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      Study: Covid-19 has reduced diverse urban interactions

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      The Covid-19 pandemic has reduced how often urban residents intersect with people from different income brackets, according to a new study led by MIT researchers.

      Examining the movement of people in four U.S. cities before and after the onset of the pandemic, the study found a 15 to 30 percent decrease in the number of visits residents were making to areas that are socioeconomically different than their own. In turn, this has reduced people’s opportunities to interact with others from varied social and economic spheres.

      “Income diversity of urban encounters decreased during the pandemic, and not just in the lockdown stages,” says Takahiro Yabe, a postdoc at the Media Lab and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s results. “It decreased in the long term as well, after mobility patterns recovered.”

      Indeed, the study found a large immediate dropoff in urban movement in the spring of 2020, when new policies temporarily shuttered many types of institutions and businesses in the U.S. and much of the world due to the emergence of the deadly Covid-19 virus. But even after such restrictions were lifted and the overall amount of urban movement approached prepandemic levels, movement patterns within cities have narrowed; people now visit fewer places.

      “We see that changes like working from home, less exploration, more online shopping, all these behaviors add up,” says Esteban Moro, a research scientist at MIT’s Sociotechnical Systems Research Center (SSRC) and another of the paper’s co-authors. “Working from home is amazing and shopping online is great, but we are not seeing each other at the rates we were before.”

      The paper, “Behavioral changes during the Covid-19 pandemic decreased income diversity of urban encounters,” appears in Nature Communications. The co-authors are Yabe; Bernardo García Bulle Bueno, a doctoral candidate at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); Xiaowen Dong, an associate professor at Oxford University; Alex Pentland, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and the Toshiba Professor at the Media Lab; and Moro, who is also an associate professor at the University Carlos III of Madrid.

      A decline in exploration

      To conduct the study, the researchers examined anonymized cellphone data from 1 million users over a three-year period, starting in early 2019, with data focused on four U.S. cities: Boston, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle. The researchers recorded visits to 433,000 specific “point of interest” locations in those cities, corroborated in part with records from Infogroup’s U.S. Business Database, an annual census of company information.  

      The researchers used U.S. Census Bureau data to categorize the socioeconomic status of the people in the study, placing everyone into one of four income quartiles, based on the average income of the census block (a small area) in which they live. The scholars made the same income-level assessment for every census block in the four cities, then recorded instances in which someone spent from 10 minutes to four hours in a census block other than their own, to see how often people visited areas in different income quartiles. 

      Ultimately, the researchers found that by late 2021, the amount of urban movement overall was returning to prepandemic levels, but the scope of places residents were visiting had become more restricted.

      Among other things, people made many fewer visits to museums, leisure venues, transport sites, and coffee shops. Visits to grocery stores remained fairly constant — but people tend not to leave their socioeconomic circles for grocery shopping.

      “Early in the pandemic, people reduced their mobility radius significantly,” Yabe says. “By late 2021, that decrease flattened out, and the average dwell time people spent at places other than work and home recovered to prepandemic levels. What’s different is that exploration substantially decreased, around 5 to 10 percent. We also see less visitation to fun places.” He adds: “Museums are the most diverse places you can find, parks — they took the biggest hit during the pandemic. Places that are [more] segregated, like grocery stores, did not.”

      Overall, Moro notes, “When we explore less, we go to places that are less diverse.”

      Different cities, same pattern

      Because the study encompassed four cities with different types of policies about reopening public sites and businesses during the pandemic, the researchers could also evaluate what impact public health policies had on urban movement. But even in these different settings, the same phenomenon emerged, with a narrower range of mobility occurring by late 2021.

      “Despite the substantial differences in how cities dealt with Covid-19, the decrease in diversity and the behavioral changes were surprisingly similar across the four cities,” Yabe observes.

      The researchers emphasize that these changes in urban movement can have long-term societal effects. Prior research has shown a significant association between a diversity of social connections and greater economic success for people in lower-income groups. And while some interactions between people in different income quartiles might be brief and transactional, the evidence suggests that, on aggregate, other more substantial connections have also been reduced. Additionally, the scholars note, the narrowing of experience can also weaken civic ties and valuable political connections.

      “It’s creating an urban fabric that is actually more brittle, in the sense that we are less exposed to other people,” Moro says. “We don’t get to know other people in the city, and that is very important for policies and public opinion. We need to convince people that new policies and laws would be fair. And the only way to do that is to know other people’s needs. If we don’t see them around the city, that will be impossible.”

      At the same time, Yabe adds, “I think there is a lot we can do from a policy standpoint to bring people back to places that used to be a lot more diverse.” The researchers are currently developing further studies related to cultural and public institutions, as well and transportation issues, to try to evaluate urban connectivity in additional detail.

