Learning

The Media Lab Talks with Visionaries

by Amy Marcott on February 23, 2012

in Events,Learning,Media

Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig

Click the image to view the video on the Media Lab site.

The new series Media Lab Conversations will host visionaries who work at the intersection of technology, art, and enterprise. Earlier this week, the program featured Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, who is also the director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

Lessig spoke on “One Way Forward: The Outsider’s Guide to Fixing a Republic.” Lessig’s current academic work addresses the question of institutional corruption in a number of contexts. Click the image to view the video, which was posted the day after the event.

Next up in the series is Wadah Khanfar, president of the Sharq Forum, an international think tank focused on political and economic development in the Arab world, and former director general of the Al Jazeera network. His talk is entitled “One Year After Mubarak: The Past and Future of the ‘Arab Spring.’” Khanfar’s talk will be followed by a dialogue with Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab; Ethan Zuckerman, director of MIT’s Center for Civic Media; and Mohamed Nanabhay, head of online at Al Jazeera English, as well as questions and answers with the audience.

Find this and other upcoming Media Lab events.

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MITx Kicks Off: Sign Up for the Pilot Class–6.002x Circuits and Electronics

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on February 17, 2012

in Classroom,Learning

Professor Anant Agarwal, director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, leads the course.

Professor Anant Agarwal, who teaches the campus course, leads the MITx course as well.

Don’t know what lumped circuit abstraction has to do with Maxwell’s equations? MITx can fix that. Starting in the world of physics with the electron, you can travel through the digital gates of new devices thanks to MIT’s new educational venture–MITx.

Just announced in December, MITx aims to stimulate research and platform development of interactive online learning tools while offering the world’s independent learners a focused course that can result in an MITx certificate.

You can sign up now to take the pilot, 6.002x Circuits and Electronics, which is based on a core electrical engineering and computer science course taught to engineering students on campus.

Here’s how it will work:

To access the course, registered students will log in at mitx.mit.edu, where they will find a course schedule, an e-textbook for the course, and a discussion board. Each week, students will watch video lectures and demonstrations, work with practice exercises, complete homework assignments, and participate in an online interactive lab specifically designed to replicate its real-world counterpart. Students will also take exams and be able to check their grades as they progress in the course. Overall, students can expect to spend approximately 10 hours each week on the course.

Check the course description to learn what physics and math you need to be successful, watch a short introductory video, and enroll. The course, which runs March 5-June 8, is free but you must register and complete the assignments to earn an MITx certificate.

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Join Leading Entrepreneurs at the MIT Global Startup Workshop, March 28–30

by Amy Marcott on February 7, 2012

in Learning,Management,Student Life

Guest bloggers: Grad students Terrence Pong and Maria Telleria on behalf of the GSW 2012 team

Want to find out the latest in innovation strategies? Interested in meeting world-renowned entrepreneurs to discuss the startup landscape and your startup ideas? Looking to expand your network on a global scale?

Then the 15th MIT Global Startup Workshop (MIT GSW) is the conference for you. MIT GSW is the world’s premier workshop dedicated to fostering entrepreneurship and building entrepreneurial ecosystems globally. This year, it will be held in Istanbul, Turkey. MIT students, in conjunction with the MIT Enterprise Forum of Turkey and Turkey’s leading Ozyegin and Sabanci Universities, bring you  three days packed with networking opportunities, discussions led by leading entrepreneurs, and the first-ever Startup Showcase. The workshop brings together over 300 participants from over 70 nations; participants include entrepreneurial leaders, executives, next-generation entrepreneurs, professors, financiers, students, and government officials.

MIT Global Startup Workshop in Istanbul, Turkey

The MIT Global Startup Workshop (MIT GSW) was founded in 1997 when the MIT $50K (now $100K) Entrepreneurship Competition received numerous queries from around the world from organizations interested in starting and improving their own business plan competitions (BPCs). The first MIT GSW was held on campus in March 1998 and brought together an international community committed to launching BPCs to stimulate and nurture entrepreneurship worldwide.

A decade later, having helped grow and mature the BPC community, the MIT GSW expanded its mission to include all aspects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Today we continue to build stronger, more productive entrepreneurial ecosystems around the world and a diverse and dynamic global support network for entrepreneurs.

How Do Students Pull this Off?

Each year, the all-student GSW team organizes panels to address region-specific challenges over three days. As soon as one conference concludes, preparation gets underway for the next GSW. Through a competitive bidding process, organizations, universities, and governments from around the world make their pitch on how the GSW could help to inspire and foster interest in entrepreneurship in their country. The team then travels to the host country to conduct site visits and meet with the local team.

