The factors impacting successful patient care are many and varied. Early diagnosis, proper adherence to prescription medication schedules, and effective monitoring and management of chronic disease, for example, all contribute to better outcomes. However, each of these factors can be hindered by outside influences — medication doesn’t work as well if it isn’t taken as prescribed, and disease can be missed or misdiagnosed in early stages if symptoms are mild or not present.

Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Career Development Professor, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and a gastroenterologist in the Division of Gastroenterology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH), is working on a variety of innovative solutions to improve patient care. As a physician and an engineer, he brings a unique perspective.

“Bringing those two domains together is what really can help transform and accelerate our capacity to develop new biomedical devices or new therapies for a range of conditions,” he says. “As physicians, we're extremely fortunate to be able to help individuals. As scientists and engineers, not only can we help individuals … we can help populations.”

Traverso found a passion for this work early in life. His family lived in his father’s native Peru through much of his childhood, but left in the late 1980s at the height of the nation’s political instability, emigrating to Canada, where he began high school.

“In high school, I had the incredible opportunity to actually spend time in a lab,” he says. “I really fell in love with molecular genetics. I loved the lab environment and that ability to investigate a very specific problem, with the hopes that those developments would eventually help people.”

He started medical school immediately after high school, attending the University of Cambridge, but paused his medical training to pursue a PhD in medical sciences at Johns Hopkins University before returning to Cambridge. After completing medical school, he completed internal medicine residency at BWH and his gastroenterology fellowship training at Massachusetts General Hospital, both at Harvard Medical School. For his postdoctoral research, he transitioned to the fields of chemical and biomedical engineering in the laboratory of Professor Robert Langer.

Traverso’s research interests today include biomedical device development, ingestible and implantable robotics, and drug delivery for optimal drug adherence. His academic home at MIT is in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, but his work integrates multiple domains, including mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, material science, and synthetic biology.

“The mechanical engineering department is a tremendous place to engage with students, as well as faculty, towards the development of the next generation of medical devices,” he says. “At the core of many of those medical devices are fundamental mechanical principles.”

Traverso’s team in the Laboratory for Translational Engineering is developing pioneering biomedical devices such as drug delivery systems to enable safe, efficient delivery of therapeutics, and novel diagnostic tests to support early detection of diseases.

The heart of his work, he says, is “about trying to help others. Patients, of course, but also students, to help them see the arc of bench-to-bedside and help stimulate their interest in careers applying engineering to help improve human health.”

More than 50,000 Indian students from secondary schools in Andhra Pradesh have completed the University of Melbournes Schools Engagement Program.

University of Melbourne researchers, in partnership with Girl Geek Academy andfunded bytheeSafetyCommissioner, have developed new artificial intelligence (AI) software, designed to help combat online abuse by empowering victims.

A highly-committed athlete in university lives a life of careful balance – planning training sessions in tandem with lectures and classes, managing an academic load while preparing for events and competitions, staying healthy in the face of daily physical and mental exertion, and weighing up which of the many responsibilities and commitments should come first in the limited 24 hours of a day.

Lucas Chew (Year 2, Environmental Studies) has been an athlete for most of his life, but this balancing act is still a consistent effort, so much so that he quips that his current role as a national finswimming representative feels like he is pursuing a double degree programme instead.

Finswimming is not a common sport in Singapore – so uncommon, in fact, that Lucas is the sole competitive finswimming athlete in the whole of NUS. It is a version of competitive swimming, where athletes don customised fins and snorkelling equipment to traverse the length of the pool at high speed.

“Over the past five years, finswimming has taken over more and more of my life. As a student-athlete, time and energy are always in short supply and require a delicate balance between school, sport, and sleep,” shared Lucas.

While continuing to keep NUS’ flag flying at national competitions as a member of the varsity table tennis team, Year 3 Dentistry undergraduate Janine Chew has also set her sights on widening access to table tennis within the NUS community, and as a means of community outreach beyond the University.

Janine played a central role in organising community events, such as the NUS Racketlon, a two-day multi-sport competition event which aims to promote racket sports in a fun manner, with no minimal skill prerequisites, among the NUS community. The team also recently concluded the Learn-to-Play Table Tennis programme, in collaboration with NUS Office of Student Affairs (OSA) which organises sessions to teach NUS students basic table tennis skills. The programme serves as a stepping stone into the sport for participants who have no prior experience.

The time taken for meticulous planning and execution of these events comes into careful balance alongside schoolwork.  “Key factors that have helped me balance both my sporting and academic commitments would be discipline, time management and having a good support system,” reflected Janine.

“The chance to interact with individuals from diverse sporting backgrounds has broadened my perspective and showed me that there is so much more to sports than just competition; it is also about engaging the community around us. While I might get tired and drained at times, I am reminded of the joy that I feel when I see people enjoying the sport and this helps to push me through the tough times,” she added.

Supporting sporting excellence

Lucas and Janine both credit the NUS Sports Scholarship for helping to even out the scales as they balance their lives as student-athletes.

Every academic year, the University awards up to 20 bond-free sports scholarships to national athletes and outstanding student-athletes, which cover tuition fees and include an annual allowance and on-campus accommodation allowance. Awarded to students pursuing full-time undergraduate programmes at NUS, the scholarship is disbursed in two categories – Sports Excellence for national representatives such as Lucas, and Community Sports for athletes like Janine who have made significant contributions towards promoting active sports participation in NUS.

Janine expressed her appreciation for the NUS Sports Scholarship for helping her to pursue goals in both academics and sports without the constant worry about financial constraints.

“The NUS Community Sports Scholarship has empowered me to channel my enthusiasm for community engagement in sports by spearheading events and initiatives aimed at bringing sports closer to the NUS community. It allowed me to connect and collaborate with some amazing like-minded individuals who share a passion for sports and community engagement,” added Janine. 

Sports support at NUS can also come in the form of subsidies for travel to overseas competitions, such as when Lucas travelled to Colombia recently to represent NUS and Singapore at the Finswimming World University Championship (WUC) 2024, which was subsidised by the U-SPARKS grant for NUS student-athletes who qualify for any World University Championships or Games. Seventy hours of travel time and some amazing local hot chocolate later, Lucas came home with not one, but three new national records for finswimming.

They can also consult the University when alternative arrangements to classes and exams are required, in consideration of overseas competition schedules.

“I’m appreciative of the scholarship for its all-rounded support, clear systems in place for communicating my goals with a sports manager, and the systemic perks of building my academic schedules around my training commitments so that I need not choose one or the other,” explained Lucas.

“We’re all in it together”

The athletic journey in NUS is not one of solitude; TeamNUS athletes are spurred on by the support of friends, family, coaches and teammates. They can also rely on a reliable team of sports managers at OSA, who wear many hats in their role of supporting athletes to pursue their sporting dreams.

Despite being the sole finswimmer in NUS, Lucas has the unwavering support of his sports manager at NUS, Mr Lim Fang Yi, who was himself a student-athlete in the past. “Fang Yi has always had my back administratively in registering for events, such as the recent Finswimming WUC,” said Lucas.

A former national swimmer, Fang Yi recently returned to competitive swimming, clinching three gold medals at the Singapore Masters 2024.

“More importantly, he uses his own experience as a student-athlete and national swimmer to mentor me to develop myself in ways outside of purely sporting performance, but also in community service, leadership, and in balancing my personal commitments, among other things,” Lucas added, emphasising the well-rounded development that comes from stable guidance.

Similar sentiments were also echoed by Janine, as she reflected on her relationship with her sports manager Riley Tan. “I have received a lot of support from the OSA sports managers, especially Riley. I appreciate that they often check in on our well-being and provide us with advice and support, especially when it gets tougher to balance academic and sporting commitments.”

Janine also said, “Riley arranges for regular sessions for catch-ups and updates on our recent developments, providing us with timely feedback where necessary. She also helped to advise me on my future goals and discuss small actionable steps that I can take along the way. The OSA sports managers even helped to guide me in the planning process of my events!”

Recognising excellence, supporting students for future success  

NUS Dean of Students Associate Professor Ho Han Kiat, said, “Co-curricular space is part of the expanded classroom to develop students holistically in preparation for the future of work. Such opportunities allow our students to engage in activities that align with their passion, and to take it to the level in accordance with their motivation. Through such endeavours, students pick up life skills, sharpen their personal effectiveness and become more meaningfully engaged with the community.”

“Besides recognising their accomplishments in different aspects of student life, such as sports, arts and culture, community impact, scholarships are an institutional commitment that we esteem to see our students build themselves towards future success,” Assoc Prof Ho added.

More than 50,000 Indian students from secondary school students in Andhra Pradesh have completed the University of Melbournes Schools Engagement Program.

An Australian research team and their American collaborators have been awarded the 2024 Gordon Bell Prize, regarded as the Nobel Prize ofhigh-performance computing (HPC).

A team of researchers led by Aman Husbands of the School of Arts Sciences has uncovered surprising ways transcription factors—the genetic switches for genes—regulate plant development, revealing how subtle changes in a lipid-binding region can dramatically alter gene regulation.

Troy Van Voorhis, the Robert T. Haslam and Bradley Dewey Professor of Chemistry, will step down as department head of the Department of Chemistry at the end of this academic year. Van Voorhis has served as department head since 2019, previously serving the department as associate department head since 2015.

“Troy has been an invaluable partner and sounding board who could always be counted on for a wonderful mix of wisdom and pragmatism,” says Nergis Mavalvala, the Kathleen and Curtis Marble professor of astrophysics and dean of the MIT School of Science. “While department head, Troy provided calm guidance during the Covid pandemic, encouraging and financially supporting additional programs to improve his community’s quality of life.”

“I have had the pleasure of serving as head of our department for the past five-plus years. It has been a period of significant upheaval in our world,” says Van Voorhis. “Throughout it all, one of my consistent joys has been the privilege of working within the chemistry department and across the wider MIT community on research, education, and community building.”

Under Van Voorhis’ leadership, the Department of Chemistry implemented a department-wide statement of values that launched the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee, a Future Faculty Symposium that showcases rising stars in chemistry, and the Creating Bonds in Chemistry program that partners MIT faculty with chemistry faculty at select historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions.

Van Voorhis also oversaw a time of tremendous faculty growth in the department with the addition of nine new faculty. During his tenure as head, he also guided the department through a period of significant growth of interest in chemistry with the number of undergraduate majors, enrolled students, graduate students, and graduate student yields all up significantly.

Van Voorhis also had the honor of celebrating with the entire Institute for Professor Moungi Bawendi’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry — the department’s first win in 18 years, since Professor Richard R. Schrock’s win in 2005.

In addition to his service to the department within the School of Science, Van Voorhis had also co-chaired the Working Group on Curricula and Degrees for the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. This service relates to Van Voorhis’ own research interests and programs.

Van Voorhis’ research lies at the nexus of chemistry and computation, and his work has impact on renewable energy and quantum computing. His lab is focused on developing new methods that provide an accurate description of electron dynamics in molecules and materials. Over the years, his research has led to advances in light-emitting diodes, solar cells, and other devices and technologies crucial to addressing 21st-century energy concerns.   

Van Voorhis received his bachelor's degree in chemistry and mathematics from Rice University and his PhD in chemistry from the University of California at Berkeley in 2001. Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University, he joined the faculty of MIT in 2003 and was promoted to professor of chemistry in 2012.

He has received many honors and awards, including being named an Alfred P. Sloan research fellow, a fellow of the David and Lucille Packard Foundation, and a recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He has also received the MIT School of Science’s award for excellence in graduate teaching.

Capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius is a tall order. Achieving that goal will not only require a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, but also a substantial reallocation of land to support that effort and sustain the biosphere, including humans. More land will be needed to accommodate a growing demand for bioenergy and nature-based carbon sequestration while ensuring sufficient acreage for food production and ecological sustainability.

The expanding role of land in a 1.5 C world will be twofold — to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to produce clean energy. Land-based carbon dioxide removal strategies include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage; direct air capture; and afforestation/reforestation and other nature-based solutions. Land-based clean energy production includes wind and solar farms and sustainable bioenergy cropland. Any decision to allocate more land for climate mitigation must also address competing needs for long-term food security and ecosystem health.

Land-based climate mitigation choices vary in terms of costs — amount of land required, implications for food security, impact on biodiversity and other ecosystem services — and benefits — potential for sequestering greenhouse gases and producing clean energy.

Now a study in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of competing land-use and technology options to limit global warming to 1.5 C. Led by researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), the study applies the MIT Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework to evaluate costs and benefits of different land-based climate mitigation options in Sky2050, a 1.5 C climate-stabilization scenario developed by Shell.

Under this scenario, demand for bioenergy and natural carbon sinks increase along with the need for sustainable farming and food production. To determine if there’s enough land to meet all these growing demands, the research team uses the global hectare (gha) — an area of 10,000 square meters, or 2.471 acres — as the standard unit of measurement, and current estimates of the Earth’s total habitable land area (about 10 gha) and land area used for food production and bioenergy (5 gha).

The team finds that with transformative changes in policy, land management practices, and consumption patterns, global land is sufficient to provide a sustainable supply of food and ecosystem services throughout this century while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the 1.5 C goal. These transformative changes include policies to protect natural ecosystems; stop deforestation and accelerate reforestation and afforestation; promote advances in sustainable agriculture technology and practice; reduce agricultural and food waste; and incentivize consumers to purchase sustainably produced goods.

If such changes are implemented, 2.5–3.5 gha of land would be used for NBS practices to sequester 3–6 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ per year, and 0.4–0.6 gha of land would be allocated for energy production — 0.2–0.3 gha for bioenergy and 0.2–0.35 gha for wind and solar power generation.

“Our scenario shows that there is enough land to support a 1.5 degree C future as long as effective policies at national and global levels are in place,” says CS3 Principal Research Scientist Angelo Gurgel, the study’s lead author. “These policies must not only promote efficient use of land for food, energy, and nature, but also be supported by long-term commitments from government and industry decision-makers.”

Capping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius is a tall order. Achieving that goal will not only require a massive reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from human activities, but also a substantial reallocation of land to support that effort and sustain the biosphere, including humans. More land will be needed to accommodate a growing demand for bioenergy and nature-based carbon sequestration while ensuring sufficient acreage for food production and ecological sustainability.

The expanding role of land in a 1.5 C world will be twofold — to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and to produce clean energy. Land-based carbon dioxide removal strategies include bioenergy with carbon capture and storage; direct air capture; and afforestation/reforestation and other nature-based solutions. Land-based clean energy production includes wind and solar farms and sustainable bioenergy cropland. Any decision to allocate more land for climate mitigation must also address competing needs for long-term food security and ecosystem health.

Land-based climate mitigation choices vary in terms of costs — amount of land required, implications for food security, impact on biodiversity and other ecosystem services — and benefits — potential for sequestering greenhouse gases and producing clean energy.

Now a study in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Science provides the most comprehensive analysis to date of competing land-use and technology options to limit global warming to 1.5 C. Led by researchers at the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3), the study applies the MIT Integrated Global System Modeling (IGSM) framework to evaluate costs and benefits of different land-based climate mitigation options in Sky2050, a 1.5 C climate-stabilization scenario developed by Shell.

Under this scenario, demand for bioenergy and natural carbon sinks increase along with the need for sustainable farming and food production. To determine if there’s enough land to meet all these growing demands, the research team uses the global hectare (gha) — an area of 10,000 square meters, or 2.471 acres — as the standard unit of measurement, and current estimates of the Earth’s total habitable land area (about 10 gha) and land area used for food production and bioenergy (5 gha).

The team finds that with transformative changes in policy, land management practices, and consumption patterns, global land is sufficient to provide a sustainable supply of food and ecosystem services throughout this century while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions in alignment with the 1.5 C goal. These transformative changes include policies to protect natural ecosystems; stop deforestation and accelerate reforestation and afforestation; promote advances in sustainable agriculture technology and practice; reduce agricultural and food waste; and incentivize consumers to purchase sustainably produced goods.

If such changes are implemented, 2.5–3.5 gha of land would be used for NBS practices to sequester 3–6 gigatonnes (Gt) of CO₂ per year, and 0.4–0.6 gha of land would be allocated for energy production — 0.2–0.3 gha for bioenergy and 0.2–0.35 gha for wind and solar power generation.

“Our scenario shows that there is enough land to support a 1.5 degree C future as long as effective policies at national and global levels are in place,” says CS3 Principal Research Scientist Angelo Gurgel, the study’s lead author. “These policies must not only promote efficient use of land for food, energy, and nature, but also be supported by long-term commitments from government and industry decision-makers.”

In this series, NUS News profiles the personalities shaping vibrant residential life and culture on campus, and how they craft a holistic residential experience that brings out the best in student residents.

When his son graduated from university in 2016, Associate Professor Prahlad Vadakkepat felt a sudden void in his life. Over the years, he had taken on the role of a mentor, learning about the younger generation’s challenges and perspectives as he supported his child through his academic journey.

But as his son prepared to enter the working world, their topics of conversation shifted, and Assoc Prof Prahlad was struck by a sense of loss. “There was a vacuum, like there was something I was missing out on,” he said.

Then came the serendipitous email in early 2017. It detailed an opening for Master of a new hostel at Prince George’s Park Residences at NUS. Without hesitation, he applied for it.

“(It) turned out to be one of the best decisions of my life,” the professor, who hails from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the NUS College of Design and Engineering, said. “I truly enjoy serving as the Master of Pioneer House.”

He was a mentor once more, this time to hundreds of students as Master of Pioneer House.

Pioneer House’s journey began in 2017, when the Office of Student Affairs proposed a fourth model of student housing in NUS. Initially dubbed PGP House, it was renamed Pioneer House in 2022, when NUS officially recognised the “House” model.

Pioneer House lives up to its name, being the first hostel on campus to merge NUS’ three existing housing models. It balances the vibrancy of halls and residential colleges with the quiet freedom of residences. In short, the House model balances residents’ involvement while maintaining a lively student residence.

Pioneer House also features Dining with Master sessions, where Assoc Prof Prahlad and the students gather for a weekly chat over dinner.

It currently houses over 600 residents, who can participate in interest groups, find peer mentors for support, and rely on Pastoral Care Teams (PCTs) comprising student leaders and staff when they need help.

NUS sits down with Assoc Prof Prahlad as he shares his journey in making Pioneer House the caring home it is for students today.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: What’s a typical day like for you?

In the morning, I check various Telegram channels for any messages that need attention, and we start the day with warm greetings. Evenings often involve student activities in the House, ranging from cultural events, sports, and training to various meetings.

Living in a hostel surrounded by familiar faces is both comforting and reassuring. It creates a sense of belonging, like being part of a family. Every time I pass a resident or colleague, we exchange smiles and waves and engage in small conversations. These small interactions make a big difference – I truly enjoy interacting with young minds and fellow residents.

Q: What’s buzzing at Pioneer House?

We have all kinds of student life activities for residents to choose from, allowing them to explore and destress after a long day of classes. Before COVID-19, we had something called “Chill and Chat”, where we came together, went outside, and sat in a space between the blocks. There, we would chat and dine – an under-the-stars kind of thing.

We had an event for Deepavali as well! There was Indian food, Indian dancing, and people wore traditional costumes. There was also henna and floral decoration (using) flowers or powders. And once night fell, sparklers were lit.

We also celebrate birthdays. When we have a Dining with Master or Cluster event, a PCT event, or a meeting with student leaders, we celebrate the birthdays of students as well as the management team with a cake. I'm a vegetarian, and the students will buy me a cake without eggs. There’s the sense that you belong and matter in Pioneer House. They feel that I matter to them, and they feel that they matter to me, and they care about the food I eat.

Q: Tell us about the theme of “Frugality and Sustainability” at Pioneer House. How did that come about?

During my childhood, my grandmother would make sure we never wasted even a single grain of rice. As I grew older, I began to realise how much we waste while many communities struggle for a better life. This awareness led me to delve deeper into the concepts of frugality and sustainability.

At Pioneer House, we integrate the principles of frugality and sustainability into our daily practices, whether it's managing resources, nurturing plants, or fostering leadership.

Pioneer House has a community garden where residents cultivate and harvest their own vegetables. It is equivalent to the size of about two master bedrooms. We grow sweet potatoes, lady's fingers, and other leafy vegetables, then we harvest them. We go to the barbecue pit nearby, cook, and we share.

By weaving these values into every aspect of our operations, we foster a culture that respects resources, promotes sustainability, and nurtures growth in all forms.

Q: What are the most rewarding and challenging parts of being a Master?

The most rewarding aspect is the opportunity to connect with a diverse group of people and work collaboratively to provide the best experience for our students. Here, we create a sense of belonging and mattering; it’s really important.

Once, after a break, a student from Pioneer House sat next to me on the bus. I asked her, “Did you go home (during the break)?” She told me she did, and that she was in tears on the flight back to Singapore from her home country. I had also just come back from India, and I told her: “I cried too.” It is these authentic conversations – I was happy that she could share that with me, and that I could share that with her. Again, a sense of mattering. We care, and we do things genuinely.

The challenge was establishing a completely new hostel model in 2017. We didn’t have a specific model to follow; the closest existing framework was the Hall model. We had extensive discussions and empowered ourselves through research, exploring frameworks that would help us build a community grounded in care and support. I had previously helped a community in India and developed a social enterprise, uniting around 900 individuals from varied backgrounds for the project and honing my ability to form personal human connections. My entrepreneurial background, combined with my experience in brainstorming and design thinking, helped me navigate these uncharted waters.

Concepts like a sense of belonging and mattering, inclusive leadership, frugality, and sustainability became central to our approach. We integrated the principles of belonging into our programmes and events, fostering a community where students could work together, while also feeling free to be themselves. One such example is PHamigo—creatively named to reflect its affiliation and mission, it is a group formed by residents which leverages the "Design-Your-Own-Course" academic scheme to foster inclusiveness by engaging the international student community. The support from student leaders was instrumental in weaving these values into the very fabric of Pioneer House.

Q: What makes Pioneer House home for you?

Colleagues and residents share a strong bond and support each other wholeheartedly. During the COVID-19 period, my family was in India – that was the first time I lived alone. The community really helped me, such as my House colleagues who would bring me fruits and homemade food. Though I am a strict vegetarian, I also made sure to source specially cooked chicken for my colleagues as a gesture of appreciation.

Residents often greet us warmly, waving whenever we cross paths, whether in the House, on the shuttle bus, or on the MRT. This deep sense of belonging fosters a familial community atmosphere. During the Dining with Master sessions, I often share stories about my family, and the residents frequently ask about how we’re doing. Pioneer House truly feels like home.

More than 350 distinguished guests comprising university and faculty members, donors, cherished alumni, students and friends came together to celebrate the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ (FASS) legacy of education and research excellence at a gala dinner held at One Farrer Hotel on 22 November 2024.

From humble beginnings to a world-class faculty

FASS boasts a rich and illustrious history that spans close to a century.

The Faculty began by offering diploma courses in the four disciplines of English, History, Geography and Economics in 1929. Over the years, in response to the nation’s growth and local and international needs, other departments such as Social Work (1952), Philosophy (1954), Political Science (1961), Communications and New Media (2005), and many others were formed.

Today, the Faculty is one of the largest faculties at NUS boasting 16 different departments and programmes and academic offerings in the fields of humanities, social sciences, Asian studies, and language studies that cover a rich and diverse array of disciplines ranging from Southeast Asian Studies and Psychology to Theatre Studies, and Sociology and Anthropology.

From just fewer than 40 students taking its classes in 1929, FASS welcomed about 4,400 undergraduates and more than 1,500 postgraduates in the current academic year. The Faculty also has a strong international outlook, offering students diverse opportunities to study abroad and engage with global perspectives through joint degree programmes, exchange programmes, internships and collaborations with top universities worldwide such as King’s College London and the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. In the last academic year alone, the Faculty received more than 800 exchange students from 34 countries, a testament to its global appeal and multicultural campus environment.  

Reflecting on FASS’ legacy at the dinner, Dean of FASS and FASS alumnus Professor Lionel Wee noted that the Faculty has never wavered in its mission to advance knowledge and learning in the humanities and social sciences. He said, “Over the decades, while the world around us has changed, this mission has remained steadfast – the guiding of generations of students to become thoughtful leaders and engaged citizens who make a difference in Singapore and beyond.”  

