Eric Landau, Co-Founder & CEO of Encord – Interview Series

Eric Landau is the CEO & Co-Founder of Encord, an active learning platform for computer vision. Eric was the lead quantitative researcher on a global equity delta-one desk, putting thousands of models into production. Before Encord, he spent nearly a decade in high-frequency trading at DRW….

Visme Review: Creating Stunning Visual Content with AI

Creating visually engaging content can be difficult for many people, whether for work presentations or social media posts. Unless you have a degree in graphic design or money to spend hiring a professional, you’re often left struggling to produce high-quality visuals independently. With Visme, that no…

Meet the 2024 tenured professors in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

In 2024, eight faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences. They include the following:

Dwaipayan Banerjee is an associate professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society. His work foregrounds the intellectual labor of South Asian scientists, engineers and medical practitioners, challenging conventional understandings of science, technology, and medicine. Banerjee has published two books, “Enduring Cancer” and “Hematologies,” with a third, “Computing in the Time of Decolonization,” under review at Princeton University Press. His research spans the politics of health, pandemics, and computing, all through a lens that critically examines global inequalities in scientific and technological practice. Drawing upon his research, Banerjee’s teaching philosophy emphasizes global perspectives and interdisciplinary inquiry, with courses like STS.012 (Science in Action) and 21A.504J/STS.086J/WGS.276J (Cultures of Computing) being highly popular at MIT. He has also played a pivotal role in various editorial boards, MIT committees, and advising PhD students, further solidifying his impact on both the academic and global community.

Kevin Dorst PhD ‘19 is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He works at the border between philosophy and the behavioral sciences, combining mathematical, computational, and empirical methods to study the causes of bias and polarization — and argues that people are more rational than you’d think. He earned his PhD from MIT in 2019, and then was a junior research fellow at Magdalen College at Oxford University and an assistant professor at the University of Pittsburgh, before returning to MIT in 2022. He currently holds a visiting Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy.

Paloma Duong is an associate professor in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. At the intersection of cultural studies, media theory, and critical theory, she researches and teaches modern and contemporary Latin American culture. She works with social texts and emergent media cultures that speak to the exercise of cultural agencies and the formation of political subjectivity. Her most recent book is “Portable Postsocialisms: Cuban Mediascapes after the End of History,” a study of Cuba’s changing mediascape and an inquiry on the postsocialist condition and its contexts. Her articles have been published in the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Art Margins, and Cuban Counterpoints: Public Scholarship about a Changing Cuba.

Amy Moran-Thomas is an associate professor in MIT Anthropology. Her ethnographic research focuses on how health technologies and ecologies are designed and come to be materially embodied — often inequitably — by people in their ordinary lives. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Princeton University in 2012. Her first book, “Traveling with Sugar: Chronicles of a Global Epidemic (University of California Press, 2019),” offers an anthropological account of diabetes care technologies in use and the lives they shape in global perspective. The book received an award from the caregivers in Belize whose work it describes, alongside others. In 2024-26, she is co-leading a climate and health humanities project funded by an ACLS Digital Seed Grant, “Sugar Atlas: Counter-Mapping Diabetes from the Caribbean,” together with co-PIs Tonya Haynes and Nicole Charles. Also working on a book about embodied histories of energy, Moran-Thomas is interested in how social perspectives on design can contribute to producing fairer health technologies. More broadly, her research explores the material culture of chronic conditions; embodied aspects of planetary health; intergenerational dilemmas of responsibility; and writing public anthropology.

