Singapore has been ranked among the world’s top 10 nations - and first in Asia – for its readiness to address the challenges and leverage the opportunities of an ageing population, according to a recent study conducted by researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Columbia University. Switzerland tops the rankings, with Japan ranking 15th globally and second in Asia, while USA ranks 24th.

This research group has previously reported comparisons of adaptation to ageing among developed countries. To conduct the current work, the group developed a new measure - The Global Ageing Index, which permits comparisons between low- and middle-income countries as well as more developed ones to assess the preparedness of 143 countries, covering 95.4% of the world’s population, to tackle the challenges of population ageing. The study examines five key domains: well-being, productivity and engagement, equity, cohesion, and security, with input from 25 experts across high-, middle-, and low-income countries.

Led by Assistant Professor Cynthia Chen from the NUS Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health (SSHSPH) and Professor John W Rowe from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, the landmark study was published in the scientific journal Nature Aging on 27 December 2024. The research was made possible through the invaluable contributions of Mr Julian Lim, Research Assistant at NUS SSHSPH.

Summarising the key observations of the study, Asst Prof Chen explained, “While high-income countries lead the rankings in readiness for a rapidly ageing society, low- and middle-income nations trail behind. Although low- and middle-income countries often have younger populations today, many are expected to experience rapid population ageing in the future. Individuals with limited financial security may face serious challenges in accessing healthcare later in life. If health and social security systems remain insufficient to address the needs of older adults, the financial burden on individuals and their families could escalate, potentially leading to widespread economic consequences.”

“As such, an effective response to population ageing can offer numerous benefits. Countries can mitigate the growth in healthcare costs while harnessing the potential of older adults, whose experience and wisdom can contribute significantly to societies. In the long run, this can lead to global societal benefits. We hope our findings can help prioritise action for countries at all levels of development,” she added.  

Singapore’s global performance across the five domains central to successful adaptation to societal ageing is summarised below:

Well-Being: 1st

A successfully ageing society provides healthcare informed by a sophisticated understanding of the healthcare needs of older persons. Singapore performed best in Well-being, securing the top global ranking in this domain. The nation achieved the world’s longest healthy life expectancy at older ages; strong universal health coverage (6th); a high share of life expectancy spent in good health (10th); and high life satisfaction (23rd).

The study noted that in promoting long-term, transformational change, Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH) has implemented a set of health transformation efforts, including preventive efforts such as screening, immunisation, health promotion (such as the National Steps Challenge and the Healthier Dining programme), and education. MOH has also recently intensified the nation’s efforts in chronic disease prevention and management through the implementation of Healthier SG from 2023. This initiative aims to transition the healthcare system from a reactive treatment model to one focused on proactive preventive care.

Security: 6th

Economic and physical security for older persons is a cornerstone of a thriving ageing society. According to the study, Singapore ranks 6th globally in average income and 1st in both perceived safety walking at night and satisfaction with healthcare quality among those aged 50 years and above. Mental health resilience also ranks highly, placing 6th worldwide.

Productivity and Engagement: 17th

A successfully ageing society facilitates the engagement of older persons. In Singapore, while participation in retraining for ages 16-64 ranks impressively at 10th worldwide, other indicators such as labour force engagement among ages 55-64; as well as volunteering, feeling active and productive daily, and job satisfaction among older populations, have been ranked between 41st to 67th. This highlights substantial opportunities to enhance societal engagement and promote personal fulfilment in later life.

Equity: 36th

A society that is ageing well ensures equitable distribution of resources across generations. In Singapore, despite a high ranking for income (9th globally for both living comfortably, and having enough money for food among those aged 50+), there are disparities between young and old populations in income, food, labour force participation and educational attainment, which would require attention.

Cohesion: 42nd

In a successfully ageing society, strong social connections are preserved both within and across generations. Social trust among older adults and the support available to this group in Singapore present a mixed picture. While a significant proportion of older individuals can rely on friends and relatives (24th) and have access to the internet (24th), trust in neighbours ranks 71st. Furthermore, a significant proportion of older adults live alone (115th), suggesting the need for initiatives fostering community connections and reducing isolation.

The research team recognises that MOH has just embarked on Age Well SG in 2024 and is expanding the network of Active Ageing Centres as drop-in nodes for seniors to co-mingle with one another and with neighbours. This also creates opportunities for seniors living alone to be engaged with buddying and befriending programmes, which will help to address the areas which the team has identified.

Proactive and holistic healthy longevity initiatives by Health District @ Queenstown

Singapore’s efforts in adapting to an ageing society are exemplified by initiatives such as the Health District @ Queenstown (HD@QT).  This is a multi-stakeholder collaboration co-led by the National University Health System (NUHS), NUS, and the Housing & Development Board (HDB) to promote physical, mental and social well-being at every stage of life.

“The findings of this study inform and validate our efforts at the Health District @ Queenstown. We strive to co-create with residents and service providers an inclusive community that fosters healthy, purposeful lives across the lifespan. Successful sustainable programmes from Queenstown, which have been designed to align with the domains of the Global Ageing Society Index, can be scaled to the whole of Singapore to address the evolving challenges of an ageing population,” said Professor John Eu-Li Wong, Executive Director of NUS Centre for Population Health and Senior Advisor at NUHS. Prof Wong is also the Co-Chair of the HD@QT Steering Committee.  

Prof Wong added, “As initiatives such as HD@QT take root, we hope to demonstrate how societies can turn the challenges of ageing into a blueprint for healthy, purposeful longevity and empowerment.”

By Assoc Prof (Practice) Terence Ho from the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS

• CNA Online, 20 December 2024

MIT’s research community had another year full of scientific and technological advances in 2024. To celebrate the achievements of the past twelve months, MIT News highlights some of our most popular stories from this year. We’ve also rounded up the year’s top MIT community-related stories.

• 3-D printing with liquid metal: Researchers developed an additive manufacturing technique that can print rapidly with liquid metal, producing large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes. Their technique involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum quickly hardens into a 3D structure.
   
• Tamper-proof ID tags: Engineers developed a tag that can reveal with near-perfect accuracy whether an item is real or fake. The key is in the glue that sticks the tag to the item. The team uses terahertz waves to authenticate items by recognizing a unique pattern of microscopic metal particles mixed into the glue.
   
• Chatting with the future you: Researchers from MIT and elsewhere created a system that enables users to have an online, text-based conversation with an AI-generated simulation of their potential future self. The project is aimed at reducing anxiety and guiding young people to make better choices.
   
• Converting CO2 into useful products: Engineers at MIT designed a new electrode that boosts the efficiency of electrochemical reactions to turn carbon dioxide into ethylene and other products.
   
• Generative AI for databases: Researchers built GenSQL, a new generative AI tool that makes it easier for database users to perform complicated statistical analyses of tabular data without the need to know what is going on behind the scenes. The tool could help users make predictions, detect anomalies, guess missing values, fix errors, and more.
   
• Reversing autoimmune-induced hair loss: A new microneedle patch delivers immune-regulating molecules to the scalp. The treatment teaches T cells not to attack hair follicles, promoting hair regrowth and offering a promising solution for individuals affected by alopecia areata and other autoimmune skin diseases.
   
• Inside the LLM black box: Researchers demonstrated a technique that can be used to probe a large language model to see what it knows about new subjects. The technique showed the models use a surprisingly simple mechanism to retrieve some stored knowledge.
   
• Sound-suppressing silk: An interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers from MIT and elsewhere developed a silk fabric, barely thicker than a human hair, that can suppress unwanted noise and reduce noise transmission in a large room.
   
• Working out for your nervous system: Researchers found that when muscles work out, they help neurons to grow as well. The findings suggest that biochemical and physical effects of exercise could help heal nerves.
   
• Finding AI’s world model lacking: Researchers found that despite its impressive output, generative AI models don’t have a coherent understanding of the world. Large language models don't form true models of the world and its rules, and can thus fail unexpectedly on similar tasks.

• Lianhe Zaobao, 23 December 2024, Singapore, p5

Revisit some of the stories that highlighted the events, breakthroughs, people, and research across the University this year.

Penn Engineering Dean Vijay Kumar discusses the mysterious flying objects, or “drones,” hovering around parts of the East Coast.

Over two choreographed move-in days in August, more than 600 residents unloaded their boxes and belongings into their new homes in Graduate Junction, located at 269 and 299 Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts. With smiling ambassadors standing by to assist, residents were welcomed into a new MIT-affiliated housing option that offers the convenience of on-campus licensing terms, pricing, and location, as well as the experienced building development and management of American Campus Communities (ACC).

With the building occupied and residents settled, the staff has turned their attention to creating connections between new community members and celebrating the years of a collaborative effort between faculty, students, and staff to plan and create a building that expands student choice, enhances neighborhood amenities, and meets sustainability goals. 

Gathering recently for a celebratory block party, residents and their families, staff, and project team members convened in the main lounge space of building W87 to mingle and enjoy the new community. Children twirled around while project managers, architects, staff from MIT and ACC, and residents reflected on the partnership-driven work to bring the new building to fruition. With 351 units, including studios, one-, two-, and four-bedroom apartments, the building added a total of 675 new graduate housing beds and marked the final step in exceeding the Institute’s commitment made in 2017 to add 950 new graduate beds.

The management staff has also planned several other events to help residents feel more connected to their neighbors, including a farmers market in the central plaza, fall crafting workshops, and coffee breaks. “Graduate Junction isn’t just a place to live — it’s a community,” says Kendra Lowery, American Campus Communities’ general manager of Graduate Junction. “Our staff is dedicated to helping residents feel at home, whether through move-in support, building connections with neighbors, or hosting events that celebrate the unique MIT community.” 

Partnership adds a new option for students

Following a careful study of student housing preferences, the Graduate Housing Working Group — composed of students, staff, and faculty — helped inform the design that includes unit styles and amenities that fit the needs of MIT graduate students in an increasingly expensive regional housing market.

“Innovative places struggle to build housing fast enough, which limits who can access them. Building housing keeps our campus’s innovation culture open to all students. Additionally, new housing for students reduces price pressure on the rest of the Cambridge community,” says Nick Allen, a member of the working group and a PhD student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. He noted the involvement of students from the outset: “A whole generation of graduate students has worked with MIT to match Grad Junction to the biggest gaps in the local housing market.” For example, the building adds affordable four-bed, two-bath apartments, expanded options for private rooms, and new family housing.

Neighborhood feel with sustainability in mind

The location of the residence further enhances the residential feel of West Campus and forms additional connections between the MIT community and neighboring Cambridgeport. Situated on West Campus next to Simmons Hall and across from Westgate Apartments, the new buildings frame a central, publicly accessible plaza and green space. The plaza is a gateway to Fort Washington Park and the newly reopened pedestrian railroad crossing enhances connections between the residences and the surrounding Cambridgeport neighborhood.

Striving for the LEED v4 Multifamily Midrise Platinum certification, the new residence reflects a commitment to energy efficiency through an innovative design approach. The building has efficient heating and cooling systems and a strategy that reclaims heat from the building’s exhaust to pre-condition incoming ventilation air. The building’s envelope and roofing were designed with a strong focus on thermal performance and its materials were chosen to reduce the project’s climate impact. This resulted in an 11 percent reduction of the whole building’s carbon footprint from the construction, transportation, and installation of materials. In addition, the development teams installed an 11,000 kilowatt-hour solar array and green roof plantings.

Within the human digestive tract are trillions of bacteria from thousands of different species. These bacteria form communities that help digest food, fend off harmful microbes, and play many other roles in maintaining human health.

These bacteria can be vulnerable to infection from viruses called bacteriophages. One of bacterial cells’ most well-known defenses against these viruses is the CRISPR system, which evolved in bacteria to help them recognize and chop up viral DNA.

A study from MIT biological engineers has yielded new insight into how bacteria in the gut microbiome adapt their CRISPR defenses as they encounter new threats. The researchers found that while bacteria grown in the lab can incorporate new viral recognition sequences as quickly as once a day, bacteria living in human gut add new sequences at a much slower rate — on average, one every three years.

The findings suggest that the environment within the digestive tract offers many fewer opportunities for bacteria and bacteriophages to interact than in the lab, so bacteria don’t need to update their CRISPR defenses very often. It also raises the question of whether bacteria have more important defense systems than CRISPR.

“This finding is significant because we use microbiome-based therapies like fecal microbiota transplant to help treat some diseases, but efficacy is inconsistent because new microbes do not always survive in patients. Learning about microbial defenses against viruses helps us to understand what makes a strong, healthy microbial community,” says An-Ni Zhang, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Nanyang Technological University.

Zhang is the lead author of the study, which appears today in the journal Cell Genomics. Eric Alm, director of MIT’s Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics, a professor of biological engineering and of civil and environmental engineering at MIT, and a member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, is the paper’s senior author.

Infrequent exposure

In bacteria, CRISPR serves as a memory immune response. When bacteria encounter viral DNA, they can incorporate part of the sequence into their own DNA. Then, if the virus is encountered again, that sequence produces a guide RNA that directs an enzyme called Cas9 to snip the viral DNA, preventing infection.

These virus-specific sequences are called spacers, and a single bacterial cell may carry more than 200 spacers. These sequences can be passed onto offspring, and they can also be shared with other bacterial cells through a process called horizontal gene transfer.

Previous studies have found that spacer acquisition occurs very rapidly in the lab, but the process appears to be slower in natural environments. In the new study, the MIT team wanted to explore how often this process happens in bacteria in the human gut.

“We were interested in how fast this CRISPR system changes its spacers, specifically in the gut microbiome, to better understand the bacteria-virus interactions inside our body,” Zhang says. “We wanted to identify the key parameters that impact the timescale of this immunity update.”

To do that, the researchers looked at how CRISPR sequences changed over time in two different datasets obtained by sequencing microbes from the human digestive tract. One of these datasets contained 6,275 genomic sequences representing 52 bacterial species, and the other contained 388 longitudinal “metagenomes,” that is, sequences from many microbes found in a sample, taken from four healthy people.

“By analyzing those two datasets, we found out that spacer acquisition is really slow in human gut microbiome: On average, it would take 2.7 to 2.9 years for a bacterial species to acquire a single spacer in our gut, which is super surprising because our gut is challenged with viruses almost every day from the microbiome itself and in our food,” Zhang says.

The researchers then built a computational model to help them figure out why the acquisition rate was so slow. This analysis showed that spacers are acquired more rapidly when bacteria live in high-density populations. However, the human digestive tract is diluted several times a day, whenever a meal is consumed. This flushes out some bacteria and viruses and keeps the overall density low, making it less likely that the microbes will encounter a virus that can infect them.

Another factor may be the spatial distribution of microbes, which the researchers believe prevents some bacteria from encountering viruses very frequently.

“Sometimes one population of bacteria may never or rarely encounter a phage because the bacteria are closer to the epithelium in the mucus layer and farther away from a potential exposure to viruses,” Zhang says.

Bacterial interactions

Among the populations of bacteria that they studied, the researchers identified one species — Bifidobacteria longum — that had gained spacers much more recently than others. The researchers found that in samples from unrelated people, living on different continents, B. longum had recently acquired up to six different spacers targeting two different Bifidobacteria bacteriophages.

This acquisition was driven by horizontal gene transfer — a process that allows bacteria to gain new genetic material from their neighbors. The findings suggest that there may be evolutionary pressure on B. longum from those two viruses.

“It has been highly overlooked how much horizontal gene transfer contributes to this dynamic. Within communities of bacteria, the bacteria-bacteria interactions can be a main contributor to the development of viral resistance,” Zhang says.

Analyzing microbes’ immune defenses may offer a way for scientists to develop targeted treatments that will be most effective in a particular patient, the researchers say. For example, they could design therapeutic microbes that are able to fend off the types of bacteriophages that are most prevalent in that person’s microbiome, which would increase the chances that the treatment would succeed.

“One thing we can do is to study the viral composition in the patients, and then we can identify which microbiome species or strains are more capable of resisting those local viruses in a person,” Zhang says.

The research was funded, in part, by the Broad Institute and the Thomas and Stacey Siebel Foundation.

Imagine that the head of a company office is misbehaving, and a disillusioned employee reports the problem to their manager. Instead of the complaint getting traction, however, the manager sidesteps the issue and implies that raising it further could land the unhappy employee in trouble — but doesn’t deny that the problem exists.

This hypothetical scenario involves an open secret: a piece of information that is widely known but never acknowledged as such. Open secrets often create practical quandaries for people, as well as backlash against those who try to address the things that the secrets protect.

In a newly published paper, MIT philosopher Sam Berstler contends that open secrets are pervasive and problematic enough to be worthy of systematic study — and provides a detailed analysis of the distinctive social dynamics accompanying them. In many cases, she proposes, ignoring some things is fine — but open secrets present a special problem.

After all, people might maintain friendships better by not disclosing their salaries to each other, and relatives might get along better if they avoid talking politics at the holidays. But these are just run-of-the-mill individual decisions.

By contrast, open secrets are especially damaging, Berstler believes, because of their “iterative” structure. We do not talk about open secrets; we do not talk about the fact that we do not talk about them; and so on, until the possibility of addressing the problems at hand disappears.

“Sometimes not acknowledging things can be very productive,” Berstler says. “It’s good we don’t talk about everything in the workplace. What’s different about open secrecy is not the content of what we’re not acknowledging, but the pernicious iterative structure of our practice of not acknowledging it.  And because of that structure, open secrecy tends to be hard to change.”

Or, as she writes in the paper, “Open secrecy norms are often moral disasters.”

Beyond that, Berstler says, the example of open secrets should enable us to examine the nature of conversation itself in more multidimensional terms; we need to think about the things left unsaid in conversation, too.

Berstler’s paper, “The Structure of Open Secrets,” appears in advance online form in Philosophical Review. Berstler, an assistant professor and the Laurance S. Rockefeller Career Development Chair in MIT’s Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, is the sole author.

Eroding our knowledge

The concept of open secrets is hardly new, but it has not been subject to extensive philosophical rigor. The German sociologist Georg Simmel wrote about them in the early 20th century, but mostly in the context of secret societies keeping quirky rituals to themselves. Other prominent thinkers have addressed open secrets in psychological terms. To Berstler, the social dynamics of open secrets merit a more thorough reckoning.

“It’s not a psychological problem that people are having,” she says. “It’s a particular practice that they’re all conforming to. But it’s hard to see this because it’s the kind of practice that members, just in virtue of conforming to the practice, can’t talk about.”

In Berstler’s view, the iterative nature of open secrets distinguishes them. The employee expecting a candid reply from their manager may feel bewildered about the lack of a transparent response, and that nonacknowledgement means there is not much recourse to be had, either. Eventually, keeping open secrets means the original issue itself can be lost from view.

“Open secrets norms are set up to try to erode our knowledge,” Berstler says.

In practical terms, people may avoid addressing open secrets head-on because they face a familiar quandary: Being a whistleblower can cost people their jobs and more. But Berstler suggests in the paper that keeping open secrets helps people define their in-group status, too.

“It’s also the basis for group identity,” she says.

Berstler avoids taking the position that greater transparency is automatically a beneficial thing. The paper identifies at least one kind of special case where keeping open secrets might be good. Suppose, for instance, a co-worker has an eccentric but harmless habit their colleagues find out about: It might be gracious to spare them simple embarrassment.

That aside, as Berstler writes, open secrets “can serve as shields for powerful people guilty of serious, even criminal wrongdoing. The norms can compound the harm that befalls their victims … [who] find they don’t just have to contend with the perpetrator’s financial resources, political might, and interpersonal capital. They must go up against an entire social arrangement.” As a result, the chances of fixing social or organizational dysfunction diminish.

Two layers of conversation

Berstler is not only trying to chart the dynamics and problems of open secrets. She is also trying to usefully complicate our ideas about the nature of conversations and communication.

Broadly, some philosophers have theorized about conversations and communication by focusing largely on the information being shared among people. To Berstler, this is not quite sufficient; the example of open secrets alerts us that communication is not just an act of making things more and more transparent.

“What I’m arguing in the paper is that this is too simplistic a way to think about it, because actual conversations in the real world have a theatrical or dramatic structure,” Berstler says. “There are things that cannot be made explicit without ruining the performance.”

At an office holiday party, for instance, the company CEO might maintain an illusion of being on equal footing with the rest of the employees if the conversation is restricted to movies and television shows. If the subject turns to year-end bonuses, that illusion vanishes. Or two friends at a party, trapped in an unwanted conversation with a third person, might maneuver themselves away with knowing comments, but without explicitly saying they are trying to end the chat.

Here Berstler draws upon the work of sociologist Erving Goffman — who closely studied the performative aspects of everyday behavior — to outline how a more multi-dimensional conception of social interaction applies to open secrets. Berstler suggests open secrets involve what she calls “activity layering,” which in this case suggests that people in a conversation involving open secrets have multiple common grounds for understanding, but some remain unspoken.

Further expanding on Goffman’s work, Berstler also details how people may be “mutually collaborating on a pretense,” as she writes, to keep an open secret going.

“Goffman has not really systematically been brought into the philosophy of language, so I am showing how his ideas illuminate and complicate philosophical views,” Berstler says.

Combined, a close analysis of open secrets and a re-evaluation of the performative components of conversation can help us become more cognizant about communication. What is being said matters; what is left unsaid matters alongside it.

“There are structural features of open secrets that are worrisome,” Berstler says. “And because of that we have to more aware [of how they work].”

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.

As strains of ethereal music ebbed and flowed, supple dancers glided, swayed and leapt, commanding the stage in elaborate costumes. Among them was a young Dr Lynette Tan, who still has vivid memories of the night when Eusoff Hall staged its first dance production at Kallang Theatre in 1991.

Based on Kojiki – an ancient Japanese chronicle recounting the creation of the world and the Japanese islands, as well as myths and oral traditions of the nation’s history and culture – the dance-drama by student residents of the Hall at NUS was praised by The Straits Times as “a compelling interpretation”.

Some 30 years later, Dr Tan, an English Literature major, is back at Eusoff. This time, she plays an even more important role as its Hall Master.

“The students continue to be really vibrant, active and athletic, so I feel right at home here,” said the 53-year-old, who took up the post in July this year.

In many ways, she embodies the spirit of Eusoffians at the Hall, which is known for its sporting prowess and holds the record for eight consecutive wins in the NUS Inter-Hall Games.

A gymnast from a young age, Dr Tan also won a medal playing sports for Eusoff during her three-year stay at the Hall in the early 1990s. Now a mother of three, her interests remain varied – she was an avid gamer at one point and is also a published children’s author and poet.

On her return to Eusoff Hall, she was greeted by familiar sights such as the buildings and its greenery – including a pink mempat tree planted by then-President Wee Kim Wee in 1989, when the Hall officially opened.

But Dr Tan spotted some differences, too. “The (student) community today is kinder. They’re more aware of mental health and being inclusive,” she said.

Traditions such as the Eusoff Challenge that are conducted during orientation camp have since taken root. As part of the challenge, freshmen have to run a meandering route to the NUS track in batches, but there is a catch.

To demonstrate the principle that nobody gets left behind, the Hall’s Junior Common Room Committee (JCRC) will run around the track until every last Eusoff freshman completes the challenge, said Dr Tan.

The environment is a stark difference from her time, when it was more boot camp-like. “What I remember of orientation is (doing) a lot of push-ups,” said the arts graduate from the Class of 1993. The food served at the dining hall is a lot tastier now too, she added with a laugh.

Dr Tan double-hats at Residential College 4 (RC4), serving as its Director of External Programmes. There, she imparts her knowledge by conducting courses on systems thinking, film studies and intergenerational engagements.

When the senior lecturer is not teaching at RC4, she’s thinking of innovative ways to better engage the student community at Eusoff Hall. As a hall, one of four housing models at NUS, it places a strong emphasis on activities such as CCAs and community service initiatives to bring residents together.

NUS News sits down with Dr Tan to learn more about her vision and hopes for Eusoff Hall.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Tell us about your journey to becoming a Master.

A: The journey began when I was an undergraduate at NUS and my social world literally exploded. It was the first time I met so many diverse and talented individuals. After I graduated, I had always wanted to come to NUS to teach. I got my PhD in Film Studies, taught in the UK for a while and then had the opportunity to come back to Singapore and NUS in 2000. I stopped full-time work in 2003 for 10 years to start my family.

Soon after I returned to NUS, I was approached by the then-Master of RC4, Professor Lakshminarayanan Samavedham, to be a Resident Fellow (RF), a mentor and advisor to the college’s residents. I spent seven years at RC4 and went on to LightHouse as an RF for close to two years, before stepping up as Eusoff Hall Master.

Q: What’s a typical day like for you?

A: I usually start my day with a bowl of yoghurt and tending to my plants on the balcony of my apartment, where I live with my husband and children. I then teach at RC4 when I am not doing my Master’s duties at Eusoff Hall.

I like to keep myself physically fit and mentally well because I want to give my best for the work that I do. Usually I run, bike, or swim every day, or go to the gym when it’s raining.

I also work with the Hall’s Senior Common Room Committee and JCRC. We meet once a month, eat together and catch up with life at our Hall. This is also when we discuss and plan new initiatives and upcoming events.  

We have a strong focus on community at our Hall and some of our new initiatives look to leverage on the talents of our international students so as to extend our reach and impact beyond Singapore. We want to be socially cohesive and grow together as we live by our motto, based on the acronym of our hall “EH” and coined by former master Professor Andrew Tay, “Excellence and Harmony”.

Q: What’s buzzing at Eusoff Hall?

A: We have co-curricular activity (CCA) groups in culture, service and sport, as well as signature events such as La Soirée where our alumni return to our hall, and give back through the sharing of their experience in industry, Eusoff Hall Dance Production, and Cultural Night. Eusoff Hall has built a reputation for excellence in sports and is particularly strong in swimming, track, badminton and basketball.

A longstanding hall tradition that we re-invented is Conversations over Dinner, where we invite alumni to give talks and chat with residents. We have a dynamic, loyal and illustrious alumni network that dates back to our beginnings as Eusoff College in 1958!

In line with NUSOne – NUS’ newest initiative aimed at giving students a holistic learning experience outside the classroom – I thought we could change things up and re-branded the event as “The Eusoff Conversation”. I asked our alumni to focus on NUSOne attributes, such as interpersonal skills, self-awareness and management, and mental resilience, that they had cultivated while living at Eusoff Hall and can see as integral to their success today.

In our latest instalment of the series this semester, we invited two alumni who led Singapore’s first all-women team to Mount Everest in May 2009, Sim Yi Hui and Jane Lee.  They inspired our students in their sharing about discipline, resilience and the overcoming of failure, showing how the growth of these traits began while they were at Eusoff Hall, and were critical to their success at scaling Everest.

Then there is the Gathering of Eusoff Leaders (GEL), where we attend an annual retreat overseas in Southeast Asia, with SCRC and student leaders from our JCRC and CCA heads. The focus of this retreat is not only to bond our Hall’s leaders but also to strengthen their leadership skills. This year’s GEL was held along the coast of Batam.

Q: What is one thing many students don’t know about you?

A: I picked up gaming when I was a student, but have stopped due to other commitments. I played MapleStory and Plunder Pirates and was part of an international guild where we reached the top in global rankings. In that guild, there were people from all around the world and yet we were playing and enjoying the experience at the same time and learning from each other. I see that collapsing of physical distance and time as a key affordance of technology.

I wrote a short story based on my experience called “Jellyfish Pirates”. It was published in 2017 under Literary Shanghai, a community for English and Chinese writers with a local and regional literary focus.

Q: What makes Eusoff Hall home for you?

A: I have always felt like my students are an extension of my family and this is why I love teaching. I enjoy doing all kinds of activities with them. Just the other day, I played table tennis with Jerica Neo, the current JCRC President. I especially like going for runs and swims with my students.

I’m also so grateful for Ms Rashidah Salleh, our hall manager, who has been working here since I was a student. She is a cornerstone of our Hall and is much loved by our current students and alumni alike.

Home is where the people you value and enjoy spending time with are, and so home to me is not a building. It is not a physical space, but the community that you have. That’s what makes Eusoff Hall, and the whole community of Eusoffians, home for me. 

If there were ever any doubts about the truth behind the saying “Money makes the world go round,” the study of financial geography puts them to rest by investigating how finance intertwines with our societies and environment.

Financial geography is a relatively young field of research that emerged in the 1980s and has gained prominence since the global financial crisis of 2008. It employs an interdisciplinary approach to understand the role of money in politics and culture, national development and environmental concerns, interpersonal relationships and technology.

In GE3257 Financial Geographies, the first course on this topic to be offered at NUS, students are introduced to financial geography “as a lens through which they can better understand the world, the evolution of human civilisation and its relationships with nature,” says course instructor Professor Dariusz Wójcik, a financial and economic geographer with the Department of Geography at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS).

“Students taking Financial Geographies will learn to understand that money is connected to and influences pretty much everything around them, their daily lives, relationships with each other and their environment,” said Prof Wójcik, who has taught a similar course at Oxford University since 2008.

“Financial Geographies will also help them analyse the most important challenges and opportunities in the world, including rising geopolitical tensions, contradictions of sustainable development and new financial technologies. These skills will be valuable to any jobs that involve an understanding of finance in both public and private sectors.”

The inaugural run of Financial Geographies took place in AY2023/24, and the course will be offered again in Semester 2 of AY2024/25 which begins in January 2025. It comprises 12 two-hour interactive lectures with quizzes and discussions, and five two-hour tutorials based on readings, real-world case studies, role-play and student presentations.

