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            2 <rss xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" version="2.0" xml:base="https://news.mit.edu">
            3   <channel>
            4     <title>MIT News</title>
            5     <link>https://news.mit.edu/rss/research</link>
            6     <atom:link href="https://news.mit.edu/rss/research" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/>
            7     <description>MIT News is dedicated to communicating to the media and the public the news and achievements of the students, faculty, staff and the greater MIT community.</description>
            8     <language>en</language>
            9     
           10     <lastBuildDate>Tue, 27 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0400</lastBuildDate>
           11     <item>
           12   <title>Study helps explain why motivation to learn declines with age</title>
           13   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/why-learn-motivate-age-decline-1027</link>
           14   <description>Research on mice suggests aging affects a brain circuit critical for learning to make some types of decisions.</description>
           15   <pubDate>Tue, 27 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
           16     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/why-learn-motivate-age-decline-1027</guid>
           17         <dc:creator>Anne Trafton | MIT News Office</dc:creator>
           18   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;As people age, they often lose their motivation to learn new things or engage in everyday activities. In a study of mice, MIT neuroscientists have now identified a brain circuit that is critical for maintaining this kind of motivation.&lt;/p&gt;
           19 
           20 &lt;p&gt;This circuit is particularly important for learning to make decisions that require evaluating the cost and reward that come with a particular action. The researchers showed that they could boost older mice’s motivation to engage in this type of learning by reactivating this circuit, and they could also decrease motivation by suppressing the circuit.&lt;/p&gt;
           21 
           22 &lt;p&gt;“As we age, it’s harder to have a get-up-and-go attitude toward things,” says Ann Graybiel, an Institute Professor at MIT and member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “This get-up-and-go, or engagement, is important for our social well-being and for learning — it’s tough to learn if you aren’t attending and engaged.”&lt;/p&gt;
           23 
           24 &lt;p&gt;Graybiel is the senior author of the study, which appears today in &lt;em&gt;Cell&lt;/em&gt;. The paper’s lead authors are Alexander Friedman, a former MIT research scientist who is now an assistant professor at the University of Texas at El Paso, and Emily Hueske, an MIT research scientist.&lt;/p&gt;
           25 
           26 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Evaluating cost and benefit&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
           27 
           28 &lt;p&gt;The striatum is part of the basal ganglia — a collection of brain centers linked to habit formation, control of voluntary movement, emotion, and addiction. For several decades, Graybiel’s lab has been studying clusters of cells called striosomes, which are distributed throughout the striatum. Graybiel discovered striosomes many years ago, but their function had remained mysterious, in part because they are so small and deep within the brain that it is difficult to image them with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).&lt;/p&gt;
           29 
           30 &lt;p&gt;In recent years, Friedman, Graybiel, and colleagues including MIT research fellow Ken-ichi Amemori have discovered that striosomes &lt;a href="https://news.mit.edu/2015/brain-circuit-controls-decisions-causing-anxiety-0528"&gt;play an important role&lt;/a&gt; in a type of decision-making known as approach-avoidance conflict. These decisions involve choosing whether to take the good with the bad — or to avoid both — when given options that have both positive and negative elements. An example of this kind of decision is having to choose whether to take a job that pays more but forces a move away from family and friends. Such decisions often provoke great anxiety.&lt;/p&gt;
           31 
           32 &lt;p&gt;In a &lt;a href="https://news.mit.edu/2016/neural-connections-linked-emotional-decision-making-0919"&gt;related study&lt;/a&gt;, Graybiel’s lab found that striosomes connect to cells of the substantia nigra, one of the brain’s major dopamine-producing centers. These studies led the researchers to hypothesize that striosomes may be acting as a gatekeeper that absorbs sensory and emotional information coming from the cortex and integrates it to produce a decision on how to act. These actions can then be invigorated by the dopamine-producing cells.&lt;/p&gt;
           33 
           34 &lt;p&gt;The researchers later discovered that chronic stress has a major impact on this circuit and on this kind of emotional decision-making. In a &lt;a href="https://news.mit.edu/2017/stress-can-lead-risky-decisions-1116"&gt;2017 study&lt;/a&gt; performed in rats and mice, they showed that stressed animals were far more likely to choose high-risk, high-payoff options, but that they could block this effect by manipulating the circuit.&lt;/p&gt;
           35 
           36 &lt;p&gt;In the new &lt;em&gt;Cell&lt;/em&gt; study, the researchers set out to investigate what happens in striosomes as mice learn how to make these kinds of decisions. To do that, they measured and analyzed the activity of striosomes as mice learned to choose between positive and negative outcomes.&lt;/p&gt;
           37 
           38 &lt;p&gt;During the experiments, the mice heard two different tones, one of which was accompanied by a reward (sugar water), and another that was paired with a mildly aversive stimulus (bright light). The mice gradually learned that if they licked a spout more when they heard the first tone, they would get more of the sugar water, and if they licked less during the second, the light would not be as bright.&lt;/p&gt;
           39 
           40 &lt;p&gt;Learning to perform this kind of task requires assigning value to each cost and each reward. The researchers found that as the mice learned the task, striosomes showed higher activity than other parts of the striatum, and that this activity correlated with the mice’s behavioral responses to both of the tones. This suggests that striosomes could be critical for assigning subjective value to a particular outcome.&lt;/p&gt;
           41 
           42 &lt;p&gt;“In order to survive, in order to do whatever you are doing, you constantly need to be able to learn. You need to learn what is good for you, and what is bad for you,” Friedman says.&lt;/p&gt;
           43 
           44 &lt;p&gt;“A person, or this case a mouse, may value a reward so highly that the risk of experiencing a possible cost is overwhelmed, while another may wish to avoid the cost to the exclusion of all rewards. And these may result in reward-driven learning in some and cost-driven learning in others,” Hueske says.&lt;/p&gt;
           45 
           46 &lt;p&gt;The researchers found that inhibitory neurons that relay signals from the prefrontal cortex help striosomes to enhance their signal-to-noise ratio, which helps to generate the strong signals that are seen when the mice evaluate a high-cost or high-reward option.&lt;/p&gt;
           47 
           48 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Loss of motivation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
           49 
           50 &lt;p&gt;Next, the researchers found that in older mice (between 13 and 21 months, roughly equivalent to people in their 60s and older), the mice’s engagement in learning this type of cost-benefit analysis went down. At the same time, their striosomal activity declined compared to that of younger mice. The researchers found a similar loss of motivation in a mouse model of Huntington’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects the striatum and its striosomes.&lt;/p&gt;
           51 
           52 &lt;p&gt;When the researchers used genetically targeted drugs to boost activity in the striosomes, they found that the mice became more engaged in performance of the task. Conversely, suppressing striosomal activity led to disengagement.&lt;/p&gt;
           53 
           54 &lt;p&gt;In addition to normal age-related decline, many mental health disorders can skew the ability to evaluate the costs and rewards of an action, from anxiety and depression to conditions such as PTSD. For example, a depressed person may undervalue potentially rewarding experiences, while someone suffering from addiction may overvalue drugs but undervalue things like their job or their family.&lt;/p&gt;
           55 
           56 &lt;p&gt;The researchers are now working on possible drug treatments that could stimulate this circuit, and they suggest that training patients to enhance activity in this circuit through biofeedback could offer another potential way to improve their cost-benefit evaluations.&lt;/p&gt;
           57 
           58 &lt;p&gt;“If you could pinpoint a mechanism which is underlying the subjective evaluation of reward and cost, and use a modern technique that could manipulate it, either psychiatrically or with biofeedback, patients may be able to activate their circuits correctly,” Friedman says.&lt;/p&gt;
           59 
           60 &lt;p&gt;The research was funded by the CHDI Foundation, the Saks Kavanaugh Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation, the Bachmann-Strauss Dystonia and Parkinson’s Foundation, the William N. and Bernice E. Bumpus Foundation, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Kristin R. Pressman and Jessica J. Pourian ’13 Fund, Michael Stiefel, and Robert Buxton.&lt;/p&gt;
           61 </content:encoded>
           62       <media:content url="https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_article__cover_image__original/public/images/202010/MIT-Aging-Motivation-01.gif?itok=mt_HGA2Y" medium="image" type="image/jpeg" width="390" height="260">
           63               <media:description type="plain">“As we age, it's harder to have a get-up-and-go attitude toward things,” says study author Ann Graybiel.</media:description>
           64               <media:credit>Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT</media:credit>
           65       </media:content>
           66     </item>
           67 <item>
           68   <title>Silencing gene expression to cure complex diseases</title>
           69   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/immuneering-gene-expression-1026</link>
           70   <description>Immuneering uses bioinformatics to develop new medicines while also helping large pharmaceutical companies improve their treatments.</description>
           71   <pubDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2020 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
           72     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/immuneering-gene-expression-1026</guid>
