Students from MIT and Imperial College measure the height of a water channel near London. Photo: Courtesy of the students.

Julia Mongo | MIT Global Education and Career Development

Building on the success of existing partnerships, MIT’s Global Education and Career Development (GECD) is significantly expanding its academic exchange with Imperial College London, while continuing to grow the Imperial summer research exchange. Twelve MIT departments will now take part in one or both exchanges.

These augmented multidepartmental exchange programs will allow even more MIT undergraduates to participate in rigorous and enriching study abroad and research experiences at Imperial, a leading U.K. university that focuses exclusively on science, engineering, medicine, and business.

The academic exchange is transforming from a departmental exchange spanning two departments to a multidepartmental exchange involving nine departments. GECD will start sending students on the expanded academic exchange program this coming fall.

Meanwhile, the summer research exchange with Imperial has been growing steadily, from two departments in 2013 to 10 now.

“Such opportunities provide hugely valuable experiences in learning to learn and work in another culture and a different scientific environment,” says Professor Linn Hobbs of the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering. “Students find the experience challenging, exciting, and full of potential for both personal and intellectual growth.”

MIT’s partnership with Imperial began in 2013 with a summer research program for students from both schools’ departments of Materials Science and Physics. Hobbs spearheaded the exchange, working closely with Robin Grimes, professor of materials physics at Imperial and chief scientific advisor to the U.K.

Hobbs was also the impetus behind the academic exchange program that shortly followed, and has championed the development of both exchange programs. As part of the academic exchange, a corresponding number of Imperial students come to MIT to partake in courses and research.

Semester/year academic exchange

The academic exchange program offers the opportunity for two juniors each (four in the case of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) from nine departments to spend either the spring semester of their junior year or their full junior year in the corresponding department at Imperial College London. Students apply through GECD and are selected jointly by faculty in their MIT department and GECD’s Global Education staff.

While on the exchange, students study on Imperial’s campus, which is located in central London’s posh Kensington and Chelsea neighborhoods steps away from such cultural attractions as the Science and Industry Museum, Royal Albert Hall, and numerous music and restaurant venues. Students take academic subjects that provide MIT transfer credit for core or restricted-elected subjects in their majors. In addition, Imperial offers UROP-like experiences whenever possible.

The 2019 academic year will initiate a two-year pilot for the expanded exchange that will enable student participation from seven new departments. These new departments, joining Materials Science and Engineering and Nuclear Science and Engineering, are: Mechanical Engineering; Chemistry; Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; Chemical Engineering; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; Aeronautics and Astronautics; and Mathematics.

Faculty as well as students are enthusiastic about the multidepartmental expansion. “We are excited to be initiating a student exchange with Imperial College London, one of the great research institutions of the world,” says Professor Haynes Miller in the Department of Mathematics. “Imperial has an excellent undergraduate program, one that will offer our students the same kind of perspective and growth that the Cambridge-MIT Exchange did. Thirty-seven of our majors spent a year as Cambridge students over the 16 years of the program. Each and every one gained from it in deep ways, and we anticipate the same results from the Imperial project. We look forward also to hosting an equal number of Imperial students here; their different perspectives will enrich the experience of our majors here in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

Summer research exchange

Since its launch in 2013, the summer research exchange with Imperial has added new departments over the years and welcomed increasing numbers of participants. The research exchange is now open to undergraduates in Civil and Environmental Engineering, Materials Science and Engineering, Chemistry, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Physics, Chemical Engineering, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mathematics, Biological Engineering, and Nuclear Science and Engineering. Each department nominates two students to participate each year. The faculty coordinators then work closely with their counterparts at Imperial to identify labs, faculty supervisors, and advisors for participating students.

The research exchange runs from late June through mid-August. During those weeks, MIT also welcomes Imperial students to its campus. Last summer, 18 MIT students and 18 Imperial students participated in the exchange, including rising MIT junior Yun Chang. Chang, an AeroAstro major who is also an Emerson fellow in piano, immersed himself in his lab’s research on quadrocopter 3-D SLAM implementation, savored the cosmopolitan world of London and Imperial, and attended numerous BBC classical music promenade concerts.

