Research

Mobile Gaming Jam Captures Network Data

by Maddy Myers on May 23, 2013

in Campus Culture, Classroom, Engineering, Events, Research, Student Life, Uncategorized

Ravi and Tiffany at the Stata Center.

Tiffany Chen and Ravi Netravali at the Stata Center.

What did MIT students do last weekend? Some of them hosted a game jam.

Research students in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) Networks and Mobile Systems group extended an open invitation to local mobile game developers to come to the Stata Center and participate in a weekend-long challenge: create a game that encourages its players to go forth and explore new places.

The event resulted in a new mobile game made by a small group of developers; the team hopes to officially release it in the next two weeks. Game design teams who missed last weekend’s game jam can find the NetMap Game Client on Github.com should they wish to aid these researchers in their quest.

The hosts of the game jam have already been collecting data on their own about wireless and cellular networks via a tool called NetMap, as a class project for 6.829 Computer Networks. Three PhD students in the class–Tiffany Chen, Ravi Netravali, and Victor Costan ’07 MNG ’08—believed that their research project could extend beyond just a class assignment. They wanted to collect more data to analyze from mobile users all over the world.

How could the team get users everywhere to find out about NetMap, install it, and provide more data for the researchers to analyze? Make a game, of course.

The Teaching Assistant of the students’ Computer Networks class, PhD student Jonathan Perry SM ’12, took this idea one step further. He suggested the team host a game jam, a hackathon-like event for game developers to meet up and make a game in a single weekend.

“We needed an easy way to collect a large volume of measurements,” Perry explains. “If you’re going to go big-scale, why have one game when you can have many?”

Although the game jam event produced only one game so far, the team hopes for further development with NetMap in the future.

“Our wildest dream would be to have these collections everywhere where there are wireless device users,” says Netravali. “The problems of a poor connection can plague you anywhere.”

“You could find out if AT&T works better in this area or T-Mobile works better in this area,” Tiffany Chen explains. “You could know which service you should choose. Everybody can use that information.”

Perry hopes the data collected via NetMap and the team’s subsequent research and analysis will help network researchers. “When you make new network equipment or when you design new standards—later versions of 4G, for example or the next version of Wi-Fi—you can take into account data.”

The game jam focused on development for Android devices so that the games and the entire NetMap project can remain open source and freely available for future researchers and developers.

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In the Name of Art, Umbrellas Light Up the Sky

by Jay London on May 22, 2013

in Campus Culture, Design, Events, Modern Geekhood

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

More than 200 MIT community members armed with LED-enhanced umbrellas took to MIT’s Jack Barry Field on Sunday, May 19, 2013, for “UP: The Umbrella Project,” a collaboration between the MIT CSAIL Lab and the Pilobolus dance troupe.

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

During the UP live performance, each participant was provided with an umbrella equipped with red, green, and blue lights. Each participant used a CSAIL-designed controller to manually change the umbrella’s color throughout the performance and—guided by Pilobolus—walked throughout the field and created what CSAIL called “an ever-changing display of live art.”

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

A roving camera was located above the participants and images from the camera were projected onto a large inflatable screen. (Check out the Boston Globe’s video coverage of UP.)

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

Kyle Gilpen '06, MNG '06, PhD '12, a CSAIL post-doctoral associate, says that lab’s research goal is to monitor the "human-robot dance" and match the umbrellas’ robotic algorithms with the behavior of the attendees.

From CSAIL:

"Our work deals with developing algorithms that allow robots to operate independently within a large decentralized network so that the robots can coordinate and work together to accomplish a common task. Through UP, we can study the behaviors of large groups, which can be applied to our research in robotics."

Slice_pic_3

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

UP marked CSAIL's second collaboration with Pilobolus, a renowned dance collaborative that has performed on the Academy Awards, Oprah Winfrey, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien. In 2012, the groups created Seraph, a performance piece involving human dancers and live robots.