      “The quantity of our mobility has recovered,” Yabe says. “The quality has really changed, and we’re more segregated as a result.” More

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      Celebrating open data

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      The inaugural MIT Prize for Open Data, which included a $2,500 cash prize, was recently awarded to 10 individual and group research projects. Presented jointly by the School of Science and the MIT Libraries, the prize recognizes MIT-affiliated researchers who make their data openly accessible and reusable by others. The prize winners and 16 honorable mention recipients were honored at the Open Data @ MIT event held Oct. 28 at Hayden Library. 

      “By making data open, researchers create opportunities for novel uses of their data and for new insights to be gleaned,” says Chris Bourg, director of MIT Libraries. “Open data accelerates scholarly progress and discovery, advances equity in scholarly participation, and increases transparency, replicability, and trust in science.” 

      Recognizing shared values

      Spearheaded by Bourg and Rebecca Saxe, associate dean of the School of Science and John W. Jarve (1978) Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the MIT Prize for Open Data was launched to highlight the value of open data at MIT and to encourage the next generation of researchers. Nominations were solicited from across the Institute, with a focus on trainees: research technicians, undergraduate or graduate students, or postdocs.

      “By launching an MIT-wide prize and event, we aimed to create visibility for the scholars who create, use, and advocate for open data,” says Saxe. “Highlighting this research and creating opportunities for networking would also help open-data advocates across campus find each other.” 

      Recognizing researchers who share data was also one of the recommendations of the Ad Hoc Task Force on Open Access to MIT’s Research, which Bourg co-chaired with Hal Abelson, Class of 1922 Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. An annual award was one of the strategies put forth by the task force to further the Institute’s mission to disseminate the fruits of its research and scholarship as widely as possible.

      Strong competition

      Winners and honorable mentions were chosen from more than 70 nominees, representing all five schools, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and several research centers across MIT. A committee composed of faculty, staff, and a graduate student made the selections:

      Yunsie Chung, graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, won for SolProp, the largest open-source dataset with temperature-dependent solubility values of organic compounds. 
      Matthew Groh, graduate student, MIT Media Lab, accepted on behalf of the team behind the Fitzpatrick 17k dataset, an open dataset consisting of nearly 17,000 images of skin disease alongside skin disease and skin tone annotations. 
      Tom Pollard, research scientist at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, accepted on behalf of the PhysioNet team. This data-sharing platform enables thousands of clinical and machine-learning research studies each year and allows researchers to share sensitive resources that would not be possible through typical data sharing platforms. 
      Joseph Replogle, graduate student with the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, was recognized for the Genome-wide Perturb-seq dataset, the largest publicly available, single-cell transcriptional dataset collected to date. 
      Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, graduate student with the MIT Media Lab/Art, Culture, and Technology, and Diana Duarte, co-founder at Diversa, won for Retos, an open-data platform for detailed documentation and sharing of local innovations from under-resourced settings. 
      Maanas Sharma, an undergraduate student, led States of Emergency, a nationwide project analyzing and grading the responses of prison systems to Covid-19 using data scraped from public databases and manually collected data. 
      Djuna von Maydell, graduate student in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, created the first publicly available dataset of single-cell gene expression from postmortem human brain tissue of patients who are carriers of APOE4, the major Alzheimer’s disease risk gene. 
      Raechel Walker, graduate researcher in the MIT Media Lab, and her collaborators created a Data Activism Curriculum for high school students through the Mayor’s Summer Youth Employment Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Students learned how to use data science to recognize, mitigate, and advocate for people who are disproportionately impacted by systemic inequality. 
      Suyeol Yun, graduate student in the Department of Political Science, was recognized for DeepWTO, a project creating open data for use in legal natural language processing research using cases from the World Trade Organization. 
      Jonathan Zheng, graduate student in the Department of Chemical Engineering, won for an open IUPAC dataset for acid dissociation constants, or “pKas,” physicochemical properties that govern how acidic a chemical is in a solution.
      A full list of winners and honorable mentions is available on the Open Data @ MIT website.

      A campus-wide celebration

      Awards were presented at a celebratory event held in the Nexus in Hayden Library during International Open Access Week. School of Science Dean Nergis Mavalvala kicked off the program by describing the long and proud history of open scholarship at MIT, citing the Institute-wide faculty open access policy and the launch of the open-source digital repository DSpace. “When I was a graduate student, we were trying to figure out how to share our theses during the days of the nascent internet,” she said, “With DSpace, MIT was figuring it out for us.” 

      The centerpiece of the program was a series of five-minute presentations from the prize winners on their research. Presenters detailed the ways they created, used, or advocated for open data, and the value that openness brings to their respective fields. Winner Djuna von Maydell, a graduate student in Professor Li-Huei Tsai’s lab who studies the genetic causes of neurodegeneration, underscored why it is important to share data, particularly data obtained from postmortem human brains. 

