MIT ILP Upcoming Events

11/09/09: IT for the Non-IT Executive

11/09/09

11/09/09:
Today, staying ahead of the competition means staying up-to-date on IT. Information technology has become a strategic asset that strengthens organizational decision-making and competitive advantage. IT penetrates an organization's products, processes, and services, and affects how it is structured and managed.

IT for the Non-IT Executive helps technical and non-technical managers identify critical strategic issues in today's environment of rapid technological change. They learn what it means to be an information-based organization, and how IT-enabled processes add value to their organizations. They learn where IT is going, where it fits into their organizations, and how to govern it.

Through case studies, research reports, hands-on exercises, and interactive discussions with industry experts, participants learn

* how to align IT with their organizations' business goals * how to communicate those goals * how to set business and technology priorities based on those goals

Participants come away from IT for the Non-IT Executive with a senior manager's perspective on the most important IT issues of the day. And they leave with a clear sense of their own role in streamlining company performance through technology.

The Participant Team

IT for the Non-IT Executive is designed for line managers and corporate strategists who want a better handle on their role in IT oversight and management. Past participants have included senior managers at the division or corporate level, including:

* CEOs * corporate and strategic planners * presidents * executive vice presidents * COOs * vice presidents of operations

Faculty

George Westerman, Faculty Chair and a Research Scientist at MIT Center for Information Systems Research, examines executive-level management challenges at the interface between IT and business units. His reasearch on risk management, innovation, and communicating about value, including award-winning publications, is used by organizations throughout the world.

Cyrus F. (Chuck) Gibson, Senior Lecturer associated with the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, focuses on IT-enabled business change, building on experience consulting with CSC Index and teaching at MIT Sloan and the Harvard Business School.

Jeanne W. Ross, Director and Principal Research Scientist, MIT Center for Information Systems Research, examines the relationship between IT and enterprise business processes. Her work on enterprise architecture has been widely adopted in masters level IT classes and applied by businesses and consulting organizations around the world.

Peter Weill researches and presents on the role, value, and governance of IT. He has published widely, including award winning books, case studies, and journal articles. In 2008, Ziff-Davis recognized him as #24 of the "Top 100 Most Influential People in IT."

11/09/09: Quantum Gravity without Space-time Singularities or Horizons

11/09/09

11/09/09: Gerard 't Hooft
Utrecht University

11/09/09: Analyticity and the Planar Limit

11/09/09

11/09/09: Ionel Popsecu
Georgia Tech

The planar limit is a combinatorial generating function which counts the number of planar graphs of arbitrary valency and this is very closely connected to random matrix calculations. On the other hand an analytic treatment of the random matrix reduces the problem to studying the minimizer of the so called logarithmic energy with external field.

We will show an elementary way of dealing with the minimizer of the logarithmic energy with external fields. This is based on manipulations of Chebyshev polynomials and combinatorial identities which give a nice new formula for the minimum of the energy. This indicates why the analyticity claim of the planar limit holds true.

We also were able to compute some of the various planar limit in closed form.

This is joint work with Stavros Garoufalidis and Marcos Marinio.

11/09/09: Remote Sensing of Coastal Waves Using Stereo Imaging

11/09/09

11/09/09: Professor David Hill
Penn State

The measurement of water wave characteristics, such as wavelength and wave height, in the surf zone is important for monitoring, prediction of erosion, and numerical model calibration. Traditional methods of measuring wave heights have either been limited to a small number of points or required contact with the water. An experimental study of the remote sensing of water wave elevations, through the application of stereo photogrammetry, is presented. This method uses two spatially offset cameras, with overlapping fields of view, to determine water surface elevation over a large spatial extent. A phased approach was taken, with medium scale laboratory experiments being followed by a large scale field test of the method. In the laboratory, reconstructed surface elevations were validated using a pressure sensor and the stereo image reconstructions of the water surface showed excellent agreement. In the field, the measured wave heights & periods showed good agreement with nearby available buoy data.

Overall, the method proved very successful at measuring nearshore waves and appears to hold considerable promise as a robust remote sensing technique. The advantages of this approach are that it provides excellent spatial & temporal coverage, has fairly minimal hardware needs, and that the system is quickly deployed, calibrated and operational.

