Research

Innovative Thinking, Chicago Style

by Jay London on May 1, 2013

in Alumni Life, Events, Learning, Media

Chunka Mui '84

Chunka Mui ’84

MIT has more than 126,000 alumni and nearly 100,000 live away from the Boston-Cambridge area. And while alumni away from campus can feel separated from Institute happenings, there are many ways to stay connected.

An example of this is View from the Top, an Alumni Association event that brings together Institute alumni and community members for networking and discussion in locations throughout the U.S. The interactive events feature prominent alumni who share their professional journey and provide perspectives on innovation, entrepreneurship, and the role MIT played in their lives and careers.

Smita Shah SM '96

Smita Shah SM ’96

The most recent event, “Innovative Thinking, Chicago Style,” took place on Thursday, April 25, 2013, and focused on a variety of topics, including the future of the automotive industry, innovations in printing technology, hiring strategies, and the perils of building a company from scratch.

The program, which was moderated by Scott Marks ’68, SM ’69, former vice chairman of the First Chicago NBD Corporation, and featured GrubHub co-founder Michael Evans ’99, MNG ’00; author Chunka Mui ’84; and entrepreneur Smita Shah SM ’96 and Gordon Smith SM ’90, ScD ’93, CTO of GSI Technologies.

Mui began the program by sharing one simple business strategy: Start small, think big, and learn fast. He discussed the dichotomy between Google’s innovative self-driving car with the slowly-evolving strategies of traditional vehicle manufacturing—a $35 trillion industry.

“Failure comes from companies that only rely on incremental change—that’s thinking small,” Mui said. “Companies like Google rely on the law of disruption, which is basically making changes based on advances in technology. That’s thinking big.”

Evans, a finalist for the 2011 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award, shared the origins of Grub Hub, which began as a side project in 2004 and now has investment funding of more than $84 million. GrubHub is a web-based company that allows users to find takeout restaurants and order online for free.

(From left) Smith, Mui, Evans, Marks, and Shah

(From left) Smith, Mui, Evans, Marks, and Shah

“In true MIT fashion, GrubHub started as an all-nighter,” he says. “It started as a small idea—I was basically sick of ordering pizza from the same place. So I took this problem and tried to write a code to solve it.”

Evans also discussed the company’s rapid evolution, which featured new technology, employees, and strategies.

“Innovation is, to a large degree, identifying problems,” he says. “Sometimes you can break those problems into smaller problems. We tackled questions like ‘How do we make service better?’ and updated technology like switching from fax orders to tablets.”

Shah, the CEO of the SPAAN Tech engineering firm discussed how her MIT education helped prepare her for a successful professional career.

The Chicago alumni host committee: Christopher Resto ’99; Alex Menchaca ’85; Claudia Perry ’81; Aaron Barlow ’86: and Benjamin Hellweg ’97, SM ’00.

The Chicago alumni host committee: Christopher Resto ’99; Alex Menchaca ’85; Claudia Perry ’81; Aaron Barlow ’86: and Benjamin Hellweg ’97, SM ’00.

“MIT is home to the best virtues of education—it’s elite but not elitist,” Shah says. “The school of life can be hard and MIT prepares you for that. You have to be good to be part of the MIT club but you’re encouraged to do well. It takes a very structured approach.”

Smith discussed how his MIT education prepared him for a career beyond his degree in chemical engineering.

“Innovation can take time,” he says. “It doesn’t happen overnight. But it’s important to adapt technologies from sister markets—it’s something our company has been very successful with.”

Other recent View from the Top events include “Global Capital Markets,” which was held in New York and featured Goldman Sachs director Armen Avanessians ’81, and “Exploration: New Frontiers in a New Era,” a Houston event moderated by Emmy-winning meteorologist Gene Norman ’82.

The program, which began in 2008, has also taken place in Boston, London, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Check the Alumni Association site for information on future events.

