a radically different tack, and "argued in pragmatic practical terms" that the state couldn't afford to imprison so many, and that depriving prisoners of educational opportunities merely forced released inmates back to crime. This argument prevailed briefly, during a tough fiscal climate, but when the state was flush, it invested in more prisons. The result: Texas today holds four times as many prisoners as it did 20 years ago. LaMarche says "Pragmatic terms didn't work." His Atlantic Philanthropies poured millions into comprehensive health reform legislation, which resulted in the "most significant advance for the social safety net in over 40 years." Yet the law yielded no political benefits, says LaMarche, because the administration "erred in framing the healthcare campaign largely around costs, not around morality and justice." As a result, there is no match for the backlash -- "ferocious passion" around the issue of governmental and fiscal overreach. LaMarche also cites immigration reform as a case where philanthropy could have spurred action based on the "scope of injustice," but instead relied on political tactics, such as splitting conservatives, and "fixing a broken system." Technocracy, he says, "is no match for the virulent passion of the other side." Philanthropies have become sidetracked by public opinion and establishing metrics for their performance. They retreat to safe positions, and "erode what moral authority they have" by protecting their own self"interest, especially around tax distinctions. LaMarche says it is possible to strike a balance between the goals of effective philanthropy, and tackling social inequities and large, complex problems such as climate change. This means speaking out in the current "toxic political environment" with a coherent world view about "what is right," while not getting lost in polling and problem"solving, which risks "losing what gains we've made because the story of which those are part has no moral." About the Speaker(s): Gara LaMarche leads The Atlantic Philanthropies, an international grantmaking foundation dedicated to bringing about lasting changes in the lives of disadvantaged and vulnerable people. Atlantic focuses on four critical social challenges: Ageing, Children & Youth, Population Health, and Reconciliation & Human Rights. LaMarche joined Atlantic in April 2007 to lead the organization through its final chapter as the foundation plans to disburse its remaining endowment and complete active grantmaking by 2016. Before joining Atlantic, LaMarche served as Vice President and Director of U.S. Programs for the Open Society Institute, established by George Soros. Earlier, he was Associate Director of Human Rights Watch, and served in a variety of positions with the American Civil Liberties Union. LaMarche has written numerous articles on human rights and social justice issues for major national publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. He serves on the boards of StoryCorps, The White House Project, the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and the Leadership Council of Hispanics in Philanthropy.Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for International Studies

RLE Investigator Profile Video Series: George C. Verghese

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 18:28:44 GMT

Professor George C. Verghese of MIT discusses research and education in his group, and the intellectual challenges facing engineers at the frontiers of computational modeling and clinical monitoring.

Communications Forum: Civics in Difficult Places

Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:12:45 GMT

In a live demonstration of globe-straddling communication technologies like Skype, this forum connects to citizen journalists and activists around the world, some of whom frequently test the limits of governmental authority. Moderator Ethan Zuckerman wonders if these new digital forms are fundamentally liberating, providing users access to public spaces they might otherwise be denied. He pursues this line of inquiry in a series of internet conversations with correspondents covering some of the world's most ravaged or oppressed regions.

Featuring:

Cameran Ashraf, Iran
Mehdi Yahyanejad, Iran
Georgia Popplewell, Haiti
Huma Yusuf, Pakistan
Ruthie Ackerman, Liberia
Brenda Burrell and Bev Clark, Zimbabwe
Lova Rakotomalala, Madagascar

Artificial Life: A global good or evil?
CIS audits the discovery

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 19:38:06 GMT

The Center's series Audit of the Conventional Wisdom continues with a look at the recent discovery out of the Venter laboratory: artificial life. Is this a global good or evil? Ken Oye, director of the Center's Program on Emerging Technologies and associate professor of political science and engineering systems, discusses the discovery from his MIT office on Friday, May 28, 2010.

Content and time approximates:
Intro
The significance of the discovery (1:40)
The reactions from NGOs, industry, media (4:01)
Potential applications, both near and long-term (5:06)
Potential risks (7:58)
Safety and security issues (12:12)
The bottomline (16:53)

How Can Engineers Contribute to the Fight Against Malaria?

Tue, 11 May 2010 04:00:00 GMT

05/11/2010 6:00 PM MuseumSubra Suresh, ScD '81, Dean, MIT School of Engineering; ; Monica Diez"Silva, Post"doctoral fellow, DMSE; David Quinn, Graduate student, Mechanical EngineeringDescription: Malaria has afflicted mankind from time immemorial, confounding many attempts at its eradication. Hundreds of millions now contract the disease annually, and between one and three million -- primarily children -- die from malaria each year. But thanks to an alliance with engineering, medical science has some powerful, new weapons in its arsenal that may ultimately prevail over malaria. From the labs of MIT Dean of Engineering Subra Suresh comes a fresh approach to the disease. The parasitic microbe that causes malaria affects the ability of red blood cells to contract, or deform, as they move through the body's thousands of blood vessels, delivering oxygen and removing CO2. Several years ago, Suresh had the insight that the infection could be viewed as "an engineering problem." With the recent deciphering of the malaria parasite genome, and new methods for measuring forces on individual molecules and cells, says Suresh, "We have some hope of asking a question that we did not have the hope of answering 10 years ago." Researchers can now minutely and systematically track how biochemical and environmental triggers lead to devastating changes in red blood cell deformability in malaria. Suresh has assembled an international group of researchers to investigate different pieces of this complex disease, which involves mosquitoes and humans, and multiple phases of infection. From the Institut Pasteur Suresh recruited microbiologist Monica Diez"Silva, who is exploring how Plasmodium falciparum (the parasite responsible for the most severe form of malaria) produces mechanical changes inside infected red blood cells. This microorganism churns out thousands of merozoites that enter the cells, making them stick to each other and to the walls of blood vessels. They become so rigid that they can't squeeze easily through blood vessels, compromising circulation. Diez"Silva is especially concerned with infected cells that invade the brain. Another Suresh group member, mechanical engineer David Quinn, developed a home"made optic system to trap and stretch red blood cells. He learned that in the late stages of malaria infection, the membranes of these cells increase in stiffness by a factor of 50. He is also using microfluidics to model the flow of infected and uninfected red blood cells -- an "engineered obstacle course" -- which may some day yield a portable diagnostic tool. Suresh hopes his team's work will lead to a host of analytic and therapeutic aids for malaria. They have already made a great leap with the discovery of a Plasmodium falciparum gene that codes for a protein reducing the deformability of red blood cells. This same protein, they learned, also has greater impact when body temperature rises _ typical of high fever episodes in malaria. With research partners in Singapore, the Suresh group is working on a humanized mouse model in which different genes of the Plasmodium parasite are removed to see how they affect the disease. Some day, it might be possible to kill key parasite proteins in mosquitoes by widespread spraying, effectively defanging the disease. But Suresh warns, "We are very far away from therapeutic success. Mosquitoes adapt faster than we can study malaria." About the Speaker(s): Subra Suresh joined the MIT faculty from Brown University in 1993. He has served as the head of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT, and became Dean of the School of Engineering in 2007. His current research focuses on the mechanical responses of single biological cells and molecules and their implications for human health and diseases. Suresh has published more than 210 articles in journals, and is co"inventor of 14 U.S. and international patents. Suresh is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering. His honors include the Gordon Moore Distinguished Scholar award from CalTech, the Brahm Prakash Visiting Professorship from the Indian Institute of Science, selection by the Institute for Scientific Information as one of the most highly cited researchers in Materials Science, the Clark B. Millikan Visiting Professorship at CalTech, the TFR Swedish National Chair in Engineering from the Royal Instiute of Technology, Stockholm and the Distinguished Alumnus Award from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Museum

Looking Ahead to the Future of NASA

Mon, 10 May 2010 04:00:00 GMT

05/10/2010 3:00 PM 32"123Gen. Charles Bolden, NASA AdministratorDescription: From the MIT News Office: NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. defended President Barack Obama's controversial plans for the U.S. space agency's future and touted the president's plan to invest billions of dollars in basic science research. Some in Congress have criticized Obama's proposal to cancel the Constellation program, which would have sent humans to the moon by 2020, saying such a move will effectively cede U.S. space leadership to other nations. But Bolden noted that the White House's plan would also invest an additional $6 billion in NASA over the next five years, including a 60"percent increase in earth sciences research funding, as well as a 20"percent increase in planetary sciences research. Such an expansion could revitalize NASA's ties with institutions like MIT, which has played an instrumental role in the agency since NASA was founded in 1958. Bolden said NASA was going through what he called a "difficult, but very interesting" period. As a former astronaut who completed four space flights, Bolden expressed sadness about the prospect of ending NASA's space"shuttle fleet, admitting he is "emotionally attached" to the shuttle program. But he insisted that NASA is "committed" to Obama's new era of space exploration, which calls for a flexible path approach for NASA to gain progressively more experience, such as a lunar fly"by or exploration of asteroids, before making a trip to Mars. The plan also calls for developing a "heavy"lift" system to launch spacecraft into deep space, as well as technologies to protect humans from long"term radiation. In the future, NASA would lease vehicles from private companies to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. "The president, with my full agreement, made a change - a big change," Bolden said of Obama's decision to undertake a new direction for NASA, adding that the agency's fundamental goal "to boldly advance the human presence beyond the cradle of Earth," has not changed, and that Mars remains an "especially compelling target." Bolden outlined several tracks that NASA has proposed to achieve its goals, such as developing robotic technologies to scout new targets and test precision landings. He said the agency remains focused on using the International Space Station to learn more about human health issues, referring to ongoing work by ISS researchers to develop a salmonella vaccine. He pledged NASA's commitment to develop a commercial launch industry for carrying humans into low Earth orbit, but said that the agency was still fine"tuning specific operations details, such as whether a crew would be trained at NASA facilities. He also said the agency was honoring Obama's request to collaborate with other countries like Saudi Arabia to foster science research. When pressed to name a timetable for a manned mission to Mars, Bolden said it was "pretty vague," but that if NASA started to develop the architecture for a heavy"lift launch vehicle right now, it could be as soon as the early 2020s that a spacecraft orbits the moon, and maybe 2025 for a spacecraft or robot to land on an asteroid. Those advances could make travel to Mars a reality by 2030, he said. Host(s): School of Engineering, Massachusetts Space Grant Consortium

MIT/ Harvard Gaza: America's Response

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 15:44:03 GMT

Guest speakers:
Augustus Richard Norton, professor of anthropology and international relations, Boston University
Robert Blecher, historian and analyst with the International Crisis Group
Uri Zaki, USA Director, B'Tselem, the Israeli Information Center

Moderating the discussion:
Balakrishnan Rajagopal Acting Head, International Development Group at MIT Associate Professor of Law and Development at MIT Director, Program on Human Rights & Justice at MIT

Denialism: Media in the Age of Disinformation

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:00:00 GMT

04/27/2010 7:00 PM MuseumMichael Specter, Staff Writer, The New Yorker; Chris Mooney, Discover Blogger and Knight Fellow ; Shannon Brownlee, Instructor, The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice; Shankar Vedantam, National Science Writer, The Washington PostDescription: A few hundred years after the Enlightenment, western civilization is rushing back to the Dark Ages. The causes are debatable, but, argue these science journalists, the public increasingly rejects the findings of science, from climate change to evolution, and is turning away from rationality and reason in general. "People are afraid of anything that will hammer away at their preconceived notions," says Michael Specter. He points to the fanatic opposition in some quarters to genetically engineered foods, and the worship of organic products. Almost everything we eat is the result of genetic modification, he notes, and "organics kill people, too." It doesn't make sense to think that returning to "the old ways" will keep us healthy and supply the world with food. "We're hurting ourselves in lots of ways," says Specter, when people insist on believing what they want. Human nature plays a big part in feeding denialism, believes Chris Mooney. "We all ... argue against information that contradicts our existing worldview." The unfortunate evolution of media in the digital age is feeding our inherent "confirmation bias," and today "Americans with different political leanings construct different realities." We must "give up" on the idea that truth triumphs and society advances as more people become critical thinkers. Concludes Mooney, "We have to work with the media and brains we have, and seek realistic change." Shannon Brownlee had an "epiphany" a decade ago when she realized that prostate cancer tests did not lead to a lower risk of dying, as researchers suggested, but instead to potentially harmful treatment. Her "awakening" led her to perceive "how much of medicine we take on faith." Brownlee's journalistic beat now involves the frequent occurrence of "bad science" in medicine. She believes we are not all that far removed from the days when medicine was based on "four humors of disease" and bleeding was the key remedy. Health care, on which Americans spend more than anything else, depends on "the perception of science as its underpinning"_ a terrible delusion, she implies. To contend with denialism, says Shankar Vedentam, we need a more nuanced view, one that recognizes its different shapes: One type rejects events from the past for which we have evidence, and another kind "says I'm not willing to trust projections of what will happen in the future." Climate change falls in the latter category, as people "are being asked to trust data rather than their intuitions." Some summers feel cold, and some winters feel hot, for instance. Also, he says, partisanship now holds sway in all aspects of life, with people swearing loyalty to particular positions in unrelated areas, and to fellow members of their "team." Given indifference to facts, good information "paradoxically, horrifyingly can amplify the effects of bad information," believes Vedentam. Just look at the explosive growth of the Obama birther movement, in spite of ample evidence that the president was indeed born in Hawaii. Panelists see no easy antidote to this large"scale retreat from reason. Specter recommends that schools teach statistics, and Brownlee concurs that kids "should know what a big denominator and small numerator means." Vendantam argues for a nonpartisan approach to such issues as climate change, and Mooney thinks hard scientists and social scientists should be "in better dialog" to craft an effective approach to the big scientific and policy questions of our time. About the Speaker(s): Michael Specter has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1998. His most recent book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, was published on October 29, 2009. Specter writes often about science, technology, and public health. Specter came to The New Yorker from The New York Times, where he had been a roving foreign correspondent based in Rome. Earlier, Specter worked at The Washington Post, where, from 1985 to 1991, he covered local news, before becoming the paper's national science reporter and, later, the newspaper's New York bureau chief. In 1996 he won the Overseas Press Club's Citation for Excellence for his reporting from Chechnya. He has twice received the Global Health Council's annual Excellence in Media Award, first for a 2001 article about AIDS, and second for his 2004 article "The Devastation," about the ethics of testing H.I.V. vaccines in Africa. He also received the 2002 AAAS Science Journalism Award, for his article, "Rethinking the Brain," about the scientific basis of how we learn. Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist and commentator and the author of three books, including the The Republican War on Science, and Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future, co"authored by Sheril Kirshenbaum. They also write "The Intersection" blog together for Discover blogs. Moponey has also been a visiting associate in the Center for Collaborative History at Princeton University. For the summer of 2010, he is a Templeton"Cambridge Fellow in Science and Religion. He is also a contributing editor to Science Progress and a senior correspondent for The American Prospect magazine. Mooney's 2005 article for Seed magazine on the Dover evolution trial was included in the volume Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006. In 2006, Chris won the "Preserving Core Values in Science" award from the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals. His 2009 article for The Nation, "Unpopular Science" (co"authored with Sheril Kirshenbaum) will be included in Best American Science Writing 2010. Shannon Brownlee is a writer and essayist whose book, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Us Sicker and Poorer, was named the best economics book of 2007 by New York Times economics correspondent, David Leonhardt, and is being used by legislators and policy makers to craft health care reform legislation. A former senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, her work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Atlantic Monthly, Discover, Glamour, More, Mother Jones, New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, and Time, among others. In 2008"2009, Brownlee served as a visiting scholar at the National Institutes of Health, and is a Woodrow Wilson Visiting Scholar. In 2010, Brownlee received two awards from the American Society of Journalists and Authors: the June Roth Award for Medical Journalism, and the ASJA's award for Reporting on a Significant Topic. Other honors include the Association of Health Care Journalists Award for Excellence, the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, the National Association of Science Writers Science"in"Society Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. She holds an M.S. in Marine Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Shankar Vedantam writes about science and human behavior. He authored the weekly Department of Human Behavior column in The Washington Post from 2006 to 2009. He is the winner of several journalism awards and was a 2009"2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. He previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Knight"Ridder's Washington Bureau, and New York Newsday. Vedantam has a master's degree in journalism from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree in electronics engineering. He is interested in the history of conflict over the theory of evolution, the changes over time of religious theories concerning the creation of the universe, and the effects of religious faith on health. He has written about the interplay between neuroscience and spirituality, an area he would like to explore further. Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Museum

Lunch with a Laureate: Robert Horvitz

Tue, 27 Apr 2010 04:00:00 GMT

As an undergraduate at MIT, Robert Horvitz did not take a biology course until his senior year.

Modeling Human Mobility

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 04:00:00 GMT

03/16/2010 4:00 PM 3"270Marta Gonzalez, Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental EngineeringDescription: Researchers who wish to study mobility patterns might be reaching for your phone. Increasingly, cell phones are equipped with locational receivers (Global Positioning Systems or GPS) and their bread crumb trails are opening up entirely new ways to study and predict the dynamics of travel. "We are in the GPS revolution because most PCS of tomorrow will be in our hands in the (form of) the smart phone", according to Marta Gonz^lez. San Francisco is a city on the forefront of this revolution: there, willing cell phone users have voluntarily uploaded their GPS trajectories. If that is the data of the future, it is still possible to study mobility patterns today, by conducting a secondary analysis of cell phone records. Gonz^lez cites an example from Europe, where she worked with cell phone billing data for 7 million customers. She examined a subset of 16 million records, which represented 100,000 users. Although individual locations could not be identified, Dr. Gonz^lez used a proxy variable, the cell phone tower from which a call originated or was received. Using a combination of parsing and data mining, the data was scaled from anonymous, individual call to identify aggregate mobility. The analysis shows that there are very powerful and stable underlying patterns. Travel did not follow a random walk; there was great regularity in the functions" " and in this dataset, just two locations, per person, could account for 65% of their movement, within an average area of 16 by 16 kilometers. This research uses a statistical "spatial language" to describe and model human movement. These measures include a "Levy flight" and a " radius of gyration-- a quantitative measure of the average distance a person visits from a defined center"point. The radius of gyration can be used to predict, "what is the probability that a person will be in an expected place." Gonz^lez expects that GPS data will play a vital role in future transportation research, and will be used to model the number of trips, and average trip"lengths. The data will also be applied to widespread and popular gravity based transportation models. This locational research, while new to transportation, is extensively used in physics and biology" for example, to model the diffusion and spread of epidemics and infectious diseases. For transportation researchers, these distributions could be used to develop entirely new analytical calculations that can capture lots of information, like the likely diffusion of travelers within a known network, or the regularities of trips taken with smart cards. About the Speaker(s): Assistant Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Gonz^lez integrates methods of complex systems with statistical physics approaches, computational sciences, geographic information systems and network theory to characterize and model human dynamics. Her current research explores human mobility patterns using mobile phone communication, propagation of mobile phone viruses and urban transportation models. Her work also addresses the analysis of networks' organization in relation to their attributes in social systems and spreading dynamics. Gonz^lez received the Licentiate in physics, from the Universidad Simon Bolivar in 1999, the Magister Sc. in physics, from Central University of Venezuela in 2001, and earned her Ph.D. in physics (Dr. rer. nat), at Stuttgart Univarsit_t in 2006. Host(s): School of Engineering, Transportation@MIT

Rebuilding Haiti

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

02/23/2010 4:00 PM Bartos theaterCherie Moit Abbanat, Lecture, Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the Department of Architecture, MIT; Michel DeGraff, Associate Professor of Linguistics, MIT; Erica James, Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT; Dale Joachim, Visiting Scientist, MIT Media LabDescription: In the aftermath of the January 2010 earthquake, four panelists with strong personal and professional ties to Haiti share their insights about the different paths to rebuilding and reconstructing the country. Erica James begins with a view of Haiti's history of "ins_curit_", a term used to describe "cycles of political violence, crime, and economic deterioration that have accompanied periods of political and economic upheaval, foreign occupation, dictatorship, and continued environment decline." She believes the transition from emergency to reconstruction must deal with the challenges of repeated cycles of psychosocial trauma. Her concern is that international organizations, in attempting to alleviate the suffering of earthquake survivors, will give rise to practices that undermine the effectiveness of their interventions and create even more victims and victimization-unintended, and unwanted, consequences of their help. For James, the issues of population management-the regulation and distribution of resources, identity, and accountability-are important considerations in reconstruction and rehabilitation efforts. Cheri Miot Abbanat taps into her American and Haitian networks to find out what survivors need and want immediately to help rebuild their lives and their country. While governments and NGOs bring in traditional support-technology, medicine, food, housing-Abbanat suggests first "seeing it with Haitian eyes." She asks that aid organizations respect what is already in place in Haiti: homegrown knowledge, the language, what already works. Although fragile, existing support systems could be bolstered by international aid organizations instead of being replaced by them. Dale Joachim recognizes that "technology doesn't solve everything, but it solves a lot of things." His vision for rebuilding Haiti focuses on energy, the environment, and communications. By addressing Haiti's serious energy imbalance and by "bootstrapping" the public health, education, and rural enterprise systems with a robust communication infrastructure, the path to reversing the breakdown of the environment-in particular, Haiti's massive deforestation-will lead to far greater long"term recovery for the country overall. Using a series of overheads comparing several different countries of similar sizes and densities, he shows how the imbalance in Haiti's energy input/output has a pervasive impact on the Haitian infrastructure. Resolving the energy problem will help resolve issues of education, deforestation, and public health concurrently. Michel DeGraff uses language and linguistics "as a lens on [Haiti's] history." Without recognizing and resolving the complicated socio political stratifications created by language and economics, Haiti will be "rebuilt for the 5% who have always been well off," leaving the other 90%-those who speak Creole-no better off than they were before. DeGraff asserts that Haiti still suffers under brutal class and race inequities brought about, in part, by the power held by those who speak French over those who speak Creole. He believes that by changing the school system, which has been used to maintain these inequities, and by using Creole as the language of all Haitians, the system of language apartheid would be minimized and allow more Haitians access to economic power. A Q&A session follows. Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for International Studies

