By Rachel Gordon, MIT CSAIL  

This week the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) awarded MIT CSAIL graduate student Haitham Hassanieh PhD ’15 the Doctoral Dissertation Award for his work in creating efficient algorithms for computing the Sparse Fourier Transform (SFT).

Hassanieh, who was a grad student in CSAIL Professor Dina Katabi’s lab, demonstrated the many applications of his algorithms in building systems to solve problems in areas like wireless networks, mobile systems, computer graphics, medical imaging, biochemistry and digital circuits.

His dissertation showed a new way to reduce the size of computation needed for data processing, making programs in many areas of computing more efficient. Before his work, the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) was considered the most efficient algorithm in this realm, but with the influx of Big Data, the FFT can no longer keep up. SFT can be processed at 10 to 100 times faster than before, which largely increases the power of devices and networks.

Hassanieh is an assistant professor in the computer science and electrical and computer engineering departments at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He received his MS and PhD at MIT and his BS in Engineering from the American University of Beirut.

ACM will formally recognize Hassanieh at its annual awards banquet in San Francisco in June.

Press Contact

Adam Conner-Simons, MIT CSAIL 
Email: aconner@csail.mit.edu
Phone: (617) 324-9135 
MIT CSAIL

Two EECS professors were among 12 School of Engineering faculty members who received tenure from MIT.

Timothy Lu ’03, SM ’03, PhD ’08, uses principles inspired by electrical engineering and computer science to develop new techniques for constructing, probing, modulating, and modeling synthetically engineered biological circuits.

Lu is an associate professor in EECS and an associate member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.  Lu's lab, the Synthetic Biology Group, is focused on advancing fundamental designs and applications for synthetic biology. Lu received MIT bachelor's and MEng degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. He received an MD from Harvard Medical School and PhD from the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Medical Engineering and Medical Physics Program. He has won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize, the Grand Prize in the National Inventor Hall of Fame’s Collegiate Inventors Competition, and the Leon Reznick Memorial Prize for “outstanding performance in research” from Harvard Medical School. Lu has also been selected as a Kavli Fellow by the National Academy of Sciences and a Siebel Scholar.

Ryan Williams works on the theoretical design and analysis of efficient algorithms and in computational complexity theory, focusing mainly on new connections between algorithm design and logical circuit complexity.  

Williams joined MIT as an associate professor in EECS in January 2017. He received a bachelor's in computer science and mathematics from Cornell, and a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon. Following postdoctoral appointments at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton) and IBM Almaden, he spent five years as an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford. In addition to some best-paper awards, he has received a Sloan Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellowship, and was an invited speaker at the 2014 International Congress of Mathematicians. Williams is a member of the Theory of Computation group in CSAIL.

More than 140 undergraduates from throughout the School of Engineering successfully completed in-depth SuperUROP projects during the 2016-2017 academic year. They received certificates during a high-energy celebration at MIT’s Samberg Conference Center on May 18.

The audience clapped and cheered as student after student stepped up to receive certificates from and pose for pictures with School of Engineering administrators and faculty members.

"It's really amazing to see the transformation from the very beginning — the proposals last September and October — through the conclusion of your projects,” Anantha Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and EECS department head, told the students. “Congratulations to all of you.”

Chandrakasan created the year-long program — an extension of the traditional Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP) — in 2012 to provide students with immersive, graduate-level research experiences. During the ceremony, Ian Waitz, Dean of the School of Engineering, emphasized the overall value of the UROP experience: “It takes our undergraduates and it puts them shoulder to shoulder with grad students, and, with faculty, has them solve problems that haven't been solved before,” he said.

This year’s SuperUROP class included students from EECS and four other School of Engineering departments: Aeronautics and Astronautics, Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Civil and Environmental Engineering.

See more photos on Dropbox and find out more about the SuperUROP program on the SuperUROP website.

Photo: Dominick Reuter

Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office
June 8, 2017

Three-time EECS alumna Lisa Su, now the president and CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, urged MIT’s new doctoral graduates to “dream big” and “work hard every day to solve the world’s toughest problems,” in her commencement address today at the Institute’s 2017 Investiture of Doctoral Hoods.

The festive, colorful ceremony featured new graduates earning doctoral degrees this academic year, and was held in the Johnson Athletics Center before a large audience of friends and family.

“I encourage each of you to dream big and believe you can change the world, have the courage to take risks and enthusiastically learn from mistakes, and work hard every day to solve the world’s toughest problems,” said Su, who received an SB in 1990, an SM in 1991, and a PhD in 1994. “I think if you do that, I’m pretty sure you will make everybody very proud, and you will be incredibly lucky throughout your career.”

In outlining her own experiences in technology and business, which have taken her from the Institute’s laboratories to the executive suite, Su observed that MIT has been a central influence on her own life and career. “The MIT PhD degree truly shaped who I am in so many ways, both personally and professionally,” she said.