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Local Warming Project Offers Smart Heat

by Amy Marcott on April 29, 2013

in Design, Energy, Research

The Local Warming installation above the door leading to Lobby 7.

The Local Warming installation above the door leading to Lobby 7.

Walking up the steps to 77 Mass. Ave. on the evening of April 4, I encountered three strange circles above the doorway. Two were mirrored, one was glowing. At first I thought it was an elaborate hack, but it turns out it was part of an energy conservation research project called Local Warming by the Senseable City Lab.

The concept is brilliantly simple: rather than heating vast, often unoccupied (or sparsely occupied) rooms in buildings, target the people who need the heat. The local warming device is an infrared energy beam directed by a sophisticated motion sensor. To engage it, you step on a pair of footprints on a carpet, then the beam follows you around.

Rendering of how the Local Warming device works.

Says the research project’s website: “While over time there has been improved retention of pervasive heating through developments in materials and construction, we believe a fundamental shift in climate control strategy towards occupant-localized heating will achieve an order of magnitude improvement in heating efficiency.”

Watch some footage of the Local Warming project in action below.

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The Great Snow Hack Explained

by Jay London on April 26, 2013

in Alumni Life, Campus Culture, Hacks, Media, Remember When..., Student Life

The photo that appeared in the Boston Herald Traveler.

The photo that appeared in the Boston Herald Traveler.

Hacks at MIT are a pastime that prides itself on secrecy—watching a hack unfold in anonymity is part of the fun. Despite this, most recent hacks are well-chronicled. The online MIT Gallery of Hacks has summaries of more than 200 Institute hacks dating back to 1989.

There is less online information on hacks pre-1989, but they are no less imaginative and clever. Inspired by a recent revelation, one alumnus has provided Slice of MIT with detailed info a decades-old hack that briefly gained national media attention: The Great Snow Hack of 1968.

The alum requested anonymity and will be henceforth referred to as Mr. Snow.

Unlike many hacks that take months of preparation, the Great Snow Hack wasn’t planned. It was the result of boredom on a freezing-cold January night.

“It was a bitter winter, even for New England,” Mr. Snow says. “We were bored to death in the dorm and there was so much snow outside. So we thought, ‘Let’s go have a massive snowball fight—inside.’”

The students gathered buckets of snow and filled the dorm’s shower stalls. But the dry air made it difficult to mold a snowball and the students turned on the shower to get the snow more damp.

“It caused a huge amount of steam,” Mr. Snow says. “You couldn’t see two inches in front of your face. So we opened the windows and let a bitter wind into the stall. It looked like a complete blizzard.”

Sensing the opportunity for a hack, the students called the Boston Herald Traveler. “We called the paper and said, ‘We figured out a way to make snow in the shower.”

The Traveler sent a reporter and a photographer. When the photographer arrived, he entered the shower stalls and was met with a mix freezing wind, whirling snow, and hazy steam.

“The photographer said, ‘I can’t take a picture. You can’t see anything,’” Mr. Snow says. “We told him, ‘If you want to stop the snow, just shut the shower off.”

The students convinced The Traveler that they had invented a shower nozzle that makes snow. The paper fell for the gag and featured the crew in a photo and article in the next day’s paper. (The newspaper is occasionally on display at the MIT Museum.)

More publicity followed and the Baker House students were contacted by Time, Newsweek, the Associated Press, and other wire services.

“It caused a big sensation in Boston—other schools around the city tried to recreate it,” he says. “Other schools called us and said, ‘How do you do it? We’re not doing it right.’”

Snow in the shower also became a hot topic on call-in radio and a subject of scorn from another Cambridge university.

“Harvard students got upset and call a few radio stations saying it was impossible—which it was,” he says. “Of course, we had some engineering majors call the same shows and say, ‘Of course Harvard can’t do it—they’re using the wrong-size nozzle. They don’t know how to engineer a correct shower system.’”

The Baker house students eventually got a cease-and-desist order from an MIT dean, but the hack had been accomplished. An evening or boredom resulted in a brief media sensation.

