#Hewlett Foundation funds new MIT initiative on cybersecurity policy MIT has received $15 million in funding from the William
and Flora Hewlett Foundation to establish an initiative aimed at laying the foundations for a smart sustainable cybersecurity policy to deal with the growing cyber threats faced by governments businesses and individuals.
The MIT Cybersecurity Policy Initiative (CPI) is one of three new academic initiatives to receive a total of $45 million in support through the Hewlett Foundation s Cyber Initiative.
Simultaneous funding to MIT Stanford university and the University of California at Berkeley is intended to jumpstart a new field of cyber policy research.
The idea is to generate a robust marketplace of ideas about how best to enhance the trustworthiness of computer systems while respecting individual privacy and free expression rights encouraging innovation and supporting the broader public interest.
Choices we are making today about Internet governance and security have profound implications for the future.
Each of the three universities will take complementary approaches to addressing this challenge. MIT s CPI will focus on establishing quantitative metrics
Stanford s Cyber-X Initiative will focus on the core themes of trustworthiness and governance of networks.
Interdisciplinary approachthe Institute-wide CPI will bring together scholars from three key disciplinary pillars: engineering social science and management.
and frame policy solutions while management scholars offer insight on practical approaches to institutionalize best practices in operations.
MIT has a strong record of applying interdisciplinary approaches to large-scale problems from energy to cancer.
For example the MIT Energy Initiative has brought together faculty from across campus including the social sciences to conduct energy studies designed to inform future energy options and research.
These studies include technology policy reports focused on nuclear power coal natural gas and the smart electric grid.
That s our unique contribution to this challenge says Daniel Weitzner the principal investigator for the CPI and a principal research scientist in MIT s Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL.
As an analogy Weitzner says imagine trying to shape environmental policy without any way of measuring carbon levels in the atmosphere
CSAIL is home to much of the technology that is at the core of cybersecurity such as the RSA cryptography algorithm that protects most online financial transactions and the development of web standards via the MIT-based World wide web Consortium.
That gives us the ability to have our hands on the evolution of these technologies to learn about how to make them more trustworthy says Weitzner who was the United states deputy chief technology officer for Internet policy in the White house from 2011 to 2012 while on leave from his longtime position at MIT.
First stepsin pioneering a new field of study CPI s first challenge is to identify key research questions select appropriate methodologies to guide the work
How financial institutions can reduce risk by sharing threat intelligence; Developing cybersecurity policy frameworks for autonomous vehicles like drones and self-driving cars;
andhow to achieve regional and even global agreements on both privacy and security norms in online environments.
To address these issues CPI will not only bring to bear different disciplines from across MIT from computer science to management to political science
but also engage with stakeholders outside the Institute including government industry and civil society organizations. We want to understand their challenges
and work with them on formulating solutions Weitzner said. In addition to research a contribution of the CPI in the long run will be to create a pipeline of students to serve as the next generation of leaders working at this intersection of technology and public policy.
The mission of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation is to help people build measurably better lives.
The Foundation concentrates its resources on activities in education the environment global development and population performing arts and philanthropy as well as grants to support disadvantaged communities in the San francisco bay Area.
The Foundation was established by the late William Hewlett with his wife Flora Lamson Hewlett and their eldest son Walter B. Hewlett.
William Hewlett who earned an SM degree in electrical engineering from MIT in 1936 was cofounder with David Packard of the Hewlett-packard Company a multinational information technology company y
#Two sensors in one MIT chemists have developed new nanoparticles that can simultaneously perform magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and fluorescent imaging in living animals.
Such particles could help scientists to track specific molecules produced in the body monitor a tumor s environment
In a paper appearing in the Nov 18 issue of Nature Communications the researchers demonstrate the use of the particles which carry distinct sensors for fluorescence
Future versions of the particles could be designed to detect reactive oxygen species that often correlate with disease says Jeremiah Johnson an assistant professor of chemistry at MIT and senior author of the study.
You may be able to learn more about how diseases progress if you have imaging probes that can sense specific biomolecules Johnson says.
Dual actionjohnson and his colleagues designed the particles so they can be assembled from building blocks made of polymer chains carrying either an organic MRI contrast agent called a nitroxide
or a fluorescent molecule called Cy5. 5. When mixed together in a desired ratio these building blocks join to form a specific nanosized structure the authors call a branched bottlebrush polymer.