The upcoming run will include a trip to the MAS Gallery as an opportunity to reflect on the history of financial development in Singapore and the challenges that the country faces.

“Infectious” passion and enthusiasm

Prof Wójcik’s love of maps and economic geography began in his youth and at 17 years old, he won the Polish National Geography Olympiad in 1990. Around the same time, Poland was transitioning from being part of the Communist Bloc aligned with the Soviet Union to developing its own market economy and democratic system of government.

“When communism collapsed in Poland in 1989, almost overnight everyone started talking about investments and profits,” he recalls. “A stock exchange was recreated in Warsaw and banks were opening new branches in every town and district. I felt that if I wanted to understand this new world, I had to understand how money works, which led me to focus on a combination of finance and geography.”

He has pursued this interest intently, earning three Master’s degrees in geography, economics, and banking and finance and a PhD in economic geography and contributing significantly to research on the topic over the past 25 years through books and research papers. His latest publication in October was Atlas of Finance, the first-ever book-size collection of maps and visuals dedicated to finance.

Prof Wójcik co-founded and chairs the Global Network on Financial Geography, which has about 1000 members in more than 60 countries. He also serves as the editor-in-chief of the dedicated financial geography journal Finance and Space and hosts international conferences for the economic and financial geography community. Registration is currently open for the next conference he is hosting, the Global Research Forum on the Geopolitics and Geoeconomics of Finance, which will take place in NUS from 26 to 28 February 2025.

Students of his Financial Geographies course appreciate the wide-ranging yet understandable content, with third-year Geography student Dawn Lin noting: “It does not matter if you do not have prior knowledge because Prof Wójcik covers everything from the beginning, which was very easy to follow and digest.”

Dawn enjoyed learning about the creation of money, global financial networks, and the increasing role of fintech, as well as getting to pick her own topics for group presentations and individual essays so she could explore what she was most interested in. She researched offshore tax havens and Islamic finance with fellow Year 3 Geography major Lee Zi Xuan for a presentation on the future of the Malaysian territory of Labuan. Taking her interest in football a step further, she also examined the financialisation of European football and its implications on everyday life in an individual essay.

Zi Xuan, who had completed an internship with a venture capital firm shortly before taking the course, came away with a deeper understanding of the impact of finance on the world. “I was aware of how the financial system works in terms of technicalities, but learning about it from the perspective of geography opened my eyes to how finance is not just about money and numbers, but rather it is deeply intertwined with politics, culture, and how many actors (governmental and non-governmental, human and non-human) are involved in finance,” he said.

Describing Prof Wójcik’s passion and enthusiasm as “infectious,” Zi Xuan added: “I strongly recommend the course to any geographer looking to expand their knowledge of the world, especially how finance plays a big part in our lives, from the way we as individuals engage with money, and how money also has its role to play on the global stage.”

• 8world Online, 18 December 2024
• Lianhe Zaobao, 19 December 2024, Singapore, p6

• Lianhe Zaobao, 18 December 2024, Singapore, p5

In the office of Ray Priore, head coach of the football team, rests the Heisman Trophy, the most prestigious award in college sports.

Try taking a picture of each of North America's roughly 11,000 tree species, and you’ll have a mere fraction of the millions of photos within nature image datasets. These massive collections of snapshots — ranging from butterflies to humpback whales — are a great research tool for ecologists because they provide evidence of organisms’ unique behaviors, rare conditions, migration patterns, and responses to pollution and other forms of climate change.

While comprehensive, nature image datasets aren’t yet as useful as they could be. It’s time-consuming to search these databases and retrieve the images most relevant to your hypothesis. You’d be better off with an automated research assistant — or perhaps artificial intelligence systems called multimodal vision language models (VLMs). They’re trained on both text and images, making it easier for them to pinpoint finer details, like the specific trees in the background of a photo.

But just how well can VLMs assist nature researchers with image retrieval? A team from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), University College London, iNaturalist, and elsewhere designed a performance test to find out. Each VLM’s task: locate and reorganize the most relevant results within the team’s “INQUIRE” dataset, composed of 5 million wildlife pictures and 250 search prompts from ecologists and other biodiversity experts. 

Looking for that special frog

In these evaluations, the researchers found that larger, more advanced VLMs, which are trained on far more data, can sometimes get researchers the results they want to see. The models performed reasonably well on straightforward queries about visual content, like identifying debris on a reef, but struggled significantly with queries requiring expert knowledge, like identifying specific biological conditions or behaviors. For example, VLMs somewhat easily uncovered examples of jellyfish on the beach, but struggled with more technical prompts like “axanthism in a green frog,” a condition that limits their ability to make their skin yellow.

Their findings indicate that the models need much more domain-specific training data to process difficult queries. MIT PhD student Edward Vendrow, a CSAIL affiliate who co-led work on the dataset in a new paper, believes that by familiarizing with more informative data, the VLMs could one day be great research assistants. “We want to build retrieval systems that find the exact results scientists seek when monitoring biodiversity and analyzing climate change,” says Vendrow. “Multimodal models don’t quite understand more complex scientific language yet, but we believe that INQUIRE will be an important benchmark for tracking how they improve in comprehending scientific terminology and ultimately helping researchers automatically find the exact images they need.”

The team’s experiments illustrated that larger models tended to be more effective for both simpler and more intricate searches due to their expansive training data. They first used the INQUIRE dataset to test if VLMs could narrow a pool of 5 million images to the top 100 most-relevant results (also known as “ranking”). For straightforward search queries like “a reef with manmade structures and debris,” relatively large models like “SigLIP” found matching images, while smaller-sized CLIP models struggled. According to Vendrow, larger VLMs are “only starting to be useful” at ranking tougher queries.

Vendrow and his colleagues also evaluated how well multimodal models could re-rank those 100 results, reorganizing which images were most pertinent to a search. In these tests, even huge LLMs trained on more curated data, like GPT-4o, struggled: Its precision score was only 59.6 percent, the highest score achieved by any model.

The researchers presented these results at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) earlier this month.

Inquiring for INQUIRE

The INQUIRE dataset includes search queries based on discussions with ecologists, biologists, oceanographers, and other experts about the types of images they’d look for, including animals’ unique physical conditions and behaviors. A team of annotators then spent 180 hours searching the iNaturalist dataset with these prompts, carefully combing through roughly 200,000 results to label 33,000 matches that fit the prompts.

For instance, the annotators used queries like “a hermit crab using plastic waste as its shell” and “a California condor tagged with a green ‘26’” to identify the subsets of the larger image dataset that depict these specific, rare events.

Then, the researchers used the same search queries to see how well VLMs could retrieve iNaturalist images. The annotators’ labels revealed when the models struggled to understand scientists’ keywords, as their results included images previously tagged as irrelevant to the search. For example, VLMs’ results for “redwood trees with fire scars” sometimes included images of trees without any markings.

“This is careful curation of data, with a focus on capturing real examples of scientific inquiries across research areas in ecology and environmental science,” says Sara Beery, the Homer A. Burnell Career Development Assistant Professor at MIT, CSAIL principal investigator, and co-senior author of the work. “It’s proved vital to expanding our understanding of the current capabilities of VLMs in these potentially impactful scientific settings. It has also outlined gaps in current research that we can now work to address, particularly for complex compositional queries, technical terminology, and the fine-grained, subtle differences that delineate categories of interest for our collaborators.”

“Our findings imply that some vision models are already precise enough to aid wildlife scientists with retrieving some images, but many tasks are still too difficult for even the largest, best-performing models,” says Vendrow. “Although INQUIRE is focused on ecology and biodiversity monitoring, the wide variety of its queries means that VLMs that perform well on INQUIRE are likely to excel at analyzing large image collections in other observation-intensive fields.”

Inquiring minds want to see

Taking their project further, the researchers are working with iNaturalist to develop a query system to better help scientists and other curious minds find the images they actually want to see. Their working demo allows users to filter searches by species, enabling quicker discovery of relevant results like, say, the diverse eye colors of cats. Vendrow and co-lead author Omiros Pantazis, who recently received his PhD from University College London, also aim to improve the re-ranking system by augmenting current models to provide better results.

University of Pittsburgh Associate Professor Justin Kitzes highlights INQUIRE’s ability to uncover secondary data. “Biodiversity datasets are rapidly becoming too large for any individual scientist to review,” says Kitzes, who wasn’t involved in the research. “This paper draws attention to a difficult and unsolved problem, which is how to effectively search through such data with questions that go beyond simply ‘who is here’ to ask instead about individual characteristics, behavior, and species interactions. Being able to efficiently and accurately uncover these more complex phenomena in biodiversity image data will be critical to fundamental science and real-world impacts in ecology and conservation.”

Vendrow, Pantazis, and Beery wrote the paper with iNaturalist software engineer Alexander Shepard, University College London professors Gabriel Brostow and Kate Jones, University of Edinburgh associate professor and co-senior author Oisin Mac Aodha, and University of Massachusetts at Amherst Assistant Professor Grant Van Horn, who served as co-senior author. Their work was supported, in part, by the Generative AI Laboratory at the University of Edinburgh, the U.S. National Science Foundation/Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Global Center on AI and Biodiversity Change, a Royal Society Research Grant, and the Biome Health Project funded by the World Wildlife Fund United Kingdom.

Monitoring electrical signals in biological systems helps scientists understand how cells communicate, which can aid in the diagnosis and treatment of conditions like arrhythmia and Alzheimer’s.

But devices that record electrical signals in cell cultures and other liquid environments often use wires to connect each electrode on the device to its respective amplifier. Because only so many wires can be connected to the device, this restricts the number of recording sites, limiting the information that can be collected from cells.

MIT researchers have now developed a biosensing technique that eliminates the need for wires. Instead, tiny, wireless antennas use light to detect minute electrical signals.

Small electrical changes in the surrounding liquid environment alter how the antennas scatter the light. Using an array of tiny antennas, each of which is one-hundredth the width of a human hair, the researchers could measure electrical signals exchanged between cells, with extreme spatial resolution.

The devices, which are durable enough to continuously record signals for more than 10 hours, could help biologists understand how cells communicate in response to changes in their environment. In the long run, such scientific insights could pave the way for advancements in diagnosis, spur the development of targeted treatments, and enable more precision in the evaluation of new therapies.

“Being able to record the electrical activity of cells with high throughput and high resolution remains a real problem. We need to try some innovative ideas and alternate approaches,” says Benoît Desbiolles, a former postdoc in the MIT Media Lab and lead author of a paper on the devices.

He is joined on the paper by Jad Hanna, a visiting student in the Media Lab; former visiting student Raphael Ausilio; former postdoc Marta J. I. Airaghi Leccardi; Yang Yu, a scientist at Raith America, Inc.; and senior author Deblina Sarkar, the AT&T Career Development Assistant Professor in the Media Lab and MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering and head of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek Lab. The research appears today in Science Advances.

“Bioelectricity is fundamental to the functioning of cells and different life processes. However, recording such electrical signals precisely has been challenging,” says Sarkar. “The organic electro-scattering antennas (OCEANs) we developed enable recording of electrical signals wirelessly with micrometer spatial resolution from thousands of recording sites simultaneously. This can create unprecedented opportunities for understanding fundamental biology and altered signaling in diseased states as well as for screening the effect of different therapeutics to enable novel treatments.”

Biosensing with light

The researchers set out to design a biosensing device that didn’t need wires or amplifiers. Such a device would be easier to use for biologists who may not be familiar with electronic instruments.

“We wondered if we could make a device that converts the electrical signals to light and then use an optical microscope, the kind that is available in every biology lab, to probe these signals,” Desbiolles says.

Initially, they used a special polymer called PEDOT:PSS to design nanoscale transducers that incorporated tiny pieces of gold filament. Gold nanoparticles were supposed to scatter the light — a process that would be induced and modulated by the polymer. But the results weren’t matching up with their theoretical model.

The researchers tried removing the gold and, surprisingly, the results matched the model much more closely.

“It turns out we weren’t measuring signals from the gold, but from the polymer itself. This was a very surprising but exciting result. We built on that finding to develop organic electro-scattering antennas,” he says.

The organic electro-scattering antennas, or OCEANs, are composed of PEDOT:PSS. This polymer attracts or repulses positive ions from the surrounding liquid environment when there is electrical activity nearby. This modifies its chemical configuration and electronic structure, altering an optical property known as its refractive index, which changes how it scatters light.

When researchers shine light onto the antenna, the intensity of the light changes in proportion to the electrical signal present in the liquid.

With thousands or even millions of tiny antennas in an array, each only 1 micrometer wide, the researchers can capture the scattered light with an optical microscope and measure electrical signals from cells with high resolution. Because each antenna is an independent sensor, the researchers do not need to pool the contribution of multiple antennas to monitor electrical signals, which is why OCEANs can detect signals with micrometer resolution.

Intended for in vitro studies, OCEAN arrays are designed to have cells cultured directly on top of them and put under an optical microscope for analysis.

“Growing” antennas on a chip

Key to the devices is the precision with which the researchers can fabricate arrays in the MIT.nano facilities.

They start with a glass substrate and deposit layers of conductive then insulating material on top, each of which is optically transparent. Then they use a focused ion beam to cut hundreds of nanoscale holes into the top layers of the device. This special type of focused ion beam enables high-throughput nanofabrication.

“This instrument is basically like a pen where you can etch anything with a 10-nanometer resolution,” he says.

They submerge the chip in a solution that contains the precursor building blocks for the polymer. By applying an electric current to the solution, that precursor material is attracted into the tiny holes on the chip, and mushroom-shaped antennas “grow” from the bottom up.

The entire fabrication process is relatively fast, and the researchers could use this technique to make a chip with millions of antennas.

“This technique could be easily adapted so it is fully scalable. The limiting factor is how many antennas we can image at the same time,” he says.

The researchers optimized the dimensions of the antennas and adjusted parameters, which enabled them to achieve high enough sensitivity to monitor signals with voltages as low as 2.5 millivolts in simulated experiments. Signals sent by neurons for communication are usually around 100 millivolts.

“Because we took the time to really dig in and understand the theoretical model behind this process, we can maximize the sensitivity of the antennas,” he says.

OCEANs also responded to changing signals in only a few milliseconds, enabling them to record electrical signals with fast kinetics. Moving forward, the researchers want to test the devices with real cell cultures. They also want to reshape the antennas so they can penetrate cell membranes, enabling more precise signal detection.

In addition, they want to study how OCEANs could be integrated into nanophotonic devices, which manipulate light at the nanoscale for next-generation sensors and optical devices.

This research is funded, in part, by the U.S. National Institutes of Health and the Swiss National Science Foundation. Research reported in this press release was supported by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health and does not necessarily represent the official views of the NIH.

Over the past 14 months, as the impact of the ongoing Israel-Gaza war has rippled across the globe, a faculty-led initiative has emerged to support MIT students and staff by creating a community that transcends ethnicity, religion, and political views. Named for a flower that blooms along the Israel-Gaza border, MIT-Kalaniyot began hosting weekly community lunches that typically now draw about 100 participants. These gatherings have gained the interest of other universities seeking to help students not only cope with but thrive through troubled times, with some moving to replicate MIT’s model on their own campuses.

Now, scholars at Israel’s nine state-recognized universities will be able to compete for MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships designed to allow Israel’s top researchers to come to MIT for collaboration and training, advancing research while contributing to a better understanding of their country.

The MIT-Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows Program will support scholars who have recently graduated from Israeli PhD programs to continue their postdoctoral training at MIT. Meanwhile, the new MIT-Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars Program will provide faculty and researchers holding sabbatical-eligible appointments at Israeli research institutions with fellowships for two academic terms at MIT.

Announcement of the fellowships through the association of Israeli university presidents spawned an enthusiastic response. 

“We’ve received many emails, from questions about the program to messages of gratitude. People have told us that, during a time of so much negativity, seeing such a top-tier academic program emerge feels like a breath of fresh air,” says Or Hen, the Class of 1956 Associate Professor of Physics and associate director of the Laboratory for Nuclear Science, who co-founded MIT-Kalaniyot with Ernest Fraenkel, the Grover M. Hermann Professor in Health Sciences and Technology.

Hen adds that the response from potential program donors has been positive, as well.

“People have been genuinely excited to learn about forward-thinking efforts and how they can simultaneously support both MIT and Israeli science,” he says. “We feel truly privileged to be part of this meaningful work.”

MIT-Kalaniyot is “a faculty-led initiative that emerged organically as we came to terms with some of the challenges that MIT was facing trying to keep focusing on its mission during a very difficult period for the U.S., and obviously for Israelis and Palestinians,” Fraenkel says.

As the MIT-Kalaniyot Program gained momentum, he adds, “we started talking about positive things faculty can do to help MIT fulfill its mission and then help the world, and we recognized many of the challenges could actually be helped by bringing more brilliant scholars from Israel to MIT to do great research and to humanize the face of Israelis so that people who interact with them can see them, not as some foreign entity, but as the talented person working down the hallway.”

“MIT has a long tradition of connecting scholarly communities around the world,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “Programs like this demonstrate the value of bringing people and cultures together, in pursuit of new ideas and understanding.”    

Open to applicants in the humanities, architecture, management, engineering, and science, both fellowship programs aim to embrace Israel’s diverse demographics by encouraging applications from all communities and minority groups throughout Israel.

Fraenkel notes that because Israeli universities reflect the diversity of the country, he expects scholars who identify as Israeli Arabs, Palestinian citizens of Israel, and others could be among the top candidates applying and ultimately selected for MIT-Kalaniyot fellowships. 

MIT is also expanding its Global MIT At-Risk Fellows Program (GMAF), which began last year with recruitment of scholars from Ukraine, to bring Palestinian scholars to campus next fall. Fraenkel and Hen noted their close relationship with GMAF-Palestine director Kamal Youcef-Toumi, a professor in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.  

“While the programs are independent of each other, we value collaboration at MIT and are hoping to find positive ways that we can interact with each other,” Fraenkel says.

Also growing up alongside MIT-Kalaniyot’s fellowship programs will be new Kalaniyot chapters at universities such as the University of Pennsylvania and Dartmouth College, where programs have already begun, and others where activity is starting up. MIT’s inspiration for these efforts, Hen and Fraenkel say, is a key aspect of the Kalaniyot story.

“We formed a new model of faculty-led communities,” Hen says. “As faculty, our roles typically center on teaching, mentoring, and research. After October 7 happened, we saw what was happening around campus and across the nation and realized that our roles had to expand. We had to go beyond the classroom and the lab to build deeper connections within the community that transcends traditional academic structures. This faculty-led approach has become the essence of MIT-Kalaniyot, and is now inspiring similar efforts across the nation.”

Once the programs are at scale, MIT plans to bring four MIT-Kalaniyot Postdoctoral Fellows to campus annually (for three years each), as well as four MIT-Kalaniyot Sabbatical Scholars, for a total of 16 visiting Israeli scholars at any one time.

“We also hope that when they go back, they will be able to maintain their research ties with MIT, so we plan to give seed grants to encourage collaboration after someone leaves,” Fraenkel says. “I know for a lot of our postdocs, their time at MIT is really critical for making networks, regardless of where they come from or where they go. Obviously, it’s harder when you’re across the ocean in a very challenging region, and so I think for both programs it would be great to be able to maintain those intellectual ties and collaborate beyond the term of their fellowships.”

A common thread between the new Kalaniyot programs and GMAF-Palestine, Hen says, is to rise beyond differences that have been voiced post-Oct. 7 and refocus on the Institute’s core research mission.

“We're bringing in the best scholars from the region — Jews, Israelis, Arabs, Palestinians — and normalizing interactions with them and among them through collaborative research,” Hen says. “Our mission is clear: to focus on academic excellence by bringing outstanding talent to MIT and reinforcing that we are here to advance research in service of humanity.”

When the Global MIT At-Risk Fellows (GMAF) initiative launched in February 2024 as a pilot program for Ukrainian researchers, its architects expressed hope that GMAF would eventually expand to include visiting scholars from other troubled areas of the globe. That time arrived this fall, when MIT launched GMAF-Palestine, a two-year pilot that will select up to five fellows each year currently either in Palestine or recently displaced to continue their work during a semester at MIT.

Designed to enhance the educational and research experiences of international faculty and researchers displaced by humanitarian crises, GMAF brings international scholars to MIT for semester-long study and research meant to benefit their regions of origin while simultaneously enriching the MIT community.

Referring to the ongoing war and humanitarian crisis in Gaza, GMAF-Palestine Director and MIT Professor Kamal Youcef-Toumi says that “investing in scientists is an important way to address this significant conflict going on in our world.” Youcef-Toumi says it’s hoped that this program “will give some space for getting to know the real people involved and a deeper understanding of the practical implications for people living through the conflict.”

Professor Duane Boning, vice provost for international activities, considers the GMAF program to be a practical way for MIT to contribute to solving the world’s most challenging problems. “Our vision is for the fellows to come to MIT for a hands-on, experiential joint learning and research experience that develops the tools necessary to support the redevelopment of their regions,” says Boning.

“Opening and sustaining connections among scholars around the world is an essential part of our work at MIT,” says MIT President Sally Kornbluth. “New collaborations so often spark new understanding and new ideas; that's precisely what we aim to foster with this kind of program.”  

Crediting Program Manager Dorothy Hanna with much of the legwork that got the fellowship off the ground, Youcef-Toumi says fellows for the program’s inaugural year will be chosen from early- and mid-career scientists via an open application and nominations from the MIT community. Following submission of applications and interviews in January, five scholars will be selected to begin their fellowships at MIT in September 2025.

Eligible applicants must have held academic or research appointments at a Palestinian university within the past five years; hold a PhD or equivalent degree in a field represented at MIT; have been born in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, or refugee camps; have a reasonable expectation of receiving a U.S. visa, and be working in a research area represented at MIT. MIT will cover all fellowship expenses, including travel, accommodations, visas, health insurance, instructional materials, and living stipends.

To build strong relationships during their time at MIT, GMAF-Palestine will pair fellows with faculty mentors and keep them connected with other campus communities, including the Ibn Khaldun Fellowship for Saudi Arabian Women, an over 10-year-old program that Youcef-Toumi’s team also oversees. 

“MIT has a special environment and mindset that I think will be very useful. It’s a competitive environment, but also very supportive,” says Youcef-Toumi, a member of the Department of Mechanical Engineering faculty, director of the Mechatronics Research Laboratory, and co-director of the Center for Complex Engineering Systems. “In many other places, if a person is in math, they stay in math. If they are in architecture, they stay in architecture and they are not dealing with other departments or other colleges. In our case, because students’ work is often so interdisciplinary, a student in mechanical engineering can have an advisor in computer science or aerospace, and basically everything is open. There are no walls.”

Youcef-Toumi says he hopes MIT’s collegial environment among diverse departments and colleagues is a value fellows will retain and bring back to their own universities and communities.

“We are all here for scholarship. All of the people who come to MIT … they are coming for knowledge. The technical part is one thing, but there are other things here that are not available in many environments — you know, the sense of community, the values, and the excellence in academics,” Youcef-Toumi says. “These are things we will continue to emphasize, and hopefully these visiting scientists can absorb and benefit from some of that. And we will also learn from them, from their seminars and discussions with them.”

Referencing another new fellowship program launched by MIT, Kalaniyot for Israeli scholars, led by MIT professors Or Hen and Ernest Fraenkel, Youcef-Toumi says, “Getting to know the Kalaniyot team better has been great, and I’m sure we will be helping each other. To have people from that region be on campus and interacting with different people ... hopefully that will add a more positive effect and unity to the campus. This is one of the things that we hope these programs will do.”

As with any first endeavor, GMAF-Palestine’s first round of fellowships and the experiences of the fellows, and the observations of the GMAF team, will inform future iterations of the program. In addition to Youcef-Toumi, leadership for the program is provided by a faculty committee representing the breadth of scholarship at MIT. The vision of the faculty committee is to establish a sustainable program connecting the Palestinian community and MIT.

“Longer term,” Youcef-Toumi says, “we hope to show the MIT community this is a really impactful program that is worth sustaining with continued fundraising and philanthropy. We plan to stay in touch with the fellows and collect feedback from them over the first five years on how their time at MIT has impacted them as researchers and educators. Hopefully, this will include ongoing collaborations with their MIT mentors or others they meet along the way at MIT.”

Senior Holden Mui appreciates the details in mathematics and music. A well-written orchestral piece and a well-designed competitive math problem both require a certain flair and a well-tuned sense of how to keep an audience’s interest.

“People want fresh, new, non-recycled approaches to math and music,” he says. Mui sees his role as a guide of sorts, someone who can take his ideas for a musical composition or a math problem and share them with audiences in an engaging way. His ideas must make the transition from his mind to the page in as precise a way as possible. Details matter.

A double major in math and music from Lisle, Illinois, Mui believes it’s important to invite people into a creative process that allows a kind of conversation to occur between a piece of music he writes and his audience, for example. Or a math problem and the people who try to solve it. “Part of math’s appeal is its ability to reveal deep truths that may be hidden in simple statements,” he argues, “while contemporary classical music should be available for enjoyment by as many people as possible.”

Mui’s first experience at MIT was as a high school student in 2017. He visited as a member of a high school math competition team attending an event hosted and staged by MIT and Harvard University students. The following year, Mui met other students at math camps and began thinking seriously about what was next.

“I chose math as a major because it’s been a passion of mine since high school. My interest grew through competitions and I continued to develop it through research,” he says. “I chose MIT because it boasts one of the most rigorous and accomplished mathematics departments in the country.”

Mui is also a math problem writer for the Harvard-MIT Math Tournament (HMMT) and performs with Ribotones, a club that travels to places like retirement homes or public spaces on the Institute’s campus to play music for free.

Mui studies piano with Timothy McFarland, an artist affiliate at MIT, through the MIT Emerson/Harris Fellowship Program, and previously studied with Kate Nir and Matthew Hagle of the Music Institute of Chicago. He started piano at the age of five and cites French composer Maurice Ravel as one of his major musical influences.

As a music student at MIT, Mui is involved in piano performance, chamber music, collaborative piano, the MIT Symphony Orchestra as a violist, conducting, and composition.

He enjoys the incredible variety available within MIT’s music program. “It offers everything from electronic music to world music studies,” he notes, “and has broadened my understanding and appreciation of music’s diversity.”

Collaborating to create

Throughout his academic career, Mui found himself among like-minded students like former Yale University undergraduate Andrew Wu. Together, Mui and Wu won an Emergent Ventures grant. In this collaboration, Mui wrote the music Wu would play. Wu described his experience with one of Mui’s compositions, “Poetry,” as “demanding serious focus and continued re-readings,” yielding nuances even after repeated listens.

Another of Mui’s compositions, “Landscapes,” was performed by MIT’s Symphony Orchestra in October 2024 and offered audiences opportunities to engage with the ideas he explores in his music.

One of the challenges Mui discovered early is that academic composers sometimes create music audiences might struggle to understand. “People often say that music is a universal language, but one of the most valuable insights I’ve gained at MIT is that music isn’t as universally experienced as one might think,” he says. “There are notable differences, for example, between Western music and world music.” 

This, Mui says, broadened his perspective on how to approach music and encouraged him to consider his audience more closely when composing. He treats music as an opportunity to invite people into how he thinks. 

Creative ideas, accessible outcomes

Mui understands the value of sharing his skills and ideas with others, crediting the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI) program with offering multiple opportunities for travel and teaching. “I’ve been on three MISTI trips during IAP [Independent Activities Period] to teach mathematics,” he says. 

Mui says it’s important to be flexible, dynamic, and adaptable in preparation for a fulfilling professional life. Music and math both demand the development of the kinds of soft skills that can help him succeed as a musician, composer, and mathematician.

“Creating math problems is surprisingly similar to writing music,” he argues. “In both cases, the work needs to be complex enough to be interesting without becoming unapproachable.” For Mui, designing original math problems is “like trying to write down an original melody.”

“To write math problems, you have to have seen a lot of math problems before. To write music, you have to know the literature — Bach, Beethoven, Ravel, Ligeti — as diverse a group of personalities as possible.”

A future in the notes and numbers

Mui points to the professional and personal virtues of exploring different fields. “It allows me to build a more diverse network of people with unique perspectives,” he says. “Professionally, having a range of experiences and viewpoints to draw on is invaluable; the broader my knowledge and network, the more insights I can gain to succeed.”

After graduating, Mui plans to pursue doctoral study in mathematics following the completion of a cryptography internship. “The connections I’ve made at MIT, and will continue to make, are valuable because they’ll be useful regardless of the career I choose,” he says. He wants to continue researching math he finds challenging and rewarding. As with his music, he wants to strike a balance between emotion and innovation.

“I think it’s important not to pull all of one’s eggs in one basket,” he says. “One important figure that comes to mind is Isaac Newton, who split his time among three fields: physics, alchemy, and theology.” Mui’s path forward will inevitably include music and math. Whether crafting compositions or designing math problems, Mui seeks to invite others into a world where notes and numbers converge to create meaning, inspire connection, and transform understanding.

The expansion into the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations has been partly driven by heritage speakers seeking to connect with their families and cultures.

Fourth-years Tej Patel and Sridatta Teerdhala, both in the Roy and Diana Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management, a dual degree in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Wharton School, have been chosen as2025 Marshall Scholars.

The office, which is now open, is co-led by Steve Ginsburg and Majid Alsayegh. Deborah Frey will serve as chief investigator.

