Category: Uncategorized

<p>Encouraged by her family, Lavender Tessmer explored various creative pursuits from a young age, particularly textiles, including knitting and crocheting. When she came to MIT, she figured that working with textiles would remain just a hobby; she never expected them to become integral to her career path.</p>

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<p>However, when she interviewed for a research assistant position in <a href=”https://selfassemblylab.mit.edu/” target=”_blank”>Self Assembly Lab</a>, it just so happened that the lab had recently received funding from the Advanced Functional Fabrics of America, one of the <a href=”https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/20/fact-sheet-president-obama-announces-winner-new-smart-manufacturing” target=”_blank”>manufacturing institutes launched during the Obama administration</a>, for a textile-based project.</p>

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<p>Tessmer, now a fifth-year doctoral student in design and computation within the School of Architecture and Planning, took on the project, working with <a href=”https://architecture.mit.edu/people/skylar-tibbits” target=”_blank”>Skylar Tibbits</a>, associate professor of design research, and <a href=”https://cee.mit.edu/people_individual/caitlin-mueller/” target=”_blank”>Caitlin Muller</a>, associate professor in building technology. “At MIT, my interest in textiles really exploded and became the center of everything,” Tessmer says.</p>

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<p>While textiles may appear commonplace, the Covid-19 pandemic underscored the need for textile products in safeguarding our general health and safety, particularly through the filtration necessary for masks. Recognizing the importance of manufacturing capabilities for textiles, Tessmer’s research has focused on programming textiles with specific functional properties while also considering the feasibility of large-scale manufacturing of such products.</p>

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<p><strong>A nonlinear path to MIT</strong></p>

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<p>Tessmer studied music as an undergraduate student at Duquesne University, pursuing a passion that bloomed as a high schooler. One assignment opened her eyes to a different career path: She was told to compare a piece of music to some other artistic medium. Through this assignment, she discovered the world of architecture by underscoring the systematic nature of both disciplines, emphasizing the need for repetition and structure to unleash creativity. “I immediately realized that’s what I want to do,” she says.</p>

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<p>Tessmer switched gears and decided to devote the year after college to architecture, instead of auditioning for music ensembles. She says, “I always liked making things, and then, with architecture, I realized that you can make things as part of your profession.” She relied on the basic drafting skills that her father had taught her, and channeled these into building her architecture portfolio.</p>

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<p>Ultimately, she decided to pursue a master’s degree in architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. She graduated with her master’s at the end of the 2007 economic recession, a time when jobs in architecture were scarce. She eagerly accepted a part-time role teaching at WashU. Over the next five years, this role evolved into a full-time lecturer role, where she taught students while also independently establishing her own design practice and leading various installation design projects. Fittingly, all of the installations were inspired by textiles. “They were these high-performance carbon-fiber braided structures that we hand-made into large-scale braided nets with specific geometries,” Tessmer explains.</p>

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<p><strong>“Squeezing everything” out of graduate school</strong></p>

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<p>Teaching at WashU was a great experience, but the practice-oriented nature of the architecture department motivated Tessmer to seek complementary perspectives on design. “I wanted a totally new venue that was supportive of research and pushing the boundaries of design. I wanted to see what other approaches were out there,” she says. As her interests continued to grow in that direction, she learned that MIT has some renowned researchers in the field. She decided to apply for a master’s degree in architecture studies, and ultimately a doctorate in design and computation, within the School of Architecture and Planning.</p>

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<p>MIT’s program stood out to Tessmer because of the interdisciplinary approach of the architecture department. She says, “If you are an architect or designer, it is not strange to end up in a class full of people who are not architects, and that’s totally normal and even expected.” The integrated nature of her program is a shift from her previous academic experiences, where each discipline had been distinct and separate. She also values the lack of hierarchy between different disciplines within the architecture department here. “There is respect across disciplines for the contribution from each participant,” she says.</p>

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<p>As an older student, Tessmer has a slightly different approach to graduate school, compared to her peers. She says, “MIT is amazing because there is so much variety and so many things that you can get involved in. But my style is to be hyperfocused on my interests. For me, there have been huge benefits to focusing on this specific thing and squeezing everything I can out of it, even in the face of all of these other opportunities.”</p>

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<p>Tessmer has devoted herself to several projects throughout grad school, but all share a common thread: an emphasis on fiber development and textile programming. As a master’s student in the Self Assembly Lab, she utilized the inherent properties of materials and optimized their configurations for specific functions by integrating computation into the material itself. “At MIT, I learned a much broader definition of computation,” she says. “For example, in the Self Assembly Lab, we believe that material is a storage format of information and that you can program material to behave in certain ways.” &nbsp;</p>

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<p>The first project Tessmer worked on was designing a fiber that could respond to temperature fluctuations. Another project focused on embedding many different properties within a single fabric, potentially for astronauts. “The human body is so varied in the number of properties that you need to match,” she says. In conjunction with collaborators across multiple MIT departments, she designed a spacesuit sleeve with embedded padding, stretchable areas, a compression gradient, and various sensors. Her third project has focused on embedding shapechange behavior into fabric structures to enhance human comfort or fit, as an alternative to manual tailoring. Finally, in a return to her architectural roots, she is also working on designing a reinforced concrete beam using textiles, a more sustainable solution to building with concrete, which has a significant carbon footprint.</p>

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<p>Another crucial aspect of Tessmer’s research is her focus on the feasibility of large-scale manufacturing for a product. She regularly relies on industrial-scale machinery and consults with manufacturing partners. She says, “The way research is being conducted in the lab is a close parallel to how it would be made in real life. The potential for a direct bridge between one and the other is a high priority for me and a constraint that I have tried to layer on to all of my projects.”</p>

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<p><strong>Dabbling in entrepreneurship</strong></p>

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<p>Tessmer says with a laugh, “My entire hobby [textiles] has now been absorbed into my research. So I am in the market for a new hobby.” For now, that hobby has taken the form of entrepreneurship. She has been exploring the commercialization potential of her technologies, having filed multiple patents and completed the <a href=”https://engine.xyz/blueprint” target=”_blank”>Blueprint</a> program with The Engine Accelerator. She hopes that one day her method for embedding properties in textiles, while also reducing manufacturing process steps, will be used for commercial fabrics.</p>

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<p>As an example, she points to shoe manufacturing. “Your shoes are normally an assembly of lots of different materials and lots of different layers. Instead, my proposal to The Engine focused on embedding all of these properties in an automated way, eliminating the need for an extensive assembly process.” Tessmer envisions entrepreneurship as one of her potential future paths.</p>

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<p>For the time being, however, she plans to remain in academia. “From the outside, being a professor seems like an unattainable position. However, I keep being surprised at my ability to get to the next level of the academic hierarchy.” She aims to integrate all her past experiences into a future research career, designing textiles within an architectural context, while also weaving in the constraints of manufacturing scalability.</p>

<p><em>This is part 1 of a two-part </em>MIT News<em> feature examining new job creation in the U.S. since 1940, based on new research from Ford Professor of Economics David Autor. Part 2 is available <a href=”https://news.mit.edu/2024/does-technology-help-or-hurt-employment-0401″ target=”_blank”>here</a>.</em></p>

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<p>In 1900, Orville and Wilbur Wright listed their occupations as “Merchant, bicycle” on the U.S. census form. Three years later, they made their famous first airplane flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. So, on the next U.S. census, in 1910, the brothers each called themselves “Inventor, aeroplane.” There weren’t too many of those around at the time, however, and it wasn’t until 1950 that “Airplane designer” became a recognized census category.</p>

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<p>Distinctive as their case may be, the story of the Wright brothers tells us something important about employment in the U.S. today. Most work in the U.S. is new work, as U.S. census forms reveal. That is, a majority of jobs are in occupations that have only emerged widely since 1940, according to a major new study of U.S. jobs led by MIT economist David Autor.</p>