11/09/09: Wired For War: The Prospects and Perils of Robotic Warfare

11/09/09

11/09/09: Dr. Peter W. Singer
Senior Fellow and Director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative
Brookings Institution

Host: CSAIL and the MIT Security Studies Program

According to Peter W. Singer, an amazing revolution is taking place on the battlefield, starting to change not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself. Remote-controlled drones take out terrorists in Afghanistan, while the number of unmanned systems on the ground in Iraq has gone from zero to 12,000 over the last five years. But this is only the start. What is right and wrong in a world where our wars are increasingly being handed over to machines?

Dr. Peter W. Singer is considered one of the world's leading experts on changes in 21st century warfare. He has been quoted in major U.S. newspaper and news magazine and delivered talks at venues ranging from the U.S. Congress to over 40 universities around the world. He is also a founder and organizer of the U.S.-Islamic World Forum, a global conference that brings together leaders from across the US and the Muslim world (www.us-islamicworldforum.org).

11/09/09: Informal Discussion of Biostatistics Research and Biostatistics M.S./Ph.D. Programs

11/09/09

11/09/09: Michael Rosenblum
Johns Hopkins University

Host: Marilyn C. Wilson, PhD
Host Affiliation: MIT, Career Development Center

Interested in applying your strong technical background to research in understanding dynamics of major diseases (e.g. HIV/AIDS, malaria, cancer) with the goal of improving prevention and treatment? I'm an MIT alum (Ph.D. math, 2004) who transitioned to the field of biostastistics (currently I'm an assistant professor in biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University). I'll give an informal talk and discussion on biostatistics research and M.S./Ph.D. programs in this field.

11/09/09: An entropy method for Partial Order Production

11/09/09

11/09/09: Rapha�l Jungers
MIT

Abstract:
Since the 40's, algorithms have been proposed to solve the well known "sort by comparisons" problem, that realize the "O(n log(n))" lower bound on the number of comparisons.

The *Partial Order Production problem*, introduced in 1976 by Sch�nage, only requires retrieving a given *partial order* from the elements, instead of completely sorting them. For this more general problem, there also exists a simple lower bound on the number of comparisons to make.

We survey the problem and its connections with many fundamental sorting problems. We then make use of a nice approximation tool borrowed from information theory: graph entropy. We obtain a (first) polynomial time algorithm for chosing the good comparisons, which asymptotically realizes the lower bound, and we improve on the exact number of comparisons needed.

This is joint work with Jean Cardinal, Samuel Fiorini, Gwena�l Joret, and J. Ian Munro.

Speaker Bio:
Dr. Rapha�l Jungers is a postdoctoral fellow of the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MA, USA). His main interests lie in the fields of computer science, graph theory, optimization and control. He received a PhD in mathematical engineering from the Universit� catholique de Louvain, Belgium (2008), and an engineering degree in applied mathematics, both from the Ecole Centrale Paris, France (2004), and from the Universit� catholique de Louvain, Belgium (2005). He holds a minor degree in electrical engineering from the Universit� catholique de Louvain (2005). He was a visiting student at Massachussets Institute of Technology (2006).

He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Computer Science of the Universit� Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium (2008-2009). He is a FNRS fellow and a BAEF fellow. He was the recipient of the IBM Belgium 2009 award.

11/09/09: Evolution Analyzed as a Communication Channel: Capacities and Codes

11/09/09

11/09/09: Chris Watkins
Department of Computer Science
Royal Holloway, UK

Host: Leslie Kaelbling
Host Affiliation: MIT CSAIL

This talk presents an a priori information-theoretic analysis of evolution, by defining and calculating channel capacities of some standard genetic models. This work is relevant to genetics and evolutionary computation.

Organisms are wonderfully adapted to their environments. Some natural basic questions are: How complex can evolved organisms become - what sets the limit? What precision of adaptation is possible? Are there different limits on the precision of adaptation of sexual and of asexual organisms? What are the most efficient ways to encode information in the genome, so that the greatest amount of information can be maintained with the smallest amount of selection? Are efficient genetic codes different for sexual and asexual organisms? How, indeed, can we define the 'complexity of an organism'?

This talk (partially) answers these questions by setting out a clear framework for analyzing selective breeding as a communication channel: the capacity of this channel is meaningful as a limit on the achievable precision of adaptation. The capacities of some standard genetic models are calculated or estimated, using this framework. This framework sidesteps the ill-posed question of how to define the 'complexity of an organism' by considering instead the channel capacity of a selective breeding experiment, which is a well-defined quantity that can actually be calculated.

A surprise is that, for sexual reproduction, the greatest channel capacity is achieved for long genomes in which individual loci are poorly controlled by selection. This suggests that, for sexual organisms, the 'junk' is the part of the genome in which information can be most efficiently accumulated and maintained by evolution. For asexual organisms, there is no advantage in such diffuse genetic encodings.

The reason that 'junk' may be informationally efficient for sexual organisms is formally similar to the reason that, in radio transmission, wide-band encoding is more efficient than narrow-band for a power-limited Gaussian channel.

The performance of some error-correcting codes in standard genetic models is presented: some well-known error-correcting codes can allow greater amounts of information to be maintained in the genome with less selection than is needed without error correction. This raises the question of what other efficient genetic codes are possible, and how they might evolve.

11/09/09: PORTS and TERMINALS

11/09/09

11/09/09: Jan Willems
K.U. Leuven, Belgium

Abstract:
This lecture has a �back to basics� flavor. We examine what is meant by the power and the energy which an open system exchanges with its environment. The systems which we consider interact through terminals, as wires in the case of electrical circuits, and pins for mechanical systems. Systems are interconnected by sharing terminal variables. We define a port as a set of terminals that satisfy port- KVL and port-KCL. The usual expressions for power and energy are not valid unless the terminals involved form a port. We also discuss the nature of ports for mechanical systems, and derive an expression for kinetic energy that is not frame dependent. We conclude that terminals are for interconnection, and ports are for energy transfer. Interconnection is local, while power and energy involve action at a distance. We end by formulating a conjecture that states that a connected RLC circuit forms a 1-port.

Biography:
Jan Willems was born in Bruges, and received engineering degrees from the University of Gent and the University of Rhode Island. He got his Ph.D. degree from MIT in 1968, and was an assistant professor of electrical engineering at MIT until 1973. He was professor of Systems and Control in the Mathematics Department of the University of Groningen from 1973 until 2003. Presently he is professor at the K.U. Leuven. More details and a list of publications may be found at http://www.esat.kuleuven.be/_jwillems.

11/09/09: A Gut Feeling: is ghrelin a novel stress pathway?

11/09/09

11/09/09: Retsina Meyer
Graduate Student
Goosens

11/10/09: Protein Folding Sculpting Evolution

11/10/09

11/10/09: Susan Lindquist
Whitehead Institute

Host: frank Gertler

11/10/09: Holography from Conformal Field Theory

11/10/09

11/10/09: Joao Penedones
Kavli ITP

11/10/09: The Application of Microelectronics to Improving Macro Energy Solutions

11/10/09

11/10/09: David Anderson
National Semiconductor

11/10/09: A Formulation and Theory for Delay Guarantees in Wireless Networks

11/10/09

11/10/09: P. R. Kumar
University of Illinois

Abstract:
Delay guarantees have been problematic in networking. The usual focus of theory is only on providing throughput guarantees. Yet, wireless networks will increasingly need to support applications requiring such guarantees, e.g., voice-over-IP, interactive video, and control over networks. We propose a theoretical framework for addressing the problem of delay guarantees in wireless networks that incorporates three key issues � delay, throughput, and channel reliability � in the specification of quality of service. A somewhat surprising necessary and sufficient condition characterizes when the quality of service requirements of a given set of nodes can be met. It can be checked in nearly linear time, providing a tractable admission control algorithm. Further, there are easily implementable scheduling policies that are feasibility optimal in the sense that they can meet the demands of every feasible set of nodes. The theory can be extended to more general arrival patterns and fading processes, and can also be cast in a utility maximization framework for delay guarantees.

[Joint work with I-Hong Hou and V. Borkar]

Biography:
P. R. Kumar obtained his B. Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from I.I.T. Madras in 1973, and the M.S. and D.Sc. degrees in Systems Science and Mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis, in 1975 and 1977, respectively.

Since 1985 he has been at the University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, where he is currently Franklin W. Woeltge Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Research Professor in the Coordinated Science Laboratory, Research professor in the Information Trust Institute, and Affiliate Professor of the Department of Computer Science.

He has received the Donald P. Eckman Award of the American Automatic Control Council, the IEEE Field Award in Control Systems, and the Fred W. Ellersick Prize of the IEEE Communications Society. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, and member of the US National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded an honorary doctorate (Doctor of Science, Honoris Causa) by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule), Zurich in 2008.

11/10/09: Manipulating nanoparticles and enhancing spectroscopy with surface plasmons

11/10/09

11/10/09: Ken Crozier
Harvard University

Field enhancement from surface plasmon structures presents new opportunities for optical manipulation and surface enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS). We demonstrate the propulsion of gold nanoparticles using surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs, NanoLetters 9, 2623 (2009)). SPPs are excited on a thin gold film. The resultant evanescent field draws nanoparticles toward the film, where they are propelled along by the optical scattering force. We also review related work on Fresnel zone plate optical tweezers. We show that these offer comparable performance to conventional optical tweezers (APL 92, 071112 (2008)), but with considerably smaller footprints. Lastly, we describe our work on metal nanoparticle substrates for SERS. Arrays of metal nanoparticles are often used for SERS, but the interactions between nanoparticles are mostly overlooked. Here, we demonstrate that periodic metal nanoparticle arrays can exhibit spectrally-narrow surface plasmon resonances, with numerical simulations predicting considerably enhanced optical near-fields (APL 93, 181108 (2008)). To conclude, we describe a novel SERS substrate consisting of a metal nanoparticle array separated from a gold film by a thin SiO_2 spacer (Opt Lett 34, 244 (2009)). We show that the double plasmon resonances of these structures enable field enhancement at both pump and Stokes frequencies (FiO 2009, paper FWT5).

11/11/09: MIT Closed - Veterans' Day

11/11/09

11/11/09:

11/11/09: Managing Complex Product Development Projects

11/11/09

11/11/09:
Managing complex product development projects is a massive integration effort at many levels. Product and production plans must be integrated into components, components into subsystems, subsystems into systems and systems into quality products.

The traditional project management does not provide the kind of detail required today to both accelerate product development and improve product quality in the 21st century. Managing Complex Product Development Projects presents a revolutionary design structure matrix (DSM) that MIT researchers use to determine which tasks within each phase of a complex project should or should not be performed concurrently. The DSM method is already applied in a number of corporations.

MIT researchers developed the DSM modeling approach to learn how to solve problems facing large-scale projects. After field-testing DSM in dozens of organizations and industries around the world, they found that it successfully streamlined the development of a wide array of projects including:

* complex automotive components systems and subsystems * aerospace configuration design * concept development and program roll-out * electronics and semi-conductor development * equipment and machine tool development * plant engineering * construction projects

Through lectures, exercises, interactive discussions, and teamwork, participants in the program learn how to use DSM to map complex design procedures into simple arrays. Most important, they learn how to solve four key problems that confound complex product development project management: iteration, overlapping tasks, architecture, decomposition and integration.

In Managing Complex Product Development Projects, participants learn to:

* better document existing procedures * reduce complexity * share data with confidence * facilitate project flow * expose constraints and conflicts * design iteration strategically

Project Management Institute (PMI) Participants in this program are eligible for 11 PDU credits from PMI. Provider ID: 2420. Course number: PD001.

The Participants

Managing Complex Product Development Projects is designed for senior managers involved in complex product development and project management as well as those responsible for speeding up the process of improving design procedures and designing and developing better products. These include:

* vice presidents of engineering, manufacturing, and technology * directors of project management * product and business development * engineering and R&D program managers * chief project engineers * product design and process development engineers * technology strategists * project leaders

Faculty

Steven D. Eppinger, Deputy Dean and Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, holds the General Motors Leaders for Global Operations Chair and has a joint appointment in MIT's Engineering Systems Division. His research creates new approaches to improve complex product development processes. This work has been applied primarily in the automotive, electronics, aerospace, and equipment industries. Co-author of Product Design and Development, the primary text for this course, Eppinger lectures regularly for international corporations and in executive education programs and has consulted for or conducted research with more than fifty organizations. He has worked as a manufacturing engineer, product designer, and consultant in both prototype and production operations.

11/12/09: Communications Forum: Culture Beat and New Media: Arts Journalism in the Internet Era

11/12/09

11/12/09: Doug McLennan
and
William Marx

Newspapers and magazines are reducing their critical coverage of the arts, but the human appetite to evaluate culture, to debate reactions and opinions, remains as vibrant as ever. Panelists Doug McLennan (editor of ArtsJournal.com) and Bill Marx (editor of TheArtsFuse.com) will discuss how cyberspace is transforming arts journalism, in some cases radically redefining its form and content. The forum will debate what critical values from the traditional media should survive, explore how digital media is changing the ways we articulate our responses to the arts, and point to promising contemporary business models and experiments in cultural coverage.

