Boston's fleeting edge in innovation

One country after another is racing to build the capacity for innovation which is increasingly viewed as a hallmark of national success. In March 2008 the UK released a white paper with a sweeping innovation agenda, joining China, Canada, Denmark, India, Israel, Korea, and many others which are putting put innovation squarely in the middle of their plans to drive economic and social development.

Why worry about all of the other countries whose government policies push innovation? After all, there is no place like Massachusetts, which provides a competitive advantage that is hard to duplicate. Just last week, Massachusetts ranked as the nation’s top state in technology and science, according to the Milken Institutes's 2008 State Technology and Science Index.

According to John Kao, we have plenty to worry about. In his book, Innovation Nation: How America Is Losing Its Innovation Edge, Why It Matters, and What We Can Do to Get It Back, all the key advantages we once enjoyed are nearly gone. Kao was the keynote at a recent forum organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His strongest point is that the geography of innovation is changing. For much of the 20th century, the leading-edge was the U.S. and Europe. The rise of Asia is evening that out, redistributing the fruits of innovation: wealth and power.

— Talent is now everywhere. The return to greatness of Asia’s older universities and the building of new educational institutions mean that brainpower is more evenly distributed. In addition, a giant reverse diaspora is under way as tens of thousands of Chinese and Indian scientists and engineers, many of them tops in their fields, leave the U.S. to return to their homelands to teach and work.

— Capital is now everywhere. Venture capital pools are operating all over Asia and Europe, speeding the generation of new startups. European and American VC firms have offices in most major cities in Asia and Eastern Europe.

— Route 128 is now everywhere. The social and economic ecosystem that has been so productive is being reproduced all over the world. Bangalore in India, Biopolis in Singapore, and the Otaniemi tech cluster in Finland have found the magic once mainly centered in U.S. innovation hubs.

— Military spending is now everywhere. The high tech spin-off benefits that once accrued mostly to the U.S. are being spread around. A 2006 Defense Dept. survey of 42 leading-edge technologies for future weapons found that 20 came from outside the U.S.

This new global competition in research and innovation is felt most acutely in regions like Boston that compete on the smarts of its workers and the technology prowess of its firms. As explained by Jack Wilson, President of the University of Massachusetts:

"Massachusetts has employed a simple formula to create a vibrant economy: Rely on the innovations produced by outstanding higher education and healthcare institutions, corporations and individuals to build the enterprises that fuel our economic engine. While this recipe has worked well for a century, it may no longer be enough to secure our economic future. Increased competition is eroding historical advantages in higher education and research that have been at the heart of our success…."

Kao argues that the U.S. still has the capability not only to regain our competitive edge, but to take a bold step out ahead of the global community and secure a leadership role in the twenty-first century. The centerpiece of his idea is to spend $20 billion to create 20 innovation hubs around the country. The model would be San Diego, which transformed itself from a Navy town into a life-sciences and biotech center in 15 years.

Kao is far from alone in calling for a national innovation strategy. In May the National Academy of Sciences issued a collection of studies, “Innovation in Global Industries,” an analysis of innovation in several important industries. In April the Brookings Institution produced a report, “Boosting Productivity, Innovation and Growth Through an Innovation Foundation.”

“His theme resonates with what we are seeing in much of the rest of the scientific community,” Alan I. Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in an interview in the New York Times. “There is a lot of competition around the world as more and more countries realize that investing in science fuels innovation over the long term and leads to economic growth.”

What role can UMass Boston play in innovation?

According to a report by the Battelle Memorial Institute for UMass Boston, Research Reenvisioned for the 20th Century:

"In the future, UMass Boston’s research capacities will be critical as the region needs to address the new global competition in research and innovation. UMass Boston, in fulfilling its urban mission, needs to respond to new challenges facing the Boston region. None may be as significant and far-reaching to the region’s economic vitality as the rise of global competition in research and innovation. For the first time, states and regions in the U.S. are facing competition from developing nations not only in lower cost production, but also in research activities and the high skilled talent and innovation it drives.

The continued development of UMass Boston’s research base can be an important element in how the region responds to this growing competitive challenge in research and innovation. As the only public university in the Boston region, UMass Boston can grow its research base in a manner that directly embraces its “urban mission” by focusing on “use-inspired basic research” for addressing the gaps in translating innovation between basic university research and the more applied and development-focused research of industry. In this way, UMass Boston can advance research efforts defined in concert with industry and community stakeholders, while seeking to be collaborators with existing private research universities in the Boston area filling in critical interdisciplinary research."

Another boost for the Venture Development Center

Underway in the heart of Wheatley Hall on the campus of the University of Massachusetts Boston (UMass Boston) is an 18,000 sf high-tech metal-and-glass innovation center. Called the Venture Development Center (VDC), it will be completed in fall 2008, with operations beginning early 2009.

The project's purpose is to provide laboratory, office and collaboration space for research-oriented organizations to be close to UMass Boston’s researchers - to promote exchange of knowledge and commercialization of research.

"This is UMass Boston's first effort to create space on campus for joint research and development with industry and others," according to William Brah, assistant vice provost for research and executive director, Venture Development Center.

The project received a big boost last week with notification of a $1.5 million award from the federal Economic Development Administration (EDA), the only award made in the Boston metropolitan region. According to the announcement, "We believe this will be an exceptionally successful and economically lasting project." EDA’s investments have two goals: attracting private capital investment and creating higher-skill, higher-wage jobs. Last year, UMass Boston received $4 million in funding for construction of the VDC from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Executive Office of Housing and Economic Development.

The investments by federal and state economic development agencies underscore the role of UMass Boston as a source of innovation for the economy. The project’s location in Dorchester is especially significant to the economic development agencies, since the area exemplifies a significant challenge facing the Greater Boston region, that of spreading the benefits of the growth of the innovation economy to its inner-ring.

Life science research and development is the most promising inner-ring opportunity, according to most analysts. The VDC project positions UMass Boston for innovators in their very early stage that need small, reasonably priced lab and office space and need to collaborate with the university.