FASS alumni have gone on to excel on the national and global stages – playing leading roles in shaping global and public policy, trailblazing business initiatives in the private sector, advancing cultural initiatives and driving social change. Eminent alumni include former President of Singapore Mr S R Nathan; Former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and social scientist Dr Noeleen Heyzer; influential Asian historian and NUS Emeritus Professor Wang Gungwu, as well as prominent business entrepreneur and Founder of Banyan Tree Holdings, Mr Ho Kwon Ping.

Over the years, the Faculty has continuously spearheaded fresh educational strategies – demonstrating its keen understanding of evolving societal trends. In 2019, it introduced the FASS 2.0 Industry Tracks initiative that provides undergraduates industry-relevant training to complement the FASS education. A year later, the Faculty and the NUS Faculty of Science launched the NUS College of Humanities and Sciences with interdisciplinary education as its focus.

Indeed, initiatives such as CHS, said Prof Wee, demonstrate FASS’ dedication to equip students to meet the demands of an interconnected and rapidly changing world. “This interdisciplinary approach helps prepare them to view challenges from multiple perspectives, positioning them as well-rounded leaders and changemakers.”

Echoing similar sentiments was guest-of-honour, Prof Aaron Thean, NUS Deputy President (Academic Affairs) and Provost, who noted that CHS also offers more opportunities for NUS academics as it encourages groundbreaking interdisciplinary research partnerships between FASS and faculties across NUS. FASS, he stressed, “has been, and will continue to be, a cornerstone of our university and a place where intellectual exploration and a sense of community can be found.”

FASS alumni: Memories of FASS and the value of a FASS education

The gala dinner was an opportunity for alumni to reconnect and recall fond memories of their time at FASS.

Reminiscing about her university days, Ms Nichol Ng, CEO of food and beverage business X-Inc Group and Co-founder of the Food Bank Singapore, shared that her best memories were of studying on the steps of the Forum near the Central Library and climbing the hills to get to class.

The rigour and diversity of experiences offered by the Faculty proved invaluable in the FASS Economics and Japanese Studies alumna’s career. “The diversity of people whom I have met in FASS also allowed me to work with peers from different backgrounds and passions, establishing the people skills that I have today,” she added.

Another alumna, Ms Nur Diyana shared that the academic rigour and emphasis on critical inquiry during her time at the Department of Malay Studies sharpened her analytical thinking and nurtured a deep curiosity. “This has been instrumental in my graduate studies and continues to influence my work as a research librarian at NUS Libraries, where I draw upon those same skills to navigate complex information and contribute meaningfully to my field.”

Professor Robbie Goh, former FASS Dean and Provost at the Singapore University of Social Sciences observed how far FASS has come, with international university counterparts now lining up to seek potential collaborations with FASS – a far cry from the situation he witnessed as a young FASS academic in the 1990s. FASS, he added, had made a profound impact on his professional and personal lives.

He said, “FASS is my alma mater as well as my intellectual home and where I spent 33 years as an academic.  It’s where I met my wife when we were undergraduates together. Without the opportunities and encouragement that FASS gave me, I simply would not have had the resources and wherewithal to become an academic.”

Looking ahead – A FASS that continues to nurture young changemakers, with a strong social ethos

To mark the Faculty’s 95th birthday, FASSCares, an annual community engagement programme that started in 2018, held a fundraising initiative for Club Rainbow – a charity that supports children with chronic illnesses and their families. FASS had chosen to partner with Club Rainbow given a shared commitment to social responsibility and community support. A special outing was also organised for 22 children from Club Rainbow and their families at Jewel Changi Airport’s Canopy Park in September, where FASS staff, students and alumni spent the afternoon playing with the children and their families on the slides and bouncing nets, and bonded over lunch.

Close to S$66,000 was raised at this fundraising initiative through donations from staff, students and alumni and ticket sales for the gala dinner.

Thanking FASS for its efforts at the dinner, Mr Teo Siang Loong, Executive Director of Club Rainbow said, “We are currently serving close to 5,000 individuals in Club Rainbow including 1,200 children with chronic illnesses, many of whom have special needs and disabilities. In this year of an uncertain economic climate and inflationary environment, our donations have decreased overall. All the support garnered will have a direct impact on the children in need and on the vulnerable families.”

FASS also launched the new 95th FASS Distinguished Speaker Series with the aim to inspire FASS students towards excellence through meaningful engagements with alumni about their achievements. The series’ inaugural speaker, Ms Denise Phua, Member of Parliament for Jalan Besar GRC and Mayor for Central Singapore District, engaged students in September on the leadership lessons she learnt from her careers in the private, public and social sectors.

As FASS enters its centennial, Prof Wee stressed that the Faculty will focus on building on the work of past FASS cohorts to advance an interdisciplinary education that has both breadth and depth. It will continue to nurture adaptable, empathetic and innovative problem-solvers with a strong social ethos.

The Faculty, he added, is also committed to enhancing impact through research that spans disciplines and connects with real-world issues, “from urban studies to public policy, from heritage conservation to digital humanities.”

When asked for his views on the role FASS will take in shaping contemporary society, Dr Maliki Osman, an alumnus and Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office and Second Minister for Education and Foreign Affairs, summed it up succinctly. “In today's world where issues are becoming increasingly complex and require a multi-disciplinary approach to solve, the humanities and social sciences continue to play an important role…I am confident that FASS will continue to scale new heights and nurture tomorrow’s citizens – people who are creative, collaborative and compassionate.”

For four decades, more than one million Jews left the USSR despite the Soviet Union’s complex bureaucracy and opposition to emigration. Doctoral candidate Sasha Zborovsky explores the intricate dynamics.

The initiative expands Penn’s long-standing commitment to need-based financial aid, guaranteeing no-loan financial aid packages to eligible students and families since 2008.

Deeply Rooted is a community partnership that plants trees, greens vacant lots, and funds grassroots programs. The goal: health justice in action.

The Quaker Girls Dance Team partners with the Netter Center for Community Partnerships to mentor West Philadelphia dance and cheer teams.

The Responsible Computing for Just Futures Initiative, an initiative of the Responsible Computing Challenge at Penn Carey Law, has ambitious plans for the mindset with which the next generation of Penn students will engage careers at the intersection of law and technology.

With the bat population on asharp declinesince 2008, the Program collaborated withPenn SustainabilityandPenn Facilities and Real Estate Services to develop bat boxes designed to mimic tree habitat and support the daily needs and overall health of bats.

The seventh Penn in Latin America and the Caribbeanconference centered on the theme of “Public and Community Engaged Scholarship in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Its Diaspora.”

Penn’s fall semester officially began in August, as many students returned to campus. While staff, faculty, and postdocs are largely in West Philadelphia year-round, the fall marks a reset and starting point for many. The late summer and mild fall weather brings the natural beauty of campus to life.

The new Penn Plant Adaptability and Resilience Center brought together faculty speakers from five schools for its Climate Solutions for the Living World symposium.

The Council consists of five faculty members collaborating to enhance visibility and impact of AI research across Penn.

The MIT Press has released a comprehensive report that addresses how open access policies shape research and what is needed to maximize their positive impact on the research ecosystem.

The report, entitled “Access to Science and Scholarship 2024: Building an Evidence Base to Support the Future of Open Research Policy,” is the outcome of a National Science Foundation-funded workshop held at the Washington headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sept. 20.

While open access aims to democratize knowledge, its implementation has been a factor in the consolidation of the academic publishing industry, an explosion in published articles with inconsistent review and quality control, and new costs that may be hard for researchers and universities to bear, with less-affluent schools and regions facing the greatest risk. The workshop examined how open access and other open science policies may affect research and researchers in the future, how to measure their impact, and how to address emerging challenges.

The event brought together leading experts to discuss critical issues in open scientific and scholarly publishing. These issues include:

• the impact of open access policies on the research ecosystem;
• the enduring role of peer review in ensuring research quality;
• the challenges and opportunities of data sharing and curation; and
• the evolving landscape of scholarly communications infrastructure.

The report identifies key research questions in order to advance open science and scholarship. These include:

• How can we better model and anticipate the consequences of government policies on public access to science and scholarship?
• How can research funders support experimentation with new and more equitable business models for scientific publishing? and
• If the dissemination of scholarship is decoupled from peer review and evaluation, who is best suited to perform that evaluation, and how should that process be managed and funded?

“This workshop report is a crucial step in building a data-driven roadmap for the future of open science publishing and policy,” says Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor and professor of biology emeritus at MIT, and faculty lead of the working group behind the workshop and the report. “By identifying key research questions around infrastructure, training, technology, and business models, we aim to ensure that open science practices are sustainable and that they contribute to the highest quality research.”

The full report is available for download, along with video recordings of the workshop.

The MIT Press is a leading academic publisher committed to advancing knowledge and innovation. It publishes significant books and journals across a wide range of disciplines spanning science, technology, design, humanities, and social science.

The MIT Press has released a comprehensive report that addresses how open access policies shape research and what is needed to maximize their positive impact on the research ecosystem.

The report, entitled “Access to Science and Scholarship 2024: Building an Evidence Base to Support the Future of Open Research Policy,” is the outcome of a National Science Foundation-funded workshop held at the Washington headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science on Sept. 20.

While open access aims to democratize knowledge, its implementation has been a factor in the consolidation of the academic publishing industry, an explosion in published articles with inconsistent review and quality control, and new costs that may be hard for researchers and universities to bear, with less-affluent schools and regions facing the greatest risk. The workshop examined how open access and other open science policies may affect research and researchers in the future, how to measure their impact, and how to address emerging challenges.

The event brought together leading experts to discuss critical issues in open scientific and scholarly publishing. These issues include:

• the impact of open access policies on the research ecosystem;
• the enduring role of peer review in ensuring research quality;
• the challenges and opportunities of data sharing and curation; and
• the evolving landscape of scholarly communications infrastructure.

The report identifies key research questions in order to advance open science and scholarship. These include:

• How can we better model and anticipate the consequences of government policies on public access to science and scholarship?
• How can research funders support experimentation with new and more equitable business models for scientific publishing? and
• If the dissemination of scholarship is decoupled from peer review and evaluation, who is best suited to perform that evaluation, and how should that process be managed and funded?

“This workshop report is a crucial step in building a data-driven roadmap for the future of open science publishing and policy,” says Phillip Sharp, Institute Professor and professor of biology emeritus at MIT, and faculty lead of the working group behind the workshop and the report. “By identifying key research questions around infrastructure, training, technology, and business models, we aim to ensure that open science practices are sustainable and that they contribute to the highest quality research.”

The full report is available for download, along with video recordings of the workshop.

The MIT Press is a leading academic publisher committed to advancing knowledge and innovation. It publishes significant books and journals across a wide range of disciplines spanning science, technology, design, humanities, and social science.

Captivated as a child by video games and puzzles, Marzyeh Ghassemi was also fascinated at an early age in health. Luckily, she found a path where she could combine the two interests. 

“Although I had considered a career in health care, the pull of computer science and engineering was stronger,” says Ghassemi, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and principal investigator at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). “When I found that computer science broadly, and AI/ML specifically, could be applied to health care, it was a convergence of interests.”

Today, Ghassemi and her Healthy ML research group at LIDS work on the deep study of how machine learning (ML) can be made more robust, and be subsequently applied to improve safety and equity in health.

Growing up in Texas and New Mexico in an engineering-oriented Iranian-American family, Ghassemi had role models to follow into a STEM career. While she loved puzzle-based video games — “Solving puzzles to unlock other levels or progress further was a very attractive challenge” — her mother also engaged her in more advanced math early on, enticing her toward seeing math as more than arithmetic.

“Adding or multiplying are basic skills emphasized for good reason, but the focus can obscure the idea that much of higher-level math and science are more about logic and puzzles,” Ghassemi says. “Because of my mom’s encouragement, I knew there were fun things ahead.”

Ghassemi says that in addition to her mother, many others supported her intellectual development. As she earned her undergraduate degree at New Mexico State University, the director of the Honors College and a former Marshall Scholar — Jason Ackelson, now a senior advisor to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security — helped her to apply for a Marshall Scholarship that took her to Oxford University, where she earned a master’s degree in 2011 and first became interested in the new and rapidly evolving field of machine learning. During her PhD work at MIT, Ghassemi says she received support “from professors and peers alike,” adding, “That environment of openness and acceptance is something I try to replicate for my students.”

While working on her PhD, Ghassemi also encountered her first clue that biases in health data can hide in machine learning models.

She had trained models to predict outcomes using health data, “and the mindset at the time was to use all available data. In neural networks for images, we had seen that the right features would be learned for good performance, eliminating the need to hand-engineer specific features.”

During a meeting with Leo Celi, principal research scientist at the MIT Laboratory for Computational Physiology and IMES and a member of Ghassemi’s thesis committee, Celi asked if Ghassemi had checked how well the models performed on patients of different genders, insurance types, and self-reported races.

Ghassemi did check, and there were gaps. “We now have almost a decade of work showing that these model gaps are hard to address — they stem from existing biases in health data and default technical practices. Unless you think carefully about them, models will naively reproduce and extend biases,” she says.

Ghassemi has been exploring such issues ever since.

Her favorite breakthrough in the work she has done came about in several parts. First, she and her research group showed that learning models could recognize a patient’s race from medical images like chest X-rays, which radiologists are unable to do. The group then found that models optimized to perform well “on average” did not perform as well for women and minorities. This past summer, her group combined these findings to show that the more a model learned to predict a patient’s race or gender from a medical image, the worse its performance gap would be for subgroups in those demographics. Ghassemi and her team found that the problem could be mitigated if a model was trained to account for demographic differences, instead of being focused on overall average performance — but this process has to be performed at every site where a model is deployed.

“We are emphasizing that models trained to optimize performance (balancing overall performance with lowest fairness gap) in one hospital setting are not optimal in other settings. This has an important impact on how models are developed for human use,” Ghassemi says. “One hospital might have the resources to train a model, and then be able to demonstrate that it performs well, possibly even with specific fairness constraints. However, our research shows that these performance guarantees do not hold in new settings. A model that is well-balanced in one site may not function effectively in a different environment. This impacts the utility of models in practice, and it’s essential that we work to address this issue for those who develop and deploy models.”

Ghassemi’s work is informed by her identity.

“I am a visibly Muslim woman and a mother — both have helped to shape how I see the world, which informs my research interests,” she says. “I work on the robustness of machine learning models, and how a lack of robustness can combine with existing biases. That interest is not a coincidence.”

Regarding her thought process, Ghassemi says inspiration often strikes when she is outdoors — bike-riding in New Mexico as an undergraduate, rowing at Oxford, running as a PhD student at MIT, and these days walking by the Cambridge Esplanade. She also says she has found it helpful when approaching a complicated problem to think about the parts of the larger problem and try to understand how her assumptions about each part might be incorrect.

“In my experience, the most limiting factor for new solutions is what you think you know,” she says. “Sometimes it’s hard to get past your own (partial) knowledge about something until you dig really deeply into a model, system, etc., and realize that you didn’t understand a subpart correctly or fully.”

As passionate as Ghassemi is about her work, she intentionally keeps track of life’s bigger picture.

“When you love your research, it can be hard to stop that from becoming your identity — it’s something that I think a lot of academics have to be aware of,” she says. “I try to make sure that I have interests (and knowledge) beyond my own technical expertise.

“One of the best ways to help prioritize a balance is with good people. If you have family, friends, or colleagues who encourage you to be a full person, hold on to them!”

Having won many awards and much recognition for the work that encompasses two early passions — computer science and health — Ghassemi professes a faith in seeing life as a journey.

“There’s a quote by the Persian poet Rumi that is translated as, ‘You are what you are looking for,’” she says. “At every stage of your life, you have to reinvest in finding who you are, and nudging that towards who you want to be.”

Filter feeders are everywhere in the animal world, from tiny crustaceans and certain types of coral and krill, to various molluscs, barnacles, and even massive basking sharks and baleen whales. Now, MIT engineers have found that one filter feeder has evolved to sift food in ways that could improve the design of industrial water filters.

In a paper appearing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team characterizes the filter-feeding mechanism of the mobula ray — a family of aquatic rays that includes two manta species and seven devil rays. Mobula rays feed by swimming open-mouthed through plankton-rich regions of the ocean and filtering plankton particles into their gullet as water streams into their mouths and out through their gills.

The floor of the mobula ray’s mouth is lined on either side with parallel, comb-like structures, called plates, that siphon water into the ray’s gills. The MIT team has shown that the dimensions of these plates may allow for incoming plankton to bounce all the way across the plates and further into the ray’s cavity, rather than out through the gills. What’s more, the ray’s gills absorb oxygen from the outflowing water, helping the ray to simultaneously breathe while feeding.

“We show that the mobula ray has evolved the geometry of these plates to be the perfect size to balance feeding and breathing,” says study author Anette “Peko” Hosoi, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

The engineers fabricated a simple water filter modeled after the mobula ray’s plankton-filtering features. They studied how water flowed through the filter when it was fitted with 3D-printed plate-like structures. The team took the results of these experiments and drew up a blueprint, which they say designers can use to optimize industrial cross-flow filters, which are broadly similar in configuration to that of the mobula ray.

“We want to expand the design space of traditional cross-flow filtration with new knowledge from the manta ray,” says lead author and MIT postdoc Xinyu Mao PhD ’24. “People can choose a parameter regime of the mobula ray so they could potentially improve overall filter performance.”

Hosoi and Mao co-authored the new study with Irmgard Bischofberger, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

A better trade-off

The new study grew out of the group’s focus on filtration during the height of the Covid pandemic, when the researchers were designing face masks to filter out the virus. Since then, Mao has shifted focus to study filtration in animals and how certain filter-feeding mechanisms might improve filters used in industry, such as in water treatment plants.

Mao observed that any industrial filter must strike a balance between permeability (how easily fluid can flow through a filter), and selectivity (how successful a filter is at keeping out particles of a target size). For instance, a membrane that is studded with large holes might be highly permeable, meaning a lot of water can be pumped through using very little energy. However, the membrane’s large holes would let many particles through, making it very low in selectivity. Likewise, a membrane with much smaller pores would be more selective yet also require more energy to pump the water through the smaller openings.

“We asked ourselves, how do we do better with this tradeoff between permeability and selectivity?” Hosoi says.

As Mao looked into filter-feeding animals, he found that the mobula ray has struck an ideal balance between permeability and selectivity: The ray is highly permeable, in that it can let water into its mouth and out through its gills quickly enough to capture oxygen to breathe. At the same time, it is highly selective, filtering and feeding on plankton rather than letting the particles stream out through the gills.

The researchers realized that the ray’s filtering features are broadly similar to that of industrial cross-flow filters. These filters are designed such that fluid flows across a permeable membrane that lets through most of the fluid, while any polluting particles continue flowing across the membrane and eventually out into a reservoir of waste.

The team wondered whether the mobula ray might inspire design improvements to industrial cross-flow filters. For that, they took a deeper dive into the dynamics of mobula ray filtration.

A vortex key

As part of their new study, the team fabricated a simple filter inspired by the mobula ray. The filter’s design is what engineers refer to as a “leaky channel” — effectively, a pipe with holes along its sides. In this case, the team’s “channel” consists of two flat, transparent acrylic plates that are glued together at the edges, with a slight opening between the plates through which fluid can be pumped. At one end of the channel, the researchers inserted 3D-printed structures resembling the grooved plates that run along the floor of the mobula ray’s mouth.

The team then pumped water through the channel at various rates, along with colored dye to visualize the flow. They took images across the channel and observed an interesting transition: At slow pumping rates, the flow was “very peaceful,” and fluid easily slipped through the grooves in the printed plates and out into a reservoir. When the researchers increased the pumping rate, the faster-flowing fluid did not slip through, but appeared to swirl at the mouth of each groove, creating a vortex, similar to a small knot of hair between the tips of a comb’s teeth.

“This vortex is not blocking water, but it is blocking particles,” Hosoi explains. “Whereas in a slower flow, particles go through the filter with the water, at higher flow rates, particles try to get through the filter but are blocked by this vortex and are shot down the channel instead. The vortex is helpful because it prevents particles from flowing out.”

The team surmised that vortices are the key to mobula rays’ filter-feeding ability. The ray is able to swim at just the right speed that water, streaming into its mouth, can form vortices between the grooved plates. These vortices effectively block any plankton particles — even those that are smaller than the space between plates. The particles then bounce across the plates and head further into the ray’s cavity, while the rest of the water can still flow between the plates and out through the gills.

The researchers used the results of their experiments, along with dimensions of the filtering features of mobula rays, to develop a blueprint for cross-flow filtration.

“We have provided practical guidance on how to actually filter as the mobula ray does,” Mao offers.

“You want to design a filter such that you’re in the regime where you generate vortices,” Hosoi says. “Our guidelines tell you: If you want your plant to pump at a certain rate, then your filter has to have a particular pore diameter and spacing to generate vortices that will filter out particles of this size. The mobula ray is giving us a really nice rule of thumb for rational design.”

This work was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the Harvey P. Greenspan Fellowship Fund. 

James Wesley “Jim” Harris PhD ’67, professor emeritus of Spanish and linguistics, passed away on Nov. 10. He was 92.

Harris attended the University of Georgia, the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He later earned a master’s degree in linguistics from Louisiana State University and a PhD in linguistics from MIT.

Harris joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 1967, where he remained until his retirement in 1996. During his tenure, he served as head of what was then called the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures.

“I met Jim when I came to MIT in 1977 as department head of the neonatal Department of Linguistics and Philosophy,” says Samuel Jay Keyser, MIT professor emeritus of linguistics. “Throughout his career in the department, he never relinquished his connection to the unit that first employed him at MIT.”

In his early days at MIT, when French, German, and Russian dominated as elite “languages of science and world literature,” Harris championed, over some opposition, the introduction of Spanish language and literature courses.

He later oversaw the inclusion of Japanese and Chinese courses as language offerings at MIT. He promoted undergraduate courses in linguistics, leading to a full undergraduate degree program and later broadening the focus of the prestigious PhD program. 

His research in linguistics centered on theoretical phonology and morphology. His books, presentations at professional meetings, and articles in peer-reviewed journals were among the most discussed — in both positive and negative assessments, as he noted — by prominent scholars in the field. The ability to teach complex technical material comfortably in Spanish, plus the status of an MIT professorship, resulted in invitations to teach at universities across Spain and Latin America. He was also highly valued as a member of the editorial boards of several professional journals.

“I remember Jim most of all for being the consummate scholar,” Keyser says. “His articles were models of argumentation. They were assembled with all the precision of an Inca wall and all the beauty of a Faberge Egg. You couldn’t slip a credit card through any of its arguments, they were so superbly sculpted.”

Having achieved national recognition as an English-Spanish bilingual teacher and teacher-trainer, Harris was engaged as a writer at the Modern Language Materials Development Center in New York. Later, he co-authored, with Guillermo Segreda, a series of popular college-level Spanish textbooks.

“Harris belonged to Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle’s first generation of graduate students,” says MIT linguist Michael John Kenstowicz. “Together they overturned the distributionalist model of the structuralists in favor of ordered generative rules.”

After retiring from MIT, he remained internationally recognized as a highly influential figure in the area of Romance linguistics, and “el decano” (“the dean”) of Spanish phonology.

Harris was married to Florence Warshawsky Harris for 50 years until her passing in 2020. In 2011, in celebration of the program’s 50th anniversary, they partnered to prepare and publish a detailed history of the linguistics program’s origins. Warshawsky Harris, formerly an MIT graduate student, also edited Chomsky and Halle’s influential "The Sound Pattern on English" and numerous other important linguistic texts.

Harris’ scholarship was widely recognized in a diverse group of scholarly articles and textbooks he authored, co-authored, edited, and published.

Harris was born outside Atlanta, Georgia, in 1932. During the Korean War, he performed his military service as the clarinet and saxophone instructor at the U.S. Naval School of Music in Washington. After his discharge, he directed the band at the Charlotte Hall School in Maryland, where he also taught Spanish, French, and Latin.

Harris is survived by ​​his daughter, Lynn Corinne Harris, his son-in-law, Rabbi David Adelson, and his grandchildren, Bee Adelson and Sam Harris.

In the latest step to implement commitments made in MIT’s Fast Forward climate action plan, staff from the Department of Facilities; Office of Sustainability; and Environment, Health and Safety Office are advancing new solar panel installations this fall and winter on four major campus buildings: The Stratton Student Center (W20), the Dewey Library building (E53), and two newer buildings, New Vassar (W46) and the Theater Arts building (W97).

These four new installations, in addition to existing rooftop solar installations on campus, are “just one part of our broader strategy to reduce MIT’s carbon footprint and transition to clean energy,” says Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship.

