Friday, March 18th, 2016

Time	Event
12:00a	Mobius App released to empower MIT maker community With over 130,000 square feet of hands-on makerspaces, MIT has more of these facilities on its campus than anywhere in the world. Yet, according to findings from a student-wide survey conducted last summer, the top two places where MIT students make things are in their dorm rooms and off-campus. The reason? Students face too many barriers when trying to use MIT’s expansive maker infrastructure. Students across the Institute need access to makerspaces not only for their studies but to work on personal and entrepreneurial projects. Rebecca Li, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering, notes that students often have to “hijack a club or lab’s machine shop access, pay many different membership fees, or stumble into little known shops like MITERS [MIT Electronics Research Society] and Maker Works.” According to Li, who helps manage the MITERS space as their facilities manager, the only way to find out about these options is effectively through referral. “If you are not involved in some builder club, lab, or group, you are unlikely to hear about all of the shops or what you have the ability to access,” she says. In Aaron Ramirez’s experience as a PhD student, new arrivals to MIT have little idea of what resources exist on campus and are often lost as to where to begin and where to turn to for help. “Many of the incoming students, including myself long ago, never had exposure to or training on machine tools, rapid prototyping equipment, or instrumentation. These tools are essential for engineering and for obtaining and improving your skills as an engineer — it’s not just a hobby for us, it’s our life and passion, and necessary for our development,” he says. “Students have to put in a decent amount of effort to finally get access to the workshops, which is not trivial when you consider how much other stuff they have to do already, especially as a freshmen!” No one understands these hindrances more than Marty Culpepper, MIT alumnus, professor of mechanical engineering, and the recently appointed MIT “Maker Czar.” He acknowledges that it can take a student up to nine months to get into a space and build anything, a startling statistic that doesn’t sit well with him. “There are reasons why students have difficulty getting into these spaces,” Culpepper says. “One barrier is knowing where everything is. Another is, how do you get trained, whom do you contact to get trained, and once you’ve been trained, do other shops know you’ve got that skill set? How do you pay for things if you need to pay for them? All of these things stacked on top of each other make it very difficult not only for students to get things done, but for faculty and their research to get done.” In an effort to address the situation, Culpepper has been charged with determining the best ways to increase student access to campus makerspaces, which in part means breaking down these barriers in a myriad of ways. “We know that MIT students want to design and build things. We know this is important to their education and to their desire to start companies. We are here to fix the problem and the first step to doing that is with Mobius,” says Culpepper. Designed to help the MIT community navigate a complex making system, the Mobius app (shown here), released March 4, enables users to search through the vast array of makerspaces and equipment on campus. (Christine Daniloff/MIT) Mobius Designed to help the MIT community navigate a complex making system, the Mobius app, released March 4, enables users to search through the vast array of makerspaces and equipment on campus. Developed in partnership with students, shop managers, alumni, and MIT’s Information Systems and Technology office, the app is the first of its kind. It was realized through the support of the Lord Foundation of Massachusetts and MIT alumni Colin and Erika Angle, who recognized the potential of Mobius to transform the maker experience for MIT students. Available to download for iOS (with an Android version in development), Mobius will match users’ needs to maker resource availability as well as assist technical staff in managing their shops and improving student communications and interactions. Students who use the app will be able to locate that laser cutter or mill they need for their project from the convenience of their mobile device, saving them time spent searching for information that is not available online. Using the app also eliminates the step of having to call or walk to each space for shop hours, policies, and training protocols. Li, who along with Ramirez worked with Culpepper to design the app, says that Mobius “will let people uncover which makerspace is both open and has the right machines for them.” She continues, “Knowing where certain machines are on campus, or even that they exist, will help people get things done and make more things. The most important aspect of the app is the elimination of the unknown of whom to contact or whom to ask for access. People will feel more confident knowing that they are talking to the right person who can get them help, instead of playing email ping pong as their project gathers dust.” Other key features of Mobius include the ability to pay for materials, machine time, and access fees directly through the app. Additionally, shop managers will be able to check a user’s abilities with a built-in endorsement and flagging system, potentially allowing someone already skilled at machining and endorsed by another shop to fast-track their training to gain access in a different facility. In the future, users in turn will be able to rate their experience with a particular shop, providing helpful tips and advice to others in the maker community. The future of making For the last two years, Culpepper has spent his days learning about all of MIT’s makerspaces and visiting other universities across the country to explore theirs. The experience was eye-opening, leading to the realization that while MIT boasted the most makerspace square footage, its utilization rate was underwhelming. Culpepper is determined to lead the future of making at MIT and beyond, with new technologies such as Mobius and other activities of the recently launched Project Manus. Initiated in October 2015 by MIT Provost Martin Schmidt and housed within the MIT Innovation Initiative, Project Manus will build capacity in MIT’s makerspaces and foster the maker communities that will create the gold standard in next-generation academic maker systems. Lessons learned on the MIT campus — including Mobius — will be shared widely so students and staff at other universities can take advantage. “Today marks a very important first step in a journey to provide our community with seamless access to the vast maker resources on our campus, and to bring greater coordination of all these resources. In Mobius, and the other elements of Project Manus, Professor Culpepper has provided us with an exciting vision for the future and a roadmap to get there. I am grateful to Professor Culpepper and the MIT Innovation Initiative for advancing this critical effort to strengthen our innovation ecosystem,” said Provost Schmidt upon the app’s release. Culpepper, whose work is just beginning, remarks, “Mobius is just one of five major programs that Project Manus is working on to improve the way MIT supports students and makerspace staff. I invite everyone to visit the Project Manus web site to learn more.” (Comment on this)
