#Ride sharing could cut cabs road time by 30 percent Cellphone apps that find users car rides in real time are exploding in popularity:
The car service company Uber was recently valued at $18 billion and even as it faces legal wrangles a number of companies that provide similar services with licensed taxi cabs have sprung up.
What if the taxi-service app on your cellphone had a button on it that let you indicate that you were willing to share a ride with another passenger?
How drastically could cab-sharing reduce traffic fares and carbon dioxide emissions? Authoritatively answering that question requires analyzing huge volumes of data
which hasn t been computationally feasible with traditional methods. But in today s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences researchers at MIT Cornell University
and the Italian National Research Council s Institute for Informatics and Telematics present a new technique that enabled them to exhaustively analyze 150 million trip records collected from more than 13000 New york city cabs over the course of a year.
Their conclusions: If passengers had been willing to tolerate no more than five minutes in delays per trip almost 95 percent of the trips could have been shared.
The optimal combination of trips would have reduced total travel time by 40 percent with corresponding reductions in operational costs and carbon dioxide emissions.
Of course nobody should ever be forced to share a vehicle says Carlo Ratti professor of the practice in MIT s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP) and one of the paper s coauthors.
However our research shows what would happen if people have sharing as an option. This is more than a theoretical exercise with services such as Uber Pool bringing these ideas into practice.
On the flyfinding the optimal combination of trips does require foreknowledge of trips starting times: For instance a 30-minute trip the length of Manhattan might be combined with a 10-minute trip beginning 15 minutes later.
But that kind of advance planning is unlikely if the passengers are using cellphone apps. So the researchers also analyzed the data on the assumption that only trips starting within a minute of each other could be combined.
Even then they still found a 32 percent reduction in total travel time. We think that with the potential of a 30 percent reduction in operational costs there is plenty of room for redistributing these benefits to customers
because we have to offer them lower fares; to drivers because we have to incentivize them to belong to this system;
to companies; and of course there is a benefit for the community says Paolo Santi a visiting scientist in DUSP and first author on the paper.
In fact Santi says the results of his and his colleagues analysis were so striking that they asked Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz to review their methodology.
Strogatz is a co-author on the paper as are Ratti and postdoc Stanislav Sobolevsky both of MIT s Senseable City Lab. Rounding out the author list are Michael Szell who was a postdoc in the Senseable City lab
when the work was done and is now at Northeastern University and Giovanni Resta a researcher at Santi s home institution the Institute for Informatics and Telematics.
In analyzing taxi data for ride sharing opportunities Typically the approach that was taken was a variation of the so-called traveling-salesman problem Santi explains.
This is the basic algorithmic framework and then there are extensions for sharing. The traveling-salesman problem asks
whether given a set of cities and the travel times between them there is a route that would allow a traveling salesman to reach all of them within some time limit.
Unfortunately the traveling-salesman problem is also an example indeed perhaps the most famous example of an NP-complete problem meaning that even for moderate-sized data sets it can t (as far as anyone knows) be solved in a reasonable amount of time.
the time and GPS coordinates of both the pickup and the dropoff. Then for each trip their algorithm identifies the set of other trips that overlap with it the ones that begin before it ends.
Then it determines whether the trip they re examining can be combined with any of those other trips without exceeding the delay threshold.
Next the algorithm represents the shareability of all 150 million trips in the database as a graph.
The graphical representation itself was the key to the researchers analysis. With that in hand well-known algorithms can efficiently find the optimal matchings to either maximize sharing
The researchers also conducted experiments to ensure that their matching algorithm would work in real time if it ran on a server used to coordinate data from cellphones running a taxi-sharing app.
They found that even running on a single Linux box it could find optimal matchings for about 100000 trips in a tenth of a second
whereas the GPS data indicated that on average about 300 new taxi trips were initiated in New york every minute.
Finally an online application designed by Szell Hubcab allows people to explore the taxi data themselves using a map of New york as an interface.
David Mahfouda the CEO of the car-and taxi-hailing company Bandwagon whose business model is built specifically around ride sharing says that his company hired analysts to examine the same data set that Santi
and his colleagues did. We did analysis of rides from Laguardia Airport and were able to build really detailed maps around where passengers were headed from that high-density departure point he says.
