Technology Day 2008 - "Out of This World”

MODERATOR: Welcome to Technology Day 2008 edition. And I'd also like to welcome all the folks watching on the web. Increasingly, we're able to offer this program not only here in Kresge, but to the MIT community around the world. So welcome to all of you. Technology Day is the annual symposium that is organized by an alumni committee for your intellectual pleasure. In between all of the parties that you have during Reunion Week, we know you like to have a few moments of a little bit of hard thinking and also a chance to see some of the exciting work that's going on with today's faculty and students. The Technology Day Committee, if you would stand, I'd like to thank you for your work this year.

[APPLAUSE]

And on behalf of the committee, I have to thank Lou Alexander, who is on the staff of the MIT Alumni Association. He runs this committee and makes our job extremely easy. And he is also responsible for the wonderful video that we had running, both here and on the web, as the introduction to the program. So Lou thank you to you for all the hard work you do on behalf of this event.

[APPLAUSE]

Now, I'd like to say everyone, cell phones. Pagers, noisemakers, turn them off or down. That's always the first announcement. Thank you very much. And our program today, our theme is called Out of This World. And humankind has always had an interest in the heavens and the world outside of Earth. And today our first two speakers are going to help us understand that world.

Max Tegmark is going to talk about cosmology and our current understanding of our place in space. And then Professor Dava Newman is going to talk about humans in space and human exploration of space. And then our final speaker, Cynthia Breazeal is going to bring us back to Earth and introduce us a little bit to the parallel world of robots. So we have a very exciting program.

And I'm sure each of these speakers could talk all day, but we're going to try to limit them to about 35 minutes, so we have some time for questions. And this year, we're going to go back to the old-fashioned method of collecting questions on index cards. Those of you who have been to Tech Day in the past or other events with MIT alums know that there is a bad habit of asking questions, turning into long pontificating speeches, where it's hard to figure out where the question actually is.

So this, year the ushers, about five minutes before the scheduled end of the speakers' presentations, the ushers will quietly walk through the aisles and collect cards. So write your questions as you think them, pass them to the edges. And that will make it easier for the ushers to collect them. And then during the Q&A time, we'll also, if you have questions on cards, the ushers will come and get them. We'll do a little bit of vetting and organizing of the questions and do a little structured Q&A that way.

Let's see. So with that, I think that's the end of the preliminaries. And it's my great pleasure to introduce Beth Garvin, currently the executive vice president and CEO of the MIT Alumni Association, but soon to be former CEO. She has just accepted a job at Brown and will be heading-- oh, RISD, ooh, sorry, RISD, that other school in Providence. And we're very excited for her, although very sad to see her leave the MIT Alumni Association. So Beth.

[APPLAUSE]

GARVIN: Well, good morning. It is always my pleasure at this event to officially welcome you back to MIT on behalf of the Alumni Association. As we prepare for reunions, I always remind the staff that there is a bit of a shock sometimes for alumni as they return. The campus is quite different, for many of you, since your last visit.

And on the staff, we tend to think about the brand-new buildings, the Stata Center or Simmons Hall or the construction that's going on seemingly endlessly on Cambridge streets. But I've had a couple instances this week that remind me that those aren't necessarily the questions we're going to get. I had one very frustrated alumnus asking me earlier this week where McCormick Hall was, because, you know, that wasn't built when we were here. I said, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we kind of traced Ashdown as being a landmark and figured out how to get there.

Last night someone asked me, just remind me, which one is Kresge? And we forget. Change is such a constant here, that we forget how much this place has evolved. And it reminds me of the collective wisdom of the people in this room. You are the people who have seen MIT evolve not just physically, but in the curriculum, in the leadership, in the face of our students today.

And it's wonderful to have a chance to have all of you back here and sharing some of that wisdom and knowledge and experience with us. At the very same time, we see our class of 2008 graduate. It's a wonderful opportunity to bring MIT together. And we're very grateful to have you here, spending some of your time with us.

The community of alumni has become increasingly connected over the years. Some of that is due to the wonderful power of our online tools. But a lot of it is just because of the personal connections that we've been able to help facilitate.

