The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has proposed new rules that would effectively end the public’s ability to challenge improperly granted patents at their source—the Patent Office itself. If these rules take effect, they will hand patent trolls exactly what they’ve been chasing for years: a way to keep bad patents alive and out of reach. People targeted with troll lawsuits will be left with almost no realistic or affordable way to defend themselves.

We need EFF supporters to file public comments opposing these rules right away. The deadline for public comments is December 2. The USPTO is moving quickly, and staying silent will only help those who profit from abusive patents. 

TAKE ACTION

Tell USPTO: The public has a right to challenge bad patents

We’re asking supporters who care about a fair patent system to file comments using the federal government’s public comment system. Your comments don’t need to be long, or use legal or technical vocabulary. The important thing is that everyday users and creators of technology have  the chance to speak up, and be counted. 

Below is a short, simple comment you can copy and paste. Your comment will carry more weight if you add a personal sentence or two of your own. Please note that comments should be submitted under your real name and will become part of the public record. 

Sample comment: 

I oppose the USPTO’s proposed rule changes for inter partes review (IPR), Docket No. PTO-P-2025-0025. The IPR process must remain open and fair. Patent challenges should be decided on their merits, not shut out because of legal activity elsewhere. These rules would make it nearly impossible for the public to challenge bad patents, and that will harm innovation and everyday technology users.

Why This Rule Change Matters

Inter partes review, (IPR), isn’t perfect. It hasn’t eliminated patent trolling, and it’s not available in every case. But it is one of the few practical ways for ordinary developers, small companies, nonprofits, and creators to challenge a bad patent without spending millions of dollars in federal court. That’s why patent trolls hate it—and why the USPTO’s new rules are so dangerous.

IPR isn’t easy or cheap, but compared to years of litigation, it’s a lifeline. When the system works, it removes bogus patents from the table for everyone, not just the target of a single lawsuit. 

IPR petitions are decided by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), a panel of specialized administrative judges inside the USPTO. Congress designed  IPR to provide a fresh, expert look at whether a patent should have been granted in the first place—especially when strong prior art surfaces. Unlike  full federal trials, PTAB review is faster, more technical, and actually accessible to small companies, developers, and public-interest groups.

Here are three real examples of how IPR protected the public: 

• The “Podcasting Patent” (Personal Audio)

Personal Audio claimed it had “invented” podcasting and demanded royalties from audio creators using its so-called podcasting patent. EFF crowdsourced prior art, filed an IPR, and ultimately knocked out the patent—benefiting  the entire podcasting world.

Under the new rules, this kind of public-interest challenge could easily be blocked based on procedural grounds like timing, before the PTAB even examines the patent. 

• SportBrain’s “upload your fitness data” patent

SportBrain sued more than 80 companies over a patent that claimed to cover basic gathering of user data and sending it over a network. A panel of PTAB judges canceled every claim.

Under the new rules, this patent could have survived long enough to force dozens more companies to pay up.

• Shipping & Transit: a troll that sued hundreds of businesses

For more than a decade, Shipping & Transit sued companies over extremely broad “delivery notifications”patents. After repeated losses at PTAB and in court (including fee awards), the company finally collapsed. 

Under the new rules, a troll like this could keep its patents alive and continue carpet-bombing small businesses with lawsuits.

IPR hasn’t ended patent trolling. But when a troll waves a bogus patent at hundreds or thousands of people, IPR is one of the only tools that can actually fix the underlying problem: the patent itself. It dismantles abusive patent monopolies that never should have existed,   saving entire industries from predatory litigation. That’s exactly why patent trolls and their allies have fought so hard to shut it down. They’ve failed to dismantle IPR in court or in Congress—and now they’re counting on the USPTO’s own leadership to do it for them. 

What the USPTO Plans To Do

First, they want you to give up your defenses in court. Under this proposal, a defendant can’t file an IPR unless they promise to never challenge the patent’s validity in court. 

For someone actually being sued or threatened with patent infringement, that’s simply not a realistic promise to make. The choice would be: use IPR and lose your defenses—or keep your defenses and lose IPR.

Second, the rules allow patents to become “unchallengeable” after one prior fight. That’s right. If a patent survives any earlier validity fight, anywhere, these rules would block everyone else from bringing an IPR, even years later and even if new prior art surfaces. One early decision—even one that’s poorly argued, or didn’t have all the evidence—would block the door on the entire public.

Third, the rules will block IPR entirely if a district court case is projected to move faster than PTAB. 

So if a troll sues you with one of the outrageous patents we’ve seen over the years, like patents on watching an ad, showing picture menus, or clocking in to work, the USPTO won’t even look at it. It’ll be back to the bad old days, where you have exactly one way to beat the troll (who chose the court to sue in)—spend millions on experts and lawyers, then take your chances in front of a federal jury. 

The USPTO claims this is fine because defendants can still challenge patents in district court. That’s misleading. A real district-court validity fight costs millions of dollars and takes years. For most people and small companies, that’s no opportunity at all. 

Only Congress Can Rewrite IPR

IPR was created by Congress in 2013 after extensive debate. It was meant to give the public a fast, affordable way to correct the Patent Office’s own mistakes. Only Congress—not agency rulemaking—can rewrite that system.

The USPTO shouldn’t be allowed to quietly undermine IPR with procedural traps that block legitimate challenges.

Bad patents still slip through every year. The Patent Office issues hundreds of thousands of new patents annually. IPR is one of the only tools the public has to push back.

These new rules rely on the absurd presumption that it’s the defendants—the people and companies threatened by questionable patents—who are abusing the system with multiple IPR petitions, and that they should be limited to one bite at the apple. 

