http://mitworld.mit.edu/ MIT World media in category 'Technology'. en-us Tue, 24 Nov 2009 21:03:26 GMT Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/723 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/723 Dries Buytaert relates a synopsis of his life with Drupal from its inception while a "typical geek" undergraduate in Antwerp in 1999 to the upcoming release of Drupal 7 with a particular emphasis on the community that has been created by the nature of an open source product. Drupal is "software to build websites with" intended for anyone to modify and improve then redistribute to its users.

Community is a recurring theme throughout his dialogue. When 40 users attended his first DrupalCon in 2004, Dries found it "shocking" that so many people would fly to Antwerp just to "talk about Drupal all day." When his shared server experienced the "Big Drupal Server Meltdown of 2005," he was further astounded by the community's response—Sun Microsystems donated an Enterprise server, the Open Source Lab offered hosting and administration services, and end users donated $10K.

The statistics are impressive. Websites using Drupal include Yahoo!, Sony Music, Google, MIT, Harvard, and, recently, The White House. There are thousands of developers, half a million websites, a quarter of a million downloads of Drupal core and over one million unique visitors each month.

Having created Drupal in brief spurts grabbed in hours here and there, Buytaert decided to devote himself full-time to Drupal after defending his PhD in 2007. With each incremental milestone creating opportunities for more improvements and problem solving, Buytaert now wanted to devote himself to providing the necessary commercial grade support. To that end, he created Acquia—a company based in Boston—to reduce the barriers to adoption and the problems related to starting big sites. Growing pains required the organization to think less from a developer's point of view and more from an end user's view with the goal of making Drupal easier to use. Users were now categorized as clients, site builders, or developers. Each "user" would have a different view of the site and each would require different tools for getting around.

Buytaert recognized that while Drupal is good at fixing small, incremental issues, it now needed to step back and take a more "holistic view" to improve overall usability. The newly hired management team worked diligently to change the information architecture, improving navigation and making it easier for any end user to find information quicker.

Using a series of screenshots, Buytaert delineates the specific feature modifications for each set of users that will be included in Drupal 7. He recognizes how important the work that is being done now will "define the future of Drupal and [its] ability to succeed and compete with other systems."

Even though Drupal 7 is not ready for release yet—it is in code freeze—Buytaert encourages users to become familiar with its new functionality and features. More than 500 users in the Drupal community have already contributed to patches and improvements as Drupal continues to evolve. ]]> Wed, 18 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/724 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/724 Rickshaw drivers in India are frequent victims of tuberculosis after just a few years inhaling traffic fumes. This near-epidemic went unacknowledged until
Kapil Sibal demanded a solution. The fix, now gaining traction across the country, is a solar-powered vehicle that eliminates pedaling. But what began as a project to assist his nation’s afflicted rickshaw drivers has broadened into a much grander scheme in Sibal’s hands. Project 800 is a government venture to apply science and technology to better the lives of India’s 800 million citizens facing a multitude of hardships.

Sibal’s mission at MIT is not merely to communicate his people’s great challenges, but to recruit. He is candid: “MIT should be a partner in Project 800,” helping to solve the “ordinary problems of ordinary men with ordinary lives.” Sibal wonders how the globalization of trade, manufacturing and services alone will solve the extraordinary problems of India in the 21st century: feeding a growing population with a limited amount of arable land just as the green revolution has gone “gray;” managing the impacts of global warming and greater energy demands; and the spread of health threats that respect no national borders. Solutions to these problems, Sibal believes, depend in large part on the globalization of education -- the dissemination of scientific and technical know-how from places like MIT to India.

But this flow of transformative ideas, warns Sibal, requires a “change in the mindset of educational institutions.” They must begin to perceive their community as global, and also be willing to move where they are needed. “They are not silos of knowledge living in one part of the world, protecting the national interest, saying as long as we’re OK, it doesn’t matter what else is happening in the world.” Academic institutions must find common cause with other communities, learn that problems thousands of miles away have the power to touch home. “There should be an element of self-interest. It should be win-win,” says Sibal.

To that end, Sibal invites MIT to partner with India on site in projects “to combat the challenges of tomorrow.” He sees natural affiliations that increase the odds for success in these collaborations: “freedom of speech, diversity of culture, the enormous ability to have dialog.” MIT also lends such ventures another advantage, says Sibal -- a woman president, “who has the vision to create, nurture and transform.” ]]> Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/722 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/722 Astronaut Mike Massimino returns to MIT and shares his experience on the Space Shuttle Atlantis (STS-125). Topics include the challenges of space walking while repairing the Hubble, having the right tools on hand for high stakes repairs, and the long hours of practice that lead up to the task.

As the first astronaut to Twitter from space, Massimino provides funny, personal and insightful anecdotes from the mission including the competition amongst his team to be the last human to touch the Hubble.

Accompanying Massimino on the mission was a rare book loaned from the MIT Libraries’ collections. The book, a limited edition facsimile of Galileo’s landmark publication “Sidereius Nuncius” (Starry Messenger), was chosen to coincide with the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s astronomical research, the first recorded planetary observations using a telescope.

He presents the well-traveled book to MIT Libraries Director Ann Wolpert. She happily accepts the undamaged book and waives any late fees. The book traveled 5.3 million miles, making 197 orbits of the earth. It is now on display in an exhibit at the MIT Science Library. ]]> Tue, 14 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/689 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/689 Researchers are well along in designing a highly efficient, inexpensive solar cell, but the big barrier to the dissemination of solar power in society remains the problem of installation, says Marc Baldo.

As an engineer, Baldo expresses confidence that “we’re going to mow down” the problem of producing a great solar cell and making it cheap. His own lab has developed a unique approach that’s found enthusiastic support from the federal government and others. Unlike conventional solar cells that use a single material such as silicon to perform both functions of absorbing light and converting it into electricity, Baldo’s cell “separates the functions and optimizes both.” His solar concentrator utilizes inexpensive material like glass or plastic onto which a thin film of dye has been painted. Sunlight strikes this surface, and the dye, which can be “tuned” or colored to trap specific wavelengths of light, emits light back to solar cells along the edge of the plate. There are enormous advantages derived from this design: The glass or plastic (considerably cheaper than silicon) catches diffuse light, so there’s no need to track the sun, and it concentrates the sunlight much more efficiently than conventional solar cells.

But solar concentrators alone don’t signal the start of a new solar age. Baldo addresses the considerable uncertainty around the broad deployment of solar power. Installation costs for single homes appear formidably high, perhaps 2/3rd the cost of the entire system. Colossal solar fields that might replace fossil fuel burning plants must ship their energy across vast distances, losing electricity along the way. And right now the national power grid isn’t set up to handle the fluctuations in energy that large-scale intermittent energy sources such as solar or wind present. Clouds are a “big pain” for grid operators, says Baldo.

