Celebrating its 10th anniversary this month the Broad Institute is today home to a community of more than 2000 members including physicians biologists chemists computer scientists engineers staff and representatives of many other disciplines.
A novel control algorithm enables it to move in sync with the wearer s fingers to grasp objects of various shapes and sizes.
Wearing the robot a user could use one hand to for instance hold the base of a bottle while twisting off its cap.
To develop an algorithm to coordinate the robotic fingers with a human hand the researchers first looked to the physiology of hand gestures learning that a hand s five fingers are highly coordinated.
The researchers used this information to develop a control algorithm to correlate the postures of the two robotic fingers with those of the five human fingers.
Asada explains that the algorithm essentially teaches the robot to assume a certain posture that the human expects the robot to take.
As a user works with the robot it could learn to adapt to match his
She likens this machine learning to that of voice-command systems like Apple s Siri. After you ve been using it for a while it gets used to your pronunciation so it can tune to your particular accent Wu says.
This approach could lead to devices to charge cellphones or other electronics using just the humidity in the air.
For example Miljkovic has calculated that at 1 microwatt per square centimeter a cube measuring about 50 centimeters on a side about the size of a typical camping cooler could be sufficient to fully charge a cellphone in about 12 hours.
Near the end of the last decade however a team of MIT researchers led by Professor of Physics Marin Soljacic took definitive steps toward more practical wireless charging.
Now this wireless electricity (or Witricity) technology licensed through the researchers startup Witricity Corp.#is coming to mobile devices electric vehicles and potentially a host of other applications.
But it could also lead to benefits such as smaller batteries and less hardware which would lower costs for manufacturers and consumers.
We believe wireless charging has a potential to do that. He is not alone. Last month Witricity signed a licensing agreement with Intel to integrate Witricity technology into computing devices powered by Intel.
Back in December Toyota licensed Witricity technology for a future line of electric cars. Several more publicized
At present Witricity technology#charges devices#at around 6 to 12 inches with roughly 95 percent efficiency#12 watts for mobile devices and up to 6. 6 kilowatts for cars.
Witricity Corp. recently unveiled a design for a smartphone and wireless charger powered by its technology.
The charger can charge two phones simultaneously and can be placed on top of a table or mounted underneath a table or desk.
Courtesy of Witricity Corp. Full Screen The Witricity technology can charge an electric car with the vehicle parked about a foot above the transmitting pad.
Courtesy of Witricity Corp. Full Screen Stronger couplingsimilar wireless charging technologies have been around for some time. For instance traditional induction charging
or a radio antenna tuning into a single station out of hundreds.##The concept took shape in early 2000s
Frustrated and standing half awake he contemplated ways to harness power from all around to charge the phone.
At the time he was working on various photonics projects lasers solar cells and optical fiber that all involved a phenomenon called resonant coupling.
Wireless charging: An expectationthese days Gruzen sees wireless charging as analogous to the evolution of a similar technology Wifi that he witnessed in the early 2000s as senior vice president of global notebook business at Hewlett packard.
At the time Wifi capabilities were implemented rarely into laptops; this didn t change#until companies began bringing Wireless internet access into hotel lobbies libraries airports and other public places.
Now having established a standard for wireless charging#of consumer devices with the A4wp (Alliance for Wireless Power) known as Rezence Witricity aims to be the driving force behind wireless charging.
Soon Gruzen says it will be an expectation much like Wifi. You can have a charging surface wherever you go from a kitchen counter to your workplace to airport lounge
and hotel lobbies he says. In this future you re not worried about carrying cords. Casual access to topping off power in your devices just becomes an expected thing.
This is where we re Going with an expected rise of wireless charging one promising future application Soljacic sees is in medical devices especially implanted ventricular assist devices (or heart pumps) that support blood flow.
Currently a patient who has experienced a heart attack or weakening of the heart has wires running from the implant to a charger
#Own your own data Cellphone metadata has been in the news quite a bit lately but the National security agency isn t the only organization that collects information about people s online behavior.
Newly downloaded cellphone apps routinely ask to access your location information your address book or other apps and of course websites like Amazon or Netflix track your browsing history in the interest of making personalized recommendations.
