Richard Larson ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’69

INTERVIEWER: Today is September 23, 2010. My name is Lawrence Gallagher, and I have the pleasure of interviewing my longtime friend and colleague, professor Richard Larson, as part of the MIT sesquicentennial Infinite History project. Doctor Larson received his PhD from MIT, where he is the Mitsui professor in the engineering systems division, and is currently founding director of the Center for Engineering Systems Fundamentals.

The majority of his career has focused on operations research, as applied to service industries. He is author, co-author, or editor of six books, and author of over 85 scientific articles, primarily in the fields of urban service systems, queuing logistics, disaster management, disease dynamics, dynamic pricing of critical infrastructures, education, and workforce planning. Doctor Larson's research on queues has not only resulted in new computational techniques, but he has also been covered extensively in the national media, earning him the nickname, Doctor Queue.

Doctor Larson served as co-director of the MIT Operations Research Center, over 15 years in that post, and 1995 to mid-2003, served as director of MIT's CAES, Center for Advanced Educational Services. He is founding director of LINC, Learning International Networks Consortium, an MIT-based international project that has held five international symposia, and sponsored a number of initiatives in Africa, China, and the Middle East. He recently started LINC's newest and largest initiative, BLOSSOMS, or Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies. And we look forward to hearing more about that.

Dick, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with us today.

LARSON: Thank you, Larry.

INTERVIEWER: Can you please start by telling us a bit about where you grew up?

LARSON: Well, that's a complicated one. I was born in Bayside, Queens, New York, at the age of five, moved to Sunbury, Pennsylvania, spent six years there, then moved to North Plainfield, New Jersey, and I graduated from a high school not far from MIT, Needham High School, which is a western suburb of Boston.

INTERVIEWER: Please tell me a little bit about your family, and any significant events or influences that stand out from your childhood.

LARSON: Well, there are so many. But I think I would just like to share one of them here, today, as an indication of my parents' support, and that sort of thing. We were in Sunbury, Pennsylvania, which is a rural community, farming community, and I was age five. And there was a day, my parents came to me, it was a Friday, I remember. They said, Dick, you know, in Pennsylvania, going to kindergarten is optional. You can choose to go, or not to go. And you're the age, now, come September, you would go to kindergarten. You choose to go, or not to go. It's your choice. And I thought that was pretty cool. For the parents to ask a five-year old that. So I said, well that's a difficult decision. Can I give you my answer on Monday? So I thought about it for the whole weekend, and then on Monday, I told them. I said, well, thank you for giving me the opportunity to think about this. I think I'd like to be a child for one more year. I will pass kindergarten. And so I did not go to kindergarten. I played in the woods, and the grass, and all those sorts of things, and with friends. And on the first day of first grade, I was the only kid in the class who couldn't count to 10, write his name, or know the alphabet. But I tried to catch up as soon as I could.

INTERVIEWER: It sounds certainly like you did. When did you first develop an interest, or another way of putting it, was there an a-ha moment when you realized you had a special aptitude in the sciences?

LARSON: I found out, I always liked math, and I liked the physical sciences. And I think I understood that from first grade and it just accelerated as I went along. I always liked to figure out how the world worked, and putting math to all that. So that was kind of neat. Then at Needham High School, I think I was in the first class that took MIT's created PSSE physics. And when PSSE physics was introduced, it was born from the Sputnik era of the 1950s. It was really wonderful for me, because it put math into physical world together in ways I'd never seen before. And I kind of fell in love with that approach to learning, and to research, and to science.

INTERVIEWER: Is that when MIT first appeared on your radar screen?

LARSON: Yes, that was when MIT first appeared on the radar screen.

INTERVIEWER: What grade?

LARSON: Well, I was a senior in high school at the time.

INTERVIEWER: So what were the motivating factors that brought you to MIT?

LARSON: Well, candidly, my father thought I would be a commuting student, and it would be less expensive for him to send me to MIT than someplace else that I'd be on campus! I surprised him quickly, though, by moving onto campus. I never thought MIT would admit me. So that was my stretch school, and I applied to a number of other schools. And when I was admitted, like a third of other freshman, I thought they had made a mistake! So when I came here, I was terrified!

INTERVIEWER: Where else had you applied?

LARSON: Well, I don't want to say where else I applied, because that indicates that they were my second choice! But good schools.

INTERVIEWER: So that must have been exciting. What were your first impressions when you came to MIT of the students, the culture, the environment?

LARSON: My first impressions were great. I was overwhelmed by the geographic diversity of the people, including from other countries. My living group, we had people from Argentina, from Austria, from Italy, from Cuba. I had never met folks my age before who came from such other countries, as well as from Iowa, from California. And they were all smart, and they were all motivated to learn. And that was just a fantastic thing to experience.