He believes the best start for solar will be in commercial and industrial installations such as the rooftops of factories, supermarkets or warehouses, sites where there’s no loss moving power around, and where managers are already seeking ways to save on lighting and refrigeration, including smart electronics. His cost-effective concentrators could find their way to such installations in several years.

In addition to solar concentrators, Baldo is researching biological models for making solar cells more efficient: He just received a $19 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to study exciton circuitry in plants -- how plants capture light in packets of energy and direct the energy to where it’s needed. Says Baldo, “This exciton is the last, great unexplored territory in solar cells.” ]]> Wed, 08 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/686 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/686 How much energy does it take to turn on a lightbulb? Way too much in the U.S., where 22% of all electricity gets channeled into illuminating homes, businesses and thoroughfares. Vladimir Bulovic wants to end the exorbitant use of power for lighting, and simultaneously brighten our lives more pleasantly, with the application of nanostructure materials called quantum dots.

Incandescent bulbs, he tells the MIT Museum audience, are hugely wasteful, with just 5% efficiency converting electricity to light. Fluorescents do the job somewhat better, and light emitting diodes better still, but these more efficient bulbs often emit colors that feel harsh to the eye. Bulovic and other researchers have been designing a fix for both the color and power conversion problems, a new kind of photo cell based on special inorganic crystals called quantum dots. The size of a human hair sliced lengthwise 5,000 times (10 nanometers), these crystals fluoresce in precise, predictable colors at different sizes: bigger chunks look red, smaller ones look blue.

Bulovic has been experimenting with nanocrystal suspensions -- applying a thin film of quantum dot solution onto a surface that can be excited by shining light or by electricity. “By tuning mixtures of quantum dots, we can make…any color of the rainbow.” New sorts of lights, and displays with “fantastic responsiveness” and true blacks are emerging from this research, along with power consumption half that of today’s LCDs and plasma screens, and the potential of reducing energy use 20 fold down the road. Some versions of photo cells could be used in laptops, and the technology has the capacity to scale up fairly quickly.

The world, well on its way to 9 billion people (many of whom still clamor for electric power), and a climate crisis, desperately needs this kind of new technology, believes Bulovic. He wonders if nanostructure materials might help with some of the hurdles engineers have encountered in scaling up solar energy solutions. For instance, the silicon used in most photovoltaics could be made more efficient by using films consisting of nanostructures that capture spectra of light that silicon can’t. While solar won’t solve the world’s energy problems alone, it figures to be one very prominent solution, and Bulovic hopes nanotechnology will help generate energy independence, “in a controlled, clean way,” helping to “uplift the world.” ]]> Tue, 02 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/675 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/675 According to Tonio Buonassisi, we’re “on the cusp” of achieving a competitive technology for capturing the limitless energy of the sun. Buonassisi, in conversation with an MIT Museum audience, describes how, with the work of MIT and other researchers, photovoltaics may finally be coming into its own.

Buonassisi describes solar cells as his “life’s passion” since age 16, but scientists have been laboring somewhat longer to figure out how to convert sunlight to useful power on Earth. In 1954, Bell Labs pioneered the first solar cell. It took 12 thousand dollars’ worth of these “to run an ordinary household toaster,” says Buonassisi. In spite of a great leap forward in the 1990s, with breakthroughs around the purification of silicon crystals and large subsidies for national industries in Japan and Germany, solar energy today constitutes just 1% of total electric generation worldwide.

The process behind solar cells appears straightforward, involving the sun’s light energy (photons) exciting electrons inside some substrate; the separation of positive and negative charges; and then the collection of those charges into an external circuit. Yet scaling up this industry to compete with coal and other fossil fuels has proven daunting. Buonassisi sees several hurdles to overcome: lower materials and processing costs, improved conversion efficiencies of cells, and better manufacturing yields. He says that it takes half a square meter-sized solar panel to power a 100-watt bulb, for instance, and it would require a land area equivalent to 1/3rd the size of Nevada to convert enough sunlight to electricity for the whole U.S. In some parts of the world with intense, year-round sun, solar makes sense already, but in the cloudy, wintry northeastern U.S., huge subsidies are still required to make a go of it.

Buonassisi is still optimistic: His own group removes impurities from materials that serve as wafers for solar cells, so cells can convert photons to electrons more effectively. While technological advances in photovoltaics research have not followed Moore’s Law, Buonassisi believes that research can “kick off the constraint” on efficiency and performance. By the end of the next decade, photovoltaics may be “hitting some big potential markets, hundreds of millions of people.” ]]> Wed, 20 May 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/671 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/671 Wielding numerous analogies for his audience of MIT students, Anant Agarwal makes the case that the next generation of computers, not to mention much of the technology in everyday life, will be built with smaller, simpler parts “combined in a clever way.”

Agarwal starts with Puerto Rico’s enormous Arecibo radio telescope, 400 meters in diameter, tuned to detect extraterrestrial life. Rather than being carved from a single gigantic material, the dish consists of “a whole bunch of tiles” adjusted to create a spherical surface. In the same way, CPU designers no longer make “one big honking processor,” says Agarwal, but lots of little processing elements called tiles or cores. This engineering movement, which MIT helped spark in the 1990s, has brought about multicore processors on chips, which overcome not just the number-crunching limitations of single processors, but their power drain as well.

Agarwal uses the example of eating ice cream: You really enjoy the first few spoonfuls, but by the 30th or 40th taste, “you’re tapped out.” By illustrating the marginal value of eating one more spoonful, Agarwal tries to get at the idea that once you’ve got a big processor, “making it bigger doesn’t give you much return.” In fact, as he shows with some math and graphs, having two or more processors works much better, including burning less power. He applies Moore’s law and predicts that beyond the four or more cores on chips we now have (he’s already developed a 64-core chip), we’ll be seeing 1000 tiles per chip in the next five years or so -- assuming we can overcome three big “P” challenges. There’s the performance hurdle of getting all those multicore chips to talk to each other and to the outside world without the gridlock found on a busy city street; power efficiency, which will require rethinking CPU architecture; and a very big programming obstacle, which may involve deploying an optical broadcast medium. Crack these, and “multicore could replace all hardware in the future,” claims Agarwal. ]]> Mon, 09 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/652 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/652 Cellphone and mobile communication aficionados (not to mention the rest of us) appreciate that our favorite tech gadgets increasingly resemble props from Star Trek. A shout out then to Irwin Jacobs and Qualcomm, the company perhaps most responsible for such astonishing gear.

In his talk, Jacobs narrates his journey from MIT, as a faculty member in the early 60s, to California and his initial entrepreneurial venture, Linkabit. Jacobs and other MIT talent applied information theory to projects for NASA and JPL, including coding for deep space probes, and processor designs. Before Jacobs moved on, Linkabit had come up with the idea for satellites that enabled live data communications between headquarters and retail stores for both Wal-Mart and 7-11. The company’s designs led to the direct broadcast satellite systems for XM and Direct TV. Its digital scrambling system fed digital technology into TV transmissions.