“Doing research at Imperial College London was an amazing experience, and was especially unique in that I got to meet people from all over the world,” says Chang. “I got to do interesting research, and I was able to broaden my horizons. I am already missing walking through Kensington Gardens on my way to Imperial every morning.”

MIT’s UROP office is an integral partner with GECD’s Global Education team for this program. As a co-sponsor, UROP provides student funding through hourly wages and an airfare stipend, while GECD funds MIT students’ accommodations in London.

Looking forward to future collaboration

“MIT is looking forward to a long-term partnership with Imperial College London,” says Julie Maddox, assistant dean for Global Education at GECD. “I’ve seen students profiting from their academic and research experiences at Imperial over the years and have been inspired by how they speak about their intellectual and personal growth. Likewise, Imperial students who come to our campus greatly contribute to our classes and labs and are enthusiastic about their experiences here.”

“I’m thrilled that we succeeded in growing both the academic and research exchanges with Imperial so more students from across MIT will be able to engage in these important opportunities,” adds Malgorzata Hedderick, associate dean for Global Education at GECD. “Imperial has been a very supportive partner over the years and we are excited to continue this mutually beneficial relationship. Huge thanks go to the MIT and Imperial faculty; none of this would have been possible without their leadership, dedication, and involvement.”

Please join us as students in the 2018-2019 Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (SuperUROP) share the findings of their year-long projects at a special electronic poster session.

The SuperUROP Showcase will be held on Thursday, April 26, from 3 to 5 p.m. in Morss Hall, Walker Memorial (Building 50, 142 Memorial Drive). Masterworks, the EECS poster event for master's-level thesis projects, will immediately follow the Showcase from 5 to 6 p.m. in the same location. Hors d'oeuvres and refreshments will be served throughout the electronic-poster sessions.

The Showcase will be the second poster session for this year's SuperUROP participants, who also presented at the December 2017 Proposal Pitch event. For more information about the program, please visit the SuperUROP website.

Interested in learning more about SuperUROP for the 2018-2019 academic year? Attend one of the upcoming information sessions:

• Monday, March 12, from 4-5 p.m. in 34-401B.
• Tuesday, March 13, from 4-5 p.m. in 34-401A.
• Tuesday, March 20, from 12:30-1:30 p.m. in 36-428.

No pre-registration is necessary, and refreshments will be served. 

MIT Institute Professor Barbara Liskov

EECS Staff

The IEEE Computer Society has named Institute Professor Barbara Liskov as the recipient of is 2018 Computer Pioneer Award.

The society gives the award in recognition of significant contributions to early concepts and developments that have clearly advanced the state of the art in computing. Specifically, Liskov is being honored for her "pioneering data abstraction, polymorphism, and support for fault tolerance and distributed computing in the programming languages CLU and Argus,” according to the society’s announcement.  

Liskov, a long-time EECS faculty member, is head of the Programming Methodology Group in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Her research interests include distributed and parallel systems, programming methodology, and programming languages.  

She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Sciences, and National Inventors Hall of Fame. She is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and a charter fellow of the National Academy of Inventors.

She has also received the ACM Turing Award, the IEEE John von Neumann Medal, an achievement award from the ACM Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN), and a lifetime achievement award from the Society of Women Engineers. In 2003, Discover Magazine named her one of the 50 most important women in science.

Liskov received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from University of California Berkeley and master’s and PhD degrees in computer science from Stanford University. She was one of the first women in the United States to earn a doctorate in computer science.

The IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors established the Computer Pioneer Award in 1981 to recognize individuals whose efforts influenced the computer industry. The award is presented to people whose main contribution to the concepts and development of the computer field was made at least 15 years earlier.

Liskov will receive the Computer Pioneer Award at the 2019 Computer Software and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), held in conjunction with SEMICON West in San Francisco in July 2019. The award consists of a silver medal and a speaking invitation.

