From The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution: “Robots to the Rescue”

From The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

5.31.23
Laura Castanon

A/R CUREE uses outstretched hydrophones to listen to the sounds of coral reefs in St. John of the U.S. Virgin Islands. (Photo by Austin Greene, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

To monitor changes in a rapidly warming Arctic, scientists deploy A/S/V ChemYak in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, where it uses an array of sensors to measure the rapid release of greenhouse gases in the spring thaw. (Photos by William Pardis, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

Victoria Preston watched as ChemYak, a robotic kayak rigged with sensors, navigated the shallow, ice-filled waters of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, Canada. Preston, a doctoral student at the time, was working with a team of researchers looking into the release of greenhouse gases in the Arctic during the annual spring thaw. ChemYak allowed the team to take thousands of in situ measurements, instead of needing to bring water samples back to the lab.

When we think about the power of putting instruments on robotic machines that can place those instruments optimally, it’s so different than the oceanography of just a few decades ago,” says Preston, who is now a postdoctoral investigator at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Having access to so much data is changing the game in many fields.”

Robots are a vital tool for ocean science and their role has only grown over time. The first videos of deep-sea hydrothermal vents and the unexpected plethora of life they support were taken in 1977 by A/S/V Alvin, WHOI’s crewed submersible.

US Navy owned WHOI operated A/S/V ALVINsubmersible

Since then, researchers have been able to explore details of the seafloor through remotely operated vehicles (R/O/V’s) like Jason, which are tethered to a ship, or map areas of it with autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) like Sentry, sent out on preprogrammed missions.

R/O/V “Jason” Credit WHOI.

A/U/V “Sentry” Credit WHOI.

With improved longevity, battery life, processing power, and intelligence, ocean robots have grown into new roles. Some are jacks-of-all trades, with swappable sensor packages for different missions, and others are specialists designed for under-ice exploration or other harsh environments. They act as scouts, explorers, warning systems, monitors, and, increasingly, scientific partners.

“I don’t think we’ll ever stop wanting a vehicle that can take people to the deep sea to do science in a real, 3D space, but there are a lot of ways that we want to take measurements in the ocean that don’t require us to go out there,” says Anna Michel, chief scientist of WHOI’s National Deep Submergence Facility. “Because of big problems like climate change, there’s a lot of need for technology to monitor the oceans. We’re nowhere near having too many robots.”

As designs and technology continue to evolve, robots of the future will be integral parts of understanding and helping to address some of the biggest challenges facing the ocean, including the climate crisis, dying coral reefs, and other damages caused by human activity.

To monitor changes in a rapidly warming Arctic, scientists deploy A/S/VChemYak in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, where it uses an array of sensors to measure the rapid release of greenhouse gases in the spring thaw. (Photos by William Pardis, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

But the technological innovations needed to make this future a reality are not insignificant. We need ocean robots that are affordable, independent, long-lasting, networked, and loaded with sensors. We need the capacity to store, process, and transmit vast amounts of data. We need long-lasting batteries and charging stations powered by renewable energy sources. And we need all of this at an unprecedented scale.

Monitoring a changing ocean

Robotic platforms like ChemYak provide valuable access to hard-to-reach places and are great for investigating specific events or areas. But their deployments are measured in hours, not weeks or months—researchers have to make sure they’re in the right place at the right time. To make accurate predictions for the ocean and our planet as the climate continues to change, we need to combine these local observations with consistent, long-term data sets to reveal both ongoing changes and sporadic or seasonal events.

[Hint: Engage ESA’s Copernicus mission.
___________________________________________________________________
The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU) Copernicus mission

European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea][Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU) Copernicus Sentinels

The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea] [Agence spatiale européenne][Europäische Weltraumorganization](EU) Copernicus Sentinel-1B radar satellite.

ESA Copernicus Sentinel-2.

ESA Copernicus Sentinel-3.

The European Space Agency [La Agencia Espacial Europea][Agence spatiale européenn] [Europäische Weltraumorganization] (EU) Copernicus Sentinel-5P.

ESA/Airbus Copernicus Polar Ice and Snow Topography Altimeter CRISTAL Mission depiction.

Copernicus Science Center campus

Editor
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Researchers and research vessels can’t be everywhere at once, but fleets of long-lived, inexpensive robots can fill in the gaps and, in some cases, already are. Around 4,000 Argo floats drift through the world’s oceans, recording temperature and salinity profiles through the water column, which help us predict and track extreme weather.

Argo float. Credit: NOAA

Scientific buoys, moored and drifting, collect data on the air-sea interactions that produce El Niño events and alert us to everything from tsunami waves to endangered marine mammals. Torpedo-shaped gliders loaded with sensors coast through different layers of the ocean for months at a time, improving predictions of tropical storm and hurricane intensity, while helping us understand the ocean’s currents, which play a critical role in our climate system.

Ocean robots are heading towards longer endurances, shore launch, and autonomous recovery capabilities, at-sea maintenance—these trends have been going on for a long time, but some of them are finally maturing,” says Mike Jakuba, a senior engineer at WHOI. “I don’t see research ships or ship-launched A/U/V’s ever going away, but operations are going to become more autonomous and less people-intensive at sea.”

One of the major limiting factors for today’s ocean robots is power. Engineers often have to make trade-offs between a robot’s capabilities—which sensors it uses, how quickly it travels, what information it can process on board—and how long it can operate independently.

Jakuba is collaborating with researchers at WHOI and the University of Washington on a low-power system to improve undersea navigation for ocean gliders, autonomous robots that use changes in their buoyancy to cruise slowly through the ocean.

Slocum glider. Credit: WHOI.

Typically, underwater navigation systems use a lot of power. To avoid that, ocean gliders only get an accurate location when they surface and connect to satellites. Underwater, they navigate by dead reckoning—estimating their position based on where they started and the speed and direction they have traveled. This type of navigation doesn’t account for ocean currents, so a glider’s estimated location can be off by several kilometers.

WHOI engineers Mike Jakuba and Victor Naklicki inspect a battery pack while working on A/V Clio, a robot designed for deep-ocean mapping and biochemical sampling. (Photo by Daniel Hentz, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

“Gliders have been a very successful platform for collecting profiles of salinity, temperature, and other things in the water column,” Jakuba says. “But if we had more precision navigation, it would open up new possibilities.”

Gliders could, for example, be sent out to survey the seafloor to identify the locations of methane seeps or hydrothermal vents. Researchers are still studying how these seafloor phenomena and the unique ecosystems around them affect ocean chemistry and circulation, and understanding their quantity and locations could help improve ocean models and climate predictions.

The researchers have created an extremely low-power navigation system for ocean gliders by pairing them with an A/S/V called a “wave glider”. The wave glider, which is powered by wave and solar energy, broadcasts a simple acoustic signal under the water and the ocean gliders use that to determine where they are in the water column.

“If you want to move the ocean glider on the bottom, you would move the wave glider—it follows like a dog on a leash,” Jakuba says. “It speaks to this vision of longer-term robots working in parallel with one another in a scalable system, getting away from the model of needing a ship.”

Empowering communities

Closer to shore, volunteers often lead water quality monitoring efforts, collecting samples by hand. As robotic technologies become less expensive and more commercially available, coastal communities may be able to build simple ocean robots to get a better idea of what’s going on in their own backyard. Over the past four years, Jakuba has been working with a local high school student, Patrick McGuire, to design and build an inexpensive coastal profiling float known as the TideRider that can monitor changing ocean conditions.

Climate change is warming the waters of Cape Cod Bay, shifting seasonal patterns and allowing new species of phytoplankton to bloom and decompose, potentially causing deadly low-oxygen zones along the bottom. One such event occurred in September of 2019, when fishermen in southern Cape Cod Bay started hauling up trap after trap of dead lobsters. A blob of hypoxic water—water with very little oxygen—had formed along the bottom of the bay and any animal that couldn’t escape it had suffocated. If the fishermen had known about the hypoxic water, they could have placed their traps in other areas.

The TideRider [no image available] was originally designed to help aid in the public understanding of the coastal ocean and to foster a sense of stewardship, but a small fleet of them could also provide continuous data throughout the bay, forming the basis of an alert system for changing conditions. They can be programmed over cell networks to move between the seafloor and the surface, using favorable tides to drift to new locations. And, the instrument costs less than $1,000 to build and can carry sensors to detect dissolved oxygen levels or other water quality data.

“What we’re imagining is a hypoxia alert system where the TideRider would sit on the seafloor and if the oxygen dips below the level where it’s going to cause fish kills, for example, then it would come to the surface and at least warn you,” Jakuba says.

Robots as emergency responders

When the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in April of 2010, millions of gallons of oil began gushing out of a damaged seafloor well in the Gulf of Mexico. In the months that followed, as cleanup workers tried to contain and disperse the spill, robots were sent down to survey the damage and help track the currents that would spread the plume of oil. Although they were the best available instruments for the job, none of them had been designed with this sort of emergency in mind. In the years that followed, government agencies and researchers started considering better tools to respond to oil spills.

WHOI research engineer Amy Kukulya (left in grouping) braces with members of the United States Coast Guard as a USCG Jayhawk prepares to transport a Long-Range AUV (LRAUV) off its cradle during a test deployment in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. (Photo by Daniel Hentz, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

WHOI engineer Kevin Nikolaus stands in between two Long-Range AUV (LRAUV) robots being modified with different sensors in the Scibotics Lab inside the George and Wendy David Center for Ocean Innovation. (Photo by Daniel Hentz, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

The importance of this has only grown as shipping traffic expands in the Arctic and melting ice opens potential new routes for commercial vessels. An oil spill in the Arctic, where resources are scarce and oil may be moving under ice, could be disastrous.

“Previously, if we got a call that there was a ship that hit an iceberg in northern Alaska waters, we wouldn’t get there quickly,” says Amy Kukulya, a research engineer at WHOI. “There were no assets around to be able to respond to the oil spill.” Kukulya is working with collaborators at WHOI and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) to address this issue. They have been designing and testing a Long-Range AUV, or LRAUV [above], that can be deployed quickly—via helicopter, if necessary—to track and collect data on oil spills or other environmental hazards. The propeller-driven cylindrical robot can sniff out dissolved hydrocarbons (evidence of an oil spill) and other environmental anomalies under ice and stay out for more than two weeks at a time, helping emergency responders determine where a hazard is headed and how cleanup efforts should be deployed.

“We’ve been working on reliability, software, intelligence, and endurance,” Kukulya says. “And the idea of being able to recharge once you get your robot to the Arctic.”

One possibility is to allow robots to recharge at underwater docking stations, either on a mooring in the ice or something anchored to the seafloor. After a mission, an A/U/V could return to its dock and attach itself to recharge before heading out again. A dock could even hold multiple LRAUVs intended to work together as a survey fleet. The researchers have already developed docks that allow the robots to wait for retrieval or further instructions, but current versions do not include the ability to recharge the robots yet. Kukulya says that capability will be a critical addition down the line.

Kukulya and her colleagues are also investigating the possibility of using multiple types of robots in tandem. An A/U/V could survey under the water while a drone spots oil slicks from the air, with a sea-surface robot facilitating communication between the two.

The LRAUV is already an impressively flexible platform. It has several modes of movement, including hovering in place, swimming through the water column like a glider, and conducting lawnmower-style surveys. The researchers can turn various sensors on and off to save battery life. When searching for a sunken ship leaking oil, for example, the vehicle might start with only its hydrocarbon sensor on. Once it picks up a trail, it might turn on a sensor that could take samples or turn on a camera to collect images.

By building these options into a rapid-response tool, the researchers have made it simple to change mission parameters on-the-fly. When a nor’easter rolled in while the LRAUV was surveying a shipwreck, instead of packing up and going home, Kukulya and her team switched on a new set of sensors and collected a storms-worth of data about air-sea interactions instead. It’s a platform that could be used to track harmful algal blooms—which contain toxins that can make people and animals sick—map undersea salinity fronts that affect commercial fisheries, or study any number of other ocean anomalies.

“I’m really excited to have some measurable impact and collect the kind of baseline data that people can learn from and then directly apply,” Kukulya says. “If we can prove that vehicles are reliable and we can run them without much overhead, and we can use the data they send back to shore to make informed decisions, then we can start to get more and more people interested in and investing in ocean technology.”

Working smarter, not harder

Hovering above the fragile and complex terrain of a coral reef, CUREE (Curious Underwater Robot for Ecosystem Exploration) focuses its front-facing cameras on a barracuda. The fish glides easily through the water, crossing a sandy patch and touring another group of corals before returning to float, mouth open, at a cleaning station where small fish will pick parasites and dead tissue from its teeth. Throughout the route, CUREE follows, occasionally losing track of the silvery shape but always finding it again.

“We have been able to follow things like barracudas, stingrays, and some other smaller animals like triggerfish and jacks visually, without any tags,” says Yogi Girdhar, an associate scientist at WHOI. “We can’t follow everything, yet—it’s a very difficult problem to follow things around, especially in a coral reef.”

Girdhar wants to use this technology, which was developed in his lab by MIT-WHOI Joint Program student Levi Cai, to guide reef restoration efforts. Changes in animal behavior could be an early indicator that a reef is damaged or stressed. Or, if species return to their usual patterns, it could show that coral planting efforts have successfully restored an ecosystem’s function, not just its appearance.

“The goal should be to restore a reef to something like a rich, old-growth forest environment,” Girdhar says. “We can use artificial intelligence to discover patterns in how these species are interacting with the environment, and identify how these patterns change with external influences like climate change or pollution or invasive species.”

But teaching a robot to follow fish around is tricky. The robot has to be able to think on its own—avoiding obstacles, finding the right angle to approach without spooking an animal, deciding how close is too close, and keeping track of a moving shape through a dynamic environment. It’s a task that requires the kind of artificial intelligence that most ocean robots don’t have.

“If we can nail this technology, it’ll be a game changer for how we understand not just marine animals and their behavior, but also the ecosystem they’re in,” Girdhar says.

Tracking individual animals is just one aspect of Girdhar’s work to turn CUREE into a full-fledged scientific partner. He is also training the robot to identify and monitor biodiversity hotspots on a reef for more accurate surveys and to seek out rare phenomena, the kinds of unexpected discoveries that researchers sometimes stumble on, and investigate them the way any curious scientist would.

“There is a lot of potential for artificial intelligence to make breakthroughs, helping ocean scientists model and understand these ecosystems in different ways,” Girdhar says. “And that can help us with restoration efforts.”

While a fully intelligent, curious, autonomous robot would be the ultimate scientific partner, even small amounts of intelligent decision-making could make robots more effective explorers. Orpheus, the first of a new class of A/U/V’s at WHOI that can land and take samples in the deepest parts of the ocean, isn’t currently doing much thinking on its own. But the researchers have plans to make the robot increasingly independent. The first steps in that process will be to program Orpheus to change its behavior when its sensors detect whatever the researchers are interested in (akin to the LRAUV following the scent of hydrocarbons), but eventually Orpheus will be able to make simple judgement calls based on what it sees.

“The five-to-ten-year vision is to start working on image processing,” says Casey Machado, a research engineer at WHOI and one of Orpheus’ designers. “Since we already have all of the computer smarts and the data pipelines in the vehicle to look at images and be able to analyze them, we can start to teach Orpheus to be smarter about how it uses that information.”

