SPRING
2013
Annual News from the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
the MIT EECS
Connector
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Annual News from the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
the MIT EECS Connector
Perspectives from the Department Head : 1
Department Snapshot : 3
SuperUROP Starts Strong : 7
Rising Stars in EECS : 11
Women’s Technology Program : 13
Centers: hubs for collaborative action : 14
bigdata@CSAIL : 14
Wireless@MIT : 15
Connection Science and Engineering : 17
MIT/MTL Center for Graphene Devices and 2D Systems : 18
Center for Excitonics : 19
Research Lab News : 21
CSAIL: From the Integrated Circuit to the Internet: Bridging Engineering and the Social Sciences,
Constantinos Daskalakis : 21
CSAIL: Computer Aided Programming: Changing the way we code, Armando Solar-Lezama : 23
LIDS: When the whole is weaker than the sum of its parts: robustness and fragility in power grids,
Mardavij Roozbehani, Munther Dahleh : 24
MTL: Nanofabrication, Karl K. Berggren, Vitor R. Manfrinato, Samuel M. Nicaise, Jae-Byum Chang : 26
RLE: Largest Ever Optical Phased Array, Michael Watts : 28
Anantha P. Chandrakasan
Department Head
Munther A. Dahleh
Associate Department Head
William T. Freeman
Associate Department Head
CONTACT
the MIT EECS Connector
Room 38-401
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA 02139
newsletter@eecs.mit.edu
Editor: Patricia A. Sampson
Design: Subbiah Design
Printer: Artco, Inc.
www.eecs.mit.edu
Faculty News : 30
Awards, Fellowships, Chairs : 30, 33, 35
New Faculty : 38
L. Rafael Reif, MIT’s 17th president : 39
New Classes in EECS : 40
6.S02, a medical technology alternative to 6.02 is launched : 40
6.S193: Biological Circuit Engineering Laboratory : 42
6.S196 brings out the human side of technology : 44
Staff Features : 46
Claire Benoit, Agnes Chow, Janet Fischer and Myron (Fletch) Freeman
Student Groups : 51
The MIT Formula SAE Team Goes Electric! : 51
6.270: The Course 6 autonomous robot competition – entirely run by students : 52
USAGE 2012–2013 : 54
Alumni Features : 55
Deborah Estrin PhD ’85 : 55
Perspectives from the
Department Head
Drew Houston ’05, Arash Ferdowsi '08 : 57
Sal Khan SB, MEng ’98 : 60
Susie Wee SB ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’96 : 63
Donor Recognition : 66
Remember This? : inside back cover
Front cover images: 1: Students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science work on a lab project to build a light-tracking “pet robot” in
6.01. See Department Snapshot, page 3. 2: Read about the largest ever, optical phased array – work presented by Prof. Michael Watts in the Research Lab News,
page 28. 3: The SuperUROP Starts Strong – read about the new Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program allowing in-depth high-caliber research and
more on page 7. 4: Participants including top young female PhD graduates and postdocs gathered for the Rising Stars in EECS two-day workshop to present their
research and network. Read more page 11. 5: Prof. Asuman Ozdaglar discusses connection science ideas with graduate students in her research group. See
Department Snapshot, page 4. 6: Prof. Anantha Chandrakasan with collaborators used mammalian inner ear’s natural battery to power implantable devices.
7: EECS Professors William Freeman, Frédo Durand and John Guttag teamed to develop a system that amplifies video. See the EECS homepage www.eecs.mit.edu
Feb. 28, 2013.
Welcome to the 2013 edition of the MIT EECS Connector. I am pleased to share news
of ongoing academic and research programs as well as the implementation of the
2012 EECS Strategic Plan. Over the past academic year we launched several major
initiatives that have already made a positive impact on our faculty, students, staff,
and alumni. The EECS Department at MIT continues to lead internationally in
education and research, establishing the basis for tomorrow’s breakthrough
technologies.
The new SuperUROP program, launched in September 2012, features a year-long
advanced research experience during which undergraduate students (juniors and
seniors) focus on a challenging research problem. The program provides mentorship and resources necessary to produce publication-worthy results and advanced
software or hardware prototypes that could be commercially developed. In essence,
SuperUROP is a jump-start on graduate school, a startup accelerator and an
industry-training bootcamp, all rolled into one. With the generous financial support
of industry and private donors, named undergraduate research and innovation
scholars are engaged in projects that are commensurate with graduate level work.
Students are also exposed to best research practices through the newly created
class, 6.UAR: Preparation for Undergraduate Research.
Several major inter-disciplinary centers have been created by EECS faculty over
the past several years. The centers hosted by the EECS-affiliated research labs
(CSAIL, LIDS, MTL and RLE) bring together faculty, students, staff, and sponsors
from industry and government to address critical emerging problems in big data,
wireless communications, connection science, materials and devices, synthetic
biology, and health care. Several research centers are featured in this edition and
more details are available on the lab websites.
Our faculty continues to be recognized by major international awards. Several
members of our faculty have been appointed to prestigious career development
and senior faculty chairs. In order to recognize EECS faculty members for outstanding research contributions and international leadership in their fields, the
Department has established the EECS Faculty Research Innovation Fellowship
(FRIF) program. In 2013 we marked the second year of FRIF awards to support the
research of senior faculty who do not hold endowed chairs. The newly established
Steven and Renée Finn Innovation Fellowship provides tenured mid-career faculty
in EECS with resources for up to three years to pursue new research and development paths.
Another key initiative of the 2012 EECS Strategic Plan is Rising Stars in EECS,
designed to bring together outstanding women PhD students close to graduation
as well as women postdocs in electrical engineering and/or computer science. The
first Rising Stars in EECS workshop, held November 2012, provided a two-day
intensive networking experience for 36 attendees to share their research results
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Department Snapshot
with each other and our faculty, and to learn about entering and building an
academic career. Another goal is to increase their visibility with top departments
in EE and CS. The workshop appears to have been a positive and energizing
experience for all involved.
"the Department has
created a flagship
sophomore-level
class, 6.S02:
Introduction to
EECS in Medicine."
In response to growing interest in bio-medical systems, the Department has created
a flagship sophomore-level class, 6.S02: Introduction to EECS in Medicine, which is
in its first offering this spring term. The class is designed to expose students to a
wide spectrum of concepts, problems and hands-on laboratory experiences relevant
to EECS in medicine. Our faculty members continue to engage in the pioneering MITx
class offerings, including 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics) and 6.00x (Introduction to
Computer Science and Programming). The Department is also offering many exciting
new undergraduate courses, including Principles and Practice of Assistive Technology, Biological Circuit Engineering Laboratory (BioCel), Introduction to Inference, and
Introduction to Machine Learning.
We continue to engage our alumni in a number of programs. They are invited to
provide cooperative teaching and mentoring through the Course 6 Mentoring
Network, which is ideal for our large undergraduate software courses, such as 6.172,
6.005, and soon 6.813 and 6.170. The associated infrastructure, currently in development, will allow distant alumni to interact with students as reviewers of code. In this
edition of the Connector we are very pleased to feature several alumni, including
Dropbox co-founders Drew Houston (SB ’05) and Arash Ferdowsi ('08); Khan Academy
founder Sal Kahn (SB ‘98, MEng ‘98); Susie Wee (SB’91, SM’91, PhD’96), Vice
President and Chief Technology Officer of Networked Experiences at Cisco Systems;
and Deborah Estrin (PhD ’85), Professor of Computer Science at Cornell Tech in New
York City.
It is my pleasure to share, through this edition of the Connector and through our
website (www.eecs.mit.edu), the energy and excitement generated by our faculty,
students and staff. We invite our alumni to be in touch through the Alumni News
section of our website. I am also always delighted to hear directly from you.
Best wishes,
Anantha P. Chandrakasan
Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of Electrical Engineering
Department Head, MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
EECS places renewed emphasis on interdisciplinary research,
partnerships with alumni and industry, and experiential learning.
Larry Hardesty, MIT News Office. November 16, 2012
Students in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science work on a lab project to build a light-tracking "pet robot" in 6.01. [Top left and center,
photos by Dominick Reuter]. Undergraduate student Victor Pontis studies in a common area in the Stata Center (right). [photo by M. Scott Brauer. Both photos courtesy MIT News]
In the 1950s, when MIT researchers were helping to invent the
discipline of computer science, they didn’t think of themselves
as computer scientists; they thought of themselves as electrical engineers or physicists or mathematicians. Operating
systems and programming languages were just tools they
needed in order to maximize the productivity of the hugely
complex new machines they were building.
By 1975, however, computer science had developed enough
autonomy that MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering
changed its name, becoming the Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science (EECS). Now, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is the
largest lab at MIT.
EECS may now be in the midst of a similar expansion of its
intellectual boundaries. According to department head
Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley
Professor of Electrical Engineering, some of its most exciting
research lies at the intersections of EECS and other disciplines. That includes research on “big data” — techniques for
making sense of the massive amount of information unleashed
by the Web, by biological, medical and physics research, and by
the financial industry — as well as energy and biomedical
research. “More than a third of our faculty are interested in the
biomedical space,” Chandrakasan says.
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At the same time, Chandrakasan says, the core EECS curriculum is more popular than ever. EECS has long drawn the
largest undergraduate enrollment at MIT, since the days when
it was just EE. But this year, Chandrakasan says, enrollment in
the department’s two introductory courses — 6.01 and 6.02, in
MIT’s course-numbering system — reached an all-time high.
“Nearly half of MIT undergraduates take 6.01, regardless of
major,” Chandrakasan says.
Data deluge
With big data, the field is, in large part, reaping what it sowed.
Exponential increases in computing power, and simpler tools
for exploiting it, have led to an explosion of online data. But as
rapidly as computers have improved, gene-sequencing
machines have improved even more rapidly. Meanwhile,
physics experiments at the Large Hadron Collider can generate petabytes of data every day.
Andrew Lo, the Charles E. and Susan T. Harris Professor of
Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, who has
been on the MIT faculty since 1988, last year accepted a
secondary appointment in EECS and became a primary
investigator in CSAIL. Recently, Lo has used techniques
borrowed from computer science to mine credit-bureau data
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Department Snapshot
intracranial pressure from noninvasive-sensor data such as
ultrasound scans and blood pressure measurements, rather
than requiring physicians to drill holes in their patients’ skulls.
CSAIL’s John Guttag, the Dugald C. Jackson Professor of
Computer Science and Engineering, and RLE’s Collin Stultz, an
associate professor of biomedical engineering, have mined
electrocardiogram data to more accurately diagnose patients
at risk for heart failure; RLE’s Elfar Adalsteinsson, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science
and health sciences and technology, and Vivek Goyal, an
associate professor of electrical engineering and computer
science, developed algorithms that could reduce the duration
of MRI scans from 45 to 15 minutes.
Left: Graduate student Kimon Drakopoulos (in green) presents his work on the LinkedIn social network to members of Asuman Ozdaglar's (in red) research group
in a lab in the Connection Science and Engineering Center. [Both photos: M. Scott Brauer, courtesy MIT News] Right: Senior Adwoa Boakye works alongside other
students on a lab for course 6.002, Circuits and Electronics, in the fifth floor student lab in Building 38. The project was the first group lab and focused on measuring
output in metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) to see if observed results match theoretical predictions.
and data about the transactions conducted by customers of
financial institutions to more accurately predict the risk of
default or delinquency.
Lo is one of the researchers at bigdata@CSAIL, a new initiative
led by professor of computer science and engineering Sam
Madden. Madden investigates techniques for searching
databases more efficiently and for interpreting sensor data
from networks of cars, among other things. Other project
participants include professor of computer science and
engineering Piotr Indyk, whose new algorithm for calculating
the discrete Fourier transform — developed with professor of
computer science and engineering Dina Katabi — has a broad
range of applications in the big-data context, and associate
professor of computer science and engineering Rob Miller,
who finds ways to enlist human aid in the execution of large
information-processing tasks.
As people store more of their data online, however, it becomes
more vulnerable to attack. Nickolai Zeldovich, an associate
professor of software technology and another member of
bigdata@CSAIL, has, together with Frans Kaashoek, the
Charles A. Piper Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, researched ways to plug security holes in web applications; Zeldovich and Katabi introduced a new way to prevent
the interception of wireless transmissions. And cryptography
luminary Shafi Goldwasser, the RSA Professor of Computer
Science and Engineering, a two-time winner of the Association
for Computing Machinery’s Gödel Prize for theoretical computer science, and most recently (with Professor Silvio Micali)
winner of the 2012 ACM Turing Award, has developed
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algorithms that protect data stored in the cloud from particularly ingenious attacks.
The Cryptography and Information Security Group at CSAIL
contains celebrated luminaries. Silvio Micali, the Ford Professor of Engineering, shared the first-ever Gödel Prize with
Goldwasser for the development of zero-knowledge proofs.
The group’s other faculty members, adjunct professor of
computer science and engineering Butler Lampson and Ron
Rivest, the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Computer
Science and Engineering, are recipients of the Turing Award,
commonly referred to as the Nobel Prize of computer science.
(In all, eleven researchers have won the Turing — Professors
Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali on March 13, 2013.)
The search for alternative sources of energy is squarely within
the purview of classical electrical engineering: RLE researchers such as associate professor of electrical engineering Mark
Baldo and Vladimir Bulović, the Fairborz Maseeh (1990)
Professor of Emerging Technology, for instance, are developing flexible, transparent and even printable solar cells, while
Bulović and Jing Kong, the ITT Career Development Associate
Professor of Electrical Engineering, showed that graphene —
an atom-thick layer of carbon atoms — could offer a much
more cost-effective way to provide electrodes for such devices.
Tomás Palacios of the Microsystems Technology Laboratory,
the Emanuel E. Landsman Career Development Associate
Professor of Electronics, has shown that using gallium nitride
in power converters that switch between alternating and direct
current could cut mechanical devices’ power loss by 30
percent.
Associate department head Munther Dahleh, professor of
electrical engineering and computer science, on the other
hand, is approaching the energy problem less directly.
Among other things, Dahleh investigates how the type of
control principles studied at the Laboratory for Information
and Decision Systems can be brought to bear on management
of the power grid.
Biology and energy
Undergrads as innovators
Other CSAIL researchers, such as associate professor of
computer science Manolis Kellis and professor of computer
science and engineering David Gifford, are developing novel
algorithms for finding biologically informative patterns in
mountains of genetic data. But another central area of
convergence between computer science and medicine is the
analysis and interpretation of signals from biomedical sensors.
The department’s undergraduate curriculum, too, has an
increasingly interdisciplinary flavor. Its introductory courses,
6.01 and 6.02, concentrate on robotics and communications,
respectively, canvassing a wide range of topics — from control
theory and algorithms to signal processing and circuit design.
Chandrakasan says the department is planning to offer a third
introductory course, which will concentrate on biomedical
applications of EECS principles.
For instance, CSAIL’s Polina Golland, an associate professor of
computer science and engineering, finds correlations between
anomalies in brain scans and neurological disorders. Similarly, George Verghese of the Research Laboratory of Electronics
(RLE), the Henry Warren Ellis Professor of Electrical Engineering, has developed algorithms that could infer changes in
The creation of a third introductory course is an element of
Chandrakasan’s strategic plan for the department, which
EECS leaders began developing soon after he became department head in 2011. The plan’s hallmark educational initiative,
however, is the so-called “SuperUROP” program, which builds
Top: EECS postdoc Puneet Srivastava (right) works with Mark Mondol, facility
manager at the MIT Electron Beam Lithography lab, at MIT in Cambridge, Mass.
Srivastava is learning how to use the tool.Bottom: Junior Sylvia Zakarian (center)
works alongside other students on a lab for course 6.002, Circuits and Electronics. [Both photos: M. Scott Brauer, courtesy MIT News Office]
on MIT’s much-emulated Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Founded in 1969, UROP offers funding
and academic credit to undergraduates who do original
research in MIT labs.
While the majority of UROP projects last only a semester,
SuperUROP projects last a full year, and students are required
to take a yearlong course in which a series of outside speakers
discuss both research topics and entrepreneurship. Each
student receives a stipend for the year, and each faculty supervisor gets additional funding in his or her lab budget. The yearlong student commitment, and the additional research
funding, makes sponsoring a SuperUROP student much more
attractive to faculty, Chandrakasan says; this greater faculty
involvement, in turn, enriches the undergraduates’ experience.
The SuperUROP program launched this fall — with funding from
both private donors and a roster of 14 corporate sponsors —
and 86 EECS undergraduates enrolled. At the beginning of the
year, the program’s website posted a detailed list of more than
100 research projects that faculty were willing to supervise; the
corporate sponsors posted a second list. But several students
opted instead to create their own projects and find faculty to
sponsor them. Indeed, Chandrakasan says, one of the program’s aims is to provide an outlet for the entrepreneurship that
seems to be second nature for many MIT students.
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Department Snapshot
SuperUROP Starts Strong
By Lauren J. Clark
Similarly, Miller has recruited MIT alumni to help with code
reviews in a course he teaches, 6.005 (Elements of Software
Construction). There, however, the mechanism is much
different. Where the volunteers in Leiserson and Amarasinghe’s
course meet with students in pairs, those in Miller’s course examine small chunks of code online whenever they have time.
Indeed, cultivating an “alumni teaching network” is another
aspect of EECS’s strategic plan, Chandrakasan says. “We want
to engage the broad network of our alumni, but also experts
out there in industry,” he says.
The department is also in the process of building a new
Engineering Design Studio, led by professor of mechanical and
electrical engineering and computer science Steven Leeb.
Chandrakasan describes it as “a hands-on advanced-prototyping lab where students can prototype both mechanical and
electronic systems, including biomedical devices. We’ll have
state-of-the-art wireless components and devices from
electronic-systems manufacturers. We’ll have tutorials from
industry people through videoconferencing, teaching students
how to build and use systems.” The studio would be available
for lab assignments in undergraduate courses and to undergraduates pursuing independent projects, Chandrakasan says.
Top: Senior Robert Johnson works on final project ideas on a blackboard in the
38-600 student lab at MIT. Lower left: Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences
and Technology graduate student Gabrielle Merchant works with Teaching Assistant David Jenicek (right) alongside other students on a lab for course 6.002,
Circuits and Electronics. Lower right Students listen as Professor Dennis Freeman speaks to the 6.UAR students about the EECS MEng program [All Photos:
M. Scott Brauer, courtesy MIT News]
Meet the real world
The SuperUROP initiative illustrates another principle that,
Chandrakasan argues, has been crucial to the success of
EECS at MIT: corporate partnership. Both CSAIL and MTL have
existing programs for corporate sponsors — respectively, the
Industry Affiliates Program and the Microsystems Industrial
Group. Both programs provide companies with opportunities
to sponsor research, to initiate joint projects, and to keep
abreast of the labs’ research. In turn, the programs help
match MIT students with prospective employers.
Recently, Chandrakasan points out, some CSAIL professors
have begun to engage with industry in novel ways. Three years
ago, professors of computer science and engineering Charles
Leiserson and Saman Amarasinghe, who co-teach 6.172
(Performance Engineering of Software Systems), initiated a
program that recruits senior programmers from the Boston
area to review the code written by students in the class. In the
program’s first few years, Leiserson has said, he and Amarasinghe had to turn volunteers away.
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Equalizing opportunities
Even as EECS takes steps to enhance the educational experience for MIT students, it’s also assumed a leading role in edX,
an ambitious project to make the educational resources of
MIT, Harvard University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Texas system — and, over time, other
universities — available to students worldwide. The first
course offered through edX was an EECS class, 6.002x
(Circuits and Electronics), and professor of computer science
and engineering Anant Agarwal, the CSAIL head who stepped
down to become president of edX, led a group of EECS
researchers in developing the technological platform that
undergirds the whole system. Since the introduction of 6.002x,
Chandrakasan says, on-campus enrollment in 6.002 has gone
up by 40 percent.
In addition to its educational initiatives, the department’s
strategic plan also aims to increase the number of women
faculty in electrical engineering and computer science. The
centerpiece of that project is “Rising Stars in EECS,” an annual
workshop, created by Chandrakasan and Golland, that brings
talented women from the nation’s top EECS graduate programs to the MIT campus for two days of symposia and talks
on research and job-search skills. The first such workshop was held earlier this month. n
Left: Professor Anantha Chandrakasan talks with students at the SuperUROP class 6.UAR, fall 2012. Middle: Analog Devices Chairman Ray Stata ’57, SM ’58 talks with
the 6.UAR students about startups and building a company. Right: 6.UAR students and guests listen to a panel discussion, fall 2012. [Photos by Bethany Versoy]
In September 2012, EECS and the Undergraduate Research
Opportunities Program (UROP) launched SuperUROP, which
has the potential to transform undergraduate education. It
gives EECS juniors and seniors the chance to make greater
contributions to MIT’s world-renowned research than they
would under a typical UROP.
“This is an amazing experience as an undergrad,” says Luis
Voloch, who is investigating how computer networks conceal
and reveal sources of information. “SuperUROP is a special
arrangement, because there’s a high level of expectation from
the students. It creates a setting in which professors and
students take a project very seriously and for a long term. I
think it’s a good preview of what graduate school can be like.”
Voloch’s research is supported by Draper Laboratory.
When Anantha P. Chandrakasan became department head in
July 2011, he spearheaded the expansion of research opportunities for undergraduates. The idea for SuperUROP evolved out
of his 2012 strategic plan, and he invited the Undergraduate
Student Advisory Group (USAGE) to play a lead role in developing a program that excited fellow students.
An impressive 86 juniors and seniors have participated in
SuperUROP’s pilot year, and interest among both students and
faculty has been so great that the program will likely expand to
other departments.
Launched in 1969, when undergraduates were rarely found in
the laboratory, UROP evolved into a widely copied MIT program
in which more than 80 percent of the Institute’s undergraduates participate. Typically, they spend a semester getting their
feet wet in the laboratory, experiencing what it’s like to work
side-by-side with senior researchers.
But many students extend their UROP projects — often for a year
or more — indicating that there is a demand for greater exposure to the rewards and complexities of scientific investigation.
“Many students desire a more in-depth research experience —
one that culminates in results that could be published in
a journal or top conference, or advanced prototypes that
could be commercially developed,” says Chandrakasan, who
is also the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor of
Electrical Engineering.
SuperUROP is, in essence, a jump-start on graduate school, a
startup accelerator, and an industry-training bootcamp, all
rolled into one.
In October, EECS held a reception to celebrate the launch of
SuperUROP. Students in the inaugural class, EECS faculty,
individual and industry sponsors and MIT administrators who
helped implement the program gathered in the Stata Center
R&D dining area for the festivities. Chandrakasan welcomed
all at the gathering and acknowledged those who helped make
SuperUROP a reality.
He noted that the program would not be possible without
significant financial support. Fourteen companies, along with
individual donors, generously support SuperUROP through the
Research and Innovation Scholars Program (RISP). RISP is a
prestigious named-scholars program that underwrites the
participating students and provides some discretionary
funding for the host research group. The companies and
donors provide not only mentoring, but also project suggestions and research directions.
Some of the key players in implementing SuperUROP gave
remarks at the reception. They included Julie Norman, MIT MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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SuperUROP Starts Strong
“The exciting thing about MIT is the number of revolutionary
ideas that develop here. I think it’s important to encourage [the
students] — for them to see that people from the real world
who invest are putting in the time to see what they’re working
on and that [research is] not just academic,” Grinnell says.
Many of the students are working on research aligned with
the interests of SuperUROP’s industrial sponsors. These
companies aim to solve complicated, open-ended problems
ranging from achieving ultra-low power computing and
nanoelectronics systems to modeling the massive amounts
of data generated by social networks.
Rui Jin, a senior, is taking a mobile-phone charging technology
developed by Texas Instruments and specializing it for medical
devices. Representatives of the company, which supports Jin’s
research through RISP (Research and Innovation Scholars
Along with Colin and Erika Angle and several anonymous
donors, Dinarte R. Morais and Paul Rosenblum, Jr., both 1986
EECS alumni, provide financial support for SuperUROP.
Industrial sponsors are Analog Devices, Basis Technology,
Denso, Draper Laboratory, eBay Inc., Facebook, Foxconn,
Google, Intel, MediaTek, Qualcomm, Quanta Computer, Texas
Instruments and VMware.
“As an industrial sponsor, Analog Devices will look for
opportunities to collaborate with students and faculty on
research topics of continual interest and provide insights into
the relevance of research to real-world applications,” says
Stata. “Analog Devices is excited about exploring new possibilities to strengthen our relationship with MIT students and
faculty through the SuperUROP program.”
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really own and really take
control of”
Program), attended the poster session and were “pretty
enthusiastic,” he says."
Jin explains why his research requires the time, training and
technical facilities that SuperUROP provides.
