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      MIT Center for Real Estate advances climate and sustainable real estate research agenda

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      Real estate investors are increasingly putting sustainability at the center of their decision-making processes, given the close association between climate risk and real estate assets, both of which are location-based.

      This growing emphasis comes at a time when the real estate industry is one of the biggest contributors to global warming; its embodied and operational carbon accounts for more than one-third of total carbon emissions. More stringent building decarbonization regulations are putting pressure on real estate owners and investors, who must invest heavily to retrofit their buildings or pay “carbon penalties” and see their assets lose value.

      The impacts of acute and chronic climate risks — flooding, hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, sea-level rise, and extreme weather — are becoming more salient. Action across all areas of the real estate sector will be required to limit the social and economic risks arising from the climate crisis. But what business and policy levers are most effective at guiding the industry toward a more sustainable future?

      The MIT Center for Real Estate (MIT/CRE) believes that the real estate industry can be a catalyst for the rapid mobilization of a global transition to a greener society. Since its inception in 1983, MIT/CRE has focused on the physical aspect of real estate, especially the development industry, and how the built environment gets produced and changed.

      “The real estate industry is now at the critical moment to address the climate crisis. That is why our center initiated this major research agenda on climate and real estate two years ago,” says William Wheaton, a former director of MIT/CRE and professor emeritus in MIT’s Department of Economics, who is leading a research project on the impact of flood risks in real estate markets.

      Producing high-quality research to support climate actions

      The work of scientists and practitioners responding to the climate crisis is often bifurcated into mitigation or adaptation responses. Mitigation seeks to reduce the severity of the climate crisis by addressing emissions, while adaptation efforts seek to anticipate the most severe effects of the crisis and minimize potential risks to people and the built environment.

      The fundamental nature of the real estate industry — location-based and capital-intensive — enables potential meaningful action for both mitigation and adaptation interventions. Exploring both avenues, MIT/CRE faculty and researchers have published academic papers exploring how chronic climate events such as extreme temperatures lower people’s expressed happiness and also disrupt habits of daily life; and how acute climate events such as hurricanes damage the built environment and decrease the financial value of real estate.

      “This ongoing research production centers on industry’s imperative to take action quickly, the real losses resulting from inaction, and the potential social and business value creation for early adopters of more sustainable practices,” says Siqi Zheng, a co-author of those papers, who is the MIT/CRE faculty director and the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability.

      Building a global community of academics and industry leaders

      In addition to sponsoring research and related courses, MIT/CRE has created a global network of researchers and industry leaders, centered around sharing ideas and experience to quickly scale more sustainable practices, such as building decarbonization and circular economy in real estate, as well as climate risk modeling and pricing. Collaborating with industry leaders from the investment and real estate sector, such as EY, Veris Residential, Moody’s Analytics, Colliers, Finvest, KPF, Taurus Investment Holdings, Climate Alpha, and CRE alumnus Paul Clayton SM ’02, MIT/CRE blends real-world experiences and questions with applied data and projects to create a “living lab” for MIT/CRE researchers to conduct climate research.

      At an inaugural symposium on climate and real estate held at MIT in December 2022, more than a dozen scholars presented papers on the intersection of real estate and sustainability, which will form the basis of a special issue on climate change and real estate in the Journal of Regional Science. A “fireside chat” connected scholars and industry leaders in practical conversations about how to use research to aid practitioners.

      “Dissemination of research is critical to the success of our efforts to address climate change in the real estate industry,” says David Geltner, post-tenure professor of real estate finance and former director of  MIT/CRE, whose research group is working on climate risks and commercial real estate. “If we produce excellent research but it is cloistered in academic journals, it does no one any good. Similarly, if we do not work with collaborators to focus our research, we run the risk of investigating levers to reduce emissions that are of no use to practitioners.”

      Juan Palacios, coordinator of MIT/CRE’s climate and real estate research team, emphasizes that industry collaboration creates a two-way sharing of information that refines how research is being conducted at the center and ensures that it has positive impact.

      “More and more real estate investors and market players are putting sustainability at the center of their investment approach,” says Zheng. “A broad range of stakeholders (investors, regulators, insurers, and the public) have started to understand that long-term profitability cannot be achieved without embracing multiple dimensions of sustainability such as climate, wealth inequality, public health, and social welfare. Because of its unique relationship with industry collaborators and its place in the MIT innovation ecosystem, MIT/CRE has a responsibility and the opportunity to champion multiple pathways toward greater sustainability in the real estate industry.” More

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      Low-cost device can measure air pollution anywhere

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      Air pollution is a major public health problem: The World Health Organization has estimated that it leads to over 4 million premature deaths worldwide annually. Still, it is not always extensively measured. But now an MIT research team is rolling out an open-source version of a low-cost, mobile pollution detector that could enable people to track air quality more widely.

      The detector, called Flatburn, can be made by 3D printing or by ordering inexpensive parts. The researchers have now tested and calibrated it in relation to existing state-of-the-art machines, and are publicly releasing all the information about it — how to build it, use it, and interpret the data.

      “The goal is for community groups or individual citizens anywhere to be able to measure local air pollution, identify its sources, and, ideally, create feedback loops with officials and stakeholders to create cleaner conditions,” says Carlo Ratti, director of MIT’s Senseable City Lab. 

      “We’ve been doing several pilots around the world, and we have refined a set of prototypes, with hardware, software, and protocols, to make sure the data we collect are robust from an environmental science point of view,” says Simone Mora, a research scientist at Senseable City Lab and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the scanner’s testing process. The Flatburn device is part of a larger project, known as City Scanner, using mobile devices to better understand urban life.