A/U/V Orpheus sits on the deck of OceanX’s M/V Alucia during a mission in 2018. (Photo by Luis Lamar, © Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution)

If Orpheus was sent to take a sediment core sample of the seafloor, for example, the robot could use the images it recorded to determine whether the sediment was too rocky to take a core where it was originally sent. The robot could move slightly and try again, saving a trip to the surface with an empty core barrel.

Orpheus was built to be a portable, affordable, and flexible platform. The robot can be flown where it’s needed and launched from a small research vessel. Right now, there are two Orpheus A/U/V’s (named Orpheus and Eurydice), but the hope is to have a small fleet of them that can be chartered for deep-sea scientific missions or helping small countries explore and understand their own waters. Adding levels of autonomy will only make it more capable.

Of course, it’s always good to have an analog backup plan, Machado says. On one of Orpheus’ test dives, the vehicle ran through its battery life faster than expected and stopped responding. Fortunately, the engineers simply had to wait—weights on the bottom of Orpheus were secured with metal clips intended to corrode away in salt water. After a few hours, the weights dropped and Orpheus bobbed cheerfully backed to the surface for recovery.

“Literally everything else had gone wrong,” Machado says. “But you can always count on the laws of physics applying and corrosion working.”

An internet of the ocean

Any individual robot can only do so much. Like any individual scientist, it can only be in one place at a time, but when it shares information and collaborates, it can achieve much more. As we confront the climate crisis, we will need the combined power of all the robotic technologies researchers have been developing.

The ocean stores a large portion of the excess carbon dioxide we have produced by the burning of fossil fuels, and it may be able to hold more, helping to slow the effects of climate change while we transition to renewable energies. WHOI is working to design a large-scale, full-depth, high-resolution network of robots and sensors in the North Atlantic to monitor ocean changes and track carbon in the ocean and atmosphere. The Ocean Vital Signs Network (OSVN), which would cover roughly one million square kilometers of ocean, would function as a test-bed to study the potential efficacy and impacts of ocean-based carbon dioxide removal (CDR) efforts.

“It makes no sense at all to pursue CDR if you can’t prove that it works,” said Peter de Menocal, president and director of WHOI, during a TEDx talk in Boston. “This Ocean Vital Signs Network, this internet of the ocean, allows us to do that.”

Many of the technologies necessary to find, evaluate, and deploy climate solutions already exist, or are in development. But refining and implementing them at the necessary scale will require partnerships between governments, industry, philanthropy, and multiple research organizations. The Ocean and Climate Innovation Accelerator (OCIA) consortium, launched by WHOI and Analog Devices, Inc. in 2021, is laying out a roadmap for what these cross-industry partnerships could look like.

“We recognized the collective combination of Analog Devices, Inc., Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and other like-minded industry players can help us all accelerate the pace of innovation necessary for finding climate solutions,” says Dan Leibholz, chief technology officer for Analog Devices, Inc. “We are on a mission to create a ‘solutions engine’ that leverages people, projects, and places to respond to a wide range of urgent climate challenges, and mobilizes science and engineering brainpower to solve them.”

The consortium is supporting projects that will advance ocean sensing, optimize technology development, tackle large-scale data processing and lead to real-world impacts—all the developments that ocean robots need to effectively tackle climate change.

“We live on an ocean planet, so it should come as no surprise that understanding the ocean is going to be key for climate solutions,” de Menocal said. “We have a responsibility and an opportunity to revolutionize our understanding of the oceans and to drive new understanding that’s going to help us lead these solutions.”

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Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Mission Statement

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is dedicated to advancing knowledge of the ocean and its connection with the Earth system through a sustained commitment to excellence in science, engineering, and education, and to the application of this knowledge to problems facing society.

Vision & Mission

The ocean is a defining feature of our planet and crucial to life on Earth, yet it remains one of the planet’s last unexplored frontiers. For this reason, WHOI scientists and engineers are committed to understanding all facets of the ocean as well as its complex connections with Earth’s atmosphere, land, ice, seafloor, and life—including humanity. This is essential not only to advance knowledge about our planet, but also to ensure society’s long-term welfare and to help guide human stewardship of the environment. WHOI researchers are also dedicated to training future generations of ocean science leaders, to providing unbiased information that informs public policy and decision-making, and to expanding public awareness about the importance of the global ocean and its resources.

The Institution is organized into six departments, the Cooperative Institute for Climate and Ocean Research, and a marine policy center. Its shore-based facilities are located in the village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts and a mile and a half away on the Quissett Campus. The bulk of the Institution’s funding comes from grants and contracts from the National Science Foundation and other government agencies, augmented by foundations and private donations.

WHOI scientists, engineers, and students collaborate to develop theories, test ideas, build seagoing instruments, and collect data in diverse marine environments. Ships operated by WHOI carry research scientists throughout the world’s oceans. The WHOI fleet includes two large research vessels (R/V Atlantis and R/V Neil Armstrong); the coastal craft Tioga; small research craft such as the dive-operation work boat Echo; the deep-diving human-occupied submersible Alvin; the tethered, remotely operated vehicle Jason/Medea; and autonomous underwater vehicles such as the REMUS and SeaBED.

US Navy owned WHOI operated R/V Atlantis

US Navy owned WHOI operated Neil Armstrong.

US Navy owned WHOI operated ALVIN submersible

WHOI offers graduate and post-doctoral studies in marine science. There are several fellowship and training programs, and graduate degrees are awarded through a joint program with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. WHOI is accredited by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges . WHOI also offers public outreach programs and informal education through its Exhibit Center and summer tours. The Institution has a volunteer program and a membership program, WHOI Associate.

On October 1, 2020, Peter B. de Menocal became the institution’s eleventh president and director.

History

In 1927, a National Academy of Sciences committee concluded that it was time to “consider the share of the United States of America in a worldwide program of oceanographic research.” The committee’s recommendation for establishing a permanent independent research laboratory on the East Coast to “prosecute oceanography in all its branches” led to the founding in 1930 of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

A $2.5 million grant from the Rockefeller Foundation supported the summer work of a dozen scientists, construction of a laboratory building and commissioning of a research vessel, the 142-foot (43 m) ketch R/V Atlantis, whose profile still forms the Institution’s logo.

WHOI grew substantially to support significant defense-related research during World War II, and later began a steady growth in staff, research fleet, and scientific stature. From 1950 to 1956, the director was Dr. Edward “Iceberg” Smith, an Arctic explorer, oceanographer and retired Coast Guard rear admiral.

In 1977 the institution appointed the influential oceanographer John Steele as director, and he served until his retirement in 1989.

On 1 September 1985, a joint French-American expedition led by Jean-Louis Michel of IFREMER and Robert Ballard of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution identified the location of the wreck of the RMS Titanic which sank off the coast of Newfoundland 15 April 1912.

On 3 April 2011, within a week of resuming of the search operation for Air France Flight 447, a team led by WHOI, operating full ocean depth autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) owned by the Waitt Institute discovered, by means of sidescan sonar, a large portion of debris field from flight AF447.

In March 2017 the institution effected an open-access policy to make its research publicly accessible online.

The Institution has maintained a long and controversial business collaboration with the treasure hunter company Odyssey Marine. Likewise, WHOI has participated in the location of the San José galleon in Colombia for the commercial exploitation of the shipwreck by the Government of President Santos and a private company.

In 2019, iDefense reported that China’s hackers had launched cyberattacks on dozens of academic institutions in an attempt to gain information on technology being developed for the United States Navy. Some of the targets included the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The attacks have been underway since at least April 2017.

From The Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Helping robots handle fluids”

From The Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

At

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

5.24.23
Rachel Gordon | MIT CSAIL

Researchers created “FluidLab,” a simulation environment with a diverse set of manipulation tasks involving complex fluid dynamics. Image: Alex Shipps/MIT CSAIL via Midjourney.

Imagine you’re enjoying a picnic by a riverbank on a windy day. A gust of wind accidentally catches your paper napkin and lands on the water’s surface, quickly drifting away from you. You grab a nearby stick and carefully agitate the water to retrieve it, creating a series of small waves. These waves eventually push the napkin back toward the shore, so you grab it. In this scenario, the water acts as a medium for transmitting forces, enabling you to manipulate the position of the napkin without direct contact.

Humans regularly engage with various types of fluids in their daily lives, but doing so has been a formidable and elusive goal for current robotic systems. Hand you a latte? A robot can do that. Make it? That’s going to require a bit more nuance.

FluidLab, a new simulation tool from researchers at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), enhances robot learning for complex fluid manipulation tasks like making latte art, ice cream, and even manipulating air. The virtual environment offers a versatile collection of intricate fluid handling challenges, involving both solids and liquids, and multiple fluids simultaneously. FluidLab supports modeling solid, liquid, and gas, including elastic, plastic, rigid objects, Newtonian and non-Newtonian liquids, and smoke and air.

At the heart of FluidLab lies “FluidEngine”, an easy-to-use physics simulator capable of seamlessly calculating and simulating various materials and their interactions, all while harnessing the power of graphics processing units (GPUs) for faster processing. The engine is “differential,” meaning the simulator can incorporate physics knowledge for a more realistic physical world model, leading to more efficient learning and planning for robotic tasks. In contrast, most existing reinforcement learning methods lack that world model that just depends on trial and error. This enhanced capability, say the researchers, lets users experiment with robot learning algorithms and toy with the boundaries of current robotic manipulation abilities.

To set the stage, the researchers tested said robot learning algorithms using FluidLab, discovering and overcoming unique challenges in fluid systems. By developing clever optimization methods, they’ve been able to transfer these learnings from simulations to real-world scenarios effectively.

“Imagine a future where a household robot effortlessly assists you with daily tasks, like making coffee, preparing breakfast, or cooking dinner. These tasks involve numerous fluid manipulation challenges. Our benchmark is a first step towards enabling robots to master these skills, benefiting households and workplaces alike,” says visiting researcher at MIT CSAIL and research scientist at the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab Chuang Gan, the senior author on a new paper [OpenReview.net (below)] about the research. “For instance, these robots could reduce wait times and enhance customer experiences in busy coffee shops. “FluidEngine” is, to our knowledge, the first-of-its-kind physics engine that supports a wide range of materials and couplings while being fully differentiable. With our standardized fluid manipulation tasks, researchers can evaluate robot learning algorithms and push the boundaries of today’s robotic manipulation capabilities.”

Fluid fantasia

Over the past few decades, scientists in the robotic manipulation domain have mainly focused on manipulating rigid objects, or on very simplistic fluid manipulation tasks like pouring water. Studying these manipulation tasks involving fluids in the real world can also be an unsafe and costly endeavor.

With fluid manipulation, it’s not always just about fluids, though. In many tasks, such as creating the perfect ice cream swirl, mixing solids into liquids, or paddling through the water to move objects, it’s a dance of interactions between fluids and various other materials. Simulation environments must support “coupling,” or how two different material properties interact. Fluid manipulation tasks usually require pretty fine-grained precision, with delicate interactions and handling of materials, setting them apart from straightforward tasks like pushing a block or opening a bottle.

FluidLab’s simulator can quickly calculate how different materials interact with each other.

Helping out the GPUs is “Taichi,” a domain-specific language embedded in Python. The system can compute gradients (rates of change in environment configurations with respect to the robot’s actions) for different material types and their interactions (couplings) with one another. This precise information can be used to fine-tune the robot’s movements for better performance. As a result, the simulator allows for faster and more efficient solutions, setting it apart from its counterparts.

The 10 tasks the team put forth fell into two categories: using fluids to manipulate hard-to-reach objects, and directly manipulating fluids for specific goals. Examples included separating liquids, guiding floating objects, transporting items with water jets, mixing liquids, creating latte art, shaping ice cream, and controlling air circulation.

“The simulator works similarly to how humans use their mental models to predict the consequences of their actions and make informed decisions when manipulating fluids. This is a significant advantage of our simulator compared to others,” says Carnegie Mellon University PhD student Zhou Xian, another author on the paper. “While other simulators primarily support reinforcement learning, ours supports reinforcement learning and allows for more efficient optimization techniques. Utilizing the gradients provided by the simulator supports highly efficient policy search, making it a more versatile and effective tool.”

Next steps

FluidLab’s future looks bright. The current work attempted to transfer trajectories optimized in simulation to real-world tasks directly in an open-loop manner. For next steps, the team is working to develop a closed-loop policy in simulation that takes as input the state or the visual observations of the environments and performs fluid manipulation tasks in real time, and then transfers the learned policies in real-world scenes.

The platform is publicly available, and researchers hope it will benefit future studies in developing better methods for solving complex fluid manipulation tasks.

“Humans interact with fluids in everyday tasks, including pouring and mixing liquids (coffee, yogurts, soups, batter), washing and cleaning with water, and more,” says University of Maryland computer science professor Ming Lin, who was not involved in the work. “For robots to assist humans and serve in similar capacities for day-to-day tasks, novel techniques for interacting and handling various liquids of different properties (e.g. viscosity and density of materials) would be needed and remains a major computational challenge for real-time autonomous systems. This work introduces the first comprehensive physics engine, FluidLab, to enable modeling of diverse, complex fluids and their coupling with other objects and dynamical systems in the environment. The mathematical formulation of ‘differentiable fluids’ as presented in the paper makes it possible for integrating versatile fluid simulation as a network layer in learning-based algorithms and neural network architectures for intelligent systems to operate in real-world applications.”

Gan and Xian wrote the paper alongside Hsiao-Yu Tung a postdoc in the MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Antonio Torralba, an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator; Dartmouth College Assistant Professor Bo Zhu, Columbia University PhD student Zhenjia Xu, and CMU Assistant Professor Katerina Fragkiadaki. The team’s research is supported by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, Sony AI, a DARPA Young Investigator Award, an NSF CAREER award, an AFOSR Young Investigator Award, DARPA Machine Common Sense, and the National Science Foundation.

The research was presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations earlier this month.

OpenReview.net

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The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (AI Lab). Housed within the Ray and Maria Stata Center, CSAIL is the largest on-campus laboratory as measured by research scope and membership. It is part of the Schwarzman College of Computing but is also overseen by the MIT Vice President of Research.

Research activities

CSAIL’s research activities are organized around a number of semi-autonomous research groups, each of which is headed by one or more professors or research scientists. These groups are divided up into seven general areas of research:

Artificial intelligence
Computational biology
Graphics and vision
Language and learning
Theory of computation
Robotics
Systems (includes computer architecture, databases, distributed systems, networks and networked systems, operating systems, programming methodology, and software engineering among others)

In addition, CSAIL hosts the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center (US), and the Haystack Observatory, as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard(US) and Whitehead Institute.

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU).

Foundation and vision

In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

“The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

Early developments

Two days after Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

In 1916, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

Curricular reforms

In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US) catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

These activities affected Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However six Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

In the 1980s, there was more controversy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (US)’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

Recent history

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology , and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also an Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

The mission of Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.

From The Faculty of Arts & Science At The University of Toronto (CA): “Researchers develop interactive ‘Stargazer’ camera robot that can help film tutorial videos”

From The Faculty of Arts & Science

At

The University of Toronto (CA)

5.19.23
Krystle Hewitt

Research led by U of T computer science PhD candidate Jiannan Li explores how an interactive camera robot can assist instructors and others in making how-to videos (photo by Matt Hintsa)

A group of computer scientists from the University of Toronto wants to make it easier to film how-to videos.

The team of researchers have developed “Stargazer”, an interactive camera robot that helps university instructors and other content creators create engaging tutorial videos demonstrating physical skills.