           73         <dc:creator>Zach Winn | MIT News Office</dc:creator>
           74   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;Many people think of new medicines as bullets, and in the pharmaceutical industry, frequently used terms like “targets” and “hits” reinforce that idea. Immuneering co-founder and CEO Ben Zeskind ’03, PhD ’06 prefers a different analogy.&lt;/p&gt;
           75 
           76 &lt;p&gt;His company, which specializes in bioinformatics and computational biology, sees many effective drugs more like noise-canceling headphones.&lt;/p&gt;
           77 
           78 &lt;p&gt;Rather than focusing on the DNA and proteins involved in a disease, Immuneering focuses on disease-associated gene signaling and expression data. The company is trying to cancel out those signals like a pair of headphones blocks out unwanted background noise.&lt;/p&gt;
           79 
           80 &lt;p&gt;The approach is guided by Immuneering’s decade-plus of experience helping large pharmaceutical companies understand the biological mechanisms behind some of their most successful medicines.&lt;/p&gt;
           81 
           82 &lt;p&gt;“We started noticing some common patterns in terms of how these very successful drugs were working, and eventually we realized we could use these insights to create a platform that would let us identify new medicine,” Zeskind says. “[The idea is] to not just make existing medicines work better but also to create entirely new medicines that work better than anything that has come before.”&lt;/p&gt;
           83 
           84 &lt;p&gt;In keeping with that idea, Immuneering is currently developing a bold pipeline of drugs aimed at some of the most deadly forms of cancer, in addition to other complex diseases that have proven difficult to treat, like Alzheimer’s. The company’s lead drug candidate, which targets a protein signaling pathway associated with many human cancers, will begin clinical trials within the year.&lt;/p&gt;
           85 
           86 &lt;p&gt;It’s the first of what Immuneering hopes will be a number of clinical trials enabled by what the company calls its “disease-canceling technology,” which analyzes the gene expression data of diseases and uses computational models to identify small-molecule compounds likely to bind to disease pathways and silence them.&lt;/p&gt;
           87 
           88 &lt;p&gt;“Our most advanced candidates go after the RAS-RAF-MEK [protein] pathway,” Zeskind explains. “This is a pathway that’s activated in about half of all human cancers. This pathway is incredibly important in a number of the most serious cancers: pancreatic, colorectal, melanoma, lung cancer — a lot of the cancers that have proven tougher to go after. We believe this is one of the largest unsolved problems in human cancer.”&lt;/p&gt;
           89 
           90 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A good foundation&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
           91 
           92 &lt;p&gt;As an undergraduate, Zeskind participated in the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition (the $50K back then) and helped organize some of the MIT Enterprise Forum’s events around entrepreneurship.&lt;/p&gt;
           93 
           94 &lt;p&gt;“MIT has a unique culture around entrepreneurship,” Zeskind says. “There aren’t many organizations that encourage it and celebrate it the way MIT does. Also, the philosophy of the biological engineering department, of taking problems in biology and analyzing them quantitatively and systematically using principles of engineering, that philosophy really drives our company today.”&lt;/p&gt;
           95 
           96 &lt;p&gt;Although his PhD didn’t focus on bioinformatics, Zeskind’s coursework did involve some computational analysis and offered a primer on oncology. One course in particular, taught by Doug Lauffenburger, the Ford Professor of Biological Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Biology, resonated with him. The class tasked students with uncovering some of the mechanisms of the interleukin-2 (IL-2) protein, a molecule found in the immune system that’s known to severely limit tumor growth in a small percentage of people with certain cancers.&lt;/p&gt;
           97 
           98 &lt;p&gt;After Zeskind earned his MBA at Harvard Business School in 2008, he returned to MIT’s campus to talk to Lauffenburger about his idea for a company that would decipher the reasons for IL-2’s success in certain patients. Lauffenburger would go on to join Immuneering’s advisory board.&lt;/p&gt;
           99 
          100 &lt;p&gt;Of course, due to the financial crisis of 2007-08, that proved to be difficult timing for launching a startup. Without easy access to capital, Zeskind approached pharmaceutical companies to show them some of the insights his team had gained on IL-2. The companies weren’t interested in IL-2, but they were intrigued by Immuneering’s process for uncovering the way it worked.&lt;/p&gt;
          101 
          102 &lt;p&gt;“At first we thought, ‘We just spent a year figuring out IL-2 and now we have to start from scratch,’” Zeskind recalls. “But then we realized it would be easier the second time around, and that was a real turning point because we realized the company wasn’t about that specific medicine, it was about using data to figure out mechanism.”&lt;/p&gt;
          103 
          104 &lt;p&gt;In one of the company’s first projects, Immuneering uncovered some of the mechanisms behind an early cancer immunotherapy developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb. In another, they studied the workings of Teva Pharmaceuticals’ drug for multiple sclerosis.&lt;/p&gt;
          105 
          106 &lt;p&gt;As Immuneering continued working on successful drugs, they began to notice some counterintuitive patterns.&lt;/p&gt;
          107 
          108 &lt;p&gt;“A lot of the conventional wisdom is to focus on DNA,” Zeskind says. “But what we saw over and over across many different projects was that transcriptomics, or which genes are turned on when — something you measure through RNA levels — was the thing that was most frequently informative about how a drug was working. That ran counter to conventional wisdom.”&lt;/p&gt;
          109 
          110 &lt;p&gt;In 2018, as Immuneering continued helping companies appreciate that idea in drugs that were already working, it decided to start developing medicines designed from the start to go after disease signals.&lt;/p&gt;
          111 
          112 &lt;p&gt;Today the company has drug pipelines focused around oncology, immune-oncology, and neuroscience. Zeskind says its disease-canceling technology allows Immuneering to launch new drug programs about twice as fast and with about half the capital as other drug development programs.&lt;/p&gt;
          113 
          114 &lt;p&gt;“As long as we have a good gene-expression signature from human patient data for a particular disease, we’ll find targets and biological insights that let us go after them in new ways,” he says. “It’s a systematic, quantitative, efficient way to get those biological insights compared to a more traditional process, which involves a lot of trial and error.”&lt;/p&gt;
          115 
          116 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;An inspired path&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          117 
          118 &lt;p&gt;Even as Immuneering advances its drug pipelines, its bioinformatics services business continues to grow. Zeskind attributes that success to the company’s employees, about half of which are MIT alumni — the continuation of trend that began in the early days of the company, when Immuneering was mostly made up of recent MIT PhD graduates and postdocs.&lt;/p&gt;
          119 
          120 &lt;p&gt;“We were sort of the Navy Seals of bioinformatics, if you will,” Zeskind says. “We’d come in with a small but incredibly well-trained team that knew how to make the most of the data they had available.”&lt;/p&gt;
          121 
          122 &lt;p&gt;In fact, it’s not lost on Zeskind that his analogy of drugs as noise-canceling headphones has a distinctively MIT spin: He was inspired by longtime MIT professor and Bose Corporation founder Amar Bose.&lt;/p&gt;
          123 
          124 &lt;p&gt;And Zeskind’s attraction to MIT came long before he ever stepped foot on campus. Growing up, his father, Dale Zeskind ’76, SM ’76, encouraged Ben and his sister Julie ’01, SM ’02 to attend MIT.&lt;/p&gt;
          125 
          126 &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, Dale passed away recently after a battle with cancer. But his influence, which included helping to spark a passion for entrepreneurship in his son, is still being felt. Other members of Immuneering’s small team have also lost parents to cancer, adding a personal touch to the work they do every day.&lt;/p&gt;
          127 
          128 &lt;p&gt;“Especially in the early days, people were taking more risk [joining us over] a large pharma company, but they were having a bigger impact,” Zeskind says. “It’s all about the work: looking at these successful drugs and figuring out why they’re better and seeing if we can improve them.”&lt;/p&gt;
          129 
          130 &lt;p&gt;Indeed, even as Immuneering’s business model has evolved over the last 12 years, the company has never wavered in its larger mission.&lt;/p&gt;
          131 
          132 &lt;p&gt;“There’s been a ton of great progress in medicine, but when someone gets a cancer diagnosis, it’s still, more likely than not, very bad news,” Zeskind says. “It’s a real unsolved problem. So by taking a counterintuitive approach and using data, we’re really focused on bringing forward medicines that can have the kind of durable responses that inspired us all those years ago with IL-2. We’re really excited about the impact the medicines we’re developing are going to have.”&lt;/p&gt;
          133 </content:encoded>
          134       <media:content url="https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_article__cover_image__original/public/images/202010/MIT-Immuneering-01-PRESS.jpg?itok=OJSnYqdH" medium="image" type="image/jpeg" width="390" height="260">
          135               <media:description type="plain">Immuneering develops drugs to bind to disease pathways and silence them.</media:description>
          136               <media:credit>Image: courtesy of Immuneering</media:credit>
          137       </media:content>
          138     </item>
          139 <item>
          140   <title>Yogesh Surendranath wants to decarbonize our energy systems</title>
          141   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/yogesh-surendranath-energy-1023</link>
          142   <description>By developing novel electrochemical reactions, he hopes to find new ways to generate energy and reduce greenhouse gases.</description>
          143   <pubDate>Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
          144     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/yogesh-surendranath-energy-1023</guid>
          145         <dc:creator>Anne Trafton | MIT News Office</dc:creator>
