Tag: MIT

Making her way through MIT | MIT News

Lucy Du, a doctoral student in the MIT Media Lab, has a remarkable passion for making. She spends her work day in lab designing and fabricating prosthetics, and devotes her free time to personal projects in the MIT MakerWorkshop or inspiring other students to try their hands at engineering. “The best feeling is when I get to go into a shop and make some parts, or order some parts — and the day they come in is like Christmas,” she says.

Her affinity for making started at a young age. “I loved building things and having tangible hardware to work on. Sitting there and coding or doing math all day was never what I wanted,” Du says. She participated in a robotics team in high school and has drawn inspiration from Disney movies and entertainment for many years, especially as their humanoid animatronic technology has grown. (Disney’s “eerily organic-looking” Spiderman stunt robot is a particular favorite of hers.)

Now, as a fourth-year PhD student, Du is channeling her passion for building things into designing a prosthetic ankle that is readily accessible to people of all sizes, since current commercial designs are only suited for tall individuals.

She also shares her love of engineering in her pursuits outside of the lab. Throughout her time here (Du also earned her undergraduate and master’s degree at MIT), she has found ways to make building things and engineering more accessible to others — from creating a student makerspace to teaching high school girls. She even turned a role on Discovery’s reality TV show “BattleBots” into an opportunity to inspire kids about engineering.

Making for prosthetics

When Du finished her master’s in mechanical engineering in 2016, she was ready to experience something outside of academia. She went on to work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, but after two years, she started to feel an itch to get her PhD. Even though she considered other schools, MIT stood out as an obvious choice. “MIT has so many resources and so many opportunities that you can be here for years and years and not even scratch the surface,” she says. “I think it was where I was meant to be.”

Du knew she wanted to work on animatronic robotics. Finding the right lab was not without bumps, but she ultimately ended up in the Biomechatronics Group under professor of media arts and sciences Hugh Herr. Housed within the Media Lab, it is an interdisciplinary lab broadly focused on prosthetics, exoskeletons, and the human-robot interface. She knew Herr’s lab was the right fit for her because of its emphasis on hardware design. “It is actually really hard to find robotics labs that focus on hardware building,” she notes. “A lot of robotics labs will buy the hardware for a project and focus solely on the software. I believe in designing your hardware with the end application in mind, as this can make the whole process better.”

To that end, Du’s research project focuses on designing the hardware for a robotic ankle that functions better than what is available now. “I hope the design will be able to fully mimic biological movements, including fast walking, walking up and down stairs and ramps, and some other common motions that you would make throughout a day,” she explains.

Currently, there is only one commercial powered prosthetic ankle that provides enough force for walking. But it has notable limitations, Du says. Because the design is large and bulky, “you either need to be a person of tall stature or you have to have a very short residual limb after amputation in order to wear the product.”

In contrast, her prosthetic ankle has a smaller profile that would enable more people to use it. She notes, “The design itself is meant to be scaled, so you can have the same design and scale it down for children or other people who don’t need as much power, and then scale up to larger adults.”

Inspiring other makers

Du has devoted considerable time and energy over her years at MIT to helping others explore making and engineering. As a master’s student, she served as an instructor for the Women’s Technology Program in Mechanical Engineering, a summer program for high school girls that aims to inspire them to pursue engineering. During a month-long crash course, she served as one of three graduate instructors for the mechanical engineering curriculum, teaching 20 high school girls the basics of kinematics and dynamics, and working with them on cool, hands-on experiments.

Mentoring, she says, is “probably the most rewarding thing that I’ve done” — especially watching some of those students attend MIT and excel. She has continued to cultivate her love of teaching and mentoring as a teaching assistant during her PhD program.

Du is also a founding member and leader of the MIT MakerWorkshop, the only completely student-run makerspace at MIT. As a master’s student, she noticed an unmet need for a makerspace where students could work on their personal projects, at hours that were convenient to them and did not conflict with class time. Even though there were already a lot of shops on campus, she says, “It was “pretty difficult to get access to a machine shop and for most of them, you were only supposed to work on class projects or research projects.”

The MakerWorkshop has served as much more than a workplace for Du; it has also been a hub for connections and inspiration throughout her graduate career. “A lot of times, I have an engineering problem or a life problem and I just want to talk to somebody. I could roam around the space, somebody would be there, and you could just talk to them about their experiences or have impromptu design reviews on the board.”