The installations will not only meet but exceed the target set for total solar energy production on campus in the Fast Forward climate action plan that was issued in 2021. With an initial target of 500 kilowatts of installed solar capacity on campus, the new installations, along with those already in place, will bring the total output to roughly 650 kW, exceeding the goal. The solar installations are an important facet of MIT’s approach to eliminating all direct campus emissions by 2050.

The process of advancing to the stage of placing solar panels on campus rooftops is much more complex than just getting them installed on an ordinary house. The process began with a detailed assessment of the potential for reducing the campus greenhouse gas footprint. A first cut eliminated rooftops that were too shaded by trees or other buildings. Then, the schedule for regular replacement of roofs had to be taken into account — it’s better to put new solar panels on top of a roof that will not need replacement in a few years. Other roofs, especially lab buildings, simply had too much existing equipment on them to allow a large area of space for solar panels.

Randa Ghattas, senior sustainability project manager, and Taya Dixon, assistant director for capital budgets and contracts within the Department of Facilities, spearheaded the project. Their initial assessment showed that there were many buildings identified with significant solar potential, and it took the impetus of the Fast Forward plan to kick things into action. 

Even after winnowing down the list of campus buildings based on shading and the life cycle of roof replacements, there were still many other factors to consider. Some buildings that had ample roof space were of older construction that couldn’t bear the loads of a full solar installation without significant reconstruction. “That actually has proved trickier than we thought,” Ghattas says. For example, one building that seemed a good candidate, and already had some solar panels on it, proved unable to sustain the greater weight and wind loads of a full solar installation. Structural capacity, she says, turned out to be “probably the most important” factor in this case.

The roofs on the Student Center and on the Dewey Library building were replaced in the last few years with the intention of the later addition of solar panels. And the two newer buildings were designed from the beginning with solar in mind, even though the solar panels were not part of the initial construction. “The designs were built into them to accommodate solar,” Dixon says, “so those were easy options for us because we knew the buildings were solar-ready and could support solar being integrated into their systems, both the electrical system and the structural system of the roof.”

But there were also other considerations. The Student Center is considered a historically significant building, so the installation had to be designed so that it was invisible from street level, even including a safety railing that had to be built around the solar array. But that was not a problem. “It was fine for this building,” Ghattas says, because it turned out that the geometry of the building and the roofs hid the safety railing from view below.

Each installation will connect directly to the building’s electrical system, and thus into the campus grid. The power they produce will be used in the buildings they are on, though none will be sufficient to fully power its building. Overall, the new installations, in addition to the existing ones on the MIT Sloan School of Management building (E62) and the Alumni Pool (57) and the planned array on the new Graduate Junction dorm (W87-W88), will be enough to power 5 to 10 percent of the buildings’ electric needs, and offset about 190 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, Ghattas says. This is equivalent to the electricity use of 35 homes annually.

Each building installation is expected to take just a couple of weeks. “We’re hopeful that we’re going to have everything installed and operational by the end of this calendar year,” she says.

Other buildings could be added in coming years, as their roof replacement cycles come around. With the lessons learned along the way in getting to this point, Ghattas says, “now that we have a system in place, hopefully it’s going to be much easier in the future.”

Higgins adds that “in parallel with the solar projects, we’re working on expanding electric vehicle charging stations and the electric vehicle fleet and reducing energy consumption in campus buildings.”

Besides the on-campus improvements, he says, “MIT is focused on both the local and the global.” In addition to solar installations on campus buildings, which can only mitigate a small portion of campus emissions, “large-scale aggregation partnerships are key to moving the actual market landscape for adding cleaner energy generation to power grids,” which must ultimately lead to zero emissions, he says. “We are spurring the development of new utility-grade renewable energy facilities in regions with high carbon-intensive electrical grids. These projects have an immediate and significant impact in the urgently needed decarbonization of regional power grids.”

MIT is also making more advances to accelerate renewable energy generation and electricity grid decarbonization at the local and state level. The Institute has recently concluded an agreement through the Solar Massachusetts Renewable Target program that supports the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’ state solar power development goals by enabling the construction of a new 5-megawatt solar energy facility on Cape Cod. The new solar energy system is integral to supporting a new net-zero emissions development that includes affordable housing, while also providing additional resiliency to the local grid.

Higgins says that other technologies, strategies, and practices are being evaluated for heating, cooling, and power for the campus, “with zero carbon emissions by 2050, utilizing cleaner energy sources.” He adds that these campus initiatives “are part of MIT’s larger Climate Project, aiming to drive progress both on campus and beyond, advancing broader partnerships, new market models, and informing approaches to climate policy.” 

Visualizing the potential impacts of a hurricane on people’s homes before it hits can help residents prepare and decide whether to evacuate.

MIT scientists have developed a method that generates satellite imagery from the future to depict how a region would look after a potential flooding event. The method combines a generative artificial intelligence model with a physics-based flood model to create realistic, birds-eye-view images of a region, showing where flooding is likely to occur given the strength of an oncoming storm.

As a test case, the team applied the method to Houston and generated satellite images depicting what certain locations around the city would look like after a storm comparable to Hurricane Harvey, which hit the region in 2017. The team compared these generated images with actual satellite images taken of the same regions after Harvey hit. They also compared AI-generated images that did not include a physics-based flood model.

The team’s physics-reinforced method generated satellite images of future flooding that were more realistic and accurate. The AI-only method, in contrast, generated images of flooding in places where flooding is not physically possible.

The team’s method is a proof-of-concept, meant to demonstrate a case in which generative AI models can generate realistic, trustworthy content when paired with a physics-based model. In order to apply the method to other regions to depict flooding from future storms, it will need to be trained on many more satellite images to learn how flooding would look in other regions.

“The idea is: One day, we could use this before a hurricane, where it provides an additional visualization layer for the public,” says Björn Lütjens, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, who led the research while he was a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “One of the biggest challenges is encouraging people to evacuate when they are at risk. Maybe this could be another visualization to help increase that readiness.”

To illustrate the potential of the new method, which they have dubbed the “Earth Intelligence Engine,” the team has made it available as an online resource for others to try.

The researchers report their results today in the journal IEEE Transactions on Geoscience and Remote Sensing. The study’s MIT co-authors include Brandon Leshchinskiy; Aruna Sankaranarayanan; and Dava Newman, professor of AeroAstro and director of the MIT Media Lab; along with collaborators from multiple institutions.

Generative adversarial images

The new study is an extension of the team’s efforts to apply generative AI tools to visualize future climate scenarios.

“Providing a hyper-local perspective of climate seems to be the most effective way to communicate our scientific results,” says Newman, the study’s senior author. “People relate to their own zip code, their local environment where their family and friends live. Providing local climate simulations becomes intuitive, personal, and relatable.”

For this study, the authors use a conditional generative adversarial network, or GAN, a type of machine learning method that can generate realistic images using two competing, or “adversarial,” neural networks. The first “generator” network is trained on pairs of real data, such as satellite images before and after a hurricane. The second “discriminator” network is then trained to distinguish between the real satellite imagery and the one synthesized by the first network.

Each network automatically improves its performance based on feedback from the other network. The idea, then, is that such an adversarial push and pull should ultimately produce synthetic images that are indistinguishable from the real thing. Nevertheless, GANs can still produce “hallucinations,” or factually incorrect features in an otherwise realistic image that shouldn’t be there.

“Hallucinations can mislead viewers,” says Lütjens, who began to wonder whether such hallucinations could be avoided, such that generative AI tools can be trusted to help inform people, particularly in risk-sensitive scenarios. “We were thinking: How can we use these generative AI models in a climate-impact setting, where having trusted data sources is so important?”

Flood hallucinations

In their new work, the researchers considered a risk-sensitive scenario in which generative AI is tasked with creating satellite images of future flooding that could be trustworthy enough to inform decisions of how to prepare and potentially evacuate people out of harm’s way.

Typically, policymakers can get an idea of where flooding might occur based on visualizations in the form of color-coded maps. These maps are the final product of a pipeline of physical models that usually begins with a hurricane track model, which then feeds into a wind model that simulates the pattern and strength of winds over a local region. This is combined with a flood or storm surge model that forecasts how wind might push any nearby body of water onto land. A hydraulic model then maps out where flooding will occur based on the local flood infrastructure and generates a visual, color-coded map of flood elevations over a particular region.

“The question is: Can visualizations of satellite imagery add another level to this, that is a bit more tangible and emotionally engaging than a color-coded map of reds, yellows, and blues, while still being trustworthy?” Lütjens says.

The team first tested how generative AI alone would produce satellite images of future flooding. They trained a GAN on actual satellite images taken by satellites as they passed over Houston before and after Hurricane Harvey. When they tasked the generator to produce new flood images of the same regions, they found that the images resembled typical satellite imagery, but a closer look revealed hallucinations in some images, in the form of floods where flooding should not be possible (for instance, in locations at higher elevation).

To reduce hallucinations and increase the trustworthiness of the AI-generated images, the team paired the GAN with a physics-based flood model that incorporates real, physical parameters and phenomena, such as an approaching hurricane’s trajectory, storm surge, and flood patterns. With this physics-reinforced method, the team generated satellite images around Houston that depict the same flood extent, pixel by pixel, as forecasted by the flood model.

“We show a tangible way to combine machine learning with physics for a use case that’s risk-sensitive, which requires us to analyze the complexity of Earth’s systems and project future actions and possible scenarios to keep people out of harm’s way,” Newman says. “We can’t wait to get our generative AI tools into the hands of decision-makers at the local community level, which could make a significant difference and perhaps save lives.”

The research was supported, in part, by the MIT Portugal Program, the DAF-MIT Artificial Intelligence Accelerator, NASA, and Google Cloud.

PSA International (PSA) and National University of Singapore (NUS) announced today the launch of the PSA-NUS Supply Chain Living Lab. Recognising the growing need for integrated solutions that extend beyond container handling within ports, PSA has in recent years, expanded its role as a leading global port operator to also encompass complementary services in the broader supply chain sphere. In line with its overall strategy, PSA will be supporting the initiative with funds totalling up to S$10 million.

The PSA-NUS Supply Chain Living Lab will strengthen collaboration between industry and academic expertise to address critical supply chain challenges. The Lab will provide a sandbox to foster the development of community-centric solutions for supply chain optimisation together with industry stakeholders, with a focus on enhancing agility, resilience and sustainability for supply chain operations both regionally and globally.

Mr Ong Kim Pong, Group CEO of PSA International, said, "As we navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of global trade, it has become essential for PSA Group to continually adapt and refine our business strategy. We will continue to look for new areas of expansion whilst enhancing our presence in key locations, and connecting these strategic nodes to form a cohesive and integrated network across the globe. This collaboration with NUS also marks a significant step in our journey towards strengthening PSA’s position as a leading global port operator and supply chain services provider, capable of delivering supply chain efficiency and resilience across the world.”

Professor Tan Eng Chye, NUS President, said, “The establishment of the PSA-NUS Supply Chain Living Lab marks a significant milestone in our collaborative efforts to advance supply chain innovation. This initiative exemplifies the synergy between academia and industry, leveraging our combined strengths to address complex challenges such as optimising logistical efficiency, enhancing data-driven decision-making, and integrating sustainable practices across supply chain operations. By fostering a dynamic ecosystem for research and development, we aim to drive transformative solutions that enhance the resilience and efficiency of supply chain operations, ultimately benefitting communities and economies worldwide.”

The launch of the Supply Chain Living Lab follows the recent groundbreaking of the upcoming PSA Supply Chain Hub (PSCH), which is an integral part of PSA’s strategic expansion of Singapore’s Tuas Port Ecosystem. The state-of-the-art PSCH facility is scheduled to be ready by 2027 and will seamlessly integrate with Singapore’s extensive supply chain ecosystem, offering unparalleled connectivity and supply chain synergies.

Evolution Day is observed on 24 November each year, marking the anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s groundbreaking work, On the Origin of Species, in 1859. This day commemorates not just a book but a seismic shift in our understanding of life — a theory that connects all living organisms in a vast, intricate web of shared ancestry.

This year, to commemorate Evolution Day, we shine the spotlight on researchers from the Department of Biological Sciences at the NUS Faculty of Science who are building on Darwin’s legacy, exploring the mechanisms of evolution and its impact on biodiversity in the region and beyond. Their work underscores the enduring relevance of evolutionary theory in addressing modern challenges, from conservation to climate change.

Learning from insects: Understanding biodiversity through reproductive evolution research

Evolution is often synonymous with the phrase ‘survival of the fittest,’ but in evolutionary biology, ‘fitness’ refers to an organism’s ability to survive, reproduce and pass on its genes to the next generation. Reproductive evolution, which focuses on how mating behaviours and reproductive strategies evolve across species, plays a crucial role in shaping population dynamics, speciation, and biodiversity.

Assistant Professor Nalini Puniamoorthy from the Department of Biological Sciences at the NUS Faculty of Science, together with her team at the Reproductive Evolution Lab (ReproLab), are exploring how sexual selection – a mechanism of natural selection – affects reproductive traits and influences population differentiation and speciation, the process by which new species emerge.

“Since reproductive processes directly influence a species’ adaptation and resilience to environmental variability, studying reproductive evolution can support biodiversity conservation by shedding light on how species evolve and adapt to changes to their habitats, especially in the face of climate change and habitat loss,” said Asst Prof Nalini.

The ReproLab studies micro- and macro-evolutionary processes of various insects: From ecosystem service providers like dung beetles, disease vectors like mosquitoes, and even to food waste recyclers like black soldier flies.

For instance, a recent study published by Asst Prof Nalini’s team in Ecology and Evolution, investigated how resource constraints affect dung beetle fitness in secondary rainforests. Dung beetles are important for nutrient recycling and forest health but are often sensitive to habitat changes and resource variations. Asst. Prof. Nalini’s team found that parental provisioning is crucial and that there was a trade-off between early offspring fitness and resource quality. This discovery documents genotype by environment interactions that are relevant for understanding dung beetle ecology in the face of climatic and environmental changes.

Seeking sustainable solutions to challenges

The ReproLab also investigates the interactions between insects and their bacterial symbionts, like gut microbes in black soldier flies that aid in breaking down food waste as well as the reproductive bacteria Wolbachia in mosquitoes. Their study on Aedes albopictus documented that the dispersal of this secondary dengue vector was not limited to green spaces, and that urban and forest populations of Ae. albopictus are naturally infected with more than one strain of Wolbachia. “Untangling these interactions has implications for vector management and combating disease transmission in a city with heterogenous landscapes like Singapore,” explained Asst Prof Nalini.

Shaping biodiversity of tropical ecosystems: The role of fruit-eating animals

In tropical ecosystems, plant-frugivore interactions — where animals help disperse seeds of fruiting plants — play a critical role in maintaining biodiversity. Approximately 90 per cent of woody plant species in tropical forests rely on animals to disperse their seeds. Assistant Professor Lim Jun Ying and his team from the NUS Department of Biological Sciences are investigating how these interactions shape plant biodiversity and ecosystem dynamics. This is especially pertinent as human activities such as habitat loss and hunting are threatening these crucial relationships.

“The loss of fruit-eating animals or frugivores can disrupt plant populations, preventing them from migrating to new areas in response to climate change. Understanding how plant-frugivore interactions evolve is important for quantifying the long-term effects of human activities on tropical ecosystems,” said Asst Prof Lim.

In a recent study published in Global Ecology and Conservation, Asst Prof Lim and his team studied large-bodied birds known as hornbills, which are essential for dispersing large-fruited plants. Many of these birds are under threat from habitat loss and hunting. As the gapes – mouth-openings – of these hornbills are larger than most birds, plants with large fruits and seeds depend on them for seed dispersal.

Asst Prof Lim noted, “Evolution in fruits is shaped by a complex web of interactions with various animals and other factors, suggesting that co-evolution between plants and frugivores must be understood at a community level. This broader perspective is essential for grasping the full complexity of ecological evolution in tropical forests and helping to conserve their biodiversity.”

Understanding fungi: From a billion-year evolutionary journey to addressing environmental challenges

Fungi represent one of the most diverse and ancient groups of organisms on Earth, with an evolutionary history spanning over a billion years. Despite their widespread presence and ecological importance, our understanding of fungal diversity is still limited.

“Less than 10 per cent of the estimated fungal diversity has been documented. The challenge lies in the fact that many fungi remain microscopic throughout their life stages, and a vast majority cannot be cultured in laboratories, hindering direct observation and experimentation,” said Assistant Professor Chang Ying from the NUS Department of Biological Sciences.

At Asst Prof Chang’s lab, her team is dedicated to finding the hidden diversity of fungi, with a focus on marine and coastal environments. Their research tackles two key aspects of fungal ecology: reconstructing the evolutionary history of fungal adaptations using genomic tools, and exploring fungal diversity in natural habitats through metagenomics. By studying the genetic, structural, and ecological traits of existing fungal species, Asst Prof Chang and her team are able to infer a fungi’s common ancestor and understand the traits that allowed ancestral fungi to diversify and adapt to a range of ecological and environmental conditions.

An ongoing project by Asst Prof Chang and her team, in collaboration with the One Thousand Fungal Genomes (1KFG) consortium, investigates the evolution of digestive enzymes across the fungal kingdom. This study could help to predict the ecological capabilities of unknown or newly discovered fungi, as well as entire fungal communities.

“Insights from this research also has practical applications, particularly in the field of bioremediation, where fungi are increasingly valued for their potential to break down environmental pollutants,” added Asst Prof Chang.

By analysing the distribution of hydrocarbon-degrading enzymes across a large set of fungal genomes and mapping their evolutionary trajectories, NUS researchers could identify fungal groups that are especially suited to utilising petroleum hydrocarbons as nutrient sources, making them strong candidates for bioremediation strategies.

The state-of-the-art indoor track facility is the first of its kind in Philadelphia.

MIT is co-leading an effort to enable the development of two new large-scale renewable energy projects in regions with carbon-intensive electrical grids: Big Elm Solar in Bell County, Texas, came online this year, and the Bowman Wind Project in Bowman County, North Dakota, is expected to be operational in 2026. Together, they will add a combined 408 megawatts (MW) of new renewable energy capacity to the power grid. This work is a critical part of MIT’s strategy to achieve its goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2026.

The Consortium for Climate Solutions, which includes MIT and 10 other Massachusetts organizations, seeks to eliminate close to 1 million metric tons of greenhouse gases each year — more than five times the annual direct emissions from MIT’s campus — by committing to purchase an estimated 1.3-million-megawatt hours of new solar and wind electricity generation annually.

“MIT has mobilized on multiple fronts to expedite solutions to climate change,” says Glen Shor, executive vice president and treasurer. “Catalyzing these large-scale renewable projects is an important part of our comprehensive efforts to reduce carbon emissions from generating energy. We are pleased to work in partnership with other local enterprises and organizations to amplify the impact we could achieve individually.”

The two new projects complement MIT’s existing 25-year power purchase agreement established with Summit Farms in 2016, which enabled the construction of a roughly 650-acre, 60 MW solar farm on farmland in North Carolina, leading to the early retirement of a coal-fired plant nearby. Its success has inspired other institutions to implement similar aggregation models.

A collective approach to enable global impact

MIT, Harvard University, and Mass General Brigham formed the consortium in 2020 to provide a structure to accelerate global emissions reductions through the development of large-scale renewable energy projects — accelerating and expanding the impact of each institution’s greenhouse gas reduction initiatives. As the project’s anchors, they collectively procured the largest volume of energy through the aggregation.  

The consortium engaged with PowerOptions, a nonprofit energy-buying consortium, which offered its members the opportunity to participate in the projects. The City of Cambridge, Beth Israel Lahey, Boston Children’s Hospital, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Tufts University, the Mass Convention Center Authority, the Museum of Fine Arts, and GBH later joined the consortium through PowerOptions. 
 
The consortium vetted over 125 potential projects against its rigorous project evaluation criteria. With faculty and MIT stakeholder input on a short list of the highest-ranking projects, it ultimately chose Bowman Wind and Big Elm Solar. Collectively, these two projects will achieve large greenhouse gas emissions reductions in two of the most carbon-intensive electrical grid regions in the United States and create clean energy generation sources to reduce negative health impacts.

“Enabling these projects in regions where the grids are most carbon-intensive allows them to have the greatest impact. We anticipate these projects will prevent two times more emissions per unit of generated electricity than would a similar-scale project in New England,” explains Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship Joe Higgins.

By all consortium institutions making significant 15-to-20-year financial commitments to buy electricity, the developer was able to obtain critical external project financing to build the projects. Owned and operated by Apex Clean Energy, the projects will add new renewable electricity to the grid equivalent to powering 130,000 households annually, displacing over 950,000 metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions each year from highly carbon-intensive power plants in the region. 

Complementary decarbonization work underway 

In addition to investing in offsite renewable energy projects, many consortium members have developed strategies to reduce and eliminate their own direct emissions. At MIT, accomplishing this requires transformative change in how energy is generated, distributed, and used on campus. Efforts underway include the installation of solar panels on campus rooftops that will increase renewable energy generation four-fold by 2026; continuing to transition our heat distribution infrastructure from steam-based to hot water-based; utilizing design and construction that minimizes emissions and increases energy efficiency; employing AI-enabled sensors to optimize temperature set points and reduce energy use in buildings; and converting MIT’s vehicle fleet to all-electric vehicles while adding more electric car charging stations.

The Institute has also upgraded the Central Utilities Plant, which uses advanced co-generation technology to produce power that is up to 20 percent less carbon-intensive than that from the regional power grid. MIT is charting the course toward a next-generation district energy system, with a comprehensive planning initiative to revolutionize its campus energy infrastructure. The effort is exploring leading-edge technology, including industrial-scale heat pumps, geothermal exchange, micro-reactors, bio-based fuels, and green hydrogen derived from renewable sources as solutions to achieve full decarbonization of campus operations by 2050.

“At MIT, we are focused on decarbonizing our own campus as well as the role we can play in solving climate at the largest of scales, including supporting a cleaner grid in line with the call to triple renewables globally by 2030. By enabling these large-scale renewable projects, we can have an immediate and significant impact of reducing emissions through the urgently needed decarbonization of regional power grids,” says Julie Newman, MIT’s director of sustainability.  

The National University of Singapore’s Faculty of Science (NUS Science) concluded a year of celebratory events marking its 95th Anniversary with a Charity Golf event, raising a record of over S$1.2 million for its 95th Anniversary Bursary Fund - the largest amount raised in the history of the NUS Charity Golf series since 2012.

The Bursary Fund will support over 40 bursaries each year, starting from 2026. The bursaries will benefit undergraduates at the Faculty who are facing financial challenges, providing them with the resources they need to focus on their studies, pursue their passions and achieve their academic and professional aspirations.

In partnership with the NUS Alumni Student Advancement Committee, benefactors who contributed S$25,000 or more to the Bursary Fund had the opportunity to sub-name their bursaries under the NUS Science 95^th Anniversary Bursary Fund. Professors rallied former PhD students and members of their research groups in NUS Science to pool donations, resulting in bursaries sub-named after these groups. Former students, colleagues and friends contributed collectively to honour professors, both past and present, while corporate partners and individual benefactors also made independent contributions to this initiative. The Department of Physics, for example, led efforts to gather contributions from colleagues, alumni and friends to sub-name a bursary in honour of Emeritus Professor Bernard Tan Tiong Gie, the longest serving Dean of Science (1985-1997).

Making the announcement at the Faculty’s 95th Anniversary Gala Dinner on 22 November 2024, Dean of NUS Science Professor Sun Yeneng said, “I am deeply grateful for the support and generosity of our community. Your collective commitment will make a lasting impact on the lives of our students, giving them the opportunity to realise their full potential, regardless of their circumstances.”  

95 years of excellence in science education and research

NUS President Professor Tan Eng Chye, who was the Guest-of-Honour at the Gala Dinner, commended the Faculty’s progress and achievements. “Science research in Singapore started off small and unknown in the academic research space, but we have since made immense and very visible progress. From fundamental science, such as the development of advanced materials to translational innovations like nature-based climate solutions, the Faculty has been timely and relevant in addressing pressing challenges of the day.”

He added, “We have built up global credibility and repute for our research; this has enabled us to draw top minds from across the world to build their careers and research aspirations here.”

At the Gala Dinner, the Faculty also presented awards to 16 Science alumni from industries such as healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, technology, sustainability-related sectors, data analytics and Artificial Intelligence, to name a few. Prof Tan presented the Distinguished Science Alumni Award to three alumni who have distinguished themselves in national leadership, service, research excellence, or the betterment and promotion of science.

