The Digital Insider | Author: Julio Marchi

Translating MIT research into real-world results

Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the commercial world, where their novel innovations aim to improve productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, creating economic, environmental, and societal benefits along the way.

The J-WAFS Solutions program launched in 2015 with support from Community Jameel, an international organization that advances science and learning for communities to thrive. Since 2015, J-WAFS Solutions has supported 19 projects with one-year grants of up to $150,000, with some projects receiving renewal grants for a second year of support. Solutions projects all address challenges related to water or food. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Center staff, the J-WAFS Solutions program follows a similar approach by supporting projects that have already completed the basic research and proof-of-concept phases. With technologies that are one to three years away from commercialization, grantees work on identifying their potential markets and learn to focus on how their technology can meet the needs of future customers.

“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving inventions that can be translated into real-world applications for widespread adoption, implantation, and use,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “But successful commercialization of MIT technology requires engineers to focus on many challenges beyond making the technology work. MIT’s I&E network offers a variety of programs that help researchers develop technology readiness, investigate markets, conduct customer discovery, and initiate product design and development,” Lienhard adds. “With this strong I&E framework, many J-WAFS Solutions teams have established startup companies by the completion of the grant. J-WAFS-supported technologies have had powerful, positive effects on human welfare. Together, the J-WAFS Solutions program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem demonstrate how academic research can evolve into business innovations that make a better world,” Lienhard says.

Creating I&E collaborations

In addition to support for furthering research, J-WAFS Solutions grants allow faculty, students, postdocs, and research staff to learn the fundamentals of how to transform their work into commercial products and companies. As part of the grant requirements, researchers must interact with mentors through MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with teams of carefully selected professionals who provide free and confidential mentorship, guidance, and other services to help advance ideas into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs across all industries, through a dynamic and accomplished group of nearly 200 mentors who volunteer their time so that others may succeed. The mentors provide impartial and unbiased advice to members of the MIT community, including MIT alumni in the Boston area. J-WAFS Solutions teams have been guided by 21 mentors from numerous companies and nonprofits. Mentors often attend project events and progress meetings throughout the grant period.

“Working with VMS has provided me and my organization with a valuable sounding board for a range of topics, big and small,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former research engineer in MIT’s D-Lab and founder of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Along with professors Leon Glicksman and Daniel Frey, Verploegen received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to help farmers preserve fruits and vegetables in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen started CoolVeg in 2022 to increase access and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling technologies through collaborations with businesses, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit venture, it is always great to have avenues to get feedback on communications approaches, overall strategy, and operational issues that my mentors have experience with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the initial Solutions grant, one of the VMS mentors assigned to the evaporative cooling team still acts as a mentor to Verploegen today.

Another Solutions grant requirement is for teams to participate in the Spark program — a free, three-week course that provides an entry point for researchers to explore the potential value of their innovation. Spark is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is an “immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” In 2018, MIT received an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to deliver I-Corps training to participants across New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who want to engage in a customer discovery process for their technology. Offered regularly throughout the year, the Spark course helps participants identify markets and explore customer needs in order to understand how their technologies can be positioned competitively in their target markets. They learn to assess barriers to adoption, as well as potential regulatory issues or other challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps reports that since its start, over 1,200 researchers from MIT have completed the program and have gone on to launch 175 ventures, raising over $3.3 billion in funding from grants and investors, and creating over 1,800 jobs.

Constantinos Katsimpouras, a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering, went through the NE I-Corps Spark program to better understand the customer base for a technology he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 for their microbial platform that converts food waste from the dairy industry into valuable products. “As a scientist with no prior experience in entrepreneurship, the program introduced me to important concepts and tools for conducting customer interviews and adopting a new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most importantly, it encouraged me to get out of the building and engage in interviews with potential customers and stakeholders, providing me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my industry,” he adds. These interviews also helped connect the team with companies willing to provide resources to test and improve their technology — a critical step to the scale-up of any lab invention.