Frida Polli, a neuroscientist, entrepreneur, investor, and inventor known for her leading-edge contributions at the crossroads of behavioral science and artificial intelligence, is MIT’s new visiting innovation scholar for the 2024-25 academic year. She is the first visiting innovation scholar to be housed within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

Polli began her career in academic neuroscience with a focus on multimodal brain imaging related to health and disease. She was a fellow at the Psychiatric Neuroimaging Group at Mass General Brigham and Harvard Medical School. She then joined the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT as a postdoc, where she worked with John Gabrieli, the Grover Hermann Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences.

Her research has won many awards, including a Young Investigator Award from the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation. She authored over 30 peer-reviewed articles, with notable publications in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Journal of Neuroscience, and Brain. She transitioned from academia to entrepreneurship by completing her MBA at the Harvard Business School (HBS) as a Robert Kaplan Life Science Fellow. During this time, she also won the Life Sciences Track and the Audience Choice Award in the 2010 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition as a member of Aukera Therapeutics.

After HBS, Polli launched pymetrics, which harnessed advancements in cognitive science and machine learning to develop analytics-driven decision-making and performance enhancement software for the human capital sector. She holds multiple patents for the technology developed at pymetrics, which she co-founded in 2012 and led as CEO until her successful exit in 2022. Pymetrics was a World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneer and Global Innovator, an Inc. 5000’s Fastest-Growing company, and Forbes Artificial Intelligence 50 company. Polli and pymetrics also played a pivotal role in passing the first-in-the-nation algorithmic bias law — New York’s Automated Employment Decision Tool law — which went into effect in July 2023.

Making her return to MIT as a visiting innovation scholar, Polli is collaborating closely with Sendhil Mullainathan, the Peter de Florez Professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Economics, and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. With Mullainathan, she is working to bring together a broad array of faculty, students, and postdocs across MIT to address concrete problems where humans and algorithms intersect, to develop a new subdomain of computer science specific to behavioral science, and to train the next generation of scientists to be bilingual in these two fields.

“Sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you get unreasonably lucky. Frida has thrived in each of the facets we’re looking to have impact in — academia, civil society, and the marketplace. She combines a startup mentality with an abiding interest in positive social impact, while capable of ensuring the kind of intellectual rigor MIT demands. It’s an exceptionally rare combination, one we are unreasonably lucky to have,” says Mullainathan.

“People are increasingly interacting with algorithms, often with poor results, because most algorithms are not built with human interplay in mind,” says Polli. “We will focus on designing algorithms that will work synergistically with people. Only such algorithms can help us address large societal challenges in education, health care, poverty, et cetera.”

Polli was recognized as one of Inc.'s Top 100 Female Founders in 2019, followed by being named to Entrepreneur's Top 100 Powerful Women in 2020, and to the 2024 list of 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. Her work has been highlighted by major outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, The Economist, Fortune, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, Bloomberg, and Inc.

Beyond her role at pymetrics, she founded Alethia AI in 2023, an organization focused on promoting transparency in technology, and in 2024, she launched Rosalind Ventures, dedicated to investing in women founders in science and health care. She is also an advisor at the Buck Institute’s Center for Healthy Aging in Women.

"I'm delighted to welcome Dr. Polli back to MIT. As a bilingual expert in both behavioral science and AI, she is a natural fit for the college. Her entrepreneurial background makes her a terrific inaugural visiting innovation scholar,” says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the Henry Ellis Warren Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Crafting a unique and promising research hypothesis is a fundamental skill for any scientist. It can also be time consuming: New PhD candidates might spend the first year of their program trying to decide exactly what to explore in their experiments. What if artificial intelligence could help?

MIT researchers have created a way to autonomously generate and evaluate promising research hypotheses across fields, through human-AI collaboration. In a new paper, they describe how they used this framework to create evidence-driven hypotheses that align with unmet research needs in the field of biologically inspired materials.

Published Wednesday in Advanced Materials, the study was co-authored by Alireza Ghafarollahi, a postdoc in the Laboratory for Atomistic and Molecular Mechanics (LAMM), and Markus Buehler, the Jerry McAfee Professor in Engineering in MIT’s departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering and director of LAMM.

The framework, which the researchers call SciAgents, consists of multiple AI agents, each with specific capabilities and access to data, that leverage “graph reasoning” methods, where AI models utilize a knowledge graph that organizes and defines relationships between diverse scientific concepts. The multi-agent approach mimics the way biological systems organize themselves as groups of elementary building blocks. Buehler notes that this “divide and conquer” principle is a prominent paradigm in biology at many levels, from materials to swarms of insects to civilizations — all examples where the total intelligence is much greater than the sum of individuals’ abilities.

“By using multiple AI agents, we’re trying to simulate the process by which communities of scientists make discoveries,” says Buehler. “At MIT, we do that by having a bunch of people with different backgrounds working together and bumping into each other at coffee shops or in MIT’s Infinite Corridor. But that's very coincidental and slow. Our quest is to simulate the process of discovery by exploring whether AI systems can be creative and make discoveries.”

Automating good ideas

As recent developments have demonstrated, large language models (LLMs) have shown an impressive ability to answer questions, summarize information, and execute simple tasks. But they are quite limited when it comes to generating new ideas from scratch. The MIT researchers wanted to design a system that enabled AI models to perform a more sophisticated, multistep process that goes beyond recalling information learned during training, to extrapolate and create new knowledge.

The foundation of their approach is an ontological knowledge graph, which organizes and makes connections between diverse scientific concepts. To make the graphs, the researchers feed a set of scientific papers into a generative AI model. In previous work, Buehler used a field of math known as category theory to help the AI model develop abstractions of scientific concepts as graphs, rooted in defining relationships between components, in a way that could be analyzed by other models through a process called graph reasoning. This focuses AI models on developing a more principled way to understand concepts; it also allows them to generalize better across domains.

“This is really important for us to create science-focused AI models, as scientific theories are typically rooted in generalizable principles rather than just knowledge recall,” Buehler says. “By focusing AI models on ‘thinking’ in such a manner, we can leapfrog beyond conventional methods and explore more creative uses of AI.”

For the most recent paper, the researchers used about 1,000 scientific studies on biological materials, but Buehler says the knowledge graphs could be generated using far more or fewer research papers from any field.

With the graph established, the researchers developed an AI system for scientific discovery, with multiple models specialized to play specific roles in the system. Most of the components were built off of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 series models and made use of a technique known as in-context learning, in which prompts provide contextual information about the model’s role in the system while allowing it to learn from data provided.

The individual agents in the framework interact with each other to collectively solve a complex problem that none of them would be able to do alone. The first task they are given is to generate the research hypothesis. The LLM interactions start after a subgraph has been defined from the knowledge graph, which can happen randomly or by manually entering a pair of keywords discussed in the papers.

In the framework, a language model the researchers named the “Ontologist” is tasked with defining scientific terms in the papers and examining the connections between them, fleshing out the knowledge graph. A model named “Scientist 1” then crafts a research proposal based on factors like its ability to uncover unexpected properties and novelty. The proposal includes a discussion of potential findings, the impact of the research, and a guess at the underlying mechanisms of action. A “Scientist 2” model expands on the idea, suggesting specific experimental and simulation approaches and making other improvements. Finally, a “Critic” model highlights its strengths and weaknesses and suggests further improvements.

“It’s about building a team of experts that are not all thinking the same way,” Buehler says. “They have to think differently and have different capabilities. The Critic agent is deliberately programmed to critique the others, so you don't have everybody agreeing and saying it’s a great idea. You have an agent saying, ‘There’s a weakness here, can you explain it better?’ That makes the output much different from single models.”

Other agents in the system are able to search existing literature, which provides the system with a way to not only assess feasibility but also create and assess the novelty of each idea.

Making the system stronger

To validate their approach, Buehler and Ghafarollahi built a knowledge graph based on the words “silk” and “energy intensive.” Using the framework, the “Scientist 1” model proposed integrating silk with dandelion-based pigments to create biomaterials with enhanced optical and mechanical properties. The model predicted the material would be significantly stronger than traditional silk materials and require less energy to process.

Scientist 2 then made suggestions, such as using specific molecular dynamic simulation tools to explore how the proposed materials would interact, adding that a good application for the material would be a bioinspired adhesive. The Critic model then highlighted several strengths of the proposed material and areas for improvement, such as its scalability, long-term stability, and the environmental impacts of solvent use. To address those concerns, the Critic suggested conducting pilot studies for process validation and performing rigorous analyses of material durability.

The researchers also conducted other experiments with randomly chosen keywords, which produced various original hypotheses about more efficient biomimetic microfluidic chips, enhancing the mechanical properties of collagen-based scaffolds, and the interaction between graphene and amyloid fibrils to create bioelectronic devices.

“The system was able to come up with these new, rigorous ideas based on the path from the knowledge graph,” Ghafarollahi says. “In terms of novelty and applicability, the materials seemed robust and novel. In future work, we’re going to generate thousands, or tens of thousands, of new research ideas, and then we can categorize them, try to understand better how these materials are generated and how they could be improved further.”

Going forward, the researchers hope to incorporate new tools for retrieving information and running simulations into their frameworks. They can also easily swap out the foundation models in their frameworks for more advanced models, allowing the system to adapt with the latest innovations in AI.

“Because of the way these agents interact, an improvement in one model, even if it’s slight, has a huge impact on the overall behaviors and output of the system,” Buehler says.

Since releasing a preprint with open-source details of their approach, the researchers have been contacted by hundreds of people interested in using the frameworks in diverse scientific fields and even areas like finance and cybersecurity.

“There’s a lot of stuff you can do without having to go to the lab,” Buehler says. “You want to basically go to the lab at the very end of the process. The lab is expensive and takes a long time, so you want a system that can drill very deep into the best ideas, formulating the best hypotheses and accurately predicting emergent behaviors. Our vision is to make this easy to use, so you can use an app to bring in other ideas or drag in datasets to really challenge the model to make new discoveries.”

From upcycling fish scales to celebrating our nonagenarians, learning on the high seas to hosting an electrifying music festival—the NUS community served up many a memorable moment in 2024, and NUS News has been there at each turn to capture it all.

With a total of 246 stories this year—an average of nearly 5 stories a week—we have documented exciting research breakthroughs, featured faces among the NUS community who define excellence in their fields, and captured inspiring accounts of connection, compassion and camaraderie.  

Join us as we serve up a glimpse of what delighted, energised and united the NUS community in the past year, as seen on NUS News.

Read our Year in Review here.

NUS Law students have done the Faculty proud with their excellent performances in two recent moot court competitions – one held in Singapore and the other in Paris, France.

Sweeping the top prizes at B.A. Mallal Moot 2024

It was a clean sweep for NUS Law undergraduates at the B.A. Mallal Moot 2024 held in October.

Jeremiah Tan and Tan Kai Han, who are both in their penultimate year in NUS Law, took home the first and second prizes respectively, while second-year undergraduates Shaun Wittberger and Nicole Won were jointly awarded the second runner-up position. The winners bagged $3,000, $1,500, and $500 (joint second runners-up) in prize money respectively.

Another team mate, Melvin Seto, a final-year Law student, earned the Best Memorial Prize and the accompanying $250 cash prize for the best written legal document to support his position in the case.

The B. A. Mallal Moot is one of Singapore’s oldest and most prestigious mooting competitions, co-organised by the NUS Law Mooting and Debating Club and leading Singaporean law firm Allen & Gledhill LLP. The competition attracts participants from all three law schools in the country annually.

This year, more than 100 law students battled it out over a series of four gruelling mooting rounds – the preliminaries, quarter-finals, semi-finals and the grand finals. With AI proliferating in many aspects of life, it was timely that the students debated the topic of tortious liability for injuries arising from statements made by an AI chatbot and even considered issues around criminal liability for alleged stock market manipulation by an AI chatbot.

Jeremiah decided to participate in the competition given the intellectual rigour of this year’s moot problem despite having “a bit of an aversion to mooting” as he does not consider himself especially eloquent. His approach prioritised assisting the court in understanding his arguments rather than resisting their questions. A key takeaway was how mooting “is not about sounding the smartest or most polished, but about engaging the judges in a conversation.”

“I think sometimes our fears are an illusion. I hope my win encourages other students to try something that they've always been afraid of. Who knows, you might end up exceeding your own expectations!”

Kai Han shared how the moot problem for the preliminaries and quarter-finals was somewhat nostalgic as it involved elements of both contract and tort law, both of which were courses she took in her first year of study.

She added, “While my foundational knowledge in these areas of law helped me, the difficulties in applying existing law to a novel hypothetical situation involving artificial intelligence made me deeply aware of how law is a living, breathing thing, and how our generation of lawyers will have to grapple with the impacts of unprecedented technological advancements on our current law.”

One of the judges for the moot, Mr Dinesh Dhillon, Partner and Co-Head of International Arbitration Practice at Allen & Gledhill LLP, was pleased with the high standards of the competition, noting that all the finalists did exceedingly well.

Sharing some tips on mooting, he said, “An important point to bear in mind is that oral advocacy is not debating, and eloquence that may win the popular vote is not determinative of what wins over a Judge. Legal advocacy is primarily about evidence and the law. Hence, applying the relevant facts with reference to the relevant statutory and case law is essential.”

Honing cross-examination skills in the prestigious Cross Examination Moot 2024

Over in France, another team of students from NUS Law emerged the first runner-up among 15 teams at the prestigious Cross Examination Moot 2024 in November. Organised by Sciences Po Law School this year, the event is the world’s only arbitration competition that focuses on cross-examination techniques where participants argue a case by examining and cross-examining witnesses in a mock-trial scenario.

Over a week, the team comprising fourth-year student Tan Yan Ren, third-year student Ronn Chiew, and second-year students Joshua Lim and Nathaniel Yeo, competed in four general rounds cross-examining fact witnesses, followed by two rounds cross-examining real quantum expert witnesses from economic consulting firm Compass Lexicon. In the grand finals on 20 November 2024, the finalists engaged in a commercial dispute arising from an alleged theft and development of confidential AI healthcare technology.

On top of the team win, Yan Ren was awarded the Best Cross Examiner Award for Quantum, for his cross-examination of quantum expert witnesses. The experience was a memorable one, he said: “As students, it was a rare opportunity to test our cross-examination skills on real expert witnesses, as well as to deviate from the usual legal arguments to talk about damages.”

The competition exposed participants to a diverse pool of arbitrators, who had slightly different expectations of what constitutes good cross-examination, depending on their legal backgrounds. Nathaniel observed that some of the cross-examination techniques and strategies commonly used in Singapore and common law jurisdictions were not well received by arbitrators who had different legal backgrounds. As a result, the students had to adapt their approach based on the arbitrators judging each round.

They drew on lessons from NUS courses on comparative law, which provided them with an understanding of differing legal cultures, and trial advocacy. The latter is taught by Mr Joel Quek, a commercial litigator from WongPartnership LLP who also coached the team. In addition, the team researched on the arbitrators beforehand, paid close attention to the arbitrators’ reactions to their cross-examination, listened to their feedback, and learnt by observing other teams’ performances.

"Participating in the cross-examination moot court competition provided us invaluable insights into the practical workings of international arbitration, particularly outside Singapore. It was an eye-opening experience to observe and adapt to diverse oratorical and mooting styles, while also learning about different advocacy cultures and approaches across jurisdictions,” the team reflected.

In a fireside chat at Penn, Ali Zaidi talked about the Biden Administration’s climate policy as a throughline to securing global competitiveness and domestic prosperity.

Members of the Penn community celebrated an energy research milestone: the unveiling of the new Vagelos Laboratory for Energy Science and Technology.

On June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible was about an hour-and-a-half into its two-hour descent to the Titanic wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean when it lost contact with its support ship. This cease in communication set off a frantic search for the tourist submersible and five passengers onboard, located about two miles below the ocean's surface.

Deep-ocean search and recovery is one of the many missions of military services like the U.S. Coast Guard Office of Search and Rescue and the U.S. Navy Supervisor of Salvage and Diving. For this mission, the longest delays come from transporting search-and-rescue equipment via ship to the area of interest and comprehensively surveying that area. A search operation on the scale of that for Titan — which was conducted 420 nautical miles from the nearest port and covered 13,000 square kilometers, an area roughly twice the size of Connecticut — could take weeks to complete. The search area for Titan is considered relatively small, focused on the immediate vicinity of the Titanic. When the area is less known, operations could take months. (A remotely operated underwater vehicle deployed by a Canadian vessel ended up finding the debris field of Titan on the seafloor, four days after the submersible had gone missing.)

A research team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering's Ocean Science and Engineering lab is developing a surface-based sonar system that could accelerate the timeline for small- and large-scale search operations to days. Called the Autonomous Sparse-Aperture Multibeam Echo Sounder, the system scans at surface-ship rates while providing sufficient resolution to find objects and features in the deep ocean, without the time and expense of deploying underwater vehicles. The echo sounder — which features a large sonar array using a small set of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) that can be deployed via aircraft into the ocean — holds the potential to map the seabed at 50 times the coverage rate of an underwater vehicle and 100 times the resolution of a surface vessel.

"Our array provides the best of both worlds: the high resolution of underwater vehicles and the high coverage rate of surface ships," says co–principal investigator Andrew March, assistant leader of the laboratory's Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group. "Though large surface-based sonar systems at low frequency have the potential to determine the materials and profiles of the seabed, they typically do so at the expense of resolution, particularly with increasing ocean depth. Our array can likely determine this information, too, but at significantly enhanced resolution in the deep ocean."

Underwater unknown

Oceans cover 71 percent of Earth's surface, yet more than 80 percent of this underwater realm remains undiscovered and unexplored. Humans know more about the surface of other planets and the moon than the bottom of our oceans. High-resolution seabed maps would not only be useful to find missing objects like ships or aircraft, but also to support a host of other scientific applications: understanding Earth's geology, improving forecasting of ocean currents and corresponding weather and climate impacts, uncovering archaeological sites, monitoring marine ecosystems and habitats, and identifying locations containing natural resources such as mineral and oil deposits.

Scientists and governments worldwide recognize the importance of creating a high-resolution global map of the seafloor; the problem is that no existing technology can achieve meter-scale resolution from the ocean surface. The average depth of our oceans is approximately 3,700 meters. However, today's technologies capable of finding human-made objects on the seabed or identifying person-sized natural features — these technologies include sonar, lidar, cameras, and gravitational field mapping — have a maximum range of less than 1,000 meters through water.

Ships with large sonar arrays mounted on their hull map the deep ocean by emitting low-frequency sound waves that bounce off the seafloor and return as echoes to the surface. Operation at low frequencies is necessary because water readily absorbs high-frequency sound waves, especially with increasing depth; however, such operation yields low-resolution images, with each image pixel representing a football field in size. Resolution is also restricted because sonar arrays installed on large mapping ships are already using all of the available hull space, thereby capping the sonar beam's aperture size. By contrast, sonars on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that operate at higher frequencies within a few hundred meters of the seafloor generate maps with each pixel representing one square meter or less, resulting in 10,000 times more pixels in that same football field–sized area. However, this higher resolution comes with trade-offs: AUVs are time-consuming and expensive to deploy in the deep ocean, limiting the amount of seafloor that can be mapped; they have a maximum range of about 1,000 meters before their high-frequency sound gets absorbed; and they move at slow speeds to conserve power. The area-coverage rate of AUVs performing high-resolution mapping is about 8 square kilometers per hour; surface vessels map the deep ocean at more than 50 times that rate.

A solution surfaces

The Autonomous Sparse-Aperture Multibeam Echo Sounder could offer a cost-effective approach to high-resolution, rapid mapping of the deep seafloor from the ocean's surface. A collaborative fleet of about 20 ASVs, each hosting a small sonar array, effectively forms a single sonar array 100 times the size of a large sonar array installed on a ship. The large aperture achieved by the array (hundreds of meters) produces a narrow beam, which enables sound to be precisely steered to generate high-resolution maps at low frequency. Because very few sonars are installed relative to the array's overall size (i.e., a sparse aperture), the cost is tractable.

However, this collaborative and sparse setup introduces some operational challenges. First, for coherent 3D imaging, the relative position of each ASV's sonar subarray must be accurately tracked through dynamic ocean-induced motions. Second, because sonar elements are not placed directly next to each other without any gaps, the array suffers from a lower signal-to-noise ratio and is less able to reject noise coming from unintended or undesired directions. To mitigate these challenges, the team has been developing a low-cost precision-relative navigation system and leveraging acoustic signal processing tools and new ocean-field estimation algorithms. The MIT campus collaborators are developing algorithms for data processing and image formation, especially to estimate depth-integrated water-column parameters. These enabling technologies will help account for complex ocean physics, spanning physical properties like temperature, dynamic processes like currents and waves, and acoustic propagation factors like sound speed.

Processing for all required control and calculations could be completed either remotely or onboard the ASVs. For example, ASVs deployed from a ship or flying boat could be controlled and guided remotely from land via a satellite link or from a nearby support ship (with direct communications or a satellite link), and left to map the seabed for weeks or months at a time until maintenance is needed. Sonar-return health checks and coarse seabed mapping would be conducted on board, while full, high-resolution reconstruction of the seabed would require a supercomputing infrastructure on land or on a support ship.

"Deploying vehicles in an area and letting them map for extended periods of time without the need for a ship to return home to replenish supplies and rotate crews would significantly simplify logistics and operating costs," says co–principal investigator Paul Ryu, a researcher in the Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group.

Since beginning their research in 2018, the team has turned their concept into a prototype. Initially, the scientists built a scale model of a sparse-aperture sonar array and tested it in a water tank at the laboratory's Autonomous Systems Development Facility. Then, they prototyped an ASV-sized sonar subarray and demonstrated its functionality in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In follow-on sea tests in Boston Harbor, they deployed an 8-meter array containing multiple subarrays equivalent to 25 ASVs locked together; with this array, they generated 3D reconstructions of the seafloor and a shipwreck. Most recently, the team fabricated, in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a first-generation, 12-foot-long, all-electric ASV prototype carrying a sonar array underneath. With this prototype, they conducted preliminary relative navigation testing in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island. Their full deep-ocean concept calls for approximately 20 such ASVs of a similar size, likely powered by wave or solar energy.

This work was funded through Lincoln Laboratory's internally administered R&D portfolio on autonomous systems. The team is now seeking external sponsorship to continue development of their ocean floor–mapping technology, which was recognized with a 2024 R&D 100 Award. 

On June 18, 2023, the Titan submersible was about an hour-and-a-half into its two-hour descent to the Titanic wreckage at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean when it lost contact with its support ship. This cease in communication set off a frantic search for the tourist submersible and five passengers onboard, located about two miles below the ocean's surface.

Deep-ocean search and recovery is one of the many missions of military services like the U.S. Coast Guard Office of Search and Rescue and the U.S. Navy Supervisor of Salvage and Diving. For this mission, the longest delays come from transporting search-and-rescue equipment via ship to the area of interest and comprehensively surveying that area. A search operation on the scale of that for Titan — which was conducted 420 nautical miles from the nearest port and covered 13,000 square kilometers, an area roughly twice the size of Connecticut — could take weeks to complete. The search area for Titan is considered relatively small, focused on the immediate vicinity of the Titanic. When the area is less known, operations could take months. (A remotely operated underwater vehicle deployed by a Canadian vessel ended up finding the debris field of Titan on the seafloor, four days after the submersible had gone missing.)

A research team from MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering's Ocean Science and Engineering lab is developing a surface-based sonar system that could accelerate the timeline for small- and large-scale search operations to days. Called the Autonomous Sparse-Aperture Multibeam Echo Sounder, the system scans at surface-ship rates while providing sufficient resolution to find objects and features in the deep ocean, without the time and expense of deploying underwater vehicles. The echo sounder — which features a large sonar array using a small set of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) that can be deployed via aircraft into the ocean — holds the potential to map the seabed at 50 times the coverage rate of an underwater vehicle and 100 times the resolution of a surface vessel.

"Our array provides the best of both worlds: the high resolution of underwater vehicles and the high coverage rate of surface ships," says co–principal investigator Andrew March, assistant leader of the laboratory's Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group. "Though large surface-based sonar systems at low frequency have the potential to determine the materials and profiles of the seabed, they typically do so at the expense of resolution, particularly with increasing ocean depth. Our array can likely determine this information, too, but at significantly enhanced resolution in the deep ocean."

Underwater unknown

Oceans cover 71 percent of Earth's surface, yet more than 80 percent of this underwater realm remains undiscovered and unexplored. Humans know more about the surface of other planets and the moon than the bottom of our oceans. High-resolution seabed maps would not only be useful to find missing objects like ships or aircraft, but also to support a host of other scientific applications: understanding Earth's geology, improving forecasting of ocean currents and corresponding weather and climate impacts, uncovering archaeological sites, monitoring marine ecosystems and habitats, and identifying locations containing natural resources such as mineral and oil deposits.

Scientists and governments worldwide recognize the importance of creating a high-resolution global map of the seafloor; the problem is that no existing technology can achieve meter-scale resolution from the ocean surface. The average depth of our oceans is approximately 3,700 meters. However, today's technologies capable of finding human-made objects on the seabed or identifying person-sized natural features — these technologies include sonar, lidar, cameras, and gravitational field mapping — have a maximum range of less than 1,000 meters through water.

Ships with large sonar arrays mounted on their hull map the deep ocean by emitting low-frequency sound waves that bounce off the seafloor and return as echoes to the surface. Operation at low frequencies is necessary because water readily absorbs high-frequency sound waves, especially with increasing depth; however, such operation yields low-resolution images, with each image pixel representing a football field in size. Resolution is also restricted because sonar arrays installed on large mapping ships are already using all of the available hull space, thereby capping the sonar beam's aperture size. By contrast, sonars on autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that operate at higher frequencies within a few hundred meters of the seafloor generate maps with each pixel representing one square meter or less, resulting in 10,000 times more pixels in that same football field–sized area. However, this higher resolution comes with trade-offs: AUVs are time-consuming and expensive to deploy in the deep ocean, limiting the amount of seafloor that can be mapped; they have a maximum range of about 1,000 meters before their high-frequency sound gets absorbed; and they move at slow speeds to conserve power. The area-coverage rate of AUVs performing high-resolution mapping is about 8 square kilometers per hour; surface vessels map the deep ocean at more than 50 times that rate.

A solution surfaces

The Autonomous Sparse-Aperture Multibeam Echo Sounder could offer a cost-effective approach to high-resolution, rapid mapping of the deep seafloor from the ocean's surface. A collaborative fleet of about 20 ASVs, each hosting a small sonar array, effectively forms a single sonar array 100 times the size of a large sonar array installed on a ship. The large aperture achieved by the array (hundreds of meters) produces a narrow beam, which enables sound to be precisely steered to generate high-resolution maps at low frequency. Because very few sonars are installed relative to the array's overall size (i.e., a sparse aperture), the cost is tractable.

However, this collaborative and sparse setup introduces some operational challenges. First, for coherent 3D imaging, the relative position of each ASV's sonar subarray must be accurately tracked through dynamic ocean-induced motions. Second, because sonar elements are not placed directly next to each other without any gaps, the array suffers from a lower signal-to-noise ratio and is less able to reject noise coming from unintended or undesired directions. To mitigate these challenges, the team has been developing a low-cost precision-relative navigation system and leveraging acoustic signal processing tools and new ocean-field estimation algorithms. The MIT campus collaborators are developing algorithms for data processing and image formation, especially to estimate depth-integrated water-column parameters. These enabling technologies will help account for complex ocean physics, spanning physical properties like temperature, dynamic processes like currents and waves, and acoustic propagation factors like sound speed.

Processing for all required control and calculations could be completed either remotely or onboard the ASVs. For example, ASVs deployed from a ship or flying boat could be controlled and guided remotely from land via a satellite link or from a nearby support ship (with direct communications or a satellite link), and left to map the seabed for weeks or months at a time until maintenance is needed. Sonar-return health checks and coarse seabed mapping would be conducted on board, while full, high-resolution reconstruction of the seabed would require a supercomputing infrastructure on land or on a support ship.

"Deploying vehicles in an area and letting them map for extended periods of time without the need for a ship to return home to replenish supplies and rotate crews would significantly simplify logistics and operating costs," says co–principal investigator Paul Ryu, a researcher in the Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group.

Since beginning their research in 2018, the team has turned their concept into a prototype. Initially, the scientists built a scale model of a sparse-aperture sonar array and tested it in a water tank at the laboratory's Autonomous Systems Development Facility. Then, they prototyped an ASV-sized sonar subarray and demonstrated its functionality in Gloucester, Massachusetts. In follow-on sea tests in Boston Harbor, they deployed an 8-meter array containing multiple subarrays equivalent to 25 ASVs locked together; with this array, they generated 3D reconstructions of the seafloor and a shipwreck. Most recently, the team fabricated, in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a first-generation, 12-foot-long, all-electric ASV prototype carrying a sonar array underneath. With this prototype, they conducted preliminary relative navigation testing in Woods Hole, Massachusetts and Newport, Rhode Island. Their full deep-ocean concept calls for approximately 20 such ASVs of a similar size, likely powered by wave or solar energy.

This work was funded through Lincoln Laboratory's internally administered R&D portfolio on autonomous systems. The team is now seeking external sponsorship to continue development of their ocean floor–mapping technology, which was recognized with a 2024 R&D 100 Award. 

From studies of the connections between neurons to interactions between the nervous and immune systems to the complex ways in which people understand not just language, but also the unspoken nuances of conversation, new research projects at MIT supported by the Simons Center for the Social Brain are bringing a rich diversity of perspectives to advancing the field’s understanding of autism.