Another 13 alumni received the Outstanding Science Alumni Award (OSA) from Prof Sun. The OSA recognised the recipients’ leadership and contributions to their professions, industries and disciplines, service to the nation or community, entrepreneurship, research, as well as other noteworthy endeavours.

“Our students do not just excel academically - their accomplishments extend beyond the classroom in service of diverse communities. Many of them go on to pursue distinguished careers; some have founded successful enterprises, contributing to society and making meaningful advancements in fields ranging from environmental sustainability to technology and healthcare,” lauded Prof Tan.

Year-long celebration

The Gala Dinner was the culminating event in a series of specially-curated activities celebrating the Faculty of Science’s 95th Anniversary this year.  These other events included the Achieving Gender Diversity in STEM conference in March 2024, which highlighted leadership in STEM and insights from our female alumni; a Homecoming for Alumni programme at both Bukit Timah and Kent Ridge Campuses in May 2024; the launch of a mural wall to commemorate the former Deans of Science in September 2024, and the Faculty of Science Symposium in September 2024 where researchers, educators, alumni and entrepreneurs, as well as students, came together to share their experiences in scientific developments, educational advancements, career journeys and student advocacy respectively.

• Channel 5 News, 21 November 2024
• 8world Online, 21 November 2024
• Lianhe Zaobao, 22 November 2024, Singapore, p10
• CNA, 22 November 2024

By Dr Azhar Ibrahim Alwee, a Senior Lecturer at the Dept of Malay Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at NUS

• Berita Harian, 21 November 2024, p6

• The Straits Times, 20 November 2024, Life, pC4

By Prof Teo Yik Ying, Vice President for Global Health and Dean of the NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health

• The Straits Times, 20 November 2024, Opinion, pB1-B2
• The Straits Times, 22 November 2024, Forum, pB5

By Ms Humaira Safiya Mohd Helmi, student from the Dept of Political Science and Dept of Economics at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences in NUS, and Mr Amirul Daniez, student in NTU

• Berita Harian, 20 November 2024, p11

• Lianhe Zaobao, 16 November 2024, Opinion, p18

• Berita Harian, 16 November 2024, p7

• Berita Harian, 16 November 2024, p10

• Berita Harian Online, 16 November 2024
• Suria News Online, 16 November 2024

Genomics-driven cancer prevention, testing and treatment strategies will be at the forefront of a new joint venture between the University of Melbourne and Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Peter Mac), announced in Melbourne today.

Fields ranging from robotics to medicine to political science are attempting to train AI systems to make meaningful decisions of all kinds. For example, using an AI system to intelligently control traffic in a congested city could help motorists reach their destinations faster, while improving safety or sustainability.

Unfortunately, teaching an AI system to make good decisions is no easy task.

Reinforcement learning models, which underlie these AI decision-making systems, still often fail when faced with even small variations in the tasks they are trained to perform. In the case of traffic, a model might struggle to control a set of intersections with different speed limits, numbers of lanes, or traffic patterns.

To boost the reliability of reinforcement learning models for complex tasks with variability, MIT researchers have introduced a more efficient algorithm for training them.

The algorithm strategically selects the best tasks for training an AI agent so it can effectively perform all tasks in a collection of related tasks. In the case of traffic signal control, each task could be one intersection in a task space that includes all intersections in the city.

By focusing on a smaller number of intersections that contribute the most to the algorithm’s overall effectiveness, this method maximizes performance while keeping the training cost low.

The researchers found that their technique was between five and 50 times more efficient than standard approaches on an array of simulated tasks. This gain in efficiency helps the algorithm learn a better solution in a faster manner, ultimately improving the performance of the AI agent.

“We were able to see incredible performance improvements, with a very simple algorithm, by thinking outside the box. An algorithm that is not very complicated stands a better chance of being adopted by the community because it is easier to implement and easier for others to understand,” says senior author Cathy Wu, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Career Development Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), and a member of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

She is joined on the paper by lead author Jung-Hoon Cho, a CEE graduate student; Vindula Jayawardana, a graduate student in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); and Sirui Li, an IDSS graduate student. The research will be presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

Finding a middle ground

To train an algorithm to control traffic lights at many intersections in a city, an engineer would typically choose between two main approaches. She can train one algorithm for each intersection independently, using only that intersection’s data, or train a larger algorithm using data from all intersections and then apply it to each one.

But each approach comes with its share of downsides. Training a separate algorithm for each task (such as a given intersection) is a time-consuming process that requires an enormous amount of data and computation, while training one algorithm for all tasks often leads to subpar performance.

Wu and her collaborators sought a sweet spot between these two approaches.

For their method, they choose a subset of tasks and train one algorithm for each task independently. Importantly, they strategically select individual tasks which are most likely to improve the algorithm’s overall performance on all tasks.

They leverage a common trick from the reinforcement learning field called zero-shot transfer learning, in which an already trained model is applied to a new task without being further trained. With transfer learning, the model often performs remarkably well on the new neighbor task.

“We know it would be ideal to train on all the tasks, but we wondered if we could get away with training on a subset of those tasks, apply the result to all the tasks, and still see a performance increase,” Wu says.

To identify which tasks they should select to maximize expected performance, the researchers developed an algorithm called Model-Based Transfer Learning (MBTL).

The MBTL algorithm has two pieces. For one, it models how well each algorithm would perform if it were trained independently on one task. Then it models how much each algorithm’s performance would degrade if it were transferred to each other task, a concept known as generalization performance.

Explicitly modeling generalization performance allows MBTL to estimate the value of training on a new task.

MBTL does this sequentially, choosing the task which leads to the highest performance gain first, then selecting additional tasks that provide the biggest subsequent marginal improvements to overall performance.

Since MBTL only focuses on the most promising tasks, it can dramatically improve the efficiency of the training process.

Reducing training costs

When the researchers tested this technique on simulated tasks, including controlling traffic signals, managing real-time speed advisories, and executing several classic control tasks, it was five to 50 times more efficient than other methods.

This means they could arrive at the same solution by training on far less data. For instance, with a 50x efficiency boost, the MBTL algorithm could train on just two tasks and achieve the same performance as a standard method which uses data from 100 tasks.

“From the perspective of the two main approaches, that means data from the other 98 tasks was not necessary or that training on all 100 tasks is confusing to the algorithm, so the performance ends up worse than ours,” Wu says.

With MBTL, adding even a small amount of additional training time could lead to much better performance.

In the future, the researchers plan to design MBTL algorithms that can extend to more complex problems, such as high-dimensional task spaces. They are also interested in applying their approach to real-world problems, especially in next-generation mobility systems.

The research is funded, in part, by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Kwanjeong Educational Foundation PhD Scholarship Program, and an Amazon Robotics PhD Fellowship.

Nestled against the lush backdrop of Kent Ridge Forest, Ridge View Residential College (RVRC) is the University’s first and only residential college located outside NUS University Town. Founded on the integrated themes of sustainability and workplace readiness, the College started as a one-year living-learning programme in 2014, expanding into a two-year programme in 2017 and evolving further in 2021 to align with the enhanced NUS General Education Curriculum.

This year, RVRC celebrates its 10th anniversary, a milestone that has seen learning at the residential college transcend the boundaries of the classroom, and its students playing an active role in contributing towards sustainability efforts in NUS and the community.

In line with its sustainability theme, many of the courses offered at RVRC incorporate the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, allowing students to explore sustainability initiatives that help shape a future that is more sustainable and equitable for all. This is done through a multifaceted learning approach that focuses on experiential outdoor learning and collaboration with industry partners. In line with its workplace readiness theme, students are also encouraged to participate in meaningful college activities beyond coursework that diversify their interests and skillsets to help develop them into better versions of their current selves.

“Place, Programme, and People are the elements that make for memorable university experiences, and these are the elements that make for a memorable RV10,” said RVRC College Master Associate Professor Sim Tick Ngee, outlining the focus of the year-long celebration in his congratulatory message.

As part of RV10, the College’s initiative to encapsulate the anniversary celebrations, a series of commemorative events were held to strengthen the college culture and collective sense of community among its students, alumni, and staff. Here are three of the events that showcased the different but integrated aspects of life at RVRC – namely academic, student and residential life.

RVRC Symposium: Living and learning for a shared future – the RVRC way

For the first time this year, students led the planning and organising of the annual RVRC Symposium held on 24 February 2024. Some 145 participants comprising students, educators and community partners attended the Symposium which showcased the best of student and alumni achievements through panel discussions, oral presentations, and poster sessions.

Guest-of-Honour Associate Professor Adrian Loo from the NUS Department of Biological Sciences shared about the importance of education and community stewardship for youth, drawing on his extensive experience in his previous role as National Parks Board’s Group Director for Wildlife Management and Senior Director for Community Projects. Participants also gleaned insights from RVRC alumnus, Founder and CEO of Hatch Mr Victor Zhu (Science '20), who shared about his journey in building his start-up with a social mission of providing digital skills and employability programmes whilst still a student at RVRC.

The day’s programme was segmented into three key themes, namely Edu-venture, Adventure, and Venturing Beyond. Edu-venture showcased RVRC’s approach towards fostering a learning ecosystem that has addressed societal and environmental challenges, as well as student projects on real-world issues. Adventure highlighted the importance of various co-curricular and student life activities, which has helped hone students’ soft skills and provided them an avenue to give back to society. Lastly, Venturing Beyond challenged students to build meaningful initiatives that go beyond the walls of the College and beyond their time at NUS, encouraging them to champion lasting environmental and societal changes through innovative means. 

Co-Chair of the Symposium’s organising committee and RVRC Senior Jason Qiu, a Year 4 undergraduate from the School of Computing, said, “It was the insightful questions posed during the presentations along with the meaningful tea break discussions that brought home the value of the engagement for the RVRC community which truly represented the vibrant learning spirit that the College embodies.”

Gala Dinner: Celebrating a decade of shared memories, experiences and achievements

The RVRC 10th Anniversary Gala Dinner on 30 August 2024 saw past and present members of the College celebrate the journey that has shaped RVRC into the unique, dynamic community it is today.

The evening began with a commemorative speech by College Master Assoc Prof Sim, who reflected on the College's decade of achievements. RVRC Rector Dr Noeleen Heyzer and RVRC’s first Director of Studies Associate Professor Lee Kooi Cheng shared about the College's indelible impact over the years while founding RVRC College Master Professor Adekunle Adeyeye recounted the strong foundation upon which the college was built, in a special video message.

Guests were also treated to a night of engaging performances, including song items by RVRC’s Jukebox and the winners of the RV10 songwriting competition, as well as an electrifying dance performance by the NUS Dance Ensemble.

A highlight at the gala dinner was the commemorative video created by RVRC students which showcased RVRC’s key milestones since its inception, evoking a deep sense of nostalgia amongst alumni, faculty and staff, both past and present, who had an enjoyable time reconnecting and reminiscing about the pivotal moments that defined their time at the College.

RVRC alumnus Zhang Xiangyu Oliver (Business ‘24), said, “It was great to reconnect with the people who made my four-year journey in RVRC memorable, and celebrate together the countless milestones of the college since inception. I’m confident that RVRC will continue to inspire the next generation in the upcoming decade and beyond!”

RVRC Day: Building bridges, strengthening bonds

Apart from sustainability, the RVRC community is also passionate about giving back to society, a cornerstone of NUS' ethos. The theme of RVRC Day – Building Bridges, Strengthening Bonds – underscored the importance of community building, not just amongst the RVRC community of students and staff, but just as importantly, with the wider community and the less privileged.

In the early morning hours of 26 October 2024, the RVRC community gathered at the Harbourfront area for Walk for Rice, a long-running signature event at RVRC to support vulnerable families. In partnership with a charity organisation, for every 300 meters walked, food donations were made to support vulnerable families, turning each step into a meaningful act of kindness. With the support of 52 RVRC students and staff, a total of 520 kilometres were clocked, making possible a donation of 1,733 packets of rice and oatmeal.

Following the charity walk, the event continued with a second segment focused on community engagement. Titled OutRidge, this initiative aimed to raise awareness for persons with disabilities (PWDs), foster inclusivity and inspire participants to take active steps toward building a more inclusive society. In addition to having the opportunity to interact with PWDs on their lived experiences and challenges, the event held at the College also featured a fireside chat with two invited speakers – Year 4 NUS student Kimberly Quek, a Deaflympic athlete who won numerous medals at international bowling competitions, and Joan Hung, a visually impaired para athlete with Team Singapore.

Additionally, participants had the opportunity to engage in interactive games at several informative booths designed by RVRC students to raise awareness about the daily challenges faced by PWDs. They also lent their support through their patronage of the food stalls set up by social enterprises that advocate for the PWD community.

RVRC Senior and Year 3 Computing undergraduate Soh Zheng Yang, Marcus, reflected, “I found the fireside chat to be eye-opening, especially when the two speakers shared about how they strive to overcome the challenges they face in pursuing their dreams. The interactive booths made me realise how adaptable PWDs have to be, to overcome the limitations of living in a society that does not primarily cater to their special needs or circumstances. I was happy to see the RVRC community come together to empower PWDs through active participation and enhanced awareness.”

As the celebrations come to a close, College Master Assoc Prof Sim, said, “The conclusion of the year-long activities held in conjunction with RV10 has brought a renewed understanding of what has shaped the College into what it is today. With this reflection comes a strong sense of optimism for the future—one where the College continues to evolve, striving towards becoming a better place that offers a more robust RVRC programme with a more united and inclusive RVRC community.”

University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Professor Duncan Maskell has announced the appointment of Professor Muthupandian Ashokkumar as Director of the Melbourne Global Centre in Delhi.

The Irish philosopher George Berkely, best known for his theory of immaterialism, once famously mused, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

What about AI-generated trees? They probably wouldn’t make a sound, but they will be critical nonetheless for applications such as adaptation of urban flora to climate change. To that end, the novel “Tree-D Fusion” system developed by researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Google, and Purdue University merges AI and tree-growth models with Google's Auto Arborist data to create accurate 3D models of existing urban trees. The project has produced the first-ever large-scale database of 600,000 environmentally aware, simulation-ready tree models across North America.

“We’re bridging decades of forestry science with modern AI capabilities,” says Sara Beery, MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) assistant professor, MIT CSAIL principal investigator, and a co-author on a new paper about Tree-D Fusion. “This allows us to not just identify trees in cities, but to predict how they’ll grow and impact their surroundings over time. We’re not ignoring the past 30 years of work in understanding how to build these 3D synthetic models; instead, we’re using AI to make this existing knowledge more useful across a broader set of individual trees in cities around North America, and eventually the globe.”

Tree-D Fusion builds on previous urban forest monitoring efforts that used Google Street View data, but branches it forward by generating complete 3D models from single images. While earlier attempts at tree modeling were limited to specific neighborhoods, or struggled with accuracy at scale, Tree-D Fusion can create detailed models that include typically hidden features, such as the back side of trees that aren’t visible in street-view photos.

The technology’s practical applications extend far beyond mere observation. City planners could use Tree-D Fusion to one day peer into the future, anticipating where growing branches might tangle with power lines, or identifying neighborhoods where strategic tree placement could maximize cooling effects and air quality improvements. These predictive capabilities, the team says, could change urban forest management from reactive maintenance to proactive planning.

A tree grows in Brooklyn (and many other places)

The researchers took a hybrid approach to their method, using deep learning to create a 3D envelope of each tree’s shape, then using traditional procedural models to simulate realistic branch and leaf patterns based on the tree’s genus. This combo helped the model predict how trees would grow under different environmental conditions and climate scenarios, such as different possible local temperatures and varying access to groundwater.

Now, as cities worldwide grapple with rising temperatures, this research offers a new window into the future of urban forests. In a collaboration with MIT’s Senseable City Lab, the Purdue University and Google team is embarking on a global study that re-imagines trees as living climate shields. Their digital modeling system captures the intricate dance of shade patterns throughout the seasons, revealing how strategic urban forestry could hopefully change sweltering city blocks into more naturally cooled neighborhoods.

“Every time a street mapping vehicle passes through a city now, we’re not just taking snapshots — we’re watching these urban forests evolve in real-time,” says Beery. “This continuous monitoring creates a living digital forest that mirrors its physical counterpart, offering cities a powerful lens to observe how environmental stresses shape tree health and growth patterns across their urban landscape.”

AI-based tree modeling has emerged as an ally in the quest for environmental justice: By mapping urban tree canopy in unprecedented detail, a sister project from the Google AI for Nature team has helped uncover disparities in green space access across different socioeconomic areas. “We’re not just studying urban forests — we’re trying to cultivate more equity,” says Beery. The team is now working closely with ecologists and tree health experts to refine these models, ensuring that as cities expand their green canopies, the benefits branch out to all residents equally.

It’s a breeze

While Tree-D fusion marks some major “growth” in the field, trees can be uniquely challenging for computer vision systems. Unlike the rigid structures of buildings or vehicles that current 3D modeling techniques handle well, trees are nature’s shape-shifters — swaying in the wind, interweaving branches with neighbors, and constantly changing their form as they grow. The Tree-D fusion models are “simulation-ready” in that they can estimate the shape of the trees in the future, depending on the environmental conditions.

“What makes this work exciting is how it pushes us to rethink fundamental assumptions in computer vision,” says Beery. “While 3D scene understanding techniques like photogrammetry or NeRF [neural radiance fields] excel at capturing static objects, trees demand new approaches that can account for their dynamic nature, where even a gentle breeze can dramatically alter their structure from moment to moment.”

The team’s approach of creating rough structural envelopes that approximate each tree’s form has proven remarkably effective, but certain issues remain unsolved. Perhaps the most vexing is the “entangled tree problem;” when neighboring trees grow into each other, their intertwined branches create a puzzle that no current AI system can fully unravel.

The scientists see their dataset as a springboard for future innovations in computer vision, and they’re already exploring applications beyond street view imagery, looking to extend their approach to platforms like iNaturalist and wildlife camera traps.

“This marks just the beginning for Tree-D Fusion,” says Jae Joong Lee, a Purdue University PhD student who developed, implemented and deployed the Tree-D-Fusion algorithm. “Together with my collaborators, I envision expanding the platform’s capabilities to a planetary scale. Our goal is to use AI-driven insights in service of natural ecosystems — supporting biodiversity, promoting global sustainability, and ultimately, benefiting the health of our entire planet.”

Beery and Lee’s co-authors are Jonathan Huang, Scaled Foundations head of AI (formerly of Google); and four others from Purdue University: PhD students Jae Joong Lee and Bosheng Li, Professor and Dean's Chair of Remote Sensing Songlin Fei, Assistant Professor Raymond Yeh, and Professor and Associate Head of Computer Science Bedrich Benes. Their work is based on efforts supported by the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service and is directly supported by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The researchers presented their findings at the European Conference on Computer Vision this month. 

The Irish philosopher George Berkely, best known for his theory of immaterialism, once famously mused, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

What about AI-generated trees? They probably wouldn’t make a sound, but they will be critical nonetheless for applications such as adaptation of urban flora to climate change. To that end, the novel “Tree-D Fusion” system developed by researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), Google, and Purdue University merges AI and tree-growth models with Google's Auto Arborist data to create accurate 3D models of existing urban trees. The project has produced the first-ever large-scale database of 600,000 environmentally aware, simulation-ready tree models across North America.

“We’re bridging decades of forestry science with modern AI capabilities,” says Sara Beery, MIT electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) assistant professor, MIT CSAIL principal investigator, and a co-author on a new paper about Tree-D Fusion. “This allows us to not just identify trees in cities, but to predict how they’ll grow and impact their surroundings over time. We’re not ignoring the past 30 years of work in understanding how to build these 3D synthetic models; instead, we’re using AI to make this existing knowledge more useful across a broader set of individual trees in cities around North America, and eventually the globe.”

Tree-D Fusion builds on previous urban forest monitoring efforts that used Google Street View data, but branches it forward by generating complete 3D models from single images. While earlier attempts at tree modeling were limited to specific neighborhoods, or struggled with accuracy at scale, Tree-D Fusion can create detailed models that include typically hidden features, such as the back side of trees that aren’t visible in street-view photos.

The technology’s practical applications extend far beyond mere observation. City planners could use Tree-D Fusion to one day peer into the future, anticipating where growing branches might tangle with power lines, or identifying neighborhoods where strategic tree placement could maximize cooling effects and air quality improvements. These predictive capabilities, the team says, could change urban forest management from reactive maintenance to proactive planning.

A tree grows in Brooklyn (and many other places)

The researchers took a hybrid approach to their method, using deep learning to create a 3D envelope of each tree’s shape, then using traditional procedural models to simulate realistic branch and leaf patterns based on the tree’s genus. This combo helped the model predict how trees would grow under different environmental conditions and climate scenarios, such as different possible local temperatures and varying access to groundwater.

Now, as cities worldwide grapple with rising temperatures, this research offers a new window into the future of urban forests. In a collaboration with MIT’s Senseable City Lab, the Purdue University and Google team is embarking on a global study that re-imagines trees as living climate shields. Their digital modeling system captures the intricate dance of shade patterns throughout the seasons, revealing how strategic urban forestry could hopefully change sweltering city blocks into more naturally cooled neighborhoods.

“Every time a street mapping vehicle passes through a city now, we’re not just taking snapshots — we’re watching these urban forests evolve in real-time,” says Beery. “This continuous monitoring creates a living digital forest that mirrors its physical counterpart, offering cities a powerful lens to observe how environmental stresses shape tree health and growth patterns across their urban landscape.”

AI-based tree modeling has emerged as an ally in the quest for environmental justice: By mapping urban tree canopy in unprecedented detail, a sister project from the Google AI for Nature team has helped uncover disparities in green space access across different socioeconomic areas. “We’re not just studying urban forests — we’re trying to cultivate more equity,” says Beery. The team is now working closely with ecologists and tree health experts to refine these models, ensuring that as cities expand their green canopies, the benefits branch out to all residents equally.

It’s a breeze

While Tree-D fusion marks some major “growth” in the field, trees can be uniquely challenging for computer vision systems. Unlike the rigid structures of buildings or vehicles that current 3D modeling techniques handle well, trees are nature’s shape-shifters — swaying in the wind, interweaving branches with neighbors, and constantly changing their form as they grow. The Tree-D fusion models are “simulation-ready” in that they can estimate the shape of the trees in the future, depending on the environmental conditions.

“What makes this work exciting is how it pushes us to rethink fundamental assumptions in computer vision,” says Beery. “While 3D scene understanding techniques like photogrammetry or NeRF [neural radiance fields] excel at capturing static objects, trees demand new approaches that can account for their dynamic nature, where even a gentle breeze can dramatically alter their structure from moment to moment.”

The team’s approach of creating rough structural envelopes that approximate each tree’s form has proven remarkably effective, but certain issues remain unsolved. Perhaps the most vexing is the “entangled tree problem;” when neighboring trees grow into each other, their intertwined branches create a puzzle that no current AI system can fully unravel.

The scientists see their dataset as a springboard for future innovations in computer vision, and they’re already exploring applications beyond street view imagery, looking to extend their approach to platforms like iNaturalist and wildlife camera traps.

“This marks just the beginning for Tree-D Fusion,” says Jae Joong Lee, a Purdue University PhD student who developed, implemented and deployed the Tree-D-Fusion algorithm. “Together with my collaborators, I envision expanding the platform’s capabilities to a planetary scale. Our goal is to use AI-driven insights in service of natural ecosystems — supporting biodiversity, promoting global sustainability, and ultimately, benefiting the health of our entire planet.”

Beery and Lee’s co-authors are Jonathan Huang, Scaled Foundations head of AI (formerly of Google); and four others from Purdue University: PhD students Jae Joong Lee and Bosheng Li, Professor and Dean's Chair of Remote Sensing Songlin Fei, Assistant Professor Raymond Yeh, and Professor and Associate Head of Computer Science Bedrich Benes. Their work is based on efforts supported by the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service and is directly supported by the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. The researchers presented their findings at the European Conference on Computer Vision this month. 

Penn’s Climate and Sustainability Action Plan 4.0 outlines sustainability goals for fiscal year 2025-29 and lays out Penn’s path toward carbon neutrality by 2042.

The plan outlines a sweeping strategy to become the nation’s most eco-friendly health care organization.

Will Chan, a Thouron Scholar and Ph.D. candidate in theoretical physics, is also an advocate for building Asian communities.