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

Photo: Emily Muldoon Kathan

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IkeaBot Assembles Furniture Using “Common Sense”

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on May 21, 2013

in Engineering

Assembling popular Swedish furniture may help the masses, but it’s only a hint of what goes on in MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory. How the bots do it is the breakthrough. According to a recent IEEE Spectrum article, the bots are fully autonomous and need no human help to whip together a Lack table in 10 minutes. The magic is in the software and the grippers—and that magic can be applied to industrial-scale problems in manufacturing.

Ross A. Knepper, a postdoctoral associate, is leading the effort to teach a team of commercially available KUKA youBots to assemble the furniture. In an earlier life, he created motion planners that drive Mars rovers, unmanned military vehicles, and a personal home-assistant robot called HERB.

With the Ikeabot, Knepper is tackling a key problem in robotics with savvy algorithms.

“A lot of problems in factory automation are similar to the problem in Ikea furniture assembly,” says Knepper. “There are many robots in factories but they perform very simple functions. In the future, we want robots that can move around in the factory and interact with people…so they can be treated as teammates, not just tools.”

Knepper is writing code that creates the kind of common sense that allows humans to work side by side intuitively. “If you imagine two people assembling furniture together, they can infer what the other is doing—they don’t have to explain it. [The IKeabots] are trying to infer how parts fit together and the logical order of assembly.”

Using a natural language feature, the robots can ask for help. If they can’t reach a part, for example, they find a human and ask that the part be handed to them, and then they continue to work.

Space requirements have guided much of robot research in the past few decades, Knepper says. In space, robots need a higher order of intelligence to solve problems and work independently. The payoff may be closer to home though—on the factory floor. Using intelligent robots could help rebuild manufacturing and create jobs in the US. “We will need highly skilled people to operate the robots and robots and humans can trade off jobs,” he says. “You can have a much more efficient process.”

What’s next for the Ikeabot? The team is working on an Allen Wrench glove that the robot can put on and off as needed, and the future is about groups of robots working collaboratively with one another—and with people. And all that fits neatly into the Distributed Robotics Laboratory, which is headed by Daniela Rus, director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). DRL is known for research in programmable matter and distributed robotics. In fact, the lab’s robots have many talents: they can end a garden, bake cookies from scratch, fly in swarms to perform surveillance functions, and dance with humans.

Want the details? Download “The IkeaBot: An Autonomous Multi-Robot Coordinated Furniture Assembly System,” which was nominated for Best Automation Paper at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)in Karlsruhe, Germany, May 2013.

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Fore! Giving Green for DAPER

by Joe McGonegal on May 20, 2013

in Alumni Life, Athletics, Campus Culture, Economics, Public Service, Travel

Your favorite search engine will tell you that there are about 225,000 instances of the term “MIT golf”out there. Not overwhelming, but it’s more sizable than a search for “CalTech Golf,” which yields a mere 2,000 results.

Source: Pound Ridge Golf Club.

Pound Ridge Golf Club.

Somewhere deep in that query is Ken Wang ’71, who owns Pound Ridge Golf Club and who is hosting the first annual MIT Golf Outing on May 20 in Westchester County, New York. The tournament will benefit MIT’s Department of Athletics, Physical Education, and Recreation.

Offering his course to MIT for a day caps years of service to the Institute.  Currently a member of the corporation, Wang is also a former Alumni Association board president, MIT Club of New York president, and member of over a dozen visiting committees and advisory boards over the years.

But Wang is always eager to advance MIT’s brand into the world of athletics.

“I really believe that as MIT evolves, and the people involved with it evolve, it’s important that we start doing more mainstream stuff,” says Wang. “Plus, it’s just good fresh air.”

Pound Ridge has been a favorite among New York celebrities and politicians over the years. Its challenging 146-slope design came from Pete Dye, who also designed TPC Sawgrass and other world-famous courses.  Wang bought the course in 2008; four years later, Pound Ridge was named second among the New York City area’s top courses by Golf Magazine.