12:00a	Secure, user-controlled data Most people with smartphones use a range of applications that collect personal information and store it on Internet-connected servers — and from their desktop or laptop computers, they connect to Web services that do the same. Some use still other Internet-connected devices, such as thermostats or fitness monitors, that also store personal data online. Generally, users have no idea which data items their apps are collecting, where they’re stored, and whether they’re stored securely. Researchers at MIT and Harvard University hope to change that, with an application they’re calling Sieve. With Sieve, a Web user would store all of his or her personal data, in encrypted form, on the cloud. Any app that wanted to use specific data items would send a request to the user and receive a secret key that decrypted only those items. If the user wanted to revoke the app’s access, Sieve would re-encrypt the data with a new key. “This is a rethinking of the Web infrastructure,” says Frank Wang, a PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science and one of the system’s designers. “Maybe it’s better that one person manages all their data. There’s one type of security and not 10 types of security. We’re trying to present an alternative model that would be beneficial to both users and applications.” The researchers are presenting Sieve at the USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation this month. Wang is the first author, and he’s joined by MIT associate professors of electrical engineering and computer science Nickolai Zeldovich and Vinod Vaikuntanathan, who is MIT’s Steven and Renee Finn Career Development Professor, and by James Mickens, an associate professor of computer science at Harvard University. Selective disclosure Sieve required the researchers to develop practical versions of two cutting-edge cryptographic techniques called attribute-based encryption and key homomorphism.With attribute-based encryption, data items in a file are assigned different labels, or “attributes.” After encryption, secret keys can be generated that unlock only particular combinations of attributes: name and zip code but not street name, for instance, or zip code and date of birth but not name. The problem with attribute-based encryption — and decryption — is that it’s slow. To get around that, the MIT and Harvard researchers envision that Sieve users would lump certain types of data together under a single attribute. For instance, a doctor might be interested in data from a patient’s fitness-tracking device but probably not in the details of a single afternoon’s run. The user might choose to group fitness data by month. This introduces problems of its own, however. A fitness-tracking device probably wants to store data online as soon as the data is generated, rather than waiting until the end of the month for a bulk upload. But data uploaded to the cloud yesterday could end up in a very different physical location than data uploaded by the same device today. So Sieve includes tables that track the locations at which grouped data items are stored in the cloud. Each of those tables is encrypted under a single attribute, but the data they point to are encrypted using standard — and more efficient — encryption algorithms. As a consequence, the size of the data item encrypted through attribute-based encryption — the table — is fixed, which makes decryption more efficient. In experiments, the researchers found that decrypting a month’s worth of, say, daily running times grouped under a single attribute would take about 1.5 seconds, whereas if each day’s result was encrypted under its own attribute, decrypting a month’s worth would take 15 seconds. Wang developed an interface that displays a Sieve user’s data items as a list and allows the user to create and label icons that represent different attributes. Dragging a data item onto an icon assigns it that attribute. At the moment, the interface is not particularly user friendly, but its purpose is to show that the underlying encryption machinery works properly. Blind manipulation Key homomorphism is what enables Sieve to revoke an app’s access to a user’s data. With key homomorphism, the cloud server can re-encrypt the data it’s storing without decrypting it first — or without sending it to the user for decryption, re-encryption, and re-uploading. In this case, the researchers had to turn work that was largely theoretical into a working system. “All these things in cryptography are very vague,” Wang says. “They say, ‘Here’s an algorithm. Assume all these complicated math things.’ But in reality, how do I build this? They’re like, ‘Oh, this group has this property.’ But they don’t tell you what the group is. Are they numbers? Are they primes? Are they elliptic curves? It took us a month or so to wrap our heads around what we needed to do to get this to work.” Of course, a system like Sieve requires the participation of app developers. But it could work to their advantage. A given application might provide more useful services if it had access to data collected by other devices. And were a system like Sieve commercially deployed, applications could distinguish themselves from their competitors by advertising themselves as Sieve-compliant. “Privacy is increasing in importance and the debate between Apple's iPhone encryption and the FBI is a good example of that,” says Engin Kirda, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University. “I think a lot of users would appreciate having cryptographic control over their own data.” “I think the real innovation is how they use attribute-based encryption smartly, and make it usable in practice,” Kirda adds. “They show that it is possible to have private clouds where the users have real privacy control over their data.” (Comment on this)

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