11/12/09: Assessing Solution Quality in Stochastic Programs via Sampling

11/12/09

11/12/09: David Morton
Engineering Foundation Professor in the
Graduate Program in Operations Research in the Mechanical Engineering
University of Texas at Austin
Joint work with Jacob Mattingley, Yang Wang

Abstract:
Determining if a solution is optimal or near optimal is fundamental in optimization theory, algorithms and computation. For instance, Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions provide necessary and sufficient optimality conditions for certain classes of problems, and bounds on optimality gaps are frequently used as part of optimization algorithms. Such bounds are obtained through Lagrangian, integrality or semidefinite programming relaxations. An alternative approach in stochastic programming is to use Monte Carlo sampling-based estimators on the optimality gap. We present a simple, easily implemented procedure that forms a point and interval estimator on the optimality gap of a given candidate solution. We then discuss methods to reduce the computational effort, bias and variance of our simplest estimator. We also provide a framework that allows the use these optimality gap estimators in an algorithmic way by providing rules to iteratively increase the sample sizes and to terminate. This scheme can be used as a stand-alone sequential sampling procedure or, it can be used in conjunction with a variety of sampling-based algorithms to obtain a solution to a stochastic program with a priori control on the quality of that solution.

11/12/09: The Culture Beat and New Media -- Arts journalism in the internet era

11/12/09

11/12/09: William Marx, theartsfuse.com, BU
Douglas McLennan, artsjournal.com
Moderator: David Thorburn, MIT

11/12/09: The Origin of the Universe and the Arrow of Time

11/12/09

11/12/09: Sean Carroll
California Institute of Technology

Over a century ago, Boltzmann and others provided a microscopic understanding for the tendency of entropy to increase. But this understanding relies ultimately on an empirical fact about cosmology: the early universe had a very low entropy. Why was it like that? Cosmologists aspire to provide a dynamical explanation for the observed state of the universe, but have had very little to say about the dramatic asymmetry between early times and late times. I will argue that the observed breakdown of time-reversal symmetry in statistical mechanics provides good evidence that we live in a multiverse.

11/12/09: Human-Centered Robotics

11/12/09

11/12/09: Oussama Khatib
Stanford University

Host: Daniela Rus
Host Affiliation: CSAIL

Abstract:
Robotics is rapidly expanding into the human environment and vigorously engaged in its new emerging challenges. From a largely dominant industrial focus, robotics has undergone by the turn of the new millennium a major transformation in scope and dimensions. This expansion has been brought about by the maturity of the field and the advances in its related technologies. The new generation of robots is expected to safely and dependably co-habitat with humans in homes, workplaces, and communities, providing support in services, entertainment, education, health care, manufacturing, and assistance. Interacting, exploring, and working with humans, the new generation of robots will increasingly touch people and their lives. New design and fabrication concepts, novel sensing modalities, effective planning and control strategies, modeling and understanding of human motion and skills are among the key requirements discussed for the development of this new generation of human-friendly robots.

Biography:
Oussama Khatib is Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. in 1980 from Sup'Aero, Toulouse, France. His current research is in human-centered robotics, haptic interactions, and human-friendly robot design. Professor Khatib was the Program Chair of ICRA2000 (San Francisco) and Co-Editor of �The Robotics Review� (MIT Press). He is the President of the International Foundation of Robotics Research, IFRR, Co-Editor of STAR, Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, and the Springer Handbook of Robotics. Professor Khatib is an IEEE Fellow who served as a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE, and is a recipient of the JARA Award.

11/12/09: Mechanisms of Experience-based Brain Development

11/12/09

11/12/09: Dr. Takao Hensch
Harvard University

Host - Elly Nedivi

11/13/09: Genes, brains, and spatial representation: Evidence from Williams syndrome

11/13/09

11/13/09: Barbara Landau, PhD
Dick and Lydia Todd Professor of Cognitive Science
Johns Hopkins University

11/13/09: Turbulent momentum transport in gyrokinetic simulations

11/13/09

11/13/09: Felix Parra-Diaz
Christ Church, University of Oxford

11/13/09: Enterprise Uses of Social Media

11/13/09

11/13/09: Jonathan Grudin
Speaker Affiliation: Microsoft Research

Host: Rob Miller
Host Affiliation: MIT CSAIL

For several years I have studied enterprise attitudes toward and uses of technologies that are primarily used by students and consumers, such as instant messaging, weblogs, wikis, and social networking sites. It took decades for email to move from research and student use to full acceptance by enterprises. Today, communication and collaboration tools can make that transition far more quickly�but not instantaneously and not without encountering a few of the same hurdles. In this talk I describe some patterns that emerge and fit them into some literature on the social psychology of groups and organizational behavior.

Speaker Biography:
Jonathan Grudin is a Principal Researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction group at Microsoft Research, prior to which he was Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine. He earned a BS in Mathematics-Physics at Reed College and PhD in Cognitive Psychology at UC San Diego, where he was advised by Donald Norman. He worked at Wang Laboratories and MCC, and taught at Aarhus University, Keio University, and the University of Oslo. He has been involved in CHI and CSCW conferences since each began. He was Editor of ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction from 1997-2003, is ACM Computing Surveys Associate Editor for HCI, and writes and edits an ACM Interactions column on HCI history. Somewhere in there he spent a year working on an MIT project while located at Stanford and two summers split between the MIT Psychology and AI Labs in Cambridge.

Funding support for this seminar series has been provided by Yahoo!.

11/16/09: Strategic Cost Analysis for Program and Project Management

11/16/09

11/16/09:
As a program or project manager, your understanding of costs is critical to the success of both product development and technical projects. Yet many technical and general project managers do not have a working knowledge of accounting or the cost analysis skills that are necessary to make good project decisions.

This program is about how to analyze projects from a financial perspective. It offers a unique opportunity for program and project managers to learn cost accounting-based project management practices and strategies for making smart project choices which justify outcomes and create value.

At MIT Sloan School of Management much of the teaching and research of our award-winning Accounting Group focuses on issues that are relevant to the challenges that program and project managers face.

Strategic Cost Analysis for Program and Project Management is drawn from our popular and highly-rated MBA courses on financial and managerial accounting and shows how you can leverage cost analysis to better influence the outcomes of product development and project management.

Led by Professor Joseph Weber, the head of the MIT Sloan Accounting Group, and Senior Lecturer Scott Keating, the program offers a series of interactive lectures, cases, and small group exercises that will help you to better understand:

* the language and mechanics of the accounting that goes on in complex organizations * how to identify good results even though the accounting numbers look bad, and bad results when the accounting numbers look good * cost allocations, absorption costing, and transfer pricing, and their effect on reported performance * your own company�s internal metrics for evaluating management

The Participants

This program has been developed for senior program and project managers from a wide range of consumer and business-to-business industries, including those from engineering, manufacturing, IT and technology departments, directors of project management, product and business development, and R&D, chief project engineers, product design and process development engineers, and key members of their staff with performance responsibility.

Faculty

Joseph P.Weber is a tenured Associate Professor in Economics, Finance, & Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He specializes in empirical work on the importance of accounting information in financial markets. One stream of research focuses on how managers choose among accounting methods (i) when communicating corporate financial performance and (ii) when designing and implementing contracts between the firm and its managers and creditors. A second stream of research focuses on the effects of audit quality, disclosure quality, and financial analysts on the functioning of capital markets.

Scott Keating is a Senior Lecturer in Economics, Finance, & Accounting at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on understanding the internal workings of large and complex organizations. Keating is specifically interested in the role of internal accounting practices � such as accounting based performance measurement and compensation programs, transfer pricing policies, costing systems, and cost allocation practices � in regulating organizational activities. He teaches an undergraduate course in financial accounting and a second-year MBA elective in managerial accounting.

11/16/09: Fundamentals of Finance for the Technical Executive

11/16/09

11/16/09:
In today's market, if you oversee R&D, product innovation, or technological implementation, you also deal with financial issues. As a technical executive, you must be able to use finance to persuade corporate financial officers to fund your projects, and you must be able to use financial tools to address senior management's concerns about risk. Applying basic principles of finance and accounting to your day-to-day and longer-term management activities will transform your ability to achieve your goals.

Fundamentals of Finance for the Technical Executive is designed to take the mystery out of finance. This interactive, hands-on program will teach you how funding decisions are made and how you can influence those decisions by applying financial principles to project evaluation and resource allocation. You will learn to assess projects for their potential economic value and to do discounted cash flow (DCF) valuations.

Using case studies and analytical exercises, MIT Sloan finance faculty teach this program to provide practical solutions to the financial problems you face every day.

Fundamentals of Finance for the Technical Executive covers three basic challenges:

1. Understanding Basic Concepts of Finance. Pivotal information about financial theory and the application of theory to real business decisions. 2. Acquiring New Project Funds. How the company raises external funds, the basics of capital structure, and issues facing corporate finance. 3. Evaluating Projects and Allocating Resources: How to Spend Money Effectively. Key methods of investment evaluation and the practical implications of cost of capital, cash flow, and net present value.

The Participants

Fundamentals of Finance for the Technical Executive has been especially designed for executives who manage project teams and departments, and technical professionals involved with R&D, product and software design, engineering, and other scientific and technical work. Past participants have included key members of technical management such as CIOs, chief technologists, head scientists, R&D and product development directors, engineering and manufacturing vice presidents, corporate strategists, project managers, and systems information managers. No advanced quantitative skills are required, but participants should bring calculators.

Faculty

Paul Asquith is the Gordon Y Billard Chair in Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he has been on the faculty for fifteen years. He served for two of those years as Senior Associate Dean. He teaches in the Finance and Accounting areas, most recently a second year MBA elective on new security design.

Nittai Bergman is Assistant Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He has been teaching MBA Corporate Finance since joining MIT Sloan's faculty in 2003. Professor Bergman's research interests are in the fields of international corporate governance and behavioral corporate finance.

Dirk Jenter is Assistant Professor of Finance at Stanford University. Formerly, he was Assistant Professor of Finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he taught Corporate Finance in the MBA program. His research focuses primarily on firm capital structure decisions and option and stock compensation for executives and other employees.

Antoinette Schoar, Michael Koerner '49 Career Development Associate Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is an expert in corporate finance, entrepreneurship, and organizational economics. She researches venture capital, entrepreneurial finance, corporate diversification, and governance and capital budgeting decisions in firms.

11/16/09: The Tough Get Growing: How To Succeed in a Down Economy

11/16/09

11/16/09: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is right now.

In 2008, the average age of a US-born entrepreneur founding a technology-based company was 39.

Four out of ten US students between the ages of 8 and 21 either already have or want to start their own business.

At The Tough Get Growing, you'll hear the real-world experiences of entrepreneurs, the lessons they learned going from start-up to success story, and the research and best practices that will help YOU get growing.

Featuring opening remarks by MIT President Susan Hockfield.

11/16/09: Dirichlet heat kernel estimates in Euclidean domains

11/16/09

11/16/09: Laurent Saloff-Coste
Cornell

11/16/09: Integrability, Medical Imaging, and Boundary Value Problems

11/16/09

11/16/09: Thanasis Fokas
University of Cambridge

11/16/09: The Tough Get Growing: How to Succeed in a Down Economy

11/16/09

11/16/09: Featuring Bo Fishback, Kauffman; Helen Greiner, iRobot / The Droid Works; Daphne Zohar, PureTech Ventures

Website: http://enterpriseforum.mit.edu/network/broadcasts/200911/index.html

11/17/09: 2009 MIT Research and Development Conference

11/17/09

11/17/09:

11/17/09: Mobility Networks

11/17/09

11/17/09: Marta Gonzalez
Civil and Environmental Engineering

11/17/09: Patterning and Morphogenesis of the Vertebrate Limb and Gut

11/17/09

11/17/09: Cliff Tabin
Harvard Medical School

Host: Bob Weinberg

11/17/09: Design of New Catalytic Reactions Based on Metal- Ligand Cooperation

11/17/09

11/17/09: Professor Dr. David Milstein
The Weizmann Institute of Science

11/17/09: Design Requirement Considerations for a Commercial Aircraft in 2035

11/17/09

11/17/09: Mr. Jonathan Lovegren
Graduate Research Assistant
Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics

11/18/09: Strategic Marketing for the Technical Executive

11/18/09

11/18/09:
Marketing Is More Than Advertising and Sales

As a non-marketing manager, your understanding of marketing concepts and the role marketing plays in your organization is critical to the success of both technical and product development projects.

Yet, many non-marketing managers do not have a working knowledge of marketing principles or the marketing strategies and tactics that are necessary to make good technical decisions.

The MIT Sloan School of Management is ideally placed to teach these skills to professionals like you. Much of the teaching and research of our award-winning Marketing Group focuses on issues that are relevant to the challenges facing non-marketing professionals. We offer a unique opportunity to understand the science of marketing and to make a more informed contribution to the role that marketing plays in the success of your organization.

Our two-day program, Strategic Marketing for the Technical Executive, provides a new perspective on the relationship between marketing and technology. It is drawn from our popular and highly-rated MBA course on strategic marketing and shows how you can leverage marketing concepts and research to better influence the outcomes of product development and project management.

Led by Professor Duncan Simester, the head of the MIT Sloan Marketing Group, you will take part in a series of interactive lectures, case examples and hands-on, small-team exercises that will help you to understand:

* how to anticipate and take advantage of surprising inconsistencies in the customer decision process * how to evaluate market attractiveness and select target markets * how to manage the tradeoff between risk and information in the product development process * the keys to concept testing * a structure for thinking about the design and management of distribution channels * why pricing decisions are complex and how they get made * how to manage an advertising campaign

About the MIT Sloan School Marketing Department Marketing faculty at MIT Sloan are a dynamic team that studies and helps define market practices for businesses around the globe. They are widely renowned for their rigorous scientific approach to helping managers implement change.

The research is inter-disciplinary, using methods drawn from economics, operations research and psychology. It has led to numerous awards and recognition, including a recent Nobel prize nomination.

The department's research program includes work on customer satisfaction, competitive pricing, optimal design of product decisions, channel relationships, customer incentives and competitive marketing strategy.

Who Should Attend

This program has been developed for general and technical executives and key members of their staff who are responsible for project management of new product design, development and distribution. This includes senior engineering, R&D, product development, project management, IT and manufacturing managers.

Learning Process

This program has been designed to take the mystery out of marketing for non-marketing managers. It provides a comprehensive roadmap of the science of marketing. By the end of the program you will better understand:

* Customers * Marketing Strategy * Product Development and Concept Testing * Distribution Channel Management * Pricing * Advertising

Marketing is not just selling or advertising. It is a rigorous, disciplined science that applies a reasoned framework to the assessment of consumer needs, market segmentation, product design, branding, advertising, channel management and pricing. As a non-marketing manager in this program, you will learn to look at marketing problems through the lens of an analytical framework that will help you better understand:

* what information you can provide to improve marketing strategy, and tactics, and when your technical decisions should reflect marketing issues * how to collect customer data to support the product development process * how to communicate more effectively with the marketing team

Program Faculty

Duncan Simester is Associate Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He is the head of the Marketing Group at MIT Sloan and is an expert on how economic theory, statistics and operation research can contribute to the understanding and practice of marketing.

Professor Simester teaches the Strategic Marketing course at Sloan. This is among the the most popular and highly rated courses in the Sloan MBA program. Prior to joining MIT Professor Simester taught at the University of Chicago. He holds a PhD in Management Science from MIT. He also has a law degree and graduate and undergraduate degrees in commerce from the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Professor Simester has published widely and has won several awards for his research. He is on the Editorial Board of Marketing Science and is an Area Editor at Management Science.

11/18/09: Active Photonic Materials with Random or Periodic Nanostructures

11/18/09

11/18/09: Hui Cao
Yale Univeristy

11/18/09: Functional imaging of social communication deficits in autism and relation to autism risk gene

11/18/09

11/18/09: Susan Bookheimer, Ph.D.
Joaquin Fuster Professor of Cognitive Neurosciences
Department of Psychiatry
and Biobehavioral Sciences
UCLA School of Medicine

Hosted by Nancy Kanwisher, Ph.D., Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT

This talk will present several functional MRI studies of children with autism that examine critical aspects of the autism spectrum, particularly those involved with social communication. Data from artificial language acquisition, implicit learning, reward responsiveness, and imitation/observation of affect, suggest a relatively circumscribed network of brain regions consistently affected in autism. I will argue that a primary deficit in striatal mediated reward systems underlies the social motivation deficit in autism, affecting implicit learning systems involved in language acquisition and social skills development. The relationship between abnormalities in these brain regions and autism risk genes will also be presented.