At the tournament to support DAPER, MIT golfers will face Pound Ridge’s signature boulder in the middle of the 13th fairway and pray for luck on the backboard headstone behind the 15th green. But Wang won’t be among them.

“I’ll be there, but I won’t be golfing,” he says, adding, “I’d rather not have my game seen in public!”

Asked to name the best golfer in MIT history, Wang replies, “He’s going to kill me for saying it, but I’d say Robert Turner ’74, who’ll be there. He’s a very good golfer.”

Ken Wang '71. Photo: Tanit Sakakini.

Ken Wang ’71. Photo: Tanit Sakakini.

In an interview on the Golf Trips blog, Wang lists the Blue Monster at Doral as a favorite course and says he prefers Jack Nicklaus over Arnold Palmer.

As for Tiger Woods, Wang says, “I don’t necessarily approve of the shenanigans, but I love Tiger. He’s the most important person in the sport.”

When he’s not thinking about golf, Wang serves as president of the U.S. Summit Corporation, founded by his father CC Wang SM ’45 and three of his classmates. Between these two roles, Wang puts his MIT economics degree to good use.

Wang didn’t golf during his years at MIT, though he loved playing intramural hockey. At times, his relationship with DAPER was less than appreciative. “I didn’t pass the swim test, although I’d like you to know that I could have. I just wasn’t a very competent swimmer, so I took swimming because I hoped it would make me better. I was finally able to splash my way through it.”

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Robot Bartender: Should You Still Leave a Tip?

by Jay London on May 17, 2013

in Engineering, In the News, Modern Geekhood, Research

Makr-ShakrThe most prolific bartenders have knowledge of thousands of different drink recipes, but a how about a googol? A new robotic bartender developed by MIT’s SENSEable City Lab makes that claim and more.

The Makr Shakr is a three-armed robotic barman created through a partnership with Coca-Cola and Bacardi USA. The robot’s programmable  mixing system claims an infinite number of drinks and users can submit their own through a mobile app.

From dezeen magazine:

“Users will download an app on their handheld devices and mix ingredients as virtual barmen. They can gain inspiration by viewing other users’ recipes and comments before sending in their drink of choice. The cocktail is then crafted by three robotic arms, whose movements reproduce every action of a barman—from the shaking of a Martini to the muddling of a Mojito, and even the thin slicing of a lemon garnish.”

The Makr Shakr was previewed during Milan Design Week in April and made its official debut at the Google I/O annual developer conference in San Francisco on May 15. The machine was created at Google’s request. A year earlier, they asked the inventors to create a device that best exemplifies participatory design.

The robotic arms mimic the movements of a bartender—a very graceful bartender. The designers programmed the robot’s gestures by recording the movements of Italian ballet dancer Roberto Bolle.

Five SENSEable researchers helped develop the Makr Shakr, including project leader and graduate student Yaniv Turgeman. SENSEable’s 35-person team includes associate director Assaf Biderman ’05, Otto Ng ’12, Dietman Offenhuber ’08, Anthony Vanky SM ’11. Bacardi also has MIT ties; Joaquin E. Bacardi III MBA ‘98 is the company’s president and CEO.

Inspired by Coca-Cola’s Freestyle touchscreen beverage dispenser, the Makr Shakr can create alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks. The app’s customization system can monitor alcohol consumption and blood alcohol levels and help users self-monitor their intake. Users can also share their recipes and drink photos.

SENSEable City director Carlo Ratti told Boston Magazine that the Makr Shakr will not replace human bartenders and is “more a research platform aimed at the third industrial revolution, where anyone can design and produce.”

Fear not, barkeeps. There are no plans to make the Makr Shakr commercially available.