Justin Reich is an associate professor in MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing. He is an educational researcher interested in the future of learning in a networked world. He is the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab, which aspires to design, implement and research the future of teacher learning. He is the author of “Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools” and “Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can’t Transform Education” from Harvard University Press. He is the host of the TeachLab podcast, and five open online courses on EdX including 0.504x (Sorting Truth from Fiction: Civic Online Reasoning) and 0.503x (Becoming a More Equitable Educator: Mindsets and Practices). He is a former fellow and faculty associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Bettina Stoetzer is an associate professor in MIT Anthropology. She is a cultural anthropologist whose research focuses on the intersections of ecology, globalization, and social justice in Europe and the U.S. Bettina’s award-winning book, “Ruderal City: Ecologies of Migration, Race, and Urban Nature in Berlin (Duke University Press, 2022),” draws on fieldwork with immigrant and refugee communities, as well as ecologists, nature enthusiasts and other Berlin residents to illustrate how human-environment relations become a key register through which urban citizenship is articulated in Europe. She is also the author of a 2004 book on feminism and anti-racism, “InDifferenzen: Feministische Theorie in der Antirassistischen Kritik” (“InDifferences: Feminist Theory in Antiracist Criticism, argument”). She co-edited “Shock and Awe: War on Words” with Bregje van Eekelen, Jennifer Gonzalez, and Anna Tsing (New Pacific Press, 2004). She is currently working on a new project on wildlife mobility, climate change, and border politics in the U.S. and Germany. At MIT, she teaches classes on cities, race and migration, environmental justice, gender, and climate change. She received her MA in sociology, anthropology and media studies from the University of Goettingen and completed her PhD in anthropology at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2011.

Ariel White is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. She studies voting and voting rights, race, the criminal legal system, and bureaucratic behavior. Her research uses large datasets to measure individual-level experiences, and to shed light on people’s everyday interactions with government. Her recent work investigates how potential voters react to experiences with punitive government policies, such as incarceration and immigration enforcement, and how people can make their way back into political life after these experiences. In other projects, she and her co-authors have examined how local election officials treat constituents of different ethnicities, how media shapes public conversations, and whether parties face electoral penalties when nominating minority candidates. Her research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, the Journal of Politics, Science, and elsewhere.

Bernardo Zacka is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. He is a political theorist with an interest in ethnographic methods. His research focuses on how the state is experienced by those who interact with it and those who act in its name. His first book, “When the State Meets the Street (Harvard University Press, 2017),” probes the everyday moral life of street-level bureaucrats. His second book project, “Institutional Atmospherics,” looks at several episodes in the 20th century when welfare agencies turned to architecture and interior design to try to repair their relationship to citizens, and recovers from that history a more ambitious conception of what an interface between state and society can and should do. He received his PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University. He has been a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and is currently on sabbatical at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Harnessing the power of placebo for pain relief

Placebos are inert treatments, generally not expected to impact biological pathways or improve a person’s physical health. But time and again, some patients report that they feel better after taking a placebo. Increasingly, doctors and scientists are recognizing that rather than dismissing placebos as mere trickery, they may be able to help patients by harnessing their power.

To maximize the impact of the placebo effect and design reliable therapeutic strategies, researchers need a better understanding of how it works. Now, with a new animal model developed by scientists at the McGovern Institute at MIT, they will be able to investigate the neural circuits that underlie placebos’ ability to elicit pain relief.

“The brain and body interaction has a lot of potential, in a way that we don’t fully understand,” says Fan Wang, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and investigator at the McGovern Institute. “I really think there needs to be more of a push to understand placebo effect, in pain and probably in many other conditions. Now we have a strong model to probe the circuit mechanism.”

Context-dependent placebo effect

In the Sept. 5, 2024, issue of the journal Current Biology, Wang and her team report that they have elicited strong placebo pain relief in mice by activating pain-suppressing neurons in the brain while the mice are in a specific environment, thereby teaching the animals that they feel better when they are in that context. Following their training, placing the mice in that environment alone is enough to suppress pain. The team’s experiments — which were funded by the National Institutes of Health, the K. Lisa Yang Brain-Body Center, and the K. Lisa Yang and Hock E. Tan Center for Molecular Therapeutics within MIT’s Yang Tan Collective — show that this context-dependent placebo effect relieves both acute and chronic pain.

Context is critical for the placebo effect. While a pill can help a patient feel better when they expect it to, even if it is made only of sugar or starch, it seems to be not just the pill that sets up those expectations, but the entire scenario in which the pill is taken. For example, being in a hospital and interacting with doctors can contribute to a patient’s perception of care, and these social and environmental factors can make a placebo effect more probable.

MIT postdocs Bin Chen and Nitsan Goldstein used visual and textural cues to define a specific place. Then they activated pain-suppressing neurons in the brain while the animals were in this “pain-relief box.” Those pain-suppressing neurons, which Wang’s lab discovered a few years ago, are located in an emotion-processing center of the brain called the central amygdala. By expressing light-sensitive channels in these neurons, the researchers were able to suppress pain with light in the pain-relief box and leave the neurons inactive when mice were in a control box.