The connections that Du formed through MakerWorkshop led her in an unexpected direction: reality TV. She was one of a group of MakerWorkshop members who formed a team named SawBlaze for the Discovery show “BattleBots,” a revival of an old Comedy Central show from the early 2000s. In the show, teams build 250-pound robots to “fight to the death” in an arena. The SawBlaze team has competed in four seasons to date, starting in 2016 with season 2. “It is really different from the stuff we usually design and build [for research or class], because you are designing to material failure,” Du says. So far, the experience has taught her how to plan and design for the most extreme cases of impact, often relying on intuition, experience, and empirical testing, because these scenarios are usually beyond the limits of modeling. 

However, Du is less than interested in the screen time that the “BattleBots” role has brought her. Even though she is excited about the show’s upcoming season 6, she favors the outreach events, termed maker faires, where awe-struck kids excitedly point out their favorite robots and she has the opportunity to share how she got started in engineering.

This fall marks the 10th year of Du’s MIT career. As she begins to contemplate what she’ll do after she graduates, she’s keeping an open mind. She knows she wants to work on new technology development, whether that leads her to industry or academia. And she knows that teaching and mentoring will play an important role in her future. “The more time you put into teaching, the more rewarding it is,” she says. “To see your students get it and improve, that just means the world to me.”

MIT ID cards go digital | MIT News

MIT community members have a new and easier way to navigate campus life at the Institute: the MIT Mobile ID, a digital version of the MIT ID card for iOS and Android devices. Developed prior to the pandemic and released by Information Systems and Technology (IS&T), the MIT Mobile ID can be used just like a physical ID. A simple wave of your device — an iPhone, Apple Watch, or Android phone — near a reader is all it takes to open a door or pay for a coffee. 

“The Mobile ID has made my life so convenient on campus overall this semester,” says Danielle Allison, a junior in mechanical engineering. “I can scan into buildings using my watch when my hands are full, and I have easy access to my TechCash and Pharos balances with a single tap.”

In fact, if you routinely walk around with your phone in your hand (or an Apple Watch on your wrist) the MIT Mobile ID will take on the same functionality that your physical MIT ID card does on campus, making it quicker and easier to do routine things such as accessing buildings and parking facilities, paying for food and beverages, and releasing Pharos print jobs. Moreover, if you keep your MIT Mobile ID in your Apple Wallet, you will also be able to view your TechCash and dining dollar balances. 

“Throughout the pandemic, our community has been absolutely incredible as they have embraced a variety of new protocols that have helped to ensure the health and safety of the MIT campus,” says Mark V. Silis, vice president for information systems and technology. “The MIT Mobile ID was developed in an accelerated effort as part of the MIT Atlas program’s continuing commitment to transforming the campus experience for our faculty, students, and staff.”

Rapid adoption

After an invitation-only initial pilot phase, the MIT Mobile ID was announced to members of the undergraduate Class of 2025 during Orientation kickoff on Aug. 29. Adoption was swift, with about half of first-year students enabling their digital ID on day one. 

As initial transaction data showed the Mobile ID was being used successfully across campus, IS&T proceeded with the full community rollout in mid-September. Since then, adoption and use has been strong. Currently, more than 14,000 community members have enabled their digital IDs. In October, Mobile IDs were used for almost 50,000 transactions (other than building access), more than doubling use in September.

Pre-Covid planning

In conjunction with the Department of Facilities, IS&T began planning for a digital version of the MIT ID back in September 2018. Before digital IDs could be offered to community members, a number of systems and devices would require upgrades or replacements.

Specifically, thousands of access card readers across campus would have to be upgraded. A new application to replace legacy physical access control software that Institute “gatekeepers” have used for decades to grant individuals access to specific spaces would need to be developed. Finally, engineers would have to design, test, and deploy the Mobile ID across a variety of devices. 

Card reader replacement began in late 2019 and the rollout of the MIT Mobile ID was initially targeted for community-wide release in 2020. Work was proceeding as planned when the global Covid-19 pandemic hit.