The even bigger story for Jacobs (and the world) involves his next venture, Qualcomm (for Quality Communications), launched in 1985. This fruitful collaboration among MIT and Linkabit graduates launched the wireless telecommunications revolution. Qualcomm first gave the trucking industry OmniTRACS, a satellite-based commercial mobile system, and then dreamed up a technology for wireless and data devices -- Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) -- that has revolutionized business and personal communications.

Qualcomm made it possible for a multitude of users to share a confined spectrum space, and then for high speed data to fit comfortably alongside voice applications. There are four billion mobile subscribers around the world, says Jacobs, of which 100 million users get voice plus data. Even in these dire economic times, new subscribers are growing, and he predicts six billion subscribers by 2013.

Qualcomm’s hard at work optimizing how data and voice share transmissions, making new applications possible (and affordable) worldwide. The goal: wireless broadband connectivity for all, and to each his or her own Smartphone or Kindle. As cellphones proliferate and merge with mobile computing, we’ll be able to keep tabs on each other via GPS, says Jacobs. He believes phones “will quickly replace credit cards, even replace money.” He sees particular opportunities in telemedicine, where phones armed with sensors can transmit patient information to specialists in hospitals, who then zip back treatment recommendations. Jacobs takes pride in Qualcomm’s efforts to leverage wireless cellphone tech for social benefits: helping Indonesian women in business ventures; bringing farmers and fishermen a way of determining market prices for their goods without a middle man; and bringing in 3G phones for kids without computer capability in China. ]]> Sun, 18 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/636 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/636 In his unassuming way, Craig Newmark believes his eponymous website might just help nudge people toward greater civic engagement. While Craigslist.org “is a simple platform where people help each other out,” focusing on everyday needs like getting a job or an apartment, it is also a profoundly collaborative venture, with political potential.

Newmark outlines the Craigslist success story, which began as a hobby for him in the early 1990s. Newmark quickly detected the Internet’s social networking possibilities, and built an email list for friends “to get the word out on cool events, arts and technology.” He developed an instant fan base, with people suggesting new items to add to the list like “stuff to sell,” and he soon felt encouraged to expand. His name for the site was “SF Events,” but friends nixed that title, infinitely preferring their own version: “Craig’s List.” Says Newmark, “I had a brand already, and it was personal and quirky. I didn’t know what a brand was at that point, but I learned and they were right.”

By the end of 1997, the site was receiving one million page views per month, but was still being run on a volunteer basis. Newmark was doing software and customer service, and recognized he could not also provide strong leadership. As a self-professed nerd who “lived the Dilbert life,” Newmark grasped that his hobby had grown too big to manage on his own, so in 2000, after having formally incorporated, he hired a CEO, and threw himself into customer service, corporate governance, and staying on top of technological innovations that could enhance the website. Craigslist is now approaching 13 billion page views per month.

Through this explosive growth, Newmark has remained true to his business values: “We can do well as a company financially by doing good stuff for people.” He has no plans to sell Craigslist. “There’s nothing altruistic, noble or pious about it. We figure once we make enough money to live comfortably and provide for the future…it’s more satisfying to change things.” He’s been involved for years “with a guy named Barack” and views himself as a “community meta organizer,” using the internet to allow face to face communication on a scale of tens of millions. Some prominent interests: using social networking to spark volunteer national service; making government more transparent; shining a light on campaign financing, and helping out returning Iraq and Afghanistan vets and their families. ]]> Mon, 12 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/634 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/634 Contemporary science has done a great disservice to Sigmund Freud, suggests Sherry Turkle, who believes the psychoanalytic tradition can teach us much about the often concealed connections between physical objects and our thoughts and feelings. On the occasion of the publication of her latest book, The Inner History of Devices -- the third in a trilogy -- Turkle speaks of the importance of technology as a subjective tool, as a window into the soul.

When she first arrived at MIT, Turkle relates, colleagues viewed devices like their computers as simply instruments for accomplishing work. Turkle set out on her life’s work to demonstrate that technology serves a much greater purpose in our lives. People turn their devices “into beings, which they animate, anthropomorphize.” Her research and writing involves the ways people invest themselves in physical objects, and how those objects “inflect inner life, relationships, carry ideas, sensibilities and memory.”

Turkle’s latest work, as she describes it, brings together the artful listening of a memoirist, the interpretive skills of a clinician, and the participant observational skills of an ethnographer. Together, these enable her to dig deep into such questions as how cellphones can change people’s sensibilities, what is intimacy without privacy (e.g., texting and Second Life); and how people are starting to add robots as companions to their lives. There is no doubt that technology is “changing our hearts and minds,” and that people increasingly attach “to the inanimate without prejudice.” Whether online or with robotic creatures, “we are lost in cyber intimacies and solitudes, and we often don’t know if we’ve been alone, together, close or distant.”

Turkle reads snippets from her three books, which, as an ensemble, tell the story of the intellectual and emotional links between objects and ourselves. Technology, she says, serves as a Rorschach for personal, political and social concerns, carrying ideas, expressing individual differences in style. It also “acts as a foil we use to figure out what it means to be human,” crystallizing memory and identity and provoking new thought. For instance, kids have at least seven radically different styles of using Legos, she says, which allow us “to see who the child is.” “For too long we have stressed … that technology has affordances that constrain its use. I take it from the other side: how do different personalities, cognitive styles and desires take a technology and turn it into what that person wants to know and express.” ]]> Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/619 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/619 While the ongoing world economic crisis has left many business leaders sweating (or worse), John Chambers is rolling up his sleeves in anticipation of an eventual recovery. After every economic challenge, he says, Cisco has come out with dramatic gains in market share. This time won’t be different, if Chambers’ bets pay off.

In the 1990s, he predicted that networks would transform the way the world works, becoming platforms for communications and other IT, and Chambers placed Cisco at the center of that transformation. Today, he envisions a Web 2.0 premised on collaboration and social networking that will similarly transfigure all business life. Since 2001, he’s been positioning Cisco to catch this massive market transition, and indeed, is “betting the company’s future on it.”

In “phase two of the Internet,” says Chambers, “Content will find me; I will not search for it.” Any device, anywhere, will be able to receive any kind of content. We will be dealing with licenses for things like music, rather than worrying about compatibility issues between our digital tools and what’s streaming through them. Web 2.0 will also bring “effective collaboration,” by which Chambers means network-enabled visual tools, which will make “working together for a common goal truly possible.” Expect much faster business processes and revved up productivity, says Chambers.

