mit tpp thesis

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We strive to recruit a diverse class of students to the Technology and Policy Program. Applicants should be interested in combining mastery of a specific technological domain (energy, environment, computation, transportation, aerospace, etc.) with deep understanding of the application of social science methods (economics, political science, management, law, etc.) to policy formulation and analysis.

The program prepares graduates for professional careers at the interface of science, technology, and policy, including in industry, government, academia, regulatory agencies or consulting. Graduates also leave the program prepared for PhD work, such as the IDSS PhD in Social and Engineering Systems .

What does the TPP Admissions team look for in an application?

Applicants to the Technology and Policy Program are expected to have the background to excel in graduate-level subjects in engineering, data analysis, statistics, economics, political science, and management, as well as to complete a research thesis that contributes to the field of technology policy. In addition to an appropriate academic background most successful candidates also have acquired one or more years of work experience following completion of their undergraduate degree. Again, these elements are not required for admission, but are common skills and experiences for most admitted students.

Academic Excellence

We evaluate each applicant individually, consider the opportunities that each prospective student has had to demonstrate their intellectual capabilities. In this context, we consider university coursework, research experience, and standardized test scores such as the Graduate Record Examination (GRE). ( NOTE: For the 2025 Admissions Cycle, the GRE General Test is optional .) We pay particular attention to recent evidence of academic performance and achievements in areas directly relevant to technology and policy.

Interest in Technology Policy

We evaluate prospective students’ interest in technology and policy through their prior experience and their statement of objectives. Practical experience in understanding how technology issues are approached in real-world contexts is important to students’ success in the program. Generally, successful applicants have previous work or internship experience in government, nonprofit, or industry sectors. We are particularly interested in hearing about the goals and career plans of applicants through their statement of objectives, and how TPP will fulfill their objectives.

Capacity for Technology Policy Leadership

We seek students who are prepared to work for the good of a larger community. Leadership experience is interpreted broadly – we would like to hear through your statement of objectives how you have influenced and inspired the people around you. We are especially interested in candidates who can be effective in motivating concern about issues, catalyzing coalitions to effect change, and managing implementation of new policies.

TPP promotes team-centered learning among a culturally and internationally diverse group of students. A diverse student body has always been critical to the educational mission of MIT. TPP is committed to providing our students “with an education that combines rigorous academic study and the excitement of discovery with the support and intellectual stimulation of a diverse campus community” (MIT Mission) .

Our students’ success depends on their exposure to many viewpoints and their ability to trust peers to provide both support and criticism. Moreover, the experience of working with a diverse set of peers at MIT prepares our students to work effectively in the world outside MIT: it opens their minds and attunes them both to the variety of strengths and the variety of concerns of others.

The existence of such diversity of viewpoints depends upon representation within our student body of backgrounds and experiences that vary along many dimensions, among which are gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, culture, nationality, disability, religion, age, veteran status, and socio-economic background.

No student should feel isolated, and all students should come into contact with members of other groups and experience them as colleagues with valuable ideas and insights.

It is through this experience of the richness and diversity of interests, strengths, viewpoints and concerns of their fellow students that our students become open-minded intellectuals and innovators, primed to pursue the MIT mission of the betterment of humankind.

MIT Technology and Policy Program Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 617-253-7693

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This collection of MIT Theses in DSpace contains selected theses and dissertations from all MIT departments. Please note that this is NOT a complete collection of MIT theses. To search all MIT theses, use MIT Libraries' catalog .

MIT's DSpace contains more than 58,000 theses completed at MIT dating as far back as the mid 1800's. Theses in this collection have been scanned by the MIT Libraries or submitted in electronic format by thesis authors. Since 2004 all new Masters and Ph.D. theses are scanned and added to this collection after degrees are awarded.

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If you have questions about MIT theses in DSpace, [email protected] . See also Access & Availability Questions or About MIT Theses in DSpace .