Many SuperUROP students work on projects proposed by MIT
faculty, who are eager to bring enterprising undergraduates
into their laboratories. Faculty submitted 100 different
research topics for the program’s inaugural year, including a
microelectromechanical tactile display for the blind, an
integrated language for Web application coding that would fix
security vulnerabilities and coding mistakes, and a method of
predicting a hospital patient’s blood pressure based on
cloud-scale machine learning.
High-caliber research — and much more
In addition to a research experience that lasts a year or more,
SuperUROP participants take a two-semester class,
“Preparation for Undergraduate Research,” that covers topics
ranging from industry best practices to presentation skills to
ethics in engineering.
Notably, in their roles as UROP supervisors and academic
advisors, faculty can have a major impact on a student’s
decision to attend graduate school as well as the graduate
school selection process. Among seniors choosing to further
their education, 68 percent indicated that faculty had provided
assistance in their search for a graduate program.
They also get access to MIT’s sophisticated nanofabrication
facilities (through the Microsystems Technology Laboratories) —
a privilege typically reserved for graduate students. Upon
completion of the program, they receive a certificate in
advanced undergraduate research with a designated focus
area, such as artificial intelligence, computer systems
or nanotechnology.
Lyne Tchapmi Petse is deciding whether to pursue graduate
school or an industry position. She has been working with
EECS Professor Charles Soldini on a smart phone-compatible
heart-monitoring system.
SuperUROP students receive a significant stipend of $3,000
per semester for 10 hours per week of work. Their faculty
supervisors receive $4,000 to support the student for the
entire academic year.
The students have the opportunity to interact with industry
mentors and venture capitalists. In December, Fairhaven
Capital founder and EECS alumnus Rick Grinnell ’92, SM ’93
attended SuperUROP’s first poster session to meet the
program’s participants and offer them advice.
independent project that I can
“With my project, I need to first build a prototype, but that’s not
the end of it. I need to test the prototype and make improvements. But the ultimate goal is to actually fabricate silicon and
design a chip that will support all the features that are in my
prototype. All of that work combined will take far more than one
semester—more than even one year,” Jin says, adding that he
will expand his SuperUROP project into his graduate thesis.
Left: Speakers at the Oct. 18, 2012 reception for the SuperUROP included, from left, Counterpoint Health Sciences CEO, Dr. Erika N, Angle ’04, Analog Devices Chairman
Ray Stata ’57, SM ’58, EECS Department Head Anantha Chandrakasan, Julie Norman, MIT senior associate dean for undergraduate education and director of undergraduate advising and academic programming, Carine Abi Akar, ’12, member of USAGE in 2011-12, and Dennis Freeman, EECS professor and undergraduate officer.
[Photo: Patricia Sampson] SuperUROP student Annie Holladay was featured in the MIT News Office on Feb. 25, 2013, for her contributions to work in the Learning and
Intelligent Systems Group at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory showing how household robots could use lateral thinking to compensate
for their physical shortcomings. [Photo: Allegra Boverman, courtesy MIT News]
senior associate dean for undergraduate education and director
of undergraduate advising and academic programming; Analog
Devices Chairman Ray Stata ‘57, SM ‘58; Counterpoint Health
Sciences CEO Dr. Erika N. Angle ‘04, who with her husband,
iRobot Corporation CEO and chairman of the board, Colin A.
Angle ‘89, SM ‘91 supports SuperUROP; Carine Abi Akar, ‘12,
member of USAGE in 2011-2012; and Dennis Freeman, EECS
professor and undergraduate officer.
“SuperUROP offers me an
Top: SuperUROP students Avanti Shrikumar and Jennifer Wang pick out a T
shirt at the SuperUROP reception in the MIT Stata R&D Dining area.
Bottom: Prof. Arvind, left, talks with SuperUROP student Stephan Boyer at the
Dec. 6, 2012 SuperUROP poster session. [Photos: Patricia Sampson/EECS]
Worn just behind the ear, the device transmits vital signs in
real time via Bluetooth radio signals to a smart phone app for
analysis and display. “You have Bluetooth on your smart
phone, so you can basically have a device that you can wear at
home and that can help you monitor your heart,” says Petse,
whose work is supported by Analog Devices.
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
9
SuperUROP Starts Strong
Rising Stars in EECS
By Lauren J. Clark
Another student, Sebastian Leon, is among the very first
researchers to examine the user dynamics of edX, which offers
free online courses from MIT, Harvard and other universities.
A member of EECS Professor Una-May O’Reilly’s research
group, Leon explains that edX has about 100,000 users whose
interactions with the platform generate a “gigantic mass of
raw data. The idea is to create a predictive model of student
behavior based on all of this data.
“SuperUROP offers me an independent project that I can really
own and really take control of,” Leon adds.
MIT Chancellor and EECS faculty member Eric Grimson is
inspired by such commitment to high-caliber work.
“The level of research being conducted is remarkable, and the
articulate manner in which students talk about their research
and the excitement they communicate are impressive,” said
the Bernard M. Gordon Professor of Medical Engineering
during SuperUROP’s December poster session.
In addition to working on industry- and faculty-led research
projects, students may choose their own topics. In fact,
choosing a research topic and pitching it to a VC or a government sponsor such as DARPA is part of the syllabus of
“Preparation for Undergraduate Research.”
However they get involved in their research projects, undergraduates can gain a lot from SuperUROP, says Stan Reiss of
Matrix Partners, another EECS alumnus and venture capitalist
who attended the poster session.
“They can get to some real results, and that’s the kind of
experience you really need,” he says. “Even if [the students]
have no intention of commercializing their work, this is a great
program. It’s an opportunity to do something relevant to the
real world—to whatever they’re going to end up doing when
they graduate.”
Whether they go on to graduate school, a startup or an industry
career, SuperUROP gives MIT students a valuable head start on
generating the revolutionary ideas of the future. n
The Rising Stars in EECS participants gathered with MIT EECS faculty and visiting faculty and administrators from the University of California at Berkeley and the
University of Rochester to present their research and network with each other for two days in November 2012. Here they took a moment to pose on the fourth level
patio of the Stata Center. [Photo: Patricia Sampson/EECS]
On Nov. 1 and 2, nearly three dozen of the world’s top young
female electrical engineers and computer scientists gathered
at MIT to experience something rare: they outnumbered the
men in the room.
The MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Department invited the women to its inaugural “Rising Stars in
EECS” workshop. Attendees came from MIT, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, Cornell University,
Carnegie Mellon University, the Max Planck Institute in
Munich, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in
Switzerland and other research institutions to network with
one another and with faculty from MIT and elsewhere. On the
cusp of entering the workforce, these PhD candidates and
postdocs came for guidance on launching careers as professors and to raise their visibility in the field of electrical
engineering and computer science.
“You see so few women [in EECS], it’s nice to see them all
together,” said Lydia Chilton, a PhD candidate at the University
of Washington who studies crowdsourcing and other aspects
of human-computer interaction. “As I’ve gotten older I really
value the female colleagues that I have. I feel like I interact
with them more naturally.”
Top: SuperUROP students Jelimo Maswan, left, and Lisa Liu discuss their research at the Dec. 6, 2012 poster session. Middle: SuperUROP student Jeff Chan
discusses his research with a fellow SuperUROP student. Bottom: SuperUROP
student Arvind Thiagarajan discusses his research with SuperUROP Industrial
Interface Coordinator Ted Equi at the Dec. 6, poster session. [Photos by Patricia
Sampson/EECS]
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“I’m at the end of my PhD, and I thought this was an amazing
opportunity to meet other women interested in education and
to get some advice,” said Floraine Berthouzoz, who works in
computer graphics and computer vision at UC Berkeley and is
the only woman in a research group of about 20 people.
While women’s representation in most science and engineering fields has increased substantially over the past 25 years,
their participation in EECS has been halting. A recent National
Science Foundation survey shows that women make up just 22
percent of PhDs in computer science. Moving up the ranks of
academia, the numbers become even more stark: women
comprise a mere 10 percent of tenure-track faculty in the top
electrical engineering academic departments, according to the
National Academies.
“When you talk to search committees at different universities,
one of the complaints is that there aren’t many applications
from women,” said Polina Golland, an MIT associate professor
in EECS who organized Rising Stars with the head of her department, Anantha P. Chandrakasan, the Keithley Professor of
Electrical Engineering. They plan to hold the workshop annually.
EECS departments at MIT and peer institutions are keen to
add more women to academia’s pipeline by identifying
potential candidates and encouraging them to apply for faculty
positions, said Golland. She believes that the workshop was a
significant step in the right direction.
It afforded a valuable opportunity, she said, for elite researchers to meet peers in the broad field of EECS—outside the
confines of their respective sub-disciplines—and to be inspired
by established women faculty.
Kristen Dorsey, a PhD candidate studying microelectromechanical systems at Carnegie Mellon, said: “Before
attending [the workshop], I thought, ‘Well, I’d like to be a
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
11
Rising Stars in EECS
Left: EECS Professor Dina Katabi introduces several Rising Stars presenters. Rising Stars participants also presented their work in several poster sessions in the
Bill and Melinda Gates Tower of the Stata Center (right top and lower middle photos). They met for the conference in the Star Conference room of the Alexander W.
Dreyfoos, Jr. Tower of the Stata Center. [Photos: Patricia Sampson/EECS]
faculty member, but I don’t have what it takes. I don’t have the
publication record, I don’t know what I’m doing.’” However,
being invited to MIT and meeting women who have successful
careers in academia gave her a measure of confidence, she
said.
women faculty, including National Medal of Science honoree
Mildred Dresselhaus and Turing Award recipient Barbara
Liskov. They also got a primer on how the promotion process
works from a panel of faculty representing Harvard, MIT,
Boston University and the University of Rochester.
Dorsey and other attendees, including Jenna Wiens of MIT,
added that meeting talented researchers from the wide variety
of fields that EECS encompasses exposed them to new
possibilities for collaboration and professional support.
The issue of work-life balance arose at the panel on promotions and at occasional moments throughout the workshop.
The panelists noted that it has become common policy at
universities to adjust the “tenure clock” for women who have
to take time off to care for infants, and that male faculty can
and do take advantage of family leave policies.
“It’s a great networking opportunity to meet other women who
are interested in pursuing careers in academia whom I could
forge relationships with early on—and then hopefully tap into
that network later,” said Wiens, whose research focuses on
machine learning and data mining.
That was precisely Chandrakasan’s vision when he began
planning Rising Stars with Golland as part of his department’s
2012 strategic plan. He was inspired by the success that the
Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics has had with a
similar annual workshop for women. In his welcoming
remarks, he told the invitees, “As you start thinking about
applying for faculty positions, I hope you can use each other as
a resource. This is a group I hope will stay together.”
The workshop’s attendees shared their research during formal
presentations and poster sessions on topics ranging from
improving online video streaming rates to tamper-proofing
circuits to modeling the risk of infection among hospital
patients. They networked over breakfast with MIT senior
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www.eecs.mit.edu
During the Q&A session with junior faculty, Dana Weinstein,
MIT’s Steve and Renée Finn CD Assistant Professor in EECS,
pointed out that while being in a high-profile academic position
keeps her very busy, “there is lot of flexibility in your schedule.
You can have a life outside of work.”
Looking ahead to a career as a faculty member, Chilton of the
University of Washington was enthusiastic about other ways in
which academia offers flexibility. “I like that it doesn’t preclude
me from doing other things, such as a startup. And I really like
being on the cutting edge. I feel like, even though I’m making
things that aren’t immediately practical, they will be in five years.”
It is Chandrakasan’s and Golland’s bet that a cohort of
passionate and talented women like Chilton will advance the
field of EECS—not only through groundbreaking research, but
by paving the way for the next, substantially larger, generation
of female engineers and scientists. n
EECS Women’s Technology Program
Students and staff of the 2012 EECS Women's Technology Program
“Not only have I learned
so much about electrical
engineering, computer
science, and discrete math,
I have also gained a broader
perspective on the cuttingedge discoveries and breakthroughs that are happening
at MIT and developed my
ability to think critically to
solve problems.”
Since 2002, the EECS department has reached into the high
school pipeline to attract young women to engineering and
computer science with the Women’s Technology Program
(WTP). This four-week academic and residential experience
allows female high school students to explore EECS through
hands-on classes, labs, and team-based projects in the
summer after 11th grade.
The goal of WTP is to spark girls’ interest in future study of
engineering and computer science.
This introductory yet rigorous program is taught by female MIT
graduate students and is designed for high school girls who
excel at math and science, have the requisite background to be
engineers and attend MIT, but who are not yet headed in that
direction. The EECS department provides essential resources
to support this important and successful outreach mission.
WTP-EECS has tracked the college career pathways of its
alumnae over 10 years to measure the program’s impact: 65%
have majored in a field of engineering or computer science;
another 20% have majored in a science or mathematics. 43%
have matriculated at MIT, with 73% selecting majors in the
School of Engineering and 29% majoring in Course 6.
To learn more about WTP visit: http://wtp.mit.edu n
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
13
Centers: hubs for collaborative action
Dealing with Big Data
The bigdata@CSAIL initiative was launched at MIT on May 31,
2012 to focus on managing the huge amount of information
generated today by modern enterprises, websites, and
networked sensors. Bigdata@CSAIL includes a number of
industry partners, including AIG, Alior Bank, EMC, Intel,
Huawei, Microsoft, Samsung, SAP and Thomson Reuters.
Professor Sam Madden of the MIT Department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) heads bigdata@
CSAIL, and Elizabeth Bruce acts as its executive director.
When bigdata@CSAIL launched in spring 2012, Massachusetts
Governor Deval Patrick announced the formation of the
Massachusetts Big Data Initiative. This initiative will sponsor a
grant-matching program, an internship program, and a project to
investigate how big-data technologies can improve government.
Another large area to explore includes security in relation to
information policy. What is data privacy? As bigdata@CSAIL
grows, it is hoped that outside collaborators— such as major
research hospitals, for example — will benefit from the data
As Sam Madden pointed out at the May 31st launch event,
“existing tools for analyzing data are outdated and rooted in
computer systems and technologies developed in the 1970s.”
This is the core mission of the 20 EECS colleagues and six MIT
CSAIL researchers and staff in bigdata@CSAIL: to develop a
new generation of technologies to store, manage, analyze,
share, and understand today’s huge quantities of data.
In terms of defining big data, Executive Director Elizabeth Bruce
says, “From the technology side, you can define big data with
the three “V’s”: volume, velocity — collecting data real-time;
and variety.” She explains that the latter is considered one of the
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www.eecs.mit.edu
experts in more highly facilitated research. Elizabeth Bruce
points to several projects that kicked off this past fall that are
making use of one of the world’s largest cancer patient
databases located at Massachusetts General Hospital.
Locating this major research initiative at MIT CSAIL is also a
way to ensure that education in this new field is a natural
by-product. Encouraging interested students and building data
scientists will build the new field.
Elizabeth Bruce explains: “With the growth of big data, we also
want to demonstrate the importance of open access to data.
Some of the questions that are going to come up in the future
are probably going to be questions of ownership. Transparency
is important. We would like to show the good of big data — how
data can be used to really improve the quality of our lives.” n
Wireless@MIT is created to address
immediate and long-term wireless needs
The multidisciplinary approach of bigdata@CSAIL will bring
together world leaders in parallel architecture, massive-scale
data processing, algorithms, machine learning, visualization,
and interfaces to identify and address four research themes:
first, scalable platforms — computing infrastructures that can
expand indefinitely to accommodate increasing data loads;
second, the data-analysis tools that will run on those platforms; third, scalable techniques for handling security and
privacy; and fourth, new techniques for visualizing and
understanding data.
Work in these four areas is being coupled with application
experts in areas such as finance (Professor Andrew Lo),
medicine (Professor John Guttag), science (Professor Stonebraker), education (through a relationship with the MITx
initiative), and transportation (Professor Hari Balakrishnan
and Professor Madden). To date, over twenty MIT faculty-headed big data projects are underway including: Energy-Efficient
Algorithms (Erik Demaine); Uncovering Clinically Relevant
Medical Knowledge (John Guttag); Execution Migration
Machine (EM2) (Srini Devadas); Maintaining Coherent Memory
in Dynamic Distributed Systems (Nancy Lynch); Privacy-preserving Methods for Sharing Financial Risk Exposures
(Andrew Lo); BLINKDB (Sam Madden); Smart Transportation
Cartel (Hari Balakrishnan, Sam Madden); and Energy:
Hydrocarbon Exploration (Piotr Indyk, Tommi Jaakkola,
William Freeman and Tomaso Poggio).
history) of the data and visualizing the data. Elizabeth Bruce
points out that the data will need to be accessible to not just a
handful of experts — but, in a large corporation, for example,
to multiple levels from corporate leadership on down to allow
the whole organization to benefit from the analytics. This will
be true for multiple areas including government.
Last October, the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence
Lab (CSAIL) launched a new interdisciplinary center dedicated
to developing the next generation of wireless networks
and mobile devices. The MIT Center for Wireless Networks and
Mobile Computing dubbed "Wireless@MIT," headed by EECS
faculty members Hari Balakrishnan and Dina Katabi, offers a
unique approach to advancing wireless communications by
bringing together researchers and companies from across the
wireless ecosystem.
Top: The May 2012 launch of the new initiative bigdata@CSAIL brought crowds to
hear speakers including Governor Duval Patrick, MIT President Susan Hockfield,
Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin Rattner, CSAIL Director Daniela Rus and
EECS Professor and leader of bigdata@CSAIL Sam Madden. Bottom: Professor
Sam Madden, bigdata@CSAIL leader is flanked by MIT President Susan Hockfield (left) and Intel CTO Justin Rattner. [Photos: Jason Dorfmann/CSAIL]
most difficult challenges. Increasingly, there are many kinds of
data – images (photos and videos that will account for over 85%
of total Internet traffic in the next few years, for example); and
Twitter and other social network feeds, all of which need to be
integrated, structured and then analyzed.
In addition, the challenges of developing the technologies to
store the data must be addressed—once it has been determined what to store, verifying and assuring the reliability (the
Industry partners in the new center include Amazon.com,
Cisco, Google, Intel, MediaTek, Microsoft, STMicroelectronics,
and Telefonica. The Wireless@MIT collaboration is aimed at
influencing and impacting standards and products while
offering a medium for companies, academics and government
representatives to discuss the future of the wireless industry.
Wireless@MIT co-director Dina Katabi, professor of electrical
engineering and computer science, notes about the structure
of the center: “If you look, there are many centers in other
universities and institutions but they are focused on a specific
area. Some centers only work on circuits, others work only on
applications. The unique feature of this center is that it brings
the experts in radios, circuits, communications, networks, and
mobile apps, and makes them work together on innovative
technologies." She adds, “ A lesson we have learned in
wireless is that you cannot have breakthrough innovations by
working on one aspect of the problem alone.”
Today the wireless industry is composed of entities—such as
application vendors and content providers, network operators,
equipment manufacturers and radio chipset developers—operating more or less independently of each other. Wireless@
MIT will bring these groups closer together with researchers
to enable a more coordinated, holistic approach to mobile
system design.
It is not too soon for this development. “There are already over
five billion mobile phones in the world today; add to this all the
tablets, laptops, medical devices and wireless sensors, and the
numbers are staggering,” says Hari Balakrishnan, the Fujitsu
Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
and co-director of the center. “The goal of our center is to push
the frontiers of wireless research to their full potential, and to
ensure that the industry that grows up around these new
devices is able to work in innovative and productive ways.”
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
15
Centers: hubs for collaborative action
Wireless@MIT’s aggressive goals start with the spectrum
crisis – the exhaustion of radio spectrum caused by the
explosive popularity of wireless systems. Prof. Katabi notes:
“By getting more from the spectrum than we already have, we
can get 10 times higher data speeds for our wireless networks,
and we can do it all without asking for additional spectrum.”
She adds, “And, we do have technologies that can get you
potentially toward this magnitude over the next five years.”
Connection Science and Engineering:
a virtual center brings together network initiatives from across MIT
holistic framework for the study of decentralized networks that
are comprised of both human and technological elements.”
The second goal of Wireless@MIT is energy and energy
efficiency. “Transmission energy is a humongous consumer of
energy,” notes Prof. Katabi. The center develops hardware and
software designs for energy-efficient mobile systems. These
include low-power handsets, energy-scavenging sensors, and
wireless medical devices – work that is carried out by Prof.
Anantha Chandrakasan, the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Arvind, the Johnson
Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT.
The Connection Science center will focus on fundamental
research and applications within four broad areas: modeling
social flows, understanding implications of networked
interactions on economic and financial outcomes, developing a
theory of network computation, and design of social architectures. The scope of social flows will include developing a
systematic framework for modeling and understanding the
nature and spread of information and influence in dynamically
evolving and complex social networks.
The third goal of the center includes the development of a new
paradigm for wireless video delivery. “We all want video on our
wireless devices. And, this is one example where you can see
the importance of having people work together,” says Prof.
Katabi. “When you are trying to deliver that video to the user,
it's not just the video, it's the channel and how you record the
signal on the channel and the video application.” By looking at
the whole system and coordinating the various layers required,
Prof. Katabi notes, today’s uneven delivery will gain in performance, reliability and efficiency.
The fourth goal of the center is delivering new means for
secure website service across commercial and other Internet
transactions. Projects underway include Hari Balakrishnan’s
MOSH: Mobile Shell as a robust and responsive replacement
for SSH particularly over WI-FI, cellular, and long-distance
links. Another application known as Tamper-Evident Pairing
(TEP) is being developed by Dina Katabi and EECS Associate
Professor Nickolai Zeldovich. TEP is the first wireless pairing
protocol that works in-band, with no pre-shared keys and
protects again MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks.
Top: Graduate student Ezzeldin Hamed (in white, seated) shows software
radios to, from left, Professor Hari Balakrishnan, graduate student Shuo Deng,
graduate student Anirudh Sivaraman and Professor Dina Katabi in the Wireless
Center. [Photo: M. Scott Brauer, courtesy MIT News Office]. Middle: Wireless@
MIT demos in late May, 2012. On March 6, Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the
United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), answered questions
about wireless spectrum - including spectrum sharing, spectrum access and
allocation, and the impact of the spectrum crunch on the wireless industry - with
Professors Hari Balakrishnan and Dina Katabi, co-directors of the MIT Center for
Wireless Networks and Mobile Computing (Wireless@MIT). [Bottom two photos:
Jason Dorfman/CSAIL]
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www.eecs.mit.edu
Where will life with wireless take us in the future? Dina Katabi
describes what is coming sooner than we think. “Cell phones
are just one part of the revolution,” she says. “Whether they
will completely morph to glasses or to whole environment; it’s
like being able to have a wireless interface without carrying
any device. Wireless signals reflected off our skin may be used
to capture our gestures. Such technologies can change how
we interact with devices in our environment and will enable
many new interesting applications.” n
The center also aims to study the implications of networked
interactions in shaping economic behavior and financial
outcomes. This will include investigation of how social networks
shape economic behavior, consumer choice, insurance and
collective action. In addition, understanding how ideas, failures
and risks spread and cascade through networks and how to
leverage the power of networks to improve resource allocation
and technological innovation will be addressed.
In 2011, more than 20 senior MIT faculty members from all
five schools came to discuss a new virtual center for connection science. That so many chose to attend this 8:30 am
meeting on one week’s notice was considered a good portent
for the new initiative.
Any modeling exercise commensurate with the size of today’s
networks will inevitably run into computational challenges. An
important goal of the center is to design scalable local
algorithms for network computation and develop tractable
algorithms for detection and inference in large networks.
This meeting marked the start of a new virtual center that is
projected to lay the foundation for a new discipline as well—to
be known as Connection Science. Engaging existing networkbased initiatives from across the Institute, Connection Science
will focus on core theory to develop experimentally-based mathematical models that are powerful enough to predict network
outcomes. Among the issues to be addressed, the initiative will
also aim to build metrics to measure changes in network
structure as well as construct models for multi-scale interactions among connected networks of different sizes and types.
“Our lives have been transformed by networks that combine
people and computers in new ways,” notes Connection Science
center’s co-director Asu Ozdaglar, the Steven and Renée Finn
Innovation Fellow and professor of electrical engineering and
computer science in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. She adds: “The new center ‘Connection Science and Engineering’ at MIT brings together a large
number of researchers working on different aspects of this
increasingly connected landscape to develop a systematic and
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Centers: hubs for collaborative action
Social architectures entail design of new applications and
architectures that enable more efficient and flexible interplay
between technological and social platforms. Developing such
architectures will facilitate and empower the user collective
human-computer intelligence and large-scale human
assisted computation.
The new center also has an educational mission that includes
development of new multi-disciplinary core courses to be
available Institute-wide. Courses in the field will not only
introduce fundamental tools for analysis and design of
networked systems but also provide the bridge for PhD
candidates to launch their research careers in this area
including postdoctoral appointments.
