The MIT Press announces the acquisition of textbook publisher University Science Books from AIP Publishing, a subsidiary of the American Institute of Physics (AIP).

University Science Books was founded in 1978 to publish intermediate- and advanced-level science and reference books by respected authors, published with the highest design and production standards, and priced as affordably as possible. Over the years, USB’s authors have acquired international followings, and its textbooks in chemistry, physics, and astronomy have been recognized as the gold standard in their respective disciplines. USB was acquired by AIP Publishing in 2021.

Bestsellers include John Taylor’s “Classical Mechanics,” the No. 1 adopted text for undergrad mechanics courses in the United States and Canada, and his “Introduction to Error Analysis;” and Don McQuarrie’s “Physical Chemistry: A Molecular Approach” (commonly known as “Big Red”), the second-most adopted physical chemistry textbook in the U.S.

“We are so pleased to have found a new home for USB’s prestigious list of textbooks in the sciences,” says Alix Vance, CEO of AIP Publishing. “With its strong STEM focus, academic rigor, and high production standards, the MIT Press is the perfect partner to continue the publishing legacy of University Science Books.” 

“This acquisition is both a brand and content fit for the MIT Press,” says Amy Brand, director and publisher of the MIT Press. “USB’s respected science list will complement our long-established publishing history of publishing foundational texts in computer science, finance, and economics.”

The MIT Press will take over the USB list as of July 1, with inventory transferring to Penguin Random House Publishing Services, the MIT Press’ sales and distribution partner.

For details regarding University Science Books titles, inventory, and how to order, please contact the MIT Press. 

Established in 1962, The MIT Press is one of the largest and most distinguished university presses in the world and a leading publisher of books and journals at the intersection of science, technology, art, social science, and design.

AIP Publishing is a wholly owned not-for-profit subsidiary of the AIP and supports the charitable, scientific, and educational purposes of AIP through scholarly publishing activities on its behalf and on behalf of our publishing partners.

Researchers at MIT and the Scripps Research Institute have shown that they can generate a strong immune response to HIV with just one vaccine dose, by adding two powerful adjuvants — materials that help stimulate the immune system.

In a study of mice, the researchers showed that this approach produced a much wider diversity of antibodies against an HIV antigen, compared to the vaccine given on its own or with just one of the adjuvants. The dual-adjuvant vaccine accumulated in the lymph nodes and remained there for up to a month, allowing the immune system to build up a much greater number of antibodies against the HIV protein.

This strategy could lead to the development of vaccines that only need to be given once, for infectious diseases including HIV or SARS-CoV-2, the researchers say.

“This approach is compatible with many protein-based vaccines, so it offers the opportunity to engineer new formulations for these types of vaccines across a wide range of different diseases, such as influenza, SARS-CoV-2, or other pandemic outbreaks,” says J. Christopher Love, the Raymond A. and Helen E. St. Laurent Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard.

Love and Darrell Irvine, a professor of immunology and microbiology at the Scripps Research Institute, are the senior authors of the study, which appears today in Science Translational Medicine. Kristen Rodrigues PhD ’23 and Yiming Zhang PhD ’25 are the lead authors of the paper.

More powerful vaccines

Most vaccines are delivered along with adjuvants, which help to stimulate a stronger immune response to the antigen. One adjuvant commonly used with protein-based vaccines, including those for hepatitis A and B, is aluminum hydroxide, also known as alum. This adjuvant works by activating the innate immune response, helping the body to form a stronger memory of the vaccine antigen.

Several years ago, Irvine developed another adjuvant based on saponin, an FDA-approved adjuvant derived from the bark of the Chilean soapbark tree. His work showed that nanoparticles containing both saponin and a molecule called MPLA, which promotes inflammation, worked better than saponin on its own. That nanoparticle, known as SMNP, is now being used as an adjuvant for an HIV vaccine that is currently in clinical trials.

Irvine and Love then tried combining alum and SMNP and showed that vaccines containing both of those adjuvants could generate even more powerful immune responses against either HIV or SARS-CoV-2.

In the new paper, the researchers wanted to explore why these two adjuvants work so well together to boost the immune response, specifically the B cell response. B cells produce antibodies that can circulate in the bloodstream and recognize a pathogen if the body is exposed to it again.

For this study, the researchers used an HIV protein called MD39 as their vaccine antigen, and anchored dozens of these proteins to each alum particle, along with SMNP.

After vaccinating mice with these particles, the researchers found that the vaccine accumulated in the lymph nodes — structures where B cells encounter antigens and undergo rapid mutations that generate antibodies with high affinity for a particular antigen. This process takes place within clusters of cells known as germinal centers.

The researchers showed that SMNP and alum helped the HIV antigen to penetrate through the protective layer of cells surrounding the lymph nodes without being broken down into fragments. The adjuvants also helped the antigens to remain intact in the lymph nodes for up to 28 days.

“As a result, the B cells that are cycling in the lymph nodes are constantly being exposed to the antigen over that time period, and they get the chance to refine their solution to the antigen,” Love says.

This approach may mimic what occurs during a natural infection, when antigens can remain in the lymph nodes for weeks, giving the body time to build up an immune response.

Antibody diversity

Single-cell RNA sequencing of B cells from the vaccinated mice revealed that the vaccine containing both adjuvants generated a much more diverse repertoire of B cells and antibodies. Mice that received the dual-adjuvant vaccine produced two to three times more unique B cells than mice that received just one of the adjuvants.

That increase in B cell number and diversity boosts the chances that the vaccine could generate broadly neutralizing antibodies — antibodies that can recognize a variety of strains of a given virus, such as HIV.

“When you think about the immune system sampling all of the possible solutions, the more chances we give it to identify an effective solution, the better,” Love says. “Generating broadly neutralizing antibodies is something that likely requires both the kind of approach that we showed here, to get that strong and diversified response, as well as antigen design to get the right part of the immunogen shown.”

Using these two adjuvants together could also contribute to the development of more potent vaccines against other infectious diseases, with just a single dose.

“What’s potentially powerful about this approach is that you can achieve long-term exposures based on a combination of adjuvants that are already reasonably well-understood, so it doesn’t require a different technology. It’s just combining features of these adjuvants to enable low-dose or potentially even single-dose treatments,” Love says.

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health; the Koch Institute Support (core) Grant from the National Cancer Institute; the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard; and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

This year, like almost all years before, LGBTQ+ Pride month is taking place at a time of burgeoning anti-LGBTQ+ violence, harassment, and criticism. Lawmakers and regulators are passing legislation restricting freedom of expression and privacy for LGBTQ+ individuals and fueling offline intolerance. Online platforms are also complicit in this pervasive ecosystem by censoring pro-LGBTQ+ speech, forcing LGBTQ+ individuals to self-censor or turn to VPNs to avoid being profiled, harassed, doxxed, or criminally prosecuted. Unfortunately, these risks look likely to continue, threatening LGBTQ+ individuals and the fight for queer liberation. 

This Pride, we’re here to help build an online space where you get to decide what aspects of yourself you share with others, how you present to the world, and what things you keep private.

We know that it feels overwhelming thinking about how to protect yourself online in the face of these issues—whether that's best practices for using gay dating apps like Grindr and Her, how to download a VPN to see and interact with banned LGBTQ+ content, methods for posting pictures from events and protests without outing your friends, or how to argue over your favorite queer musicians’ most recent problematic takes without being doxxed. 