INTERVIEWER: When you say that you were, you thought they made a mistake, when did you realize that you fit in to MIT?

LARSON: Oh, a few years ago! MIT is a very interesting place. It's very competitive place, and I remember a colleague of mine, when he returned sixty. He said, because he had the same feeling, he said, Dick, now it doesn't matter if they found out they made a mistake! No, I would say, honestly, I'd say, probably by my sophomore year.

INTERVIEWER: Was there any one thing when you realized, wow, this, yeah! OK! This feels OK.

LARSON: Yeah. When you work hard, and you get competitive grades, and your colleagues take you as a supporting colleague.

INTERVIEWER: And so then, what determined or influenced your course of study at MIT?

LARSON: Well, I took Course 6, which is, for those who don't know, Electrical Engineering, at the time. Now it's called Electrical Engineering Computer Science. And my father studied Electrical Engineering, so I saw that was good. But basically, you know, you ask around, and I think it's somewhat the same today. If you don't know what you're going to do, but you want to be an engineer, or you want to apply systematic reasoning, quantitative reasoning, to the world, the default choice here on campus has been, and continues to be, I think, Course 6, Electrical Engineering and now Computer Science. Because it trains your mind to think systematically about complex problems in ways which are we very valuable, no matter what you do later. So I chose that field, and my degrees are in Course 6.

INTERVIEWER: And what was the course that led you from undergraduate to graduate studies at MIT?

LARSON: What was the--?

INTERVIEWER: Not the course, what was the path?

LARSON: Well, it's very complicated, and I don't want to bore people with all of the complications. But basically, I was accepted in for a Master's degree, Master of Science degree, because I had a Bell Laboratories fellowship. And then professor Bruce Wedlock said, well, let's transfer them that into a scholarship, so you're not obligated to work for any particular employer. And then physics professor Eric Cosman here, who happened to be a fraternity brother of mine, said Dick, you really should study, spend the last summer after you graduate with the senior year, study for the doctoral qualifying exams. And I said to Eric, I'm not doctoral material. I never thought of myself as a getting a PhD. And so he yelled at me every night, and yelled at me every day. He said, Dick, study for the exam, study for the exam. So finally, just to stop the pain, I studied for the exam, and I took it, and I passed it. So I went into the PhD program kind of, not even, without anticipating it ahead of time. And thank goodness.

INTERVIEWER: So as a graduate student, Dick, how did you decide upon your choice of theses?

LARSON: OK, well that's an interesting and complex question. But basically, a living group that I felt close to had a theft on a party night. And they knew the physical description of the perpetrators, the two of them, and so I thought, well, maybe I could follow the lead, and be like a detective, and find out who they are, get them arrested, and get the money back to the people whose money were stolen, driver's licenses, and so on. And so I collected police books, police detective books, from the MIT library system. And one day I had like a dozen under my arms, like this, and professor Al Drake, who was my adviser at the time, saw me walking down the hallway with these books, like this. He says, Dick, what are all those books? I told him the story, I said, they were police detective books. I'm going to solve this crime. He said, that's fascinating. You're applying your engineering thinking to this sort of thing. Why don't you bring that on campus? We'll fill out a form, we'll give you 12 units of research credit for this, and you can start that way. So that started my career in policing, studying police from a scientific point of view.

And that led to a Master's thesis, and that lead to a doctoral thesis, it lead to me being the youngest member of the Science and Technology Task Force of the president's Crime Commission, and my first book, which is called Urban Police Patrol Analysis, MIT Press.

INTERVIEWER: Interesting! Could you, we're going to get back to also how that let into your passion for operations research. But could you describe the process and how it felt to transition from student to faculty at MIT?

LARSON: Well, you know that I said that when I was here as a freshman, I figured they made a mistake? I kind of had the same feeling then! Because you're an assistant professor, you know, you're assistant professor here, and you look all around, you see all these Nobel Prize winners, and see these members of the National Academy of Sciences and Engineering, you say, what am I doing here? It's almost a Groucho Marx situation! So it took a while to feel comfortable, to say that I wasn't feeling intimidated for the first year or two would be denying the reality. But then again, you start writing, you start doing research, you start interacting with students, they start doing theses, and you start getting research grants, and all of a sudden you feel like you belong.

INTERVIEWER: That's great. So tell me about your feelings about teaching at MIT. How would you describe teaching at MIT?