Why History Matters: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict

Mon, 22 Feb 2010 05:00:00 GMT

02/22/2010 4:30 PM 66"110Victor Kattan, Fellow, University of London; Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor, MITDescription: Given the volume of writing on the Arab"Israeli conflict, "you might think that everything has been said," says Noam Chomsky. But Victor Kattan's new book, Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab"Israeli Conflict, takes a fresh look at the prehistory of the dispute, as well as the evolution of international law and its import for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine, says Chomsky. While he is familiar with much of the material in this account, Chomsky also notes episodes in Kattan's narrative that open up new, "sordid chapters" in these "convoluted, complex, often painful historical events." Kattan set out to explore how the conflict began, and so pored over the writing of scores of European political figures, and leaders of Zionist and Arab nationalist movements of the late 19th and 20th centuries. His key insight: Neither Arabs nor Jews were to blame for triggering hostilities, but rather Britain, and the other major powers. Kattan argues that anti"Semitism, which welled up during a period of collapsing colonial empires, motivated British actions that led to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and paved the way for trouble over decades to the current time. In the 19th century, Jews viciously persecuted in Russia began flooding Western Europe, especially Britain, where many thousands more embarked to the U.S. America and Britain were the promised land to the Jews, says Kattan -- not Palestine. But British distaste for these immigrants soon led to plans for diverting the unwanted foreigners to an alternative location. In the early 1900s, Kattan describes documents authored by British statesmen, and by such early Zionist leaders as Theodor Herzl, arguing that Britain's Jewish immigration "problem" could be solved by finding Jews a homeland in Palestine. Kattan even cites U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis endorsing such a solution. Anti"immigrant fervor, says Kattan, led to the Balfour Declaration of 1917, describing Britain's intention to facilitate a Jewish homeland in Palestine. This was a compromised piece of diplomacy, suggests Kattan, ushering in an era of unending disputes and hostility. Key issues the British sidestepped or muddied, says Kattan, included promises made to Arabs for their own independent kingdom, and the principle of self"determination, emergent in international law, which would have acknowledged the claims of the Arab majority in the lands carved out for the Jews. While Britain bore the largest share in creating the Middle East mess -- with its many vital interests in the region -- Kattan says that other nations were complicit, entangled as they were by immigration and independence movements and their own strategic influence. Kattan follows this sorry tale through the Second World War and Israel's founding, describing repeated failed attempts to reach a settlement between Arabs and Jews over a shared homeland. But due to a conflict set in motion so many years before, a "culture of blame" now exists that will likely prevent agreement, particularly, says Kattan, "as long as Israeli settlements expand." About the Speaker(s): Victor Kattan has an LL.B (Hons.) from Brunel University, an LL.M from Leiden University and is studying towards a Ph.D. He was a Research Fellow in Public International Law at the British Institute of International and Comparative Law on their Human Rights in International Law and Iran project from 2006"8. Prior to this, he was a Director with the London"based media watchdog Arab Media Watch where he also worked as a journalist, an adviser and a researcher. In 2003"4, Kattan worked in the Occupied Palestinian Territories as a U.N. Development Programme TOKTEN consultant on secondment to the BADIL Resource Center, a non"governmental organization specializing in Palestinian refugee rights. Kattan is the author of more than half a dozen scholarly articles on the Arab"Israeli conflict in international law journals. His book, From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab"Israeli Conflict was published June 2009 by Pluto Books. Kattan also compiled an edited collection of legal articles in The Palestine Question in International Law, which was published by The British Institute of International and Comparative Law in May 2008. He was the assistant editor of the Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law from 2005"8. Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for International Studies

3. Intelligence Initiative - Action and Space

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 16:40:25 GMT

Speakers:
M. Wilson: Thinking from experience - mechanism and principles of sequential event memory
N. Roy: Bridging the gap between robot and human intelligence
L. Kaelbling: Household Intelligence

Future of Human Spaceflight: The Augustine Report

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 19:21:52 GMT

In June 2009, NASA created the Review of U.S. Human Space Flight Plans Committee and charged it with conducting "an independent review of ongoing U.S. human space flight plans and programs, as well as alternatives, to ensure the Nation is pursuing the best trajectory for the future of human space flight - one that is safe, innovative, affordable, and sustainable." Retired aerospace executive Norman Augustine was named committee chairman. The committee presented its report in October 2009. The report found that "The U.S. human spaceflight program appears to be on an unsustainable trajectory. It is perpetuating the perilous practice of pursuing goals that do not match allocated resources." Among its recommendations: extend the life of the international space station until 2020, look to commercial spaceflight for placing astronauts in low-Earth orbit, and consider flights to asteroids and other locations as part of a long-term plan to get to Mars. The report is available at http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/index.html

Humans in Space

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 05:00:00 GMT

12/08/2009 6:00 PM MuseumDava Newman, Sm '89, PhD '92, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering SystemsDescription: The future of space exploration is "the Moon, Mars, and beyond." For the human scientist"astronaut, "the issue is one of location and locale," according to Dava Newman. The argument is no longer whether it's man vs. robot; rather it's how humans and robots will work together in missions throughout the solar system. Where exploration-getting out of a spacecraft and moving around-is the primary reason, humans will be sent. Otherwise, they may be tele operating a robot on a distant planet, carrying out experiments on an international space station, or working at Mission Control as experimenters and investigators. But humans will always be involved. Nothing on Earth can truly mimic the environmental vagaries the astronauts will face on that distant planet or the challenges in getting there. Much of Newman's work in astronaut performance focuses on creating the BioSuit that will provide the necessary mobility, protection, and life support. The space travel itself creates further physiological deconditioning effects such as bone loss and other ravages of extended weightlessness. Newman cites four significant show stoppers to future space travel: radiation/exposure, bone loss, psychological effects ("playing well together") and immunology "because so little is known about what's out there." Of additional interest to her audience were the issues of expense and time needed to get to a distant planet such as Mars and commercial applications here on Earth. Newman refers to NASA's $400 billion price tag and points to a lower $20 billion cost if supported by both government and private monies but run by non"governmental organizations. Commercial space flight offers similar exciting opportunities as well as risks and dangers. Medical/pharmaceutical applications such as growing crystals in the weightlessness of space or studying locomotion that would assist people with cerebral palsy are currently being considered. Collaboration with other nations will ultimately provide on"going program funding since the future of space travel is more about human space travel and less about an individual nation's ability to build an entire program. About the Speaker(s): Professor Dava Newman is currently the director of the Technology and Policy Program and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT. She is professor of Aeronautics and the Astronautics and Engineering Systems Division as well as an affiliate faculty in the Harvard"MIT Health, Sciences and Technology Division. Professor Newman's research contributes to the fundamental knowledge of human performance in extreme environments by interweaving biomechanics, human factors engineering, modeling, and design. In the space environment, she quantifies astronaut motion and studies the subtle mechanisms underlying neuron"musculoskeletal adaptation, which are not easily studied on earth. She is currently developing her fourth space flight experiment, the MICRO"G experiment, which will fly on the International Space Station in a few years. Newman is concurrently designing a revolutionary, advanced spacesuit for future exploration missions, the BioSuit System, which she targets for 2020. She has been honored with a NASA Manned Flight Awareness Team Award and a NASA Group Achievement Award. She is a recognized AIAA Distinguished Lecturer and recently received the National Aerospace Educator Award. In addition to teaching classes in leadership and engineering at MIT, she has published and presented more than 200 papers in refereed journals and at conferences and other professional groups. She is a regular speaker and participant at engineering conferences given by groups such as the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA) and International Design for Extreme Environments Assembly (IDEEA) among many others. In 2001, she published her first book entitled Interactive Aerospace Engineering and Design. Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Museum

Autism: What Do We Know, What Do We Need?

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 05:00:00 GMT

"I'll give you the 30,000 foot view of autism."

Session III: Reality Mining: The End of Personal Privacy?

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 15:43:17 GMT

Anmol Madan, Ben Waber, Margaret Ding, Paul Kominers, Alex (Sandy) Pentland (MIT). 10/12/2009

Global Pandemics

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:00:00 GMT

In his role as a biochemist, Hidde Ploegh explains the "essential features of the lifestyle of the flu virus."

STARR FORUM: DARFUR/DARFUR: "The Crisis"

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:19:52 GMT

This video is from "The Crisis" half of the Starr Forum "DARFUR/DARFUR: The Crisis| The Exhibit" The Starr Forum event commences in the Kirsch Auditorium with a panel discussion featuring Robert Rotberg, Belfer Center, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; Susannah Sirkin, Physicians for Human Rights; and Marcus Bleasdale, member of the DARFUR/DARFUR team. The event concludes in the TSMC Lobby with the DARFUR/DARFUR exhibit and reception. DARFUR/DARFUR is a traveling exhibit of digitally-projected images that provide visual education about the richly multi-cultural region while exposing the horrors of the ongoing humanitarian crisis. The exhibit is a product of Art Works Projects and curated by Leslie Thomas, founding director of Art Works Projects. Photographers include former U.S. Marine Brian Steidle and photojournalists Lynsey Addario, Mark Brecke, Helene Caux, Ron Haviv, Paolo Pellegrin, James Nachtwey, Ryan Spencer Reed, and Michal Safdie. The exhibit was edited by Matthew Jacob and is accompanied by Sudanese inspired music. A CIS Starr Forum event brought to you by MIT Center for International Studies and Boston International. Additional co-sponsors include the MIT Program on Human Rights and Justice; MIT Amnesty International; and Physicians for Human Rights. The event was funded in part by the Council for the Arts at MIT.

Darfur/Darfur: The Crisis

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 04:00:00 GMT

10/15/2009 7:00 PM 32"123Robert Rotberg, Director, Program on Intrastate Conflict and Conflict Resolution, Belfer Center, Harvard's Kennedy School of Government; Susannah Sirkin, Deputy Director, Physicians for Human Rights; Marcus Bleasdale, Author: One Hundred Years of DarknessDescription: Six years after Darfur made its appearance on the world stage, the horrific crisis burns on, as these panelists vividly attest. In a forum companion to the traveling exhibit DARFUR/DARFUR, the speakers provide big picture political context, as well as actual images from the field, which are not for the faint of heart. While the conflict may no longer be "hot news," the "genocidal years are continuing," says Robert Rotberg. Three million Darfuris are languishing in refugee camps on the border with Chad and in their own country. The leader of this desert nation, President Omar al"Bashir, has been accused by the International Court of war crimes, yet militias under his direction, including the feared Janjaweed, continue to rain death down on villages and refugee camps. Neither the world's condemnation, nor a multilateral force, has stopped the violence. China's support of Sudan (with its rich oil fields) presents another obstacle to peace. Rotberg worries about the appointment by President Obama of a special envoy, J. Scott Gration, who "has made welcoming noises to Bashiroffering carrots without carrying a big stick." A plan for peace, says Rotberg, should include a ban on overflights; dismantling of the Janjaweed and all the militias, and their repatriation into village life; a mechanism for power"sharing at all levels; compensation for genocide; and support for reconstruction. Susannah Sirkin and her investigators from Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) are among those who have documented the Sudanese government's atrocities against the people of Darfur. People have been bombed, strafed and burnt out of their villages. Says Sirkin, "The government of Sudan knew full well what would happen when hundreds of thousands of people were forced out of their homes, knew they wouldn't make it to a place where they could receive the basic necessities of survival." In spite of harrowing conditions, including the regime's persecution of aid workers, PHR has collected ample evidence of "the crime of mass rape as a weapon in this war," a crime that goes on even at the refugee camps. The peaceful pre"war existence of women, tending animals, family and farming, is brutally shattered when militias massacre their families, and assault them sexually. PHR doctors describe their suffering as "unimaginable." Sirkin recounts the tragic story of one 18"year"old, whose experiences stand for the thousands who endure comparable horrors. The finale of the panel is a slideshow by photojournalist Marcus Bleasdale of his 12 trips to Darfur in the past six years. He captures the fear -- entire communities huddled under trees for fear of detection by government planes _ and the aftermath of Janjaweed attacks. There are charred villages, bodies left to rot in the sun and people burned by white phosphorus, dumped by helicopter. At the camps, there are child soldiers with amputated limbs, starving mothers and babies, and long lines for the plastic bottles of water provided by aid agencies. Says Bleasdale, "These aren't singular stories; they're happening thousands of times, in every village." About the Speaker(s): Robert I. Rotberg previously served as Professor of Political Science and History, MIT; Academic Vice President, Tufts University; and President, Lafayette College. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on US foreign policy, Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, most recently, China into Africa: Trade, Aid, and Influence (2008); Worst of the Worst: Dealing with Repressive and Rogue Nations (2007); Building a New Afghanistan (2007); A Leadership for Peace: How Edwin Ginn Tried to Change the World (2006); Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa (2005); and When States Fail: Causes and Consequences (2004), among others. Susannah Sirkin joined Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) in 1987. Previously, she was director of membership programs for Amnesty International USA. Sirkin has organized health and human rights investigations in many nations, including recent documentation of genocide and systematic rape in Darfur and Sudan, exhumations of mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda for the International Criminal Tribunals, investigations into consequences of human rights abuses, and violations of international humanitarian law in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Kosovo, Kuwait, Somalia, Turkey, Zimbabwe, and the United States, among others. She has conducted studies of sexual violence in Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Thailand, and Chad, and published numerous reports on the medical consequences of human rights violations, physical evidence of human rights abuses, and physician complicity in violations. Sirkin co"developed and directed the first postgraduate course in medicine and human rights initiated at Harvard Medical School in 1992, and lectures regularly on health and human rights in medical schools and schools of public health. She also served from 1992 to 2001 for PHR as a member of the Coordination Committee of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the co"recipient of the 1997 Nobel Prize for Peace. Marcus Bleasdale has spent eight years covering the brutal conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo and his work was published in the book One Hundred Years of Darkness. His new book, The Rape of a Nation, was published in 2009. He is widely published in the UK, Europe and the USA in publications such as TIME, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Harpers, Stern, Geo Magazine and National Geographic Magazine. In 2004 he was awarded UNICEF Photographer of the Year Award, the 3p Grant and the Alexia Foundation Grant. He exhibited in New York at Moving Walls 2005 and was awarded the OSI Distribution Grant 2005. Bleasdale's images have also been chosen by PDN as one of the most iconic of the 21st Century. In 2005, Bleasdalewas named Magazine Photographer of the Year by POYi. In 2006 Marcus was awarded a World Press Daily Life award and won the prestigious OPC Olivier Rebbot Award. In 2007, he was awarded a Freedom of Expression grant for his new project on our relationship with oil. He was also shortlisted for the Amnesty International Photojournalism Awards. Bleasdale was awarded a first prize in POYi for his work on DRC in 2009. Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for International Studies

Challenges in Nation Building

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT

09/29/2009 2:30 PM 10"250President José Ramos"Horta, President, East Timor, 1996 Nobel Peace Prize LaureateDescription: At times humorous and defiant, JoséRamos"Horta describes nurturing the 21st century's first sovereign state through its formative years. The journey of East Timor from brutal Indonesian rule to fragile self"governance has involved Ramos"Horta in conflict and debate from the halls of the U.N. to the smallest villages of this tiny Southeast Asian island. He describes the scene in 2002, after two years of UN"supervised transition, when Indonesia handed off a nation it had governed by force for decades: "A human calamity -- close to 200 thousand people lost their lives." Another 200 thousand were forcibly displaced into West Timor. As it departed "in anger and frustration," Indonesia's military orchestrated the destruction of the nation's cities, roads, schools and clinics. "The economy was at a standstill," says Ramos"Horta. "We received barely a sketch of a state, a skeleton." The challenge of rebuilding East Timor is all the more daunting given "the psychological"emotional trauma of 24 years of violence." There are bitter disputes involving how to conduct a national process of reconciliation. Western ambassadors recently called on Ramos"Horta, "representatives of two countries most notoriousfor providing weapons and the red carpet treatment to the dictatorship of Indonesia." They advocated establishing an international tribunal to pursue crimes against humanity during Indonesian rule. Says Ramos"Horta, "Had I been in a bad mood, I would have said, 'Excuse me, the two of you are lecturing me on human rights and justice?'" Despite warnings from the U.N. that "lack of justice encourages impunity," he believes East Timor must travel its own path toward reconciliation. If East Timor set up such a tribunal, "Who would it start with -- Indonesia or the U.S., which provided weapons to Suharto, or Australia, or all of them at once?" He states, "If you pursue justice at any cost without being sensitive to the challenges and complexities on the ground, you undermine the incipient nation, democracy and justice." Today, when Ramos"Horta travels in the countryside, people don't want to discuss security and unity. Recounts Ramos"Horta, "They joke with me: 'Mr. President, we really like your road to peace, but we prefer a road to our village.'" He's now focused on providing his people with such essentials as clean water and electricity, and shoring up the nation's fragile social and economic institutions. "Let's put all the past behind us. Look after the victims, the wounded, in their minds, bodies and souls, build a country that is deserving of so much sacrifice. Chasing the ghosts of the past leads us nowhere," says Ramos"Horta. About the Speaker(s): José Manuel Ramos"Horta took office as the second President of East Timor (since independence from Indonesia) on May 20, 2007. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1996 with fellow East Timorese Bishop Ximenes Belo for "sustained efforts to hinder the oppression of a small people. " As a founder and former member of the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (FRETILIN), Ramos"Horta served as the exiled spokesman for the East Timorese resistance during the years of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor (1975 to 1999). After East Timor achieved independence in 2002, Ramos"Horta was appointed as the country's first Foreign Minister. He served in this position until his resignation on June 25, 2006, amidst political turmoil. In July 2006, he was officially sworn in as the second Prime Minister of East Timor. On February 11, 2008, Ramos"Horta was injured when he was shot during an assassination attempt. Ramos"Horta studied Public International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law (1983) and at Antioch University where he completed an M.A. in Peace Studies (1984). He was trained in Human Rights Law at the International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg (1983). He attended Post"Graduate courses in American foreign policy at Columbia University(1983). He is a Senior Associate Member of the University of Oxford's St Antony's College (1987). Host(s): School of Architecture and Planning, Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship

U.S.-Cuba Relations: The Beginning of a Long Thaw?

