MIT highlights progress, future

BOSTON - If society is to embrace technology, educational institutions need to produce technologists that play an active role in helping politicians and decision-makers understand how it works, and how it should be implemented, said Paul Penfield Jr., a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Friday.

Alumni, faculty, and current students gathered at the Kresge Auditorium at MIT to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) department. Speakers focused on not only what has been accomplished by former students and faculty, but what MIT needs to do to stay on top of the constantly changing world of technology.

"We're here to celebrate and affirm our achievements, but make sure they are just beginning," said Charles Vest, president of the venerable institute located in Cambridge, Mass.

Penfield, who headed the EECS department from 1989 to 1999, reviewed the history of the department, from its early days working with magnetics and electricity to its latest work in advanced computer science. While the event reminded those in attendance of the historical role MIT played in developing the computer age, graduates and faculty must never forget that their technological achievements must help society improve, Penfield said.

"We must educate students who will help the world understand and widely implement rapidly changing technology," he said during his address.

Speakers at the event discussed some cutting-edge technologies under investigation by MIT professors and students, including human-computer communication, robotics, miniaturization, and computer learning.

Victor Zue, director of MIT's laboratory for computer science, discussed his group's work on developing anthropomorphic computers. Much research has been done on speech recognition and face identification, with few reliable products available, but a combination of the two technologies presents the best hope for real computer-human interaction, he said.

Getting computers to understand images and communicate with humans also allows computers to simulate speech and facial movements, Zue said. His demonstration of how the technologies can be combined to produce realistic images of an English-speaking woman that could suddenly sing in Chinese -- with accurate lip movements -- got a big laugh from the audience.

But during a question and answer session following the discussions, one audience member asked if Zue had considered the potential ramifications of such technologies, such as that this speech and image-producing technology could be used to fool citizens into believing that a realistic image of a national leader just appeared on television fraudulently informing them of an attack against their country.

"That certainly is a concern," Zue said. Privacy and security are big issues with this type of technology, and it is something the group is taking very seriously, he said.

Some of the more easily apparent benefits of MIT's work were shown during a discussion about robotics. A woman who had endured a leg amputation was shown demonstrating the difficulty she had in ascending and descending stairs with a prosthetic leg that was unable to bend at the knee. MIT researchers have developed a robotic leg that can sense the texture of the ground, and the speed at which the person is moving, and adjust the knee joint accordingly.

A video of the overjoyed woman ascending a staircase normally with the robotic leg provoked a burst of applause from the audience.

On Thursday, MIT unveiled its Institute of Solider Nanotechnologies, a U.S. government funded research center that will investigate ways to protect soldiers and make their jobs easier.