“Stargazer” is an interactive camera robot that helps instructors to create engaging and informative physical skill instruction videos.

For those without access to a camera person, Stargazer can capture dynamic instructional videos and address the constraints of working with static cameras.

“The robot is there to help humans, but not to replace humans,” explains lead researcher Jiannan Li, a PhD candidate in U of T’s department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science.

“The instructors are here to teach. The robot’s role is to help with filming – the heavy-lifting work.”

The “Stargazer” work is outlined in a published paper [below] presented this year at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, a leading international conference in human-computer interaction.

Li’s co-authors include fellow members of U of T’s Dynamic Graphics Project (dgp) lab: postdoctoral researcher Mauricio Sousa, PhD students Karthik Mahadevan and Bryan Wang, Professor Ravin Balakrishnan and Associate Professor Tovi Grossman; as well as Associate Professor Anthony Tang (cross-appointed with the Faculty of Information); recent U of T Faculty of Information graduates Paula Akemi Aoyaui and Nicole Yu; and third-year computer engineering student Angela Yang.

A study participant uses the interactive camera robot Stargazer to record a how-to video on skateboard maintenance (supplied photo)

“Stargazer” uses a single camera on a robot arm, with seven independent motors that can move along with the video subject by autonomously tracking regions of interest. The system’s camera behaviors can be adjusted based on subtle cues from instructors, such as body movements, gestures and speech that are detected by the prototype’s sensors.

The instructor’s voice is recorded with a wireless microphone and sent to Microsoft Azure Speech-to-Text, a speech-recognition software. The transcribed text, along with a custom prompt, is then sent to the GPT-3 program, a large language model which labels the instructor’s intention for the camera – such as a standard versus high angle and normal versus tighter framing.

These camera control commands are cues naturally used by instructors to guide the attention of their audience and are not disruptive to instruction delivery, the researchers say.

For example, the instructor can have “Stargazer” adjust its view to look at each of the tools they will be using during a tutorial by pointing to each one, prompting the camera to pan around. The instructor can also say to viewers, “If you look at how I put ‘A’ into ‘B’ from the top,” Stargazer will respond by framing the action with a high angle to give the audience a better view.

In designing the interaction vocabulary, the team wanted to identify signals that are subtle and avoid the need for the instructor to communicate separately to the robot while speaking to their students or audience.

“The goal is to have the robot understand in real time what kind of shot the instructor wants,” Li says. “The important part of this goal is that we want these vocabularies to be non-disruptive. It should feel like they fit into the tutorial.”

“Stargazer’s” abilities were put to the test in a study involving six instructors, each teaching a distinct skill to create dynamic tutorial videos.

Using the robot, they were able to produce videos demonstrating physical tasks on a diverse range of subjects, from skateboard maintenance to interactive sculpture-making and setting up virtual-reality headsets, while relying on the robot for subject tracking, camera framing and camera angle combinations.

The participants were each given a practice session and completed their tutorials within two takes. The researchers reported all of the participants were able to create videos without needing any additional controls than what was provided by the robotic camera and were satisfied with the quality of the videos produced.

While “Stargazer’s” range of camera positions is sufficient for tabletop activities, the team is interested in exploring the potential of camera drones and robots on wheels to help with filming tasks in larger environments from a wider variety of angles.

They also found some study participants attempted to trigger object shots by giving or showing objects to the camera, which were not among the cues that Stargazer currently recognizes. Future research could investigate methods to detect diverse and subtle intents by combining simultaneous signals from an instructor’s gaze, posture and speech, which Li says is a long-term goal the team is making progress on.

“Stargazer”: An Interactive Camera Robot for Capturing How-To Videos Based on Subtle Instructor Cues.

While the team presents “Stargazer” as an option for those who do not have access to professional film crews, the researchers admit the robotic camera prototype relies on an expensive robot arm and a suite of external sensors. Li notes, however, that the “Stargazer” concept is not necessarily limited by costly technology.

“I think there’s a real market for robotic filming equipment, even at the consumer level. “Stargazer” is expanding that realm, but looking farther ahead with a bit more autonomy and a little bit more interaction. So realistically, it could be available to consumers,” he says.

Li says the team is excited by the possibilities Stargazer presents for greater human-robot collaboration.

“For robots to work together with humans, the key is for robots to understand humans better. Here, we are looking at these vocabularies, these typically human communication behaviors,” he explains.

“We hope to inspire others to look at understanding how humans communicate … and how robots can pick that up and have the proper reaction, like assistive behaviors.”

Science paper:
Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23)

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Toronto Faculty of Arts & Science is Canada’s largest and most research-intensive undergraduate and graduate enterprise, a vibrant intellectual community of students and scholars who are deeply committed to excellence, discovery and diversity.

The Faculty comprises 29 departments, seven colleges and 48 interdisciplinary centres, schools and institutes, which not only provide academic offerings, but also a thriving community outside the classroom. This breadth allows us to develop new synergies, to address novel research opportunities and student interest in areas that cut across the sectors.

More than 300 undergraduate and 70 graduate programs are offered across the humanities, social sciences and sciences.

Departments

Anthropology
Art History
David A. Dunlap Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics
Cell & Systems Biology
Chemistry
Classics
Computer Science
Earth Sciences
East Asian Studies
Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
Economics
English
French
Geography & Planning
Germanic Languages & Literatures
History
Italian Studies
Linguistics
Mathematics
Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
Philosophy
Physics
Political Science
Psychology
Study of Religion
Slavic Languages & Literatures
Sociology
Spanish & Portuguese
Statistical Sciences

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich [ETH Zürich] [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH): “From robotic fish to artificial muscles”

From The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich [ETH Zürich] [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH)

5.23.23

Bachelor’s students at ETH Zürich were given a year to turn their original ideas into finished products. ETH News presents videos of two of these projects.

The MetaSuit team developed artificial muscles. In the SURF-​eDNA project, students developed a diving robot capable of collecting DNA samples. (Photograph: ETH Zürich)

A robot that moves like a fish, a suit with artificial muscles, a heart-​lung machine for babies, and a technique for spinning yarn out of used clothing – these are just four of the ideas that ETH Zurich Bachelor’s students of Mechanical Engineering have pursued as part of focus projects over the past year. On 31 May, the teams will present their products to the public.

For the SURF-​eDNA project, students are developing an autonomous underwater robot that moves like a fish and does so virtually noiselessly. This robot can film underwater and collect samples that provide a picture of which organisms live in a given environment. It has a built-​in filter with which it collects fragments of DNA present in the water. The robot is propelled by a silicone fin, into which water is pumped in cycles. As the robot can move almost silently, it can be deployed in sensitive ecosystems without disrupting them.

Dieser Roboterfisch sammelt DNA-Spuren im Meer – Surf eDNA

The students belonging to the MetaSuit project want to make virtual reality (VR) a full-​body experience: they are developing a suit complete with artificial muscles. Wearers can immerse themselves in virtual worlds and get haptic feedback – for instance, by feeling resistance on their arms. In this way, the suit opens up new VR experiences that could be attractive to the film industry as well as to the medical sector for rehabilitation treatments.

MetaSuit – Improving the Virtual Reality Experience.

The byPulse team are tackling a problem that arises when babies or toddlers have to undergo heart surgery. A heart-​lung machine helps keep these young patients alive during their operation. But achieving the optimum setup for such machines is not easy – one incorrect setting can cause lasting brain damage. The students are developing a heart-​lung machine that can be operated while blood flow in the brain is monitored using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). They hope this kind of monitoring will reveal what parameters need to be adjusted to reduce the number of cases of infant brain damage resulting from this kind of surgery. Since the heart-​lung machines currently on the market contain metal components and electric motors, they are not compatible with the magnetic field generated by MRI machines.

Students of the byPulse project test their heart-​lung machine in an MRI device. (Photograph: Bypulse)

In the ReTex project, students are attempting to get the clothing industry in shape for a circular economy. The team is developing ways of recovering textile fibres from used clothing and spinning these into high-​quality yarn. Today, only one in every hundred items of clothing is worn again second-​hand. The rest are either shredded for use as insulation material or end up in landfills. The team hopes that their new technology will help make the textile industry more sustainable.

Students of the ReTex focus project with a carding machine they developed to obtain fibres from fabric. (Photograph: Retex)

Run by Bachelor’s students of mechanical engineering and electrical engineering, the focus projects provide an opportunity to put theory into practice. Working in teams, the students have two semesters to turn an idea into an innovative product. They manage all stages of product development themselves – from concept and design to manufacture and marketing. At the end of the two semesters, the students present their projects at the Focus Rollout.

Other focus projects in 2022/23

aCentauric is building a solar-​powered racing car designed to complete the 3,000 kilometre course at the World Solar Challenge in Australia in October 2023. In addition to being aerodynamic, the car is also stable enough to withstand strong crosswinds.
Cellsius Project H2 is developing a propulsion system for small aircraft that uses a hydrogen fuel cell to power an electric motor. Hydrogen opens up the possibility of carbon-​free flight, short refuelling times and long ranges.
Cito Libra is developing a driverless electric motorcycle. Gyroscopes ensure that the two-​wheeler remains stable. Potential future applications include autonomous two-​wheelers and improved stabilization for conventional motorcycles.
eXact is building a fully electric – and thus quieter – excavator. Whereas the grappler arm on today’s excavators is powered by hydraulics, the ETH team is using electric linear drives that are particularly efficient.
Formula Student Electric is developing an electric racing car to compete in Formula Student competitions against cars designed by student teams from other European universities. Named “Castor”, the team’s racing car has an entirely original design.
magnecko is developing a four-​legged robot whose magnetic feet allow it to climb up steel structures. The idea is for the robot to help with safety inspections of these structures in the future.
PROMETHEUS is developing a rocket engine powered by ethanol and liquid oxygen as part of the ARIS student project. In the next few years, PROMETHEUS aims to launch a rocket powered by this engine into space as part of a student competition.
SONANO is developing a new contrast material for optoacoustics, a new and comparatively inexpensive method of medical imaging. Based on gold nanoparticles, this contrast material should help make it easier to detect tumours in breast tissue.
swissloop is developing a Hyperloop high-​speed transport system that will enable goods and people to be transported faster and in a more climate-​friendly way than by air. The students are building a new type of linear motor and an energy-​efficient floating system.
________________________________________________________________________________________
Focus Rollout

The students will present their projects as part of a public exhibition: Tuesday, 30 May, 12 noon to 5.30 p.m., LEE Building, floor E, Leonhardstrasse 21, Zurich

There will also be an event at which the students will provide background information about their projects: Tuesday, 30 May, 1.30 p.m. to 4.30 p.m., livestream

More about Focus Rollout

See the full article here .

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The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich [ETH Zürich] [Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich] (CH) is a public research university in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. Founded by the Swiss Federal Government in 1854 with the stated mission to educate engineers and scientists, the school focuses exclusively on science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Like its sister institution The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne [EPFL-École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne](CH) , it is part of The Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain (ETH Domain)) , part of the The Swiss Federal Department of Economic Affairs, Education and Research [EAER][Eidgenössisches Departement für Wirtschaft, Bildung und Forschung] [Département fédéral de l’économie, de la formation et de la recherche] (CH).

The university is an attractive destination for international students thanks to low tuition fees of 809 CHF per semester, PhD and graduate salaries that are amongst the world’s highest, and a world-class reputation in academia and industry. There are currently 22,200 students from over 120 countries, of which 4,180 are pursuing doctoral degrees. In the 2021 edition of the QS World University Rankings ETH Zürich is ranked 6th in the world and 8th by the Times Higher Education World Rankings 2020. In the 2020 QS World University Rankings by subject it is ranked 4th in the world for engineering and technology (2nd in Europe) and 1st for earth & marine science.

As of November 2019, 21 Nobel laureates, 2 Fields Medalists, 2 Pritzker Prize winners, and 1 Turing Award winner have been affiliated with the Institute, including Albert Einstein. Other notable alumni include John von Neumann and Santiago Calatrava. It is a founding member of the IDEA League and the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) and a member of the CESAER network.

ETH Zürich was founded on 7 February 1854 by the Swiss Confederation and began giving its first lectures on 16 October 1855 as a polytechnic institute (eidgenössische polytechnische schule) at various sites throughout the city of Zurich. It was initially composed of six faculties: architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemistry, forestry, and an integrated department for the fields of mathematics, natural sciences, literature, and social and political sciences.

It is locally still known as Polytechnikum, or simply as Poly, derived from the original name eidgenössische polytechnische schule, which translates to “federal polytechnic school”.

ETH Zürich is a federal institute (i.e., under direct administration by the Swiss government), whereas The University of Zürich [Universität Zürich ] (CH) is a cantonal institution. The decision for a new federal university was heavily disputed at the time; the liberals pressed for a “federal university”, while the conservative forces wanted all universities to remain under cantonal control, worried that the liberals would gain more political power than they already had. In the beginning, both universities were co-located in the buildings of the University of Zürich.

From 1905 to 1908, under the presidency of Jérôme Franel, the course program of ETH Zürich was restructured to that of a real university and ETH Zürich was granted the right to award doctorates. In 1909 the first doctorates were awarded. In 1911, it was given its current name, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. In 1924, another reorganization structured the university in 12 departments. However, it now has 16 departments.

ETH Zürich, EPFL (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) [École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne](CH), and four associated research institutes form The Domain of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology (ETH Domain) [ETH-Bereich; Domaine des Écoles polytechniques fédérales] (CH) with the aim of collaborating on scientific projects.

Reputation and ranking

ETH Zürich is ranked among the top universities in the world. Typically, popular rankings place the institution as the best university in continental Europe and ETH Zürich is consistently ranked among the top 1-5 universities in Europe, and among the top 3-10 best universities of the world.

Historically, ETH Zürich has achieved its reputation particularly in the fields of chemistry, mathematics and physics. There are 32 Nobel laureates who are associated with ETH Zürich, the most recent of whom is Richard F. Heck, awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2010. Albert Einstein is perhaps its most famous alumnus.

In 2018, the QS World University Rankings placed ETH Zürich at 7th overall in the world. In 2015, ETH Zürich was ranked 5th in the world in Engineering, Science and Technology, just behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University and University of Cambridge (UK). In 2015, ETH Zürich also ranked 6th in the world in Natural Sciences, and in 2016 ranked 1st in the world for Earth & Marine Sciences for the second consecutive year.

In 2016, Times Higher Education World University Rankings ranked ETH Zürich 9th overall in the world and 8th in the world in the field of Engineering & Technology, just behind the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, California Institute of Technology, Princeton University, University of Cambridge(UK), Imperial College London(UK) and University of Oxford(UK) .

In a comparison of Swiss universities by swissUP Ranking and in rankings published by CHE comparing the universities of German-speaking countries, ETH Zürich traditionally is ranked first in natural sciences, computer science and engineering sciences.

In the survey CHE Excellence Ranking on the quality of Western European graduate school programs in the fields of biology, chemistry, physics and mathematics, ETH Zürich was assessed as one of the three institutions to have excellent programs in all the considered fields, the other two being Imperial College London (UK) and the University of Cambridge (UK), respectively.

From Cornell University Via “The Chronicle”: “I robot – Remote proxy collaborates on your behalf”

From Cornell University

Via

“The Chronicle”

5.11.23
Louis DiPietro | Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science

Cornell researchers have developed a robot called “ReMotion” that occupies physical space on a remote user’s behalf, automatically mirroring the user’s movements in real time and conveying key body language that is lost in standard virtual environments.

Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student in the field of information science, with the “ReMotion” robot.

“Pointing gestures, the perception of another’s gaze, intuitively knowing where someone’s attention is – in remote settings, we lose these nonverbal, implicit cues that are very important for carrying out design activities,” said Mose Sakashita, a doctoral student in the field of information science.

Sakashita is the lead author of a presentation paper
which he presented at the Association for Computing Machinery CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Hamburg, Germany in April. “With ‘ReMotion’ we show that we can enable rapid and dynamic interactions through the help of a mobile and automated robot.”

With further development, “ReMotion” could be deployed in virtual collaborative environments as well as in classrooms and other educational settings, Sakashita said.

The idea for “ReMotion” came out of Sakashita’s experience as a teaching assistant for a popular rapid prototyping course in the spring 2020 semester, which was held largely online due to COVID-19. Confined with students to a virtual learning environment, Sakashita came to understand that physical movement is vital in collaborative design projects: teammates lean in to survey parts of the prototype; they inspect circuits, troubleshoot faulty code together and then may draw up solutions on a nearby whiteboard.

This range of motion is all but lost in a virtual environment, as are the subtle ways collaborators communicate through body language and expressions, he said.

“It was super challenging to teach. There are so many tasks that are involved when you’re doing a hands-on design activity,” Sakashita said. “The kind of instinctive, dynamic transitions we make – like gesturing or addressing a collaborator – are too dynamic to simulate through Zoom.”

The lean, nearly six-foot-tall “ReMotion” device itself is outfitted with a monitor for a head, omnidirectional wheels for feet and game-engine software for brains. It automatically mirrors the remote user’s movements – thanks to another Cornell-made device, “Neckface”, which the remote user wears to track head and body movements. The motion data is then sent remotely to the ReMotion robot in real-time.

Telepresence robots are not new, but remote users generally need to steer them manually, distracting from the task at hand, researchers said. Other options such as virtual reality and mixed reality collaboration can also require an active role from the user and headsets may limit peripheral awareness, researchers added.

In a small study of about a dozen participants, nearly all reported a heightened sense of co-presence and behavioral interdependence when using “ReMotion” compared to an existing telerobotic system. Participants also reported significantly higher shared attention among remote collaborators.

In its current form, “ReMotion” only works with two users in a one-on-one remote environment, and each user must occupy physical spaces of identical size and layout. In future work, “ReMotion” developers intend to explore asymmetrical scenarios, like a single remote team member collaborating virtually via “ReMotion” with multiple teammates in a larger room.

Other co-authors are: Ruidong Zhang and Hyunju Kim, doctoral students in the field of information science; Xiaoyi Li, M.P.S. ’21; Michael Russo, M.P.S. ‘21; Cheng Zhang, assistant professor of information science; Malte Jung, associate professor of information science and the Nancy H. ’62 and Philip M. ’62 Young Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow; and François Guimbretière, professor of information science.

This research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Nakajima Foundation.

presentation paper

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Once called “the first American university” by educational historian Frederick Rudolph, Cornell University represents a distinctive mix of eminent scholarship and democratic ideals. Adding practical subjects to the classics and admitting qualified students regardless of nationality, race, social circumstance, gender, or religion was quite a departure when Cornell was founded in 1865.

Today’s Cornell reflects this heritage of egalitarian excellence. It is home to the nation’s first colleges devoted to hotel administration, industrial and labor relations, and veterinary medicine. Both a private university and the land-grant institution of New York State, Cornell University is the most educationally diverse member of the Ivy League.

On the Ithaca campus alone nearly 20,000 students representing every state and 120 countries choose from among 4,000 courses in 11 undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools. Many undergraduates participate in a wide range of interdisciplinary programs, play meaningful roles in original research, and study in Cornell programs in Washington, New York City, and the world over.

Cornell University is a private, statutory, Ivy League and land-grant research university in Ithaca, New York. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, the university was intended to teach and make contributions in all fields of knowledge—from the classics to the sciences, and from the theoretical to the applied. These ideals, unconventional for the time, are captured in Cornell’s founding principle, a popular 1868 quotation from founder Ezra Cornell: “I would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The university is broadly organized into seven undergraduate colleges and seven graduate divisions at its main Ithaca campus, with each college and division defining its specific admission standards and academic programs in near autonomy. The university also administers two satellite medical campuses, one in New York City and one in Education City, Qatar, and The Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute in New York City, a graduate program that incorporates technology, business, and creative thinking. The program moved from Google’s Chelsea Building in New York City to its permanent campus on Roosevelt Island in September 2017.

Cornell is one of the few private land grant universities in the United States. Of its seven undergraduate colleges, three are state-supported statutory or contract colleges through The State University of New York (SUNY) system, including its Agricultural and Human Ecology colleges as well as its Industrial Labor Relations school. Of Cornell’s graduate schools, only the veterinary college is state-supported. As a land grant college, Cornell operates a cooperative extension outreach program in every county of New York and receives annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions. The Cornell University Ithaca Campus comprises 745 acres, but is much larger when the Cornell Botanic Gardens (more than 4,300 acres) and the numerous university-owned lands in New York City are considered.

Alumni and affiliates of Cornell have reached many notable and influential positions in politics, media, and science. As of January 2021, 61 Nobel laureates, four Turing Award winners and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with Cornell. Cornell counts more than 250,000 living alumni, and its former and present faculty and alumni include 34 Marshall Scholars, 33 Rhodes Scholars, 29 Truman Scholars, 7 Gates Scholars, 55 Olympic Medalists, 10 current Fortune 500 CEOs, and 35 billionaire alumni. Since its founding, Cornell has been a co-educational, non-sectarian institution where admission has not been restricted by religion or race. The student body consists of more than 15,000 undergraduate and 9,000 graduate students from all 50 American states and 119 countries.

History

Cornell University was founded on April 27, 1865; the New York State (NYS) Senate authorized the university as the state’s land grant institution. Senator Ezra Cornell offered his farm in Ithaca, New York, as a site and $500,000 of his personal fortune as an initial endowment. Fellow senator and educator Andrew Dickson White agreed to be the first president. During the next three years, White oversaw the construction of the first two buildings and traveled to attract students and faculty. The university was inaugurated on October 7, 1868, and 412 men were enrolled the next day.

Cornell developed as a technologically innovative institution, applying its research to its own campus and to outreach efforts. For example, in 1883 it was one of the first university campuses to use electricity from a water-powered dynamo to light the grounds. Since 1894, Cornell has included colleges that are state funded and fulfill statutory requirements; it has also administered research and extension activities that have been jointly funded by state and federal matching programs.

Cornell has had active alumni since its earliest classes. It was one of the first universities to include alumni-elected representatives on its Board of Trustees. Cornell was also among the Ivies that had heightened student activism during the 1960s related to cultural issues; civil rights; and opposition to the Vietnam War, with protests and occupations resulting in the resignation of Cornell’s president and the restructuring of university governance. Today the university has more than 4,000 courses. Cornell is also known for the Residential Club Fire of 1967, a fire in the Residential Club building that killed eight students and one professor.

Since 2000, Cornell has been expanding its international programs. In 2004, the university opened the Weill Cornell Medical College in Qatar. It has partnerships with institutions in India, Singapore, and the People’s Republic of China. Former president Jeffrey S. Lehman described the university, with its high international profile, a “transnational university”. On March 9, 2004, Cornell and Stanford University laid the cornerstone for a new ‘Bridging the Rift Center’ to be built and jointly operated for education on the Israel–Jordan border.

Research

Cornell, a research university, is ranked fourth in the world in producing the largest number of graduates who go on to pursue PhDs in engineering or the natural sciences at American institutions, and fifth in the world in producing graduates who pursue PhDs at American institutions in any field. Research is a central element of the university’s mission; in 2009 Cornell spent $671 million on science and engineering research and development, the 16th highest in the United States.

Cornell is a member of the Association of American Universities and is classified among “R1: Doctoral Universities – Very high research activity”.

For the 2016–17 fiscal year, the university spent $984.5 million on research. Federal sources constitute the largest source of research funding, with total federal investment of $438.2 million. The agencies contributing the largest share of that investment are The Department of Health and Human Services and the National Science Foundation , accounting for 49.6% and 24.4% of all federal investment, respectively. Cornell was on the top-ten list of U.S. universities receiving the most patents in 2003, and was one of the nation’s top five institutions in forming start-up companies. In 2004–05, Cornell received 200 invention disclosures; filed 203 U.S. patent applications; completed 77 commercial license agreements; and distributed royalties of more than $4.1 million to Cornell units and inventors.

Since 1962, Cornell has been involved in unmanned missions to Mars. In the 21st century, Cornell had a hand in the Mars Exploration Rover Mission. Cornell’s Steve Squyres, Principal Investigator for the Athena Science Payload, led the selection of the landing zones and requested data collection features for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. NASA-JPL/Caltech engineers took those requests and designed the rovers to meet them. The rovers, both of which have operated long past their original life expectancies, are responsible for the discoveries that were awarded 2004 Breakthrough of the Year honors by Science. Control of the Mars rovers has shifted between National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Caltech and Cornell’s Space Sciences Building.

Further, Cornell researchers discovered the rings around the planet Uranus, and Cornell built and operated the telescope at Arecibo Observatory located in Arecibo, Puerto Rico(US) until 2011, when they transferred the operations to SRI International, the Universities Space Research Association and the Metropolitan University of Puerto Rico [Universidad Metropolitana de Puerto Rico].

The Automotive Crash Injury Research Project was begun in 1952. It pioneered the use of crash testing, originally using corpses rather than dummies. The project discovered that improved door locks; energy-absorbing steering wheels; padded dashboards; and seat belts could prevent an extraordinary percentage of injuries.

In the early 1980s, Cornell deployed the first IBM 3090-400VF and coupled two IBM 3090-600E systems to investigate coarse-grained parallel computing. In 1984, the National Science Foundation began work on establishing five new supercomputer centers, including the Cornell Center for Advanced Computing, to provide high-speed computing resources for research within the United States. As a National Science Foundation center, Cornell deployed the first IBM Scalable Parallel supercomputer.

In the 1990s, Cornell developed scheduling software and deployed the first supercomputer built by Dell. Most recently, Cornell deployed Red Cloud, one of the first cloud computing services designed specifically for research. Today, the center is a partner on the National Science Foundation XSEDE-Extreme Science Engineering Discovery Environment supercomputing program, providing coordination for XSEDE architecture and design, systems reliability testing, and online training using the Cornell Virtual Workshop learning platform.

Cornell scientists have researched the fundamental particles of nature for more than 70 years. Cornell physicists, such as Hans Bethe, contributed not only to the foundations of nuclear physics but also participated in the Manhattan Project. In the 1930s, Cornell built the second cyclotron in the United States. In the 1950s, Cornell physicists became the first to study synchrotron radiation.

During the 1990s, the Cornell Electron Storage Ring, located beneath Alumni Field, was the world’s highest-luminosity electron-positron collider. After building the synchrotron at Cornell, Robert R. Wilson took a leave of absence to become the founding director of DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, which involved designing and building the largest accelerator in the United States.

Cornell’s accelerator and high-energy physics groups are involved in the design of the proposed ILC-International Linear Collider (JP) and plan to participate in its construction and operation. The International Linear Collider (JP), to be completed in the late 2010s, will complement the The European Organization for Nuclear Research [La Organización Europea para la Investigación Nuclear][Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire] [Europäische Organisation für Kernforschung](CH)[CERN] Large Hadron Collider(CH) and shed light on questions such as the identity of dark matter and the existence of extra dimensions.

As part of its research work, Cornell has established several research collaborations with universities around the globe. For example, a partnership with the University of Sussex(UK) (including the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex) allows research and teaching collaboration between the two institutions.

From NASA JPL-Caltech: “JPL’s Snake-Like EELS Slithers Into New Robotics Terrain”

From NASA JPL-Caltech

5.8.23
Melissa Pamer
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif
626-314-4928
melissa.pamer@jpl.nasa.gov

Snake robot called EELSs. EELS in snow with team. JPL.

Tests in sandy terrain. EELS in Mars Yard curled. JPL.

A versatile robot that would autonomously map, traverse, and explore previously inaccessible destinations is being put to the test at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

How do you create a robot that can go places no one has ever seen before – on its own, without real-time human input? A team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that’s creating a snake-like robot for traversing extreme terrain is taking on the challenge with the mentality of a startup: Build quickly, test often, learn, adjust, repeat.

Called “EELS” (short for Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor), the self-propelled, autonomous robot was inspired by a desire to look for signs of life in the ocean hiding below the icy crust of Saturn’s moon Enceladus by descending narrow vents in the surface that spew geysers into space. Although testing and development continue, designing for such a challenging destination has resulted in a highly adaptable robot. EELS could pick a safe course through a wide variety of terrain on Earth, the Moon, and far beyond, including undulating sand and ice, cliff walls, craters too steep for rovers, underground lava tubes, and labyrinthine spaces within glaciers.

“It has the capability to go to locations where other robots can’t go. Though some robots are better at one particular type of terrain or other, the idea for EELS is the ability to do it all,” said JPL’s Matthew Robinson, EELS project manager. “When you’re going places where you don’t know what you’ll find, you want to send a versatile, risk-aware robot that’s prepared for uncertainty – and can make decisions on its own.”

Testing Out JPL’s New Snake Robot. JPL.

The project team began building the first prototype in 2019 and has been making continual revisions. Since last year, they’ve been conducting monthly field tests and refining both the hardware and the software that allows EELS to operate autonomously. In its current form, dubbed EELS 1.0, the robot weighs about 220 pounds (100 kilograms) and is 13 feet (4 meters) long. It’s composed of 10 identical segments that rotate, using screw threads for propulsion, traction, and grip. The team has been trying out a variety of screws: white, 8-inch-diameter (20-centimeter-diameter) 3D-printed plastic screws for testing on looser terrain, and narrower, sharper black metal screws for ice.

The robot has been put to the test in sandy, snowy, and icy environments, from the Mars Yard at JPL to a “robot playground” created at a ski resort in the snowy mountains of Southern California, even at a local indoor ice rink.

“We have a different philosophy of robot development than traditional spacecraft, with many quick cycles of testing and correcting,” said Hiro Ono, EELS principal investigator at JPL. “There are dozens of textbooks about how to design a four-wheel vehicle, but there is no textbook about how to design an autonomous snake robot to boldly go where no robot has gone before. We have to write our own. That’s what we’re doing now.”

How EELS Thinks and Moves

Because of the communications lag time between Earth and deep space, EELS is designed to autonomously sense its environment, calculate risk, travel, and gather data with yet-to-be-determined science instruments. When something goes wrong, the goal is for the robot to recover on its own, without human assistance.

EELS lowering head on Athabasca glacier. JPL.

EELS screw examples. JPL.

“Imagine a car driving autonomously, but there are no stop signs, no traffic signals, not even any roads. The robot has to figure out what the road is and try to follow it,” said the project’s autonomy lead, Rohan Thakker. “Then it needs to go down a 100-foot drop and not fall.”

EELS creates a 3D map of its surroundings using four pairs of stereo cameras and lidar, which is similar to radar but employs short laser pulses instead of radio waves. With the data from those sensors, navigation algorithms figure out the safest path forward. The goal has been to create library of “gaits,” or ways the robot can move in response to terrain challenges, from sidewinding to curling in on itself, a move the team calls “banana.”

