Charlene Xia is a PhD candidate, who pursued her Master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Labs. One day before joining a Ph.D. she had two thoughts running in her mind, to pursue a Ph.D. and work on projects that can protect our planet and another is to start a restaurant. Then, Charlene Xia poured over her cookbook collection, exploring international cuisines. In the process, she also took a look at the coast of a food truck permit in the Boston area. In between this, she was accepted into the mechanical engineering graduate program at MIT.
Later, Charlene’s advisor, Professor David Wallace approached her with an interesting opportunity about MathWorks, which is well known for developing the MATLAB computing platform which has announced a new seed funding program in MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. This was the program that motivated collaborative research projects that are aimed at the health of the planet.
Charlene Xia soon saw this as a great opportunity to combine her passion for food too in ocean engineering, and her interest in sustainably helping our planet. “Charlene Xia is a remarkable student with extraordinary talent who is capable of embracing challenges in almost any domain”, says Wallance.
Alongside Wallace and Stefanie Muellar, who is an Associate Professor, Charlene proposed a project to predict and prevent the spread of diseases in aquaculture, so the team of three focused on seaweed farms. However, seaweed holds potential as a sustainable food source in East Asian cuisines with the world's growing population.
So now, the problem is that seaweed needs to be protected from climate change such as warm temperatures or minimal sunlight that boosts the growth of harmful bacteria such as ice-ice disease. After days, the whole seaweed farms are destroyed by unchecked bacterial growth. Charlene Xia turned to the microbiota present in these seaweed farms as a predictive indicator of any threat to the seaweed or livestock. She says, ‘Our project is to develop a low-cost device that can detect and prevent disease before they affect seaweed or livestock by monitoring the microbiome of the environment’.
The team correlates old technology with the latest in computing using a submersible digital holographic microscope, they take a 2D image. After which they used a machine learning system called a neural network to convert the 2D image into a representation of the microbiome present in the 3D ecosystem. “Using a machine learning network, you can take a 2D image and reconstruct it almost in real time to get an idea of what the microbiome looks like in a 3D space”, says Charlene Xia.
Under the guidance of Professor Allan Adams and Professor Joseph Paradiso in the Media Lab, Charlene Xia focused on developing small underwater communication devices that can depend on data about the ocean back to researchers. The device was designed at a cost of about US$100 rather than US$4,000 helping lower the cost for those interested in uncovering the mysteries of the oceans.
Charlene Xia also aims to design a low-cost real-time monitoring system that can be scaled to cover entire seaweed farms. Armed with this data about the microbiome, Xia and her team detect if the disease is about to strike and jeopardize seaweed before it is too late.