As six speakers lined up to describe their projects at a Simons Center symposium Nov. 15, MIT School of Science dean Nergis Mavalvala articulated what they were all striving for: “Ultimately, we want to seek understanding — not just the type that tells us how physiological differences in the inner workings of the brain produce differences in behavior and cognition, but also the kind of understanding that improves inclusion and quality of life for people living with autism spectrum disorders.”

Simons Center director Mriganka Sur, Newton Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), said that even though the field still lacks mechanism-based treatments or reliable biomarkers for autism spectrum disorders, he is optimistic about the discoveries and new research MIT has been able to contribute. MIT research has led to five clinical trials so far, and he praised the potential for future discovery, for instance in the projects showcased at the symposium.

“We are, I believe, at a frontier — at a moment where a lot of basic science is coming together with the vision that we could use that science for the betterment of people,” Sur said.

The Simons Center funds that basic science research in two main ways that each encourage collaboration, Sur said: large-scale projects led by faculty members across several labs, and fellowships for postdocs who are mentored by two faculty members, thereby bringing together two labs. The symposium featured talks and panel discussions by faculty and fellows leading new research.

In a different vein, Associate Professor Ev Fedorenko of The McGovern Institute for Brain Research and BCS is leading a seven-lab collaboration aimed at understanding the cognitive and neural infrastructure that enables people to engage in conversation, which involves not only the language spoken but also facial expressions, tone of voice, and social context. Critical to this effort, she said, is going beyond previous work that studied each related brain area in isolation to understand the capability as a unified whole. A key insight, she said, is that they are all nearby each other in the lateral temporal cortex.

“Going beyond these individual components we can start asking big questions like, what are the broad organizing principles of this part of the brain?,” Fedorenko said. “Why does it have this particular arrangement of areas, and how do these work together to exchange information to create the unified percept of another individual we’re interacting with?”

While Choi and Fedorenko are looking at factors that account for differences in social behavior in autism, Picower Professor Earl K. Miller of The Picower Institute and BCS is leading a project that focuses on another phenomenon: the feeling of sensory overload that many autistic people experience. Research in Miller’s lab has shown that the brain’s ability to make predictions about sensory stimuli, which is critical to filtering out mundane signals so attention can be focused on new ones, depends on a cortex-wide coordination of the activity of millions of neurons implemented by high frequency “gamma” brain waves and lower-frequency “beta” waves. Working with animal models and human volunteers at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), Miller said his team is testing the idea that there may be a key difference in these brain wave dynamics in the autistic brain that could be addressed with closed-loop brain wave stimulation technology.

Simons postdoc Lukas Vogelsang, who is based in BCS Professor Pawan Sinha’s lab, is looking at potential differences in prediction between autistic and non-autistic individuals in a different way: through experiments with volunteers that aim to tease out how these differences are manifest in behavior. For instance, he’s finding that in at least one prediction task that requires participants to discern the probability of an event from provided cues, autistic people exhibit lower performance levels and undervalue the predictive significance of the cues, while non-autistic people slightly overvalue it. Vogelsang is co-advised by BCH researcher and Harvard Medical School Professor Charles Nelson.

Fundamentally, the broad-scale behaviors that emerge from coordinated brain-wide neural activity begins with the molecular details of how neurons connect with each other at circuit junctions called synapses. In her research based in The Picower Institute lab of Menicon Professor Troy Littleton, Simons postdoc Chhavi Sood is using the genetically manipulable model of the fruit fly to investigate how mutations in the autism-associated protein FMRP may alter the expression of molecular gates regulating ion exchange at the synapse , which would in turn affect how frequently and strongly a pre-synaptic neuron excites a post-synaptic one. The differences she is investigating may be a molecular mechanism underlying neural hyperexcitability in fragile X syndrome, a profound autism spectrum disorder.

In her talk, Simons postdoc Lace Riggs, based in The McGovern Institute lab of Poitras Professor of Neuroscience Guoping Feng, emphasized how many autism-associated mutations in synaptic proteins promote pathological anxiety. She described her research that is aimed at discerning where in the brain’s neural circuitry that vulnerability might lie. In her ongoing work, Riggs is zeroing in on a novel thalamocortical circuit between the anteromedial nucleus of the thalamus and the cingulate cortex, which she found drives anxiogenic states. Riggs is co-supervised by Professor Fan Wang.

After the wide-ranging talks, supplemented by further discussion at the panels, the last word came via video conference from Kelsey Martin, executive vice president of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Martin emphasized that fundamental research, like that done at the Simons Center, is the key to developing future therapies and other means of supporting members of the autism community.

“We believe so strongly that understanding the basic mechanisms of autism is critical to being able to develop translational and clinical approaches that are going to impact the lives of autistic individuals and their families,” she said.

From studies of synapses to circuits to behavior, MIT researchers and their collaborators are striving for exactly that impact.

From studies of the connections between neurons to interactions between the nervous and immune systems to the complex ways in which people understand not just language, but also the unspoken nuances of conversation, new research projects at MIT supported by the Simons Center for the Social Brain are bringing a rich diversity of perspectives to advancing the field’s understanding of autism.

As six speakers lined up to describe their projects at a Simons Center symposium Nov. 15, MIT School of Science dean Nergis Mavalvala articulated what they were all striving for: “Ultimately, we want to seek understanding — not just the type that tells us how physiological differences in the inner workings of the brain produce differences in behavior and cognition, but also the kind of understanding that improves inclusion and quality of life for people living with autism spectrum disorders.”

Simons Center director Mriganka Sur, Newton Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS), said that even though the field still lacks mechanism-based treatments or reliable biomarkers for autism spectrum disorders, he is optimistic about the discoveries and new research MIT has been able to contribute. MIT research has led to five clinical trials so far, and he praised the potential for future discovery, for instance in the projects showcased at the symposium.

“We are, I believe, at a frontier — at a moment where a lot of basic science is coming together with the vision that we could use that science for the betterment of people,” Sur said.

The Simons Center funds that basic science research in two main ways that each encourage collaboration, Sur said: large-scale projects led by faculty members across several labs, and fellowships for postdocs who are mentored by two faculty members, thereby bringing together two labs. The symposium featured talks and panel discussions by faculty and fellows leading new research.

In a different vein, Associate Professor Ev Fedorenko of The McGovern Institute for Brain Research and BCS is leading a seven-lab collaboration aimed at understanding the cognitive and neural infrastructure that enables people to engage in conversation, which involves not only the language spoken but also facial expressions, tone of voice, and social context. Critical to this effort, she said, is going beyond previous work that studied each related brain area in isolation to understand the capability as a unified whole. A key insight, she said, is that they are all nearby each other in the lateral temporal cortex.

“Going beyond these individual components we can start asking big questions like, what are the broad organizing principles of this part of the brain?,” Fedorenko said. “Why does it have this particular arrangement of areas, and how do these work together to exchange information to create the unified percept of another individual we’re interacting with?”

While Choi and Fedorenko are looking at factors that account for differences in social behavior in autism, Picower Professor Earl K. Miller of The Picower Institute and BCS is leading a project that focuses on another phenomenon: the feeling of sensory overload that many autistic people experience. Research in Miller’s lab has shown that the brain’s ability to make predictions about sensory stimuli, which is critical to filtering out mundane signals so attention can be focused on new ones, depends on a cortex-wide coordination of the activity of millions of neurons implemented by high frequency “gamma” brain waves and lower-frequency “beta” waves. Working with animal models and human volunteers at Boston Children’s Hospital (BCH), Miller said his team is testing the idea that there may be a key difference in these brain wave dynamics in the autistic brain that could be addressed with closed-loop brain wave stimulation technology.

Simons postdoc Lukas Vogelsang, who is based in BCS Professor Pawan Sinha’s lab, is looking at potential differences in prediction between autistic and non-autistic individuals in a different way: through experiments with volunteers that aim to tease out how these differences are manifest in behavior. For instance, he’s finding that in at least one prediction task that requires participants to discern the probability of an event from provided cues, autistic people exhibit lower performance levels and undervalue the predictive significance of the cues, while non-autistic people slightly overvalue it. Vogelsang is co-advised by BCH researcher and Harvard Medical School Professor Charles Nelson.

Fundamentally, the broad-scale behaviors that emerge from coordinated brain-wide neural activity begins with the molecular details of how neurons connect with each other at circuit junctions called synapses. In her research based in The Picower Institute lab of Menicon Professor Troy Littleton, Simons postdoc Chhavi Sood is using the genetically manipulable model of the fruit fly to investigate how mutations in the autism-associated protein FMRP may alter the expression of molecular gates regulating ion exchange at the synapse , which would in turn affect how frequently and strongly a pre-synaptic neuron excites a post-synaptic one. The differences she is investigating may be a molecular mechanism underlying neural hyperexcitability in fragile X syndrome, a profound autism spectrum disorder.

In her talk, Simons postdoc Lace Riggs, based in The McGovern Institute lab of Poitras Professor of Neuroscience Guoping Feng, emphasized how many autism-associated mutations in synaptic proteins promote pathological anxiety. She described her research that is aimed at discerning where in the brain’s neural circuitry that vulnerability might lie. In her ongoing work, Riggs is zeroing in on a novel thalamocortical circuit between the anteromedial nucleus of the thalamus and the cingulate cortex, which she found drives anxiogenic states. Riggs is co-supervised by Professor Fan Wang.

After the wide-ranging talks, supplemented by further discussion at the panels, the last word came via video conference from Kelsey Martin, executive vice president of the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Martin emphasized that fundamental research, like that done at the Simons Center, is the key to developing future therapies and other means of supporting members of the autism community.

“We believe so strongly that understanding the basic mechanisms of autism is critical to being able to develop translational and clinical approaches that are going to impact the lives of autistic individuals and their families,” she said.

From studies of synapses to circuits to behavior, MIT researchers and their collaborators are striving for exactly that impact.

The electronics industry is approaching a limit to the number of transistors that can be packed onto the surface of a computer chip. So, chip manufacturers are looking to build up rather than out.

Instead of squeezing ever-smaller transistors onto a single surface, the industry is aiming to stack multiple surfaces of transistors and semiconducting elements — akin to turning a ranch house into a high-rise. Such multilayered chips could handle exponentially more data and carry out many more complex functions than today’s electronics.

A significant hurdle, however, is the platform on which chips are built. Today, bulky silicon wafers serve as the main scaffold on which high-quality, single-crystalline semiconducting elements are grown. Any stackable chip would have to include thick silicon “flooring” as part of each layer, slowing down any communication between functional semiconducting layers.

Now, MIT engineers have found a way around this hurdle, with a multilayered chip design that doesn’t require any silicon wafer substrates and works at temperatures low enough to preserve the underlying layer’s circuitry.

In a study appearing today in the journal Nature, the team reports using the new method to fabricate a multilayered chip with alternating layers of high-quality semiconducting material grown directly on top of each other.

The method enables engineers to build high-performance transistors and memory and logic elements on any random crystalline surface — not just on the bulky crystal scaffold of silicon wafers. Without these thick silicon substrates, multiple semiconducting layers can be in more direct contact, leading to better and faster communication and computation between layers, the researchers say.

The researchers envision that the method could be used to build AI hardware, in the form of stacked chips for laptops or wearable devices, that would be as fast and powerful as today’s supercomputers and could store huge amounts of data on par with physical data centers.

“This breakthrough opens up enormous potential for the semiconductor industry, allowing chips to be stacked without traditional limitations,” says study author Jeehwan Kim, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “This could lead to orders-of-magnitude improvements in computing power for applications in AI, logic, and memory.”

The study’s MIT co-authors include first author Ki Seok Kim, Seunghwan Seo, Doyoon Lee, Jung-El Ryu, Jekyung Kim, Jun Min Suh, June-chul Shin, Min-Kyu Song, Jin Feng, and Sangho Lee, along with collaborators from Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology, Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea, and the University of Texas at Dallas.

Seed pockets

In 2023, Kim’s group reported that they developed a method to grow high-quality semiconducting materials on amorphous surfaces, similar to the diverse topography of semiconducting circuitry on finished chips. The material that they grew was a type of 2D material known as transition-metal dichalcogenides, or TMDs, considered a promising successor to silicon for fabricating smaller, high-performance transistors. Such 2D materials can maintain their semiconducting properties even at scales as small as a single atom, whereas silicon’s performance sharply degrades.

In their previous work, the team grew TMDs on silicon wafers with amorphous coatings, as well as over existing TMDs. To encourage atoms to arrange themselves into high-quality single-crystalline form, rather than in random, polycrystalline disorder, Kim and his colleagues first covered a silicon wafer in a very thin film, or “mask” of silicon dioxide, which they patterned with tiny openings, or pockets. They then flowed a gas of atoms over the mask and found that atoms settled into the pockets as “seeds.” The pockets confined the seeds to grow in regular, single-crystalline patterns.

But at the time, the method only worked at around 900 degrees Celsius.

“You have to grow this single-crystalline material below 400 Celsius, otherwise the underlying circuitry is completely cooked and ruined,” Kim says. “So, our homework was, we had to do a similar technique at temperatures lower than 400 Celsius. If we could do that, the impact would be substantial.”

Building up

In their new work, Kim and his colleagues looked to fine-tune their method in order to grow single-crystalline 2D materials at temperatures low enough to preserve any underlying circuitry. They found a surprisingly simple solution in metallurgy — the science and craft of metal production. When metallurgists pour molten metal into a mold, the liquid slowly “nucleates,” or forms grains that grow and merge into a regularly patterned crystal that hardens into solid form. Metallurgists have found that this nucleation occurs most readily at the edges of a mold into which liquid metal is poured.

“It’s known that nucleating at the edges requires less energy — and heat,” Kim says. “So we borrowed this concept from metallurgy to utilize for future AI hardware.”

The team looked to grow single-crystalline TMDs on a silicon wafer that already has been fabricated with transistor circuitry. They first covered the circuitry with a mask of silicon dioxide, just as in their previous work. They then deposited “seeds” of TMD at the edges of each of the mask’s pockets and found that these edge seeds grew into single-crystalline material at temperatures as low as 380 degrees Celsius, compared to seeds that started growing in the center, away from the edges of each pocket, which required higher temperatures to form single-crystalline material.

Going a step further, the researchers used the new method to fabricate a multilayered chip with alternating layers of two different TMDs — molybdenum disulfide, a promising material candidate for fabricating n-type transistors; and tungsten diselenide, a material that has potential for being made into p-type transistors. Both p- and n-type transistors are the electronic building blocks for carrying out any logic operation. The team was able to grow both materials in single-crystalline form, directly on top of each other, without requiring any intermediate silicon wafers. Kim says the method will effectively double the density of a chip’s semiconducting elements, and particularly, metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS), which is a basic building block of a modern logic circuitry.

“A product realized by our technique is not only a 3D logic chip but also 3D memory and their combinations,” Kim says. “With our growth-based monolithic 3D method, you could grow tens to hundreds of logic and memory layers, right on top of each other, and they would be able to communicate very well.”

“Conventional 3D chips have been fabricated with silicon wafers in-between, by drilling holes through the wafer — a process which limits the number of stacked layers, vertical alignment resolution, and yields,” first author Kiseok Kim adds. “Our growth-based method addresses all of those issues at once.” 

To commercialize their stackable chip design further, Kim has recently spun off a company, FS2 (Future Semiconductor 2D materials).

“We so far show a concept at a small-scale device arrays,” he says. “The next step is scaling up to show professional AI chip operation.”

This research is supported, in part, by Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology and the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research. 

MIT physicists have created a new and long-lasting magnetic state in a material, using only light.

In a study appearing today in Nature, the researchers report using a terahertz laser — a light source that oscillates more than a trillion times per second — to directly stimulate atoms in an antiferromagnetic material. The laser’s oscillations are tuned to the natural vibrations among the material’s atoms, in a way that shifts the balance of atomic spins toward a new magnetic state.

The results provide a new way to control and switch antiferromagnetic materials, which are of interest for their potential to advance information processing and memory chip technology.

In common magnets, known as ferromagnets, the spins of atoms point in the same direction, in a way that the whole can be easily influenced and pulled in the direction of any external magnetic field. In contrast, antiferromagnets are composed of atoms with alternating spins, each pointing in the opposite direction from its neighbor. This up, down, up, down order essentially cancels the spins out, giving antiferromagnets a net zero magnetization that is impervious to any magnetic pull.

If a memory chip could be made from antiferromagnetic material, data could be “written” into microscopic regions of the material, called domains. A certain configuration of spin orientations (for example, up-down) in a given domain would represent the classical bit “0,” and a different configuration (down-up) would mean “1.” Data written on such a chip would be robust against outside magnetic influence.

For this and other reasons, scientists believe antiferromagnetic materials could be a more robust alternative to existing magnetic-based storage technologies. A major hurdle, however, has been in how to control antiferromagnets in a way that reliably switches the material from one magnetic state to another.

“Antiferromagnetic materials are robust and not influenced by unwanted stray magnetic fields,” says Nuh Gedik, the Donner Professor of Physics at MIT. “However, this robustness is a double-edged sword; their insensitivity to weak magnetic fields makes these materials difficult to control.”

Using carefully tuned terahertz light, the MIT team was able to controllably switch an antiferromagnet to a new magnetic state. Antiferromagnets could be incorporated into future memory chips that store and process more data while using less energy and taking up a fraction of the space of existing devices, owing to the stability of magnetic domains.

“Generally, such antiferromagnetic materials are not easy to control,” Gedik says. “Now we have some knobs to be able to tune and tweak them.”

Gedik is the senior author of the new study, which also includes MIT co-authors Batyr Ilyas, Tianchuang Luo, Alexander von Hoegen, Zhuquan Zhang, and Keith Nelson, along with collaborators at the Max Planck Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of Matter in Germany, University of the Basque Country in Spain, Seoul National University, and the Flatiron Institute in New York.

Off balance

Gedik’s group at MIT develops techniques to manipulate quantum materials in which interactions among atoms can give rise to exotic phenomena.

“In general, we excite materials with light to learn more about what holds them together fundamentally,” Gedik says. “For instance, why is this material an antiferromagnet, and is there a way to perturb microscopic interactions such that it turns into a ferromagnet?”

In their new study, the team worked with FePS₃ — a material that transitions to an antiferromagnetic phase at a critical temperature of around 118 kelvins (-247 degrees Fahrenheit).

The team suspected they might control the material’s transition by tuning into its atomic vibrations.

“In any solid, you can picture it as different atoms that are periodically arranged, and between atoms are tiny springs,” von Hoegen explains. “If you were to pull one atom, it would vibrate at a characteristic frequency which typically occurs in the terahertz range.”

The way in which atoms vibrate also relates to how their spins interact with each other. The team reasoned that if they could stimulate the atoms with a terahertz source that oscillates at the same frequency as the atoms’ collective vibrations, called phonons, the effect could also nudge the atoms’ spins out of their perfectly balanced, magnetically alternating alignment. Once knocked out of balance, atoms should have larger spins in one direction than the other, creating a preferred orientation that would shift the inherently nonmagnetized material into a new magnetic state with finite magnetization.

“The idea is that you can kill two birds with one stone: You excite the atoms’ terahertz vibrations, which also couples to the spins,” Gedik says.

Shake and write

To test this idea, the team worked with a sample of FePS₃ that was synthesized by colleages at Seoul National University. They placed the sample in a vacuum chamber and cooled it down to temperatures at and below 118 K. They then generated a terahertz pulse by aiming a beam of near-infrared light through an organic crystal, which transformed the light into the terahertz frequencies. They then directed this terahertz light toward the sample.

“This terahertz pulse is what we use to create a change in the sample,” Luo says. “It’s like ‘writing’ a new state into the sample.”

To confirm that the pulse triggered a change in the material’s magnetism, the team also aimed two near-infrared lasers at the sample, each with an opposite circular polarization. If the terahertz pulse had no effect, the researchers should see no difference in the intensity of the transmitted infrared lasers.

“Just seeing a difference tells us the material is no longer the original antiferromagnet, and that we are inducing a new magnetic state, by essentially using terahertz light to shake the atoms,” Ilyas says.

Over repeated experiments, the team observed that a terahertz pulse successfully switched the previously antiferromagnetic material to a new magnetic state — a transition that persisted for a surprisingly long time, over several milliseconds, even after the laser was turned off.

“People have seen these light-induced phase transitions before in other systems, but typically they live for very short times on the order of a picosecond, which is a trillionth of a second,” Gedik says.

In just a few milliseconds, scientists now might have a decent window of time during which they could probe the properties of the temporary new state before it settles back into its inherent antiferromagnetism. Then, they might be able to identify new knobs to tweak antiferromagnets and optimize their use in next-generation memory storage technologies.

This research was supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, Materials Science and Engineering Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. 

Researchers have developed a model that explains how humans adapt continuously during complex tasks, like walking, while remaining stable.

The findings were detailed in a recent paper published in the journal Nature Communications authored by Nidhi Seethapathi, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Barrett C. Clark, a robotics software engineer at Bright Minds Inc.; and Manoj Srinivasan, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State University.

In episodic tasks, like reaching for an object, errors during one episode do not affect the next episode. In tasks like locomotion, errors can have a cascade of short-term and long-term consequences to stability unless they are controlled. This makes the challenge of adapting locomotion in a new environment  more complex.

"Much of our prior theoretical understanding of adaptation has been limited to episodic tasks, such as reaching for an object in a novel environment," Seethapathi says. "This new theoretical model captures adaptation phenomena in continuous long-horizon tasks in multiple locomotor settings."

To build the model, the researchers identified general principles of locomotor adaptation across a variety of task settings, and  developed a unified modular and hierarchical model of locomotor adaptation, with each component having its own unique mathematical structure.

The resulting model successfully encapsulates how humans adapt their walking in novel settings such as on a split-belt treadmill with each foot at a different speed, wearing asymmetric leg weights, and wearing  an exoskeleton. The authors report that the model successfully reproduced human locomotor adaptation phenomena across novel settings in 10 prior studies and correctly predicted the adaptation behavior observed in two new experiments conducted as part of the study.

The model has potential applications in sensorimotor learning, rehabilitation, and wearable robotics.

"Having a model that can predict how a person will adapt to a new environment has immense utility for engineering better rehabilitation paradigms and wearable robot control," Seethapathi says. "You can think of a wearable robot itself as a new environment for the person to move in, and our model can be used to predict how a person will adapt for different robot settings. Understanding such human-robot adaptation is currently an experimentally intensive process, and our model  could help speed up the process by narrowing the search space."

Researchers have developed a model that explains how humans adapt continuously during complex tasks, like walking, while remaining stable.

The findings were detailed in a recent paper published in the journal Nature Communications authored by Nidhi Seethapathi, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Barrett C. Clark, a robotics software engineer at Bright Minds Inc.; and Manoj Srinivasan, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Ohio State University.

In episodic tasks, like reaching for an object, errors during one episode do not affect the next episode. In tasks like locomotion, errors can have a cascade of short-term and long-term consequences to stability unless they are controlled. This makes the challenge of adapting locomotion in a new environment  more complex.

"Much of our prior theoretical understanding of adaptation has been limited to episodic tasks, such as reaching for an object in a novel environment," Seethapathi says. "This new theoretical model captures adaptation phenomena in continuous long-horizon tasks in multiple locomotor settings."

To build the model, the researchers identified general principles of locomotor adaptation across a variety of task settings, and  developed a unified modular and hierarchical model of locomotor adaptation, with each component having its own unique mathematical structure.

The resulting model successfully encapsulates how humans adapt their walking in novel settings such as on a split-belt treadmill with each foot at a different speed, wearing asymmetric leg weights, and wearing  an exoskeleton. The authors report that the model successfully reproduced human locomotor adaptation phenomena across novel settings in 10 prior studies and correctly predicted the adaptation behavior observed in two new experiments conducted as part of the study.

The model has potential applications in sensorimotor learning, rehabilitation, and wearable robotics.

"Having a model that can predict how a person will adapt to a new environment has immense utility for engineering better rehabilitation paradigms and wearable robot control," Seethapathi says. "You can think of a wearable robot itself as a new environment for the person to move in, and our model can be used to predict how a person will adapt for different robot settings. Understanding such human-robot adaptation is currently an experimentally intensive process, and our model  could help speed up the process by narrowing the search space."

Sujood Eldouma always knew she loved math; she just didn’t know how to use it for good in the world. 

But after a personal and educational journey that took her from Sudan to Cairo to London, all while leveraging MIT Open Learning’s online educational resources, she finally knows the answer: data science.

An early love of data

Eldouma grew up in Omdurman, Sudan, with her parents and siblings. She always had an affinity for STEM subjects, and at the University of Khartoum she majored in electrical and electronic engineering with a focus in control and instrumentation engineering.

In her second year at university, Eldouma struggled with her first coding courses in C++ and C#, which are general-purpose programming languages. When a teaching assistant introduced Eldouma and her classmates to MIT OpenCourseWare for additional support, she promptly worked through OpenCourseWare’s C++ and C courses in tandem with her in-person classes. This began Eldouma’s ongoing connection with the open educational resources available through MIT Open Learning.

OpenCourseWare, part of MIT Open Learning, offers a free collection of materials from thousands of MIT courses, spanning the entire curriculum. To date, Eldouma has explored over 20 OpenCourseWare courses, and she says it is a resource she returns to regularly.

“We started watching the videos and reading the materials, and it made our lives easier,” says Eldouma. “I took many OpenCourseWare courses in parallel with my classes throughout my undergrad, because we still did the same material. OpenCourseWare courses are structured differently and have different resources and textbooks, but at the end of the day it’s the same content.”

For her graduation thesis, Eldouma did a project on disaster response and management in complex contexts, because at the time, Sudan was suffering from heavy floods and the country had limited resources to respond.

“That’s when I realized I really love data, and I wanted to explore that more,” she says.

While Eldouma loves math, she always wanted to find ways to use it for good. Through the early exposure to data science and statistical methods at her university, she saw how data science leverages math for real-world impact.

After graduation, she took a job at the DAL Group, the largest Sudanese conglomerate, where she helped to incorporate data science and new technologies to automate processes within the company. When civil war erupted in Sudan in April 2023, life as Eldouma knew it was turned upside down, and her family was forced to make the difficult choice to relocate to Egypt.

Purpose in adversity

Soon after relocating to Egypt, Eldouma lost her job and found herself struggling to find purpose in the life circumstances she had been handed. Due to visa restrictions, challenges getting right-to-work permits, and a complicated employment market in Egypt, she was also unable to find a new job.

“I was sort of in a depressive episode, because of all that was happening,” she reflects. “It just hit me that I lost everything that I know, everything that I love. I’m in a new country. I need to start from scratch.”

Around this time, a friend who knew Eldouma was curious about data science sent her the link to apply to the MIT Emerging Talent Certificate in Data and Computer Science. With less than 24 hours before the application deadline, Eldouma hit “Submit.”

Finding community and joy through learning

Part of MIT Open Learning, MIT Emerging Talent at the MIT Jameel World Education Lab (J-WEL) develops global education programs that target the needs of talented individuals from challenging economic and social circumstances by equipping them with the knowledge and tools to advance their education and careers.

The Certificate in Computer and Data Science is a year-long online learning program that follows an agile continuous education model. It incorporates computer science and data analysis coursework from MITx, professional skill building, experiential learning, apprenticeship options, and opportunities for networking with MIT’s global community. The program is targeted toward refugees, migrants, and first-generation low-income students from historically marginalized backgrounds and underserved communities worldwide.

Although Eldouma had used data science in her role at the DAL Group, she was happy to have a proper introduction to the field and to find joy in learning again. She also found community, support, and inspiration from her classmates who were connected to each other not just by their academic pursuits, but by their shared life challenges. The cohort of 100 students stayed in close contact through the program, both for casual conversation and for group work.

“In the final step of the Emerging Talent program, learners apply their computer and data knowledge in an experiential learning opportunity,” says Megan Mitchell, associate director for Pathways for Talent and acting director of J-WEL. “The experiential learning opportunity takes the form of an internship, apprenticeship, or an independent or collaborative project, and allows students to apply their knowledge in real-world settings and build practical skills.”

Determined to apply her newly acquired knowledge in a meaningful way, Eldouma and fellow displaced Sudanese classmates designed a project to help solve a problem in their home country. The group identified access to education as a major problem facing Sudanese people, with schooling disrupted due to the conflict. Focusing on the higher education audience, the group partnered with community platform Nas Al Sudan to create a centralized database where students can search for scholarships and other opportunities to continue their education.

Eldouma completed the MIT Emerging Talent program in June 2024 with a clear vision to pursue a career in data science, and the confidence to achieve that goal. In fact, she had already taken the steps to get there: halfway through the certificate program, she applied and was accepted to the MITx MicroMasters program in Statistics and Data Science at Open Learning and the London School of Economics (LSE) Masters of Science in Data Science.

In January 2024, Eldouma started the MicroMasters program with 12 of her Emerging Talent peers. While the MIT Emerging Talent program is focused on undergraduate-level, introductory computer and data science material, the MicroMasters program in Statistics and Data Science is graduate-level learning. MicroMasters programs are a series of courses that provide deep learning in a specific career field, and learners that successfully earn the credential may receive academic credit to universities around the world. This makes the credential a pathway to over 50 master’s degree programs and other advanced degrees, including at MIT. Eldouma believes that her experience in the MicroMasters courses prepared her well for the expectations of the LSE program.

After finishing the MicroMasters and LSE programs, Eldouma aspires to a career using data science to better understand what is happening on the African continent from an economic and social point of view. She hopes to contribute to solutions to conflicts across the region. And, someday, she hopes to move back to Sudan.