In the case of Professor Cem Tasan’s research group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Solutions grant, instead of the other way around. Tasan is currently working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Solutions project to manufacture formable sheet metal by consolidating steel scrap without melting, thereby reducing water use compared to traditional steel processing. Before applying for the Solutions grant, Guvenc took part in NE I-Corps. Like Katsimpouras, Guvenc benefited from the interaction with industry. “This program required me to step out of the lab and engage with potential customers, allowing me to learn about their immediate challenges and test my initial assumptions about the market,” Guvenc recalls. “My interviews with industry professionals also made me aware of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which ultimately led to the J-WAFS 2023 Solutions Grant,” says Guvenc.

After completing the Spark program, participants may be eligible to apply for the Fusion program, which provides microgrants of up to $1,500 to conduct further customer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring teams to conduct 12 additional customer interviews and craft a final presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Solutions team completed the Spark and Fusion programs at MIT. Most recently, their team was accepted to join the NSF I-Corps National program with a $50,000 award. The intensive program requires teams to complete an additional 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Located in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is working on a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to rapidly remove micropollutants from water. The team’s focus has expanded to higher value purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 worked with Doyle on much of the underlying science.

“Our platform technology could potentially be used for selective separations in very diverse market segments, ranging from individual consumers to large industries and government bodies with varied use-cases,” Gokhale explains. He goes on to say, “The I-Corps Spark program added significant value by providing me with an effective framework to approach this problem … I was assigned a mentor who provided critical feedback, teaching me how to formulate effective questions and identify promising opportunities.” Gokhale says that by the end of Spark, the team was able to identify the best target markets for their products. He also says that the program provided valuable seminars on topics like intellectual property, which was helpful in subsequent discussions the team had with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.

Another member of Doyle’s team, Arjav Shah, a recent PhD from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a current MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is spearheading the team’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion last fall and hopes to lead efforts to incorporate a startup company called hydroGel. “I admire the hypothesis-driven approach of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to identify our customers’ biggest pain points, which will hopefully lead us to finding a product-market fit.” He adds “based on our learnings from the program, we have been able to pivot to impact-driven, higher-value applications in the food processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical team at hydroGel alongside Shah.

In a different project, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Solutions project that aims to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of major algal species and provide early detection of harmful algal blooms. After completing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to participate in the Fusion program, and potentially the National I-Corps program, to further explore market opportunities and minimize risks in our future product development.”

Economic and societal benefits

Commercializing technologies developed at MIT is one of the ways J-WAFS helps ensure that MIT research advances will have real-world impacts in water and food systems. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions program has awarded 28 grants (including renewals), which have supported 19 projects that address a wide range of global water and food challenges. The program has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 research staff, 15 postdocs, and 30 students across MIT. Nearly half of all J-WAFS Solutions projects have resulted in spinout companies or commercialized products, including eight companies to date plus two open-source technologies.

Nona Technologies is an example of a J-WAFS spinout that is helping the world by developing new approaches to produce freshwater for drinking. Desalination — the process of removing salts from seawater — typically requires a large-scale technology called reverse osmosis. But Nona created a desalination device that can work in remote off-grid locations. By separating salt and bacteria from water using electric current through a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), their technology also reduces overall energy consumption. The novel method was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and research scientist Junghyo Yoon. Along with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Technologies to bring their lightweight, energy-efficient desalination technology to the market.

“My feeling early on was that once you have technology, commercialization will take care of itself,” admits Crawford. The team completed both the Spark and Fusion programs and quickly realized that much more work would be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we learned that the two first markets we envisioned would not be viable in the near term, and we also got our first hints at the beachhead we ultimately selected,” says Crawford. Nona Technologies has since won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, received media attention from outlets like Newsweek and Fortune, and hired a team that continues to further the technology for deployment in resource-limited areas where clean drinking water may be scarce.

Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria in order to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security.

“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually.

J-WAFS Solutions companies have raised nearly $66 million in venture capital and other funding. Just this past June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration announced that it raised an $11.8 million seed round. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was another early J-WAFS Solutions grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The project enabled the development of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout companies, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was a part of the original J-WAFS team. Smith is CEO of the company and has overseen the advancement of the membrane technology, which has gone on to reduce cost and resource consumption in industrial wastewater treatment, advanced manufacturing, and resource extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries. The company also recently announced that it is working with the mining company Rio Tinto to handle harmful wastewater generated at mines.

