by Karen Theroux

State-of-the-art experiments at Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) are a click away from students in Africa—thanks to an engineering A-Team with truly global vision.

“This is the Stata Center—what do you think of it?” The question comes from Jesus del Alamo, electrical engineering and computer science professor, as he leads the way through MIT’s rambling new Frank Gehry-designed building. Full of twisting stairways, towers, odd angles and unfinished surfaces, the vast structure is fitted with labs, lofts, open work areas and casual meeting spaces, most of which can be reconfigured any way the students and researchers headquartered there decide. It’s an ingenious design, surprising yet entirely in sync with the academic culture of MIT. Here, experimentation and ad hoc collaboration are the norm, and the overarching mission of advancing knowledge to benefit the world is practiced openly, in inventive and pragmatic ways.

A visitor comes to MIT, known for 140 years of world-changing discoveries and 61 Nobel Prize winners, expecting to be impressed. While its accomplishments are awesome, even more impressive is the institution’s philosophy of applying science and technology to meet human needs, a viewpoint that informs the everyday work of innovators like Jesus del Alamo. In an effort to address today’s global challenges, del Alamo and his team of MIT technology aces are focusing on Africa, in a groundbreaking effort linking state-of-the-art facilities in the United States with students in Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda. As a result of their efforts, African students can conduct complex experiments in the same Web-based labs used by students at MIT. Because of MIT’s iLab program, which has received support from Carnegie Corporation of New York, all the African students need is a computer and access to the Internet.

High Tech Takes a Human Touch
“If you can’t come to the lab, the lab will come to you,” says del Alamo, who, together with several graduate and undergraduate students in his lab, developed the Web-based experiments. “Many people are surprised to learn that even the most advanced universities cannot afford to offer their students all the lab experiences they would like to have. But with a lab setting that’s accessible via the Internet, you have access anytime, from anywhere in the world. Instead of all institutions having all labs, sharing allows costs to be pooled. The result is better labs with better equipment and better pedagogical experiences.”

Online laboratories, known as iLabs, are real labs, not virtual labs or canned experiments. The iLab designed by del Alamo and his students is used to measure the electrical characteristics of transistors and other microelectronic devices. The lab itself consists of instruments for taking current-voltage measurements plus computer hardware and software components that bring the laboratory experience onto the Web. Students log onto the lab and set up their experiments by entering the desired specifications, or test vectors, executing them and, in a matter of seconds, viewing the obtained data, which is downloaded onto their computer. They can then compare measured characteristics (actual results) with theoretical predictions and reflect on discrepancies, limitations and design criteria.

By making it possible to perform real-time experiments via the Internet, these labs allow students to study the characteristics of real and state-of-the-art devices regardless of how restricted their school’s resources may be. The information covered in the microelectronics iLab is essential preparation for working in the semiconductor or telecommunications industry, for example. For hundreds of African students, these online lab activities could instantly open up a new world of scientific discovery and provide an opportunity to see the true power of the computer as an engineering tool. “African nations have eager students and eager faculty,” says del Alamo, “but they do not have resources. So we start with what they do have: people. In engineering, when you work with people you need a close rapport. Different cultures and infrastructures make it critical to spend a lot of time together learning to understand. That’s why human exchange is the key.”

That “human exchange” brought Kayode (Peter) Ayodele and Olumide (Olu) Akinwunmi, graduate engineering students from Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU) in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, to MIT in June 2005. Ayodele, with a master’s degree in electronics, and Akinwunmi, a Ph.D. student, are part of a dedicated team that runs OAU’s growing computer network. Described by del Alamo as “energetic and entrepreneurial,” the Nigerian students left their sprawling university, with its 25,000-plus students on a tropical campus about the size of Manhattan, to spend quality time in Cambridge, Massachusetts, absorbing MIT’s collaborative culture while learning the nuts and bolts of iLabs. If all goes according to plan, not only these labs, but new ones designed to meet uniquely African needs, will be accessible online in Nigeria in the very near future.

“Peter and Olu have learned how research is done here,” del Alamo explains. “We’ve shared all our technology and our know-how. We’ve helped them scope out the labs they will eventually want to develop and provided the entire software architecture they can bring back home to do it.” Ayodele rates the project “very exciting…and very useful to Nigeria. It will be the first time we could actually conduct this type of experiment. Working with the MIT team has opened new horizons and I’ve learned how to get a lot done with a lot less stress,” he says. “There’s a very friendly, open approach to research and sharing that we’ll take back and hope it will catch on.” Akinwunmi is just as enthusiastic, acknowledging that the MIT experience “changed our point of view and improved our educative standards. Back home, we’ll be looking for things to improve. Now we can keep up with anybody, anywhere in the world.”

Next page: Two weeks after they’d arrived, the visitors had left for Ile-Ife to “take back home” the lessons learned in Cambridge.

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