After three workshops attended by faculty members from across the university, Sasaki Associates Inc. designed a very flexible and adaptable facility to support how researchers work today to produce the innovations of tomorrow. The design features four small group collaboration spaces, one large group collaboration/presentation space, temporary offices and labs (two dry, two with fume hoods, two without) and informal gathering areas. It enables innovators to move from insight to discussion, sketching, modeling, computing, experimenting then feedback and informal debriefing, all in the same place.

This month an important construction milestone was met. Metal stud installation and framing were completed, and drywall installation is underway.

Developing bioinformatics tools for conservation science and education

Edward O. Wilson, a retired Harvard professor, in “The Future of Life," writes that "to conserve biological diversity is an investment in immortality," as it serves as a survival mechanism for our species and ourselves. But he predicts that at current rates, half of the Earth's plant and animal species will cease to exist by the end of the century, taking with them their genetic legacy and potential benefits to the world.

At the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, nearly all countries of the world promised to “achieve by 2010 a significant reduction in the current rate of loss of biological diversity.” An army of scientists, conservationists and organizations are working to measure and communicate the state of biodiversity to help drive effective decision-making in support of conservation, similar to recent successes in moving data on climate change into global policymaking.

UMass Boston’s Robert Morris, Department of Computer Science and Robert Stevenson, Department of Biology, are among them. With multi-year National Science Foundation support, Morris and Stevenson have developed software tools that help scientists identify species and manage their data in a collaborative environment. Their electronic field guides greatly accelerate the production of new field guides for species identification. In contrast to traditional methods, which can take years, their software automatically produces many forms of online or publishable field guides. The resulting guides leverage the ease with which high quality digital photography helps support comparing a specimen to an image, thus easing the identification task and helping avoid confusion with species similar to the correct one.

Nonspecialists, especially teachers and students, can also use or develop their own guides. “Field guides are a way for people to connect with the environment,” Morris says. He and Stevenson want to mobilize "citizen science" to help make the case for biodiversity conservation. Their electronic field guides were in use at the Maria Mitchell Institute on Nantucket which last month sponsored Nantucket Biodiversity Initiative Week.

(Their key-building and guide-making software was designed to apply to any science or non-scientific disciplines and can be used for example to build a guide to the world's soccer teams or to your local restaurants.)

The biggest challenge to biodiversity monitoring, however, is open access to species descriptions. Species descriptions are hidden in thousands of journals and books, and access to new descriptions is increasingly restricted by an ever more proprietary copyright environment. The irony is that researchers in developing countries — where most biodiversity is found — cannot access information about their nations' species. Morris has been at the forefront in international organizations such as Biodiversity Information Standards/Taxonomic Databases Working Group and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility promoting common standards for and open access to biodiversity data, especially related to descriptive data and images.

Open access is a lively debate among scientists, librarians, publishers and other stakeholders. Even Wilson, a prominent biologist and an outspoken environmentalist, is questioned in Nature for writing a book which includes 624 descriptions of ants that cannot be readily integrated into the worldwide biodiversity knowledge base as the book is copyrighted. “It is a pity that Wilson, with his ingenuity and access to resources, did not grasp the opportunity to present these important data in a more novel and useful way.”

The winds of change, though, are sweeping through how scientists work and publish. New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user.

Technology is propelling this change. Scanning, markup, encoding, searching, retrieving and archiving tools have been developed which recognize, extract and store descriptions of species in scientific publications. Associations have sprung up that distribute these tools and archive the processed documents, resulting in a dynamic database linked to references, maps and the like.

Recently, the Biodiversity Heritage Library launched a large-scale operation to digitize this biodiversity literature. Currently, it includes major US and UK natural history libraries, with the ultimate goal of including the entire global literature. These publications will be openly accessible to the public, unless they are copyrighted -- thus most publications since 1925 are still out of reach.

"Digital library technologies can widen the access to scientific literature, especially to out-of-copyright publications that may be found only in large research libraries," says Morris.

There are well over 100 million pages of scientific publications to which every year more than 20,000 are added. Even with new technology, it would take hundreds of years to process all known species descriptions. That is why Morris and his colleagues advocate for journal production systems with underlying markup templates to facilitate machine reading and sharing of the structured species data.

The vision of openly accessible digital taxonomic literature is based on an interpretation that taxonomic descriptions cannot be copyrighted because they are factual descriptions, and should be open access.

“Such an open access infrastructure is what publically funded science is about: disseminating results as widely as possible,” Morris says. He adds that efforts to conserve the planet's biodiversity depend on free and open access to information about it.

Participatory sensing, right up our alley

UMass Boston has a research cluster called Integrated Environmental Monitoring, the goal of which is to develop and use modeling and software technologies to advance the science and improve the decision making surrounding resource and environmental issues. Given our urban mission, the new wave of participatory urban sensing seems right up our alley.

Mobile phones already have some processing and sensing capabilities, so why not use them to gather and communicate information about the sounds and smells of a city for cultural or environmental or safety purposes? In this paradigm, referred to as “participatory urban sensing” by many prominent researchers including Deborah Estrin and Henri Tirri, citizens can contribute sensed data gathered via handheld devices and cell phones, and publish it directly on the web using geo-centric web interfaces such as Google Maps.

Computer scientists are busy at places like the University of Helsinki, Stanford University, Sun Labs and Microsoft Research developing these kinds of applications. Nokia has circulated a concept design for a phone that would enable just such usage. Sun has released the Sun SPOT, a sensing device the size of a smart phone. Microsoft has published SensorMap, an application that mashes up sensor data on a map interface, and provides interactive tools to selectively query sensors and visualize data, along with authenticated access to manage sensors. Portland State University even offers a practicum course on participatory and urban sensing.

Is there a market for these types of citizen sensors? Initially they could form the basis for a crowdsourced research project like the measurement of real-time air quality throughout an entire city over a year.