As young children, how do we build our vocabulary? Even by age 1, many infants seem to think that if they hear a new word, it means something different from the words they already know. But why they think so has remained subject to inquiry among scholars for the last 40 years.

A new study carried out at the MIT Language Acquisition Lab offers a novel insight into the matter: Sentences contain subtle hints in their grammar that tell young children about the meaning of new words. The finding, based on experiments with 2-year-olds, suggests that even very young kids are capable of absorbing grammatical cues from language and leveraging that information to acquire new words.

“Even at a surprisingly young age, kids have sophisticated knowledge of the grammar of sentences and can use that to learn the meanings of new words,” says Athulya Aravind, an associate professor of linguistics at MIT.

The new insight stands in contrast to a prior explanation for how children build vocabulary: that they rely on the concept of “mutual exclusivity,” meaning they treat each new word as corresponding to a new object or category. Instead, the new research shows how extensively children respond directly to grammatical information when interpreting words.

“For us it’s very exciting because it’s a very simple idea that explains so much about how children understand language,” says Gabor Brody, a postdoc at Brown University, who is the first author of the paper.

The paper is titled, “Why Do Children Think Words Are Mutually Exclusive?” It is published in advance online form in Psychological Science. The authors are Brody; Roman Feiman, the Thomas J. and Alice M. Tisch Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences and Linguistics at Brown; and Aravind, the Alfred Henry and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.

Focusing on focus

Many scholars have thought that young children, when learning new words, have an innate bias toward mutual exclusivity, which could explain how children learn some of their new words. However, the concept of mutual exclusivity has never been airtight: Words like “bat” refer to multiple kinds of objects, while any object can be described using countlessly many words. For instance a rabbit can be called not only a “rabbit” or a “bunny,” but also an “animal,” or a “beauty,” and in some contexts even a “delicacy.” Despite this lack of perfect one-to-one mapping between words and objects, mutual exclusivity has still been posited as a strong tendency in children’s word learning.

What Aravind, Brody, and Fieman propose is that children have no such tendency, and instead rely on so-called “focus” signals to decide what a new word means. Linguists use the term “focus” to refer to the way we emphasize or stress certain words to signal some kind of contrast. Depending on what is focused, the same sentence can have different implications. “Carlos gave Lewis a Ferrari” implies contrast with other possible cars — he could have given Lewis a Mercedes. But “Carlos gave Lewis a Ferrari” implies contrast with other people — he could have given Alexandra a Ferrari.

The researchers’ experiments manipulated focus in three experiments with a total of 106 children. The participants watched videos of a cartoon fox who asked them to point to different objects.

The first experiment established how focus influences kids’ choice between two objects when they hear a label, like “toy,” that could, in principle, correspond to either of the two. After giving a name to one of the two objects (“Look, I am pointing to the blicket”), the fox told the child, “Now you point to the toy!” Children were divided into two groups. One group heard “toy” without emphasis, while the other heard it with emphasis.

In the first version, “blicket” and “toy” plausibly refer to the same object. But in the second version, the added focus, through intonation, implies that “toy” contrasts with the previously discussed “blicket.” Without focus, only 24 percent of the respondents thought the words were mutually exclusive, whereas with the focus created by emphasizing “toy,” 89 percent of participants thought “blicket” and “toy” referred to different objects.

The second and third experiments showed that focus is not just key when it comes to words like “toy,” but it also affects the interpretation of new words children have never encountered before, like “wug” or “dax.” If a new word was said without focus, children thought the word meant the previously named object 71 percent of the time. But when hearing the new word spoken with focus, they thought it must refer to a new object 87 percent of the time.

“Even though they know nothing about this new word, when it was focused, that still told them something: Focus communicated to children the presence of a contrasting alternative, and they correspondingly understood the noun to refer to an object that had not previously been labeled,” Aravind explains.

She adds: “The particular claim we’re making is that there is no inherent bias in children toward mutual exclusivity. The only reason we make the corresponding inference is because focus tells you that the word means something different from another word. When focus goes away, children don’t draw those exclusivity inferences any more.”

The researchers believe the full set of experiments sheds new light on the issue.

“Earlier explanations of mutual exclusivity introduced a whole new problem,” Feiman says. “If kids assume words are mutually exclusive, how do they learn words that are not? After all, you can call the same animal either a rabbit or a bunny, and kids have to learn both of those at some point. Our finding explains why this isn't actually a problem. Kids won’t think the new word is mutually exclusive with the old word by default, unless adults tell them that it is — all adults have to do if the new word is not mutually exclusive is just say it without focusing it, and they’ll naturally do that if they're thinking about it as compatible.”

Learning language from language

The experiment, the researchers note, is the result of interdisciplinary research bridging psychology and linguistics — in this case, mobilizing the linguistics concept of focus to address an issue of interest in both fields.

“We are hopeful this will be a paper that shows that small, simple theories have a place in psychology,” Brody says. “It is a very small theory, not a huge model of the mind, but it completely flips the switch on some phenomena we thought we understood.”

If the new hypothesis is correct, the researchers may have developed a more robust explanation about how children correctly apply new words.

“An influential idea in language development is that children can use their existing knowledge of language to learn more language,” Aravind says. “We’re in a sense building on that idea, and saying that even in the simplest cases, aspects of language that children already know, in this case an understanding of focus, help them grasp the meanings of unknown words.”

The scholars acknowledge that more studies could further advance our knowledge about the issue. Future research, they note in the paper, could reexamine prior studies about mutual exclusivity, record and study naturalistic interactions between parents and children to see how focus is used, and examine the issue in other languages, especially those marking focus in alternate ways, such as word order.

The research was supported, in part, by a Jacobs Foundation Fellowship awarded to Feiman.

• Lianhe Zaobao, 19 November 2024, Focus, p4

By Ms Liu Jingting, Ms Ulrike Sengstschmid, Ms Yan Bowen, and Ms Thi Hang Banh, researchers from the Asia Competitiveness Institute at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS

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By Professor Julian Savulescu, Chen Su Lan Centennial Professor of Medical Ethics and Director, and Associate Professor Brian D. Earp, both from the Centre for Biomedical Ethics at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine at NUS, together with Dr Sebastian Porsdam Mann, a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford

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University of Melbourne and La Trobe University have begun a project to compile a four-volume collection of key documents that tell the story of Australian history from an Aboriginal perspective, which will be sent to remote community schools across Australia and will eventually be in every school and public library.

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By Dr Qi Dongtao, Senior Research Fellow from the East Asian Institute at NUS

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A visionary gift from Pamela Galli AO will sustain and advance research into neurodevelopmental disorders, skin cancer prevention and treatments, as well as enabling new areas of investigation and research collaboration.

Each year on World Philosophy Day on 21 November, people around the globe are invited to reflect on the role philosophy plays in shaping our understanding of the world.

Philosophy, meaning ‘love of wisdom’, is interpreted differently by different people, and this diversity of interpretation is one of its most enduring strengths. For some, it’s an intellectual pursuit, a way of seeking deep truths about existence, morality, and knowledge. For others, it’s simply a practical guide to living more meaningfully.

“Philosophy is an attempt to make sense of life, the universe, and everything, through human reason,” says Associate Professor Loy Hui Chieh from the Department of Philosophy at the NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.

For final-year Philosophy major Christopher Chin, the understanding of philosophy challenges our norms and forces us to grow, while final-year History and Philosophy double major Sofia Marliini Heikkonen believes it offers the privilege of interrogating life.

Dr Daryl Ooi, a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy agrees, saying that, “Philosophy is one of the activities humans practice when we’re trying to figure out how to relate and orientate ourselves to this exciting, complex and confusing world we live in.”

Fundamentally, however, philosophy is a way of thinking that cuts to the heart of what it means to be human.

‘Confucius says…’

The foundational ideas established by many great thinkers and philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle have shaped our understanding of the world. These renowned philosophers pioneered the use of reason and logic to explore the workings of the universe while delving into the complexities of human morality.

Although Confucius lived around 500 BC, some 2,500 years ago, today he remains synonymous with wisdom and insights into life. The expression ‘Confucius says...’ is often cited when imparting general wisdom, exemplifying how philosophy transcends time and generations.

In the context of retaliation, for example – whether in war or conflict – one might consider Confucius’ wise words before determining a course of action: ‘Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.’

“A common misunderstanding about philosophy is that it’s purely abstract and impractical, dealing only with questions that have no real-world impact. In reality, many of the questions discussed in philosophy have significant real-world implications,” said the Department’s Assistant Professor Song Moonyoung.

A compass for the modern world

Some may question the relevance of philosophical thinking today given the proliferation of science and technology that comes with the promise to simplify our lives and even make decisions on our behalf. Philosophers, however, agree that as the world changes rapidly through technology and social upheaval, the role of philosophy will only grow in importance.

Dr Ooi believes that as long as humans continue to ask big and narrow questions about the world today and attempt to make sense of their beliefs, values, emotions and ideas, philosophy will continue to endure.

Likewise, Asst Prof Song believes philosophy is even more relevant in a time when science and technology are at the forefront. “Philosophy encourages us to consider the ethical implications of technological advancements, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and genetic engineering, and guides us in making thoughtful, responsible choices about their development and use,” she says.

Assoc Prof Loy views philosophy as one part of a much larger repertoire now available to modern humanity. Its strength stems not from disregarding developments in other fields and domains, but from working in tandem with them. “Take artificial intelligence or AI for example. I have been drawn to research projects that look into how AI will affect education because it involves contributions from social science, data science, computer science and many others,” he says.  

Related to that is the complex task of developing a practical governing framework for the development of AI and, even more critically, the ethics of its application. Dr Ooi, himself a former student of Assoc Prof Loy, says that the intricacy of such tasks is precisely the reason we recognise the value of interdisciplinary education.

He explains, “We need specialists from different disciplines to work together – and philosophers certainly have much to contribute towards the development or shaping of any kind of moral framework that would support the development and application of AI. Get a philosopher in the room to ask questions about ethics and morality, or even what it means to be human. This will trigger some incredibly meaningful and important conversations, and sometimes, you may even get something like an answer!”

Assoc Prof Loy, who is also Vice Dean (Academic Affairs) for NUS College, adds that he sees philosophers as some of the most interested and equipped people to discuss complex issues, not necessarily by supplying any ready-made “moral framework”, but simply by being people who are keen on thinking very carefully and working with experts from other technical disciplines.

Expanding on this perspective, Asst Prof Song, who specialises in the philosophy of art, notes that the increasing integration of AI into our lives invites us to reflect on what truly defines humanity. The answer may not lie in what we can do better than AI. Instead, what makes us special may indeed be our limitations, such as the fact that humans have physical bodies that inevitably age and perish.

She adds, “These limitations give human achievements – such as artwork – a completely different meaning, even if, on the surface, they may look similar to AI-created products.”

In recent years, mental health has become another area where philosophy provides a unique lens through which we can understand and address psychological well-being. Commenting on the role of philosophy or philosophical ideas in mental health treatment or in helping people cope with mental health challenges, Dr Ooi highlights the increasing attention given to the therapeutic value of philosophical ideas.

He says, “The idea of ‘care for the soul’ and ‘care for the self’ is a historically important one that is of immense relevance for us today, and there are many important philosophical questions that we can ask that are highly relevant to issues surrounding mental health today. For instance, how do we understand the obligations individuals have to care for one another, should education systems have an ethical responsibility to ensure that students do not suffer certain harms, or how can individuals and societies understand values such as ‘respect’ and ‘dignity’ so that those values shape the way humans treat each other?”

Many of the tools employed in philosophy and the intellectual dispositions it nurtures have broad applications – particularly in instances where careful reasoning is needed or when navigating any situations without any clear precedents. This intellectual rigour is what has drawn some undergraduates to take up Philosophy to complement other fields of study, recognising the value of the discipline’s critical thinking and reasoning skills.  

Joan Lim, a final-year Philosophy and Life Sciences double degree student, was first introduced to Philosophy in secondary school.

Joan was part of the pioneering batch at the College of Humanities and Sciences and says she jumped at the opportunity to take two contrasting degrees, believing in the importance of an interdisciplinary education to gain a deeper understanding of our increasingly complex and interconnected world. 

“I feel that the disciplines are complementary because science needs to be ethically applied, and the humanities benefit from the real-world grounding from the sciences.  Fields such as AI and sustainability consider the best ways to apply science and technology such that harm may be reduced; a purely scientific approach may lack that moral analysis.”

Armed with the insights gained from her philosophy studies, Joan is looking for a career that will allow her to contribute to the field of sustainability, another existential challenge for mankind. “I hope to provide an ethical and logical lens for analysing complex issues such as sustainability and AI, but also in the vein of the philosophical training that I have received here at NUS, one which is empathetic and kind,” she says.

Marliini, who has always felt very strongly about diversity, representation and inclusivity, is looking for opportunities to build bridges within the communities around her. “I'm still discovering what exactly my career will look like post-graduation, and what excites me is the prospect of fostering environments where people feel empowered, accepted and connected.”

Beyond its influence on society, Christopher believes that philosophy’s teachings have made an impact on his personal relationships.

“The clarity and discernment that philosophy teaches us should be channelled towards goodness. It reminds us to be compassionate because as (Chinese Confucian philosopher) Mengzi suggests, all humans have the heart of compassion. Whatever the psychological pain, I believe being compassionate, empathetic, and present should be our first response,” says Christopher, reflecting on the wisdom drawn from philosophy when dealing with friends and loved ones in need.

Enduring influence in shaping humanity

From artificial intelligence to mental health, philosophy offers a powerful lens for understanding and navigating the complexities of contemporary life. Whether for those immersed in academic inquiry or individuals looking for clarity in a fast-paced world, philosophy provides a space for thoughtful reflection, grounded in the search for truth and meaning.

Assoc Prof Loy has noted how students get to have a lot of intellectual fun reading philosophy while giving them leverage for other intellectual pursuits.

“Everyone stands to gain from the process of philosophical inquiry,” says Marliini. “The skills we learn are beneficial far beyond academics because philosophy at its core teaches us how to hold space for different perspectives while maintaining the rigour to examine and articulate our own.”

In the words of Peter Singer, one of the most highly regarded modern philosophers alive today, “Philosophy ought to question the basic assumptions of the age. Thinking through, critically and carefully, what most of us take for granted is, I believe, the chief task of philosophy, and the task that makes philosophy a worthwhile activity.”

Acoustic metamaterials — architected materials that have tailored geometries designed to control the propagation of acoustic or elastic waves through a medium — have been studied extensively through computational and theoretical methods. Physical realizations of these materials to date have been restricted to large sizes and low frequencies.

“The multifunctionality of metamaterials — being simultaneously lightweight and strong while having tunable acoustic properties — make them great candidates for use in extreme-condition engineering applications,” explains Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Chair and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “But challenges in miniaturizing and characterizing acoustic metamaterials at high frequencies have hindered progress towards realizing advanced materials that have ultrasonic-wave control capabilities.”

A new study coauthored by Portela; Rachel Sun, Jet Lem, and Yun Kai of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE); and Washington DeLima of the U.S. Department of Energy Kansas City National Security Campus presents a design framework for controlling ultrasound wave propagation in microscopic acoustic metamaterials. A paper on the work, “Tailored Ultrasound Propagation in Microscale Metamaterials via Inertia Design,” was recently published in the journal Science Advances. 

“Our work proposes a design framework based on precisely positioning microscale spheres to tune how ultrasound waves travel through 3D microscale metamaterials,” says Portela. “Specifically, we investigate how placing microscopic spherical masses within a metamaterial lattice affect how fast ultrasound waves travel throughout, ultimately leading to wave guiding or focusing responses.”

Through nondestructive, high-throughput laser-ultrasonics characterization, the team experimentally demonstrates tunable elastic-wave velocities within microscale materials. They use the varied wave velocities to spatially and temporally tune wave propagation in microscale materials, also demonstrating an acoustic demultiplexer (a device that separates one acoustic signal into multiple output signals). The work paves the way for microscale devices and components that could be useful for ultrasound imaging or information transmission via ultrasound.

“Using simple geometrical changes, this design framework expands the tunable dynamic property space of metamaterials, enabling straightforward design and fabrication of microscale acoustic metamaterials and devices,” says Portela.

The research also advances experimental capabilities, including fabrication and characterization, of microscale acoustic metamaterials toward application in medical ultrasound and mechanical computing applications, and underscores the underlying mechanics of ultrasound wave propagation in metamaterials, tuning dynamic properties via simple geometric changes and describing these changes as a function of changes in mass and stiffness. More importantly, the framework is amenable to other fabrication techniques beyond the microscale, requiring merely a single constituent material and one base 3D geometry to attain largely tunable properties.

“The beauty of this framework is that it fundamentally links physical material properties to geometric features. By placing spherical masses on a spring-like lattice scaffold, we could create direct analogies for how mass affects quasi-static stiffness and dynamic wave velocity,” says Sun, first author of the study. “I realized that we could obtain hundreds of different designs and corresponding material properties regardless of whether we vibrated or slowly compressed the materials.”

This work was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano facilities.

Acoustic metamaterials — architected materials that have tailored geometries designed to control the propagation of acoustic or elastic waves through a medium — have been studied extensively through computational and theoretical methods. Physical realizations of these materials to date have been restricted to large sizes and low frequencies.

“The multifunctionality of metamaterials — being simultaneously lightweight and strong while having tunable acoustic properties — make them great candidates for use in extreme-condition engineering applications,” explains Carlos Portela, the Robert N. Noyce Career Development Chair and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “But challenges in miniaturizing and characterizing acoustic metamaterials at high frequencies have hindered progress towards realizing advanced materials that have ultrasonic-wave control capabilities.”

A new study coauthored by Portela; Rachel Sun, Jet Lem, and Yun Kai of the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE); and Washington DeLima of the U.S. Department of Energy Kansas City National Security Campus presents a design framework for controlling ultrasound wave propagation in microscopic acoustic metamaterials. A paper on the work, “Tailored Ultrasound Propagation in Microscale Metamaterials via Inertia Design,” was recently published in the journal Science Advances. 

“Our work proposes a design framework based on precisely positioning microscale spheres to tune how ultrasound waves travel through 3D microscale metamaterials,” says Portela. “Specifically, we investigate how placing microscopic spherical masses within a metamaterial lattice affect how fast ultrasound waves travel throughout, ultimately leading to wave guiding or focusing responses.”

Through nondestructive, high-throughput laser-ultrasonics characterization, the team experimentally demonstrates tunable elastic-wave velocities within microscale materials. They use the varied wave velocities to spatially and temporally tune wave propagation in microscale materials, also demonstrating an acoustic demultiplexer (a device that separates one acoustic signal into multiple output signals). The work paves the way for microscale devices and components that could be useful for ultrasound imaging or information transmission via ultrasound.

“Using simple geometrical changes, this design framework expands the tunable dynamic property space of metamaterials, enabling straightforward design and fabrication of microscale acoustic metamaterials and devices,” says Portela.

The research also advances experimental capabilities, including fabrication and characterization, of microscale acoustic metamaterials toward application in medical ultrasound and mechanical computing applications, and underscores the underlying mechanics of ultrasound wave propagation in metamaterials, tuning dynamic properties via simple geometric changes and describing these changes as a function of changes in mass and stiffness. More importantly, the framework is amenable to other fabrication techniques beyond the microscale, requiring merely a single constituent material and one base 3D geometry to attain largely tunable properties.

“The beauty of this framework is that it fundamentally links physical material properties to geometric features. By placing spherical masses on a spring-like lattice scaffold, we could create direct analogies for how mass affects quasi-static stiffness and dynamic wave velocity,” says Sun, first author of the study. “I realized that we could obtain hundreds of different designs and corresponding material properties regardless of whether we vibrated or slowly compressed the materials.”

This work was carried out, in part, through the use of MIT.nano facilities.

In 2015, 195 nations plus the European Union signed the Paris Agreement and pledged to undertake plans designed to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Yet in 2023, the world exceeded that target for most, if not all of, the year — calling into question the long-term feasibility of achieving that target.

To do so, the world must reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and strategies for achieving levels that will “stabilize the climate” have been both proposed and adopted. Many of those strategies combine dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions with the use of direct air capture (DAC), a technology that removes CO₂ from the ambient air. As a reality check, a team of researchers in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) examined those strategies, and what they found was alarming: The strategies rely on overly optimistic — indeed, unrealistic — assumptions about how much CO₂ could be removed by DAC. As a result, the strategies won’t perform as predicted. Nevertheless, the MITEI team recommends that work to develop the DAC technology continue so that it’s ready to help with the energy transition — even if it’s not the silver bullet that solves the world’s decarbonization challenge.

DAC: The promise and the reality

Including DAC in plans to stabilize the climate makes sense. Much work is now under way to develop DAC systems, and the technology looks promising. While companies may never run their own DAC systems, they can already buy “carbon credits” based on DAC. Today, a multibillion-dollar market exists on which entities or individuals that face high costs or excessive disruptions to reduce their own carbon emissions can pay others to take emissions-reducing actions on their behalf. Those actions can involve undertaking new renewable energy projects or “carbon-removal” initiatives such as DAC or afforestation/reforestation (planting trees in areas that have never been forested or that were forested in the past). 

DAC-based credits are especially appealing for several reasons, explains Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at MITEI. With DAC, measuring and verifying the amount of carbon removed is straightforward; the removal is immediate, unlike with planting forests, which may take decades to have an impact; and when DAC is coupled with CO₂ storage in geologic formations, the CO₂ is kept out of the atmosphere essentially permanently — in contrast to, for example, sequestering it in trees, which may one day burn and release the stored CO₂.

Will current plans that rely on DAC be effective in stabilizing the climate in the coming years? To find out, Herzog and his colleagues Jennifer Morris and Angelo Gurgel, both MITEI principal research scientists, and Sergey Paltsev, a MITEI senior research scientist — all affiliated with the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) — took a close look at the modeling studies on which those plans are based.

Their investigation identified three unavoidable engineering challenges that together lead to a fourth challenge — high costs for removing a single ton of CO₂ from the atmosphere. The details of their findings are reported in a paper published in the journal One Earth on Sept. 20.

Challenge 1: Scaling up

When it comes to removing CO₂ from the air, nature presents “a major, non-negotiable challenge,” notes the MITEI team: The concentration of CO₂ in the air is extremely low — just 420 parts per million, or roughly 0.04 percent. In contrast, the CO₂ concentration in flue gases emitted by power plants and industrial processes ranges from 3 percent to 20 percent. Companies now use various carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies to capture CO₂ from their flue gases, but capturing CO₂ from the air is much more difficult. To explain, the researchers offer the following analogy: “The difference is akin to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue [the task representing DAC] versus needing to find about 10 red marbles in a jar of 100 marbles of which 90 are blue [the task for CCS].”

Given that low concentration, removing a single metric ton (tonne) of CO₂ from air requires processing about 1.8 million cubic meters of air, which is roughly equivalent to the volume of 720 Olympic-sized swimming pools. And all that air must be moved across a CO₂-capturing sorbent — a feat requiring large equipment. For example, one recently proposed design for capturing 1 million tonnes of CO₂ per year would require an “air contactor” equivalent in size to a structure about three stories high and three miles long.

Recent modeling studies project DAC deployment on the scale of 5 to 40 gigatonnes of CO₂ removed per year. (A gigatonne equals 1 billion metric tonnes.) But in their paper, the researchers conclude that the likelihood of deploying DAC at the gigatonne scale is “highly uncertain.”

Challenge 2: Energy requirement

Given the low concentration of CO₂ in the air and the need to move large quantities of air to capture it, it’s no surprise that even the best DAC processes proposed today would consume large amounts of energy — energy that’s generally supplied by a combination of electricity and heat. Including the energy needed to compress the captured CO₂ for transportation and storage, most proposed processes require an equivalent of at least 1.2 megawatt-hours of electricity for each tonne of CO₂ removed.

The source of that electricity is critical. For example, using coal-based electricity to drive an all-electric DAC process would generate 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ for each tonne of CO₂ captured. The result would be a net increase in emissions, defeating the whole purpose of the DAC. So clearly, the energy requirement must be satisfied using either low-carbon electricity or electricity generated using fossil fuels with CCS. All-electric DAC deployed at large scale — say, 10 gigatonnes of CO₂ removed annually — would require 12,000 terawatt-hours of electricity, which is more than 40 percent of total global electricity generation today.

Electricity consumption is expected to grow due to increasing overall electrification of the world economy, so low-carbon electricity will be in high demand for many competing uses — for example, in power generation, transportation, industry, and building operations. Using clean electricity for DAC instead of for reducing CO₂ emissions in other critical areas raises concerns about the best uses of clean electricity.

