Economics and computer science had always been on friendly terms at MIT. With the growth of cloud computing, e-commerce, machine learning, and online social networks, their relationship grew more serious. Now that these tools and applications have become ubiquitous and gone global, economics and computer science are taking their relationship to the next level.

Starting in the fall of 2017, the two academic departments will offer a joint major — Course 6-14: Computer Science, Economics, and Data Science — because elements of the two fields have become, well, inseparable. The new major aims to prepare students to think at the nexus of economics and computer science, so they can understand and design the kinds of systems that are coming to define modern life. Think Amazon, Uber, eBay, etc.

“This area is super-hot commercially,” says David Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics and associate head of the Department of Economics. “Hiring economists has become really prominent at tech companies because they’re filling market-design positions.”

Because these companies need analysts who can decide which objectives to maximize, what information and choices to offer, what rules to set, and so on, “companies are really looking for this skill set,” he says.

Asu Ozdaglar, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering and acting head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), says the fields had moved apart in decades prior, but “for the past 10 to 15 years, there’s been a convergence in research areas between economics and facets of computer science, such as optimization and networking.”

“Now, the motivating applications are so vivid, we have to rethink bringing the fields together,” she says.

MIT students agree. In a poll of the introductory economics course 14.01, which all students are required to take, faculty found that a whopping three-quarters of them were interested in the joint major, Ozdaglar says. She believes students are so intrigued because combining engineered systems and economics requires asking profoundly complex human questions, and then creating equally complex technical models to address them.

“If you’re thinking about humans making decisions in large-scale systems, you have to think about incentives,” she says. “How, for example, do you design rewards and costs so that people behave the way you desire?”

These issues will be familiar to any Uber user caught in a downpour. Suddenly, the cost of getting anywhere increases dramatically, which is also an incentive for Uber drivers to move toward the storm of demand. Surge pricing may be a scourge to customers, but it's also a way to match supply with demand — in this case, cars with riders.

The new major is designed to train students to become the unseen game-makers behind these types of virtual markets — people who can exert their skill by making it “blatantly obvious for people how to play, in accordance with the market designer’s goals,” says Costis Daskalakis, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering who is one of the faculty leads in the new major’s creation.

This combination of fields, Daskalakis points out, is hardly new. Many venerated economists were also early computer scientists, he says. John von Neumann, a pioneer of game theory, which uses mathematics to predict human behavior, was involved in one of the earliest articulations of the design for an electronic computer: the Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) report published in 1945. Herb Simon, a key figure in the development of artificial intelligence, won both a Nobel Prize in economics in 1978 and the prestigious Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1975. 

Computer science and economics offer complementary tools, Daskalakis says. For example, a computer science technique like machine learning can reveal patterns in data coming from a social platform. But economics helps pull back the curtain of why such patterns emerge, he says, by offering theories of how people strategized for these patterns to arise.

“You can’t just be a plain economist in this environment, because we’re talking about massive amounts of data and systems implemented on computational platforms,” he says. The new major, he says, will give students a firm footing in both disciplines to create — and understand — virtual markets of the future.

Students should contact Anne Hunter in EECS and Eva Economou in the Department of Economics for more information about Course 6-14.

Paul Gray ’54, SM ’55, ScD ’60, a devoted leader at MIT whose lifetime career at the Institute included turns as a student, professor, dean of engineering, associate provost, chancellor, president, and MIT Corporation chair, died on Sept. 18 at his home in Concord, Massachusetts, after a lengthy battle with Alzheimer’s disease. He was 85.

As MIT’s 14th president, from 1980 to 1990, and in his other roles, Gray transformed the Institute through his commitment to enhancing undergraduate education and increasing the presence of women and underrepresented minorities on campus. With his wife, Priscilla King Gray, at his side, he helped guide MIT through the social change and technological transformation that marked the second half of the 20th century.