In its final form, the robot will contain 48 actuators – essentially little motors – that give it the flexibility to assume multiple configurations but add complexity for both the hardware and software teams. Thakker compares the actuators to “48 steering wheels.” Many of them have built-in force-torque sensing, working like a kind of skin so EELS can feel how much force it’s exerting on terrain. That helps it to move vertically in narrow chutes with uneven surfaces, configuring itself to push against opposing walls at the same time like a rock climber.

Last year, the EELS team got to experience those kinds of challenging spaces when they lowered the robot’s perception head – the segment with the cameras and lidar – into a vertical shaft called a moulin at Athabasca Glacier in the Canadian Rockies. In September, they’re returning to the location, which is in many ways an analog for icy moons in our solar system, with a version of the robot designed to test subsurface mobility. The team will drop a small sensor suite – to monitor glacier chemical and physical properties – that EELS will eventually be able to deploy to remote sites.

“Our focus so far has been on autonomous capability and mobility, but eventually we’ll look at what science instruments we can integrate with EELS,” Robinson said. “Scientists tell us where they want to go, what they’re most excited about, and we’ll provide a robot that will get them there. How? Like a startup, we just have to build it.”

More About the Project

EELS is funded by the Office of Technology Infusion and Strategy at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California through a technology accelerator program called JPL Next. JPL is managed for NASA by Caltech in Pasadena, California. The EELS team has worked with a number of university partners on the project, including Arizona State University, Carnegie Mellon University, and University of California, San Diego. The robot is not currently part of any NASA mission.

See the full article here .

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Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

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NASA JPL-Caltech Campus

NASA JPL-Caltech is a federally funded research and development center and NASA field center located in the San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles County, California, United States. Although the facility has a Pasadena postal address, it is actually headquartered in the city of La Cañada Flintridge, on the northwest border of Pasadena. JPL is managed by the nearby California Institute of Technology for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Laboratory’s primary function is the construction and operation of robotic planetary spacecraft, though it also conducts Earth-orbit and astronomy missions. It is also responsible for operating NASA’s Deep Space Network.

NASA Deep Space Network. Credit: NASA.

NASA Deep Space Network Station 56 Madrid Spain added in early 2021.

Deep Space Station 53, or DSS-53, the 111-foot (34-meter) antenna is part of NASA’s Deep Space Network now operational at the network’s facility outside Madrid.

NASA Deep Space Network Station 14 at Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California

NASA Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, AU, Deep Space Network. Credit: NASA

NASA Deep Space Network Madrid Spain. Credit: NASA.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the agency of the United States government that is responsible for the nation’s civilian space program and for aeronautics and aerospace research.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958 with a distinctly civilian (rather than military) orientation encouraging peaceful applications in space science. The National Aeronautics and Space Act was passed on July 29, 1958, disestablishing NASA’s predecessor, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). The new agency became operational on October 1, 1958.

Since that time, most U.S. space exploration efforts have been led by NASA, including the Apollo moon-landing missions, the Skylab space station, and later the Space Shuttle. Currently, NASA is supporting the International Space Station and is overseeing the development of the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle and Commercial Crew vehicles. The agency is also responsible for the Launch Services Program (LSP) which provides oversight of launch operations and countdown management for unmanned NASA launches. Most recently, NASA announced a new Space Launch System that it said would take the agency’s astronauts farther into space than ever before and lay the cornerstone for future human space exploration efforts by the U.S.

NASA science is focused on better understanding Earth through the Earth Observing System, advancing heliophysics through the efforts of the Science Mission Directorate’s Heliophysics Research Program, exploring bodies throughout the Solar System with advanced robotic missions such as New Horizons, and researching astrophysics topics, such as the Big Bang, through the Great Observatories [Hubble, Chandra, Spitzer, and associated programs.] NASA shares data with various national and international organizations such as from the[JAXA]Greenhouse Gases Observing Satellite.

From “The Gazette” At Harvard University: “Wonders never cease” Henry Cerbone

From “The Gazette”

At

Harvard University

5.4.23
Alvin Powell

For his senior thesis, Henry Cerbone created a robotic model of a basilisk lizard’s broad foot, which holds the secret to its ability to run on the water’s surface. Credit:Jon Chase/Harvard Staff Photographer.

Senior Henry Cerbone melded philosophy, robotics, engineering, biology, math into undergrad degree, but computer science spilled over to master’s.

To Henry Cerbone, Central America’s water-running basilisk lizard isn’t that far afield from the dogs, cats, bees, chickens, and snakes on his parents’ 13-acre farm in rural West Virginia.

Cerbone, graduating this spring from Harvard with both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree, has been fascinated by all of them. Since an early age, his amazement at their capabilities — whether a bird in flight or a lizard that runs across water — inspired an evolution of pursuits from hunting tadpoles as a kid to creating a robotic model of a lizard foot in Robert Wood’s Harvard lab.

“I think that much of my life and my academic career at Harvard has been trying to take seriously — or to realize academically — this childlike intuition that animals are important, and we should pay attention to them,” said Cerbone. “And I think that one arrives at that through the sense of wonder that one gets from looking at them as a child.”

Cerbone, an Adams House resident, is the son of a philosophy professor from West Virginia University and a nurse midwife, both members of the Harvard Class of 1988. And he thinks that we can learn a thing or two from the living world as we design more sophisticated robots and that, in turn, robot design has a few things to teach us about the natural world.

“Almost anything that you’d like a robot to do in the world, an animal already does very well,” Cerbone said. “A refutation of that is that ‘Birds fly, and airplanes fly, and they have nothing to do with one another.’ But if you look at the structure of a bird’s wing and you look at the structure of an airfoil, you think about them very similarly, and they have similar design principles. So it’s not always straightforward — a copycat — but there’s a way of thinking about design and problem-solving that animals can show us that I think is really important.”

Sean Kelly, the Teresa G. and Ferdinand F. Martignetti Professor of Philosophy, is Cerbone’s adviser for a special concentration called the ontology of autonomous systems, which Cerbone created. It combines elements of philosophy, robotics, engineering, biology, and mathematics. Cerbone also earned a master’s degree in computer science along the way.

“He’s fantastic. He has a huge range of interests, but they’re focused in this really great way,” said Kelly. “He’s interested in these famously difficult philosophers, but at the same time, he’s a very serious mathematician.”

In designing the concentration, Cerbone spoke to 17 faculty members, asking their opinions on the disciplines needed to fully explore his interests. Since starting the work, he’s delved deeply enough in the various fields to have published papers in three of them. He also tackled a project for his senior thesis to create a robotic model of a basilisk lizard’s broad foot, which holds the secret to its ability to run on the water’s surface.

“He’s driven, very creative, very intelligent, and willing to take risks in terms of things to pursue, and combining things in interesting ways,” said Perrin Schiebel, a fellow in Wood’s lab who also advised Cerbone. “What he did was very challenging and he was willing to take it on even though it was going to be difficult and probably wouldn’t get completed to the level he would have liked. I was impressed that he was willing to pursue that anyway, with the understanding that we would learn something, we would make progress, and it would be successful even if it wasn’t successful.”

Outside of class, Cerbone worked as a photographer on campus and also had a column in The Crimson. Both Kelly and Schiebel said Cerbone’s passion for academics doesn’t preclude having a social life. In fact, Kelly said, conversation is part of how Cerbone does his work.

“He loves being around people. He loves talking with people,” Kelly said. “He does a lot of his intellectual work in conversation with others, is very generous helping others, is also super interested in learning from others. He brings people together around projects that he thinks are interesting or that he thinks other people will think are interesting.”

Though he did take part in several activities, Cerbone said his main extracurricular was working in the lab of roboticist Wood, the Harry Lewis and Marlyn McGrath Professor of Engineering and Applied Sciences. And, though Cerbone said he spent a lot of time there, he also said he might have spent more, if he could have found any.

“I have this deep conviction that doing this kind of work is important and that these ways of thinking are important, important in the sense that they can help us interface with and enact various kinds of changes in the world,” Cerbone said. “But, as much as it frustrates me, I need to sleep and stuff, and one can only work on so many things in four years of undergrad.”

Cerbone will carry on his intellectual journey this summer, studying ants of the Pacific rim with a Japanese biologist and ecologist. In the fall, he will begin a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University, studying for a D.Phil. in biology, the result of evolving interests that have come to focus more squarely on the natural world.

Cerbone said he’s looking forward to being part of the Rhodes community, getting to know and work with bright people with an array of backgrounds and interests who are asking and answering potentially world-changing questions.

“I didn’t spend that much time, for better or for worse, doing deep analyses of where change and what kind of change should be enacted in the world,” he said. “But there are so many brilliant people, many of whom have been awarded things like the Rhodes Scholarship. That’s why I wanted to be a part of that community: to be around people who are asking those kinds of questions, but also answering those kinds of questions.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Harvard University is the oldest institution of higher education in the United States, established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was named after the College’s first benefactor, the young minister John Harvard of Charlestown, who upon his death in 1638 left his library and half his estate to the institution. A statue of John Harvard stands today in front of University Hall in Harvard Yard, and is perhaps the University’s best-known landmark.

Harvard University has 12 degree-granting Schools in addition to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The University has grown from nine students with a single master to an enrollment of more than 20,000 degree candidates including undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. There are more than 360,000 living alumni in the U.S. and over 190 other countries.

The Massachusetts colonial legislature, the General Court, authorized Harvard University’s founding. In its early years, Harvard College primarily trained Congregational and Unitarian clergy, although it has never been formally affiliated with any denomination. Its curriculum and student body were gradually secularized during the 18th century, and by the 19th century, Harvard University (US) had emerged as the central cultural establishment among the Boston elite. Following the American Civil War, President Charles William Eliot’s long tenure (1869–1909) transformed the college and affiliated professional schools into a modern research university; Harvard became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900. James B. Conant led the university through the Great Depression and World War II; he liberalized admissions after the war.

The university is composed of ten academic faculties plus the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Arts and Sciences offers study in a wide range of academic disciplines for undergraduates and for graduates, while the other faculties offer only graduate degrees, mostly professional. Harvard has three main campuses: the 209-acre (85 ha) Cambridge campus centered on Harvard Yard; an adjoining campus immediately across the Charles River in the Allston neighborhood of Boston; and the medical campus in Boston’s Longwood Medical Area. Harvard University’s endowment is valued at $41.9 billion, making it the largest of any academic institution. Endowment income helps enable the undergraduate college to admit students regardless of financial need and provide generous financial aid with no loans The Harvard Library is the world’s largest academic library system, comprising 79 individual libraries holding about 20.4 million items.

Harvard University has more alumni, faculty, and researchers who have won Nobel Prizes (161) and Fields Medals (18) than any other university in the world and more alumni who have been members of the U.S. Congress, MacArthur Fellows, Rhodes Scholars (375), and Marshall Scholars (255) than any other university in the United States. Its alumni also include eight U.S. presidents and 188 living billionaires, the most of any university. Fourteen Turing Award laureates have been Harvard affiliates. Students and alumni have also won 10 Academy Awards, 48 Pulitzer Prizes, and 108 Olympic medals (46 gold), and they have founded many notable companies.

Colonial

Harvard University was established in 1636 by vote of the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1638, it acquired British North America’s first known printing press. In 1639, it was named Harvard College after deceased clergyman John Harvard, an alumnus of the University of Cambridge(UK) who had left the school £779 and his library of some 400 volumes. The charter creating the Harvard Corporation was granted in 1650.

A 1643 publication gave the school’s purpose as “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust.” It trained many Puritan ministers in its early years and offered a classic curriculum based on the English university model—many leaders in the colony had attended the University of Cambridge—but conformed to the tenets of Puritanism. Harvard University has never affiliated with any particular denomination, though many of its earliest graduates went on to become clergymen in Congregational and Unitarian churches.

Increase Mather served as president from 1681 to 1701. In 1708, John Leverett became the first president who was not also a clergyman, marking a turning of the college away from Puritanism and toward intellectual independence.

19th century

In the 19th century, Enlightenment ideas of reason and free will were widespread among Congregational ministers, putting those ministers and their congregations in tension with more traditionalist, Calvinist parties. When Hollis Professor of Divinity David Tappan died in 1803 and President Joseph Willard died a year later, a struggle broke out over their replacements. Henry Ware was elected to the Hollis chair in 1805, and the liberal Samuel Webber was appointed to the presidency two years later, signaling the shift from the dominance of traditional ideas at Harvard to the dominance of liberal, Arminian ideas.

Charles William Eliot, president 1869–1909, eliminated the favored position of Christianity from the curriculum while opening it to student self-direction. Though Eliot was the crucial figure in the secularization of American higher education, he was motivated not by a desire to secularize education but by Transcendentalist Unitarian convictions influenced by William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

20th century

In the 20th century, Harvard University’s reputation grew as a burgeoning endowment and prominent professors expanded the university’s scope. Rapid enrollment growth continued as new graduate schools were begun and the undergraduate college expanded. Radcliffe College, established in 1879 as the female counterpart of Harvard College, became one of the most prominent schools for women in the United States. Harvard University became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900.

The student body in the early decades of the century was predominantly “old-stock, high-status Protestants, especially Episcopalians, Congregationalists, and Presbyterians.” A 1923 proposal by President A. Lawrence Lowell that Jews be limited to 15% of undergraduates was rejected, but Lowell did ban blacks from freshman dormitories.

President James B. Conant reinvigorated creative scholarship to guarantee Harvard University’s preeminence among research institutions. He saw higher education as a vehicle of opportunity for the talented rather than an entitlement for the wealthy, so Conant devised programs to identify, recruit, and support talented youth. In 1943, he asked the faculty to make a definitive statement about what general education ought to be, at the secondary as well as at the college level. The resulting Report, published in 1945, was one of the most influential manifestos in 20th century American education.

Between 1945 and 1960, admissions were opened up to bring in a more diverse group of students. No longer drawing mostly from select New England prep schools, the undergraduate college became accessible to striving middle class students from public schools; many more Jews and Catholics were admitted, but few blacks, Hispanics, or Asians. Throughout the rest of the 20th century, Harvard became more diverse.

Harvard University’s graduate schools began admitting women in small numbers in the late 19th century. During World War II, students at Radcliffe College (which since 1879 had been paying Harvard University professors to repeat their lectures for women) began attending Harvard University classes alongside men. Women were first admitted to the medical school in 1945. Since 1971, Harvard University has controlled essentially all aspects of undergraduate admission, instruction, and housing for Radcliffe women. In 1999, Radcliffe was formally merged into Harvard University.

21st century

Drew Gilpin Faust, previously the dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, became Harvard University’s first woman president on July 1, 2007. She was succeeded by Lawrence Bacow on July 1, 2018.

From The University of Toronto (CA): “The University of Toronto receives $200-million grant to support Acceleration Consortium’s ‘self-driving labs’ research”

From The University of Toronto (CA)

4.28.23
Tabassum Siddiqui

Funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund will support the Acceleration Consortium’s work on “self-driving labs,” which combine AI, robotics and advanced computing to discover new materials. (Photo by James Morley)

The University of Toronto has been awarded a $200-million grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) to revolutionize the speed and impact of scientific discovery through its Acceleration Consortium.

The funding – the largest federal research grant ever awarded to a Canadian university – will support the consortium’s work on “self-driving labs” that combine artificial intelligence, robotics and advanced computing to discover new materials and molecules in a fraction of the usual time and cost. Applications include everything from life-saving medications and biodegradable plastics to low-carbon cement and renewable energy.