But it’s not just J-WAFS spinout companies that are producing real-world results. Products like the ECC Vial — a portable, low-cost method for E. coli detection in water — have been brought to the market and helped thousands of people. The test kit was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT History Section. The duo received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2018 to promote safely managed drinking water and improved public health in Nepal, where it is difficult to identify which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the end of their grant period, the team had manufactured approximately 3,200 units, of which 2,350 were distributed — enough to help 12,000 people in Nepal. The researchers also trained local Nepalese on best manufacturing practices.

“It’s very important, in my life experience, to follow your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Economic success is important to the health of any venture, whether it’s a company or a product, but equally important is the social impact — a philosophy that J-WAFS research strives to uphold. “Do something because it’s worth doing and because it changes people’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott adds.

As J-WAFS prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, we look forward to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E programs to advance knowledge and develop solutions that will have tangible effects on the world’s water and food systems.

Learn more about the J-WAFS Solutions program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT.

3 Questions: Bridging anthropology and engineering for clean energy in Mongolia

In 2021, Michael Short, an associate professor of nuclear science and engineering, approached professor of anthropology Manduhai Buyandelger with an unusual pitch: collaborating on a project to prototype a molten salt heat bank in Mongolia, Buyandelger’s country of origin and place of her scholarship. It was also an invitation to forge a novel partnership between two disciplines that rarely overlap. Developed in collaboration with the National University of Mongolia (NUM), the device was built to provide heat for people in colder climates, and in places where clean energy is a challenge.

Buyandelger and Short teamed up to launch Anthro-Engineering Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale, an initiative intended to advance the heat bank idea in Mongolia, and ultimately demonstrate its potential as a scalable clean heat source in comparably challenging sites around the world. This project received funding from the inaugural MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium Seed Awards program. In order to fund various components of the project, especially student involvement and additional staff, the project also received support from the MIT Global Seed Fund, New Engineering Education Transformation (NEET), Experiential Learning Office, Vice Provost for International Activities, and d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education.

As part of this initiative, the partners developed a special topic course in anthropology to teach MIT undergraduates about Mongolia’s unique energy and climate challenges, as well as the historical, social, and economic context in which the heat bank would ideally find a place. The class 21A.S01 (Anthro-Engineering: Decarbonization at the Million-Person Scale) prepares MIT students for a January Independent Activities Period (IAP) trip to the Mongolian capital of Ulaanbaatar, where they embed with Mongolian families, conduct research, and collaborate with their peers. Mongolian students also engaged in the project. Anthropology research scientist and lecturer Lauren Bonilla, who has spent the past two decades working in Mongolia, joined to co-teach the class and lead the IAP trips to Mongolia.

With the project now in its third year and yielding some promising solutions on the ground, Buyandelger and Bonilla reflect on the challenges for anthropologists of advancing a clean energy technology in a developing nation with a unique history, politics, and culture.

Q: Your roles in the molten salt heat bank project mark departures from your typical academic routine. How did you first approach this venture?

Buyandelger: As an anthropologist of contemporary religion, politics, and gender in Mongolia, I have had little contact with the hard sciences or building or prototyping technology. What I do best is listening to people and working with narratives. When I first learned about this device for off-the-grid heating, a host of issues came straight to mind right away that are based on socioeconomic and cultural context of the place. The salt brick, which is encased in steel, must be heated to 400 degrees Celsius in a central facility, then driven to people’s homes. Transportation is difficult in Ulaanbaatar, and I worried about road safety when driving the salt brick to gers [traditional Mongolian homes] where many residents live. The device seemed a bit utopian to me, but I realized that this was an amazing educational opportunity: We could use the heat bank as part of an ethnographic project, so students could learn about the everyday lives of people — crucially, in the dead of winter — and how they might respond to this new energy technology in the neighborhoods of Ulaanbaatar.