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<p>“We estimate that about six out of 10 jobs people are doing at present didn’t exist in 1940,” says Autor, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the results. “A lot of the things that we do today, no one was doing at that point. Most contemporary jobs require expertise that didn’t exist back then, and was not relevant at that time.”</p>

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<p>This finding, covering the period 1940 to 2018, yields some larger implications. For one thing, many new jobs are created by technology. But not all: Some come from consumer demand, such as health care services jobs for an aging population.</p>

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<p>On another front, the research shows a notable divide in recent new-job creation: During the first 40 years of the 1940-2018 period, many new jobs were middle-class manufacturing and clerical jobs, but in the last 40 years, new job creation often involves either highly paid professional work or lower-wage service work.</p>

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<p>Finally, the study brings novel data to a tricky question: To what extent does technology create new jobs, and to what extent does it replace jobs?</p>

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<p>The paper, “<a href=”https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjae008/7630187″ target=”_blank”>New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018</a>,” appears in the <em>Quarterly Journal of Economics</em>. The co-authors are Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT; Caroline Chin, a PhD student in economics at MIT; Anna Salomons, a professor in the School of Economics at Utrecht University; and Bryan Seegmiller SM ’20, PhD ’22, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Northwestern University.</p>

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<p>“This is the hardest, most in-depth project I’ve ever done in my research career,” Autor adds. “I feel we’ve made progress on things we didn’t know we could make progress on.”</p>

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<p><strong>“Technician, fingernail”</strong></p>

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<p>To conduct the study, the scholars dug deeply into government data about jobs and patents, using natural language processing techniques that identified related descriptions in patent and census data to link innovations and subsequent job creation. The U.S. Census Bureau tracks the emerging job descriptions that respondents provide — like the ones the Wright brothers wrote down. Each decade’s jobs index lists about 35,000 occupations and 15,000 specialized variants of them.</p>

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<p>Many new occupations are straightforwardly the result of new technologies creating new forms of work. For instance, “Engineers of computer applications” was first codified in 1970, “Circuit layout designers” in 1990, and “Solar photovoltaic electrician” made its debut in 2018.</p>

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<p>“Many, many forms of expertise are really specific to a technology or a service,” Autor says. “This is quantitatively a big deal.”</p>

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<p>He adds: “When we rebuild the electrical grid, we’re going to create new occupations — not just electricians, but the solar equivalent, i.e., solar electricians. Eventually that becomes a specialty. The first objective of our study is to measure [this kind of process]; the second is to show what it responds to and how it occurs; and the third is to show what effect automation has on employment.”</p>

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<p>On the second point, however, innovations are not the only way new jobs emerge. The wants and needs of consumers also generate new vocations. As the paper notes, “Tattooers” became a U.S. census job category in 1950, “Hypnotherapists” was codified in 1980, and “Conference planners” in 1990. Also, the date of U.S. Census Bureau codification is not the first time anyone worked in those roles; it is the point at which enough people had those jobs that the bureau recognized the work as a substantial employment category. For instance, “Technician, fingernail” became a category in 2000.</p>

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<p>“It’s not just technology that creates new work, it’s new demand,” Autor says. An aging population of baby boomers may be creating new roles for personal health care aides that are only now emerging as plausible job categories.</p>

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<p>All told, among “professionals,” essentially specialized white-collar workers, about 74 percent of jobs in the area have been created since 1940. In the category of “health services” — the personal service side of health care, including general health aides, occupational therapy aides, and more — about 85 percent of jobs have emerged in the same time. By contrast, in the realm of manufacturing, that figure is just 46 percent.</p>

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<p><strong>Differences by degree</strong></p>

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<p>The fact that some areas of employment feature relatively more new jobs than others is one of the major features of the U.S. jobs landscape over the last 80 years. And one of the most striking things about that time period, in terms of jobs, is that it consists of two fairly distinct 40-year periods.</p>

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<p>In the first 40 years, from 1940 to about 1980, the U.S. became a singular postwar manufacturing powerhouse, production jobs grew, and middle-income clerical and other office jobs grew up around those industries.</p>

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<p>But in the last four decades, manufacturing started receding in the U.S., and automation started eliminating clerical work. From 1980 to the present, there have been two major tracks for new jobs: high-end and specialized professional work, and lower-paying service-sector jobs, of many types. As the authors write in the paper, the U.S. has seen an “overall polarization of occupational structure.”</p>

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<p>That corresponds with levels of education. The study finds that employees with at least some college experience are about 25 percent more likely to be working in new occupations than those who possess less than a high school diploma.</p>

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<p>“The real concern is for whom the new work has been created,” Autor says. “In the first period, from 1940 to 1980, there’s a lot of work being created for people without college degrees, a lot of clerical work and production work, middle-skill work. In the latter period, it’s bifurcated, with new work for college graduates being more and more in the professions, and new work for noncollege graduates being more and more in services.”</p>

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<p>Still, Autor adds, “This could change a lot. We’re in a period of potentially consequential technology transition.”</p>

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<p>At the moment, it remains unclear how, and to what extent, evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence will affect the workplace. However, this is also a major issue addressed in the current research study: How much does new technology augment employment, by creating new work and viable jobs, and how much does new technology replace existing jobs, through automation? In their paper, Autor and his colleagues have produced new findings on that topic, which are outlined in part 2 of this <em>MIT News</em> series.</p>

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<p class=”MsoNoSpacing”>Support for the research was provided, in part, by the Carnegie Corporation; Google; Instituut Gak; the MIT Work of the Future Task Force; Schmidt Futures; the Smith Richardson Foundation; and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.</p>

<p><em>This is part 2 of a two-part </em>MIT News<em> feature examining new job creation in the U.S. since 1940, based on new research from Ford Professor of Economics David Autor. Part 1 is available <a href=”https://news.mit.edu/2024/most-work-is-new-work-us-census-data-shows-0401″ target=”_blank”>here</a>.</em></p>

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<p>Ever since the Luddites were destroying machine looms, it has been obvious that new technologies can wipe out jobs. But technical innovations also create new jobs: Consider a computer programmer, or someone installing solar panels on a roof.</p>

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<p>Overall, does technology replace more jobs than it creates? What is the net balance between these two things? Until now, that has not been measured. But a new research project led by MIT economist David Autor has developed an answer, at least for U.S. history since 1940.</p>

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<p>The study uses new methods to examine how many jobs have been lost to machine automation, and how many have been generated through “augmentation,” in which technology creates new tasks. On net, the study finds, and particularly since 1980, technology has replaced more U.S. jobs than it has generated.</p>

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<p>“There does appear to be a faster rate of automation, and a slower rate of augmentation, in the last four decades, from 1980 to the present, than in the four decades prior,” says Autor, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the results.</p>

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<p>However, that finding is only one of the study’s advances. The researchers have also developed an entirely new method for studying the issue, based on an analysis of tens of thousands of U.S. census job categories in relation to a comprehensive look at the text of U.S. patents over the last century. That has allowed them, for the first time, to quantify the effects of technology over both job loss and job creation.</p>

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<p>Previously, scholars had largely just been able to quantify job losses produced by new technologies, not job gains.</p>

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<p>“I feel like a paleontologist who was looking for dinosaur bones that we thought must have existed, but had not been able to find until now,” Autor says. “I think this research breaks ground on things that we suspected were true, but we did not have direct proof of them before this study.”</p>

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<p>The paper, “<a href=”https://academic.oup.com/qje/advance-article/doi/10.1093/qje/qjae008/7630187″ target=”_blank”>New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018</a>,” appears in the <em>Quarterly Journal of Economics</em>. The co-authors are Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics; Caroline Chin, a PhD student in economics at MIT; Anna Salomons, a professor in the School of Economics at Utrecht University; and Bryan Seegmiller SM ’20, PhD ’22, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Northwestern University.</p>