Eventually they could make it easier for people like Brooke Singer who created Superfund365, an online data visualization application with an accompanying email alert system. Each day for a year, starting on September 1, 2007, Superfund365 will visit one toxic site currently active in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The site invites the public to document the 365 sites featured in Superfund365. "Make a trip there with your camera. Bring friends, bring the whole family, even bring a picnic. Afterwards, upload your images with captions along with a longer text description of the site."

Clips of how new media artists like Brooke Singer envision citizen sensing are posted at Eyebeam, a New York City art and technology center:

Living Buildings

Superfund365

Here are some more clips of of participatory sensing from Project SUN Spot.

Do you have any doubt that participatory urban sensing has arrived? Or that artists ought to be collaborating with the computer scientists?

Poised for greater growth in clean energy

Talk in Massachusetts of late is that clean energy has the potential to bring about an economic bonanza at the same time that it improves the planet's well being. "If we get this right, the whole world will be our customer," Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick has said of his plans to make Massachusetts a hotbed of both innovation and implementation in clean energy.

Governor Patrick has identified clean energy as a key emerging industry for Massachusetts. But, as clean energy markets begin to develop rapidly around the world, few think about Massachusetts as a hub of such activity, except perhaps for the controversial proposal to develop a wind farm off Cape Cod. In fact, Massachusetts has strengths in at least four sectors related to clean energy production, according to an analysis by David Levy, a professor of management, and David Terkla, a professor of economics, at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

The four major clean energy sectors in Massachusetts — renewable energy equipment and generation, power electronics, energy efficiency, and clean energy research — are in some way associated with the development, production, distribution or use of renewable and/or clean energy, or the reduction in use of “dirty” energy sources. Together, these sectors have a substantial impact on the Massachusetts economy, employing almost 11,000 people in approximately 400 firms (based on the most conservative estimates), while undergoing very rapid growth rates as the promotion of clean energy continues to expand nationally and worldwide. One hundred sixteen companies have been founded since 2001.

The Levy and Terkla analysis, published in MassBenchmarks, reviews Massachusetts’ clean energy sector in the context of the industry nationally and worldwide. They also suggest policy options to enhance the sector’s potential for the Massachusetts economy.

Massachusetts ranks eleventh nationally in terms of the number of businesses involved in the clean energy sector and seventh nationally in total employment in the clean energy industry. Total employment in the Massachusetts clean energy cluster has the potential to grow to more than 20,000 within six years — if Massachusetts remains at the forefront in terms of both policy and technology in clean energy development, according to Levy and Terkla.

Many research-intensive companies, as well as some smaller manufacturing companies, are located in the state, but Massachusetts is not currently home for any of the top four or five largest manufacturers in any clean energy sector.

Late last month, the three most powerful leaders on Beacon Hill, the governor and the leaders of the house and senate, presented a united front on a bill to make targeted investments in clean energy companies and research institutions.

Adding impetus was a report that Levy and his colleagues authored, Clean Energy for the Commonwealth Powered by The University of Massachusetts, documenting investments by other states in clean energy. The report also identifies at least 120 faculty engaged in clean energy-related research and development, ranging from wireless self-powered sensor networks for large wind energy farms, ultra high-capacity solid-state batteries and inexpensive and efficient light-harvesting materials.

The full article by Levy and Terkla is available for download at MassBenchmarks. Their report was sponsored by the Massachusetts Renewable Energy Trust, which turned to them in its formative years in order to define the clean energy industry.

Levy has co-edited two books, titled “The Business of Global Environmental Governance”, published by MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2005, and The Business of Climate Change, Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing, 2005.

Social venturing, right up our alley

UMass Boston’s fulfillment of its urban mission is often touted through the prism of its engagement with the community to improve the human condition. So it seems like the new wave of "social venturing" washing over our community ought to be something we pay attention to.

An announcement last month of the winner of the MIT 100K Entrepreneurship Competition represents a coming of age of sorts for social ventures. A social venture won the grand prize of what is arguably the leading business plan competition in the world. Diagnostic for All is a not-for-profit venture from Harvard University aimed at delivering cheap, dispensable diagnostic tests to impoverished countries. Social entrepreneurs are similar to regular entrepreneurs with one main difference--their gains aren't measured in just financial success, but by the impact they have on society.

Perhaps the best known local social venture is One Laptop Per Child which is mass producing the extremely low cost, low power XO computer for children in the developing world. The mission is to provide a means for learning, self-expression, and exploration to the nearly two billion children of the developing world with little or no access to education. The XO initiative is not without controversy, but has inspired other businesses to market low-cost laptops of their own.

Some entrepreneurs arrive at the blending of mission and business as a practical matter of having to achieve self-sufficiency in an increasingly competitive environment. Today there are three times as many nonprofits as three decades ago all at the same watering hole. Other entrepreneurs have started social ventures because they see a business opportunity that can best be realized through a social venture.

No matter how they get there, either seeking to do well by doing good, or by seeking to do good by doing well, social venturing is really taking off around the world. This according to David Bornstein, author of the 2004 book How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas. A PBS series The New Heros ran a year after this book was published. "Take a journey into a world where people take action to make a big difference."

Harvard Business School gave legitimacy and gravitas to social ventures by creating the Social Enterprise Initiative in 1993, which has published more than 400 cases and teaching notes on topics related to social enterprise. It was the first formal academic program in the field.

In 1999, the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, Columbia Business School, and Yale School of Management launched the Global Social Venture Competition, the largest and oldest student-led business plan competition providing mentoring, exposure, and prizes for social ventures from around the world. Nearly 25% of entrants are now operating companies.

A group of faculty, alumni, and other leaders committed to social change at Stanford Graduate School of Business created in 2000 the Center for Social Innovation that publishes Social Innovation Review. In 2002, Columbia Business School launched the Research Initiative on Social Entrepreneurship. Also in 2002, Duke University established the Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship in the Fuqua School of Business. It is a research and education center that promotes the entrepreneurial pursuit of social impact through the thoughtful adaptation of business expertise.