Bonilla: When I first went to Mongolia in the early 2000s as an undergraduate student, the impacts of climate change were already being felt. There had been a massive migration to the capital after a series of terrible weather events that devastated the rural economy. Coal mining had emerged as a vital part of the economy, and I was interested in how people regarded this industry that both provided jobs and damaged the air they breathed. I am trained as a human geographer, which involves seeing how things happening in a local place correspond to things happening at a global scale. Thinking about climate or sustainability from this perspective means making linkages between social life and environmental life. In Mongolia, people associated coal with national progress. Based on historical experience, they had low expectations for interventions brought by outsiders to improve their lives. So my first take on the molten salt project was that this was no silver bullet solution. At the same time, I wanted to see how we could make this a great project-based learning experience for students, getting them to think about the kind of research necessary to see if some version of the molten salt would work.

Q: After two years, what lessons have you and the students drawn from both the class and the Ulaanbaatar field trips?

Buyandelger: We wanted to make sure MIT students would not go to Mongolia and act like consultants. We taught them anthropological methods so they could understand the experiences of real people and think about how to bring people and new technologies together. The students, from engineering and anthropological and social science backgrounds, became critical thinkers who could analyze how people live in ger districts. When they stay with families in Ulaanbaatar in January, they not only experience the cold and the pollution, but they observe what people do for work, how parents care for their children, how they cook, sleep, and get from one place to another. This enables them to better imagine and test out how these people might utilize the molten salt heat bank in their homes.

Bonilla: In class, students learn that interventions like this often fail because the implementation process doesn’t work, or the technology doesn’t meet people’s real needs. This is where anthropology is so important, because it opens up the wider landscape in which you’re intervening. We had really difficult conversations about the professional socialization of engineers and social scientists. Engineers love to work within boxes, but don’t necessarily appreciate the context in which their invention will serve.

As a group, we discussed the provocative notion that engineers construct and anthropologists deconstruct. This makes it seem as if engineers are creators, and anthropologists are brought in as add-ons to consult and critique engineers’ creations. Our group conversation concluded that a project such as ours benefits from an iterative back-and-forth between the techno-scientific and humanistic disciplines.

Q: So where does the molten salt brick project stand?

Bonilla: Our research in Mongolia helped us produce a prototype that can work: Our partners at NUM are developing a hybrid stove that incorporates the molten salt brick. Supervised by instructor Nathan Melenbrink of MIT’s NEET program, our engineering students have been involved in this prototyping as well.

The concept is for a family to heat it up using a coal fire once a day and it warms their home overnight. Based on our anthropological research, we believe that this stove would work better than the device as originally conceived. It won’t eliminate coal use in residences, but it will reduce emissions enough to have a meaningful impact on ger districts in Ulaanbaatar. The challenge now is getting funding to NUM so they can test different salt combinations and stove models and employ local blacksmiths to work on the design.

This integrated stove/heat bank will not be the ultimate solution to the heating and pollution crisis in Mongolia. But it will be something that can inspire even more ideas. We feel with this project we are planting all kinds of seeds that will germinate in ways we cannot anticipate. It has sparked new relationships between MIT and Mongolian students, and catalyzed engineers to integrate a more humanistic, anthropological perspective in their work.

Buyandelger: Our work illustrates the importance of anthropology in responding to the unpredictable and diverse impacts of climate change. Without our ethnographic research — based on participant observation and interviews, led by Dr. Bonilla, — it would have been impossible to see how the prototyping and modifications could be done, and where the molten salt brick could work and what shape it needed to take. This project demonstrates how indispensable anthropology is in moving engineering out of labs and companies and directly into communities.

Bonilla: This is where the real solutions for climate change are going to come from. Even though we need solutions quickly, it will also take time for new technologies like molten salt bricks to take root and grow. We don’t know where the outcomes of these experiments will take us. But there’s so much that’s emerging from this project that I feel very hopeful about.

CSS Anchor Positioning Guide

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CSS Anchor Positioning Guide originally published on CSS-Tricks, which is part of the DigitalOcean family….

Tal Kreisler, CEO & Co-Founder of NoTraffic – Interview Series

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How to Set-up Cellular Bonding with Kiloview P3 and P3 Mini & How To M – Videoguys

On this week’s Videoguys Live, James is joined by Logan, our Workflow Sales Specialist, to explain how to set up and utilize the new P3 and P3 Mini as well as going into how Kiloview’s NDI Products and Converters can be used to manage your NDI Workflow.

