Friday, January 29th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00a	Computer science and engineering major helps people while having fun Sami Alsheikh’s time at MIT has been guided by a few simple principles: pursue things you enjoy, develop useful skills that can be applied in different ways, and help people as much as possible. Over the past four years, whether he has been absorbed in computer science courses, building a platform to increase political engagement, or playing with campers as a counselor at Camp Kesem, Alsheikh has managed to live by all three. Alsheikh, a senior computer science and engineering major, grew up in Pensacola, Florida. His parents, both physicians, moved from Syria to the United States before he was born, seeking better professional opportunities. Alsheikh’s extended family still lives in Syria, and he and his family visited every summer until 2011. Alsheikh describes Pensacola as a politically conservative region, a sharp contrast to the more liberal area around MIT. He appreciates that his experiences living in parts of the United States with differing political views, along with his visits to Syria, have provided him with diverse perspectives about the world. Alsheikh first set his eyes on MIT while researching top institutions for math and science, but for him, what makes MIT special is the people. “That was one of the biggest draws for me and has proven to be one of the best things,” explains Alsheikh. “There's kind of this guarantee that everyone here has worked to become really clever at something. It's awesome to be a part of a collaborative community with people like that.” Computer science is the tool When Alsheikh came to MIT he planned on studying physics, but over the course of his freshman year, he found himself gravitating toward computer science, which he describes as more of a tool than a subject. “I saw that computer science touched on a lot of different subjects,” he says. “It has this theoretical and precise appeal of purer sciences like math and physics, while still providing the applicability of engineering.”   He experienced this first-hand during an MIT course where he designed a computer game called “Balloon Boy” that involves a boy with a balloon who must move left and right to avoid falling nails that could pop the balloon. “That sounds really silly,” he admits. “But it actually kick-started everything because of how interdisciplinary it was.” As Alsheikh and his classmates designed the game, they drew on a number of different fields including physics, which they needed to accurately simulate the drag and buoyancy of the balloon.   Alsheikh is currently doing computer science research in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) with Wojciech Matusik, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, who leads the Computational Fabrication Group. The research focuses on using newly developed radar technologies to understand different environments. Radar offers advantages over video because it doesn’t require light and has the potential to pick up on additional characteristics such as texture or material properties. Alsheikh’s work involves taking readings with small, new high-frequency radar chips, and exploring different analysis methods to derive meaning from the data. He stays motivated by focusing on the technical problem at hand. “In research contexts, I’m driven mostly by the technical difficulty of the problem, and the opportunity to learn,” he explains. Alsheikh is also interested in socially impactful applications of his computer science skills. As part of Start IAP, a four-week startup accelerator for MIT students, he is working on building a Web-based platform that will encourage people to become more engaged in U.S. policy. “I don't know what legislation is passed, and neither do a lot of people,” explains Alsheikh. “We're trying to build this platform where, based on your demographic information and your interests, we tell you how current legislation that's being considered affects you.” Helping others and having fun Beyond his academic interests, Alsheikh also enjoys helping people, offering the simple explanation that he does it because it makes him feel good. Over the past three years, Alsheikh has been involved in Camp Kesem, a one-week overnight camp for kids ages 6 to 18 whose parents have been affected by cancer. The camp, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this summer, now serves over 170 children each summer, free of charge. It is a place where the campers are able to open up and find support, but also have fun and enjoy themselves despite their tough situations. “It's really a great deal,” says Alsheikh. “It sounds like it's supposed to be a therapy camp, maybe have a little bit of a sad mood, but it's actually nothing like that.” Alsheikh, who enjoys that camp allows him to embrace his goofy, energetic side, reveals that all of the campers and counselors choose camp names, new identities that heighten the fun. His is Cheese, the counterpart of Mac, a.k.a. Jonathon Zuniga, Alsheikh’s freshman-year roommate and fellow counselor. While there are opportunities for campers to share their stories and talk about everything they are dealing with, for Alsheikh the magic of camp is that the kids can be regular kids, which often isn’t the case at home.    “It's really about the small, fun moments more than anything,” he explains. “The campers already know their situation at home and they don't always want to explore that further. I think they enjoy being with counselors and other campers who are there to have fun and offer support. It shows them that they can still have a light-hearted time despite whatever situation they’re in.” Alsheikh joined Camp Kesem as a counselor during his freshman year so he could help kids who were dealing with circumstances beyond their control. The following year he wanted to learn more about the families, so he returned to camp as the outreach coordinator, who is the point of contact for all families. The next year, Alsheikh, along with Mac and Peaches (counselor and MIT senior Lizy Trujillo), co-directed the camp, leading a 13-member coordinating board that handles fundraising, developing programming, organizing events, and recruiting counselors.    