Animals learned to prefer the pain-relief box to other environments. And when the researchers tested their response to potentially painful stimuli after they had made that association, they found the mice were less sensitive while they were there. “Just by being in the context that they had associated with pain suppression, we saw that reduced pain—even though we weren’t actually activating those [pain-suppressing] neurons,” Goldstein explains.

Acute and chronic pain relief

Some scientists have been able to elicit placebo pain relief in rodents by treating the animals with morphine, linking environmental cues to the pain suppression caused by the drugs similar to the way Wang’s team did by directly activating pain-suppressing neurons. This drug-based approach works best for setting up expectations of relief for acute pain; its placebo effect is short-lived and mostly ineffective against chronic pain. So Wang, Chen, and Goldstein were particularly pleased to find that their engineered placebo effect was effective for relieving both acute and chronic pain.

In their experiments, animals experiencing a chemotherapy-induced hypersensitivity to touch exhibited a preference for the pain relief box as much as animals who were exposed to a chemical that induces acute pain, days after their initial conditioning. Once there, their chemotherapy-induced pain sensitivity was eliminated; they exhibited no more sensitivity to painful stimuli than they had prior to receiving chemotherapy.

One of the biggest surprises came when the researchers turned their attention back to the pain-suppressing neurons in the central amygdala that they had used to trigger pain relief. They suspected that those neurons might be reactivated when mice returned to the pain-relief box. Instead, they found that after the initial conditioning period, those neurons remained quiet. “These neurons are not reactivated, yet the mice appear to be no longer in pain,” Wang says. “So it suggests this memory of feeling well is transferred somewhere else.”

Goldstein adds that there must be a pain-suppressing neural circuit somewhere that is activated by pain-relief-associated contexts — and the team’s new placebo model sets researchers up to investigate those pathways. A deeper understanding of that circuitry could enable clinicians to deploy the placebo effect — alone or in combination with active treatments — to better manage patients’ pain in the future.

Anchor Positioning Quirks

I am thrilled to say, that from this week onwards, the CSS-tricks Almanac has an entry for each property, function, and at-rule related to the new Anchor Positioning API! For the last month, I have tried to fully understand this …

Anchor Positioning Quirks originally published on…

School of Engineering faculty and staff receive awards in spring 2024

Faculty, researchers, and staff receive many external awards throughout the year. The School of Engineering periodically highlights the honors, prizes, and medals won by community members working in academic departments, labs, and centers. Spring 2024 honorees include the following:

  • Lallit Anand, the Warren and Towneley Rohsenow Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was named a 2024 Society of Engineering Fellow. Fellows are awarded to individuals who are distinguished in a relevant field and who have made meaningful contributions to the Society and the technical community.
     
  • Adam Belay, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received a Google Research Scholar Award, awarded to professors based on merit to support their cutting-edge research.
     
  • Michael Birnbaum, associate professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, received the Bose Award for Excellence in Teaching, given annually to a faculty member whose contributions to education have been characterized by dedication, care, and creativity.
     
  • Tamara Broderick, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was named a 2024 Class of Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow for her significant contributions to theoretical modeling and computational methodology at the intersection of Bayesian Statistical Machine Learning and Bayesian nonparametric theory and applications.
     
  • Michael Cima, the David H. Koch Professor of Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was named a 2024 American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow in recognition of his distinguished and continuing achievements in medical and biological engineering.
     
  • Tal Cohen, associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the Arthur C Smith Award, presented to a member of the MIT faculty for meaningful contributions and devotion to undergraduate student life and learning at MIT.
     
  • Jesús del Alamo, the Donner Professor of Science in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the Intel 2023 Outstanding Researcher Award. The annual award program recognizes the exceptional contributions made through Intel university-sponsored research that help further Intel’s mission of creating world-changing technology that improves the lives of everyone on the planet.
     
  • Betar Gallant, Class of 1922 Career Development Professor and associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the Electrochemical Society’s Charles W. Tobias Young Investigator Award (245th meeting). The award recognizes outstanding scientific and/or engineering work in fundamental or applied electrochemistry or solid-state science and technology by a young scientist or engineer.
     
  • Marzyeh Ghassemi, the Germeshausen Career Development Professor and associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and MIT Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, received a Google Research Scholar Award, which are awarded to professors based on merit to support their cutting-edge research.
     