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<p><strong>Automation versus augmentation</strong></p>

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<p>The study finds that overall, about 60 percent of jobs in the U.S. represent new types of work, which have been created since 1940. A century ago, that computer programmer may have been working on a farm.</p>

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<p>To determine this, Autor and his colleagues combed through about 35,000 job categories listed in the U.S. Census Bureau reports, tracking how they emerge over time. They also used natural language processing tools to analyze the text of every U.S. patent filed since 1920. The research examined how words were “embedded” in the census and patent documents to unearth related passages of text. That allowed them to determine links between new technologies and their effects on employment.</p>

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<p>“You can think of automation as a machine that takes a job’s inputs and does it for the worker,” Autor explains. “We think of augmentation as a technology that increases the variety of things that people can do, the quality of things people can do, or their productivity.”</p>

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<p>From about 1940 through 1980, for instance, jobs like elevator operator and typesetter tended to get automated. But at the same time, more workers filled roles such as shipping and receiving clerks, buyers and department heads, and civil and aeronautical engineers, where technology created a need for more employees.&nbsp;</p>

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<p class=”MsoNoSpacing”>From 1980 through 2018, the ranks of cabinetmakers and machinists, among others, have been thinned by automation, while, for instance, industrial engineers, and operations and systems researchers and analysts, have enjoyed growth.</p>

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<p class=”MsoNoSpacing”>Ultimately, the research suggests that the negative effects of automation on employment were more than twice as great in the 1980-2018 period as in the 1940-1980 period. There was a more modest, and positive, change in the effect of augmentation on employment in 1980-2018, as compared to 1940-1980.</p>

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<p class=”MsoNoSpacing”>“There’s no law these things have to be one-for-one balanced, although there’s been no period where we haven’t also created new work,” Autor observes.</p>

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<p><strong>What will AI do?</strong></p>

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<p>The research also uncovers many nuances in this process, though, since automation and augmentation often occur within the same industries. It is not just that technology decimates the ranks of farmers while creating air traffic controllers. Within the same large manufacturing firm, for example, there may be fewer machinists but more systems analysts.</p>

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<p>Relatedly, over the last 40 years, technological trends have exacerbated a gap in wages in the U.S., with highly educated professionals being more likely to work in new fields, which themselves are split between high-paying and lower-income jobs.</p>

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<p>“The new work is bifurcated,” Autor says. “As old work has been erased in the middle, new work has grown on either side.”</p>

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<p>As the research also shows, technology is not the only thing driving new work. Demographic shifts also lie behind growth in numerous sectors of the service industries. Intriguingly, the new research also suggests that large-scale consumer demand also drives technological innovation. Inventions are not just supplied by bright people thinking outside the box, but in response to clear societal needs.</p>

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<p>The 80 years of data also suggest that future pathways for innovation, and the employment implications, are hard to forecast. Consider the possible uses of AI in workplaces.</p>

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<p>“AI is really different,” Autor says. “It may substitute some high-skill expertise but may complement decision-making tasks. I think we’re in an era where we have this new tool and we don’t know what’s good for. New technologies have strengths and weaknesses and it takes a while to figure them out. GPS was invented for military purposes, and it took decades for it to be in smartphones.”</p>

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<p>He adds: “We’re hoping our research approach gives us the ability to say more about that going forward.”</p>

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<p>As Autor recognizes, there is room for the research team’s methods to be further refined. For now, he believes the research open up new ground for study.</p>

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<p>“The missing link was documenting and quantifying how much technology augments people’s jobs,” Autor says. “All the prior measures just showed automation and its effects on displacing workers. We were amazed we could identify, classify, and quantify augmentation. So that itself, to me, is pretty foundational.”</p>

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<p>Support for the research was provided, in part, by The Carnegie Corporation; Google; Instituut Gak; the MIT Work of the Future Task Force; Schmidt Futures; the Smith Richardson Foundation; and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.</p>

<p>Without a map, it can be just about impossible to know not just where you are, but where you’re going, and that’s especially true when it comes to materials properties.</p>

<p>For decades, scientists have understood that while bulk materials behave in certain ways, those rules can break down for materials at the micro- and nano-scales, and often in surprising ways. One of those surprises was the finding that, for some materials, applying even modest strains — a concept known as elastic strain engineering — on materials can dramatically improve certain properties, provided those strains stay elastic and do not relax away by plasticity, fracture, or phase transformations. Micro- and nano-scale materials are especially good at holding applied strains in the elastic form.</p>

<p>Precisely how to apply those elastic strains (or equivalently, residual stress) to achieve certain material properties, however, had been less clear — until recently.</p>

<p>Using a combination of first principles calculations and machine learning, a team of MIT researchers has developed the first-ever map of how to tune crystalline materials to produce specific thermal and electronic properties.</p>

<p>Led by&nbsp;<a href=”https://web.mit.edu/nse/people/faculty/li.html”>Ju Li</a>, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor in Nuclear Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering, the team described a framework for understanding precisely how changing the elastic strains on a material can fine-tune properties like thermal and electrical conductivity. The work is described in an open-access paper published in&nbsp;<a href=”https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2313840121″><em>PNAS</em></a>.</p>

<p>“For the first time, by using machine learning, we’ve been able to delineate the complete six-dimensional boundary of ideal strength, which is the upper limit to elastic strain engineering, and create a map for these electronic and phononic properties,” Li says. “We can now use this approach to explore many other materials. Traditionally, people create new materials by changing the chemistry.”</p>

<p>“For example, with a ternary alloy, you can change the percentage of two elements, so you have two degrees of freedom,” he continues. “What we’ve shown is that diamond, with just one element, is equivalent to a six-component alloy, because you have six degrees of elastic strain freedom you can tune independently.”</p>

<p><strong>Small strains, big material benefits</strong></p>

<p>The paper builds on a foundation laid as far back as the 1980s, when researchers first discovered that the performance of semiconductor materials doubled when a small — just 1 percent — elastic strain was applied to the material.</p>

<p>While that discovery was quickly commercialized by the semiconductor industry and today is used to increase the performance of microchips in everything from laptops to cellphones, that level of strain is very small compared to what we can achieve now, says Subra Suresh, the Vannevar Bush Professor of Engineering Emeritus.</p>

<p>In a 2018&nbsp;<a href=”https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aar4165″><em>Science</em></a>&nbsp;paper, Suresh, Dao, and colleagues demonstrated that 1 percent strain was just the tip of the iceberg.</p>

<p>As part of a 2018 study, Suresh and colleagues demonstrated for the first time that diamond nanoneedles could withstand elastic strains of as much as 9 percent and still return to their original state. Later on, several groups independently confirmed that microscale diamond can indeed elastically deform by approximately 7 percent in tension reversibly.</p>

<p>“Once we showed we could bend nanoscale diamonds and create strains on the order of 9 or 10 percent, the question was, what do you do with it,” Suresh says. “It turns out diamond is a very good semiconductor material … and one of our questions was, if we can mechanically strain diamond, can we reduce the band gap from 5.6 electron-volts to two or three? Or can we get it all the way down to zero, where it begins to conduct like a metal?”</p>

<p>To answer those questions, the team first turned to machine learning in an effort to get a more precise picture of exactly how strain altered material properties.</p>

<p>“Strain is a big space,” Li explains. “You can have tensile strain, you can have shear strain in multiple directions, so it’s a six-dimensional space, and the phonon band is three-dimensional, so in total there are nine tunable parameters. So, we’re using machine learning, for the first time, to create a complete map for navigating the electronic and phononic properties and identify the boundaries.”</p>