That’s utterly upside-down. It’s patent trolls like Shipping & Transit and Personal Audio that have sued, or threatened, entire communities of developers and small businesses.

When people have evidence that an overbroad patent was improperly granted, that evidence should be heard. That’s what Congress intended. These rules twist that intent beyond recognition. 

In 2023, more than a thousand EFF supporters spoke out and stopped an earlier version of this proposal—your comments made the difference then, and they can again. 

Our principle is simple: the public has a right to challenge bad patents. These rules would take that right away. That’s why it’s vital to speak up now. 

TAKE ACTION

Sample comment: 

I oppose the USPTO’s proposed rule changes for inter partes review (IPR), Docket No. PTO-P-2025-0025. The IPR process must remain open and fair. Patent challenges should be decided on their merits, not shut out because of legal activity elsewhere. These rules would make it nearly impossible for the public to challenge bad patents, and that will harm innovation and everyday technology users.

Powerful institutions are using automated decision-making against us. Landlords use it to decide who gets a home. Insurance companies use it to decide who gets health care. ICE uses it to decide who must submit to location tracking by electronic monitoring. Bosses use it to decide who gets fired, and to predict who is organizing a union or planning to quit. Bosses even use AI to assess the body language and voice tone of job candidates. And these systems often discriminate based on gender, race, and other protected statuses.

Fortunately, workers, patients, and renters are resisting.

In 2024, Colorado enacted a limited but crucial step forward against automated abuse: the AI Act (S.B. 24-205). We commend the labor, digital rights, and other advocates who have worked to enact and protect it. Colorado recently delayed the Act’s effective date to June 30, 2026.

EFF looks forward to enforcement of the Colorado AI Act, opposes weakening or further delaying it, and supports strengthening it.

What the Colorado AI Act Does

The Colorado AI Act is a good step in the right direction. It regulates “high risk AI systems,” meaning machine-based technologies that are a “substantial factor” in deciding whether a person will have access to education, employment, loans, government services, healthcare, housing, insurance, or legal services. An AI-system is a “substantial factor” in those decisions if it assisted in the decision and could alter its outcome. The Act’s protections include transparency, due process, and impact assessments.

The Act is a solid foundation. Still, EFF urges Colorado to strengthen it

Transparency. The Act requires “developers” (who create high-risk AI systems) and “deployers” (who use them) to provide information to the general public and affected individuals about these systems, including their purposes, the types and sources of inputs, and efforts to mitigate known harms. Developers and deployers also must notify people if they are being subjected to these systems. Transparency protections like these can be a baseline in a comprehensive regulatory program that facilitates enforcement of other protections.

Due process. The Act empowers people subjected to high-risk AI systems to exercise some self-help to seek a fair decision about them. A deployer must notify them of the reasons for the decision, the degree the system contributed to the decision, and the types and sources of inputs. The deployer also must provide them an opportunity to correct any incorrect inputs. And the deployer must provide them an opportunity to appeal, including with human review.

Impact assessments. The Act requires a developer, before providing a high-risk AI system to a deployer, to disclose known or reasonably foreseeable discriminatory harms by the system, and the intended use of the AI. In turn, the Act requires a deployer to complete an annual impact assessment for each of its high-risk AI systems, including a review of whether they cause algorithmic discrimination. A deployer also must implement a risk management program that is proportionate to the nature and scope of the AI, the sensitivity of the data it processes, and more. Deployers must regularly review their risk management programs to identify and mitigate any known or reasonably foreseeable risks of algorithmic discrimination. Impact assessment regulations like these can helpfully place a proactive duty on developers and deployers to find and solve problems, as opposed to doing nothing until an individual subjected to a high-risk system comes forward to exercise their rights.

How the Colorado AI Act Should Be Strengthened

The Act is a solid foundation. Still, EFF urges Colorado to strengthen it, especially in its enforcement mechanisms.

Private right of action. The Colorado AI Act grants exclusive enforcement to the state attorney general. But no regulatory agency will ever have enough resources to investigate and enforce all violations of a law, and many government agencies get “captured” by the industries they are supposed to regulate. So Colorado should amend its Act to empower ordinary people to sue the companies that violate their legal protections from high-risk AI systems. This is often called a “private right of action,” and it is the best way to ensure robust enforcement. For example, the people of Illinois and Texas on paper have similar rights to biometric privacy, but in practice the people of Illinois have far more enjoyment of this right because they can sue violators.

Civil rights enforcement. One of the biggest problems with high-risk AI systems is that they recurringly have an unfair disparate impact against vulnerable groups, and so one of the biggest solutions will be vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws. Unfortunately, the Colorado AI Act contains a confusing “rebuttable presumption” – that is, an evidentiary thumb on the scale – that may impede such enforcement. Specifically, if a deployer or developer complies with the Act, then they get a rebuttable presumption that they complied with the Act’s requirement of “reasonable care” to protect people from algorithmic discrimination. In practice, this may make it harder for a person subjected to a high-risk AI system to prove their discrimination claim. Other civil rights laws generally do not have this kind of provision. Colorado should amend its Act to remove it.

Next Steps

Colorado is off to an important start. Now it should strengthen its AI Act, and should not weaken or further delay it. Other states must enact their own laws. All manner of automated decision-making systems are unfairly depriving people of jobs, health care, and more.

EFF has long been fighting against such practices. We believe technology should improve everyone’s lives, not subject them to abuse and discrimination. We hope you will join us.

Kendra Albert gave an excellent talk at USENIX Security this year, pointing out that the legal agreements surrounding vulnerability disclosure muzzle researchers while allowing companies to not fix the vulnerabilities—exactly the opposite of what the responsible disclosure movement of the early 2000s was supposed to prevent. This is the talk.

