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    MIT engineers design tiny batteries for powering cell-sized robots

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    A tiny battery designed by MIT engineers could enable the deployment of cell-sized, autonomous robots for drug delivery within in the human body, as well as other applications such as locating leaks in gas pipelines.The new battery, which is 0.1 millimeters long and 0.002 millimeters thick — roughly the thickness of a human hair — can capture oxygen from air and use it to oxidize zinc, creating a current of up to 1 volt. That is enough to power a small circuit, sensor, or actuator, the researchers showed.“We think this is going to be very enabling for robotics,” says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study. “We’re building robotic functions onto the battery and starting to put these components together into devices.”Ge Zhang PhD ’22 and Sungyun Yang, an MIT graduate student, are the lead author of the paper, which appears in Science Robotics.Powered by batteriesFor several years, Strano’s lab has been working on tiny robots that can sense and respond to stimuli in their environment. One of the major challenges in developing such tiny robots is making sure that they have enough power.Other researchers have shown that they can power microscale devices using solar power, but the limitation to that approach is that the robots must have a laser or another light source pointed at them at all times. Such devices are known as “marionettes” because they are controlled by an external power source. Putting a power source such as a battery inside these tiny devices could free them to roam much farther.“The marionette systems don’t really need a battery because they’re getting all the energy they need from outside,” Strano says. “But if you want a small robot to be able to get into spaces that you couldn’t access otherwise, it needs to have a greater level of autonomy. A battery is essential for something that’s not going to be tethered to the outside world.”To create robots that could become more autonomous, Strano’s lab decided to use a type of battery known as a zinc-air battery. These batteries, which have a longer lifespan than many other types of batteries due to their high energy density, are often used in hearing aids.The battery that they designed consists of a zinc electrode connected to a platinum electrode, embedded into a strip of a polymer called SU-8, which is commonly used for microelectronics. When these electrodes interact with oxygen molecules from the air, the zinc becomes oxidized and releases electrons that flow to the platinum electrode, creating a current.In this study, the researchers showed that this battery could provide enough energy to power an actuator — in this case, a robotic arm that can be raised and lowered. The battery could also power a memristor, an electrical component that can store memories of events by changing its electrical resistance, and a clock circuit, which allows robotic devices to keep track of time.The battery also provides enough power to run two different types of sensors that change their electrical resistance when they encounter chemicals in the environment. One of the sensors is made from atomically thin molybdenum disulfide and the other from carbon nanotubes.“We’re making the basic building blocks in order to build up functions at the cellular level,” Strano says.Robotic swarmsIn this study, the researchers used a wire to connect their battery to an external device, but in future work they plan to build robots in which the battery is incorporated into a device.“This is going to form the core of a lot of our robotic efforts,” Strano says. “You can build a robot around an energy source, sort of like you can build an electric car around the battery.”One of those efforts revolves around designing tiny robots that could be injected into the human body, where they could seek out a target site and then release a drug such as insulin. For use in the human body, the researchers envision that the devices would be made of biocompatible materials that would break apart once they were no longer needed.The researchers are also working on increasing the voltage of the battery, which may enable additional applications.The research was funded by the U.S. Army Research Office, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and a MathWorks Engineering Fellowship. More

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      in Environment

      Researchers return to Arctic to test integrated sensor nodes

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      Shimmering ice extends in all directions as far as the eye can see. Air temperatures plunge to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit and colder with wind chills. Ocean currents drag large swaths of ice floating at sea. Polar bears, narwhals, and other iconic Arctic species roam wild.For a week this past spring, MIT Lincoln Laboratory researchers Ben Evans and Dave Whelihan called this place — drifting some 200 nautical miles offshore from Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, on the frozen Beaufort Sea in the Arctic Circle — home. Two ice runways for small aircraft provided their only way in and out of this remote wilderness; heated tents provided their only shelter from the bitter cold.

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      Video: MIT Lincoln Laboratory