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT

09/23/2009 4:30 PM Wong AuditoriumJulia Sweig, Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow For Latin America Studies, Council on Foreign Relations; Wayne Smith, Senior Fellow and Director of the Cuba Program, Center for International PolicyDescription: To the dismay of these seasoned Cuba specialists, the Obama administration is not pursuing a rapid thaw in relations with the Castro regime. While there appears no speedy end to 50 years of icy antipathy toward Cuba, the speakers detect a few hopeful signs of warming in recent times. Wayne Smith has seen opportunities for a real bilateral relationship come and go. He first went to Cuba in 1958, just before the U.S. broke off diplomatic relations. He was among the first to go back in 1977 when Jimmy Carter attempted to reopen channels for discussion. Smith left the foreign service in 1982 after Reagan was elected, and had great hopes that Clinton would soften the U.S. stance following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But Cuban exiles in the U.S. succeeded in retaining a hard"line policy against Cuba. Smith says, "Here we are again: another opportunity." It's in the best interest of the U.S., says Smith, to begin "a mature relationship" with Cuba. He thinks the window is open a crack now. He knows many Cuban"Americans whose families lost property, or had relatives imprisoned, and "50 years later have come around to say, it's time to begin talking." We may be entering "an interesting period of change" following a half century of "abnormal, unnatural relations," says Julia Sweig. A few years ago, on the heels of Fidel Castro's illness, Cuba initiated a "significant reform agenda." In a record"short (34 minute) inaugural speech, Castro's appointed successor, brother Raul, "implied awareness of the intense unhappiness on the island," announcing proposed internal travel freedoms, and discussing agrarian and currency reform. "He sounded often more like Margaret Thatcher than Karl Marx," says Sweig. But this fledgling effort to expand opportunities for Cubans was derailed in 2008 by three devastating hurricanes, the collapse of world commodity and financial markets, and Fidel Castro's recovery (he's "notoriously allergic to the market," Sweig says). There is some reason for optimism beyond Cuba. Sweig perceives a major shift in public opinion among Cuban"Americans, especially the young cohort that helped vote in Obama. There's a prevailing sense that the embargo has failed, and that America should completely lift its travel ban. And the Obama administration has indicated a slight softening toward Cuba, permitting family remittances, and signaling that it might allow American telecom companies to do business in Cuba. Sweig believes "this glacial, almost like walking through peanut butter pace of change that we have in bilateral relations suits each government just fine." She concludes with a genuine bright spot: the September '09 Havana concert by Colombian musician Juanes, which demonstrated that the U.S. and Cuba can have meaningful contact with each other "without governments getting in the way." About the Speaker(s): Julia E. Sweig is the author of Cuba: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2009), and Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti"American Century,/i> (PublicAffairs, 2006), as well as numerous publications on Latin America and American foreign policy. She has directed several Council on Foreign Relations reports on Latin America. Sweig's Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground (Harvard University Press, 2002) received the American Historical Association's Herbert Feis Award for best book of the year by an independent scholar. Sweig serves on the International Advisory Board of the Brazilian Center for International Relations (CEBRI), on the editorial board of Foreign Affairs Latinoam_rica, and from 1999"2008, served as a consultant on Latin American affairs for The Aspen Institute's Congressional Program. She frequently provides commentary for the major television, radio, and print media, speaking in both English and Spanish. She holds a B.A. from the University of California and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Wayne Smith is also a visiting professor of Latin American Studies and Director of the University of Havana exchange Program at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He is a former Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. During his twenty"five years with the State Department (1957"82), he served as executive secretary of President Kennedy's Latin American Task Force and chief of mission at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana. In addition, he served in Argentina, Brazil and the Soviet Union. Smith's most recent book is The Russians Aren't Coming: New Soviet Policy in Latin America (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1992), of which he is the editor. His other works include Portrait of Cuba (Turner Publishing, 1991); Toward Resolution: The Falklands/Malvinas Dispute (Lynne Rienner, 1991), again as an editor; and The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of the Castro Years (W.W. Norton of New York City, 1987). He was also the co"editor, along with Esteban Morales, of Subject to Solution: Problems in Cuban"U.S. Relations (Lynne Rienner, 1988), which won the Critic award in 1989 as one of the best academic books reviewed that year. He received his university education at La Universidad de las Americas in Mexico City from which he holds a B.A. and an M.A. (summa cum laude), at Columbia University in New York City, from which he holds another M.A., and at George Washington University in Washington D.C., where he received a third M.A. and a Ph.D. In 1990, Smith received the Henry L. Cain Most Distinguished Alumnus award from La Universidad de las Americas. Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for International Studies

Entrepreneurship, Government, and Development in Africa

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 04:00:00 GMT

09/21/2009 4:00 PM 34"101President John Kufuor, President of Ghana 2001"2009Description: After centuries of insufferable oppression by colonial powers, bloody independence struggles, and corrupt home"grown regimes, "Africa today is quickly awakening, and determined to mainstream itself in the phenomenon of the globalization process," says John Kufuor, who served as Ghana's president for two terms starting in 2000. Kufuor recounts how Ghana transcended its dark history to attain astonishing political and economic progress, establishing the nation as an exemplar for fellow African states. In a brisk history lesson, Kufuor accounts for the lag between Africa and other continents in socioeconomic development: geography kept Africa outside ancient trading routes, and when "marauding" Europeans eventually encountered Africa, it was "more or less a one"sided, institutional gang rape..." Denied citizenship and rights, for 600 years "the African ego and personality was assailed and trampled upon." Following World War 2, colonial powers relinquished their African holdings, but successor native governments were often little better, says Kufuor, spouting revolutionary rhetoric, and stifling "visionary individualism and creativity." State control meant "private capital formation went underground." African rulers maintained attachments to their "former European overlords," who imported Africa's resources "raw on concessionary terms." Kufuor blames the "stinginess" of foreign entrepreneurs, their unwillingness to "add value" to these products, for African nations' current paucity of medium and large"scale business. But Ghana's trick was to transform this disadvantage -- a large pool of small, agriculturally based businesses -- into the centerpiece of an economic revival. Kufuor cites in particular cocoa farmers, responsible for one of Ghana's principal exports, who own on average no more than three acres. When he arrived in office, Kufuor determined to support the "self"reliant, risk"taking initiative" of such farmers and other small"scale businesses, recognizing that they were key to "unleashing the potential wealth of the nation." His government pursued debt forgiveness by the IMF; separating the central bank from the president's office; and distributing more banking licenses and lowering lending rates. Aid to farmers with trading, modernization, irrigation, and other infrastructure led to unprecedented economic growth: the GDP quadrupled over an eight year period beginning in 2000, with growth at 7.3% last year. Government "had promised to usher the country into a golden age," says Kufuor, and came through not just with economic policies, but with investment in education and a national health insurance plan for all citizens. Two years ago, oil was discovered offshore, and Kufuor, "proud of having laid a solid foundation" for Ghana, prays that this find will prove "a blessing and not a curse, for the good of all our sons and daughters." About the Speaker(s): John Kufuor helped lead Ghana during its first peaceful democratic transition, focusing on modernizing agriculture, improving infrastructure and attracting direct foreign investment. Kufuor championed the nation's entrepreneurs, and promoted transparency in government. He is also a former chairperson of the African Union (2007"2008). In 2008, Kufuor became a partner in the World Food Programme's "Fill the Cup" drive to provide nutritious school meals to millions of hungry children. "Every nation's future rests on nutritious food and education for its children," he said. Kufuor earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees from Oxford University before becoming a lawyer. But he soon turned to politics, serving as member of parliament, deputy foreign minister and secretary for local government before becoming Ghana's president in 2000.Host(s): School of Architecture and Planning, Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship

Looking Ahead to 2020

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT

06/16/2009 11:00 AM Wong AuditoriumWilliam Rouse, SM '70, PhD '72, Executive Director, The Tennenbaum Institute, ; Georgia Institute of Technology ; ; Robert E. Skinner, Jr., Executive Director, Transportation Research Board, National Academies; Joel Moses, PhD '67, MIT Institute Professor; Heinz Stoewer, Distinguished Visiting Scientist, Jet Propulsion Lab and Chair Emeritus, TU Delft; David H. Lehman, Senior Vice President and General Manager, The MITRE Corporation's Command and Control CenterDescription: Real"world practitioners of systems engineering/engineering systems describe how the young discipline has shaped their very large enterprises. For the past 10 years, David Lehman has been incorporating key systems engineering ideas within MITRE Corporation. Successes include getting project leaders to think about engineering solutions in the context of political and economic organization, and learning how to communicate these solutions better. MITRE has talked to defense acquisition managers in the field to extract data and create models that get disseminated to other managers. But Lehman is disappointed that Defense Department acquisition methods are still large"scale, and unresponsive to swiftly changing situations. He'd like to show program managers how "to step outside what they've been taught," and create incentives for doing the right things rather than "sticking with regulations." Robert Skinner, Jr. wonders if engineering systems approaches can help with some pressing questions: the way to mix transportation and land use decisions in urban areas, for instance, or government pricing strategies for surface transport. One nettlesome issue involves the right scope of analysis, says Skinner. Should researchers be looking at the components of the transportation system, or the whole enterprise? "As we move downward, uncertainty increases and the role of social systems and social science enters into it; politics upper and lower case becomes more significant." And he adds, "We're sorely lacking in analogs in the policy world to transmit complex engineering concepts. If analysis gets too far out ahead of the public's and decision"makers' ability to absorb it, it all comes to naught." "Why are so many complex systems behind schedule and over budget?" asks Heinz Stoewer. A single line of code missing can cause system collapse, says Stoewer. And big problems can flow from human shortcomings in calculations, accounting or risk management. Stoewer believes another reason for failure is that program managers and systems engineers "are too process focused," and not well enough aligned. They may lack sufficient depth in the key discipline of their projects, leading to faulty product design or production. To improve the chances of success, Stoewer emphasizes the importance of early phases: "I can tell you two dozen programs in trouble because they'remaking enormous efforts trying to get things right when they're almost done." br> By 2020, Joel Moses hopes that engineering systems will be recognized "as having made significant contributions" to health care, energy, environment, financial services and the military. To achieve such an impact, the field should focus on "maybe the key issue" of system architecture. Each engineering field thinks of architecture in different ways and groups must communicate better with each other. Moses believes educators should teach "what makes for a good system architect," and that "systems thinking is important, but not enough." A good system architect sees things holistically. Moses notes as well, "the difference between designing a one"off versus a family of systems." About the Speaker(s): Joel Moses has served as MIT's Provost, Dean of Engineering, Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Associate Head of EECS, and Associate Director of the Laboratory for Computer Science. He was also instrumental in the conceptualization of a joint engineering and management graduate program, which is now the System Design and Management Program, and in creating the Engineering Systems Division. Moses is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, and of the IEEE. He led the development of the Macsyma system for algebraic formula manipulation and is the co"developer of the Knowledge"Based Systems concept in Artificial Intelligence. His current interests include the complexity and flexibility of engineering systems, algebraic formula manipulation, and knowledge"based systems. Moses received his undergraduate degree and master's degrees in mathematics from Columbia University, and his doctorate in mathematics from MIT.Host(s): School of Engineering, Engineering Systems Division

The Mysterious Field of Engineering Systems

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT

06/16/2009 8:30 AM Wong AuditoriumNorman R. Augustine, Retired, Chairman and CEO, Lockheed Martin CorporationDescription: One of the nation's revered technology leaders dispenses anecdotes and wisdom on the slippery subject of engineering systems (or systems engineering). Norm Augustine just can't get a handle on the discipline: "No one agrees on what it is, or what it does." After years in industries like Lockheed Martin, Augustine has come up with "Norm's Rules," and can at least define 'system' as "having two or more elements that interact," and 'engineering' as "creating the means for performing useful functions." But these definitions don't get you too far in the real world. Augustine shows a fuel control system, which some engineers might view as part of a propulsion system. In turn, aeronautical engineers might think of the entire airplane as a system, and transport engineers view aircraft as merely components in systems incorporating airports, highways, shipping lanes. Augustine continues up the ladder until "our system that started as a fuel controllerseems to have the whole universe as a system." Like Russian Matryoshka dolls, systems can always be embedded within larger systems. Even if you try to simplify a system in terms of just a few objects with a binary, on"off interaction, things can get complex very quickly. Five elements in a system can exist in more than a million possible states. Says Augustine, "A typical earth satellite has nearly one million parts; a 747 over 5 million. How does that make you feel about flying?" Distinguishing the significant interactions and the important external influences on a system are central to designing and problem solving. And these days, engineers must include politics, public policy and economics as part of their systems. "The trick is to bound the scope of the system so it's not too large to be analyzed and not too small to be representative." Doing this right is "why systems engineers should be paid so much." Augustine concludes with his "Dirty Dozen" systems engineering traps, which have led to embarrassing bust"ups, monumental failures, and real tragedies. Notable among these: "the ubiquitous interface," (or absence thereof). He describes how two flight control groups used different metric units and accidentally sent a Mars"bound spacecraft whizzing off into deep space. There's the "single"point failure," exemplified by the collapse of a football field"sized satellite dish due to a poorly designed bracket. There's software, "which like entropy, always increases:" a Mariner spacecraft headed in the wrong direction due to a missing hyphen in 100 thousand lines of code. The problem with most systems ultimately is that they "contain human elements and humans sometimes do irrational things." About the Speaker(s): Norman R. Augustine is also a former Under Secretary of the Army. He currently serves as a member of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Advisory Council. He chaired the National Academy of Sciences' panel that produces the 2005 report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm: Energizing and Employing America for a Brighter Economic Future." Among Augustine's many honors are the National Medal of Technology and the U.S. Department of Defense's highest civilian award, the Distinguished Service Medal, given to him five times. Most recently, he was awarded the 2009 American Chemical Society Public Service Award, the 2008 National Science Foundation Vannevar Bush Award, the 2007 Bower Award for Business Leadership, from The Franklin Institute, the 2005 AAAS Philip Hauge Abelson Prize and the 2006 Public Welfare Medal from the National Academy of Science. Augustine served as chairman and principal officer of the American Red Cross for nine years and as chairman of the NAE, the AUSA, the AIA, and the Defense Science Board. He is a former president of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Boy Scouts of America. He is a current or former member of the Board of Directors of ConocoPhillips, Black and Decker, Procter & Gamble and Lockheed Martin and is a member of the board of trustees of Colonial Williamsburg, a trustee emeritus of Johns Hopkins, and a former member of the board of trustees of Princeton and MIT. He holds eighteen honorary degrees. Augustine attended Princeton University where he graduated with a B.S.E. in Aeronautical Engineering, magna cum laude, and an M.S.E. Host(s): School of Engineering, Engineering Systems Division

MIT/Harvard Gaza Symposium (panel 1)

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:30:30 GMT

The second annual Gaza symposium, this year jointly organized by MIT and Harvard, will host a series of panels on the role of U.S. and international actors, as well as human rights and international humanitarian law in the wake of recent events in Gaza. Bringing together experts in the fields of human rights, history, political science, U.S. foreign policy and law, the two-day symposium will include a range of views from US, Israeli, Palestinian and UN/NGO perspectives. This event is free and open to the public.
The official web site for the second annual Gaza symposium, including all updates, is located here.
Welcome and Introduction John Tirman, Executive Director of the Center for International Studies, MIT.
A View from Gaza: Congressman Brian Baird, Representative, Washington State (D-03.) Moderator: Nancy Kanwisher, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the McGovern Institute, MIT. Gabriel Piterberg, Professor of History at UCLA. Irene Gendzier, Political Science Professor at Boston University. Karma Nabulsi, Lecturer in International Relations at Oxford University and former PLO representative.
Sponsors at MIT: The Center for International Studies and its Program for Human Rights and Justice.
Sponsors at Harvard: The Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School; The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; University Committee on Human Rights Studies Human Rights Program at the Harvard Law School

MIT/Harvard Gaza Symposium (panel 2)

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 19:01:59 GMT

The second annual Gaza symposium, this year jointly organized by MIT and Harvard, will host a series of panels on the role of U.S. and international actors, as well as human rights and international humanitarian law in the wake of recent events in Gaza. Bringing together experts in the fields of human rights, history, political science, U.S. foreign policy and law, the two-day symposium will include a range of views from US, Israeli, Palestinian and UN/NGO perspectives. This event is free and open to the public. The official web site for the second annual Gaza symposium, including all updates, is located here This video is of the second panel that took place on the first day of the symposium, March 30, 2009 at MIT. Going Forward Moderator: Leila Farsakh, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. George Bisharat, Professor of Law at UC Hastings College of Law. Meron Benvenisti, former Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem. Barry Posen, Director of the MIT Security Studies Program. Henry Siegman, Director of the U.S./Middle East Project. Sponsors at MIT: The Center for International Studies and its Program for Human Rights and Justice Sponsors at Harvard: The Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School; The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences; University Committee on Human Rights Studies Human Rights Program at the Harvard Law School

Noam Chomsky Addresses the Gaza Crisis

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 18:15:38 GMT

Noam Chomsky addresses the crisis in Gaza followed by a question-and-answer session with the audience. The public event will be on Tuesday, January 13, at 4p, in the Wong Auditorium, MIT Bldg E51.

The Next Giant Leaps in Space Exploration

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT

06/11/2009 3:00 PM KresgeDr. Maria T. Zuber, E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics, Head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, MIT ; ; Dr. Edward F. Crawley, Ford Professor of Engineering, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems, MIT; James H. Crocker, Vice President and General Manager, Sensing & Exploration Systems, Lockheed Martin Space Systems Co.; Richard Garriott, private astronaut, Vice Chairman of Space Adventures ; Dr. James Garvin, Chief Scientist, Goddard Space Flight Center, NASA ; Dr. David W. Thompson, Chairman & CEO of Orbital Sciences Corporation ; Dr. Erika Wagner, Lecturer, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, MITDescription: From satellite"enabled radio and TV to climate tracking, space has become a "ubiquitous capability in our lifetime," as Edward Crawley puts it. But he also notes there is uncertainty about the future of U.S. spaceflight, which closely follows the "cadence" of political elections. Symposium panelists both predict and suggest directions the nation's public and private space programs might take. As a child, keynote speaker Maria Zuber "wrote long letters to the Apollo astronauts," and her early enthusiasm never waned. A geophysicist involved in missions investigating distant worlds, Zuber's take on space exploration is both pragmatic and adventurous. She seeks "an achievable future in space," with an exploration program that is "reality based." She advocates a "bold, diverse agenda" that includes extended use of the International Space Station for conducting science on human physiology and behavior; exploring the impact of the sun on Earth climate and space weather; gathering data on the constitution of the universe; detailed characterization of terrestrial planets; a renewed commitment to Earth observation (we have better data on Mars' ice caps than on our own); and seeking extra"terrestrial life. This ambitious portfolio means we may send humans to space for "objectives that are worth the risk." NASA should mix big and small missions, remembering that it's "crucial to inspire and train the next generation." Ultimately, says Zuber, "It's great to be a dreamer, but the only good space mission is one that really works, and is practical and implementable." NASA scientist James Garvin describes his agency's plans to pursue the legacy of Apollo, by developing new capabilities to carry people into space, and supporting significant research, such as tracking carbon in Earth's atmosphere and oceans. Says Garvin, "Somewhere there is a sweet spot between robotic spaceflight that does grand science ... and human spaceflight that enables those" missions. The private space industry will play an increasing role in fulfilling the spaceflight dreams of ordinary people, believes Richard Garriott, one of the few lucky citizens to take the ride (via a Soyuz craft). He cites the surge in space plane companies, which may ultimately make spaceflight routine. While there's "a reasonable probability there will be fatalities," Garriott accepts the risks. "Ultimately only by democratizing access to space, by having multiple vendors competing to keep the price down, and safety up, will we ultimately find the best access to space." To engage American youth in space exploration, Erika Wagner says we "need to take back the storyline and discuss challenging things." 18"24 year olds are not captivated by the Apollo mission to the moon, and to inspire them about the future, they need to understand we "go to space because it's a difficult thing." To get this point across means using social media such as Flickr and YouTube, as well as flying students into space. "It's time for space exploration to become interactive again." Commercial space ventures, built on a series of incremental improvements, have become a phenomenally successful industry in the last 40 years, says David Thompson. Customers spend between $15"25 per month on such products and services as direct broadcast TV and handheld satellite navigators. This dwarfs the per capita expenditure on government space exploration or defense activities. Thompson looks for more of an intersection between the well"financed commercial, and needier public, sectors of space enterprise, with anticipated benefits for both. The problem is not how we build space vehicles, "but how we procure them," states James Crocker. Purchasing and launching such expensive devices one at a time continues to inhibit capability. Crocker's company, Lockheed, is trying to economize through smarter software, weight" and volume"reduction of space"bound technology, and reuse of expensive parts (including some avionics in NASA's new Ares rocket). He hopes that innovative ways to bring down costs "while not as cheap as flying from here to Europe on an airliner," might get to the point where "we can do more with the dollars the public is willing to spend." About the Speaker(s): Edward Crawley is also the director of the Bernard M. Gordon _ MIT Engineering Leadership Program. His research focuses on the domain of architecture, design, and decision support in complex technical systems. He is currently engaged with NASA on the design of its lunar and Earth observing systems, and with BP on oil exploration system designs. Crawley is a former head of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and was a finalist in the NASA astronaut selection in 1980. He received an S.B. (1976) and an S.M. (1978) in Aeronautics and Astronautics, and an Sc.D. (1981) in Aerospace Structures from MIT. Crawley is a Fellow of the AIAA and the Royal Aeronautical Society (UK), and is a member of three national academies of engineering: the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Science, the (UK) Royal Academy of Engineering, and the US National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded a Doctor Honoris Causa by Chalmers University, Sweden in 2006.Host(s): School of Engineering, Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Computers with Commonsense: Artificial Intelligence at the MIT Round Table

