The Digital Insider | Year: 2024

Researchers demonstrate rapid 3D printing with liquid metal

MIT researchers have developed an additive manufacturing technique that can print rapidly with liquid metal, producing large-scale parts like table legs and chair frames in a matter of minutes.

Their technique, called liquid metal printing (LMP), involves depositing molten aluminum along a predefined path into a bed of tiny glass beads. The aluminum quickly hardens into a 3D structure.

Researchers demonstrate rapid 3D printing with liquid metal

Play video

The researchers say LMP is at least 10 times faster than a comparable metal additive manufacturing process, and the procedure to heat and melt the metal is more efficient than some other methods.

The technique does sacrifice resolution for speed and scale. While it can print components that are larger than those typically made with slower additive techniques, and at a lower cost, it cannot achieve high resolutions.

For instance, parts produced with LMP would be suitable for some applications in architecture, construction, and industrial design, where components of larger structures often don’t require extremely fine details. It could also be utilized effectively for rapid prototyping with recycled or scrap metal.

In a recent study, the researchers demonstrated the procedure by printing aluminum frames and parts for tables and chairs which were strong enough to withstand postprint machining. They showed how components made with LMP could be combined with high-resolution processes and additional materials to create functional furniture.

“This is a completely different direction in how we think about metal manufacturing that has some huge advantages. It has downsides, too. But most of our built world — the things around us like tables, chairs, and buildings — doesn’t need extremely high resolution. Speed and scale, and also repeatability and energy consumption, are all important metrics,” says Skylar Tibbits, associate professor in the Department of Architecture and co-director of the Self-Assembly Lab, who is senior author of a paper introducing LMP.

Tibbits is joined on the paper by lead author Zain Karsan SM ’23, who is now a PhD student at ETH Zurich; as well as Kimball Kaiser SM ’22 and Jared Laucks, a research scientist and lab co-director. The research was presented at the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture Conference and recently published in the association’s proceedings.

Significant speedup

One method for printing with metals that is common in construction and architecture, called wire arc additive manufacturing (WAAM), is able to produce large, low-resolution structures, but these can be susceptible to cracking and warping because some portions must be remelted during the printing process.

LMP, on the other hand, keeps the material molten throughout the process, avoiding some of the structural issues caused by remelting.

Drawing on the group’s previous work on rapid liquid printing with rubber, the researchers built a machine that melts aluminum, holds the molten metal, and deposits it through a nozzle at high speeds. Large-scale parts can be printed in just a few seconds, and then the molten aluminum cools in several minutes.

“Our process rate is really high, but it is also very difficult to control. It is more or less like opening a faucet. You have a big volume of material to melt, which takes some time, but once you get that to melt, it is just like opening a tap. That enables us to print these geometries very quickly,” Karsan explains.

The team chose aluminum because it is commonly used in construction and can be recycled cheaply and efficiently.

Bread loaf-sized pieces of aluminum are deposited into an electric furnace, “which is basically like a scaled-up toaster,” Karsan adds. Metal coils inside the furnace heat the metal to 700 degrees Celsius, slightly above aluminum’s 660-degree melting point.

The aluminum is held at a high temperature in a graphite crucible, and then molten material is gravity-fed through a ceramic nozzle into a print bed along a preset path. They found that the larger the amount of aluminum they could melt, the faster the printer can go.

“Molten aluminum will destroy just about everything in its path. We started with stainless steel nozzles and then moved to titanium before we ended up with ceramic. But even ceramic nozzles can clog because the heating is not always entirely uniform in the nozzle tip,” Karsan says.

By injecting the molten material directly into a granular substance, the researchers don’t need to print supports to hold the aluminum structure as it takes shape.

Perfecting the process

They experimented with a number of materials to fill the print bed, including graphite powders and salt, before selecting 100-micron glass beads. The tiny glass beads, which can withstand the extremely high temperature of molten aluminum, act as a neutral suspension so the metal can cool quickly.

“The glass beads are so fine that they feel like silk in your hand. The powder is so small that it doesn’t really change the surface characteristics of the printed object,” Tibbits says.

The amount of molten material held in the crucible, the depth of the print bed, and the size and shape of the nozzle have the biggest impacts on the geometry of the final object.

For instance, parts of the object with larger diameters are printed first, since the amount of aluminum the nozzle dispenses tapers off as the crucible empties. Changing the depth of the nozzle alters the thickness of the metal structure.

To aid in the LMP process, the researchers developed a numerical model to estimate the amount of material that will be deposited into the print bed at a given time.

Because the nozzle pushes into the glass bead powder, the researchers can’t watch the molten aluminum as it is deposited, so they needed a way to simulate what should be going on at certain points in the printing process, Tibbits explains.

They used LMP to rapidly produce aluminum frames with variable thicknesses, which were durable enough to withstand machining processes like milling and boring. They demonstrated a combination of LMP and these post-processing techniques to make chairs and a table composed of lower-resolution, rapidly printed aluminum parts and other components, like wood pieces.

Moving forward, the researchers want to keep iterating on the machine so they can enable consistent heating in the nozzle to prevent material from sticking, and also achieve better control over the flow of molten material. But larger nozzle diameters can lead to irregular prints, so there are still technical challenges to overcome.

“If we could make this machine something that people could actually use to melt down recycled aluminum and print parts, that would be a game-changer in metal manufacturing. Right now, it is not reliable enough to do that, but that’s the goal,” Tibbits says.

“At Emeco, we come from the world of very analog manufacturing, so seeing the liquid metal printing creating nuanced geometries with the potential for fully structural parts was really compelling,” says Jaye Buchbinder, who leads business development for the furniture company Emeco and was not involved with this work. “The liquid metal printing really walks the line in terms of ability to produce metal parts in custom geometries while maintaining quick turnaround that you don’t normally get in other printing or forming technologies. There is definitely potential for the technology to revolutionize the way metal printing and metal forming are currently handled.”

Unlocking history with geology and genetics

Fatima Husain grew up in the heart of the Midwest, surrounded by agriculture. “Every time you left your home, you saw fields of corn and soybeans. And it was really quite beautiful,” she says. During elementary school, she developed her own love of gardening and cultivated a small plot in her family’s backyard.