Making the entire data set available on a queryable basis does seem like a significantly larger lift.
He adds that at the 2014 Consumer electronics Show in Las vegas Bandwagon ran a demonstration version of its service for conference attendees.
Over a four-day period he says ride sharing saved $18000 in fares and operational costs and more than 1000 pounds in carbon emissions.
if you re willing to share vehicles s
#A new way to diagnose malaria Over the past several decades malaria diagnosis has changed very little.
After taking a blood sample from a patient a technician smears the blood across a glass slide stains it with a special dye
which causes the disease. This approach gives an accurate count of how many parasites are in the blood an important measure of disease severity
but is not ideal because there is potential for human error. A research team from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research
The researchers have devised a way to use magnetic resonance relaxometry (MRR) a close cousin of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI to detect a parasitic waste product in the blood of infected patients.
This technique could offer a more reliable way to detect malaria says Jongyoon Han a professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering at MIT.
It s based on a naturally occurring biomarker that does not require any biochemical processing of samples says Han one of the senior authors of a paper describing the technique in the Aug 31 issue of Nature Medicine.
Peter Rainer Preiser of SMART and Nanyang Technical University in Singapore is also a senior author.
Hunting malaria with magnetswith the traditional blood-smear technique a technician stains the blood with a reagent that dyes cell nuclei.
However the technology and expertise needed to identify the parasite are not always available in some of the regions most affected by malaria
which can be toxic so the parasite converts the iron into hemozoin a weakly paramagnetic crystallite.
Those crystals interfere with the normal magnetic spins of hydrogen atoms. When exposed to a powerful magnetic field hydrogen atoms align their spins in the same direction.
When a second smaller field perturbs the atoms they should all change their spins in synchrony
or lab bench but the team is also working on a portable version that is about the size of a small electronic tablet.
which can be obtained with a finger prick making the procedure minimally invasive and much easier for health care workers than drawing blood intravenously.
This system can be built at a very low cost relative to the million-dollar MRI machines used in a hospital Peng says.
Tracking infectionhemozoin crystals are produced in all four stages of malaria infection including the earliest stages
Also the amount of hemozoin can reveal how severe the infection is or whether it is responding to treatment.
and requires less blood sample as compared to the standard blood-smear protocol says Donhee Ham a professor of electrical engineering at Harvard university who was not part of the research team.
The researchers are launching a company to make this technology available at an affordable price.
MIT alumni entrepreneurs Gauti Reynisson MBA 10 and var Helgason HS 08 spent the early 2000s working for companies that implemented medication-safety technologies
such as electronic-prescription and pill-barcoding systems at hospitals in their native Iceland and other European countries.
But all that time spent in hospitals soon opened their eyes to a major health care issue:
Indeed a 2006 report from the Institute of Medicine found that 1. 5 million hospitalized patients in the United states experience medication errors every year due in part to drug-administration mistakes.
There they teamed up with Mar A r narsd ttir MBA 08 and devised Medeye a bedside medication-scanning system that uses computer vision to identify pills
and check them against medication records to ensure that a patient gets the right drug and dosage.
Commercialized through startup Mint Solutions Medeye has now been used for a year in hospitals in The netherlands where the startup is based) garnering significant attention from the medical community.
Medication verification is a pinnacle point of medical safety says Helgason a physician and product developer.
Mint Solutions aim Reynisson says is to aid nurses in rapidly efficiently and correctly administering medication.
We want the device to be the nurse s best friend says Reynisson now Mint s CEO.
which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars Currently the startup has raised $6 million in funding
and working with a Dutch health care insurance company to bring the Medeye to 15 hospitals across the country as well as Belgium the United kingdom and Germany.
Systematic approachto use the Medeye a foot-high box in a white housing a nurse first scans a patient s wristband
The nurse then pushes the assigned pills into the Medeye via a sliding tray. Inside the device a small camera scans the pills rapidly identifying them by size shape color and markings.
Algorithms distinguish the pills by matching them against a database of nearly all pills in circulation.
Although the hardware is impressive much innovation is in Medeye s software which cross-references (and updates) the results in the patient s records.