      “Hopefully with the release of the open-source Flatburn we can get grassroots groups, as well as communities in less developed countries, to follow our approach and build and share knowledge,” says An Wang, a researcher at Senseable City Lab and another of the paper’s co-authors.

      The paper, “Leveraging Machine Learning Algorithms to Advance Low-Cost Air Sensor Calibration in Stationary and Mobile Settings,” appears in the journal Atmospheric Environment.

      In addition to Wang, Mora, and Ratti the study’s authors are: Yuki Machida, a former research fellow at Senseable City Lab; Priyanka deSouza, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Colorado at Denver; Tiffany Duhl, a researcher with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and a Tufts University research associate at the time of the project; Neelakshi Hudda, a research assistant professor at Tufts University; John L. Durant, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Tufts University; and Fabio Duarte, principal research scientist at Senseable City Lab.

      The Flatburn concept at Senseable City Lab dates back to about 2017, when MIT researchers began prototyping a mobile pollution detector, originally to be deployed on garbage trucks in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The detectors are battery-powered and rechargable, either from power sources or a solar panel, with data stored on a card in the device that can be accessed remotely.

      The current extension of that project involved testing the devices in New York City and the Boston area, by seeing how they performed in comparison to already-working pollution detection systems. In New York, the researchers used 5 detectors to collect 1.6 million data points over four weeks in 2021, working with state officials to compare the results. In Boston, the team used mobile sensors, evaluating the Flatburn devices against a state-of-the-art system deployed by Tufts University along with a state agency.

      In both cases, the detectors were set up to measure concentrations of fine particulate matter as well as nitrogen dioxide, over an area of about 10 meters. Fine particular matter refers to tiny particles often associated with burning matter, from power plants, internal combustion engines in autos and fires, and more.

      The research team found that the mobile detectors estimated somewhat lower concentrations of fine particulate matter than the devices already in use, but with a strong enough correlation so that, with adjustments for weather conditions and other factors, the Flatburn devices can produce reliable results.

      “After following their deployment for a few months we can confidently say our low-cost monitors should behave the same way [as standard detectors],” Wang says. “We have a big vision, but we still have to make sure the data we collect is valid and can be used for regulatory and policy purposes,”

      Duarte adds: “If you follow these procedures with low-cost sensors you can still acquire good enough data to go back to [environmental] agencies with it, and say, ‘Let’s talk.’”

      The researchers did find that using the units in a mobile setting — on top of automobiles — means they will currently have an operating life of six months. They also identified a series of potential issues that people will have to deal with when using the Flatburn detectors generally. These include what the research team calls “drift,” the gradual changing of the detector’s readings over time, as well as “aging,” the more fundamental deterioration in a unit’s physical condition.

      Still, the researchers believe the units will function well, and they are providing complete instructions in their release of Flatburn as an open-source tool. That even includes guidance for working with officials, communities, and stakeholders to process the results and attempt to shape action.

      “It’s very important to engage with communities, to allow them to reflect on sources of pollution,” says Mora. 

      “The original idea of the project was to democratize environmental data, and that’s still the goal,” Duarte adds. “We want people to have the skills to analyze the data and engage with communities and officials.” More

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      Taking the long view: The Deep Time Project

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      How would we design and build differently if we learned to live at multiple time scales? How would human communities respond to global challenges if the short-term mindset of contemporary life was expanded to encompass new dimensions of past and future — diving into the depths of geological history and projecting forward to imagine the consequences of our actions today?

      These are questions that Cristina Parreño Alonso addresses in her practice as an architect, artist, and senior lecturer in the MIT Department of Architecture. Her field of research, which she has termed “Transtectonics,” explores the cultural and environmental implications of expanded temporal sensibilities in architectural material practice. A building, Parreño argues, is a “material event,” part of a process of construction and deconstruction that is shaped by the past and directly impacts the future — an impact that has become all the more apparent in the epoch of the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the dominant force influencing the physical composition and regulating systems of the planet.

      Parreño’s classes at MIT have included design studios that position architecture in relation to geological processes, and historical surveys of building practices that embrace traces of time and rhythms of maintenance. She recently devised a new class, 4.181 (The Deep Time Project), which launched in fall 2022 with the support of a 2022 Cross Disciplinary Class Grant from the MIT Center for Art, Science and Technology (CAST), in addition to the d’Arbeloff Fund for Excellence in Education.

      Learning deep time literacy

      “The course proposes that architects must develop deep-time literacy if we are to become true planetary stewards,” says Parreño. “Rather than attempting to identify solutions, the course is intended to provoke new ways of thinking that lead to greater accountability — a recognition that we, as architects, are intervening in something larger than ourselves, and that the consequences of our actions extend far beyond the timescales of our human lives and civilizations.” The class, which was offered to master’s students in the School of Architecture and Planning and the Harvard Graduate School of Design, culminated in a series of “material essays” that seek to bring deep time into contemporary consciousness. These multimedia projects — which include physical prototypes, text components, sound, and video  — are on display until March 24 at the Wiesner Student Art Gallery.

      “Being part of the exhibition has made me realize the advantages of belonging to a collective that recognizes the urgency of addressing the idea of time at different scales,” says architecture master’s student Christina Battikha, whose material essay “Plastic Time” imagines a future when plastic is integral to the geological structure of the Earth. Envisioned as a jagged plastic “rock,” the sculpture interprets the ubiquitous synthetic material as a natural phenomenon, a human-made product that far outlasts a human lifespan.