The efforts undertaken by the business schools have not gone unnoticed by the Aspen Institute, a leadership think tank, which ranks MBA programs that are integrating social and environmental topics into their core classes, electives, and academic research. Stanford was the 2007 top school in its "Beyond Grey Pinstripes" biannual rankings of business schools.

How have social ventures fared? In 2002, the Investor's Circle collaborated with Harvard Business School and McKinsey & Company to conduct a study of the financial returns on $72 million of member investments over 10 years. The study found that companies generated respectable returns comparable to the stock market. The study was published in the McKinsey Quarterly, A Halo for Angel Investors.

Many of those who manage non-profits will tell you that it seems that they spend more time raising money than actually working toward their cause of choice. The competition for donations and gifts seems to get tighter every year. And so-called donor fatigue seems to be becoming almost epidemic. That is why more social ventures are moving toward business models that are self-sustainable without reliance on the generosity of benefactors.

The relentless won't-take-no-for-an-answer quality of entrepreneurs is what give social ventures an edge. They absorb failure, they learn, they surround themselves with a good team and then they redirect. These same attributes can result in community-changing solutions.

Basic research, inspired by use

This is an interesting article in The Scientist about Drexel University's new strategic plan. Drexel is among the universities embracing use inspired basic research, which UMass Boston is urged to do in Research Reenvisioned for the 21st Century.

"Drexel University is a comprehensive national research institution in Philadelphia that has grown substantially in the past 10 years...Drexel's new strategic plan expands upon this mission with a commitment to use-inspired, interdisciplinary research that addresses practical solutions to complex societal issues. Drexel's approach to building its research enterprise continues to lead to an increase in the commercialization of technologies that has resulted in their transfer into the public sector to the benefit of society and economic development in Greater Philadelphia.

Fundamental to Drexel's use-inspired research enterprise is the development of expert interdisciplinary teams. Drexel has initiated a process to identify Major Research Initiatives: multidisciplinary programs that research critical issues. As a result, Drexel has initiated Major Research Initiatives in electron plasma medicine, neuroengineering of brain-machine interfaces and the growth of urban centers.

...An urban university, Drexel has also developed an Engineering Cities Initiative that addresses issues related to the massive growth in urban populations and the emergence of megacities with populations of more than 10 million people. This highly interdisciplinary program brings together expertise in civil and environmental engineering, architecture, energy, communications, information systems, public health and healthcare delivery, sustainability, education and policy to address issues related to the quality of life for urban residents...

The Drexel research enterprise is an important component of the educational mission of the University that contributes to the training of the next generation of scientists and engineers. In addition to research training in our master's and Ph.D. graduate programs, undergraduates have ample opportunity to participate in exciting research projects, which encourages them to pursue goals that are important for our national competitiveness in the global economy."

The concept of "use-inspired research" means conducting basic research that maximizes the utility of the work for user-communities. Over the last decade there have been several indicators of interest in a new approach to research along these lines and several fields have coined a variety of terms that refer to this kind of work. What holds them together is a paradigm shift away from a rigid distinction between basic and applied work. The sciences and psychology have primarily drawn on the term translational research, political scientists and economics have used policy relevant research, and education researchers and others have referred to useable knowledge. The term "use-inspired research" is used by the widest number of disciplines and also has been adopted by various national societies and foundations such as AAC&U, Spencer Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Council on Undergraduate Research, and the National Research Council in material about a vision of research.

An excellent source for a deeper understanding of use-inspired research can be found in Stokes' important book Pasteur's quadrant: Basic science and technological innovation, published in 1997 by the Brookings Institution. Stokes places the issue of use-inspired research in historical and political context while examining the evolving relationship of universities, governments, and other institutions to scientific research.

Diversifying the science talent pipeline

Rachel Skvirsky and Adán Colón-Carmona believe that a career in the life sciences should be a real and exciting possibility for everybody, and that the demographics of scientists should reflect those of the wider population.

Associate Professors of the Biology Department at UMass Boston, they wrote a successful proposal to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that recently awarded UMass Boston a $1.4 million, four-year Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity, or IMSD, grant. The program will increase the number underrepresented minority students eventually pursing doctoral degrees in biomedical fields.

As the life sciences industry sees the population it serves becoming more diverse, many in the industry realize that it only makes sense to try to understand the values of that population. The key to the industry’s success is a pipeline of diverse talent. University students in biomedical fields also value diversity in their educational experience, ultimately improving their ability to practice in an increasing multicultural society and patient population.

But turning a student's early spark of interest in science into a sustained career takes years of study, planning, and dedication. All too often, interested underrepresented students choose not to pursue a demanding university program. Large introductory classes can be daunting, particularly when students don't see other underrepresented minorities in the class as students or more importantly as teachers and scientists.

Those who have succeeded make it clear that mentoring was key to their success, along with their own love of science and drive to succeed. This requires a faculty role model, general faculty commitment to strong mentoring, a solid peer group, and a generally heterogeneous and diverse graduate student population. That is where the IMSD comes in.

“We believe students are going to fully embrace the mentoring component of this program,” said Skvirsky. “Our faculty and Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center faculty will mentor our IMSD fellows.” But, according to Skvirsky, it won’t stop there. “Our fellows will serve as mentors to other students, or affiliates. And affiliates can aspire to become fellows.” Skvirsky and Colón-Carmona are the project’s lead investigators, though many other science faculty will play key roles in the program.

Using a proactive recruitment process, underrepresented minority students at the sophomore level who are currently taking science courses will be recruited to apply to become IMSD affiliates. Affiliates who successfully complete at least the first level of IMSD gateway courses will be encouraged to apply to become IMSD fellows. The program will develop a community of science learners with a drive to excel academically. Each IMSD affiliate will be coached by an upper-class IMSD fellow and will also be mentored by individual faculty member who is a researcher in the fellow’s area of concentration, as well as by the program’s co-directors.

