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.