      Taking the form of a clay “Rosetta Stone” inscribed with multiple languages, architecture student Tatiana Victorovna Estrina’s material essay explores how the evolution of language impacts the built environment. “My project identifies a gap of imagination in deep time research,” she explains. “The installation became a futuristic exploration of opportunities for the adaptive relationship between the human body and its prosthetic additions of language and architecture.”

      Provocative perspectives

      “Developing the class here at MIT grants us the capacity to hold conversations across disciplines,” says Parreño. “That’s all the more necessary, because deep time literacy requires a very holistic way of thinking; it raises awareness of the fact that we are inherently interconnected, and makes it clear that we can’t afford to operate in compartments.”

      This attention to interdisciplinarity is exemplified by the guest speakers invited to share their ideas with the class, each providing a new way of accessing the deep time paradigm. Among the speakers were Marcia Bjornerud, a structural geologist and educator who argues that a geologist’s temporal perspective can empower us to make decisions for a more sustainable future. Richard Fisher, a senior journalist at the BBC, and Bina Venkataraman, journalist and author of “The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age,” both shared their experiences of engaging the public in the perils of short-term-ism and the positive effects of taking the long view in daily life. The historian of science Jimena Canales provided a philosophical background to the conundrums of time perception, citing the renowned debate between Albert Einstein and the philosopher Henri Bergson.

      Alongside these large-scale thinkers and academic researchers were practitioners who directly apply planetary perspectives at a local level. Joseph Bagley is Boston’s city architect, investigating the layers of time that constitute the urban fabric. Faries Gray, the sagamore of the Massachusett Tribe at Ponkapoag, advocates for Indigenous ways of knowing that recognize the continuity between human cultures and the living history of the land. Together, these different ways of relating to deep time offer a toolkit for contemplating a concept too large to be held in the human mind.

      Thinking through art

      Parreño’s own way of conceptualizing deep time is informed by her artistic and philosophical inquiry into the paradoxes of time, tectonics, and materiality. Exhibited at the Schusev State Museum of Architecture in Moscow, her installation Tectonics of Wisdom focused on the typology of the library as a way of demonstrating how architecture is intertwined with geological and civilizational history. Carbon to Rock, shown at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, explores new artificial manipulations of the geological timescales of the carbon cycle, rethinking igneous rocks as a resilient material for high-carbon-capture architecture. In addition, Parreño has published several essays on the subject of deep time for journals including Strelka Magazine, Log, and JAE Journal of Architectural Education. Her work as a writer and theorist is complemented by her art installations — or material essays — that serve as a research methodology and a means of communication.

      Likewise, the exhibition component of the Deep Time Project is a way of giving thoughts physical form. Estrina’s installation was initially prompted by the need to communicate the presence of buried nuclear waste to future generations — or even future species. Battikha’s sculpture is a response to the vast buildup of plastic generated by cycles of supply and demand. However, rather than making value judgements or condemning human actions, these works are intended to disrupt conventional patterns of perception, experimenting with longer-term perspectives that have the potential to change ingrained assumptions and daily habits. “There needs to be a paradigm shift before we can effectively address the enormity of the challenges ahead,” says Parreño. “The Deep Time Project is about taking a step back, reframing these problems in ways that will allow us to ask the right questions.” More

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      Q&A: Tod Machover on “Overstory Overture,” his new operatic work

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      Composers find inspiration from many sources. For renowned MIT Media Lab composer Tod Machover, reading the Richard Powers novel “The Overstory” instantly made him want to adapt it as an operatic composition. This might not seem an obvious choice to some: “The Overstory” is about a group of people, including a wrongly maligned scientist, who band together to save a forest from destruction.

      But Machover’s resulting work, “Overstory Overture,” a 35-minute piece commissioned and performed by the chamber ensemble Sejong Soloists, has come to fruition and will have its world premiere on March 7 in Alice Tully Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center. Opera superstar Joyce DiDonato will have the lead role, with Earl Lee conducting. On March 16, the piece will have its second performance, in Seoul, South Korea. MIT News recently talked to Machover about his original new work.

      Q: How did you get the idea for your new work?

      A: I’ve been a fan of Richard Powers’ novels for a long time. He started out as a musician. He’s a cellist like I am, and was a composer before he was a writer, and he’s also been deeply interested in science for his whole career. All of his novels have something to do with people, ideas, music, and science. He’s always been on my radar.

      Q: What’s compelling to you about this particular Powers book?

      A: “The Overstory” is made up of many stories about characters who come together, improbably, because of trees. It starts with short chapters describing characters with relationships to trees. One is about a family that moved to the Midwest and planted a chestnut tree. It grows for 150 years and they take pictures every year, and it’s at the center of the family until it gets cut down in the 1990s. Another guy is in a plane in Vietnam and gets shot down, and his parachute gets caught in a tree right before he hits the ground.

      One character is named Patricia Westerford and she’s a scientist. Her life work is studying the forest and trees, and she discovers that trees communicate — both underground, through the roots, and through the air, via particles. They’re much more like a network than they are static, isolated objects. Her whole world is discovering the miracle of this network, but nobody believes her and she loses her tenure. And she basically goes and lives in the forest. Eventually all the characters in the book come together to preserve a forest in the Northwest that’s going to be destroyed. They become connected through trees, but in the book, all their lives are basically destroyed. It’s not a happy ending, but you understand how human beings are connected through the natural world, and have to think about this connection in a radically new way.

