My name is Fadel Adib, and I'm a professor at MIT where I direct the Signal Kinetics group
at the MIT Media Lab. In our group, we invent new technologies that allow us to sense and
connect the physical world in ways that were not possible before. And we do this in order for us to
solve major societal problems ranging from climate change to healthcare and supply chain resilience.
A lot of the work that we do is inspired by our own personal journeys. I grew up in a coastal
city on the Eastern Mediterranean, and the sea was a big part of our lives, but the sea was
also very mysterious. And little did I know that a few decades later, as a faculty at MIT I will
be researching the ocean and uncovering its mysteries. It's remarkable that we've mapped
the whole surface of the ocean from satellites, but once you go a few inches below the surface,
we've seen so little, we've mapped maybe less than 1% of what is below the surface of the ocean.
This is why we know more about the far side of the moon and the surface of Mars than we have
mapped the depth of our ocean. This is why in my group, we invent new technologies to map and
observe hidden areas of the ocean so that we can better monitor it and help develop solutions that
can mitigate and reverse the impact of climate change on the ocean, which is the largest part of
our world. The ocean is hidden, but another area that is obscure is also inside the human body.
For example, sometimes I wake up in the morning and I'm feeling a little bit under the weather
and I'm not sure, am I getting sick? Do I have some new disease? And it would be great for me
if I can get that information right away. And yet it is so difficult to get that information.
So we built new microchips that can be swallowed or injected into the human body
so that we can monitor the body from the inside continuously to learn what is going
on. And over the next few years, we can use them for continuous monitoring to understand
if we're getting new diseases. But as the research evolves, we also want to use them
so that we can start treating human diseases and enabling new form of therapeutics. And over the
past few years, we've seen the emergence of amazing AI models.
What we've been thinking about is how we can use AI to augment our lives, our bodies, and even the
way we work and interact with the environment. If you think of it, a lot of labor across the
supply chain is about finding and moving items and being able to make sense of chaos that is there.
If you can be efficient through chaos and you can optimize operations, you can bring down
costs and you can make the whole supply chain much more resilient. And this is how we want
to use AI in order for us to augment the human experience in how we live our everyday lives and
also in how we work. In work, it would make us more efficient and in our everyday lives,
it would allow us to make things that we wish we didn't waste so much time on,
much more efficient so that we can spend time on the things that we love to do more.