      Here, in the northernmost region on Earth, Evans and Whelihan joined other groups conducting fieldwork in the Arctic as part of Operation Ice Camp (OIC) 2024, an operational exercise run by the U.S. Navy’s Arctic Submarine Laboratory (ASL). Riding on snowmobiles and helicopters, the duo deployed a small set of integrated sensor nodes that measure everything from atmospheric conditions to ice properties to the structure of water deep below the surface.Ultimately, they envision deploying an unattended network of these low-cost sensor nodes across the Arctic to increase scientific understanding of the trending loss in sea ice extent and thickness. Warming much faster than the rest of the world, the Arctic is a ground zero for climate change, with cascading impacts across the planet that include rising sea levels and extreme weather. Openings in the sea ice cover, or leads, are concerning not only for climate change but also for global geopolitical competition over transit routes and natural resources. A synoptic view of the physical processes happening above, at, and below sea ice is key to determining why the ice is diminishing. In turn, this knowledge can help predict when and where fractures will occur, to inform planning and decision-making.Winter “camp”Every two years, OIC, previously called Ice Exercise (ICEX), provides a way for the international community to access the Arctic for operational readiness exercises and scientific research, with the focus switching back and forth; this year’s focus was scientific research. Coordination, planning, and execution of the month-long operation is led by ASL, a division of the U.S. Navy’s Undersea Warfighting Development Center responsible for ensuring the submarine force can effectively operate in the Arctic Ocean.Making this inhospitable and unforgiving environment safe for participants takes considerable effort. The critical first step is determining where to set up camp. In the weeks before the first participants arrived for OIC 2024, ASL — with assistance from the U.S. National Ice Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, and UIC Science — flew over large sheets of floating ice (ice floes) identified via satellite imagery, landed on some they thought might be viable sites, and drilled through the ice to check its thickness. The ice floe must not only be large enough to accommodate construction of a camp and two runways but also feature both multiyear ice and first-year ice. Multiyear ice is thick and strong but rough, making it ideal for camp setup, while the smooth but thinner first-year ice is better suited for building runways. Once the appropriate ice floe was selected, ASL began to haul in equipment and food, build infrastructure like lodging and a command center, and fly in a small group before fully operationalizing the site. They also identified locations near the camp for two Navy submarines to surface through the ice.The more than 200 participants represented U.S. and allied forces and scientists from research organizations and universities. Distinguished visitors from government offices also attended OIC to see the unique Arctic environment and unfolding challenges firsthand.“Our ASL hosts do incredible work to build this camp from scratch and keep us alive,” Evans says.Evans and Whelihan, part of the laboratory’s Advanced Undersea Systems and Technology Group, first trekked to the Arctic in March 2022 for ICEX 2022. (The laboratory in general has been participating since 2016 in these events, the first iteration of which occurred in 1946.) There, they deployed a suite of commercial off-the-shelf sensors for detecting acoustic (sound) and seismic (vibration) events created by ice fractures or collisions, and for measuring salinity, temperature, and pressure in the water below the ice. They also deployed a prototype fiber-based temperature sensor array developed by the laboratory and research partners for precisely measuring temperature across the entire water column at one location, and a University of New Hampshire (UNH)−supplied echosounder to investigate the different layers present in the water column. In this maiden voyage, their goals were to assess how these sensors fared in the harsh Arctic conditions and to collect a dataset from which characteristic signatures of ice-fracturing events could begin to be identified. These events would be correlated with weather and water conditions to eventually offer a predictive capability.“We saw real phenomenology in our data,” Whelihan says. “But, we’re not ice experts. What we’re good at here at the laboratory is making and deploying sensors. That’s our place in the world of climate science: to be a data provider. In fact, we hope to open source all of our data this year so that ice scientists can access and analyze them and then we can make enhanced sensors and collect more data.”Interim iceIn the two years since that expedition, they and their colleagues have been modifying their sensor designs and deployment strategies. As Evans and Whelihan learned at ICEX 2022, to be resilient in the Arctic, a sensor must not only be kept warm and dry during deployment but also be deployed in a way to prevent breaking. Moreover, sufficient power and data links are needed to collect and access sensor data.“We can make cold-weather electronics, no problem,” Whelihan says. “The two drivers are operating the sensors in an energy-starved environment — the colder it is, the worse batteries perform — and keeping them from getting destroyed when ice floes crash together as leads in the ice open up.”Their work in the interim to OIC 2024 involved integrating the individual sensors into hardened sensor nodes and practicing deploying these nodes in easier-to-access locations. To facilitate incorporating additional sensors into a node, Whelihan spearheaded the development of an open-source, easily extensible hardware and software architecture.In March 2023, the Lincoln Laboratory team deployed three sensor nodes for a week on Huron Bay off Lake Superior through Michigan Tech’s Great Lakes Research Center (GLRC). Engineers from GLRC helped the team safely set up an operations base on the ice. They demonstrated that the sensor integration worked, and the sensor nodes proved capable of surviving for at least a week in relatively harsh conditions. The researchers recorded seismic activity on all three nodes, corresponding to some ice breaking further up the bay.“Proving our sensor node in an Arctic surrogate environment provided a stepping stone for testing in the real Arctic,” Evans says.Evans then received an invitation from Ignatius Rigor, the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program (IABP), to join him on an upcoming trip to Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska, and deploy one of their seismic sensor nodes on the ice there (with support from UIC Science). The IABP maintains a network of Arctic buoys equipped with meteorological and oceanic sensors. Data collected by these buoys are shared with the operational and research communities to support real-time operations (e.g., forecasting sea ice conditions for coastal Alaskans) and climate research. However, these buoys are typically limited in the frequency at which they collect data, so phenomenology on shorter time scales important to climate change may be missed. Moreover, these buoys are difficult and expensive to deploy because they are designed to survive in the harshest environments for years at a time.  The laboratory-developed sensor nodes could offer an inexpensive, easier-to-deploy option for collecting more data over shorter periods of time. In April 2023, Evans placed a sensor node in Utqiaġvik on landfast sea ice, which is stationary ice anchored to the seabed just off the coast. During the sensor node’s week-long deployment, a big piece of drift ice (ice not attached to the seabed or other fixed object) broke off and crashed into the landfast ice. The event was recorded by a radar maintained by the University of Alaska Fairbanks that monitors sea ice movement in near real time to warn of any instability. Though this phenomenology is not exactly the same as that expected for Arctic sea ice, the researchers were encouraged to see seismic activity recorded by their sensor node.In December 2023, Evans and Whelihan headed to New Hampshire, where they conducted echosounder testing in UNH’s engineering test tank and on the Piscataqua River. Together with their UNH partners, they sought to determine whether a low-cost, hobby-grade echosounder could detect the same phenomenology of interest as the high-fidelity UNH echosounder, which would be far too costly to deploy in sensor nodes across the Arctic. In the test tank and on the river, the low-cost echosounder proved capable of detecting masses of water moving in the water column, but with considerably less structural detail than afforded by the higher-cost option. Seeing such dynamics is important to inferring where water comes from and understanding how it affects sea ice breakup — for example, how warm water moving in from the Pacific Ocean is coming into contact with and melting the ice. So, the laboratory researchers and UNH partners have been building a medium-fidelity, medium-cost echosounder.In January 2024, Evans and Whelihan — along with Jehan Diaz, a fellow staff member in their research group — returned to GLRC. With logistical support from their GLRC hosts, they snowmobiled across the ice on Portage Lake, where they practiced several activities to prepare for OIC 2024: augering (drilling) six-inch holes in the ice, albeit in thinner ice than that in the Arctic; placing their long, pipe-like sensor nodes through these holes; operating cold-hardened drones to interact with the nodes; and retrieving the nodes. They also practiced sensor calibration by hitting the ice with an iron bar some distance away from the nodes and correlating this distance with the resulting measured acoustic and seismic intensity.