His commitment to MIT, particularly to its students, was absolute. Even after retiring as MIT Corporation chair in 1997, he returned to teaching and advising. His work at the Institute was carried out in partnership with Priscilla, a champion of public service who led efforts to create a sense of community at MIT and co-founded what is now called the Priscilla King Gray Public Service Center.

“Paul Gray led MIT with the clear-eyed pragmatism and uncommon steadiness of a born engineer, and the humility, warmth, and wisdom of an exceptional human being,” says MIT President L. Rafael Reif. “He was an indispensable advisor to two MIT presidents who preceded him and all three who have followed him. His affection for and trust in our students allowed him to serve as an anchor at MIT during the turbulence of the Vietnam War; inspired him to greatly increase the presence and profile of underrepresented minority and women students in our community; and led him to pioneer the creation of the then-revolutionary Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, now an inseparable part of the MIT experience. Paul loved the MIT community like family — and we feel his loss like family, too.”

“Paul became my first and most essential guide to MIT. With the wisdom gained from a lifetime devoted to the Institute, he showed me MIT’s ethos and history,” says MIT President Emerita Susan Hockfield, who served as president of the Institute from 2004 to 2012. “Whether at dinner with his newly red-coated Class of ’54 classmates, or walking the Infinite Corridor with wonderful Priscilla — love of his life and partner in a presidency of warmth and purpose — his love of the place, of the people, and of our mission shone brightly in all he said and did. A part of me has always and will always see MIT through his eyes.”

A vigorous embrace of diversity

When Gray arrived at MIT as an undergraduate, women made up less than 2 percent of each MIT class, and the percentage of underrepresented minorities was similarly low. After joining the administration, he took up the charge to make the MIT community more representative of society at large.

In 1968, in response to recommendations from the newly created Black Students Union, Gray, who was then associate provost, and others created the Task Force on Educational Opportunity. Among other efforts, they hired an assistant director of admissions and worked with him to actively recruit minority students. MIT also began the landmark summer program Project Interphase, staffed largely by students of color.

As chancellor, Gray wrote and began implementing the Institute’s first formal plan to increase the presence of women and minorities among MIT’s faculty as well as its student body. In a 2008 MIT Infinite History interview, Gray recalled that these efforts represented a sea change for the Institute. Until that time, “MIT had never recruited [any students]. We waited for applications to come,” he said.

By the time he stepped down from the presidency in 1990, women made up more than 30 percent of incoming undergraduate classes, and underrepresented minorities constituted 14 percent. Gray’s efforts had laid the foundation for MIT’s subsequent leaders to further increase diversity and inclusion at the Institute. His work on diversity among students and the faculty “may be the most important thing I did around here,” Gray said in the Infinite History interview.

One of the first members of the Black Students Union was Shirley Ann Jackson ’68, PhD ’73, who is now the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a life member of the MIT Corporation. “For me, Paul was foremost a great friend, advisor, supporter, and confidante. I always turned to him at critical junctures in my career. He never failed me — his advice and guidance were always spot on,” Jackson says.

Reshaping undergraduate education

Even after becoming a full-time administrator in the 1970s, Gray maintained a close connection with the Institute’s students. He earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees from MIT, all in electrical engineering, in 1954, 1955, and 1960, respectively. After three years of teaching as an instructor, he joined the faculty in 1960 and became the MIT Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering from 1968 to 1971. He was associate dean for student affairs from 1965 to 1967, associate provost from 1969 to 1970, and dean of the School of Engineering from 1970 to 1971.

“To me, he is the iconic president of MIT because he was made out of pure Institute clay, as an undergraduate, graduate, professor, and academic leader,” says Institute Professor Emeritus John Deutch, who served as MIT provost from 1985 to 1990. “As his provost, I witnessed his endless devotion to education and scholarship. His love for Priscilla and his family matched his love for MIT.”