Watch the full video below:

[embedded content]

Kiloview P3 Mini 4G Wireless Bonding Encoder

Up to 6-channel Connections Bonding
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Recording	SD Card and USB Expansion	USB Expansion
Network	5G / 4G / WiFi / Ethernet	4G / WiFi / Ethernet
Display	4.3″ LCD Touchscreen	3″ LCD Touchscreen
Bonding Performance	WiFi/ 4 channels of 5G(Or 4 channels of 4G) cellular, WiFi (2.4G/5G), Ethernet	3CH 4G cellular network, WiFi (2.4G/5G dual band) , USB expanded Ethernet
Battery	Built-in 3500mAh 7.2V 25.2W battery External 7000mAh 7.2V 50.4W battery	4900mAh 7.2v 35.28W

Step 2: Make Sure You’re Connected

P3 Mini

On board Modems included

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Step 3: Set-Up Your KiloLink Server

Kiloview P3 Workflow

Kiloview P3 Mini Workflow

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How AI is improving simulations with smarter sampling techniques

Imagine you’re tasked with sending a team of football players onto a field to assess the condition of the grass (a likely task for them, of course). If you pick their positions randomly, they might cluster together in some areas while completely neglecting others. But if you give them a strategy, like spreading out uniformly across the field, you might get a far more accurate picture of the grass condition.

Now, imagine needing to spread out not just in two dimensions, but across tens or even hundreds. That’s the challenge MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) researchers are getting ahead of. They’ve developed an AI-driven approach to “low-discrepancy sampling,” a method that improves simulation accuracy by distributing data points more uniformly across space.

A key novelty lies in using graph neural networks (GNNs), which allow points to “communicate” and self-optimize for better uniformity. Their approach marks a pivotal enhancement for simulations in fields like robotics, finance, and computational science, particularly in handling complex, multidimensional problems critical for accurate simulations and numerical computations.

“In many problems, the more uniformly you can spread out points, the more accurately you can simulate complex systems,” says T. Konstantin Rusch, lead author of the new paper and MIT CSAIL postdoc. “We’ve developed a method called Message-Passing Monte Carlo (MPMC) to generate uniformly spaced points, using geometric deep learning techniques. This further allows us to generate points that emphasize dimensions which are particularly important for a problem at hand, a property that is highly important in many applications. The model’s underlying graph neural networks lets the points ‘talk’ with each other, achieving far better uniformity than previous methods.”

Their work was published in the September issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Take me to Monte Carlo

The idea of Monte Carlo methods is to learn about a system by simulating it with random sampling. Sampling is the selection of a subset of a population to estimate characteristics of the whole population. Historically, it was already used in the 18th century, when mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace employed it to estimate the population of France without having to count each individual.

Low-discrepancy sequences, which are sequences with low discrepancy, i.e., high uniformity, such as Sobol’, Halton, and Niederreiter, have long been the gold standard for quasi-random sampling, which exchanges random sampling with low-discrepancy sampling. They are widely used in fields like computer graphics and computational finance, for everything from pricing options to risk assessment, where uniformly filling spaces with points can lead to more accurate results.

The MPMC framework suggested by the team transforms random samples into points with high uniformity. This is done by processing the random samples with a GNN that minimizes a specific discrepancy measure.

One big challenge of using AI for generating highly uniform points is that the usual way to measure point uniformity is very slow to compute and hard to work with. To solve this, the team switched to a quicker and more flexible uniformity measure called L2-discrepancy. For high-dimensional problems, where this method isn’t enough on its own, they use a novel technique that focuses on important lower-dimensional projections of the points. This way, they can create point sets that are better suited for specific applications.

The implications extend far beyond academia, the team says. In computational finance, for example, simulations rely heavily on the quality of the sampling points. “With these types of methods, random points are often inefficient, but our GNN-generated low-discrepancy points lead to higher precision,” says Rusch. “For instance, we considered a classical problem from computational finance in 32 dimensions, where our MPMC points beat previous state-of-the-art quasi-random sampling methods by a factor of four to 24.”