LARSON: Well, teaching at MIT is great, because we have the greatest students. You know, the biggest asset of MIT is our students, undergraduates and graduates that come from all over the world. They're eager to learn, they're very, very bright, they're very, very energetic, and you can try different things with them, you can try experiments in teaching, and as long as you challenge them and keep them involved, they always give back much more than you give to them.

INTERVIEWER: Wonderful. So what are the distinctions between teaching undergrads versus graduate students?

LARSON: The difference between teaching undergrads and graduate students. A lot of undergraduate courses are kind of required, basic material, particularly the freshman and sophomore year. So those tend to be large classes. And like one of those that I taught, which was when Al Drake, when he was here, and he was on sabbatical, I taught what we call here 604.1, 643.1, which is Applied Probability. And freshmen take that, seniors take that, grad students take that. But it's a large lecture hall with 350 people, both semesters. And that's OK. I did things to do live probability experiments, to include them, but it's hard to be that interactive.

Graduate student courses tend to be smaller. They can be, 40 or 50 students would be a large graduate class. Some of them are 20. And you have more intimate contact with them, and it's more dialogue and interchange. So it's a little bit like, and the graduate classes also tend to be more researching-oriented, more state-of-the-art, more advanced. But both are fun to teach. Right now, for instance, I'm teaching a freshman seminar. So we have eight 18-year olds, who are just in from high school. And that's a wonderful experience.

INTERVIEWER: And then you also were thesis advisors to graduate students as well, which gives you an opportunity to interact on even more intimate level.

LARSON: Oh, right. Being a thesis advisor is terrific. I've lost count of how many MA and PhD theses I've supervised over the years. And we who do this, I think all the faculty members think of their PhD thesis students as their children, you know, quote unquote, and then when they become assistant professors and associate professors, and they supervise, and you have grandchildren-- well, I'm old enough now, I've got great-great grandchildren out there! I've lost track of them.

INTERVIEWER: And how does teaching impact your research?

LARSON: Teaching and research kind of are meshed like this. Because today's research results go into tomorrow's courses. Here at MIT we don't call them courses, we call them subjects, but I think most the world, they view these things as courses. And so it goes back and forth like this. And sometimes in teaching, you can say, OK, here's the Chinese Postman Problem, or here's this queuing thing. But this result, the following thing, if you generalize this in this way, it's not known. So then you challenge the students. Say, well, if you're really interested in this, maybe you'd like to do research in this. Because this particular thing is an open question. And if you solve it, just think of, this whole class of problems you would help to solve in the real world. So the two of them go hand in hand.

INTERVIEWER: Clearly, clearly from that description, yes. Let's talk about your passions, starting with operations research. What is it about operations research that captured you?

LARSON: Well, first of all, as an undergraduate here, I didn't know what operations research was. And most people today still don't. I view it as the world's most important invisible profession. And if you go to a gathering, a social gathering, and somebody, some stranger comes up and says to you, what do you do? If I say, well, I do operations research, sometimes they say, that's very good. It's nice to have those doctors, have researchers in the operating room, looking at what they're doing. That's operations research.

So operations research is industrial engineering, management science, and these sorts of things. Basically, what I call it, is the physics of the real world that involves people and technology. And so when I entered graduate school, I loved Course 6, electrical engineering, but I didn't want to be an electrical engineer. I wanted to apply that kind of thinking more broadly. And I searched around, searched around, searched around, and I found operations research. And it wasn't well-marketed, it wasn't-- today it is, for the undergraduate, but then it wasn't. And I fell in love with it. Because you can apply the engineering point of view, the physics point of view, to these complex problems involving people and technology.

INTERVIEWER: And you have applied operations research to private and public systems, including transportation and logistics, service industries, queuing theory, location theory, technology-enabled education, disease dynamics and higher education in developing countries. That's quite a scope. Can you talk a bit about how you've applied operations research to, say, two or three of these areas that interest you most?

LARSON: Well, which one would you like me to--

INTERVIEWER: What's queuing theory?

LARSON: OK, queuing theory. Well, you know, my first application of queuing theory was in policing. Because my Master's and PhD thesis here at MIT, decades ago, was in policing, and if you call-- at the time we didn't have 911 in the country, now we have 911. So you'd have to call a seven-digit emergency number. And you enter a cascade of queues. First of all, there's a telephone answering person who takes the thing, and then he or she fills out a form, goes to dispatcher, to the dispatcher queue, blah, blah, blah, and then the police cars may be busy, so there's a queue there. And so my first application of queuing theory was to there. And I've applied it to the post office, to banking, to ATMs, to lots of things.