In his Infinite History interview, Gray reflected on his early days of teaching, which he did alongside Harold “Doc” Edgerton, another popular MIT professor: “I found it enormously satisfying. Demanding, but very satisfying. And somewhere in that two-year interval, with teaching every semester, I came to the conclusion that this is what I want to do with my life.”

As a professor, Gray was part of an effort in the 1960s to overhaul the way electrical engineering was taught, moving the focus away from vacuum tubes and squarely onto semiconductor electronics. In support of this transition, Gray wrote seven textbooks and other materials, working with MIT colleagues as well as others at Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Raytheon, and IBM.

Gray joined the MIT administration full-time when he accepted the position of chancellor, serving from 1971 to 1980, followed by a decade as MIT president. He was chairman of the MIT Corporation from 1991 to 1997.

As associate provost, Gray championed professor Margaret MacVicar and her innovative proposal to create a program that would involve undergraduates in faculty research. The result was the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), one of the earliest programs of its kind in the United States and now a national model, supporting thousands of projects each year. Today, 90 percent of MIT graduating seniors participate in at least one UROP during their undergraduate years.

As president, Gray committed himself to paying renewed attention to the “pace, coherence, and intellectual impact” of the undergraduate experience.

To this end, he helped make a number of reforms to MIT’s undergraduate curriculum. He reaffirmed the pass/no record grading system for freshman that he had helped implement while associate provost. He also launched a formal review of an undergraduate curriculum that until then had been largely focused on engineering, mathematics, and the physical sciences. This led to the addition of biology to the core requirements, as well as a strengthening of the offerings in the humanities and social sciences.

“There may be no single person in modern history who has had such an impact on MIT as Paul Gray,” says MIT Corporation Life Member Emeritus Jim Champy ’63, SM ’65. “So much of what we experience at MIT today was begun by Paul. I worked for him in my years at MIT while he was chancellor, and knew him later as a friend and Corporation member. For all the magnitude of his impact, Paul — together with Priscilla — brought a genuine warmth and caring for every student and member of the MIT community.”

Responding to national and international trends

In broadening the MIT curriculum, Gray was also carrying out another of his goals: to rededicate science and technology as socially powerful activities. 
“We continue to hear the complaint that … many of our human and social ills are the direct result of unanticipated and deleterious artifacts of technology, foisted upon the world by technicians with tunnel vision,” he said in his inaugural address.

“It is clear, however, that the future development not only of this nation, but of the world, is inexorably tied to continued scientific progress and to the humane and thoughtful applications of science,” Gray continued. “What is needed is not a retreat from science and technology, but a more complete science and technology. We must strive to develop among ourselves, among our students, and in the public at large, an understanding of the fact that engineering and science are, by their very nature, humanistic enterprises.”

Gray furthered his vision of a science and engineering enterprise in service of society while developing new ventures at MIT and representing the Institute in Washington.

In 1986, with the economic recessions of the 1970s and early 1980s still a recent memory, MIT under Gray’s leadership created the Commission on Industrial Productivity. The group, which comprised 17 MIT faculty members, produced the landmark study “Made in America: Regaining the Productive Edge,” which examined the causes of the recent slowdown in U.S. productivity growth and made recommendations for improved economic performance.

Gray also helped establish the Leaders for Manufacturing Program (now Leaders for Global Operations), a joint effort by the MIT Sloan School of Management and the School of Engineering in partnership with top manufacturing companies. The program’s goal was to help students develop the technical, analytical, and business skills needed to lead strategic initiatives in high-tech, operations, and manufacturing companies.

Also during his presidency, Gray implemented a plan to establish the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT. Initially headed by MIT Professor David Baltimore, the institute brought major new biology resources to MIT.

Gray served for four years on the White House Science Council and the Council’s Panel on the Health of Universities. He was also vice chairman of the nonprofit Council on Competiveness. He was a staunch advocate for public understanding of science, federal support for research and higher education, and collaboration between academia and industry.