The IMSD program is just one facet of a larger, unified plan for student development in the sciences at UMass Boston. The programs that IMSD will complement include two—Bridges to the Baccalaureate and the Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participants —that focus on involving community college students and UMass Boston undergraduates in scientific study. IMSD will provide the next level of training, specifically to prepare and channel highly qualified students into PhD programs.

The University Of Massachusetts-Boston has a student population of 38.7% underrepresented minorities. It is the only public university in New England recognized by NIH as a minority-serving institution. In 2005, NIH awarded a $4.3 million 5-year grant for a Comprehensive Minority Institution/Cancer Center Partnership between UMass Boston and Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center. This grant supports opportunities for minority students to pursue cancer-focused graduate training in diverse fields, collaborative cancer research focused on health disparities in minority populations, and outreach to special populations to redress cancer health disparity services.

If Massachusetts is to maintain its supercluster status in life science, it will need to develop a cadre of workers to staff these growing companies. Many companies say that a diverse workplace can make for novel and innovative science brought about via the richness of different approaches and experiences, and add to the robustness of proposals and solutions.

There are plenty of data that make it clear that we have a long way to go before the life sciences really look like the wider population. But programs like IMSD, and universities like UMass Boston, represent the pathway.

Moving infant depression out of the shadows

Ed Tronick is an internationally renowned child development specialist, currently studying, with National Science Foundation support, how babies learn to cope with stress and how long they can remember the stress.

Tronick is Chief of the Child Development Unit at Children's Hospital Boston. But he isn't a pure researcher. Everything he does bespeaks his passion to achieve broad impact.

To fulfill that passion he accepted a joint position in the Psychology Department of the University of Massachusetts at Boston, so that he can work with urban families who often lack mental health resources.

"These are people who are really struggling," says Tronick. "I want to take my work and use it in a practical setting."

You could see it coming. As a postgraduate in the Psychology Department at Harvard, Tronick took a job at a daycare center in the Bromley - Heath housing project in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. That experience was an eye-opener for him.

"I thought I knew all about infant development from my classes, but I saw babies do things that I knew they couldn't be doing," he says.

Tronick was one of the first researchers to explore the emotional capacities of infants and to show that babies are profoundly affected by their parents' emotional states and behavior. After years of filming the moment-by-moment interactions between depressed mothers and their babies, Tronick came to see depression as a communicable disease, transferred by a mother's communication to her baby and then back from the baby to the mother. A truly vicious cycle.

Out of his studies came his still-face paradigm, which is the standard for studying social emotional development. In this experiment, the mother freezes in front of her child, eliciting increasingly strong reactions as the baby attempts to win back her attention. But after a while, confronted with only that blank face, each child stops trying.

Tronick has revolutionized understanding of the emotional capacities and coping of infants and the effects of factors such as maternal anxiety and depression on infant social emotional development.

In a powerful passage in Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection, by Deborah Blum, Tronick says:

"When I first did the still-face paradigm, I said to people, look at this emotional reaction." Yet the psychologists he showed the pictures to thought that what they saw couldn’t represent emotion. It seemed to Tronick that his colleagues were almost personally uncomfortable with the idea that the connection between mother and child could be so strong, and that relationships could matter that much. "People don’t want to believe that a child could be so hurt—or that we could be so hurtful."

Tronick is always trying to show that depression is a treatable disease. A documentary Tronick helped develop, "Depression: Out of the Shadows." aired on PBS on May 21, 2008.

It features a mother, Ellie, who suffers from depression after the birth of her first son, Graham. It would take Ellie nearly four months to start to feel better. During her ordeal, Ellie noticed that her maternal bond with Graham was suffering.

She says: “I was physically unable to have an expressive face with him and to be able to really smile at him. And when he did start to smile, he never smiled at me. And that was absolutely devastating.”

The documentary features Ellie looking at a video on Ed Tronick’s web site [edward.tronick.org]: "Mom puts on the still-face, and Michael tries everything he can to reestablish connection." The web site helped Ellie to realize that treating her depression would not only help her, but also minimize Graham's risk of becoming depressed. “It just breaks my heart to see those video clips, though, because, you can just feel the pain that those children are experiencing.”

Tronick is off to a fast start at UMass Boston, rolling out an ambitious Infant-Parent Mental Health Certificate Training Program. It offers professionals the opportunity to engage over ten months in leading edge learning with international luminaries. The sessions are opened to the public as a vehicle for expanding inter-disciplinary educational opportunities and enhancing clinical practice in this vitally important field.

Dr. Tronick received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and completed postgraduate training at Harvard University. Over the course of his career, he has co-authored and authored more than 150 scientific papers and chapters. His book, The Neurobehavioral and Social Emotional Development of Infants and Children, is a tour de force according to a review in New England Psychologist.

Tronick's research is part of UMass Boston's Developmental Sciences research cluster. Developmental sciences entail the investigation of progressive changes that occur over the life span of individuals.

Stretching electronic skin across Massachusetts Bay

The skin is a smart piece of engineering. As the interface with the environment, it processes immense amounts of data, and triggers the body’s responses to changes in pressure, temperature, and light.

The earth is beginning to don electronic skin. Every day, it is being stitched together across the planet. It consists of millions of embedded electronic measuring devices or sensors. It uses the Internet as a scaffold to support and transmit its information, about the atmosphere, health and the environment. And when the earth's electronic skin signals a change, the network alerts people, and even takes action.

In just a few years, there will be 10,000 sensors for every human being on the planet, according to a Business Week forecast.

Electronic skin for Massachusetts Bay is being stitched together by scientists at UMass Boston under the leadership of Dr. Robert Chen, Environmental, Earth and Ocean Sciences associate professor, so that surfers, swimmers, and fishermen are alerted to dangerous bacterial levels in the water. These scientists envision forecasts of beach conditions delivered on demand to mobile handsets.

Chen’s Center for Environmental Sensor Networks is unique in its development of underwater sensor networks, thus crossing the land-water interface, in focusing on “smart” networks, networks that are not simply automated, but can also shift attention to objects and events of interest, and in applying networks to urban environments.

