MIT ILP Upcoming Events

11/24/09: Sensors and Transducers at Analog Devices

11/24/09

11/24/09: Michael Judy
Analog Devices

11/24/09: Unraveling Small Molecule Reactivity in Water

11/24/09

11/24/09: Steve Bradforth
University of Southern California

11/24/09: An Online High Performance Computing Service for Genetic Linkage Analysis

11/24/09

11/24/09: Mark Silberstein
Technion
Israel Institute of Technology

Abtract:
In this talk I will describe the algorithms and mechanisms underlying a distributed system for genetic linkage analysis, called Superlink-online. It is a production online system which serves hundreds of geneticists worldwide allowing for faster analysis of genetic data via automatic parallelization and execution on thousands of non-dedicated computers.

I will describe the following innovative technologies forming the core of this system

1. Practical scheduling and execution of embarrassingly parallel Bags of Tasks in multiple non-dedicated computing environments (SC09). Our approach allows for virtualization of multiple grids, clouds and Volunteer gids as a single computing platform by building an overlay of execution clients over the physical resources; another component is a generic mechanism for dynamic scheduling policies to reduce the turnaround time in the presence of resource failures and heterogeneity. Our system has executed hundreds of Bags of Tasks with over 9 million jobs during 3 months alone; these have been invoked on 25,000 hosts from the local clusters, the Open Science Grid, EGEE, UW Madison pool and Superlink@Technion community grid.

2. A general technique for designing memory-bound algorithms on GPUs through software-managed cache (ICS08). This technique was successfully applied to the probabilistic network inference yielding an order of magnitude performance improvement versus the performance without such a cache. Overall we achieved up to three orders of magnitude speedup when executing our GPU-based algorithm versus single CPU performance.

3. Coarse- and fine-grained parallel algorithms for the inference in probabilistic networks on large-scale non-dedicated environments and GPUs. We devised and implemented an algorithm suitable for loosely coupled environments with unreliable resources (American Journal of Human Genetics 2006, HPDC06) and adapted it for heterogeneous GPU-CPU supercomputer TSUBAME in Tokyo Tech.

11/24/09: The Body-Specificity of Language and Thought

11/24/09

11/24/09: Daniel Casasanto
PhD, Max Planck Institute

11/24/09: MIT Energy Club: Energy Research, Entrepreneurship, Education and Fun

11/24/09

11/24/09: Mr. Pedro Santos
MBA'10 (Sloan)
and
Mr. Anil Rachankonda
SDM'10 (Sloan)

11/26/09: MIT Closed - Thanksgiving Day

11/26/09

11/26/09:

11/27/09: MIT Closed - Day after Thanksgiving Day

11/27/09

11/27/09:

11/30/09: The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge

11/30/09

11/30/09: Donald MacKenzie
University of Edinburgh

11/30/09: Reflections on the Revolution in Europe

11/30/09

11/30/09: Christopher Caldwell
author of Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a regular contributor to the Financial Times and Slate. His essays and reviews appear in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

http://web.mit.edu/cis/eventposter_113009_migration_caldwell.html

12/01/09: Algorithmic Game Theory and Transportation: A Survey

12/01/09

12/01/09: Andreas Schulz
Sloan School of Management

12/01/09: Building, Leading, and Sustaining the Innovative Organization

12/01/09

12/01/09:
Where do you get the breakthrough innovative ideas you need to create successful competitive products for the future?

At the MIT Sloan School of Management, where we have long been recognized as a worldwide leader in the field of innovation, our two-day executive program on Building, Leading, and Sustaining the Innovative Organization draws on powerful MIT Sloan research to offer a set of strategies for growing your company in the face of changing markets, technologies, and consumer demand.

In this unique session on identifying and bringing successful ideas to market, you'll learn about the steps you need to take as to drive strategic innovation in the organization, including how to:

* Get the right mix of people and skills you'll need to generate innovative ideas in a more timely manner * Develop the processes required to support these people * Build cultures that encourage innovative behaviors * Decide which ideas are the right ideas in which to invest, and which are the new business opportunities you ought to pursue

Our faculty of senior experts and MIT researchers also will help you to understand:

* Tactics for dealing with the internal politics and resistance to change that can threaten innovation initiatives and early-stage developments * Techniques you can use to build innovation streams * Processes for collecting competitive intelligence, forecasting technology change and gathering information on user needs * Methods for identifying better innovations more quickly, including the lead-user method for discovering breakthrough products, services and strategies, and toolkits for user innovation that enable users to design their own mass-customized products and services.