      Every single character came alive. The book is just a miracle. It’s a great work of art. Immediately, reading it, I thought, this is something I want to work on.

      Q: How did you start turning that into an operatic composition?

      A: I got in touch with Powers soon after that. Richard knew my music and answered immediately, saying, “I’d love to have you do an opera on this, and let’s figure out how.” I started working on it just before the pandemic. Around that time he came to Harvard to give a lecture, so he came here to my office in the Media Lab, and we got to chat.

      Generally novels leave more room for you to decide how to make music out of them; they’re a lot less scripted than a movie or a play, and the many inner thoughts and asides leave room for music to fill in. I asked Richard, “Would you be interested in writing the text for this?” And right away he said, “Look, I’d like to be involved in the process, but I don’t feel equipped to write a libretto.” So, I went to Simon Robson, who worked on “Schoenberg in Hollywood” [another Machover opera], and we started working and checked in with Richard from time to time.

      Just about that time the ensemble Sejong Soloists, who are based in New York and Seoul, offered to have their string orchestra collaborate on a project with a theatrical aspect, which was new for them. I explained I was working on an opera based on “The Overstory,” and I felt we could explore its themes. I could imagine the string instruments being like trees and the orchestra being the forest.

      The next thing I did was contact my favorite singer, Joyce DiDonato. She’s such a beautiful, powerful singer. I did an opera in 1999 for Houston called “Resurrection,” which was based on Tolstoy’s last novel, and we were casting the main female character. We did auditions in New York, Los Angeles, and Europe, couldn’t find the main character, and finally the head of the Houston Grand Opera said, “You know, there’s this young singer in our apprentice program who’s pretty special, and you should hear her.”

      And sure enough, that was Joyce. It was her first major role. We hadn’t done another project together although we remained close over the years, but I called her and said “Joyce, I know how busy you are, but I’ve got this idea, and I’ll send you the book. It’s great and I’d love to focus on this one character, would you consider doing it?” And she said she’d love to, partly because sustainability and the environment is something she really cares about.

      Q: Okay, but how do you get started writing music for a piece when it’s based on a book about trees?

      A: I began with two things. Musically I started with the idea of creating this language for tree communication. I was inspired by this idea that one of the reasons we don’t know about it is it’s underground, it’s low, it’s spreading out. I’m a cellist, and I’ve always loved music that grows from the bottom. When you play the cello, in a lot of the great literature, you’re playing the low part of a quartet or quintet or orchestra, and often people don’t quite hear it as the most prominent thing.

      The second thing I did was start making this text. Which was hard, because it’s a big novel. It’s a 35-minute piece where Joyce is at the center. When she starts, she just talks, for a minute, and then little by little it turns into song. It’s her sharing with everybody what she learned, she brings you into the world of the forest. In time, there’s a crisis, they’re destroying the forest, and as she says, they’re tearing out the lungs — tearing out the mind — of the world. The last part of the piece is a vision of how the trees need us but we need them even more.

      Q: I don’t want to push too hard on this, but the composition sounds parallel with its subject matter. Trees are connected; an orchestra is connected. And then this story is about people building a connection to nature, while you want the audience to feel a connection to the piece. How much did you think about it that way?

      A: I was thinking about that pretty consciously, and I really tried to make something that feels very still and simple, but where there’s a lot going on. It feels like it’s living and moving. The piece starts out with solo instruments, so at first everybody’s doing their bit, then they all join in. The strings make a rich ensemble sound, but in the last section every single instrument has its own part — I wrote an individual part for all these string players so they’re kind of weaving in and out. Musically it’s very much constructed to lead people through a forest that is both diverse but connected together.

      I also enjoy using electronics to add another dimension. In this piece I’ve tried to create an electronic world that doesn’t necessarily remind you of electronics, except for one part where machines comes in ripping the forest apart. But mostly the electronics are blended with the orchestra in a way you might not always notice. The sound and feel, hopefully, will appear more natural than nature.

      Q: You also seem to have clearly identified a story with real operatic drama here, unusual as it may be.

      A: The emotional transition that happens is the awareness of what the forest means, and in your gut what it means to protects it, and what it would mean to lose it, and then a glimpse of what it might feel like to live in a different way. I think the contribution someone like myself might be able to make is to change attitudes, to think about our limits as a species and as individuals. Technical solutions alone aren’t going to solve things; people’s behavior somehow has to change. A piece like this is a way of having the experience of crisis, and a vision of what could be different.

      Q: Here’s something a lot of us want to know: What’s it like working with Joyce DiDonato?

      A: She’s one of those rare people. She’s completely direct and honest and lives life to the fullest. Joyce, I mean, thank God she has the best voice you’ll ever hear and she’s at the top of her game, but she also thinks about the world and ideas, and she did a whole project a few years ago performing a repertoire around the world about war and peace, to jolt people into a new understanding. Every project she’s involved with, she cares about the characters and she’s in it all the way.

      For this piece we did a bunch of Zoom sessions and tried things out. And she’s fantastic at saying, “To make that phrase the best you can for my voice at this point in the piece, would you consider changing that one note?” She has incredibly precise ideas about that. So, we worked musically on every detail and on the whole shape. What a pleasure! She also came here to MIT. She hadn’t been to the Media Lab, so she spent two days here at the beginning of August with her partner. She was so open to all the students and all the ideas and inventions and machines and software, just in the most gracious and truly excited way. You couldn’t have had a better visitor.

      Q: Any last thoughts about this piece you want to share?

