Women Advancing STEM Panel sponsored by IIT Association of Greater New England (IIT AGNE)

Chitra Javdekar

Chitra N. Javdekar is Dean of the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) at Massachusetts Bay (MassBay) Community College since July 2013. As Dean, she oversees various STEM departments at the College as well as grants, projects, and initiatives. Her office is responsible for managing budgets and activities such as industry collaboration that advance the College’s mission. In addition to developing new academic programs at the college for the college’s traditional and non-traditional student population, she has led the development of several new enrichment and STEM mentoring and outreach programs for K-12 and college students at MassBay in collaboration with community and higher education partners.

Prior to becoming the Dean, Dr. Javdekar served as Department Chair and Professor of Engineering at MassBay.  She holds a M.S. in Civil (Structural) Engineering from Mumbai University, India, and a Ph.D. in Civil (Structural) Engineering from Tufts University, Massachusetts.

Kathleen Mead Vandiver

Kathleen M. Vandiver is presently the director of the Community Outreach Education and Engagement Core (COE2C) for the MIT Center for Environmental Health Sciences (CEHS). She enjoys the position at MIT very much, because it uses both her training in biomedical research and in science education.   Kathy received her PhD from the Tufts Medical School (now the Sackler Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences) and became a principal investigator on NIH and NIEHS grants through the Small Business Innovative Research program (SBIR) in the mid-1980s.  The company earned an R& D 100 Award in MA. Then after several years, in preparation for a new career, she entered Harvard Graduate School of Education to earn a Master’s in Education.

Kathy taught middle school science for 15 years in the Lexington Public Schools before working at MIT.  Her career as an innovative science teacher began with a bold collaboration with her 6th grade Teacher Team at Diamond Middle School.  With Lexington Foundation funding, they produced a project-based curriculum called Horace’s Fridays.  Also while at Diamond Middle School, Kathy designed and developed cell biology manipulatives and lesson plans that were later sold to the LEGO Education Company.  These original models were created from standard LEGO bricks and components.   The key part of the innovation however, was that the models were designed simulate how molecules actually work and interact, unlike most molecular models that are designed as statues.  The Vandiver models can be used to simulate cell processes like DNA transcription and translation that are difficult to learn.  When Kathy joined MIT in 2005, she improved the models further and set up a unique gallery at the MIT Museum for teaching the molecular biology with the LEGO DNA and Proteins to people of all ages.  Kathy now holds an US patent with her husband, J. Kim Vandiver, for the development of the latest DNA and Protein versions that can now be mass produced and distributed.  The DNA sets were released in February this year and the Protein Sets will soon follow this summer.

Gitika Srivastava

Founder, Chief Executive Officer, Navya Network (startup for medical decision making) and Partner/Founder KAHM Capital

Gitika graduated in computer science from Harvard University and has an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management. She has over fourteen years of experience as an entrepreneur and investor in early stage high tech and health care companies. Gitika was the CEO of Skyris Networks, which was acquired by Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s Timberline Venture Partners. She holds patents in distributed networking, databases, and search technologies, and decision making. Gitika is a pre-career tutor for undergraduates at Harvard and an advisor to many start-up companies and young entrepreneurs. She is also a Partner at KAHM Capital – an early stage venture capital firm, investing globally in high tech and health care and Founder/CEO at Navya Network – a startup for medical decision making.

Mondira (Mandy) Deb Pant

Academic Research Director at Intel, Dr. Mondira (Mandy) Deb Pant, works with leading academic researchers worldwide and technical experts at Intel to seed and drive research efforts in strategic areas of importance to the computing industry. Her core area of expertise includes VLSI devices and circuits, architecture, systems, on-chip power delivery, power management and power reduction. She has published 20+ technical papers in prestigious VLSI conferences and journals, has 2 issued patents and 5 pending patents.

Mandy received her Bachelors (B.Tech) in Computer Science and Engineering from I.I.T Kharagpur, India, a Masters (MS) in Electrical Engineering and a Doctorate (PhD) in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA.