The Participants Building, Leading, and Sustaining the Innovative Organization has been developed for senior corporate and technical executives, including Executive Vice Presidents, Vice Presidents of Marketing, New Product Development, Research and Development, Human Resources, and New Business Development, Chief Information Officers, Chief Technologists, Corporate Strategists, Corporate Planners, and other executives with leadership responsibility for their organization.

Faculty Eric A. von Hippel, Professor, Management of Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research discovers and explores patterns in the sources of innovation. For example, he finds that, contrary to conventional wisdom, successful innovations are often first developed and tested by the users themselves, "lead users", rather than by the firms that are first to bring those innovations to market.

Ralph Katz, Principal Research Associate. For more than 35 years, Professor Katz has been carrying out extensive management research, education and consulting on technology-based innovation with a particular interest in the management and motivation of technical professionals and high performing groups and project teams.

Jay Paap, President of Paap Associates, Inc. He has been active in the management of technology for 30 years, and has consulted with industrial and governmental organizations for over 25 years. He has been a frequent speaker on the management of innovation, appearing throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Japan. Dr. Paap received his PhD from MIT's Sloan School of Management and has held faculty positions at MIT Sloan and Indiana University.

12/01/09: Transforming Your Leadership Strategy

12/01/09

12/01/09:
�When innovation is king and keeping your finger on the pulse of technology and changing markets is critical, it is no longer the case that someone at the top will figure it all out and everyone else will execute.�

Deborah Ancona and Henrik Bresman, �X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate, and Succeed�

Fierce, innovation-driven competition is forcing a new way of thinking about leadership among senior executives and technical managers throughout the world.

Successful leaders are moving away from �command and control� in favor of �cultivate and coordinate� strategies that allow them to:

� innovate and move quickly from generating ideas to executing and diffusing them throughout the organization.

� unlock crucial information, expertise, and new ways of working together, wherever these qualities reside within or outside the company

In a competitive �flat world� of smart, orchestrated networks, tiny firms that do not need huge capitalization to compete, and new organizational architectures, successful leaders are moving to make their organizations more agile, responsive, and creative.

How are they doing it? How can you do it? In Transforming Your Leadership Strategy, you learn about a powerful, innovative approach to executive leadership that lies at the core of leadership development at MIT, the result of an intensive, four-year research project at the MIT Leadership Center to identify more effective strategies for leading in a networked economy.

Tested in diverse, real-world settings, MIT�s unique Distributed Leadership Model allows you to succeed as a leader by being flexible and adaptive in ways you may not have imagined, through the application of two key concepts:

� a 4 Capabilities Leadership Framework that makes it possible to harness, align, and leverage the leadership capabilities that exist all across your organization, and

� X-Teams, a revolutionary approach to creating flexible, outwardly- focused project teams that enables you to both keep current with shifts in markets, technologies, and competition, and accelerate the pace of innovation and change

The Participants

Senior general and technical executives whose organizations compete in an environment of rapidly-changing markets, technologies, and cultures, including: CEOs; Presidents; COOs; Executive Vice Presidents; heads of R&D, Engineering, Manufacturing & IS; Chief Technologists; Corporate Planners; Corporate Strategists; Vice Presidents of Marketing and New Venture Development; and other senior managers with leadership responsibility.

Faculty

Deborah Ancona, Seley Distinguished Professor of Management, is faculty director of the MIT Leadership Center. She is engaged in research examining core leadership capabilities. Her work includes the design and creation of leadership courses and workshops, a leadership model, and a 360-degree survey instrument.

12/01/09: Understanding and Solving Complex Business Problems

12/01/09

12/01/09:
Change. Rapid, ever-accelerating, unpredictable change. It's a crucial dilemma facing all businesses today. Changes in technology, population, and economic activity are transforming the world, and the complexity of the systems in which we live is growing. But as complexity multiplies, so do the unanticipated side effects on humanity itself, further increasing complexity.