Thirty years ago, a debate raged over whether vulnerability disclosure was good for computer security. On one side, full disclosure advocates argued that software bugs weren’t getting fixed and wouldn’t get fixed if companies that made insecure software wasn’t called out publicly. On the other side, companies argued that full disclosure led to exploitation of unpatched vulnerabilities, especially if they were hard to fix. After blog posts, public debates, and countless mailing list flame wars, there emerged a compromise solution: coordinated vulnerability disclosure, where vulnerabilities were disclosed after a period of confidentiality where vendors can attempt to fix things. Although full disclosure fell out of fashion, disclosure won and security through obscurity lost. We’ve lived happily ever after since...

A 25-person startup is developing technology to block the sun and turn down the planet’s thermostat. The stakes are huge — and the company and its critics say regulations need to catch up.

The Department of Justice called the tax a “scheme to extort American citizens and businesses.”

A public outcry helped sink the proposal, but one top lawmaker said he expected the issue to resurface soon.

Governments across Europe, the Pacific islands, Latin America and Africa embraced the call. The United States did not.

The order comes days after business groups pressed the Supreme Court to stop the state's climate laws on First Amendment grounds.

The California Air Resources Board exhibits "growing hostility" to its EJ advisory panel, the co-chair said in her resignation letter.

Companies will have an extra year to comply with two provisions in the rule that were set to take effect on Dec. 10.

Tech companies are promoting AI to help solve global warming, while greens push regulations to soften AI’s environmental footprint.

India, the world’s third-largest polluter, has long argued that industrialized nations should carry a greater decarbonization burden.

Denmark’s climate minister announced Monday that his government would submit a binding target to cut emissions by 82 percent by 2035 compared with 1990 levels.

If countries follow their climate plans, global methane emissions in 2030 will be 8 percent below 2020 levels, a U.N. official said.

Computer-Aided Design (CAD) is the go-to method for designing most of today’s physical products. Engineers use CAD to turn 2D sketches into 3D models that they can then test and refine before sending a final version to a production line. But the software is notoriously complicated to learn, with thousands of commands to choose from. To be truly proficient in the software takes a huge amount of time and practice.

MIT engineers are looking to ease CAD’s learning curve with an AI model that uses CAD software much like a human would. Given a 2D sketch of an object, the model quickly creates a 3D version by clicking buttons and file options, similar to how an engineer would use the software.

The MIT team has created a new dataset called VideoCAD, which contains more than 41,000 examples of how 3D models are built in CAD software. By learning from these videos, which illustrate how different shapes and objects are constructed step-by-step, the new AI system can now operate CAD software much like a human user.

With VideoCAD, the team is building toward an AI-enabled “CAD co-pilot.” They envision that such a tool could not only create 3D versions of a design, but also work with a human user to suggest next steps, or automatically carry out build sequences that would otherwise be tedious and time-consuming to manually click through.

“There’s an opportunity for AI to increase engineers’ productivity as well as make CAD more accessible to more people,” says Ghadi Nehme, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

“This is significant because it lowers the barrier to entry for design, helping people without years of CAD training to create 3D models more easily and tap into their creativity,” adds Faez Ahmed, associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT.

Ahmed and Nehme, along with graduate student Brandon Man and postdoc Ferdous Alam, will present their work at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) in December.

Click by click

The team’s new work expands on recent developments in AI-driven user interface (UI) agents — tools that are trained to use software programs to carry out tasks, such as automatically gathering information online and organizing it in an Excel spreadsheet. Ahmed’s group wondered whether such UI agents could be designed to use CAD, which encompasses many more features and functions, and involves far more complicated tasks than the average UI agent can handle.

In their new work, the team aimed to design an AI-driven UI agent that takes the reins of the CAD program to create a 3D version of a 2D sketch, click by click. To do so, the team first looked to an existing dataset of objects that were designed in CAD by humans. Each object in the dataset includes the sequence of high-level design commands, such as “sketch line,” “circle,” and “extrude,” that were used to build the final object.

However, the team realized that these high-level commands alone were not enough to train an AI agent to actually use CAD software. A real agent must also understand the details behind each action. For instance: Which sketch region should it select? When should it zoom in? And what part of a sketch should it extrude? To bridge this gap, the researchers developed a system to translate high-level commands into user-interface interactions.

“For example, let’s say we drew a sketch by drawing a line from point 1 to point 2,” Nehme says. “We translated those high-level actions to user-interface actions, meaning we say, go from this pixel location, click, and then move to a second pixel location, and click, while having the ‘line’ operation selected.”

In the end, the team generated over 41,000 videos of human-designed CAD objects, each of which is described in real-time in terms of the specific clicks, mouse-drags, and other keyboard actions that the human originally carried out. They then fed all this data into a model they developed to learn connections between UI actions and CAD object generation.

Once trained on this dataset, which they dub VideoCAD, the new AI model could take a 2D sketch as input and directly control the CAD software, clicking, dragging, and selecting tools to construct the full 3D shape. The objects ranged in complexity from simple brackets to more complicated house designs. The team is training the model on more complex shapes and envisions that both the model and the dataset could one day enable CAD co-pilots for designers in a wide range of fields.

“VideoCAD is a valuable first step toward AI assistants that help onboard new users and automate the repetitive modeling work that follows familiar patterns,” says Mehdi Ataei, who was not involved in the study, and is a senior research scientist at Autodesk Research, which develops new design software tools. “This is an early foundation, and I would be excited to see successors that span multiple CAD systems, richer operations like assemblies and constraints, and more realistic, messy human workflows.”

