Robin H. Ray, News Office Correspondent
December 8, 2006

Learning Without Barriers Symposium

The seven-year, $25 million iCampus partnership between MIT and Microsoft, which has borne fruit across the globe, was celebrated with a symposium at the Tang Center Dec. 1 and 2.

Called “Learning Without Barriers/Technology Without Borders: Celebrating the MIT-Microsoft iCampus Alliance,” the symposium brought together industry leaders, educators and government officials to discuss the progress that iCampus has facilitated in educational technology, to reflect on the challenges facing science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education, and to sample the remarkable initiatives that are being undertaken amid a climate of ever-accelerating technological change.
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By Jenn Abelson, Globe Staff  |  November 3, 2006

Now on sale: Ads in space.

In a novel bid to raise money to send a research satellite into space, a group of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is offering companies and individuals a chance to put their advertisements into orbit around the Earth.

This week, MIT’s Mars Gravity Biosatellite Program launched a website, YourNameIntoSpace.org , and created a group on Facebook.com — “I’m Sending My Name into Space and You Should Too!” — that will sell space on the satellite where cosmic marketers can place their logos, slogans, photos, and other images.

The group needs about $30 million by 2010 to help finance the YNIS project, which is researching how mammals are affected by long-term exposure to Mars-like gravity.

To raise that kind of cash, the students decided, the sky is no longer the limit.

“We needed more funding and realized that we’re sending up this satellite into orbit with all this space on board used for nothing — so why not sell it to people who want to express a message?” said Thaddeus R.F. Fulford-Jones , a 24-year-old doctoral candidate at MIT who is working on the project. “It allows them to become part of the mission.”

To date, there have been few successful marketing efforts involving spaceflight, most memorably in 2000 when Pizza Hut placed a 30-foot logo on the side of a Russian spacecraft and then delivered vacuum-sealed pizza to the International Space Station a year later.

MIT’s project would be the first attempt to plaster an entire spacecraft with logos and messages. The fund-raiser is loosely modeled after The Million Dollar Homepage, a website developed last year by a 21-year-old student from England who successfully raised $1 million to pay for his education by selling a pixel’s worth of space for $1 on his website.

The effort gained worldwide media attention and some advertisers who bought space on the webpage reported significant increases in Internet traffic.

On the YNIS spacecraft, there are 121,866 square centimeters for sale inside and outside the satellite, which is about as tall as a washing machine and as long as a Ford Focus.

Prices range from $35 to $250 per square centimeter. There’s no limit on the size of the advertisement, but prices are expected to rise as demand increases. Sponsors will be listed on the website until 2011. In an added bonus, the purchase is tax deductible as a donation to support the construction of the spacecraft.

And like any real estate market, the YNIS spacecraft has better neighborhoods than others. The cheapest property is the “introductory” zone at edges of the satellite’s solar panels (It burns up in space, unfortunately.) while the more expensive “bronze” and “silver” zones on the exterior are photographed in orbit by cameras mounted on the solar panels. Anything smaller than one square centimeter would be too small to be seen by the cameras.

For the ultimate keepsake, there’s the “gold zone” in the interior of the capsule. Within five weeks of a successful landing in the Australian desert, donors will receive their piece of the spacecraft interior.

“It’s kind of like selling pieces of the Berlin Wall,” said Jamie Tedford , senior vice president of marketing and media innovation at Arnold Worldwide, a Boston advertising firm. “It’s a new media, in a way, and could be a good public branding opportunity.”

The students are hoping to raise at least $500,000 through ad sales by next year to complete the next round of design work . To date, they have received about $1.5 million from the for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, corporations, and universities sponsoring the project, including MIT and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The mission will study the physiological effects, such as bone density and muscle mass loss, after a colony of mice on board the orbit spend about five weeks in an altered level of gravity.

The research will provide data on how mammals are affected by long-term exposure to lower gravity, a critical first step toward human missions to other planets, according to Rosamund Combs-Bachman, YNIS assistant program coordinator.

Mark Jones , president of Mead Web Design and Computing in Danvers, bought a square centimeter for $150 in the silver zone.

He is putting up the company’s logo on that piece and is already considering buying more space on the satellite.