The Connection Science and Engineering center held an
interdisciplinary workshop titled “Information and Decisions in
Social Networks” in November 2012. The workshop was widely
attended with more than 200 participants from around the
world. It featured three plenary talks by leading experts in the
field on topics such as use of mobile phone communication
networks for understanding network structure, compatibility
networks in kidney exchange, and competitive contagion
models on networks. The workshop also included a panel
discussion moderated by Connection Science and Engineering
Center co-founder and Media Lab Prof. Sandy Pentland, in
which four leading thinkers from the communication, mobile,
banking and information industries discussed the challenges
and opportunities in network research. n
MIT/MTL Center for Graphene Devices
and 2D Systems
new applications in electronics, chemistry and material
science. The Center is also exploring two-dimensional
materials beyond graphene, including insulators such as
hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) and semiconductors, like
molybdenum disulfide (MoS2).
"The unique structure and properties of two-dimensional
materials have the potential to impact numerous industries,"
says Tomás Palacios, the Emanuel E. Landsman Career
Development Associate Professor of Electronics at MIT's
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
and first director of the new center. "The MIT/MTL Center for
Graphene Devices and 2D Systems is an important driving
force in exploring the numerous applications for these
materials and in creating a vision for the future of
graphene-enabled systems."
The Center’s focus is highly interdisciplinary and it coordinates
projects on new semi-transparent graphene electrodes for
future solar cells and displays, MoS2 integrated circuits for
transparent electronics, graphene and BN membranes for
water purification, 2D materials for a new generation of solid
state lighting, to name only a few of the projects that are being
pursued within the Center. This center benefits from very close
collaboration with industrial partners. According to Michael
Strano, Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering
and co-director of the center: "This academic-industrial
partnership is essential to the advancement of both fundamental graphene science, and of emerging technological
applications. One of the main goals of the Center is to create
an environment that fosters this collaboration."
The Center coordinates the work of the more than 15 MIT
research groups in 6 different Departments, and leverages
several existing collaborative efforts in 2D material science and
engineering that currently exist on campus, including a Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative grant (MURI) from the
Office of Naval Research, as well as a regular Boston-Area
CarbOn Nanoscience (BACON) Meeting. For more information,
please visit: www-mtl.mit.edu/wpmu/graphene/ n
Getting the Best out of Nature’s Physics
Excitons have a lot of researchers very
excited
When a chlorophyll molecule in the leaf of a plant absorbs
a photon of sunlight, the solar energy is converted into an
excited state of the molecule known as an exciton. The exciton
then transports the energy between molecules in the leaf
and ultimately mediates the conversion of sunlight into
electrical energy.
Although electronics has been playing a key role in our society
for the last 60 years, its presence is still far from being
ubiquitous. The great majority of the objects around us do not
have any electronics in them. In addition, the very high cost of
starting new semiconductor companies is severely limiting the
potential growth of the electronics industry. The MIT/MTL
Center for Graphene Devices and 2D Systems (MIT Graphene
Center) was started in the second half of 2011 as an interdepartmental center and part of the Microsystems Technology
Laboratories (MTL) with the mission of bringing together MIT
researchers and industrial partners to develop a new generation of materials and devices that can potentially transform
electronics.
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www.eecs.mit.edu
Novel materials are key to developing the next generation of
electronics and the MIT Graphene Center is focusing on the
amazing properties of graphene and other two-dimensional
materials. Graphene, a form of pure carbon arranged in a
hexagonal lattice just one atom thick, has generated great
excitement among researchers worldwide. Not only is
graphene the thinnest material known, it is also the strongest.
It has unique transport properties that allow unprecedented
electron and hole mobilities. And being extremely thin,
graphene is mechanically flexible, optically transparent and
can be easily integrated with other materials. Until recently,
most studies of this amazing material have focused on its
basic physical properties. Work at the MIT Graphene Center is
focused on how these amazing properties can be exploited in
Excitons are crucial to the development of low cost solar
energy and energy efficient lighting. They are packets of
energy confined within a material and the crucial intermediate
for energy transduction in all kinds of low-cost electronic
materials. Along with molecular systems like photosynthesis,
they also dominate the behavior of synthetic nano-materials
like polymers and inorganic quantum dots. Consequently,
excitons control solar energy conversion in low-cost solar
cells, and also light emission in organic and quantum-dot
based LEDs. See the video “Excited About Excitons” – winner
of the Life at the Frontier of Energy Research video contest.
(techtv.mit.edu/videos/11732-excited-about-excitonics)
Excitonics Center is founded
Founded in 2008, the Center for Excitonics is an Energy
Frontier Research Center funded by the U.S. Department of
Energy, Office of Science and Office of Basic Energy Sciences.
Its mission is to develop the science and technology of
excitons, to reveal the fundamental characteristics of these
crucial quasi-particles, and enable new solar cells and
lighting technologies.
The Center’s work is divided into four working groups, each
containing three to five faculty devoted to key scientific problems confronting the development of more efficient solar cells
and state lighting. The Coherence and Disorder group’s work
aims to understand and control coherence in excitonic antennas
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Centers: hubs for collaborative action
Research Lab News
From the Integrated Circuit to the Internet:
Bridging Engineering and the Social Sciences
by Constantinos Daskalakis, Associate Professor, CSAIL
The integrated circuit is a good metaphor for what we do in
Engineering. Its characteristics: high complexity, limited
resources (e.g., space and energy), centralized design, and
cooperative components — its gates, switches, capacitors,
etc., interact as programmed to bring about a computation.
Throughout Engineering we study systems with these characteristics (computers, cars, airplanes, factories, etc.), and have
developed rich theories with which we can make predictions
about the performance of a design to be able to adjust and
optimize it.
The Internet, however, does not fit the above paradigm. Firstly,
its design is not centralized. While its basic protocols, such as
the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), were centrally designed
and deployed throughout the Internet, its topology, for
example, was not. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are free to
design their own network and connections to other ISPs, and
each of us is free to connect or disconnect our own computer
from the Internet. Moreover, the various entities that make up
the Internet have free will, and will operate strategically to
optimize their own objectives.
Transmission electron micrograph of 2 nm features using the STEM as the
exposure tool.
and exciton polaritons (coherent combinations of excitons and
photons). The Semiconductor Nanocrystals group works
towards understanding exciton dynamics in semiconductor
nanocrystals using multiexciton spectroscopy and photonic
interrogation of single quantum dots in the visible and infrared.
The Solar Antennas group seeks to use excitonics to collect,
concentrate, and wavelength-convert sunlight for single
junction solar cells. New states of matter and energy are
created when excitons are coupled with photons – also called
‘exciton polaritons’. Exploring the new classes of energy
conversion devices forms the basis for the Hybrid Excitonics.
The work of any one group with the Excitonics Center spills
over to others. For example, EECS graduate student Vitor
Manfrinato as a member of EECS Prof. Karl Berggren’s
Quantum Nanostructures and Nanofabrication Group at MIT
has collaborated with researchers at the Brookhaven National
Laboratory in New York (a partner with the Excitonics Center)
to use the large scanning transmission electron microscope
(STEM) there to create circuits for excitons. The scale of these
circuits is measured in quantum dots (QDs) — roughly eight
atoms wide. And, the idea is to ‘write’ these structures
in microseconds.
Using electron beam lithography (EBL), Vitor’s research
process uses beams of electrons to define patterns on a
smaller scale than even optical lithography can. He is changing the materials and techniques to find ways to improve
production efficiently at the scale of individual atoms. Ultimately, Vitor hopes to position the QDs exactly as needed so
that engineering the transfer of energy between the dots will
permit new solar devices. Read more about this work in the
Research Lab Features, page 28. n
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(from left to right) Eric Stach, Dong Su, Lihua Zhang, Vitor Manfrinato at
Brookhaven National Laboratory with STEM microscope.
For instance, would an ISP always use BGP as prescribed?
Recent observations prove that this is not always the case:
recall the recent global two-hour outage in YouTube access,
which resulted from a mere BGP table update — a result of
censorship — in Pakistan [2]. Ultimately, the various systems
developed on the Internet provide new environments for social
(think facebook, Linkedin, Twitter) and market (think eBay,
online advertising) activity, adding socio-economic characteristics to it. Daskalakis researches how to incorporate socio-economic considerations into Engineering to address the
challenges arising on the Internet.
A possible approach to do this would be to import tools from
Game Theory and Economics straight into Engineering. When
a system’s behavior is unpredictable due to strategic interactions among the system’s users or administrators, we may
appeal to the appropriate game-theoretic tool to figure out
what is going to happen. This way, we can engage in our usual
iteration of system design, behavior prediction, design
modification, new behavior prediction, and so forth, until the
system displays the desired behavior.
So what tools may we want to use for this purpose? Game
Theory offers several. The crown-jewel, going back to the
work of John Nash in 1950 for which he won the Nobel prize
in Economics, is the Nash equilibrium. This is a state of
Professor Costis Daskalakis speaking at TEDx Athens in 2011.
operation in which every interacting party is doing the best
for itself given the actions of the other parties. If a system
finds itself in such a state, there is no incentive for unilateral
changes of behavior taking the system to different states.
The postulate, often employed in Game Theory, is that systems
eventually reach equilibria, and we may study them at equilibrium: the Nash equilibrium, or one of its many refinements
or generalizations.
But here is where the plot thickens. How long may the
transient phenomena last before the system reaches equilibrium? Is there a reason to expect transient phenomena to be
short? ...so that we may ignore them and focus on equilibrium
states for the purposes of predicting system behavior?
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Research Lab News
Some thought reveals that these are computational questions,
as strategic interaction is computation of sorts. Using tools
from computational complexity theory, Daskalakis established
that Nash equilibria are, computationally speaking, unreachable [1, 3]. The result is existential; it shows that systems exist
that will not reach Nash equilibrium in centuries of computation time. And this casts doubt on the universal applicability of
equilibrium theory for the purposes of predicting behavior –
since, for any notion of practical time, systems may operate
outside of equilibrium.
proposing a novel algorithmic framework for auction design [4].
The interaction of Computer Science, Game Theory, and
Economics has already been fruitful, providing algorithmic
insights to fundamental problems in Game Theory and
Economics, and equipping Computer Science with tools for
understanding strategic behavior such as that observed on the
Internet. How this interaction will shape the future of these
fields, and how it will affect online activity is to be explored. n
Are there structural properties of a system that would make
equilibria reachable? Or should we dismiss equilibrium theory,
and replace it with some other theory? Without answering
these questions we have our hands tied in creating a robust
Internet, since we cannot predict how individuals interacting in
a system will behave and what effects their strategic behavior
will have in the system’s overall behavior. Daskalakis and his
students are investigating these questions focusing on ways to
navigate system design away from conditions that enable
computational complexity to kick in. They are prototyping this
approach in the design of auctions, which play a central role in
today’s online activity.
[1] Constantinos Daskalakis, Paul W. Goldberg and Christos H.
Papadimitriou. The complexity of computing a Nash equilibrium.
Communications of the ACM, 52(2):89–97, 2009.
We are all familiar with sponsored search results, appearing on
the right hand side of a web search with google, bing etc. These
results are advertisements, and what advertisements are
displayed and in what order is decided by an auction, taking
place in the milliseconds between clicking “search” and
receiving the results. Similarly, auctions are used to decide
what advertisements are shown in webpage banners. And there
are direct uses of auctions in online markets such as eBay.
When designing an auction, the auctioneer allocates resources
to bidders and receives payments from them looking to
optimize some objective: fairness, social happiness, or
revenue. The challenge is that bidders will try to manipulate
the outcome of the auction through their bids, shifting it away
from optimality. Thus, the auction must be cleverly designed to
cancel the effects of manipulation. For example, how does one
sell a single item to optimize revenue? Is the auction employed
by eBay optimal or are there better auctions?
In 1981, economist Roger Myerson showed that eBay is
essentially optimal. His work was very influential and won him
the 2007 Nobel prize in Economics. But it left unanswered the
question of how to design optimal auctions for allocating
multiple items — the problem facing sponsored search and
display advertising. Unresolved since the 1980s, this problem
has been one of the most important in the field of auctions.
Tying together techniques from Economics and Combinatorial
Optimization, Daskalakis and his students recently provided a
solution, generalizing Myerson’s result to multiple items, and
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References
[2] Pakistan blocks YouTube website, BBC News Online,
February 24, 2008.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7261727.stm
[3] What computer science can teach economics, MIT News,
November 8, 2009.
web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/game-theory.html
[4] Computer science tackles 30-year-old economics problem,
MIT News, June 2012.
web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/comp-sci-econ-0625.html
Computer Aided Programming:
Changing the way we code
by Armando Solar-Lezama, NBX Career Development
Assistant Professor, CSAIL
The last ten years have seen the coming of age of a range of
technologies to check for the absence of important classes of
errors, but checking for errors is only the first step down the
road to better, more reliable software. The same technology
that can help us discover bugs and verify the correctness of
existing software can enable a new class of programming
systems that will make programming easier and may ultimately lead to better software that is both more reliable and
easier to produce.
In the Computer Aided Programming group, we have been
developing a language called Sketch as a vehicle to explore
these ideas. The defining feature of Sketch is the ability to
leave holes in programs: in place of complex expressions, the
programmer can provide the set of building blocks from which
an expression can be constructed, and the system will explore
the set of all possible expressions that can be produced from
the building blocks until it finds one that matches the specification. For example, Figure 1 shows an example of a partition
function that partitions a range [0,N) among P processors.
Given a processor id pid, the function computes the beginning
and end of the range for that processor. Instead of writing the
function in full, the programmer specifies the building blocks
for the different expressions, and the synthesizer automatically derives the correct expressions. In order to describe to the
system what the function is supposed to do, the user provides
a test harness that checks that the resulting partitions are
balanced, and that they cover the entire range.
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Figure 1
Sketch can find a correct code fragment among an astronomically large space of possible expressions in a matter of
seconds. The key is to perform the search symbolically;
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Figure 2
instead of searching through possible expressions one by one,
Sketch produces a system of equations that represents the
correctness criteria and uses a combination of symbolic
manipulation and Boolean satisfiability solving in order to find
a solution to these equations. The use of symbolic search has
been used very effectively in the past to find bugs in programs.
By extending this idea to search program fragments, we can
make programming easier by discovering many of the details
that make programming difficult.
The reach of this technology extends beyond simply allowing
us to leave holes in programs; the ability to search very large
spaces of code fragments is an enabler for new programming
methodologies that are more intuitive and less error prone.
For example, graduate student Rishabh Singh has developed a
system on top of Sketch called the Storyboard Programming
Toolkit (SPT) that can take a graphical description of a
data-structure manipulation—similar to the balls-and-arrows
diagrams programmer's commonly draw in a whiteboard—and
synthesize low-level code from it. In another project, graduate
student Alvin Cheung has developed a system called QBS that
can synthesize SQL code taking an imperative code fragment
as a specification. This allows the system to automatically shift
functionality from the application to the database, a task that
traditionally required significant programmer effort.
The technology behind Sketch can also make it easier to teach
programming. Rishabh Singh has been leveraging the ability to
search large spaces of programs to find corrections to
programming assignments submitted by students. In the case
of small programming errors, the technique can precisely
pinpoint the error and suggest a correction that will make the
error disappear. In the case of conceptual errors, for example
due to a misunderstanding of the problem statement, the technique can identify the conceptual error and expose it to the
student. In short, the ability to infer correct code fragments
that satisfy certain correctness conditions has the potential to
transform not just the way we program, but also the way we
teach programming in the future. n
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Research Lab News
When the whole is weaker than the sum of its parts:
robustness and fragility in power grids
by Mardavij Roozbehani, Principal Research Scientist and Munther Dahleh, Professor
Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
It is hard to notice all the transformative changes that are
taking place in the electric power grids around the world when
you are working in your office and the lights are steadily on.
And, unless you were on the sample path of one of the recent
blackouts, the statistics of power outages in the United States
might surprise you. In fact, data from NERC (North America
Electric Reliability Corporation) and EIA (US Energy Information
Administration) show that both frequency and size of the power
outages in the United States have been steadily on the rise.
system as the system components respond to exogenous
disturbances. For example, the tripping of protective relays
isolates faults, but also creates a buildup of load on the rest of
the system sometimes in a way that can lead to a cascade of
other faults. Therefore, while such systems may perform well
under normal operating conditions or be very robust to most
common disturbance scenarios, they can exhibit fragility in
response to certain large or small disturbances. Such fragility
in power systems and more broadly in interconnected systems
is characterized by systemic risk or endogenous risk.
At an abstract level, fragility of a feedback control system can
be explained by some of the results in the classical control
literature, which establish tradeoffs between performance and
robustness. In view of these tradeoffs, fragility can be interpreted as follows: increasing robustness with respect to
certain types of disturbances, inherently increases sensitivity
with respect to uncertainties and disturbances that are not
included in the model. Such concepts are however, less well
understood, less developed, and less formalized for interconnected systems. Our research is motivated by both the theory
gap for characterization of such tradeoffs in networked
systems, and by the need to address a pressing and increasingly more important problem: systemic risk and cascaded
failures in power systems.
Figure 1: Statistics of blackouts in the US
Although some recent large blackouts have been caused by
natural disasters, e.g., hurricane Sandy, it is rare that a large
and systemic failure results from a single unbearable disturbance that brings down an entire system. Usually, such large
failures are the result of an increased level of risk or reduced
level of robustness, which brings the system closer to a state
of failure or makes it more vulnerable to a sequence of
contingencies, certain patterns of disturbances, or in some
cases, a single moderate shock.
The contingencies can be the result of a variety of events,
such as volatile weather events, local component failures,
intermittencies in renewable generation, etc. But the cascades
that follow such events are often reinforced or amplified by
mechanisms that are put in place to improve efficiency under
normal conditions, or increase robustness to withstand other
types of disturbance. In other words, fragility builds up in the
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Part of our research in this area has focused on analysis of
the feedback loops and the interactions between the market
layer (where pricing and economic decisions take place) and
the physical layer (where power flows from generators to
loads) of power systems.
agents have complete knowledge of how their decisions affect
the market price, and are fully rational in strategizing their
decisions to minimize their expected cost. By characterizing
the statistics of the stationary aggregate output process across
a spectrum of networks from fully cooperative to fully non-cooperative, we showed that a tradeoff exists between efficiency
(aggregate system cost) and risk (tail probability of aggregate
output).
While the non-cooperative network leads to an efficiency
loss — widely known as the "price of anarchy" — the stationary
distribution of the corresponding aggregate output process
has a smaller tail, whereas, the cooperative network achieves
higher efficiency at the cost of a higher probability of output
spikes. Furthermore, the cooperative network has a smaller
output variance, which can be interpreted as higher robustness; but it also has a higher probability of large output spikes,
which can be interpreted as higher fragility. This particular
fragility emerges when a large accumulated backlog in the
system coincides with lack of flexibility to either absorb the
backlog, or schedule it for the future. Intuitively, the cooperative scheme allows for shifting flexible loads more aggressively, thereby increasing the probability of a large backlog in the
system, which eventually leads to a large spike. The noncooperative scheme however, is more conservative in shifting
flexible loads, which, as a result, is less likely to lead to a large
backlog (Figures 2 and 3).
This discussion motivates questions such as “What is a right
measure of systemic risk?”, “How do we estimate the risk of a
large-scale system like the grid?”, “How does network
connectivity determine fault propagation”, and “How can we
develop design principles to balance the trade-offs and achieve
efficiency under normal operation, while enabling early
detection, containment of risk, and graceful degradation upon
approaching a state of failure?” These issues constitute the
core of our research. n
In our earlier research, we showed that volatility increases in
the system when price-taking consumers actively respond to
wholesale electricity market prices due to the uncertainty in
their response to price signals, and uneven sensitivity to prices
induced by threshold policies.
Our recent work has revealed more subtle sources of fragility
in power systems. Together with EECS graduate student
Qingqing Huang, we developed developed abstract models that
show how fragility and endogenous risk can be inherent to the
architecture of the system, and arise from the dynamics of the
system even under the most ideal assumptions of fully rational
agents with perfect information. Together with EECS graduate
student Qingqing Huang, we developed a model of a dynamic
oligopolistic energy market in which, a set of distributed
agents with market power dynamically update their output
(consumption or production) decisions. In this model, the
Figure 3: Sample paths of the aggregate output process. At a smaller time scale
(top), the cooperative load scheduling can smooth out the aggregate output
process. However, at a larger time scale (bottom), there are more output spikes
produced endogenously by the cooperative load-scheduling scheme.
Figure 2: Conceptual diagram of efficiency-risk frontier.
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Research Lab News
Nanofabrication
by Karl K. Berggren, Associate Professor; Vitor R. Manfrinato, Samuel M. Nicaise, Jae-Byum Chang,
Microsystems Technology Laboratories, Research Laboratory of Electronics
Nanolithography, the principle means by which nanometer-length-scale patterns are placed on a surface, is a
cornerstone of the modern microelectronics industry and is
integral to the future of nanotechnology. But no one can yet
reliably pattern features with adequate resolution, speed,
uniformity, and, most of all, sufficiently low cost, to make the
nanotechnology of tomorrow a reality today. To solve this
problem, several nanolithography techniques are available,
each with strengths and weaknesses. Electron-beam lithography (EBL — pattern generation using nanometer-sized
electron beams) has the highest resolution, but is not particularly well-suited to high-volume production; instead it is
applied principally to device prototyping and lithographic-mask manufacturing. Ion-beam lithography (pattern
generation using nanometer-sized ion beams) can achieve
similar resolution to EBL, but with increased exposure
efficiency. But ion-beam lithography tools are less well
developed than EBL tools, and suffer from many of the same
problems. Self-assembly of nanomaterials — the thermodynamically driven arrangement of patterns on a surface without
the use of lithography — is extremely low-cost and fast due to
its parallel nature. However, self-assembly struggles in
producing ordered patterns over long length scales. This
disorder has recently been overcome by combining self-assembly with EBL, in an approach known as templated or directed
self-assembly (TSA or DSA). The Berggren group has collaborated with Prof. Caroline Ross, in the Dept. of Materials Science
and Engineering, and used DSA to quickly generate high-resolution patterns with good long-range order. The Berggren group
also performs fundamental research on electron- and ion-beam
lithography to increase the resolution, yield, and quality of nanofabrication with these methods, and to apply this knowledge to
various electronic and photonic applications. In particular, the
group investigates using nanostructured arrays fabricated by
EBL as templates for TSA, and for controlled placement of
nanometer-sized light emitters, such as colloidal quantum dots.
In a recent attempt to achieve the ultimate resolution limit of
EBL, Berggren’s group performed EBL with the smallest
electron-beam spot size available (in collaboration with
Brookhaven National Lab). In lithography, the exposure tool is
used to affect chemical change in a thin resist layer on a
substrate. The resist is then developed to produce a topographic pattern. The team used an aberration-corrected
scanning transmission electron microscope with 0.15-nanometer-diameter electron-beam spot size as the exposure tool.
The team also used a high-resolution resist and did all the
subsequent metrology with a transmission electron microscope.
The results were images of 2-nm-wide features, roughly 10
atoms wide, the smallest structures ever achieved in a conventional electron-beam lithography material (Figure 1A and 1B).
local area. Control of long-range and uniform nanopatterns
were achieved with templates of particular spacings and
angles (Figure 2). These long-range ordered two- or threedimensional patterns could in principle be used for fabricating
a wide array of electronic and photonic devices.
The group is also looking for alternative charged-particle
species that could be potentially higher resolution and faster
than EBL. Berggren’s group, in collaboration with Carl Zeiss
NTS, recently demonstrated that it is possible to write nanostructures with neon ions. Neon-ion-beam lithography has
resolution comparable to EBL (10 nanometer line width) but an
exposure efficiency 1000× greater than EBL at comparable
electron landing energies (Figure 1C). Thus, neon could be a
viable agent for production of nanopatterns for masks for
lithography, or even perhaps for direct writing of nanostructures on a device wafer.
One example of an emerging scientific field that particularly
benefits from nanolithography is nano-optics. Nano-optics
consists of capturing, processing, and emitting light at the
nanometer scale—essentially it is engineering antennas for
visible light. One promising nanometer-sized light source is a
colloidal quantum dot (QD). These QDs are low cost and
solution-processable materials, with fine synthetic control of
their electronic and optical properties at the sub-10 nanometer length-scale. However, precise placement of QDs is needed
in order to design nano-optical systems at the single-dot level.
Berggren’s group, in collaboration with the group of Moungi
Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry at MIT,
developed a technique to control the placement of 5-nanometer-diameter QDs at a desired position with EBL (Figure 3).
This placement technique resulted in an average of three QDs
at any given desired position. Furthermore, these QDs could be
placed in close proximity to one another, with a minimum
separation of 12 nm. Photoluminescence (specific light
emission by previously absorbed light) measurements show
that the placed QD clusters are optically active after the
fabrication process. This optimized top-down lithographic
process is a step towards the integration of individual QDs in
new electronic and optical systems. n
The Berggren group’s efforts in template self-assembly have
focused on using block copolymers (BCP). Polymers are
comprised of long chains of repeating, similar, molecules.