      A: In my music in general, I’m pretty voracious at combining different things. I think in this project where it involves the natural world and the language of trees, and the language of melodies and instruments and electronic music, there may be more elements I’ve pulled together than ever. The emotional and even musical world here is larger. That’s my story here: These elements require and invite new thinking. And remember: This is just the first part of a larger project. I hope that you can hear the full “Overstory” opera — perhaps with trees growing in a major opera house — in the not-so-distant future! More

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      Chess players face a tough foe: air pollution

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      Here’s something else chess players need to keep in check: air pollution.

      That’s the bottom line of a newly published study co-authored by an MIT researcher, showing that chess players perform objectively worse and make more suboptimal moves, as measured by a computerized analysis of their games, when there is more fine particulate matter in the air.

      More specifically, given a modest increase in fine particulate matter, the probability that chess players will make an error increases by 2.1 percentage points, and the magnitude of those errors increases by 10.8 percent. In this setting, at least, cleaner air leads to clearer heads and sharper thinking.

      “We find that when individuals are exposed to higher levels of air pollution, they make more more mistakes, and they make larger mistakes,” says Juan Palacios, an economist in MIT’s Sustainable Urbanization Lab, and co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s findings.

      The paper, “Indoor Air Quality and Strategic Decision-Making,” appears today in advance online form in the journal Management Science. The authors are Steffen Künn, an associate professor in the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University, the Netherlands; Palacios, who is head of research in the Sustainable Urbanization Lab, in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); and Nico Pestel, an associate professor in the School of Business and Economics at Maastricht University.

      The toughest foe yet?

      Fine particulate matter refers to tiny particles 2.5 microns or less in diameter, notated as PM2.5. They are often associated with burning matter — whether through internal combustion engines in autos, coal-fired power plants, forest fires, indoor cooking through open fires, and more. The World Health Organization estimates that air pollution leads to over 4 million premature deaths worldwide every year, due to cancer, cardiovascular problems, and other illnesses.

      Scholars have produced many studies exploring the effects of air pollution on cognition. The current study adds to that literature by analyzing the subject in a particularly controlled setting. The researchers studied the performance of 121 chess players in three seven-round tournaments in Germany in 2017, 2018, and 2019, comprising more than 30,000 chess moves. The scholars used three web-connected sensors inside the tournament venue to measure carbon dioxide, PM2.5 concentrations, and temperature, all of which can be affected by external conditions, even in an indoor setting. Because each tournament lasted eight weeks, it was possible to examine how air-quality changes related to changes in player performance.

      In a replication exercise, the authors found the same impacts of air pollution on some of the strongest players in the history of chess using data from 20 years of games from the first division of the German chess league. 

      To evaluate the matter of performance of players, meanwhile, the scholars used software programs that assess each move made in each chess match, identify optimal decisions, and flag significant errors.

      During the tournaments, PM2.5 concentrations ranged from 14 to 70 micrograms per cubic meter of air, levels of exposure commonly found in cities in the U.S. and elsewhere. The researchers examined and ruled out alternate potential explanations for the dip in player performance, such as increased noise. They also found that carbon dioxide and temperature changes did not correspond to performance changes. Using the standardized ratings chess players earn, the scholars also accounted for the quality of opponents each player faced. Ultimately, the analysis using the plausibly random variation in pollution driven by changes in wind direction confirms that the findings are driven by the direct exposure to air particles.

      “It’s pure random exposure to air pollution that is driving these people’s performance,” Palacios says. “Against comparable opponents in the same tournament round, being exposed to different levels of air quality makes a difference for move quality and decision quality.”

      The researchers also found that when air pollution was worse, the chess players performed even more poorly when under time constraints. The tournament rules mandated that 40 moves had to be made within 110 minutes; for moves 31-40 in all the matches, an air pollution increase of 10 micrograms per cubic meter led to an increased probability of error of 3.2 percent, with the magnitude of those errors increasing by 17.3 percent.

      “We find it interesting that those mistakes especially occur in the phase of the game where players are facing time pressure,” Palacios says. “When these players do not have the ability to compensate [for] lower cognitive performance with greater deliberation, [that] is where we are observing the largest impacts.”

      “You can live miles away and be affected”

      Palacios emphasizes that, as the study indicates, air pollution may affect people in settings where they might not think it makes a difference.

      “It’s not like you have to live next to a power plant,” Palacios says. “You can live miles away and be affected.”

      And while the focus of this particular study is tightly focused on chess players, the authors write in the paper that the findings have “strong implications for high-skilled office workers,” who might also be faced with tricky cognitive tasks in conditions of variable air pollution. In this sense, Palacios says, “The idea is to provide accurate estimates to policymakers who are making difficult decisions about cleaning up the environment.”

      Indeed, Palacios observes, the fact that even chess players — who spend untold hours preparing themselves for all kinds of scenarios they may face in matches — can perform worse when air pollution rises suggests that a similar problem could affect people cognitively in many other settings.

      “There are more and more papers showing that there is a cost with air pollution, and there is a cost for more and more people,” Palacios says. “And this is just one example showing that even for these very [excellent] chess players, who think they can beat everything — well, it seems that with air pollution, they have an enemy who harms them.”

      Support for the study was provided, in part, by the Graduate School of Business and Economics at Maastricht, and the Institute for Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany. More

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      Sensing with purpose

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      Fadel Adib never expected that science would get him into the White House, but in August 2015 the MIT graduate student found himself demonstrating his research to the president of the United States.