Robots in Monte Carlo

In robotics, path and motion planning often rely on sampling-based algorithms, which guide robots through real-time decision-making processes. The improved uniformity of MPMC could lead to more efficient robotic navigation and real-time adaptations for things like autonomous driving or drone technology. “In fact, in a recent preprint, we demonstrated that our MPMC points achieve a fourfold improvement over previous low-discrepancy methods when applied to real-world robotics motion planning problems,” says Rusch.

“Traditional low-discrepancy sequences were a major advancement in their time, but the world has become more complex, and the problems we’re solving now often exist in 10, 20, or even 100-dimensional spaces,” says Daniela Rus, CSAIL director and MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science. “We needed something smarter, something that adapts as the dimensionality grows. GNNs are a paradigm shift in how we generate low-discrepancy point sets. Unlike traditional methods, where points are generated independently, GNNs allow points to ‘chat’ with one another so the network learns to place points in a way that reduces clustering and gaps — common issues with typical approaches.”

Going forward, the team plans to make MPMC points even more accessible to everyone, addressing the current limitation of training a new GNN for every fixed number of points and dimensions.

“Much of applied mathematics uses continuously varying quantities, but computation typically allows us to only use a finite number of points,” says Art B. Owen, Stanford University professor of statistics, who wasn’t involved in the research. “The century-plus-old field of discrepancy uses abstract algebra and number theory to define effective sampling points. This paper uses graph neural networks to find input points with low discrepancy compared to a continuous distribution. That approach already comes very close to the best-known low-discrepancy point sets in small problems and is showing great promise for a 32-dimensional integral from computational finance. We can expect this to be the first of many efforts to use neural methods to find good input points for numerical computation.”

Rusch and Rus wrote the paper with University of Waterloo researcher Nathan Kirk, Oxford University’s DeepMind Professor of AI and former CSAIL affiliate Michael Bronstein, and University of Waterloo Statistics and Actuarial Science Professor Christiane Lemieux. Their research was supported, in part, by the AI2050 program at Schmidt Futures, Boeing, the United States Air Force Research Laboratory and the United States Air Force Artificial Intelligence Accelerator, the Swiss National Science Foundation, Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and an EPSRC Turing AI World-Leading Research Fellowship.

An interstellar instrument takes a final bow

They planned to fly for four years and to get as far as Jupiter and Saturn. But nearly half a century and 15 billion miles later, NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft have far exceeded their original mission, winging past the outer planets and busting out of our heliosphere, beyond the influence of the sun. The probes are currently making their way through interstellar space, traveling farther than any human-made object.

Along their improbable journey, the Voyagers made first-of-their-kind observations at all four giant outer planets and their moons using only a handful of instruments, including MIT’s Plasma Science Experiments — identical plasma sensors that were designed and built in the 1970s in Building 37 by MIT scientists and engineers.

The Plasma Science Experiment (also known as the Plasma Spectrometer, or PLS for short) measured charged particles in planetary magnetospheres, the solar wind, and the interstellar medium, the material between stars. Since launching on the Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1977, the PLS has revealed new phenomena near all the outer planets and in the solar wind across the solar system. The experiment played a crucial role in confirming the moment when Voyager 2 crossed the heliosphere and moved outside of the sun’s regime, into interstellar space.

Now, to conserve the little power left on Voyager 2 and prolong the mission’s life, the Voyager scientists and engineers have made the decision to shut off MIT’s Plasma Science Experiment. It’s the first in a line of science instruments that will progressively blink off over the coming years. On Sept. 26, the Voyager 2 PLS sent its last communication from 12.7 billion miles away, before it received the command to shut down.

MIT News spoke with John Belcher, the Class of 1922 Professor of Physics at MIT, who was a member of the original team that designed and built the plasma spectrometers, and John Richardson, principal research scientist at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research, who is the experiment’s principal investigator. Both Belcher and Richardson offered their reflections on the retirement of this interstellar piece of MIT history.

Q: Looking back at the experiment’s contributions, what are the greatest hits, in terms of what MIT’s Plasma Spectrometer has revealed about the solar system and interstellar space?

