LIDS all
Research Outside the Box
Editor: Jennifer Donovan
Design, Photography & Illustration: Michael Lewy
Writers: Rachel VanCott Kate Willsky
2009 LIDS Student Conference photos provided courtesy of the Student Conference Organizing Committee; photographer: Kyle Treleaven
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 32-D608 Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
http://lids.mit.edu/ send questions or comments to lidsmag@mit.edu
A Message from the Director
Welcome to the Fall 2009 volume of LIDS|ALL. As in past issues, we have assembled a set of interviews and news that provide a picture of the LIDS community in all of its dimensions. LIDS is an exciting and world-leading research organization that plays a very important intellectual and educational role within MIT, and we are delighted to share these glimpses into our professional home.
In this issue you’ll be introduced to two of our current graduate students, Sertac Karaman and Myung Jin Choi. Sertac has been one of the most active student leaders at LIDS, serving as an organizer and participant in the annual LIDS Student Conference, and as a lead in an effort to collect images of LIDS through the years. Jin Choi is another active member of the LIDS community, who, in addition to working on the LIDS Student Conference, has a record of broader service through MIT’s Africa Information Technology Initiative as well as in her role as an EECS peer counselor.
In addition, you’ll meet one of our distinguished alumni, Dr. Dan Grunberg. Dan is a dynamic entrepreneur who remains a strong and contributing friend to LIDS, as well as a friend to MIT more generally as a member of the MIT Museum’s Advisory Board.
You’ll also read about Lynne Dell, one of the dedicated members of our administrative staff, whose warm presence adds as much to the LIDS community as her tireless efforts in ensuring
ABOUT LIDS
The Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS) at MIT, established in 1940 as the Servomechanisms Laboratory, currently focuses on four main research areas: communication and networks, control and system theory, optimization, and statistical signal processing. These areas range from basic theoretical studies to a wide array of applications in the communication, computer, control, electronics, and aerospace industries. LIDS is truly an interdisciplinary lab, home to about 130 graduate students and post-doctoral associates from EECS, Aero-Astro, and the School of Management. The intellectual culture at LIDS encourages students, postdocs, and faculty to both develop the conceptual structures of the above system areas and apply these structures to important engineering problems.
that activities such as the LIDS Student Conference run like clockwork. Lynne is also the latest member of our staff to receive recognition from the School of Engineering as a recipient of an Infinite Mile Award this past spring.
This issue also contains interviews with two of our faculty members. You’ll be introduced to Moe Win, currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and a worldrecognized leader in ultra-wide bandwidth communication and allied fields (and whose experiments and sensing devices have become permanent parts of the LIDS environment). You will also read about one of our most distinguished senior faculty members, Sanjoy Mitter, a former Director of LIDS and currently Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. In addition to enjoying a well-deserved international reputation for his many broad and deep research contributions, Sanjoy has been and continues to be a leader within LIDS in charting and pursuing the scientific agenda that we all find so exciting and fulfilling.
As I stated in last fall’s issue it would be wrong to say simply that LIDS is enriched because of activities and people such as these. LIDS exists because of activities and people like these. Thanks to them and the others in our community, LIDS stands as a world-leading center for research in information and decision systems and all of the academic disciplines that are crucial to this broad area of inquiry.
And there is more on the way: We have now assembled an external Advisory Committee, consisting of four very distinguished research and educational leaders: Dr. Henrique Malvar, Director of Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, Professor Manfred Morari of ETH, Zurich, Switzerland, Prof. H. Vincent Poor of Princeton University, and Prof. Pravin Varaiya of UC Berkeley. The Committee visited us in early May 2009 and engaged in an intensive set of meetings and activities, including talks by some of our faculty, private meetings with students and postdocs, and a very successful and enjoyable poster session. The Committee was complimentary to all in LIDS and provided us both encouragement and advice as we continue to enhance the LIDS community. Indeed, that these four leaders have been willing to give of their time and energy to listen to and advise us speaks volumes for what LIDS is and what it will remain. On top of that, we’re planning a major Symposium for later this fall which you can learn about now at http://paths.lids.mit.edu and which you will undoubtedly read about in next year’s LIDS|ALL.
Sincerely, Alan
Willsky, Director
The Man Behind the Unmanned
by Kate Willsky
Robots, for all the impersonal connotations they call to mind, do not come from impersonal places. The inner workings of unmanned vehicles and automated human approximations result from the efforts of dynamic scholars and students, people with enough life and passion in them to give rise to a second sort of life form. Sertac
Karaman, a Masters student at LIDS, is one of these people.
Two projects dominate Sertac’s hours on campus. The first, led by Professor Emilio Frazzoli, explores the potential for one human to control multiple robotic vehicles from a remote location. Ultimately, the project aspires
to produce particularly tangible goals—unmanned air vehicles for the air force —but Sertac seems more interested in its theoretical roots. “It all originates from linguistics and philosophy,” he says, explaining that his work draws on natural languages that “look a lot like English” to control the robotic vehicles.
to plan the forklift’s trajectory. The project is, admittedly, ambitious, but, Sertac says, “I mean, when you see it working it’s really getting there.”