If a pill isn t in Medeye s database because it s new for instance the system alerts the nurse who adds the information into the software for next time.
It does all the querying for the right medication for the right patient and takes care of the paperwork Helgason says.
We save a lot of time for nurses that way. Similar systems exist for catching medication errors:
About 15 years ago some hospitals began using barcode systems which Reynisson and Helgason actually helped install in some Dutch and German hospitals.
These systems also require nurses to use a handheld scanner to scan a patient s wristband
and then the imprinted barcodes on each pill container. But the hurdle has been getting these installed Reynisson says.
Companies sell medications with barcodes others sell software or barcode scanners. Hospitals have to make all these things work together
and it s hard for small and medium hospitals to afford. No one is selling turn-key barcode systems.
That s where Medeye is truly unique Helgason says: As an entire system that requires no change in a hospital s workflow or logistics it s more usable and more accessible in health care facilities.
Feedback from nurses using Medeye to ease their workloads has been positive Reynisson says. And errors are caught more often than expected.
In fact he recalls a memorable moment last year when a nurse at the Dutch hospital demonstrated the Medeye for department heads on a random patient.
The nurse scanned four pills which had been assigned to the patient and added an extra erroneous pill to show how Medeye caught errors.
Medeye showed the extra pill was incorrect. But to his surprise so were two other pills that the nurse had assumed were correct
because another nurse had dispensed those Reynisson says. Goes to show that even with full focus it is common for nurses to be in a position where they are expected to catch errors made in other parts of the medication-delivery process.
Vision for new technologyhelgason conceived of Medeye while studying in the MIT-Harvard Health Sciences and Technology program.
In a computer-vision class in the Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory he saw that advances in 3-D object-recognition technology meant computers could learn objects based on various characteristics.
At the same time he started taking heed of MIT s burgeoning startup ecosystem prompting him to contact his longtime medical device colleague.
I remember var called me one day and said Gauti you have to come to MIT:
Everyone s starting companies says Reynisson a trained programmer who wrote early object-recognition code for the Medeye.
Seeking a change of pace from computer science Reynisson enrolled in the MIT Sloan School of management where he saw that Helgason was right.
and startup pitch receiving help from mentors professors and even business-savvy students. That s when we started to think of a business beyond the technology Reynisson says.
We left with a fairly sizeable business plan to take to investors and get funding. The team felt unsure of the technology at first.
But a 2010 demonstration at a Dutch hospital of an early prototype a bulkier version of the Medeye with off-the-shelf parts constructed at MIT changed their perception.
The hospital had to identify about 250 small white pills of different medications that in fact all looked the same.
We tried them all in our prototype at once and it worked Reynisson says. That s when we realized what a change it would be for a hospital to collect data
and important safety information and get it fast and efficiently without asking the nurse to pick up a pen.
Mint Solution now has 40 Medeye systems ready to deploy across Europe in the coming months with hopes of gaining some client feedback.
At the core of the startup is this belief that better information technology in hospitals can both increase efficiency
Furthermore the researchers found that they could reverse the emotional association of specific memories by manipulating brain cells with optogenetics a technique that uses light to control neuron activity.
This circuit could offer a target for new drugs to help treat conditions such as posttraumatic stress disorder the researchers say In the future one may be able to develop methods that help people to remember positive memories more strongly than negative ones says Susumu Tonegawa the Picower
Professor of Biology and Neuroscience director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at MIT s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and senior author of the paper.#
#The paper s lead authors are Roger Redondo a Howard hughes medical institute postdoc at MIT and Joshua Kim a graduate student in MIT s Department of biology.
Shifting memoriesmemories are made of many elements which are stored in different parts of the brain. A memory s context including information about the location where the event took place is stored in cells of the hippocampus
and posttraumatic stress disorder but the neural circuitry underlying such malleability is known not. In this study the researchers set out to explore that malleability with an experimental technique they recently devised that allows them to tag neurons that encode a specific memory or engram.
Last year Tonegawa s lab used this technique to implant or incept false memories in mice by reactivating engrams
First they used their engram-labeling protocol to tag neurons associated with either a rewarding experience (for male mice socializing with a female mouse) or an unpleasant experience (a mild electrical shock.
