Flight Competition Reconnects MIT and Bose

For many MIT students, the Bose Corporation is an audio equipment company whose speakers hang on their dorm room or apartment walls. In truth, the connection between Bose and MIT dates back more than 65 years.

In 1956, graduate student Amar Gopal Bose '51, SM '52, ScD '56 purchased a stereo system. Disappointed with the stereo’s sound quality, Bose began researching acoustics and reverberant sound. He continued his research as an MIT professor and was awarded several patents on speaker technology. In 1964, he founded the Bose Corp.

As of April 2013, the company has eight operating plants and more than 150 stores worldwide.

"Most students don't realize Bose is a company that began at MIT," Lee Zamir '95, SM '97, Bose director of new business development, says. "We're a startup in every way—innovation, making good devices even better, and producing new products."

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After Bose retired from MIT in 2001, the on-campus connection between Bose and the Institute diminished. Zamir wanted to change that.

In 2011, he connected with Associate Professor Olivier de Weck SM '99, PhD '01, whose fluid dynamics course features the annual Unified Engineering Flight Competition (UEFC), where student teams design miniature airplanes and control their movement around various obstacles.

Past UEFCs had never included a sound component. For the 2013 competition, under the guidance of Zamir and Bose engineers, the students  were required to fly their plane towards a beacon tower and chirp out M-I-T in Morse code. Another task involved jamming a target receiver with audio. Points were awarded for time and decibel level.

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"The contest combined system design with flight precision," Zamir says. "A plane's speaker system needs to be lightweight and in the perfect spot. Otherwise it won't fly."

The competition was held in the Johnson Center and featured more than a dozen teams of four. The top three teams were recognized (“Supersonic ExitVelocity” took first place) as were the most resilient team and the most creative design.

In addition to the UEFC, the students received a lecture on the elements of acoustic design. The competition also allowed Zamir and other Bose employees who are MIT alums the chance to return home.

"It’s great to get back on campus—especially to do innovation-based work," he says. "We were looking to make the Bose and MIT connection even stronger and this was a perfect way to do it."

While Amar Bose is best known as the company’s chairman, at MIT he was known as Dr. Bose, and a seat in his electrical engineering courses was highly coveted.

"When I was a student there in the early '90s, there was always a fear that he could stop teaching at any time," Zamir says, "We'd check the schedule, and when he saw his name, we’d register right away."

In 2011, Bose donated a majority of the company's non-voting shares to MIT (with a caveat that the shares never be sold) to help advance MIT's research mission. Read the MIT News story.