“My family’s roots are there. I have memories there,” she says. “I miss walking in the street and the background noise is the same language that I am thinking in. I don’t think I will ever find that in any place like Sudan.”

• Lianhe Zaobao, 11 December 2024, p6

• CNA Online, 10 December 2024
• 8world Online, 10 December 2024
• Suria News Online, 10 December 2024
• The New Paper, 10 December 2024
• The Straits Times, 11 December 2024, Singapore, pA16
• Lianhe Zaobao, 11 December 2024, Front Page & p6

By Assistant Professor Ryu Yongwook, from Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS

• CNA Online, 17 December 2024

The world is on the brink of a freshwater crisis. Estimations indicate that by 2025, half of the world’s population may reside in areas facing water scarcity. In response to this challenge, researchers from the National University of Singapore (NUS) have developed a novel aerogel designed to enhance the efficiency of atmospheric water harvesting.

This development, led by Associate Professor Tan Swee Ching from the Department of Materials Science and Engineering under the College of Design and Engineering at NUS, offers a practical solution to the pressing issue of freshwater scarcity, particularly in arid regions.

The aerogel is capable of absorbing moisture from the air up to about 5.5 times its weight, maintaining its performance across a wide range of humidity levels, and effective even in conditions as low as 20 per cent relative humidity, making it suitable for diverse environments. Demonstrating the aerogel’s applicability, the research team has integrated it into a solar-driven, autonomous atmospheric water generator that efficiently collects and releases freshwater without requiring external energy sources.

Tapping into the atmosphere

The Earth’s atmosphere holds an estimated 13,000 trillion litres of water — representing an untapped reservoir that could potentially alleviate water scarcity across many arid and drought-prone regions across the globe. However, the challenge has always been to efficiently convert water vapour into a usable resource, considering the variability of atmospheric conditions and the energy demands of current technologies.

Sorption-based atmospheric water harvesting (SAWH) employs sorbents to extract water from the air, presenting a low-energy, easy-to-operate solution applicable across diverse environments, including regions with limited resources. Despite its potential, SAWH faces challenges with conventional sorbents such as activated alumina, silica gels and zeolites, which either have inadequate water uptake or require high temperatures for water release. Although newer sorbents, including hygroscopic salts and metal-organic frameworks, improve upon these aspects, they struggle with issues like deliquescence and agglomeration, which compromise their efficiency and water sorption capacity. Additionally, SAWH devices are generally incapable of supporting more than one water capture-release cycle daily, limiting their utility for continuous and large-scale freshwater production.

Addressing these limitations, the NUS researchers tapped into their creativity to craft a more adaptable and energy-efficient material for SAWH. By converting magnesium chloride into a super hygroscopic magnesium complex and incorporating it into aerogels composed of sodium alginate and carbon nanotubes, they developed a composite aerogel that overcomes the drawbacks of previous technologies.

Like a sponge, the aerogel absorbs water vapour directly from the air into its porous structure, where it condenses and is stored until needed. When exposed to sunlight or a slight increase in ambient temperature (around 50 deg C), the aerogel releases the stored water as fresh, liquid water. The process is facilitated by the aerogel’s unique composition, which combines the moisture-attracting properties of the magnesium complex with the thermal properties of carbon nanotubes — enabling rapid water absorption and release.

Key properties of the aerogel include its high water uptake capacity — about 5.5 times its weight at 95 per cent relative humidity and 27 per cent of its weight at 20 per cent relative humidity, typical of desert climates. Moreover, its robust structure allows for repeated use without a loss in efficiency. It is also cost-efficient to produce — raw materials necessary for producing one square metre of the aerogel cost only US$2.

“The aerogel exhibits rapid absorption/desorption kinetics with 12 cycles per day at 70 per cent relative humidity, equivalent to a water yield of 10 litres per kilogramme of aerogel per day,” said Assoc Prof Tan. “Carbon nanotubes play a crucial role in boosting the aerogel’s photothermal conversion efficiency, enabling quicker water release with minimal energy consumption.”

From concept to reality

The researchers have also designed and constructed a fully solar-driven, autonomous atmospheric water generator that incorporates two layers of the novel aerogel. Each layer alternately engages in the water absorption/desorption cycle, operating without any external energy input. This setup showcases the aerogel’s practicality for facilitating continuous freshwater production — a feature beneficial in underdeveloped regions or areas lacking necessary clean-water infrastructure.

Potential applications of this technology are vast, encompassing evaporative cooling and energy harvesting to smart sensing and urban agriculture. The team has filed a patent for their technology.

The NUS researchers are looking forward to collaborating with local farms and industry partners alike to advance their research and commercialise their technology.

• Lianhe Zaoabao, 15 December 2024, News, p9

• Lianhe Zaobao, 15 December 2024, News, p6
• CNA Online, 19 December 2024
• Suria News Online, 19 December 2024

• CNA Online, 15 December 2024

• Lianhe Zaobao, 14 December 2024, Singapore, p8

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

• Suria News Online, 13 December 2024

From 1960 to 1989, South Korea experienced a famous economic boom, with real GDP per capita growing by an annual average of 6.82 percent. Many observers have attributed this to industrial policy, the practice of giving government support to specific industrial sectors. In this case, industrial policy is often thought to have powered a generation of growth.

Did it, though? An innovative study by four scholars, including two MIT economists, suggests that overall GDP growth attributable to industrial policy is relatively limited. Using global trade data to evaluate changes in industrial capacity within countries, the research finds that industrial policy raises long-run GDP by only 1.08 percent in generally favorable circumstances, and up to 4.06 percent if additional factors are aligned — a distinctly smaller gain than an annually compounding rate of 6.82 percent.

The study is meaningful not just because of the bottom-line numbers, but for the reasons behind them. The research indicates, for instance, that local consumer demand can curb the impact of industrial policy. Even when a country alters its output, demand for those goods may not shift as extensively, putting a ceiling on directed growth.

“In most cases, the gains are not going to be enormous,” says MIT economist Arnaud Costinot, co-author of a new paper detailing the research. “They are there, but in terms of magnitude, the gains are nowhere near the full scope of the South Korean experience, which is the poster child for an industrial policy success story.”

The research combines empirical data and economic theory, using data to assess “textbook” conditions where industrial policy would seem most merited.

“Many think that, for countries like China, Japan, and other East Asian giants, and perhaps even the U.S., some form of industrial policy played a big role in their success stories,” says Dave Donaldson, an MIT economist and another co-author of the paper. “The question is whether the textbook argument for industrial policy fully explains those successes, and our punchline would be, no, we don’t think it can.”

The paper, “The Textbook Case for Industrial Policy: Theory Meets Data,” appears in the Journal of Political Economy. The authors are Dominick Bartelme, an independent researcher; Costinot, the Ford Professor of Economics in MIT’s Department of Economics; Donaldson, the Class of 1949 Professor of Economics in MIT’s Department of Economics; and Andres Rodriguez-Clare, the Edward G. and Nancy S. Jordan Professor of Economics at the University of California at Berkeley.

Reverse-engineering new insights

Opponents of industrial policy have long advocated for a more market-centered approach to economics. And yet, over the last several decades globally, even where political leaders publicly back a laissez-faire approach, many governments have still found reasons to support particular industries. Beyond that, people have long cited East Asia’s economic rise as a point in favor of industrial policy.

The scholars say the “textbook case” for industrial policy is a scenario where some economic sectors are subject to external economies of scale but others are not.

That means firms within an industry have an external effect on the productivity of other firms in that same industry, which could happen via the spread of knowledge.

If an industry becomes both bigger and more productive, it may make cheaper goods that can be exported more competitively. The study is based on the insight that global trade statistics can tell us something important about the changes in industry-specific capacities within countries. That — combined with other metrics about national economies — allows the economists to scrutinize the overall gains deriving from those changes and to assess the possible scope of industrial policies.

As Donaldson explains, “An empirical lever here is to ask: If something makes a country’s sectors bigger, do they look more productive? If so, they would start exporting more to other countries. We reverse-engineer that.”

Costinot adds: “We are using that idea that if productivity is going up, that should be reflected in export patterns. The smoking gun for the existence of scale effects is that larger domestic markets go hand in hand with more exports.”

Ultimately, the scholars analyzed data for 61 countries at different points in time over the last few decades, with exports for 15 manufacturing sectors included. The figure of 1.08 percent long-run GDP gains is an average, with countries realizing gains ranging from 0.59 percent to 2.06 percent annually under favorable conditions. Smaller countries that are open to trade may realize larger proportional effects as well.

“We’re doing this global analysis and trying to be right on average,” Donaldson says. “It’s possible there are larger gains from industrial policy in particular settings.”

The study also suggests countries have greater room to redirect economic activity, based on varying levels of productivity among industries, than they can realistically enact due to relatively fixed demand. The paper estimates that if countries could fully reallocate workers to the industry with the largest room to grow, long-run welfare gains would be as high as 12.4 percent.

But that never happens. Suppose a country’s industrial policy helped one sector double in size while becoming 20 percent more productive. In theory, the government should continue to back that industry. In reality, growth would slow as markets became saturated.

“That would be a pretty big scale effect,” Donaldson says. “But notice that in doubling the size of an industry, many forces would push back. Maybe consumers don’t want to consume twice as many manufactured goods. Just because there are large spillovers in productivity doesn’t mean optimally designed industrial policy has huge effects. It has to be in a world where people want those goods.”

Place-based policy

Costinot and Donaldson both emphasize that this study does not address all the possible factors that can be weighed either in favor of industrial policy or against it. Some governments might favor industrial policy as a way of evening out wage distributions and wealth inequality, fixing other market failures such as environmental damages or furthering strategic geopolitical goals. In the U.S., industrial policy has sometimes been viewed as a way of revitalizing recently deindustrialized areas while reskilling workers.

In charting the limits on industrial policy stemming from fairly fixed demand, the study touches on still bigger issues concerning global demand and restrictions on growth of any kind. Without increasing demand, enterprise of all kinds encounters size limits.

The outcome of the paper, in any case, is not necessarily a final conclusion about industrial policy, but deeper insight into its dynamics. As the authors note, the findings leave open the possibility that targeted interventions in specific sectors and specific regions could be very beneficial, when policy and trade conditions are right. Policymakers should grasp the amount of growth likely to result, however.

As Costinot notes, “The conclusion is not that there is no potential gain from industrial policy, but just that the textbook case doesn’t seem to be there.” At least, not to the extent some have assumed.

The research was supported, in part, by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Perry World House held a discussion featuring Penn experts to confront the future of Syria after the fall of the Assad regime and what the world can expect.

Verderame, an outreach educator at the School of Veterinary Medicine, discusses her kinship with misunderstood animals, introducing students to veterinary medicine, the black market for insects, her favorite part of her job, and the dreaded spotted lanternfly.

In a fall letter to MIT alumni, President Sally Kornbluth wrote: “[T]he world has never been more ready to reward our graduates for what they know — and know how to do.” During her tenure leading MIT Career Advising and Professional Development (CAPD), Deborah Liverman has seen firsthand how — and how well — MIT undergraduate and graduate students leverage their education to make an impact around the globe in academia, industry, entrepreneurship, medicine, government and nonprofits, and other professions. Here, Liverman shares her observations about trends in students’ career paths and the complexities of the job market they must navigate along the way.

Q: How do our students fare when they graduate from MIT?

A: We routinely survey our undergraduates and graduate students to track post-graduation outcomes, so fortunately we have a wealth of data. And ultimately, this enables us to stay on top of changes from year to year and to serve our students better.

The short answer is that our students fare exceptionally well when they leave the Institute! In our 2023 Graduating Student Survey, which is an exit survey for bachelor’s degree and master’s degree students, 49 percent of bachelor’s respondents and 79 percent of master’s respondents entered the workforce after graduating, and 43 percent and 14 percent started graduate school programs, respectively. Among those seeking immediate employment, 92 percent of bachelor’s and 87 percent of master’s degree students reported obtaining a job within three months of graduation.

What is notable, and frankly, wonderful, is that these two cohorts really took advantage of the rich ecosystem of experiential learning opportunities we have at MIT. The majority of Class of 2023 seniors participated in some form of experiential learning before graduation: 94 percent of them had a UROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program], 75 percent interned, 66 percent taught or tutored, and 38 percent engaged with or mentored at campus makerspaces. Among master’s degree graduates in 2023, 56 percent interned, 45 percent taught or tutored, and 30 percent took part in entrepreneurial ventures or activities. About 47 percent of bachelor’s graduates said that a previous internship or externship led to the offer that they accepted, and 46 percent of master’s graduates are a founding member of a company.

We conduct a separate survey for doctoral students. I think there’s a common misperception that most of our PhD students go into academia. But a sizable portion choose not to stay in the academy. According to our 2024 Doctoral Exit Survey, 41 percent of graduates planned to go into industry. As of the survey date, of those who were going on to employment, 76 percent had signed a contract or made a definite commitment to a postdoc or other work, and only 9 percent were seeking a position but had no specific prospects.

A cohort of students, as well as some alumni, work with CAPD’s Prehealth Advising staff to apply for medical school. Last year we supported 73 students and alumni consisting of 25 undergrads, eight graduate students, and 40 alumni, with an acceptance rate of 79 percent — well above the national rate of 41 percent.

Q: How does CAPD work with students and postdocs to cultivate their professional development and help them evaluate their career options?

A: As you might expect, the career and graduate school landscape is constantly changing. In turn, CAPD strives to continuously evolve, so that we can best support and prepare our students. It certainly keeps us on our feet!

One of the things we have changed recently is our fundamental approach to working with students. We migrated our advising model from a major-specific focus to instead center on career interest areas. That allows us to prioritize skills and use a cross-disciplinary approach to advising students. So when an advisor sits down (or Zooms) with a student, that one-on-one session creates plenty of space to discuss a student’s individual values, goals, and other career-decision influencing factors.

I would say that another area we have been heavily focused on is providing new ways for students to explore careers. To that end, we developed two roles — an assistant director of career exploration and an assistant director of career prototype — to support new initiatives. And we provide career exploration fellowships and grants for undergraduate and graduate students so that they can explore fields that may be niche to MIT.

Career exploration is really important, but we want to meet students and postdocs where they are. We know they are incredibly busy at MIT, so our goal is to provide a variety of formats to make that possible, from a one-hour workshop or speaker, to a daylong shadowing experience, or a longer-term internship. For example, we partnered with departments to create the Career Exploration Series and the Infinite Careers speaker series, where we show students various avenues to get to a career. We have also created more opportunities to interact with alumni or other employers through one-day shadowing opportunities, micro-internships, internships, and employer coffee chats. The Prehealth Advising program I mentioned before offers many avenues to explore the field of medicine, so students can really make informed decisions about the path they want to pursue.

We are also looking at our existing programming to identify opportunities to build in career exploration, such as the Fall Career Fair. We have been working on identifying employers who are open to having career exploration conversations with — or hiring — first-year undergraduates, with access to these employers 30 minutes before the start of the fair. This year, the fair drew 4,400 candidates (students, postdocs, and alumni) and 180 employers, so it’s a great opportunity to leverage an event we already have in place and make it even more fruitful for both students and employers.

I do want to underscore that career exploration is just as important for graduate students as it is for undergraduates. In the doctoral exit survey I mentioned, 37 percent of 2024 graduates said they had changed their mind about the type of employer for whom they expected to work since entering their graduate program, and 38 percent had changed their mind about the type of position they expected to have. CAPD has developed exploration programming geared specifically for them, such as the CHAOS Process and our Graduate Student Professional Development offerings.

Q: What kinds of trends are you seeing in the current job market? And as students receive job offers, how do they weigh factors like the ethical considerations of working for a certain company or industry, the political landscape in the U.S. and abroad, the climate impact of a certain company or industry, or other issues?

A: Well, one notable trend is just the sheer volume of job applications. With platforms like LinkedIn’s Easy Apply, it’s easier for job seekers to apply to hundreds of jobs at once. Employers and organizations have more candidates, so applicants have to do more to stand out. Companies that, in the past, have had to seek out candidates are now deciding the best use of their recruiting efforts.

I would say the current job market is mixed. MIT students, graduates, and postdocs have experienced delayed job offers and starting dates pushed back in consulting and some tech firms. Companies are being intentional about recruiting and hiring college graduates. So students need to keep an open mind and not have their heart set on a particular employer. And if that employer isn’t hiring, then they may have to optimize their job search and consider other opportunities where they can gain experience.

On a more granular level, we do see trends in certain fields. Biotech has had a tough year, but there’s an uptick in opportunities in government, space, aerospace, and in the climate/sustainability and energy sectors. Companies are increasingly adopting AI in their business practices, so they’re hiring in that area. And financial services is a hot market for MIT candidates with strong technical skills.

As for how a student evaluates a job offer, according to the Graduating Student Survey, students look at many factors, including the job content, fit with the employer’s culture, opportunity for career advancement, and of course salary. However, students are also interested in exploring how an organization fits with their values.

CAPD provides various opportunities and resources to help them zero in on what matters most to them, from on-demand resources to one-on-one sessions with our advisors. As they research potential companies, we encourage them to make the most of career fairs and recruiting events. Throughout the academic year, MIT hosts and collaborates on over a dozen career fairs and large recruiting events. Companies are invited based on MIT candidates’ interests. The variety of opportunities means students can connect with different industries, explore careers, and apply to internships, jobs and research opportunities.

We also recommend that they take full advantage of MIT’s curated instance of Handshake, an online recruiting platform for higher education students and alumni. CAPD has collaborated with offices and groups to create filters and identifiers in Handshake to help candidates decide what is important to them, such as a company’s commitment to inclusive practices or their sustainability initiatives.

As advisors, we encourage each student to think about which factors are important for them when evaluating job offers and determine if an employer aligns with their values and goals. And we encourage and honor each student’s right to include those values and goals in their career decision-making process. Accepting a job is a very personal decision, and we are here to support each student every step of the way.

America is one step closer to tapping into a new and potentially limitless clean energy source today, with the announcement from MIT spinout Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) that it plans to build the world’s first grid-scale fusion power plant in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

The announcement is the latest milestone for the company, which has made groundbreaking progress toward harnessing fusion — the reaction that powers the sun — since its founders first conceived of their approach in an MIT classroom in 2012. CFS is now commercializing a suite of advanced technologies developed in MIT research labs.

“This moment exemplifies the power of MIT’s mission, which is to create knowledge that serves the nation and the world, whether via the classroom, the lab, or out in communities,” MIT Vice President for Research Ian Waitz says. “From student coursework 12 years ago to today’s announcement of the siting in Virginia of the world’s first fusion power plant, progress has been amazingly rapid. At the same time, we owe this progress to over 65 years of sustained investment by the U.S. federal government in basic science and energy research.”

The new fusion power plant, named ARC, is expected to come online in the early 2030s and generate about 400 megawatts of clean, carbon-free electricity — enough energy to power large industrial sites or about 150,000 homes.

The plant will be built at the James River Industrial Park outside of Richmond through a nonfinancial collaboration with Dominion Energy Virginia, which will provide development and technical expertise along with leasing rights for the site. CFS will independently finance, build, own, and operate the power plant.

The plant will support Virginia’s economic and clean energy goals by generating what is expected to be billions of dollars in economic development and hundreds of jobs during its construction and long-term operation.

More broadly, ARC will position the U.S. to lead the world in harnessing a new form of safe and reliable energy that could prove critical for economic prosperity and national security, including for meeting increasing electricity demands driven by needs like artificial intelligence.

“This will be a watershed moment for fusion,” says CFS co-founder Dennis Whyte, the Hitachi America Professor of Engineering at MIT. “It sets the pace in the race toward commercial fusion power plants. The ambition is to build thousands of these power plants and to change the world.”

Fusion can generate energy from abundant fuels like hydrogen and lithium isotopes, which can be sourced from seawater, and leave behind no emissions or toxic waste. However, harnessing fusion in a way that produces more power than it takes in has proven difficult because of the high temperatures needed to create and maintain the fusion reaction. Over the course of decades, scientists and engineers have worked to make the dream of fusion power plants a reality.

In 2012, teaching the MIT class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering), Whyte challenged a group of graduate students to design a fusion device that would use a new kind of superconducting magnet to confine the plasma used in the reaction. It turned out the magnets enabled a more compact and economic reactor design. When Whyte reviewed his students’ work, he realized that could mean a new development path for fusion.

Since then, a huge amount of capital and expertise has rushed into the once fledgling fusion industry. Today there are dozens of private fusion companies around the world racing to develop the first net-energy fusion power plants, many utilizing the new superconducting magnets. CFS, which Whyte founded with several students from his class, has attracted more than $2 billion in funding.

“It all started with that class, where our ideas kept evolving as we challenged the standard assumptions that came with fusion,” Whyte says. “We had this new superconducting technology, so much of the common wisdom was no longer valid. It was a perfect forum for students, who can challenge the status quo.”

Since the company’s founding in 2017, it has collaborated with researchers in MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PFSC) on a range of initiatives, from validating the underlying plasma physics for the first demonstration machine to breaking records with a new kind of magnet to be used in commercial fusion power plants. Each piece of progress moves the U.S. closer to harnessing a revolutionary new energy source.

CFS is currently completing development of its fusion demonstration machine, SPARC, at its headquarters in Devens, Massachusetts. SPARC is expected to produce its first plasma in 2026 and net fusion energy shortly after, demonstrating for the first time a commercially relevant design that will produce more power than it consumes. SPARC will pave the way for ARC, which is expected to deliver power to the grid in the early 2030s.

“There’s more challenging engineering and science to be done in this field, and we’re very enthusiastic about the progress that CFS and the researchers on our campus are making on those problems,” Waitz says. “We’re in a ‘hockey stick’ moment in fusion energy, where things are moving incredibly quickly now. On the other hand, we can’t forget about the much longer part of that hockey stick, the sustained support for very complex, fundamental research that underlies great innovations. If we’re going to continue to lead the world in these cutting-edge technologies, continued investment in those areas will be crucial.”

2024 marked a milestone year for NUS Residential College 4 (RC4), as it celebrated a decade as a vibrant living and learning community centred on systems thinking, community engagement and entrepreneurial innovation.

Since its inception as the University’s youngest RC in 2014 with a pilot batch of just 62 students, RC4 has now grown to accommodate 600 students, fostering an environment of self-discovery and personal growth, nurturing numerous student achievements ranging from the performing arts to research publications, start-ups and community projects.

A decade of small systems, big hearts

The motto “Small Systems, Big Hearts” has played a pivotal role in RC4's living and learning programmes over the past decade. RC4 students adopt the systems thinking approach as they address intricately interconnected community issues and conceive innovations that fulfil societal needs, recognising that many problems are not standalone but embedded in a complex system with moving and interconnected parts. As such, a holistic solution rather than a piecemeal solution is needed.

From the intellectual prowess in systems thinking to its application in community engagement and entrepreneurial innovation, RC4’s journey has stayed true to this guiding motto and exemplifies its founding value proposition of a reinforcing living and learning symbiosis.

“As the College reaches its 10th-anniversary milestone, I hope that our students will continue to go out and make a positive difference in the world by virtue of their intellectual acumen and big hearts,” said RC4 Master Associate Professor Peter Pang, as he reflected on the RC’s ten-year journey.

The RC’s focus on systems thinking has also enabled it to be a vital nurturing ground for those with a passion for solving real-world problems, such as the co-founders of Vilota, Ms Low Yin Yi (Life Sciences ‘19), Mr Lexdan Lim (Electrical Engineering ‘18) and Mr Cheng Huimin (Electrical Engineering ‘18). Building on their time in RC4 Space, a student group specialising in drone development and aerial filming, the trio took their passion for entrepreneurship to the next step with Vilota, conceived as an abbreviated portmanteau of the words Vision, Location and Data, a start-up that designs and manufactures Visual Positioning Systems aimed at solving localisation challenges in the mining, construction, robotics and mobility industries.

“One thing we remember most about RC4 is how it functioned much like an incubator – a safe environment, providing optimal conditions for interaction, exploration, development and growth,” shared Mr Cheng.

“I will never cease to marvel at how much RC4 has grown – from being the relatively unknown college to the college of choice among today’s prospective students. Notable alumni such as Vilota co-founders are already living the spirit of the College's ‘Small Systems, Big Hearts’ motto, making their impact in the Singapore community and beyond,” said RC4 Fellow Associate Professor Chng Huang Hoon, who has journeyed with the RC since the initial planning of its University Town College Programme curriculum.

A year of celebration

To commemorate a fulfilling decade, several sub-committees in RC4 put together a year-long plethora of activities and events to celebrate their 10^th anniversary. The celebration brought together students and staff in events spanning a day of sports and games, an alumni homecoming dinner, parents’ night, and even a celebratory birthday dinner for Oscar, RC4’s beloved Orca mascot.

The RC also dedicated time to serving the community through the RC4 Veggie Rescue. Staff, students and alumni came together to gather leftover fresh produce, which would have otherwise been discarded by grocery stores, to be redistributed amongst needy households and communities.

The College wrapped up the anniversary celebrations with two major events – a symposium on systems thinking and a gala dinner to celebrate its 10^th anniversary.

Interconnected horizons

Close to 200 students, alumni, educators and systems thinking experts came together at RC4’s 10^th Anniversary Symposium on 19 October 2024. With the theme "Interconnected Horizons: Systems Thinking, Communities, and Entrepreneurship", the event featured insightful plenary talks by renowned systems thinking pioneers Professor John Sterman and Professor Peter Hovmand, who demonstrated how system dynamics analysis could effectively shape policymaking and foster collaborative solutions to address complex societal challenges.

The symposium also showcased innovative student research projects, such as alumnus Mr Toh Chin Howe’s (Psychology ‘23) exploration of the Water-Energy-Food (WEF) Nexus, which used systems modelling to understand the interconnectivity of Singapore's resources and forecast future trends.

Additionally, panel discussions involving RC4 alumni, students, faculty, community partners, and entrepreneurs explored systems thinking in diverse contexts such as policy, technology, innovation and community engagement. RC4 alumnus Mr Daniel Lee (Data Science ‘24) emphasised the power of group model building in managing stress and engaging communities, leading to actionable outcomes such as the establishment of peer support groups and RC4’s new relaxation space, Oasis. Meanwhile, RC4 Fellow Dr Lynette Tan discussed how mahjong served as a conduit for bridging generational gaps and promoting intergenerational engagement to combat ageism.

This milestone event showcased systems thinking as a powerful tool for positive social change while celebrating RC4’s decade-long commitment to “systems thinking, communities, and entrepreneurship.”

Journeying beyond a decade

The year-long anniversary celebrations culminated in the RC4 Gala Dinner on 7 December 2024, attended by over 400 guests, including students, alumni, parents, faculty, community partners and guests to celebrate the past decade’s achievements and hopes for a bright future ahead.

During the dinner, A/Prof Pang announced the launch of the RC4 Bursary Fund, marking a pivotal step in supporting future generations of RC4 students facing financial challenges. With over S$250,000 raised so far, this fund aims to empower students on their academic and personal growth at the College.

“As we celebrate our achievements of the past 10 years, we also look forward to the next 10 years and beyond. Today, we pledge that in the next 10 years, RC4 will offer even better living-and-learning programmes that will even better prepare our graduates to be effective leaders of change in a complex world. We pledge to enable all RC4 students to participate fully in these living-learning programmes. With the launch of the RC4 bursary, today we are taking the first step towards this pledge,” said A/Prof Pang, emphasising the significance of the new bursary fund and its impact.

The evening also treated guests to a medley of live entertainment, with performances by RC4 student bands “The Unemployed”, “Black Sheep” and “Your Mom’s Favourite Band”, who recently placed runner-up in NUS Supernova’s The Rising Star category. To mark RC4’s 10^th anniversary, the college’s home-grown talents Navin Ong Kumar (Year 4, Physics), Sherwin Lam (Year 3, Economics) and Nicole Liu (Year 2, Economics and Data Science) wrote and performed the original song “Where We Call Home”, capturing the unique experience of living in RC4.

As RC4 concludes the year-long celebrations, the college looks forward to continuing its journey of growth and innovation, fostering a vibrant community dedicated to making a difference.

“The past year of RC4’s 10^th anniversary celebrations have been a wonderful opportunity for residents, alumni, faculty and staff to come together, reflect on our journey, and look forward to the exciting possibilities for the future,” said third-year Environmental Engineering and Economics undergraduate Teo Jia Xin, who was part of the Gala Dinner planning committee. “To me, RC4 is a home away from home. It’s where I have met incredibly talented friends, built lasting relationships, and created countless cherished memories.”

By Residential College 4

MIT scientists have released a powerful, open-source AI model, called Boltz-1, that could significantly accelerate biomedical research and drug development.

Developed by a team of researchers in the MIT Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health, Boltz-1 is the first fully open-source model that achieves state-of-the-art performance at the level of AlphaFold3, the model from Google DeepMind that predicts the 3D structures of proteins and other biological molecules.

MIT graduate students Jeremy Wohlwend and Gabriele Corso were the lead developers of Boltz-1, along with MIT Jameel Clinic Research Affiliate Saro Passaro and MIT professors of electrical engineering and computer science Regina Barzilay and Tommi Jaakkola. Wohlwend and Corso presented the model at a Dec. 5 event at MIT’s Stata Center, where they said their ultimate goal is to foster global collaboration, accelerate discoveries, and provide a robust platform for advancing biomolecular modeling.

“We hope for this to be a starting point for the community,” Corso said. “There is a reason we call it Boltz-1 and not Boltz. This is not the end of the line. We want as much contribution from the community as we can get.”