      Adib, fellow grad student Zachary Kabelac, and their advisor, Dina Katabi, showcased a wireless device that uses Wi-Fi signals to track an individual’s movements.

      As President Barack Obama looked on, Adib walked back and forth across the floor of the Oval Office, collapsed onto the carpet to demonstrate the device’s ability to monitor falls, and then sat still so Katabi could explain to the president how the device was measuring his breathing and heart rate.

      “Zach started laughing because he could see that my heart rate was 110 as I was demoing the device to the president. I was stressed about it, but it was so exciting. I had poured a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into that project,” Adib recalls.

      For Adib, the White House demo was an unexpected — and unforgettable — culmination of a research project he had launched four years earlier when he began his graduate training at MIT. Now, as a newly tenured associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Media Lab, he keeps building off that work. Adib, the Doherty Chair of Ocean Utilization, seeks to develop wireless technology that can sense the physical world in ways that were not possible before.

      In his Signal Kinetics group, Adib and his students apply knowledge and creativity to global problems like climate change and access to health care. They are using wireless devices for contactless physiological sensing, such as measuring someone’s stress level using Wi-Fi signals. The team is also developing battery-free underwater cameras that could explore uncharted regions of the oceans, tracking pollution and the effects of climate change. And they are combining computer vision and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to build robots that find hidden items, to streamline factory and warehouse operations and, ultimately, alleviate supply chain bottlenecks.

      While these areas may seem quite different, each time they launch a new project, the researchers uncover common threads that tie the disciplines together, Adib says.

      “When we operate in a new field, we get to learn. Every time you are at a new boundary, in a sense you are also like a kid, trying to understand these different languages, bring them together, and invent something,” he says.

      A science-minded child

      A love of learning has driven Adib since he was a young child growing up in Tripoli on the coast of Lebanon. He had been interested in math and science for as long as he could remember, and had boundless energy and insatiable curiosity as a child.

      “When my mother wanted me to slow down, she would give me a puzzle to solve,” he recalls.

      By the time Adib started college at the American University of Beirut, he knew he wanted to study computer engineering and had his sights set on MIT for graduate school.

      Seeking to kick-start his future studies, Adib reached out to several MIT faculty members to ask about summer internships. He received a response from the first person he contacted. Katabi, the Thuan and Nicole Pham Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the MIT Jameel Clinic, interviewed him and accepted him for a position. He immersed himself in the lab work and, as the end of summer approached, Katabi encouraged him to apply for grad school at MIT and join her lab.

      “To me, that was a shock because I felt this imposter syndrome. I thought I was moving like a turtle with my research, but I did not realize that with research itself, because you are at the boundary of human knowledge, you are expected to progress iteratively and slowly,” he says.

      As an MIT grad student, he began contributing to a number of projects. But his passion for invention pushed him to embark into unexplored territory. Adib had an idea: Could he use Wi-Fi to see through walls?

      “It was a crazy idea at the time, but my advisor let me work on it, even though it was not something the group had been working on at all before. We both thought it was an exciting idea,” he says.

      As Wi-Fi signals travel in space, a small part of the signal passes through walls — the same way light passes through windows — and is then reflected by whatever is on the other side. Adib wanted to use these signals to “see” what people on the other side of a wall were doing.

      Discovering new applications

      There were a lot of ups and downs (“I’d say many more downs than ups at the beginning”), but Adib made progress. First, he and his teammates were able to detect people on the other side of a wall, then they could determine their exact location. Almost by accident, he discovered that the device could be used to monitor someone’s breathing.

      “I remember we were nearing a deadline and my friend Zach and I were working on the device, using it to track people on the other side of the wall. I asked him to hold still, and then I started to see him appearing and disappearing over and over again. I thought, could this be his breathing?” Adib says.

      Eventually, they enabled their Wi-Fi device to monitor heart rate and other vital signs. The technology was spun out into a startup, which presented Adib with a conundrum once he finished his PhD — whether to join the startup or pursue a career in academia.

      He decided to become a professor because he wanted to dig deeper into the realm of invention. But after living through the winter of 2014-2015, when nearly 109 inches of snow fell on Boston (a record), Adib was ready for a change of scenery and a warmer climate. He applied to universities all over the United States, and while he had some tempting offers, Adib ultimately realized he didn’t want to leave MIT. He joined the MIT faculty as an assistant professor in 2016 and was named associate professor in 2020.

      “When I first came here as an intern, even though I was thousands of miles from Lebanon, I felt at home. And the reason for that was the people. This geekiness — this embrace of intellect — that is something I find to be beautiful about MIT,” he says.

      He’s thrilled to work with brilliant people who are also passionate about problem-solving. The members of his research group are diverse, and they each bring unique perspectives to the table, which Adib says is vital to encourage the intellectual back-and-forth that drives their work.

      Diving into a new project

      For Adib, research is exploration. Take his work on oceans, for instance. He wanted to make an impact on climate change, and after exploring the problem, he and his students decided to build a battery-free underwater camera.

      Adib learned that the ocean, which covers 70 percent of the planet, plays the single largest role in the Earth’s climate system. Yet more than 95 percent of it remains unexplored. That seemed like a problem the Signal Kinetics group could help solve, he says.

      But diving into this research area was no easy task. Adib studies Wi-Fi systems, but Wi-Fi does not work underwater. And it is difficult to recharge a battery once it is deployed in the ocean, making it hard to build an autonomous underwater robot that can do large-scale sensing.