That's why this LGBTQ+ Pride month, we’re launching an LGBT Q&A. Throughout Pride, we’ll be answering your most pressing digital rights questions on EFF’s Instagram and TikTok accounts. Comment your questions under these posts on Instagram and TikTok, and we’ll reply directly. Want to stay anonymous? Submit your questions via a secure link on our website and we’ll answer these in separate posts. 

Everyone needs guidance and protection from prying eyes. This is especially true for those of us who face consequences when intimate details around gender or sexual identities are revealed without consent. This Pride, we’re here to help build an online space where you get to decide what aspects of yourself you share with others, how you present to the world, and what things you keep private.

No question is too big or too small! But comments that discriminate against marginalized groups, including the LGBTQ+ community, will not be engaged with. 

The fight for the safety and rights of LGBTQ+ people is not just a fight for visibility online (and offline)—it’s a fight for survival. Now more than ever, it's essential to collectivize information sharing to not only make the digital world safer for LGBTQ+ individuals, but to make it a space where people can have fun, share memes, date, and build communities without facing repression and harm. Join us to make the internet private, safe, and full of gay pride.

Just in time for summer, EFFector is back—with a brand new look! If you're not signed up, now's a perfect time to subscribe and get the latest details on EFF's work defending your rights to privacy and free expression online.

EFFector 37.6 highlights an important role that EFF has to protecting you online: watching the watchers. In this issue, we're pushing back on invasive car-tracking technologies, and we share an update on our case challenging the illegal disclosure of government records to DOGE. You'll also find updates on issues like masking at protests, defending encryption in Europe, and the latest developments in the right to repair movement.

Speaking of right to repair: we're debuting a new audio companion to EFFector as well! This time, Hayley Tsukayama breaks down how Washington's new right to repair law fits into broader legislative trends. You can listen now on YouTube or the Internet Archive.

SUBSCRIBE TO EFFECTOR

EFFECTOR 37.6 - BIG BROTHER'S LITTLE PROBLEM

Since 1990 EFF has published EFFector to help keep readers on the bleeding edge of their digital rights. We know that the intersection of technology, civil liberties, human rights, and the law can be complicated, so EFFector is a great way to stay on top of things. The newsletter is chock full of links to updates, announcements, blog posts, and other stories to help keep readers—and listeners—up to date on the movement to protect online privacy and free expression. 

Thank you to the supporters around the world who make our work possible! If you're not a member yet, join EFF today to help us fight for a brighter digital future.

The variations seem to be endless. Here’s a fake ghostwriting scam that seems to be making boatloads of money.

This is a big story about scams being run from Texas and Pakistan estimated to run into tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, viciously defrauding Americans with false hopes of publishing bestseller books (a scam you’d not think many people would fall for but is surprisingly huge). In January, three people were charged with defrauding elderly authors across the United States of almost $44 million ­by “convincing the victims that publishers and filmmakers wanted to turn their books into blockbusters.”...

The industry has a strategy to avoid recriminations from a president who has expressed disdain for "windmills."

Laura Grimm has overseen layoffs and budget cuts as the agency's chief of staff and acting administrator.

Groups and companies have blitzed Capitol offices in recent weeks. They're also running ads.

The South American nation is drawing scrutiny for opening a large swath of ocean to oil companies as it prepares to hold the COP30 conference.

EPA's plan to scrap a rule curbing power plant emissions has dimmed the outlook for U.S. carbon capture and storage projects.

Wildfire specialists at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health were on leave when smoke from Canadian blazes shrouded the Midwest.

The Legislature passed a measure that will shift the cost of new gas connections to residential customers seeking service.

The biggest drivers are insurance premiums that have doubled since 2017, post-disaster spending and federal aid.

The National Hurricane Center said Erick was expected to rapidly intensify and is forecast to approach coastal southern Mexico by late Wednesday.

The country is the world’s biggest exporter of coal, which is central to its economy, generating tax revenues and jobs.

Public-interest journalism speaks truth to power, so protecting press freedom is part of protecting democracy. But what does it take to digitally secure journalists’ work in an environment where critics, hackers, oppressive regimes, and others seem to have the free press in their crosshairs?

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(You can also find this episode on the Internet Archive and on YouTube.)

That’s what Harlo Holmes focuses on as Freedom of the Press Foundation’s digital security director. Her team provides training, consulting, security audits, and other support to newsrooms, independent journalists, freelancers, documentary filmmakers – anyone who is making independent journalism in the public interest – so that they can do their jobs more safely and securely. Holmes joins EFF’s Cindy Cohn and Jason Kelley to discuss the tools and techniques that help journalists protect themselves and their sources while keeping the world informed.  

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• The importance of protecting online anonymity on an ever-increasingly “data-greedy” internet
• How digital security nihilism in the United States compares with regions of the world where oppressive and repressive governance are more common
• Why compartmentalization can be a simple, easy approach to digital security
• The need for middleware to provide encryption and other protections that shield sources’ anonymity and journalists’ work product when using corporate data platforms
• How podcasters, YouTubers, and TikTokers fit into the broad sweep of media history, and need digital protections as well 

Harlo Holmes is the chief information security officer and director of digital security at Freedom of the Press Foundation. She strives to help individual journalists in various media organizations become confident and effective in securing their communications within their newsrooms, with their sources, and with the public at large. She is a media scholar, software programmer, and activist. Holmes was a regular contributor to the open-source mobile security collective Guardian Project, where she spearheaded the media metadata verification initiative currently empowering ProofMode, Save by OpenArchive, eyeWitness to Atrocities, and others. 

Resources: 

• SecureDrop
• The Tor Project
• EFF: “Privacy Isn't Dead. Far From It." (Feb. 13, 2024)
• Digital Dada Podcast: “Combatting Digital Security Nihilism featuring Harlo Holmes” (Dec. 20, 2023) 
• Reuters: “Inside the UAE’s secret hacking team of American mercenaries” (Jan. 30, 2019) 

What do you think of “How to Fix the Internet?” Share your feedback here.

Transcript

HARLO HOLMES: within the sphere of public interest journalism. The reason why it exists is because it holds truth to power and it doesn't have to be adversarial, although, that's our right as citizens on this planet, but it doesn't have to be adversarial. And over the tenure that I've had, I've seen so many amazing examples where affecting change through public interest journalism done right, with the most detail paid to the operational and digital security of an investigation, literally ended up with laws being changed and legislation being written in order to make sure the problem that the journalist pointed out does not happen again.
One of my favorites is with Reuters. They wrote a story about how members of the intelligence community in Washington DC, after they had left Washington DC, were being actively poached by intelligence services in the UAE.
So it would take, like, leaving members of the people working in Washington DC, place them in cushy intelligence jobs at the UAE in order to, like, work on programs that we know are like, surveillance heavy, antithetical to all of our interests, public interest as well as the interest of the United States government.
And when that reporting came out, literally like, uh, Congress approved a bill saying that you have to wait three years before you can go through that revolving door rotation. 
And that's the trajectory that makes me the most proud to work where I do.