          146   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;Electricity plays many roles in our lives, from lighting our homes to powering the technology and appliances we rely on every day. Electricity can also have a major impact at the molecular scale, by powering chemical reactions that generate useful products.&lt;/p&gt;
          147 
          148 &lt;p&gt;Working at &lt;a href="https://news.mit.edu/2015/inexpensive-new-catalysts-fine-tuned-0916"&gt;that molecular level&lt;/a&gt;, MIT chemistry professor Yogesh Surendranath harnesses electricity to rearrange chemical bonds. The electrochemical reactions he is developing hold potential for processes such as splitting water into hydrogen fuel, creating more efficient fuel cells, and converting waste products like carbon dioxide into useful fuels.&lt;/p&gt;
          149 
          150 &lt;p&gt;“All of our research is about decarbonizing the energy ecosystem,” says Surendranath, who recently earned tenure in MIT’s Department of Chemistry and serves as the associate director of the Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage Center, one of the Low-Carbon Energy Centers run by the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).&lt;/p&gt;
          151 
          152 &lt;p&gt;Although his work has many applications in improving energy efficiency, most of the research projects in Surendranath’s group have grown out of the lab’s fundamental interest in exploring, at a &lt;a href="http://news.mit.edu/2019/thermodynamic-electron-proton-reactions-predict-0502"&gt;molecular level&lt;/a&gt;, the chemical reactions that occur between the surface of an electrode and a liquid.&lt;/p&gt;
          153 
          154 &lt;p&gt;“Our goal is to uncover the key rate-limiting processes and the key steps in the reaction mechanism that give rise to one product over another, so that we can, in a rational way, control a material's properties so that it can most selectively and efficiently carry out the overall reaction,” he says.&lt;/p&gt;
          155 
          156 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Energy conversion&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          157 
          158 &lt;p&gt;Born in Bangalore, India, Surendranath moved to Kent, Ohio, with his parents when he was 3 years old. Bangalore and Kent happen to have the world’s leading centers for studying liquid crystal materials, the field that Surendranath’s father, an organic chemist, specialized in.&lt;/p&gt;
          159 
          160 &lt;p&gt;“My dad would often take me to the laboratory, and although my parents encouraged me to pursue medicine, I think my interest in science and chemistry probably was sparked at an early age, by those experiences,” Surendranath recalls.&lt;/p&gt;
          161 
          162 &lt;p&gt;Although he was interested in all of the sciences, he narrowed his focus after taking his first college chemistry class at the University of Virginia, with a professor named Dean Harman. He decided on a double major in chemistry and physics and ended up doing research in Harman’s inorganic chemistry lab.&lt;/p&gt;
          163 
          164 &lt;p&gt;After graduating from UVA, Surendranath came to MIT for graduate school, where his thesis advisor was then-MIT professor Daniel Nocera. With Nocera, he explored &lt;a href="http://news.mit.edu/2011/artificial-leaf-0930"&gt;using electricity to split water&lt;/a&gt; as a way of renewably generating hydrogen. Surendranath’s PhD research focused on developing methods to catalyze the half of the reaction that extracts oxygen gas from water.&lt;/p&gt;
          165 
          166 &lt;p&gt;He got even more involved in catalyst development while doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California at Berkeley. There, he became interested in nanomaterials and the reactions that occur at the interfaces between solid catalysts and liquids.&lt;/p&gt;
          167 
          168 &lt;p&gt;“That interface is where a lot of the key processes that are involved in energy conversion occur in electrochemical technologies like batteries, electrolyzers, and fuel cells,” he says.&lt;/p&gt;
          169 
          170 &lt;p&gt;In 2013, Surendranath returned to MIT to join the faculty, at a time when many other junior faculty members were being hired.&lt;/p&gt;
          171 
          172 &lt;p&gt;“One of the most attractive features of the department is its balanced composition of early career and senior faculty. This has created a nurturing and vibrant atmosphere that is highly collaborative,” he says. “But more than anything else, it was the phenomenal students at MIT that drew me back. Their intensity and enthusiasm is what drives the science.”&lt;/p&gt;
          173 
          174 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Fuel decarbonization&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          175 
          176 &lt;p&gt;Among the many electrochemical reactions that Surendranath’s lab is trying to optimize is the &lt;a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/greenhouse-gas-into-gasoline-1115"&gt;conversion of carbon dioxide&lt;/a&gt; to simple chemical fuels such as carbon monoxide, ethylene, or other hydrocarbons. Another project focuses on &lt;a href="http://news.mit.edu/2017/new-way-harness-wasted-methane-1017"&gt;converting methane&lt;/a&gt; that is burned off from oil wells into liquid fuels such as methanol.&lt;/p&gt;
          177 
          178 &lt;p&gt;“For both of those areas, the idea is to convert carbon dioxide and low-carbon feedstocks into commodity chemicals and fuels. These technologies are essential for decarbonizing the chemistry and fuels sector,” Surendranath says.&lt;/p&gt;
          179 
          180 &lt;p&gt;Other projects include improving the efficiency of catalysts used for water electrolysis and fuel cells, and for producing &lt;a href="http://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-process-could-make-hydrogen-peroxide-available-remote-places-1023"&gt;hydrogen peroxide&lt;/a&gt; (a versatile disinfectant). Many of those projects have grown out of his students’ eagerness to chase after difficult problems and follow up on unexpected findings, Surendranath says.&lt;/p&gt;
          181 
          182 &lt;p&gt;“The true joy of my time here, in addition to the science, has been about seeing students that I've mentored grow and mature to become independent scientists and thought leaders, and then to go off and launch their own independent careers, whether it be in industry or in academia,” he says. “That role as a mentor to the next generation of scientists in my field has been extraordinarily rewarding.”&lt;/p&gt;
          183 
          184 &lt;p&gt;Although they take their work seriously, Surendranath and his students like to &lt;a href="https://news.mit.edu/2019/chemistry-bonds-quirky-researchers-hard-working-surendranath-lab-1226"&gt;keep the mood light&lt;/a&gt; in their lab. He often brings mangoes, coconuts, and other exotic fruits in to share, and enjoys flying stunt kites — a type of kite that has multiple lines, allowing them to perform acrobatic maneuvers such as figure eights. He can also occasionally be seen making balloon animals or blowing extremely large soap bubbles.&lt;/p&gt;
          185 
          186 &lt;p&gt;“My group has really cultivated an extraordinarily positive, collaborative, uplifting environment where we go after really hard problems, and we have a lot of fun along the way,” Surendranath says. “I feel blessed to work with people who have invested so much in the research effort and have built a culture that is such a pleasure to work in every day.”&lt;/p&gt;
          187 </content:encoded>
          188       <media:content url="https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_article__cover_image__original/public/images/202010/MIT_Yogesh_Surendranath_SL-press.jpg?itok=JycVnNL8" medium="image" type="image/jpeg" width="390" height="260">
          189               <media:description type="plain">“The true joy of my time here, in addition to the science, has been about seeing students that I've mentored grow and mature to become independent scientists and thought leaders, and then to go off and launch their own independent careers, whether it be in industry or in academia,” Yogesh Surendranath says.</media:description>
          190               <media:credit>Photo: Gretchen Ertl</media:credit>
          191       </media:content>
          192     </item>
          193 <item>
          194   <title>A wearable sensor to help ALS patients communicate</title>
          195   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/sensor-als-communicate-1022</link>
          196   <description>Researchers have designed a skin-like device that can measure small facial movements in patients who have lost the ability to speak.</description>
          197   <pubDate>Thu, 22 Oct 2020 11:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
          198     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/sensor-als-communicate-1022</guid>
          199         <dc:creator>Anne Trafton | MIT News Office</dc:creator>
          200   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;People with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) suffer from a gradual decline in their ability to control their muscles. As a result, they often lose the ability to speak, making it difficult to communicate with others.&lt;/p&gt;
          201 
          202 &lt;p&gt;A team of MIT researchers has now designed a stretchable, skin-like device that can be attached to a patient’s face and can measure small movements such as a twitch or a smile. Using this approach, patients could communicate a variety of sentiments, such as “I love you” or “I’m hungry,” with small movements that are measured and interpreted by the device.&lt;/p&gt;
          203 
          204 &lt;p&gt;The researchers hope that their new device would allow patients to communicate in a more natural way, without having to deal with bulky equipment. The wearable sensor is thin and can be camouflaged with makeup to match any skin tone, making it unobtrusive.&lt;/p&gt;
          205 
          206 &lt;p&gt;“Not only are our devices malleable, soft, disposable, and light, they’re also visually invisible,” says Canan Dagdeviren, the LG Electronics Career Development Assistant Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT and the leader of the research team. “You can camouflage it and nobody would think that you have something on your skin.”&lt;/p&gt;
          207 
          208 &lt;p&gt;The researchers tested the initial version of their device in two ALS patients (one female and one male, for &lt;a href="https://conformabledecoders.media.mit.edu/diversitystatement.html"&gt;gender balance&lt;/a&gt;) and showed that it could accurately distinguish three different facial expressions — smile, open mouth, and pursed lips.&lt;/p&gt;
          209 &lt;img alt="als" data-align="center" data-entity-type="file" data-entity-uuid="b762f998-fc75-4bc6-9689-444eedb12342" src="/sites/default/files/images/inline/ALS-communication-1.gif" /&gt;