“I don’t advertise much, and I thought this was pretty different,” Jones said. “The space project really caught my eye, and I think it will get a lot of attention.”

So far, Microsoft Research, a division of Microsoft Corp., which has been funding the project for several years, has the biggest property at 196 square centimeters — about the size of a CD case. YNIS hopes for even bigger sponsors, though the students caution there’s some risk with any space travel.

“We can’t guarantee everyone’s name will make it up there. Things happen in space. Rockets blow up, satellites go into the wrong orbit,” Fulford-Jones said. “But obviously, we’re doing our best to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Jenn Abelson can be reached at abelson@globe.com.

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

August 3, 2006

Five MIT researchers are among the pioneers behind a new research center in synthetic biology, a precocious field whose primary long-term goal is to make it easier to design and build useful organisms.

Current work includes refining pieces of DNA into standard biological parts that researchers could then mix and match to produce novel biological systems — such as bacteria that synthesize rare cancer drugs — and also fostering the responsible development and application of next-generation biological technologies.

The Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center (SynBERC) is funded by a five-year, $17 million grant from the National Science Foundation.

In addition to MIT, participating universities are the University of California at Berkeley; Harvard University; University of California at San Francisco; and Prairie View A&M University. Matching funds from industry and these universities bring the total five-year commitment to $20 million, with NSF offering the possibility of a five-year extension of the grant. The center is managed via the California Institute for Quantitative Biomedical Research and directed by Professor Jay Keasling of UC Berkeley. The work of the center will be distributed, with major nodes in Cambridge and in San Francisco.

“SynBERC is the first time we’ve had long-term support to improve the technical foundations that underlie the engineering of biology,” said Andrew D. Endy, an assistant professor in MIT’s Division of Biological Engineering and a co-investigator in the new center.

SynBERC will build on 10 years of synthetic biology research. Most notably for MIT, the center will allow expanded support for the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, a worldwide resource started in 2003 to promote the framework of interchangeable biological parts, or BioBricks, pioneered by Thomas F. Knight Jr., another SynBERC investigator and senior research scientist in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The registry aims to promote synthetic biology in the same way that the adoption of a uniform system of screw threads in the 1860s made it easier to build machines, and the simplification of integrated electronic circuit design in the 1970s paved the way for today’s microprocessors.

“Our view of engineering biology focuses on the abstraction and standardization of biological components. The registry is the field’s first catalog of standard biological parts,” said Randy Rettberg, a SynBERC investigator, director of the registry and principal research engineer in MIT’s Biological Engineering Division.

Rettberg will also help SynBERC’s educational efforts by continuing to lead iGEM — the International Genetically Engineered Machines competition.

“iGEM 2006 grew from a small short course that we first taught at MIT in January of 2003. This summer there are teams of students at 38 schools around the world competing to make the coolest synthetic biological systems, from bacteria that smell like fruit-stripe gum to yeast that count,” said Rettberg. Endy added, “iGEM also benefits from and feeds back into Course 20, MIT’s new major in biological engineering.”

SynBERC’s foundational research will be motivated by pressing biotechnology applications.

For example, Kristala Jones Prather, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and SynBERC investigator, will lead a project to engineer microbes to produce vincristine and vinblastine — two drugs that are given as treatments for some types of cancer but that today must be extracted at high cost from Madagascar periwinkle plants.

Prather is also developing tools to facilitate the design and construction of novel biosynthetic routes to chemicals.

Another project led by Chris Voigt of UCSF will attempt to engineer bacteria with genetic sensors, logic and actuators such that the microbes can actively seek and destroy tumors.

Other key SynBERC work will examine the ethical, economic and biosecurity implications of synthetic biology and assess the effects of intellectual property and security regimes on the development of the field. Kenneth Oye, an associate professor of political science and engineering systems, will co-direct SynBERC’s societal research with Paul Rabinow, a philosopher and anthropologist at UC Berkeley.

This work will build on MIT’s Program on Emerging Technologies, an NSF-sponsored program led by Dean for Undergraduate Education Daniel Hastings and Professors Oye, Dava Newman and Merritt Roe Smith. It will also build on an ongoing study sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation that is considering the impact of next-generation DNA synthesis technologies, and a series of topical conversations sponsored by MIT’s Technology and Culture Forum.

