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      Enabling AI-driven health advances without sacrificing patient privacy

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      There’s a lot of excitement at the intersection of artificial intelligence and health care. AI has already been used to improve disease treatment and detection, discover promising new drugs, identify links between genes and diseases, and more.

      By analyzing large datasets and finding patterns, virtually any new algorithm has the potential to help patients — AI researchers just need access to the right data to train and test those algorithms. Hospitals, understandably, are hesitant to share sensitive patient information with research teams. When they do share data, it’s difficult to verify that researchers are only using the data they need and deleting it after they’re done.

      Secure AI Labs (SAIL) is addressing those problems with a technology that lets AI algorithms run on encrypted datasets that never leave the data owner’s system. Health care organizations can control how their datasets are used, while researchers can protect the confidentiality of their models and search queries. Neither party needs to see the data or the model to collaborate.

      SAIL’s platform can also combine data from multiple sources, creating rich insights that fuel more effective algorithms.

      “You shouldn’t have to schmooze with hospital executives for five years before you can run your machine learning algorithm,” says SAIL co-founder and MIT Professor Manolis Kellis, who co-founded the company with CEO Anne Kim ’16, SM ’17. “Our goal is to help patients, to help machine learning scientists, and to create new therapeutics. We want new algorithms — the best algorithms — to be applied to the biggest possible data set.”

      SAIL has already partnered with hospitals and life science companies to unlock anonymized data for researchers. In the next year, the company hopes to be working with about half of the top 50 academic medical centers in the country.

      Unleashing AI’s full potential

      As an undergraduate at MIT studying computer science and molecular biology, Kim worked with researchers in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) to analyze data from clinical trials, gene association studies, hospital intensive care units, and more.

      “I realized there is something severely broken in data sharing, whether it was hospitals using hard drives, ancient file transfer protocol, or even sending stuff in the mail,” Kim says. “It was all just not well-tracked.”

      Kellis, who is also a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, has spent years establishing partnerships with hospitals and consortia across a range of diseases including cancers, heart disease, schizophrenia, and obesity. He knew that smaller research teams would struggle to get access to the same data his lab was working with.

      In 2017, Kellis and Kim decided to commercialize technology they were developing to allow AI algorithms to run on encrypted data.

      In the summer of 2018, Kim participated in the delta v startup accelerator run by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. The founders also received support from the Sandbox Innovation Fund and the Venture Mentoring Service, and made various early connections through their MIT network.

      To participate in SAIL’s program, hospitals and other health care organizations make parts of their data available to researchers by setting up a node behind their firewall. SAIL then sends encrypted algorithms to the servers where the datasets reside in a process called federated learning. The algorithms crunch the data locally in each server and transmit the results back to a central model, which updates itself. No one — not the researchers, the data owners, or even SAIL —has access to the models or the datasets.

      The approach allows a much broader set of researchers to apply their models to large datasets. To further engage the research community, Kellis’ lab at MIT has begun holding competitions in which it gives access to datasets in areas like protein function and gene expression, and challenges researchers to predict results.

      “We invite machine learning researchers to come and train on last year’s data and predict this year’s data,” says Kellis. “If we see there’s a new type of algorithm that is performing best in these community-level assessments, people can adopt it locally at many different institutions and level the playing field. So, the only thing that matters is the quality of your algorithm rather than the power of your connections.”

      By enabling a large number of datasets to be anonymized into aggregate insights, SAIL’s technology also allows researchers to study rare diseases, in which small pools of relevant patient data are often spread out among many institutions. That has historically made the data difficult to apply AI models to.

      “We’re hoping that all of these datasets will eventually be open,” Kellis says. “We can cut across all the silos and enable a new era where every patient with every rare disorder across the entire world can come together in a single keystroke to analyze data.”

      Enabling the medicine of the future

      To work with large amounts of data around specific diseases, SAIL has increasingly sought to partner with patient associations and consortia of health care groups, including an international health care consulting company and the Kidney Cancer Association. The partnerships also align SAIL with patients, the group they’re most trying to help.