          210 &lt;p&gt;MIT graduate student Farita Tasnim and former research scientist Tao Sun are the lead authors of the study, which appears today in &lt;em&gt;Nature Biomedical Engineering&lt;/em&gt;. Other MIT authors are undergraduate Rachel McIntosh, postdoc Dana Solav,&amp;nbsp;research scientist Lin Zhang, and senior lab manager David Sadat. Yuandong Gu of the A*STAR Institute of Microelectronics in Singapore and Nikta Amiri, Mostafa Tavakkoli Anbarani, and M. Amin Karami of the University of Buffalo are also authors.&lt;/p&gt;
          211 
          212 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;A skin-like sensor&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          213 
          214 &lt;p&gt;Dagdeviren’s lab, the &lt;a href="https://conformabledecoders.media.mit.edu/"&gt;Conformable Decoders&lt;/a&gt; group, specializes in developing conformable (flexible and stretchable) electronic devices that can adhere to the body for a variety of medical applications. She became interested in working on ways to help patients with neuromuscular disorders communicate after meeting Stephen Hawking in 2016, when the world-renowned physicist visited Harvard University and Dagdeviren was a junior fellow in Harvard’s Society of Fellows.&lt;/p&gt;
          215 
          216 &lt;p&gt;Hawking, who passed away in 2018, suffered from a slow-progressing form of ALS. He was able to communicate using an infrared sensor that could detect twitches of his cheek, which moved a cursor across rows and columns of letters. While effective, this process could be time-consuming and required bulky equipment.&lt;/p&gt;
          217 
          218 &lt;p&gt;Other ALS patients use similar devices that measure the electrical activity of the nerves that control the facial muscles. However, this approach also requires cumbersome equipment, and it is not always accurate.&lt;/p&gt;
          219 
          220 &lt;p&gt;“These devices are very hard, planar, and boxy, and reliability is a big issue. You may not get consistent results, even from the same patients within the same day,” Dagdeviren says.&lt;/p&gt;
          221 
          222 &lt;p&gt;Most ALS patients also eventually lose the ability to control their limbs, so typing is not a viable strategy to help them communicate. The MIT team set out to design a wearable interface that patients could use to communicate in a more natural way, without the bulky equipment required by current technologies.&lt;/p&gt;
          223 
          224 &lt;p&gt;The device they created consists of four piezoelectric sensors embedded in a thin silicone film. The sensors, which are made of aluminum nitride, can detect mechanical deformation of the skin and convert it into an electric voltage that can be easily measured. All of these components are easy to mass-produce, so the researchers estimate that each device would cost around $10.&lt;/p&gt;
          225 
          226 &lt;p&gt;The researchers used a process called digital imaging correlation on healthy volunteers to help them select the most useful locations to place the sensor. They painted a random black-and-white speckle pattern on the face and then took many images of the area with multiple cameras as the subjects performed facial motions such as smiling, twitching the cheek, or mouthing the shape of certain letters. The images were processed by software that analyzes how the small dots move in relation to each other, to determine the amount of strain experienced in a single area.&lt;/p&gt;
          227 
          228 &lt;p&gt;“We had subjects doing different motions, and we created strain maps of each part of the face,” McIntosh says. “Then we looked at our strain maps and determined where on the face we were seeing a correct strain level for our device, and determined that that was an appropriate place to put the device for our trials.”&lt;/p&gt;
          229 
          230 &lt;p&gt;The researchers also used the measurements of skin deformations to train a machine-learning algorithm to distinguish between a smile, open mouth, and pursed lips. Using this algorithm, they tested the devices with two ALS patients, and were able to achieve about 75 percent accuracy in distinguishing between these different movements. The accuracy rate in healthy subjects was 87 percent.&lt;/p&gt;
          231 
          232 &lt;p&gt;“The continuous monitoring of facial motions plays a key role in nonverbal communications for patients with neuromuscular disorders. Currently, the mainstream approach is camera tracking, which presents a challenge for continuous, portable usage,” says Takao Someya, a professor of electrical engineering and information systems and dean of the School of Engineering at the University of Tokyo, who was not involved in the study. “The authors have successfully developed thin, wearable, piezoelectric sensors that can reliably decode facial strains and predict facial kinematics.”&lt;/p&gt;
          233 
          234 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Enhanced communication&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          235 
          236 &lt;p&gt;Based on these detectable facial movements, a library of phrases or words could be created to correspond to different combinations of movements, the researchers say.&lt;/p&gt;
          237 
          238 &lt;p&gt;“We can create customizable messages based on the movements that you can do,” Dagdeviren says. “You can technically create thousands of messages that right now no other technology is available to do. It all depends on your library configuration, which can be designed for a particular patient or group of patients.”&lt;/p&gt;
          239 
          240 &lt;p&gt;The information from the sensor is sent to a handheld processing unit, which analyzes it using the algorithm that the researchers trained to distinguish between facial movements. In the current prototype, this unit is wired to the sensor, but the connection could also be made wireless for easier use, the researchers say.&lt;/p&gt;
          241 &lt;p&gt;The researchers have filed for a patent on this technology and they now plan to test it with additional patients. In addition to helping patients communicate, the device could also be used to track the progression of a patient’s disease, or to measure whether treatments they are receiving are having any effect, the researchers say.&lt;/p&gt;
          242 
          243 &lt;p&gt;“There are a lot of clinical trials that are testing whether or not a particular treatment is effective for reversing ALS,” Tasnim says. “Instead of just relying on the patients to report that they feel better or they feel stronger, this device could give a quantitative measure to track the effectiveness.”&lt;/p&gt;
          244 
          245 &lt;p&gt;The research was funded by the MIT Media Lab Consortium, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.&lt;/p&gt;
          246 </content:encoded>
          247       <media:content url="https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_article__cover_image__original/public/images/202010/MIT-ALS-Communication-01-PRESS.jpg?itok=XW-qgfQB" medium="image" type="image/jpeg" width="390" height="260">
          248               <media:description type="plain">All images: David Sadat</media:description>
          249               <media:credit>Image: David Sadat</media:credit>
          250       </media:content>
          251     </item>
          252 <item>
          253   <title>Autonomous boats could be your next ride </title>
          254   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/autonomous-boats-could-be-your-next-ride-1026</link>
          255   <description>Five years in the making, MIT’s autonomous floating vessels get a size upgrade and learn a new way to communicate aboard the waters. </description>
          256   <pubDate>Mon, 26 Oct 2020 09:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
          257     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/autonomous-boats-could-be-your-next-ride-1026</guid>
          258         <dc:creator>Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL</dc:creator>
          259   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;The feverish race to produce the shiniest, safest, speediest self-driving car has spilled over into our wheelchairs, scooters, and even golf carts. Recently, there’s been movement from land to sea, as marine autonomy stands to change the canals of our cities, with the potential to deliver goods and services and collect waste across our waterways.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          260 
          261 &lt;p&gt;In an update to a five-year project from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Senseable City Lab, researchers have been developing the world's first fleet of autonomous boats for the City of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and have recently added a new, larger vessel to the group: “Roboat II.” Now sitting at 2 meters long, which is roughly a “Covid-friendly” 6 feet, the new robotic boat is capable of carrying passengers.&lt;/p&gt;
          262 &lt;p&gt;Alongside &lt;a href="https://www.ams-institute.org/"&gt;the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions&lt;/a&gt;, the team also created navigation and control algorithms to update the communication and collaboration among the boats.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          263 
          264 &lt;p&gt;“Roboat II navigates autonomously using algorithms similar to those used by self-driving cars, but now adapted for water,” says MIT Professor Daniela Rus, a senior author on a new paper about Roboat and the director of CSAIL. “We’re developing fleets of Roboats that can deliver people and goods, and connect with other Roboats to form a range of autonomous platforms to enable water activities.”&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          265 
          266 &lt;p&gt;Self-driving boats have been able to transport small items for years, but adding human passengers has felt somewhat intangible due to the current size of the vessels. Roboat II is the “half-scale” boat in the growing body of work, and joins the previously developed quarter-scale Roboat, which is 1 meter long. The third installment, which is under construction in Amsterdam and is considered to be “full scale,” is 4 meters long and aims to carry anywhere from four to six passengers.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          267 
          268 &lt;p&gt;Aided by powerful algorithms, Roboat II autonomously navigated the canals of Amsterdam for three hours collecting data, and returned back to its start location with an error margin of only 0.17 meters, or fewer&amp;nbsp;than 7 inches.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          269 
          270 &lt;p&gt;“The development of an autonomous boat system capable of accurate mapping, robust control, and human transport is a crucial step towards having the system implemented in the full-scale Roboat,” says senior postdoc Wei Wang, lead author on a new paper about Roboat II. “We also hope it will eventually be implemented in other boats in order to make them autonomous.”&lt;/p&gt;