CINDY COHN: That's Harlo Holmes talking about some of the critically important journalism that she is able to help facilitate in her role with the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
I'm Cindy Cohn, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

JASON KELLEY: And I'm Jason Kelley, EFF's activism director. This is our podcast, How to Fix the Internet.

CINDY COHN: On this show, we flip the script from the dystopian doom and gloom thinking we all get mired in when thinking about the future of tech -- we're here challenge ourselves, our guests and our listeners to imagine the better future that we could be working towards. What can we look forward to if we dare to dream about getting things right?

JASON KELLEY: Our guest today, Harlo Holmes, is the chief information security officer and the director of digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation where she teaches journalists how to keep themselves – and their sources – safe online.

CINDY COHN: We started off by getting Harlo to explain exactly how the Freedom of the Press Foundation operates.

HARLO HOLMES: What we do, I like to say, is a three-pillared approach to protecting press freedom in the 21st century. The first, absolutely most important is our advocacy team. So not only do we have a staff of lawyers and legal scholars that weigh in on First Amendment issues and protect them within the United States, we also have a fantastic advocacy team at our own little newsroom, the US Press Freedom Tracker, where we have reporters who, anytime members of the press have their right to perform their rightful function challenged, minimized, persecuted, et cetera, we have reporters who are there who report on it, and we stay with those cases for as long as it takes.
And that's something that we're incredibly proud of. That's just one pillar. The other pillars that we have, is our engineering wing. So perhaps you have heard of a tool called SecureDrop. In certain newsrooms all over the planet, it's actually installed in order to technologically enable, as much anonymity as, uh, technically possible. Between reporters at those newsrooms and members of the press at large who might want to be whistleblowers or just to, you know, like, uh, say hey to, a news outlet that they admire in a way that ensures their anonymity.
And then there is my small team. We are the digital security team. Uh, we do a lot of training, consulting, security audits, and other supports that we can provide to newsrooms, independent journalists, freelancers, documentary filmmakers, anyone who is making independent journalism in the public interest in order to do their job more safely and securely.

CINDY COHN: Yeah. I think this is a really important thing that the Freedom of the Press Foundation does. Specifically your piece of it, this kind of connective tissue between the people who are really busy doing the reporting and finding things out and the people who wanna give them information and making sure that this whole thing is protected in a secure way. And I appreciate that you put it third, but to me it's really central to how this whole thing works. So I think that's really important.
And of course, SecureDrop for, you know, old time EFF and digital rights people – we know that this piece of technology was developed by our friend Aaron Schwartz, before he passed away. And the Freedom Press Foundation has picked it up and really turned it from a good but small idea into something that is vital and in newsrooms all around the world.

HARLO HOLMES: Yes. And thank you very, very much, for recognizing those particular achievements. SecureDrop has grown over the past, what, 12 years? I would say, into not only a tool that enables, the groundbreaking amount of journalism that has pretty much changed the trajectory of current events over the years that it's been developed, but also, represents increasing advances in technology around security that everyone on the planet benefits from. So for example, SecureDrop would not be anywhere were it not for its deep collaboration with the Tor Project, right?
And for all of us who pay attention to, digital security cryptography and, the intersection with human rights, you know, that the Tor Network is a groundbreaking piece of technology that not only provides, you know, anonymity on the internet in an increasingly, like, data-greedy environment, but also, like, represents, the ways that people can access parts of the internet in so many different innovative ways. And investigative journalism use in Secure drop is just one example of the benefits of like having Tor around and having it supported.
And so, that's one example. Another example is that, as people's interactions with computers change, uh, the way that we interface with browsers change the. Interplay between, you know, like using a regular computer and accessing stuff on mobile, that's changed, right?
And so our team has, like, such commendable intellectual curiosity in talking about these nuances and finding ways to make people's safety using all of these interfaces better. And so even though, we build Secure Drop in service of promoting public interest journalism, the way that it reverberates in technology is something that we're incredibly proud of. And it's all done in open source, right? Which means that anyone can access it. Anyone can iterate upon it, anyone can benefit from it.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, and it, and everyone can trust it. 'cause you know, you might not be able to read the code, but many people can. And so developing this trust and security, you know, they go hand in hand.

HARLO HOLMES: Yes,

JASON KELLEY: You use this term "data-greedy," which I really love. I've never heard that before.

CINDY COHN: It's so good!

JASON KELLEY: So you just created this incredible term "data-greedy" that I've never heard anyone use and I love and it's a good descriptor, I think of sort of like why journalists, but also everyone needs to be aware of like the tracks that they're leaving, the digital security practices that they use because it's not even necessarily the case that that data collection is intended to be harmful, but we just live in this environment where data is collected, where it's, you know, used sometimes intentionally to track people, but often just for other reasons.
Let's talk a little bit about that third pillar. What is it that journalists specifically need to think about in terms of security? I think a lot of people probably who have never done journalism, don't really think about the dangers of collecting information, of talking to sources of, you know, protecting that, how, how should they be thinking about it and what are the kinds of things that you talk to people about?

HARLO HOLMES: Great question. First and foremost, I feel that our team at Freedom of the Press Foundation, leads every training with the assumption that a journalist's job is to tell the story in the most compelling and effective way. Their job is not to concern themselves with what data stewardship means.
What protection of digital assets means. That's our job. And so, we really, really lean into meeting people where they are and just giving them exactly what it is that they need to know in order to do this job better without putting undue pressure on them. And also without scaring the bejesus out of anyone.
Because when you do take stock of like how data greedy all of our devices are, it can be a little bit scary to the point of making people feel disempowered. And so we always want to avoid that.

CINDY COHN: What are some techniques you use to try to avoid that? 'Cause I think that's really central to a lot of work that we're trying to do to try to get people, beyond what I think my colleague, Eva Galperin called “privacy nihilism. I'm not sure if she started it. She's the one who I heard it from.

HARLO HOLMES: I probably have heard that from her as well. I love, Eva and, uh, she has been so instrumental in the way that I think through these issues over the past like decade so yeah, digital security nihilism is 100% a thing.
And, perhaps maybe later we can get into like the regional contours of that because people in the United States have or exhibit a certain amount of nihilism. And then if you talk to people in like Central and Eastern Europe, it's a different way. If you talk to people in Latin America and South America, it's a different way.
So having that perspective actually like really helps the contours around how you approach people in digital security education and training..

CINDY COHN: Oh please, tell us more. I'm fascinated by this.

HARLO HOLMES: OK, so, I do want to come back to your original question, but, that said, I can definitely do a detour into the historicity of, um, digital security nihilism and how it interplays with where you are on the planet.
It's all political and in the United States we have, well, even though we're currently like in a bit of a, or in a bit of a, in a crisis mode, where we are absolutely looking at, you know, like our rights to privacy, the concessions that we make, our prominence in building these technologies and thus having a little bit of, like, insider knowledge of what the contours are.
Uh, if you compare that to the digital security protections of people who are in, let's say, you know, like Central or Eastern Europe, where, historically, they have never had or not for, you know, like decades, um, if not even like, you know, a hundred years. Um, that access to transparency about what's being done to their data and also transparency into how that data has been taken away from them because they didn't have a seat at the table.
if you look at places in, Latin America, Central America, South America, there are plenty of places where loss of digital security also comes hand in hand with loss of physical security, right? Like speaking to someone over the phone can often, especially where journalists are considered, will often come with a threat of physical violence, often to the most extreme. Right. So, yeah, exactly. Which is, you know, according to, um, so many, you know, like academics and scholars who focus on press freedom, know that, that that is one of the most dangerous places on the planet to be a journalist because failures in digital security can often come with literally, you know, like being summarily executed, right? So, every region on this planet has their own contours. It is constantly a fascinating challenge and one that I'm willing to meet in order to understand these contexts and to appropriately apply the right digital security solutions to the audiences that we find ourselves in front of.