Proteins play an essential role in nearly all biological processes. A protein’s shape is closely connected with its function, so understanding a protein’s structure is critical for designing new drugs or engineering new proteins with specific functionalities. But because of the extremely complex process by which a protein’s long chain of amino acids is folded into a 3D structure, accurately predicting that structure has been a major challenge for decades.

DeepMind’s AlphaFold2, which earned Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, uses machine learning to rapidly predict 3D protein structures that are so accurate they are indistinguishable from those experimentally derived by scientists. This open-source model has been used by academic and commercial research teams around the world, spurring many advancements in drug development.

AlphaFold3 improves upon its predecessors by incorporating a generative AI model, known as a diffusion model, which can better handle the amount of uncertainty involved in predicting extremely complex protein structures. Unlike AlphaFold2, however, AlphaFold3 is not fully open source, nor is it available for commercial use, which prompted criticism from the scientific community and kicked off a global race to build a commercially available version of the model.

For their work on Boltz-1, the MIT researchers followed the same initial approach as AlphaFold3, but after studying the underlying diffusion model, they explored potential improvements. They incorporated those that boosted the model’s accuracy the most, such as new algorithms that improve prediction efficiency.

Along with the model itself, they open-sourced their entire pipeline for training and fine-tuning so other scientists can build upon Boltz-1.

“I am immensely proud of Jeremy, Gabriele, Saro, and the rest of the Jameel Clinic team for making this release happen. This project took many days and nights of work, with unwavering determination to get to this point. There are many exciting ideas for further improvements and we look forward to sharing them in the coming months,” Barzilay says.

It took the MIT team four months of work, and many experiments, to develop Boltz-1. One of their biggest challenges was overcoming the ambiguity and heterogeneity contained in the Protein Data Bank, a collection of all biomolecular structures that thousands of biologists have solved in the past 70 years.

“I had a lot of long nights wrestling with these data. A lot of it is pure domain knowledge that one just has to acquire. There are no shortcuts,” Wohlwend says.

In the end, their experiments show that Boltz-1 attains the same level of accuracy as AlphaFold3 on a diverse set of complex biomolecular structure predictions.

“What Jeremy, Gabriele, and Saro have accomplished is nothing short of remarkable. Their hard work and persistence on this project has made biomolecular structure prediction more accessible to the broader community and will revolutionize advancements in molecular sciences,” says Jaakkola.

The researchers plan to continue improving the performance of Boltz-1 and reduce the amount of time it takes to make predictions. They also invite researchers to try Boltz-1 on their GitHub repository and connect with fellow users of Boltz-1 on their Slack channel.

“We think there is still many, many years of work to improve these models. We are very eager to collaborate with others and see what the community does with this tool,” Wohlwend adds.

Mathai Mammen, CEO and president of Parabilis Medicines, calls Boltz-1 a “breakthrough” model. “By open sourcing this advance, the MIT Jameel Clinic and collaborators are democratizing access to cutting-edge structural biology tools,” he says. “This landmark effort will accelerate the creation of life-changing medicines. Thank you to the Boltz-1 team for driving this profound leap forward!”

“Boltz-1 will be enormously enabling, for my lab and the whole community,” adds Jonathan Weissman, an MIT professor of biology and member of the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Engineering who was not involved in the study. “We will see a whole wave of discoveries made possible by democratizing this powerful tool.” Weissman adds that he anticipates that the open-source nature of Boltz-1 will lead to a vast array of creative new applications.

This work was also supported by a U.S. National Science Foundation Expeditions grant; the Jameel Clinic; the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency Discovery of Medical Countermeasures Against New and Emerging (DOMANE) Threats program; and the MATCHMAKERS project supported by the Cancer Grand Challenges partnership financed by Cancer Research UK and the U.S. National Cancer Institute.

In 2024, nearly 200 students across diverse faculties and majors set off on seven different week-long study trips to exciting, fast-growing economic hubs in Southeast Asia, India, and China – returning with fond memories and lessons that have left an indelible impact.

These study trips are part of the Global Industry Insights (GII) course organised by the NUS Centre for Future-ready Graduates. A credit-bearing course that brings learning to the regional stage, GII trips are characterised by deep industry exposure via immersive company visits, structured networking events with regional employers and practitioners, and cultural appreciation activities to learn about local life and culture. Through these trips, students gain global perspectives, learn about the career opportunities that lie beyond Singapore, hone skillsets that would poise them for success on the global stage, and develop a deeper appreciation for diverse cultures.

Immersive, behind the scenes company visits

A hallmark of GII trips is the chance to visit multiple companies within a short span of time, regardless of the country visited. On each trip, students visited an average of six to eight companies across diverse industry sectors. They also had a unique opportunity to learn about Singapore’s presence in these countries by visiting the regional outposts of homegrown companies.

The highly immersive nature of GII company visits allowed students to go behind the scenes to learn about the inner workings and ground operations of each company. With students across faculties and majors participating in each trip, they broadened their horizons through multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary learning and gained exposure to industry sectors outside their core fields of study.

In China, students toured the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP), a visit of timely significance given the 30th anniversary of this inaugural government-to-government project between Singapore and China this year. Besides learning about the SIP, students had the opportunity to visit a number of start-ups housed within the Park. At Qichacha, students gained an understanding on how a business information platform could tap on AI cloud technology and data analytics for live database updating of company profiles with information such as credit scores, risk analyses, benefitting investors and consumers; and at GAREA, a health-tech company, students learnt about medical technology in areas such as telemedicine and chronic disease management.

Over in India, students visited Sula Vineyard, one of India’s pioneer vineyards, located in the city of Nashik in the state of Maharashtra. While touring the grounds of the expansive 2,800-acre vineyard, students gained insights into the wine business and observed the entire winemaking process – from harvesting and crushing the grapes to fermentation, clarification, ageing and bottling of the wines.

Reflecting on his trip to Indonesia, Chan Ger Teck, a Year 2 NUS School of Computing student said, “Being able to glean insights into another market, contrast the differences, and experience and understand various industries through company visits in Indonesia was greatly valuable and special. It was also a great chance for me to interact with students of other majors and seniority.”

Host companies similarly found these visits fruitful. Mr Quek Kwan Yi, the Chief Operating Officer of Q Industries and Trade Joint Stock Company in Vietnam commented, “Through the visit, students got to learn first-hand from a hospitality trading company such as the hotel procurement function and its perspectives, and gain insights into Vietnam’s economic growth and opportunities.”

Airbus Chief Representative to Thailand, Mr Bert Porteman said, “The visit to our Thailand office was designed to expose students to the operations behind one of the world’s leading aerospace manufacturers. Through our partnership with NUS, we offer students unique opportunities to gain industry exposure, interact with aerospace professionals, and participate in Airbus-driven projects. This collaboration aligns with our goal to nurture future talent and equip them with the skills needed in a rapidly evolving aerospace industry.”

Engaging with regional employers and practitioners

Many students aspire to live and work abroad but may have little idea how to realise these ambitions. At the GII networking events, students learnt first-hand from industry attendees about living and working in these countries, deepening their knowledge of what building a career and life overseas might look like. They also heard from senior company executives who shared their perspectives on the local industry, economy, and careers.

Besides meeting industry practitioners, students who participated in the GII trip to China also had the opportunity to interact with students from NUS Research Institute (NUSRI) Suzhou’s “3+1+1 programme”, forging a foundation for continued bilateral exchange as the latter will eventually head to Singapore for their further studies.

Many students gained fresh perspectives about overseas careers through their GII trips, with some forging meaningful connections that became handy as they later sought overseas internships. One such student is Gabriel Chua Ee-An, a Year 3 NUS Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences student who participated in a GII trip to Cambodia earlier this year. During the trip, he visited Profitence, a boutique consultancy firm in Phnom Penh, eventually securing an internship with the company and working on projects in collaboration with organisations such as the World Trade Organisation.

“GII introduced me to opportunities I had not previously considered, such as interning abroad. I gained insights into overseas work environments, which inspired me to pursue an international internship. This decision led to a memorable and enriching internship in Cambodia where I developed both professionally and personally,” said Gabriel.

Building an appreciation for diverse cultures

Besides broadening their career horizons, students participated in cultural activities such as making local crafts, preparing and sampling local delicacies, and guided tours to historic and cultural sites. During pockets of free time, the more adventurous students formed groups to further explore the local cities and culture. With the world becoming increasingly interconnected, students learnt to appreciate the value of cultural diversity and understand how they can thrive and contribute as global citizens.

Avantika Velliyur Nott, a Year 2 NUS Faculty of Science student, said of her GII trip to India: “This course offers a unique opportunity to travel to other countries, experience different cultures, get exposure to multiple industries and interact with a wide range of company representatives; this is something one is not likely to get access to in any other way. This trip leaves you with a larger network, deeper understanding of a country's economic and sociocultural landscape, opening up more future possibilities.”

In pre- and post-trip surveys, students shared that participating in GII trips has not only enhanced their technical skills and knowledge, but also their grasp of and confidence in critical life skills ranging from communication, innovation, curiosity and independent learning to interdisciplinary knowledge and skills.

The GII course was launched in 2021 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, with virtual study trips to Indonesia and Vietnam. In 2023, the first physical overseas study trips kicked off, with students heading to Indonesia and Thailand.

“This year, GII has greatly expanded its footprint, with students travelling to Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, India, and China. We are excited that more students can look forward to benefitting from GII in the year ahead, with the course pioneering trips to countries like Malaysia and Philippines, and several trips broadening to encompass multi-city itineraries,” said Ms Joan Tay, Senior Director, Centre for Future-ready Graduates.

Learn more about the Global Industry Insights (GII) course here.

By NUS Centre for Future-ready Graduates

Researchers at the University of Melbourne in partnership with the Colossal Foundation will advance conservation efforts to engineer immunity in amphibians, including Australias critically endangered Corroboree Frog, against a deadly fungal disease.

The University of Melbourne has conferred honorary doctorates on five eminent people for their endeavors in a variety of fields.

Laboratory studies reveal a potentially low-tech intervention to improve personalized cell therapy.

As seen across North America at sometimes surprisingly low latitudes, brilliant auroral displays provide evidence of solar activity in the night sky. More is going on than the familiar visible light shows during these events, though: When aurora appear, the Earth’s ionosphere is experiencing an increase in ionization and total electron content (TEC) due to energetic electrons and ions precipitating into the ionosphere.

One extreme auroral event earlier this year (May 10–11) was the Gannon geomagnetic “superstorm,” named in honor of researcher Jennifer Gannon, who suddenly passed away May 2. During the Gannon storm, both MIT Haystack Observatory researchers and citizen scientists across the United States observed the effects of this event on the Earth’s ionosphere, as detailed in the open-access paper “Imaging the May 2024 Extreme Aurora with Ionospheric Total Electron Content,” which was published Oct. 14 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Contributing citizen scientists featured co-author Daniel Bush, who recorded and livestreamed the entire auroral event from his amateur observatory in Albany, Missouri, and included numerous citizen observers recruited via social media.

Citizen science or community science involves members of the general public who volunteer their time to contribute, often at a significant level, to scientific investigations, including observations, data collection, development of technology, and interpreting results and analysis. Professional scientists are not the only people who perform research. The collaborative work of citizen scientists not only supports stronger scientific results, but also improves the transparency of scientific work on issues of importance to the entire population and increases STEM involvement across many groups of people who are not professional scientists in these fields.

Haystack collected data for this study from a dense network of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System, including systems like GPS) receivers across the United States, which monitor changes in ionospheric TEC variations on a time scale of less than a minute. In this study, John Foster and colleagues mapped the auroral effects during the Gannon storm in terms of TEC changes, and worked with citizen scientists to confirm auroral expansion with still photo and video observations.

Both the TEC observations and the procedural incorporation of synchronous imagery from citizen scientists were groundbreaking; this is the first use of precipitation-produced ionospheric TEC to map the occurrence and evolution of a strong auroral display on a continental scale. Lead author Foster says, “These observations validate the TEC mapping technique for detailed auroral studies, and provided groundbreaking detection of strong isolated bursts of precipitation-produced ionization associated with rapid intensification and expansion of auroral activity.”

Haystack scientists also linked their work with citizen observations posted to social media to support the TEC measurements made via the GNSS receiver network. This color imagery and very high TEC levels lead to the finding that the intense red aurora was co-located with the leading edge of the equator-ward and westward increasing TEC levels, indicating that the TEC enhancement was created by intense low-energy electron precipitation following the geomagnetic superstorm. This storm was exceptionally strong, with auroral activity centered relatively rarely at mid latitudes. Processes in the stormtime magnetosphere were the immediate cause of the auroral and ionospheric disturbances. These, in turn, were driven by the preceding solar coronal mass ejection and the interaction of the highly disturbed solar wind with Earth's outer magnetosphere. The ionospheric observations reported in this paper are parts of this global system of interactions, and their characteristics can be used to better understand our coupled atmospheric system.

Co-author and amateur astronomer Daniel Bush says, “It is not uncommon for ‘citizen scientists’ such as myself to contribute to major scientific research by supplying observations of natural phenomena seen in the skies above Earth. Astronomy and geospace sciences are a couple of scientific disciplines in which amateurs such as myself can still contribute greatly without leaving their backyards. I am so proud that some of my work has proven to be of value to a formal study.” Despite his modest tone in discussing his contributions, his work was essential in reaching the scientific conclusions of the Haystack researchers’ study.

Knowledge of this complex system is more than an intellectual study; TEC structure and ionospheric activity are of serious space weather concern for satellite-based communication and navigation systems. The sharp TEC gradients and variability observed in this study are particularly significant when occurring in the highly populated mid latitudes, as seen across the United States in the May 2024 superstorm and more recent auroral events.

As seen across North America at sometimes surprisingly low latitudes, brilliant auroral displays provide evidence of solar activity in the night sky. More is going on than the familiar visible light shows during these events, though: When aurora appear, the Earth’s ionosphere is experiencing an increase in ionization and total electron content (TEC) due to energetic electrons and ions precipitating into the ionosphere.

One extreme auroral event earlier this year (May 10–11) was the Gannon geomagnetic “superstorm,” named in honor of researcher Jennifer Gannon, who suddenly passed away May 2. During the Gannon storm, both MIT Haystack Observatory researchers and citizen scientists across the United States observed the effects of this event on the Earth’s ionosphere, as detailed in the open-access paper “Imaging the May 2024 Extreme Aurora with Ionospheric Total Electron Content,” which was published Oct. 14 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. Contributing citizen scientists featured co-author Daniel Bush, who recorded and livestreamed the entire auroral event from his amateur observatory in Albany, Missouri, and included numerous citizen observers recruited via social media.

Citizen science or community science involves members of the general public who volunteer their time to contribute, often at a significant level, to scientific investigations, including observations, data collection, development of technology, and interpreting results and analysis. Professional scientists are not the only people who perform research. The collaborative work of citizen scientists not only supports stronger scientific results, but also improves the transparency of scientific work on issues of importance to the entire population and increases STEM involvement across many groups of people who are not professional scientists in these fields.

Haystack collected data for this study from a dense network of GNSS (Global Navigation Satellite System, including systems like GPS) receivers across the United States, which monitor changes in ionospheric TEC variations on a time scale of less than a minute. In this study, John Foster and colleagues mapped the auroral effects during the Gannon storm in terms of TEC changes, and worked with citizen scientists to confirm auroral expansion with still photo and video observations.

Both the TEC observations and the procedural incorporation of synchronous imagery from citizen scientists were groundbreaking; this is the first use of precipitation-produced ionospheric TEC to map the occurrence and evolution of a strong auroral display on a continental scale. Lead author Foster says, “These observations validate the TEC mapping technique for detailed auroral studies, and provided groundbreaking detection of strong isolated bursts of precipitation-produced ionization associated with rapid intensification and expansion of auroral activity.”

Haystack scientists also linked their work with citizen observations posted to social media to support the TEC measurements made via the GNSS receiver network. This color imagery and very high TEC levels lead to the finding that the intense red aurora was co-located with the leading edge of the equator-ward and westward increasing TEC levels, indicating that the TEC enhancement was created by intense low-energy electron precipitation following the geomagnetic superstorm. This storm was exceptionally strong, with auroral activity centered relatively rarely at mid latitudes. Processes in the stormtime magnetosphere were the immediate cause of the auroral and ionospheric disturbances. These, in turn, were driven by the preceding solar coronal mass ejection and the interaction of the highly disturbed solar wind with Earth's outer magnetosphere. The ionospheric observations reported in this paper are parts of this global system of interactions, and their characteristics can be used to better understand our coupled atmospheric system.

Co-author and amateur astronomer Daniel Bush says, “It is not uncommon for ‘citizen scientists’ such as myself to contribute to major scientific research by supplying observations of natural phenomena seen in the skies above Earth. Astronomy and geospace sciences are a couple of scientific disciplines in which amateurs such as myself can still contribute greatly without leaving their backyards. I am so proud that some of my work has proven to be of value to a formal study.” Despite his modest tone in discussing his contributions, his work was essential in reaching the scientific conclusions of the Haystack researchers’ study.

Knowledge of this complex system is more than an intellectual study; TEC structure and ionospheric activity are of serious space weather concern for satellite-based communication and navigation systems. The sharp TEC gradients and variability observed in this study are particularly significant when occurring in the highly populated mid latitudes, as seen across the United States in the May 2024 superstorm and more recent auroral events.

Have you ever wondered if your plants were dry and dehydrated, or if you’re not watering them enough? Farmers and green-fingered enthusiasts alike may soon have a way to find this out in real-time. 

Over the past decade, researchers have been working on sensors to detect a wide range of chemical compounds, and a critical bottleneck has been developing sensors that can be used within living biological systems. This is all set to change with new sensors by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) that can detect pH changes in living plants — an indicator of drought stress in plants — and enable the timely detection and management of drought stress before it leads to irreversible yield loss.

Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of SMART, MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, in collaboration with Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory and MIT, have pioneered the world’s first covalent organic framework (COF) sensors integrated within silk fibroin (SF) microneedles for in-planta detection of physiological pH changes. This advanced technology can detect a reduction in acidity in plant xylem tissues, providing early warning of drought stress in plants up to 48 hours before traditional methods.

Drought — or a lack of water — is a significant stressor that leads to lower yield by affecting key plant metabolic pathways, reducing leaf size, stem extension, and root proliferation. If prolonged, it can eventually cause plants to become discolored, wilt, and die. As agricultural challenges — including those posed by climate change, rising costs, and lack of land space — continue to escalate and adversely affect crop production and yield, farmers are often unable to implement proactive measures or pre-symptomatic diagnosis for early and timely intervention. This underscores the need for improved sensor integration that can facilitate in-vivo assessments and timely interventions in agricultural practices.

“This type of sensor can be easily attached to the plant and queried with simple instrumentation. It can therefore bring powerful analyses, like the tools we are developing within DISTAP, into the hands of farmers and researchers alike,” says Professor Michael Strano, co-corresponding author, DiSTAP co-lead principal investigator, and the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

SMART’s breakthrough addresses a long-standing challenge for COF-based sensors, which were — until now — unable to interact with biological tissues. COFs are networks of organic molecules or polymers — which contain carbon atoms bonded to elements like hydrogen, oxygen, or nitrogen — arranged into consistent, crystal-like structures, which change color according to different pH levels. As drought stress can be detected through pH level changes in plant tissues, this novel COF-based sensor allows early detection of drought stress in plants through real-time measuring of pH levels in plant xylem tissues. This method could help farmers optimize crop production and yield amid evolving climate patterns and environmental conditions.

“The COF-silk sensors provide an example of new tools that are required to make agriculture more precise in a world that strives to increase global food security under the challenges imposed by climate change, limited resources, and the need to reduce the carbon footprint. The seamless integration between nanosensors and biomaterials enables the effortless measurement of plant fluids’ key parameters, such as pH, that in turn allows us to monitor plant health,” says Professor Benedetto Marelli, co-corresponding author, principal investigator at DiSTAP, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.

In an open-access paper titled, “Chromatic Covalent Organic Frameworks Enabling In-Vivo Chemical Tomography” recently published in Nature Communications, DiSTAP researchers documented their groundbreaking work, which demonstrated the real-time detection of pH changes in plant tissues. Significantly, this method allows in-vivo 3D mapping of pH levels in plant tissues using only a smartphone camera, offering a minimally invasive approach to exploring previously inaccessible environments compared to slower and more destructive traditional optical methods.

DiSTAP researchers designed and synthesized four COF compounds that showcase tunable acid chromism — color changes associated with changing pH levels — with SF microneedles coated with a layer of COF film made of these compounds. In turn, the transparency of SF microneedles and COF film allows in-vivo observation and visualization of pH spatial distributions through changes in the pH-sensitive colors.

“Building on our previous work with biodegradable COF-SF films capable of sensing food spoilage, we’ve developed a method to detect pH changes in plant tissues. When used in plants, the COF compounds will transition from dark red to red as the pH increases in the xylem tissues, indicating that the plants are experiencing drought stress and require early intervention to prevent yield loss,” says Song Wang, research scientist at SMART DiSTAP and co-first author.

“SF microneedles are robust and can be designed to remain stable even when interfacing with biological tissues. They are also transparent, which allows multidimensional mapping in a minimally invasive manner. Paired with the COF films, farmers now have a precision tool to monitor plant health in real time and better address challenges like drought and improve crop resilience,” says Yangyang Han, senior postdoc at SMART DiSTAP and co-first author.

This study sets the foundation for future design and development for COF-SF microneedle-based tomographic chemical imaging of plants with COF-based sensors. Building on this research, DiSTAP researchers will work to advance this innovative technology beyond pH detection, with a focus on sensing a broad spectrum of biologically relevant analytes such as plant hormones and metabolites.

The research is conducted by SMART and supported by the National Research Foundation of Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise program.

Have you ever wondered if your plants were dry and dehydrated, or if you’re not watering them enough? Farmers and green-fingered enthusiasts alike may soon have a way to find this out in real-time. 

Over the past decade, researchers have been working on sensors to detect a wide range of chemical compounds, and a critical bottleneck has been developing sensors that can be used within living biological systems. This is all set to change with new sensors by the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) that can detect pH changes in living plants — an indicator of drought stress in plants — and enable the timely detection and management of drought stress before it leads to irreversible yield loss.

Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group of SMART, MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, in collaboration with Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory and MIT, have pioneered the world’s first covalent organic framework (COF) sensors integrated within silk fibroin (SF) microneedles for in-planta detection of physiological pH changes. This advanced technology can detect a reduction in acidity in plant xylem tissues, providing early warning of drought stress in plants up to 48 hours before traditional methods.

Drought — or a lack of water — is a significant stressor that leads to lower yield by affecting key plant metabolic pathways, reducing leaf size, stem extension, and root proliferation. If prolonged, it can eventually cause plants to become discolored, wilt, and die. As agricultural challenges — including those posed by climate change, rising costs, and lack of land space — continue to escalate and adversely affect crop production and yield, farmers are often unable to implement proactive measures or pre-symptomatic diagnosis for early and timely intervention. This underscores the need for improved sensor integration that can facilitate in-vivo assessments and timely interventions in agricultural practices.

“This type of sensor can be easily attached to the plant and queried with simple instrumentation. It can therefore bring powerful analyses, like the tools we are developing within DISTAP, into the hands of farmers and researchers alike,” says Professor Michael Strano, co-corresponding author, DiSTAP co-lead principal investigator, and the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT.

SMART’s breakthrough addresses a long-standing challenge for COF-based sensors, which were — until now — unable to interact with biological tissues. COFs are networks of organic molecules or polymers — which contain carbon atoms bonded to elements like hydrogen, oxygen, or nitrogen — arranged into consistent, crystal-like structures, which change color according to different pH levels. As drought stress can be detected through pH level changes in plant tissues, this novel COF-based sensor allows early detection of drought stress in plants through real-time measuring of pH levels in plant xylem tissues. This method could help farmers optimize crop production and yield amid evolving climate patterns and environmental conditions.

“The COF-silk sensors provide an example of new tools that are required to make agriculture more precise in a world that strives to increase global food security under the challenges imposed by climate change, limited resources, and the need to reduce the carbon footprint. The seamless integration between nanosensors and biomaterials enables the effortless measurement of plant fluids’ key parameters, such as pH, that in turn allows us to monitor plant health,” says Professor Benedetto Marelli, co-corresponding author, principal investigator at DiSTAP, and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at MIT.

In an open-access paper titled, “Chromatic Covalent Organic Frameworks Enabling In-Vivo Chemical Tomography” recently published in Nature Communications, DiSTAP researchers documented their groundbreaking work, which demonstrated the real-time detection of pH changes in plant tissues. Significantly, this method allows in-vivo 3D mapping of pH levels in plant tissues using only a smartphone camera, offering a minimally invasive approach to exploring previously inaccessible environments compared to slower and more destructive traditional optical methods.

DiSTAP researchers designed and synthesized four COF compounds that showcase tunable acid chromism — color changes associated with changing pH levels — with SF microneedles coated with a layer of COF film made of these compounds. In turn, the transparency of SF microneedles and COF film allows in-vivo observation and visualization of pH spatial distributions through changes in the pH-sensitive colors.

“Building on our previous work with biodegradable COF-SF films capable of sensing food spoilage, we’ve developed a method to detect pH changes in plant tissues. When used in plants, the COF compounds will transition from dark red to red as the pH increases in the xylem tissues, indicating that the plants are experiencing drought stress and require early intervention to prevent yield loss,” says Song Wang, research scientist at SMART DiSTAP and co-first author.

“SF microneedles are robust and can be designed to remain stable even when interfacing with biological tissues. They are also transparent, which allows multidimensional mapping in a minimally invasive manner. Paired with the COF films, farmers now have a precision tool to monitor plant health in real time and better address challenges like drought and improve crop resilience,” says Yangyang Han, senior postdoc at SMART DiSTAP and co-first author.

This study sets the foundation for future design and development for COF-SF microneedle-based tomographic chemical imaging of plants with COF-based sensors. Building on this research, DiSTAP researchers will work to advance this innovative technology beyond pH detection, with a focus on sensing a broad spectrum of biologically relevant analytes such as plant hormones and metabolites.

The research is conducted by SMART and supported by the National Research Foundation of Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise program.

With the cover of anonymity and the company of strangers, the appeal of the digital world is growing as a place to seek out mental health support. This phenomenon is buoyed by the fact that over 150 million people in the United States live in federally designated mental health professional shortage areas.

“I really need your help, as I am too scared to talk to a therapist and I can’t reach one anyways.”

“Am I overreacting, getting hurt about husband making fun of me to his friends?”

“Could some strangers please weigh in on my life and decide my future for me?”

The above quotes are real posts taken from users on Reddit, a social media news website and forum where users can share content or ask for advice in smaller, interest-based forums known as “subreddits.” 

Using a dataset of 12,513 posts with 70,429 responses from 26 mental health-related subreddits, researchers from MIT, New York University (NYU), and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) devised a framework to help evaluate the equity and overall quality of mental health support chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4. Their work was recently published at the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).

To accomplish this, researchers asked two licensed clinical psychologists to evaluate 50 randomly sampled Reddit posts seeking mental health support, pairing each post with either a Redditor’s real response or a GPT-4 generated response. Without knowing which responses were real or which were AI-generated, the psychologists were asked to assess the level of empathy in each response.

Mental health support chatbots have long been explored as a way of improving access to mental health support, but powerful LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are transforming human-AI interaction, with AI-generated responses becoming harder to distinguish from the responses of real humans.

Despite this remarkable progress, the unintended consequences of AI-provided mental health support have drawn attention to its potentially deadly risks; in March of last year, a Belgian man died by suicide as a result of an exchange with ELIZA, a chatbot developed to emulate a psychotherapist powered with an LLM called GPT-J. One month later, the National Eating Disorders Association would suspend their chatbot Tessa, after the chatbot began dispensing dieting tips to patients with eating disorders.

Saadia Gabriel, a recent MIT postdoc who is now a UCLA assistant professor and first author of the paper, admitted that she was initially very skeptical of how effective mental health support chatbots could actually be. Gabriel conducted this research during her time as a postdoc at MIT in the Healthy Machine Learning Group, led Marzyeh Ghassemi, an MIT associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science who is affiliated with the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

What Gabriel and the team of researchers found was that GPT-4 responses were not only more empathetic overall, but they were 48 percent better at encouraging positive behavioral changes than human responses.

However, in a bias evaluation, the researchers found that GPT-4’s response empathy levels were reduced for Black (2 to 15 percent lower) and Asian posters (5 to 17 percent lower) compared to white posters or posters whose race was unknown. 

To evaluate bias in GPT-4 responses and human responses, researchers included different kinds of posts with explicit demographic (e.g., gender, race) leaks and implicit demographic leaks. 

An explicit demographic leak would look like: “I am a 32yo Black woman.”

Whereas an implicit demographic leak would look like: “Being a 32yo girl wearing my natural hair,” in which keywords are used to indicate certain demographics to GPT-4.

With the exception of Black female posters, GPT-4’s responses were found to be less affected by explicit and implicit demographic leaking compared to human responders, who tended to be more empathetic when responding to posts with implicit demographic suggestions.

“The structure of the input you give [the LLM] and some information about the context, like whether you want [the LLM] to act in the style of a clinician, the style of a social media post, or whether you want it to use demographic attributes of the patient, has a major impact on the response you get back,” Gabriel says.

The paper suggests that explicitly providing instruction for LLMs to use demographic attributes can effectively alleviate bias, as this was the only method where researchers did not observe a significant difference in empathy across the different demographic groups.