And I've even developed some work in the psychology of queuing. And I find out now that the psychology of queuing is just as important as the mathematics of queuing. So I've applied it in a lot of different areas. It's a beautiful theory, and in fact, in this year, queuing theory, the mathematics thereof, is celebrating its 100th birthday, because it was born in Denmark, around 1909, 1910.

INTERVIEWER: Could you describe a couple of practical applications, particularly in those instances when you've been actually hired as a consultant to basically put some of these practices into the real situations?

LARSON: The queuing theory?

INTERVIEWER: Exactly, exactly.

LARSON: Well, I think the first one was with the New York City Police Department. The New York City Police Department, in the late 60s, see, I'm dating myself here, but I still remember this, announced with great fanfare that instead of having seven different numbers from the different boroughs to call for police, and you had to have a different number for fire, and a different number for an ambulance, they merged them all with 911. And with great fanfare, the mayor cut a large ribbon, and it was all over the headlines of the New York Times and the Daily News, et cetera. And then, all of a sudden, you saw letters to the editor come in, saying, I called the mayor's 911 number last Saturday night to report this crime in progress. After hearing 30 minutes of a ringing telephone, I hung up and called again. After 29 minutes, somebody answered the phone. Police emergency, may I help you?

And we went down there, and I lived in the Police Department for one month, with two lieutenants from the Police Department. And we collected all the data, we interviewed, we observed. And it turned out to be a very simple application of the queuing that was invented in Denmark 100 years ago. And so I took all the data, and I applied those queuing formulas, and we rescheduled all the call operators it in a way which matched the pattern of arrival, by the time of day and day of week. And we attached names to the different tours, of the guy who was in charge of that tour, so there was accountability about those delays. And we posted it on a big bulletin board. Anyway, the delays plummeted, not to zero, but to measurable amounts, without adding any manpower. And it's because we scheduled them differently than the police had done.

INTERVIEWER: And did start a business on the side to provide these services?

LARSON: Yes. A few years later, I started a not-for-profit company called Public Systems Evaluation, and we applied some of these same techniques, initially in police departments. In Wilmington, Delaware, Worcester, Massachusetts, Saint Louis, Missouri, and other places. And that's because we were doing this kind of research at MIT under an NSF grant, and I got calls from all these places-- Professor Larson, you've got to help us here, you have to help us there! And there were no more MIT resources to do that, so that I was encouraged to form an off-campus company. That changed to for-profit when President Reagan became president, and it's had several different names since then, but it still exists today. And we're doing, about half of the work that the company does, is public sector, for government, particularly the Federal government and places like New York City, and the other half is for the private sector.

INTERVIEWER: So this is just another MIT spinoff!

LARSON: This is another MIT spinoff, among the thousands of MIT spinoffs, this is one of them! And interestingly, a lot of my doctoral students have spent some time there before they finish their thesis. So it's very integrated in a compatible way with MIT's objectives.

INTERVIEWER: And a description of operations research as it applies to disease dynamics.

LARSON: A description of operations research as it applies to disease dynamics. Well, operations research applied to disease, particularly we're thinking about pandemic influenza these days. We just had H1N1 last year, and it's going to come back this year, perhaps as part of the seasonal flu this year, 2010 -2011. So operations research can be applied to emergency response and diseases in a number of different ways. The most standard way of thinking about it is, I think of operations research as logistics. Supply chains. So how do you get the supply chain of medicine and vaccines to people? And the queuing for the vaccines? And so those are all very important things, but that's not what we've been doing. Because we view that as too standard. So we've been applying operations research to the progression of disease, as it propagates throughout the population, and trying to discover non-medical interventions, NPIs, non-pharmaceutical interventions, which reduce the prevalence of disease among the population. And we're mathematically modeling that. We've had some publications out, book chapters, and these sorts of things. So that's our focus.

INTERVIEWER: You've done work on everything from the psychology of waiting, to influenza pandemic modeling. What's the uniting thread for all your interests, if there is one?

LARSON: Well, that's an excellent question. I think the uniting thread is, given the education that MIT has given me, and given my students, and the ability to frame problems in a particular way, and then to formulate them in a systematic way, there's no need to just limit those problems to little silos of academia. Some kind of circuit design, or protocol for some piece of software, or something like this. You can take that approach and apply it to very important complex problems. And so I like to attack those kinds of problems. I bring my students in with them. And so sometimes it's education in developing countries, sometimes it's pandemic influenza, often times it's planning and response to what we call low-probability, high-consequence events, disasters of various kinds, these sorts of things. And operations research is a beautiful field, because if you study it in-depth and from a broad perspective, you are armed and equipped to frame and formulate those kinds of problems.

INTERVIEWER: What do you consider to be some of your most important or interesting contributions in those fields?