CINDY COHN: Yeah. Okay. Back to my original question, sorry.

HARLO HOLMES: Go for it.

JASON KELLEY: Well, what, what is, I mean, did we get to the point? I don't think we really covered yet, really the basics of, like, what journalists need to think about in terms of their security. I mean, that's, you know, I, I, I love talking about privacy nihilism and how we can fight it, but, um, we would talk for three hours if we did that.

HARLO HOLMES: Yeah. Um, so quite frankly, one of the things that we're leaning most heavily on, and this is pretty much across the board, right, has to do with compartmentalization. I feel that, uh, recently within the United States, it's become really like technicolor to people. So they understand exactly why that's important, but it's always been important and it's always like something that you can apply everywhere.
There's always historically been attention as, uh, since the very moment the first iPhone stepped onto the market, this temptation to go the easy route. Everything is on the same device. You're calling your mom. You're, you know, like researching a flight on Expedia. You're, you know, Googling something. And then you're also talking to a source about a sensitive story, or you're also like, you know, gonna like, go through the comments in the Google Doc on the report that you're writing regarding a national security issue.
People definitely do need to be encouraged to like decouple the ways that they treat devices because these devices are not our friends. And the companies that like, create the experiences on these devices, they are definitely not our friends. They never have been.
But I hear you on that and, uh, reminding people, despite their digital security nihilism, despite their temptation to do the easiest of things, just reminding people to apply appropriate compartmentalization.
We take things very slowly. We take things as easily as we possibly can because there are ways that people can get started in order to, actually be effective at this until they get to the point where it actually means something either to their livelihoods or the story that they're working on and that of the sources that they, interact with. But yeah, that's pretty much where it starts.
Also, credential security is like the bread and butter. And I've been at this for, almost exactly 10 years at FPF and, you know, within this industry for about 15.
And it never changes that people really, really do need to maintain as much rigor regarding how people access their accounts. So like, you gotta have a unique, complex password. You have to be using a password manager. You have to be using multifactor authentication. And the ways that you can get it have changed over the years and they get better and better and better.
You have to be vigilant against phishing, but the ways that people try to phish you are like, you know, increasingly, like, sneakier. You know, we deal with it as it comes, but ultimately that has never changed. It really hasn't.

CINDY COHN: So we've, we've talked a little bit about kind of the nihilism and the kind of, thicket of things that you have to kind of make your way through in order to, help, journalists and their sources feel more secure. So let's flip it a bit. What does it look like if it's better? What are the kinds of places where you see, you know, if we could get this right, it would start to get better?

HARLO HOLMES: I love this question because I do feel that I've been able to look at it from multiple sides. Similarly, as I was describing how Secure Drop not only enables impactful public interest journalism, it represents a herculean feat of cryptography and techno activism. This is one example, Signal is another example.
So, one of the things I thought was so poignant when, as Joe Biden was exiting the White House, one of his, like, parting shots was to say like, everyone should use Signal. Like, and the reason why he says this is because, Signal not only represents like a cool app or like, you know, a thing that, like, hackers love and you know, like we can be proud of 'cause we got in on the first floor.
It represents the evolution of technologies that we should have. Our phone conversations had not been encrypted. Now they are. Get with it. You know, like that's the point. So from a technical perspective, that's what is so important and that's something that we always want to position ourselves to champion.

JASON KELLEY: Let's take a quick moment to say thank you to our sponsor. How to Fix The Internet is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology, enriching people's lives through a keener appreciation of our increasingly technological world and portraying the complex humanity of scientists, engineers, and mathematicians.
We also wanna thank EFF members and donors. You can become a member for just $25 and for a little more, you can get some good, very stylish gear. Your support is the reason we can keep our digital security guides for journalists, and everyone else, up to date to deal with the latest threats. So please, if you like what we do, go to eff.org/pod to donate.
We also wanted to share that our friend Cory Doctorow has a new podcast. Listen to this.
[Who Broke the Internet trailer]

JASON KELLEY: And now back to our conversation with Harlo Holmes.
Are there tools that are missing that, in a better world you're like, oh, this would be great to have, you know, or things that maybe couldn't exist without changes to technology or to the way that people, work or to policy that you just absolutely hear, you know, oh, it would be nice if we could do this, but for whatever reason, that's not a place we're at yet.

HARLO HOLMES: Yeah. Actually I have started to have a couple of conversations about that. Um, before I answer, I will say that I don't have, like, the bandwidth or time to be a technologist. Um, it's like my code writing days are probably over, but I have so many opinions.

JASON KELLEY: Of course. So many ideas.

HARLO HOLMES: Yeah. Um -

CINDY COHN: Well, we're your audience, right? I mean, you know, the EFF audience are people who, you know, uh, not overwhelmingly, um, but a lot of people with technical skills who are trying to figure out, okay, how do I, how do I apply them to do good? And, and, and I think, you know, over the years we've seen a lot of really well-meaning efforts by technologists to try to do something to support other communities that weren't grounded enough in those communities, and so didn't really work.
And I think your work at Freedom of the Press Foundation, again, has kind of bridged that gap, especially for journalists. But there's, there's broader things. so where else could you see places where technologists could really dig in and have this work in a way that sometimes it does, but often it doesn't.

HARLO HOLMES: I love that question because that is exactly the point, right? Bridging the gap. And I feel that like at FPF, given, you know how I introduce it with like the three pillars or whatever, we are uniquely poised in order to perform, like, you know, user research within a community, right? And then have that directly inform technology mandates, have that directly inform advocacy, uh, like, you know, charge to action.
So I think anyone who finds themselves at those cross sections, that's exactly what you have to kind of, like, strategize around in order to be as effective as possible. In terms of, like, actual technologies, one thing and I already kind of started having these conversations with people, is let's take our relationship within a typical newsroom to cloud services like Google when you are drafting, right? I mean it's anecdotal and like the plural anecdote is not data, right. But that said, we do know that given that, you know, Google's Drive has so much machine learning and AI enabled power, drafting a story that's like the next Watergate, right? Like that's actually going to get you put in jail before you get to publish, right?
Because we know about their capabilities. And, not gonna, like, talk about specific anecdotes, but like that is a thing, right? But one of the things, or like the big contention is that actually, like, in terms of collaboration, how effective you can be writing a story, how like, you know, you rely on the comments section with your editor, right, as you're, you know, massaging a story. You rely on those features as much.
What are 0pen source, like, you know, hacker ethos alternatives. We have, you know, we have Nextcloud, we have uh, CryptPad, we have Etherpad. But all of those things are insufficient not only, like, in terms of their feature set in what needs to be accommodated in order for a journalist to work, right, but also, can be insufficient in terms of their sustainability models, the fact that we can rely upon them in the future. And as much as we love all of those people at those developer initiatives, no one is supporting them to make sure that they can be in a place to be a viable alternative, right?
So, what's the next frontier, right? If I don't want to live in a world where a Nextcloud doesn't exist, where a CryptPad doesn't exist, or an Etherpad, like that's not what I'm saying, 'cause they're fantastic and they're really great to use in creative scenarios.
However, if you're thinking about the meat and potatoes day to day in a typical newsroom, and you have to contend with a tech giant like Google that has become increasingly, like, ideologically unreliable. Guess what? They actually do have a really cool tool called client side encryption, right? So now you're actually, like, removing the people who decide at Google what is ideologically acceptable use of their tools, right? You're removing them from the position where they can make any decision or scrutinize further and client side encryption.
Or like anything that provides end-to-end encryption, that is like the ultimate goal. That's what we should protect. Whether it is in Secure Drop, whether it is in Nextcloud or CryptPad, or if it's in Google itself. And so actually, I would recommend, like, anybody who has these spare cycles to contribute to a developer effort to tackle this type of middleware that allows us to still have as much autonomy as possible within the ecosystems that we have to kind of work within.

