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Clean-energy technologies offer the promise of revitalizing a dwindling base of manufacturing jobs in the United States while also addressing the problems of climate change and energy security, said Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico in a keynote speech at the annual MIT Energy Conference. But as great as the potential may be, it won’t be realized unless substantial new policies and regulations are put in place — and the chances of that happening anytime soon are slim, he said.

While Congress and the Obama administration have taken some first steps, he said, “the policies that have been enacted to date are clearly not sufficient to establish the U.S. as the leader in clean technology.” Right now, he said, “90 percent of the production capacity for new clean technology is outside the United States.”

Bingaman added that “China is moving ahead very aggressively,” and the United States needs to act soon to reverse the present tide. For example, while lithium-ion battery technology was developed in this country, only 1 percent of the manufacturing of these batteries — now used mostly in portable electronics devices, but seen as a key to the next generation of electric vehicles — takes place in the U.S.

That view of great potential but political stagnation was echoed by several speakers at the conference, which was held on March 6 at the Sheraton Boston. Speakers representing various levels of government, industry, academic research, international organizations, and the financial sector, among others, tended to agree that government action will play a crucial and decisive role in determining how the world responds to the challenges of growing energy demand and the risks of climate change, and how different nations’ economies fare as a result.

There were two areas where clear government action was seen as being especially important: first and foremost, setting in place a clear and predictable system that puts a price on emissions of carbon, whether it be in the form of a cap-and-trade system, as the U.S. Congress has been considering, or simply a direct tax on carbon, which many consider to be a better option but not a politically feasible one; and second, offering financial support for new energy technologies, not only at the research stage but also in establishing manufacturing capacity.

Regaining the competitive edge

Globally, the trend toward non-fossil-fuel energy is clear: In 2008, Bingaman said, for the first time global investments in clean energy technology exceeded those for fossil fuel technology. But for U.S. competitiveness, the trend is not encouraging. For many years, he said, the U.S. made the technological breakthroughs, while other countries, especially Japan, provided the follow-through. But now, other countries are joining in the follow-through, and “the U.S. no longer has a monopoly on the breakthroughs.”

There are ways to turn that around, suggested Bingaman, who chairs the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, but only with substantial policy changes. Clean technology “offers the opportunity to revitalize our manufacturing sector,” he said, but in the past the kinds of incentives the government has provided “were concentrated downstream,” on the consumers or suppliers rather than on the manufacturing end of the spectrum, and the policies have tended to come and go with changing political tides, resulting in “government-driven boom-and-bust cycles.”

To change that, several senators and congressmen, with President Obama’s support, are urging the creation of a substantial loan-guarantee program for clean-tech manufacturing. The biggest impact of all, Bingaman said, could come from improvements in energy efficiency, which could both produce a dramatic lowering of greenhouse emissions and oil imports, and at the same time create large numbers of long-term jobs. But to make that happen requires some form of price on carbon-emitting fuels, he said.

That’s not likely in this country anytime soon, he added. “Getting comprehensive climate-change legislation is not that promising this year,” he said, though he still has hope for some steps in that direction. And what might be possible next year depends on the outcome of the fall elections, he said.

Looking for innovation — and consistency

“The government’s role is vital, and temporary,” said David Anthony, managing partner of the investment company 21Ventures, at the conference’s closing panel discussion about the financing of energy technology. He stressed that the government’s main role is to invest in basic research and development, at the early stages where private financing is too difficult to secure. “The government needs to fix the problem, and then get out of the way,” he said.

But while the legislative process is moving slowly, many segments of industry are moving ahead. “It’s easy for me to be pro-climate legislation — it is in my economic self-interest,” said John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, the nation’s largest electric utility company and owner of the nation’s largest fleet of nuclear power plants. Rowe, one of the conference’s keynote speakers, explained that the greatest danger, from a business point of view, lies in “continuing to deal with energy in ways that are haphazard,” as opposed to setting a clear policy in place that businesses can base their plans on.