<p>Armed with that map, the team subsequently demonstrated how strain could be used to dramatically alter diamond’s semiconductor properties.</p>

<p>“Diamond is like the Mt. Everest of electronic materials,” Li says, “because it has very high thermal conductivity, very high dielectric breakdown strengths, a very big carrier mobility. What we have shown is we can controllably squish Mt. Everest down … so we show that by strain engineering you can either improve diamond’s thermal conductivity by a factor of two, or make it much worse by a factor of 20.”</p>

<p><strong>New map, new applications</strong></p>

<p>Going forward, the findings could be used to explore a host of exotic material properties, Li says, from dramatically reduced thermal conductivity to superconductivity.</p>

<p>“Experimentally, these properties are already accessible with nanoneedles and even microbridges,” he says. “And we have seen exotic properties, like reducing diamond’s (thermal conductivity) to only a few hundred watts per meter-Kelvin. Recently, people have shown that you can produce room-temperature superconductors with hydrides if you squeeze them to a few hundred gigapascals, so we have found all kinds of exotic behavior once we have the map.”</p>

<p>The results could also influence the design of next-generation computer chips capable of running much faster and cooler than today’s processors, as well as quantum sensors and communication devices. As the semiconductor manufacturing industry moves to denser and denser architectures, Suresh says the ability to tune a material’s thermal conductivity will be particularly important for heat dissipation.</p>

<p>While the paper could inform the design of future generations of microchips, Zhe Shi, a postdoc in Li’s lab and first author of the paper, says more work will be needed before those chips find their way into the average laptop or cellphone.</p>

<p>“We know that 1 percent strain can give you an order of magnitude increase in the clock speed of your CPU,” Shi says. “There are a lot of manufacturing and device problems that need to be solved in order for this to become realistic, but I think it’s definitely a great start. It’s an exciting beginning to what could lead to significant strides in technology.”</p>

<p>This work was supported with funding from the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the Nanyang Technological University School of Biological Sciences, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the MIT Vannevar Bush Professorship, and a Nanyang Technological University Distinguished University Professorship.</p>

<p>Hydrosocial displacement refers to the idea that resolving water conflict in one area can shift the conflict to a different area. The concept was coined by Scott Odell, a visiting researcher in MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). As part of ESI’s Program on Mining and the Circular Economy, Odell researches the impacts of extractive industries on local environments and communities, especially in Latin America. He discovered that hydrosocial displacements are often in regions where the mining industry is vying for use of precious water sources that are already stressed due to climate change.</p>