Once the host country has been chosen, the MIT team focuses on the main issues that impact the entrepreneurial ecosystem in and around the host country. They invite keynote speakers, identify promising young entrepreneurs, and mobilize a growing group of active GSW alumni to make the next conference a success. The content is designed entirely by the student-run team with individual graduate and undergraduate students taking charge of organizing panel sessions, case studies, or networking sessions.

Running the conference exposes the team to wide-reaching experiences that truly live up to the Global Startup Workshop name. In the past, the team has coordinated the conference in South Korea using the local Hangul (Korean) standard keyboards, organized a gala dinner in an ancient Castle in Cape Town, and rubbed elbows with the president of Iceland in the midst of the 2010 Eyjafjallajokull volcano eruption.

The theme of the 2012 workshop is Directions for Innovation, and discussions will focus on new technological directions, ways of addressing a global market, and the relationships among entrepreneurs, investors, and supporting organizations. Turkey, situated at the crossroads of civilizations with its own vibrant economy, young population, and a fast-growing consumer market, is poised to be a regional hub for entrepreneurship and investment. Istanbul, spanning East to West, is an inspiring location for this year’s MIT GSW.

Special Application Deadlines

The Startup Showcase is an unrivaled marketing opportunity for startups at all stages and offers attendees the opportunity to highlight their products and services to the entire conference. This is your chance to show your idea to potential customers and investors as well as to receive feedback from fellow entrepreneurs. Applications for a spot in the Startup Showcase are due Feb. 15.

The GSW fellowship is meant to encourage new entrepreneurs to attend the conference by covering the registration and accommodation costs for up to 10 budding entrepreneurs. Applicants must present a compelling story of how they plan to contribute to entrepreneurial development in their region as well as to the GSW community. Applications are due Feb 8.

 “The 2011 MIT GSW was such a turning point, both for my personal life and for my startup life. During the GSW I participated in the Elevator Pitch Contest, and I was able to pitch my idea to students, entrepreneurs, and VCs from all over the world. The connections I made there led me to apply for the startup accelerator MassChallenge and eventually to launch the first beta version of StyleShare for the international community.” —Jay, South Korea MIT GSW attendee

This year’s confirmed keynote speakers include:

  • Iqbal Quadir  (founder and director, MIT Legatum Center)
  • Guler Sabanci (chairman, Sabanci Holding)
  • Rakesh Malhotra (founder, SAR Group Companies)
  • Hüsnü M. Özyeğin (founder, Finasbank)

Join this unique community, experience the dynamic forum, and help build the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Register today.

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Of Sunflowers and Solar Plants

by Jay London on February 1, 2012

in Design,Energy,Engineering,In the News,Learning,Research

When looking for ways to increase solar energy efficiency, MIT researchers simply stopped and smelled the…sunflowers.

Using the flower as inspiration, a team of researchers led by Professor Alexander Mitsos developed a solar panel layout that mimics the arrangement of sunflower florets, a pattern called Fermat’s spiral.

From MIT News:

“The MIT team…looked to nature for inspiration — specifically, to the sunflower. The florets of a sunflower are arranged in a spiraling pattern, known as a Fermat spiral, that appears in many natural objects and has long fascinated mathematicians: The ancient Greeks even applied the patterns to buildings and other architectural structures. Mathematicians have found that each sunflower floret is turned at a ‘golden angle’—about 137 degrees—with respect to its neighboring floret.”

The new layout takes up to 20 percent less space than Spain’s PS10 Solar Power Plant, Europe’s first concentrated solar power plant, which can covert enough electricity to power 6,000 homes.  Compared with the PS10’s configuration, where mirrors are arranged around in circles and the distance between mirrors akin to the seats in a movie theater, the new layout reduces shading and blocking, and increases total efficiency.

The research team, which includes Corey Noone SM ’11 and Manuel Torrihon of RWTH Aachen University in Germany, found that their new pattern could reduce shadowing and blocking throughout the day. Their findings were published in the journal Solar Energy, and the team has recently filed for patent protection.

From MIT News:

“…the spiral pattern reduced shading and blocking and increased total efficiency compared with PS10’s radially staggered configuration.

Mitsos says arranging a CSP plant in such a spiral pattern could reduce the amount of land and the number of heliostats required to generate an equivalent amount of energy, which could result in significant cost savings.”

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Faculty Forum Online: Making Desalination Efficient, Feb. 2

by Amy Marcott on January 26, 2012

in Engineering,Health,Learning

MIT Faculty Forum Online logo

Update: View a video of the presentation.

More than a billion people worldwide lack access to clean drinking water. Sea water is one possible solution. But current methods of desalination are expensive, energy intensive, and require infrastructure not usually available in areas most in need of it.

