Sanjay Sarma on revolutionizing everyday products with artificial intelligence
Sanjay Sarma leads the Office of Digital Learning, which oversees MIT OpenCourseWare and supports the development and use of digital technology for on-campus teaching and massive open online courses.
❝ Professor Sanjay Sarma and Research Scientist Josh Siegel hope to integrate smart devices within the biggest product we own: our homes.
One evening, Sarma was in his home when one of his circuit breakers kept going off. This circuit breaker — known as an arc-fault circuit interrupter (AFCI) — was designed to shut off power when an electric arc is detected to prevent fires. While AFCIs are great at preventing fires, in Sarma’s case there didn’t seem to be an issue. “There was no discernible reason for it to keep going off,” recalls Sarma. “It was incredibly distracting.”
AFCIs are notorious for such ‘nuisance trips,’ which disconnect safe objects unnecessarily. Sarma, who also serves as MIT's vice president for open learning, turned his frustration into opportunity. If he could embed the AFCI with smart technologies and connect it to the ‘internet of things,’ he could teach the circuit breaker to learn when a product is safe or when a product actually poses a fire risk.
“Think of it like a virus scanner,” explains Siegel. “Virus scanners are connected to a system that updates them with new virus definitions over time.” If Sarma and Siegel could embed similar technology into AFCIs, the circuit breakers could detect exactly what product is being plugged in and learn new object definitions over time. [MIT.edu]
| SANJAY SARMA is MIT's Director of Digital Learning, & author of The Inversion Factor. Watch him discuss the future of education below, and learn more about booking Sanjay for your next event today. |