Increasing MIT’s financial strength

Federal funding for science and technology research and for higher education had been at a historic high during the Sputnik era, but it declined significantly in the 1970s and remained stagnant in the ’80s, during Gray’s term as president.

In 1987, MIT under Gray launched the five-year Campaign for the Future, which raised $710 million. And in 1994, while at the helm of the MIT Corporation, Gray played a lead role in the seven-year Campaign for MIT, which raised $2.05 billion, surpassing the original goal of $1.5 billion and bringing the Institute into a small group of universities — many with significantly larger alumni populations — that had comparably ambitious campaign goals. By the time Gray retired from the Corporation in 1997, MIT’s endowment was more than $2.1 billion.

Gray also helped MIT secure funding from corporations in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and created long-term partnerships with industry that provided relatively unconstrained support for MIT research.

Much of Gray’s success in the fundraising arena can be credited to the personable approach both he and his wife brought to MIT.

Many alumni have recalled the care the couple demonstrated toward MIT students. Together, the pair held weekly dinners for seniors in the president’s house — now known as Gray House — and visited dormitories and other student residences. They were often seen together on campus, talking with students, faculty, and staff from across the MIT community.

“In the whole history of MIT, very few people have ever rivaled Paul Gray’s legacy of stewardship and service — as a faculty member, an administrator, an alumnus, a trustee, and a leader,” says Robert Millard ’73, chair of the MIT Corporation. “His nearly 50 years on the MIT Corporation included 26 as a member of the Executive Committee and, after his presidency, seven distinguished years as Corporation Chair. He played a pivotal role in countless key decisions, including the selection of MIT’s two most recent presidents. Universally respected and loved, Paul was — and remains — an inspiration to all of us charged with caring for what he called ‘this special place.’”

Family at the center of life

Paul Edward Gray was born on Feb. 7, 1932, in Newark, New Jersey. He cited his father, a technician at a public utility who never finished high school, as an influential figure who helped him discover his interest in electricity at an early age. By first or second grade, Gray was winding copper wire around nails to make electromagnets, and by age 10 he was repairing his neighbors’ radios. He built his own radio equipment and was a ham radio operator for many years.

By high school, Gray knew he wanted to be an engineer. As an undergraduate at MIT, he joined the Phi Sigma Kappa fraternity, enrolled in ROTC, and met Priscilla on a blind date. After earning his master’s degree and marrying Priscilla in 1955, he served in the U.S. Army for two years, then returned to MIT for further graduate study. Together, the Grays raised and educated four children. In his spare time, Gray played squash, made furniture in his woodshop, and enjoyed many outdoor activities with his family.

Gray served on the board of directors of the Boeing Company and Eastman Kodak Company, and was a Life Trustee of the Boston Museum of Science and Wheaton College. He was a life fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Gray is survived by his wife, Priscilla King Gray; by four children and their spouses — Virginia and Thomas Army, Amy and David Sluyter, Andrew and Yukiko Gray, and Louise and Timothy Huyck — and by 12 grandchildren, three of their spouses, and one great grandchild. He also leaves a sister-in-law and brother-in-law, Cynthia and Louis Schueler, and several nephews and nieces.

Gifts in Gray’s memory may be made to MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative to support research on Alzheimer’s disease. A memorial service will be held at Hancock United Church of Christ in Lexington on Oct. 1. An MIT memorial service is planned for 3 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 30, in Kresge Auditorium.

For additional information and photos, please visit the MIT News website. Media inquiries: Sarah McDonnell, MIT News, s_mcd@mit.edu, (617) 253-8923.

Photo: Lillie Paquette/School of Engineering

Staff | School of Engineering

EECS Professor Antonio Torralba has been named MIT director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab effective immediately, Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, has announced.