Researchers in the consortium recently revealed that they used the technology to develop a potential cancer drug in just 30 days – a process that typically takes years, or even decades.

“The University of Toronto is grateful for this significant investment in artificial intelligence-driven research and innovation, which promises to improve the lives of Canadians and those of people around the world,” said U of T President Meric Gertler.

“The federal government’s critical support of this initiative builds on years of strategic planning and decisions in this space by the University and the federal government, including the 2017 launch of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy that helped cement Toronto’s status as a global hub for a revolutionary technology.

“This is the next step in achieving that bold vision.”

François-Philippe Champagne, minister of innovation, science and industry, announced the U of T funding alongside 10 other large-scale projects across the country.

“The initiatives announced today will lead to breakthrough discoveries that will improve people’s lives, nourish our innovation ecosystems, and shape Canada’s prosperity for years to come,” he said in a statement. “Such is the value of Canadian institutions and researchers who think outside the box to tackle the greatest challenges of our time.”

Launched as an Institutional Strategic Initiative in 2021, the Acceleration Consortium brings together partners from academia, government and industry who are accelerating the discovery of materials and molecules needed for a sustainable future. The consortium aims to reduce the time and cost of bringing advanced materials to market, from an average of 20 years and $100 million to as little as one year and $1 million.

Meet the Acceleration Consortium

“Our goal is to accelerate science,” said Acceleration Consortium Director Alán Aspuru-Guzik, a professor in the departments of chemistry and computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science who is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence. “To do that, we realized we need to take a cue from self-driving cars and extended that concept to a self-driving lab, which uses AI and automation to carry out more experiments in a smarter way.

“We’ve essentially supercharged the process of scientific discovery.”

The CFREF funding, along with additional support from U of T – which includes an investment of $130 million to expand facilities to house the Acceleration Consortium’s state-of-the-art labs at the Lash Miller Chemical Laboratories building on the St. George campus – will help secure the researchers, spaces and partnerships needed to build a world-leading centre for accelerated materials discovery and innovation.

The funding will also help the consortium rapidly create high quality datasets to better train AI models and validate the model’s predictions in real time. That, in turn, will dramatically accelerate the discovery and development of molecules and materials for a wide range of industries.

With a strong plan of equity, diversity and inclusion guiding project implementation and research design, the initiative will commercialize ethically designed technologies and materials to benefit society and train today’s scientists with the skills they need to advance the emerging field of accelerated materials discovery. It will also allow the consortium to examine critical issues regarding the application of the technology, including from environmental and Indigenous perspectives.

“With this funding – which enabled us to obtain matching commitments of about $300 million from all our partners – we are talking about half a billion dollars of investments, said Aspuru-Guzik, who joined U of T from Harvard University in 2018 as a Canada 150 Research Chair in Theoretical and Quantum Chemistry and is one of a growing number of global experts at the Acceleration Consortium.

“This will help us make the Greater Toronto Area and Canada world leaders in AI-frontier discovery – we have no excuse not to be after this project.”

The Acceleration Consortium comprises nearly 100 researchers – and is hiring many more – across a wide variety of disciplines, including AI, computer science, mathematics, chemistry, economics, engineering, materials science, mechatronics, biology, pharmacology, robotics, technoscience and more. It also includes 30 partners from the private and public sector, including the University of British Columbia, a lead partner on the grant.

“What’s unique about this model is that it’s kind of this idea of a university without borders,” said Jason Hein, a member of the Acceleration Consortium’s scientific leadership team and an associate professor in the chemistry department in the Faculty of Science at UBC.

“What happens a lot in Canadian research culture is that we’re good at punching above our weight class, but, in the past, other countries have had bigger budgets. What’s great about this is that through the energy of the people at Acceleration Consortium, we’re saying, ‘We’re doing something huge here.’ And to get the vote of confidence back saying, ‘Yes, we believe in you and let’s go forward’ is really important.”

CFREF aims to boost the strengths of Canadian postsecondary institutions so that they can achieve global success in research areas that create long-term social and economic advantages for Canada. It invests approximately $200 million per year (or approximately $1.4 billion over a competition cycle of seven years) through a highly competitive peer review process.

“We named this a consortium and not an institute for a reason,” Aspuru-Guzik said. “We are a global effort with its homebase in Toronto that involves academia, government and industry.

“A core goal of our efforts is to spin out the next generation of companies that will develop the materials for the 21st century here in Canada. This, in turn, will help make the GTA the economic epicentre for this field.”

Leah Cowen, U of T’s vice-president, research and innovation, and strategic initiatives, said the impact of the CFREF grant will be felt far beyond Acceleration Consortium itself.

“This level of investment can really transform how universities do innovation,” she said. “It allows us to not only drive forward discovery, but also improve adoption by Canadian companies and foster an ethical approach to technology development that’s guided by principles of equity, diversity and inclusion, benefiting all segments of society.”

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

five-ways-keep-your-child-safe-school-shootings

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

The University of Toronto (CA) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen’s Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King’s College, the oldest university in the province of Ontario.

Originally controlled by the Church of England, the university assumed its present name in 1850 upon becoming a secular institution.

As a collegiate university, it comprises eleven colleges each with substantial autonomy on financial and institutional affairs and significant differences in character and history. The university also operates two satellite campuses located in Scarborough and Mississauga.

University of Toronto has evolved into Canada’s leading institution of learning, discovery and knowledge creation. We are proud to be one of the world’s top research-intensive universities, driven to invent and innovate.

Our students have the opportunity to learn from and work with preeminent thought leaders through our multidisciplinary network of teaching and research faculty, alumni and partners.

The ideas, innovations and actions of more than 560,000 graduates continue to have a positive impact on the world.

Academically, the University of Toronto is noted for movements and curricula in literary criticism and communication theory, known collectively as the Toronto School.

The university was the birthplace of insulin and stem cell research, and was the site of the first electron microscope in North America; the identification of the first black hole Cygnus X-1; multi-touch technology, and the development of the theory of NP-completeness.

The university was one of several universities involved in early research of deep learning. It receives the most annual scientific research funding of any Canadian university and is one of two members of the Association of American Universities outside the United States, the other being McGill(CA).

The Varsity Blues are the athletic teams that represent the university in intercollegiate league matches, with ties to gridiron football, rowing and ice hockey. The earliest recorded instance of gridiron football occurred at University of Toronto’s University College in November 1861.

The university’s Hart House is an early example of the North American student centre, simultaneously serving cultural, intellectual, and recreational interests within its large Gothic-revival complex.

The University of Toronto has educated three Governors General of Canada, four Prime Ministers of Canada, three foreign leaders, and fourteen Justices of the Supreme Court. As of March 2019, ten Nobel laureates, five Turing Award winners, 94 Rhodes Scholars, and one Fields Medalist have been affiliated with the university.

Early history

The founding of a colonial college had long been the desire of John Graves Simcoe, the first Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada and founder of York, the colonial capital. As an University of Oxford (UK)-educated military commander who had fought in the American Revolutionary War, Simcoe believed a college was needed to counter the spread of republicanism from the United States. The Upper Canada Executive Committee recommended in 1798 that a college be established in York.

On March 15, 1827, a royal charter was formally issued by King George IV, proclaiming “from this time one College, with the style and privileges of a University … for the education of youth in the principles of the Christian Religion, and for their instruction in the various branches of Science and Literature … to continue for ever, to be called King’s College.” The granting of the charter was largely the result of intense lobbying by John Strachan, the influential Anglican Bishop of Toronto who took office as the college’s first president. The original three-storey Greek Revival school building was built on the present site of Queen’s Park.

Under Strachan’s stewardship, King’s College was a religious institution closely aligned with the Church of England and the British colonial elite, known as the Family Compact. Reformist politicians opposed the clergy’s control over colonial institutions and fought to have the college secularized. In 1849, after a lengthy and heated debate, the newly elected responsible government of the Province of Canada voted to rename King’s College as the University of Toronto and severed the school’s ties with the church. Having anticipated this decision, the enraged Strachan had resigned a year earlier to open Trinity College as a private Anglican seminary. University College was created as the nondenominational teaching branch of the University of Toronto. During the American Civil War the threat of Union blockade on British North America prompted the creation of the University Rifle Corps which saw battle in resisting the Fenian raids on the Niagara border in 1866. The Corps was part of the Reserve Militia lead by Professor Henry Croft.

Established in 1878, the School of Practical Science was the precursor to the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering which has been nicknamed Skule since its earliest days. While the Faculty of Medicine opened in 1843 medical teaching was conducted by proprietary schools from 1853 until 1887 when the faculty absorbed the Toronto School of Medicine. Meanwhile the university continued to set examinations and confer medical degrees. The university opened the Faculty of Law in 1887, followed by the Faculty of Dentistry in 1888 when the Royal College of Dental Surgeons became an affiliate. Women were first admitted to the university in 1884.

A devastating fire in 1890 gutted the interior of University College and destroyed 33,000 volumes from the library but the university restored the building and replenished its library within two years. Over the next two decades a collegiate system took shape as the university arranged federation with several ecclesiastical colleges including Strachan’s Trinity College in 1904. The university operated the Royal Conservatory of Music from 1896 to 1991 and the Royal Ontario Museum from 1912 to 1968; both still retain close ties with the university as independent institutions. The University of Toronto Press was founded in 1901 as Canada’s first academic publishing house. The Faculty of Forestry founded in 1907 with Bernhard Fernow as dean was Canada’s first university faculty devoted to forest science. In 1910, the Faculty of Education opened its laboratory school, the University of Toronto Schools.

World wars and post-war years

The First and Second World Wars curtailed some university activities as undergraduate and graduate men eagerly enlisted. Intercollegiate athletic competitions and the Hart House Debates were suspended although exhibition and interfaculty games were still held. The David Dunlap Observatory in Richmond Hill opened in 1935 followed by the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies in 1949. The university opened satellite campuses in Scarborough in 1964 and in Mississauga in 1967. The university’s former affiliated schools at the Ontario Agricultural College and Glendon Hall became fully independent of the University of Toronto and became part of University of Guelph (CA) in 1964 and York University (CA) in 1965 respectively. Beginning in the 1980s reductions in government funding prompted more rigorous fundraising efforts.

Since 2000

In 2000 Kin-Yip Chun was reinstated as a professor of the university after he launched an unsuccessful lawsuit against the university alleging racial discrimination. In 2017 a human rights application was filed against the University by one of its students for allegedly delaying the investigation of sexual assault and being dismissive of their concerns. In 2018 the university cleared one of its professors of allegations of discrimination and antisemitism in an internal investigation after a complaint was filed by one of its students.

The University of Toronto was the first Canadian university to amass a financial endowment greater than c. $1 billion in 2007. On September 24, 2020 the university announced a $250 million gift to the Faculty of Medicine from businessman and philanthropist James C. Temerty- the largest single philanthropic donation in Canadian history. This broke the previous record for the school set in 2019 when Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman jointly donated $100 million for the creation of a 750,000-square foot innovation and artificial intelligence centre.

Research

Since 1926 the University of Toronto has been a member of the Association of American Universities a consortium of the leading North American research universities. The university manages by far the largest annual research budget of any university in Canada with sponsored direct-cost expenditures of $878 million in 2010. In 2018 the University of Toronto was named the top research university in Canada by Research Infosource with a sponsored research income (external sources of funding) of $1,147.584 million in 2017. In the same year the university’s faculty averaged a sponsored research income of $428,200 while graduate students averaged a sponsored research income of $63,700. The federal government was the largest source of funding with grants from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research; the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council; and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council amounting to about one-third of the research budget. About eight percent of research funding came from corporations- mostly in the healthcare industry.

The first practical electron microscope was built by the physics department in 1938. During World War II the university developed the G-suit- a life-saving garment worn by Allied fighter plane pilots later adopted for use by astronauts.Development of the infrared chemiluminescence technique improved analyses of energy behaviours in chemical reactions. In 1963 the asteroid 2104 Toronto was discovered in the David Dunlap Observatory (CA) in Richmond Hill and is named after the university. In 1972 studies on Cygnus X-1 led to the publication of the first observational evidence proving the existence of black holes. Toronto astronomers have also discovered the Uranian moons of Caliban and Sycorax; the dwarf galaxies of Andromeda I, II and III; and the supernova SN 1987A. A pioneer in computing technology the university designed and built UTEC- one of the world’s first operational computers- and later purchased Ferut- the second commercial computer after UNIVAC I. Multi-touch technology was developed at Toronto with applications ranging from handheld devices to collaboration walls. The AeroVelo Atlas which won the Igor I. Sikorsky Human Powered Helicopter Competition in 2013 was developed by the university’s team of students and graduates and was tested in Vaughan.

The discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1921 is considered among the most significant events in the history of medicine. The stem cell was discovered at the university in 1963 forming the basis for bone marrow transplantation and all subsequent research on adult and embryonic stem cells. This was the first of many findings at Toronto relating to stem cells including the identification of pancreatic and retinal stem cells. The cancer stem cell was first identified in 1997 by Toronto researchers who have since found stem cell associations in leukemia; brain tumors; and colorectal cancer. Medical inventions developed at Toronto include the glycaemic index; the infant cereal Pablum; the use of protective hypothermia in open heart surgery; and the first artificial cardiac pacemaker. The first successful single-lung transplant was performed at Toronto in 1981 followed by the first nerve transplant in 1988; and the first double-lung transplant in 1989. Researchers identified the maturation promoting factor that regulates cell division and discovered the T-cell receptor which triggers responses of the immune system. The university is credited with isolating the genes that cause Fanconi anemia; cystic fibrosis; and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease among numerous other diseases. Between 1914 and 1972 the university operated the Connaught Medical Research Laboratories- now part of the pharmaceutical corporation Sanofi-Aventis. Among the research conducted at the laboratory was the development of gel electrophoresis.

The University of Toronto is the primary research presence that supports one of the world’s largest concentrations of biotechnology firms. More than 5,000 principal investigators reside within 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) from the university grounds in Toronto’s Discovery District conducting $1 billion of medical research annually. MaRS Discovery District is a research park that serves commercial enterprises and the university’s technology transfer ventures. In 2008, the university disclosed 159 inventions and had 114 active start-up companies. Its SciNet Consortium operates the most powerful supercomputer in Canada.

From The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science At Columbia University Via “phys.org” : “Highly dexterous robot hand can operate in the dark—just like us”

From The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science

At

Columbia University

Via

“phys.org”

4.27.23

Using a sense of touch, a robot hand can manipulate in the dark, or in difficult lighting conditions. Credit: Columbia University ROAM Lab.

Think about what you do with your hands when you’re home at night pushing buttons on your TV’s remote control, or at a restaurant using all kinds of cutlery and glassware. These skills are all based on touch, while you’re watching a TV program or choosing something from the menu. Our hands and fingers are incredibly skilled mechanisms, and highly sensitive to boot.

Robotics researchers have long been trying to create “true” dexterity in robot hands, but the goal has been frustratingly elusive. Robot grippers and suction cups can pick and place items, but more dexterous tasks such as assembly, insertion, reorientation, packaging, etc. have remained in the realm of human manipulation. However, spurred by advances in both sensing technology and machine-learning techniques to process the sensed data, the field of robotic manipulation is changing very rapidly.

Highly dexterous robot hand even works in the dark

Researchers at Columbia Engineering have demonstrated a highly dexterous robot hand, one that combines an advanced sense of touch with motor learning algorithms in order to achieve a high level of dexterity.