          271 
          272 &lt;p&gt;Wang wrote the paper alongside&lt;em&gt; &lt;/em&gt;MIT Senseable City Lab postdoc Tixiao Shan, research fellow Pietro Leoni, postdoc David Fernandez-Gutierrez, research fellow Drew Meyers, and MIT professors Carlo Ratti and Daniela Rus. The work was supported by a grant from the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions in the Netherlands. A paper on Roboat II will be virtually presented at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          273 
          274 &lt;p&gt;To coordinate communication among the boats, another team from MIT CSAIL and Senseable City Lab, also led by Wang, came up with a new control strategy for robot coordination.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          275 
          276 &lt;p&gt;With the intent of self-assembling into connected, multi-unit trains — with distant homage to children’s train sets&amp;nbsp;— “collective transport” takes a different path to complete various tasks. The system uses a distributed controller, which is a collection of &lt;a href="https://controlstation.com/what-is-a-distributed-control-system/"&gt;sensors, controllers, and associated computers&lt;/a&gt; distributed throughout a system), and a strategy inspired by how a colony of ants can transport food without communication. Specifically, there’s no direct communication among the connected robots — only one leader knows the destination. The leader initiates movement to the destination, and then the other robots can estimate the intention of the leader, and align their movements accordingly.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          277 
          278 &lt;p&gt;“Current cooperative algorithms have rarely considered dynamic systems on the water,” says Ratti, the Senseable City Lab director. “Cooperative transport, using a team of water vehicles, poses unique challenges not encountered in aerial or ground vehicles. For example, inertia and load of the vehicles become more significant factors that make the system harder to control. Our study investigates the cooperative control of the surface vehicles and validates the algorithm on that.”&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          279 
          280 &lt;p&gt;The team tested their control method on two scenarios: one where three robots are connected in a series, and another where three robots are connected in parallel. The results showed that the coordinated group was able to track various trajectories and orientations in both configurations, and that the magnitudes of the followers’ forces positively contributed to the group — indicating that the follower robots helped the leader.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          281 
          282 &lt;p&gt;Wang wrote a paper about collective transport alongside Stanford University PhD student Zijian Wang, MIT postdoc Luis Mateos, MIT researcher Kuan Wei Huang, Stanford Assistant Professor Mac Schwager, Ratti, and Rus.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          283 
          284 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Roboat II&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          285 
          286 &lt;p&gt;In 2016, MIT researchers &lt;a href="http://news.mit.edu/2016/autonomous-fleet-amsterdam-roboat-0919"&gt;tested&lt;/a&gt; a prototype that could move “forward, backward, and laterally along a pre-programmed path in the canals.” Three years later, the team’s robots were updated to “shapeshift” by &lt;a href="https://news.mit.edu/2019/roboats-autonomous-connect-assemble-0829"&gt;autonomously disconnecting and reassembling&lt;/a&gt; into a variety of configurations.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          287 
          288 &lt;p&gt;Now, Roboat II has scaled up to explore transportation tasks, aided by updated research. These include a new algorithm for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), a model-based optimal controller called nonlinear model predictive controller, and an optimization-based state estimator, called moving horizon estimation.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          289 
          290 &lt;p&gt;Here’s how it works: When a passenger pickup task is required from a user at a specific position, the system coordinator will assign the task to an unoccupied boat that’s closest to the passenger. As Roboat II picks up the passenger, it will create a feasible path to the desired destination, based on the current traffic conditions.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          291 
          292 &lt;p&gt;Then, Roboat II, which weighs more than 50 kilograms, will start to localize itself by running the SLAM algorithm and utilizing &lt;a href="https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/lidar.html"&gt;lidar&lt;/a&gt; and GPS sensors, as well as an inertial measurement unit for localization, pose, and velocity. The controller then tracks the reference trajectories from the planner, which updates the path to avoid obstacles that are detected to avoid potential collisions.&amp;nbsp;&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          293 
          294 &lt;p&gt;The team notes that the improvements in their control algorithms have made the obstacles feel like less of a giant iceberg since their last update; the SLAM algorithm provides a higher localization accuracy for Roboat, and allows for online mapping during navigation, which they didn’t have in previous iterations.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          295 
          296 &lt;p&gt;Increasing the size of Roboat also required a larger area to conduct the experiments, which began in the MIT pools and subsequently moved to the Charles River, which cuts through Boston and Cambridge, Massachusetts.&lt;/p&gt;
          297 
          298 &lt;p&gt;While navigating the congested roads of cities alike can lead drivers to feel trapped in a maze, canals largely avoid this. Nevertheless, tricky scenarios in the waterways can still emerge. Given that, the team is working on developing more efficient planning algorithms to let the vessel handle more complicated scenarios, by applying active object detection and identification to improve Roboat’s understanding of its environment. The team plans to estimate disturbances such as currents and waves, to further improve the tracking performance in more noisy waters.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          299 
          300 &lt;p&gt;“All of these expected developments will be incorporated into the first prototype of the full-scale Roboat and tested in the canals of the City of Amsterdam,” says Rus.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          301 
          302 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Collective transport &lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          303 
          304 &lt;p&gt;Making our intuitive abilities a reality for machines has been the persistent intention since the birth of the field, from straightforward commands for picking up items to the nuances of organizing in a group.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          305 
          306 &lt;p&gt;One of the main goals of the project is enabling self-assembly to complete the aforementioned tasks of collecting waste, delivering items, and transporting people in the canals — but controlling this movement on the water has been a challenging obstacle. Communication in robotics can often be unstable or have delays, which may worsen the robot coordination.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          307 
          308 &lt;p&gt;Many control algorithms for this collective transport require direct communication, the relative positions in the group, and the destination of the task — but the team’s new algorithm simply needs one robot to know&lt;em&gt; &lt;/em&gt;the desired trajectory and orientation.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          309 
          310 &lt;p&gt;Normally, the distributed controller running on each robot requires the velocity information of the connected structure (represented by the velocity of the center of the structure), but this requires that each robot knows the relative position to the center of the structure. In the team’s algorithm, they don’t need the relative position, and each robot simply uses its local velocity instead of the velocity of the center of the structure.&lt;/p&gt;
          311 
          312 &lt;p&gt;When the leader initiates the movement to the destination, the other robots can therefore estimate the intention of the leader and align their movements. The leader can also steer the rest of the robots by adjusting its input, without any communication between any two robots.&amp;nbsp;&lt;/p&gt;
          313 
          314 &lt;p&gt;In the future, the team plans to use machine learning to estimate (online) the key parameters of the robots. They’re also aiming to explore adaptive controllers that allow for dynamic change to the structure when objects are placed on the boat. Eventually, the boats will also be extended&amp;nbsp;to outdoor water environments, where large disturbances such as currents and waves exist.&lt;/p&gt;
          315 </content:encoded>
          316       <media:content url="https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_article__cover_image__original/public/images/202010/MIT-Roboat%20II-Close.jpg?itok=2CROnQzf" medium="image" type="image/jpeg" width="390" height="260">
          317               <media:description type="plain">The latest version of MIT's autonomous boat is now 2 meters long and capable of carrying passengers. </media:description>
          318               <media:credit>Photo courtesy of the researchers.</media:credit>
          319       </media:content>
          320     </item>
          321 <item>
          322   <title>What are the odds your vote will not count?</title>
          323   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/odds-mail-vote-not-count-1019</link>
          324   <description>MIT professor’s study quantifies how many mail-in ballots became “lost votes” in the 2016 U.S. federal election.</description>
          325   <pubDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2020 00:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
          326     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/odds-mail-vote-not-count-1019</guid>
          327         <dc:creator>Peter Dizikes | MIT News Office</dc:creator>
          328   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;This is part 2 of a two-part &lt;/em&gt;MIT News&lt;em&gt; series on voting research and the 2020 election. &lt;a href="https://news.mit.edu/2020/votes-counted-after-election-1015"&gt;Part 1&lt;/a&gt; focuses on shifts in post-Election Day vote tallies.&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          329 
          330 &lt;p&gt;In elections, every vote counts. Or should count. But a new study by an MIT professor indicates that in the 2016 U.S. general election, 4 percent of all mail-in ballots were not counted — about 1.4 million votes, or 1 percent of all votes cast, signaling a significant problem that could grow in 2020.&lt;/p&gt;