Eventually, the endeavor will produce a forklift that can be controlled by using a PDA, like a simple Nokia, which would allow the human controller to see the world through the robot’s eyes...
Sertac’s second big project is a joint venture with LIDS and CSAIL. Here he works with a team lead by Professor Seth Teller to develop an autonomous forklift. Again, the end goal proves—just about literally—concrete, but the abstractions are what Sertac highlights first. “The project is a big conjunction of ideas,” drawing on topics ranging from linguistics to physics to digital imagining, he says. Eventually, the endeavor will produce a forklift that can be controlled by using a PDA, like a simple Nokia, which would allow the human controller to see the world through the robot’s eyes, so to speak, getting access to the sensory input it receives and using this information
Sertac himself may have already gotten there. An interest in artificial intelligence (AI) during his childhood in Turkey—“In high school, I was making little robots, some little things that moved, that kind of thing”—led to building a smallscale robotic helicopter during his undergraduate studies, then to placing fourth in last year’s Darpa Urban Challenge—the CSAIL forklift project is a follow-up to the Darpa attempt, he says—and, eventually, to LIDS, where his converging interests in robotics and the theory behind it are readily indulged.
“My interest in robotics and AI has been incremental,” he reflects. “Over the years, the projects have gotten bigger.”
In attributing the progress of his academic pursuits to the projects’ growth, rather than his own auspices, Sertac displays both a characteristic humility and an easygoing knack for letting his intellectual interests guide him, trusting that they will lead somewhere good. As a kid, he didn’t have aspirations to build unmanned air vehicles for the US Army; he just knew that he was interested in robotics,
and wanted to keep learning more. When asked why he chose to study engineering, he laughs: “Actually, I’m not really sure. I guess I liked it.”
He liked it enough to leave his home country of Turkey—after graduating first in his class from Istanbul Technical University with a double major in computer science and mechanical engineering—to pursue a Masters degree in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. So why MIT? Another laugh: “It’s a good school,” he says. “It’s hard to reject once you get accepted.”
This take-it-as-it-comes attitude has served Sertac well. “I like it over here very much. I like MIT very much,” he says, “it was a really easy adjustment.” The international nature of MIT—“There seems to be someone from every continent in the world here”—certainly facilitated the adjustment, along with Boston’s welcoming nature. Having spent many of his pre-MIT years in a big city—Istanbul— Sertac thrives off the bustle of metropolitan activity. “I like going out in the city. I like restaurants. I like Italian cuisine, but that may be because of my advisor,” he laughs, referencing Professor Emilio Frazzoli of the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, who supervises Sertac’s work at LIDS. Always the engineer, Sertac touts Boston as “the optimal size city”—not so huge that it swallows a newcomer, but not small enough
to create a dearth of things to do.
LIDS, Sertac says, approximates Boston’s friendly energy. “It’s like Boston—it’s not a big lab where nobody knows each other, but it’s also not a small lab where you can’t find people to collaborate with,” he says, citing the prevalence of talks and research opportunities and idea exchange as fundamental tenets of the LIDS environment. LIDS is also, fittingly for Sertac, theory-focused: “I think it’s the best environment at MIT for studying and learning control and decision theory.”
This setting will serve Sertac well as he works on his Masters thesis and then his PhD, which he hopes will focus on more abstract aspects of robotics and AI. The former, due this spring, will tie together his work with natural languages to command multiple unmanned vehicles. “The interesting thing,” he says laughingly, “is that I’ve been working on all these robotics projects, but I don’t think any of this is actually going to go into my thesis.”
Whatever the thesis does contain, however, will address the question of converting natural language to algorithms that allow for a mechanical entity to be controlled by a human with minimal—or no—knowledge of how the system works. “You state the commands in English, and this English has a conversion into a set of symbols that people call logic,” Sertac says, breaking it down into
layman’s terms. “It’s like the logic you learn in high school, but an extension, a temporal extension that includes time in it.” The previously developed algorithm converts the natural language into a plan for the robots, taking into account the order in which tasks should be completed. “The algorithm parses it all out, and the person controlling it doesn’t need to know how many robots you have or how the algorithm works. The person controlling it just says a sentence,” Sertac explains. In other words, the controller gets a free ride, becoming a happy beneficiary of the efforts of Sertac and his colleagues.
This is not to say that it’s all work and no play for Sertac. He’s a regular at the MIT sailing pavilion—drawn particularly by midnight expeditions down the Charles under a full moon—and has played guitar since high school.
Stepping back to Sertac’s preferred realm of the theoretical, it seems appropriate to philosophize about how these leisure activities interface with robotics. Could a robot ever play guitar like a human? Sertac seems certain that one could, in fact he says that pianoplaying robots already exist. “Maybe robots will become intelligent and do that,” he says, then pauses, “but there’s not much of a reason for a robot to play guitar. A robot could look at the notes and everything and play the piece, but when you play an instrument, the impor-
tant thing is that you put something from you into the piece.”