Many studies assume that a DAC unit could also get energy from “waste heat” generated by some industrial process or facility nearby. In the MITEI researchers’ opinion, “that may be more wishful thinking than reality.” The heat source would need to be within a few miles of the DAC plant for transporting the heat to be economical; given its high capital cost, the DAC plant would need to run nonstop, requiring constant heat delivery; and heat at the temperature required by the DAC plant would have competing uses, for example, for heating buildings. Finally, if DAC is deployed at the gigatonne per year scale, waste heat will likely be able to provide only a small fraction of the needed energy.

Challenge 3: Siting

Some analysts have asserted that, because air is everywhere, DAC units can be located anywhere. But in reality, siting a DAC plant involves many complex issues. As noted above, DAC plants require significant amounts of energy, so having access to enough low-carbon energy is critical. Likewise, having nearby options for storing the removed CO₂ is also critical. If storage sites or pipelines to such sites don’t exist, major new infrastructure will need to be built, and building new infrastructure of any kind is expensive and complicated, involving issues related to permitting, environmental justice, and public acceptability — issues that are, in the words of the researchers, “commonly underestimated in the real world and neglected in models.”

Two more siting needs must be considered. First, meteorological conditions must be acceptable. By definition, any DAC unit will be exposed to the elements, and factors like temperature and humidity will affect process performance and process availability. And second, a DAC plant will require some dedicated land — though how much is unclear, as the optimal spacing of units is as yet unresolved. Like wind turbines, DAC units need to be properly spaced to ensure maximum performance such that one unit is not sucking in CO₂-depleted air from another unit.

Challenge 4: Cost

Considering the first three challenges, the final challenge is clear: the cost per tonne of CO₂ removed is inevitably high. Recent modeling studies assume DAC costs as low as $100 to $200 per ton of CO₂ removed. But the researchers found evidence suggesting far higher costs.

To start, they cite typical costs for power plants and industrial sites that now use CCS to remove CO₂ from their flue gases. The cost of CCS in such applications is estimated to be in the range of $50 to $150 per ton of CO₂ removed. As explained above, the far lower concentration of CO₂ in the air will lead to substantially higher costs.

As explained under Challenge 1, the DAC units needed to capture the required amount of air are massive. The capital cost of building them will be high, given labor, materials, permitting costs, and so on. Some estimates in the literature exceed $5,000 per tonne captured per year.

Then there are the ongoing costs of energy. As noted under Challenge 2, removing 1 tonne of CO₂ requires the equivalent of 1.2 megawatt-hours of electricity. If that electricity costs $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, the cost of just the electricity needed to remove 1 tonne of CO₂ is $120. The researchers point out that assuming such a low price is “questionable,” given the expected increase in electricity demand, future competition for clean energy, and higher costs on a system dominated by renewable — but intermittent — energy sources.

Then there’s the cost of storage, which is ignored in many DAC cost estimates.

Clearly, many considerations show that prices of $100 to $200 per tonne are unrealistic, and assuming such low prices will distort assessments of strategies, leading them to underperform going forward.

The bottom line

In their paper, the MITEI team calls DAC a “very seductive concept.” Using DAC to suck CO₂ out of the air and generate high-quality carbon-removal credits can offset reduction requirements for industries that have hard-to-abate emissions. By doing so, DAC would minimize disruptions to key parts of the world’s economy, including air travel, certain carbon-intensive industries, and agriculture. However, the world would need to generate billions of tonnes of CO₂ credits at an affordable price. That prospect doesn’t look likely. The largest DAC plant in operation today removes just 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year, and the price to buy the company’s carbon-removal credits on the market today is $1,500 per tonne.

The researchers recognize that there is room for energy efficiency improvements in the future, but DAC units will always be subject to higher work requirements than CCS applied to power plant or industrial flue gases, and there is not a clear pathway to reducing work requirements much below the levels of current DAC technologies.

Nevertheless, the researchers recommend that work to develop DAC continue “because it may be needed for meeting net-zero emissions goals, especially given the current pace of emissions.” But their paper concludes with this warning: “Given the high stakes of climate change, it is foolhardy to rely on DAC to be the hero that comes to our rescue.”

In 2015, 195 nations plus the European Union signed the Paris Agreement and pledged to undertake plans designed to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Yet in 2023, the world exceeded that target for most, if not all of, the year — calling into question the long-term feasibility of achieving that target.

To do so, the world must reduce the levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and strategies for achieving levels that will “stabilize the climate” have been both proposed and adopted. Many of those strategies combine dramatic cuts in carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions with the use of direct air capture (DAC), a technology that removes CO₂ from the ambient air. As a reality check, a team of researchers in the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) examined those strategies, and what they found was alarming: The strategies rely on overly optimistic — indeed, unrealistic — assumptions about how much CO₂ could be removed by DAC. As a result, the strategies won’t perform as predicted. Nevertheless, the MITEI team recommends that work to develop the DAC technology continue so that it’s ready to help with the energy transition — even if it’s not the silver bullet that solves the world’s decarbonization challenge.

DAC: The promise and the reality

Including DAC in plans to stabilize the climate makes sense. Much work is now under way to develop DAC systems, and the technology looks promising. While companies may never run their own DAC systems, they can already buy “carbon credits” based on DAC. Today, a multibillion-dollar market exists on which entities or individuals that face high costs or excessive disruptions to reduce their own carbon emissions can pay others to take emissions-reducing actions on their behalf. Those actions can involve undertaking new renewable energy projects or “carbon-removal” initiatives such as DAC or afforestation/reforestation (planting trees in areas that have never been forested or that were forested in the past). 

DAC-based credits are especially appealing for several reasons, explains Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at MITEI. With DAC, measuring and verifying the amount of carbon removed is straightforward; the removal is immediate, unlike with planting forests, which may take decades to have an impact; and when DAC is coupled with CO₂ storage in geologic formations, the CO₂ is kept out of the atmosphere essentially permanently — in contrast to, for example, sequestering it in trees, which may one day burn and release the stored CO₂.

Will current plans that rely on DAC be effective in stabilizing the climate in the coming years? To find out, Herzog and his colleagues Jennifer Morris and Angelo Gurgel, both MITEI principal research scientists, and Sergey Paltsev, a MITEI senior research scientist — all affiliated with the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (CS3) — took a close look at the modeling studies on which those plans are based.

Their investigation identified three unavoidable engineering challenges that together lead to a fourth challenge — high costs for removing a single ton of CO₂ from the atmosphere. The details of their findings are reported in a paper published in the journal One Earth on Sept. 20.

Challenge 1: Scaling up

When it comes to removing CO₂ from the air, nature presents “a major, non-negotiable challenge,” notes the MITEI team: The concentration of CO₂ in the air is extremely low — just 420 parts per million, or roughly 0.04 percent. In contrast, the CO₂ concentration in flue gases emitted by power plants and industrial processes ranges from 3 percent to 20 percent. Companies now use various carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies to capture CO₂ from their flue gases, but capturing CO₂ from the air is much more difficult. To explain, the researchers offer the following analogy: “The difference is akin to needing to find 10 red marbles in a jar of 25,000 marbles of which 24,990 are blue [the task representing DAC] versus needing to find about 10 red marbles in a jar of 100 marbles of which 90 are blue [the task for CCS].”

Given that low concentration, removing a single metric ton (tonne) of CO₂ from air requires processing about 1.8 million cubic meters of air, which is roughly equivalent to the volume of 720 Olympic-sized swimming pools. And all that air must be moved across a CO₂-capturing sorbent — a feat requiring large equipment. For example, one recently proposed design for capturing 1 million tonnes of CO₂ per year would require an “air contactor” equivalent in size to a structure about three stories high and three miles long.

Recent modeling studies project DAC deployment on the scale of 5 to 40 gigatonnes of CO₂ removed per year. (A gigatonne equals 1 billion metric tonnes.) But in their paper, the researchers conclude that the likelihood of deploying DAC at the gigatonne scale is “highly uncertain.”

Challenge 2: Energy requirement

Given the low concentration of CO₂ in the air and the need to move large quantities of air to capture it, it’s no surprise that even the best DAC processes proposed today would consume large amounts of energy — energy that’s generally supplied by a combination of electricity and heat. Including the energy needed to compress the captured CO₂ for transportation and storage, most proposed processes require an equivalent of at least 1.2 megawatt-hours of electricity for each tonne of CO₂ removed.

The source of that electricity is critical. For example, using coal-based electricity to drive an all-electric DAC process would generate 1.2 tonnes of CO₂ for each tonne of CO₂ captured. The result would be a net increase in emissions, defeating the whole purpose of the DAC. So clearly, the energy requirement must be satisfied using either low-carbon electricity or electricity generated using fossil fuels with CCS. All-electric DAC deployed at large scale — say, 10 gigatonnes of CO₂ removed annually — would require 12,000 terawatt-hours of electricity, which is more than 40 percent of total global electricity generation today.

Electricity consumption is expected to grow due to increasing overall electrification of the world economy, so low-carbon electricity will be in high demand for many competing uses — for example, in power generation, transportation, industry, and building operations. Using clean electricity for DAC instead of for reducing CO₂ emissions in other critical areas raises concerns about the best uses of clean electricity.

Many studies assume that a DAC unit could also get energy from “waste heat” generated by some industrial process or facility nearby. In the MITEI researchers’ opinion, “that may be more wishful thinking than reality.” The heat source would need to be within a few miles of the DAC plant for transporting the heat to be economical; given its high capital cost, the DAC plant would need to run nonstop, requiring constant heat delivery; and heat at the temperature required by the DAC plant would have competing uses, for example, for heating buildings. Finally, if DAC is deployed at the gigatonne per year scale, waste heat will likely be able to provide only a small fraction of the needed energy.

Challenge 3: Siting

Some analysts have asserted that, because air is everywhere, DAC units can be located anywhere. But in reality, siting a DAC plant involves many complex issues. As noted above, DAC plants require significant amounts of energy, so having access to enough low-carbon energy is critical. Likewise, having nearby options for storing the removed CO₂ is also critical. If storage sites or pipelines to such sites don’t exist, major new infrastructure will need to be built, and building new infrastructure of any kind is expensive and complicated, involving issues related to permitting, environmental justice, and public acceptability — issues that are, in the words of the researchers, “commonly underestimated in the real world and neglected in models.”

Two more siting needs must be considered. First, meteorological conditions must be acceptable. By definition, any DAC unit will be exposed to the elements, and factors like temperature and humidity will affect process performance and process availability. And second, a DAC plant will require some dedicated land — though how much is unclear, as the optimal spacing of units is as yet unresolved. Like wind turbines, DAC units need to be properly spaced to ensure maximum performance such that one unit is not sucking in CO₂-depleted air from another unit.

Challenge 4: Cost

Considering the first three challenges, the final challenge is clear: the cost per tonne of CO₂ removed is inevitably high. Recent modeling studies assume DAC costs as low as $100 to $200 per ton of CO₂ removed. But the researchers found evidence suggesting far higher costs.

To start, they cite typical costs for power plants and industrial sites that now use CCS to remove CO₂ from their flue gases. The cost of CCS in such applications is estimated to be in the range of $50 to $150 per ton of CO₂ removed. As explained above, the far lower concentration of CO₂ in the air will lead to substantially higher costs.

As explained under Challenge 1, the DAC units needed to capture the required amount of air are massive. The capital cost of building them will be high, given labor, materials, permitting costs, and so on. Some estimates in the literature exceed $5,000 per tonne captured per year.

Then there are the ongoing costs of energy. As noted under Challenge 2, removing 1 tonne of CO₂ requires the equivalent of 1.2 megawatt-hours of electricity. If that electricity costs $0.10 per kilowatt-hour, the cost of just the electricity needed to remove 1 tonne of CO₂ is $120. The researchers point out that assuming such a low price is “questionable,” given the expected increase in electricity demand, future competition for clean energy, and higher costs on a system dominated by renewable — but intermittent — energy sources.

Then there’s the cost of storage, which is ignored in many DAC cost estimates.

Clearly, many considerations show that prices of $100 to $200 per tonne are unrealistic, and assuming such low prices will distort assessments of strategies, leading them to underperform going forward.

The bottom line

In their paper, the MITEI team calls DAC a “very seductive concept.” Using DAC to suck CO₂ out of the air and generate high-quality carbon-removal credits can offset reduction requirements for industries that have hard-to-abate emissions. By doing so, DAC would minimize disruptions to key parts of the world’s economy, including air travel, certain carbon-intensive industries, and agriculture. However, the world would need to generate billions of tonnes of CO₂ credits at an affordable price. That prospect doesn’t look likely. The largest DAC plant in operation today removes just 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year, and the price to buy the company’s carbon-removal credits on the market today is $1,500 per tonne.

The researchers recognize that there is room for energy efficiency improvements in the future, but DAC units will always be subject to higher work requirements than CCS applied to power plant or industrial flue gases, and there is not a clear pathway to reducing work requirements much below the levels of current DAC technologies.

Nevertheless, the researchers recommend that work to develop DAC continue “because it may be needed for meeting net-zero emissions goals, especially given the current pace of emissions.” But their paper concludes with this warning: “Given the high stakes of climate change, it is foolhardy to rely on DAC to be the hero that comes to our rescue.”

Penn fourth-year Om Gandhi, from Barrington, Illinois, has been awarded a 2025 Rhodes Scholarship, which funds tuition and a living stipendfor graduate study at the University of Oxford in England. He is among 32 American Rhodes Scholars, and an expected 100 worldwide.

Brie Gettleson speaks about her role as a subject librarian with the Penn Libraries and liaison for the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies.

Inspired by the way that squids use jets to propel themselves through the ocean and shoot ink clouds, researchers from MIT and Novo Nordisk have developed an ingestible capsule that releases a burst of drugs directly into the wall of the stomach or other organs of the digestive tract.

This capsule could offer an alternative way to deliver drugs that normally have to be injected, such as insulin and other large proteins, including antibodies. This needle-free strategy could also be used to deliver RNA, either as a vaccine or a therapeutic molecule to treat diabetes, obesity, and other metabolic disorders.

“One of the longstanding challenges that we’ve been exploring is the development of systems that enable the oral delivery of macromolecules that usually require an injection to be administered. This work represents one of the next major advances in that progression,” says Giovanni Traverso, director of the Laboratory for Translational Engineering and an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an associate member of the Broad Institute, and the senior author of the study.

Traverso and his students at MIT developed the new capsule along with researchers at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Novo Nordisk. Graham Arrick SM ’20 and Novo Nordisk scientists Drago Sticker and Aghiad Ghazal are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature.

Inspired by cephalopods

Drugs that consist of large proteins or RNA typically can’t be taken orally because they are easily broken down in the digestive tract. For several years, Traverso’s lab has been working on ways to deliver such drugs orally by encapsulating them in small devices that protect the drugs from degradation and then inject them directly into the lining of the digestive tract.

Most of these capsules use a small needle or set of microneedles to deliver drugs once the device arrives in the digestive tract. In the new study, Traverso and his colleagues wanted to explore ways to deliver these molecules without any kind of needle, which could reduce the possibility of any damage to the tissue.

To achieve that, they took inspiration from cephalopods. Squids and octopuses can propel themselves by filling their mantle cavity with water, then rapidly expelling it through their siphon. By changing the force of water expulsion and pointing the siphon in different directions, the animals can control their speed and direction of travel. The siphon organ also allows cephalopods to shoot jets of ink, forming decoy clouds to distract predators.

The researchers came up with two ways to mimic this jetting action, using compressed carbon dioxide or tightly coiled springs to generate the force needed to propel liquid drugs out of the capsule. The gas or spring is kept in a compressed state by a carbohydrate trigger, which is designed to dissolve when exposed to humidity or an acidic environment such as the stomach. When the trigger dissolves, the gas or spring is allowed to expand, propelling a jet of drugs out of the capsule.

In a series of experiments using tissue from the digestive tract, the researchers calculated the pressures needed to expel the drugs with enough force that they would penetrate the submucosal tissue and accumulate there, creating a depot that would then release drugs into the tissue.

“Aside from the elimination of sharps, another potential advantage of high-velocity columnated jets is their robustness to localization issues. In contrast to a small needle, which needs to have intimate contact with the tissue, our experiments indicated that a jet may be able to deliver most of the dose from a distance or at a slight angle,” Arrick says.

The researchers also designed the capsules so that they can target different parts of the digestive tract. One version of the capsule, which has a flat bottom and a high dome, can sit on a surface, such as the lining of the stomach, and eject drug downward into the tissue. This capsule, which was inspired by previous research from Traverso’s lab on self-orienting capsules, is about the size of a blueberry and can carry 80 microliters of drug.

The second version has a tube-like shape that allows it to align itself within a long tubular organ such as the esophagus or small intestine. In that case, the drug is ejected out toward the side wall, rather than downward. This version can deliver 200 microliters of drug.

Made of metal and plastic, the capsules can pass through the digestive tract and are excreted after releasing their drug payload.

Needle-free drug delivery

In tests in animals, the researchers showed that they could use these capsules to deliver insulin, a GLP-1 receptor agonist similar to the diabetes drug Ozempic, and a type of RNA called short interfering RNA (siRNA). This type of RNA can be used to silence genes, making it potentially useful in treating many genetic disorders.

They also showed that the concentration of the drugs in the animals’ bloodstream reached levels on the same order of magnitude as those seen when the drugs were injected with a syringe, and they did not detect any tissue damage.

The researchers envision that the ingestible capsule could be used at home by patients who need to take insulin or other injected drugs frequently. In addition to making it easier to administer drugs, especially for patients who don’t like needles, this approach also eliminates the need to dispose of sharp needles. The researchers also created and tested a version of the device that could be attached to an endoscope, allowing doctors to use it in an endoscopy suite or operating room to deliver drugs to a patient.

“This technology is a significant leap forward in oral drug delivery of macromolecule drugs like insulin and GLP-1 agonists. While many approaches for oral drug delivery have been attempted in the past, they tend to be poorly efficient in achieving high bioavailability. Here, the researchers demonstrate the ability to deliver bioavailability in animal models with high efficiency. This is an exciting approach which could be impactful for many biologics which are currently administered through injections or intravascular infusions,” says Omid Veiseh, a professor of bioengineering at Rice University, who was not involved in the research.

The researchers now plan to further develop the capsules, in hopes of testing them in humans.

The research was funded by Novo Nordisk, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the U.S. Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.

In developing a familial and inclusive residential community, inclusiveness has been a key theme at Pioneer House (PH) since its inception in 2017 as a new housing model at NUS centred on proactive pastoral care and mentoring. As such, PH adopts various academic approaches to nurture togetherness and warmth amongst its residents – students who hail from different academic years, as well as cultural and ethnic backgrounds.

Since August 2024 (Semester 1, Academic Year 2024/2025), a pioneering group of ten students has taken this theme of fostering inclusiveness a step further by ‘formalising’ their initiatives to engage the international student community at PH. They embarked on a ‘Design-Your-Own-Course’ (DYOC) – an academic scheme at NUS which allows students the opportunities to pursue self-directed learning beyond their disciplines, through avenues such as engaging relevant subject matter experts at the University. While PH has consistently organised programmes and initiatives to engage its international student community, this step marks the first time it has been carried out through a DYOC framework.

Melding academia and application

The idea for a DYOC was mooted by team leader Nikol Goh (Year 2, Psychology), who wanted to do something meaningful in community building. Fueled by the determination to see the idea come to fruition, the initial team of four she pulled together managed to complete a quick recruitment via spreading the word and social media channels, eventually growing to a group of 10. They creatively named themselves PHamigo, tagging PH’s acronym to the word amigo which means ‘friend’ in Spanish.

Together with their mentors, PH Resident Fellows Dr Andi Sudjana Putra, Senior Lecturer at the College of Design and Engineering, and Associate Professor Wilson Tam, Deputy Head (Research) at NUS Nursing, the students formulated the intended learning outcomes through application of Bloom’s Taxonomy, an educational framework which categorises learning outcomes into seven ascending levels of thinking. Of the four intended learning outcomes from DYOC, evaluation of the community development journey required the PHamigo team to apply the sixth of seven levels of higher order learning, stretching the students' thinking.

“I was so proud that the students took charge of their own learning through DYOC. For example, the students themselves proposed the use of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) in framing their project,” said Dr Andi, referring to the strategy for community development that focuses on identifying and using a community's existing assets to improve the community.

“Many times, the student discussions during the sessions were so rigorous that I did not have to intervene much! It was very heartwarming to witness students being fully immersed in their learning,” Dr Andi enthused.

In terms of activity planning, which was one of the deliverables of DYOC, the students planned for events, tours and hands-on experiences for local and international students alike to explore cultures, cuisines, and landmarks​ of Singapore. During the student-organised tours affectionately called OpenJio, drawing from the colloquial term for an all-inclusive invitation to an activity, the PHamigo team led students on fortnightly visits to events such as the Singapore Light Festival and the Formula 1 Singapore night race, as well as to prominent local landmarks such as Parliament House, the Istana, and the Merlion.

International students also had the chance to experience Singapore’s local childhood games, such as the time-honoured pastime of flipping country erasers. And not to be omitted in a country with an identity rooted in culinary appreciation, students also introduced cuisines from their respective cultures to each other, which they would not have had the chance to try if not for the PHamigo programme.

These activities spanning across the semester were especially valuable in helping international students, most of whom may not have been in Singapore during the orientation season before the start of the academic year, stay plugged into the community.

Elevating community development

To cap off a fulfilling semester of hard work, the PHamigo team also organised a large Batik painting activity on 17 and 19 October 2024. In addition to 40 students, the event also saw the participation of seven members of PH’s housekeeping staff. It was a way for the students to express their gratitude to the staff, who have worked quietly behind the scenes to maintain the cleanliness at PH. It was a serendipitous culmination of many different initiatives which melded together seamlessly – from PHamigo’s framework to elevate community development in their penultimate activity for the semester, to a group of international students who were introduced to batik, to other students who wanted to bring the housekeeping team at PH on an outing.

“We wanted to emphasise the idea that ‘community’ in PH is not only students, but also staff, including the housekeeping team, whom we are grateful for. We wanted to appreciate them as part of PH for all the work that they have done,” Nikol reflected.

“The students originally wanted to bring the housekeeping team on an outing. However, after speaking with them, we realised the challenges in doing so due to their working hours and commitments. Some also had mobility issues, making moving around difficult for them. It was then we learnt that what we think they need, may not be what they actually need,” Nikol added, sharing that this led the team to decide to hold the activity in PH instead.

In additional to its cultural relevance and roots in Southeast Asia, the application of batik creation also tapped on the concept of ABCD that framed the DYOC, such as a group of students keen to introduce it to the community, and the knowledge drawn from previous cluster activities that many fellow students at PH have artistic talents in drawing. The batik workshop was received positively by local and international students, some who found it therapeutic and stress-relieving.

Reflecting on the experience with PHamigo, Nguyen Ky Minh, a first-year international student from Vietnam. “I found PHamigo a very useful and fascinating exercise in cultural exploration. I especially enjoyed the OpenJio walks around Singapore, which helped us learn more about facets of the Singaporean cultural mosaic that we probably would have never encountered on our own. I certainly second the continuation of this initiative, which will undoubtedly complement PH residents’ time in Singapore.”

“I think many students possess theoretical knowledge of community development. However, from its application in PH through DYOC, it was fulfilling to witness how the activities based on the concept were so enthusiastically accepted by the community, and it left me impressed by how many lives the activities have touched,” said Nikol.

Registrations for the next PHamigo DYOC, which will take place next semester, have opened, and the community eagerly looks forward to more activities in their experience of living, learning, and growing together.

By Pioneer House

A US$1.5 million gift from the Colossal Foundation, a non-profit organisation established by Colossal Biosciences, will help researchers in the Faculty of Science develop new approaches to the conservation of bird species in Australia and around the world.

The Doherty Council has today confirmed Professor Sharon Lewin AO has been reappointedDirector of the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity (Doherty Institute) foranother term.

On Nov. 15, eight distinguished alumni will receive Awards of Merit, the Alumni Social Impact Award, and the Creative Spirit Award, and André Dombrowski will receive the Faculty Award of Merit.

In April 2019, a group of astronomers from around the globe stunned the world when they revealed the first image of a black hole — the monstrous accumulation of collapsed stars and gas that lets nothing escape, not even light. The image, which was of the black hole that sits at the core of a galaxy called Messier 87 (M87), revealed glowing gas around the center of the black hole. In March 2021, the same team produced yet another stunning image that showed the polarization of light around the black hole, revealing its magnetic field.