      “This is data generated from human brains, so every data point stems from a living, breathing human being, who presumably made this donation in the hope that we would use it to advance knowledge and uncover truth,” von Maydell said. “To maximize the probability of that happening, we have to make it available to the scientific community.” 

      MIT community members who would like to learn more about making their research data open can consult MIT Libraries’ Data Services team.  More

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      Four from MIT receive NIH New Innovator Awards for 2022

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      The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded grants to four MIT faculty members as part of its High-Risk, High-Reward Research program.

      The program supports unconventional approaches to challenges in biomedical, behavioral, and social sciences. Each year, NIH Director’s Awards are granted to program applicants who propose high-risk, high-impact research in areas relevant to the NIH’s mission. In doing so, the NIH encourages innovative proposals that, due to their inherent risk, might struggle in the traditional peer-review process.

      This year, Lindsay Case, Siniša Hrvatin, Deblina Sarkar, and Caroline Uhler have been chosen to receive the New Innovator Award, which funds exceptionally creative research from early-career investigators. The award, which was established in 2007, supports researchers who are within 10 years of their final degree or clinical residency and have not yet received a research project grant or equivalent NIH grant.

      Lindsay Case, the Irwin and Helen Sizer Department of Biology Career Development Professor and an extramural member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research, uses biochemistry and cell biology to study the spatial organization of signal transduction. Her work focuses on understanding how signaling molecules assemble into compartments with unique biochemical and biophysical properties to enable cells to sense and respond to information in their environment. Earlier this year, Case was one of two MIT assistant professors named as Searle Scholars.

      Siniša Hrvatin, who joined the School of Science faculty this past winter, is an assistant professor in the Department of Biology and a core member at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. He studies how animals and cells enter, regulate, and survive states of dormancy such as torpor and hibernation, aiming to harness the potential of these states therapeutically.

      Deblina Sarkar is an assistant professor and AT&T Career Development Chair Professor at the MIT Media Lab​. Her research combines the interdisciplinary fields of nanoelectronics, applied physics, and biology to invent disruptive technologies for energy-efficient nanoelectronics and merge such next-generation technologies with living matter to create a new paradigm for life-machine symbiosis. Her high-risk, high-reward proposal received the rare perfect impact score of 10, which is the highest score awarded by NIH.

      Caroline Uhler is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society. In addition, she is a core institute member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, where she co-directs the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center. By combining machine learning, statistics, and genomics, she develops representation learning and causal inference methods to elucidate gene regulation in health and disease.

      The High-Risk, High-Reward Research program is supported by the NIH Common Fund, which oversees programs that pursue major opportunities and gaps in biomedical research that require collaboration across NIH Institutes and Centers. In addition to the New Innovator Award, the NIH also issues three other awards each year: the Pioneer Award, which supports bold and innovative research projects with unusually broad scientific impact; the Transformative Research Award, which supports risky and untested projects with transformative potential; and the Early Independence Award, which allows especially impressive junior scientists to skip the traditional postdoctoral training program to launch independent research careers.

      This year, the High-Risk, High-Reward Research program is awarding 103 awards, including eight Pioneer Awards, 72 New Innovator Awards, nine Transformative Research Awards, and 14 Early Independence Awards. These 103 awards total approximately $285 million in support from the institutes, centers, and offices across NIH over five years. “The science advanced by these researchers is poised to blaze new paths of discovery in human health,” says Lawrence A. Tabak DDS, PhD, who is performing the duties of the director of NIH. “This unique cohort of scientists will transform what is known in the biological and behavioral world. We are privileged to support this innovative science.” More

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      Empowering Cambridge youth through data activism

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      For over 40 years, the Mayor’s Summer Youth Employment Program (MSYEP, or the Mayor’s Program) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been providing teenagers with their first work experience, but 2022 brought a new offering. Collaborating with MIT’s Personal Robots research group (PRG) and Responsible AI for Social Empowerment and Education (RAISE) this summer, MSYEP created a STEAM-focused learning site at the Institute. Eleven students joined the program to learn coding and programming skills through the lens of “Data Activism.”

      MSYEP’s partnership with MIT provides an opportunity for Cambridge high schoolers to gain exposure to more pathways for their future careers and education. The Mayor’s Program aims to respect students’ time and show the value of their work, so participants are compensated with an hourly wage as they learn workforce skills at MSYEP worksites. In conjunction with two ongoing research studies at MIT, PRG and RAISE developed the six-week Data Activism curriculum to equip students with critical-thinking skills so they feel prepared to utilize data science to challenge social injustice and empower their community.

      Rohan Kundargi, K-12 Community Outreach Administrator for MIT Office of Government and Community Relations (OGCR), says, “I see this as a model for a new type of partnership between MIT and Cambridge MSYEP. Specifically, an MIT research project that involves students from Cambridge getting paid to learn, research, and develop their own skills!”