This summer will be his final year with Camp Kesem, and he is excited to return as a counselor and focus on spending time with the kids. “Our campers are amazing,” he says. “They're sharing these things that I cannot even imagine having gone through, and the next day we're singing a camp song about Chocolate Oreos, and they’re just as into it as anyone else. Their resilience is unbelievable.” The confidence to tackle any challenge Alsheikh will graduate from MIT this June, and he hopes to pursue a master’s degree in computer science at MIT. His short-term goal is to explore topics that interest him and develop technical skills that he can utilize in different contexts; eventually he wants to use what he’s learned to help people as much as possible.    “Right now I'm just trying to build skills and learn more about different aspects of the world,” he says. “I've had exposure to a few different areas, and now I'm exploring computer science research to hopefully gain some technical rigor that I could apply elsewhere.”  For Alsheikh, one of the most important things he has gained while at MIT is the confidence to tackle any challenge. He has learned how to research a problem, ask the right questions, contact the right people, and quickly get up to speed so that he can attempt to solve it.   “Honestly, I think a lot of people are capable of tackling these problems, because often the resources are out there,” he explains. “But the confidence is a big deal … having the confidence to tackle things and knowing that you have just as good a chance as anybody else.”          (Comment on this)
12:00a	Recognizing correct code MIT researchers have developed a machine-learning system that can comb through repairs to open-source computer programs and learn their general properties, in order to produce new repairs for a different set of programs. The researchers tested their system on a set of programming errors, culled from real open-source applications, that had been compiled to evaluate automatic bug-repair systems. Where those earlier systems were able to repair one or two of the bugs, the MIT system repaired between 15 and 18, depending on whether it settled on the first solution it found or was allowed to run longer. While an automatic bug-repair tool would be useful in its own right, professor of electrical engineering and computer science Martin Rinard, whose group developed the new system, believes that the work could have broader ramifications. “One of the most intriguing aspects of this research is that we’ve found that there are indeed universal properties of correct code that you can learn from one set of applications and apply to another set of applications,” Rinard says. “If you can recognize correct code, that has enormous implications across all software engineering. This is just the first application of what we hope will be a brand-new, fabulous technique.” Fan Long, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, presented a paper describing the new system at the Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages last week. He and Rinard, his advisor, are co-authors. Users of open-source programs catalogue bugs they encounter on project websites, and contributors to the projects post code corrections, or “patches,” to the same sites. So Long was able to write a computer script that automatically extracted both the uncorrected code and patches for 777 errors in eight common open-source applications stored in the online repository GitHub. Feature performance As with all machine-learning systems, the crucial aspect of Long and Rinard’s design was the selection of a “feature set” that the system would analyze. The researchers concentrated on values stored in memory — either variables, which can be modified during a program’s execution, or constants, which can’t. They identified 30 prime characteristics of a given value: It might be involved in an operation, such as addition or multiplication, or a comparison, such as greater than or equal to; it might be local, meaning it occurs only within a single block of code, or global, meaning that it’s accessible to the program as a whole; it might be the variable that represents the final result of a calculation; and so on. Long and Rinard wrote a computer program that evaluated all the possible relationships between these characteristics in successive lines of code. More than 3,500 such relationships constitute their feature set. Their machine-learning algorithm then tried to determine what combination of features most consistently predicted the success of a patch. “All the features we’re trying to look at are relationships between the patch you insert and the code you are trying to patch,” Long says. “Typically, there will be good connections in the correct patches, corresponding to useful or productive program logic. And there will be bad patterns that mean disconnections in program logic or redundant program logic that are less likely to be successful.” Ranking candidates In earlier work, Long had developed an algorithm that attempts to repair program bugs by systematically modifying program code. The modified code is then subjected to a suite of tests designed to elicit the buggy behavior. This approach may find a modification that passes the tests, but it could take a prohibitively long time. Moreover, the modified code may still contain errors that the tests don’t trigger. Long and Rinard’s machine-learning system works in conjunction with this earlier algorithm, ranking proposed modifications according to the probability that they are correct before subjecting them to time-consuming tests. The researchers tested their system, which they call Prophet, on a set of 69 program errors that had cropped up in eight popular