BCPs are interesting because two different molecular sections
(blocks) of the polymer repel each other. Self-assembly then
results in small domains that repeat with separations on the
10s-of-nanometer scale. The chemical differences between
the small domains make them great candidates for self-assembling complex patterns. Unfortunately, BCPs do not
naturally self-assemble into the long-range-ordered patterns
that would be most useful to nanopatterning.
To control the self-assembly of BCP, so as to fabricate useful
patterns, we used EBL to create topographic post arrays which
attract only one of the blocks. The choice of which block would
be attracted to the post, as well as the arrangement of posts in
the array, determined the orientation, spacing, morphology,
and layering of the BCP. Complex nanopatterns could thus be
achieved with templates that directed the self-assembly in a
Figure 1. (A) and (B) Top-down images obtained using a transmission electron microscope of the features (dark regions) fabricated using 200 keV electrons in a scanning transmission electron microscope. (C) Top-down image obtained using a scanning electron microscope of the features (horizontal bright lines) fabricated using
neon-ion beam lithography. [Photos: courtesy of the Berggren group]
26
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Figure 2. Top-down images obtained using a scanning electron microscope. In
(A) the block copolymer (alternating light grey and dark regions) self-assembled to form a nanopattern with two predominant directions. Templating posts
(white dots) directed the BCP into this nanopattern. (B) is similar to (A), though
the pattern formed by block copolymer is a mesh formed from a top and bottom
layer (light and dark grey respectively). Again, the templating posts (white dots)
directed the self-assembly of the BCP in both of the layers. Notice that the BCP
nanopattern outside of the templated region is not a mesh pattern. [Photos:
courtesy of the Berggren group]
Figure 3. Top: EBL design used to fabricate a hole array for placing sub-15-nm
clusters of colloidal quantum dots (QDs). Center: Photoluminescence (light
emission generated by previously absorbed light) image of the positioned QDs.
Bottom: Top-down image obtained using a scanning electron microscope of
placed QD clusters (each QD is a bright circular spot). [Photos: courtesy of the
Berggren group]
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
27
Research Lab News
Largest-Ever, Optical Phased Array
By Michael Watts, KDD Career Development Associate Professor in Communications and Technology
Research Laboratory of Electronics
A phased array consists of several typically identical antennas,
with each antenna emitting signals characterized by a specific
amplitude and phase that interfere to form a desired radiation
pattern in the far field. Typically phased arrays are tunable and
can be used to rapidly redirect electromagnetic or acoustic
radiation in a desired direction. It has been more than a century
since the first radio-frequency (RF) phased arrays were invented.
Today, RF phased arrays have seen widespread adoption in
applications ranging from radar to the wireless communications
networks that empower our smartphones enabling bandwidth
to be locally provisioned. And, acoustic phased arrays have
been used for underwater and ultrasound imaging.
Similarly, the ability to generate high-resolution and arbitrary
radiation patterns at optical frequencies would have a profound
impact on a number of important applications. One of the
principle near-term applications is for scanning LADAR (Laser
Distance And Ranging) beams in autonomous vehicles for
accident avoidance. However, the range of applications extends
well beyond this realm. From optical communications to
biomedical imaging and ultimately 3-D holographic displays,
optical phased arrays are expected to have wide-ranging
impact. The short optical wavelength nevertheless imposes
stringent requirements on chip fabrication, as even nano-scale
fluctuations in device dimensions significantly affect the optical
emission from the nanoantennas. Consequently, all demonstrations of optical phased arrays so far have been restricted to 1-D,
or small-scale (16 antenna) 2-D arrays.
Recently, Prof. Watts’ research group, the Photonic Microsystems Group, has developed an advanced silicon photonics
platform within a state-of-the-art 300mm CMOS fabrication
facility, using standard CMOS electronics fabrication techniques. Coupling these advanced processing techniques with
some unique designs, Prof. Watts has recently demonstrated
phased arrays at optical frequencies composed of 4,096
nanoantennas integrated on a small silicon chip. The results
are described in the January 10, 2013 issue of Nature (Vol. 493,
No. 7431, pp. 195-pp.199) and consist of a 2-D nanophotonic
phased array, in which 64 x 64 optical nanoantennas are
integrated on a silicon chip. With a dense footprint of 576μm x
576μm, the 4,096 nanoantennas are precisely balanced in
power and aligned in phase to generate a designed and
sophisticated radiation pattern—in this case the MIT-logo. A
conceptual diagram of this nanophotonic phased array is
depicted alongside a micrograph of the fabricated structure in
28
www.eecs.mit.edu
Fig. 1 (below). Light is successively tapped off of a common
silicon input waveguide to couple to the individual nanoantenna elements. Due to wiring limitations, this large phased array
was hard-encoded by adjusting the length of the S-bend
structures in each cell. Near-vertical emission was then
produced by a strong grating written into the silicon waveguide, forming the nanoantenna.
Figure 2. (left) Near-field and (right) far-field patterns of the 64×64 nanophotonic phased array. The MIT-logo was formed in the far field through
interference, as designed.
Figure 1. (left) Schematic of the passive large-scale nanophotonic phased array.
(right) Micrograph of the nanophotonic phased array. [All Figures: Jie Sun,
postdoctoral associate, RLE]
Despite the lack of a phase adjust knob, the far-field pattern
accurately reproduced the MIT-logo (Fig. 2) (left column,
below), highlighting the robust design and fabrication process.
However, active phased arrays with the ability to generate
dynamic radiation patterns in the far field were also demonstrated in a somewhat smaller, 8 x 8 element array, depicted
in Fig. 3 (next page). Active tuning of the array was achieved
through the use of heater elements placed directly in the
silicon waveguides and driven by a copper interconnect.
As seen in Fig. 3 (next page), beams can be steered in the
vertical and horizontal directions, representing the first
nanophotonic phased array steerable in both dimensions. The
robust design of the array, coupled with state-of-the-art
complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor technology,
allows large-scale optical phased arrays to be implemented on
compact and inexpensive nanophotonic chips. In turn, the
novel device architecture and fabrication process extend the
functionalities of phased arrays, opening up possibilities for
large-scale deployment in a wide variety of applications,
including 3-D holography, biomedical sciences, LADAR, and
communication systems. n
Figure 3. (top) Schematic of
the active 8×8 nanophotonic
phased array. (bottom) By
applying different voltages
on the phased array, the
optical beam can be steered
in both the vertical and
horizontal directions.
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Faculty News : Awards
30
Scott Aaronson
Hal Abelson
Anant Agarwal
Arvind
Bonnie Berger
Rodney Brooks
2012 NSF Alan T. Waterman Award
ACM 2012 Karl V. Karlstom
Outstanding Educator Award
Elected to National Academy
of Engineering
Elected to American Academy of Arts
and Sciences
2012 IEEE Computer Society’s
Harry H. Goode Award
2012 Fellow of the International Society
for Computational Biology (ISCB)
2013 IEEE Fellow
Selected by EE Times as Visionary
Anantha P. Chandrakasan
David Clark
Costis Daskalakis
Jesús del Alamo
Erik Demaine
Jack Dennis
IEEE 2013 Donald O. Pederson Award
[pictured]
ISSCC Top Contributor Awards [at the
60th Anniversary]
ACM Test of Time Award
(with Karen Sollins, Principal Research
Scientist,CSAIL)
2012 Microsoft Research Faculty
Fellowship
2012 Intel Outstanding Research Award
SRC Technical Excellence Award
IEEE Electron Devices Society Education
Award
2013 European Assoc. for Theoretical
Computer Science (EATCS) Presburger
Award for young scientists
2013 IEEE von Neumann Award
Mildred S. Dresselhaus
James Fujimoto
Qing Hu
Frans Kaashoek
Barbara H. Liskov
Nancy Lynch
2012 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience
2012 Antonio Champalimaud Vision
Award
IEEE Photonics Society’s 2012 William
Streifer Scientific Achievement Award
Elected to American Academy of Arts
and Sciences
Elected to National Academy of Sciences
Charter Fellow of National Academy of
Inventors
2012-13 ACM Athena Lecturer
www.eecs.mit.edu
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Faculty News : Innovation Fellowships
Faculty News : Awards
Faculty Research and Innovation
Fellowships for 2012
Timothy K. Lu
Wojciech Matusikk
Rob Miller
2012 Presidential Early Career Award
for Scientists and Engineers
2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award
2013 MacVicar Faculty Fellow
Frédo Durand
David Perreault
Yury Polyanskiy
Ronald Rivest
2013 IEEE Fellow
NSF Career Award
National Cyber Security Hall of Fame
Piotr Indyk
The Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department
at MIT has announced that the recipients of the Faculty Research and Innovation Fellowship (FRIF) for 2012 are Frédo
Durand, Piotr Indyk and Pablo Parrilo. In its second year, the
FRIF is given to recognize senior EECS faculty members for
outstanding research contributions and international leadership
in their fields. Winners of the FRIF receive three years of gift
funding. [Photo: The 2012 Faculty Research Innovation Fellows
are (left to right) Frédo Durand, Piotr Indyk and Pablo Parrilo.]
Frédo Durand works both on synthetic image generation and
computational photography. His research interests span mostly
aspects of picture generation and creation, with emphasis on
mathematical analysis, signal processing, and inspiration from
perceptual sciences. Frédo has been recognized for his work
including an inaugural Eurographics Young Researcher Award
in 2004, an NSF CAREER award in 2005, and an inaugural
Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship in 2005. Frédo is a
member of CSAIL.
32
Nir Shavit
Dana Weinstein
Victor Zue
2012 Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in
Distributed Computing
Intel Early Career Faculty
Honor Program
2013 IEEE Flannagan Award
2013 Okawa Prize
www.eecs.mit.edu
Pablo A. Parrilo
Pablo A. Parrilo works on optimization methods for engineering
applications, control and identification of uncertain complex
systems, robustness analysis and synthesis, and the development and application of computational tools based on convex
optimization and algorithmic algebra to practically relevant
engineering problems. Pablo has received several distinctions,
including a Finmeccanica Career Development Chair, the
Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control
Council, the SIAM Activity Group on Control and Systems
Theory (SIAG/CST) Prize, and the IEEE Antonio Ruberti Young
Researcher Prize. He is currently on the Editorial Board of the
MOS/SIAM Book Series in Optimization. Pablo is an Associate
Director of LIDS.
Inaugural FRIF recipients in 2011 included Vladimir Bulović,
Tommi Jaakkola, Dina Katabi and Muriel Médard. Read more
about them in the 2012 EECS newsletter the Connector at:
http://www.eecs.mit.edu/docs/newsletter/connector2012.pdf n
Piotr Indyk works on high-dimensional computational geometry, sketching and streaming algorithms, sparse recovery and
compressive sensing. He is a recipient of the NSF CAREER
Award, Sloan Fellowship, Packard Fellowship and Technology
Review TR10. He is an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing and SIAM Journal on Computing.
Piotr is a member of CSAIL.
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
33
Faculty News : Innovation Fellowship
Faculty News : Chairs
Vladimir currently serves as Director of the Microsystems
Technology Laboratories and is playing a critical role in
defining the future of MIT’s nanofabrication capabilities. n
Asu Ozdaglar is the Inaugural
Steven and Renée Finn Innovation Fellow 2012
Professor Asu Ozdaglar has been named the inaugural Steven
and Renée Finn Innovation Fellow. Made possible by a gift from
MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science alumnus
Steven Finn '68, SM '69, EE '70, ScD '75 and his wife Renée, the
fellowship provides tenured, mid-career faculty in the Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science Department with resources
for up to three years to pursue new research and development
paths, and to make potentially important discoveries through
early stage research.
Since 2003, Prof. Ozdaglar has been a member of the faculty of
the EECS Department, as well as a member of Laboratory for
Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) and the Operations
Research Center. Her research interests include optimization
theory, with emphasis on nonlinear programming and convex
analysis, game theory, with applications in communication,
social, and economic networks, and distributed optimization
and control. She is the co-author of the book entitled “Convex
Analysis and Optimization” (Athena Scientific, 2003). She also
co-directs (with Prof. Sandy Pentland) the Center for Connection
Science and Engineering, a virtual center at MIT to bring
together network initiatives from across the Institute. See page
17 in this issue of the Connector.
Asu Ozdaglar
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www.eecs.mit.edu
Professor Ozdaglar is the recipient of a Microsoft fellowship, the
MIT Graduate Student Council Teaching award, the NSF Career
award, Class of 1943 career development chair, the 2008 Donald
P. Eckman award of the American Automatic Control Council,
and is a 2011 Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences.
She served on the Board of Governors of the Control System
Society in 2010. She is currently the area co-editor for a new
area for the journal Operations Research, entitled "Games,
Information and Networks", an associate editor for IEEE
Transactions on Automatic Control, and the chair of the Control
System Society Technical Committee “Networks and Communications Systems”. n
Vladimir Bulović was appointed to the Fariborz Maseeh
professorship in Emerging Technology in January, 2013.
Vladimir is a widely recognized leader in the areas of energy
and nanotechnology. The Fariborz Maseeh chair was
previously held by President L. Rafael Reif.
Vladimir has made pioneering contributions to the fundamental
understanding of organic and nanostructured optics and
electronics, and has applied his findings to develop devices
that define the state of the art. Together with his former
students he has founded three start-ups that presently employ
over 200 people: in 2005, QD Vision, Inc., which produces
quantum dot optoelectronic components; in 2008, Kateeva,
Inc., which is focused on development of printed organic
electronics; and in 2011, Ubiquitous Energy, Inc., which is
developing nanostructured solar technologies. In 2012,
Vladimir shared the SEMI Award for North America in
recognition of his and his colleagues’ contributions to commercialization of quantum dot technology.
Vladimir has also made outstanding contributions to MIT’s
energy research and education. He played a critical role in the
establishment of the Energy Studies Minor Program, the first
program to link all of MIT’s departments and schools.
Vladimir’s educational contributions to the EECS department
include the development of 6.789 (a graduate class in Organic
Optoelectronics); co-development of 6.007 (an undergraduate
class on Electromagnetic Energy: from Motors to Lasers); and
the newest introductory class, 6.S079 — Nanomaker, which
emerged from the freshman seminar he has taught for many
years with Prof. Rajeev Ram. Vladimir’s educational contributions have been recognized by the Ruth and Joel Spira
Award, the Bose Award for Distinguished Teaching, Eta Kappa
Nu Honor Society Award for Outstanding Teaching, Class of
1960 Fellowship, and most recently by the Margaret
MacVicar Fellowship.
Srini Devadas was appointed the Edwin Sibley Webster
Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,
joining Prof. Alan Willsky as the second Edwin Sibley Webster
chaired professor at MIT. For nearly sixty years, many prominent faculty members have held this professorship, including
Ernst Guillemin in 1960, Lan Jen Chu in 1963, Peter Elias in
1974, and Ronald Rivest in 1992.
Professor Devadas has done pioneering work in a number of
areas related to CAD, security and computer architecture. His
early award-winning work involved developing a symbolic
simulation method for analyzing the average and worst-case
power estimation of combinational logic; this was among the
first efficient, accurate power estimation methods developed.
Professor Devadas was one of the first to recognize that manufacturing variations in integrated circuits could be used to not
just identify, but to authenticate, individual integrated circuits.
He coined the term Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) in
2002; PUFs are now a very active field of research and this
technology has been commercialized. Most recently, along
with his students, he has developed a computation-migration-based parallel processing architecture where programs
move to where the data resides rather than the other way
around. As proof of concept, his group is working on the
tape-out of a 121-core processor.
In addition to his research, his service and teaching record at
MIT has been extraordinary. He served as Associate Department Head of the EECS Department for nearly 6 years, leading
the Computer Science side of the department during that time.
He has taught 6.00, 6.001, 6.002, 6.004, 6.005, 6.006, 6.042,
6.046, and 6.170 at the undergraduate level, and graduatelevel classes in VLSI, architecture and security. n
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
35
Faculty News : Chairs
inventions made major contributions to the development of the
electrical industry. Dr. Thomson served as a member of the
MIT Corporation and its Executive Committee, as a non-resident professor of applied electricity, and in one critical period,
1920-21 as Acting President of the Institute. The Elihu Thomson Chair was previously held by Professors Hermann A. Haus
and Erich P. Ippen. n
James Fujimoto was appointed the Elihu Thomson Professor
of Electrical Engineering for a five-year term, July, 2012.
Prof. Fujimoto joined the MIT faculty in 1985 as Assistant
Professor of Electrical Engineering after completing his SB
’79, SM ’81, and PhD’84 at MIT. He is currently a Professor of
Electrical Engineering at MIT and an Adjunct Professor of
Ophthalmology at Tufts University. As principal investigator in
the Research Laboratory of Electronics, working with his
group and collaborators, Prof. Fujimoto pioneered the development of optical coherence tomography (OCT) in the early
1990s. OCT is a new medical imaging modality, which uses
echoes of light to enable real-time visualization of internal
tissue microstructure and pathology. The development of OCT
stemmed from the group’s early studies using femtosecond
optical pulses to perform optical ranging and measurement in
the eye. This ground-breaking research at MIT in collaboration
with investigators from MIT Lincoln Labs, the Harvard Medical
School and Tufts University School of Medicine, has resulted in
a host of valuable OCT applications spanning ophthalmology
and cardiology as well as fundamental research. The technology has had a major clinical impact in ophthalmology, with tens
of millions of OCT imaging procedures performed yearly and
more than 8 companies which develop OCT instruments for the
ophthalmic market.
Prof. Fujimoto has published over 375 journal articles, is
editor or author of 5 books, and co-author of numerous U.S.
patents. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Engineering,
the National Academy of Science and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences. His many honors include the
1999 Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation,
the 2001 Rank Prize in Optoelectronics and the Carl Zeiss
Research Award in 2011.
The Thomson chair was established to honor the distinguished
scientist, engineer, and inventor whose discoveries and
36
www.eecs.mit.edu
In January, 2013, Gregory Wornell [SM ’87, PhD ’91], was
appointed the Sumitomo Electric Industries Professor of
Engineering. Greg Wornell is a recognized leader in the fields
of signal processing and information theory.
Prof. Wornell’s research lies where information meets the
physical world. One important focus has been on the design of
reliable high-speed wireless communication networks. He has
a long track record of making contributions in this area. As a
recent example, Greg and his collaborators have developed a
novel ‘rateless’ coding architecture that drastically simplifies
and improves upon the current systems embodied in existing
RF standards. Greg's interests include optical and acoustic
communication as well. For instance, he and his colleagues
have developed coding architectures for multi-mode photon-efficient free-space optical communication. And he is
co-designer of the recently demonstrated ‘super-Nyquist’
modem for underwater acoustic communication.
With a strong multidisciplinary approach to his research,
Prof. Wornell has worked on neural decoding from pre-motor
cortex measurements in advanced real-time brain-machine
interfaces. He has also worked on emerging millimeter-wave
imaging system design based on novel computationallyenhanced digital phase-array technology. He has also worked
on security techniques that exploit a variety of physical
phenomena, a recent example of which is his development of
codes for practical entanglement-based quantum secret-key
distribution systems.
Faculty News : Career Development
Prof. Wornell has made major contributions to the curriculum
of EECS, which over the last decade, have redefined and
shaped the department's curriculum in statistical inference.
Together with Prof. Polina Golland and other faculty, he led the
development of two graduate courses in statistical inference,
6.437 and 6.438. These courses introduce graduate students to
the fundamentals of inference, and its interactions with the
principles of information and computation. The courses are
very popular among EECS students and attract a broad set of
students from many departments in the School of Engineering
and across the Institute. For his contributions, Prof. Wornell
was awarded the Smullin Award for Teaching Excellence.
Several other universities have adopted his viewpoint on this
topic and have utilized the course material as a template for
their own classes. More recently, Prof. Wornell and his
colleagues spearheaded a new undergraduate course on
statistical inference. Currently offered in its pilot form as
6.S080, the course is slated to become an integral part of the
EECS undergraduate curriculum. n
Career Development
Faculty Appointments
Adam Chlipala
Yury Polyanskiy
Dirk Englund
Daniel Sanchez
Adam Chlipala was selected to hold the Douglas Ross (1954)
Career Development Professorship of Software, July, 2012.
Prof. Chlipala joined MIT in July 2011 as an Assistant Professor
of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member
of CSAIL. He received a BS from Carnegie Mellon in 2003 and a
PhD from Berkeley in 2007, both in computer science.
Prof. Chlipala's research applies computer theorem proving to
construct more effective software development tools. Much of
his work involves proving theorems about the correct behavior
of software using the Coq theorem proving system, about
which he has written a popular online book, due out soon in
hard copy from MIT Press. He also works in the design and
implementation of new programming languages, including Ur/
Web, a domain-specific language for Web applications, which
applies theorem proving technology to rule out costly mistakes
in orchestrating the many pieces of a realistic Web site.
Dirk Englund joined the MIT Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science Department faculty in January 2013 as
Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science. He was appointed the Jamieson Career Development
Professor in Jan. 2013. Read more about Prof. Englund in this
newsletter under New Faculty, page 38.
Yury Polyanskiy was selected to hold the Robert J. Shillman
(1974) Career Development Professorship of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science July, 2012. Yury Polyanskiy
joined MIT on July 1, 2011 as an Assistant Professor of
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a member
of LIDS. He received the MS degree in applied mathematics
and physics from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology in 2005 and the PhD degree in electrical engineering from
Princeton University in 2010. In 2000-2005 he led development
of the embedded software in the Department of Surface
Oilfield Equipment, Borets Company LLC. His thesis work
initiated a systematic approach to studying impact of finite
delay constraint on information theoretic fundamental limits.
The accompanying journal paper won the 2011 Best Paper
Award from IEEE Information Theory Society.
Prof. Polyanskiy was also a recipient of the Best Student Paper
Awards at the 2008 and 2010 IEEE International Symposiums on
Information Theory (ISIT) and a Silver Medal at the 32 International Physics Olympiad (IPhO) in 1999. Yury's general research
interests include information theory, coding theory and the
theory of random processes. His current work focuses on
non-asymptotic characterization of the performance limits of
communication systems, optimal feedback strategies and
non-Shannon information measures.
Daniel Sanchez was selected to hold the TIBCO Career
Development Professorship in the MIT School of Engineering.
This professorship is made possible by the TIBCO Founders
Fund to advance research and teaching in computer science
at MIT. Read more about Prof. Sanchez and his research on
page 38.n
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
37
Faculty News : New Faculty
Faculty News : 17th President of MIT
L. Rafael Reif becomes the 17th President of MIT
MIT’s global strategy; promoted a major faculty-led effort to
address challenges around race and diversity; helped foster
the emergence of an innovation cluster adjacent to MIT in
Kendall Square; led the development of MITx, the Institute’s
new initiative in online learning; and led MIT’s role in the
formation of edX, the recently announced partnership between
MIT and Harvard University that builds on MITx and that aims
to enrich residential education while bringing online learning
to great numbers of people around the world.
Dirk Englund
Dirk Englund received his BS in Physics from Caltech in 2002.
Following a year at TU Eindhoven as a Fulbright Fellow, he did
his graduate studies at Stanford, earning his MS in electrical
engineering and PhD in Applied Physics in 2008. He was a
postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University until 2010, when he
became Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and of
Applied Physics at Columbia University. He moved to MIT in
2013 as Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and
Computer Science and a member of RLE and MTL.
His research focuses on quantum technologies based on
semiconductor and optical systems. Recent recognitions
include the 2012 DARPA Young Faculty Award, the 2012 IBM
Faculty Award, the 2011 Presidential Early Career Award for
Scientists and Engineers, the 2011 Sloan Research Fellowship
in Physics, the 2008 Intelligence Community (IC) Postdoctoral
Fellowship, and the 2012 IEEE-HKN Outstanding Young
Professional Award. n
Daniel Sanchez
Daniel Sanchez joined the EECS Department in September
2012 as an Assistant Professor and principal investigator in
the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL).
Prof. Sanchez was appointed as the TIBCO Career Development Professor of computer science at the MIT School of
Engineering. He earned a PhD in electrical engineering from
Stanford University in 2012, an MS in electrical engineering
from Stanford University in 2009, and received a BS in telecommunications engineering from the Technical University of
Madrid, Spain, in 2007.
Daniel is broadly interested in computer architecture and
computer systems. His research strives to improve the
performance, efficiency and scalability of future parallel and
heterogeneous systems, and to enable programmers to
leverage their full capabilities easily. His current projects focus
on designing parallel architectures that provide quality-of-service guarantees; building scalable and efficient memory
hierarchies for thousand-core chips; introducing, exposing,
and transparently managing heterogeneity in the memory
hierarchy to improve efficiency; and designing dynamic
fine-grained runtimes and schedulers using both software and
hardware to improve the utilization and ease of use of these
highly parallel systems. n
L. Rafael Reif
“We are all in this great enterprise together!” newly inaugurated MIT President L. Rafael Reif declared to an enthusiastic
crowd under a huge pavilion in MIT’s Killian Court on September 21, 2012.