At the same time a host of recent studies have demonstrated that it s shockingly easy to identify unnamed individuals in supposedly anonymized data sets even ones containing millions of records.
Their prototype system openpds short for personal data store stores data from your digital devices in a single location that you specify:
It could be encrypted an server in the cloud but it could also be a computer in a locked box under your desk.
Any cellphone app online service or big data research team that wants to use your data has to query your data store
which returns only as much information as is required. Sharing code not data The example I like to use is personalized music says Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye a graduate student in media arts and sciences and first author on the new paper.
and Samuel Wang a software engineer at Foursquare who was a graduate student in the Department of Electrical engineering
and Computer science when the research was done. After an initial deployment involving 21 people who used openpds to regulate access to their medical records the researchers are now testing the system with several telecommunications companies in Italy and Denmark.
Although openpds can in principle run on any machine of the user s choosing in the trials data is being stored in the cloud.
Meaningful permissionsone of the benefits of openpds de Montjoye says is that it requires applications to specify what information they need
You as a user have absolutely no way of knowing what that means. The permissions don t tell you anything.
Openpds preserves all that potentially useful data but in a repository controlled by the end user not the application developer or service provider.
A developer who discovers that a previously unused bit of information is useful must request access to it from the user.
If the request seems unnecessarily invasive the user can simply deny it. Of course a nefarious developer could try to game the system constructing requests that elicit more information than the user intends to disclose.
A navigation application might for instance be authorized to identify the subway stop or parking garage nearest the user.
But it shouldn t need both pieces of information at once and by requesting them it could infer more detailed location information than the user wishes to reveal.
Creating safeguards against such information leaks will have to be done on a case-by-case application-by-application basis de Montjoye acknowledges
because it allows users to control their data and at the same time open up its potential both at the economic level
such as an optical fiber, into the brain to control the selected neurons. Such implants can be difficult to insert,
The result of this screen, Jaws, retained its red-light sensitivity but had a much stronger photocurrent enough to shut down neural activity. his exemplifies how the genomic diversity of the natural world can yield powerful reagents that can be of use in biology and neuroscience,
the researchers were able to shut down neuronal activity in the mouse brain with a light source outside the animal head.
Roska and Busskamp tested the Jaws protein in the mouse retina and found that it more closely resembled the eye natural opsins
where the ability to adjust the texture of panels to minimize drag at different speeds could increase fuel efficiency,
or processing units a computer chip has, the bigger the problem of communication between cores becomes.
For years, Li-Shiuan Peh, the Singapore Research Professor of Electrical engineering and Computer science at MIT, has argued that the massively multicore chips of the future will need to resemble little Internets,
where each core has associated an router, and data travels between cores in packets of fixed size.
This week, at the International Symposium on Computer architecture, Peh group unveiled a 36-core chip that features just such a etwork-on-Chip in addition to implementing many of the group earlier ideas
Cores will spend all their time waiting for the bus to free up, rather than performing computations.
says Bhavya Daya, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, and first author on the new paper. ou can also have multiple paths to your destination.
As it performs computations, it updates the data in its cache, and every so often, it undertakes the relatively time-consuming chore of shipping the data back to main memory.
Groups of declarations reach the routers associated with the cores at discrete intervals intervals corresponding to the time it takes to pass from one end of the shadow network to another.
Each router can thus tabulate exactly how many requests were issued during which interval, and by which other cores.
Core 32 router may receive core 10 request well before it receives core 1 . But it will hold it until it passed along 1. This hierarchical ordering simulates the chronological ordering of requests sent over a bus,
a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan. heir contribution is an interesting one:
and our clever communication protocol will sort out all the details. It a much simpler approach and a faster approach.
Daya intends to load them with a version of the Linux operating system, modified to run on 36 cores,
At that point, she plans to release the blueprints for the chip, written in the hardware description language Verilog,
pulling it slightly toward the leak site. That distortion can be detected by force-resistive sensors via a carefully designed mechanical system (similar to the sensors used in computer trackpads),
and the information sent back via wireless communications. Detecting leaks by sensing a pressure gradient close to leak openings is a novel idea
Chatzigeorgiou says, and key to the effectiveness of this method: This approach can sense a rapid change in pressure close to the leak itself, providing pinpoint accuracy in locating leaks.