Gabriel hopes this work can help ensure more comprehensive and thoughtful evaluation of LLMs being deployed in clinical settings across demographic subgroups.

“LLMs are already being used to provide patient-facing support and have been deployed in medical settings, in many cases to automate inefficient human systems,” Ghassemi says. “Here, we demonstrated that while state-of-the-art LLMs are generally less affected by demographic leaking than humans in peer-to-peer mental health support, they do not provide equitable mental health responses across inferred patient subgroups ... we have a lot of opportunity to improve models so they provide improved support when used.”

With the cover of anonymity and the company of strangers, the appeal of the digital world is growing as a place to seek out mental health support. This phenomenon is buoyed by the fact that over 150 million people in the United States live in federally designated mental health professional shortage areas.

“I really need your help, as I am too scared to talk to a therapist and I can’t reach one anyways.”

“Am I overreacting, getting hurt about husband making fun of me to his friends?”

“Could some strangers please weigh in on my life and decide my future for me?”

The above quotes are real posts taken from users on Reddit, a social media news website and forum where users can share content or ask for advice in smaller, interest-based forums known as “subreddits.” 

Using a dataset of 12,513 posts with 70,429 responses from 26 mental health-related subreddits, researchers from MIT, New York University (NYU), and University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) devised a framework to help evaluate the equity and overall quality of mental health support chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4. Their work was recently published at the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP).

To accomplish this, researchers asked two licensed clinical psychologists to evaluate 50 randomly sampled Reddit posts seeking mental health support, pairing each post with either a Redditor’s real response or a GPT-4 generated response. Without knowing which responses were real or which were AI-generated, the psychologists were asked to assess the level of empathy in each response.

Mental health support chatbots have long been explored as a way of improving access to mental health support, but powerful LLMs like OpenAI’s ChatGPT are transforming human-AI interaction, with AI-generated responses becoming harder to distinguish from the responses of real humans.

Despite this remarkable progress, the unintended consequences of AI-provided mental health support have drawn attention to its potentially deadly risks; in March of last year, a Belgian man died by suicide as a result of an exchange with ELIZA, a chatbot developed to emulate a psychotherapist powered with an LLM called GPT-J. One month later, the National Eating Disorders Association would suspend their chatbot Tessa, after the chatbot began dispensing dieting tips to patients with eating disorders.

Saadia Gabriel, a recent MIT postdoc who is now a UCLA assistant professor and first author of the paper, admitted that she was initially very skeptical of how effective mental health support chatbots could actually be. Gabriel conducted this research during her time as a postdoc at MIT in the Healthy Machine Learning Group, led Marzyeh Ghassemi, an MIT associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science who is affiliated with the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

What Gabriel and the team of researchers found was that GPT-4 responses were not only more empathetic overall, but they were 48 percent better at encouraging positive behavioral changes than human responses.

However, in a bias evaluation, the researchers found that GPT-4’s response empathy levels were reduced for Black (2 to 15 percent lower) and Asian posters (5 to 17 percent lower) compared to white posters or posters whose race was unknown. 

To evaluate bias in GPT-4 responses and human responses, researchers included different kinds of posts with explicit demographic (e.g., gender, race) leaks and implicit demographic leaks. 

An explicit demographic leak would look like: “I am a 32yo Black woman.”

Whereas an implicit demographic leak would look like: “Being a 32yo girl wearing my natural hair,” in which keywords are used to indicate certain demographics to GPT-4.

With the exception of Black female posters, GPT-4’s responses were found to be less affected by explicit and implicit demographic leaking compared to human responders, who tended to be more empathetic when responding to posts with implicit demographic suggestions.

“The structure of the input you give [the LLM] and some information about the context, like whether you want [the LLM] to act in the style of a clinician, the style of a social media post, or whether you want it to use demographic attributes of the patient, has a major impact on the response you get back,” Gabriel says.

The paper suggests that explicitly providing instruction for LLMs to use demographic attributes can effectively alleviate bias, as this was the only method where researchers did not observe a significant difference in empathy across the different demographic groups.

Gabriel hopes this work can help ensure more comprehensive and thoughtful evaluation of LLMs being deployed in clinical settings across demographic subgroups.

“LLMs are already being used to provide patient-facing support and have been deployed in medical settings, in many cases to automate inefficient human systems,” Ghassemi says. “Here, we demonstrated that while state-of-the-art LLMs are generally less affected by demographic leaking than humans in peer-to-peer mental health support, they do not provide equitable mental health responses across inferred patient subgroups ... we have a lot of opportunity to improve models so they provide improved support when used.”

As the world looks for ways to stop climate change, much discussion focuses on using hydrogen instead of fossil fuels, which emit climate-warming greenhouse gases (GHGs) when they’re burned. The idea is appealing. Burning hydrogen doesn’t emit GHGs to the atmosphere, and hydrogen is well-suited for a variety of uses, notably as a replacement for natural gas in industrial processes, power generation, and home heating.

But while burning hydrogen won’t emit GHGs, any hydrogen that’s leaked from pipelines or storage or fueling facilities can indirectly cause climate change by affecting other compounds that are GHGs, including tropospheric ozone and methane, with methane impacts being the dominant effect. A much-cited 2022 modeling study analyzing hydrogen’s effects on chemical compounds in the atmosphere concluded that these climate impacts could be considerable. With funding from the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future Energy Systems Center, a team of MIT researchers took a more detailed look at the specific chemistry that poses the risks of using hydrogen as a fuel if it leaks.

The researchers developed a model that tracks many more chemical reactions that may be affected by hydrogen and includes interactions among chemicals. Their open-access results, published Oct. 28 in Frontiers in Energy Research, showed that while the impact of leaked hydrogen on the climate wouldn’t be as large as the 2022 study predicted — and that it would be about a third of the impact of any natural gas that escapes today — leaked hydrogen will impact the climate. Leak prevention should therefore be a top priority as the hydrogen infrastructure is built, state the researchers.

Hydrogen’s impact on the “detergent” that cleans our atmosphere

Global three-dimensional climate-chemistry models using a large number of chemical reactions have also been used to evaluate hydrogen’s potential climate impacts, but results vary from one model to another, motivating the MIT study to analyze the chemistry. Most studies of the climate effects of using hydrogen consider only the GHGs that are emitted during the production of the hydrogen fuel. Different approaches may make “blue hydrogen” or “green hydrogen,” a label that relates to the GHGs emitted. Regardless of the process used to make the hydrogen, the fuel itself can threaten the climate. For widespread use, hydrogen will need to be transported, distributed, and stored — in short, there will be many opportunities for leakage. 

The question is, What happens to that leaked hydrogen when it reaches the atmosphere? The 2022 study predicting large climate impacts from leaked hydrogen was based on reactions between pairs of just four chemical compounds in the atmosphere. The results showed that the hydrogen would deplete a chemical species that atmospheric chemists call the “detergent of the atmosphere,” explains Candice Chen, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It goes around zapping greenhouse gases, pollutants, all sorts of bad things in the atmosphere. So it’s cleaning our air.” Best of all, that detergent — the hydroxyl radical, abbreviated as OH — removes methane, which is an extremely potent GHG in the atmosphere. OH thus plays an important role in slowing the rate at which global temperatures rise. But any hydrogen leaked to the atmosphere would reduce the amount of OH available to clean up methane, so the concentration of methane would increase.

However, chemical reactions among compounds in the atmosphere are notoriously complicated. While the 2022 study used a “four-equation model,” Chen and her colleagues — Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry; and Kane Stone, a research scientist in EAPS — developed a model that includes 66 chemical reactions. Analyses using their 66-equation model showed that the four-equation system didn’t capture a critical feedback involving OH — a feedback that acts to protect the methane-removal process.

Here’s how that feedback works: As the hydrogen decreases the concentration of OH, the cleanup of methane slows down, so the methane concentration increases. However, that methane undergoes chemical reactions that can produce new OH radicals. “So the methane that’s being produced can make more of the OH detergent,” says Chen. “There’s a small countering effect. Indirectly, the methane helps produce the thing that’s getting rid of it.” And, says Chen, that’s a key difference between their 66-equation model and the four-equation one. “The simple model uses a constant value for the production of OH, so it misses that key OH-production feedback,” she says.

To explore the importance of including that feedback effect, the MIT researchers performed the following analysis: They assumed that a single pulse of hydrogen was injected into the atmosphere and predicted the change in methane concentration over the next 100 years, first using four-equation model and then using the 66-equation model. With the four-equation system, the additional methane concentration peaked at nearly 2 parts per billion (ppb); with the 66-equation system, it peaked at just over 1 ppb.

Because the four-equation analysis assumes only that the injected hydrogen destroys the OH, the methane concentration increases unchecked for the first 10 years or so. In contrast, the 66-equation analysis goes one step further: the methane concentration does increase, but as the system re-equilibrates, more OH forms and removes methane. By not accounting for that feedback, the four-equation analysis overestimates the peak increase in methane due to the hydrogen pulse by about 85 percent. Spread over time, the simple model doubles the amount of methane that forms in response to the hydrogen pulse.

Chen cautions that the point of their work is not to present their result as “a solid estimate” of the impact of hydrogen. Their analysis is based on a simple “box” model that represents global average conditions and assumes that all the chemical species present are well mixed. Thus, the species can vary over time — that is, they can be formed and destroyed — but any species that are present are always perfectly mixed. As a result, a box model does not account for the impact of, say, wind on the distribution of species. “The point we're trying to make is that you can go too simple,” says Chen. “If you’re going simpler than what we're representing, you will get further from the right answer.” She goes on to note, “The utility of a relatively simple model like ours is that all of the knobs and levers are very clear. That means you can explore the system and see what affects a value of interest.”

Leaked hydrogen versus leaked natural gas: A climate comparison

Burning natural gas produces fewer GHG emissions than does burning coal or oil; but as with hydrogen, any natural gas that’s leaked from wells, pipelines, and processing facilities can have climate impacts, negating some of the perceived benefits of using natural gas in place of other fossil fuels. After all, natural gas consists largely of methane, the highly potent GHG in the atmosphere that’s cleaned up by the OH detergent. Given its potency, even small leaks of methane can have a large climate impact.

So when thinking about replacing natural gas fuel — essentially methane — with hydrogen fuel, it’s important to consider how the climate impacts of the two fuels compare if and when they’re leaked. The usual way to compare the climate impacts of two chemicals is using a measure called the global warming potential, or GWP. The GWP combines two measures: the radiative forcing of a gas — that is, its heat-trapping ability — with its lifetime in the atmosphere. Since the lifetimes of gases differ widely, to compare the climate impacts of two gases, the convention is to relate the GWP of each one to the GWP of carbon dioxide. 

But hydrogen and methane leakage cause increases in methane, and that methane decays according to its lifetime. Chen and her colleagues therefore realized that an unconventional procedure would work: they could compare the impacts of the two leaked gases directly. What they found was that the climate impact of hydrogen is about three times less than that of methane (on a per mass basis). So switching from natural gas to hydrogen would not only eliminate combustion emissions, but also potentially reduce the climate effects, depending on how much leaks.

Key takeaways

In summary, Chen highlights some of what she views as the key findings of the study. First on her list is the following: “We show that a really simple four-equation system is not what should be used to project out the atmospheric response to more hydrogen leakages in the future.” The researchers believe that their 66-equation model is a good compromise for the number of chemical reactions to include. It generates estimates for the GWP of methane “pretty much in line with the lower end of the numbers that most other groups are getting using much more sophisticated climate chemistry models,” says Chen. And it’s sufficiently transparent to use in exploring various options for protecting the climate. Indeed, the MIT researchers plan to use their model to examine scenarios that involve replacing other fossil fuels with hydrogen to estimate the climate benefits of making the switch in coming decades.

The study also demonstrates a valuable new way to compare the greenhouse effects of two gases. As long as their effects exist on similar time scales, a direct comparison is possible — and preferable to comparing each with carbon dioxide, which is extremely long-lived in the atmosphere. In this work, the direct comparison generates a simple look at the relative climate impacts of leaked hydrogen and leaked methane — valuable information to take into account when considering switching from natural gas to hydrogen.

Finally, the researchers offer practical guidance for infrastructure development and use for both hydrogen and natural gas. Their analyses determine that hydrogen fuel itself has a “non-negligible” GWP, as does natural gas, which is mostly methane. Therefore, minimizing leakage of both fuels will be necessary to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the goal set by both the European Commission and the U.S. Department of State. Their paper concludes, “If used nearly leak-free, hydrogen is an excellent option. Otherwise, hydrogen should only be a temporary step in the energy transition, or it must be used in tandem with carbon-removal steps [elsewhere] to counter its warming effects.”

As the world looks for ways to stop climate change, much discussion focuses on using hydrogen instead of fossil fuels, which emit climate-warming greenhouse gases (GHGs) when they’re burned. The idea is appealing. Burning hydrogen doesn’t emit GHGs to the atmosphere, and hydrogen is well-suited for a variety of uses, notably as a replacement for natural gas in industrial processes, power generation, and home heating.

But while burning hydrogen won’t emit GHGs, any hydrogen that’s leaked from pipelines or storage or fueling facilities can indirectly cause climate change by affecting other compounds that are GHGs, including tropospheric ozone and methane, with methane impacts being the dominant effect. A much-cited 2022 modeling study analyzing hydrogen’s effects on chemical compounds in the atmosphere concluded that these climate impacts could be considerable. With funding from the MIT Energy Initiative’s Future Energy Systems Center, a team of MIT researchers took a more detailed look at the specific chemistry that poses the risks of using hydrogen as a fuel if it leaks.

The researchers developed a model that tracks many more chemical reactions that may be affected by hydrogen and includes interactions among chemicals. Their open-access results, published Oct. 28 in Frontiers in Energy Research, showed that while the impact of leaked hydrogen on the climate wouldn’t be as large as the 2022 study predicted — and that it would be about a third of the impact of any natural gas that escapes today — leaked hydrogen will impact the climate. Leak prevention should therefore be a top priority as the hydrogen infrastructure is built, state the researchers.

Hydrogen’s impact on the “detergent” that cleans our atmosphere

Global three-dimensional climate-chemistry models using a large number of chemical reactions have also been used to evaluate hydrogen’s potential climate impacts, but results vary from one model to another, motivating the MIT study to analyze the chemistry. Most studies of the climate effects of using hydrogen consider only the GHGs that are emitted during the production of the hydrogen fuel. Different approaches may make “blue hydrogen” or “green hydrogen,” a label that relates to the GHGs emitted. Regardless of the process used to make the hydrogen, the fuel itself can threaten the climate. For widespread use, hydrogen will need to be transported, distributed, and stored — in short, there will be many opportunities for leakage. 

The question is, What happens to that leaked hydrogen when it reaches the atmosphere? The 2022 study predicting large climate impacts from leaked hydrogen was based on reactions between pairs of just four chemical compounds in the atmosphere. The results showed that the hydrogen would deplete a chemical species that atmospheric chemists call the “detergent of the atmosphere,” explains Candice Chen, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It goes around zapping greenhouse gases, pollutants, all sorts of bad things in the atmosphere. So it’s cleaning our air.” Best of all, that detergent — the hydroxyl radical, abbreviated as OH — removes methane, which is an extremely potent GHG in the atmosphere. OH thus plays an important role in slowing the rate at which global temperatures rise. But any hydrogen leaked to the atmosphere would reduce the amount of OH available to clean up methane, so the concentration of methane would increase.

However, chemical reactions among compounds in the atmosphere are notoriously complicated. While the 2022 study used a “four-equation model,” Chen and her colleagues — Susan Solomon, the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies and Chemistry; and Kane Stone, a research scientist in EAPS — developed a model that includes 66 chemical reactions. Analyses using their 66-equation model showed that the four-equation system didn’t capture a critical feedback involving OH — a feedback that acts to protect the methane-removal process.

Here’s how that feedback works: As the hydrogen decreases the concentration of OH, the cleanup of methane slows down, so the methane concentration increases. However, that methane undergoes chemical reactions that can produce new OH radicals. “So the methane that’s being produced can make more of the OH detergent,” says Chen. “There’s a small countering effect. Indirectly, the methane helps produce the thing that’s getting rid of it.” And, says Chen, that’s a key difference between their 66-equation model and the four-equation one. “The simple model uses a constant value for the production of OH, so it misses that key OH-production feedback,” she says.

To explore the importance of including that feedback effect, the MIT researchers performed the following analysis: They assumed that a single pulse of hydrogen was injected into the atmosphere and predicted the change in methane concentration over the next 100 years, first using four-equation model and then using the 66-equation model. With the four-equation system, the additional methane concentration peaked at nearly 2 parts per billion (ppb); with the 66-equation system, it peaked at just over 1 ppb.

Because the four-equation analysis assumes only that the injected hydrogen destroys the OH, the methane concentration increases unchecked for the first 10 years or so. In contrast, the 66-equation analysis goes one step further: the methane concentration does increase, but as the system re-equilibrates, more OH forms and removes methane. By not accounting for that feedback, the four-equation analysis overestimates the peak increase in methane due to the hydrogen pulse by about 85 percent. Spread over time, the simple model doubles the amount of methane that forms in response to the hydrogen pulse.

Chen cautions that the point of their work is not to present their result as “a solid estimate” of the impact of hydrogen. Their analysis is based on a simple “box” model that represents global average conditions and assumes that all the chemical species present are well mixed. Thus, the species can vary over time — that is, they can be formed and destroyed — but any species that are present are always perfectly mixed. As a result, a box model does not account for the impact of, say, wind on the distribution of species. “The point we're trying to make is that you can go too simple,” says Chen. “If you’re going simpler than what we're representing, you will get further from the right answer.” She goes on to note, “The utility of a relatively simple model like ours is that all of the knobs and levers are very clear. That means you can explore the system and see what affects a value of interest.”

Leaked hydrogen versus leaked natural gas: A climate comparison

Burning natural gas produces fewer GHG emissions than does burning coal or oil; but as with hydrogen, any natural gas that’s leaked from wells, pipelines, and processing facilities can have climate impacts, negating some of the perceived benefits of using natural gas in place of other fossil fuels. After all, natural gas consists largely of methane, the highly potent GHG in the atmosphere that’s cleaned up by the OH detergent. Given its potency, even small leaks of methane can have a large climate impact.

So when thinking about replacing natural gas fuel — essentially methane — with hydrogen fuel, it’s important to consider how the climate impacts of the two fuels compare if and when they’re leaked. The usual way to compare the climate impacts of two chemicals is using a measure called the global warming potential, or GWP. The GWP combines two measures: the radiative forcing of a gas — that is, its heat-trapping ability — with its lifetime in the atmosphere. Since the lifetimes of gases differ widely, to compare the climate impacts of two gases, the convention is to relate the GWP of each one to the GWP of carbon dioxide. 

But hydrogen and methane leakage cause increases in methane, and that methane decays according to its lifetime. Chen and her colleagues therefore realized that an unconventional procedure would work: they could compare the impacts of the two leaked gases directly. What they found was that the climate impact of hydrogen is about three times less than that of methane (on a per mass basis). So switching from natural gas to hydrogen would not only eliminate combustion emissions, but also potentially reduce the climate effects, depending on how much leaks.

Key takeaways

In summary, Chen highlights some of what she views as the key findings of the study. First on her list is the following: “We show that a really simple four-equation system is not what should be used to project out the atmospheric response to more hydrogen leakages in the future.” The researchers believe that their 66-equation model is a good compromise for the number of chemical reactions to include. It generates estimates for the GWP of methane “pretty much in line with the lower end of the numbers that most other groups are getting using much more sophisticated climate chemistry models,” says Chen. And it’s sufficiently transparent to use in exploring various options for protecting the climate. Indeed, the MIT researchers plan to use their model to examine scenarios that involve replacing other fossil fuels with hydrogen to estimate the climate benefits of making the switch in coming decades.

The study also demonstrates a valuable new way to compare the greenhouse effects of two gases. As long as their effects exist on similar time scales, a direct comparison is possible — and preferable to comparing each with carbon dioxide, which is extremely long-lived in the atmosphere. In this work, the direct comparison generates a simple look at the relative climate impacts of leaked hydrogen and leaked methane — valuable information to take into account when considering switching from natural gas to hydrogen.

Finally, the researchers offer practical guidance for infrastructure development and use for both hydrogen and natural gas. Their analyses determine that hydrogen fuel itself has a “non-negligible” GWP, as does natural gas, which is mostly methane. Therefore, minimizing leakage of both fuels will be necessary to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, the goal set by both the European Commission and the U.S. Department of State. Their paper concludes, “If used nearly leak-free, hydrogen is an excellent option. Otherwise, hydrogen should only be a temporary step in the energy transition, or it must be used in tandem with carbon-removal steps [elsewhere] to counter its warming effects.”

Lara Ozkan, an MIT senior from Oradell, New Jersey, has been selected as a 2025 Marshall Scholar and will begin graduate studies in the United Kingdom next fall. Funded by the British government, the Marshall Scholarship awards American students of high academic achievement with the opportunity to pursue graduate studies in any field at any university in the U.K. Up to 50 scholarships are granted each year.

“We are so proud that Lara will be representing MIT in the U.K.,” says Kim Benard, associate dean of distinguished fellowships. “Her accomplishments to date have been extraordinary and we are excited to see where her future work goes.” Ozkan, along with MIT’s other endorsed Marshall candidates, was mentored by the distinguished fellowships team in Career Advising and Professional Development, and the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships, co-chaired by professors Nancy Kanwisher and Tom Levenson. 

Ozkan, a senior majoring in computer science and molecular biology, plans to pursue through her Marshall Scholarship an MPhil in biological science at Cambridge University’s Sanger Institute, followed by a master’s by research degree in artificial intelligence and machine learning at Imperial College London. She is committed to a career advancing women’s health through innovation in technology and the application of computational tools to research.

Prior to beginning her studies at MIT, Ozkan conducted computational biology research at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. At MIT, she has been an undergraduate researcher with the MIT Media Lab’s Conformable Decoders group, where she has worked on breast cancer wearable ultrasound technologies. She also contributes to Professor Manolis Kellis’ computational biology research group in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Ozkan’s achievements in computational biology research earned her the MIT Susan Hockfield Prize in Life Sciences.

At the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, Ozkan has examined the ethical implications of genomics projects and developed AI ethics curricula for MIT computer science courses. Through internships with Accenture Gen AI Risk and pharmaceutical firms, she gained practical insights into responsible AI use in health care.

Ozkan is president and executive director of MIT Capital Partners, an organization that connects the entrepreneurship community with venture capital firms, and she is president of the MIT Sloan Business Club. Additionally, she serves as an undergraduate research peer ambassador and is a member of the MIT EECS Committee on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. As part of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing Undergraduate Advisory Group, she advises on policies and programming to improve the student experience in interdisciplinary computing.

Beyond Ozkan’s research roles, she volunteers with MIT CodeIt, teaching middle-school girls computer science. As a counselor with Camp Kesem, she mentors children whose parents are impacted by cancer.

The University of Melbourne has today offered prestigious scholarships to almost 1600 Year 12 students, opening doors to a world-class education and life-changing opportunities.

By Dr Lance Gore Liangping, Senior Research Fellow from the East Asian Institute at NUS

• Lianhe Zaobao, 13 December 2024, Opinion, p18

By Mr Carl Skadian, Senior Associate Director from the Middle East Institute at NUS

• CNA Online, 13 December 2024

• Lianhe Zaobao, 12 December 2024, Singapore, p10

• Lianhe Zaobao, 12 December 2024, Business, p21

• 8world Online, 11 December 2024

Interim President Jameson discusses the many ways Penn is moving forward, from the opening of state-of-the-art facilities to new initiatives that advance In Principle and Practice.

Five MIT faculty members and two additional alumni were recently named to the 2024 cohort of AI2050 Fellows. The honor is announced annually by Schmidt Sciences, Eric and Wendy Schmidt’s philanthropic initiative that aims to accelerate scientific innovation. 

Conceived and co-chaired by Eric Schmidt and James Manyika, AI2050 is a philanthropic initiative aimed at helping to solve hard problems in AI. Within their research, each fellow will contend with the central motivating question of AI2050: “It’s 2050. AI has turned out to be hugely beneficial to society. What happened? What are the most important problems we solved and the opportunities and possibilities we realized to ensure this outcome?”

This year’s MIT-affiliated AI2050 Fellows include:

David Autor, the Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in the MIT Department of Economics, and co-director of the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative and the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Labor Studies Program, has been named a 2024 AI2050 senior fellow. His scholarship explores the labor-market impacts of technological change and globalization on job polarization, skill demands, earnings levels and inequality, and electoral outcomes. Autor’s AI2050 project will leverage real-time data on AI adoption to clarify how new tools interact with human capabilities in shaping employment and earnings. The work will provide an accessible framework for entrepreneurs, technologists, and policymakers seeking to understand, tangibly, how AI can complement human expertise. Autor has received numerous awards and honors, including a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, and the Heinz 25th Special Recognition Award from the Heinz Family Foundation for his work “transforming our understanding of how globalization and technological change are impacting jobs and earning prospects for American workers.” In 2023, Autor was one of two researchers across all scientific fields selected as a NOMIS Distinguished Scientist.

Sara Beery, an assistant professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), has been named an early career fellow. Beery’s work focuses on building computer vision methods that enable global-scale environmental and biodiversity monitoring across data modalities and tackling real-world challenges, including strong spatiotemporal correlations, imperfect data quality, fine-grained categories, and long-tailed distributions. She collaborates with nongovernmental organizations and government agencies to deploy her methods worldwide and works toward increasing the diversity and accessibility of academic research in artificial intelligence through interdisciplinary capacity-building and education. Beery earned a BS in electrical engineering and mathematics from Seattle University and a PhD in computing and mathematical sciences from Caltech, where she was honored with the Amori Prize for her outstanding dissertation.

Gabriele Farina, an assistant professor in EECS and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), has been named an early career fellow. Farina’s work lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence, computer science, operations research, and economics. Specifically, he focuses on learning and optimization methods for sequential decisio­­­n-making and convex-concave saddle point problems, with applications to equilibrium finding in games. Farina also studies computational game theory and recently served as co-author on a Science study about combining language models with strategic reasoning. He is a recipient of a NeurIPS Best Paper Award and was a Facebook Fellow in economics and computer science. His dissertation was recognized with the 2023 ACM SIGecom Doctoral Dissertation Award and one of the two 2023 ACM Dissertation Award Honorable Mentions, among others.

Marzyeh Ghassemi PhD ’17, an associate professor in EECS and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, principal investigator at CSAIL and LIDS, and affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, has been named an early career fellow. Ghassemi’s research in the Healthy ML Group creates a rigorous quantitative framework in which to design, develop, and place ML models in a way that is robust and fair, focusing on health settings. Her contributions range from socially aware model construction to improving subgroup- and shift-robust learning methods to identifying important insights in model deployment scenarios that have implications in policy, health practice, and equity. Among other awards, Ghassemi has been named one of MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35; and has been awarded the 2018 Seth J. Teller Award, the 2023 MIT Prize for Open Data, a 2024 NSF CAREER Award, and the Google Research Scholar Award. She founded the nonprofit Association for Health, Inference and Learning (AHLI) and her work has been featured in popular press such as Forbes, Fortune, MIT News, and The Huffington Post.

Yoon Kim, an assistant professor in EECS and a principal investigator in CSAIL, has been named an early career fellow. Kim’s work straddles the intersection between natural language processing and machine learning, and touches upon efficient training and deployment of large-scale models, learning from small data, neuro-symbolic approaches, grounded language learning, and connections between computational and human language processing. Affiliated with CSAIL, Kim earned his PhD in computer science at Harvard University; his MS in data science from New York University; his MA in statistics from Columbia University; and his BA in both math and economics from Cornell University. 

Additional alumni Roger Grosse PhD ’14, a computer science associate professor at the University of Toronto, and David Rolnick ’12, PhD ’18, assistant professor at Mila-Quebec AI Institute, were also named senior and early career fellows, respectively.

Brought together as part of the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC) initiative within the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, a community of students known as SERC Scholars is collaborating to examine the most urgent problems humans face in the digital landscape.

Each semester, students from all levels from across MIT are invited to join a different topical working group led by a SERC postdoctoral associate. Each group delves into a specific issue — such as surveillance or data ownership — culminating in a final project presented at the end of the term.

Typically, students complete the program with hands-on experience conducting research in a new cross-disciplinary field. However, one group of undergraduate and graduate students recently had the unique opportunity to enhance their resume by becoming published authors of a case study about the environmental and climate justice implications of the electronics hardware life cycle.

Although it’s not uncommon for graduate students to co-author case studies, it’s unusual for undergraduates to earn this opportunity — and for their audience to be other undergraduates around the world.

“Our team was insanely interdisciplinary,” says Anastasia Dunca, a junior studying computer science and one of the co-authors. “I joined the SERC Scholars Program because I liked the idea of being part of a cohort from across MIT working on a project that utilized all of our skillsets. It also helps [undergraduates] learn the ins and outs of computing ethics research.”

Case study co-author Jasmin Liu, an MBA student in the MIT Sloan School of Management, sees the program as a platform to learn about the intersection of technology, society, and ethics: “I met team members spanning computer science, urban planning, to art/culture/technology. I was excited to work with a diverse team because I know complex problems must be approached with many different perspectives. Combining my background in humanities and business with the expertise of others allowed us to be more innovative and comprehensive.”

Christopher Rabe, a former SERC postdoc who facilitated the group, says, “I let the students take the lead on identifying the topic and conducting the research.” His goal for the group was to challenge students across disciplines to develop a working definition of climate justice.