Sat, 06 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT

06/06/2009 11:30 AM KresgePatrick Henry Winston, '65 SM'76, PhD '70, Ford Professor of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science; Description: Visiting the San Diego Zoo's orangutans and chimpanzees inspires Patrick Henry Winston to ponder what makes humans different from our primate cousins. His field of artificial intelligence extends that question to thinking about how humans differ from computers. Winston's goal is to "develop a computational theory of intelligence." Bridging the gap from people to machines requires a complex understanding of how we think. Winston asserts we think with our eyes, our hands, our mouth. Humans rely upon visual, motor, and linguistic faculties to learn and solve problems. Perceptual powers enable naming, describing, categorizing and recalling. In the aggregate, these processes are "commonsense," a hallmark of cognition that Winston aims to vest in computer programs -- to endow transistors with the nuanced capabilities of neurons. Crucially, we also think with our stories. Throughout childhood and formal education, we are taught via fairy tales, myths, history, literature, religion, and popular entertainment. Professional disciplines like law, science, medicine, engineering, and business are conveyed through stories too. Recognizing patterns, relationships, and mistakes, as well as abstract concepts like revenge or success, helps us explain, predict, answer questions. The delicate processes of extracting knowledge and capturing meaning may appear seamless or instinctive in the evolved mind, but must be parsed syntactically to "teach" a computer to achieve the same ends. What might be practical applications "for systems that understood stories"? Winston suggests that decision"making in business and military strategy would benefit. And no less, comprehending cultures. If a computer program could derive clues from context, perhaps it could determine why "what plays in Peoria" doesn't translate to Baghdad. Early efforts to build a computational theory of intelligence focused on "symbolic integrationWe figured out how to make programs do calculus by 1960but computers remained as dumb as stones," Winston says. When we progressed to building robots -- "things that move" -- language was still lacking. "We forgot that the distinguishing characteristic of human intelligence is that linguistic veneer that stands above our perceptual apparatus," he remarks. A paradox emerging from Winston's study of how humans think is that "computers make us stupid." For instance, when students are freed from taking notes, absence of "forced engagement" with the material hinders learning. He cautions that teachers confuse the "presentation of information with the delivery of information." Too many words on a slide (or talking too fast) "jams the language processor" and impedes digesting content. Winston summarizes with an appealing prescription for becoming smarter. "Take notesdraw picturestalk and imaginetell stories!" The very act of explaining to another elucidates a lesson for oneself. About the Speaker(s): Patrick Henry Winston has been affiliated with MIT for five decades: from undergraduate and graduate education, to faculty appointment, to deep involvement in the life of the Institute through numerous committee memberships. In 1967, he joined the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, serving as director for 25 years, and continuing in the successor Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Winston focuses on integration of vision, language, and motor faculties to explain intelligence. His current research, the Human Intelligence Enterprise, is an interdisciplinary confluence of computer science, systems neuroscience, cognitive science, and linguistics. He also pursues an interest in the intriguing field of "computational politics," uniting computer scientists and social scientists toward an enlightened understanding of thinking in many cultures. Beyond academia, Winston cofounded Ascent Technology, Inc., a company that develops A.I. applications in resource planning and scheduling for airports and the Department of Defense. He is in his third term on the Naval Research Advisory Committee, for which he studied how to utilize technological advances for an all"electric Navy. This work was recognized with a Meritorious Public Service Award. Winston is past president of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. He has written or edited 17 books, including texts on programming languages and artificial intelligence, as well as anthologies of A.I. research. Host(s): Alumni Association, Alumni Association

U.S. - Iran Relations

Tue, 05 May 2009 04:00:00 GMT

05/05/2009 4:00 PM Ne30Jim Walsh, Research Associate, SSP MIT; Suzanne DiMaggio, Global Policy Director, Asia Society; Stephen Heintz, President, Rockefeller Brothers Fund; Barry Posen, Ford International Professor of Political Science at MIT, Director Security Studies ProgramDescription: While Barack Obama has rejected the Bush administration's harsh stance toward Iran, panelists warn that we're far from the start of fruitful relations, and that achieving real diplomacy will paradoxically require both patience and a sense of urgency. Suzanna DiMaggioobserves the U.S. seeking "areas of common interest and managing areas of profound differences" with Iran, moving "well beyond a change in language" to concrete and profound shifts in policy, such as recognizing Iran's right to a peaceful nuclear program; curtailing support for Iranian opposition groups; and reaching out for Iran's cooperation on Afghanistan. DiMaggio says Afghanistan may prove key to building the foundations of a relationship, since Iran is concerned about halting the spread of violent fundamentalism and curtailing drug trafficking. The way forward, she suggests, involves approaching Iran in a "direct and sustained way to clarify U.S. intentions in the region while building confidence and trust," which "will require each side to exercise great restraint," and an acceptance that there will be frequent setbacks. Jim Walsh describes recent U.S. actions toward Iran as "scene setting," with such moves as dropping preconditions for discussing Iran's nuclear program, and discouraging Israel from contemplating a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities. But "Iran is cautious," with its government demonstrating "a certain schizophrenia" -- hopefulness and curiosity about Barack Obama, but skepticism about the U.S. pursuing substantive change. Tactical cooperation with Iran around Afghanistan and the drug trade appears to Walsh a better starting point for discussions than Iran's nuclear program. He says, "Barack Obama may speak with a nicer tone, offer greater incentives, but if at the end of the day, he insists on no centrifuges, we will end up at the same outcome as before." Substantial movement will take months, and all the while, Iran will continue to build centrifuges. Walsh sees a dilemma for the president: he must attempt to build confidence by moving slowly, but the "best chance for success is if Obama acts early and boldly while he still has the power of public opinion behind him domestically and internationallyIt won't last forever. Stephen Heintz points out that "Iran is in the center of a set of issues of direct national interest to the U.S.," including Middle East peace, the war on terror, regional stability and oil. The problem is that in trying to find points of intersection with Iran, each nation "has very little knowledge of the other," as well as bad memories (the hostage crisis of 1979, the U.S. support of the Shah). This "only reinforces a relationship based on suspicion." While Barack Obama "has done a superb job at creating different atmospherics," there is a huge debate underway within policy circles, as different groups jockey to shape Iran policy. Heintz doesn't expect much movement until after the Iranian elections, but hopes that the restart of multilateral talks, and discussions about regional security and drug trade will help free both nations of the "paranoia and fear" that's built up over time. About the Speaker(s): Barry R. Posen serves on the Executive Committee of Seminar XXI, an educational program for senior military officers, government officials and business executives in the national security policy community. He has written two books, Inadvertent Escalation: Conventional War and Nuclear Risks and The Sources of Military Doctrine, which won two awards: The American Political Science Association's Woodrow Wilson Foundation Book Award, and Ohio State University's Edward J. Furniss Jr. Book Award. Posen is also the author of numerous articles, including "The Case for Restraint," The American Interest, (November/December 2007) and "Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony," International Security, (Summer, 2003.) He has been a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow; Rockefeller Foundation International Affairs Fellow; Guest Scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies; Woodrow Wilson Center Fellow, Smithsonian Institution; and most recently, Transatlantic Fellow of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Posen's current research interests include U.S. national security policy, the security policy of the European Union, the organization and employment of military force, great power intervention into civil conflicts, and innovation in the U.S. Army, 1970"1980.Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for International Studies

New Frontiers in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder Research

Mon, 04 May 2009 04:00:00 GMT

05/04/2009 3:00 PM 46"3002Ed Scolnick, Director, Psychiatric Disease Program and the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad InstituteDescription: In contrast to cardiovascular disease, few breakthrough remedies for psychiatric illness have emerged in the past half century. Edward Scolnick lays blame for this dismal situation on barriers to understanding the genetic basis behind such illnesses. But the research drought may be over, as the current revolution in human genetics opens wide a door into the molecular biology and brain physiology behind diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. These common, chronic and disabling mental illnesses are complex, involving abnormal behaviors that vary in expression. They have also lacked the kind of quantitative tests that enable precise diagnosis. While science has demonstrated that the single biggest risk factor for both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is genetic, it has not been able to design tools for exploring how the genetics relates to the evolution of the disease in people. But just in the last two years, with the sequencing of the human genome and maps of human genetic variation, ignorance has given way to major findings. In schizophrenia and bipolar disease, researchers have discovered that gene deletions and duplications (called copy number variants) cause significant brain circuit mischief. They've also learned there are gene variants common to both diseases, as well as clusters of genes that malfunction. Scolnick describes diverse research at MIT, proceeding at a "breakneck pace," that uses this genetic information "to delve into the malfunctioning of brain circuits." Scientists have applied functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare the brains of ordinary people and schizophrenia patients, and discovered that the schizophrenic's brain in a resting state is hyperactive. Other researchers found that schizophrenics generate the gamma brainwaves involved with higher mental activities in a different manner than control subjects. Another MIT lab has begun to manipulate specific brain circuits using optical technology -- shining different wavelengths of light at special interneurons that regulate the firing of other neurons, and which are postulated to have a critical role in the malfunctioning of schizophrenics' brains. Two other MIT labs are examining the biochemical disruptions due to altered genes, and developing "safe, specific chemical inhibitors" that might yield potential treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar illnesses. In Japan, researchers are growing stem cells into brain cells, which may lead to precise experiments that relate genetic problems to malfunctions in brain wiring. Indeed, adding up this research, a central biochemical pathway central to the pathogenesis of psychogenic illness seems to be emerging, knowledge that "can be exploited to understand illness and to find drug treatments." About the Speaker(s): At the Broad Institute, Edward Scolnick works to identify risk genes for bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. From 1982"2003, Scolnick served as president of Merck Research Laboratories; executive vice president for science and technology at Merck & Company, Inc; executive director and vice president in the department of virus and cell biology and senior vice president for basic research at Merck Research Laboratories. Prior to joining Merck, he worked at the National Cancer Institute where he demonstrated the cellular origin of sarcoma virus oncogenes in mammals and defined specific genes that cause human cancer. He also worked at the National Heart Institute. Scolnick was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1984 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993. He became a member of the Institute of Medicine in 1996 and served on the Board of Directors of Merck & Co., Inc. from 1997 to 2002. He recently was selected as Regents' Lecturer, University of California at Berkeley, Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 University Professor at Cornell University, and appointed to the Board of Visitors at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. He currently serves on the board of directors for Millipore Corporation; Renovis, Inc.; and TransForm Pharmaceuticals, Inc.; and on the Medical and Scientific Advisory Board for MPM Capital. He was a member of the FDA Science Board from 2000 to 2002. Scolnick holds an A.B. from Harvard College and an M.D. from Harvard University Medical School. Host(s): School of Science, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Contemplative Dimensions of Human Experience

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

04/28/2009 7:00 PM Simmons HallFr. Thomas Keating, O.C.S.O., Trappist MonkDescription: In a mind"stretching talk covering the history of the planet, development of higher"order consciousness, and East"West religious practices, Trappist monk Thomas Keating claims that humanity is poised to take its next evolutionary step, to the "furthest levels of human understanding." While Keating's focus is on the "human family," he begins his talk with Earth's emergence from the cosmos, and the origins of life on this planet. He dwells on human evolution, especially development of the neocortex. This "point at which the human spirit began to function" is captured by scripture, when God breathes life into Adam, suggests Keating. The greatest achievement of this long sweep of history, Keating proposes, is the reflective human brain, plastic and responsive to experience, like a mesa shaped by the forces of nature over time. We're born predisposed to seek security and survival, and base our definitions of happiness on gratification of such needs, leading to lives in search of power, control, esteem, sensual pleasure. These primitive "emotional programs for happiness" obstruct what may be the ultimate opportunity: "fulfilling human capacitythrough access of spiritual levels of our being." We find evidence for this potential in "sages and saints who have understood the rational capacities of the brain to open itself to love in the fullest sense and levels of happiness, peace, freedom and joy." But this higher state isn't limited to mystics, says Keating: Humankind stands "at a significant crossroads," ready to pass through the gate of rational consciousness to "further levels of human understanding." Finding this gate will prove a challenge to most, because of ingrained habits and cultural reinforcements. Fortunately, we have the words and examples of "spiritual traditions of the world" to help us break from the "straitjacket of emotional programs," and attempt to achieve "the contemplative dimension of human experience." Keating describes how Jesus invites "everyone into the ultimate reality" in the Sermon on the Mount, and recounts the story of Elijah, the Jewish prophet, who "heard the sound of sheer silence" in the desert. The great religions show that it is possible to achieve the "discipline of quieting the mind, letting go of desires or attachments we're overly committed to, so we can be free to relate to our inmost being, where ultimate reality dwells" _ even or especially when enmeshed in the difficulties of daily life. Keating invites his audience to join him in "a place of silence," where they may "let go of interior dialog, thinking about a past and future," and "let God act in us." About the Speaker(s): Thomas Keating was born in New York City, and attended Deerfield Academy, Yale University, and Fordham University, graduating in December 1943. He is a founder of the Centering Prayer movement and of Contemplative Outreach, Ltd. Keating entered the Cistercian Order in Valley Falls, Rhode Island in January, 1944. He was appointed Superior of St. Benedict's Monastery, Snowmass, Colorado in 1958, and was elected abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey, Spencer, Massachusetts in 1961. He returned to Snowmass after retiring as abbot of Spencer in 1981, where he established a program of ten"day intensive retreats in the practice of Centering Prayer, a contemporary form of the Christian contemplative tradition. In 1984, along with Gustave Reininger and Edward Bednar, he co"founded Contemplative Outreach, Ltd., an international, ecumenical spiritual network that teaches the practice of Centering Prayer and Lectio Divina, a method of prayer drawn from the Christian contemplative tradition. Contemplative Outreach provides a support system for those on the contemplative path through a wide variety of resources, workshops, and retreats. Keating also helped found the Snowmass Interreligious Conference in 1982 and is a past president of the Temple of Understanding and of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue among other interreligious activities. Host(s): Dean for Student Life, The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values

Learning to See in the Dark: The Roots of Ethical Resistance

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

04/24/2009 6:00 PM Simmons HallCarol Gilligan, University Professor, New York University School of LawDescription: In this complex narrative documenting paradigm shifts in developmental thinking, Carol Gilligan defines the very capacity of our human nature-to have a voice and to communicate-as the grounds of both love and democratic citizenship. Dissecting the roots of healthy ethical resistance, Gilligan weaves together developmental psychology, neurobiology, ethics, and politics in ethical and moral decisions. Gilligan provides an overview of the evolution of her research and thinking about gender as they relate to ethics. She recounts in her early research that she was initially blind to gender issues. These issues became strikingly clear to her after completing one study with men about their moral dilemmas relating to the Vietnam War and the draft, versus a group of women faced with the moral choice to continue to terminate a pregnancy. Though this experience she realized that all previous studies of moral and psychological development had been based on men only. This insight set off a body of research and publication that focuses on the traditional gender splits of thought verses emotion, self verses relationships and mind verses body, and the harm to both genders to operate soley within these separate and restrictive arenas. From gender, Gilligan goes onto to study patriarchy, and looks into the societal issues on how the masculine qualities of thought, self and body have been elevated while emotion, relationships and body have been devalued, causing the psychological community to conclude that patriarchy is the natural state. Reflecting with great relief that "we now have a map," she looks at current political landscape offers insights into the election of Barack Obama and what it says about how our political landscape is changing. "We are born with a voice and into relationship, and if those capacities are encouraged, not traumatized, then we are able to register within ourselves the feeling of what happens, and that's the grounds, the growing consensus, for ethical action, to be in touch in that sense". About the Speaker(s): Carol Gilligan is an ethicist and psychologist currently appointed as a University Professor at the New York University. She received an A.B. in English literature from Swarthmore College, a masters degree in clinical psychology from Radcliffe College and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University. Her landmark book, In A Different Voice (1982) is described by Harvard University Press as "the little book that started a revolution." Following In A Different Voice, she initiated the Harvard Project on Women's Psychology and Girls' Development and co"authored or edited 5 books with her students: Mapping the Moral Domain (1988), Making Connections (1990), Women, Girls, and Psychotherapy: Reframing Resistance (1991), Meeting at the Crossroads: Women's Psychology and Girls' Development, (1992) and Between Voice and Silence: Women and Girls, Race and Relationships (1995). She received a Senior Research Scholar award from the Spencer Foundation, a Grawemeyer Award for her contributions to education, a Heinz Award for her contributions to understanding the human condition and was named by Time Magazine as one of the 25 most influential Americans. Her more recent publications include The Birth of Pleasure: a New Map of Love (2002), Kyra: A Novel (2008), and, with David A. J. Richards, The Deepening Darkness: Patriarchy, Resistance, and Democracy's Future (2009). Host(s): Dean for Student Life, The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values

Climate Change in a Changing World: Meeting the Needs of Humanity and the Planet

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

04/22/2009 7:00 PM Simmons HallSteven Hamburg, Chief Scientist, Environmental Defense FundDescription: The "dominant story of the next century" will be one of either gloom or redemption, says Steven Hamburg, depending on how humanity chooses to address climate change. To date, Earth's inhabitants have not meaningfully acknowledged this choice. Yet Hamburg retains a streak of optimism, based on his belief that bringing the impact of climate change home to individuals may stimulate a constructive response. First Hamburg sketches the dire facts: the planet is headed toward at least a 2 degree Celsius increase in temperature in coming decades, with consequences likely to include shifts in crop production, coral reef decline, and rising sea levels that threaten delta populations with devastating storm surges. From Hamburg's perspective, there's no serious argument that humans are major drivers of this rapid change, which is already negatively affecting many regions of the world. While affluent societies may discuss adaptation, it's already clear that "the losers are those people living on a dollar a day, with no capital." So "the question for each of us is how much change is too much change? How much can we tolerate?" Hamburg's first climate change paper in 1988, which focused on a subject he knows intimately, the ecology of New Hampshire's White Mountains, was met with "total silence." He worries that scientists are still conducting climate change research in a kind of void, with most people relatively oblivious to an unfolding cataclysm. "It's that dissonance that's a challenge for us as a society," he says. As a result, he's working with groups that attempt to communicate how climate change affects the "places we live in and care about." For instance, in Hamburg's White Mountain territory, climate change has led to a much shorter winter, and a pattern of winter warming and cooling that has decimated the once dominant red spruce forests, leaving maples to thrive (for the moment). People everywhere must be persuaded to become "agents of change." Hamburg recounts how the CEO of Walmart enlisted him to help the corporation become more sustainable, which led to the sale of millions of compact fluorescent bulbs (replacing incandescents), major profits, and massive savings in carbon emissions. Corporations are getting it, believes Hamburg (even Rupert Murdoch's chains are going green), seeing that "doing the right thing for society" can save money. But these moves must be accompanied by government regulations, in both developed and developing countries, which will require a "conversationto link impacts in our own worlds and lives, with actions we can take." About the Speaker(s): Steven P. Hamburg is an ecosystem ecologist specializing in the impacts of disturbance on forest structure and function. He came to Brown in 1995 after nine years at the University of Kansas, where he directed the Environmental Studies Program and served as Environmental Ombudsman. Today, Hamburg collaborates with 70 science institutions to create hands"on learning opportunities and exhibits for the public. He has published widely including in Nature and Science and has served as a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Hamburg received his M.F.S. and Ph.D. (in Forest Ecology) from Yale University. He held a post"doctoral position at Stanford University and was a Bullard Fellow at Harvard University. At Brown he is the concentration advisor for the environmental science concentration and serves as Research Director of the Global Environment Program at the Watson Institute in International Studies.Host(s): Dean for Student Life, The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values

The Most Important Number in the World

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

04/13/2009 4:30 PM Wong AuditoriumBill McKibben, Writer/ OrganizerDescription: "Just a sleep"deprived activist and organizer." That's how environmentalist Bill McKibben describes his current incarnation, with writing career in abeyance while he proselytizes about the danger of climate change. The plight he first wrote about as hypothesis in 1989 has evolved into "deeply rooted consensus." By 1995, world climatologists agreed: "Human beings are heating up the planet." After the inflection point of the Industrial Revolution, McKibben reckons, "no surprise --stuff starts to happen!" That stuff is escalating atmospheric carbon. Fast forward to summer 2007, when "Arctic sea ice melted at an alarming pace." Other deleterious effects he cites include permafrost reduction; growing release of greenhouse gas methane; paradoxical increase in both drought and deluge; rising sea level; wildfires and deforestation; agricultural jeopardy. These phenomena conspire in feedback loops to pose accelerating risks to civilization. McKibben credits NASA climatologist Jim Hansen with deriving "the most important number in the world" _ the tolerable carbon level allowing survival of life on earth, now recognized as 350 parts"per"million maximum. Trouble is, we're already past that sustainability point, owing to rampant fossil fuel combustion. We face "not a problem for your grandchildren to solveit's a problem for your parents to have solved." Upon return to Vermont from a revelatory 2006 journey to Bangladesh, McKibben's mission became activism in service to global warming awareness. He gathered 1,000 people on a five"day pilgrimage to spread the word. At the sight of this mass of humanity in a rural state, he says "cows were running in terror." So began a populist movement demanding an 80% decrease in carbon emissions by 2050. McKibben saw the way ahead as harnessing the Internet's multiplicative power. In 2007, with the help of six students and email's exponential impact, 1,400 simultaneous demonstrations took place countrywide. "The thing just went viral," McKibben exclaims, "the biggest day of grass"roots environmental activism since the first Earth Day in 1970." Social networking and cell phones proved most effective tools for mobilization. Organizers next turned their aims to the upcoming Copenhagen conference to form a treaty succeeding the Kyoto Protocol. The campaign is aptly titled 350.org. McKibben endorses the virtue of a simple number as a rallying point because "Arabic numerals are one of the very few things that translate easily around the world," avoiding cross"cultural semantic mishaps. From Martin Luther King, Jr., McKibben absorbed principles of righteous activism. The good fight must be "creativedeterminedjoyful." In closing, McKibben cautions "nature does not grade on a curve." Global warming "is the morally urgent question of our moment." About the Speaker(s): Bill McKibben has been an environmental activist, educator, and prolific writer over two decades. He was one of the first to articulate the problem of climate change for a nonscientific readership, with his 1989 book, The End of Nature. In March 2007, McKibben published his most recent book, Deep Economy: the Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He zealously carries out dual pursuits as an author and crusader to spread the message of nature's vulnerability and the consequences for civilization of global warming. In 2006, he orchestrated the then largest demonstration against global warming in US history. Now he devotes his time and passion to the massive organizing effort for a worldwide event in October 2009, highlighting the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions. McKibben is a graduate of Harvard University, and the recipient of Guggenheim and Lyndhurst Fellowships as well as honorary degrees from several institutions. He is a religious school teacher in his Methodist Church in Vermont, and a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Center for International Studies

