The one thing I’ll miss most about college is the fact that dorm life is like one giant slumber party – you get to live (sans over protective parents…hi mom!) with your best friends (sleep/eat/study/party) and there is very little alone time, if you choose. Middle of the night quandry? Forget the telephone – just go next door. Need a study buddy? Great, everyone is in the lounge writing papers. Dinner time? Baker Dining – together. Gym? Round up the troops. Funny youtube video that you *have* to share? Forget email lists, just carry your laptop into the hall. Birthday? Why wait until the birth-day? Midnight is the more appropriate time to celebrate.
Or so I thought, until it was 12:22am on my birthday and I had not been summoned by friends. No knock on my door, no “showering” (did that always go on at MIT? Anyway, my friends know better), not even an instant message. A bit downtrodden, I decided it wasn’t a big deal, and that we’d just celebrate tomorrow as planned. But I wanted to say goodnight to everyone, so I slipped out of my room to scamper down to the lounge. I was greeted by a never ending supply of paper, each with a different word of the lyrics to one of my favorite songs. And then…well…see for yourself.
A dashboard robot with expressive cartoon eyes now in the works at MIT may someday help you avoid traffic jams, remind you to pick up the milk, and help you have a great night out. This Affective Intelligent Driving Agent (AIDA) will do that by learning from your expressions and your driving habits.
Researchers say that after a week of using AIDA, it will know your regular stops. After a month, AIDA can suggest the optimal driving route home via your favorite grocery store because it knows you are leaving work and this is the day you shop.
You can watch a YouTube video that profiles this “personal driving companion who understands your personal driving habits, frequent destinations, and the city environment.”
AIDA avoids traffic en route to shopping and home.
“AIDA builds on our long experience in building sociable robots,” says Prof. Cynthia Breazeal SM ’93, ScD ’00, director of Personal Robots. “We are developing AIDA to read the driver’s mood from facial expression and other cues and respond in a socially appropriate and informative way.”
Music from water. That’s the concept of the H2Organ, created by Steve Mann PhD ’97 and his colleagues at FUNtain. You can hear it – and vote for it until Oct. 20 (6 p.m. EST) in the Smithsonian/Cooper Hewett National Design Museum contest. As of today, Oct. 16, the H2Organ was placing sixth among several hundred competing inventions for the People’s Design Award.
Mann, a University of Toronto professor who earned his doctorate in Media Arts & Science, invented the H2Organ through FUNtain, which describes itself as the world leader in water-based musical instruments. Since the 1980s, Mann has invented a series of musical products based on water. Nessie is suggests a water monster, but is actually a freestanding, friendly instrument. The H2Orchestra is a series of instruments using ice, water, steam, and plasma.
The products, some freestanding and some fixed like fountains, are based on a patented hydraulophone technology and players make notes and chords by stopping jets of water with fingers or hands.
Whenever I attend events like last week’s SK Late Nite Variety Show, where MIT’s most courageous perform bizarre, embarrassing, and awesome acts for all to see, two thoughts invariably come to my mind:
1. I can’t believe these are MIT students.
2. Was it always like this or is this a new thing?
I mean the first question in the best way possible. I think it’s GREAT that international olympiad winners, valedictorians, and future nobel prize winners can come here and let loose to the extent that they do. But it still surprises me! Maybe you can help me out with my second question - has it always been this way? (By the way, the video I’m posting is the most tame act from the evening, so as to not corrupt anyone.)
My long weekend consisted of a dinner party on Friday night at Bexley (picture at right), attendance at 3 (!) MIT sporting events to cheer on some friends (Field Hockey, Soccer, and Football), a trip to Whole Foods (WHY is that place so expensive?), meetings, homework, and a party last night.
Jerry Appelstein ’80 displays a favorite bit of MIT memorabilia at ALC: Connections That Count.
“It’s hard to be humble when you’re from MIT.” That message was emblazoned on a pillow displayed at an event at the Alumni Leadership Conference, Sept. 25-26. Jerry Appelstein ’80, chair of the William Barton Rogers Society, a leadership giving group, brought the pillow from his substantial collection of MIT memorabilia. In fact, he has a room in his New Jersey home full of MIT things. While the pillow always gets a laugh, Appelstein says he actually sees his fellow donors as humble granite pillars supporting the university.
Connections That Count was the ALC theme that drew more than 400 alumni and guests to share community-building skills and learn about volunteer opportunities, event planning, and marketing with social media. Missed ALC? You can still learn from the ALC presentations online.
The Association’s annual awards were bestowed at a festive dinner. The top honor, the Bronze Beaver, went to Joseph G. Hadzima, Jr. ’73, SM ’77, a leader of the MIT Enterprise Forum and other entrepreneurial activities; Patrick J. McGovern, Jr. ’59, a life member of the Corporation and founder of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research; and Dana G. Mead PhD ’67, chairman of the MIT Corporation since 2003.
—View the 2009 ALC Media Gallery to see photos from the plenary and workshop sessions, the awards dinner, and more.
If you are an MIT graduate you may know some amazing inventors—you might even be one yourself. And now you can nominate someone for the $100K Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability. Or someone could nominate you! Deadline Oct. 3.
Joel Selanikio's EpiSurveyor at work.
The Lemelson-MIT Program honors exceptional inventors with lifetime awards of $500K and a $30K MIT student award each year. The program also hosts a creative Web site packed with stories of inventors, an Inventor’s Handbook, and games and trivia about invention.