I wanted to just mention, in the couple of minutes I have today, about one real transformational change I've had the privilege to watch over the last 10 years or so in the Alumni Association. We were trying, with the encouragement and pushing of the Alumni Association Board of Directors, to find a way for alumni to play a more meaningful role at MIT. Obviously, the role as donors is incredibly meaningful and critical to MIT support. But we wanted to find more ways for the alumni to be mentors, advisors, teachers, and learners, and friends.

In the past couple years, it has been delightful to watch how some of these new roles have emerged and become a really powerful part of the MIT alumni community. There are lots of examples I could share about how this engagement has grown. But I want to just mention one, because it really came home to me vividly yesterday.

The externship program that the Alumni Association sponsors during IAP gives students a chance to go out into the work world with alumni. These externships might be one week. They might be three weeks. Some are paid. Some are unpaid.

They are in large corporations. You might be working on a trading floor at a major investment firm. You might be working in a startup. You might be shadowing a doctor.

And they have become very meaningful to the students. Students tell us how much this influences their careers and their career choices, sometimes learning they really don't want to go into the profession they thought they wanted to go into. But that's a good thing to learn when you're a sophomore rather than after you graduate.

And alumni tell us how much they enjoy having the best and the brightest in their firms, working with them, getting a chance to see what MIT is really like today. And they like the ability to recruit those students for summer jobs and possible placement after graduation too. So it's really a win-win for everybody.

This year, and this is where it came home to me yesterday, the class of 2008 set a wonderful new record in senior gift participation. I don't want to share that with you today. That's their story for the Tech Day lunch. But from my perspective, it was just as gratifying to see what they chose to support at MIT.

Often the senior gift wants to leave something tangible, a clock, a map, a fountain in Killian Court. They all want a fountain in Killian Court. And we sort of have to guide them to something that might be sustainable, lasting. And this year, on their own, the students came up with the idea of creating a fund to support students during IEP external ships for those externships that aren't paid.

They wanted to make sure that students had the opportunity to go do the things they really wanted to do, to connect with alumni, to get an experience outside the classroom that was meaningful. And to me, that just brings this community together in a new and wonderful way and just shows the power of all of you in this room to influence the future. So I could talk for hours about wonderful examples.

But you're here to hear from the amazing faculty. I'm here to welcome our amazing alumni. Enjoy the day. And I look forward to talking to all of you. Thanks very much.

[APPLAUSE]

MODERATOR: Thank you, Beth. And we wish you all the best as you transition to RISD. Now it's my great privilege to introduce Susan Hockfield, the 16th president of MIT. Susan started her career as a neurobiologist, but her leadership skills were recognized early, and she moved up through the ranks of departmental and then academic and then university administration.

Prior to coming to MIT, she was dean of the graduate school at Yale and then provost. We're very happy to have her here and are excited about the way she's leading MIT in the 21st century. She's got some remarks for you as well. And without further ado, I give you Susan Hockfield.

[APPLAUSE]

HOCKFIELD: Good morning. Welcome to Tech Day. I was reflecting. This is my fourth Reunion Weekend, and it's an acquired taste.

[LAUGHTER]

Actually, the first two years, when I staggered through this incredible compendium of events, all I could think of was, who the heck designed this? Had to have been an engineer.

[LAUGHTER]

But I found myself, starting about the beginning of May, actually looking forward to this firehose. And it is so wonderful and so MIT to combine commencement with reunions and bringing everyone to campus and, as Beth has so beautifully talked about, all of these connections that know lie at the heart of MIT. So welcome back, everyone. It's wonderful to see you all this morning.

I'm going to try to restrain myself. But those of you who've heard me speak before, you know it's difficult. What I want to do is preserve about 10 minutes of the time I have with you this morning for questions. And so I hope you will write questions on those index cards. Because as I often say, I'm far more interested in addressing the questions you actually have than the ones I imagine you might have.

So the first part will be my addressing the questions I think you might have. But then I want to allow enough time. So I'm going to be very brief in giving just have an overview of where MIT is and where we are this year. It's been a spectacular year on campus, lots of successes, lots of advances.

Let me just tell you that the three faculty you're going to hear from today-- I could say this at any Tech Day but-- they are the superstars. I often talk about MIT's magic of working all along the continuum from the most abstract theories to the most advanced applications. And the three faculty today really show you that continuum in incredibly vibrant ways.