          331 
          332 &lt;p&gt;The study quantifies the range of reasons for this, including late-arriving ballots, problems with ballot signatures and envelopes, and improperly marked ballots, among other things.&lt;/p&gt;
          333 
          334 &lt;p&gt;“Mail ballots tend to have more mistakes on them,” says Charles Stewart, a professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science and author of a paper detailing the study, which looks at data from all 50 U.S. states.&lt;/p&gt;
          335 
          336 &lt;p&gt;Voting by mail — the same thing as absentee voting — will probably be more prevalent than ever in 2020, as voters seek to avoid crowds at polling places during the Covid-19 pandemic.&lt;/p&gt;
          337 
          338 &lt;p&gt;As the study suggests, states that have more experience with mail-in voting tend to have a slightly lower percentage of lost votes. Thus the 2020 election could feature an unusually high percentage of lost mail-in voting attempts, and the odds of your mail-in ballot counting may vary a bit, depending on where you live.&lt;/p&gt;
          339 
          340 &lt;p&gt;“The likelihood of a vote being lost by mail is, in part, determined by how the state feels about that,” says Stewart, who is the Kenan Sahin Distinguished Professor of Political Science and head of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab. “States can put more or less effort into ensuring that voters don’t make mistakes. … There are different mail-ballot regimes, they handle the ballots differently, they operate under different philosophies of what mail balloting is supposed to achieve, and who bears the risk of mail balloting.”&lt;/p&gt;
          341 
          342 &lt;p&gt;The paper, “Reconsidering Lost Votes by Mail,” appears as a working paper on the Social Science Research Network, and will be published by the &lt;em&gt;Harvard Data Science Review&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
          343 
          344 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Check your work&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          345 
          346 &lt;p&gt;The concept of “lost votes” was first studied comprehensively by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (VTP) following the contested 2000 U.S. presidential election. The VTP concluded that of 107 million votes cast in 2000 — of all kinds, not just mail-in voting — between 4 million and 6 million went unrecorded. The federal Help America Vote Act of 2003 (HAVA) subsequently reduced that number to between 2 million and 3 million.&lt;/p&gt;
          347 
          348 &lt;p&gt;The current paper extends that line of analysis to absentee votes, and updates a 2010 Stewart study. Overall, there are three main types of problems with mail-in votes: postal issues, procedural problems involving things like signatures and ballot envelopes, and vote-scanning problems.&lt;/p&gt;
          349 
          350 &lt;p&gt;In the first case, about 1.1 percent of all mail-in votes are lost because of problems during the mailing process — from unfilled absentee ballot requests to the return of those ballots. Some of those lost votes represent election-administration errors, not postal issues. Stewart does not think recent reductions in U.S. Postal Service capacity will necessarily change that, although many experts are urging voters to mail in their ballots promptly.&lt;/p&gt;
          351 
          352 &lt;p&gt;“Postal service problems, literally the ballot not arriving, the ballot arriving late, getting lost in the office, that’s one source,” Stewart says. “But it’s probably the least important source of loss, despite all the controversy about the postal service.”&lt;/p&gt;
          353 
          354 &lt;p&gt;Secondly, votes can also be lost when voters handle the process incorrectly: They fail to sign ballots, are judged to have submitted mismatched signatures, or do not use the ballot’s safety envelope, among other things. About 1.5 percent of mail-in votes suffer from these problems, Stewart estimates.&lt;/p&gt;
          355 
          356 &lt;p&gt;“The voter can make a mistake in the certification process,” Stewarts says. “They don’t sign the envelope where they’re supposed to, they don’t seal it properly … there are all sorts of things that lead to rejected ballots.” Still, Stewart observes, “Election offices could be less persnickety about technical issues.”&lt;/p&gt;
          357 
          358 &lt;p&gt;The third type of problem, comprising 1.5 percent of all attempts at absentee voting, occurs when scanning machines in polling places reject ballots.&lt;/p&gt;
          359 
          360 &lt;p&gt;“The scanning problems, nobody really talks about because it’s the most abstract, but I think it may be the most important,” Stewart says.&lt;/p&gt;
          361 
          362 &lt;p&gt;This category includes voter mistakes that could be corrected in person, but lead to rejection on absentee ballots. When people “overvote,” selecting too many candidates, scanning machines catch the errors — and HAVA mandates that in-person voters can re-do the ballot.&lt;/p&gt;
          363 
          364 &lt;p&gt;“If you overvote, there’s a requirement in federal law that the ballot be kicked back to you,” Stewart says about in-person voting. “If you undervote, there’s not a requirement, but many states will kick back the ballot [to voters]. But if you do that and drop your ballot in the mailbox, there’s nobody to kick the ballot back to you.”&lt;/p&gt;
          365 
          366 &lt;p&gt;One frequent type of overvote happens when voters redundantly add their chosen candidate’s name to the write-in line, Stewart says: “The most common reason for overvotes is people will fill in the bubble for their candidate, and then they’ll go down to the bottom and write in the name of their candidate.”&lt;/p&gt;
          367 
          368 &lt;p&gt;There are other ways a voter can foul up a ballot as well.&lt;/p&gt;
          369 
          370 &lt;p&gt;“It could be, if you’re making choices and put your pencil down next to every name, that could be picked up as a vote by the scanners,” Stewart says. “There are things you just don’t think about that could go wrong.”&lt;/p&gt;
          371 
          372 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;The geography of lost votes&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          373 
          374 &lt;p&gt;To conduct the study, Stewart used a variety of data sources, including U.S. Postal Service on-time rates, the Survey of the Performance of American Elections, the Cooperative Congressional Election Study, and the Current Population Survey of the U.S. Census Bureau.&lt;/p&gt;
          375 
          376 &lt;p&gt;One finding of the study is that the percentage of lost mail-in votes is lower in states that lean more heavily on absentee balloting overall. It is 3.5 percent in states that conduct their elections almost completely by mail (Colorado, Oregon, and Washington) and in those that keep a permanent absentee ballot list (Arizona, California, Hawaii, Montana, and Utah, plus Washington, D.C.). But the lost votes percentage for mail-in ballots is higher, at 4.4 percent, in states that honor absentee ballot requests with no excuse needed, and it’s 4.9 percent in states that require an excuse for absentee balloting.&lt;/p&gt;
          377 
          378 &lt;p&gt;That suggests both that voters become more proficient when they have more experience at mail-in voting, and that states may process mail ballots more effectively when it becomes routine for them. Stewart, for one, believes that election officials do an exceptional job overall.&lt;/p&gt;
          379 
          380 &lt;p&gt;“I’m very sanguine about the integrity of the process, from what I know about election officials,” Stewart says. Still, he acknowledges, absentee voting can be a tricky process, and a significant number of votes may be lost in 2020.&lt;/p&gt;
          381 
          382 &lt;p&gt;“That’s why we have a lot of voter education going on right now,” Stewart says.&lt;/p&gt;
          383 </content:encoded>
          384       <media:content url="https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_article__cover_image__original/public/images/202010/MIT-Lost-Votes-01-PRESS.jpg?itok=1dwFDvy-" medium="image" type="image/jpeg" width="390" height="260">
          385                   <media:credit>Image: Christine Daniloff, MIT</media:credit>
          386       </media:content>
          387     </item>
          388 <item>
          389   <title>A controllable membrane to pull carbon dioxide out of exhaust streams</title>
          390   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/membrane-carbon-dioxide-exhaust-1016</link>
          391   <description>Electrically switchable system could continuously separate gases without the need for moving parts or wasted space.</description>
          392   <pubDate>Fri, 16 Oct 2020 14:00:00 -0400</pubDate>
          393     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/membrane-carbon-dioxide-exhaust-1016</guid>
          394         <dc:creator>David L. Chandler | MIT News Office</dc:creator>
          395   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;A new system developed by chemical engineers at MIT could provide a way of continuously removing carbon dioxide from a stream of waste gases, or even from the air. The key component is an electrochemically assisted membrane whose permeability to gas can be switched on and off at will, using no moving parts and relatively little energy.&lt;/p&gt;
          396 
          397 &lt;p&gt;The membranes themselves, made of anodized aluminum oxide, have a honeycomb-like structure made up of hexagonal openings that allow gas molecules to flow in and out when in the open state. However, gas passage can be blocked when a thin layer of metal is electrically deposited to cover the pores of the membrane. The work is described today in the journal &lt;em&gt;Science Advances&lt;/em&gt;, in a paper by Professor T. Alan Hatton, postdoc Yayuan Liu, and four others.&lt;/p&gt;
          398 
          399 &lt;p&gt;This new “gas gating” mechanism could be applied to the continuous removal of carbon dioxide from a range of industrial exhaust streams and from ambient air, the team says. They have built a proof-of-concept device to show this process in action.&lt;/p&gt;
          400 
          401 &lt;p&gt;The device uses a redox-active carbon-absorbing material, sandwiched between two switchable gas gating membranes. The sorbent and the gating membranes are in close contact with each other and are immersed in an organic electrolyte to provide a medium for zinc ions to shuttle back and forth. These two gating membranes can be opened or closed electrically by switching the polarity of a voltage between them, causing ions of zinc to shuttle from one side to the other. The ions simultaneously block one side, by forming a metallic film over it, while opening the other, by dissolving its film away.&lt;/p&gt;
          402 