“Having the freedom to make a mess, experiment, and see things grow was very impactful,” says Husain, a fourth-year doctoral candidate in the MIT Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and a Hugh Hampton Young Fellow. This experimentation in the garden was the seed that blossomed into her fascination with science. “When you think about gardening and agriculture in Iowa,” she says, “you think about soil and its origins, which led me to geology and geochemistry and all these interdisciplinary fields that play a role in the Earth sciences.”

Husain has maintained that scientific curiosity throughout her academic career. As a graduate student in EAPS’ Program in Geology, Geochemistry, and Geobiology, she studies the fossil and genetic records of ancient and modern life forms to better understand the history of life on Earth. She says, “Twenty years ago, I was a stoked kid working with topsoil in Iowa. Now, I get to work with ancient dirt and sediments to better understand Earth and life’s past.”

Sharing science

Though Husain loved her environmental science class in high school, when she enrolled at Brown University, she wasn’t sure which STEM major to pursue. Then, a guest lecture in her first-year biology course dispelled any uncertainty. “A professor walked on stage and introduced himself as a biogeochemist, and after that, everything just clicked,” she says. Within weeks of that fateful lecture, she had declared a major in geochemistry. “I’ve never looked back,” she says.

She then immersed herself in her Earth science classes, which applied the core science disciplines she studied to topics such as the oceans, weather and climate, and water quality. “I gained a sincere appreciation for the excellent teaching and writing that helped me access the world of the geosciences,” she says, “And that helped me realize the value in communicating science clearly.”

To hone her writing skills, Husain took nonfiction writing classes as her electives and joined one of the school newspapers. There, she took on the role of science writer and editor. As she neared graduation, she knew that she would eventually pursue geochemistry at the graduate level, but first she wanted to focus on journalism and writing. She reasoned that, if she could formally learn the fundamentals of science writing and reporting, then “I could more effectively share all the science I learned after that point,” she says. With the support of her undergraduate professors, she decided to apply to MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, one of the only such programs in the country.

The program refined Husain’s writing skills and paved the way for her to pursue science journalism opportunities across a variety of media, including print, video, podcasting, and radio. She worked as a writing intern for MIT News during this time, and has written a number of MIT News articles while at MIT. After graduating, she served as a Curiosity Correspondent for the MIT-Nord Anglia Education Collaboration based at the MIT Museum. In that role, she says, “I worked on communicating the amazing science happening here at MIT to K-12 students around the world via educational videos.” Since beginning her PhD studies, Husain has transitioned to a new role in the collaboration — hosting a monthly webinar series called MIT Abstracts, which connects MIT researchers and experts with an international audience of middle schoolers.

Along the way, Husain has also worked as a reporter and managing producer for a Rhode Island-based sustainability science radio show called Possibly. In 2019, she founded a podcast with her colleagues called BIOmarkers, which serves as an oral history project for the discipline of organic geochemistry.

Acquiring the “biggest tool set” possible

After completing her master’s thesis, Husain began to return to her roots in geochemistry. She says, “At some point, when I was interviewing other scientists and they described their experiments, I’d miss being in the lab myself. That feeling helped me realize the time was right to get back into research.” Husain chose to stay at MIT for her PhD. “I couldn’t resist the opportunity to continue working on challenging, interdisciplinary problems within such an exciting environment,” she says. “There really is no other place quite like it.”

She joined the lab group of Roger Summons, the Schlumberger Professor of Geobiology. For her first project as a research assistant, Husain helped then-postdoc Ainara Sistiaga reconstruct the environment of Tanzania’s Olduvai Gorge 1.7 million years into the past, using molecule-scale fossils preserved in archeological sediments. Part of Africa’s Great Rift Valley, the site preserves evidence of ancient hominin tools and activities. The research team’s findings were later published in published in PNAS.

Under the mentorship of her advisors, Gregory Fournier, an associate professor of geobiology, and Summons, Husain studies both the fossil record and the genetic records of organisms alive today to answer fundamental questions about life’s evolution on Earth. “The farther back into Earth’s history we go, the fewer complete records we have,” Husain says, “To answer the questions that arise, I hope to employ the biggest tool set I can.”

Currently, Husain investigates the biomarkers of microbes living in Antarctic biofilms, which she hopes will provide hints about the types of places where the ancestors of complex life sheltered during global glaciation events through Earth’s Cryogenian period, which stretched between 720 to 635 million years ago. To do this, Husain applies techniques from chemistry, such as chromatography and mass spectrometry, to isolate and study microbial lipids, the precursors of molecular fossils preserved in the geologic record.

Husain also uses “molecular clocks,” tools which employ the genetic sequences of living organisms to estimate when in evolutionary time different species diverged, to better understand how long ago aerobic respiration arose on Earth. Using the growing databases of publicly available gene sequences, Husain says it’s possible to track the histories of metabolisms that arose billions of years ago in Earth’s past. Much of her research can also be applied to astrobiology, the study of potential life elsewhere in the universe.

As a PhD student, Husain has also had the opportunity to serve as teaching assistant for 12.885 (Science, Politics, and Environmental Policy) for two semesters. In that role, she says, “My goal is to help students improve their writing skills so that they are equipped to successfully communicate about important issues in science and policy in the future.”

Looking ahead, Husain hopes to continue applying both her science and communication skills to challenging problems related to Earth and the environment. Along the way, she knows that she wants to share the opportunities that she had with others. “Whichever form it takes,” she says, “I hope to play a role in cultivating the same types of supportive environments which have led me here.”

Give Us Feedback For A Chance To Win A Game Informer Gold Copy Of The Final Fantasy VII Rebirth Issue

For every issue of Game Informer magazine, we print a handful of Game Informer Gold editions. These versions sometimes feature alternate art, have a gold embossed logo on the front, are individually numbered and feature higher quality paper. They’re very nice, and we reserve them for special occasions like charity auctions or, as is the case here, giveaways.