Based on Cisco’s own experience in the past several years, organizations will completely restructure around these new capabilities. Indeed, he offers up his company as a paradigm of this vision. Once a hierarchical, command and control-based organization, Cisco is now much flatter, a company running “off of social networking groups.” Councils with cross-functional responsibilities suggest and take on many more projects (from emerging markets, to video, and smart grid boards); from one to two major ventures per year, to this year’s 26 launches. The next generation company is “built around the visual.” Cisco employees do non-stop teleconferencing with collaborators around the world. The company hosts 2500 such virtual meetings per week. It also employs Webex, Wikis and blogging to move work along.

With this kind of communication and carefully managed process to match, “operations can be turned on a head,” says Chambers. It’s the recipe for market-dominating speed and scale. Chambers is “loading the pipeline” with projects that assume other companies will want what Cisco has and makes. “If we’re right, we’re developing a huge wave of revenue opportunity.” Perhaps this is one reason why he’s “an optimist on global productivity, global economy and our ability to handle the challenges.”

]]> Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/604 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/604 The news these days from Africa isn’t all bad. In fact, in some places, it’s downright hopeful, as Rwandan President Paul Kagame attests. “Our continent is no longer all about violence and disease and human disasters that scarred many African countries in recent decades,” says Kagame. “We are now becoming a continent of opportunities.”

There are those who doubted Rwanda could “constitute a viable state,” says Kagame, but 14 years after bloody genocide and civil war, his country has managed an astonishing revival -- enough “stability and resilience to allow the economy to grow at an average 7% annually in the past several years.” Other African nations have been expanding at the same pace; oil producers are zooming along at even faster clips. Kagame attributes this recovery to such factors as the “leapfrogging power of mobile technology,” where hundreds of millions of new cell phone users, even in remote areas without electricity, drive the growth of new business. And the number of internet subscribers in Africa is growing more than three times as fast as the rest of the world, says Kagame.

Cell phones and the internet allow Rwandan and other micro entrepreneurs to develop business networks. Kagame describes how technology helped a Kigali bakery expand beyond its neighborhood to reach more customers and suppliers, enabling workers to move into larger homes. In Kenya, Kagame recounts, a new agricultural commodity exchange “has reduced barriers between farmers, traders and consumers,” with the internet and cell phone text messages providing timely market information. This network has improved the incomes of farm families by 25%, leading to better healthcare and education. Rwanda’s power utility is also reaping the benefits of technology, keeping track of customers and accounts more efficiently, and no longer relying on government handouts.

But while technology has enabled Africans “to leapfrog some features of underdevelopment,” Kagame says it is not enough. “Our vision of becoming a middle income country by 2020 … requires thinking and acting inventively, boldly and creatively.” Kagame wants to build a foundation not just in technology but in science. Doing this requires a heavy investment in all levels of education. “Without a knowledge base,” he says, “Africa’s imperative for agricultural and industrial development to create wealth will remain unrealized.” He calls for members of the MIT community to join “in overcoming our challenges and turning them into rewarding opportunities.” ]]> Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/602 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/602 Cynthia Breazeal’s eminently charming and huggable 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. Then only Leonardo sees when a hooded man puts the doll beneath a basket. When his confederate enters the room, Leonardo can answer the question accurately, “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 described with a scary voice 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.” ]]> Mon, 18 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/588 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/588 Cynthia Breazeal makes 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.” ]]> Mon, 04 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/582 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/582 In the curious way of technological evolution, we first had computers that occupied entire rooms, watched them shrink to desktop, laptop and palm-sized devices, and now find ourselves coming full circle, and then some, Alan Benner reports. He tells this MIT class about warehouse-sized data centers, linking processors, and ensembles of processors, in dizzyingly complex hierarchies. These gigantic operations, some with their own power and air conditioning plants, are central to the enterprise of Internet behemoths Google, Amazon and YouTube, but have not yet percolated out to more traditional companies like insurance firms -- a situation Benner and his IBM colleagues would like to remedy.

Benner describes in broad strokes how these data operations are organized into levels of “virtualization and consolidation,” where the hardware is hidden, yet the data is both fully accessible and secure, no matter where the user and the computers are located. These new enterprise data centers aim to maximize efficiency, both in utilization and power consumption. It’s better to have fewer, bigger and well-integrated machines, says Benner, working as much as possible. Since even idle servers use a lot of power, users should share processing time in a manner that keeps the processors occupied. Benner describes computer architecture and software that aims at “statistically multiplexing jobs,” matching peaks in one group’s workload to nonpeaks in another group’s. Ideally, users remain blissfully unaware of this traffic management, and need never worry whether their information is getting crunched next door, or on the other side of the planet.

Benner hopes that companies will see advantages in migrating their data and services to a bigger, shared infrastructure, especially now with the near-ubiquity of high bandwidth networks. Given the rapid rise of energy costs, and the burdens of supporting a growing IT administration, it may save money “to move work to where it can be done most efficiently,” he says. ]]> Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/561 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/561 Evelyn Hu meticulously describes designing and building a new generation of optical materials from nano-sized elements. She hopes to harness “the magic of light in nanostructures.”

Hu walks through her research of exploring and exploiting the properties of different optical materials. She first cites the most important aspects of an optical material, such as its color (emission and absorption wavelength); its ability to convert energy efficiently; how long it remains excited when stimulated; and whether we “get more output than we put in.”

Hu looks for optical material in nature, then superimposes another pattern on it, substantially transforming it at the atomic level. In one case, she uses gallium arsenide of a wavelength or so thickness, and pokes such tiny holes in it that photons of light behave differently when they encounter the structure. As Hu says, “I’m sculpting out a particular environment for photons.” Her gallium arsenide nanostructures contain a tiny cavity or “sweet spot” that creates a high intensity electromagnetic field that interacts in a specific way with photons and atoms. Each structure has a unique optical signature. Hu makes an analogy to an organ pipe, an acoustic resonator, which due to its unique geometry, produces a different pitch as air moves through it.

Hu goes on to describe how a nanostructure works with simple low energy, high energy electron states, and how the cavity exerts influence on atoms to create a relationship between electronic and photonic states, what she calls “weak coupling.” Hu has also been mixing matter and light to create new quantum states. She describes placing an atom precisely in the sweet spot, exciting it to release a photon, changing the photon’s state and stimulating an atom again: “If I do this procedure exactly right… we can transfer energy between the environment and the atom almost forever.”

To achieve the optimal effect, atoms and photons must behave predictably and do as they’re directed. To accomplish this, Hu and colleagues have fashioned semiconductor quantum dots 50 angstroms wide as tunable optical emitters, and fabricated photonic crystal membranes with patterns etched out by electron beams. Hu’s found she can control and manipulate the release of photons more and more precisely within her nano environments, creating new quantum mechanical states, and exerting a “much more powerful influence on the nature of light.” This work, concludes Hu, has “profound implications for processing information.” ]]> Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/558 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/558 While television and the Internet, among many innovations, have powerfully transformed our lives, says William Uricchio, the idea that such technologies “like Venus popped out of the water and did something to us” is neither accurate nor interesting. Uricchio describes more useful alternatives to understanding technological progress.