      Cross-Cambridge collaboration

      Cambridge’s Office of Workforce Development initially contacted MIT OGCR about hosting a potential MSYEP worksite that taught Cambridge teens how to code. When Kundargi reached out to MIT pK-12 collaborators, MIT PRG’s graduate research assistant Raechel Walker proposed the Data Activism curriculum. Walker defines “data activism” as utilizing data, computing, and art to analyze how power operates in the world, challenge power, and empathize with people who are oppressed.

      Walker says, “I wanted students to feel empowered to incorporate their own expertise, talents, and interests into every activity. In order for students to fully embrace their academic abilities, they must remain comfortable with bringing their full selves into data activism.”

      As Kundargi and Walker recruited students for the Data Activism learning site, they wanted to make sure the cohort of students — the majority of whom are individuals of color — felt represented at MIT and felt they had the agency for their voice to be heard. “The pioneers in this field are people who look like them,” Walker says, speaking of well-known data activists Timnit Gebru, Rediet Abebe, and Joy Buolamwini.

      When the program began this summer, some of the students were not aware of the ways data science and artificial intelligence exacerbate systemic oppression in society, or some of the tools currently being used to mitigate those societal harms. As a result, Walker says, the students wanted to learn more about discriminatory design in every aspect of life. They were also interested in creating responsible machine learning algorithms and AI fairness metrics.

      A different side of STEAM

      The development and execution of the Data Activism curriculum contributed to Walker’s and postdoc Xiaoxue Du’s respective research at PRG. Walker is studying AI education, specifically creating and teaching data activism curricula for minoritized communities. Du’s research explores processes, assessments, and curriculum design that prepares educators to use, adapt, and integrate AI literacy curricula. Additionally, her research targets how to leverage more opportunities for students with diverse learning needs.

      The Data Activism curriculum utilizes a “libertatory computing” framework, a term Walker coined in her position paper with Professor Cynthia Breazeal, director of MIT RAISE, dean for digital learning, and head of PRG, and Eman Sherif, a then-undergraduate researcher from University of California at San Diego, titled “Liberty Computing for African American Students.” This framework ensures that students, especially minoritized students, acquire a sound racial identity, critical consciousness, collective obligation, liberation centered academic/achievement identity, as well as the activism skills to use computing to transform a multi-layered system of barriers in which racism persists. Walker says, “We encouraged students to demonstrate competency in every pillar because all of the pillars are interconnected and build upon each other.”

      Walker developed a series of interactive coding and project-based activities that focused on understanding systemic racism, utilizing data science to analyze systemic oppression, data drawing, responsible machine learning, how racism can be embedded into AI, and different AI fairness metrics.

      This was the students’ first time learning how to create data visualizations using the programming language Python and the data analysis tool Pandas. In one project meant to examine how different systems of oppression can affect different aspects of students’ own identities, students created datasets with data from their respective intersectional identities. Another activity highlighted African American achievements, where students analyzed two datasets about African American scientists, activists, artists, scholars, and athletes. Using the data visualizations, students then created zines about the African Americans who inspired them.

      RAISE hired Olivia Dias, Sophia Brady, Lina Henriquez, and Zeynep Yalcin through the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) and PRG hired freelancer Matt Taylor to work with Walker on developing the curriculum and designing interdisciplinary experience projects. Walker and the four undergraduate researchers constructed an intersectional data analysis activity about different examples of systemic oppression. PRG also hired three high school students to test activities and offer insights about making the curriculum engaging for program participants. Throughout the program, the Data Activism team taught students in small groups, continually asked students how to improve each activity, and structured each lesson based on the students’ interests. Walker says Dias, Brady, Henriquez, and Yalcin were invaluable to cultivating a supportive classroom environment and helping students complete their projects.

      Cambridge Rindge and Latin School senior Nina works on her rubber block stamp that depicts the importance of representation in media and greater representation in the tech industry.

      Photo: Katherine Ouellette

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      Student Nina says, “It’s opened my eyes to a different side of STEM. I didn’t know what ‘data’ meant before this program, or how intersectionality can affect AI and data.” Before MSYEP, Nina took Intro to Computer Science and AP Computer Science, but she has been coding since Girls Who Code first sparked her interest in middle school. “The community was really nice. I could talk with other girls. I saw there needs to be more women in STEM, especially in coding.” Now she’s interested in applying to colleges with strong computer science programs so she can pursue a coding-related career.

      From MSYEP to the mayor’s office

      Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui visited the Data Activism learning site on Aug. 9, accompanied by Breazeal. A graduate of MSYEP herself, Siddiqui says, “Through hands-on learning through computer programming, Cambridge high school students have the unique opportunity to see themselves as data scientists. Students were able learn ways to combat discrimination that occurs through artificial intelligence.” In an Instagram post, Siddiqui also said, “I had a blast visiting the students and learning about their projects.”