The buildup to the Inauguration proved just as exhilarating as
the event itself. On May 16, the MIT News Office posted the
announcement of the MIT Corporation’s selection of the
Institute’s 17th president. This announcement read in part:
L. Rafael Reif, a distinguished electrical engineer whose
seven-year tenure as MIT’s provost has helped MIT maintain
its appetite for bold action as well as its firm financial footing,
has been selected as the 17th president of the Institute. Reif,
61, was elected to the post this morning by a vote of the MIT
Corporation. He will assume the MIT presidency on July 2.
As provost since 2005, the president-elect has inspired
innovation and played a critical role in the financial stewardship of the Institute.
As the Institute’s chief academic officer since 2005, Reif led
the design and implementation of the strategy that allowed
MIT to weather the global financial crisis; drove the growth of
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www.eecs.mit.edu
Prof. Reif has been a member of the MIT faculty since 1980,
formerly the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Science. Prof. Reif served as associate head of the Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science Department from 19992004 and as department head until his appointment as MIT
Provost in August 2005.
Upon the announcement, President-elect Reif said: “I am
deeply honored to be elected president of the Institute I love so
dearly," Reif said. "MIT’s impact on my life — how I think, how I
make sense of the world, and how I align my personal aspirations with the call to service — has been profound.”
Beginning Sept. 19, 2012, pre-inauguration festivities included
presentations, symposia, concerts and a day of post inauguration campus-wide activities from the Beaver Dash (5K+ a few
smoots) race, benefitting Habitat for Humanity to an
“Inaugural Global Barbecue.” n
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
39
New Classes in EECS
6.S02, a medical technology alternative to 6.02
(Introduction to EECS II) is launched
diagnosis. Joel Voldman, who is developing a glucose detection
module for 6.S02, is teaching students about noise and model-based inference. Undergraduate Instructor Gim Hom
developed the ECG hardware used in the cardiovascular module.
The freshman/sophomore level 6.S02, along with new junior/
senior level courses in synthetic biology (jointly with BE) and
medical device design (jointly with ME), are part of a broader
EECS strategy to expand the role of medical technology in the
undergraduate curriculum. Prof. Stultz makes note of several
reasons for this expansion. First, more than a third of the
EECS faculty are involved in research that is aligned with
medical technology and/or clinically relevant questions;
second, there are significant numbers of undergraduates who
are either keenly interested in medical applications of EECS
or who are premedical students in Course 6; and third, we
believe that our students, armed with a rigorous EECS
background and a significant appreciation of medical applications, will have a major impact on the quality and availability of
medical technology, a benefit to both patients and the broader
medical community.
As 6.S02 gets underway, students are absorbed in the ECG lab.
Course 6-2 Sophomore Eann Tuan has just set up the apparatus with her lab partner Course 18 and 6-3 junior Isabella
Tromba. Tuan has always been interested in biomedical
research and technological advancements in medicine and
health care. “The very first day,” she notes, “Professor Stultz
mentioned that he was a Cardiologist while explaining the
goals of this experimental class. Right away, I was drawn in.
After all these years of watching Grey's Anatomy, I was going
to learn from a practicing doctor!”
Isabella Tromba, a competitive swimmer at MIT, says about
her experience so far: “It was pretty neat to observe that my
heartbeat is slower than normal, and there is a very small
difference from when I hold my breath and when I breathe
normally. In the next coming weeks, we will be working with
MRI's, something that I am excited to experiment with and see
how we can use computational tools to provide new insights
into medical diagnoses and treatments.”
Instructor Gim Hom with students in the lab for 6.S02, spring term 2013. [Photos: Patricia Sampson/EECS]
As noted in the MIT Spring 2013 catalogue: This spring 6.S02
(or 6.02M) is being offered as an experimental version of 6.02
to provide a medical technology context for learning fundamental concepts in information extraction and representation.
The class explores biomedical signals generated from
electrocardiograms (ECG), glucose detectors, and magnetic
resonance images. Topics for the new class include physical
characterization and modeling of systems in the time and
frequency domains; analog and digital signals and noise; basic
machine learning including decision trees, clustering, and
classification; and introductory machine vision.
Lead faculty member Collin Stultz explains that the class is
based on 6.02, the second of the two landmark introductory
curriculum classes developed in 2008. “A lot of the material
that is covered in 6.02 will have a slightly different flavor,” he
says, “— a medical-based technology introduction to EECS.”
Prof. Stultz provides the thinking behind 6.S02. The idea is that
the new class will engage the fundamental principles at play
in EECS. From the standpoint of clinically relevant questions,
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In preparation for the lab classes starting April 25, ten
portable MRI’s have been specially designed at the MGH
Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging by a team under the
direction of EECS Visiting Associate Professor Lawrence Wald.
Team members include MIT EECS graduate student Clarissa
Zimmerman, Harvard postdoctoral associates Jason Stockmann and Cris LaPierre, and MGH Martinos Center site
physicist Thomas Witzel.
the course begins where students learn about electrocardiograms in detail and then they learn fundamental things within
signal processing like Fourier transforms, power spectra, and
the application space is the electrocardiogram. They'll be able
to record their own electrocardiograms, do some simple
analyses of that data, sample electrocardiograms of people
who are sick, be able to do some analyses of these, and then
use that information to do clinical decision-making, which then
falls into the realm of computer science. So they'll expand the
spectrum of these fundamental engineering concepts applied to
real biological signals and then apply clinical to analyze this
material. He notes that this content brings together faculty who
are interested in these problems both on the EE and CS sides.
The combination of medical technologies and application of
machine learning principals in 6.S02 has been possible
through the input and instruction by Prof. Joel Voldman,
Instructional Staff member Gim Hom and Prof. John Guttag.
Prof. Guttag, whose current research is centered on the
application of advanced computational techniques to medicine,
is teaching machine learning techniques as applied to medical
Top: Clarissa Zimmerman, EECS graduate student works on the portable MRI,
which she helped build under Visiting Associate Professor Lawrence Wald at
the MGH Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging. 6.S02 students Eann Tuann,
photo left, and Isabella Tromba, photo right, set up and take ECG readings in lab.
[Photos: Patricia Sampson/EECS]
With the goal of enabling the 6.S02 students to get an understanding of all the components and the functioning of the MRI
system — rather than viewing it as a ‘black box’— the scanners have been assembled as hands-on, low-cost table-top
units. The MRI systems have all the essential components of a
clinical scanner (magnet, console, gradient coils, gradient
amplifier, RF coil, transmit power amplifier and receiver
pre-amplifier). With help from colleagues at other universities,
the team has been able to build the system using very inexpensive components. The sample size for the scanner is about
1cm3. However, the scanner has sufficient resolution to
generate multi-slice images of interesting biological samples,
like mouse brains and hearts. n
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
41
New Classes in EECS
basic skills in wet-lab synthetic biology, and potentially get
involved in research.”
6.S193: Biological Circuit Engineering Laboratory
Prof. Tim Lu, the lead faculty for the class, notes: “Launching a
new lab class that intersects experimental and computational
aspects of synthetic biology has been an intense challenge
involving over six months of preparation. Thus, I would like to
thank the dedicated teaching staff from my lab, including
Sebastien Lemire, Allen Chen, Jerry Wang, and Michelle Lu,
and my fellow instructors, Ron Weiss and Rahul Sarpeshkar,
for their hard work with me on this new educational endeavor.
In addition, we are excited that our students are enthusiastic to
learn about this growing field and to help us enhance the
course for future iterations.”n
The teaching team for 6.S193, Biological Circuit Engineering Laboratory, from left includes (seated) EECS Professors Rahul Sarpeshkar, Ron Weiss and Tim Lu and
standing behind them, TAs Jerry Wang, Michelle Lu and Allen Chen. [Photo: Patricia Sampson/EECS]
Biological Circuit Engineering Laboratory (6.S193) is an
interdisciplinary laboratory class that aims to train students in
the emerging engineering discipline of synthetic biology and to
equip them with the hands-on experimental and computational
skills to pursue research in this area. Synthetic biology is a
growing field, which focuses on engineering biological
systems to achieve novel functionalities. Ultimately, we plan
for this course to be a recurring cornerstone of a new curriculum in synthetic biology at MIT.
This year, Professor Tim Lu, Rahul Sarpeshkar and Ron Weiss
are piloting the course with the generous support of the
d'Arbeloff Fund, the EECS Department, Biological Engineering,
the MIT Biology Department, and Quintara Biosciences. There
are currently 15 pioneering undergraduate and graduate
students from diverse disciplines such as EECS, Biological
Engineering, and Mechanical Engineering.
Biological Engineering (Course 20) sophomore Edgar
Aranda-Michel, notes on signing up for this new offering: “I
remember when first getting the email about the class I was
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puzzled, a course 6 lab that was wet...this has to be some sort
of mistake, but sure enough there it was. What really stood out
was the course 20 and 6 flavor the class offered. The course 20
side coming from synthetic biology and building new circuits
inside of cells and the 6 side coming from the modeling and
predicting of these circuits. I enjoy the fusion of working with
awesome professors in a small group setting. Right now I work
in synthetic biology, however my focus is prokaryotic systems.
This class was sure to give me experience in the eukaryotic
systems. However, in taking the class I found that it really had
much more to offer. I look forward to lab every time we have it.”
Exposure to synthetic biology as a new interdisciplinary field is
proving one of the big draws to 6.S193. Course 6 senior Rishi
Patel notes: “I am taking 6.S193 because to me synthetic
biology seems to be an exciting and new interdisciplinary field.
As someone with an electrical engineering and physics
background, I think it is important to have primer courses like
these that introduce non-experts into the area (particularly
those with little or no biological lab training). This class
provides excellent hands-on opportunities for learning
Left column: Top: Course 6 senior Aakanksha Sarda prepares some bacterial
plates in the ‘wet lab’. Lower left: Steven Keating, Mechanical Engineering
doctoral candidate in digital fabrication has recently declared a minor in Synthetic Biology because he believes the future of physical fabrication lies within
designed biological systems. Lower right: Edgar Aranda-Michel, Biological
Engineering sophomore, checks the recently inoculated plates in the wet lab.
Right top: From left, Edgar Aranda-Michel, Rishi Patel and Aakanksha Sarda
work through a problem set in a 6.S193 lab class. Patel, a joint Course 6-1 and
Course 8 junior, appreciates being able to take this lab to learn basic skills in
wet-lab synthetic biology for possible research involvement in the future. Middle
right column: Lab class students work out problems in synthetic biology. Lower
right: Zachary Banks and Kristen Cotner work in the 6.S193 wet lab. [Photos:
Patricia Sampson/EECS]
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
43
New Classes in EECS
6.S196 brings out the human side of technology
Principles and Practice of Assistive Technology
Titled by the first name of the client, the three-member
‘Project Janet’ team worked at The Boston Home, a not-forprofit, nursing-care for adults with multiple sclerosis (MS) and
other progressive neurological diseases resulting in mobility
impairment, and one of several Boston-area health-care
facilities that partner with PPAT. Project Janet team members
Joy Ekuta, a senior in Course 9 (Brain and Cognitive Sciences),
Mechanical Engineering graduate student Casey Jianzhi Chiou,
and Course 6 student Jason Strauss worked with TBH client
Janet Gardner to develop a more accessible nurse call system.
The team divided up responsibilities based on a matching of
their respective interests orchestrated by the PPAT staff.
Coming from a medically oriented background, Joy Ekuta
researched and collected data on MS, documented all aspects
of the project (now available at the open source site Make:
Projects (http://bit.ly/12jmJLr) and was the team’s primary
liaison to Janet and her caregivers at TBH. Casey Chiou
focused on hardware design and assembly — giving the project
a physical, tangible form. Finally, Jason Strauss was responsible for the software that allowed the system to recognize
Janet’s voice when she spoke the activation phrase “nurse
call,” as well as for making the microphone, buttons, LEDs and
nurse-call system interoperate via an Arduino.
Jason Strauss, Course 6-3 senior, holds in his left hand the Arduino (on photo right), an open source microprocessor which he and his teammates programmed to
have the microphone, buttons, and LEDs interact with each other and to allow them to trigger The Boston Home's nurse call system. In his right hand (photo left) is
an Arduino EasyVR Shield, a board which can be added to the Arduino, which provides the Arduino with voice recognition capabilities. By using off-the-shelf hardware,
documenting their design on a makezine blog, and putting their code on github, the team hopes that other people will be able to build and customize their system.
For at least a decade, Professor Seth Teller and members
of his Robotics, Vision, and Sensor Networks Group (RVSN)
have pursued machine perception for autonomous robotics
and human assistance. From self-driving cars and wheelchairs to body-worn navigation aides, Prof. Teller’s lab has
developed machines that can share people’s goals — and do
their bidding — in a variety of environments.
It was thus a natural outgrowth that working with Professor
Rob Miller, whose interests are at the interface of programming and human computer interaction, Prof. Teller developed
6.S196: Principles and Practice of Assistive Technology (aka
PPAT), first offered in fall 2011. The interdisciplinary class is
designed for small teams of students to work with clients
living with disabilities in the Cambridge area to develop
assistive technology, a device, mobile application or other
solution — to enable each client to live more independently.
Initial funding was provided by MIT’s Alumni Class Funds.
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Seth Teller notes the particular appeal of PPAT to students:
"This class is a good fit for students interested in public
service, user-centered product design, working closely with a
client with a disability (potentially in consultation with the
client's caregivers and/or clinicians), and tackling difficult,
real-world problems."
At the close of the fall term, 12 PPAT students, organized into
five teams, presented their work to fellow class members and
several assistive technology professionals invited from outside
MIT. The projects demonstrated a variety of new assistive
technologies including augmented caregiver access and 911
capability for a client with ALS; accessible tablet-based control
of an adjustable bed for a client with MS; accessible touchand speech-based nurse calls for a client with MS; using
machine vision to make an inaccessible coffee-maker touchscreen accessible for a blind client; and a vibrating bracelet to
notify a blind and hearing-impaired client of incoming calls on
her mobile phone.
problems was exciting and broadened my way of thinking
about my own project.“
Joy Ekuta appreciated taking PPAT because it allowed her the
chance to actually help someone in the community. She noted:
“Being in Course 9, we don't have a lot of hands-on opportunity to work with people who have any of the brain injuries that
we study. This class gave me an opportunity to actually work
with someone who had a degenerative neurological condition,
while also having a great impact. The biggest opportunity I saw
with this class was to do something that went beyond the
classroom to change someone's life.”
Profs. Teller and Miller plan to offer the class again in
fall 2013. n
Jason and Casey designed the hardware and software modularly so that more buttons, microphones and even other input
devices could be easily added. Using off-the-shelf hardware
and software including a voice-recognition application, the
team was able to set up an input system to trigger a variety of
feedback LED’s around the room, letting Janet know that the
nurse call was activated. Jason notes: “Our code is available
on github with instructions on how to modify it for similar
use cases.”
Through multiple lectures and demonstrations offered by
PPAT, team members in the class were able to build systems
that could be readily adapted for other clients with related, but
individual and varying needs. Casey Chiou notes of the class:
“Our client, living with MS, is a clear example of someone with
mobility impairment, so seeing such alternative devices
helped give us new ideas and things to consider when designing our own solution. The sessions also taught us about the
user-centered design process and how to properly collect data
and test in iterations.”
PPAT class members also benefited from frequent interaction
between teams. Jason Strauss found it helpful to hear about
other teams’ projects and solutions during the term, noting:
“Engineering problems at MIT often have a correct answer.
The issues that arose with these projects often had peculiar
and particularly creative solutions. Seeing the way other MIT
students from a variety of majors tackled these unique
Top: Joy Ekuta tests nurse call system equipment with Janet Gardner in
Dorchester, Mass. Ekuta is helping to design a new nurse call system for
Gardner, who has multiple sclerosis. Gardner's old system used a single button
attached loosely to a wall, which she often dropped. [Photo: M. Scott Brauer,
courtesy MIT News Office] Lower: Casey Chiou, left, and Jason Strauss, right,
work with Janet Gardner to make final adjustments for the nurse call system.
[Photo: Patricia Sampson/EECS]
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
45
Staff Features
Claire Benoit
Administrative Assistant II
EECS Graduate Office
Things were different in the 60’s when I was looking for my
first job. There really were not a lot of career choices for
women like there are today. Most of us were teachers, nurses,
or secretaries. I received my Associate’s degree in Business in
June 1965, and spent that summer on the Cape with a couple
of college roommates. In the fall, it was time to look for a
“real” job. I decided to apply to MIT since I had heard that it
was a great place to work. There was a job opening in the
EECS Graduate office (EE at that time) working with the
Student Administrator, Dot Young. I interviewed with her and
Prof. Truman Gray and was hired. Back then to get a job as a
secretary you must have passed a typing test at Personnel,
before being sent out for interviews. Part of my interview
included translating a letter from shorthand that was dictated
by Prof. Gray. I remember that he threw in some tricky words.
Fortunately spelling was my strong suit (no spell-check to rely
on back then) and I’m sure that was part of why I got the job. I
worked with Dot Young for a couple of years assisting with
student records, and eventually moved over to the admissions
side of the office working with first Fred Fairchild and later
Horace Smith. I left MIT in 1972 to have my first daughter
(subsequently had another daughter) and did not return to the
work force until 11 years later.
When I returned to MIT in 1983 I worked part time in the Civil
Engineering Department which is now Civil & Environmental
Engineering. I was an Administrative Assistant to faculty
members, the principal one being Jerome Connor. After a few
years I became full-time and I stayed in this department for a
total of 10 years and did the normal administrative tasks like
monitoring accounts, helping with faculty searches, photocopying course work, etc. In 1993 the department went through a
major restructuring and I knew my job might be in jeopardy. At
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the end of 1993 I saw a job listing in Tech Talk in the EECS
Graduate Office, again on the admissions side. I jumped at the
opportunity to go back to my first MIT home, and found myself
working with Peggy Carney who was secretary of the admissions committee.
Agnes Chow
EECS Admnistrative Officer
EECS is the largest department at MIT and the application
count attests to this. When I left in 1972, the department
received 900 applications for graduate admission. Today the
count is close to 3,000. The best thing to happen along the way
was the development of the online application by two of our CS
faculty members. It has been in effect for close to 9 years, and
I don’t think anyone involved in admissions would want to go
back to paper applications. It is not a paperless process
though. We still require original transcripts even though the
applicants upload a copy to the online application. I’m guessing that the transcript count is close to 8,000 per year since
most students have multiple transcripts sent in. These
transcripts arrive by two venues, postal and courier service.
They all need to be filed of course, and this is how we spend
Christmas vacation — the biggest filing job ever and we take
over the Jackson Room for a couple of weeks.
Working at MIT has been a lot of fun — it truly is a great place
to work — and at times it can be quite challenging. We deal
with many prospective international applicants and it can be
difficult at times to respond to the many telephone inquiries
without the benefit of face-to-face conversation. Thank
heavens for email. When dialogue gets difficult due to poor
phone connections, I suggest they send me an email.
The changes from my first stint in EECS and my current stint
are astounding. Back then we had typewriters, not computers.
Our copiers were mimeograph and duplicating machines and
depending on which one you used, you were covered with
purple or black ink by the end of the day. I used to type theses
on the side for extra money. How I managed that I’ll never
know. Try to imagine typing a technical thesis on a typewriter
with an original and two carbon copies — the Institute requirement at the time. Add to that the tediousness of constantly
changing the ‘elements‘ to move from English to Symbol to do
equations and Greek letters. It is a totally different story today.
Most students do their own typing with no need to hire a typist.
What is really inspiring to me are the people I have met at MIT
over all the years. I have had the privilege of working with
wonderful colleagues and this includes faculty, staff, administrators, support staff and of course students. I will sorely miss
the interaction with them when the time comes that I do leave.
MIT is a very down-to-earth place (not stuffy like some universities) and that has been the major draw for me. I truly feel
blessed to have had the good fortune of working in a worldclass institution like MIT with people I admire and respect. n
Photo by Barbara Chen, 2013
discovered that singing brought laughter to the temporarily
parentless household; music drew her and her brothers closer
together. Against all odds, Agnes managed to pass the high
school entrance exam, and was admitted to the Hsinchu Girls
High School, the best high school in town. She knew then that no
one could stop her from pursuing her education.
Agnes’s father passed away during the summer of her freshman
year at Soochow University in Taipei. After receiving her
Bachelor’s Degree in Accounting from there and working for a
couple of years at an accounting job for the Taiwan Fertilizer
Corporation, she came to the United States to study at SUNY
Binghamton, where she received her Master’s Degree in Finance
and Business Enterprise. Before entering SUNY, however, she
worked at the General Latex and Rubber Company, located on
Main Street in Cambridge, as an accountant. During that period,
she joined the MIT-Harvard Chinese Collegiate Choral Society,
whose weekly rehearsal took place at the MIT student center.
There she met Joseph Chow, a student pursuing a PhD in
optimal control at Harvard, and three years later they were
married. Joe spent his career at Lincoln Lab; their children
Jennifer and Jeffrey went on to earn their undergraduate
degrees at MIT.
Agnes Chow has spent her professional life in finance and
administration. As the firstborn child and only sister to her four
younger brothers, Agnes has known the value of responsibility,
dedication, determination, and independence from a very young
age. Those who know her at MIT recognize these same strengths
in her today.
Born in Shanghai, Agnes lived her first five years between
Shanghai and Soochow, sixty miles away, where she enjoyed
playing with cousins in her grandparents’ rock garden. Her life
changed drastically when her father, an electrical engineer,
decided to join the military to fight in Chiang Kai-shek’s army,
and ultimately moved his immediate family to Hsinchu, Taiwan.
In Taiwan, Agnes took on responsibilities to help her parents. Her
first accounting experience was at age 9, when her father asked
her to be in charge of collecting the water and electricity bills for
the 10 families living in their common building. She learned to
organize and track in a little notebook — her very first worksheet! — the money paid and owed per family, by room number.
Life was not easy for Agnes’s parents in Taiwan during those early
years. When her mother was ill and required lung surgery at a
hospital in Taipei, Agnes was asked by her father to stop school,
and not to register for the high school entrance examination,
because her help was needed at home. During the month that her
parents were away, Agnes took care of her brothers, ages 1 to 10.
She gained life-long lessons during that period, about the
importance of planning, organization, time management, and the
skills to survive in a seemingly impossible situation. She also
Photo by SDK Photo & Design, fall 2012
Agnes enjoys creative thinking, particularly in designing and
building administrative structures and processes that facilitate
the work of others in the enterprise. She has had the opportunity to work as a profitability analyst at First National Bank of
Boston, as a cost analyst at State Street Bank, as a pricing
analyst at the Chevrolet Division of General Motors, and as
“Island Auditor in Charge” for Global Associates at Kwajalein,
Marshall Islands.
In January 1984, Agnes started her career at MIT in the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). From Staff Accountant to Fiscal
Officer, she learned the ins and outs of research administration at
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
47
Staff Features
LCS, and benefited from attending budget meetings with the
towering and visionary LCS Director, Professor Michael Dertouzos.
In 1987 Agnes moved to the Center for Technology Policy and
Industrial Development (CTPID), where she worked as Administrative Officer (AO) for Professor Daniel Roos. During her eleven
years at the Center, she gained experience in global industrial
consortium management and interdisciplinary research management, and also witnessed the Engineering Systems Division (ESD)
grow from the white-paper stage to its final formation.
Janet Fischer
Graduate Administrator
EECS Graduate Office
In 1998, Agnes moved back to the computer science part of MIT,
working for Professor Rodney Brooks at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AIL). Four years later, when AIL and LCS
merged into CSAIL, Agnes was responsible for the financial part
of the merger. This gave her a unique opportunity to exercise her
creative talents — all the way from the financial system infrastructure to the final financial processes. She regards this
experience as one of the highlights of her MIT career. At CSAIL,
she worked for both Professors Rodney Brooks and Victor Zue.
For her work at CSAIL, Agnes was presented with MIT’s “Going
Above and Beyond” Excellence Award in 2004–2005.
When the EECS Department needed an AO at the end of 2004,
Agnes was alerted to this opportunity. She signed on with the
department head, Professor Rafael Reif, and moved her career
from research administration to academic administration. This is
her ninth year at EECS. She has served three department heads
(Professors Rafael Reif, Eric Grimson, and currently Anantha
Chandrakasan.) She says about this experience: “I have come to
appreciate each leader and his leadership team. I have been
inspired by their vision, passion, and dedication to building a
strong EECS Department in education and research, and by their
attention to nurturing the faculty.”
In 2010 Agnes was awarded the School of Engineering Ellen J.