Su came to the U.S. from Taiwan at age 2 and grew up in New York City. As an undergraduate at MIT, she developed a deep interest in semiconductors; as a graduate student, she received a master’s degree in management and a doctorate focused on research in silicon-on-insulator technology. Su quipped that when she entered MIT’s doctoral program, at the urging of her parents, she was “too young at the time to know any better.”

However, she wound up thriving in a challenging academic environment. “MIT is pure, and it’s really hard,” Su said. “MIT taught me how to think and solve really hard problems.”  
 
Recalling the many ways that her technical education encouraged her to pursue a career in management, Su recounted, “I thought I could make better business decisions because I understood the technology.” 

Su began her career at Texas Instruments. She spent 13 years working at IBM, rising to the level of vice president of the Semiconductor Research and Development Center. She then worked in multiple executive roles at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. She joined Advanced Micro Devices in 2012 as a senior vice president and general manager for global business units, and served as chief operating officer before becoming the CEO.

Su was named one of the Top 50 World’s Greatest Leaders by Fortune in 2017, and has been named a Top Semiconductor CEO by Institutional Investor in both 2016 and 2017. She was also cited as one of MIT Technology Review’s Top 100 Young Innovators in 2002. She serves on the board of directors for Analog Devices, the Global Semiconductor Alliance, and the U.S. Semiconductor Industry Association.

MIT Chancellor and Ford Professor of Engineering Cynthia Barnhart SM ’86 PhD ’88, who annually presides over the hooding ceremony, introduced Su while giving welcoming remarks
Barnhart said she was “thrilled” to have Su addressing the graduates, and offered her own congratulations to the newly minted doctoral graduates.

“Earning a doctoral degree from MIT is no small feat,” Barnhart told the assembled graduates. “You have every reason to be proud, to be relieved, and to be filled with hope for what the future holds.”

This marks the third year that MIT’s doctoral hooding ceremony has featured a keynote speaker, who is chosen with input from MIT faculty and doctoral students.

Academic regalia dates to at least the 15th century, but American universities only adopted formal codes for graduation gowns and hoods in 1893. MIT doctoral degree robes have had their current design since 1995. MIT features a silver-gray robe with a cardinal red velvet front panel, as well cardinal red velvet bars on the sleeves. Additional color markings denote whether graduates have received a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) or a Doctor of Science (ScD) degree.

The actual doctoral hoods are part of the doctoral robe ensemble. After the remarks by Barnhart and Su, all doctoral graduates had their names announced as they walked across the stage, then individually had the hoods draped on their ensembles by their department or program head.
 
 
 

Photo: Jake Belcher

David L. Chandler | MIT News Office

Tim Cook, the renowned CEO of Apple, spoke to MIT’s Class of 2017 on a beautiful sunny morning in the Institute’s Killian Court, urging the graduates to search for a direction and purpose that extends beyond their own lives.

Cook, who took over the reins at Apple after the death of company co-founder Steve Jobs, described his own years-long search for such a purpose, that culminated when he first met Jobs and went to work for the company. “Before that moment,” he said, “I had never met a leader with such passion, or encountered a company with such a clear and compelling purpose — to serve humanity.”

Addressing the approximately 1,066 undergraduates and 1,818 graduate students (including more than 450 from EECS) receiving their degrees, Cook said, “When you work toward something greater than yourself, you find meaning, you find purpose. So the question I hope you will carry forward from here is, how will you serve humanity?”

Speaking of the ground-breaking research that continues to emerge from MIT, Cook said, “Thanks to discoveries made right here, billions of people are leading healthier, more productive, more fulfilling lives. And if we are ever going to solve some of the hardest problems still facing the world today — everything from cancer, to climate change, to educational inequality — then technology will help us to do it.”

MIT President L. Rafael Reif, in his charge to the students, echoed those sentiments and compared the graduation of this class to one of Apple’s famed product launches: “Today, I am the one presiding over the release of a mind-blowing new product. This product is a limited edition — and it’s extremely personalized. In fact, it comes in more than 2,700 varieties.”

Reif continued, “The operating system for our latest product is amazing! It has unmatched processing ability and built-in memory. I know, because we have tested it and retested it, over and over and over!” And, he added, “I am very proud to tell you that the product we launch today has an unlimited capacity to augment reality to make a better world.”

“I see a planet that urgently needs everything you have to offer,” he said. “So now, go out there. Join the world. Find your calling. Solve the unsolvable. Invent the future. Take the high road. And you will continue to make your family, including your MIT family, proud.”

Arolyn Conwill, president of MIT’s Graduate Student Council, said, “The world is full of enormous challenges — climate change, data security, public health, to name a few. And these challenges are complex. Our ability to solve these problems is determined by both our technological capabilities as well as our ability to implement policies that maximize the impact of our work.”