  • Linda Griffith, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation in the Department of Biological Engineering, was named to the inaugural Time100 Health, a list of the world’s most influential people in health.
     
  • Jack Hare, assistant professor and the Gale (1929) Career Development Professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, received the 2024 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching. This award recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.
     
  • Marija Ilić, senior research scientist and adjunct professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the IEEE PES Prabha S. Kundur Power System Dynamics and Control Award, which is awarded annually to leading society members and industry principals for their notable contributions to IEEE Power & Energy Society and the power and energy industry.
     
  • Piotr Indyk, the Thonas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.
     
  • Linda Kaelbling, the Panasonic Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2024 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching. This award recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.
     
  • Douglas Lauffenburger, the Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Biological Engineering, was awarded the Ernst Dieter Gilles Prize, which honors outstanding scientific achievements in the field of systems theory, system dynamics, control engineering, and systems biology.
     
  • William Oliver, the Henry Ellis Warren (1894) Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was elected to the 2023 American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows. Election as a fellow honors members whose efforts on behalf of the advancement of science or its applications in service to society have distinguished them among their peers and colleagues.
     
  • Maggie Qi, assistant professor and the Joseph R. Mares ’24 Career Development Professor, received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, which supports early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
     
  • Manish Raghavan, the Drew Houston (2005) Career Development Professor and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received a Google Research Scholar Award, awarded to professors based on merit to support their cutting-edge research.
     
  • Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering and assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the 2024 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching. This award recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.
     
  • Daniela Rus, an Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, in recognition of her distinguished and continuing achievements in original research. Membership is a widely accepted mark of excellence in science and is considered one of the highest honors that a scientist can receive.
     
  • Julian Shun, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2023 Association for Computing Machinery Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award, which honors specific theoretical accomplishments that have had a significant and demonstrable effect on the practice of computing.
     
  • Michael Short, associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering, received the Capers (1976) and Marion McDonald Award for Excellence in Mentoring and Advising, which recognizes leaders in engineering and applied sciences who, as exemplary mentors and advisors, have significantly and consistently supported the personal and professional development of others.
     
  • Jessica Stark, the Underwood-Prescott Career Development Professor and assistant professor in the Department of Biological Engineering, received the V Foundation’s Women Scientists Innovation Award for Cancer Research, awarded to women scientists to advance their innovative work in the cancer field. The award helps to address the significant funding disparities for women in science.
     
  • Greg Stephanopoulos, the Willard Henry Dow Professor in Chemical Engineering, was elected to Academia Europaea. The object of Academia Europaea is the advancement and propagation of excellence in scholarship in the humanities, law, the economic, social, and political sciences, mathematics, medicine, and all branches of natural and technological sciences anywhere in the world for the public benefit and for the advancement of the education of the public of all ages.
     
  • Russ Tedrake, the Toyota Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the School of Engineering Distinguished Educator Award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to undergraduate and/or graduate education by members of its faculty and teaching staff (lecturer or instructor).
     
  • Caroline Uhler, an Andrew (1956) and Erna Viterbi Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was named a 2024 Class of Institute of Mathematical Statistics Fellow for her interdisciplinary excellence, merging mathematical statistics and computational biology in innovative and impactful ways.
     
  • Franz-Josef Ulm, the Class of 1992 Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, received the 2024 Paul Gray Public Service Award, which recognizes a member of the MIT faculty who exemplifies building “a better world” through his or her teaching, research, advising, and service.
     
  • Martin Wainwright, a Cecil H. Green Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, awarded annually to individuals making their mark in the social sciences, the natural sciences, the humanities, and the creative arts.
     
  • Ryan Williams, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, was awarded the 2024 Gödel Prize, awarded for outstanding papers in the area of theoretical computer science.
     
  • Lizhong Zheng, professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2024 Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Excellence in Teaching. This award recognizes a person who exemplifies the best in furthering engineering design education through vision, interactions with students and industry, scholarship and impact on the next generation of engineers, and a person whose action serves as a role model for other educators to emulate.

The School of Engineering also recognizes administration staff with yearly awards each spring.