By now most people feel comfortable conducting financial transactions on the Web. The cryptographic schemes that protect online banking
you may want your family to be able to share the pictures you post on a social-networking site.
Researchers in the Decentralized Information Group (DIG) at MIT s Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) believe the solution may be transparency rather than obscurity.
At the IEEE s Conference on Privacy Security and Trust in July Oshani Seneviratne an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and Lalana Kagal a principal research scientist at CSAIL will present a paper
DIG is directed by Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the Web and the 3com Founders Professor of Engineering at MIT and it shares office space with the World wide web Consortium (W3c) the organization also led by Berners-Lee that oversees the development of Web protocols like HTTP XML and CSS.
DIG s role is to develop new technologies that exploit those protocols. With HTTPA each item of private data would be assigned its own uniform resource identifier (URI) a key component of the Semantic web a new set of technologies championed by W3c that would convert the Web from essentially a collection of searchable
text files into a giant database. Remote access to a Web server would be controlled much the way it is now through passwords and encryption.
But every time the server transmitted a piece of sensitive data it would also send a description of the restrictions on the data s use.
And it would log the transaction using only the URI somewhere in a network of encrypted special-purpose servers.
HTTPA would be voluntary: It would be up to software developers to adhere to its specifications when designing their systems.
But HTTPA compliance could become a selling point for companies offering services that handle private data.
It s not that difficult to transform an existing website into an HTTPA-aware website Seneviratne says.
On every HTTP request the server should say OK here are the usage restrictions for this resource and log the transaction in the network of special-purpose servers.
But using standard Semantic web techniques it would mark that record as derived from the PCP s record
The network of servers is where the heavy lifting happens. When the data owner requests an audit the servers work through the chain of derivations identifying all the people who have accessed the data and what they ve done with it.
Seneviratne uses a technology known as distributed hash tables the technology at the heart of peer-to-peer networks like Bittorrent to distribute the transaction logs among the servers.
Redundant storage of the same data on multiple servers serves two purposes: First it ensures that
if some servers go down data will remain accessible. And second it provides a way to determine
whether anyone has tried to tamper with the transaction logs for a particular data item such as to delete the record of an illicit use.
A server whose logs differ from those of its peers would be easy to ferret out.
Seneviratne used 300 servers on Planetlab to store the transaction logs; in experiments the system efficiently tracked down data stored across the network
In practice audit servers could be maintained by a grassroots network much like the servers that host Bittorrent files or log Bitcoin transactions s
That why KGS aims to ake buildings betterwith cloud-based software, called Clockworks, that collects existing data on a building equipment specifically in HVAC (heating, ventilation,
The software then translates the data into graphs, metrics, and text that explain monetary losses, where it available for building managers, equipment manufacturers,
Phd 0. The software is now operating in more than 300 buildings across nine countries, collecting more than 2 billion data points monthly.
Last month, MIT commissioned the software for more than 60 of its own buildings, monitoring more than 7, 000 pieces of equipment over 10 million square feet.
Previously, in a yearlong trial for one MIT building, the software saved MIT $286, 000. Benefits, however, extend beyond financial savings,
The software can also help buildings earn additional incentives by participating in utility programs. e have major opportunities in some utility territories,
which is a finer level of granularity than meter-level analytics software that may extract,
For example, Clockworks may detect specific leaky valves or stuck dampers on air handlers in HVAC units that cause excessive heating or cooling.
But it also helps the software produce rapid, intelligent analytics such as accurate graphs, metrics, and text that spell out problems clearly.
it helps the software to rapidly equate data with monetary losses. hen we identify that there a fault with the right data,
KGS Buildingsfoundation The KGS cofounders met as participants in the MIT entry for the 2007 Solar Decathlon an annual competition where college teams build small-scale, solar-powered homes to display at the National Mall
such as developing low-cost sensing technology with wireless communication that could be retrofitted on to older equipment.