SuperUROP Scholar Nichole Clarke at the December 2017 Proposal Pitch poster session. Photo: Gretchen Ertl

Juniors and seniors are invited to attend an upcoming information session to learn more about the Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (better known as SuperUROP). The program is primarily targeted to students in the School of Engineering and the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

At each session, the SuperUROP team will describe what the program offers and how it works, as well as explaining the process and timeline for applications. There will be plenty of time for questions and answers, and refreshments will be served.

Information sessions will be held on: 

• Monday, March 12, from 4-5 p.m. in 34-401B (Grier B).
• Tuesday, March 13, from 4-5 p.m. in 34-401A (Grier A)
• Tuesday, March 20, from 12:30-1:30 p.m. in 36-428 (Haus and Allen Rooms).

No need to pre-register -- just drop in!

For more information, visit superurop.mit.edu or email superurop-contact@mit.edu.

Professor Timothy Lu                                                                                                                                      Photo: M. Scott Brauer

Anne Trafton | MIT News

In high school and college, Timothy Lu spent a lot of time programming computers. But as his college graduation approached, he turned his attention toward programming biological systems. The field of synthetic biology was just beginning to emerge, and he wanted to be part of it.

Since that time, Lu has devoted his career to coming up with novel ways to engineer cells, both bacterial and human, to perform new functions. Using this approach, he hopes to develop new therapies for a range of diseases, from cancer to drug-resistant infections.

Achieving this goal requires overcoming many more challenges than programming computer chips does, he says, because living cells behave in more unpredictable ways and the underlying programming language is not deeply understood.

“The advantage of the semiconductor industry is they were able to build individual units and put them together and scale them very efficiently. They weren’t putting things into an existing system that was already messy and where you didn’t know the wiring diagram,” says Lu, who recently earned tenure in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “In contrast, we’re simultaneously trying to figure out how to assemble genetic circuits together and also stick it into this giant mish-mash of what the cell normally does. That’s the key challenge.”

Fundamental challenges

Lu’s early interest in computer programming was inspired by his father, who worked as an electrical engineer at IBM.

“My dad brought home some of the early PCs that they were building at IBM, and I spent a lot of time programming computers and making them do very simple things,” Lu recalls.

When Lu was 10 years old, his family moved from upstate New York to Taiwan, where his parents had grown up. He returned to the United States to attend MIT, where he majored in electrical engineering and computer science. When he graduated in 2003, Lu realized that he enjoyed programming but wanted to apply this interest to nascent technologies with fundamental challenges that had yet to be solved.

He soon became intrigued by the idea of programming biological systems. Many Boston-area researchers were beginning to work in this field, known as synthetic biology. Lu decided to apply to the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology (HST), and he arranged to do his PhD research in a lab at Boston University headed by synthetic biology pioneer James Collins (who is now a faculty member at MIT).

As part of his HST coursework, Lu saw many patients with antibiotic-resistant infections and became interested in trying to develop new treatments for such infections. In Collins’ lab, Lu worked on engineering viruses that infect bacteria, also known as bacteriophages. He engineered these bacteriophages to produce enzymes that help to chew up biofilms (layers of bacteria that stick to surfaces), and in 2008, he won the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for this work. In a related project, he engineered bacteria to express factors that make them more susceptible to existing antibiotics.

After finishing his PhD, and an MD as well, Lu pondered a few career paths, including practicing medicine or working at a startup based on his research, but he ended up applying for a faculty position in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which was looking for someone interested in programming biological circuits. MIT had recently hired a couple of prominent synthetic biologists to launch the Institute’s new Synthetic Biology Center, and Lu was eager to get involved.

“At the time, MIT was trying to build up its synthetic biology team. I knew if I joined I would be the most junior member but would be part of something that was going to quickly grow, so it was exciting for me,” says Lu, who later received a joint appointment in MIT’s Department of Biological Engineering.

Disease-fighting circuits

Much of Lu’s research focuses on designing genetic circuits that can perform computations in living cells, such as counting events or tracking whether a specific event has occurred and then provoking the appropriate response.