      Overall, the founders are happy to see SAIL solving problems they faced in their labs for researchers around the world.

      “The right place to solve this is not an academic project. The right place to solve this is in industry, where we can provide a platform not just for my lab but for any researcher,” Kellis says. “It’s about creating an ecosystem of academia, researchers, pharma, biotech, and hospital partners. I think it’s the blending all of these different areas that will make that vision of medicine of the future become a reality.” More

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      End-to-end supply chain transparency

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      For years, companies have managed their extended supply chains with intermittent audits and certifications while attempting to persuade their suppliers to adhere to certain standards and codes of conduct. But they’ve lacked the concrete data necessary to prove their supply chains were working as they should. They most likely had baseline data about their suppliers — what they bought and who they bought it from — but knew little else about the rest of the supply chain.

      With Sourcemap, companies can now trace their supply chains from raw material to finished good with certainty, keeping track of the mines and farms that produce the commodities they rely on to take their goods to market. This unprecedented level of transparency provides Sourcemap’s customers with the assurance that the entire end-to-end supply chain operates within their standards while living up to social and environmental targets.

      And they’re doing it at scale for large multinationals across the food, agricultural, automotive, tech, and apparel industries. Thanks to Sourcemap founder and CEO Leonardo Bonanni MA ’03, SM ’05, PhD ’10, companies like VF Corporation, owner of brands like Timberland, The North Face, Mars, Hershey, and Ferrero, now have enough data to confidently tell the story of how they’re sourcing their raw materials.

      “Coming from the Media Lab, we recognized early on the power of the cloud, the power of social networking-type databases and smartphone diffusion around the world,” says Bonanni of his company’s MIT roots. Rather than providing intermittent glances at the supply chain via an auditor, Sourcemap collects data continuously, in real-time, every step of the way, flagging anything that could indicate counterfeiting, adulteration, fraud, waste, or abuse.

      “We’ve taken our customers from a situation where they had very little control to a world where they have direct visibility over their entire global operations, even allowing them to see ahead of time — before a container reaches the port — whether there is any indication that there might be something wrong with it,” says Bonanni.

      The key problem Sourcemap addresses is a lack of data in companies’ supply chain management databases. According to Bonanni, most Sourcemap customers have invested millions of dollars in enterprise resource planning (ERP) databases, which provide information about internal operations and direct suppliers, but fall short when it comes to global operations, where their secondary and tertiary suppliers operate. Built on relational databases, ERP systems have been around for more than 40 years and work well for simple, static data structures. But they aren’t agile enough to handle big data and rapidly evolving, complex data structures

      Sourcemap, on the other hand, uses NoSQL (non-relational) database technology, which is more flexible, cost-efficient, and scalable. “Our platform is like a LinkedIn for the supply chain,” explains Bonanni. Customers provide information about where they buy their raw materials, the suppliers get invited to the network and provide information to validate those relationships, right down to the farms and the mines where the raw materials are extracted — which is often where the biggest risks lie.

      Initially, the entire supply chain database of a Sourcemap customer might amount to a few megabytes of spreadsheets listing their purchase orders and the names of their suppliers. Sourcemap delivers terabytes of data that paint a detailed picture of the supply chain, capturing everything, right down to the moment a farmer in West Africa delivers cocoa beans to a warehouse, onto a truck heading to a port, to a factory, all the way to the finished goods.

      “We’ve seen the amount of data collected grow by a factor of 1 million, which tells us that the world is finally ready for full visibility of supply chains,” says Bonanni. “The fact is that we’ve seen supply chain transparency go from a fringe concern to a broad-based requirement as a license to operate in most of Europe and North America,” says Bonanni.

      These days, disruptions in supply chains, combined with price volatility and new laws requiring companies to prove that the goods they import were not made illegally (such as by causing deforestation or involving forced or child labor), means that companies are often required to know where they source their raw materials from, even if they only import the materials through an intermediary.