True, the robot would pluck the correct notes and the guitar would produce the corresponding sounds—each part fulfilling its discrete function while remaining ignorant of the other, much like the automated forklift and its remote controller – but only a human can play a guitar or probe the limits of abstract theory in any meaningful way, and Sertac has set his sights to do just that.
CHASING BIG IDEAS
By Rachel VanCott
with additional reporting by Kate Willsky
WhenSanjoy Mitter arrived at MIT in the late summer of 1969, LIDS—then known as the Electronic Systems Laboratory—was still a part of the Institute’s department of Electrical Engineering. The research group had already been the source of several foundational texts in control theory, but it was a lab in transition, shifting in scope as the field of control theory expanded.
As of this year, Sanjoy has spent four decades with MIT and LIDS. Over that time, the lab has grown in size and prominence, and Sanjoy, who served as director or co-director of the lab for nearly two decades, helped LIDS keep pace with the rapid increase of knowledge in information technology and theory. He’s served as director of the Center for Intelligent Control Systems—a collaborative effort that united researchers from MIT, Harvard, and Brown. In the late seventies and eighties, Sanjoy worked to understand “the relationship between the mathematical structure underlying quantum physics and non-linear filtering theory,” and wrote a paper on the subject, which he considers one of the biggest contributions of his career. He has helped advance estimation and filtering theory and been the recipient of several major awards, including the Richard E. Bellman Control Heritage award for his contributions to the theory of automatic control.
But when Sanjoy looks back on his career thus far, he speaks most readily about collaborating with students and colleagues and how seeking answers to big theoretical problems
could shape the future. LIDS, Sanjoy says, is a “very human place” and even seemingly abstract theoretical pursuits are continually interwoven with real world applications.
Most recently, says Sanjoy, he’s been working on unifying the fields of communication and control. The unified view is essential to understand the emerging of Control over Networks. It is associated with the implementation of smart electrical grids, and Sanjoy is working with Professors Munther
But this type of system—a smart grid that relies on sensing technology to send signals through communication channels to controllers that adjust how power is distributed, all without human oversight—is subject to the limitations of communication and control, and those theoretical limitations are currently unknown. So Sanjoy and his colleagues have been working to understand the theoretical edges of these systems.
“I’m very proud of the graduate students I’ve been fortunate to supervise over my career,” says Sanjoy.
Dahleh, Dimitri Bertsekas and Asu Ozdaglar. It’s likely that renewable energy sources—like wind and solar power—will be increasingly valuable as the world’s supply of fossil fuels continues to dwindle. But our ability to use those energy generation methods is limited by their inconsistent performance. Most renewable energy sources are intermittent—when sunlight doesn’t strike solar panels and wind doesn’t turn turbines, the power goes out. A self-regulating “smart” electrical grid could compensate for that inconsistent supply, redirecting power from one source to compensate for a lapse in another.
Theory can also enable applications on a medical level, as Sanjoy’s work with one of his former PhD students, Lakshminarayan Srinivasan, shows. As a student, Sanjoy says, Lakshminarayan was interested in understanding how spatial information is stored in the brain. Everything that we see—the shape of the letters printed here, the size of the paper you’re looking at, the width of the margin—is recorded as electrical signals that are stored in the brain. But what is the nature of that coding? How is that information stored and processed? The answer to that question could provide researchers with a way of creating neural prosthetics that can understand neural signals and translate those signals in the body, when the pathway is otherwise blocked because of injury or neurodegenerative disease. “What you’d like to do,” Sanjoy says, “is implant some prosthetic device in the brain and generate those signals to try to electronically control
the appropriate part of the brain.” Lakshminarayan is now a Neurosurgery research fellow at the Center for Nervous System Repair at Massachusetts General Hospital.
T heory may sound abstract and dry to the layperson, but Sanjoy’s description paints a portrait of a dynamic work environment filled with passionate researchers. Collaboration between professors, students and post-doctoral researchers is commonplace, and Sanjoy works to create a nurturing environment for his students that will let them develop into independent investigators.
“I’m very proud of the graduate students I’ve been fortunate to supervise over my career,” says Sanjoy. “We pay a lot of attention to the fact that students should make their own choice of research problems. The whole process of choosing a research problem is a very important thing,” he pauses, “maybe the most important thing. I interact with [my students] quite closely but give them adequate freedom... There aren’t specific tasks that the students have to fulfill. It’s much more free and open.”
O ver the years, Sanjoy’s collaborations have taken him across the globe and he’s spent considerable time as a visiting professor at universities in Italy, India, and elsewhere. He’s learned much from his travels, made strong personal connections with his collaborators and attracted talented students to MIT through his teaching. Although traveling has been stimulating and fruitful, Sanjoy says he
still prefers the academic atmosphere of his home university.