Mandigo Award for Outstanding Service. She credits the capable
EECS staff for their key role in keeping the administrative engine
of MIT’s largest department running effectively and smoothly. She
is also appreciative of the support and guidance she has received
over the years — and continues to get – from the SoE Dean’s
office, noting that her career at MIT owes much to SoE Assistant
Deans Donna Savicki and Sheila Kanode.
During her 30 years at MIT, Agnes and her husband have had
the opportunity to travel widely — the Silk Road of China, Abu
Simbel in Egypt, Machu Picchu in Peru, as well as amazing
European cities and coastlines. But in her heart the highlight
was her return visit a few years ago to Shanghai and Soochow,
where she started her life’s journey. She and Joe plan to take
their children, their children’s spouses Tom and Suzanne, and
their four adorable grandchildren — DJ, Sienna, Zac and Zoe —
back to the garden in Soochow, where Agnes left her footprints
many years ago. n
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certainly more challenging, but I strive to have positive and
meaningful encounters with all the students that come by the
office, or contact me in other ways.” In the last couple of years,
Janet has enjoyed leading seminars for women and first year
students with EECS Graduate Officer, Prof. Leslie Kolodziejski.
“This has helped to break down our large department a bit –
allowing us to get to know small groups of students very well,”
she adds. “The students I meet on an individual basis are
brilliant and the best thing I can do is help them with
“administrivia” and then get out of the way and let them do
their own thing!”
Janet says it took her a while to adjust to the EECS culture,
after having been in ChemE, where there seemed to be more
bureaucracy (in a good way). “I have come to appreciate that
there are not a lot of hurdles that EECS grad students have to
jump through (although they may not realize that)!” she says.
“I have really enjoyed working with our Graduate Officers, first
Terry Orlando, and now Leslie Kolodziejski, and the entire
Grad Office team and Headquarters staff.”
When Janet Fischer was growing up, she was always interested in the ocean, and, in high school she was quite keen on
becoming a marine biologist. “That dream dissipated during
freshman year Biology 101 class!” she admits. “I am still
interested in the ocean, but it is pretty much limited to walking
along the beach these days!”
Wheaton College, at the time Janet attended, was a small
(1,200 students) women's college, and she was really interested in the residential life programs, and helping fellow students
in the dormitory system. As a student manager in the dining
hall, she took delight in loading the giant (Hobart) dishwasher
with great efficiency. In her senior year, she was a class
officer, and got a small taste of leadership through that
experience. On graduating from Wheaton with an initial
interest in banking and finance, Janet worked at a small
financial planning company in Harvard Square. Since 1986,
she has worked at MIT.
Every position that Janet has held at MIT (with the possible
exception of her time in the Provost's Office) has been about
customer service. She says: “It is pretty simple — I see my
role as helping people reach their goals, and for the most part
that is about helping students meet their degree objectives, so
that they can then go out into the world and do amazing
things!” Beyond that, Janet really hopes that ‘her’ graduate
students enjoy the experience called graduate school.
When she was in Chemical Engineering (1991-2000), she got
to know the student population very well. (It was easier to do
with 225 students.) “With 650 students,” she notes, “it is
Some things that Janet has found fulfilling while in EECS
include getting into social media (blogging and Facebook),
overhauling the qualifying exams, and (at last) getting to do
registration and grading ON-LINE—for which she credits the
great work by the Registrar's Office and IS&T. She particularly
likes crafting the daily announcements, which she emails to all
the grad students every morning with a selection of timely
opportunities and events. She also enjoys all the parties and
events put on by the department, and our student groups, such
as GSC, GSA, GW6.
Janet values her connections with people at MIT saying: “At
MIT the most meaningful thing for me has been getting to
know such wonderful people through the years, many of whom
are lifelong friends. There are too many to mention!”
Janet’s father, Jack Fischer, is a member of the Class of 1959.
“He is still an active alum, and I got to assist his class at their
50th reunion, which was really a once in a lifetime experience.”
Janet and her father had a lot of fun celebrating the 2011
sesquicentennial, as well as President Reif's inauguration in
September 2012. Father and daughter also enjoy following the
MIT basketball teams — taking in a few games each year.
One of the most rewarding aspects of being Graduate Administrator for Janet is seeing students overcome major hurdles in
their lives to ultimately achieve their degree. When Janet
worked for the Provost, she found it extremely satisfying to be
able to develop a few programs that are still in place and going
strong today (Presidential Fellows Program, CONVERGE, Web
Grad Aid application, Postdoc Association). She was recognized with the MIT Excellence Award in 2007.
Not one to miss opportunities to meet with students worldwide,
Janet has also been involved in the Hosts for International
Student (HISP) Program since 2002. She has hosted students
from Zimbabwe, India, Kenya, Peru, Singapore, Ecuador,
China, Taiwan and Poland. If you haven’t met Janet Fischer,
you must introduce yourself! n
Myron “Fletch” Freeman
EECS Manager, Educational
Computing Facility
Myron “Fletch” Freeman: Self portrait.
Myron Freeman has been known as Fletch (since the movie by
that name came out in 1985). He grew up in the smallest
county on the Eastern shore of Maryland in a town called
Chestertown. Since his exposure as a second and third grader
to the Apple II computers in his elementary school library, he
has been fascinated with computers. “I just sort of had a love
for computers,” he remembers. “I was amazed at the computer and knew that I wanted to do something with computers.”
And he did. Fletch took programming courses along the way
and into high school, where with friends he would help
configure Macintosh computers donated by local companies.
He and his friends also helped people get started using them.
Fletch wasn’t expecting to get into MIT, but he did and came to
MIT as a student for two years. Although he admits he didn’t
have his heart set on coming in the first place, he became a
dual math and computer science major known at the time as
18C. He also made some life-long friends in the EECS Department Computing Facility. As he was deciding to leave MIT (in
1992), his friends convinced him to stay on. By 1996, after
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
49
Staff Features
working in the systems area of the Microsystems Technology
Laboratories (MTL) for several years, Fletch started working
full time with the EECS Department ultimately becoming
Manager of the Educational Computing Facility (ECF) in 1999.
“We handle a bit of everything,” he says about the work done by
the ECF. This “bit of everything” includes the computing needs
for all in the headquarters and the teaching staff on the fifth
floor. If any help is needed getting set up for Athena, Fletch and
his team handle it and they handle all the lab renovations. “I do
all sorts of things, so I get asked all sorts of questions,” he
notes. “So, for example, I need to know where the circuit
breakers are for the Grier Rooms.” His responsibilities over the
years have expanded. Now he takes care of the computing
needs in the lab down in the basement of the Stata Center. He
notes, “It is isolated and hard to keep track of, so it helps to
work with the systems folks in the affiliated labs.” Fletch works
closely with the TIG (The Infrastructure Group) in the Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), the LIDS systems
folks, Dave Foss in the Research Laboratory of Electronics
(RLE), the MTL systems group and of course the systems people
in the MIT Information Services and Technology (IS&T).
Since 1996, there have been many system updates across the
Institute. Fletch has been involved with all of the updates for
the EECS Department. He notes about this history: “We’ve
actually done ‘forklift’ updates of the networks where we
replaced all the hardware, rewired all of the floors to handle
newer networking standards. We’ve obviously upgraded all of
the various systems for not only the network but the administrative systems, the data bases, the web servers and the full
gamut of everything else at all connected with these needs.”
Fletch and the ECF crew coordinated the installation of the
Student Groups
new Voice-Over IP (VOIP) phones and subsequent training of
all the staff in 2012.
One of the more unusual roles that Fletch remembers was
taking part in the process of setting a new identity and web
presence for the EECS Department in the fall of 2011 through
spring of 2012. He enjoyed being part of the creative process,
noting: “I don’t normally get to be in on the creative side of
things in EECS. I usually just keep the nuts and bolts down. I
don’t usually get to sit down and have a voice in some of the
creative directions in how the website should look and feel and
how we should interact with it. It was lots of fun.”
Fletch is also an avid, self-taught photographer. While growing
up, he liked photography, but didn’t get involved until he got a
used, film Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera in 1994. Although
he took some photos, his interest in photography was fully
sparked when photography went digital. “With digital cameras
I was not counting the frames,” he says. “I could really learn
that skill set and find my own voice in photography.” Other
than a few classes at the New England School of Photography,
where he enjoyed being a TA for a few night photography
classes, Fletch continues to shoot photos that he has submitted for display at MIT and elsewhere. His photos have appeared at MIT for the Campus Activities and Artists Behind the
Desk events and displays along the Infinite Corridor and for
the MIT Excellence Awards showcase.
In 2003, Fletch was recognized for his service with the MIT
Excellence Award for going above and beyond providing
exceptional client service.
If you get a chance, remember to ask Fletch for his favorite
recipes. He might tell you how to cook blue crabs – the
Maryland way. n
The MIT Formula SAE Team Goes Electric!
MIT Formula SAE (Society of Automotive Engineers, http://
www.sae.org/) went through a transformation in 2012-13—
gaining a new kind of ‘charge’—as the team decided to switch
from an internal combustion engine car to an electric formula
racing vehicle. Starting in June 2013, the team will be competing in the first Formula SAE Electric event in a newly designed
and built electric racing vehicle. The completely new set of
rules and the change in design and need for entirely new
powertrain technology has brought a new level of demand for
the skills brought by EECS majors. Thus, the MIT Formula SAE
flyer with the heading “The Electrical Engineering Perspective” was earnestly distributed to EECS students this past fall.
The result is an unprecedented nine EECS students now
participating in a group that previously attracted mostly
mechanical engineering students.
Course 6 senior, Brian Sennett, the FSAE electronics team
lead, joined the group in the fall of 2011 when several of his
MIT friends on the team recruited him as an EE. He explains
that the team calls itself MIT Motorsports – though it is the
Formula SAE (FSAE) team from MIT. He says the decision to go
electric was in part influenced by the automotive industry’s
move away from the internal-combustion drive over the next
several decades – influencing the start of the electric vehicle
competitions worldwide over the past few years.
Sennett is pleased to note that MIT Formula SAE offers lots of
take-aways to Course 6 students. “To start,” he says, “we host
UROPs during IAP for credit and during the summer for credit
or pay. I've also seen the project classes I've taken (6.115/6.131)
come through very, very strongly in the technical material I'm
working on with the team, and I’ve been able to build working
components with those skills. While those project classes have
a lot of hands-on, being able to build that into a true product
that must function in the real world is invaluable.”
Participation on the MIT Formula SAE team also offers built-in
leadership skills from having to lead people in putting out a
product on schedule, to spec, and to budget. Sennett notes:
“Our team echoes a lot of the same processes that we'd see as
interns or full-time employees in corporations, and in fact,
putting Formula SAE Team on my resume has drawn praise (and
often job offers) from most companies I've interviewed with.”
Hooding 2012: The annual EECS Hooding Reception is a time for students, alums, faculty and staff to reconnect and celebrate.
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With two main roles, Brian Sennett has spent a lot of time
designing the structure of the electronic systems in the car
(control, interface, safety, data acquisition) and managing the
tasks required to get those systems built. He has split up the
Top: The main setup is the dynamometer with the two motors and the torque
transducer (pictured) in the middle. This setup will allow the team to calibrate the torque, and energy control. Middle: Course 6 students who are FSAE
members (left to right: Brian Sennett, Rachel Luo, Erik Johnson) observe the
performance of vehicle control components in a test setup. Bottom: The electric
vehicle's main computer, left, and two CANbus "nodes" that relay data to the
computer.
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
51
Student Groups
Formula SAE Team continued
sub-projects such as the vehicle computer, testing the safety
system and designing a dashboard LCD with other EECS FSAE
members such as Erik Johnson, Course 6 sophomore, and one
of the drivers.
Course 6 team members have in particular been involved with
the "brain" unit, for which many possible microcontrollers are
available. Seeing that other teams have chosen from a simple
embedded micro to a full Linux computer, the team decided to
use National Instruments' sbRIO-9606 single-board computer
running LabView. Besides the fact that LabView is designed to
flawlessly run machinery and integrate complex sensor
systems, it is an excellent programming tool for the block
diagrams needed to visualize the car's behavior. Course 6
Rachel Luo has taken on the setup of the LabView system as
well as coordinating the team’s website – although she and the
other Course 6 team members agree that even now someone
with a strong CS background could play a major role in
designing and debugging the vehicle control software.
Erik Johnson the ‘youngest’ of the Course 6 FSAE team
members is pleased with the multiple learning opportunities.
He says: “Personally I am interested in Motors and motor
controllers so I have been able to apply a lot of reading to using
expensive high quality equipment and the controls involved.”
He also notes that with the switch to electric car, a lot of extra
safety rules are required for design and failure mode analysis.
6.270: The Course 6
autonomous robot
competition – entirely run
by students
Since 1987, Course 6 students have run an IAP course called
6.270, that allows any MIT student to design and build a robot,
which will ‘play’ in the end of January competition. The goal of
the class is to design a machine that will autonomously
navigate around a playing surface, recognize other opponents
and manipulate game objects. What sets 6.270 apart from
Course 2’s 2.007, is the total lack of human intervention once
the competition rounds begin.
Through lectures and some knowledge of software (Python),
the students who take 6.270 will learn about hardware,
software and the information that is needed to design, build
and debug a working robot. As noted on their website, “there
are no formal prerequisites for 6.270, but they help.” Teams
are composed of two or three students and each team is given
the same kit containing sensors, electronic components,
One of the 6.270 robots successfully unloads its payload. Photo by Christopher A. Maynor—THE TECH
batteries, motors, and LEGO. After an intensive first week of
lectures, the remaining three weeks are left for the teams to
create a working robot.
Also part of the Powertrain team, Johnson has worked on
selecting the motor and the motor controller based on models
and constraints. The powertrain group is working on the
design of a schema for traction control and torque vectoring
– a kind of electronic differential – to enable the dual-motor
drive for the car to improve performance. In addition, Johnson
has built the dynamometer that the team is using to test
various operating points and conditions such as torque control,
regenerative breaking, transients, energy tracking, and
temperature monitoring.
Among robot competitions, 6.270 also stands out because it is
entirely run by students. In what amounts to a year round cycle
of organization, the 6.270 student organizers meet from early
spring term through the summer and following fall terms to
determine the overall approach and detailed planning needed
to run the lectures, labs and equipment for the class to
proceed through January of the following year.
The 6.270 student organizers are generally the students who
have taken (and loved) the class and really want to contribute
to how it is run. Isaac Gutekunst, this year’s president and vice
president in 2012, remembers taking 6.270 as a Freshman in
2009. “My team did not do great,” he says. “We did quite poorly
because of a lot of interesting things that I have learned to
appreciate over the past few years — not necessarily due to
technical ability — but due to lack of knowledge of what
was important.”
Other Course 6 members of the MIT Formula SAE team
include Marcelo Polanco, LabView system programming; Alan
Ho, LabView system programming; Conner Fromknecht, driver
interface and LCD control; Ariana Eisenstein, driver interface
and LCD control; Brian Alvarez, wiring and electronics
packaging; David Kim, wiring and electronics packaging. n
Top: The crowd gathers in anticipation of the 6.270 Competition in 26-100.
Bottom: Members of the winning Team – ‘Legolas’. Photos by Christopher A.
Maynor—THE TECH
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For the past two years, 6.270 has doubled (to at least 8) the
number of lectures in the first week and also included three
2.5 hour lab sessions to bring everyone up to par on the entire
process of wiring the robot and how to make a program and
get it onto the robot. Gutekunst notes that increasing the
lectures has allowed for all levels to go beyond the basics. He
and his organizers also decided to add a faculty advisor to help
for extra support and added continuity between leadership
transitions. They are pleased that Professor Seth Teller
continues to fill this role.
The 6.270 organizers are also grateful for the sponsorship
support received this year. Sponsors included Analog Devices,
ARM, Dropbox, Intempc, Lego Education, MIT CopyTechnology
Centers, Oracle, QRST’s, Sparkfun Electronics, and the EECS
Department. Apple provided the prizes for the winning team
members. Team 10, Legolas, came in first — including
John F. William ’16, Laura Jarin-Lipschitz ’16, and Jacob F.
Tims ’16 pictured on page 52. Coming in second was Team 24,
Yo Yak. Team 22, No Prescription, of Theta Xi, came in third
place and Team 13 placed fourth. n
The relevant lesson in taking 6.270, Isaac notes, is to understand the limits of your resources — particularly time —
and avoid building a robot that is theoretically perfect, but in
practice doesn’t work!
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Student Groups
Alumni Features
Deborah Estrin, SM ’83, PhD ’85
“MIT instilled in me an expectation for
passion and impact; one that I certainly
had early exposure to in my parents,
both EE PhDs (Univ Wisconsin, Madison),
but at MIT it was ubiquitous.”
This fall has marked the second year for the Undergraduate
Student Advisory Group in EECS (USAGE). Created in 2011-12
as part of the EECS department's strategic planning process,
USAGE provides critical student input to the department
leadership group to help guide curriculum development and
enhancements.
One important initiative that came out of last year's USAGE
group was the new SuperUROP, a year-long advanced
undergraduate research program. USAGE team members
thought about what they wanted to see in their department,
polled their peers, and developed a program that addressed
their desire for developing enhanced research skills. As a
result, 86 undergraduate students are participating in
SuperUROP this year, performing graduate-level research
over a wide range of research areas. USAGE was instrumental
in ensuring that the program was structured to meet the
needs of students interested in pursuing entrepreneurial,
industrial or academic career paths.
EECS Department Head Anantha Chandrakasan notes, "The
input we received from USAGE members in 2011-12 was
invaluable in creating the SuperUROP program. I'm excited to
be working with this year's group as we create new programs
and reshape current ones."
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The 2012–13 USAGE group is comprised of over thirty students
who meet regularly with Prof. Chandrakasan, Prof. Dennis
Freeman (EECS Undergraduate Officer) and with Undergraduate Administrator Anne Hunter. Additionally, they meet with
the Associate Department Heads - Professors Munther Dahleh
and Bill Freeman and other members of the department
leadership. They are providing input on a range of issues
including curriculum (e.g., a medical EECS program), improving response rates on course evaluations, the role of undergraduate students in faculty search, and IAP activities.
USAGE2012-2013 members include Ishwarya Ananthabhotla,
Joshua Blum, Moyukh Chatterjee, Deborah L. Chen, Jessica
Chen, Stephanie Chen, Cody Coleman, Owen Derby, William
Gaviria, Gustavo Goretkin, Bianca S. Homberg, Kevin Hsiue,
Alexandra Hsu, Sebastian Leon, Andres H. Lopez-Pineda, Noel
Morales, Manushaqe Muco, Santhosh Narayan, Catherine
Olsson, Anvisha Pai, Victor Pontis, Devon J. Rosner, Aakanksha Sarda, Denzil Sikka, Nitya Subramanian, Christopher Tam,
Jelle van den Hooff, Luis Voloch, Cassandra Xia, Xinyue (Linda)
Ye, Yao (Rebecca) Zhang, and Xianzhen Zhu. You can read more
about each of them at: http://www.eecs.mit.edu/news-events/
announcements/usage-2012-13-undergraduate-student-advisory-group-eecs n
On June 28, 2012, Cornell University announced that Deborah
Estrin had accepted the position of professor of computer
science — the first hire for Cornell Tech , the new technology
center on Roosevelt Island off Manhattan. As the Founding
Director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing
(CENS) 2002–2012, and a professor of computer science at the
University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), Prof. Estrin is
noted as a pioneer in networked sensing, using mobile and
wireless systems to collect and analyze real time data about
the physical world.
late father Gerald Estrin, a professor in computer science at
UCLA, was noted for developing reconfigurable computing
while working in the von Neumann group at the Institute for
Advanced Study at Princeton. Their mother, Thelma Estrin,
also a professor of computer science at UCLA, has done
pioneering work in the field of biomedical engineering. In
familial line, Thelma was inducted into the Women in Technology Iternational (WITI) Hall of Fame in 1999, followed by her
daughters Judy in 2002 and Deborah in 2008. Margo Estrin is a
medical doctor in California.
“Her forte is building real systems that solve societal and
industrial problems,” Charles M. Vest, president of the
National Academy of Engineering and MIT president emeritus
noted for the Cornell Tech press release. Enthusiastic about
this new direction, Prof. Estrin says: “The vision articulated by
the founders of Cornell Tech is a perfect match for my
interests. Their entire campus will focus on technology
innovation, application and impact through both commercial
and social entrepreneurship. It is an opportunity to build an
institution of teaching and research that engages ‘The City’ as
co-innovators.”
As a young girl, Deborah Estrin loved taking an experimental
six-year math course in middle and high schools. She was so
devoted to this class that when her parents took her with them
on a sabbatical to Norway, she stuck with these studies.
Family photos reveal her buried in her math book strikingly
framed by the Norwegian Fjords. She says about herself as a
12 year old: “I think mostly I was just determined. I took myself
seriously at a young age. I think that more than anything else
is what helped me.”
In 2007, when Deborah Estrin spoke on receiving the Anita
Borg Institute’s Women of Vision Award for Innovation, she
credited her family, saying, “I grew up surrounded by the
ideals of pursuing science and engineering as a stimulating
and creative way to have a positive impact on the world.”
Deborah and her two older sisters were raised by two electrical engineers, who she notes were also strong feminists. Their
Deborah Estrin also considers herself very fortunate to have
met influential women mentors while she was an undergraduate at Berkeley (BS ’80). Dr. Barbara Simons, noted for her
work on electronic voting, was a graduate student there when
Estrin was a freshman. Dr. Simons and Sheila Humphreys,
then Associate Director of the Women’s Center at UC Berkeley,
had convened a group of women in computer science and invited Deborah Estrin to join them. Inspired by this group and the
spirit of “Berkeley in the ‘70s”, she notes on graduating: “I left
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
55
Alumni Features
Berkeley not only with a desire to invent things but also with a
lot of idealism and activism. I wanted to fix the world, not just
solve technical problems.”
Following Berkeley, Deborah Estrin enrolled for graduate work
in both the Technology Policy Program (TPP) and computer
science at MIT. After earning her masters in 1983, she returned
to technical design because, she describes, “I found the nature
of social science research very far from social activism. I have a
more active than 'pondering' personality. Creating technology
is 'active'— it's about doing, about movement.”
Working towards her PhD in computer science, Deborah Estrin
says MIT introduced her to a world of passionate technologists.
Through example and active inclusion, she notes, Dave Clark
introduced her to the nascent Internet research and engineering
community. She credits her advisor, Jerry Saltzer with taking
her as his student despite her mixture of interests. “He believed
in me and had high expectations and plenty of constructive
criticism!” She also notes that both “…Jerry and Dave valued
impact, and system-building and use, over publications.”
In the late 80's, soon after graduate school as an Assistant
Professor of Computer Science at University of Southern
California, Deborah Estrin plunged into collaborative activities
in Internet protocol design. Dave Clark introduced her to the
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) through which she
became involved with colleagues at the Information Sciences
Institute (ISI). ISI had built and launched the key infrastructure
for the Internet—the Domain Name System and the Request
for Comments (RFC) process—providing the foundation for
today’s Internet economy. She became full professor in 1998.
In the late 90's as a member of DARPA's Information Science
and Technology (ISAT) study group and surrounded by people
pursuing bold new ideas, Prof. Estrin took the initiative to start
off in a new direction—wireless sensing. In 2002 Deborah
Estrin, by then a faculty member at UCLA, founded the NSF
Science and Technology Center for Embedded Networked
Sensing (CENS 2002-2012), which she directed for ten years.
Through the work at CENS, new technologies in support of
environmental monitoring applications were developed and set
in place.
Deborah Estrin notes that her motivation for wireless sensing
was inspired while she was on vacation in Costa Rica. She
says: “This sounds like something for the press but I was
sitting in the Costa Rican rain forest thinking about how to help
ecologists understand and protect such a dense ecosystem
where there was so much biodiversity to capture/measure
within what would have been a single pixel of a satellite image.
Environmental monitoring as the killer app for distributed
sensing all started there for me.”
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Over the past few years, Deborah Estrin has increasingly
turned to mobile health. She co-founded with Ida Sim,
Professor of Medicine at University of California San Francisco
(UCSF), the nonprofit Open mHealth in 2011. They co-authored
a position paper in 2010 for Science Magazine putting out the
call for open mobile health architecture. Subsequently, the two
convened a group of experts from the software and health
worlds to bridge health and technology. The online entity Open
mHealth invites collaborators from developer resources to
health entrepreneurs and professionals to share resources.
See: http://openmhealth.org/.
Dropbox Founders Drew Houston ’05 and Arash Ferdowsi '08
Growing up with code and dreaming
of startups
When Drew Houston was very young, his parents bought a
PCjr — their first computer. Soon after, his father, a Harvard
University trained electrical engineer, introduced his fascinated
five-year old son to programming in BASIC. Although he
played his share of computer games while growing up, Drew
was far more intrigued by how the games worked. In fact, he
taught himself C by reading the source code to a text-based
online game.