Great ideas seem to percolate for a while, often in different locations, before emerging. Some theorists describe a linear evolution, with developing scientific competencies, specific designs, prototyping, then a socially dictated need. Others describe more of a process-oriented negotiation among political and commercial interests, with false starts, and different versions of the invention popping up before society settles on a dominant application. Uricchio takes up TV as a case study. He notes that the concept for TV emerged as early as 1877, and earned a patent in 1884. Yet, film exploded on the scene first. “Why does it take TV so long to be invented?” ponders Uricchio.

He describes the history of TV as a demonstration of “interpretive flexibility,” of morphing, where the new technology allies itself in successive generations with other technologies. Uricchio recounts Alexander Graham Bell’s two-way telephone, in the 1870s, and a French “telephonoscope.” The Nazis deployed such a television telephone in the 1930s, with a link from Nuremburg to Hamburg. While the electronics industry liked this model, the burgeoning propaganda organization preferred the movie idea of TV, where an audience “was less likely to debate” a state message. “In a theater with secret police, people shut up,” said Uricchio. The Germans also tested TV as a battlefield technology, putting minicameras in the nose of bombs and torpedoes. Technological regimes replicate the vision of their cultures, says Uricchio.

After the war, TV swiftly evolved as a home-based technology, following the need to jump-start the economy and the rapid ascendance of powerful, influential industries like RCA -- which, in spite of much more high definition alternatives, pushed its standard of 525 lines. But even now this highly stable, successful invention is shifting, as TV hooks up with the Internet, and consumers become programmers and broadcasters.

Along with political and commercial pressures, popular imagination or expectations influence the way we use technologies, and where energies go, says Uricchio. The public and inventors find inspiration in the Star Trek holodeck, and ask why we can’t do that. “That’s how material, technological cultures are shaped -- by a dream,” says Uricchio. ]]> Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/549 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/549 In this heartfelt address, Tom Brokaw characterizes the transformation of the world by digital technology as a second “Big Bang,” a time of great possibility, but also of danger.

This revolution is being advanced not by “a small collection of monkish wonks working in a secret lab” but by a vast and ever larger population ranging from inventive teenagers to military analysts in the Pentagon, says Brokaw, who feel “power at their fingertips and in the bowels of their servers.” They believe that the world is limited only by their imagination. Yet, cautions Brokaw, “life is not a virtual experience. If we develop capacity and leave out compassion, what is the reward? What are the consequences if speed overruns reason?”

The most memorable people Brokaw has met during 45 years in journalism are not world leaders and movie stars, but “brave young, black and white civil rights workers” determined to end the "moral hypocrisy” of the segregated south; a doctor saving a young girl’s life in Somalia; a fireman searching for lost comrades in the wreckage of the Twin Towers. For Brokaw, greatness is defined by unrecognized and modest heroes “who put their hands in the dirt and spend nights in scary places to make this precious planet a better place for us all.”

The technology revolution must serve a larger purpose, Brokaw believes. He describes American aid workers using the internet to help victims of an earthquake in Pakistan, both to speed rebuilding and “to make a lasting impression on those poor souls who believe the world has forgotten them, especially the Western world.” Brokaw states, “These are new tools that require a human face as we attempt to diminish and lower the temperature of Islamic rage.” Brokaw has written of the “defining generation” who fought in World War II. He suggests an analogy with those in our own time who meet our greatest challenges with powerful new technologies: the growing divide between haves and have-nots; disappearing ice caps and rainforests; and increasingly scarce and expensive energy.

The generation that rises to answer these challenges must have “an attention span and patience longer than the conventional post on YouTube.” They must also search for truth amid “distortion, fraud and anarchy.” Brokaw ends by asking the privileged generation that wields new technological tools, his listeners, to make “a moral and intellectual commitment to leave this precious planet a better place than we found it.” ]]> Wed, 07 Nov 2007 00:00:00 -0500 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/494 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/494 Can human beings, with the help of smart machines, not merely avoid “collective idiocy” (in Sandy Pentland’s words), but actually achieve a degree of intelligence previously unattainable by either humans or machines alone? These three panelists study the possibilities from different angles.

Thomas Malone’s Center for Collective Intelligence examines such evolving intelligent systems as Wikipedia, which relies on a veritable army of volunteers to “create a high quality product with almost no centralized control,” and Google, with its technology “harvesting knowledge” and serving up answers to a vast audience of seekers. While a crowd doesn’t guarantee the best solution to a problem, Malone sees opportunities in “prediction markets,” where humans, with the computational help of computers, predict things with greater accuracy than single experts, whether in electoral politics, or in medical diagnostics. Malone’s research is also attempting to set up metrics to measure the intelligence of these new human group-machine hybrids, and ways of applying collective decision making to climate change policy.

Alex (Sandy) Pentland performed a unique experiment in a large German bank, tagging its employees with special badges that tracked individuals’ interactions, down to head nodding, body language, and tone of voice. His research, conducted over a month, looked at how face to face interactions played into the overall organizational flow. The patterns he uncovered in the data collected from his name badges and from email and more traditional documentation, demonstrated the significance of social dynamics in workplace productivity. Certain individuals acted as information bottlenecks; others as polarizers, group thinkers, or gossip mongers. Pentland shared information about these patterns of communication with individuals. “Rather than think of this as big brother,” says Pentland, “think of this as a personal intelligence tool that collectively produces better results.” Related technology might be able to detect depression by examining a person’s patterns of socialization.

Karim R. Lakhani says he “stumbled into collective intelligence and distributed information systems as a puzzle.” While trying to market his large corporation’s medical imaging system, he discovered that a small Canadian group had “leapfrogged” his R&D team. A community of radiologists and physicists pooled their expertise to improve imaging technology, and beat a large, centralized lab. Since that time, Lakhani has pursued other examples of decentralized groups of people with a wide range of motivations, efficiently cracking complex problems-- from the open source software community, to biotech labs and entrepreneurial ventures. A T-shirt company, Threadless, asks its online community of a half million to submit T-shirt designs, and vote on them. The best scoring designs go into production. Sales are closing in on 1.5 million shirts at $20 a pop. Says Lakhani, “One hope of collective intelligence is that it takes the distributed and sticky pockets of knowledge that exist in the world and finds ways to aggregate them for us.” ]]> Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/484 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/484 Contemporary artificial intelligence researchers (as well as neurologists and Karl Jung) are taken to task in this talk by one of the world’s preeminent scholars of artificial intelligence.

Marvin Minsky is worried that after making great strides in its infancy, AI has lost its way, getting bogged down in different theories of machine learning. Researchers “have tried to invent single techniques that could deal with all problems, but each method works only in certain domains.” Minsky believes we’re facing an AI emergency, since soon there won’t be enough human workers to perform the necessary tasks for our rapidly aging population.