Two days later the mice were placed into a large rectangular arena. For three minutes the researchers recorded which half of the arena the mice naturally preferred.
Then for mice that had received the fear conditioning the researchers stimulated the labeled cells in the dentate gyrus with light
Next the researchers again put the mice in the large two-zone arena. This time the mice that had originally been conditioned with fear
whether reactivating pleasant memories has any effect on depression in hopes of identifying new targets for drugs to treat depression and posttraumatic stress disorder.
David Anderson a professor of biology at the California Institute of technology says the study makes an important contribution to neuroscientists fundamental understanding of the brain
and also has potential implications for treating mental illness. This is a tour de force of modern molecular-biology-based methods for analyzing processes such as learning and memory at the neural-circuitry level.
It s one of the most sophisticated studies of this type that I ve seen he says.
The research was funded by the RIKEN Brain science Institute Howard hughes medical institute and the JPB Foundation i
#Sorting cells with sound waves Researchers from MIT, Pennsylvania State university, and Carnegie mellon University have devised a new way to separate cells by exposing them to sound waves as they flow through a tiny channel.
Their device, about the size of a dime, could be used to detect the extremely rare tumor cells that circulate in cancer patientsblood,
helping doctors predict whether a tumor is going to spread. Separating cells with sound offers a gentler alternative to existing cell-sorting technologies,
which require tagging the cells with chemicals or exposing them to stronger mechanical forces that may damage them. coustic pressure is very mild and much smaller in terms of forces and disturbance to the cell.
This is a most gentle way to separate cells, and there no artificial labeling necessary, says Ming Dao, a principal research scientist in MIT Department of Materials science and engineering and one of the senior authors of the paper,
which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Subra Suresh, president of Carnegie mellon, the Vannevar bush Professor of Engineering Emeritus,
and a former dean of engineering at MIT, and Tony Jun Huang, a professor of engineering science and mechanics at Penn State, are also senior authors of the paper.
Lead authors are MIT postdoc Xiaoyun Ding and Zhangli Peng a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Notre dame. The researchers have filed for a patent on the device, the technology
of which they have demonstrated can be used to separate rare circulating cancer cells from white blood cells. To sort cells using sound waves,
scientists have built previously microfluidic devices with two acoustic transducers, which produce sound waves on either side of a microchannel.
a professor of mechanical science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. hat is just enough to make cells of different sizes
who was involved not in this work. In this study, the researchers first tested the system with plastic beads, finding that it could separate beads with diameters of 9. 9 and 7. 3 microns (thousandths of a millimeter) with about 97 percent accuracy.
They also devised a computer simulation that can predict a cell trajectory through the channel based on its size
To test whether the device could be useful for detecting circulating tumor cells, the researchers tried to separate breast cancer cells known as MCF-7 cells from white blood cells.
the researchers plan to test it with blood samples from cancer patients to see how well it can detect circulating tumor cells in clinical settings.
A 1-milliliter sample of blood may contain only a few tumor cells. f you can detect these rare circulating tumor cells,
it a good way to study cancer biology and diagnose whether the primary cancer has moved to a new site to generate metastatic tumors,
Dao says. his method is a step forward for detection of circulating tumor cells in the body.
It has the potential to offer a safe and effective new tool for cancer researchers, clinicians and patients,
Suresh says. The research was funded by the National institutes of health and the National Science Foundation a
#Unlocking the potential of simulation software With a method known as finite element analysis (FEA), engineers can generate 3-D digital models of large structures to simulate how theyl fare under stress, vibrations, heat,
and other real-world conditions. Used for mapping out large-scale structures such as mining equipment, buildings, and oil rigs these simulations require intensive computation done by powerful computers over many hours, costing engineering firms much time and money.
Now MIT spinout Akselos has developed novel software, based on years of research at the Institute, that uses precalculated supercomputer data for structural components like simulated egosto solve FEA models in seconds.
A simulation that could take hours with conventional FEA software for instance, could be done in seconds with Akselosplatform.
Hundreds of engineers in the mining, power-generation, and oil and gas industries are now using the Akselos software.