It's a vicious cycle that challenges even the most sophisticated managers. In fact, a senior executive's skill in dealing with fundamental change can actually dictate the success or failure of the organization.

"Systems thinking" is a response to the change dilemma. It is founded on the idea that increasingly, we must see the world as a complex system in which events are interconnected.

Systems thinking was devised to improve our ability to manage organizations comprehensively in a volatile global environment. It offers managers a framework for understanding complex situations and the dynamics those situations produce. Senior managers can use the system dynamics method to design policies that lead their organizations to high performance.

Understanding and Solving Complex Business Problems offers a new way of thinking about and resolving complex, persistent problems that emerge from change. Applying organization theory along with intuitive principles of feedback control, participants learn to:

* assess the likely impact of different policies and decisions that relate to their organization's growth, stability, and performance * recognize business system archetypes that can trigger persistent, long-term problems * use state-of-the-art management tools to identify relationships * intervene effectively to make fundamental changes

In short, Understanding and Solving Complex Business Problems gives participants the skills and confidence to manage organizations with full understanding and solid strategy.

The Participants

Understanding and Solving Complex Business Problems is for executives with decision-making responsibility who are looking for fresh ideas to resolve organizational problems. Past participants have included:

* CEOs * presidents * COOs * CTOs * executive vice presidents * corporate planners * corporate strategists * vice presidents * senior project managers * product development managers.

Faculty

Faculty Leader: John D. Sterman, Jay W. Forrester Professor of Management and director of the System Dynamics Group, specializes in systems thinking for corporate and public policy, behavioral decision theory, nonlinear dynamics, and environmental sustainability. His widely used management flight simulators allow people to experience the opportunities and challenges facing top management.

Nelson Repenning, Associate Professor of Management Science and Organization Studies, studies how process improvement techniques such as "Total Quality Management" and "Business Process Reengineering" can be so successful in some organizations but not in others. His case studies are the basis for formal modeling efforts that use both systems method and more traditional economic and organizational models.

12/01/09: Developmental Dynamics of DNA Replication

12/01/09

12/01/09: Terry Orr-Weaver
Whitehead Institute

Host: Laurie Boyer

12/01/09: The development of declarative memory systems in the human brain

12/01/09

12/01/09: Noa Ofen
Postdoctoral Associate
Gabrieli Lab

12/02/09: 2009 MIT Global Operations Conference

12/02/09

12/02/09:

12/02/09: Silicon Photonics in High Performance Computing

12/02/09

12/02/09: Michael Watts
Sandia National Laboratory

12/02/09: Autism: What we know? What we need?

12/02/09

12/02/09: Thomas R. Insel, MD
National Institute of Mental Health, NIH
Bethesda, MD, USA

Hosted by Mriganka Sur, Ph.D., Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience Head, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT

Since the first description by Leo Kanner more than 60 years ago, autism has become a broad clinical construct with intense public and scientific interest. According to a recent article in the New York Times, ?autism has become to disorders what Africa is to social issues.? (April 27, 2007) This talk will attempt to summarize what we know and what we need to know in 2009. We know that autism can be studied as a developmental brain disorder, likely due to synaptic dysfunction. We need to know more about the precise nature or location of this dysfunction, beyond recognizing that diverse cortical pathways appear to be involved. We know from twin studies that autism is heritable and that several Mendelian disorders are associated with autism. Genetic studies of autism conform to a complex pattern, including highly penetrant rare mutations as well as less penetrant common risk alleles. While the genetics of autism has matured rapidly, we still need to use genetics as a portal to pathophysiology, ultimately identifying molecular pathways for treatment targets. We know that the prevalence of autism has increased markedly, but we do not know if this increasing prevalence has been matched by increasing incidence. We need to know if there are specific environmental changes contributing to the increasing prevalence or if it is mostly ascertainment factors that are driving this dramatic rise in autism. Perhaps our greatest certainty is that autism spectrum disorder, as it is described today, is a highly heterogeneous collection of developmental disorders, likely as heterogeneous as seizure disorders or mental retardation. Much confusion, both in research and practice, stems from our inability to identify the many syndromes within the autism spectrum, syndromes that differ in cause, treatment response, and prognosis. We need a much clearer picture of the subtypes of autism to facilitate research progress and optimize diagnosis and treatment.