So while we have a computer program that can beat a world chess champion, we don’t have one that can reach for an umbrella on a rainy day, or put a pillow in a pillow case. For “a machine to have common sense, it must know 50 million such things,” and like a human, activate different kinds of expertise in different realms of thought, says Minsky.

Minsky suggests that such a machine should, like humans, have a very high-level, rule-based system for recognizing certain kinds of problems. He labels these parts of the brain “critics.” When one critic gets selected in a particular situation, the others get turned off. In the “cloud of resources” that comprises our mind, mental states, from emotions to reasoning, result from activating or suppressing the right resource. Minsky further refines his machine’s reasoning architecture with six levels of thinking that attempt to emulate the different kinds of reasoning humans may engage in, often simultaneously: These include learned reactions, deliberative thinking, and reflective thinking, among others. A smart machine must have at least these levels, he says, because psychology, unlike physics, doesn’t lend itself to a minimal number of laws. With at least 400 different areas of the brain operating, “if a theory tries to explain everything by just 20 principles, it’s doing something wrong.”

Today, while we have machines that can automatically assemble clothes, we don’t have any that know how to sew together a tear in a shirt or a suit. Minsky proposes a new kind of AI that might eventually result in a “really resourceful, clever thinking machine...with knowledge about how to do things,” and which “can do the broad range of things children can do.”

]]> Thu, 04 Oct 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/483 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/483 In a lecture that dips into both the anatomy and history of the semiconductor, Grant Willson offers some provocative thoughts on whether industry can continue improving on this most useful of inventions.

He describes how steady advances in miniaturization enabled the astonishing progress of microchips over the past 40 years. Today, says Willson, you can “buy a transistor for less than the cost of a single written character in your local newspaper.” When he began at IBM in the 1970s, the silicon wafers produced were only 1 ¼ inches in diameter; now “they’re bigger than pizzas.”

Willson delves into the technological changes that both enabled printing on circuits to grow smaller, and the final product to grow larger. He details the original process of photolithography, involving designing a circuit pattern, then using a $25 million printer with a focused electron beam to reproduce the pattern on special glass, called a mask. It’s the mask’s pattern, etched onto a silicon wafer that forms the basis of the microchip. Layer after layer of these patterns get laid down on a single chip.

The machines behind these processes cost tens of millions of dollars. Just the lens for focusing laser light onto the wafer through the mask has 40 optical elements and weighs as much as a car. Over time, explains Wilson, “People try to make bigger lenses to make smaller structures. The bigger the lens, the shorter the wavelength of light.” In the ‘70s, recounts Wilson, machines were printing hundreds of miles of stuff the size of a bacterium. Today, with the help of chemical catalysts, printing has been reduced to less than 100 nanometers in diameter.

But there’s a problem in reaching the next generation of super-small, mass-produced chips, believes Willson. Major manufacturers are investing hundreds of millions to figure out the right method to enable light to burn ever more Lilliputian lines on chips. “Even if they succeed in building this tool, they will lose. Chemistry will defeat them in the end, and the machine will never work.” According to Willson, the chemical catalyst diffuses and there’s blurring of lines that should be sharp. Furthermore, a single machine of this type would cost $80 million, says Willson, putting production costs ludicrously high.

So has the march of improvement in semiconductor technology ended? Willson sees hope yet, in the form of Step and Flash Imprint lithography (S-FIL), a new approach to high resolution patterning, which can replicate shapes as small as 10 nanometers and at reasonable cost.

]]> Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/471 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/471 Fast-moving managers are finding that their most cherished high-tech gadget may actually be their worst enemy. JoAnne Yates reviews recent research into the evolving, dysfunctional affair between human and Blackberry. An in-depth glimpse at one company, complete with 48-hour Blackberry email logs and spouse interviews reveals a number of paradoxes, according to Yates. Key among them is the reported passion many users feel for a device that can connect them to their work 24/7, a device that can send alerts every few minutes that something needs to be dealt with. Yates and her colleagues looked at this firm,which had racked up four years of Blackberry usage, and found some typical patterns: People checked for messages quite frequently, but tended to respond in batches, and not immediately (unless the need was urgent). Blackberrys were used at weekend soccer games, at the symphony, and in one unhappy home, where a spouse didn’t enjoy its pervasive presence, “in a bathroom with the door closed.”

Yates found a number of contradictory responses among Blackberry jockeys: Users felt both controlled by the constant flood of messages, and in control via their power to not respond when ‘messaged.’ There’s also the “stress paradox,” where Blackberry users stay in constant contact so as to “not miss something that’s blowing up,” but over time find it impossible ever to disengage from the device, even on vacation. Spouses found their partners distracted and sometimes disabled by the ever-present Blackberry (some mentioned waking up at 3 a.m. to find their partners checking for messages). In sum, says Yates, interaction with Blackberrys cuts users off from the real outside world of families and non-work activities.

And, says Yates, while the Blackberry may facilitate workplace efficiency and autonomy, it “shifts expectations of availability.” When everyone in a firm keeps a Blackberry as constant companion, the temptation to send messages during evening and other downtime hours grows. There is “escalating commitment and dependence on the Blackberry, a spiral of expectations and feeling constantly on call.” The work day simply has no end.

Yates’ recommended antidote to the stress, addiction and disengagement that can accompany Blackberry use is for individuals and organizations to put the Blackberry in its place. Establish rules all must follow, such as outlawing Blackberrys during meetings and eliminating 3 a.m. emails. “If you’re an insomniac, do email, but batch and hold, send them at 7 a.m.,” suggests Yates.

]]> Mon, 16 Jul 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/463 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/463 Philosophers and AI researchers may argue the point, but Bruce Donald believes his microscopic invention qualifies as a robot. Donald’s machine is about as wide as a strand of human hair. He likens it to a car, because it’s controllable: “You can steer it anywhere on a flat surface, and drive it wherever you want to go.” Unlike previous attempts at such a microelectromechanical system, Donald’s robot has no tether, but operates via electrical charges on a silicon grid. It’s a real speed demon, proceeding in nano-sized hops (one billionth of a meter, 20,000 times per second), ultimately achieving two millimeters per second, or the equivalent on a more human scale of 80 kilometers per hour. To the tunes of a Strauss waltz, Donald demonstrates two robots dancing in straight and wavy lines around each other, and then coupling to form a single system.

Donald envisions many possible applications for this work. Since his robots can push and shove things in their path, and can also latch onto each other, they might prove quite useful assisting in techniques involving protein design, manipulation of cells and biomedical engineering. The next five to 10 years, Donald predicts, will see an even smaller generation of robots, which “will be doing useful things in the lab.” ]]> Thu, 07 Jun 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/454 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/454 This session goes a long way toward demonstrating the “happy face of the atom,” as moderator David Kaiser puts it, replacing the mushroom cloud image with a multidimensional picture of the uses of nuclear technology.

