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MIT Tech TV

Shun Kanda, Senior Lecturer, MIT School of Architecture + Planning, discusses the Japan 3.11 project.In December, two School of Architecture + Planning alumni conducted a workshop in Istanbul that brought together 24 young architects, planners and engineers — half from Armenia, half from Turkey — for a weeklong series of lectures, discussions and site visits focused on environmental sustainability.While the primary aim of the workshop was professional development, the organizers hope to create a cross-border network of faculty, students and young professionals that will foster human bonds and enhance understanding between the two estranged countries. Read moreLast August, Hurricane Irene spun through the Caribbean and parts of the eastern United States, leaving widespread wreckage in its wake. The Category 3 storm whipped up water levels, generating storm surges that swept over seawalls and flooded seaside and inland communities. Many hurricane analysts suggested, based on the wide extent of flooding, that Irene was a “100-year event”: a storm that only comes around once in a century. However, researchers from MIT and Princeton University have found that with climate change, such storms could make landfall far more frequently, causing powerful, devastating storm surges every three to 20 years. The group simulated tens of thousands of storms under different climate conditions, finding that today’s “500-year floods” could, with climate change, occur once every 25 to 240 years. The researchers published their results in the current issue of Nature Climate Change.MIT postdoc Ning Lin, lead author of the study, says knowing the frequency of storm surges may help urban and coastal planners design seawalls and other protective structures.“When you design your buildings or dams or structures on the coast, you have to know how high your seawall has to be,” Lin says. “You have to decide whether to build a seawall to prevent being flooded every 20 years.”Lin collaborated with Kerry Emanuel, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, as well as with Michael Oppenheimer and Erik Vanmarcke at Princeton. The group looked at the impact of climate change on storm surges, using New York City as a case study. To simulate present and future storm activity in the region, the researchers combined four climate models with a specific hurricane model. The combined models generated 45,000 synthetic storms within a 200-kilometer radius of Battery Park, at the southern tip of Manhattan.They studied each climate model under two scenarios: a “current climate” condition representing 1981 to 2000 and a “future climate” condition reflecting the years 2081 to 2100, a prediction based on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s projections of future moderate carbon dioxide output. While there was some variability among the models, the team generally found that the frequency of intense storms would increase due to climate change. Once they simulated storms in the region, the researchers then simulated the resulting storm surges using three different models, including one used by the National Hurricane Center (NHC). In the days or hours before a hurricane hits land, the NHC uses a storm-surge model to predict the risk and extent of flooding from the impending storm. Such models, however, have not been used to evaluate multiple simulated storms under a scenario of climate change. Again, the group compared results from multiple models: one from the NHC which simulates storm surges quickly, though coarsely; another model that generates more accurate storm surges, though less efficiently; and a model in between, developed by Lin and her colleagues, that estimates relatively accurate surge floods, relatively quickly. Today, a “100-year storm” means a surge flood of about two meters, on average, in New York. Roughly every 500 years, the region experiences towering, three-meter-high surge floods. Both scenarios, Lin notes, would easily top Manhattan’s seawalls, which stand 1.5 meters high. But with added greenhouse gas emissions, the models found that a two-meter surge flood would instead occur once every three to 20 years; a three-meter flood would occur every 25 to 240 years.“The highest [surge flood] was 3.2 meters, and this happened in 1821,” Lin says. “That’s the highest water level observed in New York City’s history, which is like a present 500-year event.”Carol Friedland, an assistant professor of construction management and industrial engineering at Louisiana State University, sees the group’s results as a useful tool to inform coastal design — particularly, she notes, as most buildings are designed with a 60- to 120-year “usable lifespan.” “The physical damage and economic loss that result from storm surge can be devastating to individuals, businesses, infrastructure and communities,” Friedland says. “For current coastal community planning and design projects, it is essential that the effects of climate change be included in storm-surge predictions.”MIT President Susan Hockfield and about a dozen members of the MIT faculty traveled to Davos, Switzerland, last week to participate in the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum (WEF). The five-day meeting, which brings together leaders in business, politics, academia and other areas, hosted a variety of discussions revolving around this year’s theme: “The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models.” A troubled global economy with high unemployment dominated many of the meeting’s conversations. In a panel on the future of economics, economists including Peter Diamond, Institute Professor Emeritus and a winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Economics, and MIT graduates Bob Shiller and Joe Stiglitz agreed that many economic models failed to recognize the nature of the current economic crisis because they largely ignored the effects of contagion and connectedness — unable to factor in the financial connections between institutions and the global risk of bankruptcy cascades. Panelists said more attention to models recognizing the role of collateral and new models, such as those incorporating behavioral economics, may offer a more accurate outlook.MIT researchers also said that basic research in neuroscience will play a significant role in shaping societies, behavior and economic progress. MIT President Susan Hockfield spoke at Davos of the importance of basic brain research in fields other than neuroscience.