She notes about this work: “First with colleagues at UCLA
(William Kaiser and Gregory Pottie) we started doing mobile
sensing since fixed point sensing has limitations of scalability
and economics. And around the same time mobile phones
were becoming prevalent and Nokia invited me to a workshop.
These two things happened to be resident in my head at the
same time, and ever since then I have been looking at mobile
phones as sensors, as sources of data – and from that to participatory sensing [for both civic engagement and STEM education]
to mobile health was really just an obvious progression.”
By freshman year in high school, Drew gained access to a
computer game by signing up to test it. Not so interested in
playing the game, he instead discovered a variety of security-related bugs and made the game company aware. Soon
after, Drew at age 14 was invited to work with them — though
his father had to sign the legal documents.
Now in her latest career move as Professor of Computer
Science at Cornell Tech (and Professor of Public Health at
Weill Cornell Medical College), Deborah Estrin is in a position
to pursue these interests from a fresh perspective and environment. Under Cornell Tech ’s mission for technical excellence
with a focus on collaborative projects, industry mentors and
entrepreneurship and business, Prof. Estrin will not only
enhance that mission but also gain new ways to pursue her life
goals for creating technology that has a positive societal
impact. n
“She really is trying to address
problems that matter and that
will impact humanity now. As a
role model, ...seeing such a strong
woman achieve so much means a
lot in a field where there aren’t that
many women.”
— Dr. Nithya Rmanathan
Researcher, Computer Science, UCLA
(former PhD student with Prof. Estrin)
The idea of innovation was at Drew’s core from an early age. At
a college prep talk to his eighth grade class, the speaker
asked: “Do you know what you want to do when you grow up?”
Drew was the only one to raise his hand. He notes, “I knew that
I loved computers and that I wanted to start a company.” He
was also a big fan of Bill Gates.
Like his Dropbox co-founder, Arash Ferdowsi began programming at an early age. His father introduced Arash to Q Basic
while he was in elementary school in Kansas City. While he
was in middle school, he took classes at a community college
to learn C++. He too was passionate about computers and
programming and realized that MIT was the best place in the
world to become a computer scientist. He says about this
decision, “There was no doubt in my mind that I needed to end
up there.”
Drew Houston (’05) and Arash Ferdowsi ('08)
The Ultimate Incubator For Startup Training
were undergraduates in Course VI, com-
Unlike high school, at MIT Drew found he could devote himself
to subjects that he was interested in. “First and foremost,” he
notes about his MIT Course VI education, “I became a better
engineer at MIT. Growing up programming was important, but
paired with the theory, I became better much more quickly.”
He also came to understand that good business decisions in
technology companies are often made by good engineers. “You
have all these examples of technologists who have picked up
the business side on the job but I can’t think of any examples
in the other direction,” he notes.
puter science, at MIT, but they didn’t really
meet until the summer of 2007 when it
came time to develop Dropbox. What made
their Dropbox partnership possible?
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
57
Alumni Features
college, where everyone is excited about and dedicated to
collaborating towards the Dropbox product goal – to make
Dropbox users happy.
One of Arash’s favorite classes at MIT was 6.046, Introduction
to Algorithms. In his words: “I love algorithms — I am obsessive about performance and doing everything possible to shave
milliseconds off code runtime. 6.046 helped formalize a lot of
my intuition around performance and gave me a much deeper
understanding of how to design algorithms that truly scale.
This was particularly important because my main focus in the
early days of Dropbox was to figure out how to make our
backend infrastructure horizontally scalable.”
Drew wasn't expecting it, but his experiences living in his
fraternity at MIT became his first training for managing Dropbox. Not only did he learn to live with and appreciate many
people who were naturally gifted in diverse areas, but he also
took on offices such as rush chair. Recollecting this responsibility, he says: “You’re handed a budget and some unpaid volunteers, and you've got to make something very complicated
happen, which is very similar to my experience with Dropbox.”
Although Arash had felt for a long time that one had to have a
business degree or a lot of experience to start a company, he
became aware through friends in classes and at his East
Campus dorm that this was not necessarily true. Besides his
Dropbox experience, he credits the “infectious curiosity for
hacking and innovating” that he found all around him at MIT.
With several friends who ultimately joined Dropbox, Arash
started a book exchange website called BookX@mit.
At MIT, Drew surrounded himself with people who were also
interested in starting companies. He joined the Entrepreneurs
Club, took courses like Prof. Hadzima’s ‘Nuts and Bolts
Business Plans’ during IAP, and met a lot of other MIT
entrepreneurs. He also remembers and values talking with
EECS faculty — such as Prof. Charles Leiserson — about their
experiences starting companies.
Drew has always been interested in both business and
management, so it wasn’t surprising that he would take a
class or two at Sloan. He describes one in particular. “One of
the most eye-opening classes I took was the negotiation class
at Sloan. Here was a subject that at first seemed totally
opaque to me. Were we going to practice bluffing and yelling?”
He discovered well-established and logical frameworks that
could allow anyone to become an effective negotiator. He
notes: “The important lesson for me was that some things that
I didn’t understand at all — leadership, public speaking,
management — could be learned and weren’t as mystical
as I thought.”
Arash’s passion has always been in scale – making things
work across thousands of computers and distributed systems
that make every aspect of a design horizontally scalable. After
his sophomore year at MIT, he applied to intern at Facebook.
He notes: “The fact that it was growing so rapidly, meant that
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www.eecs.mit.edu
Arash devotes the rest of his time to making sure that the
product they release works really well and is easy and
enjoyable to use. The technical problem solving to achieve this
requires a rigorous approach. All Dropbox members meet
every Friday to collaboratively review the important developments. During the week, the open layout of the workspace –
all on one floor – enables maximum transparency. User
operations personnel, who keep on top of user-experience, are
embedded with engineers for immediate feedback.
Drew Houston ’05
they were doing pretty innovative things to reach scale. That
definitely appealed to me.”
The Right Amount of Frustration,
Good Luck and Timing
Not long after graduating from MIT and on his way to New York
City, Drew experienced a reality check that has now been
labeled the ‘aha moment’ for creating Dropbox. He had
become comfortable with the MIT Athena environment, where
backing up his workstation or forgetting a thumb drive was
never a worry. After having graduated, however, he had to
upload his entire Linux development environment to a thumbdrive, so he could work at multiple computers (on another
startup). Leaving the thumbdrive behind as he boarded the bus
for NYC tipped the frustration balance. With nothing else to do,
he spent the trip writing out the first lines of code, which
would ultimately become Dropbox.
That was the summer of 2007 and Drew was told by a venture
capitalist to get a partner to build Dropbox. He recalls about
this process, “That's one of the great things about MIT — you
know what real talent looks like.” That talent was Arash
Ferdowsi who Drew describes as “… really smart and yet sort
of crazy enough to jump in on this.”
Naturally a bit reserved and cautious, Arash notes, “These
things don’t generally work out so well.” But in less than five
hours, they had decided to go for it. Arash says, “I think part of
it was just having the itch like Drew did.” He notes that MIT is
really good about this process. “If you are doing well [in your
classes], you can take the time to try something, and if it
doesn’t work out you can always come back.” He also credits
MIT with giving him the confidence to make this decision.
Arash Ferdowsi '08
The Wisdom of Yin and Yang
Although Arash did not have startup experience, Drew found
that Arash’s talents were refreshingly complementary to his
own and that they shared similar intuitions about technology.
In running Dropbox, Drew and Arash have similar instincts for
how to build a product, treat teammates well, and articulate
the values that drive their company. However, they also have
disparate areas of focus and views that balance each other.
Drew notes that Arash’s pragmatism helps keep his (Drew’s)
natural optimism in perspective. “So we have this kind of yin
and yang thing going,” he says.
Much press has been given to the challenge early in Dropbox’s
existence, when Apple founder and CEO, Steve Jobs offered to
buy out Dropbox. Drew notes: “ Nobody knew our business
better than we did. And our thinking was, we built something we
really loved, and it’s doing well. If the company has this much
value today, it's going to be much more valuable in the future.”
In the effort to keep their culture and product fresh, the
company holds week-long hacking sessions during which
every member works on something, for example, that is
particularly interesting or challenging that has not yet been
solved. Hackweek, held multiple times a year, has yielded new
features and intensive team-building for the entire company.
Dropbox has lately been more aggressive with recruiting and
acquisitions – a step that Drew and Arash have found very
healthy for the company. Drew notes: “We've had a lot of really
talented teams join us because overnight we can give them a
lot of scale. And, it's a really interesting playground for them.”
Notable recent hires include Guido van Rossum, the father of
Python, who had previously worked at Google. Arash comments, “At a company like Google where they have over 10k
engineers, if you join, you’re not realistically going to be able to
spend time with an engineer like Guido. In contrast,” he notes,
“at Dropbox with 70 engineers, anyone can eat lunch with
Guido.”
Drew’s equanimity also helps keep competition a manageable
part of the picture. Drew suggests that more often than not,
companies don't reach their potential because of ‘self-inflicted
wounds’. “So they hire people that aren't as good,” he says and
adds: “…or don't focus on making their users happy or they try
to do too many things. And that kind of thing happens a lot
more than getting threatened by a competitor. The Dropbox
advantage,” Drew explains, “is to focus on making our users
really happy – the one problem that we can solve.”
When asked what he would suggest to MIT students who are
thinking about working in a startup, Arash suggests that
although startups sound risky, “there will always be a job at
the larger companies. So take risks early in your career when
there is not so much to worry about.” He adds that whether
doing a startup or joining an existing one, the number one
factor needs to be the quality of people. He says, “I think the
best things happen to each of us when we find the most
brilliant people and surround ourselves with them. I think it's
certainly true in startups and tech where everyone is really
smart. Your competitive advantage is being around the
absolute best. It just makes such a big difference.”
Nurturing Dropbox Culture and Product
Be sure to tune in for the June 7, 2013 MIT Commencement at
which Drew Houston will be speaking. n
At Dropbox, Arash Ferdowsi says he focuses on two things,
both very much about quality. He meets everyone that they hire
— a measure that allows them to maintain their unique
culture. This culture he explains can seem like an extension of
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
59
Alumni Features
Sal Khan, SB, MEng ’98
“Yes, it feels utopian to me — living the
dream. I get to work with some of the
best people in the world literally — putting their talents to what’s important.
It all started off with my kind of crazy
delusions while sitting in the closet.
It's exciting!”
Sal Khan became a global superstar when he brought his life
experiences and natural inclinations to help others into focus
by creating and running the Khan Academy. Since it’s inception
in 2008, Khan Academy, as a not-for-profit, has delivered over
240 million online lessons to students worldwide — testament
to its mission to provide a free world-class education for
anyone, anywhere. Students of all ages have been viewing the
over 4000 videos and using the site associated online adaptive
exercise platform and online tracking that encourages
learning mastery. The story of his journey and his thesis to
reinvent education now appears in his book, The One World
Schoolhouse, which came out in late 2012.
Sal Khan followed his undergraduate education (in math, and
electrical engineering and computer science) and his MEng in
computer science at MIT in 1998 with several jobs in Silicon
Valley for a few years — his first career. Completing his
Harvard Business School MBA in 2003, Sal Khan started his
second career as a hedge fund manager in Boston.
Then came his third (and current) career. Sal Khan has the
good fortune to be a natural teacher — as well as a good
computer scientist — so he was more than adept at helping his
then 7th grade cousin Nadia (based in Louisiana) with a math
problem in 2004 while he worked in Boston. Teaching at a
distance was easily overcome online and eventually Nadia and
her friends and relatives ballooned into a pre-Khan Academy
set of viewers of her cousin Sal’s short, entertaining videos
ultimately posted on You Tube. Within a few years, Khan’s
interests went well beyond hedge fund management. Fortunately, the increasing recognition and support came just in
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time as Sal reached the tipping point to go on his own. Donors
began to surface including Ann Doerr (and her husband John,
a Silicon Valley venture capitalist) and then in quick succession, Bill Gates (and his family) who raved about Khan Academy to a large audience at the Aspen Ideas Festival in front of
2,000+ people, support from Google’s Eric Schmidt, and more.
By 2009, Sal Khan was fully launched to run his dream — the
Khan Academy.
Sal Khan got to this point for lots of reasons including his early
schooling and his childhood. Although Sal’s mother, a single
parent from India, was forced to work extremely hard at many
jobs, Sal and his older sister and younger brother grew up in
an environment that fostered individuality and curiosity. In his
words: “For the most part we had a fairly verbal family which
in no small way was a euphemism for argumentative. But you
can't discount that. [It] actually makes you good at articulating
yourself on the fly.“
Members of the Khan Academy gather for a picture in January, 2012.
Since his experiences growing up in the public schools in New
Orleans, Sal Khan has been sensitive to how he was taught.
When he was selected to join a class for gifted learners, he
says, one of his teachers asked him: “What do you want to
do?” His reaction? “I was like “What? You're asking me what
do I want to do?” You know, she kind of gave me license
to be creative.”
Sal is naturally the kind of person who is not afraid to ask
questions to understand something, to get to the heart of a
problem or need, to want to teach with passion and effect, and
to take on natural leadership roles. (He was president of the
Class of 1998 at MIT and president of the student body while a
student at Harvard Business School). In so many ways, Sal
Khan is what he teaches.
At the heart of his well-formulated thesis about education for
humanity, Sal points to the need for allowing each individual
(at any age) to proactively seek out learning—a positive and
creative act in itself. He proposes that by using the Khan
Academy online videos and exercises, which are self-paced
and uniquely tracked, anyone (including students in public
schools) can reach mastery (100%) of the material without
being turned off by lengthy lectures. Teachers can finally give
their full passion to individual tutoring while all students can
help each other as they progress at different (and similar)
rates. His ideas on a self paced, mastery-based model are
already being adapted for use in schools in California and
elsewhere. (Read more about applying Khan Academy courses
and concepts on the Khan Academy website. https://www.
khanacademy.org/coach/resources).
"I teach the way I wish I was taught. The lectures are actually
coming from me, an actual human being who is fascinated by
the world around him."
Sal Khan has been thinking about education for a long time.
When he came to MIT, he was keenly aware of how smart
students were sometimes struggling while others were not. He
wondered about this. At the same time, he noticed that the
pace forced him (and others) to be mercenaries with their
time. “I was thinking coldly how to get the most bang for my
hour of time,” he recalls. He discovered that he learned best at
his own pace — whether getting ‘chunks of understanding’
from a book chapter or working with classmates on a project
in the lab. He also realized that the people who understood a
subject (such as math, the basis for much of science and
engineering) holistically — on an intuitive level — were the
ones who learned most deeply.
It is interesting that between his junior and senior years as an
undergraduate at MIT, Sal Khan was given the Eloranta
Fellowship to create education software and he created
“Planet Math”. Since then he admits he has lost the domain
name and doesn’t know what’s happened to it — though he
would like to have it! [We are on it, Sal!]
Along the way, Sal also realized that effective online education
requires more than just a scripted experience. From his early
days teaching his cousin, he knew the value of the human
‘emotive’ delivery. He says, “There should be intonation and
cues that you [the teacher] care[s]. A lot of that get's lost when
you script things.” Although he misses those early days when
he recorded all his videos in a little ‘closet-like’ office, he
guards his time to continue preparing and making all the
videos for Khan Academy.
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Alumni Features
Now the 37+ individuals who work for Sal Khan are applying
these concepts to the growing Khan Academy. They come from
all over (including EECS and MIT) and are highly gifted
computer scientists and engineers who are excited to contribute to this effort. While, the focus is to effectively deliver online
mastery learning experiences in all the major core topics such
as physics, chemistry and biology, much is happening in the
real-time teaching and learning potential offered through
Khan Academy.
Last summer Sal and members of the Academy ran a camp
designed to discover what was possible in the physical
learning environment interfacing with young students — a
project simulation-based experience. He notes, “There is a
part of our DNA that really wants to interface with real kids to
see what and how they can learn.” Well over a thousand
applications were made for the class of 60 — another indication of the growing interest in the Khan Academy approach.
Is there competition? Sal Khan says, yes, but not in the
traditional sense. He explains: “There are others starting to
give tools — some for profit, some not — like Massive Open
Online Courses (MOOCs). I don’t know whether you call them
competition. They are in the same space. We want to be on the
cutting edge. So, if they’re doing something cool, we want to be
able to leverage that. It’s kind of like the competition you have
with friends. You want to do well but you want to continue the
friendship.”
In terms of MIT’s digital learning tools, Sal Khan was extremely impressed when Open Courseware was announced in 2001.
His reaction to MITx was a lot more personal. He notes, “Later
[in late 2010], when they set up MITx, they referred to ‘KSVs’
[Khan Style Videos]. I was blown away. Now they’re citing me!”
(He was and is a big supporter of edX/MITx.) In early 2012, the
MIT School of Engineering launched a series of videos
produced by MIT students and aimed at K-12 learners. Sal
Khan helped with this project and the MIT+K-12 videos are
integrated on the Khan Academy website.
Top: Sal Khan works with 6th grade students and teachers at Eastside Prep in
East Palo Alto, California. Bottom: Sal Khan spends time ‘in the field’ checking
on students using Khan Academy materials in the Egan, California classroom.
And, Sal Khan’s life observations about the holistic learning
experience — where ideally, you learn by connections between
content — have framed his approach. He notes, “When math
or science was taught, it was often not in the most emotive
way — often coming from one unit to another. It was very
disjoint; connections weren’t drawn across subjects. Even
within a subject connections were often lost.”
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This may have been about the same time that Sal Khan was
approached to speak at MIT. He reflects: “Speaking at graduation was like a Nobel Prize, literally. If someone had told me
while I was at MIT that I would be the commencement speaker, I would have said "If that happens to me the day before I am
80 years old, that's awesome.”
Among the many inspirational personalities Sal Khan followed
as a child (including his older sister), late night comedian
Johnny Carson ranks high. He says, “Literally from age 3 until
11 when he retired, I was a regular watcher. I thought there
was no more fun thing to do than to watch. Clearly I had no bed
time!” But he admits he didn’t get most of the jokes.
But, he did get the idea of entertaining — for education’s sake.
Susie Wee, ’90, SM ’91, PhD ’96
“A big theme in my life has been teamwork and collaboration — helping
people work together in teams to
achieve bigger things than they can do
themselves. Those are the things that
I do naturally.”
Several months ago Susie Wee (’90, SM ’91, PhD ’96) took on a
new role at Cisco as the VP and Chief Technology Officer of
Networked Experiences. As with other transitions in her life
and career, her abilities as a strong team builder and a
well-grounded technologist have propelled her into new roles
and challenges.
Although she grew up in a small town in western New York —
not a Silicon Valley or a Cambridge hub — Susie Wee was
intensely interested in computers and programming. In fact,
she not only went to programming classes that started at
6 am, but she stayed up all night programming on the family’s
Apple IIe computer.
When Susie applied to MIT and received her acceptance letter,
her father, who is a medical doctor (who really wanted to be an
engineer), brought the letter to her in the middle of her high
school class. She recalls, “He was so happy it was like he got
into MIT!” Her older brother also went to MIT and is a medical
doctor as well.
As a Course VI student, Susie especially loved the double 0’s —
6.001, 6.002, etc. In particular, she loved 6.003 for which Prof.
Hal Abelson was her recitation instructor. She says, “I loved
the way he taught 6.003 — working with Fourier transforms
and signals and systems gave me a great way to think about
things and got me interested in optics and image processing.”
As she seized opportunities throughout her undergraduate
years and into her masters at MIT, Susie Wee built on her love
for signal processing. Taking advantage of an Institute-wide
internship program, she worked summers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ultimately completing her masters degree
and building her knowledge of optics. And, working as a UROP
in the Media Lab with Prof. Ted Adelson, Susie was able to
extend her knowledge of 6.003 and her growing interest in
optics by doing image and video processing.
A formative graduate school experience
Continuing in optics and image processing at MIT EECS, Susie
Wee joined the lab of the late Prof. Bill Schreiber as his last
PhD student and later she found out she was his first female
PhD graduate. She notes that it was a great experience
working with Prof. Schreiber, who “always just treated me like
all the others.” She particularly appreciated the fact that Prof.
Schreiber had returned to his lab from retirement to continue
work that aimed at practical application. She notes: “I loved
that he was not only advancing theory but he was also making
leading edge practical systems. Over his career he made black
and white television into color television, black and white printing into color printing, and standard definition television into
high definition television. He was heavily involved with industry
and with government policy, making sure that things went in
the right direction, really looking at the broader issues at play.”
Susie Wee and Mike Polley (’89, SM ’90, PhD ‘96) were Prof.
Schreiber’s last two PhD students, and they studied closely
with their now spouses John Apostolopoulos (’89, SM 91,
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
63
Alumni Features
PhD ’96) and Rajni Aggarwal (’89, SM ’90, PhD ‘96). Susie and
Mike worked together on the technology aspects of a joint
project on a new approach to building a high-definition
television (HDTV) system. Susie designed the source code and
Mike designed the channel coder. John worked on the MIT
Grand Alliance HDTV system for Prof. Jae Lim. It was impressive to her that many of Prof. Schreiber’s earlier students were
designing and building the prototype HDTV systems in different
companies — before the standards were established.
She also liked the fact that because Prof. Schreiber was
retired, she was sharing the lab with Professors Jae Lim and
Al Oppenheim and their students. “It was really great to have
so many colleagues to know and work with,” she notes.
Naturally drawn to Teams and Technology
Always an avid ice hockey player, Susie Wee found that her
love not only for the sport but also for being part of a team
eventually resulted in her becoming the ice hockey captain and
ultimately a team coach during her 10 years at MIT. In fact,
when she accepted the Women in Technology International
(WITI) Hall of Fame award in 2010, she cites and compares her
experiences in both playing and coaching ice hockey to being a
woman in technology, where creating a winning move or
strategy can make the difference.
When she interviewed at Hewlett Packard Labs in Silicon
Valley in 1996, Susie Wee gave a talk. She figured that it was
standard that not only was this advertised but also the room
was packed. It was affirming that her presentation, which was
based on her thesis work, was considered unique and cutting
edge by the HP researchers. She says, “When I got there and
started working I found that not all interview talks are so well
attended. I also found that technically, I was really prepared.”
Several other factors were striking to her. As one of very few
females in the HP Labs, she says: “I didn’t look like anybody
else. Most were older men with button down shirts and
khakis.” Nevertheless, she and her work were valued and she
brought a new dimension to what they wanted to achieve. She
reasoned: “The way I am and I think most MIT people are, I
could develop technology all day long. At that stage I had no
trouble producing things, being relevant and pushing the state
of the art forward.”
Two years into her work, when she had a performance review
with her boss, she noted the contrast between her workweek
and her team-sports-filled weekends. HP then recognized
Susie Wee’s potential, and she went from supervising an intern
to leading projects and managing teams. Ultimately Susie Wee
was leading big projects with global, cross-functional teams
and leading collaborations with companies such as NTT
DoCoMo working on mobile video systems for 3G and 4G
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wireless networks and incubating new product areas such as
the HP Halo immersive video conferencing system and the HP
OpenCall Media Platform.
At this time, Susie also led a collaboration with EECS faculty at
MIT including Professors Anantha Chandrakasan, Muriel
Médard and Greg Wornell to outline a plan for an MIT Wireless
Center as well as establish an HP-MIT Researchers in
Residence program. Under this program, which ran from 2000
for nearly ten years, MIT students, particularly those in
between their masters and PhD, came out to work in the HP
Labs during IAP, creating a formative experience toward their
PhD thesis work.
Ten years into her HP Labs experience, Susie Wee moved into
the business — first into the PC group, where she was the Vice
President of the Experience Software Business, where she ran
software development for HP’s PCs and where she took her
first CTO role. She notes about this point when she was
stepping out of research, “You could say that HP Labs is like a
natural extension of MIT, doing graduate school and research.
Then basically I went up the chain in HP Labs and became a
lab director. But then I took the career step to move into the
business—this was something completely different for me.”
Transitioning is like starting over — both
challenging and exciting
“Becoming a vice president in charge of running a software
business,” Susie Wee notes, “required learning the current
way the business does things and then learning how I could
make an impact on the business with my different perspective
and experience.” In her new role as CTO of Client Cloud Services, in HP's Personal Systems Group, Susie ultimately worked
on HP Halo, which involved developing face-to-face telepresence high-end video conferencing systems. In a Tedx Bay Area
Women talk in 2010, she described this kind of helping people
to communicate as “Making Local Global and Global Local” —
something, which she obviously loved and believed in.
“The neat thing about the MIT experience is that you are
hanging out with really smart people — the people you live
with, the people you hang out with and grow with. You take it
all for granted at the time, but when you leave MIT, you realize
that you have pretty much worked with the smartest people
you are ever going to bump into."