“Our time at GLRC helped us mitigate a lot of risks and prepare to deploy these complex systems in the Arctic,” Whelihan says.Arctic againTo get to OIC, Evans and Whelihan first flew to Prudhoe Bay and reacclimated to the frigid temperatures. They spent the next two days at the Deadhorse Aviation Center hangar inspecting their equipment for transit-induced damage, which included squashed cables and connectors that required rejiggering.“That’s part of the adventure story,” Evans says. “Getting stuff to Prudhoe Bay is not your standard shipping; it’s ice-road trucking.”From there, they boarded a small aircraft to the ice camp.“Even though this trip marked our second time coming here, it was still disorienting,” Evans continues. “You land in the middle of nowhere on a small aircraft after a couple-hour flight. You get out bundled in all of your Arctic gear in this remote, pristine environment.”After unloading and rechecking their equipment for any damage, calibrating their sensors, and attending safety briefings, they were ready to begin their experiments.An icy situationInside the project tent, Evans and Whelihan deployed the UNH-supplied echosounder and a suite of ground-truth sensors on an automated winch to profile water conductivity, temperature, and depth (CTD). Echosounder data needed to be validated with associated CTD data to determine the source of the water in the water column. Ocean properties change as a function of depth, and these changes are important to capture, in part because masses of water coming in from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans arrive at different depths. Though masses of warm water have always existed, climate change–related mechanisms are now bringing them into contact with the ice.  “As ice breaks up, wind can directly interact with the ocean because it’s lacking that barrier of ice cover,” Evans explains. “Kinetic energy from the wind causes mixing in the ocean; all the warm water that used to stay at depth instead gets brought up and interacts with the ice.”They also deployed four of their sensor nodes several miles outside of camp. To access this deployment site, they rode on a sled pulled via a snowmobile driven by Ann Hill, an ASL field party leader trained in Arctic survival and wildlife encounters. The temperature that day was -55 F. At such a dangerously cold temperature, frostnip and frostbite are all too common. To avoid removal of gloves or other protective clothing, the researchers enabled the nodes with WiFi capability (the nodes also have a satellite communications link to transmit low-bandwidth data). Large amounts of data are automatically downloaded over WiFi to an arm-wearable haptic (touch-based) system when a user walks up to a node.“It was so cold that the holes we were drilling in the ice to reach the water column were freezing solid,” Evans explains. “We realized it was going to be quite an ordeal to get our sensor nodes out of the ice.”So, after drilling a big hole in the ice, they deployed only one central node with all the sensor components: a commercial echosounder, an underwater microphone, a seismometer, and a weather station. They deployed the other three nodes, each with a seismometer and weather station, atop the ice.“One of our design considerations was flexibility,” Whelihan says. “Each node can integrate as few or as many sensors as desired.”The small sensor array was only collecting data for about a day when Evans and Whelihan, who were at the time on a helicopter, saw that their initial field site had become completely cut off from camp by a 150-meter-wide ice lead. They quickly returned to camp to load the tools needed to pull the nodes, which were no longer accessible by snowmobile. Two recently arrived staff members from the Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies offered to help them retrieve their nodes. The helicopter landed on the ice floe near a crack, and the pilot told them they had half an hour to complete their recovery mission. By the time they had retrieved all four sensors, the crack had increased from thumb to fist size.“When we got home, we analyzed the collected sensor data and saw a spike in seismic activity corresponding to what could be the major ice-fracturing event that necessitated our node recovery mission,” Whelihan says.  The researchers also conducted experiments with their Arctic-hardened drones to evaluate their utility for retrieving sensor node data and to develop concepts of operations for future capabilities.“The idea is to have some autonomous vehicle land next to the node, download data, and come back, like a data mule, rather than having to expend energy getting data off the system, say via high-speed satellite communications,” Whelihan says. “We also started testing whether the drone is capable on its own of finding sensors that are constantly moving and getting close enough to them. Even flying in 25-mile-per-hour winds, and at very low temperatures, the drone worked well.”Aside from carrying out their experiments, the researchers had the opportunity to interact with other participants. Their “roommates” were ice scientists from Norway and Finland. They met other ice and water scientists conducting chemistry experiments on the salt content of ice taken from different depths in the ice sheet (when ocean water freezes, salt tends to get pushed out of the ice). One of their collaborators — Nicholas Schmerr, an ice seismologist from the University of Maryland — placed high-quality geophones (for measuring vibrations in the ice) alongside their nodes deployed on the camp field site. They also met with junior enlisted submariners, who temporarily came to camp to open up spots on the submarine for distinguished visitors.“Part of what we’ve been doing over the last three years is building connections within the Arctic community,” Evans says. “Every time I start to get a handle on the phenomenology that exists out here, I learn something new. For example, I didn’t know that sometimes a layer of ice forms a little bit deeper than the primary ice sheet, and you can actually see fish swimming in between the layers.”“One day, we were out with our field party leader, who saw fog while she was looking at the horizon and said the ice was breaking up,” Whelihan adds. “I said, ‘Wait, what?’ As she explained, when an ice lead forms, fog comes out of the ocean. Sure enough, within 30 minutes, we had quarter-mile visibility, whereas beforehand it was unlimited.”Back to solid groundBefore leaving, Whelihan and Evans retrieved and packed up all the remaining sensor nodes, adopting the “leave no trace” philosophy of preserving natural places.“Only a limited number of people get access to this special environment,” Whelihan says. “We hope to grow our footprint at these events in future years, giving opportunities to other laboratory staff members to attend.”In the meantime, they will analyze the collected sensor data and refine their sensor node design. One design consideration is how to replenish the sensors’ battery power. A potential path forward is to leverage the temperature difference between water and air, and harvest energy from the water currents moving under ice floes. Wind energy may provide another viable solution. Solar power would only work for part of the year because the Arctic Circle undergoes periods of complete darkness.The team is also seeking external sponsorship to continue their work engineering sensing systems that advance the scientific community’s understanding of changes to Arctic ice; this work is currently funded through Lincoln Laboratory’s internally administered R&D portfolio on climate change. And, in learning more about this changing environment and its critical importance to strategic interests, they are considering other sensing problems that they could tackle using their Arctic engineering expertise.“The Arctic is becoming a more visible and important region because of how it’s changing,” Evans concludes. “Going forward as a country, we must be able to operate there.” More