          403 &lt;p&gt;When the sorbent layer is open to the side where the waste gases are flowing by, the material readily soaks up carbon dioxide until it reaches its capacity. The voltage can then be switched to block off the feed side and open up the other side, where a concentrated stream of nearly pure carbon dioxide is released.&lt;/p&gt;
          404 
          405 &lt;p&gt;By building a system with alternating sections of membrane that operate in opposite phases, the system would allow for continuous operation in a setting such as an industrial scrubber. At any one time, half of the sections would be absorbing the gas while the other half would be releasing it.&lt;/p&gt;
          406 
          407 &lt;p&gt;“That means that you have a feed stream coming into the system at one end and the product stream leaving from the other in an ostensibly continuous operation,” Hatton says. “This approach avoids many process issues” that would be involved in a traditional multicolumn system, in which adsorption beds alternately need to be shut down, purged, and then regenerated, before being exposed again to the feed gas to begin the next adsorption cycle. In the new system, the purging steps are not required, and the steps all occur cleanly within the unit itself.&lt;/p&gt;
          408 
          409 &lt;p&gt;The researchers’ key innovation was using electroplating as a way to open and close the pores in a material. Along the way the team had tried a variety of other approaches to reversibly close pores in a membrane material, such as using tiny magnetic spheres that could be positioned to block funnel-shaped openings, but these other methods didn’t prove to be efficient enough. Metal thin films can be particularly effective as gas barriers, and the ultrathin layer used in the new system requires a minimal amount of the zinc material, which is abundant and inexpensive.&lt;/p&gt;
          410 
          411 &lt;p&gt;“It makes a very uniform coating layer with a minimum amount of materials,” Liu says. One significant advantage of the electroplating method is that once the condition is changed, whether in the open or closed position, it requires no energy input to maintain that state. Energy is only required to switch back again.&lt;/p&gt;
          412 
          413 &lt;p&gt;Potentially, such a system could make an important contribution toward limiting emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and even direct-air capture of carbon dioxide that has already been emitted.&lt;/p&gt;
          414 
          415 &lt;p&gt;While the team’s initial focus was on the challenge of separating carbon dioxide from a stream of gases, the system could actually be adapted to a wide variety of chemical separation and purification processes, Hatton says.&lt;/p&gt;
          416 
          417 &lt;p&gt;“We’re pretty excited about the gating mechanism. I think we can use it in a variety of applications, in different configurations,” he says. “Maybe in microfluidic devices, or maybe we could use it to control the gas composition for a chemical reaction. There are many different possibilities.”&lt;/p&gt;
          418 
          419 &lt;p&gt;The research team included graduate student Chun-Man Chow, postdoc Katherine Phillips, and recent graduates Miao Wang PhD ’20 and Sahag Voskian PhD ’19. This work was supported by ExxonMobil&amp;nbsp;through the MIT Energy Initiative.&lt;/p&gt;
          420 </content:encoded>
          421       <media:content url="https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_article__cover_image__original/public/images/202010/MIT-Gated-Membranes-01-PRESS.jpg?itok=-_WyytS2" medium="image" type="image/jpeg" width="390" height="260">
          422               <media:description type="plain">On the right is a porous anodized aluminum oxide membrane. The left side shows the same membrane after coating it with a thin layer of gold, making the membrane conductive for electrochemical gas gating.</media:description>
          423               <media:credit>Image: Felice Frankel</media:credit>
          424       </media:content>
          425     </item>
          426 <item>
          427   <title>A global collaboration to move artificial intelligence principles to practice</title>
          428   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/global-collaboration-moving-ai-principles-to-practice-1019</link>
          429   <description>Convened by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, the AI Policy Forum will develop frameworks and tools for governments and companies to implement concrete policies.</description>
          430   <pubDate>Mon, 19 Oct 2020 13:50:00 -0400</pubDate>
          431     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/global-collaboration-moving-ai-principles-to-practice-1019</guid>
          432         <dc:creator>MIT Schwarzman College of Computing</dc:creator>
          433   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;Today, artificial intelligence — and the computing systems that underlie it — are more than just matters of technology; they are matters of state and society, of governance and the public interest.&amp;nbsp;The choices that technologists, policymakers, and communities make in the next few years will shape the relationship between machines and humans for decades to come.&lt;/p&gt;
          434 
          435 &lt;p&gt;The rapidly increasing applicability of AI has prompted a number of organizations to develop high-level principles on social and ethical issues such as privacy, fairness, bias, transparency, and accountability. Building on those broader principles, the &lt;a href="https://aipolicyforum.mit.edu/" target="_blank"&gt;AI Policy Forum&lt;/a&gt;, a global effort convened by the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, will provide an overarching policy framework and tools for governments and companies to implement in concrete ways.&lt;/p&gt;
          436 
          437 &lt;p&gt;“Our goal is to help policymakers in making practical decisions about AI policy,” says Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. “We are not trying to develop another set of principles around AI, several of which already exist, but rather provide context and guidelines specific to a field of use of AI to help policymakers around the world with implementation.”&lt;/p&gt;
          438 
          439 &lt;p&gt;“Moving beyond principles means understanding trade-offs and identifying the technical tools and the policy levers to address them. We created the college to examine and address these types of issues, but this can’t be a siloed effort. We need for this to be a global collaboration and engage scientists, technologists, policymakers, and business leaders,” says MIT Provost Martin Schmidt. “This is a challenging and complex process for which we need all hands-on deck.”&lt;/p&gt;
          440 
          441 &lt;p&gt;The AI Policy Forum is designed as a yearlong process. Activities associated with this effort will be distinguished by their focus on tangible outcomes — their engagement with key government officials at the local, national, and international level charged with designing those public policies, and their deep technical grounding in the latest advances in the science of AI.&amp;nbsp;The measure of success will be whether these efforts have bridged the gap between these communities, translated principled agreement into actionable outcomes, and helped create the conditions for deeper trust between humans and machines.&lt;/p&gt;
          442 
          443 &lt;p&gt;The global collaboration will begin in late 2020 and early 2021 with a series of AI Policy Forum Task Forces, chaired by MIT researchers and bringing together the world’s leading technical and policy experts on some of the most pressing issues of AI policy, starting with AI in finance and mobility. Further task forces throughout 2021 will convene more communities of practice with the shared aim of designing the next chapter of AI: one that both delivers on AI’s innovative potential and responds to society’s needs.&lt;/p&gt;
          444 
          445 &lt;p&gt;Each task force will produce results that inform concrete public policies and frameworks for the next chapter of AI, and help define the roles that the academic and business communities, civil society, and governments will need to play in making it a reality. Research from the task forces will feed into the development of the AI Policy Framework, a dynamic assessment tool that will help governments gauge their own progress on AI policy-making goals and guide application of best practices appropriate to their own national priorities.&lt;/p&gt;
          446 
          447 &lt;p&gt;On May 6–7, 2021, MIT will host — most likely online — the first AI Policy Forum Summit, a two-day collaborative gathering to discuss the progress of the task forces towards equipping high-level decision-makers with a deeper understanding of the tools at their disposal — and trade-offs to be made — to produce better public policy around AI, and better AI systems with concern for public policy. Then, in fall 2021, a follow-on event at MIT will bring together leaders from across sectors and countries and, built atop the leading research from the task forces, the forum will provide a focal point for work to move from AI principles to AI practice, and serve as a springboard to global efforts to design the future of AI.&lt;/p&gt;
          448 </content:encoded>
          449       <media:content url="https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_article__cover_image__original/public/images/202010/MIT-AIPF-global-AI.jpg?itok=79NXW2Xw" medium="image" type="image/jpeg" width="390" height="260">
          450                   <media:credit>Image: Pete Linforth/Pixabay</media:credit>
          451       </media:content>
          452     </item>
          453 <item>
          454   <title>Neural pathway crucial to successful rapid object recognition in primates</title>
          455   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/neural-pathway-crucial-successful-rapid-object-recognition-primates-1020</link>
          456   <description>Recurrent processing via prefrontal cortex, necessary for quick visual object processing in primates, provides a key insight for developing brain-like artificial intelligence.</description>
          457   <pubDate>Tue, 20 Oct 2020 15:45:00 -0400</pubDate>
          458     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/neural-pathway-crucial-successful-rapid-object-recognition-primates-1020</guid>
          459         <dc:creator>Alison Gold | School of Science</dc:creator>
          460   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;MIT researchers have identified a brain pathway critical in enabling primates to effortlessly identify objects in their field of vision. The findings enrich existing models of the neural circuitry involved in visual perception and help to further unravel the computational code for solving object recognition in the primate brain.&lt;/p&gt;
          461 