Tune in to hear how MIT Mechanical Engineering Professor John Lienhard P’15, who is also the director of the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy at MIT and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, applies basic science and engineering to address this problem.

Lienhard will offer his thoughts and take questions from the worldwide MIT alumni community via video chat on Thursday, Feb. 2, from Noon to 12:30 p.m. ET.

Register for this free event to receive the link for live viewing. After the event, come back here and continue the conversation in the comments.

John Lienhard. Photo: Len Rubenstein.

John Lienhard. Photo by Len Rubenstein.

About John Lienhard

John Lienhard P’15 is a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT as well as the director of the Center for Clean Water and Clean Energy at MIT and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals.

He earned his BS and MS in chemical, nuclear, and thermal engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles and a PhD in fluid dynamics from the University of California, San Diego.

His research interests include desalination, water supply, energy, heat and mass transfer, fluid mechanics, convective transport, extremely high heat fluxes, and electronics thermal management.

Learn more in this Spectrum article—Drinkable Water for All.

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DIY IAP: MIT Gaming from the Inside Out

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on January 24, 2012

in Learning,Media,Modern Geekhood

Games are more than fun at MIT. One place to get a bead on the action is the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, a five-year collaboration between MIT and the government of Singapore that is exploring gaming as an academic and commercial medium. A video featuring Philip Tan ’01, SM ’03, the U.S. executive director, describes the lab’s mission.

GAMBIT develops and studies games.

GAMBIT develops and studies games.

One product is a stream of games that you can download and play for free. Play a Gambit game—there are four featured games for download and 30 more prototypes to toy with.

Another result is understanding what is intriguing about games. Watch a recent video titled Marc LeBlanc’s eight kinds of fun to learn about psychology of gaming.

During IAP, GAMBIT held a session to introduce this year’s MIT Mystery Hunt, an annual puzzle competition, and hosted a night of problem solving. Relive the 2012 Mystery Hunt—and see the problems and the solutions.

The Mystery Hunt, an annual IAP event, draws solvers of all stripes

The Mystery Hunt, an annual IAP event, draws solvers of all stripes. Photo: John A. Hawkinson—The Tech

The GAMBIT website is a cornucopia of game riches:

Listen to a podcast with Terri Brosius and Dan Thron, members of the highly influential Looking Glass Studios, pioneers of 3D first-person narrative game design.

Watch the GAMBIT Summer Summit 2011 closing keynote by Jeff Orkin of the MIT Media Lab and Cognitive Machines titled “Next Generation A.I. & Gameplay: Big Data, Big Opportunities.”

Find out how to take part in the annual Summer Game Development Program For Undergraduates.

Beginning February 20, a new video exploring the origins and processes of developing each project will be posted on Mondays. Watch the trailer.

More about Games at MIT

  • MIT is betting that games will be a key learning tool in the future. A new $3 million grant will support the MIT Education Arcade‘s development of a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) to help high school students learn math and biology.
  • Learn how to play the Mercury Game, a negotiation simulation that is designed to teach people about the role of science in international environmental policy making
  • Test your invention IQ with the Lemelson-MIT Program’s interactive Brain Drain game and other games.
  • The Tech reviews The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, released in December.
  • Read earlier Slice posts on Flu Math Games and other Video Learning and Play Platform Wars, a Sloan simulation.

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DIY-IAP: Play Platform Wars

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on January 13, 2012

in Learning,Management

Want to turn a fresh idea about video game platforms into a fabulously successful startup? You’ll need some business savvy to do that. You can start building those skills right now with a free, online simulation offered by the MIT Sloan School of Management—Platform Wars: Simulating the Battle for Video Game Supremacy.

MIT Professor John Sterman created Platform Wars.

MIT Professor John Sterman created Platform Wars.

In this real-time simulation, you play the role of senior management of a video game hardware platform producer with a hot new methodology. You will learn about the dynamics of competition in markets that depend not only on a product’s price and features, but also on how many people own it and how many games and applications are available. You plug in numbers, advance, and see how markets react.

The stakes are high, according to MIT Professor John Sterman PhD ’82, an expert in system dynamics who developed the simulation with colleagues. “The first truly successful video game was PONG, the arcade and home versions offered by Atari,” he says in an introductory video. Atari sales jumped from $100 million a year to $200 billion a year in just a few years in the 1970s largely because of their market dominance.

“Platform wars are not restricted to the Internet world, of course,” Sterman notes. “And important example that is playing out now is the competition to become the new standard for automobiles. We have the competition between the dominant platform of internal combustion engines being powered by gasoline or fossil fuels and that is being challenged by a variety of new contenders including plugin electric vehicles, plugin hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, and biofuel types of vehicles. So the lessons you can learn in the simulator are application to a variety of other markets.”