“The hack wasn’t making fake snow—it was the gullibility of the press,” he says, “They fell for the idea that the MIT students had created a snow-making machine. They were never smart enough to say, ‘Show us how to do this in another shower.’”

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How Do We Love Thee, River Charles? Let Us Count the Ways…

by Joe McGonegal on April 22, 2013

in Alumni Life, Athletics, Campus Culture, Classroom, Engineering, Events, IAP, Science, Student Life

Happy Earth Day! As you read this, teams are vying to be named champions in the annual MIT Earth Day Challenge this week. Many community members will contribute to the (rescheduled) 14th annual Charles River Cleanup this weekend.
earth day_transparent1

Being a school on a shoreline, MIT’s celebration of Earth any day is also, quite often, a celebration of the water, and in particular, the Charles River.

Like so many civilizations before us, MIT’s has been built upon a river.

How does this river sustain our work? Ocean engineering majors can tell you; they surveyed the muddy Charles’s depths in 2007. Civil engineers plumb its depths annually: check out this 2012 project to destratify it with turbulent jets.  Art, Culture,and Technology Associate Professor Gediminas Urbonas designed last winter’s IAP “Learning from the River” around it. CSAIL’s lecture series bears its name.

There was Proteus the penguin boat and the pre-Columbian raft. We’ve done sonar tests, problem sets with fictional “Charles River” companies, studied ice patterns, and silt formation.

And the Charles is our playground, too, as any runner, rower or sailor will attest. Maybe you played the MUVE game “Charles River City” a few years back, or watched the 4th of July fireworks from any available rooftop.

Always moving and yet always still, the Charles is a muse for photographers, romantics, barflys, philanthropists, and soul-searchers. Remember how Ernie Knight ’28, for his 70th reunion, took a single scull out for one more row?

2011_sunset_charles_small

Photo: Lydia Krasilnikova.

Seems logical to trek out there once a year—at least, to work on keeping the Charles clean.

In a unique sense of the word, the Charles River is also an MIT invention. Karl Haglund’s 2002 book, Inventing the Charles River, is a great exploration into how engineers (MIT alums included) shaped Boston and Cambridge’s shorelines over the years into a “Back Bay” with stabilized riverfronts. How would one’s MIT experience be different, do you think, if we looked out at mud flats and salt marshes every day?

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Are You Ready for Wearable Computers?

by Joe McGonegal on April 17, 2013

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

It’s an exciting time to be Thad Starner ’91, SM ’95, PhD ’99.

For over twenty years, Starner has been one of only a handful of pioneers to go where no humans have gone before, sporting a wearable computer in front of his eye.

Google Glass, due to be released in late 2013.

Google Glass, due to be released in late 2013. Photo: Google.

Later this year, Starner is about to have a lot of company. With the launch of Google Glass sometime in late 2013, Starner’s 20-year beta test will end.

In late February, a group of Google Explorers,  who essentially won the right to be early adopters, started seeing their world as Starner does, through a computer screen.

Starner designed and modified his own version over the years; Google’s first customers paid $1,500 for the off-the-shelf version that Starner helped design. Google Glass strives to contain everything in one device: microphone, camera, CPU and a mini-projector that will flash calendar reminders, text messages, directions and whatever else you wish it to onto a half-inch transparent area of one lens.

Serving as Technical Lead/Manager for Google alongside some former classmates, Starner has given talks on wearable computing for some time. He is quick to note, however, that we have all used wearable computers—in the form of heart-rate monitors, wristwatches and, of course, cell phones.

Long before there was industry research and symposia on the topic of wearable computers, Starner roamed the streets of Cambridge with his early model, exploring the intersections of virtual and real worlds—while crossing back and forth over a very real Mass Ave.

glass2

A typical view from a Google Glass headset. Photo: Google.