Great Leaps, Persistence, and Innovation: The Evolving Story of Hyundai

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 04:00:00 GMT

04/08/2009 3:00 PM Bartos theaterJohn Krafcik, SM '88, President and CEO, Hyundai Motor AmericaDescription: In 1986, Hyundai's first export to the U.S, the $4995 Excel, developed embarrassing quality problems, and the company found itself grist for late night talk shows. But John Krafcik recounts with pride Hyundai's turnaround, from laughingstock of the American auto market back in the 1980s, to seventh best"selling brand in the U.S., and fifth largest car maker in the world. By 1998, Hyundai's name was so tainted in the U.S. that its market share fell to .4%, and the company was on the verge of pulling out altogether. But instead, says Krafcik, Hyundai determined to redeem itself, and win back car buyers with a focus on quality design and manufacturing, and with "America's best warranty." The 10 year, 100 thousand mile power train guarantee the company put in place, says Krafcik, was "an incredible clarifier for the engineering team," forcing them to design systems for "infinite life." Hyundai's "top down, hierarchical management approach" proved critical, too. Chairman Chung Mong Koo combines "Bill Gates, Barack Obama and the Pope," and "when he says we must do something, the company aligns well around that goal." In 2001, Chung declared that Hyundai needed to beat Toyota's quality standards in five years. Unlike BMW's approach of challenging the car owner, says Krafcik, the more "humble" Hyundai engineers focused on ergonomic engineering. An "obsessive customer focus" meant getting cars at early stages in the hands of real drivers, and using feedback to improve designs. Indeed, unlike Toyota, which imposes an engineering freeze at a certain point in development, Hyundai resolved to adapt to suggestions even late in the car development game: "If there's an imperative for a late quality change, the system is adaptable to that change." Also, Hyundai chose to design and build cars where it sells them. The result speaks for itself, say Krafcik: Hyundai's achieved strong, consistent quality performance, rivaling the industry leaders globally. Current challenges for the company involve developing a proprietary hybrid solution (with a novel lithium polymer battery) to achieve 35 mpg by 2015; and confronting "residual brand issues." The economic crisis, which has reduced the world's appetite for cars, could prove advantageous for "agile" Hyundai, believes Krafcik, which has been positioning itself prominently in the downturn, by, for instance, saturating the Super Bowl and Academy Awards with ads. Huge recent gains in "brand perception" have "Hyundai on a roll", and Krafcik expects that the company's persistence and passion will pay off, despite the grim times. About the Speaker(s): John Krafcik previously served as Vice President of Product Development and Strategic Planning for Hyundai. Krafcik joined Hyundai in April, 2004. Prior to that position, he had worked at Ford Motor Company. Krafcik holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University and earned a Master of Science degree in Management from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 1988. Krafcik began his career in the auto industry at the GM/Toyota joint"venture NUMMI, and later became an industry consultant on lean production. Host(s): School of Engineering, Engineering Systems Division

Words for the Web with Neal Kane

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 21:25:26 GMT

Neal Kane, President of Libretto, Inc. shares pointers on best practices for web writing. Neal is widely regarded as one of New England's leading business writers and messaging strategists.

An Evening with Video Artist Bill Viola

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 04:00:00 GMT

03/10/2009 6:30 PM 10"250Bill ViolaDescription: Bill Violadims the lights in MIT's Room 10"250, and begins to talk of life, death and all that lies between, leaving the realm of classroom and entering a place of potential enlightenment. Weaving together his video art, personal anecdotes, poetry and other writings from religious traditions spanning the globe and the ages, Viola illuminates his own spiritual journey and search for meaning. With a light touch, he manages to tap into reservoirs of deep feeling. Viola imparts the vital interplay between his life experience, and the evolution of his vision. After his mother's death, for instance, he 'recovered' her after finding a bowl she'd given him years earlier. Objects outlive us, Viola realized, and contain their own "spark of life." This is true of technologically enabled things including Viola's own video art. He admits that this medium makes him nervous. One of the world's most dangerous weapons is the camera, whose "narrow focus, which is its strength, allows me to see inside a soul." It can also "intentionally obscure an entire class or race." Technology may be used to enrich or to harm, but its goal must be knowledge. Viola recalls Buddha, who told his followers to treat his teachings like a raft, which should just be used "to get to the other side. From that point on, only an idiot would carry a boat around." This is a good time for Buddhist ideas, suggests Viola. The world "seems like it's deconstructing before our eyes." Yet Viola says he's "excited about this age. People who've been making money, doing stuff, must suddenly start living like artists." He tells students they should be "very happy graduating into this emptiness," because collapse brings opportunities for regeneration. Viola recounts various other experiences and insights: a visit to an exhibit of Bodhisattva sculptures, which he regarded merely as ancient art, until an old lady adorned them with scarves, revering them as sacred objects; a Flemish painting of Mary that left him weeping, and made him realize that he "was using art, mourning his mother who was leaving this world." Only after years of training, says Viola, "could I see how my personal and professional life was not at odds, that it holds the whole edifice of the self up." One profound expression of that interdependence is played in this talk: his 1992 Nantes Triptych, whose three 'panels' consist of videos of the live birth of a baby, the last moments of Viola's mother's life, and a clothed man drifting in an underwater pool "in currents between the poles of life." About the Speaker(s): Bill Viola received his B.F.A. in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973 and currently lives and works in Long Beach, California with Kira Perov, his wife and long"time collaborator. Viola has exhibited works and established relationships with some of the world's most prestigious museums and institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, which in 1997 organized an exhibition entitled Bill Viola: A 25"Year Survey; the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and Guggenheim Museum, New York; the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the National Gallery, London; the Fondacin "La Caixa," Madrid; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the Op_ra National de Paris, Bastille; the Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles; and the Avery Fisher Hall at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in New York. Viola is the recipient of numerous prestigious national and international awards and honors, including a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989 and the first Medienkunstpreis in 1993. He holds honorary doctorates from Syracuse University (1995), The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1997), California Institute of the Arts (2000), Royal College of Art, London (2004) among others, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. Host(s): Office of the Provost, Council for the Arts

China's Development and China"US Relations

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:00:00 GMT

02/10/2009 3:30 PM 10"250His Excellency Zhou Wenzhong, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People's Republic of ChinaDescription: MIT President Susan Hockfield hails a new era of collaboration between the Institute and China, and Zhou Wenzhong, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the People's Republic of China, discusses the larger relationship between his country and the U.S., particularly in light of the economic crisis enveloping the world. Chinese students have been matriculating at MIT, says Susan Hockfield, since 1876 -- almost as long as the university has been around. But the 1990s saw the start of a broader and deeper institutional commitment, with Mandarin courses at MIT, and a program to send MIT students to intern with Chinese companies. Now, the relationship is deepening, with an MIT"China initiative to spark research ideas and collaborations, particularly around energy and sustainable development, robotics, and healthcare; and a China Forum Lecture series. Hockfield believes partnerships between MIT and the People's Republic of China "are virtually unlimited." In the 30 years since China began economic reforms, Zhou Wenzhong recounts, its domestic economy has grown roughly twice as fast as the world economy. Its GDP has expanded from the equivalent of $216.5 billion to $3.28 trillion. The ambassador reminds his audience that in spite of such gains, China remains a developing country, with an enormous population whose per capita GDP is less than 1/17th of that of U.S. citizens'. It is "a long way from basic modernization and prosperity for all." Much of China's growth stems from a quadrupling of international trade. But intense globalization, an "irresistible reality" for all nations, poses major challenges, especially now with the rapid onset of profound economic malaise. China is moving to respond to this crisis, and looking beyond it, to help "establish a new international financial order that is fair, just, inclusive and orderly, fostering an institutional environment conducive to sound global economic development." The government has set out a comprehensive package of reforms to keep the country's economy running in hard times. The remedy, loaded as it is with tax cuts, social investments, restructuring of major industries, and energy conservation measures, may ring a bell for the U.S. public. China also looks to its global neighbors in facing the immediate economic challenge, says Zhou Wenzhong, and in responding to such other pressures as terrorism, proliferation of WMD, climate change, epidemic diseases and national disasters. He hopes for a strengthening of U.S."China relations, predicated on an approach steeped in the "long"term and strategic perspective." The U.S. and China should "shoulder greater shared responsibilities," promote common interests in trade, counterterrorism, law enforcement, science, technology and young people. China asks that the U.S. treat it as an equal, and respect such core interests "as the Taiwan question and Tibet relation matters." With mutual trust and dialog, he concludes, "A new era offers unprecedented opportunitiesto build a better future." About the Speaker(s): Zhou Wenzhong was born in Jiangsu Province, China in August 1945. He attended Bath University and the London School of Economics. Soon after, he served as a staff member of the Beijing Service Bureau for Diplomatic Missions and staff member of the Department of Translation and Interpretation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Then he served as Attach_ and then Third Secretary of the Embassy of the People's Republic of China in the United States, then Second Secretary, Deputy Division Director and then Division Director of the Department of Translation and Interpretation, Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In 1994, he moved on to Consul General (Ambassadorial Rank) of the People's Republic of China in Los Angeles, then Minister and DCM of the Embassy of China in the United States. In 1998, became the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of China to the Commonwealth of Australia. In 2001"2003, he served as Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs. After this he became the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs until he took his current position.Host(s): Office of the President, Global MIT

A New Age of Exploration: From Earth to Mars

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT

06/07/2008 10:30 AM KresgeDava Newman, Sm '89, PhD '92, Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering SystemsDescription: Happily for human spaceflight, Dava Newman and her students enjoy working in such laboratories as NASA's "Vomit Comet." Newman's work aims to provide a better understanding of how humans can withstand the rigors of space missions. Her decades studying human physiology and performance in extreme environments may prove key not just to the success of reaching Mars this century, but to improving the quality of life for people disabled by disease or accident on Earth. Studies of astronauts in flight, training on Earth, and on long engagements at the International Space Station, reveal "significant physiological deconditioning," Newman says. Microgravity produces musculo"skeletal loss, especially in the vertebrae and leg bones, as bipeds become "more like snakes, using a swimming type of motion." Muscles also atrophy from 20"30%. It's possible some of this loss could be restored once on the moon (where people are 1/6th their weight), or on Mars (3/8th their Earth weight). But Newman wants to do something about these conditions before humans reach these destinations. She's working on such countermeasures as unique spaceflight exercises, special drugs, human augmentation, next"generation spacesuits, and creating artificial gravity. She shows a nifty, pedal"powered artificial gravity device on which an astronaut spins, to combat deleterious physiological effects. Newman says it takes the brain around 30 days to adapt to zero gravity, and to switch back to Earth gravity. Our astronauts don't get the hang of being home right away. Says Newman, "The funny thing is when a crew comes back, and they let go of their toothbrush and it just falls down." Newman provides a fast history of the spacesuit (including a giant, white spherical ball from the '60s and a shrink"wrap version from the 70s), before introducing her bio suit, the result of many experiments, including hanging people from the ceiling, to simulate moon walking. Her outfit comes with a mechanical counter pressure system, and biosensors to maximize mobility and minimize energy consumption. Newman hopes to modify this gear into a smart suit to help children with cerebral palsy achieve more normal locomotion. What fires Newman up the most is exploration, something she's passionate about, having circumnavigated the globe on a 1 1/2 year voyage. Mars is within reach --"We're up to the task" -- but we may have to accept that maybe everyone doesn't come back alive, says Newman. Yet, "what's it worth if we can really find evidence for the origins of life three to four billion years ago on Mars. That's huge!" About the Speaker(s): Dava Newman specializes in investigating astronaut performance across the spectrum of gravity. She is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) on the MICR0"G space flight experiment to quantify astronaut intravehicular activity (IVA) onboard the International Space Station. Previously, she has been the PI for Space Shuttle experiments dealing with load sensors and astronaut workloads. Newman earned a Ph.D. from MIT in Aeronautics, Biomed and Engineering.Host(s): Alumni Association, Alumni Association

Personal Robots

Sat, 07 Jun 2008 04:00:00 GMT

06/07/2008 11:45 AM KresgeCynthia Breazeal, SM '93, SCD '00, Professor, Program in Media Arts and SciencesDescription: Cynthia Breazeal's eminently charming creatures appear to have stepped out of Santa's North Pole workshop. But Breazeal wants you to know that her robots are attempts to create socially intelligent machines "whose behaviors are governed not just by physics but by having a mind," and which might someday collaborate with humans in critical interactions. Breazeal wants to shift the concept of robots from machines that explore distant places like Mars, or vacuum floors, to devices that can function in society at large, dealing with people on a daily basis "to enhance daily life, to help us as partners." Building sophisticated machines means delving into human social intelligence, our ability to develop a sense of self, communicate thoughts and feelings in words and gestures, and interact with others. Humans are wired to read the underlying mental states of our fellows. Can robots learn to "sense and perceive and interpret the same non"verbal cues to coordinate their 'mind' and behavior with people," wonders Breazeal. Indeed, could a robot "potentially leverage its interaction with people to help bootstrap its own cognitive development"? She demonstrates some remarkable milestones in the journey to develop such a machine. Leonardo, a Yoda"like creature, seems to have the cognitive savvy of a young child, with object permanence and a theory of other minds. He and a human confederate watch a Big Bird doll get hidden under a box. The human leaves, then Leonardo observes a hooded man place the doll under a basket. The confederate re"enters the room, asking Leonardo, "Can you find where I think Big Bird is?" Leo points to the box (but like a child, gives the game away by looking at the basket). Leo has also absorbed social referents, reaching eagerly for Big Bird, who's been described in a cheerful voice as fun and jolly, and shrinking away from a Cookie Monster doll, which the human "parent" has characterized with scary tone and gestures as bad. If robots are going to exist in our world, says Breazeal, they have to learn from us when things are safe to explore. Breazeal's next generation of mobile and personable creations may serve as helpmates, tutors, teammates, or even companions "addressing the loneliness of old age." They will certainly bring us closer to the question of "when might a machine be a person." About the Speaker(s): Cynthia Breazeal directs the Media Lab's Personal Robots group. She was previously a postdoctoral associate at MIT's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. Breazeal is particularly interested in developing creature"like technologies that exhibit social commonsense and engage people in familiar human terms. Kismet, her anthropomorphic robotic head, has been featured in international media and is the subject of her book Designing Sociable Robots, published by the MIT Press. She continues to develop anthropomorphic robots as part of her ongoing work of building artificial systems that learn from and interact with people in an intelligent, life"like, and sociable manner. Breazeal earned Sc.D. and M.S. degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science, and a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara.Host(s): Alumni Association, Alumni Association

Industrial Bodies

Tue, 06 May 2008 23:08:44 GMT

Connecting Petrochemicals to Human Health and the Environment

Panelists: Laura Amos, Theo Colborn, Michael Dorsey, Catharine Clabby

Moderator: Kim Fortun

Friday, April 11, 2008

Industrial Bodies, Question and Answer

Tue, 06 May 2008 23:04:44 GMT

Friday, April 11, 2008

Sociable Robots

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT

04/29/2008 6:00 PM MuseumSherry Turkle, Abby Rockefeller Mauz_ Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology,Program in Science, Technology, and Society; Cynthia Breazeal, SM '93, SCD '00, Professor, Program in Media Arts and SciencesDescription: Cynthia Breazealmakes social robots, machines with the capacity to interact with people on psychological terms. She says they "open up a new world of questions." But these increasingly sophisticated devices make Sherry Turkle uneasy, since they challenge the idea of human relationships and the very "purpose, importance, of living things." Since inventing her famously expressive, anthropomorphic Kismet, a robot that engages and learns from people through auditory, facial and social cues, Breazeal has evolved her work using robots as a scientific tool for social understanding. Her labs are putting robots through the paces of major child development milestones, such as appreciating the mental states of others. For instance, robot Leonardo has rudimentary object permanence, inferring from a tricky human's behavior where a Big Bird toy has been hidden. Another project uses robots in home"based weight management studies, where they cue dieters to provide information on food intake, and provide moral support to wavering calorie counters. People form emotional attachments and name their robot partners, says Breazeal, and the robot method easily outperforms pen and paper, or computers, in helping people stick with their programs. Another effort involves the Huggable, a teddy bear robot that acts via an internet connection to allow a distant grandparent to touch and play with the grandchildren -- "as a new kind of communication media." And Breazeal provides a first"view of the MDS, a semi"autonomous robot that will combine state"of"the"art mobility, dexterity and social interaction. This new species of extremely appealing, touchy, feely, humanoid machine puts Sherry Turkle on edge. She sees society on the verge of a "robotic moment," as plugged in, instant messaging, virtual world denizens increasingly embrace machines as "creatures they feel a desire to connect with and nurture." She believes people are passionately attaching themselves to sociable robots, and fantasizing a reciprocal interest from these machines. "You care about them and want them to care about you. Nurturance turns out to be the killer app in robotics." She describes a graduate student who would gladly trade in her boyfriend for a robot exhibiting "caring human behavior." There is a danger that we'll become accustomed to superficial cyber connections, and develop lower expectations for human to human interactions, says Turkle. Cyber intimacy may lead to cyber solitude. And you can turn off a robot when it bores you, or conversely, depend on it to "live" forever, while human relations come with endless baggage, complexities and sometimes unhappy endings. Says Turkle, "Roboticists have come to speak of 'I Thou' relationships with machines, but what is the value of interactions that contain no understanding of us and that contribute nothing to the shared store of human meaning? These are not questions with ready made answers." About the Speaker(s): Cynthia Breazeal directs the Media Lab's Personal Robots group. She was previously a postdoctoral associate at MIT's Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab. Breazeal is particularly interested in developing creature"like techologies that exhibit social commonsense and engage people in familiar human terms. Kismet, her anthropomorphic robotic head, has been featured in international media and is the subject of her book Designing Sociable Robots, published by the MIT Press. She continues to develop anthropomorphic robots as part of her ongoing work of building artificial systems that learn from and interact with people in an intelligent, life"like, and sociable manner. Breazeal earned Sc.D. and M.S. degrees at MIT in electrical engineering and computer science, and a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Sherry Turkle is engaged in active study of robots, digital pets, and simulated creatures, particularly those designed for children and the elderly as well as in a study of mobile cellular technologies. She is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Falling For Science: Objects in Mind, appeared in Spring 2008. The third volume, The Inner History of Devices, will follow in Fall 2008. Turkle is currently completing a book on robots and the human spirit based on the Initiative's 10"year research program on relational artifacts. Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Museum

Neurobiology of Fear, Anxiety and Extinction: Implications for Psychotherapy

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT

04/14/2008 4:00 PM 46"3002Dr. Michael Davis, Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of MedicineDescription: Few scientists have charted the grim territory of fear and anxiety with the same doggedness and precision as Michael Davis. Nearly four decades ago, researchers learned that animals, including humans, startle more when fearful. A sudden noise in a dark, creepy alley provokes a greater reaction than in a well"lit room, for instance. That got Davis and his colleagues wondering what neural mechanisms underlie the startle reflex, and how fear plays a part in the response. In his talk, Davis describes the meticulous experiments he and others have conducted over many years. Starting with the fear potentiated startle test -- where animals are trained to pair a stimulus such as light, or sound, with a shock -- researchers began to track the pathways that mediate the response in the nervous system. Using chemical tracers that could follow electrical activity in the brain, Davis found a group of cells in the central nucleus of the amygdala that are critical for fear conditioning. "It was a nice day in the laboratory," he says. When he knocked out this part of the amygdala with drugs or a lesion, it selectively decreased fear potentiated startle. More studies produced maps showing that outputs of the central nucleus affect other areas of the brain involved in the symptoms of fear and anxiety, such as elevated blood pressure, sweating, clammy skin, panting and pupil dilation. Of particular interest to Davis, though, were the connections between the central nucleus and another part of the amygdale long thought to be interrelated, the bed nucleus of stria terminalis (BNST). When drugs inactivated the BNST, the startle response was completely blocked. Davis began disentangling the mechanisms of these two areas, and found that a specific peptide, corticotrophin releasing hormone (CRH) "produces a constellation of behaviors that look very much like fear and anxiety" -- and acts on receptors only in the BNST. He began to test the idea of two systems acting in parallel in the brain: fear, of relatively short duration, orchestrated by the central nucleus; and anxiety, more diffuse and sustained, originating in the BNST. Davis proposes that cognitive inputs (perhaps bad experiences and memories) help drive the release of CRH and long"term anxiety, including common debilitating phobias (fear of heights, darkness) and post"traumatic stress disorder. Research has shown that to extinguish such fears, new kinds of 'inhibitory' learning must take place. Davis recently discovered a compound, D"cycloserine, that has proved extremely promising in psychotherapy aimed at extinguishing phobias. About the Speaker(s): Before coming to Emory, Michael Davis was on the faculty at Yale University School of Medicine, from 1969 to 1998. Davis also served as consultant to NIMH's prospective joint venture with NASA on the Neurolab Shuttle Mission. He is the recipient of Yale's Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Sterling Fellowship. He has also won several Public Health Service Research Scientist Awards and the National Institute of Mental Health's Merit Award. Davis earned his Ph.D. at Yale University. His research interests include the neurobiology of learning and memory using the fear"potentiated startle reflex in both rats and humans, with special emphasis on the role of the amygdala in emotion, as well as the role of peptides in the behavioral effects of stress.Host(s): School of Science, McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT

Human Augmentation

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT

04/09/2008 6:00 PM MuseumJohn Hockenberry, Distinguished Fellow, MIT Media Lab;Host, The Takeaway; Hugh Herr, SM '93, Assoc. Prof, MIT Media LabDescription: These two MIT Museum speakers hope you'll walk away from their talk with a good case of augmentation envy _ or at least a healthy respect for what technology can do for the human body and soul. John Hockenberry has used a wheelchair for 30 years, since a car accident left him a paraplegic. He tells us the public has viewed spinal cord injuries like his as "something horrific," or "staggeringly poignant." But in the last 10 years, disability has moved from being "an extraordinarily fringe activity" to a central issue facing society, that of "marrying technology with humanity in a way that is organic to the body, appropriate to the spirit and sustainable to the community." Hockenberry believes that the needs and demands of disabled people are helping push science toward creating a set of design principles "that will allow this issue of human restoration and augmentation to merge into a kind of seamless unity." In illustration of this claim, Hugh Herr describes the astonishing strides engineers are making in the development of "Human 2.0." He starts with himself -- a victim of frostbite during a 1982 mountain climbing accident. After losing both feet below the knee, Herr headed for the machine shop, and realized he didn't have to accept the version of his body provided by nature. So he cobbled together a pair of prostheses perfect for climbing (which made him over 7 feet tall), followed by other foot"ankle replacements made lightweight and responsive through carbon composite materials and computers. These designs are better than his originals, suggests Herr. "What's fun about having part of your body artificial is that you can upgrade. It's depressing to me, too bad that you folks have biological limbs." Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have fueled the work in Herr's lab. He's now building robotic versions of arms and legs that restore capability, using computers and powered systems with sensors and motors. Stroke victims can use similar models, wrapped around an impaired limb, to restore symmetry between their left and right sides. The big prize will be a neural interface, a way of growing and reactivating an amputated nerve, so that it begins to convey sensory information through the complex networks of the brain. "The dream here is that one day I and other people with limb amputations will not only be able to walk across a sandy beach but feel the sand against their prosthesis," says Herr. Researchers haven't imposed limits on their attempts at augmentation _ or improvement. An MIT lab has designed a "socio"emotional prosthesis," Herr tells us _ using deep brain stimulators that leave subjects feeling "happy, calm, content." Hockenberry wonders in conclusion whether we are "blowing away the notion of normal entirely and creating a completely improvisational notion of what it means to be human." Herr proposes that in the future, "when we have many, many types of intimate technologies that are inside and attached to our bodies, it will unleash a renaissance in expression." About the Speaker(s): John Hockenberry is a four"time Peabody Award winner, four"time Emmy award winner, and has won an Edward R. Murrow award and a Casey Medal. Hockenberry served as a correspondent for Dateline NBC after a fifteen"year career in broadcast news at both National Public Radio and ABC News. He is the author of the novel A River Out Of Eden, and Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence, a memoir of life with a disability. In 1996, Hockenberry performed a successful limited run of Spokeman, a one"man, off"Broadway show he wrote. Parade Magazine on the 15 year anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and is a contributing editor for WIRED Magazine and METROPOLIS. Hugh Herr ME '93 is also an assistant professor, MIT"Harvard Division of Health Sciences and Technology; and director of the Biomechatronics Group at the MIT Media Lab. Herr's Biomechatronics research group applies principles of muscle mechanics, neural control, and human biomechanics to guide the designs of biomimetic robots, human rehabilitation devices, and augmentation technologies that amplify the endurance and strength of humans. He has built elastic shoes that increase aerobic endurance in walking and running. In the field of human rehabilitation, Herr's group has developed gait adaptive knee prostheses for transfemoral amputees and variable impedance ankle"foot orthoses for patients suffering from drop foot, a gait pathology caused by stroke, cerebral palsy, and multiple sclerosis. Herr received his B.A. in physics from Millersville University of Pennsylvania, an M.S. in mechanical engineering from MIT, and a Ph.D. in biophysics from Harvard University. Prior to coming to the Media Lab, Herr was assistant professor at the Harvard"MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology and the Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, Harvard Medical School. Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Museum

Diversifying Cities: Migration, Habitation, and Community Development

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 04:00:00 GMT

04/04/2008 3:15 PM Broad InstituteXavier de Souza Briggs, Associate Professor of Sociology and Urban Planning, MIT ; Jessica Andors, MCP '99, Deputy Director, Lawrence CommunityWorks; Abel Valenzuela, Jr., MCP '88, PhD '95, Professor, Director, Center for the Study of Urban Poverty, University of California, Los Angeles; Anna Hardman, MCP '71, PhD '88, Lecturer, Department of Economics, Tufts UniversityDescription: The largest scale migration in human history, says Xavier de Souza Briggs, is potentially the most transformative as well. It's time to consider new frames for issues, he says -- not rehash "civic life as a competition over power" but perhaps see this as a moment when we can realize, finally, the ancient idea of a citizenship. For planners, this may mean learning "how to create a welcoming place, a sense of what's possible." At least 3% of the world's population today live in places where they were not born, says Anna Hardman, and this number is rapidly rising. And yet "immigrants are invisible in dramatic and not so dramatic ways." When riots exploded outside Paris two years ago, "policy makers had no tools to grasp what was happening" because they hadn't collected information on immigrants in those neighborhoods. "They thought it would destroy the perception that everyone with a French passport is a Frenchman." But officials and planners must take greater heed of immigrants, given their growing economic impact in both their new homes and their countries of origin. Focusing just on integration in migrant cities misses two other vital processes, says Abel Valenzuela, Jr. While migrants often lead precarious lives, frequently under the radar of the authorities, they nevertheless are powerfully transforming the neighborhoods into which they move. In South Central LA for example, Latino immigrants have recently surpassed African"Americans, bringing "new cultural mores, economic opportunitiesand lots of great food." Soccer lovers take over parks, and street life feels noticeably different, with vendors, art, employment markets and bazaars. Some communities welcome these changes; others attempt to curtail new activities, frowning on colorful public events and fearing negative impacts on labor markets. Valenzuela sees immigrant flow on the whole as "an economic and cultural stimulus" that may lead to revitalized civic institutions. He promotes policy reform, a path toward normalization for undocumented immigrants and defusing racial tensions that immigrant legislation provokes. He also suggests planners look beyond big gateway cities to rural communities and suburbs, to which immigrants are also bound. Although Lawrence CommunityWorks has built well"designed housing and launched a slew of ventures in this old Massachusetts mill town, Jessica Andors takes greatest pride in her group's network organizing approach. She notes that many "community development interventions are to a large extent supply side--designing the best housing, offering programs to meet local needs." CommunityWorks instead focuses on investing in "informed, educated demand, with people voicing and acting collectively toward what they want." This ultimately gives them an opportunity to shape the political environment that doles out important resources. CommunityWorks helps families save money, buy homes, invest in higher education; it builds mutual support networks; and engages in collective action to "transform the landscape of the city, whether economic, civic, or physical." About the Speaker(s): Xavier de Souza Briggs has a national reputation for his work on social capital and the 'geography of opportunity' _ a policy and research field concerned with the consequences of segregation by race and income. He founded and directs the Community Problem"Solving Project @ MIT, a free learning space for people and institutions worldwide where they can access useful tools for problem"solving in the field. He has written The Geography of Opportunity: Race and Housing Choice in Metropolitan America (Brookings Institution Press, 2005). Prior to MIT, he taught on the public policy faculty at Harvard where he received the Kennedy School's award for excellence in teaching in 2002. A senior policy official in the Clinton Administration from 1998 to 1999, Briggs was Acting Assistant Secretary for Policy Development and Research at the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. He has been an adviser to The World Bank, The Rockefeller Foundation and other groups. Briggs received a B.S. from Stanford University's School of Engineering, an M.P.A. from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and a Ph.D. in Sociology and Education from Columbia's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Host(s): School of Architecture and Planning, Department of Urban Studies and Planning

The City Car

Wed, 19 Mar 2008 04:00:00 GMT

03/19/2008 6:00 PM MuseumWilliam J. Mitchell, Alexander W. Dreyfoos Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences ; Director, Smart Cities research group, MIT Media Lab; Ryan Chin MA, '00, SM '04, Doctoral Student, Smart Cities ProjectDescription: William Mitchell and Ryan Chin propose an attractive alternative to the carbon"belching, gas"guzzling autos clogging our thoroughfares, a vision that is as much about transforming cities as about remaking cars. The City Car, a tiny, electric"powered, foldable, stackable vehicle, is their solution to freeing urban centers of paralyzing, polluting traffic, and the nightmare of parking. Along with a tiny footprint and lack of tailpipe emissions, the City Car comes equipped with an onboard operating system that allows the car to communicate with the rest of the fleet, and omni"directional robot wheels that turn (all the way around) on a dime. Chin enthuses about the car as a "highly personalizable, customizable thing," whose intelligence will allow it to be ergonomically configured for each driver, and whose exterior may reflect the color or even political preferences of the driver through organic LEDs. The principle behind the car is shared use _ a ride you can grab where and when you need it, especially useful for that last leg of a commute. Mitchell describes stacks of these cars stationed at the most useful points around a city, wherever you need mobility. Swipe a credit card, pick up your ride, and drop it off at your destination. Says Mitchell, "It's like having valet parking everywhere, except you don't have a 17"year"old who's going to drive your car at high speed..." City Cars "make much more efficient use of urban infrastructure," says Mitchell. Regular cars sit around 80% of the time, "burning up expensive urban real estate." More than 500 City Cars could be parked around a city block. On the road, these cars are much friendlier to pedestrians and bicyclists than SUVs. Mitchell envisions far fewer road deaths in a City Car future. Mitchell believes the City Car could "change the auto business from what it is now, a low margin, commodity product business, to an innovative service business." Think Google rather than Ford. Shared use vehicles could also drive a "dynamic new energy market, compatible with clean, intermittent energy sources," charging up when the sun shines and sending unused battery capacity to the grid. Mitchell demonstrates his grand ambition with images of Florence, Italy. Today, "all the centers of humanism in Florence are actually parking lots." With rows of City Cars in underground lots, "we give the piazzas back to the people." Theory has shifted into practice, as City Car"like scooters head for Milan and to Taipei, where they will be stationed at convenience stores that dot the city. Some challenges stand in the way of shared use vehicles taking our cities by storm: Regulations and politics must align to support this complement to public transportation; and consumers in large numbers must be persuaded to give up private car ownership. "What I want is a clean, perfectly maintained vehicle at my disposal when I need it, perfectly reliable, preheated, pre"cooled when I get into it," says Mitchell. "Why on earth would you want to own a motor car?" About the Speaker(s): William J. Mitchell is the former Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. Prior to coming to MIT, he was the G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His latest book is Imagining MIT, (MIT Press, 2007). His previous books include: e"topia: Urban Life, Jim-But Not As We Know It, (MIT Press, 1999) High Technology and Low"Income Communities, with Donald A. Sch_n and Bish Sanyal (MIT Press, 1998) City of Bits: Space, Place, and the Infobahn, (MIT Press, 1995) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post"Photographic Era, (MIT Press, 1992) The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition, (MIT Press, 1990). Mitchell holds a B.Arch. from the University of Melbourne, an M.Ed. from Yale University, and an M.A. from Cambridge. He is a Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Mitchell is currently chair of The National Academies Committee on Information Technology and Creativity. Ryan C.C. Chin is a doctoral student in the Smart Cities research group under the supervision of Professor William J. Mitchell. He is investigating the role of mass"customization and personalization in product development processes. His current research centers on the development of a concept car with General Motors. The concept car project is a design exploration utilizing multidisciplinary design processes. The vehicle itself serves as a platform for Media lab technological innovation and investigates issues of connectivity, human"machine interface, fabrication, and design computation. After receiving his Master of Architecture from MIT, he joined the MIT Media Lab as a research specialist for CC++: The Car Research group. He most recently finished his Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences in 2005. Prior to MIT, Ryan received his Bachelor of Civil Engineering and Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the Catholic University of America. Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Museum

Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 21:18:49 GMT

Welcome to the Laboratory for Human and Machine Haptics, less formally known as the Touch Lab, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Touch Lab was founded by Dr. Mandayam A. Srinivasan in 1990. The goals of research conducted in the "Touch Lab" are to understand human haptics, develop machine haptics, and enhance human-machine interactions in virtual reality and teleoperator systems. The image below shows the relationship between the different areas of Touch Lab research. A human senses and controls the position of the finger tip, while a robot exerts forces to simulate contact with a virtual object. Both systems have sensors (nerves, encoders), processors (brain, computer), and actuators (muscles, motors).

CIS Starr Forum: Don't Be an American Idiot

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:19:35 GMT

Don't Be an American Idiot
How does the U.S. use human rights in its foreign policy?
Does the occupant of the White House matter when it comes to U.S. human interests abroad? What is the role of civil society in making human rights matter?
Julie Mertus co-director of Ethics, Peace and Global Affairs Program, American University and award-winning author of Bait and Switch: Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Policy reflects on these questions and invites discussion on their importance in an election year.
MIT's Landau Building, 66-110, 25 Ames St Cambridge, MA
6-7:30pm

The Writing of Fantasy

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 05:00:00 GMT

11/14/2007 7:00 PM 32"123Susan Cooper, Author; Gregory Maguire, Author; Roger Sutton, Editor in Chief, The Horn Book; Dr. Robert M. Randolph, Chaplain to the InstituteDescription: Sometimes the world gives off a glare "that's hard to look at directly," says Susan Cooper, and for her, making sense of things means engaging in fantasy -- "a way of getting to the truth without looking at the real." Cooper and her fellow writer Gregory Maguire admit to working out personally difficult questions, and often cosmic conflicts, in their books of fantasy for children and adults. Maguire, author of Wicked, says he was bothered by the build"up to the first Gulf War, which fed into his novel for grownups about a children's character (the Wicked Witch of the West). He calls fantasy "escapism plus something else." Says Maguire, "When I sense I'm approaching a story that's going to have to be told in a fantastic way, it is usually because it's about something so upsetting to me that I wouldn't trust myself to write about it in a naturalistic way, whether it be corruption of government in any particular decade of my life, or whether it be stress that can exist within children between the need to believe in magic and the injunction to believe in God..." Says Cooper, "You're talking to yourself really. So many of us say, 'I don't write for children,' and we don't; we are published for children, read by children. You deal with your own passions, emotions, problems, by having them flow into a piece of writing that needs that particular emotion." When moderator Roger Sutton wonders about "this human impulse to make things up that are impossible," Cooper responds about her desire to tell "deep truths," cloaked in extraordinary features. Fantasy offers the freedom "to think bigger" while offering the protagonist something to identify with. Says Cooper, "There's a reason why a lot of us start from the real world and go into magic, the way I tend to doIt's partly that you want your reader to retain a sense of reality, but you're going through fantasy to truth. It's that indirect approach that's going to get you somewhere." Maguire believes that the origins of his fantasy literature, while connecting with the tradition of myths and legends, spring from "the wet ground of the subconscious." As a child he was dreaming and play acting in the dirt alley next to his home. This nourished a more deliberate engagement with fantasy as he got older. "One of the reasons one bothers to write as well as read fantasy is to continue to strengthen the muscle of the imagination, the muscle that in fact can consider that things can be different, things in the hard world in which we live, our hard lives." About the Speaker(s): Roger Sutton has served as editor of the children's book resource,The Horn Book, since 1996. He was previously editor of The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, and a children's and young adult librarian. He is also the author of Hearing Us Out: Voices from the Gay and Lesbian Community. Sutton received his M.A. in Library Science from the University of Chicago in 1982, and a B.A. from Pitzer College in 1978. Susan Cooper has been writing for more than 30 years. At Oxford University, where she earned an M.A. in English, she was the first woman to edit the university newspaper. After graduation, she worked as a reporter on London's Sunday Times. She wrote her first books, Mandrake and Over Sea, Under Stone during this period. She arrived in the U.S. in 1963, and after writing two books for adults, set out on her famous children's fantasy series, The Dark is Rising in the 1970s. She published other novels, including The Boggart and its successor, in the 1990s, and a book, Victory was published in 2006. She has also written a number of picture books for children. Gregory Maguire is the author of the novels Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, and many other novels for adults and children. Many of Maguire's adult novels are revisionist retellings of classic children's stories. Wicked was turned into a hit Broadway musical of the same name. Maguire received his Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Tufts University, and his B.A. from the State University of New York at Albany. He was a professor and co"director at the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature from 1979"1985. In 1987 he co"founded Children's Literature New England. Maguire's most recent novel is What"the"Dickens:The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy. Host(s): Office of the President, Office of Government and Community Relations

New Lessons in Cancer Research

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/24/2007 6:00 PM MuseumJacqueline Lees, SM '86, PhD '90, Associate Director, Center for Cancer Research and Professor, Dept of BiologyDescription: Cancer is a conniving enemy. Try to kill it off through surgery or chemotherapy, and it finds a way to sneak back in. Jacqueline Lees tells an engaged Soap Box audience what insights and tools research now offers in the longstanding battle against this relentless disease. Big gains have come from molecular study of tumors at different stages, Lees says. It often takes many years for a cancerous cell to develop into a dangerous tumor, one that can yield metastases. There might be six phases of development over 15 years in a cancer's evolution, and scientists have formed a good understanding of what these different lesions look like in various cancers, and how they behave. Lees calls this process -actually a beautiful example of evolution," since the cell that mutates and begins to divide uncontrollably evolves to become more successful relative to other cells in the tissue. Other research focuses on the genetic basis of cancers. Two -flavors" of genes appear responsible for provoking cancerous changes in cells: oncogenes and tumor suppressor genes. It may be possible to intervene along the genetic pathways underlying cancer growth, says Lees. Her own work, involving mutant mice and zebrafish, hopes to identify the mechanisms involved in specific kinds of tumors, and to figure out ways of inhibiting cancer cell growth. Understanding the nature of specific cancers might help prevent treating people with chemical agents that don't work for their kind of cancer, and that actually increase their tumor's growth. With the advent of fast and inexpensive genetic screens, it may soon be possible to determine whether each of us carries genes that predispose us toward certain kinds of cancers. But Lees questions the universal adoption of DNA testing, not just because of privacy concerns, but because there may very well be no known cure if a predisposition to disease is found. -If we sequenced every baby, and said you're highly predisposed to a cancer, and there's nothing we can do, would that be information people want to have?" Lees wonders. -If we could find a rapid way to sequence small subsets of genome, identify people with high risk and we could treat them if we knew they had those diseases, there'd be an argument for that, much as we do testing for diseases where we know can intervene if find children carrying them," says Lees. About the Speaker(s): Jacqueline Lees'research is focused on identifying the proteins and pathways that play a key role in tumorigenicity and establishing the mechanism of their action in both normal and tumor cells. Her lab uses a combination of molecular and cellular analyses, mutant mouse models and genetic screens in zebrafish. Lees received her Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of London.Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Museum