open-source programs. Of those, 19 are amenable to the type of modifications that Long’s algorithm uses; the other 50 have more complicated problems that involve logical inconsistencies across larger swaths of code. When Long and Rinard configured their system to settle for the first solution that passed the bug-eliciting tests, it was able to correctly repair 15 of the 19 errors; when they allowed it to run for 12 hours per problem, it repaired 18. Of course, that still leaves the other 50 errors in the test set untouched. In ongoing work, Long is working on a machine-learning system that will look at more coarse-grained manipulation of program values across larger stretches of code, in the hope of producing a bug-repair system that can handle more complex errors. “A revolutionary aspect of Prophet is how it leverages past successful patches to learn new ones,” says Eran Yahav, an associate professor of computer science at the Technion in Israel. “It relies on the insight that despite differences between software projects, fixes — patches — applied to projects often have commonalities that can be learned from. Using machine learning to learn from ‘big code’ holds the promise to revolutionize many programming tasks — code completion, reverse-engineering, et cetera.” (Comment on this)
12:00a	A jumpstart for entrepreneurs There are myriad challenges for entrepreneurs when first starting a company: fundraising, recruiting talent, developing an innovative product, networking, scaling, and — not least of all — finding customers. StartMIT, a course offered during MIT’s Independent Activities Period between semesters, aims to help engineering students navigate those early challenges, with advice from founders who have been through it all. The course is co-organized by the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and the MIT Innovation Initiative. Held this year from Jan. 11 to Jan. 26, StartMIT (formerly Start6) organized an extensive schedule of talks and panel discussions that focused on a broad range of topics, including product development, founders’ stories, MIT’s entrepreneurial resources, networking, common startup mistakes, and creating company culture. The lineup of speakers was equally diverse, ranging from startup novices to serial entrepreneurs, and spanning multiple industries. Additional activities — such as mock customer interviews and creating a pitch — focused on honing basic entrepreneurial skills. “The aim is to give our students and postdocs … a rich view of what it means to be an entrepreneur,” says StartMIT head organizer and EECS department head Anantha Chandrakasan. “In three weeks, [participants] walk away with an understanding of what entrepreneurship is all about, the different views, and learning how to put a pitch together, among other things.” During the final two days, student groups were required to deliver brief pitches for commercial ideas they formed during the course. These included hacking-recruitment services, smart windows, new airplane-de-icing technologies, various apps, and waterproof purses, among other ideas. The course also included field trips to local companies — including iRobot, Ministry of Supply, and Kayak — as well as the Cambridge Innovation Center and MassChallenge startup incubators. Around 100 engineering students participated in this year’s StartMIT, now in its third year. On Jan. 14, President L. Rafael Reif dropped by Building 34-101, where most of the talks were held, to stress the importance of StartMIT in carrying out the Institute’s mission of using commercial innovations to make tangible impact on society. “There are many ways in which we can do good … and one of those ways is to start companies,” he said, adding: “By learning from experts and by learning from one another, you’re on your way to fulfilling not just … the MIT mission, but fulfilling your own mission in starting companies.” Seasoned entrepreneurs Eight days of talks and panel discussions saw seasoned MIT-affiliated entrepreneurs and innovators offering sage advice to students about starting companies. In her Jan. 13 talk, MIT professor Sangeeta Bhatia, who has launched several biotech companies, gave a behind-the-scenes look at the sometimes-arduous process of taking innovations from lab to market — “to highlight everything you don’t see in the press,” she said. In 2008, Bhatia, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor in the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, spun out 14 years of MIT research into Hepregen, now a successful company. Hepregen’s “micro-liver” platform allows liver cells to function outside the body for up to six weeks, for use by researchers and pharmaceutical firms. Among other topics, Bhatia discussed struggles of developing the technology for commercial use, manufacturing hassles, and anxieties of dealing with big-name pharmaceutical customers. “What did we learn? We learned it takes a long time [to start a biotech company],” Bhatia said. However, “as engineers and scientists, translation of your technology to make an impact through commercialization is actually imperative.” In a kickoff talk on Jan. 11, EECS lecturer Christina Chase, a former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and founder of several tech companies, detailed key reasons tech startups fail. Among these, she said, are scaling a company too soon by hiring too many employees, splurging on machinery, or renting unnecessarily large office space. “Ultimately, understand ‘what can I not spend my money on,’ because cash is oxygen to your company,” said Chase, who also led activities on discovering value propositions and conducting mock customer interviews. Other speakers included: David H. Koch Institute Professor Robert Langer, founder of more than 20 companies, who discussed commercializing breakthrough technologies; Ethernet co-inventor and 3Com founder Robert Metcalfe ’68 who discussed forming Internet companies and led an activity on writing effective press releases; Michael