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“I’m A Nuke”: MIT’s Rising Generation of Nuclear Engineers

by Nancy DuVergne Smith on May 14, 2013

in Energy, Engineering

Guest blogger: Peter Dunn

The phrase “young nuclear engineer” has been something of an oxymoron in recent decades, with the nuclear energy industry offering few openings for newcomers. Yet a new crop of nuclear engineers are coming out of MIT and videos themed, “I’m A Nuke,” tell some of their stories.

MIT students host the American Nuclear Society 2013 Student Conference.

MIT students host the American Nuclear Society 2013 Student Conference in April.

Newly educated engineers are vital because the engineers who entered the field in the 1960s and 1970s are retiring, and climate change concerns are sparking renewed interest in the ability to generate continuous carbon-free energy. MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering (NSE) has seen a surge in applications from a diverse, dynamic group of students, many of them with strong environmental orientations.

Last month, MIT hosted the recent American Nuclear Society 2013 Student Conference, with the theme, Public Image of the Nuclear Engineer. About 630 US and international students attended the event, which was co-chaired by NSE students Nathan Gibson, Ekaterina Paranomova ‘13, and Samuel Brinton. Publicity coordinator Jake Jurewicz ’14 said the timing, about two years after the Fukushima disaster, was opportune.

“People have had time to digest Fukushima and the lessons learned; we all sat in on talks about what went wrong and what can be done to improve plants and remedy what happened,” said Jurewicz.

More broadly, he added, the conference focused on innovation, new ideas, and cultivation of the new workforce. In addition to talks and technical sessions, activities included a large poster session showcasing attendee research, career and political workshops, a job fair, tours of MIT’s fission and fusion reactors, and a three-minute pitch contest.

Brinton, who is studying nuclear waste policy, captured some of the complexity faced by his generation, saying, “my mother was raised near Three Mile Island, and my dad was an anti-nuclear weapons activist, so I wanted to address the big problems that nuclear was facing….I want to apply a scientific solution to a political problem.”

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Big Brain, Big Screen: Alum Stars on New Discovery Channel Show

by Joe McGonegal on May 13, 2013

in Alumni Life, Design, Engineering, In the News, Learning, Modern Geekhood

Alison Wong ’03 spent several weeks last year working on a missile defense system for thwarting rocket attacks.

Wong also designed methods to disengage car engines as they approached military checkpoints, one-person shelters capable of withstanding fire and extreme winds, and contraptions to prevent explosions in colliding vehicles.

Alison Wong '03. Photo: Discovery Channel.

Alison Wong ’03. Photo: Discovery Channel.

Wong did all this on the set of the Discovery Channel’s Big Brain Theory, a reality TV show that premiered in April and that will continue its run this spring on Wednesday nights.

Wong is one of ten contestants on the reality show and one of its two female stars.

After answering a casting call a year ago for the new show, which is hosted by Kal Penn of Harold and Kumar fame, Wong flew to Los Angeles for the full-immersion reality TV program. There, she lived with other contestants in a community house while solving those puzzling challenges and the occasional interpersonal dramas native to the medium of reality TV. The show’s top prize is $50,000 and a one-year contract at a top design firm.

Wong jumped at the opportunity to combine her passions in design and engineering. “Engineering is a team sport and this show is about teamwork,” she says.

At MIT, Wong majored in mechanical engineering with an architecture minor in the early years of course 2-A. She penned two regular comic strips for The Tech and did UROPs with David R. Wallace and the Media Lab.

A designer at heart, Wong pursued a master’s in design at Stanford and spent five years at IDEO as a principal designer. In 2010 she launched her own firm, Integral Design. She is currently working on bringing Keyprop, a key-ring tripod for smartphones, to market.

On Big Brain Theory’s first episode, contestants focused on the colliding-vehicle conundrum, with Wong leading efforts in the design and blueprint phase to keep an explosive box on the back of a pickup truck from reaching 25 g.

“The Discovery Channel makes quality shows, and I’m proud of them for taking a risk on promoting a show like this,” Wong says. “There’s nothing like it on TV. I’m honored to be among them.”