      So, the team borrowed from other disciplines, building an underwater camera that uses acoustics to power its equipment and capture and transmit images.

      “We had to use piezoelectric materials, which come from materials science, to develop transducers, which come from oceanography, and then on top of that we had to marry these things with technology from RF known as backscatter,” he says. “The biggest challenge becomes getting these things to gel together. How do you decode these languages across fields?”

      It’s a challenge that continues to motivate Adib as he and his students tackle problems that are too big for one discipline.

      He’s excited by the possibility of using his undersea wireless imaging technology to explore distant planets. These same tools could also enhance aquaculture, which could help eradicate food insecurity, or support other emerging industries.

      To Adib, the possibilities seem endless.

      “With each project, we discover something new, and that opens up a whole new world to explore. The biggest driver of our work in the future will be what we think is impossible, but that we could make possible,” he says. More

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      in Environment

      Preparing to be prepared

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      The Kobe earthquake of 1995 devastated one of Japan’s major cities, leaving over 6,000 people dead while destroying or making unusable hundreds of thousands of structures. It toppled elevated freeway segments, wrecked mass transit systems, and damaged the city’s port capacity.

      “It was a shock to a highly engineered, urban city to have undergone that much destruction,” says Miho Mazereeuw, an associate professor at MIT who specializes in disaster resilience.

      Even in a country like Japan, with advanced engineering, and policies in place to update safety codes, natural forces can overwhelm the built environment.

      “There’s nothing that’s ever guaranteed safe,” says Mazereeuw, an associate professor of architecture and urbanism in MIT’s Department of Architecture and director of the Urban Risk Lab. “We [think that] through technology and engineering we can solve things and fight nature. Whereas it’s really that we’re living with nature. We’re part of this natural ecosystem.”

      That’s why Mazereeuw’s work on disaster resilience focuses on plans, people, and policies, well as technology and design to prepare for the future. In the Urban Risk Lab, which Mazereeuw founded, several projects are based on the design of physical objects, spaces, and software platforms, but many others involve community-level efforts, so that local governments have workable procedures in case of emergency.

      “What we can do for ourselves and each other is have plans in place so that if something does happen, the level of chaos and fear can be reduced and we can all be there to help each other through,” Mazereeuw says. When it comes to disaster preparedness, she adds, “Definitely a lot of it is on the built environment side of things, but a lot of it is also social, making sure that in our communities, we know who would need help, and we have those kinds of relationships beforehand.”

      The Kobe earthquake was a highly influential event for Mazereeuw. She has researched the response to it and has a book coming out about natural disasters, policies, and design in Japan. Beyond that, the Kobe event helped reinforce her sense that when it comes to disaster preparedness, progress can be made many ways. For her research, teaching, and innovative work at the Urban Risk Lab, Mazereeuw was granted tenure at MIT last year.

      Two cultures grappling with nature

      Mazereeuw has one Dutch parent and one Japanese parent, and both cultures helped produce her interest in managing natural forces. On her Dutch side, many family friends were involved with local government and water management — practically an existential issue in a country that sits largely below sea level.

      Mazereeuw’s parents, however, were living in Japan in 1995. And while they happened to be away while the Kobe earthquake hit, her Japanese links helped spur her interest in studying the event and its aftermath.

      “I think that was a wake-up call for me, too, about how we need to plan and design cities to reduce the impact of chaos at the time of disasters,” Mazereeuw says.

      Mazereeuw earned her undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University, majoring in earth and environmental sciences and in studio art. After working in an architectural office in Tokyo, she decided to attend graduate school, receiving her dual masters from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, with a thesis about Kobe and disaster readiness. She then worked in architecture offices, including the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, but returned to academia to work on climate change and disaster resilience.   

      Mazereeuw’s book, “Design Before Disaster,” explores this subject in depth, from urban planning to coastal-safety strategies to community-based design frameworks, and is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press.

      Since joining the MIT faculty, Mazereeuw has also devoted significant time to the launch and growth of the Urban Risk Lab, an interdisciplinary group working on an array of disaster-preparedness efforts. One such project has seen lab members work with local officials from many places — including Massachusetts, California, Georgia, and Puerto Rico — to add to their own disaster-preparedness planning.

      A plan developed by local officials with community input, Mazereeuw suggests, will likely function better than one produced by, say, consultants from outside a community, as she has seen happen many times: “A report on a dusty shelf isn’t actionable,” she says. “This way it’s a decision-making process by the people involved.”

      In a project based on physical design, the Urban Risk Lab has also been working with the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency on an effort to produce temporary postdisaster housing for the OCONUS region (Alaska, Hawaii, and other U.S. overseas territories). The lab’s design, called SEED (Shelter for Emergency Expansion Design), features a house that is compact enough to be shipped anywhere and unfolds on-site, while being sturdy enough to withstand follow-up events such as hurricanes, and durable enough to be incorporated into longer-term housing designs.

      “We felt it had to be really, really good quality, so it would be a resource, rather than something temporary that disintegrates after five years,” Mazereeuw says. “It’s built to be a small safety shelter but also could be part of a permanent house.”

      A grand challenge, and a plethora of projects

      Mazereeuw is also a co-lead of one of the five multiyear projects selected in 2022 to move forward as part of MIT’s Climate Grand Challenges competition. Along with Kerry Emanuel and Paul O’Gorman, of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Mazereeuw will help direct a project advancing climate modeling by quantifying the risk of extreme weather events for specific locations. The idea is to help vulnerable urban centers and other communities prepare for such events.