          462 &lt;p&gt;Led by Kohitij Kar, a postdoc at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the study looked at an area called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), which sends feedback signals to the inferior temporal (IT) cortex via a network of neurons. The main goal of this study was to test how the back-and-forth information processing of this circuitry — that is, this recurrent neural network — is essential to rapid object identification in primates.&lt;/p&gt;
          463 
          464 &lt;p&gt;The current study, published in &lt;em&gt;Neuron&lt;/em&gt; and available via open access, is a followup to prior work published by Kar and James DiCarlo, the Peter de Florez Professor of Neuroscience, the head of MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and an investigator in the McGovern Institute and the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.&lt;/p&gt;
          465 
          466 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Monkey versus machine &lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          467 
          468 &lt;p&gt;In 2019, Kar, DiCarlo, and colleagues identified that primates must use some recurrent circuits during rapid object recognition. Monkey subjects in that study were able to identify objects more accurately than engineered “feed-forward” computational models, called deep convolutional neural networks, that lacked recurrent circuitry.&lt;/p&gt;
          469 
          470 &lt;p&gt;Interestingly, specific images for which models performed poorly compared to monkeys in object identification, also took longer to be solved in the monkeys’ brains — suggesting that the additional time might be due to recurrent processing in the brain. Based on the 2019 study, it remained unclear, though, exactly which recurrent circuits were responsible for the delayed information boost in the IT cortex. That’s where the current study picks up.&lt;/p&gt;
          471 
          472 &lt;p&gt;“In this new study, we wanted to find out: Where are these recurrent signals in IT coming from?” Kar says. “Which areas reciprocally connected to IT, are functionally the most critical part of this recurrent circuit?”&lt;/p&gt;
          473 
          474 &lt;p&gt;To determine this, researchers used a pharmacological agent to temporarily block the activity in parts of the vlPFC in macaques while they engaged in an object discrimination task. During these tasks, monkeys viewed images that contained an object, such as an apple, a car, or a dog; then, researchers used eye tracking to determine if the monkeys could correctly indicate what object they had previously viewed when given two object choices.&lt;/p&gt;
          475 
          476 &lt;p&gt;“We observed that if you use pharmacological agents to partially inactivate the vlPFC, then both the monkeys’ behavior and IT cortex activity deteriorates, but more so for certain specific images. These images were the same ones we identified in the previous study — ones that were poorly solved by ‘feed-forward’ models and took longer to be solved in the monkey’s IT cortex,” says Kar.&lt;/p&gt;
          477 
          478 &lt;p&gt;“These results provide evidence that this recurrently connected network is critical for rapid object recognition, the behavior we're studying. Now, we have a better understanding of how the full circuit is laid out, and what are the key underlying neural components of this behavior.”&lt;/p&gt;
          479 
          480 &lt;p&gt;The full study, entitled “Fast recurrent processing via ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is needed by the primate ventral stream for robust core visual object recognition,” will run in print Jan. 6, 2021.&lt;/p&gt;
          481 
          482 &lt;p&gt;“This study demonstrates the importance of prefrontal cortical circuits in automatically boosting object recognition performance in a very particular way,” DiCarlo says. “These results were obtained in nonhuman primates and thus are highly likely to also be relevant to human vision.”&lt;/p&gt;
          483 
          484 &lt;p&gt;The present study makes clear the integral role of the recurrent connections between the vlPFC and the primate ventral visual cortex during rapid object recognition. The results will be helpful to researchers designing future studies that aim to develop accurate models of the brain, and to researchers who seek to develop more human-like artificial intelligence.&lt;/p&gt;
          485 </content:encoded>
          486       <media:content url="https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/styles/news_article__cover_image__original/public/images/202010/Ko-DiCarlo-Neuron-edited_0.jpg?itok=afkjUs-p" medium="image" type="image/jpeg" width="390" height="260">
          487               <media:description type="plain">MIT researchers used an object recognition task (e.g., recognizing that there is a “bird” and not an “elephant” in the shown image) in studying the role of feedback from the primate ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) to the inferior temporal (IT) cortex via a network of neurons. In primate brains, temporally blocking the vlPFC (green shaded area) disrupts the recurrent neural network comprising vlPFC and IT, inducing specific deficits and implicating its role in rapid object identification. </media:description>
          488               <media:credit>Image courtesy of Kohitij Kar; brain image adapted from SciDraw.</media:credit>
          489       </media:content>
          490     </item>
          491 <item>
          492   <title>AI Cures: data-driven clinical solutions for Covid-19 </title>
          493   <link>https://news.mit.edu/2020/ai-cures-data-driven-clinical-solutions-covid-19-1027</link>
          494   <description>MIT conference illustrates technologies developed in response to the pandemic and new opportunities for AI solutions for clinical management. </description>
          495   <pubDate>Tue, 27 Oct 2020 11:55:00 -0400</pubDate>
          496     <guid isPermaLink="true">https://news.mit.edu/2020/ai-cures-data-driven-clinical-solutions-covid-19-1027</guid>
          497         <dc:creator>Terri Park | MIT Schwarzman College of Computing</dc:creator>
          498   <content:encoded>&lt;p&gt;Modern health care has been reinvigorated by the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence. From speeding image analysis for radiology to advancing precision medicine for personalized care, AI has countless applications, but can it rise to the challenge in the fight against Covid-19?&lt;/p&gt;
          499 
          500 &lt;p&gt;Researchers from the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health (Jameel Clinic), now housed within the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, say the ongoing public health crisis provides ample opportunities for leveraging AI technologies, such as accelerating the search for effective therapeutics and drugs that can treat the disease, and are actively working to translate this potential to success.&lt;/p&gt;
          501 
          502 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;AI Cures&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          503 
          504 &lt;p&gt;When Covid-19 began to spread worldwide, Jameel Clinic’s community of machine learning and life science researchers redirected their work and began exploring how they can collaborate on the search for solutions by tapping into their collective knowledge and expertise. The ensuing discussions led to the launch of &lt;a href="https://www.aicures.mit.edu" target="_blank"&gt;AI Cures&lt;/a&gt;, an initiative dedicated to developing machine learning methods for finding promising antiviral molecules for Covid-19 and other emerging pathogens, and to lower the barrier for people from varied backgrounds to get involved by inviting them to contribute to the effort.&lt;/p&gt;
          505 
          506 &lt;p&gt;As part of the mission of AI Cures to have broad impact and engagement, Jameel Clinic brought together researchers, clinicians, and public health specialists for a conference focused on the development of AI algorithms for the clinical management of Covid-19 patients, early detection and monitoring of the disease, preventing future outbreaks, and ways in which these technologies have been utilized in patient care.&lt;/p&gt;
          507 
          508 &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Data-driven clinical solutions&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
          509 
          510 &lt;p&gt;On Sept. 29, over 650 people representing 50 countries and 70 organizations logged on from around the globe for the virtual AI Cures Conference: Data-driven Clinical Solutions for Covid-19.&lt;/p&gt;
          511 
          512 &lt;p&gt;In welcoming the audience, Daniel Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, remarked that “AI in health care is moving beyond the use of computing as just simple tools, to capabilities that really aid in the processes of discovery, diagnosis, and care. The potential for AI-accelerated discovery is particularly relevant in times such as these.”&lt;/p&gt;
          513 
          514 &lt;p&gt;Attendees heard from 14 other speakers, including MIT researchers, on technologies they developed over the past six months in response to the pandemic — from epidemiological models created using clinical data to predict the risk of both infection and death for individual patients, to a wireless device that allows doctors to monitor Covid-19 patients from a distance, to a machine learning model that pinpoints patients at risk for intubation before they crash.&lt;/p&gt;
          515 
          516 &lt;p&gt;James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering, and faculty co-lead of life sciences for Jameel Clinic, gave the first talk of the day on harnessing synthetic biology to develop diagnostics to address Covid-19 and how his lab is using deep learning to enhance the design of such systems. Collins and his team are utilizing AI techniques to create a set of algorithms to effectively predict the efficacy of RNA-based sensors. The sensors, first developed in 2014 to detect the Ebola virus and later tailored for the Zika virus in 2016, were designed and optimized for a Covid-19 diagnostic, and related CRISPR-based biosensors are being used in a mask developed in Collins’ lab that produces a detectable signal when a person with the virus breathes, coughs, or sneezes.&lt;/p&gt;
          517 
          518 &lt;p&gt;While AI has proven to be an effective tool in health care, a model requires good data for it to be valuable and useful. With Covid-19 being a new disease, limited amounts of information are available to researchers, and in order to advance even more efforts to combat the virus, Collins notes that “we need to put in place and secure the resources to generate and collect large amounts of well-characterized data to train deep learning models. At present we generally don’t have such large datasets. In the system we developed, our dataset consists of about 91,000 RNA elements, which is currently the largest available for RNA synthetic biology, but it should be larger and expanded to many more different sensors.”&lt;/p&gt;
          519 
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