      Students worked on an activity that asked them to envision how data science might be used to support marginalized communities. They transformed their answers into block-printed T-shirt designs, carving pictures of their hopes into rubber block stamps. Some students focused on the importance of data privacy, like Jacob T., who drew a birdcage to represent data stored and locked away by third party apps. He says, “I want to open that cage and restore my data to myself and see what can be done with it.”

      The subject of Cambridge Community Charter School student Jacob T.’s project was the importance of data privacy. For his T-shirt design, he drew a birdcage to represent data stored and locked away by third party apps. (From right to left:) Breazeal, Jacob T. Kiki, Raechel Walker, and Zeynep Yalcin.

      Photo: Katherine Ouellette

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      Many students wanted to see more representation in both the media they consume and across various professional fields. Nina talked about the importance of representation in media and how that could contribute to greater representation in the tech industry, while Kiki talked about encouraging more women to pursue STEM fields. Jesmin said, “I wanted to show that data science is accessible to everyone, no matter their origin or language you speak. I wrote ‘hello’ in Bangla, Arabic, and English, because I speak all three languages and they all resonate with me.”

      Student Jesmin (left) explains the concept of her T-shirt design to Mayor Siddiqui. She wants data science to be accessible to everyone, no matter their origin or language, so she drew a globe and wrote ‘hello’ in the three languages she speaks: Bangla, Arabic, and English.

      Photo: Katherine Ouellette

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      “Overall, I hope the students continue to use their data activism skills to re-envision a society that supports marginalized groups,” says Walker. “Moreover, I hope they are empowered to become data scientists and understand how their race can be a positive part of their identity.” More

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      MIT welcomes eight MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars for 2022-23

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      From space traffic to virus evolution, community journalism to hip-hop, this year’s cohort in the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program will power an unprecedented range of intellectual pursuits during their time on the MIT campus. 

      “MIT is so fortunate to have this group of remarkable individuals join us,” says Institute Community and Equity Officer John Dozier. “They bring a range and depth of knowledge to share with our students and faculty, and we look forward to working with them to build a stronger sense of community across the Institute.”

      Since its inception in 1990, the MLK Scholars Program has hosted more than 135 visiting professors, practitioners, and intellectuals who enhance and enrich the MIT community through their engagement with students and faculty. The program, which honors the life and legacy of MLK by increasing the presence and recognizing the contributions of underrepresented scholars, is supported by the Office of the Provost with oversight from the Institute Community and Equity Office. 

      In spring 2022, MIT President Rafael Reif committed to MIT to adding two new positions in the MLK Visiting Scholars Program, including an expert in Native American studies. Those additional positions will be filled in the coming year.  

      The 2022-23 MLK Scholars:

      Daniel Auguste is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Florida Atlantic University and is hosted by Roberto Fernandez in MIT Sloan School of Management. Auguste’s research interests include social inequalities in entrepreneurship development. During his visit, Auguste will study the impact of education debt burden and wealth inequality on business ownership and success, and how these consequences differ by race and ethnicity.

      Tawanna Dillahunt is an associate professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan, where she also holds an appointment with the electrical engineering and computer science department. Catherine D’Ignazio in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Fotini Christia in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society are her faculty hosts. Dillahunt’s scholarship focuses on equitable and inclusive computing. She identifies technological opportunities and implements tools to address and alleviate employment challenges faced by marginalized people. Dillahunt’s visiting appointment begins in September 2023.

      Javit Drake ’94 is a principal scientist in modeling and simulation and measurement sciences at Proctor & Gamble. His faculty host is Fikile Brushett in the Department of Chemical Engineering. An industry researcher with electrochemical energy expertise, Drake is a Course 10 (chemical engineering) alumnus, repeat lecturer, and research affiliate in the department. During his visit, he will continue to work with the Brushett Research Group to deepen his research and understanding of battery technologies while he innovates from those discoveries.

      Eunice Ferreira is an associate professor in the Department of Theater at Skidmore College and is hosted by Claire Conceison in Music and Theater Arts. This fall, Ferreira will teach “Black Theater Matters,” a course where students will explore performance and the cultural production of Black intellectuals and artists on Broadway and in local communities. Her upcoming book projects include “Applied Theatre and Racial Justice: Radical Imaginings for Just Communities” (forthcoming from Routledge) and “Crioulo Performance: Remapping Creole and Mixed Race Theatre” (forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press). 

      Wasalu Jaco, widely known as Lupe Fiasco, is a rapper, record producer, and entrepreneur. He will be co-hosted by Nick Montfort of Comparative Media Studies/Writing and Mary Fuller of Literature. Jaco’s interests lie in the nexus of rap, computing, and activism. As a former visiting artist in MIT’s Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), he will leverage existing collaborations and participate in digital media and art research projects that use computing to explore novel questions related to hip-hop and rap. In addition to his engagement in cross-departmental projects, Jaco will teach a spring course on rap in the media and social contexts.