      The Urban Risk Lab has many other kinds of projects in its portfolio, following Mazereeuw’s own interest in conceptualizing disaster preparedness broadly. In collaboration with officials in Japan, and with support from Google, lab members worked on interactive, real-time flood-mapping software, in which residents can help officials know where local flooding has reached emergency levels. The researchers also created an AI module to prioritize the information.

      “Residents really have the most localized information, which you can’t get from a satellite,” Mazereeuw says. “They’re also the ones who learn about it first, so they have a lot of information that emergency managers can use for their response. The program is really meant to be a conduit between the efforts of emergency managers and residents, so that information flow can go in both directions.”

      Lab members in the past have also mapped the porosity of the MIT campus, another effort that used firsthand knowledge. Additionally, lab members are currently engaging with a university in Chile to design tsunami response strategies; developing a community mapping toolkit for resilience planning in Thailand and Vietnam; and working with Mass Audubon to design interactive furniture for children to learn about ecology.  

      “Everything is tied together with this interest in raising awareness and engaging people,” Mazereeuw says.

      That also describes Mazereeuw’s attitude about participation in the Urban Risk Lab, a highly cross-disciplinary place with members who have gravitated to it from around MIT.

      “Our lab is extremely interdisciplinary,” Mazereeuw says. “We have students coming in from all over, from different parts of campus. We have computer science and engineering students coming into the lab and staying to get their graduate degrees alongside many architecture and planning students.” The lab also has five full-time researchers — Aditya Barve, Larisa Ovalles, Mayank Ojha, Eakapob Huangthananpan, and Saeko Baird — who lead their own projects and research groups.

      What those lab members have in common is a willingness to think proactively about reducing disaster impacts. Being prepared for those events itself requires preparation.

      Even in the design world, Mazereeuw says, “People are reactive. Because something has happened, that’s when they go in to help. But I think we can have a larger impact by anticipating and designing for these issues beforehand.” More

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      in Environment

      Study: Extreme heat is changing habits of daily life

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      Extreme temperatures make people less likely to pursue outdoor activities they would otherwise make part of their daily routine, a new study led by MIT researchers has confirmed.

      The data-rich study, set in China, shows that when hourly temperatures reach 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), people are 5 percent less likely to go to public parks, and when hourly temperatures hit 35 C (95 F), people are 13 percent less likely to go to those parks.

      “We did observe adaptation,” says Siqi Zheng, an MIT professor and co-author of a new paper detailing the study’s findings. She adds: “Environmental hazards hurt the daily quality of life. Yes, people protect themselves [by limiting activity], but they lose the benefit of going out to enjoy themselves in nature, or meeting friends in parks.”

      The research adds to our knowledge about the effects of a warming climate by quantifying the effects of hot temperatures on the activity of people within a given day — how they shift their activities from hotter to cooler time periods — and not just across longer periods of time.

      “We found that if we take into account this within-day adaptation, extreme temperatures actually have a much larger effect on human activity than the previous daily or monthly estimations [indicate],” says Yichun Fan, an MIT doctoral candidate and another of the paper’s co-authors.

      The paper, “Intraday Adaptation to Extreme Temperatures in Outdoor Activity,” is published this week in Nature Scientific Reports. The authors are Fan, a doctoral student in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); Jianghao Wang, a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences; Nick Obradovich, chief scientist at Project Regeneration; and Zheng, who is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at MIT’s Center for Real Estate and DUSP, and faculty director of the MIT Center for Real Estate.

      To conduct the study, the researchers used anonymized data for 900 million cellphone users in China in 2017, studying a total of 60 billion separate cellphone location queries per day available through the technology firm Tencent. With this data, the scholars also examined activity in 10,499 parks across the country, comparing useage totals across a range of conditions. And they obtained temperature data from about 2,000 weather stations in China.

      Ultimately, as the scholars write in the paper, they were able to “document large and significant activity-depressing and activity-delaying effects” on park visits as a result of ultrahot temperatures.

      “People have intraday adaptation patterns that hadn’t been documented in the previous literature,” Fan says. “These have important implications about people’s heat exposure and how future climate change will affect people’s activity and health.”

      As Zheng points out, altered use of public spaces affects daily routines not only in terms of individual activity and exercise, but also in terms of social and community life.

      “Extreme climates will reduce people’s opportunities to socialize in cities, or just watch kids playing basketball or soccer, which is not good,” she says. “We want people to have a wide-ranging urban life. There is a social cost to this adaptation.”

      As the research indicates, people clearly adapt to temperature spikes. The data also show that evening use of parks increases on extremely hot days, but only after conditions have cooled down. While that seems like a beneficial adaptation to very hot weather, the scholars citing existing research suggest people may sleep less as a result of making this kind of change to their daily routines.

      “Adaptation also has its own cost,” Fan says. “People significantly increased their nighttime outdoor activity, which means they delayed their nighttime, which will have a significant health implication, when you consider the potential sleep disruption.”

      All told, the study provides data, and a method, for better characterizing the effects on climate change on human activity in detail.

      “If we have more and more granular data about future climate scenarios, they support better predictions about these scenarios, reflecting people’s dynamic behaviors, and the health implications,” says Fan, whose doctoral research incorporates this work and other related studies on climate and urban activity.

      The researchers also note that the research methods used in this study could be applied to additional future studies of many other aspects of urban life, including street-level retail activities, and other things with implications for economic activity, real estate, and urban planning.

      “This relates to many other issues,” Zheng says.

      Jianghao Wang received funding from the National Key Research and Development Program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. More