we need ways to monitor neural function deep in the brain with spatial, temporal, and functional precision, he says.
The researchers also developed an algorithm that lets them calculate the precise amount of dopamine present in each fraction of a cubic millimeter of the ventral striatum.
And we have a solution. ompared to our competitors at the panel level, we can recover twice as much energy under partial shading conditions, at a fraction of existing costs, added Arthur Chang,
an MIT Phd student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) who invented the technology. With the prize money, the team including students from MIT, the California Institute of technology,
Existing solutions for partially shaded solar panels optimize power at the panel level. But these bulky oxesrely on costly energy storage components
The idea is that providing power balance for individual PV cells instead of for an entire panel allows for finer tuning of power optimization. hen youe at the cell level,
an EECS Phd student studying power electronics, said during the team pitch. t empowers users to build their own grid, from the ground up,
which is developing smart LED LIGHTS that can wirelessly connect to the Internet and change colors to match people moods p
which houses computers for automation and control, and expandable 20,000-gallon treatment units. In these units, microbes called xoelectrogensexecute a unique process, electromethanogenesis which is being used for the first time ever in treating wastewater.
Depending on several site factors, this produces anywhere from 30 to 400 kilowatts of electricity. Treated wastewater exits the reactor with 80 to 90 percent of pollutants removed,
Ecovolt, on the other hand, is applicable to a range of sites, and has demonstrated a more robust treatment process,
The researchers also believe this test could be exploited to screen for new drugs that inhibit
and to monitor whether treatments are having the desired effect according to the researchers who describe the device in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 21.
Long-term MRIMRI uses magnetic fields and radio waves that interact with protons in the body to produce detailed images of the body s interior.
and sciences at MIT gets about 100 emails daily from people across the world interested in his bionic limbs.
Then algorithms generate fluctuating power depending on terrain to propel a wearer up and forward. When fitting the prosthesis to patients prosthetists can program appropriate stiffness
and power throughout all the stages of a gait using software created by Herr s group a process the company calls Personal Bionic Tuning.
Several of these prototype designs with exposed mechanical parts and looping wires are on permanent display at the MIT Media Lab. Still today Herr can remember stepping into the group s first bionic leg prototype and then back
Herr s experience commercializing a computer-controlled knee joint designed by his group for the Icelandic company Ossur inspired him to launch iwalk in 2006.
One could just bolt these pieces together to produce a humanoid hardware platform Herr says.
based on computer analysis. But translating that theoretical work into a practical material proved daunting: In order to reach the desired energy density the amount of energy that can be stored in a given weight
what their computer simulations showed they would need, the material nevertheless seemed to deliver the heat storage they were aiming for.
smartphone-readable particle that they believe could be deployed to help authenticate currency, electronic parts, and luxury goods, among other products.
without impacting smartphone readout or requiring a complete redesign of the system. Another advantage to these particles is that they can be read without an expensive decoder like those required by most other anti-counterfeiting technologies.
Using a smartphone camera equipped with a lens offering twentyfold magnification anyone could image the particles after shining near-infrared light on them with a laser pointer.
The researchers are also working on a smartphone app that would further process the images and reveal the exact composition of the particles.
and privacy filters for display screens. The work is described in a paper appearing this week in the journal Science,
The filtering could also be applied to display screens on phones or computers so only those viewing from directly in front could see them.
associate professor of mathematics Steven Johnson; John Joannopoulos, the Francis Wright Davis Professor of Physics; and Dexin Ye of Zhejiang University in China.
Using a computer algorithm that traces the shapes of neurons and groups them based on structural similarity,
the researchers sorted more than 350 mouse retinal neurons into 15 types, including six that were unidentified previously.
