MIT Students Use Algorithms to Arrange Lunch Meetings
Two Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT) graduate students have applied algorithms
to help students
on campus connect for platonic face-to-face lunch meetings.
For the last year, MIT
graduate students have been able to use their MIT ID to sign up on MIT
Connect,
answer a few questions about their daily schedules and what they like
to eat,
and then be matched with another student. In the first year, 1,000
students
have used MIT Connect to arrange 1,000 face-to-face meetings.
The idea by Mohammad Ghassemi
and Tuka Al-Hanai, students in the MIT electrical engineering and
computer
science department, warranted grants from the Office of the Dean of
Graduate
Education, the MindHandHeart Initiative, the DeFlorez Fund and the
Legatum
Fellowship that allowed them to move MIT Connect from a simple Google
doc to a
full-fledged platform that employs algorithmic matching.
They have now been able to
expand access beyond MIT graduate students to undergraduate and
postdoctoral
students as well as alumni and employees.
Last year, after Ghassemi
learned of the deaths of two very close friends and confided to
Al-Hani, the
two began asking others they knew of personal challenges they were
having.
"Time and again," Ghassemi
said, "students would explain how they wanted to find friends, mentors
or
co-founders, but found mixers to be impersonal and sometimes even
awkward."
One suggestion from a friend
was to come up with a way to meet people at random for lunch.
"If you were going to take
time to eat lunch anyway," Al-Hanai said, "you might as well have lunch
with
someone new."
The two MIT Connect creators
are now working on launching a version of the platform that will help
students
find mentors, employers and investors for their own projects.
About the Author
Michael Hart is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer and the former executive editor of THE Journal.