Get Started:

Go the Platform Wars page and watch the Student Instruction Video (26 minutes) and then log in to the Platform Wars simulation itself.

For more business savvy, download the 24-page case study “Sony’s Battle for Video Game Supremacy” by Sterman, Khan Jekarl, Cate Reavis.

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DIY IAP: Say it with a Photo Essay

by Amy Marcott on January 6, 2012

in Campus Culture,Classroom,Design,IAP,Learning,Student Life

Each fall, freshmen involved with the Discover Product Design (DPD) pre-orientation program document their weeklong class experience—of campus lab tours, visits to design firms, and various design exercises and activities—with photo essays. These are intended to teach basic photography, but DPD also shows students how to document work for a design portfolio and conduct ethnographic research for understanding existing behavior to inform the design process.

Take a look at the gallery of each student’s top three photos. During the week, they designed a product for their dorm room (created on a laser cutter in thin acrylic), created posters to encourage student life, and disassembled existing products to learn how they are manufactured.

DPD is run by members of the MIT Ideation Lab, a mechanical engineering research group studying early-stage design processes. Check out some of the designs from the 2010 program.

Want to create your own photo essay? Check out Sensing Place: Photography as Inquiry on OpenCourseWare for instruction (including videos) and inspiration, especially the student image galleries that explore things like light, significant detail, and landscape poetics.

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What’s it like to be 75 years old? Try this on.

by Jay London on December 28, 2011

in Design,Health,In the News,Learning,Modern Geekhood,Research

The U.S. population of persons 65 years or older numbered 39.6 million in 2009 and is expected to increase to 72.1 million by 2030. Coupled with falling birth rates and lengthening age expectancies, the U.S. population is rapidly aging.

For engineers and designers, this creates design challenges that didn’t previously exist with younger populations. Existing and developing products may need to be altered to cater to the older demographic.

Thanks to MIT’s Agelab, young designers may be better equipped to understand the needs of their aging clients. Under the direction of Joe Coughlin, Agelab has created AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System), a suit designed to approximate the motor, visual, flexibility, dexterity, and strength of a person in their mid-70s.

AGNES simulates a gerontological atmosphere in retail, public transportation, and workplace environments. Braces and bands mimic joint stiffness and muscular fatigue. Leg straps create slower leg movements, and helmet attachments give the wearer an age-induced curved spine. Yellow eyeglasses make it difficult to read small print, and earplugs simulate difficulty with sounds and tones.

MIT Research Fellow Rozanne Puleo told Fastcodesign.com:

“We’ve suited up students and taken them to the grocery store to purchase foods with low sugar, low sodium, and low fat—foods commonly purchased by older adults. They found that it was very challenging to locate these items on the shelf. That’s valuable information that we can take back to organizations.”

Part of the Engineering Systems Division, MIT AgeLab works to transform technologies into practical solutions that improve how products are designed and services are delivered. In addition to AGNES, the AgeLab has created AwareCar (a vehicle that monitors driver state); Miss Daisy (a driving simulator used for evaluating cognitive distraction and the effects of disease and medication); and Miss Rosie (a Volkswagen Beetle that evaluates a driver’s capacity for vehicle operation), among others.

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Blunders, viewed as aids to memory

by Patrick on December 4, 2011

in Classroom,Learning,Prof. Winston's Ideas,Remember When...

Professor Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70

I was rummaging around in the attic when I stumbled across my notes and quizzes from my first term, fifty years ago. I opened up the binder and there it was: the dreaded 8.01 quiz #2.

When I was a freshman, I always wrote down F = Ma, force is equal to mass times acceleration, as the first step toward solving 8.01 problems. Writing it down got the formula into my visual field, which generaly is a good idea, because visual problem solving is an important contributor to problem solving.

Alas, on that 8.01 quiz #2, writing F = Ma got me into big trouble.

This was the problem: an open railroad car rolls along a frictionless track at constant speed, v. Then, it starts to rain into the car. What force is required to keep the car going at constant speed?

I concluded that each drop went from zero horizontal velocity to v instantaneously, but then I was baffled, not knowing yet about impulses.

I should written F = d mv/dt, because force is equal to the derivative of momentum, mv. Usually, mass is fixed and velocity changes, so F = m dv/dt = ma; but in the quiz problem, velocity is constant, but the mass is changing, so F = v dm/dt.

Simple, but I muffed it, and because it was simple, and because I was extremely sore at myself for muffing it, I couldn’t ever forget it, so I would never make that kind of mistake again.

Curiously, this year’s 8.01 quiz #2 also featured rail cars moving along a frictionless track.

I wonder if any of the freshmen will remember the problem 50 years from now. Probably just the ones who got it wrong.

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