The startup is also providing software for an MITX course on structural engineering. With its technology, Akselos aims to make 3-D simulations more accessible worldwide to promote efficient engineering design,
says David Knezevic, Akseloschief technology officer, who co-founded the startup with former MIT postdoc Phuong Huynh
and alumnus Thomas Leurent SM01. ee trying to unlock the value of simulation software, since for many engineers current simulation software is far too slow
and labor-intensive, especially for large models, Knezevic says. igh-fidelity simulation enables more cost-effective designs, better use of energy and materials,
and generally an increase in overall efficiency. imulation componentsakselossoftware runs on a novel technique called the educed basis (RB) component method,
co-invented by Anthony Patera, the Ford Professor of Engineering at MIT, and Knezevic and Huynh.
The technique builds on a decade of research by Patera group. This technique merges the concept of the RB method
which reproduces expensive FEA results by solving related calculations that are much faster with the idea of decomposing larger simulations into an assembly of components. e developed a component-based version of the reduced basis method,
which enables users to build large and complex 3-D models out of a set of parameterized components,
Knezevic says. In 2010, the firm founders were part of a team, led by Patera, that used that technique to create a mobile app that displayed supercomputer simulations, in seconds, on a smartphone.
A supercomputer first presolved problems such as fluid flow around a spherical obstacle in a pipe that had known a form
but for dozens of different parameters. These parameters were chosen automatically to cover a range of possible solutions.
When app users plugged in custom parameters for problems such as the diameter of that spherical obstacle the app would compute a solution for the new parameters by referencing the precomputed data.
Today Akselos software runs on a similar principle, but with new software, and cloud-based service.
A supercomputer precalculates individual components, such as, say, a simple tube or a complex mechanical part. nd this creates a big data footprint for each one of these components,
which we push to the cloud, Knezevic says. These components contain adjustable parameters, which enable users to vary properties,
such as geometry, density, and stiffness. Engineers can then access and customize a library of precalculated components,
drag and drop them into an ssemblerplatform, and connect them to build a full simulation.
After that, the software will reference the precomputed data to create a highly detailed 3-D simulation in seconds.
In one demonstration, for instance, a mining company used components available in the Akselos library to rapidly create a simulation of shiploader infrastructure complete with high-stress ot spotsthat needed inspection.
and created modified simulations within a few minutes. he software also allows people to model the machinery in its true state,
since with other software it not feasible to simulate large structures in full 3-D detail.
Ultimately, pushing the data to the cloud has helped Akselos, by leveraging the age-old tradeoff between speed and storage:
By storing and reusing more data, algorithms can do less work and hence finish more quickly. hese days,
with cloud technology, storing lots of data is no big deal. We store a lot more data than other methods,
but that data, in turn, allows us to go faster, because wee able to reuse as much precomputed data as possible,
he says. Bringing technology to the world Akselos was founded in 2012, after Knezevic and Huynh,
along with Leurent who actually started FEA work with Patera group back in 2000 earned a Deshpande innovation grant for their upercomputing-on-a-smartphoneinnovation. hat was a trigger,
Knezevic says. ur passion and goal has always been to bring new technology to the world.
That where the Deshpande Center and the MIT innovation ecosystem are great. From there, Akselos grew with additional help from MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS),
sales, opening a Web platform to users, and hiring. e needed a sounding board, Knezevic says. e go into meetings
who is using the startup software albeit a limited version in her MITX class, 2. 01x (Elements of Structures).
Feedback from students has been positive, Knezevic says. Primarily, he hears that the software is allowing students to uild intuition for the physics of structures beyond
what they could see by simply solving math problems. n 2. 01x the students learn about axial loading, bending,
and torsion we have apps for each case so they can visualize the stress, strain,
and displacement in 3-D in their browser, he says. e think it a great way to show students the value of fast, 3-D simulations.
Commercially, Akselos is expanding, hiring more employees in its three branches in Boston Vietnam, and Switzerland building a community of users,
and planning to continue its involvement with edx classes. On Knezevic end, at the Boston office, it all about software development, tailoring features to customer needs a welcome challenge for the longtime researcher. n academia,
typically only you and a few colleagues use the software, he says. ut in a company you have people all over the world playing with it
and testing it, saying, his button needs to be need thereor e this new type of analysis. Everything revolves around the customer.
But it was good to have that solid footing in academic work that we could build on
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