An expert in computer vision, machine learning, and human visual perception, Torralba is also a principal investigator at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). His projects span a wide range — from investigating object recognition and scene understanding in pictures and movies, to studying the inner workings of deep neural networks, to building models of human vision and cognition, to the development of applications and systems such as Pic2Recipe that can look at a photo of food, predict the ingredients, and suggest similar recipes. He is also an enthusiastic investigator of the intersections between visual art and computation.

“As the inaugural MIT director of our collaboration with IBM, Antonio will closely collaborate with IBM leadership and lab researchers to design and implement the lab’s ambitious research agenda,” said Chandrakasan, who is also the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “He is an accomplished scholar and a creative thinker with deep experience and a broad range of research interests in AI. I look forward to working with Antonio as we shape this exciting endeavor.”

Torralba is an associate editor of the International Journal in Computer Vision and served as program chair for the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in 2015. He received the 2008 National Science Foundation Career award, the best student paper award at the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in 2009, and the 2010 J.K. Aggarwal Prize from the International Association for Pattern Recognition. During the 2016-2017 academic year, he received a Frank Quick Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship and the Louis D. Smullin (’39) Award for Teaching Excellence, both from EECS. He earned a degree in telecommunications engineering from Telecom BCN in Spain, in 1994, and his PhD in signal, image, and speech processing from the National Polytechnic Institute of Grenoble in France, in 2000.   

“I am delighted by the appointment of Antonio Torralba as MIT director of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab,” said Dario Gil, vice president of AI and IBM Q at IBM Research, who, along with Chandrakasan, oversees the MIT-IBM collaboration. (Gil is an EECS alum, having received a master's degree in 2000 and a PhD in 2003.) He brings a unique combination of deep technical excellence, intellectual curiosity, and enthusiasm — which I hope become hallmarks of our collaboration. I look forward to working closely with Antonio and the joint teams across MIT and IBM to kick off what I know will be a tremendously successful collaboration."

Torralba and the IBM director will lead the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, a $240 million investment by IBM in AI efforts over the next 10 years, with $90 million dedicated to supporting MIT research. They will co-chair a committee comprised of equal numbers of MIT faculty and IBM researchers. This committee will review and select proposals for funding and provide strategic direction to the lab. The initial areas of joint research between MIT and IBM will be core AI algorithms, the physics of AI, the application of AI to industries, and advancing shared prosperity through AI.   

Torralba and IBM are moving quickly to engage with researchers from MIT and IBM to get the lab’s first round of research projects initiated and underway. They have established a series of upcoming events through which MIT principal investigators and IBM research staff can meet, learn more about the lab, and discuss opportunities for collaboration. 

For more information, visit mitibmwatsonailab.mit.edu.

A 3-D-printed manufacturing device can extrude fibers that are only 75 nanometers in diameter, or one-thousandth the width of a human hair. Image: Luis Fernando Velásquez-García,

Larry Hardesty | MIT News Service

Meshes made from fibers with nanometer-scale diameters have a wide range of potential applications, including tissue engineering, water filtration, solar cells, and even body armor. But their commercialization has been hampered by inefficient manufacturing techniques.

In the latest issue of the journal Nanotechnology, MIT researchers describe a new device for producing nanofiber meshes, which matches the production rate and power efficiency of its best-performing predecessor — but significantly reduces variation in the fibers’ diameters, an important consideration in most applications.

But whereas the predecessor device, from the same MIT group, was etched into silicon through a complex process that required an airlocked “clean room,” the new device was built using a $3,500 commercial 3-D printer. The work thus points toward nanofiber manufacture that is not only more reliable but also much cheaper.

The new device consists of an array of small nozzles through which a fluid containing particles of a polymer are pumped. As such, it is what’s known as a microfluidic device.

“My personal opinion is that in the next few years, nobody is going to be doing microfluidics in the clean room,” says Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a principal research scientist in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories and senior author on the new paper. “There’s no reason to do so. 3-D printing is a technology that can do it so much better — with better choice of materials, with the possibility to really make the structure that you would like to make. When you go to the clean room, many times you sacrifice the geometry you want to make. And the second problem is that it is incredibly expensive.”