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      in Security

      Researchers develop a detector for continuously monitoring toxic gases

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      Most systems used to detect toxic gases in industrial or domestic settings can be used only once, or at best a few times. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a detector that could provide continuous monitoring for the presence of these gases, at low cost.The new system combines two existing technologies, bringing them together in a way that preserves the advantages of each while avoiding their limitations. The team used a material called a metal-organic framework, or MOF, which is highly sensitive to tiny traces of gas but whose performance quickly degrades, and combined it with a polymer material that is highly durable and easier to process, but much less sensitive.The results are reported today in the journal Advanced Materials, in a paper by MIT professors Aristide Gumyusenge, Mircea Dinca, Heather Kulik, and Jesus del Alamo, graduate student Heejung Roh, and postdocs Dong-Ha Kim, Yeongsu Cho, and Young-Moo Jo.Highly porous and with large surface areas, MOFs come in a variety of compositions. Some can be insulators, but the ones used for this work are highly electrically conductive. With their sponge-like form, they are effective at capturing molecules of various gases, and the sizes of their pores can be tailored to make them selective for particular kinds of gases. “If you are using them as a sensor, you can recognize if the gas is there if it has an effect on the resistivity of the MOF,” says Gumyusenge, the paper’s senior author and the Merton C. Flemings Career Development Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering.The drawback for these materials’ use as detectors for gases is that they readily become saturated, and then can no longer detect and quantify new inputs. “That’s not what you want. You want to be able to detect and reuse,” Gumyusenge says. “So, we decided to use a polymer composite to achieve this reversibility.”The team used a class of conductive polymers that Gumyusenge and his co-workers had previously shown can respond to gases without permanently binding to them. “The polymer, even though it doesn’t have the high surface area that the MOFs do, will at least provide this recognize-and-release type of phenomenon,” he says.The team combined the polymers in a liquid solution along with the MOF material in powdered form, and deposited the mixture on a substrate, where they dry into a uniform, thin coating. By combining the polymer, with its quick detection capability, and the more sensitive MOFs, in a one-to-one ratio, he says, “suddenly we get a sensor that has both the high sensitivity we get from the MOF and the reversibility that is enabled by the presence of the polymer.”The material changes its electrical resistance when molecules of the gas are temporarily trapped in the material. These changes in resistance can be continuously monitored by simply attaching an ohmmeter to track the resistance over time. Gumyusenge and his students demonstrated the composite material’s ability to detect nitrogen dioxide, a toxic gas produced by many kinds of combustion, in a small lab-scale device. After 100 cycles of detection, the material was still maintaining its baseline performance within a margin of about 5 to 10 percent, demonstrating its long-term use potential.In addition, this material has far greater sensitivity than most presently used detectors for nitrogen dioxide, the team reports. This gas is often detected after the use of stove ovens. And, with this gas recently linked to many asthma cases in the U.S., reliable detection in low concentrations is important. The team demonstrated that this new composite could detect, reversibly, the gas at concentrations as low as 2 parts per million.While their demonstration was specifically aimed at nitrogen dioxide, Gumyusenge says, “we can definitely tailor the chemistry to target other volatile molecules,” as long as they are small polar analytes, “which tend to be most of the toxic gases.”Besides being compatible with a simple hand-held detector or a smoke-alarm type of device, one advantage of the material is that the polymer allows it to be deposited as an extremely thin uniform film, unlike regular MOFs, which are generally in an inefficient powder form. Because the films are so thin, there is little material needed and production material costs could be low; the processing methods could be typical of those used for industrial coating processes. “So, maybe the limiting factor will be scaling up the synthesis of the polymers, which we’ve been synthesizing in small amounts,” Gumyusenge says.“The next steps will be to evaluate these in real-life settings,” he says. For example, the material could be applied as a coating on chimneys or exhaust pipes to continuously monitor gases through readings from an attached resistance monitoring device. In such settings, he says, “we need tests to check if we truly differentiate it from other potential contaminants that we might have overlooked in the lab setting. Let’s put the sensors out in real-world scenarios and see how they do.”The work was supported by the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium (MCSC), the Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) at MIT, and the U.S. Department of Energy. More

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      in Environment

      Shining a light on oil fields to make them more sustainable

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      Operating an oil field is complex and there is a staggeringly long list of things that can go wrong.

      One of the most common problems is spills of the salty brine that’s a toxic byproduct of pumping oil. Another is over- or under-pumping that can lead to machine failure and methane leaks. (The oil and gas industry is the largest industrial emitter of methane in the U.S.) Then there are extreme weather events, which range from winter frosts to blazing heat, that can put equipment out of commission for months. One of the wildest problems Sebastien Mannai SM ’14, PhD ’18 has encountered are hogs that pop open oil tanks with their snouts to enjoy on-demand oil baths.

      Mannai helps oil field owners detect and respond to these problems while optimizing the operation of their machinery to prevent the issues from occurring in the first place. He is the founder and CEO of Amplified Industries, a company selling oil field monitoring and control tools that help make the industry more efficient and sustainable.

      Amplified Industries’ sensors and analytics give oil well operators real-time alerts when things go wrong, allowing them to respond to issues before they become disasters.

      “We’re able to find 99 percent of the issues affecting these machines, from mechanical failures to human errors, including issues happening thousands of feet underground,” Mannai explains. “With our AI solution, operators can put the wells on autopilot, and the system automatically adjusts or shuts the well down as soon as there’s an issue.”

      Amplified currently works with private companies in states spanning from Texas to Wyoming, that own and operate as many as 3,000 wells. Such companies make up the majority of oil well operators in the U.S. and operate both new and older, more failure-prone equipment that has been in the field for decades.

      Such operators also have a harder time responding to environmental regulations like the Environmental Protection Agency’s new methane guidelines, which seek to dramatically reduce emissions of the potent greenhouse gas in the industry over the next few years.

      “These operators don’t want to be releasing methane,” Mannai explains. “Additionally, when gas gets into the pumping equipment, it leads to premature failures. We can detect gas and slow the pump down to prevent it. It’s the best of both worlds: The operators benefit because their machines are working better, saving them money while also giving them a smaller environmental footprint with fewer spills and methane leaks.”

      Leveraging “every MIT resource I possibly could”

      Mannai learned about the cutting-edge technology used in the space and aviation industries as he pursued his master’s degree at the Gas Turbine Laboratory in MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Then, during his PhD at MIT, he worked with an oil services company and discovered the oil and gas industry was still relying on decades-old technologies and equipment.

      “When I first traveled to the field, I could not believe how old-school the actual operations were,” says Mannai, who has previously worked in rocket engine and turbine factories. “A lot of oil wells have to be adjusted by feel and rules of thumb. The operators have been let down by industrial automation and data companies.”

      Monitoring oil wells for problems typically requires someone in a pickup truck to drive hundreds of miles between wells looking for obvious issues, Mannai says. The sensors that are deployed are expensive and difficult to replace. Over time, they’re also often damaged in the field to the point of being unusable, forcing technicians to make educated guesses about the status of each well.

      “We often see that equipment unplugged or programmed incorrectly because it is incredibly over-complicated and ill-designed for the reality of the field,” Mannai says. “Workers on the ground often have to rip it out and bypass the control system to pump by hand. That’s how you end up with so many spills and wells pumping at suboptimal levels.”

      To build a better oil field monitoring system, Mannai received support from the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund and the Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). He also participated in the delta V summer accelerator at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, the fuse program during IAP, and the MIT I-Corps program, and took a number of classes at the MIT Sloan School of Management. In 2019, Amplified Industries — which operated under the name Acoustic Wells until recently — won the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship competition.

      “My approach was to sign up to every possible entrepreneurship related program and to leverage every MIT resource I possibly could,” Mannai says. “MIT was amazing for us.”

      Mannai officially launched the company after his postdoc at MIT, and Amplified raised its first round of funding in early 2020. That year, Amplified’s small team moved into the Greentown Labs startup incubator in Somerville.

      Mannai says building the company’s battery-powered, low-cost sensors was a huge challenge. The sensors run machine-learning inference models and their batteries last for 10 years. They also had to be able to handle extreme conditions, from the scorching hot New Mexico desert to the swamps of Louisiana and the freezing cold winters in North Dakota.