For the recent Final Fantasy VII Rebirth issue featuring both Cloud and Sephiroth awash in an ocean of flame, we have two Game Informer Gold editions we are prepared to send to readers. For a chance at winning one of these collectible issues, we want to hear from you about what’s on your mind about gaming and Game Informer. Send a message to our Feedback for a chance to be featured in our monthly magazine letters column.

[embedded content]

If you fill out the form below before February 12, 2024, you will be entered to win one of two Game Informer Gold copies of our Final Fantasy VII Rebirth issue. In terms of the kind of feedback we’re looking for, we want thoughtful responses to our content, general thoughts on the video game industry, your criticisms of previously released or upcoming games, or anything else that will make the magazine better. We’re flexible! We want to know what’s on your mind, and potentially share your thoughts and questions with the rest of Game Informer’s readers.

We’re looking forward to your responses and we hope you are looking forward to seeing your responses in the magazine. Good luck! And please enjoy a little necessary legalese before you fill out and submit the form below.

Giveaway valid for U.S. addresses only. Responses must reach a baseline level of quality and originality to be considered valid. Winners will be notified through the email address linked to their GameInformer.com account. If response is not received within 5 business days, winners may forfeit their prize.

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review – Passing The Torch – Game Informer

By the time I saw the credits on Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, I felt like I had been through the emotional ringer. I was mentally exhausted. I think that’s by design. Infinite Wealth is developer Ryu Ga Gotoku’s (RGG) most ambitious project by a long shot – an epic tale told across multiple characters and continents, featuring the conclusion of some nearly 20-year-old plot threads that leave at least one character, quite literally and relatably, asleep in the streets. Some of this is the best work the developer has ever done, a new watermark for the series going forward. And some of it is some of the studio’s worst. Like everything in Infinite Wealth, it’s complicated.

Infinite Wealth picks up a few years after the events of Yakuza: Like a Dragon and continues the story of dual-series protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, a former yakuza who’s now taken up work trying to help rehabilitate other yakuza members back into society by finding them jobs. By the laws of narrative, this goes horribly wrong, and it’s not long before Ichiban and friends, who now all find themselves out of work, are back in the folds of the criminal underworld. After the dissolution of the nation’s two biggest families, the Tojo Clan and the Omi Alliance, in the previous game, the Seiryu Clan reigns supreme in Yokohama’s Ijincho district. The group is not only working on its own dissolution program and trying to give former yakuza work, but it also has information on Ichiban’s long-lost mother, Akane. He just needs to go to Hawaii to find her.

Once in Hawaii, Ichiban quickly runs into his counterpart and former star of the show Kiryu Kazuma. Kiryu plays a much larger role in this game than in Like a Dragon before it – mainly because he’s also a playable character. Ichiban and Kiryu being playable in the same game represents a passing of the torch of sorts, and I truly love the time I got to spend with Kiryu. He’s an old man now with cancer and a few months to live. He’s coming to terms with his life, and Infinite Wealth goes a long way in softening and humanizing him. I always felt that letting Kiryu live after the events of Yakuza 6, where he faked his death, was the wrong call. This game reckons with that idea a lot, and even if I’m not totally sold on where it ends up, I like the road it takes to get there a lot.

The dual protagonists also give the cast the chance to expand and breathe. At one point in the story, Kiryu and a small team of characters from the previous game return to Japan, leaving Ichiban with a cast of mostly new characters. The game jumps back and forth between the two, allowing tons of time to get to know everyone. I especially love newcomers Chitose and Tomizawa and never skipped a moment to learn more about the central cast.

Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth Review – Passing The Torch – Game Informer

Moving a bulk of the game’s story to Hawaii allows RGG to open up its narrative potential. No longer confined to just Japan, the studio aims common issues facing America today – including further criticisms of the treatment of the unhoused and sex workers, something it examined in Japan in previous games. America’s corrupt police state gets especially harsh criticism as we see how the police abuse its position to exploit common citizens and foreigners and ignore its roles within society. The Yakuza/Like a Dragon series has always been political, and RGG has always been very opinionated. While the studio hasn’t always stuck the landing, Infinite Wealth reinforces how the studio is insistent on tackling these concepts. Seeing a studio successfully approaching these issues with maturity is incredibly refreshing.

That’s not to say this game isn’t still about the yakuza. Infinite Wealth pulls from the real-world laws against former members of Japanese crime families. It examines whether or not they’re actually useful means of rehabilitation while also looking at the ways these groups can be easily exploited by those in power. Kiryu, as a character, beautifully fits this narrative hook. He is a criminal, after all; for all the good he’s done, his past is full of darkness. Ichiban, too. What does it mean to reintroduce criminals into society, rehabilitate them, allow them to be sorry, and offer them forgiveness? What does it mean to let these people live normal lives again, and will society ever actually allow that? The best moments of Infinite Wealth are when these questions are called into focus, and I was constantly surprised at the empathy and nuance RGG showed throughout the story.

But it takes some pretty spectacular stumbles on the way to that greatness. Much of the Hawaii plotline revolves around the Palekana religious cult, which Akane is a member of, and its figurehead, Bryce Fairchild. For all the nuance and thought put into its real-world topics, the game’s portrayal of cults and religious fanaticism is laughable at best and completely superfluous at worst. Bryce is certainly evil; it’s just that he’s evil in a way with no depth. RGG has gone to great lengths to humanize its villains and give meanings to their actions – and the other antagonists of Infinite Wealth have loads of interesting motives. But not Bryce. He’s just a bad guy. And a boring one at that. The game is all too quick to shove the Palekana story aside, including characters it spent dozens of hours building up to focus on other topics. Almost like the game itself knows it isn’t very good. It’s unfortunate because this plotline is stacked against some of the best moments in the series.

Unfortunate, too, is how that story is delivered. As usual, Infinite Wealth features some of the best acting in the entire game industry – most of the time. A lot of the Japanese talent behind the main cast is incredible, especially newcomers such as Satoru Iguchi, of King Gnu fame, who plays Tomizawa. His entire arc is wonderfully realized, moving, and funny. On the other hand, other characters fall entirely flat. For example, Bryce is written to be fluent in both Japanese and English. His Japanese is great. His English sounds like someone reading the words out phonetically in a different language. In fact, many of the American characters are clearly voiced by actors struggling to deliver their English lines. Switching to the English VO doesn’t help much either, as the main cast feels awful when contrasted against who they are as people – with the exception of maybe Danny Trejo’s character. The voice acting is full of odd choices such as this that, depending on the character, can really pull you out of the moment.