“My deepest personal interest is in the clinical applications of synthetic biology,” Lu says. “Can you program cells or viruses to sense and respond to their environment, so that you can try to detect the presence of disease and treat it effectively and safely?”

In a recent study, Lu and his colleagues developed a synthetic gene circuit that triggers the body’s immune system to attack cancers when it detects signs of the disease. They are also working on designing more control elements to help them turn such circuits on and off, and developing ways to help circuits change their output in response to different disease biomarkers.

Lu’s lab also continues to pursue novel antimicrobial treatments, including engineered bacteriophages as well as new types of antimicrobial peptides. By modifying these naturally occurring proteins, Lu hopes to make them more efficient at killing microbes, and potentially to develop them for use against infection in humans.

Such research has become increasingly important, Lu says, as more strains of bacteria become resistant to existing drugs.

“When we first started, in the early 2000s, people didn’t care about antibiotic resistance that much. Most antibiotics were still working and people didn’t think it was a big deal,” he says. “But over time, resistance has continued to grow, and the antibiotic pipeline has become drier and drier. So we still firmly believe that we need new strategies. The days when you would just go and dig in the dirt and easily find new antibiotics with broad-spectrum activity are over.”

For related content about this story, please visit the MIT News website.

For more on MIT IQ, visit the MIT News website or intelligencequest.mit.edu. 

MIT faculty and students addressed alumni during the first "Infinite" symposium in the Bay Area. Photo: Hagpop's Photography.

School of Engineering
 

EECS PhD student Tsui-Wei "Lily" Weng (center) networks with her peers at the 2018 Women in Data Science conference. Photo: Dana J. Quigley

Scott Murray | Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Two hundred students, industry professionals, and academic leaders convened in Cambridge recently for the second annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) conference.

The MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) co-hosted the event with Harvard University’s Institute for Applied Computational Science (IACS) and Microsoft Research New England, in partnership with Stanford University. Attendance at the conference, held at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development (NERD) Center, grew from 150 participants last year.

“The WiDS conference highlighted female leadership in data science in the Boston area,” said WiDS steering committee member Caroline Uhler, Henry L. and Grace Doherty assistant professor in EECS and IDSS. “This event is particularly important to encourage more female scientists in related areas to join this emerging area that has such broad societal impact.”

Regina Barzilay, Delta Electronics Professor of EECS, gave the first presentation on how data science and machine learning approaches are improving cancer research. Barzilay explained how her experiences as a breast cancer survivor motivates her work: “Going through this treatment really opened my eyes to how much computer science and data science is not a part of that equation,” she said.

Barzilay discovered that most clinical decisions in breast cancer treatment were based on 3 percent of patients — those participating in clinical trials — leaving a huge amount of unused patient information. Her research uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and deep neural networks to organize and analyze some of that previously unused patient data in the hopes of better understanding the connection between features of the disease and treatment outcomes. She is also developing techniques to use pixel-by-pixel analysis of mammogram images to assess cancer risks earlier than humans can.

Other speakers showed the broad applicability of data science approaches to many fields in addition to health care. Tamara Broderick, ITT Career Development Assistant Professor of EECS and a member of IDSS, spoke about developing a modern toolbox for data analysis. Ideally, that toolbox would be reliable and accurate, with theoretical guarantees on quality, Broderick said. The tools should allow practitioners to assess how certain they are about the reported outcomes. The output of the tools should be interpretable, and running the tools should be fast and easy for non-expert practitioners, she added. Moreover, the tools should be able to run on streaming data, where new data are constantly being acquired, and should be able to take advantage of modern, distributed computing. Broderick also discussed how to achieve these qualities in practical applications, citing examples in evaluating the efficacy of microloans and online advertising.

Francesca Dominici, professor of biostatistics and co-director of the Data Science Initiative at Harvard, presented on the power of data science to affect environmental policy. Dominici combines meteorological, traffic, land-use, and demographic data against Medicare claims to assess health risks of pollutants. Her research was referenced by U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) during a Senate hearing for Kathleen Hartnett White, President Trump’s former nominee to head the Council on Environmental Quality.