Rowe, whose Chicago-based electric utility holding company has already closed many of its coal-burning plants and plans to eliminate all of its 15 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, said that addressing the problems of greenhouse-gas emissions will depend on putting a price on carbon, either through a cap-and-trade system, or a carbon tax.

“We ought to have a predictable, confident and decisive policy on climate change,” he said. Public resistance is largely based on incorrect assumptions, he suggested, because polls show people oppose carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems because they believe those will cost them money, but they support renewable energy standards — requiring utilities to provide a set percentage of their power from renewable energy — because they believe those are cost-free. That kind of free lunch, he suggested, is an illusion.

But if policies are put in place that set a realistic price on carbon emissions, he said, the marketplace will do the rest. With such a policy, “you’ll be surprised at how much can happen in 10 years.”

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Once, if you wanted to become the general manager of a professional sports team, you had to have been a great athlete. For decades, sports teams were almost exclusively run by former players.

Times have changed. Today, an MBA can be a route into the NBA. Take Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, who has the height and bearing of a basketball star, but never played professionally. Instead, Morey graduated from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2000, and parlayed his analytical skills into his current job.

“All else equal, it is preferable to have played the sport,” Morey said on Saturday, during a panel at the fourth annual MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, which he co-founded. But all else is not equal: Sports are awash in misguided conventional wisdom, and scores of former players have blatantly mismanaged franchises. So Morey is in the vanguard of general managers applying the analytical techniques of academia to basketball.

In practice, that means Morey’s staff has been dissecting the sport, doing things like pinpointing the most efficient shot location (the three-pointer from the corner), and slicing defensive performance into small, measurable elements, in an attempt to quantify how effective Houston’s players are. Their forward Chuck Hayes, for example, would be considered too small for his position, at a mere 6’6,” according to the conventions of coaches and scouts, but new-school metrics indicate that Hayes is a defensive ace. “You have to have a culture where there are no bad ideas,” said Morey, meaning he encourages his staff to develop new ways of assessing talent. As a result, a year ago, unheralded Houston pushed the eventual champion Los Angeles Lakers to the seven-game limit in their playoff series.  

To be sure, the field of sports analytics has existed for years: The baseball writer Bill James’ pioneering annual book, “The Baseball Abstract,” began reaching a national audience in 1982. The subject gained new popularity through Michael Lewis’ best-seller, Moneyball (Norton, 2003), which chronicled how the Oakland Athletics were using James’ principles to find undervalued players.

The Sloan conference, which featured panels examining analytical techniques, and research papers on subjects like blocked shots in basketball (not all of them are equally valuable), reflects this wave of interest. Saturday’s event, held at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center, drew more than 1,000 attendees, up from 400 last year; half the NBA’s teams had a representative present.

Is Plus/Minus a plus?

The current state of analytics varies widely among sports. Baseball is the most developed, because it largely consists of a series of individual confrontations between pitchers and hitters, whose results can be easily isolated. As a morning session on “Baseball Analytics” made clear, defense is the last statistical frontier of the game, and even there, statistician John Dewan estimated, observers know “60 percent” of everything they can.

Baseball analytics are so thorough, “Now I don’t think you even have to watch baseball” to dissect it, quipped ESPN.com columnist Bill Simmons during an afternoon panel. Indeed, he added, you may not even “need to know how to hold a bat.”

But other sports feature the simultaneous interaction of many athletes at once. Isolating an individual’s performance in these sports remains problematic.

“Unlike baseball where you have a lot of discrete events, in football there is a lot of interplay, so it’s more difficult to analyze,” said Parag Marathe, a San Francisco 49ers executive, at a panel on “Emerging Analytics.” Consider a 25-yard run. How much of the credit goes to the running back, his blockers, or to defense lapses? “The NFL is a little bit behind” in analytics, Marathe suggested.

To work around the problem of complex interactions in basketball, analysts are refining the concept of “Plus/Minus,” which records how many points a team scores and allows when a particular player is on the court, per 100 possessions. One winner of the conference’s research-paper contest this year attempted to improve the concept; Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has tried to use Plus/Minus, while recognizing its flaws.