Supported by the Simons Initiative on Autism and the Brain at MIT (web.mit.edu/autism)

12/02/09: Plumber's Wonderland Found On Graphene

12/02/09

12/02/09: Ju Li
Materials Theory Group
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
University of Pennsylvania

Abstract:
Curvy nanostructures such as carbon nanotubes and fullerenes have extraordinary properties but are difficult to pick up, handle and assemble into devices after synthesis. We have performed experimental and modeling research into how to construct curvy nanostructures directly integrated on graphene, taking advantage of the fact that graphene, an atomically thin two-dimensional sheet, bends easily after open edges have been cut on it, which can then fuse with other open edges, like a plumber connecting metal fittings. By applying electrical current heating to few-layer graphene inside an electron microscope, we observed the in situ creation of many interconnected, curved carbon nanostructures, such as graphene bilayer edges (BLEs), aka �fractional nanotubes�; BLE polygons equivalent to �squashed fullerenes� and �anti quantum-dots�; and nanotube-BLE junctions connecting multiple layers of graphene. Further theoretical research has indicated that multiple-layer graphene offers unique opportunities for tailoring carbon-based structures and engineering novel nano-devices with complex topologies.

The MIT Seminars in Computational Engineering are free and open to the public.

The series is sponsored by the Center for Computational Engineering and the Singapore-MIT Alliance.

12/02/09: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention

12/02/09

12/02/09: Gary Bass
Princeton University

12/03/09: Western Otaku: Games Crossing Cultures

12/03/09

12/03/09: Mia Consalvo

From Nintendo's first Famicom system, Japanese consoles and videogames have played a central role in the development and expansion of the digital game industry. Players globally have consumed and enjoyed Japanese games for many reasons, and in a variety of contexts. This study examines one particular subset of videogame players, for whom the consumption of Japanese videogames in particular is of great value, in addition to their related activities consuming anime and manga from Japan. Through in-depth interviews with such players, this study investigates how transnational fandom operates in the realm of videogame culture, and how a particular group of videogame players interprets their gameplay experience in terms of a global, if hybrid, industry.

Mia Consalvo is visiting associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT. She is the author of Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames and is co-editor of the forthcomingBlackwell Handbook of Internet Studies.

12/03/09: Developing and Managing a Successful Technology and Product Strategy

12/03/09

12/03/09:
It's not enough to have a great idea. If your R&D dollars are going to pay off in profitable products and technologies, you need a strategy that not only makes markets but also beats the competition.

Developing and Managing a Successful Technology and Product Strategy presents a depth of challenges that extend from R&D to manufacturing, engineering, project management, and new ventures. Where do you begin? How do you decide which projects are most likely to succeed and in which technologies to invest? How can you link your technology choices with your business choices?

Developing and Managing a Successful Technology and Product Strategy provides an innovative and powerful approach to developing technologies and products that people want to buy. Equally important, it explores ways to link those technologies and products with your company's business strategy. Drawn from the MIT Sloan School's top-ranked MBA curriculum, this groundbreaking program provides a framework for understanding how technologies and markets evolve, how they are linked, how technologies differ across markets, and how new technologies get accepted.

Participants will develop the skill to identify profitable projects for their research dollars and find out how to capture the value of those projects. They will learn how to build technical capabilities for products that create value for their customers and how to restructure their organizations to respond to market and technical dynamics. Most important, they will leave the program with the know-how to implement their strategies for maximum benefit.

The Participants Developing and Managing a Successful Technology and Product Strategy is a must for senior general and technical executives involved in developing, managing, or marketing technology or products, or with managing organizations that sell their products in rapidly changing markets. The program is designed for managers in technology-intensive organizations, marketing and business development executives in technology organizations, and R&D managers in any organization.

Faculty

Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan, Associate Professor of Strategic Management and course head of the Core Strategy Department at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is an economic sociologist with a focus on social network analysis. He studies how social structures of various kinds emerge and influence behavior and key outcomes for individuals, teams, and organizations. Zuckerman�s current research projects include a study of industry peer networks, exclusive groups of non-competing peer firms from the same industry that gather on a regular basis to learn from one another�s experiences and to motivate one another to achieve higher performance.