Wong got the full Hollywood treatment last month. Discovery hosted a red-carpet premiere for the show’s cast at design firm WET’s headquarters in LA.

Though Wong doesn’t rule out future roles on screen, her focus remains on her design career and using this experience to inspire others.

“I’m open to a lot of things, but I’m mostly trying to leverage this to inspire girls,” she says. “I just talked at a local school and showed students some of my 3D prints and products. I want to lead by example and show them that math and science can be really creative industries.”

To judge the contestants’ efforts in the first episode of Big Brain Theory, Discovery brought in another alum—astronaut Michael Massimino ME ’88—who critiqued Wong’s design and participated in the elimination vote at the end of the show.

Rest assured, he did not vote Wong off.

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Senior Gets Animated about the Infinite Connection

by Joe McGonegal on May 12, 2013

in Alumni Life, Campus Culture, Classroom, Media, Modern Geekhood, Student Life

Did you see Jeffrey Lin’s video tutorial on how to navigate the MIT Alumni Directory?

MIT’s Class of 2013 should find it useful next month as they earn their official listing in it, and the thousands of alumni who haven’t yet logged in to the Infinite Connection should check it out as well. You know who you are.Jeffrey Lin shot

Lin didn’t just make the video for the $300 gift card prize offering in the MIT Alumni Association contest. An avid designer, Lin enjoys fooling with film technologies and says he made this video on the night before deadline.

“I saw the listing and figured I had a shot,” he said. “And I thought, ‘what better way to do this quickly than with animation?’ I grabbed a Wacom tablet, which you can hook to your laptop and use for drawing by hand. I used QuickTime screen capturing.”

A big fan of RSA Animate, Lin designed the directory tutorial with its instructional, straightforward style in mind, telling the story of a login through clever animated slides.

“I hadn’t really done something like it before and wanted to see how it would work out,” he recalled.

Whether experimenting with live-action or animation, Lin enjoys storytelling. His short documentary on the MIT lightweight crew team and his moving profile of Emma Nelson ’14 demonstrate his attention to a film’s narrative arc.

Though Lin is a course 4 (architecture) major, he has enjoyed Professor Vivek Bald’s documentary filmmaking course and Angel Nevarez’s intro to video class. In the latter, Lin directed A Proper Meal, which won the undergraduate CMS Media Spectacle Award last year.

Lin has also been active in the Asian American Association and the DynaMIT engineering camp, where he mentors middle school-aged students in math and science.

Whether Lin pursues film or architecture or design or none of the above, he clearly knows how to use the alumni directory for reaching out to fellow beavers. During IAP in 2011, he interned at the Brand Union in New York, working under its North American CEO Robert Scalea ’77, an experience he chronicled on Slice.

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Who is Iron Man?

by Jay London on May 10, 2013

in Alumni Life, In the News, Media, Modern Geekhood, Student Life

Tony Stark, class of 1987 (maybe), proudly sporting his Brass Rat.

Tony Stark, class of 1987 (maybe), proudly sporting his Brass Rat.

It’s been established that Tony Stark is MIT’s greatest (fictional) alumnus. In fact, Stark can be seen wearing his Brass Rat in multiple scenes in the first Iron Man movie. The film’s director, Jon Favreau, once said of Stark, “He’s somebody who created a suit using his own intelligence and sweat of his brow. I would love for that to make being an engineer cool—that  people might want to go to MIT instead of being on MTV.”

A proud affiliation notwithstanding, little is known about Stark’s time at MIT. His academic record is sealed and existing public information is inconsistent. MIT Admissions tentatively lists Stark as receiving his undergraduate degree in 1987 but Marvel Comics claims he received two master’s degrees in engineering by age 19. Confusing matters more, a LinkedIn profile for Tony Stark indicates he received doctorates in engineering physics and artificial intelligence.

These contradictory statements lead to one question: Just who was Tony Stark during his time at MIT?