LARSON: That's an interesting question. It's difficult to figure that out. I mean, in each decade there've been certain things. I guess, from an analytical point of view, my two most important contributions were, in the 1970s I invented something called a hypercube queuing model. Sounds very techno-geeky, hypercube queuing model. But this really was the first model that included spatial aspects of emergency response with the temporal aspects of queuing. And it's been applied and implemented in many cities in the US and some cities overseas, particularly for allocating resources and dispatching resources, police and ambulances. In fact, I've been involved with some of that implementation in Dallas, Texas, Saint Louis, New York City was a major one for ambulances, Boston, we wrote a book chapter about this for ambulances. And that required going through some hoops. And we had to implement this at a computer. And if you have n police cars and n ambulances, the number of state variables is two to the power of n. So it grows exponentially. And we're doing this in the 1970s on 1970s computers. And they were very, very limited. What now you can do on an iPod, or iPad, certainly, it required huge mainframes at the time. So we had to go through some analytical hoops, and so that was a major thing.

And then again in queuing in the 1990s, we developed something called the queue inference engine. Which allows you to infer the queuing behavior of customers that queue, just by the time that they start the transaction, time they end the transaction, with no videotape of the queue itself, or no censors or monitoring system. It's almost like magic. And when I first figured this out, I thought, I must have made a mistake, because there's too much information here. But we found it, and that's now something as well. But I've done lots of different things in other areas, too, and I don't want to bore the viewers with too much.

INTERVIEWER: Those are two great examples. So you're currently affiliated with the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the Operations Research Center, Leaders for Global Operations, and the Center for Biomedical Innovation. How do you split your time between all of these?

LARSON: Well, I view my primary allegiance to the Engineering Systems Division, where, that's my home. I can't even say department, because it's not a department, it's a division, ESD. And it's kind of an experiment at MIT, where if you think of civil environmental engineering, mechanical engineering, and you can go on, electrical engineering, computer science, these are vertical things, sometimes called academic silos. And ESD sits on top of this horizontally, and draws faculty from each of these engineering departments, and also three other schools at MIT. And it's interdisciplinary.

INTERVIEWER: And so those entities you just mentioned, it depends on what project you're working on, or what students you're supervising. And some of them come and go over time. So you're not really splitting your time between these entities. They're all intertwined.

LARSON: Correct. It's all an organic whole. It's organically kind of like this.

INTERVIEWER: Let's talk a bit more about your administrative contributions to MIT over the years. You were co-director of the MIT Operations Research Center for more than 15 years, and you served as director of MIT CAES, Center for Advanced Educational Services, from 1995 to 2003. How did the CAES opportunity come about?

LARSON: Well, the CAES opportunity, again it's the culture of MIT, in the sense that you're allowed to, and you're encouraged to, follow your passions. You know, what happened? I'm blessed with three children, and at the time my oldest was in middle school. And this was the early 90s. And I came down one Sunday morning, and I noticed Eric, the oldest, who was in middle school, hadn't slept a wink that night, and he was still on our Apple Macintosh Mac Plus or something, black and white, little screen like this, and he was still working away. I said, Eric, what are you doing? He said, well, I'm working on this project with two other students on mammals and birds. And look what I've created overnight. And he had this with music accompaniment, he had birds flying in, and this is 1992 or so, small computer that Apple had made. And I was just awestruck by this. And I said, well, are your friends doing similar things? Oh yeah, we're all, you know, kind of blah, blah, blah.

And all of a sudden it struck me. I said, you know, we professors at MIT who are generations apart from this teenage group that is coming up, are not prepared to handle this cohort of young students. Because we're teaching in an old-fashioned way, and we don't really understand the technology-laden universe in which they live, and what excites them, and how they learn.

And so I started making a pest of myself here at MIT. I happened to be founding, a guy in charge of a couple of committees, on education technology with professor Paul Penfield, he was partnered with me in the first of these, and eventually Joel Moses, who was then, I think he was the dean of the School of Engineering before became provost, said, all right, Dick, let's have an off-campus one-day retreat. So we had a one-day retreat, and I kept on making an annoyance of myself. So finally Joel Moses had been promoted to provost. He said, Dick, here's the keys to CAES. Why did you make CAES a technology-focused educational enterprise. And that's how that all came about.

So it came about, again, from a personal experience. Just like the police thing, when I was a student, was a personal experience I brought onto campus, in this case, it was a personal experience watching one of my own children learn, and I brought that onto campus, and did that for eight years, and it's really changed my career ever since.

INTERVIEWER: So to use your words, you were given the keys to CAES by Joel Moses as a result of your participation and the MIT counsel on educational technology in the mid-90s.