The Ellen J. Mandigo Award recognizes staff who have demonstrated, over an extended period of time, the qualities that Mandigo possessed in abundance during her long career at MIT: intelligence, skill, hard work, and dedication to the Institute. The 2024 recipients are:

  • Ted Equi in MIT Leaders for Global Operations;
  • Carol Niemi in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics; and
  • Gwen Wilcox in the Department of Chemical Engineering.

The Infinite Mile Award recognizes and rewards members of the MIT School of Engineering’s administrative, support, sponsored research, and, when appropriate, academic staff in the categories of excellence, diversity and community, and institutional cooperation. This year’s honorees are:

  • Marygrace Aboudou in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; 
  • Amanda Beyer-Purvis in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science;
  • Mahia Brown in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering;
  • Steven Derocher in MIT Leaders for Global Operation/System Design and Management;
  • Tia Giurleo in the Dean’s Office of the MIT School of Engineering;
  • Linda Gjerasi in the Department of Mechanical Engineering;
  • Suxin Hu in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics;
  • Alexis Runstadler in the Department of Biological Engineering;
  • Rebecca Shepardson in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering;
  • Michael Skocay in the Department of Mechanical Engineering;
  • Justin Snow in the Masters in Supply Chain Management Program; and
  • Christina Spinelli in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

LiveU Scores Gold at Paris Olympics: How LiveU is Transforming Coverag – Videoguys

In the article “Live from Paris: How LiveU is Transforming Coverage of the Summer Games 2024” from ProductionHub, author Omer Feingold, Vice President of Sales Engineering & Events Management at LiveU, shares exclusive insights into how LiveU is revolutionizing live sports broadcasting for the Paris Summer Olympics 2024. With its innovative IP-video solutions, LiveU is positioned as the backbone of global coverage, providing broadcasters with powerful tools to deliver high-quality, real-time video streams.

LiveU’s Role at the 2024 Summer Games

LiveU is deploying its state-of-the-art LU800 multi-cam encoders and cloud-based solutions, including LiveU Matrix, to streamline live broadcasting from various Olympic venues across Paris. These technologies enable broadcasters to capture live footage from multiple angles and transmit it directly to centralized production studios. With enhanced 5G connectivity and optimized data plans, LiveU ensures seamless, high-quality video streaming, even in densely populated areas like stadiums.

How 5G Technology is Enhancing Live Broadcasts

One of the key innovations LiveU is bringing to the 2024 Summer Olympics is the deployment of native 5G technology. LiveU’s 5G-ready portable units provide broadcasters with ultra-low latency and highly resilient live streams. This advanced technology allows for cost-effective remote production, eliminating the need for traditional broadcast methods like fiber or satellite. By using 5G, LiveU guarantees uninterrupted live coverage, even in challenging environments where network congestion is a concern.

LiveU’s Remote Production Capabilities at the Paris Olympics

LiveU’s remote production capabilities are a game-changer for broadcasters. The LU800 encoder can handle up to four high-resolution feeds, fully synchronized, allowing for more flexibility and reduced on-site crew requirements. This remote workflow minimizes the need for large production teams and equipment, cutting costs and enabling more sustainable, eco-friendly live productions.

Sustainability and Efficiency in Live Broadcasting

LiveU is committed to promoting sustainability in live broadcasting. By reducing the need for satellite trucks and large production setups, LiveU’s cloud-based solutions help decrease the carbon footprint of the Summer Games coverage. Their solutions are not only efficient but also cost-effective, making live production more accessible for broadcasters around the world.

24/7 Support for Stress-Free Broadcasting

To ensure a smooth broadcasting experience, LiveU has a dedicated team of 13 technical engineers stationed in Paris, providing 24/7 support for their clients. This hands-on approach, coupled with remote support from their global team, ensures that broadcasters can focus on delivering exceptional coverage without technical disruptions.

The Future of Sports Broadcasting with LiveU

The deployment of LiveU’s advanced technology at the 2024 Paris Olympics is setting new standards for live sports broadcasting. By offering innovative solutions like 5G connectivity, cloud-based distribution, and remote production capabilities, LiveU is not only enhancing the viewer experience but also shaping the future of how major sporting events are covered.

LiveU’s transformative role at the 2024 Summer Games showcases its commitment to providing cutting-edge solutions that enable broadcasters to produce more content, reach wider audiences, and create more engaging and interactive live experiences.

Read the full article from ProductionHub HERE

Learn more about LiveU below: