Simple Science: The Neuroscience of Memories

This post is the first in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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I study the brain. When you think about it, the brain has made possible everything ever--from music to computers to hospitals, from kisses to high-fives to tears.

However, to me, there is one thing that the brain does that is the most amazing act in the world, and yet it happens every single day just in between your ears: the art of memory. When you think back to your first date, what you had for lunch today, or who you were as a child, you're actually cutting through time and feeling everything that makes memory so important, so story-like. It is who you are and what gives you a sense of "you" as the days and months and years go by. It is what goes away when some brain pieces break down and become broken thoughts.

Your brain is actually very much like the brain of other animals, such as the small, cat-hating, fast-moving animals that so often come out to eat at night and scare people to jump onto their chairs. To study the tiny pieces of the brain that make memory possible, I put on a clean, white, almost dress-like long-armed shirt and play with these animals each day. While doing so, I also can make their brain cells to respond light. Send some light into the brain and, as if part of a movie that you know was a lot of money to make, you can now control thoughts with flashes of light. My work can also take this a step further: it is now possible to find out which brain cells are holding on to a single memory, to make only those cells respond to light, and then to use the very same light to turn memories on or off, or even make new ones! Imagine being able to turn off memories that sometimes force people into a never-ending, deep-blue state of pain on the inside, or to turn on the kind of memories that remind us how happy of a thing life can be. So far, this is only in animals but, after all, we are animals too, just ones with bigger brains that know how to read and write and reason.

This is my work, and the age of memory control is here.

- Steve Ramirez, Ph.D. student in Neuroscience

Simple Science: Busy Doctors Make Less Money for Their Hospital

This post is the first in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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Being sick can cause you to spend a lot of money on the doctor and the hospital. The money you spend is not completely set by how sick you are. When your doctor is not tired, you may need to spend more money than if your doctor is tired. A tired doctor often writes less. When a doctor writes more, you often must spend more. This is because the stuff that a doctor writes is used to figure out how much you must spend. If doctors look at the stuff they did when they were tired at a time at which they are not tired, their hospitals may make more money. So, when a doctor has a lot of work, the hospital may get less money from each person that the doctor sees that day.

- Adam Powell, Ph.D.
President, Payer+Provider Syndicate

This is based on Dr. Powell's article, Physician Workload and Hospital Reimbursement: Overworked Physicians Generate Less Revenue per Patient.

Simple Science: Social Robotics

This post is the first in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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Humans are very good at some things, like recognizing things and using words. Computers are very good at other things, like working very fast with large numbers. I try to make the computers good at the things that humans are good at, like talking to and understanding people.

I build computers with bodies that can see, hear, and move around. Some of these things are already in the world - they build cars or clean your floor. But they aren't very good at working with people, because they don't understand how people act.

I try to make these seeing, hearing, moving computers better at dealing with humans by helping them understand people's voices and faces and also by making the computers act and move in ways that make people feel safe. This has many practical uses, because these computers can then do things that humans had to do before, even if they didn't want to (like making the same things over and over again all day).

Seeing, hearing, and understanding other people is very hard, even though it seems easy for us. So my work can also help us understand how humans do these things so easily by letting us check whether our ideas about how humans hear, see, and understand others are right. We make a guess about how it works in humans, then check to see if our guess is right by making the computer do what we think humans do and seeing if the computers act the way humans do.

- Sam Spaulding, graduate student

Simple Science: Formal Models in System Biology

This is a post in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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Life is hard to understand. Animals and other living things are made of parts which all start the same, but become different as they grow. They do this by sending signs to one another. The order in which these signs are felt changes their meaning and can change how the parts grow. When the signs break down, the parts don't grow right, and this can make people sick.
We are getting better at finding the signs, but understanding what happens when different signs arrive at the same time, and fight is still hard. I use computers to build an understanding of these relationships in growing animals. The computer allows us to study "what-if" questions, check with what we already know, and gives us new ideas. Sometimes they also need us to find new ways to use the computer to ask these questions.  By doing my work I hope  we can better fight the things which make us all sick and better understand life.

- Dr. Ben Hall, Microsoft Research

Simple Science: Research on Multicore Memory Systems

This is a post in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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My work is about how to make computers use space well. All computers have a lot of space for work that takes a long time to get to. Computers also have other space that is fast to get to, but there isn't much of it. Most of the stuff people do with computers doesn't fit in the fast space, so the computer has to decide what to keep in the fast space and what to put in the slow space. This is hard to do because the computer just follows orders and doesn't know what the person using the computer really wants. So it has to guess. Even worse, the person using the computer often doesn't exactly know what they want, so it's really left to the computer to guess!

In new computers, this is harder because a new computer is really several computers in one, and the fast space for one computer will not be quite so fast for the rest of the computers. This means that its not enough to decide just what to keep in the fast space, but the computer should also decide where to put things. It is even harder because it turns out that it is often a good idea to take space from one computer and give it to another. But you want to make sure you don't take too much from one computer and slow it down too much.  Once you've done that, you need to make sure all of the computers agree about where things go just in case they happen to work on the same stuff.

All of these different concerns make it a very hard problem, and the best we can hope for is to get close to the best answer. My job is to build computers that let us do this at all, and then come up with ways to get closer to the best answer. I also try to do this in ways that make sense for some deep reason, instead of ways that seem to work but we don't understand and may not work always.