Dava Newman, who you'll hear from, her bio suit, which is over there, I think there's a version that is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It will be there until the end of August, just an example of how the news of what's coming out of MIT gets around the world. Max and Dava are both just back from the World Science Festival.

We have a Science Festival here. We actually have the first Science Festival in North America here. We started it last year. But we call it the Cambridge Science Festival. They did one in New York last week, week before last. And they called it the World Science Festival. Cambridge needs do a better job of imagining ourselves as the center of the universe. We'll call it the Galactic Science Festival.

[LAUGHTER]

And the news of MIT, I'm just delighted. I see references to stories about it everywhere. Let me just tell you about four fabulous mentions of MIT in the last year. There was an article that appeared in The New York Times in the International Herald Tribune asking a question of, in economics, who are the John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman's of today?

And the writer took the perspective that a lot of economics has gone very small. Some of it gets be kind of flashy news, like about gambling or shopping. But the writer was reflecting on where are the people who are really changing the view of the world, the way Friedman and Keynes did?

And so he did a survey of leading economists. And then he writes, "the runaway winner was a small group of economists who work at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, led by Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee. Not bad. Not bad that Esther and Abhijit are being put in the category of Keynes and Friedman. And actually, I think the work they're doing actually is equivalent.

They are operating from a simple but quite radical idea that they could be as systematic in testing methods that are designed to alleviate poverty, as we are for drug trials. So they look for the application of these huge funds in a controlled way so that they can actually measure the outcome. This is an idea that is really catching on. The Jameel Poverty Action Lab is flourishing, has grown enormously over the last several years.

Then Open Courseware, I always get a question about Open Courseware when I talk to alumni. It makes me feel very proud of MIT. It's being noticed by other people, too. Bill Gates had a column in Fortune, where he talked about the challenge of global education.

I was in India in November, and the challenge of building capacity in education is so pressed there and in other parts of the world. And he cites as the model solution, Open Courseware, where we now have 1,800, almost every one of our courses online. We get emails from people around the world for whom this has really changed their lives. Now, I have to point out that as much as Bill Gates might love Open Courseware, he has not gone the next step, which is to supporting Open Courseware.

[LAUGHTER]

I've got to get a meeting with him in the coming year. Tom Friedman was on campus for the celebration of reaching our 800 courses on Open Courseware in November. And he is a marvelously curious intellect. And so he roamed all over campus while he was here to give the keynote for the Open Courseware celebration. And he found his way to the Vehicle Design Summit. Some of you may have heard this.

This was the brainchild of two women engineering students a couple of years ago. They had the idea of gathering the students who previously had competed in the solar car race to come together and collaborate, building a vehicle that will get 200 miles per gallon. This has now become an international phenomenon. He titled the his op ed on this particular piece from their tag line, "We Are the People We've Been Waiting For."

[LAUGHTER]

I look at the students today, and I just say, you sure are. They are the people that we've been waiting for. And they are not the kind of people that we were in college. You all know what we were doing when we were in college. It was not rolling up our sleeves and getting to work. But they are certainly rolling up their sleeves and getting to work.

And then most recently, CBS Evening News is doing a whole series on cancer, I would think mostly precipitated by Senator Kennedy's terrible diagnosis with brain cancer. And so they are looking at the frontier of cancer research. And they have featured cancer research going on here from Bob Langer, Sangeeta, Bhatia and Phil Sharpe.

Now, these last two things I talk about, I mentioned, tie into two of the big campus initiatives. And I say the two big campus initiatives. There are hundreds of brilliant and wonderful and world-changing things going on on campus. But these two large initiatives have really taken form and gained traction in the last year. So let me give you a short update on each of them.

The Energy Initiative was officially launched only a year and a half ago. It is raging through campus like some kind of storm. About 15% of our faculty have written white papers or participated in some way in the Energy Initiative.

The Student Energy Club has 750 members, mostly graduate students. When I asked the co-presidents what this club was about, thinking of a club in a sense is something you do as your hobby, they reminded me rapidly and severely that the reason they're in the club is they're going to be working in the field. So MIT is producing the future energy pioneers, the energy technologists, scientists, policymakers at a rate that is simply staggering and really quite wonderful.