CONTACT

Elizabeth A. Thomson
MIT News Office
Phone: 617-258-5402
E-mail: thomson@mit.edu

 

By Christopher Rowland, Globe Staff  |  July 31, 2006

SIGGRAPH 2006: From idea to image
It’s an academic conference. It’s a digital art exhibit. It’s drawing 25,000 people to Boston this week to see how emerging technologies are being used to educate, entertain, and study everything from the sea floor to the human body.

In the future, a sick child may hug a teddy bear, and the bear may respond with a nuzzle.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab have produced a huggable robot bear that can serve as a “medical communicator” — cuddling for comfort, sensing the strength of a child’s squeeze, or summoning a nurse if the child seems afraid or agitated.

The stuffed bear and its inner workings will be on display at SIGGRAPH 2006’s Emerging Technologies exhibition, which also features such futuristic medical innovations as a high-resolution heart surgery simulator and a “forehead retina system” that helps blind people “see” by sending impulses to their skin.

“It’s cutting-edge, leading-edge technology,” said Tom Craven, chairman of the exhibition. “People are really pursuing this to better interface between us and machine.”

MIT’s stuffed bear is packed with electronic sensors and “sensitive skin” technology that can distinguish between petting, tickling, scratching, slapping, and, of course, hugging. The bear can nuzzle in response to a human touch and will be fitted with audio and video equipment to provide nurses or parents with real-time monitoring information.

The idea for the bear came from pet therapy, in which patients interact with friendly animals to improve their mood and help them recover from illness faster, said Walter Dan Stiehl, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab who helped develop it and wrote it up for his master’s thesis.

“We decided to use robots as pet surrogates,” said Stiehl, as he and his team worked last week to put finishing touches on the latest prototype. “If a young child is scared, and hugging it very tightly and rocking it back and forth, we can sense that and prompt someone to come into the room.”

Stiehl tested the concept using prototype teddy bears with sick children, a nursing home, and a hospice center in Scotland, which is home to a public economic development agency that is among those supporting the project. The team also has received two Microsoft iCampus grants, which are awarded to MIT researchers, of $25,000 each.

Computer scientists in Denmark developed the open-heart surgery simulator. The program takes detailed images produced by magnetic resonance imaging and creates a three-dimensional image of an individual’s heart. Surgeons can rehearse the operation on the image, using interactive tools that link to the computer images, before they make a single cut in the patient.

“We hope the surgeons can do a more efficient operation by moving the decision-making to the time before the surgery,” said Thomas Sangild Sorensen , a scientist at the Center for Advanced Visualization and Interaction at the University of Aarhus, Denmark.

The simulator is not yet in use. The development team is working toward a series of tests that could show doctors that it reduces complications during surgery, Sorensen said. In the tests to take place in London, images of the hearts of 30 patients with cardiac disease will be used to create models.

A barrier to its use so far has been the time it takes to create the three-dimensional images from the MRI data. If that time could be reduced from the current six hours or so to 15 minutes, he said, the system might become popular.

“We hope to make something that will at least inspire new tools to be built,” Sorensen said. “Some type of 3D modeling tool should be in place in all places that do cardiac surgery. It can help them significantly when they plan the procedure.”

The artificial retina system uses a pair of eyeglasses with a built-in camera, developed at the University of Tokyo. The camera collects images of the view ahead of the subject, and the outline of objects ahead is applied as a series of impulses transmitted via 512 electrodes to the skin of the forehead. The wearer looks like an NBA basketball player with a forehead sweatband.

The system is intended for people with visual impairments. Its developers said the device will be perfected for a blind marathon runner who is participating in the 2008 Beijing Paralympic games.

“It looks like you’re wearing a scarf,” said Craven, the chairman of SIGGRAPH 2006. “For people with sight, it’s like a third eye. You could even see behind you.”

Christopher Rowland can be reached at crowland@globe.com.  

© Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

June 12, 2006

Undergraduates are at the forefront of MIT’s latest efforts to share educational technology with China.