“We really believe that there’s much more convenient ways of having a computer augment your life than to take a phone out of your pocket,” Starner said in an interview this month. With a wearable computer, he says, “You get really good at using 30-second chunks of time.”

Aside from Google Glass, Starner’s lab at Georgia Tech, where he is director of the Contextual Computing Group, works on other types of wearable computing, like a glove with finger pulsations that can teach you to play Beethoven while you multitask. That glove also does wonders for stroke victims, Starner learned.

Clearly, wearable computing can make such profound impacts in people’s lives. Until then, Starner will have to be patient, fielding all the controversial questions about privacy and copyright and identity when the world puts on its glasses for the first time.

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Smart Farming: Alum Cooks Up Code and Fresh Produce in New Startup

by Joe McGonegal on April 12, 2013

in Alumni Life, In the News, Modern Geekhood, Science

How best to get fresh produce to market? Through clever code, of course.

Dan Chak ’02 thinks he has a great algorithm for determining how to most efficiently get good produce from California farms to the best California restaurants.

Source: USDA Economic Research Service: Structure and Finances of US Farms, 2010 Family Farm Report.

Source: smallfarmfresh.com.

With demand for “low-mileage” food sources growing, along with consumers’ increasing tastes for all things organic, restaurants in Los Angeles often had to call five or ten farmers to satisfy orders for a week’s worth of produce needs.

Using Chak’s software, launched earlier this month through his company Small Farm Fresh, chefs register their restaurant then log in to place an order as needed. The site’s interface lists quantities of carrots, lettuce, and so forth available that week from several local farms who have signed up for the directory. Farmers deliver their produce to the restaurants via the traditional farmers’ market, which, as Chak puts it, “acts as a natural aggregation point.”

Like Amazon.com, where Chak previously worked as a software engineer, Small Farm Fresh aims to become a portal through which producers and consumers connect with few or no warehouses in between.

The results of Chak’s pilot test were convincing enough for him to proceed to a full launch in southern California. With more than 30 local farms participating, Chak’s software now links inventory to demand in a useful way.

“I started Small Farm Fresh because right now, it’s harder to buy locally grown produce than it is to buy produce that was grown thousands of miles away,” writes Chak. “Even if big companies can make the numbers work to sell produce this way, these excessive food miles are bad for the environment, bad for local farmers, and ultimately, bad for consumers. We get anonymous food that isn’t as fresh as it could be when amazing produce is grown next door.”

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MIT’s Spring Soundtrack

by Jay London on April 11, 2013

in Alumni Life, Arts, Events, Media, Modern Geekhood

Every season needs a soundtrack and MIT’s Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) is providing the sounds of spring. Since late February, CAST has presented the Spring Sound Series, a slate of concerts, lectures, and demonstrations featuring prominent music and multimedia artists.

Julia Ogrydziak '96

Julia Ogrydziak ’96

The weekly series, presented in conjunction with course 21M.380 (Music and Technology), has featured African drumming, Indian classical music, and jazz improvisation, plus hybrid performances that meld music with fields like science, engineering, and robotics.

From CAST:

“The series will explore mechanical experimentation, algorithmic modes of composition and performance, playful and improvisatory processes, and the material, spatial, and kinetic properties of sound. These artists re-imagine the tools, machines, and techniques for creative expression while negotiating the blurred boundaries between the technical and aesthetic, the electronic and organic, and composition and invention.”

The series, which has already featured composer and architect Christopher Janney ’78, concludes over the next month. The final two performances feature MIT alumni: violinist Julia Ogrydziak ’96 and designer Andy Cavatorta SM ’10.

Ogrydziak’s performance takes place Wednesday, May 1, at noon at Killian Hall. She is a San Francisco-based violinist, composer, and visual artist whose live performances combine electronic and indie music, architecture, digital media, nature, and science.

At MIT, Ogrydziak earned undergraduate degrees in physics and music. A former researcher in the Media Lab’s Hyperinstruments Group, she received the AMITA Award for most outstanding woman graduate.