Mandy is an active proponent of STE(A) M for Women and young girls and has participated in various efforts in promoting it across the nation. In 2009, Mandy was recognized by Mass High Tech (A Massachusetts High Tech Journal) as one of the top 10 upcoming Women to Watch in the New England area. In 2013, she was recognized by the India New England journal as one of the top 20 South Asian Women of 2013 in the New England area. She has recently risen to the role of Technical Chair for Intel’s biggest internal technical design conference.

She is a proud Mom to two young girls ages 14 and 11 and is an avid reader, traveler, dancer and yoga enthusiast.

Rita Advani (Moderator)

Rita Advani is currently the Director for Regional Programming for High Touch High Tech of New England (www.ScienceMadefunNE.net ), an organization bringing science enrichment programs to students in PreK – Grade 8 throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  She is also the President of Bush Pond Ventures, LLC an organization focused on increasing science literacy for PreK-Grade 12. She has developed an extensive science curriculum for preschool age students and a course to teach preschool educators on how to teach science to preschool age children. The course is accredited by MassAEYC (the Massachusetts Association for the Education of Young Children).

Rita also has over 30 years of experience in marketing strategy, global product management and emerging markets development, in the supply chain, healthcare and loss prevention engineering services industries.

Her civic engagement included election to the Town of Norfolk School Committee, appointment as Chair of the Energy Committee for the Town of Norfolk and appointment to a commission on education finance for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  As part of her interest in the field of home health care, she currently serves on the Board of the VNA Care Network & Hospice Foundation in the Atrius Health alliance.

A resident of Boston, she has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management in Kolkata, India and is an avid photographer

Boundary-less Education:  Connect, and Collaborate to Transform Education

It is no longer business as usual in the education field!   The blurring and dissolution of boundaries is a necessary condition for achieving the goals of education today, be it to meet the rapid development agenda of nations that require expanded access and quality, or be it the need for increased agility and relevance to address rapidly changing skills requirements of the marketplace. Can we provide quality education at scale and relevant to the demands of an effective workforce, while fostering new opportunities for entrepreneurship and venture?

IIT AGNE conducted a symposium on March 5th, 2016 which brought a panel of experts, thought leaders and practitioners from academia and industry to illuminate some of the transformative opportunities presented by the blurring of boundaries in education, as well as the systemic “readiness” conditions for success.

The discussion was chaired by Dr. M.S. Vijay Kumar, Associate Dean & Senior Strategic Advisor for Digital Learning at MIT and included Professor Christopher Dede, Timothy E. Wirth Professor in Learning Technologies at Harvard University; Sanjay Sarma, Vice President for Open Learning, MIT; Jean Hammond, Co-founder and partner at LearnLaunch and Dr. Tinsley Galyean, Executive Director, Curious Learning.

Vijay Kumar opened the discussion by framing the themes to be addressed by the panel. As the world’s population increases by the billions, countries need to consciously start acting to scaling up education to train very large numbers of people and give them the tools to succeed in a global agile economy to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing world. This true of primary education, where millions of people are still left behind; and it is true of higher level or tertiary education, where the costs of a traditional college education are becoming prohibitive. At the same time, there cannot be compromise on quality and the skills and knowledge imparted have to equip the students to be flexible, innovative and entrepreneurial in their approach. It is very clear that Technology is going to play an increasingly critical role in reinventing education for the 21st century.

Sanjay Sarma, who leads MIT’s open education initiatives, made the point that the classroom system of education is an industrialized system of training large number of people in the shortest possible time to be productive citizens, developed in the 19th century as the world began transitioning from a rural agrarian to urban industrial economy. But it does not fit how human beings learn, where learning on a topic grows slowly but steadily with time, then accelerates to reach a peak, before declining. In addition, we are motivated by having constant positive feedback and knowing the bigger picture in terms of learning goals and complex concepts.