Dr. Deborah Estrin, a professor of computer science at UCLA, speculates that mobile phones, carried by billions, will sense the sounds and smells of the city for cultural or environmental purposes, or even to determine your personal environmental impact. She calls this participatory urban sensing, everyday mobile phones becoming a platform for widespread public participation in data collection and dissemination. Her UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing‘s urban sensing group is initiating projects to introduce these technologies into the public realm. She believes these systems promise to become a very effective ‘make a case’ technology to address a range of civic concerns, from public health to safety and sustainability.

Estrin delivered keynote remarks at a conference organized in April 2007 by the Center for Coastal Environmental Sensing Networks about how improved data gathering by wireless observatories will make it possible to see conditions that were once essentially invisible.

“Remote sensing is pretty new, and no one’s really done it in the coastal oceans,” said Chen. The case for the university being the only feasible site to plant the seeds for a digital hook-up of the physical world is strong. "By having science drive the technology, we're able to make leaps that aren't yet commercially viable to invest in," according to Chen. With a grant by the Massachusetts Technology Transfer Center, his team is developing an inexpensive and more accurate sensor to detect total bacteria. The inventors of the sensor are Drs. Bob Chen, Mike Shiaris, Steve Rudnick and Francesco Peri.

Developing and embedding sensors is one challenge, but integrating ever greater numbers of observations, analyzing the results, and developing models to forecast is another. Chen’s colleagues Drs. Mingshun Jiang and Meng Zhou have already developed a forecasting system for Massachusetts Bay, including temperature, salinity, sea level and circulation.

The Center for Coastal Environmental Sensing Networks was created in July 2006 with an UMass President’s Office science and technology grant. Recently it received a grant from the US Department of Energy. The center aims to bring together university researchers, business leaders, and state and federal decision-makers to develop environmental sensor networks.

The center’s team is part of UMass Boston’s Integrated Environmental Monitoring research cluster. The goal of integrated environmental monitoring is to develop and use modeling and software technologies to advance the science and improve the decision-making surrounding resource and environmental issues.

Inspiration in a rain forest

"I have great respect for theoreticians, but I need to know that what I'm doing will eventually be usable."
Deborah Estrin

After graduating from University High School in West Los Angeles, Deborah Estrin earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. She went on to earn a master's degree in technology policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1982. Three years later, Estrin completed the PhD program in computer science at MIT.

After graduating from MIT, Estrin headed back to the West Coast to begin her teaching career. During 1986 she accepted a position as professor of computer science at the University of Southern California (USC), where she taught and conducted research until 2000.

During 1999 Estrin vacationed in Costa Rica, home to lush tropical rain forests. She was awed by the abundant animal and plant life in the rain forests and by the admirable focus of the Costa Rican government and people on preserving their country's biodiversity. Estrin realized that biologists could radically improve their ability to observe complex biological phenomena by using embedded networked sensors. Upon returning from Costa Rica, Estrin began to focus on the impact ENS could have on the study of biology, the environment, and other natural sciences. Among many other uses, ENS could help scientists track and monitor the impact of climate change on endangered ecosystems—a community of organisms and the surrounding environment—and could provide detailed information about the type and level of contamination in the soil or air. In 2000 Estrin left USC to become a professor of computer science at UCLA. As with all scientific endeavors, Estrin's research in the field of ENS depended on funding to carry it from the planning stages to actual testing of the sensing devices in the real world. Soon after joining the faculty at UCLA, she and several colleagues from UCLA, USC, and other universities began working on a massive grant proposal that would give them the funding they needed.

During August of 2002, Estrin and her colleagues heard the news they had anxiously awaited for many months, news of a grant the likes of which most scientists can only dream of: the National Science Foundation (NSF)'s Science and Technology Center awarded them a ten-year, $40 million grant to develop ENS technologies for the study of physical and biological systems. The grant allowed for the establishment of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing (CENS), and Estrin was named the center's first director. Based at UCLA, CENS was one of six academic research centers to receive the 2002 NSF grant, which specifies that the work must be collaborative, involving people from various fields of study. Estrin's center includes professors from a number of different departments at UCLA and other universities, including computer science, electrical engineering, biology, and education. In exchange for the grant money, the research centers must commit to conducting their primary research, and to advancing educational opportunities in local schools and universities and increasing the number of minorities participating in the research. They must also connect with other research institutions as well as the business world and the surrounding community. CENS was ready and able to fulfill the many requirements, and work soon began on developing the initial programs for testing ENS technology.

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Deborah Estrin delivered the keynote at the UMass Boston Center for Coastal Environmental Sensing Networks inaugural conference in April 2007.

Expanding choice for children with learning disabilities

In a Wall Street Journal article entitled “Eli's Choice” written by Pulitzer Prize winner Amy Marcus, a young man with Down syndrome named Eli chooses to drop out of his carefully crafted inclusion placement and opt for a self-contained classroom.

"The kids liked him, they knew him, they spoke to him," said his mother. "They just didn't think of him as a peer." Eli, she says, was tired of "being the only kid who was different."

According to Dr. Gary Siperstein, the central problem for students like Eli is that "in inclusive classrooms they are there physically but not socially." The lack of social integration in high school suggests not only that Eli’s decision is correct but, indeed, inevitable. Siperstein is a professor at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, and cited as the authority in the Wall Street Journal article.

Studies have shown that people with Down syndrome who learn in regular classrooms do much better academically. They also have significantly higher rates of employment after they graduate and earn more money than peers who studied mainly in self-contained classes.

But student attitudes continue to remain the most formidable barrier to inclusion, according to studies by Siperstein’s Center for Social Development and Education. One polled 5,600 seventh- and eighth-grade students from 70 schools across the country on their willingness to interact with students with intellectual disabilities at school and outside the school environment. The study found that "67 percent of young people surveyed would not spend time with a student with an intellectual disability if given a choice, and almost 50 percent would not sit next to one on a school bus."