“I think the intellectual atmosphere that this area offers—not just MIT, but Harvard, Brown, and other universities—would be difficult to find elsewhere,” he says.
by Rachel VanCott
Whenshe came to graduate school, Myung Jin Choi had a simple formula for academic success: “I’ll just study day and night, really hard, for five years and I’ll be like the top researcher in the world, and I’ll graduate.” Back home, in Korea, she’d seen documentaries in which successful people told stories of t he productive but stressful and largely sleepless years that brought them to great heights, and her tireless efforts had served her well so far— MIT was Jin’s top choice for graduate school. But once she settled into her research, Jin realized that there’s much more to it than simple perseverance. Sometimes—in fact, most of the time—research calls for a bit of creativity and a willingness to reconsider what you know.
When she joined LIDS, Jin’s first project was sponsored by multinational oil company Shell. Shell was interested in locating pockets of petroleum stored beneath the ocean floor. Since oil and natural gas are often found near vertical salt formations, called salt domes, which form under the sea bed, scientists use seismic waves to map those features and predict the best places to drill. But the information obtained according to this procedure is incomplete and noisy. Jin’s task was to create a model t hat could help process the data gathered by the geophysicists.
Under the aegis of her advisor, Professor Alan Willsky, Jin set out to develop a model based on the so-called graphical model, which rep -
resents the statistical relationships among a collection of random variables using edges and nodes of a graph. Following approaches of her former labmates, Jin started with a multiscale tree model—which could efficiently represent the relationships between data points using a hierarchy. This type of model looks like a stick drawing of a tree, just like the name suggests. It’s shaped like an inverted tree, where one node is connected to four more nodes, and each of those branches out to four more, and so on.
T he tree model was elegant, but complicated for two-dimensional fields, because to build an accurate tree model, it was necessary to map many variables into each node of the graph. After only one semester in the lab, Jin felt she was stuck. It was around that time that she spotted a poster for an informational session about M IT’s Africa Information Technology Initiative (AITI) —an initiative that sends teams of students to various parts of Africa, where they teach Java programming to high school and college students. Jin had always been interested in using her skills and education to benefit others, and this looked like an ideal opportunity to share her knowledge. Her advisor gave his blessing, and Jin jumped at the chance to travel far from the lab and think about something else for a while.
It takes nearly a day to fly from Boston to Nairobi, Kenya. Jin was excited about the trip, but she admits that she was nervous during the
flight. As an undergraduate, she’d visited Japan and China, and spent one year studying at the University of California, Santa Barbra as an exchange student, but she was still getting used to the cultural change that came with moving to U.S. and she wondered how she’d be received in Africa.
“ Would they perceive us as arrogant Americans who came [as if on a vacation]?” Jin remembers wondering. Would the group seem like patronizing outsiders? Despite her concerns, Jin and the other members of her group found a warm reception. The students were eager to learn and the cultural difficulties that Jin anticipated never materialized, although there were a few communication issues. “English is a second language for both them and me,” says Jin, laughing “so... some barriers were there.”
For six weeks, Jin devoted her energy to her new responsibilities in Kenya. She and four other MIT students divided the work, delivering lectures, preparing assignments, dealing with hardware issues, devising advanced problems for the more ambitious students and—according to the report they wrote after the trip—coping with the lack of hot water at the group apartment.
After the whirlwind of the trip, Jin’s attention returned to her research problem. Suddenly, she found herself taking a new look at her assumptions.
“ I decided it’s better to have a simple model that approximates something, rather than a really complicated model that’s exact. So that was a change,” says Jin. Instead of rigidly adhering to the tree shape, she came up with the idea of adding a few extra edges within each scale of the model. This would create a model that looks like a pyramid, and allow connections between nearby nodes in different branches, rather than requiring that all connections run through the hierarchical edges.
“At first it seemed like a ridiculous idea,” Jin says. Adding those extra edges would allow each node to have one variable rather than many, but it would also create loops in the graph—a characteristic generally believed to make models more difficult to use. But Professor Willsky encouraged her to stay with the t hought and develop it further.
Recent advances in theory have produced several solutions to the loop problem, and Jin was able to use algorithms to manage the complexity created by those extra edges. The final product produced a more efficient way of arriving at the solution. Jin also worked out a way for scientists to update their results when more data were collected, without having to start over. That feature is bound to be valuable for geologists and geophysicists who may collect data over a period of years or decades.
T he “ridiculous” idea that came to Jin on her flight back from Kenya turned into the foun-
dation for her masters thesis, and inspired her current PhD work as well. Collaborating with her labmate Venkat Chandrasekaran, Jin modified the pyramid-shaped model so that it can pick up additional relationships that are left out of the tree model. They applied this new method to model relationships between monthly stock returns and were excited to see that it captured many interesting connections.
One of the strongest of these connections was between Microsoft and Apple, which the standard tree-hierarchy places in completely different branches of the tree because the two belong to separate divisions (Microsoft belongs to the Services division and Apple to the Manufacturing).
T his experience left Jin with a lesson about creativity. “Your productivity is not necessarily proportional to the number of hours you work each day,” says Jin. To do good research, you need to be creative, and to be creative you need to leave some space in your life to find inspiration.
I work on weekends as well, and I work at home,” says Jin, “In grad school, there’s no break. You are a gradate student.” But she makes sure to spend time away from her work every once in a while. Since returning from Kenya, Jin became a member of EECS-REFS—a peer mediation group that lends a friendly ear to students who are having professional or personal issues. Jin remembers how supportive the graduate com-
munity was when she was first starting out at MIT and wants to return the favor, offering support to incoming students and to international students in particular.