LARSON: That is correct.

INTERVIEWER: This was a very important time for e-learning initiatives at MIT. What were some of those initiatives, and what was the role of CAES in supporting those initiatives?

LARSON: Well, that's very interesting. We had a number of initiatives. We tried, we experimented with distance learning to developing countries, as an example. I remember giving live distance learning to three or four countries in South America, with professor Steve Lerman we gave some live teaching to Sub-Saharan Africa, it was extremely exciting. And the feedback we got from these people, they were so grateful, and so thankful, and they wanted us to do more. But those were kind of a proof of concept courses that we gave. So that was in one dimension.

Another dimension is, later in the decade of the 1990s, MIT was developing a strong relationship to Singapore, and working with you, because you were kind of in charge of modernizing many of the classrooms. We modernized a lot of classrooms here on the MIT campus to give live world class teaching built to the students here on campus, and to an equivalent number of Singaporean students, and I kind of defined the state-of-the-art, and proved that you could teach distance learning very, very well, and pedagogically, in an interactive way, literally on the other side of the earth. Like this, twelve time zones away. So we did that.

And we also got some interesting research grants. The one that I'm most proud of is PIVoT, Physics Interactive Video Tutor, where we took world-famous, he wasn't world-famous at the time, professor Walter Lewin, and you and your team videoed him three live cameras teaching what we call here 8.01, which is Neutonian physics. And I know Walter prepared 40 hours for each one-hour lecture. And we also then took snippets of his homework exercise solutions, and put it into a searchable database. And this was called PIVoT, and I think it was about 15 years ahead of its time. We are now revisiting that as we speak, these sorts of technologies. But it was a wonderful combination of development, let's say, of an R&D frame, the development part, let's say, for Singapore, and research, applied research, which was the PIVoT. So those are three examples that I would say.

INTERVIEWER: And then also during that time, you cofounded MIT World. Could you describe that project, and what was the motivation behind that?

LARSON: Well, MIT World. Yes, we're very proud of that. That exists now, I think there are over 700 public lectures, that are MIT public lectures, including presidents of countries, including our own country, and prime ministers of other countries, and poets and novelists as well as professors, CEOs. It's an amazing collection. I think it's the world's largest free video on demand collection of public seminars and lectures from a research university.

And basically the motivation for that is, we were at CAES at the time, and MIT alumni, I remember, like from Hong Kong, would say, Professor Larson, we're in Hong Kong, but we want to feel tied to MIT somehow. And we can't travel there. So is there somehow we can feel tied to MIT and have the MIT experience? And so we had a little group session and we talked about this, and said, well, one of the nicest things about MIT is every day there are public seminars and lectures here. Every day. I think we averaged about eight per day on campus, throughout the entire school year. So we said, why don't we take the best of these, videotape them, and put them on the web? And that was the birth of MIT World, and MIT World is still going strong today.

INTERVIEWER: So CAES, during those years, was key in supporting some of these major initiatives, like SMA.

LARSON: SMA being the Singapore initiative. Absolutely. Without CAES those things couldn't have happened.

INTERVIEWER: So Dick, moving on from the CAES years. How did your experiences at CAES influence what you decided to do next? For example, where did the idea of LINC come from?

LARSON: Well, that's a very interesting, excellent question. You know, I think faculty members who want to do research and teaching with their students, they're willing to be administrators for a finite amount of time, and then it's time to go back to teaching, and research, and working with students, which is what we all love to do. And so I think it was about seven and a half or eight years I did CAES. And we're very proud, because I think we grew CAES from two business units to about seven, by the way I count.

And one of the last two was LINC. We formed LINC during the last of the CAES years, Learning International Network Consortium. And that was in response to, I think I talked about earlier, delegations from developing countries coming to talk to us, like I mentioned South Africa. And so we thought, wouldn't it be nice to have a loose consortium of people, of leaders, vice chancellors, ministers of education, practitioners, professors from developing countries, come to MIT, or sometimes MIT will go overseas and have it there, to talk about best practice. Leveraging technology to bring education to underserved populations.

And so when I stopped being the head of CAES, and CAES, the seven business units, dispersed to various parts on campus, I'm very proud they're all growing and very healthy today, I decided to bring that with me. So LINC came with me. I wasn't going to let it go, because I was very, very committed to it. And I started traveling overseas, I became a consultant to the World Bank, to the UN, and this was just part of my core at that time. And so that's how that grew. And then also, going back to research and teaching, other things came into my life as well.

INTERVIEWER: What other institutions, countries did you enroll to participate in LINC?