[Listen to Ogrydziak perform “Shark” from the show Okeanos held in San Francisco in April 2012.]

Andy Cavatorta SM '10

Andy Cavatorta SM ’10

Cavatorta will perform Wednesday, May 8, at noon at Killian Hall. A Media Lab graduate, he has designed robotic musical instruments such as the BloBot and Whirly-Bot. His best-known creation, the Gravity Harp, is a three-meter-long pendulum with an attached harp that was featured in the Bjork album Biophilia.

Cavatorta, who is based in New York, has also collaborated with Amorphic Robot Works and the Museum of Science exhibit, “Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination.”

[Watch a 2011 demonstration of Bjork’s Gravity Harp, which was created by Cavatorta.]

Visit the Spring Sound Series site for the full schedule. The series is co-presented by the MIT Music & Theater Arts Program and is free and open to the general public.

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Building the Digital Resumé

by Jay London on April 10, 2013

in Alumni Life, Events, Learning, Media

John Hill, higher education evangelist

John Hill, higher education evangelist

Creating an online profile and building an online network, especially on LinkedIn, is an arduous but necessary task. Fine-tuning your profile, maximizing your network, and connecting with contacts can be even more perplexing.

A workshop presented by the Alumni Association and MIT Sloan’s Office of External Relations is aiming to help students and alumni manage their LinkedIn profile and best utilize their professional and MIT affiliations.

The workshop, “LinkedIn: The New Resume,” takes place on Thursday, April 18, 2013, at 7:30 p.m. in Bldg. 10-250 and will feature John Hill, LinkedIn’s higher education evangelist (yes, that’s his official title). An alumni networking reception will be held following the event.

Hill will reinforce his mantra, “Relationships matter!,” and share best practices and strategies for utilizing LinkedIn to create an online brand and network with alumni, peers, and professionals.

In his role at LinkedIn, Hill specializes in helping professionals utilize LinkedIn to maximize their university affiliation, aggregate their audience and target market, and develop robust professional networks.

Hill was previously director of Alumni Career Services at Michigan State University, where he provided career services for 420,000 alumni and utilized social media to facilitate successful alumni-to-alumni networking.

The free event is open to current MIT students and Boston-area alumni. Non-local alums can watch and participate via a live webcast. Registration is required for in-person attendance on online viewing. (An Infinite Connection account is required for registration.)

Hill will take questions for in-person attendees and the online audience throughout the seminar. Email alumnicareers@mit.edu or use the Twitter hash #MITLinkedIn to submit your questions.

The seminar is part of the Alumni Association’s Backpack to Briefcase program, which helps alumni transition from MIT into professional life. The program—which features on-campus seminars, webinars, and instructional videos—are designed for students, alumni, and their spouses and partners.

In preparation for the April 18 event, join the Alumni Association’s official LinkedIn group and update your Infinite Connection profile.

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Alums Go Locu, Using Big Data to Improve Small Businesses

by Joe McGonegal on April 9, 2013

in Alumni Life, Economics, In the News, Learning, Modern Geekhood

What do you get when you combine two Sloan MBAs and two big brains from CSAIL?

The answer is Locu, a free web platform that delivers menus and real-time stats for thousands of small businesses using the latest in search engine savvy and localized analytics.

The MBAs — Rene Reinsberg GM ‘11 and Marc Piette GM ’11 — joined CSAIL senior PhD candidate Marek Olszewski and postdoc Stelios Sidiroglou-Douskos to form Locu. They launched the site in 2011.

Marc Piette GM ’11 (left) and Rene Reinsberg GM ‘11 (right), two of Locu’s co-founders. Photo: locu.com.

Together, these four entrepreneurs found both a market in need, small businesses, and a large willing consumer base, one fatigued by Yelp ratings and Groupon discounts.  Simply give them a menu of pizzas, health club classes, or handyman services, and Locu’s software does the rest, pushing the information to dozens of reputable websites and social media platforms that aggregate such services.