CINDY COHN: I love that. I mean, it’s a story about interoperability, right? This, you know, what you're talking about, middleware in this area is like, we should be able to make a choice. Either use things that are not hosted corporately or use things that are hosted corporately, but be able to have our cake and eat it too.
Have a tool that helps us interoperate with that system without the bad parts of the deal, right. And in this instance, the bad parts of the deal are a piece of it, it’s the business model, but a piece of it is just compliance with, with government in a way that the, the company, is increasing, you know, used to fight. They still fight some.

HARLO HOLMES: They still fight, yes.

CINDY COHN: They might fight, yes, but they also don't have the ability to fight that much. We might wanna go to something that's a little, that, that gives them the ability to say, look, we don't have access to that information. Just like Apple doesn't have access to the information that's stored on your iPhone. They made a policy decision to protect you.

HARLO HOLMES: But now we're looking at what happened in the UK, and we’re like, hm.

CINDY COHN: Exactly, but then the government has to act, you know, so it's always a fight on the technical level, and on the policy level, sadly. I wish that encryption we could, you know, fix with just technology. But we need other forms of protection. but I love this idea of having so many options, you know, some that are decentralized, some that are hosted, you know, in the nonprofit world, some that might be publicly supported, and then some that are the corporate side, but with the protections that we need.
And I just feel like we need all of the above. Anybody who asks you to choose between these strategies is kind of getting you caught in a side fight when the main fight is how do we get people the privacy that they need to do their work?

HARLO HOLMES: Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things that gives me the most hope is, continuing to fight in a space where we are all about the options.
We're all about giving people options and being as creative as possible and building options for everyone.

JASON KELLEY: What else gives you hope? Because you've been at Freedom of the Press for a while now, and we're at a difficult time in a lot of ways, but I assume there are other things that you've, you know, seen change over the years in a positive way, right? Because it feels too easy to say, look, things are getting dire, because in many ways they are. But, but what else gives you hope, given how long you've been working on this issue?

HARLO HOLMES: I actually, I love really thinking through the new challenges of other types of media that is represented. So much of my career had been, pretty much centered around traditional print and/or digital. However, I am so enthusiastic about being alongside, like, podcasters and YouTube creators as they navigate these new challenges and also understand, like, the long history of media theory, where we've gone as an industry in order to understand how it applies to them.
So one thing that I thought was pretty cool was having a conversation, recently, with a somewhat influential, TikTok person about class consciousness in regards to whether or not people who are influencers should actually start considering themselves as journalists legitimately.
And one of the things that I mentioned had to do with the fact that, you know, like in the 2010s, bloggers were not considered quote unquote journalists, and yet blogging has become one of the most influential, even like from a financial perspective, like, drivers within this market. So influencers should not consider themselves anything other than journalists, because their fights are – especially like when, you know, platforms get involved and like what their economic model looks like and their, you know, integrity and ethos within journalism – like, that's the media history that we are building right now. So that excites me.

CINDY COHN: Oh, that's great. You know, EFF was involved in some of the early cases about whether bloggers could be protected by journalism shield laws, we had a case called Apple v. Does a long time ago that, uh, that helped establish that in the state of California. But I, I really love helping, kind of, new media think of itself as media.
And also, I mean, the way that I always think about it is, it's not whether you're a journalist, it's whether you're doing journalism, right? It's the verb part. and that, different framing than I think helps break people out of the mold of, well, I do some stuff that's just kind of silly, and that might not be journalism, but if you're bringing news to the public, if you're bringing information to the public that the public wants, even if it's in a fashion context, like, that's journalism and it should have, uh, you should think of yourself that way because there is this rich history of how we protect that and how important that is to society, not just about the kind of hard political issues, but actually, you know, in creating and shaping and managing our culture as well.

HARLO HOLMES: Mm-hmm. I agree 100%.

JASON KELLEY: How did you end up doing this kind of digital security work specifically for journalists? Did you make an intentional choice at some point that you wanted to help journalists, or have you sort of found yourself here and it's just incredible, important work?

HARLO HOLMES: A little bit of both. I'm an avid media consumer who cares a lot about media history, and in undergraduate school I studied comparative literature, which is all based off of the fact that the media itself has its own unique power. And the way that it is expressed says way more than what is actually said.
And I've always found that to be the most important thing to do. As far as technology is concerned, as any young inquisitive person might do, I got into coding like so hardcore and, it wasn't until I was in grad school that I discovered, via a class with this fantastic person, Nathan Freitas, who's a Harvard, uh, Berkman Fellow Emeritus, and also the head of the Guardian Project, where he opened my eyes to the fact that like the code that you're writing, just like, you know, for fun or whatever, like you can actually use this to defend human rights.
And so it was kind of the culmination of those ideas that led me through, like, a couple of things. Like, um, I was an open news fellow at, um, the New York Times for about a year where I worked with the computer assisted reporting team and that was really impressive. And that was the first time where I got to see how people will, like, scrape a webpage in order to write an investigative story.
And I was like, wow, people do that that's so cool! And then also because I was hanging out with like Nathan and other folks, um, I was the, the one of the kids in the newsroom floor who knew what Tor was, they're like, that's cool. How do we use this in journalism? I'm like, well, I got ideas. And that's how, kind of how my career got started.

CINDY COHN: That's so great. Nathan's an old friend of EFF. That's so fun to hear the tentacles of how, you know, people inspire other people. Inspire other people. I think that's part of the fun story of digital rights.

HARLO HOLMES: Yeah, yeah. I agree. I think anyone is super duper lucky to understand not only like the place that you occupy right now, but also where it sits within, like, a long history. And, I also really love, any experience where I get to kind of touch people with that as well.

CINDY COHN: Nice. Ooh, that's a nice place to end. What do you think, Jason?

JASON KELLEY: That sounds great. Yeah. And think of all the people who are saying the same thing about you now that you're saying about Nathan. Right. It never stops.

HARLO HOLMES: It shouldn't ever stop. It shouldn't. This is our history.

CINDY COHN: Oh, Harlo, thank you so much for coming and spending time with us. It's just been a delight to talk to you and good luck going forward. The times really need people like you.