Now, Susie Wee is working across all of Cisco’s products. With
the networking and data center teams she looks at software
and application-centric networking both for the enterprise as
well as for service providers and data centers. Her efforts aim
to bring an experience centric approach to the area — understanding what the operational experience is for these networks and converged infrastructure and how it can be improved with the fundamental shift in architecture towards
software-defined networks. She notes: “The area of software
and application-centric networking is being formed. It has the
chance of being defined poorly or defined well. If it gets
defined well then there are tremendous opportunities. It is
important to shift from a technology only approach to an
experience- and technology-driven approach.”
grow with. You take it all for granted at the time, but when you
leave MIT you realize that you have pretty much worked with
the smartest people you are ever going to bump into. This
raises your game.” She has found this helps her as she raises
the bar in her career advancements.
Throughout Susie Wee’s career moves since MIT, she has kept
several constants to guide her. One is her experience living
with people at MIT. She says: “The neat thing about the MIT
experience is that you are hanging out with really smart people
— the people you live with, the people you hang out with and
* In Remembrance of Professor William F. Schreiber, Nov. 21,
2009 entry in Susie Wee’s blog. n
At the same time, she remembers her PhD advisor Prof. “Bill”
Schreiber, for whom she spoke at the celebration of his life
held at the MIT Faculty Club on November 21, 2009. She spoke
about ‘Schreiber-isms’ — lessons, which he left with all who
knew him—particularly his students. Among these, “Bill
advised me not to be an analyst, but to build things that add
value to the world.” It appears to be a lesson that Susie Wee
has taken to heart.
Although Susie admits that she “tends to stick around”—as
she had for 10 years at MIT and 15 years at HP—she accepted
an offer to work as CTEO (Chief Technology and Experience
Officer) of Collaboration at Cisco. Right away, she was encouraged to build the position to combine technology and experience. She notes: “I was able to work across all of the different
businesses: video conferencing, web conferencing, unified
communication, and instant messaging and presence —mixing
these different areas into an integrated collaboration experience. This was in April 2011, when Susie moved up to Vice
President and Chief Technology and Experience Officer, CTEO
of Collaboration.
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
65
Donor Recognition and Appreciation
From the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, we extend our thanks to the generous
donors listed below who made gifts to the Department this past fiscal year 2012 (July 1, 2011-June 30, 2012). We have
attempted to list all donors of $100 or more to EECS in this time period unless anonymity was requested. Although
care has been taken in the preparation of this list, some errors or omissions may have occurred; for these we extend
our sincere apologies. If you designated your gift to the EECS Department and your name does not appear here or is
incorrectly listed, please bring the error to our attention.
All donor recognition categories are exclusive of corporate matching gifts.
*deceased
BENEFACTORS
$100,000 – 999,999
Thomas Kailath SM ’59, ScD ‘61
Alan L. McWhorter ScD ‘55
Franklin Quick Jr. ‘69, SM ‘70
PATRONS
$50,000 – 99,999
David R. Fett ’77, SM ‘77
Daniel B. Grunberg ’82, SM’83, PhD ‘86
James K. Roberge ’60, SM ’62, ScD ‘66
Raymie Stata ’90, SM ’92, ScD ‘96
SPONSORS
$10,000 – 49,999
James D. Ahlgren ‘55
Weng C. Chew ’76, EE ’78, SM ’78, PhD ‘80
Sunlin Chou ’66, SM ’67, EE ‘68
Paul R. Drouilhet, Jr ’54, SM ’55, EE ‘57
Renée Finn
Steven G. Finn ’68, SM ’69
Paul A. Green II ‘73
John V. Guttag
Olga P. Guttag
Michael G. Hluchyj ’79, SM ’79, PhD ‘82
William W. Irving, Jr ’87, SM ‘91 EE '92
MEng. '92, PhD'95
Charlene C. Kabcenell ‘79
Dirk A. Kabcenell ‘75
Kurt A. Locher ’88, SM ‘89
Barry Margolin ‘83
Chew C. Phua PhD ‘81
Nils R. Sandell SM’71, EE ’73, PhD ‘74
Richard L. Townsend SM ’59, EE ‘60
SUPPORTING MEMBERS
$5,000 – 9,999
Arthur A. Gleckler ’88, SM ‘92
John C. Hardwick ’86, SM ’88, PhD ‘92
Charlene C. Kabcenell ‘79
Dirk A. Kabcenell ‘75
Ronald B. Koo ’89, SM ‘90
Alexander Kusko
SM ’44, ScD ‘51
Kenneth W. Nill ’61, SM ’63, PhD ‘66
Mary M. Rollins
Malcom L. Schoenberg ‘45
Andrew F. Stark ’97, MEng ‘98
Gunter Stein
John D. Summers SM ‘84
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Edward G. Tiedemann PhD ‘87
Alan S. Willsky ’69, PhD ‘73
Ronald E. Zelazo ’66, SM ’67, EE ’69, PhD ‘71
SUSTAINING MEMBERS
$1,000 – 4,999
Donald J. Aoki SM ‘79
Terrance R. Bourk SM ’70, PhD ‘76
Jose M. Brito Infante SM ’62, EE ‘63
Charles G. Bures ‘69
Arthur C. Chen ’61, SM ’62, PhD ‘66
David R. Cheng ’04, MEng ‘05
Richard J. Codding SM ‘66
Fernando J. Corbató PhD ‘56
Boris D. Cukalovic ’05, MEng ‘06
Donald A. Dobson SM ‘51
David H. Doo ‘77
Robert R. Everett SM ‘43
Robert M. Fano ’41, ScD ‘47
Jenny M. Ford ’81, SM ‘82
G. David Forney SM ’63, ScD ‘65
Janet A. Fraser SM ‘84
Robert W. Freund EE ’74, SM ‘74
Edward C. Giaimo ’74, SM ‘75
Sol W. Gully
Joshua Y. Hayase ’52, EE ’57, SM ‘57
Jerrold A. Heller SM ’64, PhD ‘67
Steven J. Henry ’72 SM ‘73
Gim P. Hom ’71, SM ’72, EE ’73, SM ‘73
Tareq I. Hoque ’88, SM ‘88, SM ‘92
William F. Kelly SM ’61, EE ‘63
Byungsub Kim SM ’04, PhD ‘10
Richard Y. Kim ’83, SM ‘88
Ernest R. Kretzmer SM ’46, ScD ‘49
Yang-Pal Lee ‘72
Frederick J. Leonberger SM ’71, EE ’72, PhD ‘75
Anthony J. Ley SM ‘63
Frank J. Liu EE ‘66
John I. Makhoul PhD ‘70
Henrique S. Malvar PhD ‘86
Terrence P. McGarty Jr SM ’66, EE ’69, PhD ‘71
Sharon E. Perl SM ’88, PhD ‘92
Wendy Peikes ‘76
Paul L. Penfield, Jr ScD ‘60
Robert J. Petrokubi SM ‘68
Lisa A. Pickelsimer SM ‘92
Marina E. Pocaterra Silva SM ‘87
Clark J. Reese SM ’69, EE ‘70
Ellen E. Reintjes ‘73
Roger A. Roach
Joseph J. Rocchio ’57, SM ‘58
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
Melanie B. Rudoy SM ’06, PhD ‘09
William L. Sammons ’43, SM ‘44
John E. Savage ’61, SM ’62, PhD ‘65
Richard J. Schwartz SM ’59, ScD ‘62
Charles L. Seitz ’65, SM ’67, PhD ‘71
Carol Tucker Seward ‘47
Paul J. Shaver SM ’62, ScD ‘65
Burton J. Smith SM ’68, EE ’69, ScD ‘72
Dorothy D. Smith EE ‘72
David Smullin
David L. Sulman SM ‘69
Karl Sun ’92, SM ’93, SM ‘97
Donald L. Tatzin ’73, ‘75
Aurelie Thiele SM ’00, PhD ‘04
Richard D. Thomton SM ’54, ScD ‘57
Joseph E. Wall EE ’76, SM ’76, PhD ‘78
David Wang ’00, MEng ‘00
Harold M. Wilensky ‘70
Joseph F. Wrinn ‘75
Anthony Yen SM ’87, EE ’88, MEng ’88, PhD ’92
Dale A. Zeskind EE ’76, SM ‘76
Bazil R. Zingali ‘58
$500 – 999
Abeer A. Alwan SM ’86, EE ‘87, MEng ‘87, PhD ‘92
Bill W. Agudelo SM ‘82
Chalee Asavathiratham ’95, MEng ’96, PhD ‘01
Murat Azizoglu PhD ‘91
Richard A. Barnes ‘68
Robert V. Baron ’71, EE ’77, SM ‘77
Manish Bhardwaj SM ’01, PhD ‘09
Geoffrey F. Burns SM ’89, PhD ‘92
Woo S. Chang SM ’99, PhD ‘03
Shu-Wie F. Chen ‘86
Douglas J. Deangelis SM ‘06
Peter V. Dolan SM ‘79
Matthew L. Fichtenbaum ‘66, SM ‘67, EE ‘68
Michael D. Gerstenberger EE ’85, SM ‘85
Stephen D. Hester ‘63
Caroline B Huang SM ’85, PhD ‘91
David F. Huynh SM ’03, PhD ‘07
David L. Isaman SM ’70, PhD ‘79
Bartley C. Johnson EE ’81, SM ’81, PhD ‘86
Matthew J. Johnson SM ‘10
John S. Keen ScD ‘94
Wayne G. Kellner SM ’57, ScD ‘63
Shing Kong ‘94
James W. Lambert ‘76
Kristina S. Lambert EE ’76
Stan Y. Liao ’91, SM ’92, PhD ‘96
Nathan A. Liskov ‘60
Herschel H. Loomis Jr PhD ‘63
Charles I. Malme SM '58, EE '59
Warren A. Montgomery EE ’76, SM ’76, PhD ‘79
Robert C. Moore ’70, SM ’76, PhD ‘79
Joel Moses PhD ‘67
Phillip T. Nee SM ’94, PhD ‘99
Carl E. Nielsen Jr SM ‘58
Paola F. Nisonger SM ‘79
Robert L. Nisonger SM ‘78
Cynthia A. Phillips SM '85, PhD '79
Alexander L. Pugh SM ’53, EE ‘59
James D. Roberge ‘84
Murray A. Ruben EE ’64 SM ‘64
Nora L. Ryan ‘84
Edward M. Singel EE ’75, SM ‘75
Christopher E. Strangio EE ’76, SM ‘76
Joan M. Sulecki SM ‘83
Michael L. Telson ’76, SM ’69 EE ’70, PhD ’73
James M. Thompson ‘77
Oleh J. Tretiak SM ’60, ScD ‘63
John C. Ufford SM ‘75
Junfeng Wang SM ’97, PhD ‘99
Timothy A. Wilson ’85, SM ’87, ScD ‘94
Robert A. Young PhD ‘68
$250 – 499
Robert L. Adams SM ‘69
Roger K. Alexander SM ‘91
Tao D. Alter SM ’92, PhD ‘95
Michael S. Basca SM ‘00
H. E. Blanton SM ’49, EE ‘55
Toby Bloom SM ’79, PhD ‘83
Richard W. Boberg SM ‘73
Michael S. Branicky ScD ‘95
Randal E. Bryant SM ’77, EE ’78, PhD ‘81
Matthew S. Burnside ’00, MEng ’01, MEng ‘02
Julian J. Bussgang ‘51
Charles H. Campling SM ‘48
John Y. Cha ’91 SM ‘92
David L. Chaiken SM ’90, PhD ‘94
Ga-Yin L. Chan SM ‘87
Daniel K. Chang SM ‘92
Brian A. Chen SM ’96, PhD ‘00
Harry H. Chen SM ‘76
Rene G. Cornejo ‘84
Charles H. Cox ScD ‘79
Joel S. Douglas SM ’91, PhD ‘95
Arthur Evans
Bryan A. Ford SM ’02, PhD ‘08
Takeo Fukuda SM ‘74
Kenneth W. Golf SM ’52, ScD ‘54
Nicholas Gothard SM ‘62
Richard S. Grinnell ’92, SM ‘93
Allan R. Gunion SM ‘60
Gudmundur Hafsteinsson
Walter C. Hamscher SM '83, PhD '88
Stephen M. Hannon SM ’87, EE ’88, MEng ’88, PhD ‘90
Steven G. Herbst ’10, MEng ‘11
John S. Hill SM ‘60
Jerry L. Holsinger PhD ‘65
Jeffrey Jouppi S ’95 EE
Steven Kamerman ‘73
Stephen T. Kent SM ’76, EE ’78, MEng ’78, PhD ‘81
Zafar M. Khan ’79, SM ‘85
Thomas F. Klimek SM ‘59
Wolf Kohn SM ’74, PhD ‘78
Stephen F. Krasner ’71, SM ‘91
Yu-Ting Kuo SM ‘94
David B. Leeson SM ‘59
Ying Li SM ’89, EE ’93, MEng ’93, PhD ‘94
Chia-Liang Lin PhD ‘95
Francis C. Lowell Jr SM ’64, EE ‘65
Glendon P. Marston ScD ‘71
Emin Martinian SM ’00, PhD ‘04
Christopher S. McNulty ’98, MEng ‘99
Scott E. Meninger SM ’99, PhD ‘05
Keith S. Nabors SM ’90, PhD ‘93
Stephen D. Patek SM ’94, PhD ‘97
Vinay Pulim ’97, MEng ’99, PhD ‘08
Thomas J. Richardson PhD ‘90
Larry S. Rosenstein ’79, SM ‘82
Michael G. Safonov ’70, SM ’71, EE ’76, PhD ‘77
Paul S. Schluter EE ’76, SM ’76, PhD ‘81
Howard Schneider ‘79
Jean-Pierre Schott EE ’82, MEng ’82, SM ’82, PhD ‘89
Sarah E. Schott ‘83
Philip E. Serafim SM ’60, ScD ‘64
Howard J. Siegel ‘71
Guy M. Snodgrass SM ‘00
Birgit L. Sorgenfrei SM ‘93
David A. Spencer SM ’71, EE ‘72
Steven V. Sperry SM ‘78
Daniel D. Stancil SM ’78, EE ’79, PhD ‘81
David L. Standly SM '86, PhD '91
Russell L. Steinweg ‘79
Charles A. Stutt ScD ‘51
Olivia Tsai ‘03
James N. Walpole SM ’62, PhD ‘66
Kathleen E. Wage SM ’94, MEng ’96, PhD ‘00
Eric S. Wang ‘09
J. S. Wiley ‘73
John A. Wilkens PhD ‘77
Lucile S. Wilkens PhD ‘77
Harvey M. Wolfson EE’74, SM ‘74
$100 – 249
Jeffrey D. Abramowitz SM ‘85
Boon S. Ang SM ’93, MEng ’98, PhD ‘99
Mark Asdoorian ’98, MEng ‘98
Michael A. Ashburn SM ‘96
Eileen J. Baird SM ‘87
David R. Barbour SM ‘61
Robert L. Baughan Jr SM ‘49
Arlyn W. Boekelheide SM ‘52
Gary C. Borchardt PhD ‘92
Hardy M. Borland SM ‘57
Paul D. Bosco
John R. Brennand SM ‘59
Tom P. Broekaert SM ’89, PhD ‘92
Philippe Brou SM ’81, PhD ‘83
Gretchen P. Brown EE ’74, SM ‘74
John F. Buford ’79, SM ‘81
Wayne M. Cardoza SM ‘71
Christopher Carl ‘60
John C. Carter SM ‘78
Philippe M. Cassereau EE ’85, SM ‘85
Valentino E. Castellani SM ‘66
Upanishad K. Chakrabarti ‘94
David Chase SM ’64, PhD ‘67
Kan Chen SM ’51, ScD ‘54
Seong Hwan Cho MS ’97, SM ’97, PhD ‘02
Myung Jin Choi SM ’07, PhD ‘11
Nelson C. Chu SM ‘90
Douglas R. Cobb SM ‘65
Jack D. Cowan SM ‘60
Leigh C. Cropper ‘69
David R. Cuddy EE ’74, SM ‘74
Susan R. Curtis SM ’82, PhD ‘85
Stefano I. D’Aquino SM ‘91
Bahman Daryanian ’77, SM ’80, SM ’86, PhD ‘89
George A. Davidson SM ‘56
Wilbur R. De Hart* SM ’46, EE ‘51
Douglas R. Denison PhD ‘99
Lyric P. Doshi ’08, MEng ‘10
Jon Doyle SM ‘77, PhD ‘80
Adam M. Eames ’04, MEng ‘05
Carol Y. Espy-Wilson SM ’81, EE ’84, MEng ’84, PhD ‘87
Kenneth W. Exworthy SM ‘59
Maya S. Farhoud SM ’97, PhD ‘01
James G. Fiorenza PhD ‘02
Richard E. Fitts SM ’55, PhD ‘66
Paul J. Fox EE’73, SM ‘73
Roy E. Fraser SM ‘64
Thomas H. Gauss SM ‘73
Diane C. Gaylor SM ‘87, PhD ‘89
Michael A. Gennert ‘80, SM ‘80, ScD ‘87
Lewis K. Glanville* SM ‘62
William G. Glass SM ‘50
Thomas J. Goblick Jr SM ’58, EE ’60, PhD ‘63
David J. Goldstone ‘89, SM ‘91
Aaron A. Goodisman ’90, SM ‘91
Randall V. Gressang SM ’66, EE ‘67
Stephen E. Grodzinsky ’65, SM ‘67
Kush Gulati PhD ‘01
David H. Guttag ‘05
Wayne H. Hagman SM ‘81
William A. Harrison EE ’84, SM ‘84
John M. Heinz SM ’58, EE ’59, ScD ‘62
Wendi B. Heinzelman SM ’97, PhD ‘00
Walter O. Henry SM ‘52
Herbert L. Hess SM ‘82
Melanie E. Holland ‘90
Roger A. Holmes SM ‘58
Merit Y. Hong ’84, SM ’87, PhD ‘91
Berthold K. Horn SM ’68, PhD ‘70
Charles A. Hornig ‘79
Syed Z. Hosain ‘79
Paul K. Houpt PhD ‘75
Edward P. Hsieh SM ‘64
Caleb W. Hug SM ’06, PhD ‘09
Hing-Loi A. Hung ‘68
Joseph A. Hunt SM ‘63
Ernest G. Hurst Jr ’60, SM ’65, PhD ‘67
John D. Jackman ’06, MEng ‘07
Stephen C. Jens SM ‘83
Hsin-Kuo Kan SM ’73, ScD ‘77
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
67
Donor Recognition and Appreciation
Karrie Karahalios ’94, MEng ’95, SM ’98, PhD ‘04
Richard L. Kautz SM ’72, PhD ‘75
Kenneth P. Kimi Jr SM ‘81
Richard D. Klafter ‘58
Gregory A. Klandeman SM ‘95
Ernest S. Kuh SM ‘50
John L. Kulp Jr ’71, SM ’73, EE ’74, PhD ‘78
Shawn Kuo SM ‘04
Mark Kuznetsov EE ’82, SM ’82, ScD ‘86
Shang-Chien Kwei ‘05
John D. Lattanzi SM ’79
Christopher T. Lee SM ’62, EE ‘66
Jay K. Lee SM ’81, EE ’82, PhD ‘85
Michael Lee SM ‘95
Benjamin J. Leon SM ’57, ScD ‘59
Alan Levin ‘72
Alexander H. Levis ’63, SM ’65, MEng ’67, ScD ‘68
Kevin A. Lew SM ‘95
Wendy Liu-Battaiora ’88, SM ‘89
Sylvie J. Loday SM ‘01
John M. Ludutsky Jr ‘64
Allen W. Luniewski EE ’77, SM ’77, PhD ‘80
William F. Maher Jr SM ‘80
John A. Mallick ’73, EE ’76, SM ’76, ScD ‘79
Carla Marceau SM ‘70
Steven I. Marcus SM ’72, PhD ‘75
Elizabeth A. Marley SM ’96, PhD ‘00
Uttara P. Marti ’03, MEng ‘05
Patrick J. McCleer SM ‘72
John C. Mitchell SM ’82, PhD ‘84
Gerardo H. Molina SM ‘86
Lajos Molnar ’97, MEng ‘98
Guy E. Mongold Jr SM ‘59
Paul Moroney ’74, EE ’77, SM ’77, PhD ‘79
Ivan A. Nausieda PhD ‘09
Osama M. Nayfeh SM ’04, PhD ‘09
Stephen D. Offsey ‘86
Carmelo A. Palumbo SM ‘02
Hugh M. Pearce SM ’66, EE ‘67
David J. Perreault SM ’91. PhD ‘97
Thomas J. Perrone ‘65
Marvin E. Petersen SM ‘57
Brian K. Pheiffer SM ‘92
Michael Piech ‘90
Damian O. Plummer ‘02
Charles C. Post ’09, MEng ‘11
Matthew H. Power ’85, SM ’88, PhD ‘93
Edward J. Powers Jr SM ‘59
Aditya Prabhakar ’00, MEng ‘01
James C. Preisig EE ’88, MEng ’88, SM ’88, PhD ‘92
Robert A. Price SM ‘53
Steven D. Pudar SM ‘92
James F. Queenan ‘63
Nadir E. Rahman ’95, MEng ‘96
Richard H. Rearwin SM ‘54
Louis R. Records SM ‘78
John A. Redding SM ‘76
Howard C. Reeve SM ‘83
Barry D. Rein ‘60
Mark B. Reinhold SM ’87, PhD ‘93
John F. Reintjes Jr ‘66
Chester D. Reis Jr SM ‘70
Thomas D. Rikert ’99, MEng ‘99
68
Gail C. Ruby SM ‘81
William D. Rummler SM ’60, EE ’61, ScD ‘63
Karen B. Sarachik SM ’89, PhD ‘94
Sunil K. Sarin SM ’77, EE ’78, PhD ‘84
Frank M. Sauk ’74, SM ‘77
Amrita Sawhney
Terrence L. Saxton SM ‘66
Ronald W. Schafer PhD ‘68
Roger R. Schell PhD ‘71
Joel E. Schindall ’63, SM ’64, PhD ‘67
Jeremy H. Scholz ‘05
Russell S. Schwartz ’96, MEng ’96, PhD ‘00
David A. Segal ‘89
Orit A. Shamir ’06, MEng ‘08, PhD ‘12
Edmund M. Sheppard SM ‘58
Donald L. Snyder SM ’63, PhD ‘66
Gary H. Sockut SM ‘74
Shunmugavelu D. Sokka SM ’99, PhD ‘04
Avron N. Spector ’54, SM ‘57
John M. Spinelli SM ’85, PhD ‘89
Clifford S. Stein SM ’89, PhD ‘92
Eric H. Stern ‘73
Andrew C. Sutherland ’02, MEng ‘03
Corina E. Tanasa SM ‘02
Kah Keng Tay ‘08, SM ‘08
Susak Thongthammachat SM ‘67
Kimball D. Thurston ‘94
David A. Torrey SM ’85, EE ’86, PhD ‘88
Charles D. Trawick SM ‘80
Constantine N. Tziligakis SM ’96, SM ‘99
Olga Y. Veselova SM ‘03
Danh T. Vo ’08, MEng ‘09
Edward F. Walker SM ‘84, EE ;‘85
Lawrence C. Wang ’99, ’00, MEng ‘03
Susan S. Wang ‘83
Xiaohong Wang
Jennifer Welch SM ’84, PhD ‘88
Daniel S. Weld SM ’84, PhD ‘88
Robert J. Wenzel EE ’74, SM ‘74
Gary L. Westerlund
David F. Winchell SM ‘71
James F. Womac SM ’66, PhD ‘72
Ying-Ching E. Yang SM ’85, EE ’86, MEng ’86,
PhD ‘89
Roy D. Yates SM ’86, PhD ‘90
Robert D. Yingling SM ‘68
Ryan E. Young ‘08
Marcus Zahn ’67, SM ’68, EE ’69, ScD ‘70
Lingling Zhang
Wei Zhu
MIT EECS Connector — Spring 2013
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Goldwasser and Micali: Recipients of
the ACM 2012 Turing Award
MIT EECS professors Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali have won the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) A.M. Turing Award for their pioneering
work in the fields of cryptography and complexity theory. The two developed
new mechanisms for how information is encrypted and secured, work that is
widely applicable today in communications protocols, Internet transactions and
cloud computing. They also made fundamental advances in the theory of
computational complexity, an area that focuses on classifying computational
problems according to their inherent difficulty.
Goldwasser and Micali were credited for “revolutionizing the science of
cryptography” and developing the gold standard for enabling secure Internet
transactions. The Turing Award, which is presented annually by the ACM, is
often described as the “Nobel Prize in computing”
Read more on the EECS website: www.eecs.mit.edu
Silvio Micali and Shafi Goldwasser, winners of
the A.M. Turing Award.
[Photo: Jason Dorfman CSAIL/MIT]