If there was one thing Cameron Halliday SM ’19, MBA ’22, PhD ’22 was exceptional at during the early days of his PhD at MIT, it was producing the same graph over and over again. Unfortunately for Halliday, the graph measured various materials’ ability to absorb CO2 at high temperatures over time — and it always pointed down and to the right. That meant the materials lost their ability to capture the molecules responsible for warming our climate.

At least Halliday wasn’t alone: For many years, researchers have tried and mostly failed to find materials that could reliably absorb CO2 at the super-high temperatures of industrial furnaces, kilns, and boilers. Halliday’s goal was to find something that lasted a little longer.

Then in 2019, he put a type of molten salt called lithium-sodium ortho-borate through his tests. The salts absorbed more than 95 percent of the CO2. And for the first time, the graph showed almost no degradation over 50 cycles.  The same was true after 100 cycles. Then 1,000.

“I honestly don’t know if we ever expected to completely solve the problem,” Halliday says. “We just expected to improve the system. It took another two months to figure out why it worked.”

The researchers discovered the salts behave like a liquid at high temperatures, which avoids the brittle cracking responsible for the degradation of many solid materials.

“I remember walking home over the Mass Ave bridge at 5 a.m. with all the morning runners going by me,” Halliday recalls. “That was the moment when I realized what this meant. Since then, it’s been about proving it works at larger scales. We’ve just been building the next scaled-up version, proving it still works, building a bigger version, proving that out, until we reach the ultimate goal of deploying this everywhere.”

Today, Halliday is the co-founder and CEO of Mantel, a company building systems to capture carbon dioxide at large industrial sites of all types. Although a lot of people think the carbon capture industry is a dead end, Halliday doesn’t give up so easily, and he’s got a growing corpus of performance data to keep him encouraged.

Mantel’s system can be added on to the machines of power stations and factories making cement, steel, paper and pulp, oil and gas, and more, reducing their carbon emissions by around 95 percent. Instead of being released into the atmosphere, the emitted CO2 is channeled into Mantel’s system, where the company’s salts are sprayed out from something that looks like a shower head. The CO2 diffuses through the molten salts in a reaction that can be reversed through further temperature increases, so the salts boil off pure CO2 that can be transported for use or stored underground.

A key difference from other carbon capture methods that have struggled to be profitable is that Mantel uses the heat from its process to generate steam for customers by combining it with water in another part of its system. Mantel says delivering steam, which is used to drive many common industrial processes, lets its system work with just 3 percent of the net energy that state-of-the-art carbon capture systems require.

“We’re still consuming energy, but we get most of it back as steam, whereas the incumbent technology only consumes steam,” says Halliday, who co-founded Mantel with Sean Robertson PhD ’22 and Danielle Rapson. “That steam is a useful revenue stream, so we can turn carbon capture from a waste management process into a value creation process for our customer’s core business — whether that’s a power station using steam to make electricity, or oil and gas refineries. It completely changes the economics of carbon capture.”

From science to startup

Halliday’s first exposure to MIT came in 2016 when he cold emailed Alan Hatton, MIT’s Ralph Landau Professor of Chemical Engineering Practice, asking if he could come to his lab for the summer and work on research into carbon capture.

“He invited me, but he didn’t put me on that project,” Halliday recalls. “At the end of the summer he said, ‘You should consider coming back and doing a PhD.’”

Halliday enrolled in a joint PhD-MBA program the following year.

“I really wanted to work on something that had an impact,” Halliday says. “The dual PhD-MBA program has some deep technical academic elements to it, but you also work with a company for two months, so you use a lot of what you learn in the real world.”

Halliday worked on a few different research projects in Hatton’s lab early on, all three of which eventually turned into companies. The one that he stuck with explored ways to make carbon capture more energy efficient by working at the high temperatures common at emissions-heavy industrial sites.

Halliday ran into the same problems as past researchers with materials degrading at such extreme conditions.

“It was the big limiter for the technology,” Halliday recalls.

Then Halliday ran his successful experiment with molten borate salts in 2019. The MBA portion of his program began soon after, and Halliday decided to use that time to commercialize the technology. Part of that occurred in Course 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures), where Halliday met his co-founders. As it happens, alumni of the class have started more than 150 companies over the years.

“MIT tries to pull these great ideas out of academia and get them into the world so they can be valued and used,” Halliday says. “For the Climate and Energy Ventures class, outside speakers showed us every stage of company-building. The technology roadmap for our system is shoebox-sized, shipping container, one-bedroom house, and then the size of a building. It was really valuable to see other companies and say, ‘That’s what we could look like in three years, or six years.”

From startup to scale up

When Mantel was officially founded in 2022 the founders had their shoebox-sized system. After raising early funding, the team built its shipping container-sized system at The Engine, an MIT-affiliated startup incubator. That system has been operational for almost two years.

Last year, Mantel announced a partnership with Kruger Inc. to build the next version of its system at a factory in Quebec, which will be operational next year. The plant will run in a two-year test phase before scaling across Kruger’s other plants if successful.

“The Quebec project is proving the capture efficiency and proving the step-change improvement in energy use of our system,” Halliday says. “It’s a derisking of the technology that will unlock a lot more opportunities.”

Halliday says Mantel is in conversations with close to 100 industrial partners around the world, including the owners of refineries, data centers, cement and steel plants, and oil and gas companies. Because it’s a standalone addition, Halliday says Mantel’s system doesn’t have to change much to be used in different industries.

Mantel doesn’t handle CO2 conversion or sequestration, but Halliday says capture makes up the bulk of the costs in the CO2 value chain. It also generates high-quality CO2 that can be transported in pipelines and used in industries including the food and beverage industry — like the CO2 that makes your soda bubbly.

