Wednesday
October 23, 2019
3:30pm - 5:00pm

Fall 2019 Member Meeting
Workshops: Wednesday, October 23

The MIT Media Lab fall 2019 member meeting is an invitation-only event. 

Space Exploration Initiative: From microgravity to Martian habitats

Ariel Ekblaw and Joe Paradiso   |   E14-240

The moon awaits, with Mars soon to follow. As we reflect on the momentous significance of the Apollo 11 moon landing anniversary, the next 50 years of interplanetary civilization beckon. 

Join us for a for a special viewing of footage from the six experiments we launched into space with Blue Origin and the 14 research projects we flew on our second zero gravity flight. We’ll also give you a sneak peak of our next parabolic flight, suborbital launch, and the five new experiments we’re launching to the International Space Station (ISS). 

We’ll discuss business models for space products and space tourism in low Earth orbit and beyond, and update members on the numerous ways to get involved. 

Network Intelligence

James Weis and Joe Jacobson   |   E15-359

The new Network Intelligence program will explore the application of artificial intelligence, big data, and network science-based approaches to strategic identification and prioritization in science and technology. This workshop is for member companies interested in these areas, and will include 1) overview of recent results; 2) collective planning of objectives; and 3) discussion of program structure.

Towards closed-loop framework for measuring attention, workload, engagement and fatigue in real-time using physiological sensing for improved wellbeing

Nataliya Kosmyna, PhD   |   E14-514b

In this workshop we discuss our system, AttentivU, which provides user with real-time, closed-loop feedback about their level of engagement, cognitive load, attention, and fatigue in the workplace, during learning scenarios, or while driving. AttentivU is a pair of glasses which measures brain activity using electroencephalography (EEG) and eye movements using electrooculography (EOG). The device can be used for passive or active interventions—for example, to monitor the state of the user, providing gentle audio or haptic feedback when the user is less attentive or adapting the user’s environment/apps when cognitive overload is detected. The system operates in a standalone, non-networked fashion to ensure privacy. We have recently completed a new test of the device to measure auditory attention (cocktail party problem) as well as visual attention (binary set of images) in real time using AttentivU glasses. During the workshop we will discuss these experiments in more depth.

Current status of emerging technologies in healthcare and clinical medicine

Akram Bayat, Sam Ghosal, Hyung-jin Yoon and Pratik Shah   |   E14-393

Clinical medicine and biological research are on the verge of major transformations due to novel genomic tools and technologies, convergence of large new digital data sources, and computing power to identify clinically meaningful patterns using efficient machine-learning algorithms. This workshop summarizes insights, recent developments, and recommendations for infusing actionable computational evidence into healthcare from academia, the biotechnology industry, nonprofit foundations, and technology corporations. Analysis and learning from publicly available biomedical data sets, sensors, and genome sequences by machine-learning architectures are discussed. We conclude by discussing applications, explainability, and impact of digital algorithmic evidence to improve medical care for patients, citizens, and communities.

Integrated Social Mobile

NRI, Deloitte, and Sandy Pentland  |  E14-244 

Today mobile apps help users optimize particular services (e.g., Uber or number of steps taken); however, we can now optimize collective properties like social capital, exposure to opportunities, and safety. We can also integrate the cost of externalities like carbon footprint and social costs of inequality, thus supporting the investment needed to mitigate these externalities. On the other hand, these sort of "nudges" may reduce individual freedom of choice or may be regressive in other ways. We will show a couple of examples of integrated social mobile apps we are beginning to build, and discuss how they should be structured, the legal and ethical difficulties, and the opportunities for addressing seemingly unsolvable social problems like intergenerational mobility or global warming.