As a plasma physicist, Ian Hutchinson works on controlled fusion -- a very hot area of nuclear technology in more ways than one. By fusing together isotopes of hydrogen, you can achieve the energy source of stars, says Hutchinson. This promises infinite reserves of clean energy. These reactions are only possible at super high temperatures, and “to bring these down to a human scale,” the gases created must be contained by powerful magnets in machines called tokamaks. MIT and other labs have produced fusion energy and now a major international project to create a large fusion reactor is under way. The big challenge, says Hutchinson, is understanding the “great stirrings and eddies inside the plasma” that cause gas leaks and disruption to the fusion process.

We are now entering a time when “angst seems to be subsiding and we are able to discuss the benefits of nuclear technology in the security arena,” says Dwight Williams. He describes some major upgrades to the detection devices commonly used to prevent people from getting “bad stuff on an airplane or through a port.” Williams explains active system devices, which can induce a radioactive signature in something that was not originally radioactive, and thus signal an item’s “elemental content.” A machine using thermal neutron activation analysis can penetrate all kinds of shielding, to produce gamma rays and a 3D image of the contents of a bag. Since explosives share some of the features of jam, marzipan and chocolate, says Williams, advanced nuclear techniques will help inspectors distinguish between the benign and dangerous.

Medical applications of nuclear technology deploy different types of radiation to kill tumor cells and spare healthy tissue. But, says Jeffrey Coderre, shielding healthy cells to prevent radiation’s side effects turns out to be a tricky proposition. Coderre investigated the nature of radiation damage and determined it was a function of damage to stem cells (rather than damage to blood vessels). He describes how the radioisotopes used in medical radiation, virtually all of which come from Canadian reactors, can be used in a variety of ways: to view areas of rapid bone growth, or tumor sites in bone; to sterilize syringes and drapes used in hospitals; and in a radiation helmet called the gamma knife to get focused radiation into difficult brain tumors.

Alan Jasanoff provides a one-stop tour of medical imaging techniques, differentiating between those scans that use high energy radiation (such as computed tomography and positron emission tomography); and low wavelength radiation, based on radio waves, such as nuclear magnetic resonance imaging. PET scans detect molecular tracers that have been consumed in a sugary drink to find areas where cells are rapidly dividing, for example. New applications for this well established imaging method include locating plaques in the brain that cause Alzheimer’s disease. MRI, unlike CT or PET scans, has minimal destructive impact on tissues, and allows 3D mapping of blood vessels, and more recently, the tracing of microscopic fibers in the brain. Jasanoff’s lab uses calcium-sensitive contrast agents to detect events in the brain. ]]> Mon, 21 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/448 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/448 The Otis elevator, Carrier air conditioner and Black Hawk helicopter are well known names for many people -- unlike United Technologies Corporation. George David wouldn’t have it any other way. This CEO promises that the “parent will never get in front of the subsidiaries,” because “familiarity breeds favorability.” In David’s 30-plus years at UTC, he has built these time-tested brands by focusing on productivity. Design, engineering, and manufacturing process changes have paid off in spades, with UTC 2006 revenues standing at $48 billion and growth in productivity running at 5-7% annually. David offers numerous examples of UTC’s successes.

Jet engines are miracles of engineering, according to David, having the “characteristic of being able to operate in temperatures over the melting point of metal without melting.” Pratt & Whitney, another UTC subsidiary and maker of the industry’s top jet engines, has so improved the manufacturing process of these delicate mechanisms since 1968 that the mean time between engine failures has gone from once every six months to once in every 35 years.

The Otis Elevator Company used the same pulley-counterweight system for most of its 150 years. Big steel wires hauled loads up and down buildings, and required a large motor room at the top to house the gear. A recent breakthrough has led to small steel wires encased in a very bendable synthetic medium, so there’s no need for a motor room, and the system can capture energy when the load goes down. Orders for Otis elevators have grown three times in the last 12 years, and its workforce has increased 25%.

Key to such successes is flow optimization, says David, and simultaneous work: short assembly lines with quality checks along the way. “There is no force more powerful in modern business than productivity,” he says. “You do it or die. And it is what gives goodness to life. It’s the reason the stock market has done what it’s done in the last 15 yrs. Make no mistake. It’s nothing else. It’s product underneath everything.”

David concludes with several of his “17 Keys to the Corporate Lock” -- his philosophy and approach to organizational life (don’t expect a book, he warns): One needs “relentless constancy of purpose” and “high energy.” People with more ambition than energy “are doomed to a bad life.” He’s impatient when staff come to him with problems rather than solutions. “You decide what to do,” he says. “Be independent, work far away, have a plan, milestones, send a note once a month and come back a year later and say it’s done. That’s a scarce resource; if you have it, you’ll go a long way.” ]]> Sun, 06 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/444 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/444 Geothermal energy remains the poor cousin in our current stable of renewable resources, in spite of offering enormous benefits. That’s Jefferson Tester’s inescapable conclusion, after participating in a Department of Energy investigation into the technical and economic viability of tapping into this potentially vast energy pool. He describes the findings of the DOE report to a live and online MIT Museum audience.

The 18-member research team accepted as givens the fact that U.S. will demand ever more power, having just passed the one million megawatt milestone. But there are threats to the supply system, with increasing prices for natural gas and difficulties expanding coal production, not to mention issues around electric transmission lines and energy storage. Renewables like solar and wind won’t make much of a dent in the next 20 years, researchers believe, and nuclear power continues to meet public resistance.

Meanwhile, for the last 30 years, geothermal systems have been successfully demonstrating their capacity to generate electricity. Some areas of the world are blessed with steam or hot water located fairly close to the surface (think of Yellowstone’s Old Faithful geyser). In Iceland and locations in the U.S. west, says Tester, “instead of mining minerals from the ground, we’re mining heat.” Right now, the U.S. produces 3000 megawatts of geothermal electricity. But “not all the earth is so blessed” with hot springs, says Tester, so the trick is “to replicate what nature has done.”

In several critical demonstrations around the globe, researchers are working on such enhanced/engineered geothermal systems (EEGS). They drill down to depths of 5 kilometers and beyond, deep enough to reach hot rock. Then they circulate water into these underground heat reservoirs, where it warms up enough to generate electric power. The work shows great promise, Tester believes.

Tester’s report assumed that if geothermal were “going to be anything more than a minor curiosity,” it would have to supply energy at the level of nuclear or hydropower in the U.S. today – 100 thousand megawatts. EEGS could become such an energy player by 2050, if in the next 15 years, government and industry kicked in for a handful of field demonstrations -- first in some shallow, high grade sites in the West, which would quickly and economically start producing energy, and then eventually in some sites requiring more expensive mining at depths greater than six kilometers -- such as in the eastern U.S. The total investment of $600-800 million would be less than the cost of a single clean coal plant, notes Tester. Currently, unlike other renewable energy projects, “geothermal has no money in the budget.” Comments Tester, “If I look to the future of my children, and my grandchildren, I’d want to make sure we’re looking at all the options.”