Throughout 2010, they began trialing software at several locations, including MIT. They found guidance among the seasoned entrepreneurs at MIT Venture Mentoring Service learning to fail fast,
and advancing its software into other applications. About 180 new buildings were added to Clockworks in the past year;
by the end of 2014, KGS projects it could deploy its software to 800 buildings. arger companies are starting to catch on,
Liberating data By bringing all this data about building equipment to the cloud, the technology has plugged into the nternet of thingsa concept where objects would be connected, via embedded chips and other methods, to the Internet for inventory and other purposes.
so people can read all data associated with it. s more and more devices are connected readily to the Internet,
#The incredible shrinking power brick While laptops continue to shrink in size and weight, the ower bricksthat charge them remain heavy and bulky.
and Justin Burkhart SM 0 FINSIX has developed the world smallest laptop adapter, called the Dart.
The 65-watt Dart can power most laptops, smartphones, and tablets. By November, FINSIX aims to deliver its first shipment of around 4, 500 Darts to Kickstarter backers and other customers.
flat-screen TVS, gaming consoles, laptops, electric bikes, and air conditioners, while reducing the cost of manufacturing.
the company started focusing on laptop adapters. In traditional adapters, an array of switches flip to one state and take in AC voltage from a wall outlet,
In that analogy, the bucket is the adapter that collects the water (electricity) from a full tank (outlet) and dumps it into an empty tank (laptop battery.
and computer science students who were excited to start a company. Around 2010, their interests merged in MIT Sloan 15.390 (New Enterprises),
The team used a combination of computation and experimental analysis to derive the structure of the material,
which can then be recombined using a computer algorithm to recreate the 3-D structure. f you have one light-emitting molecule in your sample,
They also hope to speed up the computing process, which currently takes a few minutes to analyze one second of imaging data.
Google; the NSF Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines at MIT; and Jeremy and Joyce Wertheimer n
#Glasses-free 3-D projector Over the past three years, researchers in the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab have refined steadily a design for a glasses-free, multiperspective, 3-D video screen,
which are like tiny liquid-crystal displays (LCDS) positioned between the light source and the lens. Patterns of light and dark on the first modulator effectively turn it into a bank of slightly angled light emitters that is,
The screen combines two lenticular lenses the type of striated transparent sheets used to create crude 3-D effects in,
Exploiting redundancy For every frame of video, each modulator displays six different patterns which together produce eight different viewing angles:
But like the researchersprototype monitors, the projector takes advantage of the fact that, as you move around an object,
but by tailoring their algorithm to the architecture of the graphics processing units designed for video games,
One of the problems with LCD screens is that they don enable rue black A little light always leaks through even the darkest regions of the display. ormally you have contrast of,
Again, the researchers have developed an algorithm that can calculate those patterns on the fly. As content creators move to so-called uad HD, video with four times the resolution of today high-definition video, the combination of higher contrast and higher resolution could make a commercial version of the researcherstechnology appealing to theater owners,
and project through it and use this software algorithm, and you end up with a 4k image.
Spreading pixels Oliver Cossairt, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Northwestern University, once worked for a company that was attempting to commercialize glasses-free 3-D projectors. hat
is the prototype screen. here is this invariant of optical systems that says that if you take the area of the plane
We couldn figure out a way around that. hey came up with a screen that instead of stretching the image
Next year the BAT will test its ability to power microgrids at a site south of Fairbanks Alaska in an 18-month trial funded by the Alaska Energy Authority.
which can be difficult to maneuver around certain sites. The modular BAT Rein says packs into two midsize shipping containers for transport
Target sites include areas where large diesel generators provide power such as military bases and industrial sites as well as island and rural communities in Hawaii northern Canada India Brazil and parts of Australia.
When the anemometers detect optimal wind speed a custom algorithm adjusts the system s tethers to extend
But perhaps the most logical added payload Glass says is Wi-fi technology: If you have a remote village for instance he says you can put a Wi-fi unit up outside the village
and you re much higher than you d get with a traditional tower. That would allow you to cover six to eight times the area you would with a tower.
At Greentown employees engage in computer modeling and design build electronics and circuit boards develop algorithms
and test winches and cables Looking back Glass credits his undergraduate years on MIT s Solar Electrical Vehicle Team a student organization that builds and races solar
Among the tools that computer scientists are developing to make the profusion of video more useful are algorithms for activity recognition or determining
At the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in June Hamed Pirsiavash a postdoc at MIT and his former thesis advisor Deva Ramanan of the University of California at Irvine will present a new activity
-recognition algorithm that has several advantages over its predecessors. One is that the algorithm s execution time scales linearly with the size of the video file it s searching.
That means that if one file is 10 times the size of another the new algorithm will take 10 times as long to search it not 1000 times
as long as some earlier algorithms would. Another is that the algorithm is able to make good guesses about partially completed actions
so it can handle streaming video. Partway through an action it will issue a probability that the action is of the type that it s looking for.
It may revise that probability as the video continues but it doesn t have to wait until the action is complete to assess it.
Finally the amount of memory the algorithm requires is fixed regardless of how many frames of video it s already reviewed.
The grammar of actionenabling all of these advances is the appropriation of a type of algorithm used in natural language processing the computer science discipline that seeks techniques for interpreting sentences written in natural language.
For any given action Pirsiavash and Ramanan s algorithm must thus learn a new grammar.
machine learning. Pirsiavash and Ramanan feed their algorithm training examples of videos depicting a particular action
and specify the number of subactions that the algorithm should look for. But they don t give it any information about
what those subactions are or what the transitions between them look like. Pruning possibilitiesthe rules relating subactions are the key to the algorithm s efficiency.
As a video plays the algorithm constructs a set of hypotheses about which subactions are being depicted where
and it ranks them according to probability. It can t limit itself to a single hypothesis as each new frame could require it to revise its probabilities.
The researchers tested their algorithm on eight different types of athletic endeavor such as weightlifting and bowling with training videos culled from Youtube.
They found that according to metrics standard in the field of computer vision their algorithm identified new instances of the same activities more accurately than its predecessors.
Pirsiavash is interested particularly in possible medical applications of action detection. The proper execution of physical-therapy exercises for instance could have a grammar that s distinct from improper execution;
Action-detection algorithms could also help determine whether for instance elderly patients remembered to take their medication
if they didn t. We ve known for a very long time that the things that people do are made up of subactivities says David Forsyth a professor of computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
In most photovoltaic (PV) materials, a photon (a packet of sunlight) delivers energy that excites a molecule,
and Computer science and a co-author on the new paper. There s actually not that much at five feet around you.
The researchers also developed an algorithm that determines the optimal pattern for the sensors distribution.
In essence the algorithm maximizes the number of different distances between arbitrary pairs of sensors. With his new colleagues at Lincoln Lab Krieger has performed experiments at radar frequencies using a one-dimensional array of sensors deployed in a parking lot
#Computer system automatically solves word problems Researchers in MIT Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory, working with colleagues at the University of Washington, have developed a new computer system that can automatically solve the type of word problems common in introductory algebra classes.
In the near term, the work could lead to educational tools that identify errors in studentsreasoning
an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and lead author on the new paper, the new work is in the field of emantic parsing,
or translating natural language into a formal language such as arithmetic or formal logic. Most previous work on semantic parsing including his own has focused on individual sentences,
a professor of computer science and engineering and one of his two thesis advisors, and by the University of Washington Yoav Artzi and Luke Zettlemoyer.
The researchers will present their work at the annual meeting of the Association for Computational linguistics in June.
One is the computer algebra system Macsyma, whose initial development at MIT in the 1960s was a milestone in artificial-intelligence research.
and to produce the equation templates, the researchers used machine learning. Kushman found a website on which algebra students posted word problems they were having difficulty with,
and where their peers could then offer solutions. From an initial group of roughly 2
however, they used two different approaches or, in the parlance of machine learning, two different types of supervision.
a professor of computer science of the University of Southern California. he approach of building a generative story of how people get from text to answers is a great idea.
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