      Sourcemap uses its full suite of tools to walk customers through a step-by-step process that maps their suppliers while measuring performance, ultimately verifying the entire supply chain and providing them with the confidence to import goods while being customs-compliant. At the end of the day, Sourcemap customers can communicate to their stakeholders and the end consumer exactly where their commodities come from while ensuring that social, environmental, and compliance standards are met.

      The company was recently named to the newest cohort of firms honored by the MIT Startup Exchange (STEX) as STEX25 startups. Bonanni is quick to point out the benefits of STEX and of MIT’s Industrial Liaison Program (ILP): “Our best feedback and our most constructive relationships have been with companies that sponsored our research early on at the Media Lab and ILP,” he says. “The innovative exchange of ideas inherent in the MIT startup ecosystem has helped to build up Sourcemap as a company and to grow supply chain transparency as a future-facing technology that more and more companies are now scrambling to adopt.” More

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      MIT welcomes nine MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars for 2021-22

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      In its 31st year, the Martin Luther King Jr. (MLK) Visiting Professors and Scholars Program will host nine outstanding scholars from across the Americas. The flagship program honors the life and legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. by increasing the presence and recognizing the contributions of underrepresented minority scholars at MIT. Throughout the year, the cohort will enhance their scholarship through intellectual engagement with the MIT community and enrich the cultural, academic, and professional experience of students.

      The 2021-22 scholars

      Sanford Biggers is an interdisciplinary artist hosted by the Department of Architecture. His work is an interplay of narrative, perspective, and history that speaks to current social, political, and economic happenings while examining their contexts. His diverse practice positions him as a collaborator with the past through explorations of often-overlooked cultural and political narratives from American history. Through collaboration with his faculty host, Brandon Clifford, he will spend the year contributing to projects with Architecture; Art, Culture and Technology; the Transmedia Storytelling initiatives; and community workshops and engagement with local K-12 education.

      Kristen Dorsey is an assistant professor of engineering at Smith College. She will be hosted by the Program in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Her research focuses on the fabrication and characterization of microscale sensors and microelectromechanical systems. Dorsey tries to understand “why things go wrong” by investigating device reliability and stability. At MIT, Dorsey is interested in forging collaborations to consider issues of access and equity as they apply to wearable health care devices.

      Omolola “Lola” Eniola-Adefeso is the associate dean for graduate and professional education and associate professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. She will join MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering (ChemE). Eniola-Adefeso will work with Professor Paula Hammond on developing electrostatically assembled nanoparticle coatings that enable targeting of specific immune cell types. A co-founder and chief scientific officer of Asalyxa Bio, she is interested in the interactions between blood leukocytes and endothelial cells in vessel lumen lining, and how they change during inflammation response. Eniola-Adefeso will also work with the Diversity in Chemical Engineering (DICE) graduate student group in ChemE and the National Organization of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers.

      Robert Gilliard Jr. is an assistant professor of chemistry at the University of Virginia and will join the MIT chemistry department, working closely with faculty host Christopher Cummins. His research focuses on various aspects of group 15 element chemistry. He was a founding member of the National Organization of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers UGA section, and he has served as an American Chemical Society (ACS) Bridge Program mentor as well as an ACS Project Seed mentor. Gilliard has also collaborated with the Cleveland Public Library to expose diverse young scholars to STEM fields.

      Valencia Joyner Koomson ’98, MNG ’99 will return for the second semester of her appointment this fall in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Based at Tufts University, where she is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Koomson has focused her research on microelectronic systems for cell analysis and biomedical applications. In the past semester, she has served as a judge for the Black Alumni/ae of MIT Research Slam and worked closely with faculty host Professor Akintunde Akinwande.