If you are a recent MIT graduate, your thesis will be added to DSpace within 3-6 months after your graduation date. Please email [email protected] with any questions.

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Technology and Policy Program

77 Massachusetts Avenue Building E17-373 Cambridge MA, 02139

617-258-7295 [email protected]

Website: Technology and Policy Program

Application Opens: September 15

Deadline: December 15 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time

Fee: $90.00

Terms of Enrollment

Standardized tests.

Graduate Record Examination (GRE)

• General test optional for 2025-2026 admissions cycle
• Institute code: 3514
• Department code: 0000

International English Language Testing System (IELTS)

• Minimum score required: 7.5
• Electronic scores send to: MIT Graduate Admissions

Cambridge English Qualification (C1 Advanced test)

• Minimum score required: 191

Please note: TOEFL exam scores are not accepted. Waivers of IELTS or Cambridge English Qualification may be available.

Areas of Research

• Aerospace Systems
• Assistive Technologies
• Business Strategy and Entrepreneurship
• Complex Socio-Technical System Analysis
• Energy and the Environment
• Health Care, Pharmaceutical, and Service
• Human-Systems Engineering
• Industrial Relations
• Information Technology, Information Systems, Software Engineering
• International Relations
• Logistics and Supply Chain Management
• Manufacturing (economics, materials, environmental policy, strategy)
• Materials (systems analysis, environmental and economic policy)
• Networks, Distributed Simulation Systems
• Organizational Learning
• Product and Process Design and Development, Technical Innovation
• Project Management
• Risk and Safety Analysis and Decision-Making, Risk Management
• Science, Space, and Technology Policy
• Social and Organizational Psychology
• System Architecture, Systems Engineering
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• Technology Policy for Socio-Economic Development
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Application requirements.

• Online application
• Statement of objectives
• Three letters of recommendation
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• Response to the supplemental question

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Applicants must also arrange for official transcripts and test scores to be sent to the program for verification purposes.

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MIT Reports to the President 2000–2001

Technology and Policy Program

The MIT Technology and Policy Program (TPP) provides an integrative education to scientists and engineers who wish to lead in the development and implementation of responsible strategies and policies for exploitation of technology for the benefit of their communities. TPP's guiding vision is the education of "Leaders Who Are Engineers and Scientists."

The TPP graduate educational program in the School of Engineering acknowledges that the development of the skills necessary for effective implementation of technology tie into the emerging engineering systems educational thrusts and, consequently, TPP is part of the Engineering Systems Division (ESD) of MIT. The program focuses on providing a high impact, high quality education to its students. Its goal is to make TPP the most prestigious and sought after technology policy program in the world and to produce the technological decision makers of the future.

TPP sponsors both a Master of Science program and the Technology, Management and Policy (TMP) doctoral program. This year's class of Master of Science in Technology and Policy included 48 graduates, and 2 continued on as doctoral students. This year's "Best Thesis in Technology and Policy" was awarded to Robert Hyman. The TMP program has a current enrollment of twenty students, reflecting a steady-state admission rate of about five students per year. Seven students received their Technology, Management and Policy Ph.D. in June 2001.

Esther Kim received the Grossman Award and will be using it to undertake an internship in Nepal.

The close of Professor Hasting's first full academic year as Director of TPP is also marked by a number of achievements stemming directly from the strategic plan developed during the first semester of his tenure. The TPP Faculty Council has helped to broaden the intellectual footprint of TPP within the Institute, drawing upon faculty not only from the School of Engineering and the School of Management, but also from the School of Humanities and Social Sciences. As a consequence to the Sussman Curriculum Committee report, TPP has funded several curriculum development efforts, including a complete reworking of a key core course, ESD.11 (now ESD.10). This curriculum development has also been coordinated with a concurrent effort with the Cambridge-MIT Initiative, and new offerings will start at Cambridge during the upcoming Michaelmas Term. Finally, TPP and ESD hosted the first of what will be an annual event designed to raise both the external and internal profile of the Program. This year, TPP and ESD hosted a symposium marking the 25th year of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, bringing together not only almost all the past heads of the office, but also academics and professionals in the field of technology policy to reflect upon the history of the office, as well as to consider the challenges facing practitioners of technology policy today.