LARSON: Well, we had developed an email list of contacts from our eight CAES years. And some of these people who, some of them were MIT alumni, like Dr. Naveed Malik, who's the vice director of the Virtual University in Pakistan, in Lahore, Pakistan, and others had just communicated with us or visited us. So we sent out email alerts and advisories and invitations, and the response was terrific, and that's what started LINC.

Now the first LINC conference, which was in the early, two thousand aughts, whatever that decade is called, had maybe 80 or 90 people. Our fourth LINC conference, which was bilocated at the Dead Sea in Jordan and in Dubai, had over 600 people, and in fact we've now had five LINC conferences, the fifth one here at MIT this past May. So we reached out, and somehow we knew about the African Virtual University, the Pakistan Virtual University, Monterey Tech in Northern Mexico, and these people are cofounders of LINC with us, and they've been with us this whole period of time.

INTERVIEWER: Where has been the benefit of developing that community?

LARSON: Well, the benefit is a shared benefit. So the idea is, you bring these people together, and if it's a good conference, any good conference, yes, you learn things from the speakers, and you learn about best practices-- unless you learn the worst practices, people may say, we tried this and it failed, and it failed for the following reasons-- but at least half the value of a conference like this, is meeting your colleagues, forming relationships, and establishing programs that wouldn't have occurred otherwise. There's a program now between Mexico and China that would not have existed had these two people hadn't met at a LINC conference. There's a program between Ireland and Saudi Arabia which wouldn't exist if it hadn't been for a LINC conference. So it's those kinds of things.

And I think MIT benefits too, by having the president, the chancellor, the provost write letters welcoming people at LINC. All of a sudden it shows that MIT cares about delivering quality education in developing countries, leveraging technology, and I think that's very good for the Institute.

INTERVIEWER: And more recently, you've developed a practical project which you can basically share with this community, and that's called BLOSSOMS, or Blended Learning Open Source Science or Math Studies.

LARSON: You know, with each of these things, it takes us a day to figure out how to put in a word that people recognize, and then the name of it. So BLOSSOMS, it took us a day to figure out that. LINC, it also took us a day, because we liked link, about linking countries together, but we didn't have the K at the end, we have the C.

INTERVIEWER: So how did BLOSSOMS come about as part of LINC?

LARSON: My last sabbatical, 2004, my research partner, Elizabeth Murray, and I, did some research, particularly in China and in Mexico. We spent serious time in interior parts of China, inner Mongolia, Ningxia Province, and in Northern Mexico, thanks to Monterey Tech, and we were curious to find out how technology-enabled education was delivered to rural, poor communities, to alleviate poverty and to enhance economic development. And we learned a lot. And we thank, fantastically, our hosts in both China and Mexico, and we wrote a paper about this.

But there was an a-ha moment. And the a-ha moment occurred in Ningxia province in China, which is in the center of China, a little bit east of center, and it's one of the poorer provinces in China. And we were in a village where the schools were unheated, because it's against the law to turn on the heat until November 15, so the kids were wearing parkas, because it was like, 38 degrees Fahrenheit outside. There were two incandescent light bulbs hanging from the straw ceiling. And yet, they had a TV set in front of the class, and they were watching a lecture that was done by a superlative teacher in Shanghai. And the teacher would turn on the lecture for a while, and then turn it off, and interact with the class in a very exciting way! You know, just, this exciting! And call them by name, and this and this.

And I said to Elizabeth, I said, that's very fascinating. Because these kids, whose fathers are peasant farmers, their cash crop on an annual basis about $300 US, they're getting this education, they're getting the same quality lecture that the kids in much richer Shanghai are getting, or Beijing. So that's interesting. But then the thought was, this particular lecture was designed as a 60-minute lecture. It was not designed to be interrupted.

So we thought, what if we designed a video so it went in short segments, three, four, five minute segments, and then it faded to black, and then the teaching baton was pedagogically designed to be handed to the in-class teacher? And that was a-ha moment that gave rise to the primary pedagogy of BLOSSOMS.

INTERVIEWER: And could you tell us, what happened next with BLOSSOMS? How did it get from that a-ha moment to what it's doing today?

LARSON: OK. So then we had to think about how to write this up, and propose a plan that some foundation might want to fund. And that took another two years in negotiation, and talking to all of our LINC colleagues and friends about how this might work. Because our LINC cofounders were really behind this. Because they saw that if they were co-developers in different countries, of the educational content, just like Wikipedia, for instance, or other things that are shared content on the web, that could really add to cultural sensitivity, and people could communicate across boundaries, where maybe because of local concerns they couldn't actually walk across those boundaries. Conflicts, and other things.