Human Rights and Politics in Israel"Palestine

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/22/2007 6:30 PM 66"110Jeff Halper, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions; Anat Biletzki, Professor of Philosophy, Tel Aviv UniversityDescription: Human rights are central to the fraught politics between Israelis and Palestinians, these two panelists argue. Any conceivable solution to such an endless conflict must begin by acknowledging the current bleak realities of Palestinian life under Israeli rule, they say. Anat Biletzki and the group B'Tselem have conducted painstaking studies of how Israel's longstanding agenda of allowing its civilians to settle on Palestinian occupied land constitutes an infringement of the Palestinians' basic equality, property rights, freedom of movement, their very "right to self"determination." The settlements were given a "cloak of legality," sanctioned as they were by one Israeli government after another. Geographically, the settlements break up what might have been a contiguous Palestinian state. Biletzki ties the settlements together with other work by the Israelis conducted in the name of security to demonstrate the existence of a forbidding, two"tier society : a system of roads off limits to Palestinians in the occupied territories, or permitted only via carefully guarded checkpoints; the wall (or separation barrier), which runs through Palestinian land; and the total control of Gaza, from the economy to communications, which increasingly makes it "a big prison." This barricading of Palestinians has become a "routine phenomenon" _and not worthy of the headlines, in the way bombs and torture are, says Biletzki. She insists that "our political conversation must become a human rights conversation," and hopes that she can make an impact on American Jews and policy makers, who don't believe in the possibility of making a deal with the Palestinians: "If we give them the land, they'll throw us into the sea." Jeff Halper describes the current situation for Palestinians as apartheid, knowing full well the awful resonance of the term. He sees the system of settlements, roads and the wall as a deliberate land grab, "imprisoning tens of thousands of Palestinians within cities, towns and villages." The word apartheid "cuts through -- immediately you get it." This is important because the situation in Israel "is a global issue that affects everyone. It's the epicenter of instability in the entire regionone of the reasons you can't take toothpaste onto an airplane." Reframing the issue will bring the kind of negative attention that South Africa once drew, as well as international sanctions, and corporate divestment. While Halper believes Israel has essentially foreclosed a viable two"state solution, he still imagines that the U.S. might persuade Israel to pull out of the settlements, so Palestinians can move back in. "There would be dancing in the streets of Tel Aviv," Halper predicts, because so many Israelis "want this albatross off their back." About the Speaker(s): Anat Biletzki has been teaching at the Philosophy Department in Tel Aviv University since 1979. She has traveled widely, as a visiting scholar and fellow at, among others, Cambridge University, Harvard University, Boston University, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen, Norway. Her publications include Paradoxes (1996); Talking Wolves: Thomas Hobbes on the Language of Politics and the Politics of Language (1997); What Is Logic? (2002); and (Over)Interpreting Wittgenstein (2003). Biletzki has been active in the peace movement and in several human rights projects in Israel for over 25 years. In 1997"1998, Biletzki helped establish the human rights movement "Open Doors" which worked on liberating Palestinian administrative detainees in Israel. She is on the board of Faculty for Israeli"Palestinian Peace,and was chairperson of the board of B'Tselem " the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, from 2001"2006. In 2005 she was chosen as one of "50 most influential women in Israel" by Globes, the Israeli business monthly, and was nominated among the "1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize 2005." Jeff Halper is an Israeli anthropologist. He retired recently from Ben Gurion University. He is a harsh critic of Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and, as founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD), one of the leading peace and anti"occupation activists in Israel. A transplant from Minnesota, Halper has lived in Israel since 1973. He has researched and written extensively on Israeli society and is the author of the book Between Redemption and Revival: the Jewish Yishuv in Jerusalem in the Nineteenth Century Westview, 1991. Halper founded and directed Israeli's Committee to Save the Ethiopian Jews.Host(s): Office of the Provost, Program on Human Rights and Justice

The Dignity of Difference

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 04:00:00 GMT

10/16/2007 4:30 PM Wong AuditoriumSir Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British CommonwealthDescription: In a talk that interweaves philosophy, history, religion and some classic rabbinic banter, Sir Jonathan Sacks calls for a "paradigm shift in understanding of religion" in the face of globalization, which threatens to pull the world apart in tribal and religious strife. The "three great institutions of modernity -- science, economics and politics" have failed us, and cannot answer the key questions of the 21st century, which are "Who am I" and "Why am I here," says Sacks. With great difficulty, people increasingly confront others from different places, and develop a "politics of identity." There is "no overarching neutral power," says Sack, that will "make and hold peace between warring groups." The answer is to find a new mode of existence "that will allow fervent religious believers to live in the conscious presence of difference without violence and war." Sacks' travels back to the roots of culture and identity found in the Torah. We must "read the Bible again with new ears to hear a message simple and profound:" The human story begins with the world sharing one language and common speech. Inverting the order of Plato, the Bible sets the universal as a starting point. What is revolutionary about Genesis, says Sacks, is not that human beings can be in the image of God, but "that it applies to every single one of us, rich, poor, young or old," and that after the Flood, God makes a covenant with all of humanity. These are the same sentiments that "lie behind the great foundational sentence of American political life: 'We hold these truths to be self"evident, that all men are created equal.' Plato would have thought that sentence stark, raving mad." God sends Abraham and Sarah out of their land to be holy ("which means in the Bible distinctive and set apart") -- to teach all humanity the dignity of difference." Each culture is different yet "each in its way echoes and reaches out to God." Sacks offers a non"religious version of this concept to his MIT audience. The "real miracle of nature is ordered complexity," biodiversity, made possible by the unity of a single genetic language, DNA. "What we face in the 21st century is a battle of religious ideas," concludes Sacks. He aims his "message of hope for a dangerous world" not at the world's extremists, "who will not be persuaded by secular words like freedom and democracy," but rather, at those willing to "envisage a different and more gracious future." About the Speaker(s): Sir Jonathan Sacks has been Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth since September 1, 1991. Prior to becoming Chief Rabbi, Sacks had been Principal of Jews' College, London, the world's oldest rabbinical seminary, as well as rabbi of the Golders Green and Marble Arch synagogues in London. He gained rabbinic ordination from Jews' College as well as from London's Yeshiva Etz Chaim. Educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he obtained first class honours in Philosophy, he pursued postgraduate studies at New College, Oxford, and King's College, London. Sacks has been Visiting Professor of Philosophy at the University of Essex, Sherman Lecturer at Manchester University, Riddell Lecturer at Newcastle University, Cook Lecturer at the Universities of Oxford, Edinburgh and St. Andrews and Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is currently Visiting Professor of Theology at Kings' College London. He holds honorary doctorates from many universities. In September 2001, the Archbishop of Canterbury conferred on him a doctorate of Divinity in recognition of his first 10 years in the Chief Rabbinate. In 1995, he received the Jerusalem Prize for his contribution to diaspora Jewish life. He was awarded a Knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in June 2005. Host(s): Dean for Student Life, Technology and Culture Forum

Where Morals Come From (And Why it Matters)

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 04:00:00 GMT

09/20/2007 5:30 PM Wong AuditoriumBeatriz Luna, Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Dept. of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of Pittsburgh; John Mikhail, Associate Professor, Law Center and Philosophy Department, Georgetown University; Patrick Byrne, Professor of Philosophy, Boston College; Christopher Moore, PhD '98, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Whitehead InstituteDescription: A neuroscientist, lawyer and philosopher together manage to wrap their arms around the centuries' old question of the origins of human morality. Beatriz Luna's behavioral and imaging studies of the human brain provide evidence of an innate circuitry supporting moral cognition, and of distinct phases of development that directly relate to a person's ability to make a moral judgment. While the -cognitive control of behavior matures in adolescence," there are limitations in executive processes in the brain -that may limit an adolescent's ability to consistently determine and apply moral judgment." Luna says she -doesn't like people thinking adolescence is a disease." Instead, she sees it -as the last stop we have to influence what the brain is going to look like," and if we are interested in promoting responsible and ethical behavior, -maybe we need to sculpt the brain." She notes that her research has implications for an often unforgiving juvenile justice system. John Mikhail is working on a framework for a universal moral grammar that in some ways parallels the universal linguistic grammar of his mentor, Noam Chomsky. There's plenty of psychological evidence that children appear biologically prepared to act morally. Mikhail cites studies showing three-year_old children able to distinguish moral rules from social conventions, and to distinguish lies from innocent or negligent mistakes. He points to other signs of universal morality, such as prohibitions against murder and rape, commonalities in criminal law worldwide. Mikhail is methodically constructing -an experimental version of Socratic methods," in some sense testing the hypothesis that children are intuitive lawyers. The -scientific project here is to flesh out in a comprehensive way what's going on in our processing" that lies behind our moral principles. There are four wellsprings of human morality, believes Patrick Byrne. Reason -- -the deep desire to know and do what is right" -- guides humans toward principles. Byrne sees an innate need in humans to solve problems and to conduct -critical conversations" with themelves on the best ways to act and live. Simultaneously, we selectively gather moral precepts from society, from what others say is right or wrong. The brain is yet another source of morality. Byrne invokes the work of animal behaviorists, who have traced the evolution of sympathy and empathy in socially organized animals. Here as well, humans apply reason -in deciding who to help, why and when." Byrne cites the laws of God as another basis for moral conduct. God, says Byrne, -gives us the capacity to reason toward creative, critical and selective determination of what's the best way to live our lives and act, in concert and in collaboration with others." About the Speaker(s): Christopher Moore works on understanding the neural mechanisms of tactile perception. His work focuses on the context-dependent representation of information in somatosensory cortex, and tactile motion processing. To investigate these questions, he employs electrophysiological and imaging (optical imaging and fMRI) approaches in humans and animal model systems. Moore earned his doctorate in Brain and Cognitive Science at MIT, and conducted his postdoctoral work at The Martinos Center and UCSF. He joined the McGovern Institute in 2003 as both an Assistant Professor of Systems Neuroscience and a McGovern Investigator. Moore has published more than 30 articles and chapters, and is a member of the Society for Neuroscience and the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.Host(s): Dean for Student Life, Technology and Culture Forum

When I'm 64: Discounting, Time Preference, and Personal Identity

Sat, 09 Jun 2007 04:00:00 GMT

06/09/2007 9:00 AM Shane Frederick, Sarofim Family Career Development Professor, and Associate Professor of Management Science, MIT Sloan School of ManagementDescription: Neither philosophers nor economists can satisfactorily explain some quirky aspects of decision-making, such as why most people elect to receive a 30-minute massage in the next two weeks, as opposed to a 45-minute massage a few months down the road. Shane Frederick teases apart preferences like these, coming at them from different perspectives, and raises questions about the degree to which rational thinking drives human choices. Frederick's talk looks at how people weigh the future when making choices. Some studies have shown that -people give less weight to the future _ they discount future utility the way bankers discount future streams of income," says Frederick. But other research Frederick cites demonstrates that people like to save the best for last. In ordering a sequence, study participants chose to eat strawberries, then liquorice, and then jelly beans -- holding out for -the better thing later," in this case, the sweetest treat. In another example of people preferring -improving sequences," subjects chose to dine at a quotidian Greek grill first, followed by a fancy French restaurant. But in a -weird preference reversal," people chose to pay more for a -declining sequence," where they would eat first at the expensive French restaurant, and then at the Greek grill. There is incoherence in people's preferences, which has long puzzled thinkers from different disciplines. According to Frederick, economists say there's no arguing with tastes, while philosophers prefer to think that rationality requires some concern for the future. We all have a stake in such debates, points out Frederick. In the real world, individuals make decisions about current behaviors that have future impacts, such as drinking, exercising, and tanning. Societies make decisions about vaccinations and tapping energy resources that impact the climate. Do humans value or discount future life? Frederick notes a study that asked people to choose between Program A, which saves 300 lives in your generation, but no lives in your children's and grandchildren's time; or Program B, which saves 100 lives in your generation, and in each of the succeeding generations. 80% of participants preferred Program B, because it seemed fairer. But Frederick cautioned that whether people clearly place a value on their future selves, or the future of others remains a continuing controversy, with much depending on how researchers frame their studies and questions. About the Speaker(s): Shane Frederick's primary research interests are judgment and choice heuristics, intertemporal choice, preference elicitation procedures, the relation between IQ and decision making strategies, consumer regret, and biases in predicting the preferences of others. He has been at Sloan since 2001. Prior to that, he was a research associate and lecturer at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University. He received a Ph.D. in Decision Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University in 1999, an M.S. in Resource Management from Simon Fraser University in 1993 and a B.S. in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin in 1990.Host(s): Sloan School of Management, MIT Sloan School of Management

A.B.L.E. Tech: Achieving Better Life Experiences for People with Injury, Disability and Aging Challenges Through 21st Century Technologies

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 04:00:00 GMT

06/06/2007 5:30 PM KresgeJohn Hockenberry, Distinguished Fellow, MIT Media Lab;Host, The Takeaway; Hugh Herr, SM '93, Assoc. Prof, MIT Media Lab; Dean Kamen, Founder, DEKA ResearchDescription: Imagine a time when technology trumps injury and disease, and the very notion of disability begins to fade. These panelists suggest that we are at the dawn of such an era. John Hockenberry, who zips around the stage in his flashing light _equipped wheelchair, tells us that "vast, extraordinary and sometimes frightening physical change can instead of being feared actually be embraced and become an opportunity for people to take authorship of their own lives, using products and tools made by technology to make their life experiences better." He sees an aging and longer"lived demographic necessitating new and better devices, and the likelihood that such tools may find broader use among a larger, able"bodied population. Hugh Herr lost both legs below the knee to frostbite while hiking Mt. Washington in 1982. But his drive to climb compelled him to invent replacements that from his perspective far surpass the clumsy, skin"colored prostheses generally available. Herr demonstrates his biomechanical inventions, which provide not only a natural gait but additional energy to each stride _ like an airport walkway, he says. Herr believes with some tweaking, his device could help stroke victims walk with better balance, and that the advantage conferred by such a device could make it desirable beyond the disabled population _ think physical improvement by way of robotics, rather than steroids. As technology once intended exclusively for the disabled finds wider applications, there will be a transformation, says Herr, which "creates a world where there is not disability, but in fact augmentation. It makes it sexy. It's the muscle car." Dean Kamen performs astonishing pirouettes in his iBOT, a device inspired by his desire to give wheelchair users the same view of the world taken for granted by those able to stand. This machine can give physically challenged people the independence to climb stairs, take a walk in the woods or at the beach. Kamen also presents, through video clips, breathtaking developments in a robotic artificial arm _ the result of U.S. government efforts to fast track (in two years!) a state"of"the"art prosthesis for victims of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nerve and muscle"sensing electrodes enable this arm to pick up small blocks, pieces of paper, and rotate at the wrist. Without government funding, this device would not have been developed, Kamen notes, due to market limitations. Kamen himself subsidizes development of other high tech tools for disabled people (his more lucrative day job involves making insulin pumps and stents). While he'd like these technologies to become "a killer app among people who can pay," Kamen says, "We will continue to fund them with the naive notion that it's the right thing to do, and hope that we will meet our original objective of making the world a better place." About the Speaker(s): John Hockenberry is a four"time Peabody Award winner, four"time Emmy award winner, and has won an Edward R. Murrow award and a Casey Medal. Hockenberry served as a correspondent for Dateline NBC after a fifteen"year career in broadcast news at both National Public Radio and ABC News. He is the author of the novel A River Out Of Eden, and Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs and Declarations of Independence, a memoir of life with a disability. In 1996, Hockenberry performed a successful limited run of Spokeman, a one"man, off"Broadway show he wrote. Hockenberry is also an internationally known advocate and spokesman for the rights of the disabled. He was one of the founding inductees to the Spinal Cord Injury Hall of Fame in 2005. He wrote and appeared in a cover story for Parade Magazine on the 15 year anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, and is a contributing editor for WIRED Magazine and METROPOLIS.Host(s): Alumni Association, MIT Enterprise Forum

The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 04:00:00 GMT

04/02/2007 4:00 PM Wong AuditoriumPhilip G. Zimbardo, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Stanford UniversityDescription: Perhaps no one comprehends the roots of depravity and cruelty better than Philip Zimbardo. He is renowned for such research as the Stanford Prison Experiment, which demonstrated how, in the right circumstances, ordinary people can swiftly become amoral monsters. Evil is not so much inherent in individuals, Zimbardo showed, but emerges dependably when a sequence of dehumanizing and stressful circumstances unfolds. It is no wonder then, that Zimbardo has lent both his expertise and moral outrage to the case of U.S. reservists who perpetrated the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. Zimbardo's latest book, The Lucifer Effect, attempts to understand -how good people do evil deeds." His talk outlines his involvement as expert witness for the defense team of one of the military police officers responsible at Abu Ghraib, and also provides a rich history of psychological research into the kind of behavior transformations evident in Iraq. First, Zimbardo presents a slideshow of Abu Ghraib abominations, including some digital photos that were not widely distributed by the media. Then he digs deep into the archives for a horrifically illustrated tour of experiments that make a persuasive case that certain, predictable situations corrupt people into wielding power in a destructive way. He describes Stanley Milgram's 1963 Yale-based research demonstrating that people will behave sadistically when confronted by -an authority in a lab coat." A vast majority of the subjects delivered what they were told were dangerous electric shocks to a learner in another room, to the point of apparently killing the other person. Researchers skeptical of his results replicated them. This time, professors demanded that students shock real puppies standing on electrified grills. Zimbardo's own prison experiment turned an ordinary group of young men into power-hungry -guards," humiliating equally ordinary -prisoners" in the basement of Stanford's psychology building. The descent into barbarity was so rapid that Zimbardo had to cancel the experiment after a few days. The recipe for behavior change isn't complicated. -All evil begins with a big lie," says Zimbardo, whether it's a claim to be following the word of God, or the need to stamp out political opposition. A seemingly insignificant step follows, with successive small actions, presented as essential by an apparently just authority figure. The situation presents others complying with the same rules, perhaps protesting, but following along all the same. If the victims are anonymous or dehumanized somehow, all the better. And exiting the situation is extremely difficult. Abu Ghraib fit this type of situation to a T, says Zimbardo. The guards, never trained for their work helping military interrogators, worked 12-hour shifts, 40 days without a break, in chaotic, filthy conditions, facing 1,000 foreign prisoners, and hostile fire from the neighborhood. They operated in extreme stress, under orders to impose fear on their prisoners. Zimbardo believes the outcome was perfectly predictable, and while never absolving these soldiers of personal responsibility, believes justice won't be done until -the people who created the situation go on trial as well: George Tenet, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and George Bush." About the Speaker(s): Philip Zimbardo began at Stanford University in 1968, having taught previously at Yale, New York University, and Columbia University. He continues teaching graduate students at the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology, and at the Naval Post Graduate School (Monterey). He has received numerous honors, including most recently, the Havel Foundation Prize for his lifetime of research on the human condition. Among his more than 300 professional publications and 50 books is the oldest current textbook in psychology, Psychology and Life, now in its 18th Edition, and Core Concepts in Psychology, in its 5th Edition. Zimbardo has also been a social-political activist, challenging U.S. wars in Vietnam and Iraq, as well as the American Correctional System. Zimbardo has served as elected President of the Western Psychological Association (twice), President of the American Psychological Association, the Chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, representing 63 scientific, math and technical associations (with 1.5 million members), and now is Chair of the Western Psychological Foundation.Host(s): Dean for Student Life, Technology and Culture Forum

What's New at the Media Lab?