Dexterous Manipulation with Tactile Fingers.

As a demonstration of skill, the team chose a difficult manipulation task: executing an arbitrarily large rotation of an unevenly shaped grasped object in hand while always maintaining the object in a stable, secure hold. This is a very difficult task because it requires constant repositioning of a subset of fingers, while the other fingers have to keep the object stable. Not only was the hand able to perform this task, but it also did it without any visual feedback whatsoever, based solely on touch sensing.

In addition to the new levels of dexterity, the hand worked without any external cameras, so it’s immune to lighting, occlusion, or similar issues. And the fact that the hand does not rely on vision to manipulate objects means that it can do so in very difficult lighting conditions that would confuse vision-based algorithms—it can even operate in the dark.

“While our demonstration was on a proof-of-concept task, meant to illustrate the capabilities of the hand, we believe that this level of dexterity will open up entirely new applications for robotic manipulation in the real world,” said Matei Ciocarlie, associate professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science.

“Some of the more immediate uses might be in logistics and material handling, helping ease up supply chain problems like the ones that have plagued our economy in recent years, and in advanced manufacturing and assembly in factories.”

A dexterous robot hand equipped with five tactile fingers. One of the fingers is shown here with the outermost “skin” layer removed, to show the internal structure. Credit: Columbia University ROAM Lab.

Leveraging optics-based tactile fingers

In earlier work, Ciocarlie’s group collaborated with Ioannis Kymissis, professor of electrical engineering, to develop a new generation of optics-based tactile robot fingers.

These were the first robot fingers to achieve contact localization with sub-millimeter precision while providing complete coverage of a complex multi-curved surface. In addition, the compact packaging and low wire count of the fingers allowed for easy integration into complete robot hands.

Teaching the hand to perform complex tasks

For this new work, led by CIocarlie’s doctoral researcher, Gagan Khandate, the researchers designed and built a robot hand with five fingers and 15 independently actuated joints—each finger was equipped with the team’s touch-sensing technology.

The next step was to test the ability of the tactile hand to perform complex manipulation tasks. To do this, they used new methods for motor learning, or the ability of a robot to learn new physical tasks via practice. In particular, they used a method called deep reinforcement learning, augmented with new algorithms that they developed for effective exploration of possible motor strategies.

Machine learning algorithms process the data from the tactile sensors to produce coordinated finger movement patterns for manipulation. Credit: Columbia University ROAM Lab.

Robot completed approximately one year of practice in only hours of real-time

The input to the motor learning algorithms consisted exclusively of the team’s tactile and proprioceptive data without any vision. Using simulation as a training ground, the robot completed approximately one year of practice in only hours of real-time, thanks to modern physics simulators and highly parallel processors. The researchers then transferred this manipulation skill trained in simulation to the real robot hand, which was able to achieve the level of dexterity the team was hoping for.

Ciocarlie noted that “the directional goal for the field remains assistive robotics in the home, the ultimate proving ground for real dexterity. In this study, we’ve shown that robot hands can also be highly dexterous based on touch sensing alone. Once we also add visual feedback into the mix along with touch, we hope to be able to achieve even more dexterity, and one day start approaching the replication of the human hand.”

Ultimate goal: Joining abstract intelligence with embodied intelligence

Ultimately, Ciocarlie observed, a physical robot being useful in the real world needs both abstract, semantic intelligence (to understand conceptually how the world works), and embodied intelligence (the skill to physically interact with the world). Large language models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 or Google’s PALM aim to provide the former, while dexterity in manipulation as achieved in this study represents complementary advances in the latter.

For instance, when asked how to make a sandwich, ChatGPT will type out a step-by-step plan in response, but it takes a dexterous robot to take that plan and actually make the sandwich. In the same way, researchers hope that physically skilled robots will be able to take semantic intelligence out of the purely virtual world of the Internet, and put it to good use on real-world physical tasks, perhaps even in our homes.

The paper has been accepted for publication at the upcoming Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (Daegu, Korea, July 10-14, 2023).

See the full article here .

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The Columbia University Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science is the engineering and applied science school of Columbia University. It was founded as the School of Mines in 1863 and then the School of Mines, Engineering and Chemistry before becoming the School of Engineering and Applied Science. On October 1, 1997, the school was renamed in honor of Chinese businessman Z.Y. Fu, who had donated $26 million to the school.

The Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science maintains a close research tie with other institutions including National Aeronautics and Space Administration, IBM, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and The Earth Institute. Patents owned by the school generate over $100 million annually for the university. Faculty and alumni are responsible for technological achievements including the developments of FM radio and the maser.

The School’s applied mathematics, biomedical engineering, computer science and the financial engineering program in operations research are very famous and ranked high. The current faculty include 27 members of the National Academy of Engineering and one Nobel laureate. In all, the faculty and alumni of Columbia Engineering have won 10 Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, and economics.

The school consists of approximately 300 undergraduates in each graduating class and maintains close links with its undergraduate liberal arts sister school Columbia College which shares housing with SEAS students.

Original charter of 1754

Included in the original charter for Columbia College was the direction to teach “the arts of Number and Measuring, of Surveying and Navigation […] the knowledge of […] various kinds of Meteors, Stones, Mines and Minerals, Plants and Animals, and everything useful for the Comfort, the Convenience and Elegance of Life.” Engineering has always been a part of Columbia, even before the establishment of any separate school of engineering.

An early and influential graduate from the school was John Stevens, Class of 1768. Instrumental in the establishment of U.S. patent law. Stevens procured many patents in early steamboat technology; operated the first steam ferry between New York and New Jersey; received the first railroad charter in the U.S.; built a pioneer locomotive; and amassed a fortune, which allowed his sons to found the Stevens Institute of Technology.

When Columbia University first resided on Wall Street, engineering did not have a school under the Columbia umbrella. After Columbia outgrew its space on Wall Street, it relocated to what is now Midtown Manhattan in 1857. Then President Barnard and the Trustees of the University, with the urging of Professor Thomas Egleston and General Vinton, approved the School of Mines in 1863. The intention was to establish a School of Mines and Metallurgy with a three-year program open to professionally motivated students with or without prior undergraduate training. It was officially founded in 1864 under the leadership of its first dean, Columbia professor Charles F. Chandler, and specialized in mining and mineralogical engineering. An example of work from a student at the School of Mines was William Barclay Parsons, Class of 1882. He was an engineer on the Chinese railway and the Cape Cod and Panama Canals. Most importantly he worked for New York, as a chief engineer of the city’s first subway system, the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. Opened in 1904, the subway’s electric cars took passengers from City Hall to Brooklyn, the Bronx, and the newly renamed and relocated Columbia University in Morningside Heights, its present location on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Columbia University was founded in 1754 as King’s College by royal charter of King George II of England. It is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York and the fifth oldest in the United States.

University Mission Statement

Columbia University is one of the world’s most important centers of research and at the same time a distinctive and distinguished learning environment for undergraduates and graduate students in many scholarly and professional fields. The University recognizes the importance of its location in New York City and seeks to link its research and teaching to the vast resources of a great metropolis. It seeks to attract a diverse and international faculty and student body, to support research and teaching on global issues, and to create academic relationships with many countries and regions. It expects all areas of the University to advance knowledge and learning at the highest level and to convey the products of its efforts to the world.

Columbia University is a private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 on the grounds of Trinity Church in Manhattan Columbia is the oldest institution of higher education in New York and the fifth-oldest institution of higher learning in the United States. It is one of nine colonial colleges founded prior to the Declaration of Independence, seven of which belong to the Ivy League. Columbia is ranked among the top universities in the world by major education publications.

Columbia was established as King’s College by royal charter from King George II of Great Britain in reaction to the founding of Princeton College. It was renamed Columbia College in 1784 following the American Revolution, and in 1787 was placed under a private board of trustees headed by former students Alexander Hamilton and John Jay. In 1896, the campus was moved to its current location in Morningside Heights and renamed Columbia University.

Columbia scientists and scholars have played an important role in scientific breakthroughs including brain-computer interface; the laser and maser; nuclear magnetic resonance; the first nuclear pile; the first nuclear fission reaction in the Americas; the first evidence for plate tectonics and continental drift; and much of the initial research and planning for the Manhattan Project during World War II. Columbia is organized into twenty schools, including four undergraduate schools and 15 graduate schools. The university’s research efforts include the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and accelerator laboratories with major technology firms such as IBM. Columbia is a founding member of the Association of American Universities and was the first school in the United States to grant the M.D. degree. With over 14 million volumes, Columbia University Library is the third largest private research library in the United States.

The university’s endowment stands at $11.26 billion in 2020, among the largest of any academic institution. As of October 2020, Columbia’s alumni, faculty, and staff have included: five Founding Fathers of the United States—among them a co-author of the United States Constitution and a co-author of the Declaration of Independence; three U.S. presidents; 29 foreign heads of state; ten justices of the United States Supreme Court, one of whom currently serves; 96 Nobel laureates; five Fields Medalists; 122 National Academy of Sciences members; 53 living billionaires; eleven Olympic medalists; 33 Academy Award winners; and 125 Pulitzer Prize recipients.

From The Department of Materials Science and Engineering In The School of Engineering At The Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “Speedy robo-gripper reflexively organizes cluttered spaces”

From The Department of Materials Science and Engineering

In

The School of Engineering

At

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

4.27.23
Jennifer Chu

Robo-gripper grasps by reflex.

Rather than start from scratch after a failed attempt the “pick-and-place robot” adapts in the moment to get a better hold.

MIT researchers (from left): Elijah Stanger-Jones, Hongmin Kim, and Andrew SaLoutos have designed a robot gripper that incorporates reflexes to quickly grasp and sort everyday objects. Image: Jodi Hilton.

The research team, from left to right: Sangbae Kim, Elijah Stanger-Jones, Andrew SaLoutos, and Hongmin Kim. Image: Jodi Hilton.

When manipulating an “arcade claw”, a player can plan all she wants. But once she presses the joystick button, it’s a game of wait-and-see. If the claw misses its target, she’ll have to start from scratch for another chance at a prize.

The slow and deliberate approach of the arcade claw is similar to state-of-the-art pick-and-place robots, which use high-level planners to process visual images and plan out a series of moves to grab for an object. If a gripper misses its mark, it’s back to the starting point, where the controller must map out a new plan.

Looking to give robots a more nimble, human-like touch, MIT engineers have now developed “a gripper that grasps by reflex”. Rather than start from scratch after a failed attempt, the team’s robot adapts in the moment to reflexively roll, palm, or pinch an object to get a better hold. It’s able to carry out these “last centimeter” adjustments (a riff on the “last mile” delivery problem) without engaging a higher-level planner, much like how a person might fumble in the dark for a bedside glass without much conscious thought.

The new design is the first to incorporate reflexes into a robotic planning architecture. For now, the system is a proof of concept and provides a general organizational structure for embedding reflexes into a robotic system. Going forward, the researchers plan to program more complex reflexes to enable nimble, adaptable machines that can work with and among humans in ever-changing settings.

“In environments where people live and work, there is always going to be uncertainty,” says Andrew SaLoutos, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Someone could put something new on a desk or move something in the break room or add an extra dish to the sink. We’re hoping a robot with reflexes could adapt and work with this kind of uncertainty.”

SaLoutos and his colleagues will present a Paper on their design in May at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). His MIT co-authors include postdoc Hongmin Kim, graduate student Elijah Stanger-Jones, Menglong Guo SM ’22, and professor of mechanical engineering Sangbae Kim, the director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory at MIT.

High and low

Many modern robotic grippers are designed for relatively slow and precise tasks, such as repetitively fitting together the same parts on a a factory assembly line. These systems depend on visual data from onboard cameras; processing that data limits a robot’s reaction time, particularly if it needs to recover from a failed grasp.

“There’s no way to short-circuit out and say, oh shoot, I have to do something now and react quickly,” SaLoutos says. “Their only recourse is just to start again. And that takes a lot of time computationally.”

In their new work, Kim’s team built a more reflexive and reactive platform, using fast, responsive actuators that they originally developed for the group’s mini cheetah — a nimble, four-legged robot designed to run, leap, and quickly adapt its gait to various types of terrain.

The team’s design includes a high-speed arm and two lightweight, multijointed fingers. In addition to a camera mounted to the base of the arm, the team incorporated custom high-bandwidth sensors at the fingertips that instantly record the force and location of any contact as well as the proximity of the finger to surrounding objects more than 200 times per second.

The researchers designed the robotic system such that a high-level planner initially processes visual data of a scene, marking an object’s current location where the gripper should pick the object up, and the location where the robot should place it down. Then, the planner sets a path for the arm to reach out and grasp the object. At this point, the reflexive controller takes over.

If the gripper fails to grab hold of the object, rather than back out and start again as most grippers do, the team wrote an algorithm that instructs the robot to quickly act out any of three grasp maneuvers, which they call “reflexes,” in response to real-time measurements at the fingertips. The three reflexes kick in within the last centimeter of the robot approaching an object and enable the fingers to grab, pinch, or drag an object until it has a better hold.

They programmed the reflexes to be carried out without having to involve the high-level planner. Instead, the reflexes are organized at a lower decision-making level, so that they can respond as if by instinct, rather than having to carefully evaluate the situation to plan an optimal fix.

“It’s like how, instead of having the CEO micromanage and plan every single thing in your company, you build a trust system and delegate some tasks to lower-level divisions,” Kim says. “It may not be optimal, but it helps the company react much more quickly. In many cases, waiting for the optimal solution makes the situation much worse or irrecoverable.”

Cleaning via reflex

The team demonstrated the gripper’s reflexes by clearing a cluttered shelf. They set a variety of household objects on a shelf, including a bowl, a cup, a can, an apple, and a bag of coffee grounds. They showed that the robot was able to quickly adapt its grasp to each object’s particular shape and, in the case of the coffee grounds, squishiness. Out of 117 attempts, the gripper quickly and successfully picked and placed objects more than 90 percent of the time, without having to back out and start over after a failed grasp.

A second experiment showed how the robot could also react in the moment. When researchers shifted a cup’s position, the gripper, despite having no visual update of the new location, was able to readjust and essentially feel around until it sensed the cup in its grasp. Compared to a baseline grasping controller, the gripper’s reflexes increased the area of successful grasps by over 55 percent.

Now, the engineers are working to include more complex reflexes and grasp maneuvers in the system, with a view toward building a general pick-and-place robot capable of adapting to cluttered and constantly changing spaces.

“Picking up a cup from a clean table — that specific problem in robotics was solved 30 years ago,” Kim notes. “But a more general approach, like picking up toys in a toybox, or even a book from a library shelf, has not been solved. Now with reflexes, we think we can one day pick and place in every possible way, so that a robot could potentially clean up the house.”

This research was supported, in part, by Advanced Robotics Lab of LG Electronics and the Toyota Research Institute.

Paper
See the science paper for instructive material with images.

See the full article here .

Comments are invited and will be appreciated, especially if the reader finds any errors which I can correct. Use “Reply”.

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MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering campus – The Engineering Oval on Centennial Campus includes the new Fitts-Woolard Building, next to the Hunt Library. Photo by Becky Kirkland.

What is MSE?

Engineering disciplines focus on addressing human problems by constructing tools and shaping solutions. Materials science and engineering (MSE) does so by studying, understanding, designing, and producing the materials those tools and solutions are made of — and on creating new materials that serve human needs.