For example,” she said, “even the most significant scientific advances in medicine will only be felt by those who have access to health care. Our success depends on our ability to build collaborations across disciplines and to build coalitions that include innovators, policy makers, and diverse members of our global community.” Through a combination of extraordinary talent and luck, she said, MIT’s graduates “are well-positioned to influence their disciplines and influence the world. And it’s up to us to decide how to use that influence.”

Conwill added, “I hope that we not only advance more sustainable ways to use our planet’s resources, but that we also work to shepherd these technologies into the mainstream. … I hope that we not only cure cancer, but that we also work to ensure that all people have access to affordable and comprehensive health care.”'

Liana Ilutzi, president of the Class of 2017, described sage words she had received about responding to adversity: “You can run from it, or face it head on. If MIT has taught us anything, it has taught us that we cannot run from a challenge, or from adversity.” Though many challenges will come, she said, “we are equipped with the tools to handle every single one of them.” And beyond the technological solutions, she said, “when we use empathy, our skill set is beyond powerful.”

She said “we are at our best when we dig deep to go beyond our own emotions, and connect with others. … When adversity confronts you, whether it’s a conflict at work, a family illness, or just a bad day, who will you be? … MIT is all about resiliency, but empathy is its accelerator.” As the graduates go about their lives, she said, “people will lean on us, work with us, and depend on us to change the world, and I know that we are up for the challenge!”

Ilutzi then presented the traditional senior class gift to MIT, which included contributions from 64 percent of the class members, for a total donation of $17,750. She concluded, “Class of 2017, this has been a wild ride, but this is just the beginning!”

Following the ceremony, EECS graduates reunited with their families to mingle, dine, and pose for pictures during a reception under an enormous tent on the campus's North Court.

For additional coverage of MIT's 2017 Commencement ceremonies, including video of Tim Cook's address, additional photos, and links to media coverage, please visit the MIT News Commencement page. Selected photos from EECS's Commencement receptions will be posted during the week of June 11. EECS will provide graduates with links to additional photos that they can download for their personal use at the same time.

Russ Tedrake, a faculty member in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), has been named as the inaugural chair holder of the Toyota Professorship

The appointment was announced in May 2017 by Anantha Chandrakasan, EECS department head and Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Ian Waitz, Dean of the School of Engineering. “The appointment recognizes Professor Tedrake's leadership in the area of robotics and his outstanding mentorship and educational contributions,” Chandrakasan and Waitz wrote in a message to faculty. “Professor Tedrake is internationally well-known in the field of robotics, and is widely respected for his theoretical, algorithmic, and experimental contributions to the field.

Tedrake’s research focuses on developing optimization-based algorithms for planning, feedback control, and analysis of complex dynamic robots that can walk, run, and fly through unstructured environments. His work leverages the observation that the equations of motion of these robots, constrained by mechanics, have special structure. By finding new connections between convex optimization and the mathematical models of, for example, frictional contact mechanics, he has been able to make seemingly intractable problems in robot feedback control become tractable.

Tedrake's algorithmic results have led to impressive demonstrations on real hardware. His algorithms enabled the first successful demonstrations of high-speed (post-stall) perching for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs); his small airplanes could land on a perch like a bird. More recently, his team has developed bird-sized UAVs that can dart through trees at more than 30 mph, guided by a provably robust feedback motion planning engine. He also led MIT's entry in the DARPA Robotics Challenge, demonstrating optimization-based perception, planning, and feedback control for a complex humanoid that had to drive a car, open doors, turn valves, pick up and operate power tools, and walk across rough terrain and up stairs.

Tedrake has been a leader in organizing robotics activities across campus. He started the Robotics@MIT seminar series and the Robotics@MIT Student Conference, and serves as faculty advisor for many of the robotics student groups and projects at MIT.

"Professor Tedrake has made truly outstanding contributions to both graduate and undergraduate education both on and off campus,” Chandrakasan and Waitz wrote. “His Underactuated Robotics course was one of the first two graduate courses to be put on edX, with a current enrollment exceeding 20,000 students, and his course notes and open-source software are widely known in the robotics community.” Tedrake has also been instrumental in updating the core controls and signal processing curriculum, and has been recognized with both the Jerome H. Saltzer Award and the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for his undergraduate teaching.

By Alison F. Takemura

Two minutes. Maybe three. That’s all students had in which to deliver the juiciest highlights of their work to MIT commencement speaker and Apple CEO Tim Cook. But on the day before he would address 2017 graduates, Cook was whipping across campus to several meetings to soak in what makes MIT unique.

As the afternoon sun burnished Massachusetts Avenue, Cook walked into a conference room at MIT’s startup accelerator The Engine, where the students were waiting. Representing diverse programs across campus, the seven presenters somehow squeezed their accomplishments into the allotted time.

“So impressed by @MIT students & faculty who are finding new ways to tackle the world’s biggest challenges,” Cook said on Twitter. “Thanks for sharing your work!”

The presenters:

• Tony Tao, PhD candidate in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, He’s the head teaching assistant for the department’s aircraft-design capstone course, which tackles design problems as part of the MIT campus and Lincoln Laboratory joint research collaboration: Beaver Works.