“There are all these qualifications you need to keep in mind,” Cuban said in an interview with MIT News on Saturday after he spoke on two panels. A player’s Plus/Minus can depend on the quality of his teammates, the quality of opponents, the tempo of play, and more. Currently, Miami’s Dwyane Wade leads the league in Plus/Minus, relative to how his team fares when he is not on the court, but that may just mean that he has worse teammates than Cleveland’s LeBron James.

That said, Cuban thinks the metric works well in evaluating the success of different five-man lineups, not just single players. “We’ve adjusted lineups in the playoffs based on our Plus/Minus numbers,” Cuban said. In 2005, Dallas lost the first two games of its first-round series to Houston, which was using a smaller, quicker lineup. The Mavericks studied the Plus/Minus numbers, reduced lumbering center Erick Dampier’s minutes, and rallied to win the series in 7 games.

“Mark Cuban helped break me out of that mold of looking at traditional statistics,” recounted Avery Johnson, the Mavericks’ coach at the time, while speaking on a “Coaching Analytics” panel. “Using Plus/Minus helped me out a lot in terms of my substitutions.”

Well, until the team faltered. In 2007, Dallas entered the playoffs with a league-best 67-15 record. But as Johnson recounted, the numbers showed that the Mavericks fared worse against their first-round opponent, the small-but-quick Golden State Warriors, with Dampier on the court. Johnson benched Dampier, the team’s starting center, for the series’ first game. “It was the right thing to do,” Johnson said. But his players did not like the adjustment; the Warriors quickly knocked out the Mavericks in a stunning upset.

The limits of metrics

As the Mavericks’ experience suggests, analytics have limitations. General tendencies may not be borne out in specific situations. Moreover, “I think there is an onus on whoever is dispensing that information” to explain it clearly and persuasively to everyone else, asserted Simmons, whose own recent tome, The Book of Basketball (ESPN 2009), mixes empirical data and subjective impressions while judging players and teams in NBA history.

And Morey noted another problem: In a business with short careers, changing circumstances may make some sports analysis irrelevant. “I think there are fundamental things that can be solved,” said Morey. “But by the time you have enough confidence in them, the world has changed.”

What has also changed, though, is that savvy sports fans now envision a future in the business. Take Matthew Martell, a senior associate at Octothorpe Software, a Vancouver firm that designs decision-making programs. Martell, capable of talking knowledgeably about sports-analytics problems in basketball, football, and soccer, made a 12-hour trip from British Columbia on Thursday, changing planes twice, to attend the event. “This is where you want to be, to meet and see the people who really know analytics,” said Martell. “It’s incredible to be here.”

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In the past several decades, microchips have transformed consumer electronics, enabling new products from digital watches and pocket-sized calculators to laptop computers and digital music players.

The next wave of this electronics revolution will involve biomedical devices, say electrical engineers in MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratory (MTL) who are working on tiny, low-power chips that could diagnose heart problems, monitor patients with Parkinson’s disease or predict seizures in epileptic patients. Such wearable or implantable devices could transform the way medicine is practiced and help cut the costs of expensive diagnostic tests, says Dennis Buss, former vice president of silicon technology development at Texas Instruments.

“Microelectronics have the potential to reduce the cost of health care in the same way they reduced the costs of computing in the 1980s and communications in the 1990s,” says Buss, a visiting scientist at MIT. On a limited scale, this is already taking place. For example, one of the first successful applications of microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to medicine was the development of $10 disposable blood pressure sensors, which have been in use for over a decade and replaced sensors that cost hundreds of dollars.

Professor Charles Sodini, one of the MIT researchers involved in the effort, says the burgeoning field holds great potential for MIT and the greater Boston area because of the opportunities for collaboration between engineers, physicians and industry. “I want to see Boston become the Silicon Valley of medical electronic systems,” he says.

The market for MEMS for biomedical applications is more than $1 billion, and that could grow close to 100-fold by 2015, according to a 2006 market report from MedMarket Diligence.

Beating hearts

The key to developing small wearable and implantable medical monitors is an ultra-low-power chip for interfacing to biomedical sensors, signal processing, energy processing and communications, developed by the research group of MTL Director Anantha Chandrakasan.