MSE combines the power of intellectual curiosity and scientific discovery with the tangible impact of engineering disciplines. By integrating approaches from diverse academic and engineering specialties that range from physics and biology to metallurgy and ceramics, MSE addresses complex problems through a materials-focused approach. This deeply interdisciplinary field encompasses nearly every form of matter — from the atom-by-atom construction of nanomaterials and the directed growth of biological substances to the forging of heat-treated steel.

The MIT School of Engineering is one of the five schools of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The School of Engineering has eight academic departments and two interdisciplinary institutes. The School grants SB, MEng, SM, engineer’s degrees, and PhD or ScD degrees. The school is the largest at MIT as measured by undergraduate and graduate enrollments and faculty members.

Departments and initiatives:

Departments:

Aeronautics and Astronautics (Course 16)
Biological Engineering (Course 20)
Chemical Engineering (Course 10)
Civil and Environmental Engineering (Course 1)
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Course 6, joint department with MIT Schwarzman College of Computing)
Materials Science and Engineering (Course 3)
Mechanical Engineering (Course 2)
Nuclear Science and Engineering (Course 22)

Institutes:

Institute for Medical Engineering and Science
Health Sciences and Technology program (joint MIT-Harvard, “HST” in the course catalog)

(Departments and degree programs are commonly referred to by course catalog numbers on campus.)

Laboratories and research centers

Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab
Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems
Center for Computational Engineering
Center for Materials Science and Engineering
Center for Ocean Engineering
Center for Transportation and Logistics
Industrial Performance Center
Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies
Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research
Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Laboratory for Manufacturing and Productivity
Materials Processing Center
Microsystems Technology Laboratories
MIT Lincoln Laboratory Beaver Works Center
Novartis-MIT Center for Continuous Manufacturing
Ocean Engineering Design Laboratory
Research Laboratory of Electronics
SMART Center
Sociotechnical Systems Research Center
Tata Center for Technology and Design

USPS “Forever” postage stamps celebrating Innovation at MIT.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The institute has an urban campus that extends more than a mile (1.6 km) alongside the Charles River. The institute also encompasses a number of major off-campus facilities such as the MIT Lincoln Laboratory , the MIT Bates Research and Engineering Center , and the Haystack Observatory , as well as affiliated laboratories such as the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and Whitehead Institute.

MIT AeroAstro campus

MIT Lincoln Laboratory campus

Massachusettes Institute of Technology-Haystack Observatory Westford, Massachusetts, USA, Altitude 131 m (430 ft).

The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL)

MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, 314 Main St. in the Kendall Square technology center of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Kavli Institute For Astrophysics and Space Research

MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science

The MIT Media Lab

MIT PLasma Science and Fusion Center

The MIT Sloan School of Management

Spectrum

MIT School of Architecture and Planning campus.

MIT Electrical Engineering & Computer Science campus.

MIT.nano

Lisa T. Su Building at MIT

Founded in 1861 in response to the increasing industrialization of the United States, Massachusetts Institute of Technology adopted a European polytechnic university model and stressed laboratory instruction in applied science and engineering. It has since played a key role in the development of many aspects of modern science, engineering, mathematics, and technology, and is widely known for its innovation and academic strength. It is frequently regarded as one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

As of December 2020, 97 Nobel laureates, 26 Turing Award winners, and 8 Fields Medalists have been affiliated with MIT as alumni, faculty members, or researchers. In addition, 58 National Medal of Science recipients, 29 National Medals of Technology and Innovation recipients, 50 MacArthur Fellows, 80 Marshall Scholars, 3 Mitchell Scholars, 22 Schwarzman Scholars, 41 astronauts, and 16 Chief Scientists of the U.S. Air Force have been affiliated with The Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The university also has a strong entrepreneurial culture and MIT alumni have founded or co-founded many notable companies. Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a member of the Association of American Universities.

Foundation and vision

In 1859, a proposal was submitted to the Massachusetts General Court to use newly filled lands in Back Bay, Boston for a “Conservatory of Art and Science”, but the proposal failed. A charter for the incorporation of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed by William Barton Rogers, was signed by John Albion Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts, on April 10, 1861.

Rogers, a professor from the University of Virginia , wanted to establish an institution to address rapid scientific and technological advances. He did not wish to found a professional school, but a combination with elements of both professional and liberal education, proposing that:

“The true and only practicable object of a polytechnic school is, as I conceive, the teaching, not of the minute details and manipulations of the arts, which can be done only in the workshop, but the inculcation of those scientific principles which form the basis and explanation of them, and along with this, a full and methodical review of all their leading processes and operations in connection with physical laws.”

The Rogers Plan reflected the German research university model, emphasizing an independent faculty engaged in research, as well as instruction oriented around seminars and laboratories.

Early developments

Two days after The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was chartered, the first battle of the Civil War broke out. After a long delay through the war years, MIT’s first classes were held in the Mercantile Building in Boston in 1865. The new institute was founded as part of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act to fund institutions “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes” and was a land-grant school. In 1863 under the same act, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts founded the Massachusetts Agricultural College, which developed as the University of Massachusetts Amherst ). In 1866, the proceeds from land sales went toward new buildings in the Back Bay.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was informally called “Boston Tech”. The institute adopted the European polytechnic university model and emphasized laboratory instruction from an early date. Despite chronic financial problems, the institute saw growth in the last two decades of the 19th century under President Francis Amasa Walker. Programs in electrical, chemical, marine, and sanitary engineering were introduced, new buildings were built, and the size of the student body increased to more than one thousand.

The curriculum drifted to a vocational emphasis, with less focus on theoretical science. The fledgling school still suffered from chronic financial shortages which diverted the attention of the MIT leadership. During these “Boston Tech” years, Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty and alumni rebuffed Harvard University president (and former MIT faculty) Charles W. Eliot’s repeated attempts to merge MIT with Harvard College’s Lawrence Scientific School. There would be at least six attempts to absorb MIT into Harvard. In its cramped Back Bay location, MIT could not afford to expand its overcrowded facilities, driving a desperate search for a new campus and funding. Eventually, the MIT Corporation approved a formal agreement to merge with Harvard, over the vehement objections of MIT faculty, students, and alumni. However, a 1917 decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court effectively put an end to the merger scheme.

In 1916, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology administration and the MIT charter crossed the Charles River on the ceremonial barge Bucentaur built for the occasion, to signify MIT’s move to a spacious new campus largely consisting of filled land on a one-mile-long (1.6 km) tract along the Cambridge side of the Charles River. The neoclassical “New Technology” campus was designed by William W. Bosworth and had been funded largely by anonymous donations from a mysterious “Mr. Smith”, starting in 1912. In January 1920, the donor was revealed to be the industrialist George Eastman of Rochester, New York, who had invented methods of film production and processing, and founded Eastman Kodak. Between 1912 and 1920, Eastman donated $20 million ($236.6 million in 2015 dollars) in cash and Kodak stock to MIT.

Curricular reforms

In the 1930s, President Karl Taylor Compton and Vice-President (effectively Provost) Vannevar Bush emphasized the importance of pure sciences like physics and chemistry and reduced the vocational practice required in shops and drafting studios. The Compton reforms “renewed confidence in the ability of the Institute to develop leadership in science as well as in engineering”. Unlike Ivy League schools, Massachusetts Institute of Technology catered more to middle-class families, and depended more on tuition than on endowments or grants for its funding. The school was elected to the Association of American Universities in 1934.

Still, as late as 1949, the Lewis Committee lamented in its report on the state of education at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology that “the Institute is widely conceived as basically a vocational school”, a “partly unjustified” perception the committee sought to change. The report comprehensively reviewed the undergraduate curriculum, recommended offering a broader education, and warned against letting engineering and government-sponsored research detract from the sciences and humanities. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences and the MIT Sloan School of Management were formed in 1950 to compete with the powerful Schools of Science and Engineering. Previously marginalized faculties in the areas of economics, management, political science, and linguistics emerged into cohesive and assertive departments by attracting respected professors and launching competitive graduate programs. The School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences continued to develop under the successive terms of the more humanistically oriented presidents Howard W. Johnson and Jerome Wiesner between 1966 and 1980.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology‘s involvement in military science surged during World War II. In 1941, Vannevar Bush was appointed head of the federal Office of Scientific Research and Development and directed funding to only a select group of universities, including MIT. Engineers and scientists from across the country gathered at Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s Radiation Laboratory, established in 1940 to assist the British military in developing microwave radar. The work done there significantly affected both the war and subsequent research in the area. Other defense projects included gyroscope-based and other complex control systems for gunsight, bombsight, and inertial navigation under Charles Stark Draper’s Instrumentation Laboratory; the development of a digital computer for flight simulations under Project Whirlwind; and high-speed and high-altitude photography under Harold Edgerton. By the end of the war, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology became the nation’s largest wartime R&D contractor (attracting some criticism of Bush), employing nearly 4000 in the Radiation Laboratory alone and receiving in excess of $100 million ($1.2 billion in 2015 dollars) before 1946. Work on defense projects continued even after then. Post-war government-sponsored research at MIT included SAGE and guidance systems for ballistic missiles and Project Apollo.

These activities affected The Massachusetts Institute of Technology profoundly. A 1949 report noted the lack of “any great slackening in the pace of life at the Institute” to match the return to peacetime, remembering the “academic tranquility of the prewar years”, though acknowledging the significant contributions of military research to the increased emphasis on graduate education and rapid growth of personnel and facilities. The faculty doubled and the graduate student body quintupled during the terms of Karl Taylor Compton, president of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology between 1930 and 1948; James Rhyne Killian, president from 1948 to 1957; and Julius Adams Stratton, chancellor from 1952 to 1957, whose institution-building strategies shaped the expanding university. By the 1950s, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology no longer simply benefited the industries with which it had worked for three decades, and it had developed closer working relationships with new patrons, philanthropic foundations and the federal government.

In late 1960s and early 1970s, student and faculty activists protested against the Vietnam War and The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ‘s defense research. In this period Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s various departments were researching helicopters, smart bombs and counterinsurgency techniques for the war in Vietnam as well as guidance systems for nuclear missiles. The Union of Concerned Scientists was founded on March 4, 1969 during a meeting of faculty members and students seeking to shift the emphasis on military research toward environmental and social problems. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology ultimately divested itself from the Instrumentation Laboratory and moved all classified research off-campus to the MIT Lincoln Laboratory facility in 1973 in response to the protests. The student body, faculty, and administration remained comparatively unpolarized during what was a tumultuous time for many other universities. Johnson was seen to be highly successful in leading his institution to “greater strength and unity” after these times of turmoil. However, six Massachusetts Institute of Technology students were sentenced to prison terms at this time and some former student leaders, such as Michael Albert and George Katsiaficas, are still indignant about MIT’s role in military research and its suppression of these protests. (Richard Leacock’s film, November Actions, records some of these tumultuous events.)

In the 1980s, there was more controversy at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology over its involvement in SDI (space weaponry) and CBW (chemical and biological warfare) research. More recently, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s research for the military has included work on robots, drones and ‘battle suits’.

Recent history

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has kept pace with and helped to advance the digital age. In addition to developing the predecessors to modern computing and networking technologies, students, staff, and faculty members at Project MAC, the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and the Tech Model Railroad Club wrote some of the earliest interactive computer video games like Spacewar! and created much of modern hacker slang and culture. Several major computer-related organizations have originated at MIT since the 1980s: Richard Stallman’s GNU Project and the subsequent Free Software Foundation were founded in the mid-1980s at the AI Lab; the MIT Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and Jerome Wiesner to promote research into novel uses of computer technology; the World Wide Web Consortium standards organization was founded at the Laboratory for Computer Science in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee; the MIT OpenCourseWare project has made course materials for over 2,000 Massachusetts Institute of Technology classes available online free of charge since 2002; and the One Laptop per Child initiative to expand computer education and connectivity to children worldwide was launched in 2005.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology was named a sea-grant college in 1976 to support its programs in oceanography and marine sciences and was named a space-grant college in 1989 to support its aeronautics and astronautics programs. Despite diminishing government financial support over the past quarter century, MIT launched several successful development campaigns to significantly expand the campus: new dormitories and athletics buildings on west campus; the Tang Center for Management Education; several buildings in the northeast corner of campus supporting research into biology, brain and cognitive sciences, genomics, biotechnology, and cancer research; and a number of new “backlot” buildings on Vassar Street including the Stata Center. Construction on campus in the 2000s included expansions of the Media Lab, the Sloan School’s eastern campus, and graduate residences in the northwest. In 2006, President Hockfield launched the MIT Energy Research Council to investigate the interdisciplinary challenges posed by increasing global energy consumption.

In 2001, inspired by the open source and open access movements, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology launched OpenCourseWare to make the lecture notes, problem sets, syllabi, exams, and lectures from the great majority of its courses available online for no charge, though without any formal accreditation for coursework completed. While the cost of supporting and hosting the project is high, OCW expanded in 2005 to include other universities as a part of the OpenCourseWare Consortium, which currently includes more than 250 academic institutions with content available in at least six languages. In 2011, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced it would offer formal certification (but not credits or degrees) to online participants completing coursework in its “MITx” program, for a modest fee. The “edX” online platform supporting MITx was initially developed in partnership with Harvard and its analogous “Harvardx” initiative. The courseware platform is open source, and other universities have already joined and added their own course content. In March 2009 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty adopted an open-access policy to make its scholarship publicly accessible online.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its own police force. Three days after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 2013, MIT Police patrol officer Sean Collier was fatally shot by the suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, setting off a violent manhunt that shut down the campus and much of the Boston metropolitan area for a day. One week later, Collier’s memorial service was attended by more than 10,000 people, in a ceremony hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community with thousands of police officers from the New England region and Canada. On November 25, 2013, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced the creation of the Collier Medal, to be awarded annually to “an individual or group that embodies the character and qualities that Officer Collier exhibited as a member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community and in all aspects of his life”. The announcement further stated that “Future recipients of the award will include those whose contributions exceed the boundaries of their profession, those who have contributed to building bridges across the community, and those who consistently and selflessly perform acts of kindness”.

In September 2017, the school announced the creation of an artificial intelligence research lab called the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. IBM will spend $240 million over the next decade, and the lab will be staffed by MIT and IBM scientists. In October 2018 MIT announced that it would open a new Schwarzman College of Computing dedicated to the study of artificial intelligence, named after lead donor and The Blackstone Group CEO Stephen Schwarzman. The focus of the new college is to study not just AI, but interdisciplinary AI education, and how AI can be used in fields as diverse as history and biology. The cost of buildings and new faculty for the new college is expected to be $1 billion upon completion.

The Caltech/MIT Advanced aLIGO was designed and constructed by a team of scientists from California Institute of Technology , Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and industrial contractors, and funded by the National Science Foundation .

Caltech /MIT Advanced aLigo

It was designed to open the field of gravitational-wave astronomy through the detection of gravitational waves predicted by general relativity. Gravitational waves were detected for the first time by the LIGO detector in 2015. For contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves, two Caltech physicists, Kip Thorne and Barry Barish, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Rainer Weiss won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2017. Weiss, who is also a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, designed the laser interferometric technique, which served as the essential blueprint for the LIGO.

The mission of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship that will best serve the nation and the world in the twenty-first century. We seek to develop in each member of The Massachusetts Institute of Technology community the ability and passion to work wisely, creatively, and effectively for the betterment of humankind.