• Illina Yang, rising junior in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. She co-created MakerLodge, an initiative to train all freshman to use the tools in maker spaces and grant them access to these spaces across campus.

• Alicia Chong Rodriguez, MS ’17 of the Integrated Design and Management Program. With a team, she designed medical devices in fabrics — including brassieres — for personalized monitoring and treatment of women with heart disease. Her company, Bloomer Tech, is supported by MIT’s Sandbox Innovation Fund Program and the Martin Trust Center delta v accelerator to support its mission to improve women’s health worldwide.

• Daniel Richman ’17, who just received his bachelor’s in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. As part of the year-long Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (SuperUROP), he worked on a more secure wireless communication protocol that transmits data over radio frequencies.

• Sade Nabahe ’17, who just received her bachelor’s in mechanical engineering. She co-founded the Okoa Project to develop motorcycle-detachable ambulance trailers and thereby providing a lifesaving means of patient transport in rural Tanzania. With funding from MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) and other groups, Nabahe and her team will do further field testing this fall.

• David Reshef, MD PhD ’17, a student in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program. He co-developed a machine learning approach to determine, between two variables, statistically significant correlations of any shape.

• Mariana Matus, graduate student in the Computational and Systems Biology program. She co-founded a startup called Biobot Labs to monitor the health of a city’s population by sampling its sewers for microbes, which can indicate infection, and traces of drugs, including opioids. After preparations this summer at the delta v accelerator, Matus and her team will plumb the subterranean, data “gold mines” of a handful of cities, including Boston and Ithaca, N.Y.

“The students did an amazing job presenting their research and startup ideas,” said Anantha Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, department head, and board member of The Engine. Chandrakasan and veteran entrepreneur Katie Rae, The Engine’s president and CEO, hosted Cook for his visit.

“It was a wonderful opportunity to showcase their work and get feedback from an industry leader with a broad perspective,” Chandrakasan said.

Many of the students’ projects share one quality: they solve problems. That’s why they presented at The Engine, which provides workspace, tools, and mentorship for startups. Built by MIT, The Engine is open to all.

“We launched The Engine to create an environment where the world’s brightest innovators will find the support they need to develop the biggest and most transformative ideas, to positively impact society,” explained Israel Ruiz, MIT’s executive vice president and treasurer. “Our students are working to solve real-world problems, and these inspirational stories tell me we are on the right path.”

Find out more about The Engine at engine.xyz

Image: Christine Daniloff/MIT

By Larry Hardesty | MIT News

In a 1999 paper, Erik Demaine — now an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, but then an 18-year-old PhD student at the University of Waterloo, in Canada — described an algorithm that could determine how to fold a piece of paper into any conceivable 3-D shape.

It was a milestone paper in the field of computational origami, but the algorithm didn’t yield very practical folding patterns. Essentially, it took a very long strip of paper and wound it into the desired shape. The resulting structures tended to have lots of seams where the strip doubled back on itself, so they weren’t very sturdy.

At the Symposium on Computational Geometry in July, Demaine and Tomohiro Tachi of the University of Tokyo will announce the completion of a quest that began with that 1999 paper: a universal algorithm for folding origami shapes that guarantees a minimum number of seams.

“In 1999, we proved that you could fold any polyhedron, but the way that we showed how to do it was very inefficient,” Demaine says. “It’s efficient if your initial piece of paper is super-long and skinny. But if you were going to start with a square piece of paper, then that old method would basically fold the square paper down to a thin strip, wasting almost all the material. The new result promises to be much more efficient. It’s a totally different strategy for thinking about how to make a polyhedron.”

Demaine and Tachi are also working to implement the algorithm in a new version of Origamizer, the free software for generating origami crease patterns whose first version Tachi released in 2008.

Maintaining boundaries

The researchers’ algorithm designs crease patterns for producing any polyhedron — that is, a 3-D surface made up of many flat facets. Computer graphics software, for instance, models 3-D objects as polyhedra consisting of many tiny triangles. “Any curved shape you could approximate with lots of little flat sides,” Demaine explains.

Technically speaking, the guarantee that the folding will involve the minimum number of seams means that it preserves the “boundaries” of the original piece of paper. Suppose, for instance, that you have a circular piece of paper and want to fold it into a cup. Leaving a smaller circle at the center of the piece of paper flat, you could bunch the sides together in a pleated pattern; in fact, some water-cooler cups are manufactured on this exact design.

In this case, the boundary of the cup — its rim — is the same as that of the unfolded circle — its outer edge. The same would not be true with the folding produced by Demaine and his colleagues’ earlier algorithm. There, the cup would consist of a thin strip of paper wrapped round and round in a coil — and it probably wouldn’t hold water.

“The new algorithm is supposed to give you much better, more practical foldings,” Demaine says. “We don’t know how to quantify that mathematically, exactly, other than it seems to work much better in practice. But we do have one mathematical property that nicely distinguishes the two methods. The new method keeps the boundary of the original piece of paper on the boundary of the surface you’re trying to make. We call this watertightness.”