Luckily, Infinite Wealth’s gameplay is often stellar across the board. As always, it’s a joy to explore RGG’s open worlds, and the three here – Kamurocho, Ijincho, and Honolulu – are all fantastic. Honolulu, especially, has a completely different vibe than other RGG worlds, and I loved exploring its bright beaches, seedy back streets, and luxurious hotel districts. Taking Kiryu back to the streets of Kamurocho is wonderfully nostalgic, too, and Infinite Wealth wastes no time letting him reminisce and enjoy his old haunts. I spent so much time taking Kiryu to places from the old games, loving how much thought went into how we would react.

You spend the vast majority of your time as you do in any other RGG game: beating the holy hell out of dudes in the street. Infinite Wealth continues Like a Dragon’s change to turn-based combat, and the updates here make for a surprisingly deep and engaging system. Including directional and combo attacks adds interesting layers to how you approach an enemy. Exploiting an enemy’s weakness and, in turn, having multiple members of your party dynamically attack the same foe in one turn consistently feels great. And I was always excited to see what new whacky animations I’d see when getting new magic attacks.

Infinite Wealth’s job system – effectively how you change character classes and a returning mechanic from the previous game – creates a ton of interesting team line-ups, and I really enjoyed experimenting and building out as well-rounded a party as I could. Upgrading your job level also allows you to import skills from other jobs, leading to some truly dynamic characters with various elemental attacks. That said, while I do love combat, grinding out levels in the game’s dungeon was a real chore at times – boring, monotonous, and took way too long for its own good.

Your mileage will vary with the game’s unbelievable amount of side content. Infinite Wealth surprised me with its substories, which I’ve historically never really enjoyed in other games. Here, I found some of them deeply funny (there’s one about a dating app that’s great) and well-thought-out. I also enjoyed a lot of the mini-games, such as the Crazy Taxi-inspired food delivery game and finding all the optional conversations and character links. However, I did not enjoy the Animal Crossing-inspired Dondoko Island or the Pokémon-like collecting and fighting games, which I found incredibly dull and convoluted. Luckily, they are optional after their introduction, but that intro grinds the game to a halt so it can slowly explain all the various rules and mechanics. There are plenty of other side activities I didn’t have time to even touch, and I imagine there are easily 100-plus hours of the game for the most dedicated. Some of it’s pretty dang good. I just hope I never have to go back to Dondoko Island ever again.

Infinite Wealth is a swing for the fences for RGG. At one point, the Yakuza series was a cult classic relegated to small fanbases outside of Japan. That changed in 2017 when Yakuza 0 finally hit it big. By the time Yakuza: Like a Dragon came out in 2020, it was clear RGG had a phenomenon on its hands. The result of that success is a massive game brimming with things to do and say. Sometimes, it’s too much. There’s a version of Infinite Wealth that leaves a lot on the cutting room floor and saves itself loads of tedium. There were so many hours that I wished that was the game I was playing instead.

And yet, I can’t help but be amazed by what it does pull off over its impressively long run-time. It’s rare to see a triple-A video game have anything worthwhile to say about the need for criminal rehabilitation, the police state, and even nuclear disposal. Somehow, this game has all those topics and smart (albeit somewhat surface-level) things to say about them. I’m shocked that its combat system consistently felt new and fresh after 60 hours and that I was finding new ways to use it. That it gave me so much time with some of my favorite characters in video games, allowing me to know them so much deeper than I ever knew before, was just the cherry on top.

In one of the final moments of Infinite Wealth, one of the characters falls exhausted into the street, beaten down by everything that just came before. As he does so, he looks satisfied and happy, even though arguably nothing is going right for him at that moment. In a lot of ways, I felt the exact same by the end of the game. I was tired. And yet, I was also ready to see what this crew would get up to next.

The Future of Cloud Security: 20 Statistics & Trends to Track

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:

In a decade driven by digital transformation, the increased reliance on cloud computing has presented unprecedented opportunities for businesses, enabling scalability and efficiency. However, the shift to cloud has also introduced challenges — particularly in relation to cyber security.

As you strategize and prepare for the remainder of the year, it’s crucial to maintain an in-depth understanding of the contemporary cloud security landscape. In this article, explore 20 statistics and trends that will keep your organization up-to-date and ready to combat tomorrow’s threats.

The future of cloud security: Statistics and trends

1. Cloud breaches on the rise. Seventy-nine percent of companies have contended with at least one cloud breach in the last 18 months, underscoring the urgency around new and robust cloud security measures.

2. It’s tougher for large businesses. Nearly a third of all large businesses say that securing cloud assets and resources is a major challenge, highlighting the level of heightened complexity that organizations with extensive digital footprints face.

3. Expanding volume of cloud data. By the end of 2025, experts predict that the cloud will host a staggering 100 zettabytes of data. This means that cloud storage demands will soar, as will the need for unified and automated cloud security.

4. Ubiquity of cloud adoption. Ninety-two percent of organizations already have some of their IT environment hosted in the cloud. In other words, cloud infrastructure has been embraced, and organizations need to keep proactively expanding cloud security initiatives.

5. Sensitive data in the cloud. Nearly 50% of businesses use the cloud to store sensitive data; both encrypted and unencrypted. Organizations must prioritize effective encryption practices, mitigating the risks associated with unauthorized access and breaches.

6. Real-time security assessments lagging. Only one in five organizations assesses their overall cloud security posture in real-time, indicating that many organizations have a gap in their security measures.

7. Challenges in multi-cloud environments. Eighty-six percent of organizations experience issues while managing data in multi-cloud environments. Streamline and simplify your multi-cloud security this year.

8. Insecure APIs a key concern. In a survey, more than 50% of cyber security experts mentioned insecure APIs as a critical cloud security concern. Strengthening API security should be a focal point within cloud security strategies.