For this study they created particles in which 99 percent of the chains carry nitroxides and 1 percent carry Cy5. 5. Nitroxides are reactive molecules that contain a nitrogen atom bound to an oxygen atom with an unpaired electron.
but University of Nebraska chemistry professor Andrzej Rajca who is also an author of the new Nature Communications paper recently discovered that their half-life can be extended by attaching two bulky structures to them.
Furthermore the authors of the Nature Communications paper show that incorporation of Rajca s nitroxide in Johnson s branched bottlebrush polymer architectures leads to even greater improvements in the nitroxide lifetime.
With these modifications nitroxides can circulate for several hours in a mouse s bloodstream long enough to obtain useful MRI images.
The researchers found that their imaging particles accumulated in the liver as nanoparticles usually do.
The mouse liver produces Vitamin c so once the particles reached the liver they grabbed electrons from Vitamin c turning off the MRI signal
when the sensor encounters a target molecule such as Vitamin c. They have created also nanoparticles carrying the fluorescent agent plus up to three different drugs.
This allows them to track whether the nanoparticles are delivered to their targeted locations. That s the advantage of our platform we can mix
and match and add almost anything we want Johnson says. These particles could also be used to evaluate the level of oxygen radicals in a patient s tumor which can reveal valuable information about how aggressive the tumor is.
We think we may be able to reveal information about the tumor environment with these kinds of probes
if we can get them there Johnson says. Someday you might be able to inject this in a patient
and obtain real-time biochemical information about disease sites and also healthy tissues which is not always straightforward.
Steven Bottle a professor of nanotechnology and molecular science at Queensland University of Technology says the most impressive element of the study is the combination of two powerful imaging techniques into one nanomaterial.
which should provide a highly useful diagnostic tool with real potential to follow disease progression in vivo says Bottle who was involved not in the study.
The research was funded by the National institutes of health the Department of defense the National Science Foundation and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research h
What if you could bring that type of analytics to the workplace? Now MIT spinout Sociometric Solutions is developing a system it calls moneyball for business
which uses sensor identification badges and analytics tools to track behavioral data on employees providing insights that can increase productivity.
and using that data to build a baseball team. But what if I could say Here s how you need to talk to customers here s how people need to collaborate with each other
and here are the things that lead to outcomes such as turnover sales and job satisfaction says Ben Waber Phd 11 cofounder and president of Sociometric.
Individuals can use that data to boost performance and a company can use that to help set up an environment where everybody s going to succeed.
Sociometric s system based on years of MIT research consists of employee identification badges with built-in Bluetooth sensors that track location and which way someone s facing.
Other sensors show when employees lean in signaling for instance engagement in a conversation and accelerometers can track their speed (sensing bursts of lethargy and vigor).
A built-in microphone records how often fast and loud individuals talk as well as tone of voice (but not actual conversation.
Increased speed and higher voice tones for example are strong indicators of high stress levels. Readers placed around an office collect the data and push it to the cloud.
Individuals have access to their personal data via a Web dashboard or smartphone but companies are given only anonymous aggregated results of patterns and trends in behavior.)
By combining this information with employee-performance data from surveys interviews and objective performance metrics Sociometric can pinpoint areas where management can build more productive offices in ways as surprising as providing larger lunch tables or moving coffee stations to increase interaction.
In one of its earliest studies with a Bank of america call center for instance Sociometric tracked co-workers for three months.
They predicted that allowing certain employees to take breaks together to let off steam or share tips about customer service would improve productivity.
Sure enough when the bank instituted the changes Sociometric measured a 15 to 20 percent bump in productivity a 19 percent drop in stress levels and decreased turnover from 40 to 12 percent.
All things considered Waber says these and other solutions produce a 20 percent rise on average in productivity and employee satisfaction and a similar decrease in turnover.
More than 20 retail sales and consulting firms have used Sociometric s system. Additionally more than 60 research organizations across the globe are using the system on management social psychology medicine computer science and physical therapy among other things.
Sociometric s MIT cofounders and co-inventors of its technology include Alexander Sandy Pentland the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts
and Science who serves as scientific advisor; Daniel Olguin Olguin SM 07 Phd 11 who is chief operating officer;
and Taemie Kim Phd 11 who is chief scientist. Natural transition for a companysociometric traces its origins to 2007
when students in Pentland s Human Dynamics Group including Waber were approached to use behavioral analytics for a management study.
Peter Gloor a researcher in the Center for Collective Intelligence was using surveys of employees at a German bank where the marketing division was split into four teams located across 10 rooms on two floors.
The bank wanted to know how this physical layout affected productivity and job satisfaction. Waber Pentland and other researchers developed
and deployed 22 prototypes of Sociometric badges at the bank for a month registering when two wearers were talking to one another and for how long.
Accumulating more than 2000 hours of data and comparing that data with survey results they predicted with 60 percent accuracy that close-knit groups of workers who spoke frequently with one another were satisfied more
and got more work done more efficiently. They also found evidence of communication overload where high volumes of email due to lack of face-to-face interaction were causing some employees difficulty in concentrating
and decreasing their job satisfaction. Armed with these results the bank rearranged its layout to increase the proximity of the close-knit employees
and dropped from four teams to three to encourage stronger interaction. Seeing potential Waber Pentland and others started trialing the system with the Media Lab s various corporate sponsors.
From these early experiences and with some advice from MIT s Venture Mentoring Service the startup refined the system
and learned how to pitch it to potential customers and deploy it efficiently. As word spread companies started offering to pay.
We thought If we could make an impact doing something so simple as measuring face-to-face interactions imagine what we could do sophisticated with more metrics Waber says.
From there Sociometric built out its analytics tools primarily through dozens of research collaborations. A study with Cornell University in 2013 for instance allowed the startup to prove that it could accurately predict high levels of cortisol in someone s saliva an indicator of high stress based on their tone of voice.
That suddenly became a metric we could use Waber says. Longer lunch tables better outcomesover the years Sociometric has had some surprising findings.
Waber points to his firm s work with a major online travel company. While looking at the employees lunchtime interactions they discovered one of the most predictive measures of good performance was the number of people an employee ate with the more the merrier.
But they saw that in the cafeteria certain people only sat with three other people (at four-seat tables)
while others sat with 11 people (at 12-seat tables). Those who sat at larger tables were 36 percent more productive during the week.
When the company initiated layoffs during the study the employees who sat at larger tables also had 30 percent lower stress levels than those who sat at smaller tables.
The idea is that these employees Waber says had been able to accumulate larger networks knew what others were working on
and were more likely to reach out to specific people with questions and concerns. Surprisingly after this finding went public some technology firms began installing larger cafeteria tables Waber says.
It s crazy that something as trivial as physical space as the size of the lunch table could affect productivity Waber says.
Waber says many of Sociometric s results point to a need for more social interaction in the workplace.
Some major companies such as Google and Facebook Waber says are already promoting socializing by for instance building campuses where all workers come to collaborate.
#Bacteria become genomic tape recorders MIT engineers have transformed the genome of the bacterium E coli into a long-term storage device for memory.
They envision that this stable erasable and easy-to-retrieve memory will be suited well for applications such as sensors for environmental and medical monitoring.
You can store very long-term information says Timothy Lu an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and biological engineering.
The new strategy described in the Nov 13 issue of the journal Science overcomes several limitations of existing methods for storing memory in bacterial genomes says Lu the paper s senior author.
Lu and graduate student Fahim Farzadfard the paper s lead author set out to create a system for storing analog memory
To achieve that they designed a genomic tape recorder that lets researchers write new information into any BACTERIAL DNA sequence.
or a specific sequence of single stranded-dna DNA into a targeted site. However this DNA is produced only when activated by the presence of a predetermined molecule or another type of input such as light.
After the DNA is produced the recombinase inserts the DNA into the cell s genome at a preprogrammed site.
We can target it anywhere in the genome which is why we re viewing it as a tape recorder
because you can direct where that signal is written Lu says. Once an exposure is recorded through this process the memory is stored for the lifetime of the bacterial population
If the DNA is inserted into a nonfunctional part of the genome sequencing the genome will reveal
This work is very exciting because it integrates many useful capabilities in a single system:
long-lasting analog distributed genomic storage with a variety of readout options says Shawn Douglas an assistant professor at the University of California at San diego who was involved not in the study.
Rather than treating each individual cell as a digital storage device Farzadfard and Lu treat an entire population of cells as an analog hard drive greatly increasing the total amount of information that can be stored
and retrieved. Bacterial sensorsenvironmental applications for this type of sensor include monitoring the ocean for carbon dioxide levels acidity or pollutants.
In addition the bacteria could potentially be designed to live in the human digestive tract to monitor someone s dietary intake such as how much sugar
or to detect inflammation from irritable bowel disease. These engineered bacteria could also be used as biological computers Lu says adding that they would be particularly useful in types of computation that require a lot of parallel processing such as picking patterns out of an image.