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:00:00 GMT

03/01/2007 5:00 PM 3"270Henry Jenkins, Provost's Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California; ; Frank Moss, Director, MIT Media Lab; Professor of the Practice of Media Arts and Sciences; Jerome B. Wiesner Professorship of Media Technology; Adam Boulanger, SM '06; Ryan Chin MA, '00, SM '04, Doctoral Student, Smart Cities Project; Hartmut GeyerDescription: Under new leadership, MIT's Media Lab has shifted gears significantly. This forum gives viewers a sense of the Lab's current priorities, via an overview by the director and three student presentations. Frank Moss initially laughed at the headhunter aiming to recruit him to the Media Lab, but reconsidered after reflecting on his kids' pointed comments: "You've sold software to fat, white guys in IT departments all your life. When are you going to give something back to society?" In conversation with Henry Jenkins, Moss describes his vision of "inventing a better future, in which technology can impact people at a deeper level, beginning with people who are disabled, disadvantaged, or disenfranchised." Targeting these groups will lead to inventions that impact society as a whole, believes Moss. Moss hopes Lab researchers will develop designs that enable more intimate interactions between humans and technology; that open up new ways for creativity and learning to change our lives; and that allow for a rethinking and simplification of "common elements in our environment." He introduces three young exemplars of the Media Lab's new focus. Adam Boulanger uses "facilitative technologies to break the mold," by handing music composition software to severely disabled patients in a Tewksbury, Massachusetts hospital. Hyperscore, says Boulanger, has enabled "new modes of interaction, new social interactions and empowerment" among patients with psychiatric disorders, spina bifida, and Alzheimer's disease. He's working on broadening this software to provide useful interventions in autism, and to detect cognitive decline. Ryan Chin's research focuses on ways to complement the increasing density of the world's cities with appropriate car design. City Car is a two"passenger electric vehicle that folds up (to four feet) so it can be conveniently stacked in small spaces in city centers and neighborhoods, and at commuter stations. Think shopping cart, says Chin. The concept challenges fundamental ideas of car ownership and function, since it's "more a computer on wheels," says Chin and is intended for shared, community use. But 504 of these vehicles fit on a city block that normally can accommodate only 82 parked cars, and when stationary, these cars can return some of their energy back to the grid. Biomechanical devices represent perhaps the ultimate in human"machine interaction. Hartmut Geyer works on ankle and knee prostheses, applying an understanding of the human gait -- the nerve signals and muscle actions required to move in different ways -- to create more responsive devices for amputees. Signals from the residual limb of the amputee tell the prosthesis how to respond during a particular activity like walking upstairs. Eventually, says Geyer, electrodes may be implanted into nerve fibers so that the brain can directly control the prosthesis, or the prosthesis can send signals to sensory fibers "so maybe the amputee wearing it can feel what he's stepping on-maybe sand, maybe concrete." About the Speaker(s): Henry Jenkins' forthcoming books include Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture. His previous books include "What Made Pistachio Nuts": Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic; Classical Hollywood Comedy; and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Jenkins has published articles on a diverse range of topics relating to film, television and popular culture. His most recent essays include work on Star Trek, WWF Wrestling, Nintendo Games, and Dr. Seuss. Jenkins has a Ph.D. in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin"Madison and an M.A. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. Frank Moss has spent his career bringing innovative business technologies to market. Most recently, he co"founded and is on the board of Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc., an early"stage cancer"drug discovery company. In addition, he chaired the advisory council for the creation of the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School, where he remains an advisor. During his career in the computer and software industries, Moss served as CEO and chairman of Tivoli Systems Inc., which he took public in 1995 and subsequently merged with IBM in 1996. He co"founded several other companies, including Stellar Computer, Inc., a developer of graphic supercomputers; and Bowstreet, Inc., a pioneer in the emerging field of Web services. He began his career at IBM's scientific center in Haifa, Israel, where he also taught at the Technion, Israel's Institute of Technology. He later held various research and management positions at IBM's Yorktown Heights (NY) Research Center, working on advanced development projects in the areas of networking and distributed computing; and executive management positions at Apollo Computer, Inc., and Lotus Development Corporation. Host(s): School of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences, Communications Forum

Counting the Dead in Iraq

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 05:00:00 GMT

02/27/2007 4:30 PM E51-345Gilbert Burnham, Co-director of the Center for Refugee and Disaster Response, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins UniversityDescription: It's no wonder there was an outcry when Gilbert Burnham's group released its report on mortality in Iraq. The numbers of civilian deaths so overwhelmed body counts calculated by other groups that many were stunned or disbelieving, and Burnham earned the enmity of some U.S. and Iraqi government officials. Burnham's public health team looked at pre- and post-invasion deaths. The 2004 study showed that the mortality rate among Iraqis before the invasion was 2%, and after, 7.9%. The 2006 survey, which polled more households and covered greater territory, was more devastating: In the three years since the invasion, crude mortality rose to 13.2 per 1000 people per year. The leading cause was gunshot wounds and deaths from car bombs. The majority of victims of violence were men, 15-45 years old, and children also died in great numbers. By the end of the analysis period, crude mortality rates approached 17 deaths per 1000 per year. The most disturbing statistic is the report's estimate that there have been 654 thousand excess deaths since the invasion of March 2003 -- 600 thousand from violent causes. Critics, who are legion, Burnham acknowledges, point fingers at his study's methodology, accusing his group of inaccurate and inadequate record-keeping, or skewing the numbers for political purposes. Burnham notes that getting actual body counts in Iraq is literally impossible, since there is no working system for keeping accurate track of the dead in hospitals and mortuaries, and -numbers are highly susceptible to manipulation." The backbone of public health studies are surveys, in which geographic clusters are chosen, households counted and individuals interviewed. As the number of clusters increase, -precision improves and confidence intervals narrow." This enables measurements -accurate and precise enough to make the right decisions even though we will never have absolute, true numbers to two or three decimal points." At great personal peril, Burnham's on-ground Iraqi surveyors went house to house in neighborhoods all over Iraq, asking for death certificates. The author of the report -hid out at a basement of a hotel, and finally got out on forged U.N. documents." The 2004 survey reached 7868 people, and the 2006 contacted 12,800 individuals. The sample size was large enough to support the team's grisly conclusions. Civilians are doing badly in this war, dying in far greater numbers than combatants. Burnham's hope is to use such data -to protect people wrapped up in conflict," since this -won't be the only one in the 21st century." About the Speaker(s): Gilbert M. Burnham has extensive experience in emergency preparedness and response, particularly in program planning, and evaluation that address the needs of vulnerable populations, and the development and implementation of training programs. He also works in development and evaluation of community-based health program planning and implementation, health information system development, management and analysis, and health system analysis. He has worked with numerous humanitarian and health development programs for multilateral and non-governmental organizations, regional health departments, ministries of health (national and district level), and communities in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe. A major current activity is the reconstruction of health services in Afghanistan. He received his M.D. from Loma Linda University in 1968, an M.Sc. from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1977, and a Ph.D. from the University of London in 1988.Host(s): Dean for Student Life, Technology and Culture Forum

Zebrafish and Cancer: What's the Connection?

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 04:00:00 GMT

09/19/2006 6:00 PM MuseumNancy Hopkins, Amgen, Inc. Professor of BiologyDescription: Through her rapport with the zebrafish, Nancy Hopkins has made large contributions to the fields of developmental biology and cancer research. But her model organism, and to some degree her particular slant on molecular biology, were a matter of serendipity, as she relates to this MIT Museum audience. When Hopkins was 10, her mother developed a form of mild cancer, terrifying to her, but also a catalyst for her interest in medical research. Later in college, after a lecture about DNA by James Watson, Hopkins realized that -the secret of life was being placed in front of you, that molecular biology someday had the potential to explain everything worth knowing: the meaning of life, why I looked like my mother..." After obtaining a Ph.D. in molecular biology, Hopkins was determined to enter the field of cancer research, although colleagues warned it would be the -end of my career." Fortunately for her, Richard Nixon was just as energized about finding cures for cancer, and poured money into the field. Even better, scientists had begun to make some key discoveries about the source of some cancers. After years working on viruses and oncogenes, Hopkins -thought it would be fun to move on to something else." On sabbatical in Germany to study the genetics of behavior, she encountered zebrafish in her colleague's lab. The evolution of the zebrafish from fertilized egg to adult occurs in five days, and Hopkins found it a perfect subject for studying an organism's early development. In her own words, she came back to MIT completely obsessed with finding all the genes -that make things work properly" in the zebrafish. After years of painstaking study, Hopkins and her team figured out how to remove one gene at a time from the zebrafish (with its 20,000-25,000 genes), in order to understand what those genes did. She built 4,200 fish tanks with almost 100 thousand fish, and ended up with 550 mutant lines of fish. Then -a funny thing happened to bring me back to cancer," says Hopkins. A lab assistant noticed some fish were developing tumors. She screened 17 mutant lines and found a family of cancer genes that appeared comparable to a group of human cancer genes. This discovery may explain the genetic basis for other human tumors. As she continues work with her fish, Hopkins embraces new and faster technologies to accomplish genetic screens, as well as better detection and imaging capability. -I look forward to the day when I can just sit at home and do experiments with existing data," she says. About the Speaker(s): Nancy Hopkins earned widespread recognition for cloning vertebrate developmental genes. Using a techniqe called insertional mutagenesis -- designed for such invertebrate animals as the fruit fly -- Hopkins's laboratory has cloned hundreds of genes that play a role in creating a viable fish embryo. Hopkins' research earned her 1998 election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and 1999 election to the Institute of Medicine. She speaks frequently about gender equity issues in science. Hopkins obtained a B.A. from Radcliffe College in 1964 and a Ph.D. from the department of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry at Harvard University in 1971. Host(s): Office of the Provost, MIT Museum

Fighting Poverty: What Works? The Work of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT

Sat, 10 Jun 2006 04:00:00 GMT

06/10/2006 11:00 AM KresgeEsther Duflo, PhD '99, Abdul Latif Jameel Prof of Poverty Allev & Develop Department of EconomicsDescription: Esther Duflo hopes to take the measure of a wide range of anti-poverty programs. Applying scientific methodology, her colleagues and students at the MIT Poverty Action Lab are approaching the projects of well-intended governments and NGO's with a fresh eye. -We have a spotty and scattered idea of the most effective ways to deliver social impact," says Duflo, so evaluating what works is important. She describes the U.N. goal of ensuring that all children worldwide attend school. Many programs aimed at achieving this goal simply don't deliver the results intended. Some approaches that gained credibility and support involve giving away school uniforms and providing free meals. But, says Duflo, -Sometimes ideas that become conventional wisdom are erroneous and need to be rethought," especially since the -budget for fighting poverty is extremely limited and will remain limited." Researchers compared a program that aimed to improve children's school attendance through a program of deworming, with a program that paid kids to go to school. Testing these projects -the way we do drugs, with treatment and control groups chosen randomly," Duflo found that the $3 per year deworming program resulted in a dramatically higher increase in school years attended than did the $6,000 per year program paying kids to attend school. Duflo insists on -being pragmatic about what works and what doesn't," and attempts to evaluate not just the effectiveness of programs but the auditing of corruption often found in social programs in the developing world. If the groups implementing a program partner early with Duflo, and embrace a rigorous evaluation of their work, they can often abort ineffective approaches and expand successful ones, maximizing their anti-poverty investment, says Duflo. -The best quality research must form the basis of good policy," she concludes. About the Speaker(s): Esther Duflo specializes in development economics. She obtained her Masters in Economics from DELTA and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris in 1995, and completed her Ph.D. in Economics at MIT in 1999. Most recently, she was the recipient of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the John M. Olin Faculty Fellowship, the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, and the Elaine Bennett Prize for Research. Duflo's work focuses on the evaluation in developing countries of the efficacy of policies and initiatives put forth by governments and non-governmental organizations involving education reform, political participation, within-family patterns of resource allocation, and health care delivery. She is also interested in the political economy of public goods provision and gender issues and the economics of the family. She co-founded the Poverty Action Lab, a research center at MIT focusing on randomized evaluation of anti-poverty programs. Host(s): Alumni Association, Alumni Association

Immunology and Cancer

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 04:00:00 GMT

06/08/2006 9:00 AM 46-3002Jianzhu Chen, Cottrell Professor of Biology;; Professor of ImmunologyDescription: Jianzhu Chen lays out the thorny challenges of harnessing the immune system to fight cancer. He starts with the basics: how the body employs two levels of defense against pathogens: native and adaptive immunity. The latter type of protection specifically interests Chen, because it can recognize and remember -an almost unending number" of specific pathogens, both inside and outside cells. B cells, produced in the bone marrow, can generate antibodies for clearing out bacteria, and T cells, originating in the thymus, go after viruses and other intracellular threats. They work by identifying an antigen (foreign substance) and expressing receptors -- cell surface proteins -- that bind to those antigens. Early on, the immune system learns to distinguish between what is self and what is a pathogen. It develops, says Chen, -layers of self-tolerance," without which the body might launch an assault on itself. But cancers can manipulate this useful feature of the immune system. Some tumors express chemicals, or summon naturally occurring suppressor cells in order to prevent T-cells from attacking them. So, says Chen, to mount an immune response against cancer, says Chen, you -need to induce a response against the selfãyou have to overcome the built-in tolerance mechanism of the immune system." Chen sees evidence of the possibility of overcoming -tumor-induced tolerance." For instance, some tumors spontaneously shrink, and there's an accumulation of immune cells at tumor sites. Researchers are focusing on three areas: using antibodies or T cells in cancer therapy; developing a therapeutic vaccine that would induce cancer specific antibodies or T-cells; and designing a vaccine to prevent cancer that would induce the memory of B or T cells for a specific cancer. Much hard work remains: identifying tumor associated antigens, most of which, says Chen, the body sees as -normal self proteins;" and then coming up with T or B cells specifically targeting these tumor associated antigens. About the Speaker(s): Jianzhu Chen is also an adjunct professor and co-director of the Center for Infection and Immunity, the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He received a Ph.D. in Genetics from Stanford University and was an instructor at Harvard Medical School before joining the faculty at MIT. The Chen lab is interested in understanding immune response and memory to respiratory virus infection at molecular, cellular, and organismal levels. The lab uses influenza virus infection in mice as a model system. Researchers follow immune cell responses to the virus during the entire course of infection, their subsequent development into memory lymphocytes, and the effect of specific gene mutation on the processes. Chen's lab is also using new molecular technologies to develop therapies that could be relevant for other infectious respiratory diseases such as SARS.Host(s): School of Science, School of Science

The RNAi Revolution

Thu, 08 Jun 2006 04:00:00 GMT

06/08/2006 10:30 AM 46-3002Phillip A. Sharp, HM, Institute Professor; Founding Director, McGovern Institute for Brain Research Description: When a Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of molecular biology embraces a new area of research as revolutionary, attention must be paid. Phillip A. Sharp's own discoveries involving gene expression opened up new territory in the search for the genetic causes of cancer and other diseases. He now has great hopes for similar breakthroughs with the process of gene silencing. This latest advance in understanding gene regulation is quite recent. In 1998, Andrew Fire and Craig Mello discovered the process of RNA interference in the worm C. elegans. When they introduced short, double strands of synthesized RNA into a cell, the RNA silenced a gene in the cell and turned off a specific protein. (Fire and Mello recently received Nobels for this work.) Previously, scientists had viewed RNA as simply -the slave molecule between DNA and protein," as Sharp puts it, or in spliced form, capable of generating a great number of diverse proteins. But revelation of the mechanism of interfering RNA has made the field -a lot more interesting," says Sharp. In just a few years, researchers have learned that small RNA -taps into a pathway that's present in every cell," says Sharp. -At minimum, one in four or one in five of our genes is controlled by small RNAs." Researchers also suspect RNA pathways may occupy a central role in establishing controls in the -human germ line" to prevent redundant pieces of DNA from being expressed in a destructive way. This offers researchers more than a powerful, new investigative tool. Says Sharp, -This is MIT. If you've got something in the lab that's new and you know people need it outside of the lab, you're under an obligation to try to translate it into therapy." One big question is whether small RNA can be used to treat cancers. There's evidence that small RNAs injected directly into the eyeball can potentially silence interconnecting genes responsible for cancers in the back of the eye. The same technique might also work for cancers in the brain and lung, says Sharp. One challenge involves getting the highly water soluble RNA across the cell membrane. Nanoparticle packaging may help prevent the RNAs from being absorbed before they're delivered to the target area. Sharp also mentions experiments that suggest misregulation of small RNAs can cause cancer. -We as a field are now struggling with the issue of just what role short RNAs play in general in control of our genes and our normal physiological processes. It's getting really interesting." About the Speaker(s): Phillip A. Sharp received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Much of Sharp's scientific work has been conducted at MIT's Center for Cancer Research, which he joined in 1974 and directed from 1985 to 1991. He subsequently led the Department of Biology from 1991 to 1999. Sharp is co-founder of Biogen, Inc and also co-founder of Alnylam Pharmaceuticals. He earned a B.A. from Union College, KY, and a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1969. Sharp has authored more than 300 scientific papers and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In 2006, he received the National Medal of Science. Host(s): School of Science, School of Science

Animal Models of Cancer

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 04:00:00 GMT

06/07/2006 11:00 AM 46-3002Jacqueline Lees, SM '86, PhD '90, Associate Director, Center for Cancer Research and Professor, Dept of BiologyDescription: Jacqueline Lees holds the lowly mouse in high regard. It is -beautifully developed" as a model system for cancer. Lees says that while researchers can learn much from cells in a Petri dish, they require living organisms to observe, for instance, the interplay of immune system and tumor cells, or how malignancies recruit new blood vessels to feed themselves. Because scientists now understand how to switch genes on and off to promote mutations in cells and specific cancers, Lees and other researchers can trigger the growth of malignancies in mice, to explore methodically the disease's progression from first mutation through metastasis. They also test new cancer detection methods and potential therapies. The point, says Lees, is to -always ask if our understanding can be applied to human disease." Lees discusses how researchers have learned to induce both hereditary-type cancers and sporadic (non-familial) cancers, through a range of procedures, including engineering an -inducing" agent that -flips a gene into being mutant;" and creating a gene that carries a mutation and inserting it into the mouse genome. Through various manipulations, researchers have created mouse equivalents for human cancers of the colon, breast and ovaries, as well some leukemias. Lees points in particular to MIT's success with modeling lung cancer. She presents dramatic 3-D images of lung cancer progression in a mouse over the course of several months, after scientists induce a mutation in its K-ras gene. By comparing mouse data with data on the human form of the disease, MIT researchers have strongly linked a mutation in the human K-ras gene to lung cancer. Lees and colleague Nancy Hopkins hope to make even more rapid advances in identifying the genetic bases for cancers, using the humble zebrafish. Since it fully develops in 72 hours, lives up to five years, and is transparent to boot, the zebrafish provides the opportunity for -large scale screens for novel cancer genes." About the Speaker(s): Jacqueline Lees research is focused on identifying the proteins and pathways that play a key role in tumorigenicity and establishing the mechanism of their action in both normal and tumor cells. Her lab uses a combination of molecular and cellular analyses, mutant mouse models and genetic screens in zebrafish. Lees received her Ph.D. in 1990 from the University of London.Host(s): School of Science, School of Science

Cancer Research in the Genomic Era

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 04:00:00 GMT

06/07/2006 2:30 PM 46-3002Eric S. Lander, Professor of Biology ; Founding Director, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; Member, Whitehead InstituteDescription: Eric Lander likens the current age of biological discovery to the days of great ocean-going exploration. After the world was mapped, no one could imagine what it was like to live -before you knew what would happen if you sailed west." Following the current revolution in biology, we -won't be able to imagine what science was like..." This transformation, claims Lander, will be complete in the next decade or so. -MIT students in 2020 will look back with a mixture of amusement and horror at the late 20th century and say, 'Imagine, people spent years looking for the gene for something.'" Lander views biology as a vast library that will soon contain information not just about the DNA sequences of species, but 'volumes' on individuals, tissues, and cells. With great effort, researchers deciphered the secrets of chromosomes, the double helix, and more recently, the human genome and that of other species. But progress in such discoveries is now moving at a much faster clip due to high-speed computing and the Internet. MIT currently sequences _ million pieces of DNA per day, says Lander. He projects this pace will quicken by 20 fold in the next several years. Fortified by this progress, Lander has compiled an ambitious 'to-do list:' identifying -everything that matters" in the human genome, from proteins to the things that control genes; knowing all human genetic variation in the population; knowing how to recognize when a cell -is thinking of one thing or another" based on how genes are turned on or off; knowing all the mechanisms that cause cancer and how to modulate all the genes. Astonishingly, he says, -This is not the to-do list of the next century, but the next decade." Lander is confident that researchers will in the not-distant future generate a catalog of the unique genetic signatures associated with -different flavors" of a type of cancer. Scientists will find patterns in diseases, genes and drug responses, and eventually assemble a list of all the genetic variants in the human genome that put individuals at risk for different diseases. These various gene databases will serve -as foundational information for biology for centuries to come," concludes Lander. About the Speaker(s): Eric Lander was a world leader of the international Human Genome Project, the effort to map the blueprint for a human being. Today, Lander is using the knowledge of the human genome to tackle the fundamental issue of medicine: to find the causes of disease. Lander received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Oxford in 1981, as a Rhodes Scholar. He joined Whitehead Institute in 1986 and founded the Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome Research in 1990. Lander became the founding director of the newly created Broad Institute in 2003. Lander is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and U.S. Institute of Medicine. He was a MacArthur Fellow (1987-1992), and earned the Woodrow Wilson Prize from Princeton University(1998); the Baker Memorial Award for Undergraduate Teaching at MIT (1992); the City of Medicine Prize (2001); and the Gairdner International Prize (2002). Host(s): School of Science, School of Science

Introduction and Overview

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 04:00:00 GMT

06/07/2006 8:00 AM 46-3002Susan Hockfield, President, MIT; ; Tyler Jacks, Director, David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and David H. Koch Professor, MITInvestigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Description: This inaugural address lays the groundwork for an 11-part series on MIT's efforts in cancer research. Susan Hockfield views MIT's Center for Cancer Research as a central example of how -life sciences are coming into conversation with engineering in a powerful way." Robert Silbey provides historical background on the notion of faculty 'short courses', and positions the Center as -the jewel in the crown of MIT, a spawning ground for scientific discovery and rewards." Tyler Jacks introduces the key research areas and scientists who will speak in the succeeding sessions. He offers a thumbnail sketch of cancer as a molecular genetic progression involving sequential alterations in, and the proliferation of, abnormal cells. -Think of a cancer cell like an integrated circuit: the same kinds of complexities in electronic networks also exist within cells," notes Jacks. Because of work on the human genome, and advances in scientists' ability to untangle these complex molecular interactions, -We now have the first generation of anti-cancer drugs targeted against molecular alterations in cancer," says Jacks. Two highly successful drugs have already been derived from MIT research. In addition, says Jacks, collaboration among biologists, engineers and mathematicians are yielding -a tremendous collection of tools and technologies." These include tiny probes that enable diagnosis of cancers at earlier stages, nanoparticles that deliver a therapeutic payload directly to cancer cells, and devices that can be implanted in the body.About the Speaker(s): Tyler Jacks received his A.B. in biology from Harvard College and his Ph.D. in Biochemistry and Biophysics from the University of California, San Francisco. His graduate work with Harold Varmus involved the mechanism of ribosomal frameshifting in retroviral gene expression. As a postdoctoral fellow with Robert Weinberg at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, Jacks initiated his studies on tumor-suppressor gene function, using gene targeting in the mouse. Jacks was named the 2005 Simon M. Shubitz Lecturer and Award recipient, and shared the 2005 Paul Marks Prize for Cancer Research awarded by Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.Host(s): School of Science, School of Science

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