Ultimately, Sodini and others at MTL hope to use that chip as the core of a device that can monitor a range of vital signs — heart rate, breathing rate, blood pressure, pulse oxygenation and temperature. For now, they’re starting with a monitor that measures and records electrocardiograms (ECGs).

An unobtrusive, comfortable ECG monitor that patients could wear as they go about their normal lives might offer a doctors a more thorough picture of heart health than the lab tests now used, says Collin Stultz, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and health sciences and technology and a cardiologist working on the project. Cardiologists can order up treadmill stress tests, MRIs and CT scans, among other diagnostics, but “all of these tests are done in contrived settings,” says Stultz. “Data obtained from more realistic, ‘at home’ settings may provide added information that can reveal potential problems.” Furthermore, standard tests can cost from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.

Doctors often ask recent heart attack victims, and other patients suspected of having heart issues, to wear an ECG monitor as a Holter monitor for a few days. However, the device, which consists of several electrodes that stick to the chest, plus a bulky battery pack carried at the hip, is cumbersome and doesn’t have the memory to store much data.

In contrast, the new MIT monitor is an L-shaped device, about 4 inches along each side, that sticks to the chest and can be worn comfortably, with no external wires protruding. It can store up to two weeks of data in flash memory, and requires just two milliwatts of power. Eventually, the researchers hope to build chips that can harvest energy from the body of the person wearing the device, eliminating the need for a battery.

Doctors can use ECG data — which provides information on the electrical health of the heart — to help spot future problems. Stultz, working with MIT Professor John Guttag and recent PhD recipient Zeeshan Syed, has designed a computer algorithm that uses ECG data to assess risk of death in heart patients. They found that higher variability in heartbeat shapes in data recorded the day after a heart attack correlates with an eightfold increase in the risk of cardiac death within 90 days in some patient populations.

Currently that analysis can only be done after the data is downloaded from the chip, but eventually Stultz hopes to incorporate the algorithm into the chip itself. He envisions that the device could be equipped with an alarm that would alert the patient and/or doctor that a heart attack is imminent. It could also serve as an early detection system for longer-term problems, letting doctors know they may need to perform additional tests, alter the patient’s medication or perform surgery.

The researchers have built a prototype and plan to start testing the device in healthy subjects this spring, followed by trials in patients with cardiovascular disease.

New directions

While Stultz and colleagues are focusing on wearable devices, other MIT engineers are working on implantable electronics for medical monitoring. To do that, they need to overcome a significant challenge: how to run the device indefinitely without a battery that needs recharging. To solve that problem, Associate Professor Joel Dawson is working on a device that stores energy in an ultracapacitor, which doesn’t wear out like batteries do. He hopes to use the device, which would be about the size of a grain of rice, to measure tremors and shaking in patients with Parkinson’s disease.

Dawson is working on that project with neurologist Seward Rutkove of Beth Israel Hospital. That kind of collaboration between engineer and physician is exactly what Sodini would like to see happen with all of MTL’s biomedical projects. “We start out working with physicians so they can help define the problem, and they can start testing the devices in the clinic early in the process,” he says.

Other projects underway at MTL include tiny ultrasound devices and “lab on a chip” devices that can perform diagnostic tests on body fluids. Engineers are also working on the best ways to wirelessly transmit data from wearable or implanted devices to a cell phone or computer.

While those applications are promising, the future of biomedical electronics likely holds even more potential than we can imagine, says Buss.

“We will be using electronics in medical ways we don’t even conceive of yet,” he says. “When we started using cell phones, we had no idea we would be playing games and watching TV and surfing the Internet the way we do now.”

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The travel’s done, the work under way. For 35 groups traveling to Alternative Spring Break sites around the country, there’s a common motto: let the volunteering begin.

“Go spread the word, give inspiration, alleviate suffering, feed the hungry, and push the world forward,” Dean of Students Kenn Elmore tweeted yesterday morning. “Do your thing — do good.”

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JET plans to shake things up tonight at the Paradise Rock Club.

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