      Luis Gilberto Murillo-Urrutia will continue his appointment in MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative. He has 30 years of experience in public policy design, implementation, and advocacy, most notably in the areas of sustainable regional development, environmental protection and management of natural resources, social inclusion, and peace building. At MIT, he has continued his research on environmental justice, with a focus on carbon policy and its impacts on Afro-descendant communities in Colombia.

      Sonya T. Smith was the first female professor of mechanical engineering at Howard University. She will join the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at MIT. Her research involves computational fluid dynamics and thermal management of electronics for air and space vehicles. She is looking forward to serving as a mentor to underrepresented students across MIT and fostering new research collaborations with her home lab at Howard.

      Lawrence Udeigwe is an associate professor of mathematics at Manhattan College and will join MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He plans to co-teach a graduate seminar course with Professor James DiCarlo to explore practical and philosophical questions regarding the use of simulations to build theories in neuroscience. Udeigwe also leads the Lorens Chuno group; as a singer-songwriter, his work tackles intersectionality issues faced by contemporary Africans.

      S. Craig Watkins is an internationally recognized expert in media and a professor at the University of Texas at Austin. He will join MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society to assist in researching the role of big data in enabling deep structural changes with regard to systemic racism. He will continue to expand on his work as founding director of the Institute for Media Innovation at the University of Texas at Austin, exploring the intersections of critical AI studies, critical race studies, and design. He will also work with MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality to develop computational systems that support social perspective-taking.

      Community engagement

      Throughout the 2021-22 academic year, MLK professors and scholars will be presenting their research at a monthly speaker series. Events will be held in an in-person/Zoom hybrid environment. All members of the MIT community are encouraged to attend and hear directly from this year’s cohort of outstanding scholars. To hear more about upcoming events, subscribe to their mailing list.

      On Sept. 15, all are invited to join the Institute Community and Equity Office in welcoming the scholars to campus by attending a welcome luncheon. More

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      “AI for Impact” lives up to its name

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      For entrepreneurial MIT students looking to put their skills to work for a greater good, the Media Arts and Sciences class MAS.664 (AI for Impact) has been a destination point. With the onset of the pandemic, that goal came into even sharper focus. Just weeks before the campus shut down in 2020, a team of students from the class launched a project that would make significant strides toward an open-source platform to identify coronavirus exposures without compromising personal privacy.

      Their work was at the heart of Safe Paths, one of the earliest contact tracing apps in the United States. The students joined with volunteers from other universities, medical centers, and companies to publish their code, alongside a well-received white paper describing the privacy-preserving, decentralized protocol, all while working with organizations wishing to launch the app within their communities. The app and related software eventually got spun out into the nonprofit PathCheck Foundation, which today engages with public health entities and is providing exposure notifications in Guam, Cyprus, Hawaii, Minnesota, Alabama, and Louisiana.

      The formation of Safe Paths demonstrates the special sense among MIT researchers that “we can launch something that can help people around the world,” notes Media Lab Associate Professor Ramesh Raskar, who teaches the class together with Media Lab Professor Alex “Sandy” Pentland and Media Lab Lecturer Joost Bonsen. “To have that kind of passion and ambition — but also the confidence that what you create here can actually be deployed globally — is kind of amazing.”

      AI for Impact, created by Pentland, began meeting two decades ago under the course name Development Ventures, and has nurtured multiple thriving businesses. Examples of class ventures that Pentland incubated or co-founded include Dimagi, Cogito, Ginger, Prosperia, and Sanergy.

      The aim-high challenge posed to each class is to come up with a business plan that touches a billion people, and it can’t all be in one country, Pentland explains. Not every class effort becomes a business, “but 20 percent to 30 percent of students start something, which is great for an entrepreneur class,” says Pentland.

      Opportunities for Impact

      The numbers behind Dimagi, for instance, are striking. Its core product CommCare has helped front-line health workers provide care for more than 400 million people in more than 130 countries around the world. When it comes to maternal and child care, Dimagi’s platform has registered one in every 110 pregnancies worldwide. This past year, several governments around the world deployed CommCare applications for Covid-19 response — from Sierra Leone and Somalia to New York and Colorado.