“This is the solution our customers are dreaming of,” Halliday says. “It means they don’t have to shut down their billion-dollar asset and reimagine their business to address an issue that they all appreciate is existential. There are questions about the timeline, but most industries recognize this is a problem they’ll have to grapple with eventually. This is a pragmatic solution that’s not trying to reshape the world as we dream of it. It’s looking at the problem at hand today and fixing it.”

Anchorage-dependent cells are cells that require physical attachment to a solid surface, such as a culture dish, to survive, grow, and reproduce. In the biomedical industry, and others, having the ability to culture these cells is crucial, but current techniques used to separate cells from surfaces can induce stresses and reduce cell viability.

“In the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, cells are typically detached from culture surfaces using enzymes — a process fraught with challenges,” says Kripa Varanasi, MIT professor of mechanical engineering. “Enzymatic treatments can damage delicate cell membranes and surface proteins, particularly in primary cells, and often require multiple steps that make the workflow slow and labor-intensive.”

Existing approaches also rely on large volumes of consumables, generating an estimated 300 million liters of cell culture waste each year. Moreover, because these enzymes are often animal-derived, they can introduce compatibility concerns for cells intended for human therapies, limiting scalability and high-throughput applications in modern biomanufacturing.

Varanasi is corresponding author on a new paper in the journal ACS Nano, in which researchers from the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Cancer Program at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT present a novel enzyme-free strategy for detaching cells from culture surfaces. The method works by harnessing alternating electrochemical current on a conductive biocompatible polymer nanocomposite surface.

“By applying low-frequency alternating voltage, our platform disrupts adhesion within minutes while maintaining over 90 percent cell viability — overcoming the limitations of enzymatic and mechanical methods that can damage cells or generate excess waste,” says Varanasi.

Beyond simplifying routine cell culture, the approach could transform large-scale biomanufacturing by enabling automated and contamination-conscious workflows for cell therapies, tissue engineering, and regenerative medicine. The platform also provides a pathway for safely expanding and harvesting sensitive immune cells for applications such as CAR-T therapies.

“Because our electrically tunable interface can dynamically shape the ionic microenvironment around cells, it also offers powerful opportunities to control ion channels, study signaling pathways, and integrate with bioelectronic systems for high-throughput drug screening, regenerative medicine, and personalized therapies,” Varanasi explains.

“Our work shows how electrochemistry can be harnessed not just for scientific discovery, but also for scalable, real-world applications,” says Wang Hee (Wren) Lee, MIT postdoc and co-first author. “By translating electrochemical control into biomanufacturing, we’re laying the foundation for technologies that can accelerate automation, reduce waste, and ultimately enable new industries built on sustainable and precise processing.”

Bert Vandereydt, co-first author and mechanical engineering researcher at MIT, emphasizes the potential for industrial scalability. “Because this method can be applied uniformly across large areas, it’s ideal for high-throughput and large-scale applications like cell therapy manufacturing. We envision it enabling fully automated, closed-loop cell culture systems in the near future.”

Yuen-Yi (Moony) Tseng, principal investigator at the Broad Institute and collaborator on the project, underscores the biomedical significance. “This platform opens new doors for culturing and harvesting delicate primary or cancer cells. It could streamline workflows across research and clinical biomanufacturing, reducing variability and preserving cell functionality for therapeutic use.”

Industrial applications of adherent cells include uses in the biomedical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic sectors. For this study, the team tested their new method using human cancer cells, including osteosarcoma and ovarian cancer cells. After identifying an optimal frequency, the detachment efficiency for both types of cells increased from 1 percent to 95 percent, with cell viability exceeding 90 percent.

The paper, “Alternating Electrochemical Redox-Cycling on Nanocomposite Biointerface for High-Efficiency Enzyme-Free Cell Detachment,” is available from the American Chemical Society journal ACS Nano. 

EFF and the ACLU of Northern California Sue on Behalf of Local Nonprofits

Contact: Josh Richman, EFF, jrichman@eff.org;  Carmen King, ACLU of Northern California, cking@aclunc.org

SAN JOSE, Calif. – San Jose and its police department routinely violate the California Constitution by conducting warrantless searches of the stored records of millions of drivers’ private habits, movements, and associations, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California (ACLU-NC) argue in a lawsuit filed Tuesday. 

The lawsuit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court on behalf of the Services, Immigrant Rights and Education Network (SIREN) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations – California (CAIR-CA), challenges San Jose police officers’ practice of searching for location information collected by automated license plate readers (ALPRs) without first getting a warrant.  

ALPRs are an invasive mass-surveillance technology: high-speed, computer-controlled cameras that automatically capture images of the license plates of every driver that passes by, without any suspicion that the driver has broken the law. 

“A person who regularly drives through an area subject to ALPR surveillance can have their location information captured multiple times per day,” the lawsuit says. “This information can reveal travel patterns and provide an intimate window into a person’s life as they travel from home to work, drop off their children at school, or park at a house of worship, a doctor’s office, or a protest. It could also reveal whether a person crossed state lines to seek health care in California.”

The San Jose Police Department has blanketed the city’s roadways with nearly 500 ALPRs – indiscriminately collecting millions of records per month about people’s movements – and keeps this data for an entire year. Then the department permits its officers and other law enforcement officials from across the state to search this ALPR database to instantly reconstruct people’s locations over time – without first getting a warrant. This is an unchecked police power to scrutinize the movements of San Jose’s residents and visitors as they lawfully travel to work, to the doctor, or to a protest. 

San Jose’s ALPR surveillance program is especially pervasive: Few California law enforcement agencies retain ALPR data for an entire year, and few have deployed nearly 500 cameras.  