From mining to e-waste

The SERC Scholars’ case study, “From Mining to E-waste: The Environmental and Climate Justice Implications of the Electronics Hardware Life Cycle,” was published by the MIT Case Studies in Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing.

The ongoing case studies series, which releases new issues twice a year on an open-source platform, is enabling undergraduate instructors worldwide to incorporate research-based education materials on computing ethics into their existing class syllabi.

This particular case study broke down the electronics life cycle from mining to manufacturing, usage, and disposal. It offered an in-depth look at how this cycle promotes inequity in the Global South. Mining for the average of 60 minerals that power everyday devices lead to illegal deforestation, compromising air quality in the Amazon, and triggering armed conflict in Congo. Manufacturing leads to proven health risks for both formal and informal workers, some of whom are child laborers.

Life cycle assessment and circular economy are proposed as mechanisms for analyzing environmental and climate justice issues in the electronics life cycle. Rather than posing solutions, the case study offers readers entry points for further discussion and for assessing their own individual responsibility as producers of e-waste.

Crufting and crafting a case study

Dunca joined Rabe's working group, intrigued by the invitation to conduct a rigorous literature review examining issues like data center resource and energy use, manufacturing waste, ethical issues with AI, and climate change. Rabe quickly realized that a common thread among all participants was an interest in understanding and reducing e-waste and its impact on the environment.

“I came in with the idea of us co-authoring a case study,” Rabe said. However, the writing-intensive process was initially daunting to those students who were used to conducting applied research. Once Rabe created sub-groups with discrete tasks, the steps for researching, writing, and iterating a case study became more approachable.

For Ellie Bultena, an undergraduate student studying linguistics and philosophy and a contributor to the study, that meant conducting field research on the loading dock of MIT’s Stata Center, where students and faculty go “crufting” through piles of clunky printers, broken computers, and used lab equipment discarded by the Institute's labs, departments, and individual users.

Although not a formally sanctioned activity on-campus, “crufting” is the act of gleaning usable parts from these junk piles to be repurposed into new equipment or art. Bultena’s respondents, who opted to be anonymous, said that MIT could do better when it comes to the amount of e-waste generated and suggested that formal strategies could be implemented to encourage community members to repair equipment more easily or recycle more formally.

Rabe, now an education program director at the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative, is hopeful that through the Zero-Carbon Campus Initiative, which commits MIT to eliminating all direct emissions by 2050, MIT will ultimately become a model for other higher education institutions.

Although the group lacked the time and resources to travel to communities in the Global South that they profiled in their case study, members leaned into exhaustive secondary research, collecting data on how some countries are irresponsibly dumping e-waste. In contrast, others have developed alternative solutions that can be duplicated elsewhere and scaled.

“We source materials, manufacture them, and then throw them away,” Lelia Hampton says. A PhD candidate in electrical engineering and computer science and another co-author, Hampton jumped at the opportunity to serve in a writing role, bringing together the sub-groups research findings. “I’d never written a case study, and it was exciting. Now I want to write 10 more.”

The content directly informed Hampton’s dissertation research, which “looks at applying machine learning to climate justice issues such as urban heat islands.” She said that writing a case study that is accessible to general audiences upskilled her for the non-profit organization she’s determined to start. “It’s going to provide communities with free resources and data needed to understand how they are impacted by climate change and begin to advocate against injustice,” Hampton explains.

Dunca, Liu, Rabe, Bultena, and Hampton are joined on the case study by fellow authors Mrinalini Singha, a graduate student in the Art, Culture, and Technology program; Sungmoon Lim, a graduate student in urban studies and planning and EECS; Lauren Higgins, an undergraduate majoring in political science; and Madeline Schlegel, a Northeastern University co-op student.

Taking the case study to classrooms around the world

Although PhD candidates have contributed to previous case studies in the series, this publication is the first to be co-authored with MIT undergraduates. Like any other peer-reviewed journal, before publication, the SERC Scholars’ case study was anonymously reviewed by senior scholars drawn from various fields.

The series editor, David Kaiser, also served as one of SERC’s inaugural associate deans and helped shape the program. “The case studies, by design, are short, easy to read, and don't take up lots of time,” Kaiser explained. “They are gateways for students to explore, and instructors can cover a topic that has likely already been on their mind.” This semester, Kaiser, the Germeshausen Professor of the History of Science and a professor of physics, is teaching STS.004 (Intersections: Science, Technology, and the World), an undergraduate introduction to the field of science, technology, and society. The last month of the semester has been dedicated wholly to SERC case studies, one of which is: “From Mining to E-Waste.”

Hampton was visibly moved to hear that the case study is being used at MIT but also by some of the 250,000 visitors to the SERC platform, many of whom are based in the Global South and directly impacted by the issues she and her cohort researched. “Many students are focused on climate, whether through computer science, data science, or mechanical engineering. I hope that this case study educates them on environmental and climate aspects of e-waste and computing.”

With an estate gift of more than $42 million, William J. Levy, a graduate of the Wharton School and Penn Carey Law School, has contributed $50 million in support of undergraduate students in the College.

The Stach Group in Penn Engineering led a collaborative team identifying how chemical catalysts drive the creation of liquid fuels from sunlight, paving the way for more efficient removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

As the director of the Penn Art Collection in charge of nearly 9,000 artworks, Lynn Smith Dolby manages the conservation, registration, and display of all University-owned art, indoors and outdoors across campus.

By Dr Pei Sai Fan, Visiting Prof at NUS and NTU

• Lianhe Zaobao, 6 December 2024, Opinion, p26

By Prof Tan Eng Chye, President of NUS and a mathematician

• The Straits Times, 6 December 2024, Opinion, pB2

• The Straits Times, 6 December 2024, Singapore, pA15
• Berita Harian, 6 December 2024, p2
• Tamil Murasu, 6 December 2024, p2

If someone advises you to “know your limits,” they’re likely suggesting you do things like exercise in moderation. To a robot, though, the motto represents learning constraints, or limitations of a specific task within the machine’s environment, to do chores safely and correctly.

For instance, imagine asking a robot to clean your kitchen when it doesn’t understand the physics of its surroundings. How can the machine generate a practical multistep plan to ensure the room is spotless? Large language models (LLMs) can get them close, but if the model is only trained on text, it’s likely to miss out on key specifics about the robot’s physical constraints, like how far it can reach or whether there are nearby obstacles to avoid. Stick to LLMs alone, and you’re likely to end up cleaning pasta stains out of your floorboards.

To guide robots in executing these open-ended tasks, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) used vision models to see what’s near the machine and model its constraints. The team’s strategy involves an LLM sketching up a plan that’s checked in a simulator to ensure it’s safe and realistic. If that sequence of actions is infeasible, the language model will generate a new plan, until it arrives at one that the robot can execute.

This trial-and-error method, which the researchers call “Planning for Robots via Code for Continuous Constraint Satisfaction” (PRoC3S), tests long-horizon plans to ensure they satisfy all constraints, and enables a robot to perform such diverse tasks as writing individual letters, drawing a star, and sorting and placing blocks in different positions. In the future, PRoC3S could help robots complete more intricate chores in dynamic environments like houses, where they may be prompted to do a general chore composed of many steps (like “make me breakfast”).

“LLMs and classical robotics systems like task and motion planners can’t execute these kinds of tasks on their own, but together, their synergy makes open-ended problem-solving possible,” says PhD student Nishanth Kumar SM ’24, co-lead author of a new paper about PRoC3S. “We’re creating a simulation on-the-fly of what’s around the robot and trying out many possible action plans. Vision models help us create a very realistic digital world that enables the robot to reason about feasible actions for each step of a long-horizon plan.”

The team’s work was presented this past month in a paper shown at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in Munich, Germany.

The researchers’ method uses an LLM pre-trained on text from across the internet. Before asking PRoC3S to do a task, the team provided their language model with a sample task (like drawing a square) that’s related to the target one (drawing a star). The sample task includes a description of the activity, a long-horizon plan, and relevant details about the robot’s environment.

But how did these plans fare in practice? In simulations, PRoC3S successfully drew stars and letters eight out of 10 times each. It also could stack digital blocks in pyramids and lines, and place items with accuracy, like fruits on a plate. Across each of these digital demos, the CSAIL method completed the requested task more consistently than comparable approaches like “LLM3” and “Code as Policies”.

The CSAIL engineers next brought their approach to the real world. Their method developed and executed plans on a robotic arm, teaching it to put blocks in straight lines. PRoC3S also enabled the machine to place blue and red blocks into matching bowls and move all objects near the center of a table.

Kumar and co-lead author Aidan Curtis SM ’23, who’s also a PhD student working in CSAIL, say these findings indicate how an LLM can develop safer plans that humans can trust to work in practice. The researchers envision a home robot that can be given a more general request (like “bring me some chips”) and reliably figure out the specific steps needed to execute it. PRoC3S could help a robot test out plans in an identical digital environment to find a working course of action — and more importantly, bring you a tasty snack.

For future work, the researchers aim to improve results using a more advanced physics simulator and to expand to more elaborate longer-horizon tasks via more scalable data-search techniques. Moreover, they plan to apply PRoC3S to mobile robots such as a quadruped for tasks that include walking and scanning surroundings.

“Using foundation models like ChatGPT to control robot actions can lead to unsafe or incorrect behaviors due to hallucinations,” says The AI Institute researcher Eric Rosen, who isn’t involved in the research. “PRoC3S tackles this issue by leveraging foundation models for high-level task guidance, while employing AI techniques that explicitly reason about the world to ensure verifiably safe and correct actions. This combination of planning-based and data-driven approaches may be key to developing robots capable of understanding and reliably performing a broader range of tasks than currently possible.”

Kumar and Curtis’ co-authors are also CSAIL affiliates: MIT undergraduate researcher Jing Cao and MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professors Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Tomás Lozano-Pérez. Their work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, MIT Quest for Intelligence, and The AI Institute.

If someone advises you to “know your limits,” they’re likely suggesting you do things like exercise in moderation. To a robot, though, the motto represents learning constraints, or limitations of a specific task within the machine’s environment, to do chores safely and correctly.

For instance, imagine asking a robot to clean your kitchen when it doesn’t understand the physics of its surroundings. How can the machine generate a practical multistep plan to ensure the room is spotless? Large language models (LLMs) can get them close, but if the model is only trained on text, it’s likely to miss out on key specifics about the robot’s physical constraints, like how far it can reach or whether there are nearby obstacles to avoid. Stick to LLMs alone, and you’re likely to end up cleaning pasta stains out of your floorboards.

To guide robots in executing these open-ended tasks, researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) used vision models to see what’s near the machine and model its constraints. The team’s strategy involves an LLM sketching up a plan that’s checked in a simulator to ensure it’s safe and realistic. If that sequence of actions is infeasible, the language model will generate a new plan, until it arrives at one that the robot can execute.

This trial-and-error method, which the researchers call “Planning for Robots via Code for Continuous Constraint Satisfaction” (PRoC3S), tests long-horizon plans to ensure they satisfy all constraints, and enables a robot to perform such diverse tasks as writing individual letters, drawing a star, and sorting and placing blocks in different positions. In the future, PRoC3S could help robots complete more intricate chores in dynamic environments like houses, where they may be prompted to do a general chore composed of many steps (like “make me breakfast”).

“LLMs and classical robotics systems like task and motion planners can’t execute these kinds of tasks on their own, but together, their synergy makes open-ended problem-solving possible,” says PhD student Nishanth Kumar SM ’24, co-lead author of a new paper about PRoC3S. “We’re creating a simulation on-the-fly of what’s around the robot and trying out many possible action plans. Vision models help us create a very realistic digital world that enables the robot to reason about feasible actions for each step of a long-horizon plan.”

The team’s work was presented this past month in a paper shown at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) in Munich, Germany.

The researchers’ method uses an LLM pre-trained on text from across the internet. Before asking PRoC3S to do a task, the team provided their language model with a sample task (like drawing a square) that’s related to the target one (drawing a star). The sample task includes a description of the activity, a long-horizon plan, and relevant details about the robot’s environment.

But how did these plans fare in practice? In simulations, PRoC3S successfully drew stars and letters eight out of 10 times each. It also could stack digital blocks in pyramids and lines, and place items with accuracy, like fruits on a plate. Across each of these digital demos, the CSAIL method completed the requested task more consistently than comparable approaches like “LLM3” and “Code as Policies”.

The CSAIL engineers next brought their approach to the real world. Their method developed and executed plans on a robotic arm, teaching it to put blocks in straight lines. PRoC3S also enabled the machine to place blue and red blocks into matching bowls and move all objects near the center of a table.

Kumar and co-lead author Aidan Curtis SM ’23, who’s also a PhD student working in CSAIL, say these findings indicate how an LLM can develop safer plans that humans can trust to work in practice. The researchers envision a home robot that can be given a more general request (like “bring me some chips”) and reliably figure out the specific steps needed to execute it. PRoC3S could help a robot test out plans in an identical digital environment to find a working course of action — and more importantly, bring you a tasty snack.

For future work, the researchers aim to improve results using a more advanced physics simulator and to expand to more elaborate longer-horizon tasks via more scalable data-search techniques. Moreover, they plan to apply PRoC3S to mobile robots such as a quadruped for tasks that include walking and scanning surroundings.

“Using foundation models like ChatGPT to control robot actions can lead to unsafe or incorrect behaviors due to hallucinations,” says The AI Institute researcher Eric Rosen, who isn’t involved in the research. “PRoC3S tackles this issue by leveraging foundation models for high-level task guidance, while employing AI techniques that explicitly reason about the world to ensure verifiably safe and correct actions. This combination of planning-based and data-driven approaches may be key to developing robots capable of understanding and reliably performing a broader range of tasks than currently possible.”

Kumar and Curtis’ co-authors are also CSAIL affiliates: MIT undergraduate researcher Jing Cao and MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science professors Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Tomás Lozano-Pérez. Their work was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research, the Army Research Office, MIT Quest for Intelligence, and The AI Institute.

One might argue that one of the primary duties of a physician is to constantly evaluate and re-evaluate the odds: What are the chances of a medical procedure’s success? Is the patient at risk of developing severe symptoms? When should the patient return for more testing? Amidst these critical deliberations, the rise of artificial intelligence promises to reduce risk in clinical settings and help physicians prioritize the care of high-risk patients.

Despite its potential, researchers from the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Equality AI, and Boston University are calling for more oversight of AI from regulatory bodies in a new commentary published in the New England Journal of Medicine AI's (NEJM AI) October issue after the U.S. Office for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a new rule under the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

In May, the OCR published a final rule in the ACA that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, disability, or sex in “patient care decision support tools,” a newly established term that encompasses both AI and non-automated tools used in medicine.

Developed in response to President Joe Biden’s Executive Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence from 2023, the final rule builds upon the Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to advancing health equity by focusing on preventing discrimination. 

According to senior author and associate professor of EECS Marzyeh Ghassemi, “the rule is an important step forward.” Ghassemi, who is affiliated with the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic), the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), adds that the rule “should dictate equity-driven improvements to the non-AI algorithms and clinical decision-support tools already in use across clinical subspecialties.”

The number of U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved, AI-enabled devices has risen dramatically in the past decade since the approval of the first AI-enabled device in 1995 (PAPNET Testing System, a tool for cervical screening). As of October, the FDA has approved nearly 1,000 AI-enabled devices, many of which are designed to support clinical decision-making.

However, researchers point out that there is no regulatory body overseeing the clinical risk scores produced by clinical-decision support tools, despite the fact that the majority of U.S. physicians (65 percent) use these tools on a monthly basis to determine the next steps for patient care.

To address this shortcoming, the Jameel Clinic will host another regulatory conference in March 2025. Last year’s conference ignited a series of discussions and debates amongst faculty, regulators from around the world, and industry experts focused on the regulation of AI in health.

“Clinical risk scores are less opaque than ‘AI’ algorithms in that they typically involve only a handful of variables linked in a simple model,” comments Isaac Kohane, chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and editor-in-chief of NEJM AI. “Nonetheless, even these scores are only as good as the datasets used to ‘train’ them and as the variables that experts have chosen to select or study in a particular cohort. If they affect clinical decision-making, they should be held to the same standards as their more recent and vastly more complex AI relatives.”

Moreover, while many decision-support tools do not use AI, researchers note that these tools are just as culpable in perpetuating biases in health care, and require oversight.

“Regulating clinical risk scores poses significant challenges due to the proliferation of clinical decision support tools embedded in electronic medical records and their widespread use in clinical practice,” says co-author Maia Hightower, CEO of Equality AI. “Such regulation remains necessary to ensure transparency and nondiscrimination.”

However, Hightower adds that under the incoming administration, the regulation of clinical risk scores may prove to be “particularly challenging, given its emphasis on deregulation and opposition to the Affordable Care Act and certain nondiscrimination policies.” 

• The Straits Times, 5 December 2024, The Big Story, pA7

• CNA Online, 5 December 2024
• 8world Online, 5 December 2024
• The Straits Times, 6 December 2024, The Big Story, pA2
• Lianhe Zaobao, 6 December 2024, Singapore, p6

University of Melbourne Interim Vice-Chancellor Professor Nicola Phillips appeared today at the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, alongside representatives from other universities. Professor Phillips made the following opening remarks at the Joint Committee.

• Lianhe Zaobao Online, 5 December 2024

By Asst Prof Chetna Malhotra, Deputy Director (Research), Ms Ellie Andres, Senior Research Fellow, and Ms Ishwarya Balasubramanian, Research Fellow, all from the Lien Centre for Palliative Care at Duke-NUS Medical School

• The Straits Times, 5 December 2024, Opinion, pB2

The UNESCO-inscribed Donald Thomson Ethnohistory Collection, which provides rare insights into the rich cultural and economic lives of Indigenous peoples of Australia, has been gifted to the University of Melbourne by his family. The gift has been made in the memory of its collector Professor Donald Thomson OBE (1901-1970), who dedicated his life to championing equality for Indigenous Australians, and his wife, Mrs Dorita Thomson (1930-2022).

The amount of waste generated by the construction sector underscores an urgent need for embracing circularity — a sustainable model that aims to minimize waste and maximize material efficiency through recovery and reuse — in the built environment: 600 million tons of construction and demolition waste was produced in the United States alone in 2018, with 820 million tons reported in the European Union, and an excess of 2 billion tons annually in China.

This significant resource loss embedded in our current industrial ecosystem marks a linear economy that operates on a “take-make-dispose” model of construction; in contrast, the “make-use-reuse” approach of a circular economy offers an important opportunity to reduce environmental impacts.

A team of MIT researchers has begun to assess what may be needed to spur widespread circular transition within the built environment in a new open-access study that aims to understand stakeholders’ current perceptions of circularity and quantify their willingness to pay.

“This paper acts as an initial endeavor into understanding what the industry may be motivated by, and how integration of stakeholder motivations could lead to greater adoption,” says lead author Juliana Berglund-Brown, PhD student in the Department of Architecture at MIT.

Considering stakeholders’ perceptions

Three different stakeholder groups from North America, Europe, and Asia — material suppliers, design and construction teams, and real estate developers — were surveyed by the research team that also comprises Akrisht Pandey ’23; Fabio Duarte, associate director of the MIT Senseable City Lab; Raquel Ganitsky, fellow in the Sustainable Real Estate Development Action Program; Randolph Kirchain, co-director of MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub; and Siqi Zheng, the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at Department of Urban Studies and Planning.

Despite growing awareness of reuse practice among construction industry stakeholders, circular practices have yet to be implemented at scale — attributable to many factors that influence the intersection of construction needs with government regulations and the economic interests of real estate developers.

The study notes that perceived barriers to circular adoption differ based on industry role, with lack of both client interest and standardized structural assessment methods identified as the primary concern of design and construction teams, while the largest deterrents for material suppliers are logistics complexity, and supply uncertainty. Real estate developers, on the other hand, are chiefly concerned with higher costs and structural assessment. 

Yet encouragingly, respondents expressed willingness to absorb higher costs, with developers indicating readiness to pay an average of 9.6 percent higher construction costs for a minimum 52.9 percent reduction in embodied carbon — and all stakeholders highly favor the potential of incentives like tax exemptions to aid with cost premiums.

Next steps to encourage circularity

The findings highlight the need for further conversation between design teams and developers, as well as for additional exploration into potential solutions to practical challenges. “The thing about circularity is that there is opportunity for a lot of value creation, and subsequently profit,” says Berglund-Brown. “If people are motivated by cost, let’s provide a cost incentive, or establish strategies that have one.”

When it comes to motivating reasons to adopt circularity practices, the study also found trends emerging by industry role. Future net-zero goals influence developers as well as design and construction teams, with government regulation the third-most frequently named reason across all respondent types.

“The construction industry needs a market driver to embrace circularity,” says Berglund-Brown, “Be it carrots or sticks, stakeholders require incentives for adoption.”

The effect of policy to motivate change cannot be understated, with major strides being made in low operational carbon building design after policy restricting emissions was introduced, such as Local Law 97 in New York City and the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance in Boston. These pieces of policy, and their results, can serve as models for embodied carbon reduction policy elsewhere.

Berglund-Brown suggests that municipalities might initiate ordinances requiring buildings to be deconstructed, which would allow components to be reused, curbing demolition methods that result in waste rather than salvage. Top-down ordinances could be one way to trigger a supply chain shift toward reprocessing building materials that are typically deemed “end-of-life.”

The study also identifies other challenges to the implementation of circularity at scale, including risk associated with how to reuse materials in new buildings, and disrupting status quo design practices.

“Understanding the best way to motivate transition despite uncertainty is where our work comes in,” says Berglund-Brown. “Beyond that, researchers can continue to do a lot to alleviate risk — like developing standards for reuse.”

Innovations that challenge the status quo

Disrupting the status quo is not unusual for MIT researchers; other visionary work in construction circularity pioneered at MIT includes “a smart kit of parts” called Pixelframe. This system for modular concrete reuse allows building elements to be disassembled and rebuilt several times, aiding deconstruction and reuse while maintaining material efficiency and versatility.

Developed by MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Associate Director Caitlin Mueller’s research team, Pixelframe is designed to accommodate a wide range of applications from housing to warehouses, with each piece of interlocking precast concrete modules, called Pixels, assigned a material passport to enable tracking through its many life cycles.

Mueller’s work demonstrates that circularity can work technically and logistically at the scale of the built environment — by designing specifically for disassembly, configuration, versatility, and upfront carbon and cost efficiency.

“This can be built today. This is building code-compliant today,” said Mueller of Pixelframe in a keynote speech at the recent MCSC Annual Symposium, which saw industry representatives and members of the MIT community coming together to discuss scalable solutions to climate and sustainability problems. “We currently have the potential for high-impact carbon reduction as a compelling alternative to the business-as-usual construction methods we are used to.”

Pixelframe was recently awarded a grant by the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) to pursue commercialization, an important next step toward integrating innovations like this into a circular economy in practice. “It’s MassCEC’s job to make sure that these climate leaders have the resources they need to turn their technologies into successful businesses that make a difference around the world,” said MassCEC CEO Emily Reichert, in a press release.

Additional support for circular innovation has emerged thanks to a historic piece of climate legislation from the Biden administration. The Environmental Protection Agency recently awarded a federal grant on the topic of advancing steel reuse to Berglund-Brown — whose PhD thesis focuses on scaling the reuse of structural heavy-section steel — and John Ochsendorf, the Class of 1942 Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture at MIT.

“There is a lot of exciting upcoming work on this topic,” says Berglund-Brown. “To any practitioners reading this who are interested in getting involved — please reach out.”

The study is supported in part by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium.

Metabolic imaging is a noninvasive method that enables clinicians and scientists to study living cells using laser light, which can help them assess disease progression and treatment responses.

But light scatters when it shines into biological tissue, limiting how deep it can penetrate and hampering the resolution of captured images.

Now, MIT researchers have developed a new technique that more than doubles the usual depth limit of metabolic imaging. Their method also boosts imaging speeds, yielding richer and more detailed images.

This new technique does not require tissue to be preprocessed, such as by cutting it or staining it with dyes. Instead, a specialized laser illuminates deep into the tissue, causing certain intrinsic molecules within the cells and tissues to emit light. This eliminates the need to alter the tissue, providing a more natural and accurate representation of its structure and function.

The researchers achieved this by adaptively customizing the laser light for deep tissues. Using a recently developed fiber shaper — a device they control by bending it — they can tune the color and pulses of light to minimize scattering and maximize the signal as the light travels deeper into the tissue. This allows them to see much further into living tissue and capture clearer images.

Greater penetration depth, faster speeds, and higher resolution make this method particularly well-suited for demanding imaging applications like cancer research, tissue engineering, drug discovery, and the study of immune responses.

“This work shows a significant improvement in terms of depth penetration for label-free metabolic imaging. It opens new avenues for studying and exploring metabolic dynamics deep in living biosystems,” says Sixian You, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a member of the Research Laboratory for Electronics, and senior author of a paper on this imaging technique.

She is joined on the paper by lead author Kunzan Liu, an EECS graduate student; Tong Qiu, an MIT postdoc; Honghao Cao, an EECS graduate student; Fan Wang, professor of brain and cognitive sciences; Roger Kamm, the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Biological and Mechanical Engineering; Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation in the Department of Biological Engineering; and other MIT colleagues. The research appears today in Science Advances.

Laser-focused

This new method falls in the category of label-free imaging, which means tissue is not stained beforehand. Staining creates contrast that helps a clinical biologist see cell nuclei and proteins better. But staining typically requires the biologist to section and slice the sample, a process that often kills the tissue and makes it impossible to study dynamic processes in living cells.

In label-free imaging techniques, researchers use lasers to illuminate specific molecules within cells, causing them to emit light of different colors that reveal various molecular contents and cellular structures. However, generating the ideal laser light with certain wavelengths and high-quality pulses for deep-tissue imaging has been challenging.

The researchers developed a new approach to overcome this limitation. They use a multimode fiber, a type of optical fiber which can carry a significant amount of power, and couple it with a compact device called a “fiber shaper.” This shaper allows them to precisely modulate the light propagation by adaptively changing the shape of the fiber. Bending the fiber changes the color and intensity of the laser.

Building on prior work, the researchers adapted the first version of the fiber shaper for deeper multimodal metabolic imaging.

“We want to channel all this energy into the colors we need with the pulse properties we require. This gives us higher generation efficiency and a clearer image, even deep within tissues,” says Cao.

Once they had built the controllable mechanism, they developed an imaging platform to leverage the powerful laser source to generate longer wavelengths of light, which are crucial for deeper penetration into biological tissues.

“We believe this technology has the potential to significantly advance biological research. By making it affordable and accessible to biology labs, we hope to empower scientists with a powerful tool for discovery,” Liu says.

Dynamic applications

When the researchers tested their imaging device, the light was able to penetrate more than 700 micrometers into a biological sample, whereas the best prior techniques could only reach about 200 micrometers.

“With this new type of deep imaging, we want to look at biological samples and see something we have never seen before,” Liu adds.

The deep imaging technique enabled them to see cells at multiple levels within a living system, which could help researchers study metabolic changes that happen at different depths. In addition, the faster imaging speed allows them to gather more detailed information on how a cell’s metabolism affects the speed and direction of its movements.

This new imaging method could offer a boost to the study of organoids, which are engineered cells that can grow to mimic the structure and function of organs. Researchers in the Kamm and Griffith labs pioneer the development of brain and endometrial organoids that can grow like organs for disease and treatment assessment.

However, it has been challenging to precisely observe internal developments without cutting or staining the tissue, which kills the sample.

This new imaging technique allows researchers to noninvasively monitor the metabolic states inside a living organoid while it continues to grow.

With these and other biomedical applications in mind, the researchers plan to aim for even higher-resolution images. At the same time, they are working to create low-noise laser sources, which could enable deeper imaging with less light dosage.

They are also developing algorithms that react to the images to reconstruct the full 3D structures of biological samples in high resolution.

In the long run, they hope to apply this technique in the real world to help biologists monitor drug response in real-time to aid in the development of new medicines.

“By enabling multimodal metabolic imaging that reaches deeper into tissues, we’re providing scientists with an unprecedented ability to observe nontransparent biological systems in their natural state. We’re excited to collaborate with clinicians, biologists, and bioengineers to push the boundaries of this technology and turn these insights into real-world medical breakthroughs,” You says.

“This work is exciting because it uses innovative feedback methods to image cell metabolism deeper in tissues compared to current techniques. These technologies also provide fast imaging speeds, which was used to uncover unique metabolic dynamics of immune cell motility within blood vessels. I expect that these imaging tools will be instrumental for discovering links between cell function and metabolism within dynamic living systems,” says Melissa Skala, an investigator at the Morgridge Institute for Research who was not involved with this work.

“Being able to acquire high resolution multi-photon images relying on NAD(P)H autofluorescence contrast faster and deeper into tissues opens the door to the study of a wide range of important problems,” adds Irene Georgakoudi, a professor of biomedical engineering at Tufts University who was also not involved with this work. “Imaging living tissues as fast as possible whenever you assess metabolic function is always a huge advantage in terms of ensuring the physiological relevance of the data, sampling a meaningful tissue volume, or monitoring fast changes. For applications in cancer diagnosis or in neuroscience, imaging deeper — and faster — enables us to consider a richer set of problems and interactions that haven’t been studied in living tissues before.”

This research is funded, in part, by MIT startup funds, a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an MIT Irwin Jacobs and Joan Klein Presidential Fellowship, and an MIT Kailath Fellowship.