The initiative, if I can just kind of put it in its very short form, because it reaches across campus, there are many things we're working on, not on everything. But the way we collect up the ideas is in two different pieces. We all long for the transformation, the new technologies that will power the world and get us off fossil fuels. And we're very interested in those.

But those are not going to be scaled up and ready to use for quite a number of years. So the first part of the Energy Initiative is focusing on innovations. What are the changes that we can look for this year, next year, five years from now that will improve our current technologies? So there's a lot of work in clean coal. There's a lot of work improving nuclear power, a lot of work increasing the efficiency of how we use power today.

I like to think of efficiency as the fifth fuel. So after oil, gas, coal, and nuclear, conservation is going to be as important in meeting the immediate challenges, as any of these technologies. The second piece of the initiative is about the transformations. And boy, do we have a huge group of people working on exciting transformations, solar, wind, waves, tide, geothermal, biomass, and biofuels, really doing cutting-edge breakthrough work.

Now, this is a bottoms-up activity. It's not an idea I had. It's an idea the faculty, students, staff, and all of you also had, the alumni. And so we're allowing it to evolve. And what's evolved over the last, I would say, probably four months, what's emerged as the centerpiece of our Energy Initiative is solar.

And I am delighted about it because I personally view solar as the ultimate technology. When we can get to all solar, to all electric, we will be off fossil fuels in an important way. And some people who are not yet converts say, well, why would you do solar? And it's a little bit like Willie Sutton and the banks, where's the money?

[LAUGHTER]

Where is the energy? It's in the sun. An hour of sunlight falling on the earth provides enough energy to power the entire earth for a year. We have got to make better use of this particular energy source than simply heating up asphalt.

The other initiative that I want to mention is just one piece of where engineering, the life sciences are coming together in just amazing and powerful ways. This will be a source of changes that will transform our lives, the way computers and the information technologies have transformed our lives in the 20th century. One piece of that is our new Cancer Institute. It's led by Tyler Jacks.

And what it brings together are about the dozen faculty in our Center for Cancer Research that have been bringing forward the basic science behind cancer since 1974, bringing those faculty together, with about a dozen fabulous engineers who are thinking about cancer. Because we believe that the next most important insights about how to diagnose, treat, and prevent cancer are going to come out of this fantastic fusion of engineering with the life sciences. I'm enormously optimistic about the approach.

And I have to tell you, this is not theoretical. It's real. And the example I give, although it's a kind of a poor example against the complexity of cancer, is heart disease. The NIH invested something on the order of $4 a year per person in America over 30 years in cardiac research.

That's resulted in a decrease in death from heart disease by over half. What were those advances that permitted that kind of decrease? Well, they came out of both biology and technology, drugs-- how many of you have heard of Lipitor-- and devices, drug-eluting stents. The pioneer for drug-eluting stents is, of course, Bob Langer, who is a critical member of our Cancer Initiative. So bringing together these two different perspectives on what a problem is and how you solve it will be very powerful in addressing cancer.

The Koch Institute for Cancer Research right now is a big hole in the ground between the Ray and Maria Stata Center and the Koch Biology Building. We hope to open that building in 2010. Now, both of these initiatives are up and running, the Energy Initiative, in its first phase, focused on industry support, industry partnerships. That's gone very well.

We've raised over $160 million in commitments for the Energy Initiative. We have money for about 100, I think over 100 student Fellows, graduate students, who will be working in energy. But for both of these initiatives, the next phase is really going to turn to private philanthropy.

As you all know, I need not remind you that federal support of research is not what it should be. In the mid-1960s, this enormous fuel for America's innovation economy was funding research in America about 2% of GDP. This year it's less than 1% of GDP. So we are turning to other sources for support of the kind of work that we believe is critical for America to have our leadership. Some of that's industry support. Some of it is private philanthropy.

I will make only one comment about MIT'S budget. Some of you are interested in our finances. I saw Terry Stone, our new executive vice president, in the audience. She, along with the Provost Rafael Reif, Israel Ruiz, our new vice president for finance, have done a spectacular job building a new financial framework for MIT.