Jin also doesn’t limit herself to working at her desk or in her lab. Some of the best ideas come to her at night, when she’s laying in bed, organizing her thoughts, she says, “When I don’t have a paper in front of me, I tend to think at a high level.”
She looks for inspiration from all the usual sources—the scientific literature, and in conversations with friends and labmates. But in t he end, Jin feels that every research project demands a fresh idea—a spark of novelty. After all, a research project is, by definition, something that’s never been done in quite this way before.
THE PROBLEM SOLVER
By Rachel VanCott
LIDS
Alumni Daniel Grunberg jokes that his career is the result of “not ever being able to do the same thing for very long.” The dark-haired engineer and entrepreneur has worked with industrial controls and image processing, co-founded companies, and even pioneered advances in accounting software. Although he’s often shifted focus, he’s never been without a love of engineering or the values and associations he formed at LIDS.
Dan has few illusions about how he landed in graduate school. When he finished his bachelor’s degree
ized tax preparation system that turned Jackson Hewitt into a major competitor in the field. This system was one of the first to feature a dialog interface—where the preparer is asked to answer specific questions, i nstead of filling out spreadsheets.
Dan was promoted to Vice President of Technology, but he left after “the innovation and exciting stuff had been done.” A few years later, he hit upon a formula that satisfied him for a while—Dan formed
“There’s a lot of innovation that you can do, even to what you think is a very mundane thing.”
i n electrical engineering in 1983, the economy was in a recession. So rather than elbow his way into a tough job market, he decided to continue on an academic path. He joined LIDS, where he could keep working with his undergraduate advisor, Michael Athans, studying non-linear control theory.
A fter obtaining his PhD, Dan started his career by building on the relationship he’d formed with his advisor and current LIDS director Alan Willsky, and for a few years he worked as a researcher in their company. But it wasn’t long before intellectual wanderlust set in and Dan left to start on a project of his own for Jackson Hewitt. At the time, the company was making an early attempt at creating tax preparation software, and Dan pulled together a group of MIT colleagues to write a computer-
Chainwave—a one-man consulting firm that he managed while simultaneously working on the board of Boston-based venture capital organization Common Angels.
I n this position, Dan had the opportunity to tackle new problems all the time, moving from one challenge to the next. He worked in industrial control, programming schedules for electroplating robots. He created educational software that allowed students to print and cut out shapes that could be taped together to make geometric figures. He solved sensor problems. Everything intrigued him.
“ I found that for virtually anything that
you do—if you want to do a good job—you get very interested in it,” says Dan, “There’s a lot of innovation that you can do, even to what you think is a very mundane thing.”
Most recently, Dan cofounded a new company, once again collaborating with a number of colleagues from MIT. Together they’re investigating image compression technologies for d istributing video over the Internet.
What Dan describes in jest as a handicap— his need to seek out the next interesting problem—has led to a dynamic career. He’s constantly tackling new subjects, and out of necessity he’s learned to become an expert on any given topic in his field in short order. That skill seems to come from two parts training, one part passion.
“Take a lot of mathematics,” says Dan, repeating the advice he heard so often from his own advisor, “[Math] is really hard to learn on
your own, if you don’t have a certain level of mathematical maturity. The beginning parts have to be learned at school, in a classroom, with a professor to prepare you. After that you can learn on your own.”
Now, Dan says, he can easily pick up a book and learn about, for example, prime number theory. He has mathematical maturity—a characteristic born of a critical mass of mathematical experience.
A lthough he’s grown adept at teaching himself, Dan admits that it’s rarely necessary to understand every detail. Instead, he uses systems thinking—in which you draw a black box a round some parts of the system, and focus on just the inputs and outputs to understand the shape of the problem.
A portion of his success must be attributed simply to his affinity for engineering. “I guess I was what you might call a tinkerer, growing up,” says Dan. He has loved science and engineering for as long as he can remember, but he hasn’t always differentiated between the two. In fact, Dan made it through nearly three years of college as physics major before he discovered his preference for engineering.
“I was in my junior year and I realized I really wasn’t happy with the physics courses. But I loved the engineering courses and... it was just a lot more interesting. I switched and I never
looked back, and that’s not to say that physics is bad and engineering is good, but for me... I was an engineer and not a scientist.”
When asked to distinguish between science and engineering, Dan replies with a quote that he heard in one of first engineering courses at MIT. The phrase comes from HungarianAmerican engineer Theodore von Kármán:
“Scientists study that which is, engineers create that which has never been.” Engineering, Dan explains, has always been “building stuff for a purpose. [E]ven if you’re doing science or mathematics, you’re doing it with a purpose. To build something at the end.”
Recently, Dan had a chance to reflect on his time at MIT and at LIDS, when he went down to Florida for a birthday symposium for Michael Athans.