Siperstein’s groundbreaking research has caused many to step back and ask the question about why social integration of students with disabilities in high school has remained "stagnant." Siperstein believes that most schools don't place enough emphasis on teaching social skills, and don't currently have the necessary structures even if they wanted to.

In the end, though conventional wisdom supports fostering an inclusive environment, not all children will be socially accepted in all classrooms. Parents need to weight the benefits of the classroom setting versus their own definition of happiness and success for their child, according to Siperstein.

The incidence of Down syndrome is estimated at 1 per 733 live births in the United States, 5429 new cases per year. The inaugural World Down Syndrome Day was launched on 2006 in Singapore. There was worldwide shock on February 1, 2008 when Iraqi terrorists maliciously strapped bombs to 2 women with Down syndrome and sent them into 2 different pet markets to explode bombs that killed more than 90 people.

For thirty years, Siperstein has been a leader in the study of attitudes toward persons with learning and behavioral problems, and has helped change the way people think. Members of the center have conducted studies on the attitudes of youth and adults across the U.S. and internationally. Siperstein has been actively involved in the development of disability policy at both the state and national levels. The national Down syndrome congress convention will be help on July 11-13 in Boston.

Earlier this year, in February 2008, Siperstein was named the recipient of the 2007 President’s Public Service Award. UMass Board of Trustees chairman Robert Manning said of the winners, “These individuals and their campus colleagues are the key to what makes the University of Massachusetts such an exciting and rewarding place to study or work. Prospective students know that they will have opportunities to participate in cutting-edge research early on in their academic careers with professors who are among the best in their chosen fields.”

Dr. Siperstein received the prestigious MERIT Award from the National Institute of Health for his research on the social aspects of mental retardation. The highly selective award recognizes researchers who have demonstrated superior competence and outstanding productivity in research endeavors. Less than 5 percent of institute-funded investigators are selected to receive MERIT Awards.

Why motivates Siperstein to focus on social inclusion? He finished a distinguished guest lecture at Columbia University with the answer, showing a picture that one of his students had drawn of several children holding hands with the caption "It is fun to have friends.”

Siperstein's research is part of UMass Boston's Developmental Sciences research cluster. Developmental sciences entail the investigation of progressive changes that occur over the life span of individuals.

A computational tour de force

Last year, a mathematical calculation of the structure of E8 was unveiled by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, amid great fanfare. E8 is a symmetrical structure discovered in 1887 by Norwegian mathematician Sophus Lie. No one thought the structure could ever be understood. E8 was mapped by an international group of 18 mathematicians, including UMass Boston Professor Alfred Noel.

Information about the accomplishment sent to journalists was embargoed until the night before the press conference. The story appeared in the usual places (Scientific American), but also in much less usual places such as the New York Times, the BBC, le Monde, and many, many others, plus generated a lively discussion in the blogsphere.

The coverage tended to focus on how the solution to a century-old mathematical problem may help solve the mysteries of the universe. Among those is the theory of everything that fully explains and links together all known physical phenomena – which physicists have sought for nearly two centuries.

“It could well be E8 that determines the deep inner structure of the universe,” said Jeffrey D. Adams, a professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland who led the project.

The publicity obscured the real breakthrough. While it was known how to do the E8 calculations in principle, they had so far been computationally intractable. The innovative large-scale computing that was key to the work likely spells the future for how longstanding math problems will be solved in the 21st century. Perhaps even more significant, the team was a rare collaboration for mathematicians who usually work alone or in small groups and rarely turn to supercomputers.

Symmetry is a fundamental principle of nature, and behind anything symmetric is a mathematical object such as a matrix. A matrix has entries of numbers in the cells formed by the rows and columns. The E8 matrix has 205 billion entries. If each entry was written in a one-inch square, the matrix would measure more than seven miles on each side.

The team that produced the E8 calculation began work four years ago. They meet together at the American Institute of Mathematics every summer, and in smaller groups throughout the year. Their work requires a mix of theoretical mathematics and intricate computer programming.

According to team member David Vogan from MIT, "Even after we understood the underlying mathematics it still took more than two years to implement it on a computer." And then there came the problem of finding a computer large enough to do the calculation.

A mathematician-programmer, Noel’s role within the group was to develop mathematical techniques that could be programmed on a computer. Vogan is one of Noel’s mentors.

For another year, the team worked to make the calculation more efficient, so that it might fit on existing supercomputers, but it remained just beyond the capacity of the hardware available to them. The team was contemplating the prospect of waiting for a larger computer when a team member pointed out an ingenious way to perform several small versions of the calculation, each producing an incomplete version of the answer. These incomplete answers could be assembled to give the final solution. The cost was having to run the calculation four times, plus the time to combine the answers. The computation took 77 hours of computer time on the supercomputer Sage at the University of Washington.

“The E8 computation, although exceptional, is only the first step in a vast and complex program which will last for several years,” Noel said.

The effort to map E8 is part of a larger National Science Foundation sponsored project to map out all of the mathematical descriptions of symmetry for continuous objects like cones and spheres. The project is called the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations. It has made software available both for educational and research use. The software is copyrighted by Noel and three others, and available under an open public license.

Noel's collaborator at UMass Boston, Professor Steven Jackson has become a member of the Atlas project. So far the team has developed further theories that are to be implemented in the software. Professor Jackson presented these new results at the last Atlas meeting held in March 2008 at the University of Maryland at College Park.

Before joining the Department of Mathematics at UMass in 1998, Noel was a research engineer at Peritus Software Services in Billerica and a lecturer at local colleges and universities. Noel’s research on representation theory and math education has been published in dozens of mathematics journals. Noel currently splits his time between teaching Calculus and Probability and Statistics courses at UMass and conducting research at MIT, where he is a visiting scholar.

This leaves the question of why the story of E8 took off in the press. According to Jeffrey Adams, "That is harder to understand than the polynomials for E8."

However, if this structure turns out to be fundamental to how the universe works, then it seems to indicate our universe is exceptional, and perhaps singular. But, whether this theory works perfectly or not, it is undoubtedly true that the fundamental nature of our universe can be described by mathematics.