12/03/09: Leadership Accountability and the Law

12/03/09

12/03/09:
As a successful manager, you take on increasingly broad responsibilities. This is true of both general managers and managers with strong technical backgrounds who assume roles which call upon more general skills.

Some of these responsibilities are law-sensitive and require decisions likely to attract legal scrutiny. These law-sensitive issues are often fast moving, outside the normal course of business, and carry the possibility of high gains, losses, or both. A manager who can successfully navigate difficult legal waters has a key competence. A manager who triggers legal liability will find it casts a long shadow over a career. And with greater responsibility comes increased personal legal exposure.

Leadership Accountability and the Law provides senior managers like you with the skills needed to effectively manage these risks. Drawn from the curriculum of MIT Sloan, this two-day program is led by the Senior Lecturer with primary responsibility for the law curriculum and who was, for much his professional life, a practicing attorney with a top U.S. law firm.

Through a series of realistic case studies, intensive small- and large-group interactions, exercises, and expert-led discussion, you will gain valuable insights, including:

� When and how regulatory sanctions are imposed and how savvy managers exercise sound judgment when the risk of criminal prosecution is present � How to manage the threat of liability in the world�s most litigation- prone system � How the law balances the rights of employers and employees, especially during sensitive transitions such as corporate restructurings, or when a manager who possesses confidential information changes jobs � What you should know about contracts for complex business transactions and relationships and how they are negotiated and administered

The Participants

This is not a program for legal professionals. It is intended to bring a greater understanding of legal issues to senior general and technical executives who make practical strategic decisions about the development, management, or marketing of technology and/or products, or the management of organizations in rapidly-changing markets, including: CEOs, Presidents, COOs, CFOs, Executive VPs, heads of Research & Development, Engineering, Manufacturing & IS, Chief Technologists, Corporate Planners and Strategists, VPs of Marketing & New Venture Development, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, and other senior managers with business development responsibility.

Faculty

John Akula is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he has primary responsibility for the business law curriculum. He also teaches in the Biomedical Enterprise Program sponsored by MIT Sloan and the Harvard/MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology.

12/03/09: Ricci Flow and the Topology of 3-manifolds

12/03/09

12/03/09: John Morgan
Columbia University

Ricci flow is a natural evolution equation for Riemannian metrics on a manifold, which is a non-linear heat-type equation for symmetric 2-tensors. Intuitively, one expects this equation to equally distribute curvature of the metric around the manifold and hence one expects the flow of metrics to converge to homogeneous metric. At least for 3-dimensional manifolds this happens in some special cases.

But the non-linear aspect of the equation can prevent this from always happening. In regions of high curvature, the non-linear terms can dominate and drive the evolving metric to a singularity in finite-time.

Because of the revolutionary work of Perelman, building on earlier work of Hamilton, how this occurs for 3-manifolds is now completely understood. Out of this understanding, one sees how to extend the 3-dimensional Ricci flow through the singularities by doing surgery, cutting out the regions where singularities develop. Amazingly, this process is tailor made to study the topology of 3-manifolds, and it leads to a complete classification, or listing, of compact 3-manifolds in terms of those with a homogeneous geometry.

12/03/09: The Social Responsibility of the Scientist

12/03/09

12/03/09: Dr. George Daley
Director of Stem Cell Transplantation Program
Children's Hospital Boston
Investigator
Howard Hughes Medical Institute;
and Associate Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology
Harvard Medical School
The Most Rev. Katharine Jeffords Schori
Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church
(United States and 15 other nations)
and Ph.D. in oceanography

Dr. David Urion
Associate Professor of Neurology and
Director of the Division of Service Learning
Harvard Medical School

12/04/09: Art, Science, and Money: Field Guides to the Birds,1889-2009

12/04/09

12/04/09: Thomas R. Dunlap
History
Texas A & M University

12/04/09: Cell assembly sequences in the service of cognition

12/04/09

12/04/09: Gy�rgy Buzs�ki, MD, PhD
Board of Governors Professor
Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience
Rutgers University

12/04/09: Ideal perturbed equilibria in tokamaks

12/04/09

12/04/09: Jong-kyu Park
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

12/04/09: Cell assembly sequences in the service of cognition

12/04/09

12/04/09: Gy�rgy Buzs�ki, MD, PhD
Board of Governors Professor
Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience
Rutgers University