9. Cost of breaches in hybrid environments. In 2023, the average cost of a breach in a hybrid cloud environment was $3.61 million, with projections indicating a continued, severe financial impact caused by security lapses.

10. Automation in cloud security. Seventy-eight percent of companies currently assess cloud security through automation. As the year progresses, an increasing number of organizations should and likely will implement automated cloud security solutions.

11. Rise of Zero Trust approach. Eighty percent of enterprises have stated that they are considering, evaluating or deploying Zero Trust. This reflects a shift towards more stringent cyber security models.

12. Demand for comprehensive assessments. Nearly 80% of organizations are seeking a more comprehensive cloud security assessment. This trend highlights increased awareness of cloud security challenges and a growing demand for holistic security solutions.

13. Targeting newer cloud technologies. In 2024, cyber security experts anticipate more frequent attacks that target newer cloud technologies, such as container-based resources. Be sure to leverage corresponding security best practices.

14. Cloud security spending forecast. Cloud security is expected to remain as the fastest-growing area of security and risk management spending this year. In other words, organizations appear to be prioritizing cloud security investments.

15. Projected spending in 2024. Cloud security spending in 2024 is predicted to reach $7 billion, signifying a substantial financial commitment to fortifying cloud infrastructure.

16. AI-driven cloud management. In 2024, AI-driven cloud management is expected to shift from novelty to norm, enabling organizations to enhance security performance and advance overall cloud operations.

17. Focus on serverless security. As serverless computing expands, organizations need to pay greater attention to security, doing so by adopting serverless security tools and best practices.

18. Continued growth of Kubernetes. In 2024, Kubernetes is expected to maintain growth and relevance, pointing to its importance in container orchestration and management.

19. Increased cloud threat detection spending. Nearly 90% of organizations expect to increase Cloud Threat Detection and Response (CDR) spending.

20. Adaptability as a key theme. Organizations will likely need to cultivate new mindsets and to expand efforts to secure sensitive data amidst evolving threats. Adaptation is central to ensuring resilient and future-proof cloud security strategies.

Conclusion

Ready for what’s next? The stats and insights offer a few key takeaways — Organizations need to be proactive and need to adopt comprehensive cloud security solutions.

But more than that, cloud security success hinges on the abilities to stay agile, innovative and eager to continuously improve.

More future of cloud security resources

10 cloud security essentials 2024 – Read article
CEO Gil Shwed explains how Check Point CloudGuard works – Watch video
Discover advanced cloud security product information – Here

MIT Faculty Founder Initiative announces finalists for second competition

The MIT Faculty Founder Initiative has announced 12 finalists for the 2023-24 MIT-Royalty Pharma Prize Competition. The competition, which is supported by Royalty Pharma, aims to support female faculty entrepreneurs in biotechnology and provide them with resources to help take their ideas to commercialization.

“We are building a playbook to get inventions out of the lab towards impacting patients by connecting female faculty to the innovation ecosystem and creating a community of peers,” says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John J. and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and faculty director of the MIT Faculty Founder Initiative.

Throughout the academic year, finalists for the prize competition will receive support through a number of events, workshops, and programs. These activities focus on topics ranging from executive education classes in entrepreneurship to intellectual property and fundraising strategy. Participants also have access to over 50 best-in-class executives, investors, and advisors who have volunteered to provide mentorship and guidance to the finalists as they further develop their startup ideas.

This spring, the cohort will pitch their ideas to a selection committee of faculty, biotech founders, and venture capitalists. The grand prize winner will receive $250,000 in discretionary funds, and the breakthrough science award winner and runner-up award winner will each receive $100,000. The winners will be announced at a showcase event on May 2, at which the entire cohort will share their work. All participants also receive a $10,000 stipend for participating in the competition.

“The support the MIT Faculty Founder Initiative provides female entrepreneurs in biotech is tremendous. Participants receive truly invaluable guidance from some of the world’s top experts to help hone their ideas and launch companies that have the potential to make a real impact in the biotech space,” adds Anantha Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The MIT Faculty Founder Initiative was launched in 2020 by the MIT School of Engineering, in collaboration with the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. The idea for the program stemmed from a research project Bhatia conducted alongside Susan Hockfield, MIT Corporation life member, MIT president emerita, and professor of neuroscience, and Nancy Hopkins, professor emerita of biology. The team discovered that of the 250 biotech startups created by MIT professors, fewer than 10 percent had been founded by women, who made up 22 percent of all faculty.

In their research, the team estimated that if female faculty founded startups at the same rate as their male counterparts, there would be 40 more biotech companies.

“What that means is 40 more potential medicines. The societal impact of that is really important. It’s a lost opportunity,” says Bhatia, who co-write an editorial in Science alongside Hopkins and Hockfield.

In 2021, the Faculty Founder Initiative launched its first prize competition, which was supported by Northpond Ventures. Nine finalists pitched their ideas, with Ellen Roche, Latham Family Career Development Professor, an associate professor of mechanical engineering, and a core faculty of the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES), taking the grand prize. Eight of the nine participants have continued on their entrepreneurial journey.

The second prize competition cohort includes researchers affiliated with MIT as well as Brown University.

“We are thrilled to be supporting the 2023-2024 MIT-Royalty Pharma Prize Competition and this cohort of 12 brilliant researchers. Their ideas can lead to transformative solutions for patients around the world,” says Pablo Legorreta, founder and CEO of Royalty Pharma.