A closed surface — such as a sphere — doesn’t have a boundary, so an origami approximation of it will require a seam where boundaries meet. But “the user gets to choose where to put that boundary,” Demaine says. “You can’t get an entire closed surface to be watertight, because the boundary has to be somewhere, but you get to choose where that is.”

Lighting fires

The algorithm begins by mapping the facets of the target polyhedron onto a flat surface. But whereas the facets will be touching when the folding is complete, they can be quite far apart from each other on the flat surface. “You fold away all the extra material and bring together the faces of the polyhedron,” Demaine says.

Folding away the extra material can be a very complex process. Folds that draw together multiple faces could involve dozens or even hundreds of separate creases.

Developing a method for automatically calculating those crease patterns involved a number of different insights, but a central one was that they could be approximated by something called a Voronoi diagram. To understand this concept, imagine a grassy plain. A number of fires are set on it simultaneously, and they all spread in all directions at the same rate. The Voronoi diagram — named after the 19th-century Ukrainian mathematician Gyorgy Voronoi — describes both the location at which the fires are set and the boundaries at which adjacent fires meet. In Demaine and Tachi’s algorithm, the boundaries of a Voronoi diagram define the creases in the paper.

“We have to tweak it a little bit in our setting,” Demaine says. “We also imagine simultaneously lighting a fire on the entire polygon of the polyhedron and growing out from there. But that concept was really useful. The challenge is to set up where to light the fires, essentially, so that the Voronoi diagram has all the properties we need.”

Completed quest

“It’s very impressive stuff,” says Robert Lang, one of the pioneers of computational origami and a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, who in 2001 abandoned a successful career in optical engineering to become a full-time origamist. “It completes what I would characterize as a quest that began some 20-plus years ago: a computational method for efficiently folding any specified shape from a sheet of paper. Along the way, there have been several nice demonstrations of pieces of the puzzle: an algorithm to fold any shape, but not very efficiently; an algorithm to efficiently fold particular families of tree-like shapes, but not surfaces; an algorithm to fold trees and surfaces, but not every shape. This one covers it all! The algorithm is surprisingly complex, but that arises because it is comprehensive. It truly covers every possibility. And it is not just an abstract proof; it is readily computationally implementable.”

Joseph O’Rourke, a professor of mathematics and computer science at Smith College and the author of How To Fold It: The Mathematics of Linkages, Origami, and Polyhedra, agrees. “What was known before was either ‘cheating’ — winding the polyhedron with a thin strip — or not guaranteed to succeed,” he says. “Their new algorithm is guaranteed to produce a folding, and it is the opposite of cheating in that every facet of the polyhedron is covered by a ‘seamless’ facet of the paper, and the boundary of the paper maps to the boundary of the polyhedral manifold — their ‘watertight’ property. Finally, the extra structural ‘flash’ needed to achieve their folding can all be hidden on the inside and so is invisible.”

Image: Courtesy of the researchers

Last fall, the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and MIT Office of Digital Learning piloted a full-credit online course for a small cohort of residential students. The popular 6.002 (Circuits and Electronics) was offered as 6.S064, leveraging an existing massive open online course (MOOC) available via the edX platform and adding a private discussion forum for MIT students.

The Teaching and Learning Lab conducted an assessment of this pilot, which is now published as an internal working paper. This preliminary assessment suggests that there are benefits to an online-while-on-campus course format. Specifically, the students who completed 6.S064 reported more flexibility with scheduling and less overall stress relative to their traditional classes. While the findings are based upon a small sample, the pilot bodes well for the possibility of allowing more student choice in how and when they learn.

Sanjay Sarma, MIT vice president for open learning, says, “We are committed to shaping the future of digital learning, and the 6.S064 experiment is a prime example of how we can use digital learning to enhance the residential experience. Moreover, due to the online format we are able to assess a student’s experience in ways that are simply not possible in the traditional classroom.”

The impetus for the experiment came from a group of students who were frustrated by course scheduling conflicts and were seeking a solution for completing courses off-cycle, particularly while participating in off-campus internship programs. The students approached members of the EECS faculty and requested access to a self-study program. In response, MIT faculty members Anant Agarwal, David Perreault, and Anantha Chandrakasan successfully petitioned the MIT Committee on the Undergraduate Program to conduct a pilot of 6.S064.

The experimental course allowed campus students to enroll in 6.002X, the first MOOC offered by MITx in 2012 and one of the inaugural offerings from edX, the online-learning platform founded by MIT and Harvard University. Professor Gerald Sussman served as the faculty lead for both the open online course and the experimental on-campus version. For the latter, additional support processes were put in place, including a private discussion forum only for the residential students. Teaching assistants also updated campus students via weekly emails and regularly posted to the online discussion board.