Richardson: A key PLS finding at Jupiter was the discovery of the Io torus, a plasma donut surrounding Jupiter, formed from sulphur and oxygen from Io’s volcanos (which were discovered in Voyager images). At Saturn, PLS found a magnetosphere full of water and oxygen that had been knocked off of Saturn’s icy moons. At Uranus and Neptune, the tilt of the magnetic fields led to PLS seeing smaller density features, with Uranus’ plasma disappearing near the planet. Another key PLS observation was of the termination shock, which was the first observation of the plasma at the largest shock in the solar system, where the solar wind stopped being supersonic. This boundary had a huge drop in speed and an increase in the density and temperature of the solar wind. And finally, PLS documented Voyager 2’s crossing of the heliopause by detecting a stopping of outward-flowing plasma. This signaled the end of the solar wind and the beginning of the local interstellar medium (LISM). Although not designed to measure the LISM, PLS constantly measured the interstellar plasma currents beyond the heliosphere. It is very sad to lose this instrument and data!

Belcher: It is important to emphasize that PLS was the result of decades of development by MIT Professor Herbert Bridge (1919-1995) and Alan Lazarus (1931-2014). The first version of the instrument they designed was flown on Explorer 10 in 1961. And the most recent version is flying on the Solar Probe, which is collecting measurements very close to the sun to understand the origins of solar wind. Bridge was the principal investigator for plasma probes on spacecraft which visited the sun and every major planetary body in the solar system.

Q: During their tenure aboard the Voyager probes, how did the plasma sensors do their job over the last 47 years?

Richardson: There were four Faraday cup detectors designed by Herb Bridge that measured currents from ions and electrons that entered the detectors. By measuring these particles at different energies, we could find the plasma velocity, density, and temperature in the solar wind and in the four planetary magnetospheres Voyager encountered. Voyager data were (and are still) sent to Earth every day and received by NASA’s deep space network of antennae. Keeping two 1970s-era spacecraft going for 47 years and counting has been an amazing feat of JPL engineering prowess — you can google the most recent rescue when Voyager 1 lost some memory in November of 2023 and stopped sending data. JPL figured out the problem and was able to reprogram the flight data system from 15 billion miles away, and all is back to normal now. Shutting down PLS involves sending a command which will get to Voyager 2 about 19 hours later, providing the rest of the spacecraft enough power to continue.

Q: Once the plasma sensors have shut down, how much more could Voyager do, and how far might it still go?

Richardson: Voyager will still measure the galactic cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and plasma waves. The available power decreases about 4 watts per year as the plutonium which powers them decays. We hope to keep some of the instruments running until the mid-2030s, but that will be a challenge as power levels decrease.

Belcher: Nick Oberg at the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in the Netherlands has made an exhaustive study of the future of the spacecraft, using data from the European Space Agency’s spacecraft Gaia. In about 30,000 years, the spacecraft will reach the distance to the nearest stars. Because space is so vast, there is zero chance that the spacecraft will collide directly with a star in the lifetime of the universe. However, the spacecraft surface will erode by microcollisions with vast clouds of interstellar dust, but this happens very slowly.

In Oberg’s estimate, the Golden Records [identical records that were placed aboard each probe, that contain selected sounds and images to represent life on Earth] are likely to survive for a span of over 5 billion years. After those 5 billion years, things are difficult to predict, since at this point, the Milky Way will collide with its massive neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy. During this collision, there is a one in five chance that the spacecraft will be flung into the intergalactic medium, where there is little dust and little weathering. In that case, it is possible that the spacecraft will survive for trillions of years. A trillion years is about 100 times the current age of the universe. The Earth ceases to exist in about 6 billion years, when the sun enters its red giant phase and engulfs it.

In a “poor man’s” version of the Golden Record, Robert Butler, the chief engineer of the Plasma Instrument, inscribed the names of the MIT engineers and scientists who had worked on the spacecraft on the collector plate of the side-looking cup. Butler’s home state was New Hampshire, and he put the state motto, “Live Free or Die,” at the top of the list of names. Thanks to Butler, although New Hampshire will not survive for a trillion years, its state motto might. The flight spare of the PLS instrument is now displayed at the MIT Museum, where you can see the text of Butler’s message by peering into the side-looking sensor.