HARLO HOLMES: Thank you so much. Um, it's always a pleasure to talk to you and, um, I love your pod. I love the work that you do, and I'll, you know, see you next time.

JASON KELLEY: Well, I'm really glad that we got a chance to talk to Harlo because these conversations with folks who work in these, um, specific areas with people are really helpful when, you know, it's not our job every day to talk to journalists, just like it's not our job every day to talk to specific advocates about specific issues. But you learn exactly what the kinds of things are that they think about and what we need to get things right and what it'll look like if we do get things right for journalists or, or whomever it is.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, and I think the thing that I loved about the conversation is the stuff that she articulated is stuff that will help all of us. You know, it's a particular need for journalists. But when, you know, when we asked her, you know, what kind of tools need to exist, you know, she pointed, you know, not only to the open source decentralized tools like Ether Pad and things like that, but to basically an interoperability issue that making Google Docs secure, so that Google doesn't know what you're saying on your Google Docs. And I would toss Slack in there as well. That, you know, taking the tools that people rely on every day and building in things that make them secure against the company and against government coming and strong arming the company into giving them information, like that's a tool that will be really great for journalists, and I can see that. It'll also help all the rest of us.

JASON KELLEY: Yeah.

CINDY COHN: And the, you know, the other thing she said when she was giving, you know, what advice do you give to journalists, like off the top? She said, well, use separate devices for the things that you're doing and don't have everything on one device, you know, because, uh, I think I love the, what she say, they're data-hungry?

JASON KELLEY: Data-greedy.

CINDY COHN: Data-greedy, even better. That our devices are data greedy. So separating them gives us something. That's a useful piece of information for anyone who’s in activism.

JASON KELLY: Yeah. And so, I mean, I, I wanna say easy. It's not always simple to have two devices, but the idea that the solution wasn't something more complicated. It reminds me that often the best advice is something that's fairly simple and that really, you know, anyone who has the ability and the money could have multiple devices and, and journalists are no different.
So it reminded me also that, you know, when we're working on things like our surveillance, self-defense guides, it's helpful to remember that, like Harlo said, her job is to make the journalist’s job easy, right? They shouldn't have to think about this stuff. And that's how sort of the spirit of the guides that we write as well.
And that was just a really good reminder that sometimes you feel like you're trying to convince everyone, or explain to them how all these tools work and actually it might be better to think about, well, you shouldn't have to understand all of this deeply like I do. In some cases you just need to know that this works and that's what you need to use.

CINDY COHN: Yeah, I think that's right and I, you know, obviously, you know, ‘just go out and buy a second device’ isn't advice that we would give to people in parts of the world where that's a really a prohibitive suggestion. But there are many parts of the world, and journalists, many of them, live in them, where it is actually not that hard a thing to do to get yourself a burner phone or get a simpler phone for your work, rather than having to try to, you know, configure one device to really support all of those things.
And turning on two FA right? Turning on two factor authentication. Another thing that is just good advice for anybody. So, you know, what I'm hearing is that, you know, if we build a place that is better for journalists, it's better for all of us and vice versa. If we build a world that's better for all of us, it's also better for journalists. So, I really liked that. I also really liked her articulating and lifting up the role that the Tor project plays in what they do with Secure Drop. What they do to try to help protect journalists who have, uh, confidential sources.
Because we're, again, as we're looking into all of these various tools that help create a better future, a more secure future, we're discovering that actually open source tools, like Tor, underlie many different pieces of the better world. And so we're starting to see kind of the network for good, right, the conspiracy for good of a lot of the open source security projects.

JASON KELLEY: I didn't really realize when we were putting together these guests for this season, how interconnected they all were, and it's been really wonderful to hear everyone lift everyone else up. They really do all depend on one another, and it is really important to see that for the people who maybe don't think about it and use these tools as one-offs, right?

CINDY COHN: Yeah. And I think as those of us who are trying to make the internet better, recognizing that we're all in this together, so as we're headed into this time, where we're seeing a lot of targeted attacks on different pieces of a secure world. You know, recognizing that these things are interconnected and then building strength from there seems to me to be a really important strategy.

JASON KELLEY: And that's our episode for today. If you have feedback or suggestions, we'd love to hear from you. Visit eff.org/podcast and click on listener feedback. And while you're there, you can become a member and donate, maybe even pick up some of the merch, and just see what's happening in digital rights this week and every week.
Our theme music is by Nat Keefe of Beat Mower with Reed Mathis, and How to Fix the Internet is supported by the Alfred P SLoan Foundation's program and public understanding of science and technology. We'll see you next time. I'm Jason Kelley.

CINDY COHN: And I'm Cindy Cohn.

MUSIC CREDITS: This podcast is licensed creative commons attribution 4.0 international, and includes the following music licensed creative commons attribution 3.0 unported by its creators: Drops of H2, The Filtered Water Treatment by Jay Lang. Sound design, additional music and theme remixes by Gaetan Harris.

The advanced semiconductor material gallium nitride will likely be key for the next generation of high-speed communication systems and the power electronics needed for state-of-the-art data centers.

Unfortunately, the high cost of gallium nitride (GaN) and the specialization required to incorporate this semiconductor material into conventional electronics have limited its use in commercial applications.

Now, researchers from MIT and elsewhere have developed a new fabrication process that integrates high-performance GaN transistors onto standard silicon CMOS chips in a way that is low-cost and scalable, and compatible with existing semiconductor foundries.

Their method involves building many tiny transistors on the surface of a GaN chip, cutting out each individual transistor, and then bonding just the necessary number of transistors onto a silicon chip using a low-temperature process that preserves the functionality of both materials.

The cost remains minimal since only a tiny amount of GaN material is added to the chip, but the resulting device can receive a significant performance boost from compact, high-speed transistors. In addition, by separating the GaN circuit into discrete transistors that can be spread over the silicon chip, the new technology is able to reduce the temperature of the overall system.

The researchers used this process to fabricate a power amplifier, an essential component in mobile phones, that achieves higher signal strength and efficiencies than devices with silicon transistors. In a smartphone, this could improve call quality, boost wireless bandwidth, enhance connectivity, and extend battery life.

Because their method fits into standard procedures, it could improve electronics that exist today as well as future technologies. Down the road, the new integration scheme could even enable quantum applications, as GaN performs better than silicon at the cryogenic temperatures essential for many types of quantum computing.

“If we can bring the cost down, improve the scalability, and, at the same time, enhance the performance of the electronic device, it is a no-brainer that we should adopt this technology. We’ve combined the best of what exists in silicon with the best possible gallium nitride electronics. These hybrid chips can revolutionize many commercial markets,” says Pradyot Yadav, an MIT graduate student and lead author of a paper on this method.

He is joined on the paper by fellow MIT graduate students Jinchen Wang and Patrick Darmawi-Iskandar; MIT postdoc John Niroula; senior authors Ulrich L. Rohde, a visiting scientist at the Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL), and Ruonan Han, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and member of MTL; and Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of EECS, and director of MTL; as well as collaborators at Georgia Tech and the Air Force Research Laboratory. The research was recently presented at the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.

Swapping transistors

Gallium nitride is the second most widely used semiconductor in the world, just after silicon, and its unique properties make it ideal for applications such as lighting, radar systems and power electronics.