]]> Tue, 01 May 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/443 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/443 With the arrival of digital technology, we’ve become a nation “of multitaskers, snackers and samplers,” says Jonathan Miller . A longtime player in the media industry, Miller perceives two distinct trends emerging: the fragmentation of consumption, due to “an incredible explosion of choice,” and the consolidation of money and power in the business.

These intertwined phenomena will continue to play out, Miller believes, “to the consumers’ benefit,” because to a large degree, the consumer is in control. Content is available across innumerable platforms, from cell phones to laptops to handheld games, and with broadband and wireless penetration, users can get their fix of news, entertainment and data virtually anywhere, anytime. More to the point, consumers have at their command cheap and easy ways to produce and distribute their own content, whether original or freely exploited from other authors. There’s been a grassroots explosion of blogs, websites, mashups, instant messaging, and YouTubing. Miller notes that the internet served up five billion screens of video in 2002, and in the past year, five times as many.

Confronted by literally millions of rich media producers and hundreds of millions of consumers, media giants have been forced to shift gears. It’s an on-demand world now, says Miller, where marketing money is ill spent, since the product itself drives adoption. If consumers like it “they choose to pass it on to their friends…you can’t spend your way there.” The music industry, which tried to buck the trend, finally accepted the dominance of internet sharing and commerce. Now the rest of traditional media companies are rushing to shift their business models. For example, they’re “going to make great product” for TV, “upgrading the quality of narrative and the experience of viewing it” with movie stars and high definition. They’re finding “additional digital niches” to push their high and low-level products on the web and beyond, says Miller. The giant companies remain so, because of a need to “aggregate” the blogs, videos and podcasts. Scale still matters, so the big guys finance and swallow up the little guys, even as consumption continues to spread out. “At the same time of democratization of consumption we have a concentration of industry taking place,” concludes Miller. “This is the golden age of entertainment.” ]]> Mon, 30 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/442 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/442 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.”

]]> Wed, 11 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/438 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/438 James Duderstadt believes recent efforts to digitize scholarly journals, along with Google’s massive digital library enterprise, “could be as important as the Internet in changing the scaffolding for learning and scholarship in the world.” In this final panel of the iCampus series, Duderstadt asks his colleagues to take up the question of how to propagate or scale up successful initiatives in educational technology, so that they have a transformative impact on higher education.

Andrew Chien points to the evolution of retail e-commerce, with many merchants following trailblazers like Amazon, and some ultimately serving as “portals to enable small players to accelerate their reach and innovation.” Chien suggests that over time, “collaboration and competition will allow us to choose from a variety of interesting things.”

The Mellon Foundation believes that for technology to succeed, it must be developed collaboratively in the first place, says Chris Mackie. In an effort to “reduce the predilections of institutions to build silos and a balkanized world,” Mellon is talking to different institutions “about the concept of building an academic services bus environment to match enterprise services bus environments.”

Technology can be counted successful only if it “resonates in the marketplace,” says Irving Wladawsky-Berger. “What’s an example of exciting technology that people like?” he asks. “Highly visual interfaces—there are millions of people playing games.” Wladawsky-Berger says he’s “convinced that embracing highly interactive approaches in cyberinfrastructure and the Internet will revolutionize the way people interact with machines at all levels.” He also endorses engaging learners and teaching problem-solving skills through story-telling techniques.

In India and other developing nations, says Ashok S. Kolaskar, there are “many people living in the 17th century, with infrastructure very behind.” For large numbers of Indians who have no access to a decent education, technology is critical. Building an extensive broadband network, and providing something like OpenCourseWare could “bring up the bar,” and make the difference between a community college education and advanced higher education. Kolaskar also emphasizes teacher training, since the new “plug and play generation” knows more about technology than their elders.

Initiating a freewheeling exchange between panelists and such distinguished audience members as Chuck Vest and John Seely Brown, Duderstadt discusses lifelong secondary learning opportunities for all adults (assuming that increasing life spans will mean people lead productive careers into their 80s and 90s). Vest urges that with an aging workforce, “Somehow we must find ways of intelligently mixing generations on a large scale, so we’re learning from each other in a new and different way.” Chris Mackie says technologies could play a crucial role in establishing “cross generational models” of higher ed, supporting students from the earliest age, and helping mentor them via alumni networks when out of college. ]]> Mon, 09 Apr 2007 00:00:00 -0400 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/437 http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/437 The Rx for an ailing healthcare industry lies only partly with new technology, say these panelists, who report on their attempts to realize a streamlined vision of healthcare at their Hudson Valley regional hospital.

Pediatrician and CEO Daniel Aronzon describes a set of organizational challenges his institution faces, including accountability, transparency, safety, capacity, efficiency and cost. Myriad small problems can add up to millions in losses, and an occasional but catastrophic error may drain hospital resources. Aronzon notes that in the U.S., 97 thousand people die in hospitals every year because of such mistakes as giving a chemotherapy drug the wrong way. To get a handle on the safety problem, Aronzon has tried to create “a non-punitive just culture,” where employees who hurt patients by making “an honest mistake” are not punished. The hospital also invested in systems enhancements and prescription bar-coding technology to eliminate or mitigate such errors.

To cut expenses, Aronzon tagged computerized IV pumps with RFID, which prevented hoarding by staff and unnecessary replacement of the pricey machines. He frets about the coming demand on healthcare as boomers age: “Can’t you see it coming,” asks Aronzon, imagining this scene: “What do you mean there’s not enough nurses? I’ll sit on the call bell till they all come!”

After examining his hospital’s business model, Nicholas Christiano says his team decided that the most robust area for change lay with nurses. “They’re continually in motion,” running back and forth dealing with non-clinical issues. The model is “crazy and doesn’t work,” says Christiano.

The closest analogy to hospitals is the airline industry, where “if you make a mistake you have a catastrophic event,” says Christiano. To avoid errors, the airline industry has an infrastructure “that can support and track everything in a real-time environment.” Christiano proposed a wireless communication network for nurses, which he promoted through an internal marketing campaign as a way of easing nurses’ workload and enhancing their interactions with patients.

Despite all the technological advances, Stephen Katz believes healthcare is still informed by a 1950s culture. Medicine “hasn’t had to deal with efficiencies other businesses have had to establish in the same years.” But more so than other industries, “we’re a people business -- people at their very worst and stressed out.” The question, says Katz, is how to improve the lives of staff, with new systems and technology, “to bring them along with us for the betterment of the patients.” ]]>