The lawsuit, which names the city, its Police Chief Paul Joseph, and its Mayor Matt Mahan as defendants, asks the court to stop the city and its police from searching ALPR data without first obtaining a warrant. Location information reflecting people’s physical movements, even in public spaces, is protected under the Fourth Amendment according to U.S. Supreme Court case law. The California Constitution is even more protective of location privacy, at both Article I, Section 13 (the ban on unreasonable searches) and Article I, Section 1 (the guarantee of privacy). “The SJPD’s widespread collection and searches of ALPR information poses serious threats to communities’ privacy and freedom of movement."

“This is not just about data or technology — it’s about power, accountability, and our right to move freely without being watched,” said CAIR-San Francisco Bay Area Executive Director Zahra Billoo. “For Muslim communities, and for anyone who has experienced profiling, the knowledge that police can track your every move without cause is chilling. San Jose’s mass surveillance program violates the California Constitution and undermines the privacy rights of every person who drives through the city. We’re going to court to make sure those protections still mean something." 

"The right to privacy is one of the strongest protections that our immigrant communities have in the face of these acts of violence and terrorism from the federal government," said SIREN Executive Director Huy Tran. "This case does not raise the question of whether these cameras should be used. What we need to guard against is a surveillance state, particularly when we have seen other cities or counties violate laws that prohibit collaborating with ICE. We can protect the privacy rights of our residents with one simple rule: Access to the data should only happen once approved under a judicial warrant.”  

For the complaint: https://www.eff.org/files/2025/11/18/siren_v._san_jose_-_filed_complaint.pdf

For more about ALPRs: https://sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-readers-alprs 

Tags: SIREN and CAIR-CA v. San JoseAutomated License Plate Readers (ALPRs)Street Level Surveillance

“We’re here to talk about really substantive changes, and we want you to be a participant in that,” said Desirée Plata, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Climate and Energy in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at Energizing@MIT: the MIT Energy Initiative’s (MITEI) Annual Research Conference that was held on Sept. 9-10.

Plata’s words resonated with the 150-plus participants from academia, industry, and government meeting in Cambridge for the conference, whose theme was “tackling emerging energy challenges.” Meeting such challenges and ultimately altering the trajectory of global climate outcomes requires partnerships, speakers agreed.

“We have to be humble and open,” said Giacomo Silvestri, chair of Eniverse Ventures at Eni, in a shared keynote address. “We cannot develop innovation just focusing on ourselves and our competencies … so we need to partner with startups, venture funds, universities like MIT and other public and private institutions.” 

Added his Eni colleague, Annalisa Muccioli, head of research and technology, “The energy transition is a race we can win only by combining mature solutions ready to deploy, together with emerging technologies that still require acceleration and risk management.”

Research targets

In a conference that showcased a suite of research priorities MITEI has identified as central to ensuring a low-carbon energy future, participants shared both promising discoveries and strategies for advancing proven technologies in the face of shifting political winds and policy uncertainties.

One panel focused on grid resiliency — a topic that has moved from the periphery to the center of energy discourse as climate-driven disruptions, cyber threats, and the integration of renewables challenge legacy systems. A dramatic case in point: the April 2025 outage in Spain and Portugal that left millions without power for eight to 15 hours. 

“I want to emphasize that this failure was about more than the power system,” said MITEI research scientist Pablo Duenas-Martinez. While he pinpointed technical problems with reactive power and voltage control behind the system collapse, Duenas-Martinez also called out a lack of transmission capacity with Central Europe and out-of-date operating procedures, and recommended better preparation and communication among transmission systems and utility operators.

“You can’t plan for every single eventuality, which means we need to broaden the portfolio of extreme events we prepare for,” noted Jennifer Pearce, vice president at energy company Avangrid. “We are making the system smarter, stronger, and more resilient to better protect from a wide range of threats such as storms, flooding, and extreme heat events.” Pearce noted that Avangrid’s commitment to deliver safe, reliable power to its customers necessitates “meticulous emergency planning procedures.”

The resiliency of the electric grid under greatly increased demand is an important motivation behind MITEI’s September 2025 launch of the Data Center Power Forum, which was also announced during the annual research conference. The forum will include research projects, webinars, and other content focused on energy supply and storage, grid design and management, infrastructure, and public and economic policy related to data centers. The forum’s members include MITEI companies that also participate in MIT’s Center for Environmental and Energy Policy Research (CEEPR).

Storage and transportation: Staggering challenges

Meeting climate goals to decarbonize the world by 2050 requires building around 300 terawatt-hours of storage, according to Asegun Henry, a professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. “It’s an unbelievably enormous problem people have to wrap their minds around,” he said. Henry has been developing a high-temperature thermal energy storage system he has nicknamed “sun in a box.” His system uses liquid metal and graphite to hold electricity as heat and then convert it back to electricity, enabling storage anywhere from five to 500 hours.

“At the end of the day, storage provides a service, and the type of technology that you need is a function of the service that you value the most,” said Nestor Sepulveda, commercial lead for advanced energy investments and partnerships at Google. “I don't think there is one winner-takes-all type of market here.”

Another panel explored sustainable fuels that could help decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors like aviation, shipping, and long-haul trucking. Randall Field, MITEI’s director of research, noted that sustainably produced drop-in fuels — fuels that are largely compatible with existing engines — “could eliminate potentially trillions of dollars of cost for fleet replacement and for infrastructure build-out, while also helping us to accelerate the rate of decarbonization of the transportation sectors."

Erik G. Birkerts is the chief growth officer of LanzaJet, which produces a drop-in, high-energy-density aviation fuel derived from agricultural residue and other waste carbon sources. “The key to driving broad sustainable aviation fuel adoption is solving both the supply-side challenge through more production and the demand-side hurdle by reducing costs,” he said.