The 2023-24 finalists include:

Anne Carpenter, institute scientist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, serves as the senior director of the Imaging Platform. She is an expert in developing and applying methods for extracting quantitative information from biological images, especially in a high-throughput manner. Her group’s open-source CellProfiler software is used by thousands of biologists worldwide and their Cell Painting assay has been adopted throughout the pharma industry to accelerate drug discovery. Carpenter earned a BS from Purdue University and a PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Kareen Coulombe, associate professor of engineering, is the director of graduate studies in biomedical engineering at Brown University and leads the Coulombe Lab for Heart Regeneration and Health. She studies cardiac regenerative medicine — from fundamentals of tissue formation and contractility to integration with the host heart — to develop translational therapies for heart disease patients around the world. Coulombe received a BS from the University of Rochester and a PhD from the University of Washington.
Betar Gallant, Class of 1922 Career Development Professor and associate professor of mechanical engineering, leads the Gallant Energy and Carbon Conversion Lab. Her research focuses on advanced battery chemistries and materials for high-energy rechargeable and primary batteries. She is also developing insights into reaction mechanisms that underpin advanced greenhouse gas mitigation technologies. Gallant received her BS, master’s degree, and PhD from MIT.
Carolina Haass-Koffler, associate professor of psychiatry and human behavior and associate professor of behavioral and social sciences at Brown University, is the chief of Brown’s Clinical Neuroscience Lab. As a translational investigator, she combines preclinical and clinical research in an effort to examine bio-behavioral mechanisms of addiction and developing novel therapeutic interventions. Haass-Koffler received her BS from the University of California at Berkeley, her PharmD from the University of California at San Francisco, and her PhD from Università di Camerino.
Stephanie Jones is a professor of neuroscience at Brown University. Her research integrates human brain imaging and computational neuroscience methods to study brain dynamics in health and disease. She aims to develop biophysically principled models of neural circuits that bridge electrophysiological measures of brain function to the underlying cellular and network level dynamics. Jones received a BS and master’s degree in mathematics from Boston College, and a PhD in mathematics from Boston University, followed by neuroscience training at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).
Laura Lewis is the Athinoula A. Martinos Associate Professor of IMES and EECS at MIT, principal investigator in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at MIT, and an associate faculty member at the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging at MGH. Lewis focuses on neuroimaging approaches that better map brain function, with a particular focus on sleep. She is developing computational and signal processing approaches for neuroimaging data and applying these tools to study how neural computation is dynamically modulated across sleep, wake, attentional, and affective states. Lewis earned a BS at McGill University and a PhD at MIT.
Frederike Petzschner, assistant professor at the Carney Institute for Brain Science at Brown University. She also serves as the director of the Brainstorm Program, an incubator program that accelerates the translation of computational brain science to clinical applications and commercialization. She and her team at the PEAC (Psychiatry, Embodiment, and Computation) Lab study the latent cognitive processes that underpin perception and decision-making in both healthy individuals and those suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, and, most recently, chronic pain. The group recently launched SOMA, a digital tool designed to assist individuals with chronic pain. Petzschner received a BS and MS from the University of Würzburg and a PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich.
Theresa Raimondo is an assistant professor of engineering at Brown University. Her research broadly centers around the design of RNA-lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) for therapeutic applications. By modulating both the RNA molecule (structure and sequence) and the lipid nanoparticle formulation, her team can deliver RNA-LNPs to immune cells in vivo for immunotherapy. In this application, siRNA-LNPs are used as a novel cancer checkpoint inhibitor therapy. Raimondo received a BS from Brown University and a MS and PhD from Harvard University.
Ritu Raman, the Brit (1961) and Alex (1949) d’Arbeloff Career Development Professor in Engineering Design and assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, designs adaptive living materials powered by assemblies of living cells for applications ranging from medicine to machines. Currently, she is focused on building living neuromuscular tissues to advance understanding of human disease and restore mobility after injury or trauma. Raman received a BS from Cornell University and an MS and PhD as an NSF Fellow from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Deblina Sarkar, the AT&T Career Development Professor and assistant professor of media arts and sciences at MIT, is the founder and director of the Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek research group. She conducts transdisciplinary research fusing engineering, applied physics, and biology, aiming to bridge the gap between nanotechnology and synthetic biology to develop disruptive technologies for nanoelectronic devices and create new paradigms for life-nanomachine symbiosis. She received a BTech from the Indian Institute of Technology and an MS and PhD from the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Jessica Stark starts as assistant professor in the departments of Biological Engineering and Chemical Engineering and the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research at MIT this month. She develops biological technologies to realize the largely untapped potential of glycans for immunological discovery and immunotherapy. Stark received a BS from Cornell University and a PhD from Northwestern University.
Joelle Straehla is a Charles W. (1995) and Jennifer C. Johnson Clinical Investigator at the Koch Institute, a pediatric oncologist at Dana-Farber/Boston Children’s Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, and an instructor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. She conducts research at the intersection of nanotechnology and systems biology with the ultimate goal of accelerating cancer nanomedicine translation. She received a BS from the University of Florida and an MD from Northwestern University.

Q&A: What sets the recent Japan earthquake apart from others?

On Jan. 1, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the western side of Japan on the Noto Peninsula, killing over 200 people. Japan is prone to earthquakes, including a magnitude 9.1 earthquake in 2011 that triggered a tsunami and killed almost 20,000 people.

William Frank, the Victor P. Starr Career Development Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, has been studying an earthquake swarm in the region where the most recent earthquake occurred. He explains the difference between subduction earthquakes and earthquake swarms, and why the unknown nature of these swarms makes predictions hard.

Q: Why is Japan prone to earthquakes?

A: Japan is prone to earthquakes because it is at the western edge of the Pacific plate and a more complicated junction where two plates are subducting, or plunging, beneath the tectonic plate that Japan is sitting on. It’s at the interface between those plates where you’re going to have a lot of earthquakes, because you’re generating stress as the plates move past one another.

But interestingly, this earthquake was not due to subduction. It’s on the west coast of the island, and the subduction zones are on the east coast. There are still a lot of active tectonics that are not related to subduction. This one place is enigmatic [as to] why there are so many earthquakes, but there’s been this earthquake swarm happening there since 2020. This latest earthquake is the latest big earthquake in the swarm.

This map shows the radius of the intensity surrounding the epicenter of the earthquake in colored lines, while the box over the Noto Peninsula designates the slip amplitude in the area.

Image courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey

Q: What is an earthquake swarm, and how can you tell this earthquake is a part of it?