Using a computer algorithm, they traced along the many branches, known as dendrites, that extend from each cell to connect with other cells.
the researchers used a computer program to align and condense each one so that the arbors were represented by smaller,
the computer program correctly classified all of the known neurons. Among the randomly selected neurons, some ended up being grouped with the known types,
By programming cells to produce different types of curli fibers under certain conditions the researchers were able to control the biofilms properties
Results can be plugged into the company software, which tracks contaminated products and can provide analytics on
and paper or spreadsheets to track contamination hich makes it nearly impossible to gather large amounts of data,
which excites electrons that flow through the thylakoid membranes of the chloroplast. The plant captures this electrical energy
We re excited about soft robots for a variety of reasons says Daniela Rus a professor of computer science
and engineering director of MIT s Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory and one of the researchers who designed
and Computer science and lead author on the new paper where he s joined by Rus and postdoc Cagdas D. Onal.
He used the lab s 3-D printer to build the mold in which he cast the fish s tail
Video Melanie Gonick All of our algorithms and control theory are designed pretty much with the idea that we ve got rigid systems with defined joints says Barry Trimmer a biology professor at Tufts University who specializes in biomimetic soft robots.
and survive at a distant site, the researchers say. Many of the proteins overexpressed in the more aggressive tumors are activated by the same cellular signaling pathways,
It would be impractical to do this kind of large-scale protein screen in patients, but it could be possible to test samples for certain proteins using antibodies,
Custom software reads the driver s braking habits and optimizes the system. The startup also collects operational data from the vehicles to inform fleet managers of the best vehicles for the technology usually ones traveling in the stop
With the Internet boom in full swing he co-founded a couple of dot-coms but began viewing climate change and energy as the real challenges of my generation.
When we invented this new class of synthetic biomarker we used a highly specialized instrument to do the analysis says Bhatia the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical engineering and Computer science.
The simple readout could even be transmitted to a remote caregiver by a picture on a mobile phone.
These particles congregate at tumor sites where MMPS cleave hundreds of peptides which accumulate in the kidneys
For example the program has produced the first of a planned series of science centers a simple concrete building outfitted with computers
The program links MIT teachers and mentors to Tibetan community programs through Skype supplemented by regular travel by Dalai lama Center staff alumni and students who among other work teach weeklong leadership
and a bicycle-powered charging system for cellphones and lanterns. Davide Zaccagnini a vascular surgeon and program manager for the Science Monks and Technology Leadership Program says he was motivated to join because
Patients play a video game by maneuvering the robot arm, with the robot assisting as needed. While the robot has mainly been used as a form of physical therapy,
Using the robot-derived neural network map, the group calculated the effect size at twice the rate usually achieved with standard clinical outcome measurements,
#Cochlear implants with no exterior hardware Cochlear implants medical devices that electrically stimulate the auditory nerve have granted at least limited hearing to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide who otherwise would be totally deaf.
low-power signal processing chip that could lead to a cochlear implant that requires no external hardware.
both in MIT Department of Electrical engineering and Computer science, will also exhibit a prototype charger that plugs into an ordinary cell phone
and can recharge the signal processing chip in roughly two minutes. he idea with this design is that you could use a phone, with an adaptor,
Lowering the power requirements of the converter chip was the key to dispensing with the skull-mounted hardware.
and found a low-power way to implement it in hardware. Two of their collaborators at MEEI Konstantina Stankovic, an ear surgeon who co-led the study with Chandrakasan,
It a window into processes happening at the millisecond and millimeter scale, says Aude Oliva, a principal research scientist in MIT Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL.
The MIT researchers are now using representational similarity analysis to study the accuracy of computer models of vision by comparing brain scan data with the modelspredictions of how vision works.
#Bringing the world reboot-less updates It s an annoyance for the individual computer user:
You ve updated your operating system and now you need to reboot. This is so the computer can switch to the modified source code.
Imagine however having to update and reboot hundreds or thousands of computers operating in large companies and organizations:
It can have a significant impact in lost time and money as computers and online services shut down sometimes for hours.
To avoid downtime organizations will usually wait for low-traffic periods to update but this can leave the servers outdated or vulnerable to cyber attacks.
In 2008 Jeff Arnold 07 MENG 08 along with a team of MIT computer scientists and engineers began solving this issue by developing
and commercializing software called Ksplice that automatically applies patches (security updates or bug fixes) to an operating system on the fly without requiring a reboot.
Based on Arnold s award-winning MIT master s thesis the novel software compares changes between the old
and updated code and implements those changes into a running Linux kernel an operating system s core data-processing component.
In essence it does something that could normally be achieved only by shutting down the operating system. The software also incorporates novel techniques that remove the need for programmer intervention with the code (a trademark of performing updates without Ksplice)
which decreases the cost and risk of error Arnold says. The aim is to allow administrators the benefit of the update
while eliminating both the cost and downtime for the users Arnold says. After winning the 2009 MIT $100k Entrepreneurship Competition for the software Arnold co-founded Ksplice Inc. with Waseem Daher 07 MENG 08 Tim Abbott 07 SM 08
and Anders Kaseorg 08 in Cambridge to launch it as a commercial product. Arnold served as the company s CEO.
In just 18 months Ksplice accumulated 700 customers independent firms government agencies and Fortune 500 companies that were running the software on more than 100000 servers.
Then the startup sold for an undisclosed amount to technology giant Oracle which is now providing the software to its Oracle Linux customers
which include banks retail firms and telecommunications companies worldwide. After the purchase the Ksplice team joined Oracle to help the company integrate the software in its products.
As of today Ksplice has only ever run on Linux operating systems. But Daher says the code is written in a way that should make it potentially expandable to other products such as Mac and Windows operating systems.
Object focusedthe process of updating running kernels is called hot updating or hot patching and predates Ksplice.
But Ksplice s novelty is that it constructs hot patches using the object code binary that a computer can understand instead of the source code computer instructions written
and modified as text by a programmer (such as in C++ or Java). Hot patching a program without Ksplice requires a programmer to construct replacement source code
or manually inspect the code to create an update. Programmers might also need to resolve ambiguity in the code say choosing the correct location in computer memory
when two or more software components have the same name. Ksplice however hot patches the object code using two novel techniques invented by Arnold.
The first called pre-post differencing creates object code before a patch (pre) and object code modified by the patch (post) on the fly.
It then compares the pre and post code to determine what code has been modified extracts the changed code
and puts the code into its own updated object file which it will plug into the running kernel.
Essentially it makes changes to functions modified by the patch and points to relocated updated versions of those functions.
The second technique called run-pre matching computes the address in computer memory of ambiguous code by using custom computation to compare the pre code with the finalized running kernel (run code.
while the servers were in heavy use he delayed installing the update until the weekend.
This wait unfortunately resulted in a cyber attack that required reinstalling all the system software. That s what motivated
You can t bring servers down right away and can t wait until you have a chance to update
Under the tutelage of Frans Kaashoek the Charles A. Piper Professor of Computer science and Engineering Arnold started developing Ksplice for his graduate thesis
and accounting challenging for people with strictly computer science backgrounds Daher says. For help they turned to MIT s Venture Mentoring Service (VMS)
Arnold and Daher are now working on another software startup at the Cambridge Business Center and still keep in touch with the VMS they say.
Mobile phone usage is far more prevalent in Kenya than traditional banking is and the system lets people transfer money by text message.
users requested an ascension pace of 10 feet per second. But Atlas found that as soon as you maneuver over,
Today, Atlas is aiming for wider adoption of the APA. ike any good ee-whiz gadget,
when customers start thinking of it less as just a gadget, and instead as an important component in their equipment locker.
as well as for first responders. here a broad spectrum of users people who use rope access as part of their work for
Now your face could be transformed instantly into a more memorable one without the need for an expensive makeover thanks to an algorithm developed by researchers in MIT s Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL.
The algorithm which makes subtle changes to various points on the face to make it more memorable without changing a person s overall appearance was unveiled earlier this month at the International Conference on Computer Vision in Sydney.
which people will actually remember a face says lead author Aditya Khosla a graduate student in the Computer Vision group within CSAIL.
More memorable or lessthe system could ultimately be used in a smartphone app to allow people to modify a digital image of their face before uploading it to their social networking pages.
It could also be used for job applications to create a digital version of an applicant s face that will more readily stick in the minds of potential employers says Khosla who developed the algorithm with CSAIL principal research scientist Aude Oliva the senior author of the paper Antonio
Torralba an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and graduate student Wilma Bainbridge. Conversely it could also be used to make faces appear less memorable
To develop the memorability algorithm the team first fed the software a database of more than 2000 images.
In this way the software was able to analyze the information to detect subtle trends in the features of these faces that made them more or less memorable to people.
The researchers then programmed the algorithm with a set of objectives to make the face as memorable as possible
and so would fail to meet the algorithm s objectives. When the system has a new face to modify it first takes the image
The algorithm then analyzes how well each of these samples meets its objectives. Once the algorithm finds a sample that succeeds in making the face look more memorable without significantly altering the person s appearance it makes yet more copies of this new image with each containing further alterations.
It then keeps repeating this process until it finds a version that best meets its objectives.
When they tested these images on a group of volunteers they found that the algorithm succeeded in making the faces more or less memorable as required in around 75 percent of cases.
We all wish to use a photo that makes us more visible to our audience says Aleix Martinez an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Ohio State university.
Now Oliva and her team have developed a computational algorithm that can do this for us he says.
The research was funded by grants from Xerox Google Facebook and the Office of Naval Research h
All the hardware it requires can already be found in commercial lidar systems; the new system just deploys that hardware in a manner more in tune with the physics of low light-level imaging and natural scenes.
Count the photonsas Ahmed Kirmani a graduate student in MIT s Department of Electrical engineering and Computer science and lead author on the new paper explains the very idea of forming an image with only a single photon detected at each pixel location is counterintuitive.
The way a camera senses images is through different numbers of detected photons at different pixels Kirmani says.
The technique known as raster scanning is how old cathode ray tube-tube televisions produced images illuminating one phosphor dot on the screen at a time.
The camera is based on ime of Flighttechnology like that used in Microsoft recently launched second-generation Kinect device, in
Instead, the new device uses an encoding technique commonly used in the telecommunications industry to calculate the distance a signal has travelled
we can do calculations that are very common in the telecommunications world, to estimate different distances from the single signal.
a graduate student in the Media Lab. eople with shaky hands tend to take blurry photographs with their cellphones
This allows the team to use inexpensive hardware off-the-shelf light-emitting diodes (LEDS) can strobe at nanosecond periods,
much like the human eye, says James Davis, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa cruz. In contrast,
and apply sophisticated computation to the resulting data, Davis says. ormally the computer scientists who could invent the processing on this data can build the devices,
and the people who can build the devices cannot really do the computation, he says. his combination of skills
and techniques is really unique in the work going on at MIT right now. What more, the basic technology needed for the team approach is very similar to that already being shipped in devices such as the new version of Kinect,
Davis says. o it going to go from expensive to cheap thanks to video games, and that should shorten the time before people start wondering what it can be used for,
This approach offers a huge array of recognition sites specific to different targets, and could be used to create sensors to monitor diseases such as cancer, inflammation,
Synthetic antibodies The new polymer-based sensors offer a synthetic design approach to the production of molecular recognition sites enabling, among other applications, the detection of a potentially infinite library of targets.
In the new paper, the researchers describe molecular recognition sites that enable the creation of sensors specific to riboflavin, estradiol (a form of estrogen),
but they are now working on sites for many other types of molecules, including neurotransmitters, carbohydrates, and proteins.
it forms a binding site, Strano says. Laurent Cognet, a senior scientist at the Institute of Optics at the University of Bordeaux, says this approach should prove useful for many applications requiring reliable detection of specific molecules. his new concept,
They are now studying mouse models of colon and ovarian cancer. The research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund the National institutes of health Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc. the Koch Institute MIT s Center for Environmental Health Sciences the Volkswagenstiftung the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft the German
and Dust environment Explorer (LADEE) spacecraft had made history by using a pulsed laser beam to transmit data over the 239000 miles from the moon to Earth at a record-breaking data-download speed of 622 megabits per second (Mbps). This download speed is more than six times faster than the speed achieved by the best
LLCD also demonstrated a data-upload speed of 20 Mbps on a laser beam transmitted from a ground station in New mexico to the LADEE spacecraft in lunar orbit;
which was developed by MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers led by Don Boroson a laboratory fellow in MIT LL s Communication systems Division.
and delivered these various parts to the spacecraft and to the ground site. Finally we designed
what s called supervised machine learning: They re trained on sample recordings that a human has indexed indicating
You can know something about the identity of a person from the sound of their voice so this technology is keying in to that type of information says Jim Glass a senior research scientist at MIT s Computer science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and head
To create a sonic portrait of a single speaker Glass explains a computer system will generally have to analyze more than 2000 different speech sounds;
A new algorithm that determines who speaks when in audio recordings represents every second of speech as a point in a three-dimensional space.
Stephen Shum a graduate student in MIT s Department of Electrical engineering and Computer science and lead author on the new paper found that a 100-variable i-vector a 100-dimension approximation of the 120000-dimension space was an adequate
According to Patrick Kenny a principal research scientist at the Computer Research Institute of Montreal i-vectors were devised originally to solve the problem of speaker recognition or determining whether the same speaker features on multiple recordings.
It s really an order of magnitude less than the recordings that are used in text-dependent speech recognition. What was completely not obvious
We think that in this mouse model we may have some kind of indication that there s a disorganized thinking process going on says Junghyup Suh a research scientist at the Picower Institute
This mutant mouse doesn t seem to have that kind of replay of a previous experience.
when a person (or mouse) is resting between goal-oriented tasks. When the brain is focusing on a specific goal
Compilers are computer programs that translate high-level instructions written in human-readable languages like Java or C into low-level instructions that machines can execute.
Most compilers also streamline the code they produce, modifying algorithms specified by programmers so that theyl run more efficiently.
Sometimes that means simply discarding lines of code that appear to serve no purpose. But as it turns out,
compilers can be overaggressive, dispensing not only with functional code but also with code that actually performs vital security checks.
At the ACM Symposium on Operating systems Principles in November, MIT researchers will present a new system
that automatically combs through programmerscode, identifying just those lines that compilers might discard but which could, in fact, be functional.
commercial software engineers have downloaded already Stack and begun using it, with encouraging results. As strange as it may seem to nonprogrammers or people
and compilers should remove it. Problems arise when compilers also remove code that leads to ndefined behavior
. or some things this is obvious, says Frans Kaashoek, the Charles A. Piper Professor in the Department of Electrical engineering and Computer science (EECS).
f youe a programmer, you should not write a statement where you take some number and divide it by zero.
You never expect that to work. So the compiler will just remove that. It pointless to execute it anyway,
because there not going to be any sensible result. Defining moments Over time, however, ompiler writers got a little more aggressive,
Kaashoek says. t turns out that the C programming language has a lot of subtle corners to the language specification,
and there are things that are undefined behavior that most programmers don realize are undefined behavior. A classic example
the computer will lop off the bits that don fit. n machines, integers have a limit,
Seasoned C programmers will actually exploit this behavior to verify that program inputs don exceed some threshold.
According to Wang, programmers give a range of explanations for this practice. Some say that the intent of the comparison an overflow check is clearer
according to the C language specification, undefined for signed integers integers that can be either positive or negative.
The fine print Complicating things further is the fact that different compilers will dispense with different undefined behaviors:
but prohibit other programming shortcuts; some might impose exactly the opposite restrictions. So Wang combed through the C language specifications
and identified every undefined behavior that he and his coauthors Kaashoek and his fellow EECS professors Nickolai Zeldovich and Armando Solar-Lezama imagined that a programmer might ever inadvertently invoke.
Stack, in effect, compiles a program twice: once just looking to excise dead code, and a second time to excise dead code and undefined behavior.
but not the first and warns the programmer that it could pose problems. The MIT researchers tested their system on several open-source programs.
i sent them a one-line SQL statement that basically crashed their application, by exploiting their orrectcode,
Mattias Engdegård, an engineer at Intel, is one of the developers who found Stack online
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