      Moribah Jah is an associate professor in the Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Department at the University of Texas at Austin. He is hosted by Danielle Wood in Media Arts and Sciences and the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Richard Linares in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Jah’s research interests include space sustainability and space traffic management; as a visiting scholar, he will develop and strengthen a joint MIT/UT-Austin research program to increase resources and visibility of space sustainability. Jah will also help host the AeroAstro Rising Stars symposium, which highlights graduate students, postdocs, and early-career faculty from backgrounds underrepresented in aerospace engineering. 

      Louis Massiah SM ’82 is a documentary filmmaker and the founder and director of community media of Scribe Video Center, a nonprofit organization that uses media as a tool for social change. His work focuses on empowering Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) filmmakers to tell the stories of/by BIPOC communities. Massiah is hosted by Vivek Bald in Creative Media Studies/Writing. Massiah’s first project will be the launch of a National Community Media Journalism Consortium, a platform to share local news on a broader scale across communities.

      Brian Nord, a scientist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, will join the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, hosted by Jesse Thaler in the Department of Physics. Nord’s research interests include the connection between ethics, justice, and scientific discovery. His efforts will be aimed at introducing new insights into how we model physical systems, design scientific experiments, and approach the ethics of artificial intelligence. As a lead organizer of the Strike for Black Lives in 2020, Nord will engage with justice-oriented members of the MIT physics community to strategize actions for advocacy and activism.

      Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale University, will be hosted by Matthew Shoulders in the Department of Chemistry. Ogbunu’s research focus is on implementing chemistry and materials science perspectives into his work on virus evolution. In addition to serving as a guest lecturer in graduate courses, he will be collaborating with the Office of Engineering Outreach Programs on their K-12 outreach and recruitment efforts.

      For more information about these scholars and the program, visit mlkscholars.mit.edu. More

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      Ocean vital signs

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      Without the ocean, the climate crisis would be even worse than it is. Each year, the ocean absorbs billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere, preventing warming that greenhouse gas would otherwise cause. Scientists estimate about 25 to 30 percent of all carbon released into the atmosphere by both human and natural sources is absorbed by the ocean.

      “But there’s a lot of uncertainty in that number,” says Ryan Woosley, a marine chemist and a principal research scientist in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) at MIT. Different parts of the ocean take in different amounts of carbon depending on many factors, such as the season and the amount of mixing from storms. Current models of the carbon cycle don’t adequately capture this variation.

      To close the gap, Woosley and a team of other MIT scientists developed a research proposal for the MIT Climate Grand Challenges competition — an Institute-wide campaign to catalyze and fund innovative research addressing the climate crisis. The team’s proposal, “Ocean Vital Signs,” involves sending a fleet of sailing drones to cruise the oceans taking detailed measurements of how much carbon the ocean is really absorbing. Those data would be used to improve the precision of global carbon cycle models and improve researchers’ ability to verify emissions reductions claimed by countries.

      “If we start to enact mitigation strategies—either through removing CO2 from the atmosphere or reducing emissions — we need to know where CO2 is going in order to know how effective they are,” says Woosley. Without more precise models there’s no way to confirm whether observed carbon reductions were thanks to policy and people, or thanks to the ocean.

      “So that’s the trillion-dollar question,” says Woosley. “If countries are spending all this money to reduce emissions, is it enough to matter?”

      In February, the team’s Climate Grand Challenges proposal was named one of 27 finalists out of the almost 100 entries submitted. From among this list of finalists, MIT will announce in April the selection of five flagship projects to receive further funding and support.

      Woosley is leading the team along with Christopher Hill, a principal research engineer in EAPS. The team includes physical and chemical oceanographers, marine microbiologists, biogeochemists, and experts in computational modeling from across the department, in addition to collaborators from the Media Lab and the departments of Mathematics, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

      Today, data on the flux of carbon dioxide between the air and the oceans are collected in a piecemeal way. Research ships intermittently cruise out to gather data. Some commercial ships are also fitted with sensors. But these present a limited view of the entire ocean, and include biases. For instance, commercial ships usually avoid storms, which can increase the turnover of water exposed to the atmosphere and cause a substantial increase in the amount of carbon absorbed by the ocean.

      “It’s very difficult for us to get to it and measure that,” says Woosley. “But these drones can.”

      If funded, the team’s project would begin by deploying a few drones in a small area to test the technology. The wind-powered drones — made by a California-based company called Saildrone — would autonomously navigate through an area, collecting data on air-sea carbon dioxide flux continuously with solar-powered sensors. This would then scale up to more than 5,000 drone-days’ worth of observations, spread over five years, and in all five ocean basins.