Those Non-Design Technologies Web Designers Need to Know – Speckyboy

We call ourselves web designers and developers. However, the job often goes beyond those narrow margins.

Freelancers and small agencies deal with a range of non-design and coding issues. We become the first person our clients contact when they have a question. It happens – even when we aren’t directly involved with the subject matter.

“I just received this message from Google. What does it mean?“
“Why can’t I receive email from my website?“
“My website was hacked. Help!“

Yes, we are the catch-all technical support representatives. No matter the problem, web designers are the solution. That’s what some clients think, at least.

We’re often the link between clients and technology. And perhaps we shouldn’t try to tackle every problem. But it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on a few non-design technologies.

With that in mind, here are a few areas that web designers should study. You know, just in case.

SEO & Site Indexing Basics

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a niche unto itself. Some professionals specialize in making sure websites are indexed and rank well.

That doesn’t stop clients from asking their web designer, though. Site owners want to rank highly in Google search results. And they are often in the dark about how to do it.

To that end, it’s worth learning the basics of SEO. Even if the subject makes your skin crawl.

You’ll be able to explain the hows and whys to clients. That will help them make more informed decisions about content. They may decide to jump in feet first with an SEO professional.

Clients will ask you about SEO. A little background knowledge makes you look smart!

SEO Resources

DNS & Email Delivery

Launching or moving a website often includes changing a domain’s DNS settings. These settings ensure that the site directs users to the right place.

DNS is much more than that, though. There are also settings for configuring email as well. That has become a hot topic these days.

Email providers are increasingly requiring domain owners to verify their properties. Domains without DKIM, DMARC, or SPF records may have email delivery issues. For example, Gmail blocks email from unauthenticated domains.

What does this have to do with web design? Well, websites with contact forms can fall victim to these issues. The same goes for eCommerce websites. An unauthenticated domain means clients and users will miss these emails.

Now is the time to learn how DNS works. You’ll want to pay special attention to email. Clients without an IT department may need your help ensuring smooth email delivery.

DNS & Email Resources

Security for Websites and Beyond

We live in an age of online insecurity. Malicious actors don’t take a minute off. Instead, they continue to wreak havoc.

Sure, we talk about web security quite a bit. And we try our best to build a virtual mote around websites. But websites are still being compromised.

We’re learning that security goes deeper than installing updates or tweaking .htaccess files. The fitness of a user’s device also plays a role.

Stolen session cookies are a prime example. Hackers can grab them off of a compromised device. A “bulletproof” website is no match for a phone with an info stealer installed. They can waltz right in and do whatever they want.

Understanding how device security impacts the web is crucial. It’s something that can benefit us and our clients. After all, a single weak link can break the chain.

Website Security Resources

Command Line Tools

Some of us cringe at the mere thought of using a command line tool. Hasn’t that stuff gone the way of the dinosaur?

Nothing could be further from the truth. Command line tools like WordPress CLI remain popular. Why is that? It’s all about power and efficiency.

The command line doesn’t have the overhead of a graphical user interface (GUI). Thus, it handles bulk operations faster. For example, you can perform a search-and-replace operation on a database more quickly.

You can also do a lot of behind-the-scenes work with your web server. The command line may be the only way to run specific tasks.

It’s worth brushing up on command-line operations. They are a huge time saver in the right circumstances.

Command Line Resources

Become a More Well-Rounded Web Designer

The skills above are all adjacent to web design. And the need for this knowledge is growing.

Perhaps that has always been the case with SEO. Meanwhile, security and DNS seem to be just about mandatory these days.

Working with clients means you inevitably will face questions about these subjects. Freelancers and small agencies don’t always have an expert within reach. So, it’s up to us to find answers.

The command line is more about adding another tool to your toolbox. The improved efficiency will benefit you. And the result is better service for your clients.

Web designers tend to be specialists. We focus on the front-end or back-end. But the more we know, the more well-rounded we become.

It’s one way to stay on the cutting edge of the industry for years to come.

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