“New findings from neuroscience will have profound implications in fields far beyond the brain and mind, and well beyond psychology or medicine,” Hockfield said.An analysis of how human nature could improve society was the topic of discussion among faculty members H. Robert Horvitz, the David H. Koch Professor of Biology and a Nobel laureate; Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience; Alex “Sandy” Pentland, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences; and Tomaso Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Brain Sciences and Human Behavior. One example is what the group termed “trust networks”: communities, such as open-source software users, that combine technical know-how with a certain amount of trust. Code creators, sharers and users need to trust each other in order to build on and propagate a software program. The researchers argued that understanding how trust plays into such large-scale networks may foster more successful innovations for society. The researchers also discussed new advances in brain imaging, exploring the ever-closing gap between artificial and human intelligence. In the near future, they said, neuroscientists may be able to construct a precise model of the human brain, which could serve as a testing ground for potential therapies as well as a blueprint for artificially intelligent machines. Yossi Sheffi, the Elisha Gray II Professor of Engineering Systems, moderated a panel on vulnerabilities in the global supply chain. Piracy, the effects of climate change, and weaknesses in cybersecurity are significant risks to the global trade of goods and services; panelists suggested that governments work together to reduce the impact of such risks.Other MIT researchers who participated in Davos this year included Ed Boyden, the Benesse Career Development Associate Professor of Research in Education; Neil Gershenfeld, Director of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms; Carlo Ratti, Associate Professor of the Practice in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and Director of the SENSEable City Laboratory; Adèle NaudĂŠ Santos, Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning; and Tim Berners-Lee, 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering and director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).Ed Boyden participated in a panel on leadership, in which panelists looked at the complex pressures that leaders face, including rapidly changing environments, technology, and social crises. Carlo Ratti presented a project for a new, interactive urban design in Mexico, called Ciudad Creativa Digital, with Mexican president Felipe Calderon. Adèle NaudĂŠ Santos and Neil Gershenfeld contributed to a broad discussion on innovations in social and technological models. Gershenfeld noted that smart materials and the digital revolution have made it possible for ordinary people to create new technologies, while Santos argued that the physical environment — particularly modern cities — is essential to making connections between people. Susan Hockfield and MIT hosted three private events: a breakfast discussion about neuroscience moderated by Nature Editor in Chief Philip Campbell and featuring Bob Horvitz, Nancy Kanwisher and Tomaso Poggio; a dinner discussion about the fate of the Eurozone featuring Peter Diamond and Nouriel Roubini, a Professor of Economics and International Business at New York University’s Stern School made famous for having predicted the housing crisis; and a reception for friends of MIT. Hockfield, who serves as a Director of the WEF, said, “The large number of MIT faculty in attendance covered a lot of academic ground, but one message they all sent to Forum attendees was this: solving the toughest problems in the world requires science, mathematics and engineering. It’s an important message in any era and particularly important in times of fiscal austerity.””I’m fascinated by the way humanity has constructed ideas of time as tools for understanding and moving through our world, and how these ideas have come to shape our memories, myths and histories, revised over every age.”Read more”I’m interested in the intersections of new, networked technologies and the urban environment. We are now able to see a city and its people in real-time as we cull from the data created through the normal activities of life. The challenge, and my interest, is how we begin to ‘close the loop’ and use these technological opportunities to impact how we use, see, plan and design the city in new ways (…real time?).”Read moreEran Ben-Joseph’s Bronx practicum was one of 10 winners out of 150 submissions to a design competition sponsored by the Institute for Urban Design; their work was showcased in an exhibit and a special publication at the first ever Urban Design Week Festival in New York City.Masoud Akbarzadeh MArch ’11 has been awarded a $20K Research and Travel Fellowship from the Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Foundation; this is the second year in a row the fellowship has gone to a student from SA+P: last year the distinction went to Azra Dawood SMArchS ’10; both continue their studies here this year.Marcelo Coelho MAS PhD ’12 and Jamie Zigelbaum MAS SM ’09 won Honorary Mention in Interactive Arts at Ars Electronica this year for their project Six-Forty by Four-Eighty, a lighting installation composed of magnetic, physical pixels, stainless steel and remote controllers.Eric Jay Dolin PhD ’95 has received a slew of awards for his most recent book, Fur, Fortune, and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America, including being chosen as one of the best books of 2010 by The Seattle Times and one of the top 10 books of 2010 by the Rocky Mountain Land Library.Maryam Eskandari SMArchS ’11 will present her thesis ‘(Re)Constructing the Place of Gender in Contemporary American Mosque’ at the ACSA Conference in Houston in October.Topher McDougal MCP ’07, PhD ’11 has published his thesis, ‘Law of the Landless: The Dalit Bid for Land Redistribution in Gujarat, India’ as a peer-reviewed article in the L&D Review.Tony Pizzigati SB ’92, an early advocate of open-source computing, died in an car accident on his way to work in Silicon Valley in 1995; his legacy is honored by the annual Antonio Pizzigati Prize for Software in the Public Interest, the nation’s highest honor for software developers working with nonprofits to help advance innovative social change. Nominations have now opened for this year’s $10K prize.Nithya Raman MCP ’08 has published an article in the inaugural issue of Urban Affairs, a peer-reviewed publication put out by Economic and Political Weekly; ‘The Board and the Bank: Changing Policies towards Slums in Chennai’ is based on her MCP thesis. Kelly Robinson PhD ’91 has been appointed director of the Cornwall Center at Rutgers-Newark, a part of the School of Public Affairs and Administration promoting research and interchange among scholars of urban and metropolitan life, government leaders, community-based organizations and private citizens.Alice Shay and Stephen Kennedy, MCP candidates, are among three finalist teams in the AECOM Design + Planning student design competition; they are competing for a prize of up to $15K with up to $25K of in-kind donation to be made available to a charitable organization to help realize the winning entry.Steve Weikal MSRED/MCP ’08 is developing Concord Riverwalk, a pocket neighborhood of high-performance homes in West Concord, Mass., designed for minimal environmental impact, with craftsman-like quality, and featuring a Net Zero Energy standard; more than 75 percent of the homes are already sold.Andres Sevtsuk SM ’06, PhD ’10, principal investigator of the City Form Research Group, has announced a new Urban Network Analysis toolbox to help urban planners describe the spatial patterns of cities, using network analysis methods such as those used to study social networks; the new toolbox is distributed as free and open-source plug-in.