In other words, finally, that Chinese takeout in town that you love or your [Town-name] House of Pizza will have a website, or at least appear in search results.

Combining SEO with supply-and-demand economics, the Locu platform aims to give savvy business owners far more than just star-ratings and user reviews.  Though they started with a simple product called MenuPlatform, the company’s business model is ambitious—and you might think eerie: “Our mission is to structure the world’s information.” Nevertheless, it’s generating plenty of buzz.

Restaurants have jumped onboard. Locu estimates that it will index its millionth menu this year, maximizing that menu’s impact across web, mobile, and social platforms. OpenTable, which already had a pretty firm grip on the e-menu niche, conceded to Locu’s more powerful code last fall in a can’t-beat-‘em-join-‘em type concession (OpenTable still has the market on reservations).

Aside from restaurants, enough corner stores in Locu’s two hubs (Cambridge and San Francisco) had signed up by last week that the owners were able to publish a study on hipsters and PBR beer on their blog. If anyone has yet to understand the wonders of big data, perhaps Locu’s beer maps of Budweiser and Pabst distribution can win them over.

Next up for Locu? What about ordering takeout from a Facebook page?

“The reality is this: we’re geeks,” the owners write on their blog. “We love technology and spend our days finding new ways to apply it to the merchant world to make things better.”

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Alumni Ingenuity—Now in Public Restrooms!

by Amy Marcott on April 4, 2013

in Alumni Life, Design, Energy, Health

The Xlerator hand dryer.Have you noticed how hand dryers in public bathrooms have gotten more high tech lately? Super concentrated bursts of dry air that promise to work quickly and actually are noticeably faster than their predecessors? You can thank three MITers for that: Sol Aisenberg PhD ’57; George Freedman ’43; and Richard Pavelle, who was on the research staffs at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science and Lincoln Lab.

They are three of the four scientists at Invent Resources, Inc. (IRI), a company they cofounded during their retirements to create inventions on demand. Together, the four IRI scientists have expertise in just about every scientific discipline that would be useful for invention. Their “fields of competency” list includes cryogenics, general relativity, energy conversion, plasma physics, advanced materials, novel chemical processes, and medical technology, among scores more.

Before retiring, Aisenberg led the high-tech divisions of several Fortune 500 companies and pioneered ion-assisted deposition and demonstration of hydrogen-free artificial diamond film materials.

Freedman founded and was director of Raytheon’s New Products Center. One team he led produced the world’s first samarium cobalt magnets that were stronger than those that could be measured at the National Magnet Lab at MIT and were later used in Patriot missiles and tools used in space.

Pavelle patented the credit card calculator, golf-club faces that expanded the sweet spot and are now industry standard, and an electrochemical process that reduces charging times for batteries.

And then they took on commercial hand dryers, discovering that the previous models wasted 90 percent of the energy going into them. In this case, IRI had already unsuccessfully pitched their idea for a faster hand dryer to industry leader World Dryer. But Excel Dryer of East Longmeadow, Mass., a small family owned company, hired them to create a product people would actually want to use.

IRI scientists were  shooting for 10 seconds of drying time—down from 30–40 seconds, but after three-and-a-half years of work got it down to 12, which is now the standard. Excel owner Denis Gagnon was so certain the engineering team at IRI had created a revolutionary product that he risked his life savings: he borrowed against his home and life insurance, drained his bank accounts, and took loans from friends and relatives.

The resulting product was the Xlerator, the first revamped hand dryer to hit the market. Others have since followed, like the Dyson Airblade that you stick your arms into.

According to an interview with NPR, Excel’s sales have risen more than 10 percent every year for the past decade. And there’s room for growth. Data suggest that there are 25 million public bathrooms nationwide not using automatic hand dryers, even though a basic-model Xlerator costs $400, offers 95 percent cost savings over paper towels, and has a significantly smaller carbon footprint.

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