The budget that we've submitted for FY '09, the first time in many years, is balanced. We have moved to a smoothing rule for use of our endowment that will reduce the volatility of endowment pay out. The endowment now provides about 20% of our operating costs. And half of those costs are people. And as all of you know who run businesses, people are hard to move as the economic volatility changes, particularly here at MIT, where our faculty and our students are really the core of our enterprise.

We are in a very positive track to think now very productively about our future. We have new deans in many of the schools. I would say the oldest dean, longest-standing dean is Del Santos, who was here just less than a year when I arrived. These new deans over this year have gained traction in an incredible way. They have the confidence of their faculty. But I would say more extraordinarily, because they have all essentially started together, they are collaborating in ways that really haven't been seen before, bringing together the expertise from MIT Sloan, with the School of Architecture, with the Schools of Engineering and Science so that we can, in a very serious, very unique way, I believe, address problems as large as energy and the environment, as large as world poverty, as large as making a change in health care for cancer and other diseases.

Let me just wrap up with a couple of very, very positive indicators. This admission seasons was as chaotic as any that anyone has ever seen. Those of you who follow this closely, probably few of you follow it as closely as I do, in the fall, Harvard, Princeton, and University of Virginia all stopped doing action early admissions early of any sort, threw a huge amount of uncertainty into our admissions.

And then you, I'm certain, have been reading about the change in financial aid policies at Harvard and Yale and Stanford. And Princeton actually was there several years before those schools. So we did not know what was going to happen with admissions.

I have very good news to report. The applications for MIT were up 8% again. This is three years straight of 8% or greater growth in applications. This, of course, makes us feel good that so many brilliant young people want to come to MIT. But I think it's an important message around the nation.

We accepted just less than 12% of the applications, which means these students are going to go someplace else. Most of them are going to go someplace else. But it means the students in America and around the world are increasingly turning to science, technology, and a science-and-technology-based way of thinking about the humanities, arts, and social sciences that MIT represents. This is good news for the country.

We admitted, as I said, just less than 12% And our yield on those students was just over 66%. This is wonderful in the face of all of this turmoil in the admissions universe. This was not our top year, but the third-best year for yield at MIT.

Let me just talk a little bit about our financial aid policies. For 40 years, MIT has been practicing need-blind admissions, absolutely need blind. We also provide aid that is entirely need based. We don't provide any kind of merit-based aid. Many of these schools, in fact, I would argue that most schools do provide merit aid, and we don't do that.

We're also committed to meeting the full need of all of our admitted students. This has been a more aggressive financial aid policy than anyone would know. Up until this year, MIT was spending more financially dollars per enrolled student than any of our peer institutions. We certainly were spending more financial aid per endowment dollar than any of our peer institutions.

So we have really been out there ahead. This policy has been fantastic. The year's-- the freshman class that will come next year, 18% of those students will be the first in their families to go to college. The students here on campus, 30% of our students on campus come from families with annual incomes of less than $75,000 a year. This year we committed to meeting the full tuition needs of these families. Fully 17% of our students come from families with incomes of less than $45,000.

MIT, as you've heard me say before, is a place where the American dream comes true. You all have told me your stories of how getting financial aid allows you to come to MIT. And coming to MIT allowed you to change the world. Well, we are staying true to those policies, and it is clear from our admissions results that MIT remains, I would say, it continues to grow as an attractive place for the most brilliant, the most ambitious people in the world to come, the people who really do want to change the world.

We have had a great fundraising year. Thank you all for participating in the alumni fund. We have set a new record there. We set a new record in resource development. And what I can say about this is that what we do at MIT clearly resonates with alumni and with others.

I could talk about some of the startling achievements of our faculty. But I'm going to let the faculty talk about them themselves. Well, our three faculty will talk to you about it.

The last thing I'll say, I'm going to reveal the secret of the senior gift, which Beth very decorously said would wait for lunch. Some of you aren't going to be at lunch. But I would say, for me, the most important measure of our success is the seniors.

Having been given a chance to say thank you, my time at MIT meant a great deal to me, the senior gift this year has blown away all previous records. The year I arrived, four years ago, when I stood at this podium, I didn't talk about the senior gift because the participation that year was 27%. And I could not say that without hanging my head in some embarrassment, thinking, do only 27% of our students think that this was a valuable experience for them?