The "camera" that took both images is the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), which is not one singular instrument but rather a collection of radio telescopes situated around the globe that work together to create high-resolution images by combining data from each individual telescope. Now, scientists are looking to extend the EHT into space to get an even sharper look at M87's black hole. But producing the sharpest images in the history of astronomy presents a challenge: transmitting the telescope's massive dataset back to Earth for processing. A small but powerful laser communications (lasercom) payload developed at MIT Lincoln Laboratory operates at the high data rates needed to image the aspects of interest of the black hole.   

Extending baseline distances into space

The EHT created the two existing images of M87's black hole via interferometry — specifically, very long-baseline interferometry. Interferometry works by collecting light in the form of radio waves simultaneously with multiple telescopes in separate places on the globe and then comparing the phase difference of the radio waves at the various locations in order to pinpoint the direction of the source. By taking measurements with different combinations of the telescopes around the planet, the EHT collaboration — which included staff members at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) and MIT Haystack Observatory — essentially created an Earth-sized telescope in order to image the incredibly faint black hole 55 million light-years away from Earth.

With interferometry, the bigger the telescope, the better the resolution of the image. Therefore, in order to focus in on even finer characteristics of these black holes, a bigger instrument is needed. Details that astronomers hope to resolve include the turbulence of the gas falling into a black hole (which drives the accumulation of matter onto the black hole through a process called accretion) and a black hole's shadow (which could be used to help pin down where the jet coming from M87 is drawing its energy from). The ultimate goal is to observe a photon ring (the place where light orbits closest before escaping) around the black hole. Capturing an image of the photon ring would enable scientists to put Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity to the test.

With Earth-based telescopes, the farthest that two telescopes could be from one another is on opposite sides of the Earth, or about 13,000 kilometers apart. In addition to this maximum baseline distance, Earth-based instruments are limited by the atmosphere, which makes observing shorter wavelengths difficult. Earth's atmospheric limitations can be overcome by extending the EHT's baselines and putting at least one of the telescopes in space, which is exactly what the proposed CfA-led Black Hole Explorer (BHEX) mission aims to do.

One of the most significant challenges that comes with this space-based concept is transfer of information. The dataset to produce the first EHT image was so massive (totaling 4 petabytes) that the data had to be put on disks and shipped to a facility for processing. Gathering information from a telescope in orbit would be even more difficult; the team would need a system that can downlink data from the space telescope to Earth at approximately 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) in order to image the desired aspects of the black hole.

Enter TBIRD

Here is where Lincoln Laboratory comes in. In May 2023, the laboratory's TeraByte InfraRed Delivery (TBIRD) lasercom payload achieved the fastest data transfer from space, transmitting at a rate of 200 Gbps — which is 1,000 times faster than typical satellite communication systems — from low Earth orbit (LEO).

"We developed a novel technology for high-volume data transport from space to ground," says Jade Wang, assistant leader of the laboratory's Optical and Quantum Communications Group. "In the process of developing that technology, we looked for collaborations and other potential follow-on missions that could leverage this unprecedented data capability. The BHEX is one such mission. These high data rates will enable scientists to image the photon ring structure of a black hole for the first time."

A lasercom team led by Wang, in partnership with the CfA, is developing the long-distance, high-rate downlink needed for the BHEX mission in middle Earth orbit (MEO).

"Laser communications is completely upending our expectations for what astrophysical discoveries are possible from space," says CfA astrophysicist Michael Johnson, principal investigator for the BHEX mission. "In the next decade, this incredible new technology will bring us to the edge of a black hole, creating a window into the region where our current understanding of physics breaks down."

Though TBIRD is incredibly powerful, the technology needs some modifications to support the higher orbit that BHEX requires for its science mission. The small TBIRD payload (CubeSat) will be upgraded to a larger aperture size and higher transmit power. In addition, the TBIRD automatic request protocol — the error-control mechanism for ensuring data make it to Earth without loss due to atmospheric effects — will be adjusted to account for the longer round-trip times that come with a mission in MEO. Finally, the TBIRD LEO "buffer and burst" architecture for data delivery will shift to a streaming approach.

"With TBIRD and other lasercom missions, we have demonstrated that the lasercom technology for such an impactful science mission is available today," Wang says. "Having the opportunity to contribute to an area of really interesting scientific discovery is an exciting prospect."

The BHEX mission concept has been in development since 2019. Technical and concept studies for BHEX have been supported by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the Internal Research and Development program at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Arizona, and the ULVAC-Hayashi Seed Fund from the MIT-Japan Program at MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives. BHEX studies of lasercom have been supported by Fred Ehrsam and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. 

Anoushka Bose ’20 spent the summer of 2018 as an MIT Washington program intern, applying her nuclear physics education to arms control research with a D.C. nuclear policy think tank.

“It’s crazy how much three months can transform people,” says Bose, now an attorney at the Department of Justice.

“Suddenly, I was learning far more than I had expected about treaties, nuclear arms control, and foreign relations,” adds Bose. “But once I was hooked, I couldn’t be stopped as that summer sparked a much broader interest in diplomacy and set me on a different path.”

Bose is one of hundreds of MIT undergraduates whose academic and career trajectories were influenced by their time in the nation’s capital as part of the internship program.

Leah Nichols ’00 is a former D.C. intern, and now executive director of George Mason University’s Institute for a Sustainable Earth. In 1998, Nichols worked in the office of U.S. Senator Max Baucus, D-Mont., developing options for protecting open space on private land.

“I really started to see how science and policy needed to interact in order to solve environmental challenges,” she says. “I’ve actually been working at that interface between science and policy ever since.”

Marking its 30th anniversary this year, the MIT Washington Summer Internship Program has shaped the lives of alumni, and expanded MIT’s capital in the capital city.

Bose believes the MIT Washington summer internship is more vital than ever.

“This program helps steer more technical expertise, analytical thinking, and classic MIT innovation into policy spaces to make them better-informed and better equipped to solve challenges,” she says. With so much at stake, she suggests, it is increasingly important “to invest in bringing the MIT mindset of extreme competence as well as resilience to D.C.”

MIT missionaries

Over the past three decades, students across MIT — whether studying aeronautics or nuclear engineering, management or mathematics, chemistry or computer science — have competed for and won an MIT Washington summer internship. Many describe it as a springboard into high-impact positions in politics, public policy, and the private sector.

The program was launched in 1994 by Charles Stewart III, the Kenan Sahin (1963) Distinguished Professor of Political Science, who still serves as the director.

“The idea 30 years ago was to make this a bit of a missionary program, where we demonstrate to Washington the utility of having MIT students around for things they’re doing,” says Stewart. “MIT’s reputation benefits because our students are unpretentious, down-to-earth, interested in how the world actually works, and dedicated to fixing things that are broken.”

The outlines of the program have remained much the same: A cohort of 15 to 20 students is selected from a pool of fall applicants. With the help of MIT’s Washington office, the students are matched with potential supervisors in search of technical and scientific talent. They travel in the spring to meet potential supervisors and receive a stipend and housing for the summer. In the fall, students take a course that Stewart describes as an “Oxbridge-type tutorial, where they contextualize their experiences and reflect on the political context of the place where they worked.”

Stewart remains as enthusiastic about the internship program as when he started and has notions for building on its foundations. His wish list includes running the program at other times of the year, and for longer durations. “Six months would really change and deepen the experience,” he says. He envisions a real-time tutorial while the students are in Washington. And he would like to draw more students from the data science world. “Part of the goal of this program is to hook non-obvious people into knowledge of the public policy realm,” he says.

Prized in Washington

MIT Vice Provost Philip Khoury, who helped get the program off the ground, praised Stewart’s vision for developing the initial idea.

“Charles understood why science- and technology-oriented students would be great beneficiaries of an experience in Washington and had something to contribute that other internship program students would not be able to do because of their prowess, their prodigious abilities in the technology-engineering-science world,” says Khoury.

Khoury adds that the program has benefited both the host organizations and the students.

“Members of Congress and senior staff who were developing policies prized MIT students, because they were powerful thinkers and workaholics, and students in the program learned that they really mattered to adults in Washington, wherever they went.”

David Goldston, director of the MIT Washington Office, says government is “kind of desperate for people who understand science and technology.” One example: The National Institute of Standards and Technology has launched an artificial intelligence safety division that is “almost begging for students to help conduct research and carry out the ever-expanding mission of worrying about AI issues,” he says.

Holly Krambeck ’06 MST/MCP, program manager of the World Bank Data Lab, can attest to this impact. She hired her first MIT summer intern, Chae Won Lee, in 2013, to analyze road crash data from the Philippines. “Her findings were so striking, we invited her to join the team on a mission to present her work to the government,” says Krambeck.

Subsequent interns have helped the World Bank demonstrate effective, low-cost, transit-fare collection systems; identify houses eligible for hurricane protection retrofits under World Bank loans; and analyze heatwave patterns in the Philippines to inform a lending program for mitigation measures.

“Every year, I’ve been so impressed by the maturity, energy, willingness to learn new skills, and curiosity of the MIT students,” says Krambeck. “At the end of each summer, we ask students to present their projects to World Bank staff, who are invariably amazed to learn that these are undergraduates and not PhD candidates!”

Career springboard

“It absolutely changed my career pathway,” says Samuel Rodarte Jr. ’13, a 2011 program alumnus who interned at the MIT Washington Office, where he tracked congressional hearings related to research at the Institute. Today, he serves as a legislative assistant to Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer. An aerospace engineering and Latin American studies double major, Rodarte says the opportunity to experience policymaking from the inside came “at just the right time, when I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do post-MIT.”

Miranda Priebe ’03 is director of the Center for Analysis of U.S. Grand Strategy for the Rand Corp. She briefs groups within the Pentagon, the U.S. Department of State, and the National Security Council, among others. “My job is to ask the big question: Does the United States have the right approach in the world in terms of advancing our interests with our capabilities and resources?”

Priebe was a physics major with an evolving interest in political science when she arrived in Washington in 2001 to work in the office of Senator Carl Levin, D-Mich., the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee. “I was working really hard at MIT, but just hadn’t found my passion until I did this internship,” she says. “Once I came to D.C. I saw all the places I could fit in using my analytical skills — there were a million things I wanted to do — and the internship convinced me that this was the right kind of work for me.”

During her internship in 2022, Anushree Chaudhuri ’24, urban studies and planning and economics major, worked in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office, where she hoped to experience day-to-day life in a federal agency — with an eye toward a career in high-level policymaking. She developed a web app to help local governments determine which census tracts qualified for environmental justice funds.

“I was pleasantly surprised to see that even as a lower-level civil servant you can make change if you know how to work within the system.” Chaudhuri is now a Marshall Scholar, pursuing a PhD at the University of Oxford on the socioeconomic impacts of energy infrastructure. “I’m pretty sure I want to work in the policy space long term,” she says.

A crowd gathered at the MIT Media Lab in September for a concert by musician Jordan Rudess and two collaborators. One of them, violinist and vocalist Camilla Bäckman, has performed with Rudess before. The other — an artificial intelligence model informally dubbed the jam_bot, which Rudess developed with an MIT team over the preceding several months — was making its public debut as a work in progress.

Throughout the show, Rudess and Bäckman exchanged the signals and smiles of experienced musicians finding a groove together. Rudess’ interactions with the jam_bot suggested a different and unfamiliar kind of exchange. During one duet inspired by Bach, Rudess alternated between playing a few measures and allowing the AI to continue the music in a similar baroque style. Each time the model took its turn, a range of expressions moved across Rudess’ face: bemusement, concentration, curiosity. At the end of the piece, Rudess admitted to the audience, “That is a combination of a whole lot of fun and really, really challenging.”

Rudess is an acclaimed keyboardist — the best of all time, according to one Music Radar magazine poll — known for his work with the platinum-selling, Grammy-winning progressive metal band Dream Theater, which embarks this fall on a 40th anniversary tour. He is also a solo artist whose latest album, “Permission to Fly,” was released on Sept. 6; an educator who shares his skills through detailed online tutorials; and the founder of software company Wizdom Music. His work combines a rigorous classical foundation (he began his piano studies at The Juilliard School at age 9) with a genius for improvisation and an appetite for experimentation.

Last spring, Rudess became a visiting artist with the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), collaborating with the MIT Media Lab’s Responsive Environments research group on the creation of new AI-powered music technology. Rudess’ main collaborators in the enterprise are Media Lab graduate students Lancelot Blanchard, who researches musical applications of generative AI (informed by his own studies in classical piano), and Perry Naseck, an artist and engineer specializing in interactive, kinetic, light- and time-based media. Overseeing the project is Professor Joseph Paradiso, head of the Responsive Environments group and a longtime Rudess fan. Paradiso arrived at the Media Lab in 1994 with a CV in physics and engineering and a sideline designing and building synthesizers to explore his avant-garde musical tastes. His group has a tradition of investigating musical frontiers through novel user interfaces, sensor networks, and unconventional datasets.

The researchers set out to develop a machine learning model channeling Rudess’ distinctive musical style and technique. In a paper published online by MIT Press in September, co-authored with MIT music technology professor Eran Egozy, they articulate their vision for what they call “symbiotic virtuosity:” for human and computer to duet in real-time, learning from each duet they perform together, and making performance-worthy new music in front of a live audience.

Rudess contributed the data on which Blanchard trained the AI model. Rudess also provided continuous testing and feedback, while Naseck experimented with ways of visualizing the technology for the audience.

“Audiences are used to seeing lighting, graphics, and scenic elements at many concerts, so we needed a platform to allow the AI to build its own relationship with the audience,” Naseck says. In early demos, this took the form of a sculptural installation with illumination that shifted each time the AI changed chords. During the concert on Sept. 21, a grid of petal-shaped panels mounted behind Rudess came to life through choreography based on the activity and future generation of the AI model.

“If you see jazz musicians make eye contact and nod at each other, that gives anticipation to the audience of what’s going to happen,” says Naseck. “The AI is effectively generating sheet music and then playing it. How do we show what’s coming next and communicate that?”

Naseck designed and programmed the structure from scratch at the Media Lab with assistance from Brian Mayton (mechanical design) and Carlo Mandolini (fabrication), drawing some of its movements from an experimental machine learning model developed by visiting student Madhav Lavakare that maps music to points moving in space. With the ability to spin and tilt its petals at speeds ranging from subtle to dramatic, the kinetic sculpture distinguished the AI’s contributions during the concert from those of the human performers, while conveying the emotion and energy of its output: swaying gently when Rudess took the lead, for example, or furling and unfurling like a blossom as the AI model generated stately chords for an improvised adagio. The latter was one of Naseck’s favorite moments of the show.

“At the end, Jordan and Camilla left the stage and allowed the AI to fully explore its own direction,” he recalls. “The sculpture made this moment very powerful — it allowed the stage to remain animated and intensified the grandiose nature of the chords the AI played. The audience was clearly captivated by this part, sitting at the edges of their seats.”

“The goal is to create a musical visual experience,” says Rudess, “to show what’s possible and to up the game.”

Musical futures

As the starting point for his model, Blanchard used a music transformer, an open-source neural network architecture developed by MIT Assistant Professor Anna Huang SM ’08, who joined the MIT faculty in September.

“Music transformers work in a similar way as large language models,” Blanchard explains. “The same way that ChatGPT would generate the most probable next word, the model we have would predict the most probable next notes.”

Blanchard fine-tuned the model using Rudess’ own playing of elements from bass lines to chords to melodies, variations of which Rudess recorded in his New York studio. Along the way, Blanchard ensured the AI would be nimble enough to respond in real-time to Rudess’ improvisations.

“We reframed the project,” says Blanchard, “in terms of musical futures that were hypothesized by the model and that were only being realized at the moment based on what Jordan was deciding.”

As Rudess puts it: “How can the AI respond — how can I have a dialogue with it? That’s the cutting-edge part of what we’re doing.”

Another priority emerged: “In the field of generative AI and music, you hear about startups like Suno or Udio that are able to generate music based on text prompts. Those are very interesting, but they lack controllability,” says Blanchard. “It was important for Jordan to be able to anticipate what was going to happen. If he could see the AI was going to make a decision he didn’t want, he could restart the generation or have a kill switch so that he can take control again.”

In addition to giving Rudess a screen previewing the musical decisions of the model, Blanchard built in different modalities the musician could activate as he plays — prompting the AI to generate chords or lead melodies, for example, or initiating a call-and-response pattern.

“Jordan is the mastermind of everything that’s happening,” he says.

What would Jordan do

Though the residency has wrapped up, the collaborators see many paths for continuing the research. For example, Naseck would like to experiment with more ways Rudess could interact directly with his installation, through features like capacitive sensing. “We hope in the future we’ll be able to work with more of his subtle motions and posture,” Naseck says.

While the MIT collaboration focused on how Rudess can use the tool to augment his own performances, it’s easy to imagine other applications. Paradiso recalls an early encounter with the tech: “I played a chord sequence, and Jordan’s model was generating the leads. It was like having a musical ‘bee’ of Jordan Rudess buzzing around the melodic foundation I was laying down, doing something like Jordan would do, but subject to the simple progression I was playing,” he recalls, his face echoing the delight he felt at the time. “You're going to see AI plugins for your favorite musician that you can bring into your own compositions, with some knobs that let you control the particulars,” he posits. “It’s that kind of world we’re opening up with this.”

Rudess is also keen to explore educational uses. Because the samples he recorded to train the model were similar to ear-training exercises he’s used with students, he thinks the model itself could someday be used for teaching. “This work has legs beyond just entertainment value,” he says.

The foray into artificial intelligence is a natural progression for Rudess’ interest in music technology. “This is the next step,” he believes. When he discusses the work with fellow musicians, however, his enthusiasm for AI often meets with resistance. “I can have sympathy or compassion for a musician who feels threatened, I totally get that,” he allows. “But my mission is to be one of the people who moves this technology toward positive things.”

“At the Media Lab, it’s so important to think about how AI and humans come together for the benefit of all,” says Paradiso. “How is AI going to lift us all up? Ideally it will do what so many technologies have done — bring us into another vista where we’re more enabled.”

“Jordan is ahead of the pack,” Paradiso adds. “Once it’s established with him, people will follow.”

Jamming with MIT

The Media Lab first landed on Rudess’ radar before his residency because he wanted to try out the Knitted Keyboard created by another member of Responsive Environments, textile researcher Irmandy Wickasono PhD ’24. From that moment on, “It's been a discovery for me, learning about the cool things that are going on at MIT in the music world,” Rudess says.

During two visits to Cambridge last spring (assisted by his wife, theater and music producer Danielle Rudess), Rudess reviewed final projects in Paradiso’s course on electronic music controllers, the syllabus for which included videos of his own past performances. He brought a new gesture-driven synthesizer called Osmose to a class on interactive music systems taught by Egozy, whose credits include the co-creation of the video game “Guitar Hero.” Rudess also provided tips on improvisation to a composition class; played GeoShred, a touchscreen musical instrument he co-created with Stanford University researchers, with student musicians in the MIT Laptop Ensemble and Arts Scholars program; and experienced immersive audio in the MIT Spatial Sound Lab. During his most recent trip to campus in September, he taught a masterclass for pianists in MIT’s Emerson/Harris Program, which provides a total of 67 scholars and fellows with support for conservatory-level musical instruction.

“I get a kind of rush whenever I come to the university,” Rudess says. “I feel the sense that, wow, all of my musical ideas and inspiration and interests have come together in this really cool way.”

For roboticists, one challenge towers above all others: generalization — the ability to create machines that can adapt to any environment or condition. Since the 1970s, the field has evolved from writing sophisticated programs to using deep learning, teaching robots to learn directly from human behavior. But a critical bottleneck remains: data quality. To improve, robots need to encounter scenarios that push the boundaries of their capabilities, operating at the edge of their mastery. This process traditionally requires human oversight, with operators carefully challenging robots to expand their abilities. As robots become more sophisticated, this hands-on approach hits a scaling problem: the demand for high-quality training data far outpaces humans’ ability to provide it.

Now, a team of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers has developed a novel approach to robot training that could significantly accelerate the deployment of adaptable, intelligent machines in real-world environments. The new system, called “LucidSim,” uses recent advances in generative AI and physics simulators to create diverse and realistic virtual training environments, helping robots achieve expert-level performance in difficult tasks without any real-world data.

LucidSim combines physics simulation with generative AI models, addressing one of the most persistent challenges in robotics: transferring skills learned in simulation to the real world. “A fundamental challenge in robot learning has long been the ‘sim-to-real gap’ — the disparity between simulated training environments and the complex, unpredictable real world,” says MIT CSAIL postdoc Ge Yang, a lead researcher on LucidSim. “Previous approaches often relied on depth sensors, which simplified the problem but missed crucial real-world complexities.”

The multipronged system is a blend of different technologies. At its core, LucidSim uses large language models to generate various structured descriptions of environments. These descriptions are then transformed into images using generative models. To ensure that these images reflect real-world physics, an underlying physics simulator is used to guide the generation process.

The birth of an idea: From burritos to breakthroughs

The inspiration for LucidSim came from an unexpected place: a conversation outside Beantown Taqueria in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ​​“We wanted to teach vision-equipped robots how to improve using human feedback. But then, we realized we didn’t have a pure vision-based policy to begin with,” says Alan Yu, an undergraduate student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT and co-lead author on LucidSim. “We kept talking about it as we walked down the street, and then we stopped outside the taqueria for about half-an-hour. That’s where we had our moment.”

To cook up their data, the team generated realistic images by extracting depth maps, which provide geometric information, and semantic masks, which label different parts of an image, from the simulated scene. They quickly realized, however, that with tight control on the composition of the image content, the model would produce similar images that weren’t different from each other using the same prompt. So, they devised a way to source diverse text prompts from ChatGPT.

This approach, however, only resulted in a single image. To make short, coherent videos that serve as little “experiences” for the robot, the scientists hacked together some image magic into another novel technique the team created, called “Dreams In Motion.” The system computes the movements of each pixel between frames, to warp a single generated image into a short, multi-frame video. Dreams In Motion does this by considering the 3D geometry of the scene and the relative changes in the robot’s perspective.

“We outperform domain randomization, a method developed in 2017 that applies random colors and patterns to objects in the environment, which is still considered the go-to method these days,” says Yu. “While this technique generates diverse data, it lacks realism. LucidSim addresses both diversity and realism problems. It’s exciting that even without seeing the real world during training, the robot can recognize and navigate obstacles in real environments.”

The team is particularly excited about the potential of applying LucidSim to domains outside quadruped locomotion and parkour, their main test bed. One example is mobile manipulation, where a mobile robot is tasked to handle objects in an open area; also, color perception is critical. “Today, these robots still learn from real-world demonstrations,” says Yang. “Although collecting demonstrations is easy, scaling a real-world robot teleoperation setup to thousands of skills is challenging because a human has to physically set up each scene. We hope to make this easier, thus qualitatively more scalable, by moving data collection into a virtual environment.”

Who's the real expert?

The team put LucidSim to the test against an alternative, where an expert teacher demonstrates the skill for the robot to learn from. The results were surprising: Robots trained by the expert struggled, succeeding only 15 percent of the time — and even quadrupling the amount of expert training data barely moved the needle. But when robots collected their own training data through LucidSim, the story changed dramatically. Just doubling the dataset size catapulted success rates to 88 percent. “And giving our robot more data monotonically improves its performance — eventually, the student becomes the expert,” says Yang.

“One of the main challenges in sim-to-real transfer for robotics is achieving visual realism in simulated environments,” says Stanford University assistant professor of electrical engineering Shuran Song, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The LucidSim framework provides an elegant solution by using generative models to create diverse, highly realistic visual data for any simulation. This work could significantly accelerate the deployment of robots trained in virtual environments to real-world tasks.”

From the streets of Cambridge to the cutting edge of robotics research, LucidSim is paving the way toward a new generation of intelligent, adaptable machines — ones that learn to navigate our complex world without ever setting foot in it.

Yu and Yang wrote the paper with four fellow CSAIL affiliates: Ran Choi, an MIT postdoc in mechanical engineering; Yajvan Ravan, an MIT undergraduate in EECS; John Leonard, the Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Phillip Isola, an MIT associate professor in EECS. Their work was supported, in part, by a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research, Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency, Amazon, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions. The researchers presented their work at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in early November.