      “We build very rugged, resilient hardware; it’s a must in those environments” Mannai says. “But it’s also very simple to deploy, so if a device does break, it’s like changing a lightbulb: We ship them a new one and it takes them a couple of minutes to swap it out.”

      Customers equip each well with four or five of Amplified’s sensors, which attach to the well’s cables and pipes to measure variables like tension, pressure, and amps. Vast amounts of data are then sent to Amplified’s cloud and processed by their analytics engine. Signal processing methods and AI models are used to diagnose problems and control the equipment in real-time, while generating notifications for the operators when something goes wrong. Operators can then remotely adjust the well or shut it down.

      “That’s where AI is important, because if you just record everything and put it in a giant dashboard, you create way more work for people,” Mannai says. “The critical part is the ability to process and understand this newly recorded data and make it readily usable in the real world.”

      Amplified’s dashboard is customized for different people in the company, so field technicians can quickly respond to problems and managers or owners can get a high-level view of how everything is running.

      Mannai says often when Amplified’s sensors are installed, they’ll immediately start detecting problems that were unknown to engineers and technicians in the field. To date, Amplified has prevented hundreds of thousands of gallons worth of brine water spills, which are particularly damaging to surrounding vegetation because of their high salt and sulfur content.

      Preventing those spills is only part of Amplified’s positive environmental impact; the company is now turning its attention toward the detection of methane leaks.

      Helping a changing industry

      The EPA’s proposed new Waste Emissions Charge for oil and gas companies would start at $900 per metric ton of reported methane emissions in 2024 and increase to $1,500 per metric ton in 2026 and beyond.

      Mannai says Amplified is well-positioned to help companies comply with the new rules. Its equipment has already showed it can detect various kinds of leaks across the field, purely based on analytics of existing data.

      “Detecting methane leaks typically requires someone to walk around every valve and piece of piping with a thermal camera or sniffer, but these operators often have thousands of valves and hundreds of miles of pipes,” Mannai says. “What we see in the field is that a lot of times people don’t know where the pipes are because oil wells change owners so frequently, or they will miss an intermittent leak.”

      Ultimately Mannai believes a strong data backend and modernized sensing equipment will become the backbone of the industry, and is a necessary prerequisite to both improving efficiency and cleaning up the industry.

      “We’re selling a service that ensures your equipment is working optimally all the time,” Mannai says. “That means a lot fewer fines from the EPA, but it also means better-performing equipment. There’s a mindset change happening across the industry, and we’re helping make that transition as easy and affordable as possible.” More

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      in Environment

      A new sensor detects harmful “forever chemicals” in drinking water

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      MIT chemists have designed a sensor that detects tiny quantities of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — chemicals found in food packaging, nonstick cookware, and many other consumer products.

      These compounds, also known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down naturally, have been linked to a variety of harmful health effects, including cancer, reproductive problems, and disruption of the immune and endocrine systems.

      Using the new sensor technology, the researchers showed that they could detect PFAS levels as low as 200 parts per trillion in a water sample. The device they designed could offer a way for consumers to test their drinking water, and it could also be useful in industries that rely heavily on PFAS chemicals, including the manufacture of semiconductors and firefighting equipment.

      “There’s a real need for these sensing technologies. We’re stuck with these chemicals for a long time, so we need to be able to detect them and get rid of them,” says Timothy Swager, the John D. MacArthur Professor of Chemistry at MIT and the senior author of the study, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

      Other authors of the paper are former MIT postdoc and lead author Sohyun Park and MIT graduate student Collette Gordon.

      Detecting PFAS

      Coatings containing PFAS chemicals are used in thousands of consumer products. In addition to nonstick coatings for cookware, they are also commonly used in water-repellent clothing, stain-resistant fabrics, grease-resistant pizza boxes, cosmetics, and firefighting foams.

      These fluorinated chemicals, which have been in widespread use since the 1950s, can be released into water, air, and soil, from factories, sewage treatment plants, and landfills. They have been found in drinking water sources in all 50 states.

      In 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency created an “advisory health limit” for two of the most hazardous PFAS chemicals, known as perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctyl sulfonate (PFOS). These advisories call for a limit of 0.004 parts per trillion for PFOA and 0.02 parts per trillion for PFOS in drinking water.

      Currently, the only way that a consumer could determine if their drinking water contains PFAS is to send a water sample to a laboratory that performs mass spectrometry testing. However, this process takes several weeks and costs hundreds of dollars.

      To create a cheaper and faster way to test for PFAS, the MIT team designed a sensor based on lateral flow technology — the same approach used for rapid Covid-19 tests and pregnancy tests. Instead of a test strip coated with antibodies, the new sensor is embedded with a special polymer known as polyaniline, which can switch between semiconducting and conducting states when protons are added to the material.

      The researchers deposited these polymers onto a strip of nitrocellulose paper and coated them with a surfactant that can pull fluorocarbons such as PFAS out of a drop of water placed on the strip. When this happens, protons from the PFAS are drawn into the polyaniline and turn it into a conductor, reducing the electrical resistance of the material. This change in resistance, which can be measured precisely using electrodes and sent to an external device such as a smartphone, gives a quantitative measurement of how much PFAS is present.

      This approach works only with PFAS that are acidic, which includes two of the most harmful PFAS — PFOA and perfluorobutanoic acid (PFBA).

      A user-friendly system

      The current version of the sensor can detect concentrations as low as 200 parts per trillion for PFBA, and 400 parts per trillion for PFOA. This is not quite low enough to meet the current EPA guidelines, but the sensor uses only a fraction of a milliliter of water. The researchers are now working on a larger-scale device that would be able to filter about a liter of water through a membrane made of polyaniline, and they believe this approach should increase the sensitivity by more than a hundredfold, with the goal of meeting the very low EPA advisory levels.

      “We do envision a user-friendly, household system,” Swager says. “You can imagine putting in a liter of water, letting it go through the membrane, and you have a device that measures the change in resistance of the membrane.”

      Such a device could offer a less expensive, rapid alternative to current PFAS detection methods. If PFAS are detected in drinking water, there are commercially available filters that can be used on household drinking water to reduce those levels. The new testing approach could also be useful for factories that manufacture products with PFAS chemicals, so they could test whether the water used in their manufacturing process is safe to release into the environment.

      The research was funded by an MIT School of Science Fellowship to Gordon, a Bose Research Grant, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Park. More

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      Technologies for water conservation and treatment move closer to commercialization

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      The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) provides Solutions Grants to help MIT researchers launch startup companies or products to commercialize breakthrough technologies in water and food systems. The Solutions Grant Program began in 2015 and is supported by Community Jameel. In addition to one-year, renewable grants of up to $150,000, the program also matches grantees with industry mentors and facilitates introductions to potential investors. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions Program has awarded over $3 million in funding to the MIT community. Numerous startups and products, including a portable desalination device and a company commercializing a novel food safety sensor, have spun out of this support.