<p>Odell is working with John Fernández, ESI director and professor in the Department of Architecture, on a project that is examining the converging impacts of climate change, mining, and agriculture in Chile. The work is funded by a seed grant from MIT’s Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS). Specifically, the project seeks to answer how the expansion of seawater desalination by the mining industry is affecting local populations, and how climate change and mining affect Andean glaciers and the agricultural communities dependent upon them.<br />
<br />
By working with communities in mining areas, Odell and Fernández are gaining a sense of the burden that mining minerals needed for the clean energy transition is placing on local populations, and the types of conflicts that arise when water sources become polluted or scarce. This work is of particular importance considering over <a href=”https://news.mit.edu/2024/reflecting-cop28-progress-toward-meeting-global-climate-goals-0206″>100 countries</a> pledged a commitment to the clean energy transition at the recent United Nations climate change conference, known as COP28.</p>
<p><strong>Water, humanity’s lifeblood</strong><br><br>At the March 2023 United Nations (U.N.) Water Conference in New York, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres <a href=”https://press.un.org/en/2023/sgsm21737.doc.htm”>warned</a> “water is in deep trouble. We are draining humanity’s lifeblood through vampiric overconsumption and unsustainable use and evaporating it through global heating.” A quarter of the world’s population already faces “extremely high water stress,” according to the World Resources Institute. In an effort to raise awareness of major water-related issues and inspire action for innovative solutions, the U.N. created World Water Day, observed every year on March 22. This year’s theme is “Water for Peace,” underscoring the fact that even though water is a basic human right and intrinsic to every aspect of life, it is increasingly fought over as supplies dwindle due to problems including drought, overuse, and mismanagement. &nbsp;</p><p>The “Water for Peace” theme is exemplified in Fernández and Odell’s J-WAFS project, where findings are intended to inform policies to reduce social and environmental harms inflicted on mining communities and their limited water sources.<br><br>“Despite broad academic engagement with mining and climate change separately, there has been a lack of analysis of the societal implications of the interactions between mining and climate change,” says Odell. “This project is helping to fill the knowledge gap. Results will be summarized in Spanish and English and distributed to interested and relevant parties in Chile, ensuring that the results can be of benefit to those most impacted by these challenges,” he adds.</p><p><strong>The effects of mining for the clean energy transition</strong></p><p>Global climate change is understood to be the most pressing environmental issue facing humanity today. Mitigating climate change requires reducing carbon emissions by transitioning away from conventional energy derived from burning fossil fuels, to more sustainable energy sources like solar and wind power. Because copper is an excellent conductor of electricity, it will be a crucial element in the clean energy transition, in which more solar panels, wind turbines, and electric vehicles will be manufactured. “We are going to see a major increase in demand for copper due to the clean energy transition,” says Odell.</p><p>In 2021, Chile produced 26 percent of the world’s copper, more than twice as much as any other country, Odell explains. Much of Chile’s mining is concentrated in and around the Atacama Desert — the world’s driest desert. Unfortunately, mining requires large amounts of water for a variety of processes, including controlling dust at the extraction site, cooling machinery, and processing and transporting ore.</p><p>Chile is also one of the world’s largest exporters of agricultural products. Farmland is typically situated in the valleys downstream of several mines in the high Andes region, meaning mines get first access to water. This can lead to water conflict between mining operations and agricultural communities. Compounding the problem of mining for greener energy materials to combat climate change, are the very effects of climate change. According to the Chilean government, the country has suffered 13 years of the worst drought in history. While this is detrimental to the mining industry, it is also concerning for those working in agriculture, including the Indigenous Atacameño communities that live closest to the Escondida mine, the largest copper mine in the world. “There was never a lot of water to go around, even before the mine,” Odell says. The addition of Escondida stresses an already strained water system, leaving Atacameño farmers and individuals vulnerable to severe water insecurity.</p><p>What’s more, waste from mining, known as tailings, includes minerals and chemicals that can contaminate water in nearby communities if not properly handled and stored. Odell says the secure storage of tailings is a high priority in earthquake-prone Chile. “If an earthquake were to hit and damage a tailings dam, it could mean toxic materials flowing downstream and destroying farms and communities,” he says.</p><p>Chile’s treasured glaciers are another piece of the mining, climate change, and agricultural puzzle. Caroline White-Nockleby, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology, and Society, is working with Odell and Fernández on the J-WAFS project and leading the research specifically on glaciers. “These may not be the picturesque bright blue glaciers that you might think of, but they are, nonetheless, an important source of water downstream,” says White-Nockleby. She goes on to explain that there are a few different ways that mines can impact glaciers.</p><p>In some cases, mining companies have proposed to move or even destroy glaciers to get at the ore beneath. Other impacts include dust from mining that falls on glaciers. White-Nockleby says, “this makes the glaciers a darker color, so, instead of reflecting the sun’s rays away, [the glacier] may absorb the heat and melt faster.” This shows that even when not directly intervening with glaciers, mining activities can cause glacial decline, adding to the threat glaciers already face due to climate change. She also notes that “glaciers are an important water storage facility,” describing how, on an annual cycle, glaciers freeze and melt, allowing runoff that downstream agricultural communities can utilize. If glaciers suddenly melt too quickly, flooding of downstream communities can occur.</p><p><strong>Desalination offers a possible, but imperfect, solution</strong></p><p>Chile’s extensive coastline makes it uniquely positioned to utilize <a href=”https://climate.mit.edu/podcasts/e4-can-desalination-solve-water-scarcity”>desalination</a> — the removal of salts from seawater — to address water insecurity. Odell says that “over the last decade or so, there’s been billions of dollars of investments in desalination in Chile.”</p><p>As part of his dissertation work at Clark University, Odell found broad optimism in Chile for solving water issues in the mining industry through desalination. Not only was the mining industry committed to building desalination plants, there was also political support, and support from some community members in highland communities near the mines. Yet, despite the optimism and investment, desalinated water was not replacing the use of continental water. He concluded that “desalination can’t solve water conflict if it doesn’t reduce demand for continental water supplies.”</p><p>However, after publishing those <a href=”https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0959652621032935?via%3Dihub”>results</a>, Odell learned that new estimates at the national level showed that desalination operations had begun to replace the use of continental water after 2018. In two case studies that he currently focuses on — the Escondida and Los Pelambres copper mines — the mining companies have expanded their desalination objectives in order to reduce extraction from key continental sources. This seems to be due to a variety of factors. For one thing, in 2022, Chile’s water code was reformed to prioritize human water consumption and environmental protection of water during scarcity and in the allocation of future rights. It also shortened the granting of water rights from “in perpetuity” to 30 years. Under this new code, it is possible that the mining industry may have expanded its desalination efforts because it viewed continental water resources as less secure, Odell surmises.</p><p>As part of the J-WAFS project, Odell has found that recent reactions have been mixed when it comes to the rapid increase in the use of desalination. He spent over two months doing fieldwork in Chile by conducting interviews with members of government, industry, and civil society at the Escondida, Los Pelambres, and Andina mining sites, as well as in Chile’s capital city, Santiago. He has spoken to local and national government officials, leaders of fishing unions, representatives of mining and desalination companies, and farmers. He observed that in the communities where the new desalination plants are being built, there have been concerns from community members as to whether they will get access to the desalinated water, or if it will belong solely to the mines.</p><p>Interviews at the Escondida and Los Pelambres sites, in which desalination operations are already in place or under construction, indicate acceptance of the presence of desalination plants combined with apprehension about unknown long-term environmental impacts. At a third mining site, Andina, there have been active protests against a desalination project that would supply water to a neighboring mine, Los Bronces. In that community, there has been a blockade of the desalination operation by the fishing federation. “They were blockading that operation for three months because of concerns over what the desalination plant would do to their fishing grounds,” Odell says. And this is where the idea of hydrosocial displacement comes into the picture, he explains. Even though desalination operations are easing tensions with highland agricultural communities, new issues are arising for the communities on the coast. “We can’t just look to desalination to solve our problems if it’s going to create problems somewhere else” Odell advises.</p><p>Within the process of hydrosocial displacement, interacting geographical, technical, economic, and political factors constrain the range of responses to address the water conflict. For example, communities that have more political and financial power tend to be better equipped to solve water conflict than less powerful communities. In addition, hydrosocial concerns usually follow the flow of water downstream, from the highlands to coastal regions. Odell says that this raises the need to look at water from a broader perspective.</p><p>“We tend to address water concerns one by one and that can, in practice, end up being kind of like whack-a-mole,” says Odell. “When we think of the broader hydrological system, water is very much linked, and we need to look across the watershed. We can’t just be looking at the specific community affected now, but who else is affected downstream, and will be affected in the long term. If we do solve a water issue by moving it somewhere else, like moving a tailings dam somewhere else, or building a desalination plant, resources are needed in the receiving community to respond to that,” suggests Odell.</p><p>The company building the desalination plant and the fishing federation ultimately reached an agreement and the desalination operation will be moving forward. But Odell notes, “the protest highlights concern about the impacts of the operation on local livelihoods and environments within the much larger context of industrial pollution in the area.”</p><p><strong>The power of communities</strong></p><p>The protest by the fishing federation is one example of communities coming together to have their voices heard. Recent proposals by mining companies that would affect glaciers and other water sources used by agriculture communities have led to other protests that resulted in new agreements to protect local water supplies and the withdrawal of some of the mining proposals.<br><br>Odell observes that communities have also gone to the courts to raise their concerns. The Atacameño communities, for example, have drawn attention to over-extraction of water resources by the Escondida mine. “Community members are also pursuing education in these topics so that there’s not such a power imbalance between mining companies and local communities,” Odell remarks. This demonstrates the power local communities can have to protect continental water resources.<br><br>The political and social landscape of Chile may also be changing in favor of local communities. Beginning with what is now referred to as the Estallido Social (social outburst) over inequality in 2019, Chile has undergone social upheaval that resulted in voters calling for a new constitution. Gabriel Boric, a progressive candidate, whose top priorities include social and environmental issues, was elected president during this period. These trends have brought major attention to issues of economic inequality, environmental harms of mining, and environmental justice, which is putting pressure on the mining industry to make a case for its operations in the country, and to justify the environmental costs of mining.</p><p><strong>What happens after the mine dries up?</strong></p><p>From his fieldwork interviews, Odell has learned that the development of mines within communities can offer benefits. Mining companies typically invest directly in communities through employment, road construction, and sometimes even by building or investing in schools, stadiums, or health clinics. Indirectly, mines can have spillover effects in the economy since miners might support local restaurants, hotels, or stores. But what happens when the mine closes? As one community member Odell interviewed stated: “When the mine is gone, what are we going to have left besides a big hole in the ground?”</p><p>Odell suggests that a multi-pronged approach should be taken to address the future state of water and mining. First, he says we need to have broader conversations about the nature of our consumption and production at domestic and global scales. “Mining is driven indirectly by our consumption of energy and directly by our consumption of everything from our buildings to devices to cars,” Odell states. “We should be looking for ways to moderate our consumption and consume smarter through both policy and practice so that we don’t solve climate change while creating new environmental harms through mining.”<br><br>One of the main ways we can do this is by advancing the circular economy by recycling metals already in the system, or even in landfills, to help build our new clean energy infrastructure. Even so, the clean energy transition will still require mining, but according to Odell, that mining can be done better. “Mining companies and government need to do a better job of consulting with communities. We need solid plans and financing for mine closures in place from the beginning of mining operations, so that when the mine dries up, there’s the money needed to secure tailings dams and protect the communities who will be there forever,” Odell concludes.<br><br>Overall, it will take an engaged society — from the mining industry to government officials to individuals — to think critically about the role we each play in our quest for a more sustainable planet, and what that might mean for the most vulnerable populations among us.</p>

<p>Farming can be a low-margin, high-risk business, subject to weather and climate patterns, insect population cycles, and other unpredictable factors. Farmers need to be savvy managers of the many resources they deal, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides are among their major recurring expenses.</p>

<p>Despite the importance of these chemicals, a lack of technology that monitors and optimizes sprays has forced farmers to rely on personal experience and rules of thumb to decide how to apply these chemicals. As a result, these chemicals tend to be over-sprayed, leading to their runoff into waterways and buildup up in the soil.</p>

<p>That could change, thanks to a new approach of feedback-optimized spraying, invented by AgZen, an MIT spinout founded in 2020 by Professor Kripa Varanasi and Vishnu Jayaprakash SM ’19, PhD ’22.</p>
<p>Over the past decade, AgZen’s founders have developed products and technologies to control the interactions of droplets and sprays with plant surfaces. The Boston-based venture-backed company launched a new commercial product in 2024 and is currently piloting another related product. Field tests of both have shown the products can help farmers spray more efficiently and effectively, using fewer chemicals overall.</p>

<p>“Worldwide, farms spend approximately $60 billion a year on pesticides. Our objective is to reduce the number of pesticides sprayed and lighten the financial burden on farms without sacrificing effective pest management,” Varanasi says.</p>