Finally, this year marked another transition for TPP—Ms. Gail Hickey, who had worked with TPP for the last 15 years, left the program to pursue other interests. Her years of outstanding service were recognized at the 2001 MIT Awards Ceremony where she was given the James N. Murphy award.

Daniel Hastings

More information about Technology and Policy Program can be found at http://mit.edu/tpp/www/ .

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Doctoral Thesis: From Data, to Models, and Back: Making ML “Predictably Reliable”

Kiva (32-G449)

By: Andrew Ilyas

Thesis Supervisors: Costis Daskalakis, Aleksander Madry

• Date: Friday, August 23
• Time: 2:30 pm - 4:00 pm
• Category: Thesis Defense
• Location: Kiva (32-G449)

Additional Location Details:

Abstract: Despite their impressive performance, training and deploying ML models is currently a somewhat messy affair. But does it have to be? In this defense, I’ll discuss some of my research on making ML “predictably reliable”—enabling developers to know when their models will work, when they will fail, and why. To begin, we use a case study of adversarial examples to show that human intuition can be a poor predictor of how ML models operate. Motivated by this, we present a few lines of work that aim to develop a precise understanding of the entire ML pipeline: from how we source data, to the datasets we train on, to the learning algorithms to use.

• Email: [email protected]

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When the lights turned on in the universe

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Watching crowds of people hustle along Massachusetts Avenue from her window seat in MIT’s student center, Dominika Ďurovčíková has just one wish.

“What I would really like to do is convince a city to shut down their lights completely, apart from hospitals or whatever else needs them, just for an hour,” she says. “Let people see the Milky Way, or the stars. It influences you. You realize there’s something more than your everyday struggles.”

Even with a lifetime of gazing into the cosmos under her belt — with the last few years spent pursuing a PhD with professors Anna-Christina Eilers and Robert Simcoe at MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research — she still believes in the power of looking up at the night sky with the naked eye.

Most of the time, however, she’s using tools a lot more powerful than that. The James Webb Space Telescope has begun providing rich data from bodies at the very edge of the universe, exactly where she wants to be looking. With data from the JSWT and the ground-based Magellan telescopes in Chile, Ďurovčíková is on the hunt for distant quasars — ancient, supermassive black holes that emit intense amounts of light — and the farther away they are, the more information they provide about the very early universe.

“These objects are really, really bright, and that means that they’re really useful for studying the universe from very far away,” she says. “They’re like beacons from the past that you can still see, and they can tell you something about the universe at that stage. It’s almost like archaeology.”

Her recent research has focused on what’s known as the Epoch of Reionization. It’s the period of time when the radiation from quasars, stars, galaxies and other light-emitting bodies were able to penetrate through the dark clouds of hydrogen atoms left over from the Big Bang, and shine their light through space.

“Reionization was a phase transition where all the stuff around galaxies suddenly became transparent,” she says. “Finally, we could see light that was otherwise absorbed by neutral hydrogen.”

One of her goals is to help discover what caused the reionization process to start in the first place. While the astrophysical community has determined a loose time frame, there are many unanswered questions surrounding the Epoch of Reionization, and she hopes her quasar research can help solve some of them.

“The grand hope is that if you know the timing of reionization, that can inform you about the sources that caused it in the first place,” she says. “We’re not quite there, but looking at quasars could be a way to do it.”

Time and distance on a cosmic scale

The quasars that Ďurovčíková has been most interested in are classified as “high-redshift.” Redshift is a measure of how much a wave’s frequency has decreased, and in an astrophysical context, it can be used to determine how long a wave of light has been traveling and how far away its source is, while accounting for the expansion of the universe.