Velásquez-García is joined on the paper by two postdocs in his group, Erika García-López and Daniel Olvera-Trejo. Both received their PhDs from Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico and worked with Velásquez-García through MIT and Tecnológico de Monterrey’s nanotech research partnership.

Hollowed out

Nanofibers are useful for any application that benefits from a high ratio of surface area to volume — such as solar cells, which try to maximize exposure to sunlight, or fuel cell electrodes, which catalyze reactions at their surfaces. Nanofibers can also yield materials that are permeable only at very small scales, such as water filters, or that are remarkably tough for their weight, such as body armor.

Most such applications depend on fibers with regular diameters. “The performance of the fibers strongly depends on their diameter,” Velásquez-García says. “If you have a significant spread, what that really means is that only a few percent are really working. Example: You have a filter, and the filter has pores between 50 nanometers and 1 micron. That’s really a 1-micron filter.”

Because the group’s earlier device was etched in silicon, it was “externally fed,” meaning that an electric field drew a polymer solution up the sides of the individual emitters. The fluid flow was regulated by rectangular columns etched into the sides of the emitters, but it was still erratic enough to yield fibers of irregular diameter.

The new emitters, by contrast, are “internally fed”: They have holes bored through them, and hydraulic pressure pushes fluid into the bores until they’re filled. Only then does an electric field draw the fluid out into tiny fibers.

Beneath the emitters, the channels that feed the bores are wrapped into coils, and they gradually taper along their length. That taper is key to regulating the diameter of the nanofibers, and it would be virtually impossible to achieve with clean-room microfabrication techniques. “Microfabrication is really meant to make straight cuts,” Velásquez-García says.

Fast iteration

In the new device, the nozzles are arranged into two rows, which are slightly offset from each other. That’s because the device was engineered to demonstrate aligned nanofibers — nanofibers that preserve their relative position as they’re collected by a rotating drum. Aligned nanofibers are particularly useful in some applications, such as tissue scaffolding. For applications in which unaligned fibers are adequate, the nozzles could be arranged in a grid, increasing output rate.

Besides cost and design flexibility, Velásquez-García says, another advantage of 3-D printing is the ability to rapidly test and revise designs. With his group’s microfabricated devices, he says, it typically takes two years to go from theoretical modeling to a published paper, and in the interim, he and his colleagues might be able to test two or three variations on their basic design. With the new device, he says, the process took closer to a year, and they were able to test 70 iterations of the design.

“A way to deterministically engineer the position and size of electrospun fibers allows you to start to think about being able to control mechanical properties of materials that are made from these fibers. It allows you to think about preferential cell growth along particular directions in the fibers — lots of good potential opportunities there,” says Mark Allen, the Alfred Fitler Moore Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, with joint appointments in electrical and systems engineering and mechanical engineering and applied mechanics. “I anticipate that somebody’s going to take this technology and use it in very creative ways. If you have the need for this type of deterministically engineered fiber network, I think it’s a very elegant way to achieve that goal.”

A trio of researchers has created and published a data visualization map that examines trends in undergraduate gender diversity at MIT. The big reveal is heartening: Over the past 20 years, MIT’s female undergraduate population has risen to nearly 50 percent of total enrollment and such growth has been sustained across almost every department and school.

Professor of aeronautics and astronautics Karen Willcox, researcher Luwen Huang, and graduate student Elizabeth Qian devised an interactive map to show these aggregate trends, and much more. The tool, using data from the MIT Registrar’s Office, allows users to explore gender diversity on a class-by-class and department-level basis, to see links between classes, such as prerequisite requirements, and to conduct keyword searches to reveal variations in related subjects across MIT.