      The 2023 J-WAFS Solutions Grantees are Professor C. Cem Tasan of the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor Andrew Whittle of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Tasan’s project involves reducing water use in steel manufacturing and Whittle’s project tackles harmful algal blooms in water. Project work commences this September.

      “This year’s Solutions Grants are being award to professors Tasan and Whittle to help commercialize technologies they have been developing at MIT,” says J-WAFS executive director Renee J. Robins. “With J-WAFS’ support, we hope to see the teams move their technologies from the lab to the market, so they can have a beneficial impact on water use and water quality challenges,” Robins adds.

      Reducing water consumption by solid-state steelmaking

      Water is a major requirement for steel production. The steel industry ranks fourth in industrial freshwater consumption worldwide, since large amounts of water are needed mainly for cooling purposes in the process. Unfortunately, a strong correlation has also been shown to exist between freshwater use in steelmaking and water contamination. As the global demand for steel increases and freshwater availability decreases due to climate change, improved methods for more sustainable steel production are needed.

      A strategy to reduce the water footprint of steelmaking is to explore steel recycling processes that avoid liquid metal processing. With this motivation, Cem Tasan, the Thomas B. King Associate Professor of Metallurgy in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, and postdoc Onur Guvenc PhD created a new process called Scrap Metal Consolidation (SMC). SMC is based on a well-established metal forming process known as roll bonding. Conventionally, roll bonding requires intensive prior surface treatment of the raw material, specific atmospheric conditions, and high deformation levels. Tasan and Guvenc’s research revealed that SMC can overcome these restrictions by enabling the solid-state bonding of scrap into a sheet metal form, even when the surface quality, atmospheric conditions, and deformation levels are suboptimal. Through lab-scale proof-of-principle investigations, they have already identified SMC process conditions and validated the mechanical formability of resulting steel sheets, focusing on mild steel, the most common sheet metal scrap.

      The J-WAFS Solutions Grant will help the team to build customer product prototypes, design the processing unit, and develop a scale-up strategy and business model. By simultaneously decreasing water usage, energy demand, contamination risk, and carbon dioxide burden, SMC has the potential to decrease the energy need for steel recycling by up to 86 percent, as well as reduce the linked carbon dioxide emissions and safeguard the freshwater resources that would otherwise be directed to industrial consumption. 

      Detecting harmful algal blooms in water before it’s too late

      Harmful algal blooms (HABs) are a growing problem in both freshwater and saltwater environments worldwide, causing an estimated $13 billion in annual damage to drinking water, water for recreational use, commercial fishing areas, and desalination activities. HABs pose a threat to both human health and aquaculture, thereby threatening the food supply. Toxins in HABs are produced by some cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, whose communities change in composition in response to eutrophication from agricultural runoff, sewer overflows, or other events. Mitigation of risks from HABs are most effective when there is advance warning of these changes in algal communities. 

      Most in situ measurements of algae are based on fluorescence spectroscopy that is conducted with LED-induced fluorescence (LEDIF) devices, or probes that induce fluorescence of specific algal pigments using LED light sources. While LEDIFs provide reasonable estimates of concentrations of individual pigments, they lack resolution to discriminate algal classes within complex mixtures found in natural water bodies. In prior research, Andrew Whittle, the Edmund K. Turner Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, worked with colleagues to design REMORA, a low-cost, field-deployable prototype spectrofluorometer for measuring induced fluorescence. This research was part of a collaboration between MIT and the AMS Institute. Whittle and the team successfully trained a machine learning model to discriminate and quantify cell concentrations for mixtures of different algal groups in water samples through an extensive laboratory calibration program using various algae cultures. The group demonstrated these capabilities in a series of field measurements at locations in Boston and Amsterdam. 

      Whittle will work with Fábio Duarte of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the Senseable City Lab, and MIT’s Center for Real Estate to refine the design of REMORA. They will develop software for autonomous operation of the sensor that can be deployed remotely on mobile vessels or platforms to enable high-resolution spatiotemporal monitoring for harmful algae. Sensor commercialization will hopefully be able to exploit the unique capabilities of REMORA for long-term monitoring applications by water utilities, environmental regulatory agencies, and water-intensive industries.  More

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      Devices offers long-distance, low-power underwater communication

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      MIT researchers have demonstrated the first system for ultra-low-power underwater networking and communication, which can transmit signals across kilometer-scale distances.

      This technique, which the researchers began developing several years ago, uses about one-millionth the power that existing underwater communication methods use. By expanding their battery-free system’s communication range, the researchers have made the technology more feasible for applications such as aquaculture, coastal hurricane prediction, and climate change modeling.

      “What started as a very exciting intellectual idea a few years ago — underwater communication with a million times lower power — is now practical and realistic. There are still a few interesting technical challenges to address, but there is a clear path from where we are now to deployment,” says Fadel Adib, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and director of the Signal Kinetics group in the MIT Media Lab.

      Underwater backscatter enables low-power communication by encoding data in sound waves that it reflects, or scatters, back toward a receiver. These innovations enable reflected signals to be more precisely directed at their source.

      Due to this “retrodirectivity,” less signal scatters in the wrong directions, allowing for more efficient and longer-range communication.

      When tested in a river and an ocean, the retrodirective device exhibited a communication range that was more than 15 times farther than previous devices. However, the experiments were limited by the length of the docks available to the researchers.

      To better understand the limits of underwater backscatter, the team also developed an analytical model to predict the technology’s maximum range. The model, which they validated using experimental data, showed that their retrodirective system could communicate across kilometer-scale distances.

      The researchers shared these findings in two papers which will be presented at this year’s ACM SIGCOMM and MobiCom conferences. Adib, senior author on both papers, is joined on the SIGCOMM paper by co-lead authors Aline Eid, a former postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, and Jack Rademacher, a research assistant; as well as research assistants Waleed Akbar and Purui Wang, and postdoc Ahmed Allam. The MobiCom paper is also written by co-lead authors Akbar and Allam.

      Communicating with sound waves

      Underwater backscatter communication devices utilize an array of nodes made from “piezoelectric” materials to receive and reflect sound waves. These materials produce an electric signal when mechanical force is applied to them.

      When sound waves strike the nodes, they vibrate and convert the mechanical energy to an electric charge. The nodes use that charge to scatter some of the acoustic energy back to the source, transmitting data that a receiver decodes based on the sequence of reflections.