12/04/09: Internally generated cell assembly sequences in the service of cognition

12/04/09

12/04/09: Gy�rgy Buzs�ki
Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience
Rutgers
The State University of New Jersey

Hosts: BCS Graduate Students

12/07/09: Reinventing Your Business Strategy

12/07/09

12/07/09:
If the organization you lead is to achieve success in current markets, you must begin to think about your business strategy in new ways. Traditional competitive approaches that rely on product differentiation do not produce optimal results, nor do they take advantage of new sources of profitability that the connectivity of a networked economy offers. Too often, they focus your attention in the wrong place. To survive and prosper today, you must shift your attention from products to customers and create a business plan based on:

* the innovative restructuring of your customer relationships * segmenting your customers more creatively * delivering a value proposition that places the customer at the center of your strategy

At the MIT Sloan School of Management, our research has given rise to a powerful business model that reflects the many new ways to compete in the current economy. Called the Delta Model, it offers senior managers a fresh and pragmatic approach to critical strategic business thinking. This new, integrative, strategic framework allows managers like you to do exciting, bold, creative and innovative things within your firm. In Reinventing Your Business Strategy, you'll learn how to use the Delta Model to identify new sources of profitability, develop new strategic approaches that fit your firm, establish new directions for the organization, and implement a revised strategic agenda. You'll also gain pragmatic insights on how to:

* begin to change from a product-driven orientation to a customer-driven orientation * choose among three distinct strategic options to develop a strong vision * creatively segment your customer base

The Participants

Reinventing Your Business Strategy is for senior general and technical executives who are responsible for creating strategies for succeeding in rapidly-changing markets, including: Chief Executive Officers; Presidents; Chief Operating Officers; Executive Vice Presidents; heads of R&D, Engineering, Manufacturing, and IS; Chief Technologists; Corporate Planners; Corporate Strategists; Vice Presidents of Marketing and New Venture Development; and senior managers with strategic planning responsibility.

Faculty

Faculty Leader: Arnoldo C. Hax, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Management, enjoys an international reputation for his research, publishing, and consulting in the fields of strategic planning, management control, operations management, and operations research. He has participated in executive education programs around the world and consults regularly to multinational organizations. He has authored and co-authored nine books, including The Delta Project: Discovering New Sources of Profitability in a Networked Economy with Dean Wilde which provides a new organizing framework to develop strategy and manage in the new economy.

12/07/09: Developing a Leading Edge Operations Strategy

12/07/09

12/07/09:
Enterprises are becoming increasingly global, with supply chains and manufacturing processes spanning oceans and continents. To navigate the global marketplace, senior managers need to know how to plan the most efficient use of material resources, as well as manage more complicated global networks and optimize service and quality.

They need to be able to create a dynamic operations strategy that fosters:

* continuous, incremental improvement * groundbreaking innovation, and * competitive market advantage

In this two-day program, senior managers will learn new approaches to operations strategy that were developed at MIT and based on best-practice research conducted among the world's leading manufacturing companies.

Led by senior School faculty, Developing a Leading Edge Operations Strategy offers an analytic view of operations and strategic insights into:

* vertical integration and the factors that affect strategic decisions * outsourcing, supplier power and trends in supplier management * global facility network strategies and the future of supply chain management * strategic implications of process technologies * capacity and risk management, including capacity factors, supply and demand management and the role of services * how to survive in a world of outsourcing, and how to decide whether and where to go

The program draws on real issues confronting manufacturing and service companies today and provides a strategic framework for making the kinds of major decisions every company faces:

* how do we deal with globalization? * should we outsource? * how far should we go with outsourcing? * where should we be?

Program Topics

* The Principles of Operations Strategy * Vertical Integration: Factors That Affect Decisions * Outsourcing and Supplier Management * Facilities strategy and globalization * Risk Management: Supply and Demand * Analyzing Service Operations * Globalization Implications: Surviving in a World of Outsourcing

The Participants

This program is appropriate for senior managers from manufacturing and service industries who are responsible for developing and executing operations strategy, including: chief operating officers, strategic planners, vice presidents of business strategy, operations, supply chain management, services and product development, operations general managers, and senior project and program executives.