For roboticists, one challenge towers above all others: generalization — the ability to create machines that can adapt to any environment or condition. Since the 1970s, the field has evolved from writing sophisticated programs to using deep learning, teaching robots to learn directly from human behavior. But a critical bottleneck remains: data quality. To improve, robots need to encounter scenarios that push the boundaries of their capabilities, operating at the edge of their mastery. This process traditionally requires human oversight, with operators carefully challenging robots to expand their abilities. As robots become more sophisticated, this hands-on approach hits a scaling problem: the demand for high-quality training data far outpaces humans’ ability to provide it.

Now, a team of MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers has developed a novel approach to robot training that could significantly accelerate the deployment of adaptable, intelligent machines in real-world environments. The new system, called “LucidSim,” uses recent advances in generative AI and physics simulators to create diverse and realistic virtual training environments, helping robots achieve expert-level performance in difficult tasks without any real-world data.

LucidSim combines physics simulation with generative AI models, addressing one of the most persistent challenges in robotics: transferring skills learned in simulation to the real world. “A fundamental challenge in robot learning has long been the ‘sim-to-real gap’ — the disparity between simulated training environments and the complex, unpredictable real world,” says MIT CSAIL postdoc Ge Yang, a lead researcher on LucidSim. “Previous approaches often relied on depth sensors, which simplified the problem but missed crucial real-world complexities.”

The multipronged system is a blend of different technologies. At its core, LucidSim uses large language models to generate various structured descriptions of environments. These descriptions are then transformed into images using generative models. To ensure that these images reflect real-world physics, an underlying physics simulator is used to guide the generation process.

The birth of an idea: From burritos to breakthroughs

The inspiration for LucidSim came from an unexpected place: a conversation outside Beantown Taqueria in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ​​“We wanted to teach vision-equipped robots how to improve using human feedback. But then, we realized we didn’t have a pure vision-based policy to begin with,” says Alan Yu, an undergraduate student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT and co-lead author on LucidSim. “We kept talking about it as we walked down the street, and then we stopped outside the taqueria for about half-an-hour. That’s where we had our moment.”

To cook up their data, the team generated realistic images by extracting depth maps, which provide geometric information, and semantic masks, which label different parts of an image, from the simulated scene. They quickly realized, however, that with tight control on the composition of the image content, the model would produce similar images that weren’t different from each other using the same prompt. So, they devised a way to source diverse text prompts from ChatGPT.

This approach, however, only resulted in a single image. To make short, coherent videos that serve as little “experiences” for the robot, the scientists hacked together some image magic into another novel technique the team created, called “Dreams In Motion.” The system computes the movements of each pixel between frames, to warp a single generated image into a short, multi-frame video. Dreams In Motion does this by considering the 3D geometry of the scene and the relative changes in the robot’s perspective.

“We outperform domain randomization, a method developed in 2017 that applies random colors and patterns to objects in the environment, which is still considered the go-to method these days,” says Yu. “While this technique generates diverse data, it lacks realism. LucidSim addresses both diversity and realism problems. It’s exciting that even without seeing the real world during training, the robot can recognize and navigate obstacles in real environments.”

The team is particularly excited about the potential of applying LucidSim to domains outside quadruped locomotion and parkour, their main test bed. One example is mobile manipulation, where a mobile robot is tasked to handle objects in an open area; also, color perception is critical. “Today, these robots still learn from real-world demonstrations,” says Yang. “Although collecting demonstrations is easy, scaling a real-world robot teleoperation setup to thousands of skills is challenging because a human has to physically set up each scene. We hope to make this easier, thus qualitatively more scalable, by moving data collection into a virtual environment.”

Who's the real expert?

The team put LucidSim to the test against an alternative, where an expert teacher demonstrates the skill for the robot to learn from. The results were surprising: Robots trained by the expert struggled, succeeding only 15 percent of the time — and even quadrupling the amount of expert training data barely moved the needle. But when robots collected their own training data through LucidSim, the story changed dramatically. Just doubling the dataset size catapulted success rates to 88 percent. “And giving our robot more data monotonically improves its performance — eventually, the student becomes the expert,” says Yang.

“One of the main challenges in sim-to-real transfer for robotics is achieving visual realism in simulated environments,” says Stanford University assistant professor of electrical engineering Shuran Song, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The LucidSim framework provides an elegant solution by using generative models to create diverse, highly realistic visual data for any simulation. This work could significantly accelerate the deployment of robots trained in virtual environments to real-world tasks.”

From the streets of Cambridge to the cutting edge of robotics research, LucidSim is paving the way toward a new generation of intelligent, adaptable machines — ones that learn to navigate our complex world without ever setting foot in it.

Yu and Yang wrote the paper with four fellow CSAIL affiliates: Ran Choi, an MIT postdoc in mechanical engineering; Yajvan Ravan, an MIT undergraduate in EECS; John Leonard, the Samuel C. Collins Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Phillip Isola, an MIT associate professor in EECS. Their work was supported, in part, by a Packard Fellowship, a Sloan Research Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research, Singapore’s Defence Science and Technology Agency, Amazon, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the National Science Foundation Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions. The researchers presented their work at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in early November.

Forty-six NUS researchers have been placed among the world’s most prominent researchers, based on the Highly Cited Researchers 2024 List published by data analytics firm Clarivate. This annual recognition honours researchers who have demonstrated significant and far-reaching influence in their field of research.

The Highly Cited Researchers 2024 list features NUS researchers whose publications rank in the top 1 per cent by citations for their respective fields and publication year in the Web of Science over the past decade. These NUS honourees have made significant contributions to diverse fields including, Chemistry, Clinical Medicine, Computer Science, Economics and Business, Engineering, Immunology, Materials Science, Microbiology, Neuroscience and Behaviour, Pharmacology and Toxicology, Physics, Psychiatry and Psychology and more.

This year, 6,636 researchers from 59 countries and regions have been named Highly Cited Researchers. In the list, 3,560 researchers have been recognised in specific fields and 3,326 researchers for cross-field impact, with 238 researchers being named in two or more fields.

Professor Liu Bin, NUS Deputy President (Research and Technology), said, “NUS is incredibly proud of our exceptional researchers, whose dedication to excellence and groundbreaking discoveries continue to push the frontiers of knowledge. Their meaningful contributions have had a profound impact in addressing real-world issues and paving the way towards a better future for all.”

David Pendlebury, Head of Research Analysis at the Institute for Scientific Information at Clarivate, said, “The Highly Cited Researchers list identifies and celebrates exceptional individual researchers at NUS whose significant and broad influence in their fields translates to impact in their research community. Their pioneering innovations contribute to a healthier, more sustainable and secure world. These researchers’ achievements strengthen the foundation of excellence and innovation that drives societal progress.”

The Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) at Clarivate creates a new list of Highly Cited Researchers each year based on a rolling 11-year window of citation evaluation by applying a rigorous editorial selection process to identify trusted journals in the Web of Science.

The 46 highly cited NUS researchers in their respective fields are:

A new $24.79 million project is poised to revolutionise pest management for Australian grain and vegetable growers. This initiative is a crucial step in preparing these key food production industries to reduce reliance on broad-spectrum insecticides and implement innovative strategies to manage pest populations and promote beneficial insects.

By Assoc Prof (Joint) Mythily Subramaniam from NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health

• The Straits Times, 9 November 2024, Insight, pB7

• Suria News Online, 9 November 2024

From early development to old age, cell death is a part of life. Without enough of a critical type of cell death known as apoptosis, animals wind up with too many cells, which can set the stage for cancer or autoimmune disease. But careful control is essential, because when apoptosis eliminates the wrong cells, the effects can be just as dire, helping to drive many kinds of neurodegenerative disease.

By studying the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans — which was honored with its fourth Nobel Prize last month — scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research have begun to unravel a longstanding mystery about the factors that control apoptosis: how a protein capable of preventing programmed cell death can also promote it. Their study, led by Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology at MIT, and reported Oct. 9 in the journal Science Advances, sheds light on the process of cell death in both health and disease.

“These findings, by graduate student Nolan Tucker and former graduate student, now MIT faculty colleague, Peter Reddien, have revealed that a protein interaction long thought to block apoptosis in C. elegans likely instead has the opposite effect,” says Horvitz, who is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the McGovern Institute. Horvitz shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering and characterizing the genes controlling cell death in C. elegans.

Mechanisms of cell death

Horvitz, Tucker, Reddien, and colleagues have provided foundational insights in the field of apoptosis by using C. elegans to analyze the mechanisms that drive apoptosis, as well as the mechanisms that determine how cells ensure apoptosis happens when and where it should. Unlike humans and other mammals, which depend on dozens of proteins to control apoptosis, these worms use just a few. And when things go awry, it’s easy to tell: When there’s not enough apoptosis, researchers can see that there are too many cells inside the worms’ translucent bodies. And when there’s too much, the worms lack certain biological functions or, in more extreme cases, can’t reproduce or die during embryonic development.

Work in the Horvitz lab defined the roles of many of the genes and proteins that control apoptosis in worms. These regulators proved to have counterparts in human cells, and for that reason studies of worms have helped reveal how human cells govern cell death and pointed toward potential targets for treating disease.

A protein’s dual role

Three of C. elegans’ primary regulators of apoptosis actively promote cell death, whereas just one, CED-9, reins in the apoptosis-promoting proteins to keep cells alive. As early as the 1990s, however, Horvitz and colleagues recognized that CED-9 was not exclusively a protector of cells. Their experiments indicated that the protector protein also plays a role in promoting cell death. But while researchers thought they knew how CED-9 protected against apoptosis, its pro-apoptotic role was more puzzling.

CED-9’s dual role means that mutations in the gene that encode it can impact apoptosis in multiple ways. Most ced-9 mutations interfere with the protein’s ability to protect against cell death and result in excess cell death. Conversely, mutations that abnormally activate ced-9 cause too little cell death, just like mutations that inactivate any of the three killer genes.

An atypical ced-9 mutation, identified by Reddien when he was a PhD student in Horvitz’s lab, hinted at how CED-9 promotes cell death. That mutation altered the part of the CED-9 protein that interacts with the protein CED-4, which is proapoptotic. Since the mutation specifically leads to a reduction in apoptosis, this suggested that CED-9 might need to interact with CED-4 to promote cell death.

The idea was particularly intriguing because researchers had long thought that CED-9’s interaction with CED-4 had exactly the opposite effect: In the canonical model, CED-9 anchors CED-4 to cells’ mitochondria, sequestering the CED-4 killer protein and preventing it from associating with and activating another key killer, the CED-3 protein — thereby preventing apoptosis.

To test the hypothesis that CED-9’s interactions with the killer CED-4 protein enhance apoptosis, the team needed more evidence. So graduate student Nolan Tucker used CRISPR gene editing tools to create more worms with mutations in CED-9, each one targeting a different spot in the CED-4-binding region. Then he examined the worms. “What I saw with this particular class of mutations was extra cells and viability,” he says — clear signs that the altered CED-9 was still protecting against cell death, but could no longer promote it. “Those observations strongly supported the hypothesis that the ability to bind CED-4 is needed for the pro-apoptotic function of CED-9,” Tucker explains. Their observations also suggested that, contrary to earlier thinking, CED-9 doesn’t need to bind with CED-4 to protect against apoptosis.

When he looked inside the cells of the mutant worms, Tucker found additional evidence that these mutations prevented CED-9’s ability to interact with CED-4. When both CED-9 and CED-4 are intact, CED-4 appears associated with cells’ mitochondria. But in the presence of these mutations, CED-4 was instead at the edge of the cell nucleus. CED-9’s ability to bind CED-4 to mitochondria appeared to be necessary to promote apoptosis, not to protect against it.

Looking ahead

While the team’s findings begin to explain a long-unanswered question about one of the primary regulators of apoptosis, they raise new ones, as well. “I think that this main pathway of apoptosis has been seen by a lot of people as more-or-less settled science. Our findings should change that view,” Tucker says.

The researchers see important parallels between their findings from this study of worms and what’s known about cell death pathways in mammals. The mammalian counterpart to CED-9 is a protein called BCL-2, mutations in which can lead to cancer.  BCL-2, like CED-9, can both promote and protect against apoptosis. As with CED-9, the pro-apoptotic function of BCL-2 has been mysterious. In mammals, too, mitochondria play a key role in activating apoptosis. The Horvitz lab’s discovery opens opportunities to better understand how apoptosis is regulated not only in worms but also in humans, and how dysregulation of apoptosis in humans can lead to such disorders as cancer, autoimmune disease, and neurodegeneration.

From early development to old age, cell death is a part of life. Without enough of a critical type of cell death known as apoptosis, animals wind up with too many cells, which can set the stage for cancer or autoimmune disease. But careful control is essential, because when apoptosis eliminates the wrong cells, the effects can be just as dire, helping to drive many kinds of neurodegenerative disease.

By studying the microscopic roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans — which was honored with its fourth Nobel Prize last month — scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research have begun to unravel a longstanding mystery about the factors that control apoptosis: how a protein capable of preventing programmed cell death can also promote it. Their study, led by Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology at MIT, and reported Oct. 9 in the journal Science Advances, sheds light on the process of cell death in both health and disease.

“These findings, by graduate student Nolan Tucker and former graduate student, now MIT faculty colleague, Peter Reddien, have revealed that a protein interaction long thought to block apoptosis in C. elegans likely instead has the opposite effect,” says Horvitz, who is also an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the McGovern Institute. Horvitz shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering and characterizing the genes controlling cell death in C. elegans.

Mechanisms of cell death

Horvitz, Tucker, Reddien, and colleagues have provided foundational insights in the field of apoptosis by using C. elegans to analyze the mechanisms that drive apoptosis, as well as the mechanisms that determine how cells ensure apoptosis happens when and where it should. Unlike humans and other mammals, which depend on dozens of proteins to control apoptosis, these worms use just a few. And when things go awry, it’s easy to tell: When there’s not enough apoptosis, researchers can see that there are too many cells inside the worms’ translucent bodies. And when there’s too much, the worms lack certain biological functions or, in more extreme cases, can’t reproduce or die during embryonic development.

Work in the Horvitz lab defined the roles of many of the genes and proteins that control apoptosis in worms. These regulators proved to have counterparts in human cells, and for that reason studies of worms have helped reveal how human cells govern cell death and pointed toward potential targets for treating disease.

A protein’s dual role

Three of C. elegans’ primary regulators of apoptosis actively promote cell death, whereas just one, CED-9, reins in the apoptosis-promoting proteins to keep cells alive. As early as the 1990s, however, Horvitz and colleagues recognized that CED-9 was not exclusively a protector of cells. Their experiments indicated that the protector protein also plays a role in promoting cell death. But while researchers thought they knew how CED-9 protected against apoptosis, its pro-apoptotic role was more puzzling.

CED-9’s dual role means that mutations in the gene that encode it can impact apoptosis in multiple ways. Most ced-9 mutations interfere with the protein’s ability to protect against cell death and result in excess cell death. Conversely, mutations that abnormally activate ced-9 cause too little cell death, just like mutations that inactivate any of the three killer genes.

An atypical ced-9 mutation, identified by Reddien when he was a PhD student in Horvitz’s lab, hinted at how CED-9 promotes cell death. That mutation altered the part of the CED-9 protein that interacts with the protein CED-4, which is proapoptotic. Since the mutation specifically leads to a reduction in apoptosis, this suggested that CED-9 might need to interact with CED-4 to promote cell death.

The idea was particularly intriguing because researchers had long thought that CED-9’s interaction with CED-4 had exactly the opposite effect: In the canonical model, CED-9 anchors CED-4 to cells’ mitochondria, sequestering the CED-4 killer protein and preventing it from associating with and activating another key killer, the CED-3 protein — thereby preventing apoptosis.

To test the hypothesis that CED-9’s interactions with the killer CED-4 protein enhance apoptosis, the team needed more evidence. So graduate student Nolan Tucker used CRISPR gene editing tools to create more worms with mutations in CED-9, each one targeting a different spot in the CED-4-binding region. Then he examined the worms. “What I saw with this particular class of mutations was extra cells and viability,” he says — clear signs that the altered CED-9 was still protecting against cell death, but could no longer promote it. “Those observations strongly supported the hypothesis that the ability to bind CED-4 is needed for the pro-apoptotic function of CED-9,” Tucker explains. Their observations also suggested that, contrary to earlier thinking, CED-9 doesn’t need to bind with CED-4 to protect against apoptosis.

When he looked inside the cells of the mutant worms, Tucker found additional evidence that these mutations prevented CED-9’s ability to interact with CED-4. When both CED-9 and CED-4 are intact, CED-4 appears associated with cells’ mitochondria. But in the presence of these mutations, CED-4 was instead at the edge of the cell nucleus. CED-9’s ability to bind CED-4 to mitochondria appeared to be necessary to promote apoptosis, not to protect against it.

Looking ahead

While the team’s findings begin to explain a long-unanswered question about one of the primary regulators of apoptosis, they raise new ones, as well. “I think that this main pathway of apoptosis has been seen by a lot of people as more-or-less settled science. Our findings should change that view,” Tucker says.

The researchers see important parallels between their findings from this study of worms and what’s known about cell death pathways in mammals. The mammalian counterpart to CED-9 is a protein called BCL-2, mutations in which can lead to cancer.  BCL-2, like CED-9, can both promote and protect against apoptosis. As with CED-9, the pro-apoptotic function of BCL-2 has been mysterious. In mammals, too, mitochondria play a key role in activating apoptosis. The Horvitz lab’s discovery opens opportunities to better understand how apoptosis is regulated not only in worms but also in humans, and how dysregulation of apoptosis in humans can lead to such disorders as cancer, autoimmune disease, and neurodegeneration.

MIT physicists have shown that it should be possible to create an exotic form of matter that could be manipulated to form the qubit (quantum bit) building blocks of future quantum computers that are even more powerful than the quantum computers in development today.

The work builds on a discovery last year of materials that host electrons that can split into fractions of themselves but, importantly, can do so without the application of a magnetic field. 

The general phenomenon of electron fractionalization was first discovered in 1982 and resulted in a Nobel Prize. That work, however, required the application of a magnetic field. The ability to create the fractionalized electrons without a magnetic field opens new possibilities for basic research and makes the materials hosting them more useful for applications.

When electrons split into fractions of themselves, those fractions are known as anyons. Anyons come in variety of flavors, or classes. The anyons discovered in the 2023 materials are known as Abelian anyons. Now, in a paper reported in the Oct. 17 issue of Physical Review Letters, the MIT team notes that it should be possible to create the most exotic class of anyons, non-Abelian anyons.

“Non-Abelian anyons have the bewildering capacity of ‘remembering’ their spacetime trajectories; this memory effect can be useful for quantum computing,” says Liang Fu, a professor in MIT’s Department of Physics and leader of the work. 

Fu further notes that “the 2023 experiments on electron fractionalization greatly exceeded theoretical expectations. My takeaway is that we theorists should be bolder.”

Fu is also affiliated with the MIT Materials Research Laboratory. His colleagues on the current work are graduate students Aidan P. Reddy and Nisarga Paul, and postdoc Ahmed Abouelkomsan, all of the MIT Department of Phsyics. Reddy and Paul are co-first authors of the Physical Review Letters paper.

The MIT work and two related studies were also featured in an Oct. 17 story in Physics Magazine. “If this prediction is confirmed experimentally, it could lead to more reliable quantum computers that can execute a wider range of tasks … Theorists have already devised ways to harness non-Abelian states as workable qubits and manipulate the excitations of these states to enable robust quantum computation,” writes Ryan Wilkinson.

The current work was guided by recent advances in 2D materials, or those consisting of only one or a few layers of atoms. “The whole world of two-dimensional materials is very interesting because you can stack them and twist them, and sort of play Legos with them to get all sorts of cool sandwich structures with unusual properties,” says Paul. Those sandwich structures, in turn, are called moiré materials.

Anyons can only form in two-dimensional materials. Could they form in moiré materials? The 2023 experiments were the first to show that they can. Soon afterwards, a group led by Long Ju, an MIT assistant professor of physics, reported evidence of anyons in another moiré material. (Fu and Reddy were also involved in the Ju work.)

In the current work, the physicists showed that it should be possible to create non-Abelian anyons in a moiré material composed of atomically thin layers of molybdenum ditelluride. Says Paul, “moiré materials have already revealed fascinating phases of matter in recent years, and our work shows that non-Abelian phases could be added to the list.”

Adds Reddy, “our work shows that when electrons are added at a density of 3/2 or 5/2 per unit cell, they can organize into an intriguing quantum state that hosts non-Abelian anyons.”

The work was exciting, says Reddy, in part because “oftentimes there’s subtlety in interpreting your results and what they are actually telling you. So it was fun to think through our arguments” in support of non-Abelian anyons.

Says Paul, “this project ranged from really concrete numerical calculations to pretty abstract theory and connected the two. I learned a lot from my collaborators about some very interesting topics.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The authors also acknowledge the MIT SuperCloud and Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the Simons Foundation.

MIT physicists have shown that it should be possible to create an exotic form of matter that could be manipulated to form the qubit (quantum bit) building blocks of future quantum computers that are even more powerful than the quantum computers in development today.

The work builds on a discovery last year of materials that host electrons that can split into fractions of themselves but, importantly, can do so without the application of a magnetic field. 

The general phenomenon of electron fractionalization was first discovered in 1982 and resulted in a Nobel Prize. That work, however, required the application of a magnetic field. The ability to create the fractionalized electrons without a magnetic field opens new possibilities for basic research and makes the materials hosting them more useful for applications.

When electrons split into fractions of themselves, those fractions are known as anyons. Anyons come in variety of flavors, or classes. The anyons discovered in the 2023 materials are known as Abelian anyons. Now, in a paper reported in the Oct. 17 issue of Physical Review Letters, the MIT team notes that it should be possible to create the most exotic class of anyons, non-Abelian anyons.

“Non-Abelian anyons have the bewildering capacity of ‘remembering’ their spacetime trajectories; this memory effect can be useful for quantum computing,” says Liang Fu, a professor in MIT’s Department of Physics and leader of the work. 

Fu further notes that “the 2023 experiments on electron fractionalization greatly exceeded theoretical expectations. My takeaway is that we theorists should be bolder.”

Fu is also affiliated with the MIT Materials Research Laboratory. His colleagues on the current work are graduate students Aidan P. Reddy and Nisarga Paul, and postdoc Ahmed Abouelkomsan, all of the MIT Department of Phsyics. Reddy and Paul are co-first authors of the Physical Review Letters paper.

The MIT work and two related studies were also featured in an Oct. 17 story in Physics Magazine. “If this prediction is confirmed experimentally, it could lead to more reliable quantum computers that can execute a wider range of tasks … Theorists have already devised ways to harness non-Abelian states as workable qubits and manipulate the excitations of these states to enable robust quantum computation,” writes Ryan Wilkinson.

The current work was guided by recent advances in 2D materials, or those consisting of only one or a few layers of atoms. “The whole world of two-dimensional materials is very interesting because you can stack them and twist them, and sort of play Legos with them to get all sorts of cool sandwich structures with unusual properties,” says Paul. Those sandwich structures, in turn, are called moiré materials.

Anyons can only form in two-dimensional materials. Could they form in moiré materials? The 2023 experiments were the first to show that they can. Soon afterwards, a group led by Long Ju, an MIT assistant professor of physics, reported evidence of anyons in another moiré material. (Fu and Reddy were also involved in the Ju work.)

In the current work, the physicists showed that it should be possible to create non-Abelian anyons in a moiré material composed of atomically thin layers of molybdenum ditelluride. Says Paul, “moiré materials have already revealed fascinating phases of matter in recent years, and our work shows that non-Abelian phases could be added to the list.”

Adds Reddy, “our work shows that when electrons are added at a density of 3/2 or 5/2 per unit cell, they can organize into an intriguing quantum state that hosts non-Abelian anyons.”

The work was exciting, says Reddy, in part because “oftentimes there’s subtlety in interpreting your results and what they are actually telling you. So it was fun to think through our arguments” in support of non-Abelian anyons.

Says Paul, “this project ranged from really concrete numerical calculations to pretty abstract theory and connected the two. I learned a lot from my collaborators about some very interesting topics.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. The authors also acknowledge the MIT SuperCloud and Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Center, the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, and the Simons Foundation.

In a QA, Fred Dickinson of the Department of History discusses his semester as a Fulbright U.S. Scholar in Vietnam and building out Southeast Asian studies at Penn.

Students share the campus and their experiences at Penn with visitors in person and online, forming meaningful friendships and lasting connections.