Foundations for Fair Social Computing

Fadel Adib (MIT)

09 November 2022, 15:00-16:00 | ECHO-ARENA


Abstrat

As humans, we crave to explore hidden worlds. Yet, today’s technologies remain far from allowing us to perceive most of the world we live in. Despite centuries of seaborne voyaging, more than 95% of our ocean has never been observed or explored. And, at any moment in Sme, each of us has very liMle insight into the biological world inside our own bodies. The challenge in perceiving hidden worlds extends beyond ourselves: even the robots we build are limited in their visual percepSon of the world. In this talk, I will describe new technologies that allow us to decode areas of the physical world that have so far been too remote or difficult to perceive. First, I will describe a new generaSon of underwater sensor networks that can sense, compute, and communicate without requiring any baMeries; our devices enable real-Sme and ultra-long-term monitoring of ocean condiSons (temperature, pressure, coral reefs) with important applicaSons to scienSfic exploraSon, climate monitoring, and aquaculture (seafood producSon). Next, I will talk about new wireless technologies for sensing the human body, both from inside the body (via baMeryless micro-implants) as well as from a distance (for contactless cardiovascular and stress monitoring), paving the way for novel diagnosSc and treatment methods. Finally, I will highlight our work on extending roboSc percepSon beyond line-of-sight, and how we designed new RF-visual primiSves for roboScs - including sensing, serving, navigaSon, and grasping - to enable new manipulaSon tasks that were not possible before. The talk will cover how we have designed and built these technologies, and how we work with medical doctors, climatologists, oceanographers, and industry pracSSoners to deploy them in the real world. I will also highlight the open problems and opportuniSes for these technologies, and how researchers and engineers can build on our open-source tools to help drive them to their full potenSal in addressing global challenges in climate, health, and automaSon.

Fadel Adib

Fadel Adib is an Associate Professor in the MIT Media Lab and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. He is the founding director of the Signal KineScs group which invents wireless and sensor technologies for networking, health monitoring, roboScs, and ocean IoT. He is also the founder & CEO of Cartesian Systems, a spinoff from his lab that focuses on mapping indoor environments using wireless signals. Adib was named by Technology Review as one of the world’s top 35 innovators under 35 and by Forbes as 30 under 30. His research on wireless sensing (X Ray Vision) was recognized as one of the 50 ways MIT has transformed Computer Science, and his work on roboSc percepSon (Finder of Lost Things) was named as one of the 103 Ways MIT is Making a BeMer World. Adib’s commercialized technologies have been used to monitor thousands of paSents with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and COVID19, and he has had the honor to demo his work to President Obama at the White House. Adib is also the recipient of various awards including the NSF CAREER Award (2019), the ONR Young InvesSgator Award (2019), the ONR Early Career Grant (2020), the Google Faculty Research Award (2017), the Sloan Research Fellowship (2021), and the ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award (2022), and his papers have won awards for best papers, demos, and highlights at premier academic venues including SIGCOMM, MobiCom, CHI, and Nature Electronics. Adib received his Bachelors from the American University of Beirut (2011) and his PhD from MIT (2016), where his thesis won the Sprowls award for Best Doctoral DissertaSon at MIT and the ACM SIGMOBILE Doctoral DissertaSon Award.

This talk has been recorded and uploaded on our YouTube channel. We are really sorry that deal to the technical issue, the recording didn't have sound for this talk.