Because there are billions and billions of bacteria in a given test tube and now we can start leveraging more of that population for memory storage
and for computing it might be interesting to do highly parallelized computing. It might be slow
whether a certain disease marker is expressed or whether a neuron is active at a certain time.
If you could turn the DNA inside a cell into a little memory device on its own
Instead the vast majority of this genetic material is found within the trillions of microorganisms that call our bodies home.
In recent years the microbiome has attracted increasing attention for its role in health and disease.
This week MIT and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) announce the launch of the Center for Microbiome Informatics
and Therapeutics a new interdisciplinary center dedicated to advancing the understanding of the microbiome s role in human biology
and operations for the first five years the center will fuel collaborations at the junction of clinical practice basic research computational biology
and analyzing vast quantities of data related to the diverse types of bacteria within the human body and their interactions with each other and the body s own cells and organs.
and techniques for treating diseases and conditions linked to an altered microbiome.##Today low-cost genetic sequencing
but our ability to translate this data into usable knowledge is lagging behind says Arup K. Chakraborty the Robert T. Haslam (1911) Professor of Chemical engineering Physics Chemistry and Biological engineering at MIT and director of the MIT Institute
for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES). This center is built around a bold idea: to accelerate our progress toward a world in
which was established at MIT in 2012 to tackle some of the world s biggest health challenges through interdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of engineering science and clinical medicine.
The new center s co-directors are Eric Alm an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT and Ramnik Xavier chief of gastroenterology and director of the Center for the Study of Inflammatory Bowel
Disease at MGH. Under their guidance the center will seek to develop a regional ecosystem together with other hospitals universities and research institutions.
Collaboration between academic investigators and real-world clinicians is vital to the center s purpose according to Xavier who also serves as the Kurt Isselbacher Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical school.
Molecular biologists microbiologists and cell biologists seek to understand microbe/microbe and microbe/host cell function and communication he says.
Immunologists geneticists and genomics researchers drive Progress to this wealth of information clinicians contribute patient-based insights and gain potential targets for therapeutics.
We want this center to be a convening hub for strengths that are distributed across disciplines and throughout different institutions in the New england region.
The center will have three core functions: to advance the field by funding research proposals; to help individual research projects proceed more efficiently through shared services such as a regional sample facility or support for regulatory compliance;
and to draw new talent to microbiome research by promoting the field within the academic community.
The center s initial flagship project will focus on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD. Individuals with IBD which includes conditions such as ulcerative colitis
and Crohn s disease suffer from chronic inflammation of the digestive tract and experience severe diarrhea pain fatigue
and weight loss. IBD is known to have a strong link to the microbiome according to Alm:
Microbiome-based medicine is poised to revolutionize patient care for IBD and many other diseases in the gastrointestinal tract he says.
Our goal is to develop new treatment options personalized to an individual s microbiota and based on natural or engineered microorganisms that have higher efficacy and fewer side effects than conventional drug treatments.
Until a few years ago researchers studied the microbiome by carefully separating individual strains and culturing them in isolation a time-consuming method that is biased toward species that grow well in the laboratory.
Today however researchers and doctors can take advantage of faster low-cost genomic tools that allow them to study the entire bacterial system of individual patients.
These tools have opened a window into the balance of human cells and the bacteria viruses and fungi that colonize
targeted therapies designed to remove add or even modify specific bacteria; or medical interventions based on reprogramming an individual s immune system.
We need to develop a toolkit for engineering the human microbiome Alm says. Both Alm and Xavier emphasize that the center s long-term purpose is to expand the breadth and depth of this emerging field.
While IBD is the focus of the initial flagship project the center is designed to foster opportunities to explore the impact of the microbiome on systemic autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis Type 1 diabetes arthritis and other disorders such as
autism obesity acne and allergies. The co-directors are presenting their research collaboration this week at an MGH-hosted conference on microbes metabolism and mucosal circuits.
#Wind energy reaches greater heights Wind turbines across the globe are being made taller to capture more energy from the stronger winds that blow at greater heights.
or sometimes even economically feasible, to build taller towers, with shipping constraints on tower diameters and the expense involved in construction.