“MIT should be proud of the leadership it has shown,” says Willcox. “The positive trends in gender equity are not seen in just one or two departments, but literally across the spectrum of science, engineering, arts, humanities, social sciences, management and architecture. One of the unique features of our tool is that it provides insight at the subject level, going deeper beyond aggregate statistics at the major level. We hope that this will be a basis for data-driven decisions — for example, by understanding what about a particular subject’s pedagogy makes it appeal to a more diverse audience.”

The map appears as a series of discipline-based ball-and-stick clusters, with each node representing a class. The size of the node indicates the class’s total enrollment. The color of a node, ranging from teal (fewer women enrolled) to salmon (more women in enrolled), represents the percentage of women in a particular class, and helps to illustrate how diversity has changed over time.

For example, in a slice across classes in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) in 2006, the nodes appear as light and darker teal, indicating enrollments of less than 25 percent women. Fast forward to 2016, and the same slice has node colors all in shades of salmon, indicating female enrollments of 35 percent or more. In part, this change is a reflection of the steady increase in total female EECS majors, particularly over the past six years. However, since the analysis is conducted at the class level, this change is also a reflection of more women from other majors taking computer science classes.

“It is gratifying to see the change in composition of our EECS student body,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, former department head of EECS and now dean of the School of Engineering. “While it is true that we have had a dramatic increase in [computer science and engineering] majors, female enrollment has nearly tripled in the past five years. It’s a useful model for us to consider as we are improving gender equity across the school.”

Willcox credits the positive momentum in EECS to several different elements, saying, “anecdotal evidence suggests that the pedagogical reform undertaken by EECS in 2008 has played a large role.” She also points out the important role of leadership, namely Chandrakasan’s support of studies such as the EECS Undergraduate Experience Survey and his commitment to programs such as the Women in Technology Program and Rising Stars, an effort to bring together women who are interested in careers in academia.

Enrollments in the Department of Mechanical Engineering have achieved similar gender parity. This is especially impressive given that the national average of female undergraduate majors in the field is 13.2 percent. Willcox again highlights the efforts made by another leader, Mary Boyce, the first woman to head that department from 2008 to 2013 and now dean of engineering at Columbia University. The results of an internal study announced in June, suggested that the department's ongoing proactive approach — revamping the curriculum, enhancing recruitment efforts — played a part in their success.

“The map, of course, cannot reveal specific causes of changes in gender diversity, but it does provide a place to begin a conversation,” says researcher Luwen Huang, who is an expert in visualization design. “The interactivity of the map was designed to encourage the user to explore, discover connections across classes, and ask questions.”

The researchers caution that looking at department-based data only provides one view. In the case of EECS, a deeper dive shows that introductory programming classes have historically had high female enrollments, but that finding may be deceptive. "When you look at introductory courses like 1.00 (Engineering Computation and Data Science) and 6.00 (Introduction to Computer Science and Programming), you see high levels of female enrollment,” Willcox explains. “That’s not because there are more women in those fields, but likely because women might lack the preparation and/or the self-confidence to skip introductory classes.”

Biannual surveys of MIT undergraduates and other internal reports seem to bolster such a supposition, suggesting that women at MIT may experience negative stereotyping and feel less confident than their male counterparts. Lower or higher female enrollment in certain classes and departments may also be due to a variety of other factors, from job prospects to the influence of peers to level of interest in the subject matter.

The data and tool provide a starting point to begin such analysis and to take potential actions. Being open about data, sharing data, and being data-driven are valuable forcing mechanisms, says the team, and a hallmark of MIT’s ethos of transparency. Further, having a visual map of gender diversity across MIT, they say, is literally eye opening.

"This map provides ample evidence that our efforts to enroll a diverse undergraduate class have had a dramatic impact on MIT,” says Ian A. Waitz, vice chancellor and the Jerome C. Hunsaker Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics. “However, while these demographic trends are impressive, they are not sufficient. We must continue to work hard to create an inclusive, welcoming environment for all.”