Responding to pandemic challenges and opportunities

To safeguard the health and well-being of the community during the pandemic, MIT established requirements for those who access campus, including regular Covid testing and health attestations. With entry to Institute buildings restricted to those satisfying these requirements, ID cards quickly became vital to mitigating the effect of Covid and making life on campus as safe and seamless as possible.

However, this posed a new challenge, as MIT’s comprehensive measures to manage spread of the virus required issuing physical IDs to many additional people, including all vendors, contractors, and suppliers who supported campus operations. As campus began to reopen and with a commitment to the 2021-22 academic year being fully in-person, a more efficient and practical alternative to printing and managing so many plastic ID cards was needed. A digital ID could speed the onboarding process for new community members, allow for quicker and easier contactless interactions, and enable faster entry to campus spaces, since many people often have their phones in hand.

An additional challenge was determining how to deploy a digital ID across a variety of devices. Fortunately, there was a clear and convenient solution: the MIT Atlas mobile app. The Atlas app has become an essential tool for MIT community members during the pandemic, allowing them to keep up with health screening requirements to access Institute buildings and spaces, declare travel plans, upload vaccination information, and invite visitors to campus. As such, it was a natural platform for deploying the MIT Mobile ID.

A team effort

While the pandemic increased the urgency and scope of the digital ID project (for example, card readers would have to be added to many more building entrances), modernization planning and work done prior to Covid meant that IS&T and its partners didn’t have to start from scratch. As a result, much was completed in the 18 months from the pandemic outbreak to the start of the current school year.

“Teams from the Department of Facilities and IS&T did an incredible job upgrading more than 4,700 card readers, as well as hundreds of access control panels and intrusion alarm systems, at more than 120 buildings across campus,” says Marco Gomes, IS&T’s senior director of infrastructure operations. 

Additionally, Gomes noted, team members completed this work while also performing various other critical activities in support of MIT’s safe return to operations. Thanks to those efforts, campus access is now fully integrated with the Covid Pass system, with the MIT Mobile ID playing a central role. 

Future enhancements

While the MIT Mobile ID already offers many useful features, in the coming months IS&T and its partners across the Institute will continue to enhance and improve its functionality, including enabling the Mobile ID to be used as a T pass once the MBTA has enabled digital credentials.

In the meantime, MIT community members and affiliates should be sure to keep their physical ID cards, especially for the purposes of identification as well as for riding on the MBTA system. As cards may get lost or damaged, IS&T has made it easier for people to get a new or replacement card using the new self-service card-printing kiosk in the entryway of E17 at 40 Ames Street.

“We envision that the MIT Mobile ID will become an integral part of our campus fabric and help support our community in their efforts to keep us healthy and safe during these challenging times,” says Silis.

At the crossroads of language, technology, and empathy | MIT News

Rujul Gandhi’s love of looking at blossomed into a like of language at age 6, when she found out a ebook at a garage sale identified as “What’s At the rear of the Word?” With forays into historical past, etymology, and language genealogies, the e-book captivated Gandhi, who as an MIT senior continues to be fascinated with words and how we use them.

Escalating up partially in the U.S. and generally in India, Gandhi was surrounded by a variety of languages and dialects. When she moved to India at age 8, she could by now see how realizing the Marathi language permitted her to connect more effortlessly to her classmates — an early lesson in how language designs our human experiences.

At first considering she may want to review artistic crafting or theater, Gandhi first acquired about linguistics as its own area of examine by means of an on the internet system in ninth quality. Now a linguistics big at MIT, she is learning the framework of language from the syllable to sentence amount, and also mastering about how we understand language. She finds the human factors of how we use language, and the reality that languages are frequently changing, notably persuasive.

 “When you study to value language, you can then enjoy culture,” she says.

Communicating and connecting, with a technological assist

Having gain of MIT’s World Teaching Labs application, Gandhi traveled to Kazakhstan in January 2020 to teach linguistics and biology to substantial school college students. Missing a sound grasp of the language, she cautiously navigated discussions with her college students and hosts. However, she before long found that performing to fully grasp the language, giving culturally suitable examples, and producing her assignments in Russian and Kazakh authorized her to have interaction much more meaningfully with her pupils.

Engineering also assisted bridge the interaction barrier among Gandhi and her Russian-talking host father, who spoke no English. With enable from Google Translate, they bonded more than shared passions, together with 1950s and ’60s Bollywood new music.