      Spinoffs like Cogito, Prosperia, and Ginger have likewise grown into highly successful companies. Cogito helps a million people a day gain access to the health care they need; Prosperia helps manage social support payments to 80 million people in Latin America; and Ginger handles mental health services for over 1 million people.

      The passion behind these and other class ventures points to a central idea of the class, Pentland notes: MIT students are often looking for ways to build entrepreneurial businesses that enable positive social change.

      During the spring 2021 class, for example, a number of promising student projects included tools to help residents of poor communities transition to owning their homes rather than renting, and to take better control of their community health.

      “It’s clear that the people who are graduating from here want to do something significant with their lives … they want to have an impact on their world,” Pentland says. “This class enables them to meet other people who are interested in doing the same thing, and offers them some help in starting a company to do it.”

      Many of the students who join the class come in with a broad set of interests. Guest lectures, case studies of other social entrepreneurship projects, and an introduction to a broad ecosystem of expertise and funding, then helps students to refine their general ideas into specific and viable projects.

      A path toward confronting a pandemic 

      Raskar began co-teaching the class in 2019, and brought a “Big AI” focus to the Development Ventures class, inspired by an AI for Impact team he had set up at his former employer, Facebook. “What I realized is that companies like Google or Facebook or Amazon actually have enough data about all of us that they can solve major problems in our society — climate, transportation, health, and so on,” he says. “This is something we should think about more seriously: how to use AI and data for positive social impact, while protecting privacy.”

      Early into the spring 2020 class, as students were beginning to consider their own projects, Raskar approached the class about the emerging coronavirus outbreak. Students like Kristen Vilcans recognized the urgency, and the opportunity. She and 10 other students joined forces to work on a project that would focus on Covid-19.

      “Students felt empowered to do something to help tackle the spread of this alarming new virus,” Raskar recalls. “They immediately began to develop data- and AI-based solutions to one of the most critical pieces of addressing a pandemic: halting the chain of infections. They created and launched one of the first digital contact tracing and exposure notification solutions in the U.S., developing an early alert system that engaged the public and protected privacy.” 

      Raskar looks back on the moment when a core group of students coalesced into a team. “It was very rare for a significant part of the class to just come together saying, ‘let’s do this, right away.’ It became as much a movement as a venture.”

      Group discussions soon began to center around an open-source, privacy-first digital set of tools for Covid-19 contact tracing. For the next two weeks, right up to the campus shutdown in March 2020, the team took over two adjacent conference rooms in the Media Lab, and started a Slack messaging channel devoted to the project. As the team members reached out to an ever-wider circle of friends, colleagues, and mentors, the number of participants grew to nearly 1,600 people, coming together virtually from all corners of the world.

      Kaushal Jain, a Harvard Business School student who had cross-registered for the spring 2020 class to get to know the MIT ecosystem, was also an early participant in Safe Paths. He wrote up an initial plan for the venture and began working with external organizations to figure out how to structure it into a nonprofit company. Jain eventually became the project’s lead for funding and partnerships.

      Vilcans, a graduate student in system design and management, served as Safe Paths’ communications lead through July 2020, while still working a part-time job at Draper Laboratory and taking classes.

      “There are these moments when you want to dive in, you want to contribute and you want to work nonstop,” she says, adding that the experience was also a wake-up call on how to manage burnout, and how to balance what you need as a person while contributing to a high-impact team. “That’s important to understand as a leader for the future.”

      MIT recognized Vilcan’s contributions later that year with the 2020 SDM Student Award for Leadership, Innovation, and Systems Thinking. 

      Jain, too, says the class gave him more than he could have expected.

      “I made strong friendships with like-minded people from very different backgrounds,” he says. “One key thing that I learned was to be flexible about the kind of work you want to do. Be open and see if there’s an opportunity, either through crisis or through something that you believe could really change a lot of things in the world. And then just go for it.” More