2018 Year in Review CONNECTOR News from the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Year in Review: 2018 Connector The MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Rising Stars, an academic-careers workshop Computing — established with a gift from the for women, brought 76 of the world’s top EECS co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Blackstone postdocs and grad students to MIT to hear — is scheduled to open in the fall of 2019. faculty talks, network with each other, and Photo: Courtesy of Blackstone. present their research. Photo: Gretchen Ertl CONTENTS 1 A Letter from the Department Head FACULTY FOCUS FEATURES 47 Faculty Awards 4 MIT Reshapes Itself to Shape the Future: EECS Leadership Update Asu Ozdaglar Introducing the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing 53 Asu Ozdaglar, Department Head Department Head 8 Artificial Intelligence in Action: Introducing the 54 Associate Department Heads MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab 55 Education and Undergraduate Officers Saman Amarasinghe 10 EECS Professor Antonio Torralba Appointed to 56 Faculty Research Innovation Fellowships (FRIFs) Associate Department Head Direct MIT Quest for Intelligence 57 Professorships 12 Summit Explores Pioneering Approaches for AI Nancy Lynch and Digital Technology for Health Care 62 Faculty Promotions Associate Department Head, 14 SuperUROP: Coding, Thinking, Sharing, 64 Tenured Faculty Building Strategic Directions 66 New Faculty 16 SuperUROP: CS+HASS Scholarship Program Debuts with Nine Projects 69 Remembering Professor Alan McWhorter, 1930-2018 Joel Voldman 18 SuperUROP + Masterworks: Showcasing the Associate Department Head Results of Students’ Real-World Research 20 Scenes from SuperUROP Showcase + EDUCATION NEWS Masterworks Anne Stuart 72 MIT Launches Urban Science/Computer Science 22 StartMIT: Teamwork, Technology, and Trends Major EECS Communications Officer 74 Connector Editor 24 Postdocs: Learning About Leadership Joint Major Prepares Students to Design the Virtual Marketplaces of Tomorrow 26 Rising Stars in EECS Returns to MIT 76 Building the Hardware for the Next Generation Connector Production Team 28 Visiting Professor Anita Hill Facilitates of Artificial Intelligence Conversations About the Past and Future of Title IX Design by Wing Ngan, Ink Design 78 Computation Counts: Python-Based Course 30 Special Report: Envisioning the Future of Signal Sees Enormous Growth Printing by Puritan Capital Processing 80 New and Improved EECS Classes: A Roundup 33 Scenes from Commencement 2018 ALUMNI NEWS RESEARCH UPDATES Contact 84 Yonina Eldar: Doing It All — And Then Some 36 Ryan Williams: Chasing Complexity MIT EECS Connector 86 Godfrey Tan and Allen Miu: Bridging the Digital 77 Massachusetts Avenue 38 Caroline Uhler: Genome Packing and Network Divide Models Room 38-467 88 Jonathan Ragan-Kelley: From Star Wars to 40 Thomas Heldt: Closing the Loop on Reducing SIGGRAPH Cambridge, MA, 02139 Patient-Monitoring Alarms in Neonatal Critical Care 90 Benjamin Williams: On the Electromagnetic eecs.mit.edu Frontier [email protected] 42 Rabia Tugce Yazicigil: Novel Transmitter Protects Wireless Data from Hackers — And a Quick Q & A DONOR RECOGNITION About Ultrafast Frequency Hopping A LETTER FROM THE DEPARTMENT HEAD Greetings from MIT! As I write this, I have just completed my first year as head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science — and what a year it has been both for EECS and MIT. A College for Computing As this issue goes to press, we are preparing for the new MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing. This $1 billion undertaking represents both the single largest investment in computing and artificial intelligence by a U.S. institution and MIT’s most significant structural change in nearly 70 years. Scheduled to open in the fall of 2019, the College will serve MIT’s five schools as an interdisciplinary hub for education, research, and innovation in computing and other fields. Plans call for construction of a new building for the College to be completed by 2022. You can learn more about the College, and a related research initiative, the MIT Quest for Intelligence, in Professor Asu Ozdaglar the Features section of this issue. Photo: Lillie Paquette/School of Engineering EECS will, of course, be deeply involved in this important new venture. It is expected that the department, along with several other MIT units, will become part of the new College. EECS (in Faculty Updates, Research Results particular the electrical engineering part of the department) will continue to have a strong relationship with the School of EECS faculty members continue to excel. Since the last Engineering. The College’s creation reflects the increasing issue of the Connector, six have been appointed to