      Those data would be used to feed neural networks to create more precise maps of how much carbon is absorbed by the oceans, shrinking the uncertainties involved in the models. These models would continue to be verified and improved by new data. “The better the models are, the more we can rely on them,” says Woosley. “But we will always need measurements to verify the models.”

      Improved carbon cycle models are relevant beyond climate warming as well. “CO2 is involved in so much of how the world works,” says Woosley. “We’re made of carbon, and all the other organisms and ecosystems are as well. What does the perturbation to the carbon cycle do to these ecosystems?”

      One of the best understood impacts is ocean acidification. Carbon absorbed by the ocean reacts to form an acid. A more acidic ocean can have dire impacts on marine organisms like coral and oysters, whose calcium carbonate shells and skeletons can dissolve in the lower pH. Since the Industrial Revolution, the ocean has become about 30 percent more acidic on average.

      “So while it’s great for us that the oceans have been taking up the CO2, it’s not great for the oceans,” says Woosley. “Knowing how this uptake affects the health of the ocean is important as well.” More

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      Professors Elchanan Mossel and Rosalind Picard named 2021 ACM Fellows

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      The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named MIT professors Elchanan Mossel and Rosalind Picard as fellows for outstanding accomplishments in computing and information technology.

      The ACM Fellows program recognizes wide-ranging and fundamental contributions in areas including algorithms, computer science education, cryptography, data security and privacy, medical informatics, and mobile and networked systems, among many other areas. The accomplishments of the 2021 ACM Fellows underpin important innovations that shape the technologies we use every day.

      Elchanan Mossel

      Mossel is a professor of mathematics and a member at the Statistics and Data Science Center of the MIT Institute for Data, Systems and Society. His research in discrete functional inequalities, isoperimetry, and hypercontractivity led to the proof that Majority is Stablest and confirmed the optimality of the Goemans-Williamson MAX-CUT algorithm under the unique games conjecture from computational complexity. His work on the reconstruction problem on trees provides optimal algorithms and bounds for phylogenetic reconstruction in molecular biology and has led to sharp results in the analysis of Gibbs samplers from statistical physics and inference problems on graphs. His research has resolved open problems in computational biology, machine learning, social choice theory, and economics.Mossel received a BS from the Open University in Israel in 1992, and MS (1997) and PhD (2000) degrees in mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was a postdoc at the Microsoft Research Theory Group and a Miller Fellow at University of California at Berkeley. He joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 2003 as a professor of statistics and computer science, and spent leaves as a professor at the Weizmann Institute and at the Wharton School before joining MIT in 2016 as a full professor.

      In 2020, he received the Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship of the U.S. Department of Defense. Other distinctions include being named a Simons Investigator in Mathematics in 2019, being selected as a fellow of the AMS, and receiving a Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, and the Bergmann Memorial Award from the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation.

      “I am honored by this award,” says Mossel. “It makes me realize how fortunate I’ve been, working with creative and generous colleagues, and mentoring brilliant young minds.”

      Rosalind Picard

      Picard is a scientist, engineer, author, and professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab. She is recognized as the founder of the field of affective computing, and has carried this research forward as head of the Media Lab’s Affective Computing research group. She is also a founding faculty chair of MIT’s MindHandHeart Initiative, and a faculty member of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering. Picard is an IEEE fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. 

      Picard’s inventions are in use by thousands of research teams worldwide as well as in numerous products and services. She has co-founded two companies: Affectiva (now part of Smart Eye), providing emotion AI technologies now used by more than 25 percent of the Global Fortune 500, and Empatica, providing wearable sensors and analytics to improve health. Starting from inventions by Picard and her team, Empatica created the first AI-based smart watch cleared by the FDA (in neurology for monitoring seizures), which is now helping to bring potentially lifesaving help for people with epilepsy. 

      “This award makes me think of how blessed I am to work with so many amazing people here at MIT, especially at the Media Lab,” Picard notes. “Whenever any one of us has our contributions recognized, it is also a recognition of how special a place this is.” More

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      The promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence explored at TEDxMIT event

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      Scientists, students, and community members came together last month to discuss the promise and pitfalls of artificial intelligence at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for the fourth TEDxMIT event held at MIT. 

      Attendees were entertained and challenged as they explored “the good and bad of computing,” explained CSAIL Director Professor Daniela Rus, who organized the event with John Werner, an MIT fellow and managing director of Link Ventures; MIT sophomore Lucy Zhao; and grad student Jessica Karaguesian. “As you listen to the talks today,” Rus told the audience, “consider how our world is made better by AI, and also our intrinsic responsibilities for ensuring that the technology is deployed for the greater good.”

      Rus mentioned some new capabilities that could be enabled by AI: an automated personal assistant that could monitor your sleep phases and wake you at the optimal time, as well as on-body sensors that monitor everything from your posture to your digestive system. “Intelligent assistance can help empower and augment our lives. But these intriguing possibilities should only be pursued if we can simultaneously resolve the challenges that these technologies bring,” said Rus. 