      But because the backscattered signal travels in all directions, only a small fraction reaches the source, reducing the signal strength and limiting the communication range.

      To overcome this challenge, the researchers leveraged a 70-year-old radio device called a Van Atta array, in which symmetric pairs of antennas are connected in such a way that the array reflects energy back in the direction it came from.

      But connecting piezoelectric nodes to make a Van Atta array reduces their efficiency. The researchers avoided this problem by placing a transformer between pairs of connected nodes. The transformer, which transfers electric energy from one circuit to another, allows the nodes to reflect the maximum amount of energy back to the source.

      “Both nodes are receiving and both nodes are reflecting, so it is a very interesting system. As you increase the number of elements in that system, you build an array that allows you to achieve much longer communication ranges,” Eid explains.

      In addition, they used a technique called cross-polarity switching to encode binary data in the reflected signal. Each node has a positive and a negative terminal (like a car battery), so when the positive terminals of two nodes are connected and the negative terminals of two nodes are connected, that reflected signal is a “bit one.”

      But if the researchers switch the polarity, and the negative and positive terminals are connected to each other instead, then the reflection is a “bit zero.”

      “Just connecting the piezoelectric nodes together is not enough. By alternating the polarities between the two nodes, we are able to transmit data back to the remote receiver,” Rademacher explains.

      When building the Van Atta array, the researchers found that if the connected nodes were too close, they would block each other’s signals. They devised a new design with staggered nodes that enables signals to reach the array from any direction. With this scalable design, the more nodes an array has, the greater its communication range.

      They tested the array in more than 1,500 experimental trials in the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Falmouth, Massachusetts, in collaboration with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. The device achieved communication ranges of 300 meters, more than 15 times longer than they previously demonstrated.

      However, they had to cut the experiments short because they ran out of space on the dock.

      Modeling the maximum

      That inspired the researchers to build an analytical model to determine the theoretical and practical communication limits of this new underwater backscatter technology.

      Building off their group’s work on RFIDs, the team carefully crafted a model that captured the impact of system parameters, like the size of the piezoelectric nodes and the input power of the signal, on the underwater operation range of the device.

      “It is not a traditional communication technology, so you need to understand how you can quantify the reflection. What are the roles of the different components in that process?” Akbar says.

      For instance, the researchers needed to derive a function that captures the amount of signal reflected out of an underwater piezoelectric node with a specific size, which was among the biggest challenges of developing the model, he adds.

      They used these insights to create a plug-and-play model into a which a user could enter information like input power and piezoelectric node dimensions and receive an output that shows the expected range of the system.

      They evaluated the model on data from their experimental trials and found that it could accurately predict the range of retrodirected acoustic signals with an average error of less than one decibel.

      Using this model, they showed that an underwater backscatter array can potentially achieve kilometer-long communication ranges.

      “We are creating a new ocean technology and propelling it into the realm of the things we have been doing for 6G cellular networks. For us, it is very rewarding because we are starting to see this now very close to reality,” Adib says.

      The researchers plan to continue studying underwater backscatter Van Atta arrays, perhaps using boats so they could evaluate longer communication ranges. Along the way, they intend to release tools and datasets so other researchers can build on their work. At the same time, they are beginning to move toward commercialization of this technology.

      “Limited range has been an open problem in underwater backscatter networks, preventing them from being used in real-world applications. This paper takes a significant step forward in the future of underwater communication, by enabling them to operate on minimum energy while achieving long range,” says Omid Abari, assistant professor of computer science at the University of California at Los Angeles, who was not involved with this work. “The paper is the first to bring Van Atta Reflector array technique into underwater backscatter settings and demonstrate its benefits in improving the communication range by orders of magnitude. This can take battery-free underwater communication one step closer to reality, enabling applications such as underwater climate change monitoring and coastal monitoring.”

      This research was funded, in part, by the Office of Naval Research, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the National Science Foundation, the MIT Media Lab, and the Doherty Chair in Ocean Utilization. More

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      Uncovering how biomes respond to climate change

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      Before Leila Mirzagholi arrived at MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) to begin her postdoc appointment, she had spent most of her time in academia building cosmological models to detect properties of gravitational waves in the cosmos.

      But as a member of Assistant Professor César Terrer’s lab in CEE, Mirzagholi uses her physics and mathematical background to improve our understanding of the different factors that influence how much carbon land ecosystems can store under climate change.

      “What was always important to me was thinking about how to solve a problem and putting all the pieces together and building something from scratch,” Mirzagholi says, adding this was one of the reasons that it was possible for her to switch fields — and what drives her today as a climate scientist.

      Growing up in Iran, Mirzagholi knew she wanted to be a scientist from an early age. As a kid, she became captivated by physics, spending most of her free time in a local cultural center that hosted science events. “I remember in that center there was an observatory that held observational tours and it drew me into science,” says Mirzgholi. She also remembers a time when she was a kid watching the science fiction film “Contact” that introduces a female scientist character who finds evidence of extraterrestrial life and builds a spaceship to make first contact: “After that movie my mind was set on pursuing astrophysics.”

      With the encouragement of her parents to develop a strong mathematical background before pursuing physics, she earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Tehran University. Then she completed a one-year master class in mathematics at Utrecht University before completing her PhD in theoretical physics at Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich. There, Mirzgholi’s thesis focused on developing cosmological models with a focus on phenomenological aspects like propagation of gravitational waves on the cosmic microwave background.

      Midway through her PhD, Mirzgholi became discouraged with building models to explain the dynamics of the early universe because there is little new data. “It starts to get personal and becomes a game of: ‘Is it my model or your model?’” she explains. She grew frustrated not knowing when the models she’d built would ever be tested.

      It was at this time that Mirzgholi started reading more about the topics of climate change and climate science. “I was really motivated by the problems and the nature of the problems, especially to make global terrestrial ecology more quantitative,” she says. She also liked the idea of contributing to a global problem that we are all facing. She started to think, “maybe I can do my part, I can work on research beneficial for society and the planet.”

      She made the switch following her PhD and started as a postdoc in the Crowther Lab at ETH Zurich, working on understanding the effects of environmental changes on global vegetation activity. After a stint at ETH, where her colleagues collaborated on projects with the Terrer Lab, she relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to join the lab and CEE.

      Her latest article in Science, which was published in July and co-authored by researchers from ETH, shows how global warming affects the timing of autumn leaf senescence. “It’s important to understand the length of the growing season, and how much the forest or other biomes will have the capacity to take in carbon from the atmosphere.” Using remote sensing data, she was able to understand when the growing season will end under a warming climate. “We distinguish two dates — when autumn is onsetting and the leaves are starting to turn yellow, versus when the leaves are 50 percent yellow — to represent the progression of leaf senescence,” she says.