From the industry side of health care, Sanofi's Heather Bell spoke about the potential for data science to improve the clinical trial process. Bell is senior vice president and global head of digital and analytics at Sanofi, a biopharmaceutical company. She noted that 35 percent of clinical trial time was spent in recruiting patients, a process greatly improved by using patient data to identify candidates. This can shorten trials from years to months, save millions of dollars, open studies to thousands more participants, and ultimately lead to improved outcomes.

While data science has great potential to improve research in numerous fields, it presents new challenges. One critical challenge was highlighted by Cynthia Dwork, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and Radcliffe Alumnae Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Dwork spoke of fairness and a “catalog of evils” identified by researchers in algorithm use, such as excluding zip codes for targeted advertising based on the racial makeup of neighborhoods. Algorithms aren’t neutral, Dwork argued, and can present problems if they “lack cultural awareness.”

Challenges were also a theme of the concluding panel talk of speakers and women working in data science. In addition to bias, they discussed transparency, security, and privacy. “I think people have no idea, no comprehension how much data is out there on them,” Bell mused. “I think there will need to be a reckoning on some of this.”

Despite these challenges, all agreed that data science can have an extraordinary impact in addressing social challenges. Data scientists can apply their skills in almost limitless ways by collaborating with researchers wherever data sets are or can be made available. As Broderick put it: “I had all these interests and thought: 'If only there was one magical field that combined them.'”

New to the conference this year was a hall of student posters showcasing data science work in a broad range of fields, and recruitment opportunities for industry partners. The 2018 conference also included the announcement of the winners of the first WiDS Datathon competition, which ran throughout February. The Datathon challenged teams to come up with data science solutions to alleviate global poverty. Worcester Polytechnic Institute’s “Team Minions,” comprised of Xi Liu and Ye Wang, was both the local Massachusetts first-place winner and a global winner. The pair emphasized the importance of open source models and tools to their project.

IDSS Executive Director Elizabeth Sikorovsky joined Harvard IACS Executive Director Catherine Chute in making opening and closing remarks. They noted that the event sold out on the first day and joined more than 150 other conferences and events worldwide, all led by women. “We are part of a global movement,” Chute said.

See the video on the MIT News website.

MIT News

Few toys have captured the public’s imagination quite like the Rubik’s Cube. Rubik’s Cube references have been made in all corners of popular culture — from "The Simpsons" to "Being John Malkovich."For the better part of four decades, this small handheld object has tormented those who tried to solve it.

Over the years, competitions have been held to see who could solve the Rubik’s Cube the fastest by hand. Engineers then started building robots programmed to solve the cube at a lightning speeds. In 2016, a robot broke the world record and solved the cube in 0.637 seconds. Mechanical engineering graduate student Ben Katz and third-year EECS major Jared Di Carlo thought they could do better.

“We watched the videos of the previous robots, and we noticed that the motors were not the fastest that could be used,” recalls Di Carlo. “We thought we could do better with improved motors and controls.”

The pair met through the MIT Electronics Research Society, MITERS, a student-run hacker space. Throughout January’s Independent Activities Period, they set out to build a robot that could shatter the world-record for solving a Rubik’s Cube.

“The gist is that there is a motor actuating each face of a Rubik’s Cube," explains Katz, who conducts research at MIT’s Biomimetic Robotics Lab. Custom-built electronics and controls are then used to control each of those motors. The robot also has pair of webcams pointed at the cube. “When we tell the robot to solve the cube, we use those webcams to identify the different colors on the face of the cube,” says Katz.

Di Carlo wrote software that identifies the colors of each individual part within the cube to determine the cube’s initial state. The team then used existing software written to instruct the robot on exactly how to move the pieces to solve the puzzle.

The result? They set a new world record. It only took their robot 0.38 seconds to solve the Rubik’s Cube. The team credits the unique skills they brought to the table as the key to their success. “I worked on the computer vision software, while Ben worked on the more mechanical stuff,” adds Di Carlo.