- Nathan Beckmann, Ph.D. student in Computer Science

Simple Science: Algorithms for Compressive Genomics

This is a post in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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Learning the life words* that make people, and trees, and animals, and all other kinds of life, helps people like doctors find out how to help sick people, and how life works. One thing we do with these life words is to search all the life words we know to find ones that are like other ones. This search is very important.
Since people started reading life words, the words that make humans and animals and trees, we have found more and more life words. We have found so many life words, that computers aren't getting faster fast enough to keep up!

But, some life words are a lot like other life words. In fact, most life words are very much like other life words. The different parts of your life words and a tree's life words are very small.

I work on helping computers learn how to make all the life words smaller, so they can search only the life words that are not like other life words. This way, computers don't need to search nearly as much. This allows us to look through even bigger sets of life words, like those in your stomach, or in the ground, or in the water.  I hope this will help doctors find new ways to help sick people.

- Noah M. Daniels, Post-Doctoral Associate in Computational Biology

* I chose "life words" for DNA.

Simple Science: Dissertation on Computer Planning

This is a post in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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Computers have a hard time figuring out what to do when there is a change in the problem they are working on.  My work allows computers to think about possible changes that may happen in order to see which changes should be planned for ahead of time.  Then when a change happens, the computer will already know what to do.

This can be used in many situations in which change happens a lot, such as driving a car, flying things, managing power (the 'Smart_Grid'), or controlling things.

- Robert Holder, Senior Computer Scientist

Merry Christmas! Simple Science: Programming and HCI Mission Statement

This is a post in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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I looked at it as a translation problem, so I started with something I had already carefully crafted to be simple and short (but full of technical terms), the mission statement on my homepage:

I work on programming and HCI.

• crowd computing: making people part of the programming system
• online education: helping crowds teach each other
• software development tools: making programming more productive for developers
• end-user programming: making programming easier for everybody

Here's the translation into TenHundred:

I work on better ways to tell computers what to do.  Some of the things I do are:

• making people part of the computer's brain
• helping crowds of people learn from each other using computers
• making it faster to tell computers what to do, for people who do it for their jobs
• making it easier to tell computers what to do, for everyone

- Rob Miller, Professor

Simple Science: Computers That Help People Learn

This is a post in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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In my work, I build things on the computer that make it easier for people to use computers. Why? Because most people don't want to know how a computer works inside; they just want to use it to do interesting and fun things.

One thing that many people of all ages want to do is learn. People like learning all sorts of new ideas, and computers can make that easier. I am now making things on the computer that help people learn better than just using paper and books. To do so, I need to first watch how people learn, see how they struggle with what they now use to learn, make new things on the computer for those people, have people use them, and see if they learn better.

What I am making today is a thing that helps people learn how to build new things on computers. Why learn how to build new things on computers? Because it is very fun, and also because you can get many kinds of good jobs doing so ... some that even offer free food at the office! But it is very hard to learn how to do this if you don't have a teacher always sitting next to you. Most people don't have their own teacher but still want to learn by themselves.

This is why I am making a teacher inside of the computer. Just like a human teacher, this computer-teacher helps people learn to build new things on computers. A big part of this computer-teacher's job is to draw pictures of things inside of the computer that books only say in words, which makes it much easier for people to learn those ideas. It also tries to explain those pictures using simple words and gives students a place to ask questions and talk about those pictures with other students. This computer-teacher has already been used by people in many parts of the world to draw over 500,000 pictures to help them learn! Right now, I am continuing to make it work better for more kinds of students.

 

- Philip Guo, Professor's Assistant

Simple Science: My Programming Languages Research

This post is the first in our Simple Science Descriptions series of pieces written with the Up-Goer Five Text Editor restricting writers to the ten hundred most used words in English. It's harder than you might think! Send your entries (preferably under 350 words) to jeanyang [at] mit [dot] edu.

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I make it easier for people to tell computers what to do. I think about how people want to use computers and what computers need people to tell them. The people I have in mind are ones trained to use computers. In my perfect world, Ms Programmer doesn't need to tell computers much and the computers can do everything right while still running fast.

Here is how I spend my time. First, I come up with a new way Ms Programmer can tell the computer what to do. Then I think about why this way is the right way. In doing this, I sometimes have to think about what other people have shown is possible to make a computer do. Then I come up with reasons so other people also believe this way is the right way. To find these reasons, I have to both think hard and also build things. It can be hard to change minds!

I focus on ways of telling computers what to do that seem like they might force the computer to do too much work. I like thinking about these because they often let Ms Programmer do less work. The problem is that sometimes the computer can't finish all of the work. To make the new ways possible, I think about how to get the computer to do less work. In my work, I am helping Ms Programmer make sure things do not get shown to people who should not see them. Right now, Ms Programmer has to do a lot of work to guard Mr Privacy, remembering all the time where everything comes from and where everything is going. With my new way, Ms Programmer can say once how she wants Mr Privacy to be guarded and trust the computer to do it for her. I look at how to make this possible in a way that is easy for Ms Programmer and not too hard for the computer.

- Jean Yang, Ph.D. student in computer science