<p><strong>Getting droplets to stick</strong></p>

<p>While the world pesticide market is growing rapidly, a lot of the pesticides sprayed don’t reach their target. A significant portion bounces off the plant surfaces, lands on the ground, and becomes part of the runoff that flows to streams and rivers, often causing serious pollution. Some of these pesticides can be carried away by wind over very long distances.</p>

<p>“Drift, runoff, and poor application efficiency are well-known, longstanding problems in agriculture, but we can fix this by controlling and monitoring how sprayed droplets interact with leaves,” Varanasi says.</p>

<p>With support from <a href=”https://tatacenter.mit.edu/” target=”_blank”>MIT Tata Center</a> and the <a href=”https://jwafs.mit.edu/” target=”_blank”>Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab</a>, Varanasi and his team analyzed how droplets strike plant surfaces, and explored ways to increase application efficiency. This research led them to develop a novel system of nozzles that cloak droplets with compounds that enhance the retention of droplets on the leaves, a product they call EnhanceCoverage.</p>

<p>Field studies across regions — from Massachusetts to California to Italy and France —showed that this droplet-optimization system could allow farmers to cut the amount of chemicals needed by more than half because more of the sprayed substances would stick to the leaves.</p>

<p><strong>Measuring coverage</strong></p>

<p>However, in trying to bring this technology to market, the researchers faced a sticky problem: Nobody knew how well pesticide sprays were adhering to the plants in the first place, so how could AgZen say that the coverage was better with its new EnhanceCoverage system?</p>

<p>“I had grown up spraying with a backpack on a small farm in India, so I knew this was an issue,” Jayaprakash says. “When we spoke to growers, they told me how complicated spraying is when you’re on a large machine. Whenever you spray, there are so many things that can influence how effective your spray is. How fast do you drive the sprayer? What flow rate are you using for the chemicals? What chemical are you using? What’s the age of the plants, what’s the nozzle you’re using, what is the weather at the time? All these things influence agrochemical efficiency.”</p>

<p>Agricultural spraying essentially comes down to dissolving a chemical in water and then spraying droplets onto the plants. “But the interaction between a droplet and the leaf is complex,” Varanasi says. “We were coming in with ways to optimize that, but what the growers told us is, hey, we’ve never even really looked at that in the first place.”</p>

<p>Although farmers have been spraying agricultural chemicals on a large scale for about 80 years, they’ve “been forced to rely on general rules of thumb and pick all these interlinked parameters, based on what’s worked for them in the past. You pick a set of these parameters, you go spray, and you’re basically praying for outcomes in terms of how effective your pest control is,” Varanasi says.</p>

<p>Before AgZen could sell farmers on the new system to improve droplet coverage, the company had to invent a way to measure precisely how much spray was adhering to plants in real-time.</p>

<p><strong>Comparing before and after</strong></p>

<p>The system they came up with, which they tested extensively on farms across the country last year, involves a unit that can be bolted onto the spraying arm of virtually any sprayer. It carries two sensor stacks, one just ahead of the sprayer nozzles and one behind. Then, built-in software running on a tablet shows the operator exactly how much of each leaf has been covered by the spray. It also computes how much those droplets will spread out or evaporate, leading to a precise estimate of the final coverage.</p>

<p>“There’s a lot of physics that governs how droplets spread and evaporate, and this has been incorporated into software that a farmer can use,” Varanasi says. “We bring a lot of our expertise into understanding droplets on leaves. All these factors, like how temperature and humidity influence coverage, have always been nebulous in the spraying world. But now you have something that can be exact in determining how well your sprays are doing.”</p>

<p>“We’re not only measuring coverage, but then we recommend how to act,” says Jayaprakash, who is AgZen’s CEO. “With the information we collect in real-time and by using AI, RealCoverage tells operators how to optimize everything on their sprayer, from which nozzle to use, to how fast to drive, to how many gallons of spray is best for a particular chemical mix on a particular acre of a crop.”</p>

<p>The tool was developed to prove how much AgZen’s EnhanceCoverage nozzle system (which will be launched in 2025) improves coverage. But it turns out that monitoring and optimizing droplet coverage on leaves in real-time with this system can itself yield major improvements.</p>

<p>“We worked with large commercial farms last year in specialty and row crops,” Jayaprakash says. “When we saved our pilot customers up to 50 percent of their chemical cost at a large scale, they were very surprised.” He says the tool has reduced chemical costs and volume in fallow field burndowns, weed control in soybeans, defoliation in cotton, and fungicide and insecticide sprays in vegetables and fruits. Along with data from commercial farms, field trials conducted by three leading agricultural universities have also validated these results.</p>

<p>“Across the board, we were able to save between 30 and 50 percent on chemical costs and increase crop yields by enabling better pest control,” Jayaprakash says. “By focusing on the droplet-leaf interface, our product can help any foliage spray throughout the year, whereas most technological advancements in this space recently have been focused on reducing herbicide use alone.” The company now intends to lease the system across thousands of acres this year.</p>

<p>And these efficiency gains can lead to significant returns at scale, he emphasizes: In the U.S., farmers currently spend $16 billion a year on chemicals, to protect about $200 billion of crop yields.</p>

<p>The company launched its first product, the coverage optimization system called RealCoverage, this year, reaching a wide variety of farms with different crops and in different climates. “We’re going from proof-of-concept with pilots in large farms to a truly massive scale on a commercial basis with our lease-to-own program,” Jayaprakash says.</p>

<p>“We’ve also been tapped by the USDA to help them evaluate practices to minimize pesticides in watersheds,” Varanasi says, noting that RealCoverage can also be useful for regulators, chemical companies, and agricultural equipment manufacturers.</p>

<p>Once AgZen has proven the effectiveness of using coverage as a decision metric, and after the RealCoverage optimization system is widely in practice, the company will next roll out its second product, EnhanceCoverage, designed to maximize droplet adhesion. Because that system will require replacing all the nozzles on a sprayer, the researchers are doing pilots this year but will wait for a full rollout in 2025, after farmers have gained experience and confidence with their initial product.</p>

<p>“There is so much wastage,” Varanasi says. “Yet farmers must spray to protect crops, and there is a lot of environmental impact from this. So, after all this work over the years, learning about how droplets stick to surfaces and so on, now the culmination of it in all these products for me is amazing, to see all this come alive, to see that we’ll finally be able to solve the problem we set out to solve and help farmers.”</p>

<p><em>The following is a joint announcement from MIT and Applied Materials, Inc.</em></p>

<p>MIT and Applied Materials, Inc., announced an agreement today that, together with a grant to MIT from the Northeast Microelectronics Coalition (<a href=”https://cam.masstech.org/cam-programs/microelectronics”>NEMC</a>) Hub, commits more than $40 million of estimated private and public investment to add advanced nano-fabrication equipment and capabilities to <a href=”https://mitnano.mit.edu/”>MIT.nano</a>, the Institute’s center for nanoscale science and engineering. The collaboration will create a unique open-access site in the United States that supports research and development at industry-compatible scale using the same equipment found in high-volume production fabs to accelerate advances in silicon and compound semiconductors, power electronics, optical computing, analog devices, and other critical technologies.</p>

<p>The equipment and related funding and in-kind support provided by Applied Materials will significantly enhance MIT.nano’s existing capabilities to fabricate up to 200-millimeter (8-inch) wafers, a size essential to industry prototyping and production of semiconductors used in a broad range of markets including consumer electronics, automotive, industrial automation, clean energy, and more. Positioned to fill the gap between academic experimentation and commercialization, the equipment will help establish a bridge connecting early-stage innovation to industry pathways to the marketplace.</p>