And so then, Elizabeth and I wrote this proposal, and we published it, but we also published a paper in a distinguished education journal. And the Hewlett Foundation, which also funded MIT's OpenCourseWare, was sufficiently encouraged by this that they decided to fund it. We've had three or four other foundations also, in a smaller way, fund it.

And basically, we designed an architecture, where, do you want me to describe the architecture of this? Basically, we call it a teaching duet. So in a high school classroom that's math or science or engineering, the idea would be, suppose it's a 60-minute class. Then at most, 30 minutes would be video, in short three to four minute segments. You pass the baton, so it's this teaching duet. The teacher, then, is supposed to interact with the class, and the class meets among themselves, in a very interactive, experiential way, solving a very complex problem that requires development of critical thinking skills, and learning away from any test, and rote memorization is not good. It's also to excite them. It's to excite them about math, science, and engineering. So that's the pedagogy.

The other aspect of it is, we want international partners. So currently we have, as international partners, Pakistan, Jordan, and Lebanon. And we're in discussions with six other countries about becoming partners with us. And the idea is, if a country signs on as a partner, they are also coproducers. So every partner country produces at least 15 new BLOSSOMS videos. And we'll translate them to other languages. We have Arabic, Urdu, and English right now, Urdu being for Pakistan. And so that gets great country pride. Because if another country says, oh, we're partnering with MIT, and we're creating lessons for them, for American students, and MIT is creating lessons for our Jordanian students, or Pakistani students, we all learn from each other.

Example: We have, one of our most popular ones is called Donkey Cart Physics, filmed in the streets and playgrounds of Lahore, Pakistan. And it shows that you can teach Newtonian physics by looking at how a donkey card is loaded and runs in the streets. It has to stop for stop signs and stuff like this.

So that's basically it. That each country that partners with us will create content. They like that a lot. So everyone is a coproducer and a co-user. So it took us three or four years to design all these different attributes. And proof of the pudding will be maybe two years from now, when we do a formal assessment and see how it's going. But also, currently in the US right now, we're working in the various states to implement it in schools. All these states and the District of Columbia have been winners of this Race to the Top program, which has been recently announced.

INTERVIEWER: And why is it important to target BLOSSOMS to high school students?

LARSON: Here we are at a research university. And LINC initially started as focused on tertiary education only. Tertiary meaning college and university. And then, talking to a lot of the LINC partners, and even talking to a lot of our friends here in the US, and said, wait a minute. Education is a system. It starts at birth. The parents are very, very important throughout the whole process, encouraging. And then you go to kindergarten, unless you're me. I opted out of kindergarten. And then you study math and science. So there's a whole pipeline, it's a whole system. And the inputs to a freshman class here at MIT, or any university, are the outputs of the high school they came from three months earlier. So to ignore the high school and just think of tertiary is not viewing it as a system, in the way that Course 6 here at MIT, or any engineering or math group, would define a system.

And in recent years, in a lot of the developing world, and the developed world, so the US has this as a problem too, and in the developing world it's a problem, fewer and fewer young people are choosing what they call STEM careers. STEM is science, technology, engineering, and math. Fewer and fewer young people are sticking that, and we're figuring out why. Because here in the US, we're having a burst of retirement soon, the post-World War II baby boom, all these boomers are about to retire, and big technology companies are wondering, who's going to replace them if we don't have enough graduates in the STEM programs?

So we thought, hmm. Maybe in middle school and high school, we're seeing little internal dropouts, and we're trying to figure out why. And so we're hoping that BLOSSOMS plays some small rule in encouraging young people to stay with STEM careers, and to develop critical thinking skills.

INTERVIEWER: So BLOSSOMS has been online now for a couple of years.

LARSON: Two years.

INTERVIEWER: You've just received another round of funding.

LARSON: Correct.

INTERVIEWER: Could you just give us a status report right now, and just tell me, two years into it, what are some of the concrete rewards from the BLOSSOMS project at this point?

LARSON: Well, that's an excellent question, I could talk forever about that. But the first two years are proof of concept. We've ended up with forty to fifty BLOSSOMS modules, created here at MIT, in Jordan, in Pakistan, and by of NGOs, like Teachers Without Borders. We're very happy about that. The feedback we get by emails from teachers has been very good. We've given eight teacher training workshops, a large one with sixty STEM teachers at the public school system in Washington, D.C. in August, and we did a formal evaluation of that, and the feedback was good. Virtually all the teachers said that they plan to use at least one or two of these in their teaching in this fall term. And however, we're now thinking, OK, we have to go from proof of concept up to a higher level of production quality, and also our website has to be scalable, and so we're doing that.