The sustainability prize recognizes inventors whose products or processes impact issues of global relevance, as well as issues that impact local communities in terms of meeting basic health needs, and building sustainable livelihoods for the world’s poorest populations. Go to the Website for eligibility and nomination information.
Last year sustainability winner Joel Selanikio won for a new way to use cell phones for health data collection in rural areas.
Sramana Mitra SM ’95 is a high-energy entrepreneur and consultant whose books and blog, Sramana Mitra on Strategy, focus on market positioning, turnarounds, and strategic planning. As a columnist at Forbes, she’s been mulling over the cost of idle talent during the worldwide economic downturn.
Sramana Mitra SM '95
In “India’s Idle Tech Talent,” she points out that tens of thousands of young Indian IT workers are benched–employed but have nothing to do because their companies don’t have enough work. This waste of talent is not just about the recession, though—“the large Indian IT companies always have 15% to 20% of workers on the bench and some companies bench up to 30% of their employees.” But even if benching is necessary in the outsourcing business, why aren’t these people “engaged in meaningful and productive work, rather than playing computer games?” Her message to the 100,000-plus idle in India: Take control of your destiny. Otherwise, [big corporations] will control it, and you will be in splendid mediocrity all your life.”
In “Building Your Personal Brand,” Mitra describes the difficult job climate that faces recent graduates. In an experiment last summer, she hired 25 unpaid interns to work on projects of interest them and to her. One, Saad Fazil MBA ’09, a recent Sloan School grad, did research on virtual worlds that sell virtual goods and ended the summer with three job offers.
Mitra’s takeaway? Young people seeking a first step on their career ladder need some guidance and a place to exercise their abilities. Internships allow them to invest their time in professional development and personal brand—and take the next big step. Go for it!
These days, with advances in science and technology proliferating at breakneck speed, one of the most valuable allies a researcher can have is someone to explain all that complicated information to the masses. And some of the communicators most skilled at making sense of science are trained at MIT in the Graduate Program in Science Writing. Alumni of the program have gone on to publish in and/or work at most of the prestigious publications, including Discover, Technology Review, Nature, New Scientist, Popular Mechanics, Science News, and Psychology Today, among many others.
Here’s a little taste of what these talented MITers have to offer.
Robot chauffeurs at Heathrow airport.
On his Main Sequence blog, grad student, writer, musician, and video artist MacGregor Campbell offers “music, science, and experiments.” Check out some of his articles and videos, completed during a recent internship at New Scientist, about topics including the “smell of death” as a tool for forensic investigators and robot chauffeurs at London’s Heathrow airport. Also check out archives of his popular feature Sound-a-Day, where he puts a new spin on ordinary sounds. As he explains, one audio clip based on a printer is “the same printer sound layered on itself seven times, each time with a different pitch and bandpass filter setting. There’s also a bit of volume oscillation between the layers to make the shifting pitches more dynamic—and some reverb.”
Lissa Harris SM ’08 has been writing her Women Do blog since 2006. In it, she exposes media accounts focused on “the shocking spectacle of women doing stuff that people generally do.” One example: a Boston Globe article about female musicians on tour that tries to force a feminist framework on the gig.
The Artful Amoeba blog, by Jennifer Frazer SM ’04, looks at natural history and biodiversity—or, as the tagline says, “the weird wonderfulness of life on Earth”—with some stunning photography to boot.
Your team is six games back in August…What are their realistic chances of winning the division, winning the wildcard, or just making the playoffs? A couple of MIT alumni can help you there.
Theta Chi buddies Greg Agami ‘93 and Sean Walsh’93 started coolstandings.com in 2005 when these Red Sox fans thought it would be fun to know exactly what chances the Sox had of making the postseason. Within a few months, coolstandings.com was online, simulating the remainder of the MLB season one million times each day to determine the playoff probabilities for every team.
“The model uses a modified version of the Bill James Pythagorean Theorem to determine the chance each team has of beating other teams on its schedule,” Agami says. “Home/away statistics and recent team performance are used as variables for the Monte Carlo simulation, and we even implemented the various tie-breaking rules as needed to determine divisional and wild card winners. We’ve used historical data going back to 1903 to evaluate and optimize the model.”
These days, you can follow football and basketball as well as baseball in the real season and a fantasy pre-season. And this is not even their day jobs—Agami is an engineer at Motorola, while Walsh is CTO at DestinationWeddings.com.
MIT alumni in Vancouver were non-existent, James Dai SM ’04 thought when he returned home after completing his master’s at the MIT Media Lab and working as a Microsoft program manager. He now knows many and hopes to welcome even more as Vancouver hosts the world for the 2010 Winter Olympics.
He began meeting his peers at the inaugural MIT alumni event held in Vancouver, British Columbia, in April, attended by Toni Schuman ’58, president of the MIT Alumni Association, and planned by a committee headed by Oliver Chow ’93, MBA ‘97. Via a silent auction and raffle, the event raised funds to endow the MIT Alumni of BC Award for the Science Fair Foundation of British Columbia. As organizing committee member Will Gaherty ’84 noted, “wouldn’t it be great if the next admit to MIT from out here had the MIT Alumni of BC Award on his or her application! What a great legacy for this historic event.”
(By the way, the video I’m posting is the most tame act from the evening, so as to not corrupt anyone.)
