Pattie Maes (MIT Media Lab)

We are turning into cyborgs. Kids in de developed world typically get their first smart phone around the age of 14 and soon after they become inseparable from their device. The device functions as an external brain with users relying on it to remember information and answer questions rather than using their internal problem solving and memorizing capabilities. Unfortunately the way in which we currently interact with our smart phones leaves a lot to wish for: the use of the device is typically distracting, the I/O bandwidth is very limited, and competing apps encourage multi-tasking and short attention span. In this talk I will argue that the only viable solution is for our future devices to become integrated with us and augment our entire experience, including the way we perceive, process and act on the world. I will illustrate this concept with example systems we have built at the MIT Media Lab that actively assist users with memory, learning and decision making tasks.

Pattie Maes is a professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences and head of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences. She founded and directs the Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces research group. Her areas of expertise are human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence. She is particularly interested in the topic of human augmentation, or how systems can actively assist people with memory, learning, decision making, communication and physical skills.

Maes is the editor of three books, and is an editorial board member and reviewer for numerous professional journals and conferences. She has received many awards: Fast Company named her one of 50 most influential designers (2011); Newsweek picked her as one of the "100 Americans to watch for" in the year 2000; TIME Digital selected her as a member of the “Cyber Elite,” the top 50 technological pioneers of the high-tech world; the World Economic Forum honored her with the title "Global Leader for Tomorrow"; Ars Electronica awarded her the 1995 World Wide Web category prize; and in 2000 she was recognized with the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council. She has also received an honorary doctorate from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, and her 2009 TED talk is among the most-watched TED talks ever.

In addition to her academic endeavors, Maes has been an active entrepreneur as co-founder of several venture-backed companies, including Firefly Networks (sold to Microsoft), Open Ratings (sold to Dun & Bradstreet) and more recently Tulip (privately held). She remains an advisor to, and investor in, several MIT spinoffs.

Prior to joining the Media Lab, Maes was a visiting professor and a research scientist at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab. She holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and a PhD in artificial intelligence from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium.

Thyaga Nandagopal (NSF)

Wireless systems are becoming an ubiquitous part of everyday life. Some of the most common systems have become commoditized, enabling higher-layer application-driven research while at the same time inhibiting lower-layer research. On the other hand, new frontiers of wireless communications are opening up in various spectrum bands hitherto not used for wireless data communications. This talk will cover the future of wireless systems-driven research and contributions to science & technology from the vantage point of the NSF.

Dr. Thyaga Nandagopal is a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in the Directorate of Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE), where he manages wireless networking and mobile computing research across multiple funding programs. At NSF, he is spearheading the NSF Advanced Wireless Initiative, a $400M effort announced in July 2016. He also serves as the co-chair of the Wireless Spectrum Research and Development Senior Steering Group (WSRD SSG), which co-ordinates spectrum-related research and development activities across the Federal government. He is an IEEE Fellow.

Matthai Philipose, Microsoft Research

In the next five years, the mobile phone will transform from the reactive internet-access device of today into a proactive personal assistant. A key challenge in this transformation is the quintessentially systems problem of executing Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) in a manner that is cheap, accurate and private end-to-end.

In this talk, I will develop a view of DNNs as a new kind of program. Using examples from my own work and that of others, I will sketch how some of the recent overwhelming flood of results around DNNs can be understood in terms of the development, compilation, code generation, runtime support, hardware acceleration and secure execution of these programs. My hope is that when DNNs are cast in these terms, (mobile) systems researchers will dive into their guts rather than treat them as application-level black boxes to be profiled and accommodated gingerly!

I will end with two challenge problems, one systems-oriented and the other applications-oriented.

Matthai Philipose is a researcher at Microsoft. He builds AI-based systems that work under resource constraints. For the past few years, he has focused on making neural-network based computer vision pipelines efficient, from a re-designed wearable camera pipeline to efficient designs for GPU-based computer vision clusters in the cloud. His awards include a test-of-time award at PLDI (programming languages) and best paper awards at ISWC (wearable computing) and Mobisys (mobile systems). He worked at Intel for a decade before moving to Microsoft. He has a BS from Cornell University and a PhD from the University of Washington, both in Computer Science.

David Erickson (Cornell)

Smartphones and other mobile technologies will be transformative to the deployment of biomolecular diagnostics both domestically and worldwide. In this talk, I will review the existing commercial and technical roadblocks to the deployment molecular diagnostics to the consumer market and how they can be fundamentally altered by taking advantage of the now ubiquitous installed base of smartphones. I will discuss two technologies in this talk. The first is our NutriPhone technology which is designed to detect micronutrient and vitamin deficiencies both in both individuals and populations. The second is our FeverPhone system which is a diagnostic device aimed at differentially diagnosing the six most common causes of febrile illness. In addition to covering the basic engineering science advancements that led to the development of these technologies, I will also discuss our strategies for deployment and commercialization.

David Erickson is the Sibley College Professor in the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. His research focuses on: mobile and global health technology, microfluidics, photonics, and nanotechnology. Prior to joining the faculty, he was a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology and he received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto. Research in the Erickson lab is primarily funded through grants from the NSF, NIH, ARPA-E, ONR, DOE and DARPA. Prof. Erickson has helped to found numerous start-up companies commercializing: high-throughput particle analysis instrumentation, biomedical diagnostics, and mobile health technologies. In recent years, Dr. Erickson has received the DARPA-MTO Young Faculty Award, the NSF CAREER Award, the Department of Energy Early Career Award, among others. In 2011 he was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientist and Engineers (PECASE) by President Obama. For his efforts in co-founding the field of optofluidics, Erickson has been named a fellow of the Optical Society of America and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.