<p>“A brilliant new concept for a chip won’t have impact in the world unless companies can make millions of copies of it. MIT.nano’s collaboration with Applied Materials will create a critical open-access capacity to help innovations travel from lab bench to industry foundries for manufacturing,” says Maria Zuber, MIT’s vice president for research and the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics. “I am grateful to Applied Materials for its investment in this vision. The impact of the new toolset will ripple across MIT and throughout Massachusetts, the region, and the nation.”</p>

<p>Applied Materials is the world’s largest supplier of equipment for manufacturing semiconductors, displays, and other advanced electronics. The company will provide at MIT.nano several state-of-the-art process tools capable of supporting 150 and 200mm wafers and will enhance and upgrade an existing tool owned by MIT. In addition to assisting MIT.nano in the day-to-day operation and maintenance of the equipment, Applied engineers will develop new process capabilities that will benefit researchers and students from MIT and beyond.</p>

<p>“Chips are becoming increasingly complex, and there is tremendous need for continued advancements in 200mm devices, particularly compound semiconductors like silicon carbide and gallium nitride,” says Aninda Moitra, corporate vice president and general manager of Applied Materials’ ICAPS Business. “Applied is excited to team with MIT.nano to create a unique, open-access site in the U.S. where the chip ecosystem can collaborate to accelerate innovation. Our engagement with MIT expands Applied’s university innovation network and furthers our efforts to reduce the time and cost of commercializing new technologies while strengthening the pipeline of future semiconductor industry talent.”</p>

<p>The <a href=”https://cam.masstech.org/cam-programs/microelectronics”>NEMC</a> Hub, managed by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (<a href=”https://masstech.org/”>MassTech</a>), will allocate $7.7 million to enable the installation of the tools. The NEMC is <a href=”https://cam.masstech.org/news/massachusetts-wins-proposal-host-northeast-microelectronics-hub”>the regional “hub”</a> that connects and amplifies the capabilities of diverse organizations from across New England, plus New Jersey and New York. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) selected the NEMC Hub as one of eight Microelectronics Commons Hubs and awarded funding from the CHIPS and Science Act to accelerate the transition of critical microelectronics technologies from lab-to-fab, spur new jobs, expand workforce training opportunities, and invest in the region’s advanced manufacturing and technology sectors.</p>

<p>The Microelectronics Commons program is managed at the federal level by the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, and facilitated through the <a href=”https://nstxl.org/”>National Security Technology Accelerator</a> (NSTXL), which organizes the execution of the eight regional hubs located across the country. The announcement of the public sector support for the project was made at an event attended by leaders from the DoD and NSTXL during a site visit to meet with NEMC Hub members.</p>

<p><strong>“</strong>The installation and operation of these tools at MIT.nano will have a direct impact on the members of the NEMC Hub, the Massachusetts and Northeast regional economy, and national security. This is what the CHIPS and Science Act is all about,” says Ben Linville-Engler, deputy director at the MassTech Collaborative and the interim director of the NEMC Hub. “This is an essential investment by the NEMC Hub to meet the mission of the Microelectronics Commons.”</p>

<p>MIT.nano is a 200,000 square-foot facility located in the heart of the MIT campus with pristine, class-100 cleanrooms capable of accepting these advanced tools. Its open-access model means that MIT.nano’s toolsets and laboratories are available not only to the campus, but also to early-stage R&amp;D by researchers from other academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, government, and companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to local startups. Vladimir Bulović, faculty director of MIT.nano, says he expects the new equipment to come online in early 2025.</p>

<p>“With vital funding for installation from NEMC and after a thorough and productive planning process with Applied Materials, MIT.nano is ready to install this toolset and integrate it into our expansive capabilities that serve over 1,100 researchers from academia, startups, and established companies,” says Bulović, who is also the Fariborz Maseeh Professor of Emerging Technologies in MIT’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “We’re eager to add these powerful new capabilities and excited for the new ideas, collaborations, and innovations that will follow.”</p>

<p>As part of its arrangement with MIT.nano, Applied Materials will join the MIT.nano Consortium, an industry program comprising 12 companies from different industries around the world. With the contributions of the company’s technical staff, Applied Materials will also have the opportunity to engage with MIT’s intellectual centers, including continued membership with the <a href=”https://www.mtl.mit.edu/”>Microsystems Technology Laboratories</a>.</p>

<p>Students in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE) got to mingle with potential employers interested in their specific skills this fall when the department held its first DMSE Career Fair.</p>

<p>More than 20 companies, organizations, and laboratories set up booths in Walker Memorial on Oct. 20 while undergraduates and graduate students streamed in wearing collared shirts and dress slacks and carrying resumes and business cards. Giants such as Corning, IBM, Intel, and ThermoFisher Scientific, as well as startups — including MIT and DMSE spinouts — were on hand to discuss job and internship opportunities.</p>

<p>“We are always hiring,” says Dina Yuryev PhD ’17, senior research engineer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a <a href=”https://news.mit.edu/2022/mit-expands-research-collaboration-commonwealth-fusion-systems-sparc-0510″>fusion power company with MIT roots</a>.</p>

<p>Yuryev earned her PhD from DMSE in 2017. She shared that when she first looked for jobs, many were in computer science; fewer were materials-focused.</p>

<p>“Materials is such an important field and really critical for technology development both in fusion but also just in clean energy,” Yuryev says. “So it’s really cool to see all of these companies here who really care about materials.”</p>

<p><strong>Tailored opportunities </strong></p>

<p>Career Fair attendees appreciated the enthusiasm. One was Christian Duessel, a junior majoring in mechanical engineering. He plans to declare a double major this year in materials science and engineering.</p>

<p>“It’s nice that it’s smaller and more directed at us. If you’re going up to a company, they’re here because they want to hire Course Threes,” Duessel says, using the MIT naming convention for the major.</p>

<p>The event was hosted by DMSE’s academic office and FORGE, the department’s professional development and alumni relations program. Bringing together companies and organizations looking for materials science and engineering skills in one place is exactly what the organizers were looking to do — something that MIT’s annual Fall Career Fair, with hundreds of recruiters and thousands of attendees, can’t.</p>

<p>“This targeted approach ensures that our students have access to opportunities that align closely with their academic background and interests,” says Rebecca Shepardson, undergraduate administrator in DMSE.</p>

<p>Also, materials science and engineering is a rapidly evolving field with applications across industries, Shepardson says. “A specialized fair like this lets us showcase the breadth of hiring and internship opportunities — and it lets us connect students with employers that are really at the forefront of innovation.”</p>

<p>That diversity of application was not only evident in the recruiter roster, which included companies in energy, mining, health care, manufacturing, and more, but also the career goals of attendees.</p>

<p>Duessel, who is taking class 3.17 (Principles of Manufacturing), wants a process engineering position in semiconductor manufacturing.</p>

<p>“I’ve always been interested in manufacturing — how things actually get made,” Duessel says, “but then also I get to apply materials science principles and with a communication side to it — it’s a very people-focused job.”</p>

<p>Mrigi Munjal, a PhD student in DMSE who studies the supply chain for nickel in battery production, has a few years left before graduating but wants to see what jobs are out there.</p>

<p>“I’m just trying to understand what work culture is like for PhD students in startups and then maybe contrast that with the big companies to see if there’s a difference in roles and responsibilities,” Munjal says.</p>

<p><strong>“Smart, passionate people”</strong></p>

<p>On the other side of the booths, recruiters were equally interested in exploring the applicant pool. Tom Kalantar, senior research-and-development fellow at chemicals and plastics manufacturer Dow, was at the fair to talk to people about onsite interviews the company does at DMSE starting each August, as well as a <a href=”https://corporate.dow.com/en-us/careers/jobs/position.R2043407″>digital internship program</a> for scientists and engineers.</p>

<p>“The skills that the students bring or are acquiring here, and the creativity that they show in doing their work here, are the kinds of things that we are looking for broadly at Dow,” Kalantar says.</p>