      The next speaker, CSAIL principal investigator and professor of electrical engineering and computer science Manolis Kellis, started off by suggesting what sounded like an unattainable goal — using AI to “put an end to evolution as we know it.” Looking at it from a computer science perspective, he said, what we call evolution is basically a brute force search. “You’re just exploring all of the search space, creating billions of copies of every one of your programs, and just letting them fight against each other. This is just brutal. And it’s also completely slow. It took us billions of years to get here.” Might it be possible, he asked, to speed up evolution and make it less messy?

      The answer, Kellis said, is that we can do better, and that we’re already doing better: “We’re not killing people like Sparta used to, throwing the weaklings off the mountain. We are truly saving diversity.”

      Knowledge, moreover, is now being widely shared, passed on “horizontally” through accessible information sources, he noted, rather than “vertically,” from parent to offspring. “I would like to argue that competition in the human species has been replaced by collaboration. Despite having a fixed cognitive hardware, we have software upgrades that are enabled by culture, by the 20 years that our children spend in school to fill their brains with everything that humanity has learned, regardless of which family came up with it. This is the secret of our great acceleration” — the fact that human advancement in recent centuries has vastly out-clipped evolution’s sluggish pace.

      The next step, Kellis said, is to harness insights about evolution in order to combat an individual’s genetic susceptibility to disease. “Our current approach is simply insufficient,” he added. “We’re treating manifestations of disease, not the causes of disease.” A key element in his lab’s ambitious strategy to transform medicine is to identify “the causal pathways through which genetic predisposition manifests. It’s only by understanding these pathways that we can truly manipulate disease causation and reverse the disease circuitry.” 

      Kellis was followed by Aleksander Madry, MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator, who told the crowd, “progress in AI is happening, and it’s happening fast.” Computer programs can routinely beat humans in games like chess, poker, and Go. So should we be worried about AI surpassing humans? 

      Madry, for one, is not afraid — or at least not yet. And some of that reassurance stems from research that has led him to the following conclusion: Despite its considerable success, AI, especially in the form of machine learning, is lazy. “Think about being lazy as this kind of smart student who doesn’t really want to study for an exam. Instead, what he does is just study all the past years’ exams and just look for patterns. Instead of trying to actually learn, he just tries to pass the test. And this is exactly the same way in which current AI is lazy.”

      A machine-learning model might recognize grazing sheep, for instance, simply by picking out pictures that have green grass in them. If a model is trained to identify fish from photos of anglers proudly displaying their catches, Madry explained, “the model figures out that if there’s a human holding something in the picture, I will just classify it as a fish.” The consequences can be more serious for an AI model intended to pick out malignant tumors. If the model is trained on images containing rulers that indicate the size of tumors, the model may end up selecting only those photos that have rulers in them.

      This leads to Madry’s biggest concerns about AI in its present form. “AI is beating us now,” he noted. “But the way it does it [involves] a little bit of cheating.” He fears that we will apply AI “in some way in which this mismatch between what the model actually does versus what we think it does will have some catastrophic consequences.” People relying on AI, especially in potentially life-or-death situations, need to be much more mindful of its current limitations, Madry cautioned.

      There were 10 speakers altogether, and the last to take the stage was MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator Marzyeh Ghassemi, who laid out her vision for how AI could best contribute to general health and well-being. But in order for that to happen, its models must be trained on accurate, diverse, and unbiased medical data.

      It’s important to focus on the data, Ghassemi stressed, because these models are learning from us. “Since our data is human-generated … a neural network is learning how to practice from a doctor. But doctors are human, and humans make mistakes. And if a human makes a mistake, and we train an AI from that, the AI will, too. Garbage in, garbage out. But it’s not like the garbage is distributed equally.”

      She pointed out that many subgroups receive worse care from medical practitioners, and members of these subgroups die from certain conditions at disproportionately high rates. This is an area, Ghassemi said, “where AI can actually help. This is something we can fix.” Her group is developing machine-learning models that are robust, private, and fair. What’s holding them back is neither algorithms nor GPUs. It’s data. Once we collect reliable data from diverse sources, Ghassemi added, we might start reaping the benefits that AI can bring to the realm of health care.

      In addition to CSAIL speakers, there were talks from members across MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society; the MIT Mobility Initiative; the MIT Media Lab; and the SENSEable City Lab.

      The proceedings concluded on that hopeful note. Rus and Werner then thanked everyone for coming. “Please continue to reflect about the good and bad of computing,” Rus urged. “And we look forward to seeing you back here in May for the next TEDxMIT event.”

      The exact theme of the spring 2022 gathering will have something to do with “superpowers.” But — if December’s mind-bending presentations were any indication — the May offering is almost certain to give its attendees plenty to think about. And maybe provide the inspiration for a startup or two. More