named interest in majors combining computer science with other professorships, nine others have been promoted or received disciplines; in fact, about 40 percent of MIT undergraduates tenure, and more than 50 have received significant awards already major either in computer science or in an academic and honors. We have also added several new members to program combining computer science with another field. our faculty. Visit the Faculty Focus section for details on all. EECS has pioneered efforts to meet that demand, most EECS faculty also continue to publish the results from their recently launching two new joint academic programs with groundbreaking research; for just a few examples, please see the Department of Economics and the Department of Urban the Research Updates section. Science and Planning. For more on the new majors, see the Education News section. Education Improvements EECS has experienced several other changes and innovations As part of ongoing efforts to improve the undergraduate over the past year. Following are some highlights, all covered in curriculum, EECS faculty members have launched or this publication’s pages: overhauled several introductory courses in our majors. In addition, enrollments in our subjects continue to grow. Leadership Transition See the Education News section for updates. During my inaugural year as department head, I was privileged SuperUROP Showcase to work with a stellar leadership team, including several faculty members in new roles: associate department heads Saman The Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunities Amarasinghe, Joel Voldman, and Nancy Lynch; education Program, better known as SuperUROP, remains one of the officers Elfar Adalsteinsson and Dennis M. Freeman; and department’s signature programs. The yearlong program undergraduate officer Katrina LaCurts. Please see the Faculty provides students with an intensive graduate-level research Focus section to learn more about them. I am also grateful experience and a seminar covering everything from writing for the ongoing collaboration and many contributions of our technical papers to presenting results. Last year, thanks to the EECS graduate officer, Professor Leslie Kolodziejski, and the generosity of an anonymous donor, the program expanded to department’s administrative officer, Irene Yong Rong Huang. support students working on projects that combine computer Irene joined us in December 2017 with more than 12 years’ science with the humanities, arts, and social sciences. See experience at MIT, including the previous three years as the the Features section for articles and photos documenting the senior financial officer in the Institute of Medical Engineering program’s high-energy SuperUROP Showcase poster sessions. & Science. eecs.mit.edu 2018 CONNECTOR perspectives 1 Rising Stars In October 2018, 76 early-career women in EECS came to MIT for an intensive two-day workshop on academic careers. These top graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, selected from a pool of more than 240 applicants, hailed from 30 universities and organizations from the United States and a few other countries. As the workshop’s chair, I was thrilled to see these remarkable women present their research in a poster session, engage with faculty and researchers, and begin to build strong professional networks to support them throughout their careers. Founded by EECS in 2012, the annual workshop has also been hosted by Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, “ EECS faculty members and the University of California at Berkeley. We are pleased to report that of the 309 women who participated in Rising Stars continue to excel. Since the between 2012 and 2017, more than 30 percent held faculty positions as of June 2018. Please see our Rising Stars coverage last issue of the Connector, in the Features section. six have been appointed Alumni Achievements to named professorships, As in previous years, a special highlight of this issue is the collection of profiles of EECS alumni who are making a nine others have been difference in their fields — and in the world. They range from a leading signal-processing expert who teaches, directs a promoted or received research lab, and runs a nonprofit organization — all while raising five children — to two colleagues whose internet service is making great strides toward bridging the “digital tenure, and more than divide” in Myanmar. Read their impressive stories in the Alumni News section. 50 have received significant Signal Processing Symposium awards and honors. We Finally, this issue includes a special report on the Future of have also added several Signal Processing Symposium, an international conference held at MIT to mark the 80th birthday of a pioneer in the field, new members to our EECS faculty member