Stonebraker, a pioneer in database management systems with three big data companies under his belt, who gave students five easy steps for starting a company; and co-founder and CEO of Dropbox Drew Houston ’05, who gave advice to budding entrepreneurs via satellite. Fresh faces While hearing from seasoned entrepreneurs was certainly informative, mechanical engineering senior Keertan Kini connected most with a panel of recent MIT alumni entrepreneurs. That panel, held on Jan. 19, included four MIT alumni who shared their experiences of starting or working at young companies: Alice Brooks '10, co-founder of Roominate, which is developing STEM-focused toys; Theodora Koullias '13, founder and CEO of luxury fashion-tech brand Jon Lou; Wei Li SM '09, PhD '13, a principal engineer at Eta Devices, which is making mobile communications more efficient; Amrita Saigal '10, co-founder of Saathi, which manufactures sanitary pads made from waste banana tree fiber, for girls in rural India; and moderator Arun Saigal '13, SM '13, co-founder and CEO of Rappidly, a startup that makes drag-and-drop programming tools to build apps. “Hearing from people who are just recently out of MIT … was incredibly meaningful and incredibly impactful,” he says. The alumni could “relate easily to our experiences, or some of the doubts we have about our own abilities, or discuss how certain classes might actually make an impact, or relate to the challenges we’d faced as first-time founders because we don’t have the track record that a lot of the other professionals have.” With support from MIT’s Sandbox Innovation Fund, Kini and his partner are now prototyping their StartMIT project, called Ember, an interactive cooking app that uses voice commands to walk people through recipes. A talk by MIT alumnus Jeremy Conrad ’06, founding partner of Lemnos Labs, a seed-stage investment firm and incubator in San Francisco, resonated with freshman Anelise Newman, who developed a sewing-education startup for StartMIT. Conrad’s talk, Newman said, introduced her to one important and sometimes overlooked facet of entrepreneurship: networking. In his talk, Conrad discussed how he’d rush around to make sure he was in the same room as an investor, or build relationships with people that could provide an introduction to a person of interest. “It opened my eyes to the hustle that you have to get used to if you want to be an entrepreneur,” Newman said. “Not only do you need to define your product … you have to define your goals and go about them and vigorously pursue them in whatever way possible.” In three years, more than 100 projects have been developed through StartMIT, including Smarking (2014), now a successful company that uses big data analytics to help parking-garage managers maximize pricing and availability; GelSight (2014), which is commercializing sensors that can make 3-D maps of surfaces and could be used for more sensitive robotics fingertips; and Belleds Q (2015), which is developing a consumer product that uses streaming music to control wireless smart LED bulbs in homes. (Comment on this)
9:30a	Symposium calls for science-based climate action In a daylong symposium at the Stata Center on Wednesday, called “MIT on Climate: Science + Action,” a series of presentations described the severity of the global climate change threat, the wide variety of related impacts on human society and economies, and actions that might be most effective in minimizing the damage. “There will always be more to learn, but we have to act on what we already know,” said Robert van der Hilst, head of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), which sponsored the event. Maria Zuber, MIT's vice president for research, said that "addressing climate change is perhaps the defining environmental challenge of our time. The key issue before us now is what role can and must MIT play in this national and global issue?" And Raffaele Ferrari, the Breene M. Kerr Professor of Oceanography and a co-organizer of the symposium, added that "action on climate change is needed, and it is crucial that we continue basic research if we are to reach a positive outcome for humanity and the environment.” Keynote speaker Marcia McNutt, editor-in-chief of Science, began by addressing the question of whether or not climate change is a case of “settled” science. “It depends on the kind of question you ask,” she said. “Is the climate changing due to human activity? Yes. We know enough about that question to know that we should be taking action to limit emissions. But, from a scientific standpoint, there are a lot of questions that remain to be answered.” Such remaining questions, she said, include just how fast the effects of climate change are occurring, especially those effects that may have the greatest impacts on human society, such as how fast (and how far) sea level may rise. Such questions affect significant social, economic, and political decisions, not just scientific and technological ones. For example, “Should the San Francisco Airport be moved inland?” she asked, and pointed to the impacts of storm surges on the New Jersey shoreline, both during Hurricane Sandy and the recent snowstorm, to illustrate the consequences of failing to take proactive measures to deal with vulnerable facilities close to sea level. No pause As for questions that have been raised by climate change skeptics about a so-called hiatus in global warming since 2000, McNutt said that research, including some published last year in Science, clearly showed that this perceived pause was a result of improperly calibrated temperature readings that failed to account for differences between measurements taken from ships and those taken from buoys. Proper correction for those offsets, she said, “eliminates the hiatus.” One key issue in determining that rate of sea level rise has to do with how rapidly ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctica may collapse as a result of warming. “We could get rapid ice-sheet collapse, or we could