A: Normally you have the big earthquake, what we call the mainshock, that is followed by a sequence of aftershocks. But in a swarm, there’s no clear mainshock because there’s a lot of earthquakes before and there’s also a lot of earthquakes afterwards. Often there will just be one earthquake that will be bigger than the rest sometime within that swarm duration.

Earthquake swarms are typically around plate boundaries. There’s a lot of them in subduction zones but not only [there] — there are also earthquake swarms, for example, in Southern California. These can last days, months, years. We call it a swarm is because it’s generating many more earthquakes than we expect from that region, in sustained activity, for the past few years.

Q: How can you tell a swarm from general seismic activity in the region?

A: It’s not obvious; it’ll take some time before you realize that what’s happening now is not what was happening previously. Typically, it’s something that ramps up, attains some sort of sustained activity level, and then ramps back down.

Q: Tying it into the 2011 earthquake, which caused significantly more damage, what makes an earthquake more damaging than others?

A: The 2011 earthquake was the subduction of the Pacific plate beneath Japan. In there, you have a lot of fault real estate that can rupture altogether and generate a magnitude 9 earthquake. That earthquake was offshore of Japan, so the shaking was strong, but the biggest damage came from the tsunami. The sudden motion of the seafloor moved the water on top, and that created a big tsunami that then caused its own set of aftereffects and damage to the coast of Japan.

For this earthquake on the Noto Peninsula, because it was beneath the land it’s not going to have that sudden uplift of the water on top and feed that tsunami. After the New Year’s Day earthquake, the Japanese authorities initially put out a bunch of tsunami alerts, but then eventually removed them when they realized that we don’t expect this to generate the motion necessary for a tsunami. Depending on the tectonic context, a tsunami will likely be generated or not by an earthquake, and that is often the hazard that causes the most amount of damage.

Q: What can these swarms tell us about future activity in the region?

A: Going back to the mainshock/aftershock earthquake sequence, we know that there’s going to be an elevated rate [of activity] for the next few days or months, and that these earthquakes are going to happen in the general region of where that big earthquake happened.

For a swarm, because we don’t understand it as well, we don’t have a clear idea of what’s going to happen. Sometimes we’ve seen swarms that are actually stopped by a big earthquake, and then there’s nothing else afterwards — it sort of shuts down the system. Sometimes it’s just the biggest earthquake in a long sequence of earthquakes.

Q: You’ll often hear people talking about big earthquakes being foreshocks or predictors for bigger earthquakes to come. Do we need to be worried about this being a foreshock?

A: When we are thinking about something along the lines of what you just mentioned, it’s because we’re thinking about the earthquake budget along a tectonic plate boundary. On a boundary, we know the relative motion and we know that the plates are pretty much rigid, so that all the motion is being accommodated at the interface between the two plates. That gives us some budget for how these plates are going to move over a long period of time.

Let’s say, for example, there’s a magnitude 7, but we know that there’s enough slip budget potentially for a magnitude 8, then maybe that magnitude 7 will change the stress state of that tectonic environment and make it so that the eight might come quicker than if the seven hadn’t happened.

But that’s when we put ourselves within the context of a tectonic plate interface, like the subduction zones off the coast of East Japan. For this swarm, we don’t have a good idea beforehand of what are the actual structures that are going to host the earthquakes. Because we don’t have a good idea of where the earthquakes can potentially happen, we can’t use that simple model of a slip budget along a fault. Until we have a better understanding of which structures are hosting the earthquakes and the relative motion we expect on those over a long period of time, we can’t really forecast what.

Will AI transform law?

The hype is not supported by current evidence…

Generating the policy of tomorrow

As first-year students in the Social and Engineering Systems (SES) doctoral program within the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS), Eric Liu and Ashely Peake share an interest in investigating housing inequality issues.

They also share a desire to dive head-first into their research.

“In the first year of your PhD, you’re taking classes and still getting adjusted, but we came in very eager to start doing research,” Liu says.

Liu, Peake, and many others found an opportunity to do hands-on research on real-world problems at the MIT Policy Hackathon, an initiative organized by students in IDSS, including the Technology and Policy Program (TPP). The weekend-long, interdisciplinary event — now in its sixth year — continues to gather hundreds of participants from around the globe to explore potential solutions to some of society’s greatest challenges.

This year’s theme, “Hack-GPT: Generating the Policy of Tomorrow,” sought to capitalize on the popularity of generative AI (like the chatbot ChatGPT) and the ways it is changing how we think about technical and policy-based challenges, according to Dansil Green, a second-year TPP master’s student and co-chair of the event.

“We encouraged our teams to utilize and cite these tools, thinking about the implications that generative AI tools have on their different challenge categories,” Green says.

After 2022’s hybrid event, this year’s organizers pivoted back to a virtual-only approach, allowing them to increase the overall number of participants in addition to increasing the number of teams per challenge by 20 percent.

“Virtual allows you to reach more people — we had a high number of international participants this year — and it helps reduce some of the costs,” Green says. “I think going forward we are going to try and switch back and forth between virtual and in-person because there are different benefits to each.”

“When the magic hits”

Liu and Peake competed in the housing challenge category, where they could gain research experience in their actual field of study.

“While I am doing housing research, I haven’t necessarily had a lot of opportunities to work with actual housing data before,” says Peake, who recently joined the SES doctoral program after completing an undergraduate degree in applied math last year. “It was a really good experience to get involved with an actual data problem, working closer with Eric, who’s also in my lab group, in addition to meeting people from MIT and around the world who are interested in tackling similar questions and seeing how they think about things differently.”

Joined by Adrian Butterton, a Boston-based paralegal, as well as Hudson Yuen and Ian Chan, two software engineers from Canada, Liu and Peake formed what would end up being the winning team in their category: “Team Ctrl+Alt+Defeat.” They quickly began organizing a plan to address the eviction crisis in the United States.

“I think we were kind of surprised by the scope of the question,” Peake laughs. “In the end, I think having such a large scope motivated us to think about it in a more realistic kind of way — how could we come up with a solution that was adaptable and therefore could be replicated to tackle different kinds of problems.”

Watching the challenge on the livestream together on campus, Liu says they immediately went to work, and could not believe how quickly things came together.