      In the context of rising temperature, when the warming is happening plays a crucial role. If warming temperatures happen before the summer solstice, it triggers trees to begin their seasonal cycles faster, leading to reduced photosynthesis, ending in an earlier autumn. On the other hand, if the warming happens after the summer solstice, it delays the discoloration process, making autumn last longer. “For every degree Celsius of pre-solstice warming, the onset of leaf senescence advances by 1.9 days, while each degree Celsius of post-solstice warming delays the senescence process by 2.6 days,” she explains. Understanding the timing of autumn leaf senescence is essential in efforts to predict carbon storage capacity when modeling global carbon cycles.

      Another problem she’s working on in the Terrer Lab is discovering how deforestation is changing our local climate. How much is it cooling or warming the temperature, and how is the hydrological cycle changing because of deforestation? Investigating these questions will give insight into how much we can depend on natural solutions for carbon uptake to help mitigate climate change. “Quantitatively, we want to put a number to the amount of carbon uptake from various natural solutions, as opposed to other solutions,” she says.

      With year-and-a-half left in her postdoc appointment, Mirzagholi has begun considering her next career steps. She likes the idea of applying to climate scientist jobs in industry or national labs, as well as tenure track faculty positions. Whether she pursues a career in academia or industry, Mirzagholi aims to continue conducting fundamental climate science research. Her multidisciplinary background in physics, mathematics, and climate science has given her a multifaceted perspective, which she applies to every research problem.

      “Looking back, I’m grateful for all my educational experiences from spending time in the cultural center as a kid, my background in physics, the support from colleagues at the Crowther lab at ETH who facilitated my transition from physics to ecology, and now working at MIT alongside Professor Terrer, because it’s shaped my career path and the researcher I am today.” More

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      A new dataset of Arctic images will spur artificial intelligence research

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      As the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG) icebreaker Healy takes part in a voyage across the North Pole this summer, it is capturing images of the Arctic to further the study of this rapidly changing region. Lincoln Laboratory researchers installed a camera system aboard the Healy while at port in Seattle before it embarked on a three-month science mission on July 11. The resulting dataset, which will be one of the first of its kind, will be used to develop artificial intelligence tools that can analyze Arctic imagery.

      “This dataset not only can help mariners navigate more safely and operate more efficiently, but also help protect our nation by providing critical maritime domain awareness and an improved understanding of how AI analysis can be brought to bear in this challenging and unique environment,” says Jo Kurucar, a researcher in Lincoln Laboratory’s AI Software Architectures and Algorithms Group, which led this project.

      As the planet warms and sea ice melts, Arctic passages are opening up to more traffic, both to military vessels and ships conducting illegal fishing. These movements may pose national security challenges to the United States. The opening Arctic also leaves questions about how its climate, wildlife, and geography are changing.

      Today, very few imagery datasets of the Arctic exist to study these changes. Overhead images from satellites or aircraft can only provide limited information about the environment. An outward-looking camera attached to a ship can capture more details of the setting and different angles of objects, such as other ships, in the scene. These types of images can then be used to train AI computer-vision tools, which can help the USCG plan naval missions and automate analysis. According to Kurucar, USCG assets in the Arctic are spread thin and can benefit greatly from AI tools, which can act as a force multiplier.

      The Healy is the USCG’s largest and most technologically advanced icebreaker. Given its current mission, it was a fitting candidate to be equipped with a new sensor to gather this dataset. The laboratory research team collaborated with the USCG Research and Development Center to determine the sensor requirements. Together, they developed the Cold Region Imaging and Surveillance Platform (CRISP).

      “Lincoln Laboratory has an excellent relationship with the Coast Guard, especially with the Research and Development Center. Over a decade, we’ve established ties that enabled the deployment of the CRISP system,” says Amna Greaves, the CRISP project lead and an assistant leader in the AI Software Architectures and Algorithms Group. “We have strong ties not only because of the USCG veterans working at the laboratory and in our group, but also because our technology missions are complementary. Today it was deploying infrared sensing in the Arctic; tomorrow it could be operating quadruped robot dogs on a fast-response cutter.”

      The CRISP system comprises a long-wave infrared camera, manufactured by Teledyne FLIR (for forward-looking infrared), that is designed for harsh maritime environments. The camera can stabilize itself during rough seas and image in complete darkness, fog, and glare. It is paired with a GPS-enabled time-synchronized clock and a network video recorder to record both video and still imagery along with GPS-positional data.  

      The camera is mounted at the front of the ship’s fly bridge, and the electronics are housed in a ruggedized rack on the bridge. The system can be operated manually from the bridge or be placed into an autonomous surveillance mode, in which it slowly pans back and forth, recording 15 minutes of video every three hours and a still image once every 15 seconds.

      “The installation of the equipment was a unique and fun experience. As with any good project, our expectations going into the install did not meet reality,” says Michael Emily, the project’s IT systems administrator who traveled to Seattle for the install. Working with the ship’s crew, the laboratory team had to quickly adjust their route for running cables from the camera to the observation station after they discovered that the expected access points weren’t in fact accessible. “We had 100-foot cables made for this project just in case of this type of scenario, which was a good thing because we only had a few inches to spare,” Emily says.

      The CRISP project team plans to publicly release the dataset, anticipated to be about 4 terabytes in size, once the USCG science mission concludes in the fall.

      The goal in releasing the dataset is to enable the wider research community to develop better tools for those operating in the Arctic, especially as this region becomes more navigable. “Collecting and publishing the data allows for faster and greater progress than what we could accomplish on our own,” Kurucar adds. “It also enables the laboratory to engage in more advanced AI applications while others make more incremental advances using the dataset.”

      On top of providing the dataset, the laboratory team plans to provide a baseline object-detection model, from which others can make progress on their own models. More advanced AI applications planned for development are classifiers for specific objects in the scene and the ability to identify and track objects across images.

      Beyond assisting with USCG missions, this project could create an influential dataset for researchers looking to apply AI to data from the Arctic to help combat climate change, says Paul Metzger, who leads the AI Software Architectures and Algorithms Group.

      Metzger adds that the group was honored to be a part of this project and is excited to see the advances that come from applying AI to novel challenges facing the United States: “I’m extremely proud of how our group applies AI to the highest-priority challenges in our nation, from predicting outbreaks of Covid-19 and assisting the U.S. European Command in their support of Ukraine to now employing AI in the Arctic for maritime awareness.”

      Once the dataset is available, it will be free to download on the Lincoln Laboratory dataset website. More