“The goal was to experiment with new teaching methods that enhanced the student experience and provided more flexibility,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and EECS department head. “This offering allowed us explore and respond to what our students have long said they wanted: more flexibility, more on-demand learning, and more control. We are thrilled with the response from students and possibilities for education delivered in new ways.”

The campus-based course team met weekly to review data on students’ progress and reached out to those who were having difficulty by encouraging them to attend in-person office hours. Three on-campus events were held for students, including two meet-and-greet sessions and one review session prior to the final exam. At the end of 6.S064, Anne E. Marshall, associate director for assessment and evaluation, analyzed the data of the course, exploring self-reported student and instructor reactions and learner data (use of resources, time on task, quizzes and assessments) generated by the edX platform.

Thirty-one students enrolled in the experimental online course and 27 completed it. Of those, more than half reported scheduling conflicts as the reason for enrolling in 6.S064, suggesting that on-demand formats have up-front benefits for residential learners. The students also reported less overall stress with homework problem sets done online as compared to traditional classroom assignments. Encouraged by real-time feedback to assignments, the students tended to rework problems until they could answer them correctly. The online exam format, however, could also increase stress, as students were not awarded for partial credit and did not have access their graded exams to review errors. To address this issue, this spring, instructors experimented with allowing students to submit written work for partial credit on the final exam.

An analysis of the students’ feedback revealed that most of the students’ learning time was spent working on homework and viewing lecture videos. Students saw the online homework as very useful because it provided immediate feedback and allowed multiple attempts to get a correct answer. This means, students had to keep practicing until they were able to understand the material well enough to get a correct answer, instead of waiting for assignments to be graded to know if they had the correct answer. According to the report, students rated 6.S064 as significantly less stressful than their on-campus classes.

“One of the biggest problems with most standard classes is the massive delay in the problem-solving feedback loop. Students spend hours and hours on a problem set, then they have to turn it in a wait a week to find out whether they understand the material. It's very clear that instant feedback is the best way to learn something. Imagine if you were learning tennis, but you had to wait 10 minutes after you hit a shot to see if it went in. You'd never learn. I think the unbelievably slow feedback loop in standard problem sets is a huge hinderance to learning.

EdX's online problem sets fix this problem pretty easily,” wrote Kenneth Friedman in his blog post “A Glimpse of the Future of Education.”

To better understand the learning outcomes in this pilot, the authors of the report compared the distribution of final grades between students in the online class and three sections of the traditional 6.002. Even though the classes compared were taught by different instructors that might have different teaching styles and topics of focus the research concluded that the distributions are comparable. There was a slightly greater percentage of A’s and B’s earned in the online format. However, this difference was not statistically significant.

“This preliminary work highlights ways in which the edX platform can enhance student learning while addressing some of the challenges students face with residential classes,” said Marshall. “Our ongoing work on this project will help to identify approaches to using this technology to make more transformational changes across curricula at MIT and elsewhe

See this story and related content on the MIT News website.

Photo: Brandon Araki |CSAIL

Rachel Gordon | CSAIL

Being able to both walk and take flight is typical in nature — many birds, insects, and other animals can do both. If we could program robots with similar versatility, it would open up many possibilities: Imagine machines that could fly into construction areas or disaster zones that aren’t near roads and then squeeze through tight spaces on the ground to transport objects or rescue people.

The problem is that robots that are good at one mode of transportation are usually bad at another. Airborne drones are fast and agile, but generally have too limited of a battery life to travel for long distances. Ground vehicles, on the other hand, are more energy efficient, but slower and less mobile.

Researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) are aiming to develop robots that can both maneuver around on land and take to the skies. In a new paper, the team presented a system of eight quadcopter drones that can fly and drive through a city-like setting with parking spots, no-fly zones, and landing pad.

To view a video about the drones, see this article on the MIT News website.

Twenty-seven EECS students were among 87 members of the MIT Class of 2017 who were recently inducted into the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa honor society. A faculty committee annually selects inductees "in recognition of their excellent academic records and commitment to the objectives of a liberal education," according to the announcement from the society's Xi chapter at MIT. No more than 10 percent of each graduating class will be invited to join. Congratulations to:

• Suri Bandler, Scarsdale, N.Y.
• Malek Ben Romdhane, Tunis, Tunisia
• Samantha Briasco-Stewart, Wayland, Mass.
• Bryan Cai, Bryn Mawr, Pa.
• Graeme Campbell, Jackson, Miss.
• Emanuele Ceccarelli, Bologna, Italy
• Uttara Chakraborty, Cambridge, Mass.
• Lillian Chin, Decatur, Ga.
• Abigail Choe, Seoul, Korea
• Zi-Ning Choo, Napervillle, Ill.
• Prafulla Dhariwal, Pune, India
• Lisa Ho, London, U.K.
• Hyun Sub Hwang, Seoul, Korea
• Jong Wook Kim, Burlington, Mass.
• Hanna Lee, Bethesda, Md.
• Dina Levy-Lambert, New York, N.Y.
• Aofei Liu, Singapore
• Erika Lu, Lexington, Mass.
• Suzanne Mueller, McLean, Va.
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Helen Knight | MIT News correspondent

As embedded intelligence is finding its way into ever more areas of our lives, fields ranging from autonomous driving to personalized medicine are generating huge amounts of data. But just as the flood of data is reaching massive proportions, the ability of computer chips to process it into useful information is stalling.