get gradual melting, and we don’t know yet,” McNutt said. This information is key to deciding how urgently buildings and other facilities must be moved, raised, or protected by seawalls. “It’s a very important problem to solve,” she said. Other open questions, McNutt said, concern the detailed effects of ocean acidification as a result of carbon dioxide absorption, the impact of warming on droughts and flooding events, increases in the prevalence and intensity of storms, and the effect of increases in lightning strikes. “We need better predictions” of all the effects that impact human activities, she said, and “better information can guide better decisions.” A series of talks by present and former MIT faculty members outlined the state of present knowledge about climate systems, from studying the atmospheres of distant planets to understanding the links between climate and the evolution of life, including major extinction events and swings between hothouse eras and “snowball Earth” epochs, when the planet was frozen from pole to pole. Such research aims, among other things, to resolve some of the many complex interactions triggered by changing climates and to assess their likely impacts on human activities. Laying odds on the “climate gamble” Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science in EAPS and director of MIT’s Center for Global Change Science, summarized the need for making major policy decisions in the face of remaining uncertainties, by showing a pair of “roulette wheels.” These were designed to show, based on the best available global climate and economic models, the relative likelihoods of temperature rise under a “business as usual” scenario, versus a scenario in which strict emissions controls are put into place. Without such action, he showed, there is about a 25 percent chance that the average global temperature increase by the end of this century will be more than 6 degrees Celsius — an amount that would be catastrophic for many regions of the world. And, there is an 80 percent chance of exceeding a 2-degree increase, which is the amount the world’s leaders have agreed is an upper limit on what can be accepted without major disruptions to global economies and populations. Those increases are calculated relative to 1990 levels, the baseline used in the recent Paris agreements, but a more relevant measure, he said, was the increase from pre-industrial levels. By that measure, “business as usual” leads to a staggering 97 percent chance of exceeding a 2-degree increase. But that is not an inevitability, Prinn stressed. If strict emissions standards are put in place over the next few years, the chances of exceeding the 2-degree threshold would drop dramatically, as shown in the second wheel. “That’s the future we would rather live in,” he said. A series of speakers then addressed the questions of what kinds of actions could and should be taken to combat the climate-change risks. They described the noncarbon energy technologies that are available; the economic and health benefits of pursuing those options; the psychological, social, and political obstacles to taking action; and processes that can aid in negotiating agreements on mitigation measures and harnessing “collective intelligence” through the Internet to find, evaluate, and disseminate solutions. Healthy side-benefits While most studies of alternative energy sources focus on the costs and direct climate impacts, Noelle Selin, the Esther and Harold Edgerton Career Development Associate Professor in EAPS and an associate professor in the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, pointed out that switching to noncarbon energy sources can also have very significant near-term effects on health, because particulate matter associated with disease goes hand-in-hand with fossil fuel use. If the emissions reductions agreed to in Paris last fall are fully implemented, she said, that reduction in particle emissions could directly save 3 to 7 million premature deaths per year. “That’s potentially a real motivator for action,” she said, even for those who have questions about the climate science. A final panel discussion focused on what could and should be MIT’s role in the issue of climate change, as related to fundamental research on the science and technology; educating the next generation of researchers and the public; and the potential for leading by example. Valerie Karplus, an MIT alumna and assistant professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, said one of the most important things MIT students and faculty can do is “to talk to skeptics. We need to build bridges rather than create divisions.” John Fernandez, newly appointed head of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative, suggested holding a series of several events each year on environmental change, “in which people from the multitude of disciplines in MIT’s five schools play out scenarios” to find practical approaches to addressing problems. Dennis Whyte, head of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, said one important lesson is “don’t do what hasn’t worked.” Specifically, many researchers have found ingenious new ideas for energy production “that no one will ever use” because of economic, manufacturing, or materials supply issues, he said. But technologies that do have commercial potential “are new opportunities for action” for the scientific and technical community. “You have to be ambitious and realistic at the same time,” he said. Prinn said that given the clear evidence of human-caused climate change, “renewables need to be the major source of energy for the world, regardless of whether we’re on a high, low, or medium path” in terms of the speed of global warming. So now a major task for researchers is “to see who can produce renewable energy at the least cost,” he said, adding that such solutions may differ depending on locations. “It’s not one solution for the world.” (Comment on this)

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