Constant and ongoing testing promotes learning by weeding out superficial knowledge as we have to think about what we learnt and strengthen conceptual understanding. The modern education system fails in this respect by only focusing on the peak learning and using tests as a final measure of success. A new educational system has to succeed by customizing to the actual process by which human beings learn and use testing to reinforce and support the learning process.

Professor Worth Dede talked about the role of technology in enabling curiosity-driven learning in children. He showed videos of children learning about the human impact on the environment by exploring a 3-D world that included a housing development with fertilizers sprayed on lawns that impact the ecosystem of a pond/lake, which can be measured over time. This is reinforced by taking groups of children to a real pond, where they can explore the impact by taking actual measurements. The children use their natural curiosity to explore and learn by doing tasks in a problem solving context in both an artificially constructed game and the real world.

Jean Hammond, a successful technology executive and serial entrepreneur, runs LearnLaunch, a technology incubator for Ed-Tech startups in the Boston area. She described the significant opportunities for entrepreneurs in creating new technology that can be used to promote, measure and reinforce learning on a very large scale. Entrepreneurs are needed to exploit new trends such as gamification, self-paced learning and authenticated learning/testing. There is now significant private and public investment in creating and encouraging the use of education technologies, though venture capital investment is relatively low compared to other fields.

Finally Dr. Tinsley Gallean showed videos of young children with no access to education, living in remote communities and slums in Africa, who were provided tablets loaded with educational apps for young learners and left with no instruction. The children took only a few minutes to collectively experiment and find out how to turn them on, then in a few months proceeded to use the apps to master the alphabets and numbers. Within a year, four year olds were using the tablets together with the loaded music app to create music in novel ways. These children were roughly at the same level as their counterparts who were in a formal education system. This shows that the natural inventiveness and curiosity of children can be harnessed to enable young learners who have little access to formal education to catch up with their more fortunate peers.

This discussion was followed by a lively discussion with an informed audience that focused on topics such as the cost of learning, downsides of an educational approach scaled to large numbers and the possible limitations and flaws of the emerging educational systems.  Overall the presentations and the discussions highlighted the significance of transcending traditional boundaries  between disciplines, research and learning  as well as the physical and the virtual for seeking innovative solutions to advance quality educational opportunity.

A Panel Discussion on the Convergence of Artificial Intelligence, Big Data Analytics and Robotics technologies and implications held on 23rd January 2016, 2.00–4.00 PM, Cambridge Innovation Center, 1 Broadway, Cambridge, MA

Distinguished Panel & Speakers:
1. Subrata Das, President and Chief Scientist, Machine Analytics
2. Suchit Jain, VP Strategy & Community, Dassault Systemes SOLIDWORKS Corporation
3. Ashish Nadkarni, Program Director, Enterprise Servers and Storage, International Data Corporation
4. Stephen O’Dea, Senior Program Manager, Remote Presence, iRobot Corporation

IIT AGNE held the third event in the run up to Leadership Conference 2016, with the theme “Leading transformation for a better tomorrow: Technologies that lift the human spirit”.

Today we google the question that just popped in our head using Siri, set our thermostat using a smartphone and book a ride to the airport on Uber, as Roomba cleans our living room floors.

What about dreaming of living in a Smart home equipped with smart appliances, going to the office or on vacation in a driverless car, playing with a smart basketball and riding on a bike with a Smart helmet, monitoring the health of your elderly parents or family while you are on a business trip, and infusing fashion with smart technology embedded in a dress?

Technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, IoT and Robotics are no longer exclusive to the purview of research labs or capital intensive manufacturing environment. Increasingly, tools and knowledge based on the ideas in these domains are becoming common place and fundamentally transforming our lives, the nature of our work, our thinking and our work schedules as well. The sharing economy based on these technologies, pioneered by companies like AirBnB and Uber, has opened up a whole host of options for us as producers and consumers.

How is the landscape changing within these domains of knowledge? How are they enhancing our understanding of ourselves, our society and the different environments we function in? How is technology impacting us as individuals, our workplaces and society as a whole?

At the same time as new solutions and technologies are harnessed to relieve our pain points, we are facing a different set of challenges arising out of these applications.