Faculty

Charles H. Fine, Chrysler LFM Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, studies technology supply chains. Author of Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage, Fine focuses on assessing the present and future profitability and strategic leverage of the various sectors in the supply chain. He also concentrates on determining the boundaries and identity of an organization - designing a supply chain based on strategic as well as logistical assessment. In addition, he looks at assembling the capability to realize organizational boundaries of choice and to manage within and across those boundaries.

Janice Klein studies the introduction of new ideas into the workplace. She focuses on integrating the social and technical aspects of organizational change, through research, teaching, and consulting that are grounded in such resources and initiatives as lean production systems, job design, and the changing role of lower levels of management in response to the introduction of new technology and employee empowerment. Klein is currently studying the impact of organizational culture on knowledge transfer and the development and maintenance of high performance, globally dispersed teams. General Expertise: Human resource management, operations management, organizational change.

Donald B. Rosenfield, Senior Lecturer in Operations Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is an expert on operations management and strategy. He is Director of the Leaders for Manufacturing Program (a dual degree Masters program run by the School of Management and the School of Engineering in partnership with leading global corporations). He has worked principally in the areas of manufacturing strategy and supply chain management

12/07/09: Bike-sharing 3.0: The future of urban shared transport and mixed mobility models

12/07/09

12/07/09: A discussion of the past, present and future of shared-transport systems using Paris' Velib as a model.

This panel will be moderated by DUSP professor Chris Zegras and feature creators of entrepreneurial models and urban systems.

Panelists:
Matthieu Fierling � V�lib,the Paris bike-sharing project and Autolib
Robin Chase � Founder of ZipCar and GoLoco
Nicole Freedman � Director of Bicycle Programs, City of Boston
Carlo Ratti � Director, SenseableCity Lab, MIT

Moderator:
Chris Zegras � Assistant Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT

12/08/09: Autonomous Vehicles and Urban Mobility

12/08/09

12/08/09: Emilio Frazzoli
Aeronautics and Astronautics

12/08/09: TAM Receptor Regulation of the Innate Immune Response

12/08/09

12/08/09: Greg Lemke
Salk Institute

Host: Hidde Ploegh

12/09/09: Supply Chain Strategy and Management

12/09/09

12/09/09:
In the 21st century e-business environment, products can be outmoded within months and corporate market share is at risk on an almost daily basis. Supply chain choices are having an increasingly critical influence on strategic business outcomes.

A practice-oriented program, Supply Chain Strategy and Management investigates a new MIT framework for better managing supply chains in today's rapidly changing markets. The program explores:

* How to better structure your supply chain strategy * Guidelines for making strategic sourcing and make-buy decisions * How to integrate e-business thinking into supply chain strategy and management * "Clockspeed benchmarking", a tool for deriving critical business insights and management lessons from industries with the highest obsolescence rates of products, process technologies, and organizational structures (industrial "fruitflies") * Why all advantages in fast clockspeed environments are temporary

In the past, supply chain practice has been primarily tactical, but Supply Chain Strategy and Management presents a new and innovative approach to supply chain design. In this program, participants will reach a better understanding of:

* The role of supply chain design in business strategy and why, if you fail to link them, your supply chain design can undo your business strategy * Forces that influence supply chain structure -- how supply chain structures change, how supply chain structures and industry structures overlap, and how these structures are affected by the speed of change in your industry * Integrating supply chain design with product and process development -- how do you integrate your plans for product development with your plans for supply chain design * Connecting supply chain design with supply chain management and logistics -- how can you imbed supply chain process management into project management * Supply chains in the age of eBusiness

The Participant Team

Supply Chain Strategy and Management is for senior managers who are responsible for the general business and strategic management of product supply and development, including vice presidents of manufacturing, product development, and purchasing and distribution, and senior supply chain managers and project management executives in any company which manufactures or distributes products, including component manufacturers, contract manufacturing companies, semi-conductor manufacturers, equipment manufacturers, consumer goods manufacturers, telecom companies, financial services companies, and retailers who would like to control more of the supply chain.