Noel is part of UMass Boston's Computational Sciences, Analysis and Modeling research cluster. Representing an intersection of computer science, engineering, applied math, and the sciences (biology, physics, chemistry), the primary focus of the field is the construction of models and numerical analysis techniques to simulate, evaluate, and solve problems using computers.

Inventive physicist achieves optics breakthrough

Physics professor D.V.G.L.N. Rao and his protégé post-doc Chandra S. Yelleswarapu finish each other’s sentences as they explain the workings of their invention, the Fourier Phase Contrast Microscope, which images minute organisms more realistically and in greater detail than the microscopes widely used by biologists around the world.

This year, in a rare honor for a UMass Boston faculty member, Rao is being recognized, along with seven others throughout the UMass system, with a $30,000 award from the University of Massachusetts Office of Commercial Ventures and Intellectual Property (CVIP) that will help them develop the microscope commercially. Dr. Rao’s microscope is the only UMass Boston technology to receive the award.

“We regard Dr. Rao is an innovator way ahead of his time," says Susan Daudelin, the director of industry relations in the UMass Boston Venture Development Center, which manages the CVIP program on campus and acts as the incubator and promoter of university research.

Rao has been a Professor of Physics at UMass Boston for forty years, and has been producing original research for the same amount of time. In 1973, the year of the first graduating UMass Boston class, he published a research paper that was recognized by the American Physical Society. Since then, he has published over 100 papers and procured five patents.

Rao and Yelleswarapu’s microscope is based on a dramatic improvement upon standard phase contrast microscopes, which work by exploiting a property of light, its “phase,” which shifts when light travels through transparent or semi-transparent materials. Human eyes can’t detect phase shifts, but through the use of a device called a “phase plate,” the phase shifts are converted into variations in the light’s brightness, allowing scientists to get a more detailed view of the inner workings of biological specimens.

When phase contrast microscopes were first introduced in the 1930’s, they eventually won their inventor a Nobel Prize, but they had their drawbacks: Cells appear to be two-dimensional, and are surrounded by a white “halo.”

Rao and Yelleswarapu’s update uses lasers, liquid crystals, and a lens that performs a “Fourier transform” on the light waves, which create brighter, clearer, three-dimensional images. Additionally, the team’s design is also more rugged, mechanically simpler, and simpler to operate than the models used in laboratories today.

“It uses no moving parts, and is a lot more user-friendly,” Rao says.

Rao and Yelleswarapu plan to use the $30,000 from the grant to create a working prototype that will help them convince a manufacturer to sell their microscope. Rao is delighted to have the extra resources because they will not only help him introduce his invention to the world, but it will allow him to focus on what he does best.

“I’m a teacher and a basic researcher,” Rao says. “Luckily, what I do for my basic research has real-world applications.”

Rao teaches two classes and has served as the Graduate Program Director for the past ten years. He has shepherded scores of students into their own careers, and has given all of them, even undergraduates, opportunities to conduct original research in his laboratory, producing new insights into optics and lasers.

The microscope is just one of those real-world applications. There’s also mammogram technology that can detect “micro-calcifications,” a laser eye-protection project, optical holographic storage, and photonic applications for nano materials.

Bringing order to the wild west off the Bay State's coast

Massachusetts has been talking about the need for a state ocean management plan for more than fifteen years. This year, everything fell into place.

Earlier in the year, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded a three-year $8.2 million grant to the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies at UMass Boston, to focus on developing information and tools that improve the integration of natural and social science with ocean management.

In May 2008, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick signed the nation's first comprehensive ocean planning law to reduce tensions among maritime users and guide energy development. A handful of companies have announced plans to build wind farms, liquefied natural gas terminals, and projects designed to capture energy from the tides.

Many user groups think the current state of affairs off the coast is akin to the wild west. The bill as an opportunity to manage ocean sprawl based on sound science, smart economics, and sensible management principles.

The state's Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Ian A. Bowles must develop the plan by the end of 2009 with input from the public and 17-member advisory commission.

Stephen P. Crosby, dean of UMass Boston's McCormack Graduate School, hopes the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation grant will help. The grant focuses on science integration efforts that will directly support the state’s formal ocean management planning and decision making processes. Senior research fellow, Robbin Peach, assists Crosby on the project.

Peach and her colleagues on the Massachusetts Ocean Management Task Force initiated the concept of securing a grant. The Task Force, comprised of state and local officials and private individuals representing diverse ocean user groups, met between June 2003 and March 2004 to develop recommendations for state action. To maintain momentum, Peach organized a group called Massachusetts Ocean Partnership (MOP), now housed at UMass Boston. MOP is a collaborative partner with planning efforts underway.

With the Moore Foundation grant, MOP will tackle questions such as what tools exist and what tools need to be developed to evaluate economic tradeoffs when considering resource management options. MOP also will convene working groups in a non-regulatory setting to seek collaborative solutions to difficult ocean management issues and options for consideration in formal decision-making processes.

Achieving the management coordination, integration of scientific information, and stakeholder involvement will require new levels of collaboration among public and private entities involved in ocean activities.

“The University of Massachusetts Boston was a logical home for this (grant) initiative,” says Crosby, “with coastal and ocean scientists and policy specialists already conducting research on the environmental health and economic importance of coastal waters.”

UMass Boston played a leading role on the scientific committees decades earlier. The Boston Harbor cleanup project was hampered by the scarcity and poor quality of available information in such key areas as water quality and pollution sources.

The health of ocean waters and fisheries suffers from the gaps created by differing laws and mixed jurisdictions, and failure to manage the coastal-ocean ecosystem as a whole. Upon final adoption, the ocean plan will be incorporated into the existing coastal zone management plan and enforced through the state’s regulatory and permitting processes.

Concern over competing ocean uses is growing nationwide, and some states, including California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Florida, and North Carolina, have created ocean authorities or announced plans to better manage state waters. But Massachusetts has now become a leader in ocean policy in this country.