“We think a good policy framework [for sustainable fuels] would be something that is technology-neutral, does not exclude any pathways to produce, is based on life cycle accounting practices, and on market mechanisms,” said Veronica L. Robertson, energy products technology portfolio manager at ExxonMobil.

MITEI plans a major expansion of its research on sustainable fuels, announcing a two-year study, “The future of fuels: Pathways to sustainable transportation,” starting in early 2026. According to Field, the study will analyze and assess biofuels and e-fuels.

Solutions from labs big and small

Global energy leaders offered glimpses of their research projects. A panel on carbon capture in power generation featured three takes on the topic: Devin Shaw, commercial director of decarbonization technologies at Shell, described post-combustion carbon capture in power plants using steam for heat recovery; Jan Marsh, a global program lead at Siemens Energy, discussed deploying novel materials to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air; and Jeffrey Goldmeer, senior director of technology strategy at GE Vernova, explained integrating carbon capture into gas-powered turbine systems.

During a panel on vehicle electrification, Brian Storey, vice president of energy and materials at the Toyota Research Institute, provided an overview of Toyota’s portfolio of projects for decarbonization, including solid-state batteries, flexible manufacturing lines, and grid-forming inverters to support EV charging infrastructure.

A session on MITEI seed fund projects revealed promising early-stage research inside MIT’s own labs. A new process for decarbonizing the production of ethylene was presented by Yogesh Surendranath, Donner Professor of Science in the MIT Department of Chemistry. Materials Science and Engineering assistant professor Aristide Gumyusenge also discussed the development of polymers essential for a new kind of sodium-ion battery.

Shepherding bold, new technologies like these from academic labs into the real world cannot succeed without ample support and deft management. A panel on paths to commercialization featured the work of Iwnetim Abate, Chipman Career Development Professor and assistant professor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who has spun out a company, Addis Energy, based on a novel geothermal process for harvesting clean hydrogen and ammonia from subsurface, iron-rich rocks. Among his funders: ARPA-E and MIT’s own The Engine Ventures.

The panel also highlighted the MIT Proto Ventures Program, an initiative to seize early-stage MIT ideas and unleash them as world-changing startups. “A mere 4.2 percent of all the patents that are actually prosecuted in the world are ever commercialized, which seems like a shocking number,” said Andrew Inglis, an entrepreneur working with Proto Ventures to translate geothermal discoveries into businesses. “Can’t we do this better? Let’s do this better!”

Geopolitical hazards

Throughout the conference, participants often voiced concern about the impacts of competition between the United States and China. Kelly Sims Gallagher, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University and an expert on China’s energy landscape, delivered the sobering news in her keynote address: “U.S. competitiveness in low-carbon technologies has eroded in nearly every category,” she said. “The Chinese are winning the clean tech race.”

China enjoys a 51 percent share in global wind turbine manufacture and 75 percent in solar modules. It also controls low-carbon supply chains that much of the world depends on. “China is getting so dominant that nobody can carve out a comparative advantage in anything,” said Gallagher. “China is just so big, and the scale is so huge that the Chinese can truly conquer markets and make it very hard for potential competitors to find a way in.”

And for the United States, the problem is “the seesaw of energy policy,” she says. “It’s incredibly difficult for the private sector to plan and to operate, given the lack of predictability and policy here.”

Nevertheless, Gallagher believes the United States still has a chance of at least regaining competitiveness, by setting up a stable, bipartisan energy policy, rebuilding domestic manufacturing and supply chains; providing consistent fiscal incentives; attracting and retaining global talent; and fostering international collaboration.

The conference shone a light on one such collaboration: a China-U.S. joint venture to manufacture lithium iron phosphate batteries for commercial vehicles in the United States. The venture brings together Eve Energy, a Chinese battery technology and manufacturing company; Daimler, a global commercial vehicle manufacturer; PACCAR Inc., a U.S.-based truck manufacturer; and Accelera, the zero-emissions business of Cummins Inc. “Manufacturing batteries in the U.S. makes the supply chain more robust and reduces geopolitical risks,” said Mike Gerty, of PACCAR.

While she acknowledged the obstacles confronting her colleagues in the room, Plata nevertheless concluded her remarks as a panel moderator with some optimism: “I hope you all leave this conference and look back on it in the future, saying I was in the room when they actually solved some of the challenges standing between now and the future that we all wish to manifest.”

MIT and GE Vernova launched the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance on Sept. 15, a collaboration to advance research and education focused on accelerating the global energy transition.

Through the alliance — an industry-academia initiative conceived by MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan and GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik — GE Vernova has committed $50 million over five years in the form of sponsored research projects and philanthropic funding for research, graduate student fellowships, internships, and experiential learning, as well as professional development programs for GE Vernova leaders.

“MIT has a long history of impactful collaborations with industry, and the collaboration between MIT and GE Vernova is a shining example of that legacy,” said Chandrakasan in opening remarks at a launch event. “Together, we are working on energy and climate solutions through interdisciplinary research and diverse perspectives, while providing MIT students the benefit of real-world insights from an industry leader positioned to bring those ideas into the world at scale.”

The energy of change

An independent company since its spinoff from GE in April 2024, GE Vernova is focused on accelerating the global energy transition. The company generates approximately 25 percent of the world’s electricity — with the world’s largest installed base of over 7,000 gas turbines, about 57,000 wind turbines, and leading-edge electrification technology.

GE Vernova’s slogan, “The Energy of Change,” is reflected in decisions such as locating its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts — in close proximity to MIT. In pursuing transformative approaches to the energy transition, the company has identified MIT as a key collaborator.