Faculty

Faculty Leader: Charles H. Fine, Chrysler LFM Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, studies technology supply chains. Author of Clockspeed: Winning Industry Control in the Age of Temporary Advantage, Fine focuses on assessing the present and future profitability and strategic leverage of the various sectors in the supply chain. He also concentrates on determining the boundaries and identity of an organization - designing a supply chain based on strategic as well as logistical assessment. In addition, he looks at assembling the capability to realize organizational boundaries of choice and to manage within and across those boundaries.

David Simchi-Levi, Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT, focuses his research on analysis, development and implementation of robust and efficient techniques for the design, control, and operation of logistics systems. He is co-author of Designing and Managing the Supply Chain: Concepts, Strategies and Case Studies, winner of the Book-of-the-Year Award and Outstanding IIE Publication Award given in 2000 by the Institute of Industrial Engineers. He is also a co-author of the book The Logic of Logistics. Simchi-Levi has consulted and collaborated with numerous companies and organizations.

12/09/09: Managing Technical Professionals and Organizations

12/09/09

12/09/09:
Technical professionals are a breed apart. Many of them consider autonomy more important than upward mobility. Because their goals and incentives are different, so are the management challenges they present.

Drawing on the wealth of research and industry experience of faculty and leading practitioners, Managing Technical Professionals and Organizations explores proven, practical, and innovative strategies for maximizing the contribution of technical professionals. This intensive program focuses on individual contributors and members of project teams, including cross-functional teams, and examines how to work effectively with "prima donnas" and independent spirits. Participants will learn principles and strategies of crucial importance to any organization where R&D, engineering, and/or computer-related technologies lie at the core of the business.

Managing Technical Professionals and Organizations explores seven critical topics:

* transferring technology between and within organizations * developing effective reward and incentive systems for technical professionals * creating a highly motivating work environment * managing and leading creative individual contributors * maximizing the technical productivity and vitality of teams * creating the most effective physical structure for supporting innovation * organizing for innovative product development

The Participant Team

Managing Technical Professionals and Organizations has been strategically designed for executives who manage technical professionals. Past participants have included CIOs, chief technologists, directors of R&D and engineering, engineering and manufacturing vice presidents, corporate strategists, head scientists, project managers, systems information managers, product development managers, and other key members of technical management.

Faculty

Thomas J. Allen, Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus and former deputy dean of the MIT Sloan School of Management, specializes in organizational psychology and management. His long-term research targets the aerospace and pharmaceutical industries, principally project management.

Ralph Katz, Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School and Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Northeastern University's College of Business, has conducted extensive management research, education, and consulting on technology-based innovation, with an emphasis on managing and motivating technical professionals, high performing groups, and project teams.

12/10/09: beta-Maximum Pressure Policies in Stochastic Processing Networks: Heavy Traffic Analysis

12/10/09

12/10/09: Wuqin Lin
Donald P. Jacobs Scholar
Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University

Abstract:
Stochastic processing networks provide a powerful abstraction for a wide range of real-world systems. This work is about finding good operational policies for such networks. I will begin the talk by introducing several stochastic processing network examples in manufacturing, service and information systems. Then I will describe a family of operational policies called beta-maximum pressure policies and show that they are throughput optimal (rate stable). The focus of this talk is the performance of the beta-maximum pressure policies in heavy traffic. I will establish a (multiplicative) state space collapse result that the queue length process of the networks can be lifted from a lower-dimensional workload process in diffusion limit. I will also show that for networks that have a single bottleneck resource, a beta-maximum pressure policy is asymptotically optimal for both the workload process and a certain holding cost structure.

12/10/09: A Point-of-Care System for the Developing World

12/10/09

12/10/09: Prof. Paul Yager
University of Washington

12/10/09: A Sharper Image: Nearby Active Galactic Nuclei seen with Adaptive Optics

12/10/09

12/10/09: Clair Max
University of California at Santa Cruz

Mergers between galaxies are thought to play an important role in galaxy evolution, and may be key to understanding the observed correlation between the mass of central supermassive black holes and the properties of their host galaxies. We are using the new technology of adaptive optics to observe nearby galaxies in the messy process of colliding with each other, and to search more distant galaxies in order to find signs of dual active black holes. I will discuss recent results on NGC 6240, an ongoing merger between two disk galaxies. Our high-resolution near-infrared images, combined with radio and x-ray positions, reveal the location and environment of two central supermassive black holes. Spatially resolved spectroscopy is allowing us to directly measure the black hole masses.