On Tuesday, June 13, students will join MIT faculty at the first Asian MIT-iCampus Conference in Beijing, an unprecedented effort to introduce China’s top universities to iLabs, MIT’s free online remote laboratory initiative.

iLabs allows students and educators anywhere to access MIT equipment to conduct science and engineering experiments.

“Universities can share what would ordinarily be extraordinarily expensive equipment, just using the Internet,” said Hal Abelson, co-director of the MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance for Educational Technology and professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

Thousands of students in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East have used iLabs in their studies, using such equipment as a heat exchanger (which is important in the chemical engineering curriculum) and a shake table (which engineering students can use to study earthquakes).

At the Beijing conference, the MIT faculty who invented iLabs will demonstrate how the shared online laboratories can be integrated in the classroom, and representatives from the MIT-China Program (one of the eight work and study abroad programs organized by MISTI, the MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives) will explain the key role MIT students play in internationalizing iLabs.

A two-day technical workshop will follow for the Chinese universities that want to employ the iLab technology and design their own experiments.

Last summer, a team of undergraduates worked with Chinese students at Tsinghua University in Beijing through MISTI, demonstrating how to set up and access MIT’s free online computer science courses, experiments and labs. The team also gathered feedback from the participants about how well the initiative worked within China’s educational system.

“It’s about introducing people to the technology so they can adopt it and use it themselves,” said Scot Frank, a computer science student from Salt Lake City. “There are different teaching methodologies between the two countries but we really learn from each other. It’s really collaboration.”

MIT students first began working in China’s high schools in the mid-1990s to help connect students to the Internet through the China Educational Technology Initiative. In 2004, MISTI used the same classroom model and sent teams of students to introduce OpenCourseWare on the college level in China. Last year four teams of students set up iLabs and iCampus projects at four Chinese universities. This summer, students will work in twice as many schools throughout China.

After the MIT-iCampus conference is over, the MISTI students will stay in China to continue to expand the use of educational technology in dozens of other institutions in China. For the MIT students, it’s the ultimate on-the-job learning experience.

“Working internationally teaches you how to communicate with others even with a big difference in culture,” said Frank. “It’s also getting better at your own learning process since every situation you come into is always going to be different.”

iLabs is an initiative of the MIT iCampus program, which is funded by Microsoft Corp. iCampus sponsors faculty innovations in educational technology, helps incubate them through classroom use, and promotes their adoption, evaluation and continued evolution through worldwide multi-institutional cooperation.

 

A version of this article appeared in MIT Tech Talk on June 14, 2006

“Replicating controversial lab results or tricky methods could become easier, thanks to a new breed of websites where scientists share and edit each other’s laboratory techniques…..”

Nature, Published online: 7 June 2006.

Original Source: http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060605/pf/441678a_pf.html (Link no longer active)

“Opening Tuesday, May 23 is an MIT Museum exhibit designed to make teachers rethink the way they teach. Whether in a physics laboratory, a literature classroom, or a physical therapy session, educational technologies are radically changing how people learn and interact with one another….”

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MIT Museum Press Release, May 31, 2006.

A bleary eyed Massachusetts Institute of Technology student roaming the ground floor of Building 1 in the wee hours might hear a rumbling coming from the “shake table” lab, where researchers simulate earthquakes…”

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Inside Higher Ed News, 03/24/06.

By Benjamin P. Gleitzman
ASSOCIATE NEWS EDITOR

In its last year of funding, projects funded by iCampus, a $25 million partnership between MIT and Microsoft Research, are going international.

If OpenAfrica, a project by Mohamed A. Haji ’06 is successful, more students in Africa may have the chance to take the SAT’s and apply to colleges around the world. iCampus has championed the funding of sustainable student and faculty-led projects to revolutionize the practice of higher education using the tools of information technology.

Grants from iCampus were available to MIT students for one year of funding, and to faculty for two.

OpenWetWare, created by Jason R. Kelly G, is a Web site that can be edited by the public, also known as a wiki, designed to promote the sharing of information, know-how, and wisdom among researchers and groups working in biology and biological engineering. OpenWetWare allows labs, groups, and individuals to organize information and collaborate easily with others, according to the iCampus Web site. The project was inspired by the online editable encyclopedia Wikipedia and OpenCourseWare, an MIT initiative that posts course material for hundreds of MIT classes on the internet for public use.