Now, researchers at Stanford University and MIT have built a new chip to overcome this hurdle. The results are published today in the journal Nature, by lead author Max Shulaker, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. Shulaker began the work as a PhD student alongside H.-S. Philip Wong and his advisor Subhasish Mitra, professors of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford. The team also included professors Roger Howe and Krishna Saraswat, also from Stanford.

Computers today comprise different chips cobbled together. There is a chip for computing and a separate chip for data storage, and the connections between the two are limited. As applications analyze increasingly massive volumes of data, the limited rate at which data can be moved between different chips is creating a critical communication “bottleneck.” And with limited real estate on the chip, there is not enough room to place them side-by-side, even as they have been miniaturized (a phenomenon known as Moore’s Law).

To make matters worse, the underlying devices, transistors made from silicon, are no longer improving at the historic rate that they have for decades.

The new prototype chip is a radical change from today’s chips. It uses multiple nanotechnologies, together with a new computer architecture, to reverse both of these trends.

Instead of relying on silicon-based devices, the chip uses carbon nanotubes, which are sheets of 2-D graphene formed into nanocylinders, and resistive random-access memory (RRAM) cells, a type of nonvolatile memory that operates by changing the resistance of a solid dielectric material. The researchers integrated over 1 million RRAM cells and 2 million carbon nanotube field-effect transistors, making the most complex nanoelectronic system ever made with emerging nanotechnologies.

The RRAM and carbon nanotubes are built vertically over one another, making a new, dense 3-D computer architecture with interleaving layers of logic and memory. By inserting ultradense wires between these layers, this 3-D architecture promises to address the communication bottleneck.

However, such an architecture is not possible with existing silicon-based technology, according to the paper’s lead author, Max Shulaker, who is a core member of MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories. “Circuits today are 2-D, since building conventional silicon transistors involves extremely high temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Celsius,” says Shulaker. “If you then build a second layer of silicon circuits on top, that high temperature will damage the bottom layer of circuits.”

The key in this work is that carbon nanotube circuits and RRAM memory can be fabricated at much lower temperatures, below 200 C. “This means they can be built up in layers without harming the circuits beneath,” Shulaker says.

This provides several simultaneous benefits for future computing systems. “The devices are better: Logic made from carbon nanotubes can be an order of magnitude more energy-efficient compared to today’s logic made from silicon, and similarly, RRAM can be denser, faster, and more energy-efficient compared to DRAM,” Wong says, referring to a conventional memory known as dynamic random-access memory.

“In addition to improved devices, 3-D integration can address another key consideration in systems: the interconnects within and between chips,” Saraswat adds.

“The new 3-D computer architecture provides dense and fine-grained integration of computating and data storage, drastically overcoming the bottleneck from moving data between chips,” Mitra says. “As a result, the chip is able to store massive amounts of data and perform on-chip processing to transform a data deluge into useful information.”

To demonstrate the potential of the technology, the researchers took advantage of the ability of carbon nanotubes to also act as sensors. On the top layer of the chip they placed over 1 million carbon nanotube-based sensors, which they used to detect and classify ambient gases.

Due to the layering of sensing, data storage, and computing, the chip was able to measure each of the sensors in parallel, and then write directly into its memory, generating huge bandwidth, Shulaker says.

Three-dimensional integration is the most promising approach to continue the technology scaling path set forth by Moore’s laws, allowing an increasing number of devices to be integrated per unit volume, according to Jan Rabaey, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California at Berkeley, who was not involved in the research.

“It leads to a fundamentally different perspective on computing architectures, enabling an intimate interweaving of memory and logic,” Rabaey says. “These structures may be particularly suited for alternative learning-based computational paradigms such as brain-inspired systems and deep neural nets, and the approach presented by the authors is definitely a great first step in that direction.”

“One big advantage of our demonstration is that it is compatible with today’s silicon infrastructure, both in terms of fabrication and design,” says Howe.

“The fact that this strategy is both CMOS [complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor] compatible and viable for a variety of applications suggests that it is a significant step in the continued advancement of Moore’s Law,” says Ken Hansen, president and CEO of the Semiconductor Research Corporation, which supported the research. “To sustain the promise of Moore’s Law economics, innovative heterogeneous approaches are required as dimensional scaling is no longer sufficient. This pioneering work embodies that philosophy.”

The team is working to improve the underlying nanotechnologies, while exploring the new 3-D computer architecture. For Shulaker, the next step is working with Massachusetts-based semiconductor company Analog Devices to develop new versions of the system that take advantage of its ability to carry out sensing and data processing on the same chip.