“A lot of his former students [attended],” says Dan, “there must have been forty or fifty PhD students...and you know in the PhD world, your advisor is like your father. The other students of that advisor are like your siblings, so it was like a big family.”
At the symposium, he spoke about the mathematical maturity he gained under Professor Athans’ guidance, and about how systems thinking aided him as professional problem solver. He recounted how Professor Athans forced him to give talks as a student, and how,
despite Dan’s initial fear of public speaking, he developed strong communication skills, which may have helped him during his years as a consultant.
Dan and his wife Elaine have two children—a daughter in college and a son who is just finishing high school. Neither of the kids have shown a ny sign of going into electrical engineering so far, but Dan happily helped his son—who seems to be leaning toward mechanical engineering—build radio-controlled robots in the family garage.
When he isn’t with his family, running companies, or studying textbooks to gain insight on new projects, Dan donates some of his time to the MIT community. He’s spent the last six years as a member of the advisory board of the MIT museum. While there, he helped oversee the first floor expansion, in which the museum added 5,000 feet of ground floor space. He also helped with the founding of the Cambridge Science Festival—the first science festival in the U.S.
In the immediate future, Dan will continue to work on building up his new company, and doing “the usual start-up thing.” “I haven’t really figured out what goes after that,” he says, with a laugh. But no matter what Dan’s next project brings, it’s certain that he’ll find new problems to solve and new ways to innovate.
2009 LIDS Student Conference
ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
General Chairs
Marco Pavone
Vincent Yan Fu Tan
Steering Committee
Myung Jin Choi
Chung Chan
Ulric Ferner
Sertac Karaman
Mitra Osqui
Yuan Shen
Kyle Treleaven
Mengdi Wang
SPEAKERS
Mukul Agarwal
Amir Ali Ahmadi
Anima Anandkumar
Prof. Andrew Barron
Brett Bethke
Kostas Bimpikis
Utku Ozan Candogan
Prof. Christos G. Cassandras
Myung Jin Choi
Apostolos Fertis
Srikanth Jagabathula
Kyomin Jung
Georgia-Evangelia Katsargyri
Urs Niesen
Alexander Olshevsky
Marco Pavone
Sameera Ponda
Prof. Vincent Poor
Jaime Ramirez
Michael Rinehart
Jin Woo Shin
Prof. Steve Shreve
Vincent Tan
Kush R. Varshney
Lav R. Varshney
Theophane Weber
Alan Willsky
Yi-Chieh Wu
Tauhid Zaman
2009 Events @ LIDS
Breaking Ultrawide Barriers
By Rachel VanCott
“Does it work?” asks a student in a blue shirt, who pauses to examine the experimental set up that occupies much of the lobby near LIDS headquarters. On this rainy afternoon, the checkered carpet is covered in carefully spaced, numbered, paper dots, and four utility carts, each with a small black radio transmitter box affixed to the top, are in position around the area.
“We’re putting it on each dot,” explains post-doctoral researcher Henk Wymeersch, gesturing to his laptop, which is perched on one of the carts, “and we’re going to collect the—” “But does it work?” the student interjects.
Thisunique demonstration of a locationaware network is part of the third and final stage of a project led by Professor Moe Win, head of the Wireless Communications and Network Sciences group at LIDS. If it works, this trial will show for the first time that ultrawide bandwidth (UWB) radio signals can be used in practice to create cooperative location-aware networks. This type of network would offer a new way to track the position of a transmitter—and anyone holding that transmitter—even in settings where GPS doesn’t work.
It could be used in a military setting to track the position of each member of a team deployed within a building, or to give drivers a sense of direction in parking garages and “urban canyons”—where towering buildings block GPS signals. “This is the culmination of three years of our effort,” says Moe.
Other labs are equally eager to demonstrate use of the UWB radio technology, and they are also racing to show that it can be done. But LIDS has at least one advantage that no other lab can duplicate: Moe—a professor and experienced researcher who started working with UWB signals more than ten years before the technology was approved by the FCC for commercial use. “When I started working on ultra wideband, there were very few people working on this. Maybe five people across the country,” Moe recalls, “I used to know every-
body. Now there’s a conference with hundreds of people just working on UWB, a special conference all for ultra wideband.”
Ultrawide bandwidth signals, unlike the normal “narrowband” radio that we’re more familiar with, are broadcast with very wide ranges of frequency, and require correspondingly lower power. Normal radio antennas can’t easily pick up UWB signals—which means that this technology has the potential to change the face of both commercial and clandestine communications.
Throughout the afternoon, Moe brings colleagues to see the demonstration and members of the lab take on the tedious business of moving the cart across the grid of dots in shifts. At each stopping point, the UWB transmitter mounted on the cart—the researchers call this transmitter “the agent”—sends signals to all other radios in range. The agent records how long it takes to get a response from the other radios, and tries to determine its position. The researchers can instantly see how well the agent’s guesses match its actual position.
The simulations that the team ran suggest that the agent should be better able to determine its position when it cooperates with other “agent” radios that are also wandering in the field, rather than relying only on radio transmitters that have a fixed, known, position. Halfway through the trial, they uncover a minor bug
in the code, and the researchers head back to their desks to find and repair the problem. It’s a quick fix, but because of the error they have to start collecting data points all over again. Still, spirits are high. They have the answer. Yes, it works.