“We got our challenge description in the evening, came out to the purple common area in the IDSS building and literally it took maybe an hour and we drafted up the entire project from start to finish,” Liu says. “Then our software engineer partners had a dashboard built by 1 a.m. — I feel like the hackathon really promotes that really fast dynamic work stream.”

“People always talk about the grind or applying for funding — but when that magic hits, it just reminds you of the part of research that people don’t talk about, and it was really a great experience to have,” Liu adds.

A fresh perspective

“We’ve organized hackathons internally at our company and they are great for fostering innovation and creativity,” says Letizia Bordoli, senior AI product manager at Veridos, a German-based identity solutions company that provided this year’s challenge in Data Systems for Human Rights. “It is a great opportunity to connect with talented individuals and explore new ideas and solutions that we might not have thought about.”

The challenge provided by Veridos was focused on finding innovative solutions to universal birth registration, something Bordoli says only benefited from the fact that the hackathon participants were from all over the world.

“Many had local and firsthand knowledge about certain realities and challenges [posed by the lack of] birth registration,” Bordoli says. “It brings fresh perspectives to existing challenges, and it gave us an energy boost to try to bring innovative solutions that we may not have considered before.”

New frontiers

Alongside the housing and data systems for human rights challenges was a challenge in health, as well as a first-time opportunity to tackle an aerospace challenge in the area of space for environmental justice.

“Space can be a very hard challenge category to do data-wise since a lot of data is proprietary, so this really developed over the last few months with us having to think about how we could do more with open-source data,” Green explains. “But I am glad we went the environmental route because it opened the challenge up to not only space enthusiasts, but also environment and climate people.”

One of the participants to tackle this new challenge category was Yassine Elhallaoui, a system test engineer from Norway who specializes in AI solutions and has 16 years of experience working in the oil and gas fields. Elhallaoui was a member of Team EcoEquity, which proposed an increase in policies supporting the use of satellite data to ensure proper evaluation and increase water resiliency for vulnerable communities.

“The hackathons I have participated in in the past were more technical,” Elhallaoui says. “Starting with [MIT Science and Technology Policy Institute Director Kristen Kulinowski’s] workshop about policy writers and the solutions they came up with, and the analysis they had to do … it really changed my perspective on what a hackathon can do.”

“A policy hackathon is something that can make real changes in the world,” she adds.

Faculty, staff, students to evaluate ways to decarbonize MIT’s campus

With a goal to decarbonize the MIT campus by 2050, the Institute must look at “new ideas, transformed into practical solutions, in record time,” as stated in “Fast Forward: MIT’s Climate Action Plan for the Decade.” This charge calls on the MIT community to explore game-changing and evolving technologies with the potential to move campuses like MIT away from carbon emissions-based energy systems.

To help meet this tremendous challenge, the Decarbonization Working Group — a new subset of the Climate Nucleus — recently launched. Comprised of appointed MIT faculty, researchers, and students, the working group is leveraging its members’ expertise to meet the charge of exploring and assessing existing and in-development solutions to decarbonize the MIT campus by 2050. The group is specifically charged with informing MIT’s efforts to decarbonize the campus’s district energy system.

Co-chaired by Director of Sustainability Julie Newman and Department of Architecture Professor Christoph Reinhart, the working group includes members with deep knowledge of low- and zero-carbon technologies and grid-level strategies. In convening the group, Newman and Reinhart sought out members researching these technologies as well as exploring their practical use. “In my work on multiple projects on campus, I have seen how cutting-edge research often relies on energy-intensive equipment,” shares PhD student and group member Ippolyti Dellatolas. “It’s clear how new energy-efficiency strategies and technologies could use campus as a living lab and then broadly deploy these solutions across campus for scalable emissions reductions.” This approach is one of MIT’s strong suits and a recurring theme in its climate action plans — using the MIT campus as a test bed for learning and application. “We seek to study and analyze solutions for our campus, with the understanding that our findings have implications far beyond our campus boundaries,” says Newman.

The efforts of the working group represent just one part of the multipronged approach to identify ways to decarbonize the MIT campus. The group will work in parallel and at times collaboratively with the team from the Office of the Vice President for Campus Services and Stewardship that is managing the development plan for potential zero-carbon pathways for campus buildings and the district energy system. In May 2023, MIT engaged Affiliated Engineers, Inc. (AEI), to support the Institute’s efforts to identify, evaluate, and model various carbon-reduction strategies and technologies to provide MIT with a series of potential decarbonization pathways. Each of the pathways must demonstrate how to manage the generation of energy and its distribution and use on campus. As MIT explores electrification, a significant challenge will be the availability of resilient clean power from the grid to help generate heat for our campus without reliance on natural gas.

When the Decarbonization Working Group began work this fall, members took the time to learn more about current systems and baseline information. Beginning this month, members will organize analysis around each of their individual areas of expertise and interest and begin to evaluate existing and emerging carbon reduction technologies. “We are fortunate that there are constantly new ideas and technologies being tested in this space and that we have a committed group of faculty working together to evaluate them,” Newman says. “We are aware that not every technology is the right fit for our unique dense urban campus, and nor are we solving for a zero-carbon campus as an island, but rather in the context of an evolving regional power grid.”

Supported by funding from the Climate Nucleus, evaluating technologies will include site visits to locations where priority technologies are currently deployed or being tested. These site visits may range from university campuses implementing district geothermal and heat pumps to test sites of deep geothermal or microgrid infrastructure manufacturers. “This is a unique moment for MIT to demonstrate leadership by combining best decarbonization practices, such as retrofitting building systems to achieve deep energy reductions and converting to low-temperature district heating systems with ‘nearly there’ technologies such as deep geothermal, micronuclear, energy storage, and ubiquitous occupancy-driven temperature control,” says Reinhart. “As first adopters, we can find out what works, allowing other campuses to follow us at reduced risks.”

The findings and recommendations of the working group will be delivered in a report to the community at the end of 2024. There will be opportunities for the MIT community to learn more about MIT’s decarbonization efforts at community events on Jan. 24 and March 14, as well as MIT’s Sustainability Connect forum on Feb. 8.