“The higher the redshift, the closer to the beginning of the universe you get,” Ďurovčíková explains.

Research has shown that reionization began roughly 150 million years after the Big Bang, and approximately 850 million years after that, the dark hydrogen clouds that made up the “intergalactic medium,” or IGM, were fully ionized.

For her most recent paper, Ďurovčíková examined a set of 18 quasars whose light began traveling between approximately 770 million and 950 million years after the Big Bang. She and her collaborators, including scientists from four different countries, sorted the quasars into three “bins” based on distance, to compare the amount of neutral hydrogen in the IGM at different epochs. These amounts helped refine the timing of reionization and confirmed that data from quasars are consistent with data from other types of bodies.

“The story we have so far,” Ďurovčíková says, “is that at some point by redshift 5 or 6, the stuff in between galaxies was overall ionized. However, it’s not clear what type of star or what type of galaxy is more responsible for this global phase transition, which affected the whole universe.”

A closely related facet of her research — and one she’s planning on exploring further as she composes her thesis — is on how these quasars came to be in the first place. They’re so old, and so massive, that they challenge the current conceptions of how old the universe is. The light they generate comes from the immense gravitational force they exert on the plasma they absorb, and if they were already large enough to do that billions of years ago, just how long ago did they start forming?

“These black holes seem to be too massive to be grown in the time that their spectra seem to indicate,” she says. “Is there something in our way that’s obscuring the rest of the growth? We’re looking at different methods to measure their lifetime.”

Eyes towards the stars, feet grounded on Earth

In the meantime, Ďurovčíková is also working to encourage the next generation of astrophysicists. She says she was fortunate to have encouraging parents and mentors who showed her academic and career paths she hadn’t even considered, and she co-founded a nonprofit organization called Encouraging Women Across All Borders to do the same for students across the globe.

“In your life, you will see a lot of doors,” she says. “There’s doors that you’ll see are open, and there’s doors you’ll see are closed. The biggest tragedy, though, is that there are so many doors that you don’t even know exist.”

She knows the feeling all too well. Growing up in Slovakia meant the primary options were attending university in either Bratislava, the capital, or Prague, in the neighboring Czech Republic. Her love of math and physics inspired her to enroll in the International Baccalaureate program, however, and it was in that program that she met a teacher, named Eva Žitná, who “planted the seeds” that eventually sent her to Oxford for a four-year master’s program.

“Just being in the IB program environment started to open up these possibilities I had not considered before,” she says. “Both my parents and I started talking to Žitná about how this could be an interesting possibility, and somehow one thing led to another.”

While she takes great pleasure in guiding students along the same path she once took, equally as rewarding for her are the moments when she can see people realizing just how big the universe is. As a co-director of the MIT Astrogazers, she has witnessed many such moments. She remembers handing out eclipse glasses at the Cambridge Science Festival in preparation for last October’s partial solar eclipse, and recalls kids and adults alike with their necks craned upward, sharing the same look of wonder on their faces.

“The reason I care is because we all get caught up in small things in life very easily,” she says. “The traffic sucks. The T isn’t working. Then, you look up at the sky and you realize there’s something much more beautiful and much bigger than all these little things.”

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Simon Meckelnborg's thesis is among "BestMasters 2024"

13 Aug 2024 Physics

Simon Meckelnborg has been included in Springer Nature Verlag's "BestMasters 2024" series for his master's thesis "Optimisation of the 2D active grid for aerodynamics experiments". 

Simon Meckelnborg has been included in Springer Nature Verlag's "BestMasters 2024" series for his master's thesis "Optimisation of the 2D active grid for aerodynamics experiments". Every year, a number of excellent theses from German-speaking countries are selected by a panel of experts and appear in the publishing programme in the BestMasters series.

Simon remained at the Institute of Physics after graduating and is currently working on his dissertation in the TWiSt working group at ForWind.