Professor Win and a team of undergraduate and graduate students from multiple departments competed in the Institute of Soldier Nanotechnologies (ISN) soldier design competition. In this contest they demonstrated a cooperative location-aware network for GPSdenied environments, using UWB technology, leading to the team winning the L3 Communications Prize.
Moe has been a professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics for seven years, and Moe says that he “lives” where his lab and students are—in LIDS. The professor completed his undergraduate studies at Texas A&M, his graduate work at the University of Southern California, and spent time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and at the AT&T Research labs in New Jersey before coming to teach at MIT.
Moe is proud that students in his lab are exposed to a range of scientific thought—they use theory to determine the best possible outcome in a given scenario, create algorithms to find practical ways to achieve this, and put the theory to the test through experimentation.
Because they carry their research all the way through, from theory to experimentation, the students must keep their theoretical assumptions realistic and relevant. The three-stage approach also creates the opportunity for undergraduates or less-experienced lab members to participate in leading-edge research that might otherwise be too theoretically complex, by participating in the experimental part of the research. “At the early stages in their career, [students] don’t necessarily have a very deep knowledge of theory, and it takes years to develop,” says Moe, “But if they are involved in some level of laboratory experimentation as part of the program, with senior students, it gives them an opportunity to have exposure to state of the art research early in their careers.”
Moe didn’t find his own love of engineering, mathematics, and experimentation until he was given a chance to work on a research project one summer, back when he was still an inexperienced undergraduate at Texas A&M. His junior lab members, such as Spencer Parra and Keone Hon, have less experience, but they make up for it with their dedication. “This isn’t just a drill problem,” Moe says, “[the undergraduates] are really involved in the forefront of this research.”
Cutting edge research comes with a price: long hours. Moe and Henk collect data until the evening, when many of the office lights in the Stata center have gone out.
Yuan Shen, one of Moe’s current Ph.D. students, worked on the theoretical end of this project and generated three academic papers as part of his master’s work—two of which have already been accepted by prestigious journals. Other members in the lab include Wesley Gifford and Watcharapan (Ae) Suwansantisuk. Wes has been the driving force behind getting much of the high precision measurement equipment working in the lab, and has developing an automated channel measurement apparatus. Ae is working on network synchronization, which aims to make clocks in the network tick at the same rate. Both Wes and Ae recently received a best paper award at an IEEE conference on next-generation wireless communications. “The students hold themselves to the highest standard,” says Moe.
Moe spends a lot of time with his students, in and outside of the lab. The group bonds on hiking and camping trips, and on weekends Moe cooks for the students who come by his house in search of academic help. They bring him problems and he offers guidance, homecooked meals and barbecue delights. “I think that was what attracted me to the lab,” jokes Yuan. “Yuan asked me, ‘Can you give me your barbecue recipe? What’s your secret?” Moe says, laughing, “[I said] the day that I sign your thesis I’ll give you my secret recipe.”
Until then, Yuan and the members of Moe’s lab will just have to keep coming back to his enticing cookouts and pushing the boundaries of their field with their characteristic mix of theory, algorithms, and experimentation.
Sound Bites: Lynne Dell
What’s your official job title and function at LIDS?
I’m an administrative assistant. There are five different faculty members that I support. I process lots of requests—travel, supporting student visitors. I also help with coordinating events at LIDS, like the LIDS Student Conference, or the Friday socials. And I’m always here if headquarters needs support.
Sounds like a lot of responsibilities. Do you ever get worn out?
I do a lot of things, but I love it. I have a lot of energy, it’s just who I am. It makes me happy when I make something happen and everyone gets what they need.
How long have you been at LIDS?
Since October 2000, and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. There’s always something exciting here, which is great. I’m a people person, I like working with the community, making people happy.
What were you doing before you came here?
I was working at the Framingham Public Library, doing bookkeeping. I had heard a lot of good things about MIT, and a friend told me about a job opening, and I came in. I was lucky; I got the job. It was a new thing for me to work in academia. MIT has a lot of opportunities for employees, so much training and so many courses, so many skills to learn here.
Where did you grow up?
I’m originally from Cambodia. I moved to the US in 1975 after the communist takeover. I left with my four-year-old daughter and fourmonth-old son, and my mom and dad. We left by boat for Thailand. We were lucky enough to know an American officer who brought
us over to America. When we first got here we lived in an army camp in Pennsylvania, sleeping in bunk beds, for three months.
How do you like living in Boston?
I love Massachusetts. I love Boston. People here are very nice. Here, if you make friends, they’re your friends for good; they’re like family. That’s what I love about living here. And I have the best job in the world. I’ve been at LIDS almost nine years, and I still love what I’m doing. It’s a great environment, working with all the students from different countries and with all of the different faculty with their different personalities.
Do you have any interesting stories from your time at LIDS?
