Forging the digital future | MIT Technology Review

It worked out, of course. He headed to Cambridge and gravitated to MIT’s AI Lab in Technology Square, where he first worked on speech recognition and then transitioned into computer vision, at the time still in its infancy. After earning his PhD, he served simultaneously as a computer science professor at Cornell and a researcher at Xerox PARC, flying between New York and the burgeoning Silicon Valley, where he worked on computer vision for the digital transformation of copiers and scanners. “In academia, you have more curiosity-driven research projects, where in the corporate world you have the opportunity to build things people will actually use,” he says. “I’ve spent my career moving back and forth between them.”

Along the way, Huttenlocher gained administrative experience as well. He was a longtime board member and eventual chair of the MacArthur Foundation, and he also helped launch Cornell Tech, the university’s New York City–based graduate school for business, law, and technology, serving as its first dean and vice provost. When Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the investment firm Blackstone Group, gave $350 million to MIT to establish a college of computing in 2018, he was eager to return to the Institute to lead it. “The fact that MIT was making a bold commitment to become a broad-based leader in the AI-driven age—and that it was cutting across all of its schools—was exciting,” he says. 

Schwarzman College took shape through task forces involving more than 100 MIT faculty members. By the fall of 2019 a plan had been nailed down, and Huttenlocher was in place as director with EECS head Ozdaglar named deputy dean of academics. “I never believed that everybody wants to do computer science at MIT,” she says. “Students come in with a lot of passions, and it’s our responsibility to educate these bilinguals, so they are fluent in their own discipline but also able to use these advanced frontiers of computing.” 

Ozdaglar’s background is in using machine learning to optimize communications, transportation, and control systems. Recently she has become interested in applying machine-learning algorithms to social media, examining how the choices people make when sharing content affect the information—and misinformation—recommended to them. This work builds on her longstanding interdisciplinary collaborations in the social sciences, including collaborations with her husband, economics professor (and recent Nobel laureate) Daron Acemoglu. “I strongly feel that to really address the important questions in society, these old department or disciplinary silos aren’t adequate anymore,” she says. “The college has enabled me to work much more broadly across MIT and share all that I’ve learned.”

Ozdaglar has been a driving force behind faculty hiring for the college, working with 18 departments to bring on dozens of scholars at the forefront of computing. In some ways, she says, it’s been a challenge to integrate the new hires into existing disciplines. “We have to keep teaching what we’ve been teaching for tens or hundreds of years, so change is hard and slow,” she says. But she has also noticed a palpable excitement about the new tools. Already, the college has brought in more than 30 new faculty members in four broad areas: climate and computing; human and natural intelligence; humanistic and social sciences; and AI for scientific discovery. In each case, they receive an academic home in another department, as well as an appointment, and often lab space, within the college. 

That commitment to interdisciplinary work has been built into every aspect of the new headquarters. “Most buildings at MIT come across as feeling pretty monolithic,” Huttenlocher says as he leads the way along brightly lit hallways and common spaces with large walls of glass looking out onto Vassar Street. “We wanted to make this feel as open and accessible as possible.” While the Institute’s high-end computing takes place mostly at a massive computing center in Holyoke, about 90 miles away in Western Massachusetts, the building is honey­combed with labs and communal workspaces, all made light and airy with glass and natural blond wood. Along the halls, open doorways offer enticing glimpses of such things as a giant robot hanging from a ceiling amid a tangle of wires. 

Lab and office space for faculty research groups working on related problems­—who might be from, say, CSAIL and LIDS—is interspersed on the same floor to encourage interaction and collaboration. “It’s great because it builds connections across labs,” Huttenlocher says. “Even the conference room does not belong to either the lab or the college, so people actually have to collaborate to use it.” Another dedicated space is available six months at a time, by application, for special collaborative projects. The first group to use it, last spring, focused on bringing computation to the climate challenge. To make sure undergrads use the building too, there’s a classroom and a 250-seat lecture hall, which now hosts classic Course 6 classes (such as Intro to Machine Learning) as well as new multidiscipline classes. A soaring central lobby lined with comfortable booths and modular furniture is ready-made for study sessions. 

For some of the new faculty, working at the college is a welcome change from previous academic experiences in which they often felt caught between disciplines. “The intersection of climate sustainability and AI was nascent when I started my PhD in 2015,” says Sherrie Wang, an assistant professor with a shared appointment in mechanical engineering and the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, who is principal investigator of the Earth Intelligence Lab. When she hit the job market in 2022, it still wasn’t clear which department she’d be in. Now a part of Schwarzman’s climate cluster, she says her work uses machine learning to analyze satellite data, examining crop distribution and agricultural practices across the world. “It’s great to have a cohort of people who have similar philosophical motivations in applying these tools to real-world problems,” she says. “At the same time, we’re pushing the tools forward as well.”

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