The material has been around for decades and, to get access to its maximum performance, it is important for chips made of GaN to be connected to digital chips made of silicon, also called CMOS chips. To enable this, some integration methods bond GaN transistors onto a CMOS chip by soldering the connections, but this limits how small the GaN transistors can be. The tinier the transistors, the higher the frequency at which they can work.

Other methods integrate an entire gallium nitride wafer on top of a silicon wafer, but using so much material is extremely costly, especially since the GaN is only needed in a few tiny transistors. The rest of the material in the GaN wafer is wasted.

“We wanted to combine the functionality of GaN with the power of digital chips made of silicon, but without having to compromise on either cost of bandwidth. We achieved that by adding super-tiny discrete gallium nitride transistors right on top of the silicon chip,” Yadav explains.

The new chips are the result of a multistep process.

First, a tightly packed collection of miniscule transistors is fabricated across the entire surface of a GaN wafer. Using very fine laser technology, they cut each one down to just the size of the transistor, which is 240 by 410 microns, forming what they call a dielet. (A micron is one millionth of a meter.)

Each transistor is fabricated with tiny copper pillars on top, which they use to bond directly to the copper pillars on the surface of a standard silicon CMOS chip. Copper to copper bonding can be done at temperatures below 400 degrees Celsius, which is low enough to avoid damaging either material.

Current GaN integration techniques require bonds that utilize gold, an expensive material that needs much higher temperatures and stronger bonding forces than copper. Since gold can contaminate the tools used in most semiconductor foundries, it typically requires specialized facilities.

“We wanted a process that was low-cost, low-temperature, and low-force, and copper wins on all of those related to gold. At the same time, it has better conductivity,” Yadav says.

A new tool

To enable the integration process, they created a specialized new tool that can carefully integrate the extremely tiny GaN transistor with the silicon chips. The tool uses a vacuum to hold the dielet as it moves on top of a silicon chip, zeroing in on the copper bonding interface with nanometer precision.

They used advanced microscopy to monitor the interface, and then when the dielet is in the right position, they apply heat and pressure to bond the GaN transistor to the chip.

“For each step in the process, I had to find a new collaborator who knew how to do the technique that I needed, learn from them, and then integrate that into my platform. It was two years of constant learning,” Yadav says.

Once the researchers had perfected the fabrication process, they demonstrated it by developing power amplifiers, which are radio frequency circuits that boost wireless signals.

Their devices achieved higher bandwidth and better gain than devices made with traditional silicon transistors. Each compact chip has an area of less than half a square millimeter.

In addition, because the silicon chip they used in their demonstration is based on Intel 16 22nm FinFET state-of-the-art metallization and passive options, they were able to incorporate components often used in silicon circuits, such as neutralization capacitors. This significantly improved the gain of the amplifier, bringing it one step closer to enabling the next generation of wireless technologies.

“To address the slowdown of Moore’s Law in transistor scaling, heterogeneous integration has emerged as a promising solution for continued system scaling, reduced form factor, improved power efficiency, and cost optimization. Particularly in wireless technology, the tight integration of compound semiconductors with silicon-based wafers is critical to realizing unified systems of front-end integrated circuits, baseband processors, accelerators, and memory for next-generation antennas-to-AI platforms. This work makes a significant advancement by demonstrating 3D integration of multiple GaN chips with silicon CMOS and pushes the boundaries of current technological capabilities,” says Atom Watanabe, a research scientist at IBM who was not involved with this paper.

This work is supported, in part, by the U.S. Department of Defense through the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship Program and CHIMES, one of the seven centers in JUMP 2.0, a Semiconductor Research Corporation Program by the Department of Defense and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Fabrication was carried out using facilities at MIT.Nano, the Air Force Research Laboratory, and Georgia Tech.

MIT Morningside Academy for Design (MAD) Fellow Caitlin Morris is an architect, artist, researcher, and educator who has studied psychology and used online learning tools to teach herself coding and other skills. She’s a soft-spoken observer, with a keen interest in how people use space and respond to their environments. Combining her observational skills with active community engagement, she works at the intersection of technology, education, and human connection to improve digital learning platforms.

Morris grew up in rural upstate New York in a family of makers. She learned to sew, cook, and build things with wood at a young age. One of her earlier memories is of a small handsaw she made — with the help of her father, a professional carpenter. It had wooden handles on both sides to make sawing easier for her.

Later, when she needed to learn something, she’d turn to project-based communities, rather than books. She taught herself to code late at night, taking advantage of community-oriented platforms where people answer questions and post sketches, allowing her to see the code behind the objects people made.

“For me, that was this huge, wake-up moment of feeling like there was a path to expression that was not a traditional computer-science classroom,” she says. “I think that’s partly why I feel so passionate about what I’m doing now. That was the big transformation: having that community available in this really personal, project-based way.”

Subsequently, Morris has become involved in community-based learning in diverse ways: She’s a co-organizer of the MIT Media Lab’s Festival of Learning; she leads creative coding community meetups; and she’s been active in the open-source software community development.

“My years of organizing learning and making communities — both in person and online — have shown me firsthand how powerful social interaction can be for motivation and curiosity,” Morris said. “My research is really about identifying which elements of that social magic are most essential, so we can design digital environments that better support those dynamics.”

Even in her artwork, Morris sometimes works with a collective. She’s contributed to the creation of about 10 large art installations that combine movement, sound, imagery, lighting, and other technologies to immerse the visitor in an experience evoking some aspect of nature, such as flowing water, birds in flight, or crowd kinetics. These marvelous installations are commanding and calming at the same time, possibly because they focus the mind, eye, and sometimes the ear.

She did much of this work with New York-based Hypersonic, a company of artists and technologists specializing in large kinetic installations in public spaces. Before that, she earned a BS in psychology and a BS in architectural building sciences from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, then an MFA in design and technology from the Parsons School of Design at The New School.

During, in between, after, and sometimes concurrently, she taught design, coding, and other technologies at the high school, undergraduate, and graduate-student levels.

“I think what kind of got me hooked on teaching was that the way I learned as a child was not the same as in the classroom,” Morris explains. “And I later saw this in many of my students. I got the feeling that the normal way of learning things was not working for them. And they thought it was their fault. They just didn’t really feel welcome within the traditional education model.”

Morris says that when she worked with those students, tossing aside tradition and instead saying — “You know, we’re just going to do this animation. Or we’re going to make this design or this website or these graphics, and we’re going to approach it in this totally different way” — she saw people “kind of unlock and be like, ‘Oh my gosh. I never thought I could do that.’

“For me, that was the hook, that’s the magic of it. Because I was coming from that experience of having to figure out those unlock mechanisms for myself, it was really exciting to be able to share them with other people, those unlock moments.”

For her doctoral work with the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group, she’s focusing on the personal space and emotional gaps associated with learning, particularly online and AI-assisted learning. This research builds on her experience increasing human connection in both physical and virtual learning environments.

“I’m developing a framework that combines AI-driven behavioral analysis with human expert assessment to study social learning dynamics,” she says. “My research investigates how social interaction patterns influence curiosity development and intrinsic motivation in learning, with particular focus on understanding how these dynamics differ between real peers and AI-supported environments.”