As she started to study pc science at MIT, Gandhi noticed more prospects to join persons by the two language and technological know-how, therefore major her to go after a double important in linguistics and in laptop science and electrical engineering.

“The complications I recognize by means of linguistics, I can try out to uncover solutions to through pc science,” she points out.

Energized by ambitious tasks

Gandhi is established to prioritize social impact while searching for all those remedies. As a result of many leadership roles in on-campus corporations for the duration of her time at MIT, specially in the college student-run Instructional Reports Method (ESP), she recognized how much performing right with men and women and being on the logistical aspect of significant tasks energizes her. With ESP, she allows organize gatherings that bring hundreds of substantial faculty and center university pupils to campus every year for courses and other pursuits led by MIT college students.

Right after her second directing system, Spark 2020, was cancelled very last March because of the pandemic, Gandhi finally embraced the virtual expertise. She prepared and co-directed a virtual software, Splash: 2020, internet hosting about 1,100 learners. “Interacting with the ESP community convinced me that an business can operate effectively with a strong commitment to its values,” she says.

The pandemic also heightened Gandhi’s appreciation for the MIT local community, as quite a few men and women reached out to her supplying a position to keep when campus shut down. She suggests she sees MIT as house — a place exactly where she not only feels cared for, but also relishes the possibility to treatment for other individuals.

Now, she is bridging cultural limitations on campus by means of undertaking art. Dance is one more a single of Gandhi’s loves. When she could not come across a team to observe Indian classical dance with, Gandhi took matters into her personal palms. In 2019, she and a few of mates founded Nritya, a university student group at MIT. The group hopes to have its 1st in-person overall performance this slide. “Dance is like its personal language,” she observes.

Engineering born out of empathy

In her educational perform, Gandhi relishes researching linguistics difficulties from a theoretical perspective, and then applying that expertise through arms-on experiences. “The excellent detail about MIT is it allows you go out of your ease and comfort zone,” she says.

For example, in IAP 2019 she worked on a geographical dialect survey of her native Marathi language with Deccan School, a centre of linguistics in her hometown. And, as a result of the Undergraduate Research Opportunities System (UROP), she is at the moment operating on a research job focused on phonetics and phonology, focusing her focus on how language “contact,” or interactions, influences the appears that speakers use.

The adhering to winter season, she also worked with Tarjimly, a nonprofit connecting refugees with interpreters by way of a smartphone app. She notes that translating systems have state-of-the-art immediately in terms of permitting men and women to connect more successfully, but she also acknowledges that there is great potential to strengthen them to benefit and reach even a lot more persons.

“How are persons going to advocate for by themselves and make use of public infrastructure if they can’t interface with it?” she asks.

Mulling more than other strategies, Gandhi says it would be fascinating to check out how sign language may be a lot more properly be interpreted by way of a smartphone translating app. And, she sees a want for even further strengthening regional translations to much better connect with the lifestyle and context of the spots the language is spoken in, accounting for dialectal variations and new developments.

Hunting in advance, Gandhi would like to emphasis on designing techniques that improved combine theoretical developments in linguistics and on generating language technologies widely obtainable. She suggests she finds the do the job of bringing together know-how and linguistics to be most satisfying when it will involve people, and that she finds the most which means in her projects when they are centered close to empathy for others’ encounters.

“The technology born out of empathy is the technology that I want to be functioning on,” she clarifies. “Language is essentially a people today point you cannot ignore the folks when you are designing technological know-how that relates to language.”

Blockchain technology could provide secure communications for robot teams | MIT News

Visualize a staff of autonomous drones equipped with advanced sensing gear, searching for smoke as they fly superior earlier mentioned the Sierra Nevada mountains. After they place a wildfire, these leader robots relay instructions to a swarm of firefighting drones that pace to the web-site of the blaze.

But what would materialize if just one or much more leader robots was hacked by a malicious agent and began sending incorrect directions? As follower robots are led farther from the fire, how would they know they had been duped?

The use of blockchain technological innovation as a conversation instrument for a staff of robots could offer security and safeguard versus deception, in accordance to a research by scientists at MIT and Polytechnic College of Madrid, which was printed today in IEEE Transactions on Robotics. The investigate could also have applications in metropolitan areas where by multirobot techniques of self-driving automobiles are providing products and relocating individuals across town.