I caught a burglar in the building once, completely by accident. I saw this big guy walk past me, and I asked if I could help him. He told me he was looking for someone, and walked away. I got suspicious, because usually people have a room number or a floor, so I followed him all the way to the elevator. I asked him if he had found who he was looking for, and he said “No,” and took the elevator down. I called headquarters, and the police came, and it turns out it was a thief they had been looking for who had been loitering around campus. They said, “Lynne, you had
nerve.” I said, “Well I didn’t know he was a thief!”
What do you do when you’re not working?
I’ve been writing my memoir for almost three years now. I have a lot of stories to tell. I’m working on it with a friend. Right now it’s about 170 pages long, and we’re looking for a publisher. I’m also active in the Cambodian Community of Massachusetts—I was the President of their Board of Directors for five years and even did a newscast for Cambodian cable television. I also took a screenwriting class at Harvard Extension, which was great, and let me meet a lot of interesting people. Maybe one day I can make my memoir into a movie.
LIDS
Colloquia & Seminars
2008-2009
Weekly colloquia & seminars are a highlight of the LIDS experience. Each talk, which features a visiting or internal invited speaker, provides the LIDS community an unparalleled opportunity to meet with and learn from scholars at the forefront of their fields.
The Stochastic Systems Group seminar schedule can be found at: http://ssg.mit.edu/cal/cal.shtml
Listed in order of appearance.
RESEARCH AREAS
Tal Shima Technion
Eduardo Sontag
Rutgers
Naira Hovakimyan U. Of Illinois UC
Nir Sochen Tel Aviv
Misha Chertkov Los Alamos
Jeanette Wing CMU and NSF
Prakash Narayan U of Maryland
Sergio Verdu Princeton
Robert Nowak U of Wisconsin, Madison
Michael Jordan UC Berkeley
David Weiss U Penn &
Lester Mackey
UC Berkeley
Hana El-Samad
UC Santa Barbara
Dimitris Bertsimas MIT
Eric Feron Georgia Tech
Sergiu Hart
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Anouck Girard U. Michigan
Tryphon Georgiou UMN
Domitilla Del Vecchio U. Michigan
Stefano Soatto UCLA
Eli Upfal Brown
Peter Caines McGill
Al Hero U. Michigan
LIDS News & Honors
Congratulations to our members for the following achievements!
Amir Ali Ahmadi is an IEEE Control Systems Society, 2008 Conference on Decision and Control Best StudentPaper Award Finalist.
LIDS visiting student Animashree Anandkumar was selected for the 2008 IEEE Signal Processing Society Young Author Best Paper Award. Animashree also received the 2008 Fran Allen IBM award, given annually to one female PhD student in conjunction with the IBM PhD fellowship. She was the recipient of the Best Thesis Award at the Sigmetrics Conference, as well.
Administrative Assistant Lynne Dell was the recipient of a 2009 School of Engineering Infinite Mile Award for Excellence.
Prof. David Forney, together with his co-author Daniel Costello Jr., was the recipient of the 2009 IEEE Donald G. Fink Prize Paper Award.
LIDS post-doc Julien Hendrickx received the EECI PhD Award, given annually in recognition of the best PhD thesis in Europe in the field of Embedded and Networked Control. Julien is also the winner of the 2009 Alcatel-Bell-Lucent scientific prize for a Belgian PhD thesis on original new concepts and/or applications in the field of information and communication technologies.
Srikanth Jagabathula received the Best Student Paper Award at NIPS 2008 for the paper: Inferring Rankings Under Constrained Sensing, by Srikanth Jagabathula and Devavrat Shah. Srikanth also received the Ernst Guillemin Thesis Award from EECS.
Prof. Jeff Shapiro, with Prof. Horace P. Yuen of Northwestern University, was the recipient of the Quantum Electronics
Award from the IEEE Lasers and Electro-Optics Society in May 2008. Prof. Shapiro also received the Quantum Communication Award for Theoretical Research from Tamagawa University in August 2008.
Prof. Eduardo Sontag was elected an inaugural Fellow of SIAM.
Jay-Kumar Sundararajan was one of four students nationwide to receive a 2008 Marconi Society Young Scholar Award.
Shreevatsa Rajagopalan and Jin Woo Shin , received the Outstanding Student Paper Award at the ACM Signmetrics/Performance Conference for the paper “Network Adiabatic Theorem: An Efficient Randomized Protocol for Contention Resolution,” by S. Rajagopalan, D. Shah and J. Shin.
On October 8 2008, the Université catholique de Louvain conferred the title of Doctor Honoris Causa to Prof. John Tsitsiklis in recognition of his fundamental contributions to the theory and application of optimization in distributed and stochastic systems. Prof. Tsitsiklis also received the Advisor of the Year 2008-2009 award from the MIT ACM/IEEE Chapter.
Kush Varshney was recognized as having one of the outstanding student papers at the 2009 International Conference on Fusion.
Spyridon Zoumpoulis was awarded the Adler Electrical Engineering M.Eng. thesis second prize, for his thesis “Decentralized Detection in Sensor Networks with Feedback,” co-supervised by Prof. John Tsitsiklis and Dr. Pat Kreidl.