<p>Kyle Dominguez ’20, a DMSE alumnus and research scientist at Sublime Systems, said his startup is hiring every kind of engineer — mechanical, chemical, materials science, civil. Sublime, which uses electrochemistry to make low-carbon cement, was founded by <a href=”https://dmse.mit.edu/research-impact/application-impact/breaking-ground-with-green-cement/”>former DMSE postdoc Leah Ellis and Professor Yet-Ming Chiang</a>.</p>

<p>“The biggest skill set that we’re looking for is smart, passionate people who want to change the way the world makes cement,” Dominguez says. The company is now expanding into its first commercial production phase. “There are a lot of problems to solve to get to the point where we’re actually at scale.”</p>

<p>While recruiters sought diverse talent, students like Kim Cheng had other reasons beyond an immediate job search for attending the DMSE event. The DMSE senior has a job lined up after graduation — she’s moving to Chicago to work at a 3D printing startup. She was at the fair mainly to show departmental spirit and support.</p>

<p>“If it was last year, I would have come fully prepared with my resume,” Cheng says.</p>

<p>Still, Cheng sees value for any student, with or without a post-graduation job, to visit career events and talk to recruiters, especially at one as targeted as the DMSE fair.</p>

<p>“It’s important to know your options and know the scope of the field,” Cheng says. “Just getting a better idea and getting more comfortable talking to representatives, I think, is an incredibly helpful skill.”</p>

<p>Imagine you’re visiting a friend abroad, and you look inside their fridge to see what would make for a great breakfast. Many of the items initially appear foreign to you, with each one encased in unfamiliar packaging and containers. Despite these visual distinctions, you begin to understand what each one is used for and pick them up as needed.</p>

<p>Inspired by humans’ ability to handle unfamiliar objects, a group from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) designed Feature Fields for Robotic Manipulation (<a href=”https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07931″ target=”_blank”>F3RM</a>), a system that blends 2D images with foundation model features into 3D scenes to help robots identify and grasp nearby items. F3RM can interpret open-ended language prompts from humans, making the method helpful in real-world environments that contain thousands of objects, like warehouses and households.</p>

<p>F3RM offers robots the ability to interpret open-ended text prompts using natural language, helping the machines manipulate objects. As a result, the machines can understand less-specific requests from humans and still complete the desired task. For example, if a user asks the robot to “pick up a tall mug,” the robot can locate and grab the item that best fits that description.</p>

<p>“Making robots that can actually generalize in the real world is incredibly hard,” says Ge Yang, postdoc at the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Fundamental Interactions and MIT CSAIL. “We really want to figure out how to do that, so with this project, we try to push for an aggressive level of generalization, from just three or four objects to anything we find in MIT’s Stata Center. We wanted to learn how to make robots as flexible as ourselves, since we can grasp and place objects even though we’ve never seen them before.”</p>

<p><strong>Learning “what’s where by looking”</strong><br />
<br />
The method could assist robots with picking items in large fulfillment centers with inevitable clutter and unpredictability. In these warehouses, robots are often given a description of the inventory that they’re required to identify. The robots must match the text provided to an object, regardless of variations in packaging, so that customers’ orders are shipped correctly.<br />
<br />
For example, the fulfillment centers of major online retailers can contain millions of items, many of which a robot will have never encountered before. To operate at such a scale, robots need to understand the geometry and semantics of different items, with some being in tight spaces. With F3RM’s advanced spatial and semantic perception abilities, a robot could become more effective at locating an object, placing it in a bin, and then sending it along for packaging. Ultimately, this would help factory workers ship customers’ orders more efficiently.</p>

<p>“One thing that often surprises people with F3RM is that the same system also works on a room and building scale, and can be used to build simulation environments for robot learning and large maps,” says Yang. “But before we scale up this work further, we want to first make this system work really fast. This way, we can use this type of representation for more dynamic robotic control tasks, hopefully in real-time, so that robots that handle more dynamic tasks can use it for perception.”</p>

<p>The MIT team notes that F3RM’s ability to understand different scenes could make it useful in urban and household environments. For example, the approach could help personalized robots identify and pick up specific items. The system aids robots in grasping their surroundings — both physically and perceptively.</p>

<p>“Visual perception was defined by David Marr as the problem of knowing ‘what is where by looking,’” says senior author Phillip Isola, MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and CSAIL principal investigator. “Recent foundation models have gotten really good at knowing what they are looking at; they can recognize thousands of object categories and provide detailed text descriptions of images. At the same time, radiance fields have gotten really good at representing where stuff is in a scene. The combination of these two approaches can create a representation of what is where in 3D, and what our work shows is that this combination is especially useful for robotic tasks, which require manipulating objects in 3D.”<br />
<br />
<strong>Creating a “digital twin”</strong></p>

<p>F3RM begins to understand its surroundings by taking pictures on a selfie stick. The mounted camera snaps 50 images at different poses, enabling it to build a <a href=”https://www.matthewtancik.com/nerf”>neural radiance field</a> (NeRF), a deep learning method that takes 2D images to construct a 3D scene. This collage of RGB photos creates a “digital twin” of its surroundings in the form of a 360-degree representation of what’s nearby.</p>

<p>In addition to a highly detailed neural radiance field, F3RM also builds a feature field to augment geometry with semantic information. The system uses <a href=”https://openai.com/research/clip”>CLIP</a>, a vision foundation model trained on hundreds of millions of images to efficiently learn visual concepts. By reconstructing the 2D CLIP features for the images taken by the selfie stick, F3RM effectively lifts the 2D features into a 3D representation.<br />
<br />
<strong>Keeping things open-ended</strong></p>

<p>After receiving a few demonstrations, the robot applies what it knows about geometry and semantics to grasp objects it has never encountered before. Once a user submits a text query, the robot searches through the space of possible grasps to identify those most likely to succeed in picking up the object requested by the user. Each potential option is scored based on its relevance to the prompt, similarity to the demonstrations the robot has been trained on, and if it causes any collisions. The highest-scored grasp is then chosen and executed.<br />
<br />
To demonstrate the system’s ability to interpret open-ended requests from humans, the researchers prompted the robot to pick up Baymax, a character from Disney’s “Big Hero 6.” While F3RM had never been directly trained to pick up a toy of the cartoon superhero, the robot used its spatial awareness and vision-language features from the foundation models to decide which object to grasp and how to pick it up.<br />
<br />
F3RM also enables users to specify which object they want the robot to handle at different levels of linguistic detail. For example, if there is a metal mug and a glass mug, the user can ask the robot for the “glass mug.” If the bot sees two glass mugs and one of them is filled with coffee and the other with juice, the user can ask for the “glass mug with coffee.” The foundation model features embedded within the feature field enable this level of open-ended understanding.</p>

<p>“If I showed a person how to pick up a mug by the lip, they could easily transfer that knowledge to pick up objects with similar geometries such as bowls, measuring beakers, or even rolls of tape. For robots, achieving this level of adaptability has been quite challenging,” says MIT PhD student, CSAIL affiliate, and co-lead author William Shen. “F3RM combines geometric understanding with semantics from foundation models trained on internet-scale data to enable this level of aggressive generalization from just a small number of demonstrations.”<br />
<br />
Shen and Yang wrote the paper under the supervision of Isola, with MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Leslie Pack Kaelbling and undergraduate students Alan Yu and Jansen Wong as co-authors. The team was supported, in part, by Amazon.com Services, the National Science Foundation AI Institute for Artificial Intelligence Fundamental Interactions, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the Office of Naval Research’s Multidisciplinary University Initiative, the Army Research Office, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, and the MIT Quest for Intelligence. Their work will be presented at the 2023 Conference on Robot Learning.</p>