So, for example, the devices could be used to detect signs of disease by sensing particular compounds in a patient’s breath, says Shulaker.

“The technology could not only improve traditional computing, but it also opens up a whole new range of applications that we can target,” he says. “My students are now investigating how we can produce chips that do more than just computing.”

“This demonstration of the 3-D integration of sensors, memory, and logic is an exceptionally innovative development that leverages current CMOS technology with the new capabilities of carbon nanotube field–effect transistors,” says Sam Fuller, CTO emeritus of Analog Devices, who was not involved in the research. “This has the potential to be the platform for many revolutionary applications in the future.” 

This work was funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, Semiconductor Research Corporation, STARnet SONIC, and member companies of the Stanford SystemX Alliance.

The European Patent Office (EPO) has recognized American engineers James G. Fujimoto and Eric A. Swanson and German physicist Robert Huber with the 2017 European Inventor Award for their development of Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). The team was distinguished in the Non-EPO Countries category, one of five categories for the annual award.

Fujimoto is the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). He is also an adjunct professor of ophthalmology at Tufts University School of Medicine. He joined the MIT faculty in 1985 after receiving SB, SM, and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Institute. He is listed as inventor or co-inventor on 15 patent families and has contributed to more than 450 journal articles and nine books.

Swanson, who received an SM degree in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT EECS, has co-founded several startups. He worked at MIT Lincoln Laboratory for 16 years, where he collaborated in the discovery and advancement of OCT, and worked on optical networks and space communication. He holds more than 40 patents and is the co-author of 81 journal articles.

Huber is a professor at the Institute for Biomedical Optics at the University of Lübeck, Germany. He co-founded the Munich-based company Optores GmbH in 2013 to develop an ultra-fast version of OCT. He is the author of 100 peer-reviewed publications and is listed as an inventor on seven European patent applications.

All three have won numerous international awards for their work.

OCT is the first technology to deliver real-time images of human tissue at microscopic clarity without the need for invasive probing or surgical biopsies. It has become a world standard and is used in millions of exams per year, enabling early detection of serious eye diseases such as glaucoma, but also cancer and heart disease.

“Thanks to this team, doctors can now look at living tissue in new ways to diagnose eye disease, cancer, and other serious illnesses faster and more accurately,” said EPO President Benoît Battistelli. “OCT procedures have led to improved understanding of diseases, new treatments and therapeutic tools, as well as improved quality of life for millions of patients. Their story is also an impressive example of how patented inventions can help create and drive an entire business segment."

The European Inventor Award, now in its 12th year, is presented annually by the EPO to distinguish outstanding inventors from Europe and around the world who have made an exceptional contribution to social development, technological progress and economic growth. The winners were chosen by an independent international jury from a pool of more than 450 individuals and teams of inventors put forward for this year's award.

Laser-Focused on Innovation

OCT works on a principle similar to ultrasound, except that it measures the "echo" time delay of light beams instead of sound waves. Launched in 1993 as a clinical prototype, OCT revolutionized the standard of care in ophthalmology and was welcomed as a transformative medical technology. The multidisciplinary team’s invention, for which they filed more than 50 patents during development, has also had a major economic impact. "Today, the [OCT] market is approaching $1 billion per year. There are over 16,000 high-quality jobs, and it's saved billions of dollars in unnecessary health-care expenditure," Swanson says. With the help of patents, numerous European companies, such as Carl Zeiss, Heidelberg Engineering and Michelson Diagnostics have commercialized OCT technology and become major players in the industry.

All three inventors have leveraged their intellectual property into successful businesses, including the world's first OCT companies, Advanced Ophthalmic Diagnostics (acquired by Carl Zeiss Meditec) and LightLab Imaging (now owned by Abbott) — both of which were co-founded by Fujimoto and Swanson — and Germany-based Optores GmbH (co-founded by Huber). “Today, around 50 companies develop OCT systems,” Huber notes.  "Approximately 75 percent of them originated as start-ups.”

The inventors continue to advance OCT. Fujimoto trains a new generation of OCT engineers as principal investigators in both EECS and RLE. Swanson serves in technical roles at OCT companies, while Huber is creating ultra-fast lasers at the University of Lübeck.

What originally started as a diagnostic tool for eye diseases — with about 30 million scans now performed worldwide every year — has since brought high resolution to several other medical fields, including cardiology, endoscopy, surgical guidance, and dermatology, with more than 50,000 systems installed worldwide. OCT's transformative impact is even more significant considering that none of the three award-winning inventors is a medical professionals. "I am not a doctor; I am not on the front line of helping people. But even as an engineer it is possible to do things that have a positive impact," Fujimoto notes.

The EPO has provided additional information on the three inventors and their work, including:

− Short video about the inventor (YouTube)
− Additional video and photo material
− Read more about the inventors
− View their patents: EP0883793, EP0981733, EP1839375