So Beth and I put our heads together. And I challenged Beth to challenge the students to say, please tell us that this was important to you. This year's senior gift, when I last checked, was 65% participation. Hurrah, for the class of 2008!

[APPLAUSE]

And I would say hurrah for the Alumni Association. I am heartbroken that Beth will be leaving us. She has led the association in extraordinary ways. She is going on to a new challenge, which, I have to say, I can understand how RISD calls on a spirit who has been motivated by MIT, how the spirit of RISD would motivate her further.

Let me stop there. And if I've left any time, perhaps we can get some questions in. Thank you all very much for coming back to campus and joining us for Tech Day.

[APPLAUSE]

MODERATOR: Well, the index card system is working. We have a few really good questions for President Hockfield. The first is, Susan, what has surprised you the most about your job here at MIT?

HOCKFIELD: Oh, what surprised me the most-- it's a great question. People ask it all the time. So I should have a ready answer. I will tell you, quite frankly, the thing that surprised me the most-- you all know I was at a pretty good school before I came to MIT. And I had a pretty good job at that pretty good school. And other schools had tried to persuade me that it would be more exciting to go to their school and lead them. And I said, you know, I really don't think it can be more interesting to go to your lovely school.

But when MIT came calling, obviously, it was a compelling, I would say an irresistible call to service to come to MIT. And I came here because I knew that it's a great place. It's the best science-and-technology-based university in the world.

The thing that surprised me most, MIT is far better, far stronger, far warmer, far more interesting than anyone on the outside knows. This place continues to take my breath away. Every time I talk to faculty-- you'll have this experience this morning-- I find myself in a future I had not yet imagined. At my previous very fine school, that happens from time to time, but not with the kind of dependable regularity that happens to me here at MIT.

[APPLAUSE]

MODERATOR: And next question is, what do you see as the key challenges-- and the questioners suggests that you propose your top five-- that face MIT in the coming years?

HOCKFIELD: Good. Is this mic-- great. You can keep the podium. I'll walk around with this in my hand.

MODERATOR: Perfect.

HOCKFIELD: The top five challenges-- if I do the top five challenges, we won't have any more questions.

[LAUGHTER]

MODERATOR: So pick your top two.

HOCKFIELD: Let me pick a couple. The first is a challenge I mentioned, which is support for the enterprise we're engaged in. This is a very serious challenge. I mentioned the problem about federal research funding. This is an important challenge not just for my team, but for the nation.

We really have to get our heads around the fact that these are investments. They're not expenditures. I gave you some numbers about research in heart disease that has really transformed-- transformed-- saved lives. These are investments.

I can give you the same kind of numbers for the battle on AIDS, which in the beginning of the '80s, it looked like-- by the mid-'80s, it looked like every hospital bed everywhere in America was going to have an AIDS patient in it. We have turned AIDS from a death sentence to a chronic, manageable disease through investments-- through investments.

The return on the investments to come up with a treatment for AIDS has been 140 times. So as a nation, we really have to get ourself oriented. So that impacts MIT and MIT's team's commitment to helping build life-changing technologies.

But it's also true for education. No one could have escaped hearing about the battering, that I would say, that higher ed has gotten at the hands of Congress and now the media this year. This is ridiculous. The higher education system in America is the best in the world. We are the envy of the world.

And for Congress and other people to spend their time beating up these well-endowed institutions-- well endowed-- what do we do with those dollars? We turn them into these discoveries. We turn them into the inventors and the innovations of the future. So this is a very serious challenge for MIT and also for the country.

On the positive, side we have a fabulous challenge, which is only ours to address. And this is the challenge of problems that reach far across departments and schools, reach between institutions, reach between the academy and industry. And so a really important challenge for us is building the kinds of interconnections that allow our spectacular faculty and students to really get their hands around the problems of today. Now, this is a problem I think MIT is positioned to address better than just about any university in the world. And so I embrace this challenge in a very active way, as do our faculty and students.

MODERATOR: Great. I think we have time for one last question. And actually it addresses a couple of questions that came through. One is, MIT attracts elite young people for its science and engineering program. But the need for engineers and scientists is great. And another question says, is MIT doing anything toward changing current attitudes of the US public towards science?

Now, I know that K-through-12 education is one of your big concerns. And also, I know I've been reading your op-eds in The Boston Globe. But maybe this audience would like to hear a little bit about those initiatives and how you're trying to address these concerns that are raised by these questions.

HOCKFIELD: Yeah. So this is something I committed myself to, the Institute to when I started. And I will share with you a story. When I first met with the search committee, it was this period of kind of getting to know you.

And the search committees always ask a question-- and I'm guilty of the same thing when I've been on a search committee-- what should MIT do? And I looked around at this group who knew infinitely more about MIT than I do. I said, how would I know what MIT should do? Would you please tell me what MIT should do?

But then I made an appeal. I said whether the next president is me or anyone else, it's very important that MIT share the news of what we do far more broadly and far more powerfully, and I have. And Kim has mentioned a couple of the efforts to share the news about MIT. I hope you have noticed that you-- I hope you really are noticing that mentions of MIT happen more frequently in the newspapers and the media that you read.

I did a piece on Charlie Rose beginning of February to help get the story out, I had a series of op-eds in The Globe. But it's not just me. Our faculty are traveling around the world. Our alumni sit all over the world and are the information army. It's very important that what we do and how we do it at MIT is a story that gets out.

I talk about MIT being a more powerful beacon for inspiration around these issues of science and technology, science and engineering. And I talk about the visual piece of this, which is lighting the dome a year ago, moving the MIT museum to the first floor. So anyone who travels up or down Massachusetts Avenue can get a peek at the fabulous innovations that are going on here.

Open Courseware is another vehicle that we're using to inspire the world or give access to science and engineering that people wouldn't normally have. At our event in November, when we announced our goal of having our 1,800 courses online, we also celebrated the opening of a new portal for Open Courseware. It's called Highlights for High School.

One of the things that we discovered among the users of Open Courseware was that a lot of high school students and high school teachers are using Open Courseware. Any of you who have been on the site know that it's not such an easy site to navigate. And so we imagined we could create a portal that would make it more accessible for these high school students and teachers.

So we opened a portal, Highlights for High School. It's really a pilot phase. It's going very well. Any of you who's interested in this kind of outreach should go on the site. It is just a very exciting site. And in true MIT fashion, what I imagined it would look like is dwarfed by what it actually does look like. So this is one way of getting the information out.

We are working-- I've got a team of people working on how to increase the visibility for MIT. And believe me, it's not about it being good for MIT, although I believe it will be good for MIT. It's about a stronger, more powerful way for MIT to serve the nation and the world. So this continues to be a work in progress.

I would say you are the best measures of whether this is happening. So I hope in another year or two years or five years, when you're back, you will be able to say with confidence, sure enough, I'm hearing a lot more about MIT in the world. And more than that, is that kids in the high schools in my town, my city, are asking about, how can I go to MIT? How can I pursue science and engineering so that I can help invent the future for America and the world?

With that, thank you all for coming to Tech Day. It is great to have you back on campus. Share the world about MIT where you come from.

[APPLAUSE]

MODERATOR: Thanks so much to Susan Hockfield for giving us that brief insight into what's happening at MIT team today. And now, while he gets his computer set up and gets ready to go, it's my pleasure to introduce Max Tegmark. Max is an associate professor in the physics department here. And his specialty is something I have to read, precision cosmology.

And so I hope that in the next 25 minutes or so, we'll gain an understanding together of what that is. So thank you, Max. Welcome.

TEGMARK: Thank you.

MODERATOR: Welcome.

TEGMARK: It's a great pleasure to be here.

[APPLAUSE]

And it's a great pleasure to get to work on cosmology here at MIT because there are just so many wonderful people to work with. We're extremely enthusiastic about this subject. Precision cosmology, as you mentioned, that sounded kind of like a joke.

[LAUGHTER]

It's not too long ago when people have been arguing for ages about the factor of 10 in some measurement. And there's a factor of 10 in the exponent, right?

[LAUGHTER]

And as I hope to share with you today, that has really changed. And it's changed because of tech, which is the theme of our day today. And it's not just I who feels excited about cosmology. Even my curmudgeon Swedish countrymen on the Nobel Committee have realized it's exciting and decided to give a Nobel Prize to the field recently, John Mather and George Smoot.

And of course, where did he get his PhD, any guesses? And we'll come back to what they discovered shortly. But first what I would like to do is completely turn off these flood lights here up in front and get it really, really nice and dark and take you on a little journey to remind ourselves of our place in space.

Let's turn the lights off completely. Thank you. So what's this?

AUDIENCE: Kresge.

TEGMARK: Very good, the Kresge Auditorium. So let's go for a little ride. I promise we'll come back.

[LAUGHTER]

So as we start zooming out, we need to make a slight change of equipment to be able to go a little bit further. And just to set the scales here, in our solar system, as you all know, it takes light about eight minutes to get from the orbit of the Earth, from the sun out to Earth's orbit. So we see the sun not the way it is right now, but the way it was eight minutes ago.

And nonetheless, our solar system is puny compared to the distances to the nearby stars. What you're seeing here is not a computer simulation, but a real three-dimensional map of the stars in our neighborhood, painstakingly built up by astronomers across the world. And the typical stars you'll see here in Cambridge on a clear night are hundreds of light years away, which means that if someone out there is looking at us, they won't see us. They might see the Boston Tea Party.

[LAUGHTER]

And this, as well, is what we casually call our solar neighborhood in my field. It is just a small part of this beautiful agglomeration of hundreds of billions of stars we know as our Milky Way galaxy. We live about here, about 100,000 light years from side to side, beautiful pizza shape, with a big bulge in the middle and this familiar spiral structure seen from the top.

Now, for me, it's quite remarkable to think that when my grandma went on her first date, this was the universe, a little part of this galaxy. It wasn't until 1925 that the American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed that there were other galaxies. And now we're so spoiled, that with just a few clicks of my mouse, we can zoom out until our whole galaxy is just a little dot. And now all these other dots aren't stars anymore. They're other galaxies, with hundreds of millions of stars of their own.

And if we pretend for a moment that the speed of light is infinite, so I can drive as fast as I want, then let's take a little ride and check out our intergalactic neighborhood. Now we're hundreds of millions of light years away. So if you took a peek back from here, you wouldn't see the Boston Tea Party, you might see dinosaurs roaming around here.

And there are two things that really jump out at you. Again, first of all, this is not a computer simulation. This is a real three-dimensional map of our neighborhood. The two things that jump out at you are first, galaxies are kind of like MIT alumni. They like to hang out with others in groups, clusters, super clusters. And you see these giant filamentary structures here, basically because gravity is an attractive force and clumps stuff together.

And moreover, wherever you see lots of galaxies, we've since learned that there is also much more dark matter. So you're effectively seeing a dark matter map here illuminated by galaxies, much like when you're flying over Boston by night. You only see the city lights, which make up a small fraction of all the stuff. But from the contours, you can learn a lot more about what's really there.

The second thing which jumps out at me when I look at this is that by now, it's getting a little bit boring. It's kind of like you've been there, done that, more of the same. And we have a fancy geek word for that. We say that the universe is homogeneous and isotropic on large scales, which in plain English just means that on average, our universe seems to be kind of the same everywhere. It's only when you zoom out still more that you see that, in fact, it's a cube.

[LAUGHTER]

This is, of course, just a reiteration of Susan Hockfield's remark that we have plenty more to do in science. In this case, we want to map farther and go beyond where our funding ran out here.

[LAUGHTER]

So let me now share with you a little bit about a project that I have spent a lot of time working on with my colleagues. It's called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. And it's the most ambitious project, to date, to map our universe in two and three dimensions. And let's turn off these spotlights again. You can keep it nice and light there in the back so you don't get too comfortable in your seats. But this is perfect.

Now, what I want to do is just show you our data. You recognize the Big Dipper here. And I'm going to just zoom in on [INAUDIBLE] sky map on a part right below the tail of the Big Dipper. These are just photos. I can zoom in like this anywhere in the sky. I encourage you, when you get back home, to go to Google Sky and fly around because they have our Sloan Digital Sky Survey data in there already, just to give you a sort of sense of what 10-to-the-power-8 objects really involve. It's a huge amount of information.