For a short video of the robot solving the Rubik's cube, visit the MIT News website.Additional credits: Article by Mary Beth O'Leary, Department of Mechanical Engineering. Video by: Ben Katz/Jared Di Carlo.

For related coverage, visit the MIT News website.

Professor Rob Miller

EECS Staff

Rob Miller has been appointed as the inaugural Distinguished Professor in Computer Science, EECS department head Asu Ozdaglar has announced.

"This newly endowed chair was established to recognize faculty with a strong interest in K-12 education and its relation to teaching and research in computer science education," Ozdaglar says. "The appointment recognizes Professor Miller’s leadership in the area of computer science education and research as well as his outstanding mentorship and educational contributions."

Miller is internationally well-known in the field of human-computer interaction (HCI), in which he has pioneered techniques for intelligent text editing using many cursors at once, developed new approaches for end-user scripting of web pages and desktop graphical interfaces, and made seminal contributions in crowdsourcing, particularly in orchestrating small contributions from many people to solve a complex problem.

His work on crowdsourcing and HCI has found new applications in computer science education, where organizing small contributions from a crowd of students can turn the size of a massive online or residential course into a virtue rather than a curse. Much of his group’s current work focuses on tools and techniques for teaching large programming courses, including clustering and visualizing many solutions to the same problem in order to identify common mistakes, find unusual but good solutions, and speed up grading.

Miller also makes substantial contributions to the Institute’s educational mission, Ozdaglar says. He has created or co-created three courses in software design: Software Construction (originally 6.005 (now 6.031); User Interface Design and Implementation (6.813); and Principles and Practice of Assistive Technology (6.811). He has also deployed 6.005 onto MITx, where it formed two modules of the Foundations of Computer Science XSeries. For his teaching contributions, he has received the Louis D. Smullin (’39) Award for Teaching Excellence, the Burgess (’52) & Elizabeth Jamieson Award for Excellence in Teaching, the MacVicar Faculty Fellowship, and the Teaching with Digital Technology Award.

As EECS education co-officer, Miller created a predictive model of student registration that helps distribute more than 200 teaching assistants (TAs) fairly across the department’s courses as well as a calendar tool that allows for better coordination of quizzes and deadlines between large courses.

L to R: Daskalakis, Han, Uhler, Zeldovich

EECS Staff

Four EECS faculty members have received significant promotions, department head Asu Ozdaglar has announced.

Constantinos Daskalakis and Nickolai Zeldovich were each promoted to full professor of EECS, while Ruonan Han and Caroline Uhler were each promoted to associate professor without tenure (AWOT). All the appointments are effective July 1, 2018.

Constantinos Daskalakis is a leading theoretical computer scientist working in a variety of areas involving foundations and applications of probability, including algorithmic game theory, mechanism design, and statistical sampling. He received a PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2008 and joined MIT in 2009 after a one-year postdoctoral position at Microsoft Research. He is a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and he was granted tenure in 2015.

Daskalakis began his research career working in the field of algorithmic game theory. His most notable result in that area says that Nash equilibria, which describe stable configurations of competitive multi-player games, cannot be computed efficiently. After obtaining a series of related results, he began working in mechanism design, where he obtained another breakthrough: he showed that the general problem of mechanism design, which allows a system to achieve desired results in the face of strategic, possibly dishonest participants, can be reduced to the simpler problem of algorithm design, in which the participants are assumed to be honest.

More recently, Daskalakis worked on a long-standing problem from economic theory: optimal pricing for multiple items. Again, he obtained a breakthrough result, this one providing a mathematical characterization of the structure of optimal solutions. He has also been pioneering new methods for discerning properties of unknown probability distributions by using sampling.

Among other honors, he has received a Game Theory and Computer Science Prize, an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Doctoral Dissertation Award, a Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Outstanding Paper Prize, and a Vatican Giuseppe Sciacca Foundation Research and Development Award. At MIT, he has taught many courses in algorithms, probability, game theory, inference, and data science, and has received the EECS Ruth and Joel Spira Award for distinguished teaching.