This year’s student recipients of an iCampus grant include Walter D. Stiehl G, who has designed Huggable, a robotic companion that will provide pet therapy to those who do not have access to companion animals, according to the iCampus Web site and Stiehl’s wiki.

Campus Tour Bot, created by Collin E. Johnson ’07, may someday replace human tour guides because, according to Johnson’s wiki, it will be capable of traversing indoor corridors and outdoor walkways of MIT.

Mohamed A. Haji’s OpenAfrica will work in conjunction with MIT OpenCourseWare and iLabs, which provides online access to a remote laboratory for classes that, due to cost, space, and other reasons, do not include an on-site laboratory, Student teams working on OpenAfrica will be allowed to travel to three locations in Africa with the goal of constructing OCW mirror sites, remote laboratories, and enabling high school students to take the SAT’s and fill out college applications, said Paul Oka, co-chair of University Relations at Microsoft Research.

MIT students are not the only group to receive iCampus funding; faculty at the Institute can apply for iCampus grants. Among other projects, iLabs was created by Professor Steven R. Lerman ’72 and Professor Jesús A. del Alamo and funded in two phases from 2000 to 2004.

Dr. Kimberly Koile is currently being funded by iCampus for a project entitled ”The Classroom Learning Partner,” described by Oka as a Personal-Response System “on steroids.” Koile hopes to upgrade PRS, a wireless polling system currently employed in the interactive freshmen TEAL (Technology Enabled Active Learning) physics classes, to a tablet-PC based format allowing dynamic and wireless submission of digital ink answers to in-class exercises, according to the iCampus Web site.

Although varied in scope and implementation, not all iCampus projects have enjoyed a welcoming embrace from the MIT community.

TEAL, an approach for teaching freshmen physics that stresses active learning through the use of networked computers and desktop experiments rather than a straight lecture format, has met with opposition in a number of forms. A petition was signed in 2003 by MIT students stating that TEAL does not provide the intellectual challenge and stimulation that should be expected from a course at MIT, and numerous student-led groups on the college networking Web site theFacebook decry the merits of the TEAL program.

Nevertheless, international support for TEAL continues to grow, with two TEAL classrooms already constructed at the Technion in Israel and at the National University in Taiwan, according to the iCampus Web site.

But some student projects for iCampus have had problems with sustainability.

In previous years iCampus student projects included Domeview, a series of monitors dispersed throughout the MIT campus to provide information about upcoming events and information pertinent to student life. LAMP, the Library Access Music Project, is currently available on MIT cable, stations 63-76, and provides free, legal, and efficient access to a wide variety of music. ShuttleTrack, a web-based system that uses GPS technology to track MIT SafeRide vans, is also an iCampus funded project.

Both LAMP and ShuttleTrack ran into trouble soon after their creation. Implemented in April 2003, ShuttleTrack was not sustained after its creators graduated, Samuel N. Korb G said last spring. Ilia Mirkin G and Korb repaired the site and it became functional again in April 2005, after being down since the summer of 2004.

In late 2003, LAMP’s services went offline because its creators, one of whom is a senior editor for The Tech, were struggling to find a music supplier that allowed the purchase of music that could be broadcasted legally. It reopened months later in the fall of 2004 in a different form than the original design.

iCampus funding at MIT is scheduled to end in 2007 following the expiration of two-year grants given to MIT faculty in 2005. “Things are drastically different today than they were in 1999,”” said Oka. “The purpose of iCampus was to incubate ideas and move the state of the art forward, and I think we’ve done that.”

This year’s winners can be found on the iCampus Web site http://icampus.mit.edu/.

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This story was published on Wednesday, January 25, 2006.
Volume 125, Number 64

“They’re exploring the deep sea and distant planets. They’re saving lives in the operating room and on the battlefield. They’re transforming factory floors and filmmaking. They’re – oh c’mon, they’re just plain cool!…”

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Wired Magazome, Issue 14.01 – January 2006.