Boston.com’s Radio BDC blog helped answer this question earlier this week. In honor of the release of the third Iron Man film, the blog tracked down real-life Bostonians—including one former MIT director—who shared their encounters with a young Stark during the mid-80s.

A sample of the memories includes:

  • “I saw him a few times at the chess boards near Au Bon Pain in Harvard Square. There was this guy down there, a chess master, and you could give him five or ten bucks and he’d play you a game. A couple of times I remember [Tony] breezing in and throwing money on the table, and kind of wiping the floor with the guy.”
  • “No one really knew him, he was just a rich kid. Everyone wanted him around, though, because he’d always bring something fun for the party.”
  • “I remember him at after-parties on Thayer Street. He was up later than anyone else. But you could always get a ride home with him, because he always had a car.”

Perhaps the most poignant recollection comes from Henry Jenkins, the former co-director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies.

From “Bostonians sharing their memories of MIT class of ’87 grad Tony Stark:”

“Some students are larger than life—they leave a trace across the entire campus, and people talk about them well after they have left the building, so to speak. Stark was one of those people.”

“And don’t get me started about the hacks that have been ascribed to Stark through the years. I have heard all kinds of claims about what Stark put on the Great Dome to the ways he rewired the elevators in the Green Building. They can’t all be true, can they?”

Read more about Tony Stark’s (fictional) time at MIT on the Radio BDC blog. Thanks to Harbo Jensen PhD ’74 for contributing to this story.

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Running Again: Alum Helps Victims Dream of Next Year’s Marathon

by Joe McGonegal on May 9, 2013

in Alumni Life, Design, Engineering, In the News, Learning, Modern Geekhood, Research

My doctor told me recently to stop running. He said my knees, like most human knees, have had enough of high-impact exercise after twenty years of road races.

He’s the third doctor to tell me so. Maybe this time it will sink in. In a small, perhaps completely incomparable way, I’ve felt the same zeal to overcome the body’s limitations that those who have endured paralysis, severe arthritis, or amputations experience. We all have that need to mend, overcome the pain, and return to the challenge.

Hugh Herr SM '93. Photo: Webb Chappell.

Hugh Herr SM ’93. Photo: Webb Chappell.

So when I heard interviews with victims of the Boston Marathon bombing in the past few weeks, who, despite severe injury and amputation, vowed to run the race again, I nodded my head. I understood.

MIT Media Lab Associate Professor Hugh Herr SM ’93 heard the same declarations coming from bombing victims this month. He, too, understood.

But Herr, himself a double amputee, is in a unique place to help. Partnering with No Barriers USA, Herr and his Biomechatronics Research Group intend to support any marathoner who, despite severe injury or limb loss as a result of the bombings, aims to run again next year.

No Barriers, a nationwide nonprofit with a goal of improving lives through assistive technology, launched the No Barriers for Boston fund on April 26. It hopes to raise $500,000 to support investments in sport-specific prosthetic limbs to help survivors run, bike, swim, or otherwise compete athletically again.

“Assistive technology makes a profound impact on the lives of people struggling with physical disability,” Herr wrote in a May 3 post on a Wall Street Journal blog. “It created a passion in me for science and engineering that has since defined my career.”

Herr’s award-winning team focuses on creating “intimate extensions of the human body” that react with ease to the nervous system’s electromechanical commands as fluidly as natural limbs. With fourteen patents relating to the field of bionics, Herr hopes to make an array of such advanced prosthetics commercially available and affordable.

What about knees like mine? In a New York Times interview last week, Herr speculated that someday, “smart” pants that act like a second skin on one’s legs might make running a painless, lifelong pursuit.  My joints like the sound of that.

An avid athlete himself, Herr says he intends to run alongside his fellow amputees in next year’s Boston Marathon.

“We will participate as a beautifully defiant statement to the world that we the people will not be intimidated, brought down, diminished, conquered or stopped by acts of violence,” he writes.

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