Nickolai Zeldovich received a PhD from Stanford University in 2008 and, after a short postdoctoral appointment at Stanford, joined MIT later that year. He was granted tenure in 2014.

Zeldovich, also a CSAIL member, works on improving the state of computer-system security and on enabling new applications that might not be deployed today because of security concerns. To that end, he has worked on a variety of types of systems, including operating systems and distributed systems that avoid security vulnerabilities, systems that guarantee security even in the face of programmer errors, systems that recover gracefully from intrusions, systems that run applications on encrypted data, and systems that hide the identities of communicating parties.

Recently, he has also been developing rigorous techniques for finding security vulnerabilities in code or proving their absence, as well as building new secure applications such as cryptocurrencies.

Among other honors, he has received a Sloan Research Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, and an MIT Harold E. Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award. In February 2018, he was one of two EECS professors to receive the department’s Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship (FRIF), an award that recognizes midcareer faculty members for outstanding research contributions and international leadership and provides them with resources to pursue new research and development. At MIT, he has taught many different courses in systems and security, and has also received the EECS Ruth and Joel Spira Award for distinguished teaching.

Ruonan Han received a PhD degree in electrical engineering from Cornell University in January 2014. After a short stint as a research scientist at Cornell, he joined MIT as an assistant professor in July 2014, and he is also a core faculty member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL). His work focuses on pushing the fundamental limits of chip-scale electronics and exploring new application opportunities in the realms of sensing and communications. In particular, he is pursuing critical problems in the important “terahertz gap” (0.1-10 THz).

Han’s work has generated multiple records in the performance metrics of silicon-based THz circuits, including the highest radiated power and the highest detection sensitivity. In addition, his group invented a new sensor architecture that maintains high efficiency across a scalable, broad bandwidth. His group also demonstrated new applications of THz chips beyond traditional wireless radio and non-invasive imaging: molecular spectroscopy with high specificity, ultra-broadband inter-chip link through a THz dielectric waveguide, and most recently, fully-electronic time-keeping with a molecular clock.

Han’s awards include an NSF CAREER Award and best student paper awards at the IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference (CICC) and IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits (RFIC) Symposium. He also received Cornell’s award for the best PhD thesis. At MIT, he has taught multiple courses in circuits, and contributed to the development of other courses in that subject. He served as the workshop chair of the 2016 IEEE International Wireless Symposium and is steering-committee member for the 2019 IEEE International Microwave Symposium, the flagship conference for the microwave theory and technique society.

Caroline Uhler received a PhD in Statistics from the University of California Berkeley in 2011. After serving as an assistant professor at IST Austria, she joined MIT as an assistant professor of EECS and a core faculty member of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS). Currently, she is the Henry L. and Grace Doherty Assistant Professor of EECS and IDSS. 

Uhler’s primary expertise is in the general area of algebraic statistics, a field that focuses on the application of algebra, algebraic geometry, graph theory, optimization and combinatorics to statistical modeling. This broad expertise enables her to produce new paradigms and algorithms for the analysis of large heterogeneous data sets that arise in various applications. Her work to date has broken new ground on providing a systematic approach to studying graphical models. In her PhD work, she initiated the study of Gaussian graphical models using algebraic methods and introduced hyperbolic exponential families as a general class of graphical models that share the nice computational properties of Gaussian models. 

Uhler’s awards include a Sofja Kovalevskaja Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, and an NSF CAREER Award. She was a plenary speaker on the subject of algebraic statistics during the 2017 SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry.

She has developed two courses at MIT, one of which serves as the capstone class for the minor in statistics. She serves on the EECS admissions committee and the Broad Institute Fellows selection committee, and she was an organizer of the joint conference between MIT, Harvard, and Microsoft for Women in Data Science.

   Professor Pablo Parrilo

EECS Staff

EECS Professor Pablo Parrilo has been named to the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Fellows Class of 2018.

Parrilo is among 28 new SIAM Fellows nominated for exemplary research and outstanding service to the professional community. He is specifically being “foundational contributions to algebraic methods in optimization and engineering,” according to SIAM.