A key component of the mission to electrify and decarbonize the world is collaboration, according to CEO Scott Strazik. “We want to inspire, and be inspired by, students as we work together on our generation’s greatest challenge, climate change. We have great ambition for what we want the world to become, but we need collaborators. And we need folks that want to iterate with us on what the world should be from here.”

Representing the Healey-Driscoll administration at the launch event were Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Rebecca Tepper and Secretary of the Executive Office of Economic Development Eric Paley. Secretary Tepper highlighted the Mass Leads Act, a $1 billion climate tech and life sciences initiative enacted by Governor Maura Healey last November to strengthen Massachusetts’ leadership in climate tech and AI.

“We're harnessing every part of the state, from hydropower manufacturing facilities to the blue-to-blue economy in our south coast, and right here at the center of our colleges and universities. We want to invent and scale the solutions to climate change in our own backyard,” said Tepper. “That’s been the Massachusetts way for decades.”

Real-world problems, insights, and solutions

The launch celebration featured interactive science displays and student presenters introducing the first round of 13 research projects led by MIT faculty. These projects focus on generating scalable solutions to our most pressing challenges in the areas of electrification, decarbonization, renewables acceleration, and digital solutions. Read more about the funded projects here.

Collaborating with industry offers the opportunity for researchers and students to address real-world problems informed by practical insights. The diverse, interdisciplinary perspectives from both industry and academia will significantly strengthen the research supported through the GE Vernova Fellowships announced at the launch event.

“I’m excited to talk to the industry experts at GE Vernova about the problems that they work on,” said GE Vernova Fellow Aaron Langham. “I’m looking forward to learning more about how real people and industries use electrical power.”

Fellow Julia Estrin echoed a similar sentiment: “I see this as a chance to connect fundamental research with practical applications — using insights from industry to shape innovative solutions in the lab that can have a meaningful impact at scale.”

GE Vernova’s commitment to research is also providing support and inspiration for fellows. “This level of substantive enthusiasm for new ideas and technology is what comes from a company that not only looks toward the future, but also has the resources and determination to innovate impactfully,” says Owen Mylotte, a GE Vernova Fellow.

The inaugural cohort of eight fellows will continue their research at MIT with tuition support from GE Vernova. Find the full list of fellows and their research topics here.

Pipeline of future energy leaders

Highlighting the alliance’s emphasis on cultivating student talent and leadership, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik introduced four MIT alumni who are now leaders at GE Vernova: Dhanush Mariappan SM ’03, PhD ’19, senior engineering manager in the GE Vernova Advanced Research Center; Brent Brunell SM ’00, technology director in the Advanced Research Center; Paolo Marone MBA ’21, CFO of wind; and Grace Caza MAP ’22, chief of staff in supply chain and operations.

The four shared their experiences of working with MIT as students and their hopes for the future of this alliance in the realm of “people development,” as Mariappan highlighted. “Energy transition means leaders. And every one of the innovative research and professional education programs that will come out of this alliance is going to produce the leaders of the energy transition industry.”

The alliance is underscoring its commitment to developing future energy leaders by supporting the New Engineering Education Transformation program (NEET) and expanding opportunities for student internships. With 100 new internships for MIT students announced in the days following the launch, GE Vernova is opening broad opportunities for MIT students at all levels to contribute to a sustainable future.

“GE Vernova has been a tremendous collaborator every step of the way, with a clear vision of the technical breakthroughs we need to affect change at scale and a deep respect for MIT’s strengths and culture, as well as a hunger to listen and learn from us as well,” said Betar Gallant, alliance director who is also the Kendall Rohsenow Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “Students, take this opportunity to learn, connect, and appreciate how much you’re valued, and how bright your futures are in this area of decarbonizing our energy systems. Your ideas and insight are going to help us determine and drive what’s next.”

Daring to create the future we want

The launch event transformed MIT’s Lobby 13 with green lighting and animated conversation around the posters and hardware demos on display, reflecting the sense of optimism for the future and the type of change the alliance — and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts — seeks to advance.

“Because of this collaboration and the commitment to the work that needs doing, many things will be created,” said Secretary Paley. “People in this room will work together on all kinds of projects that will do incredible things for our economy, for our innovation, for our country, and for our climate.”

The alliance builds on MIT’s growing portfolio of initiatives around sustainable energy systems, including the Climate Project at MIT, a presidential initiative focused on developing solutions to some of the toughest barriers to an effective global climate response. “This new alliance is a significant opportunity to move the needle of energy and climate research as we dare to create the future that we want, with the promise of impactful solutions for the world,” said Evelyn Wang, MIT vice president for energy and climate, who attended the launch.

To that end, the alliance is supporting critical cross-institution efforts in energy and climate policy, including funding three master’s students in MIT Technology and Policy Program and hosting an annual symposium in February 2026 to advance interdisciplinary research. GE Vernova is also providing philanthropic support to the MIT Human Insight Collaborative. For 2025-26, this support will contribute to addressing global energy poverty by supporting the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in its work to expand access to affordable electricity in South Africa.

“Our hope to our fellows, our hope to our students is this: While the stakes are high and the urgency has never been higher, the impact that you are going to have over the decades to come has never been greater,” said Roger Martella, chief corporate and sustainability officer at GE Vernova. “You have so much opportunity to move the world in a better direction. We need you to succeed. And our mission is to serve you and enable your success.”

With the alliance’s launch — and GE Vernova’s new membership in several other MIT consortium programs related to sustainability, automation and robotics, and AI, including the Initiative for New Manufacturing, MIT Energy Initiative, MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, and Center for Transportation and Logistics — it’s evident why Betar Gallant says the company is “all-in at MIT.”

The potential for tremendous impact on the energy industry is clear to those involved in the alliance. As GE Vernova Fellow Jack Morris said at the launch, “This is the beginning of something big.”