Now Keystone Tower Systems co-founded by Eric Smith 1, SM 7, Rosalind Takata 0, SM 6,
and Alexander Slocum, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical engineering at MIT is developing a novel system that adapts a traditional pipe-making technology to churn out wind turbines on location,
at wind farms, making taller towers more economically feasible. Keystone system is a modification of spiral welding,
a process that been used for decades to make large pipes. In that process, steel sheets are fed into one side of a machine,
where theye continuously rolled into a spiral, while their edges are welded together to create a pipe sort of like a massive paper-towel tube.
and Dan Ainge 2 Keystone system allows the steel rolls to be tapered and made of varying thickness,
to create a conical tower. The system is automated highly using about one-tenth the labor of traditional construction
and uses steel to make the whole tower, instead of concrete. his makes it much more cost-effective to build much taller towers,
says Smith, Keystone CEO. With Keystone onsite fabrication, Smith says, manufactures can make towers that reach more than 400 feet.
Wind that high can be up to 50 percent stronger and, moreover, isn blocked by trees,
A 460-foot tower, for instance, could increase energy capture by 10 to 50 percent, compared with today more common 260-foot towers. hat site-dependent,
Smith adds. f you go somewhere in the Midwest where there open plains, but no trees, youe going to see a benefit,
because the trees slow down the wind near the ground you can see a 50 percent increase in energy capture for the same wind turbine.
Solving transport problems The Keystone system value lies in skirting wind turbine transportation constraints that have plagued the industry for years.
Towers are made in segments to be shipped to wind farms for assembly. But theye restricted to diameters of about 14 feet
so trucks can safely haul them on highways and under bridges. This means that in the United states, most towers for 2-or 3-megawatt turbines are limited to about 260 feet.
In Europe, taller towers (up to about 460 feet) are becoming common, but these require significant structural or manufacturing compromises:
Theye built using very thick steel walls at the base (requiring more than 100 tons of excess steel),
or with the lower half of the tower needing more than 1, 000 tons of concrete blocks,
or pieced together with many steel elements using thousands of bolts. f you were to design a 500-foot tower to get strong winds,
based on the force exerted on a turbine, you want something at least 20 feet in diameter at the base,
Smith explains. ut there no way to weld together a tower in a factory that 20 feet in diameter and ship it to the wind farm.
Instead Keystone delivers its mobile, industrial-sized machine and the trapezoid-shaped sheets of steel needed to feed into the system.
Essentially, the sheets are trapezoids of increasing sizes with the shorter size fed into the machine first,
and the longest piece fed in last. If you laid all the sheets flat, edge-to-edge,
they form an involute spiral.)Welding their edges assembles the sheets into a conical shape.
The machine can make about one tower per day. Any diameter is possible, Smith says.
For 450-foot, 3-megawatt towers, a base 20 feet in diameter will suffice. Increasing diameters by even a few feet, he says,
can make towers almost twice as strong to handle stress.)Smith compares the process to today at home installation of rain gutters:
For that process, professionals drive to a house and feed aluminum coils into one end of a specialized machine that shapes the metal into a seamless gutter. t a better alternative to buying individual sections
and bringing them home to assemble, he says. eystone system is that, but on a far, far grander scale.
Behind Keystone Smith, who studied mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, conceived of a tapered spiral-welding process
and other industries, for investors. As wind energy picked up steam about five years ago, venture capitalists soon funded Smith, Slocum,
and other wind energy experts to study opportunities for cost savings in large, onshore wind turbines. The team looked, for instance,
at developing advanced drivetrain controls and rotor designs. ut out of that study we spotted tower transport as one of the biggest bottlenecks holding back the industry,
In launching Keystone, Smith gives some credit to MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS), which advised the startup cofounders on everything from early company formation to scaling up the business.
Opening up the country Keystone is now conducting structural validation of towers created by its system in collaboration with structural engineers at Northeastern University and Johns hopkins university.
Now, the company is working with the Danish wind turbine manufacturer Vestas Wind Systems, and other turbine makers, to plan out full-scale production,
and is raising investments to construct the first commercial scale machine. Although their first stops may be Germany
and Sweden where taller wind towers are built more frequently, but using more expensive traditional methods Smith says he hopes to sell the system in the United states,
where shorter towers (around 260 feet) are still the norm. The earliest adopters in the United states
he says, would probably be areas where there is strong wind, but also dense tree cover. In Maine, for example, there only a small percentage of the state where wind power is economically feasible today,
because trees block wind from the state shorter turbines. In the Midwest, wind energy has reached already grid-parity,
undercutting even today low-cost natural gas but in areas like New england and the Southeast, taller towers are needed to reach the strong winds that make wind energy economically feasible. nce youe at the heights wee looking at,
Smith says, t really opens up the whole country for turbines to capture large amounts of energy. l
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