A blockchain offers a tamper-proof history of all transactions — in this scenario, the messages issued by robot workforce leaders — so follower robots can sooner or later detect inconsistencies in the data path.

Leaders use tokens to signal movements and increase transactions to the chain, and forfeit their tokens when they are caught in a lie, so this transaction-based mostly communications system limitations the variety of lies a hacked robotic could spread, in accordance to Eduardo Castelló, a Marie Curie Fellow in the MIT Media Lab and direct creator of the paper.

“The globe of blockchain outside of the discourse about cryptocurrency has several things underneath the hood that can make new strategies of understanding security protocols,” Castelló says.

Not just for Bitcoin

Even though a blockchain is ordinarily made use of as a protected ledger for cryptocurrencies, in its essence it is a listing of knowledge constructions, recognized as blocks, that are linked in a chain. Every single block contains facts it is intended to store, the “hash” of the info in the block, and the “hash” of the past block in the chain. Hashing is the process of changing a string of textual content into a sequence of exclusive numbers and letters.

In this simulation-centered examine, the data saved in each and every block is a established of instructions from a chief robotic to followers. If a destructive robotic tries to alter the articles of a block, it will alter the block hash, so the altered block will no for a longer period be related to the chain. The altered directions could be conveniently ignored by follower robots.

The blockchain also supplies a long term report of all transactions. Since all followers can eventually see all the directions issued by leader robots, they can see if they have been misled.

For instance, if five leaders send messages telling followers to transfer north, and one particular leader sends a concept telling followers to shift west, the followers could ignore that inconsistent route. Even if a follower robotic did transfer west by error, the misled robotic would sooner or later comprehend the error when it compares its moves to the transactions stored in the blockchain.

Transaction-primarily based interaction

In the program the researchers created, every leader gets a preset selection of tokens that are utilized to insert transactions to the chain — just one token is necessary to insert a transaction. If followers ascertain the data in a block is phony, by examining what the bulk of chief robots signaled at that distinct phase, the chief loses the token. The moment a robot is out of tokens it can no longer ship messages.

“We envisioned a program in which lying expenses funds. When the destructive robots operate out of tokens, they can no extended unfold lies. So, you can restrict or constrain the lies that the system can expose the robots to,” Castelló says.

The scientists tested their program by simulating several observe-the-chief conditions wherever the number of malicious robots was identified or mysterious. Utilizing a blockchain, leaders despatched instructions to follower robots that moved throughout a Cartesian aircraft, though malicious leaders broadcast incorrect directions or attempted to block the route of follower robots. 

The researchers found that, even when follower robots have been in the beginning misled by destructive leaders, the transaction-centered method enabled all followers to eventually access their destination. And for the reason that just about every leader has an equal, finite range of tokens, the scientists created algorithms to determine the utmost selection of lies a malicious robot can explain to. 

“Since we know how lies can impression the procedure, and the utmost damage that a destructive robotic can induce in the technique, we can work out the highest sure of how misled the swarm could be. So, we could say, if you have robots with a specific amount of battery lifetime, it doesn’t definitely make any difference who hacks the procedure, the robots will have sufficient battery to reach their target,” Castelló claims.

In addition to permitting a method designer to estimate the battery everyday living the robots require to entire their task, the algorithms also help the consumer to figure out the total of memory needed to store the blockchain, the quantity of robots that will be essential, and the size of the path they can travel, even if a specified percentage of leader robots are hacked and grow to be destructive.

“You can style your procedure with these tradeoffs in intellect and make a lot more informed conclusions about what you want to do with the process you are likely to deploy,” he suggests.

In the upcoming, Castelló hopes to establish off this perform to make new stability systems for robots applying transaction-dependent interactions. He sees it as a way to build have confidence in concerning humans and groups of robots.

“When you turn these robot methods into public robotic infrastructure, you expose them to destructive actors and failures. These techniques are useful to be capable to validate, audit, and recognize that the method is not likely to go rogue. Even if specified associates of the procedure are hacked, it is not likely to make the infrastructure collapse,” he suggests.

The paper was co-authored by Ernesto Jiménez and José Luis López-Presa of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. This investigate was funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Analysis and Innovation Method, the Regional Federal government of Madrid, and the MIT Global Science and Technologies Initiatives International Seed Fund.