Parrilo’s research interests include optimization methods for engineering applications, control and identification of uncertain complex systems, robustness analysis and synthesis, and the development and application of computational tools based on convex optimization and algorithmic algebra to practically relevant engineering problems.

At MIT, Parrilo is also affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations Research Center (ORC). Previously, he was an assistant professor at the Automatic Control Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and visiting associate professor at the California Institute of Technology.

In addition, he made short-term research visits to UC Santa Barbara (Physics), the Lund Institute of Technology (Automatic Control), and UC Berkeley (Mathematics). He received an undergraduate degree in electronics engineering from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems from the California Institute of Technology.

His other awards and honors include a Finmeccanica Career Development Chair, the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems Theory (SIAG/CST) Prize, the IEEE Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize, and the Farkas Prize of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Optimization Society. He is also an IEEE fellow.

Parrilo and the other new fellows will be recognized for their achievements during SIAM’s annual meeting, to be held in July in Portland, Oregon.

   Professor Dina Katabi. Photo: Simon Simard

Rachel Gordon | CSAIL

Dina Katabi, an EECS professor who created a wireless device that “sees through walls,” has won the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Prize in Computing for her significant contributions to wireless systems. The prestigious award comes with a $250,000 cash prize.

Katabi, the Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor of EECS, is cited by ACM as being “one of the most innovative researchers in the field of networking." She has spearheaded research in wireless systems for health-monitoring technologies. A principal investigator at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Katabi has focused on systems that can better predict health outcomes in a non-invasive manner. She developed a device that analyzes the wireless signals in the environment to detect humans behind walls and measure metrics like movement, breathing rate, and walking speed, which are especially important for monitoring the health of the elderly.

In addition to her research in human-sensing technologies, Katabi has pioneered research in wireless networks to improve the data rate and reliability of Wi-Fi and cellular systems. Her designs and algorithms draw on advanced mathematical models to improve how data can be moved from one point to another in a given time. Her work has provided mechanisms for combating interference and avoiding dead spots.

Katabi is also known for the development of the Sparse Fourier Transform. Alongside MIT colleague Piotr Indyk and students, Katabi created an algorithm that computes the Fourier Transform much faster than the Fast Fourier Transform. The Sparse Fourier Transform has been used to solve problems in many fields, including computer networks, medical imaging, graphics, mobile systems, circuits, and biochemistry.

“Innovations that help facilitate communications across mobile networks address an important need,” says ACM President Vicki L. Hanson in a related press release. “Katabi’s work has contributed to a seamless increase in [mobile data] traffic, as well as the ever-increasing volumes of data that are shared over mobile systems. She is known for reimagining long-standing challenges in original ways.”

Katabi is also director of the Center for Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing at MIT. The ACM Prize is now among many honors she has received, including a MacArthur Fellowship and the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award. In addition, she is an ACM Fellow and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

“Dina has done visionary work in taking a communications technology like wireless and being able to turn it into a meaningful metric for measuring all sorts of important health information, from heart rate and breathing to walking speed and sleep cycles,” says CSAIL Director Daniela Rus. “Her work has the potential to fundamentally transform the field of health care, and all of us at CSAIL are so very proud of her for being recognized with this honor.”

The award will be presented at the ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 23 in San Francisco.

This is the last call for student participation in Masterworks 2018, EECS's annual celebration leading to the Master of Science (SM) and Master of Engineering (MEng) degrees.

The final, extended deadline for participants is Wednesday, April 18. You may sign up and register at the Masterworks registration site, where you'll also find details for poster specifications.

For questions or to request a poster template, email eecs-masterworks@mit.edu before the deadline.

Masterworks 2018 will be held on Thursday, April 26, 2018, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. on the Charles M. Vest Student Street in the Stata Center (Building 32, first floor). It immediately follows the Spring 2018 SuperUROP Showcase, held in the same location beginning at 3 p.m. Following the session, several prizes will be awarded. Hors d'oeuvres will be served throughout the sessions. Please join us!

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Photo: John Parrillo, courtesy MIT System Design & Management