The first step in her research is determining which elements of social interaction are not replaceable by an AI-based digital tutor. Following that assessment, her goal is to build a prototype platform for experiential learning.

“I’m creating tools that can simultaneously track observable behaviors — like physical actions, language cues, and interaction patterns — while capturing learners’ subjective experiences through reflection and interviews,” Morris explains. “This approach helps connect what people do with how they feel about their learning experience.

“I aim to make two primary contributions: first, analysis tools for studying social learning dynamics; and second, prototype tools that demonstrate practical approaches for supporting social curiosity in digital learning environments. These contributions could help bridge the gap between the efficiency of digital platforms and the rich social interaction that occurs in effective in-person learning.”

Her goals make Morris a perfect fit for the MIT MAD Fellowship. One statement in MAD’s mission is: “Breaking away from traditional education, we foster creativity, critical thinking, making, and collaboration, exploring a range of dynamic approaches to prepare students for complex, real-world challenges.”

Morris wants to help community organizations deal with the rapid AI-powered changes in education, once she finishes her doctorate in 2026. “What should we do with this ‘physical space versus virtual space’ divide?” she asks. That is the space currently captivating Morris’s thoughts.

Research has shown that large language models (LLMs) tend to overemphasize information at the beginning and end of a document or conversation, while neglecting the middle.

This “position bias” means that, if a lawyer is using an LLM-powered virtual assistant to retrieve a certain phrase in a 30-page affidavit, the LLM is more likely to find the right text if it is on the initial or final pages.

MIT researchers have discovered the mechanism behind this phenomenon.

They created a theoretical framework to study how information flows through the machine-learning architecture that forms the backbone of LLMs. They found that certain design choices which control how the model processes input data can cause position bias.

Their experiments revealed that model architectures, particularly those affecting how information is spread across input words within the model, can give rise to or intensify position bias, and that training data also contribute to the problem.

In addition to pinpointing the origins of position bias, their framework can be used to diagnose and correct it in future model designs.

This could lead to more reliable chatbots that stay on topic during long conversations, medical AI systems that reason more fairly when handling a trove of patient data, and code assistants that pay closer attention to all parts of a program.

“These models are black boxes, so as an LLM user, you probably don’t know that position bias can cause your model to be inconsistent. You just feed it your documents in whatever order you want and expect it to work. But by understanding the underlying mechanism of these black-box models better, we can improve them by addressing these limitations,” says Xinyi Wu, a graduate student in the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS), and first author of a paper on this research.

Her co-authors include Yifei Wang, an MIT postdoc; and senior authors Stefanie Jegelka, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and a member of IDSS and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and Ali Jadbabaie, professor and head of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a core faculty member of IDSS, and a principal investigator in LIDS. The research will be presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning.

Analyzing attention

LLMs like Claude, Llama, and GPT-4 are powered by a type of neural network architecture known as a transformer. Transformers are designed to process sequential data, encoding a sentence into chunks called tokens and then learning the relationships between tokens to predict what words comes next.

These models have gotten very good at this because of the attention mechanism, which uses interconnected layers of data processing nodes to make sense of context by allowing tokens to selectively focus on, or attend to, related tokens.

But if every token can attend to every other token in a 30-page document, that quickly becomes computationally intractable. So, when engineers build transformer models, they often employ attention masking techniques which limit the words a token can attend to.

For instance, a causal mask only allows words to attend to those that came before it.

Engineers also use positional encodings to help the model understand the location of each word in a sentence, improving performance.

The MIT researchers built a graph-based theoretical framework to explore how these modeling choices, attention masks and positional encodings, could affect position bias.

“Everything is coupled and tangled within the attention mechanism, so it is very hard to study. Graphs are a flexible language to describe the dependent relationship among words within the attention mechanism and trace them across multiple layers,” Wu says.

Their theoretical analysis suggested that causal masking gives the model an inherent bias toward the beginning of an input, even when that bias doesn’t exist in the data.

If the earlier words are relatively unimportant for a sentence’s meaning, causal masking can cause the transformer to pay more attention to its beginning anyway.

“While it is often true that earlier words and later words in a sentence are more important, if an LLM is used on a task that is not natural language generation, like ranking or information retrieval, these biases can be extremely harmful,” Wu says.

As a model grows, with additional layers of attention mechanism, this bias is amplified because earlier parts of the input are used more frequently in the model’s reasoning process.

They also found that using positional encodings to link words more strongly to nearby words can mitigate position bias. The technique refocuses the model’s attention in the right place, but its effect can be diluted in models with more attention layers.

And these design choices are only one cause of position bias — some can come from training data the model uses to learn how to prioritize words in a sequence.

“If you know your data are biased in a certain way, then you should also finetune your model on top of adjusting your modeling choices,” Wu says.

Lost in the middle

After they’d established a theoretical framework, the researchers performed experiments in which they systematically varied the position of the correct answer in text sequences for an information retrieval task.

The experiments showed a “lost-in-the-middle” phenomenon, where retrieval accuracy followed a U-shaped pattern. Models performed best if the right answer was located at the beginning of the sequence. Performance declined the closer it got to the middle before rebounding a bit if the correct answer was near the end.

Ultimately, their work suggests that using a different masking technique, removing extra layers from the attention mechanism, or strategically employing positional encodings could reduce position bias and improve a model’s accuracy.

“By doing a combination of theory and experiments, we were able to look at the consequences of model design choices that weren’t clear at the time. If you want to use a model in high-stakes applications, you must know when it will work, when it won’t, and why,” Jadbabaie says.

In the future, the researchers want to further explore the effects of positional encodings and study how position bias could be strategically exploited in certain applications.

“These researchers offer a rare theoretical lens into the attention mechanism at the heart of the transformer model. They provide a compelling analysis that clarifies longstanding quirks in transformer behavior, showing that attention mechanisms, especially with causal masks, inherently bias models toward the beginning of sequences. The paper achieves the best of both worlds — mathematical clarity paired with insights that reach into the guts of real-world systems,” says Amin Saberi, professor and director of the Stanford University Center for Computational Market Design, who was not involved with this work.

This research is supported, in part, by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, and an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship.

MIT researchers have designed a compact, low-power receiver for 5G-compatible smart devices that is about 30 times more resilient to a certain type of interference than some traditional wireless receivers.

The low-cost receiver would be ideal for battery-powered internet of things (IoT) devices like environmental sensors, smart thermostats, or other devices that need to run continuously for a long time, such as health wearables, smart cameras, or industrial monitoring sensors.

The researchers’ chip uses a passive filtering mechanism that consumes less than a milliwatt of static power while protecting both the input and output of the receiver’s amplifier from unwanted wireless signals that could jam the device.

Key to the new approach is a novel arrangement of precharged, stacked capacitors, which are connected by a network of tiny switches. These miniscule switches need much less power to be turned on and off than those typically used in IoT receivers.

The receiver’s capacitor network and amplifier are carefully arranged to leverage a phenomenon in amplification that allows the chip to use much smaller capacitors than would typically be necessary. 

“This receiver could help expand the capabilities of IoT gadgets. Smart devices like health monitors or industrial sensors could become smaller and have longer battery lives. They would also be more reliable in crowded radio environments, such as factory floors or smart city networks,” says Soroush Araei, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student at MIT and lead author of a paper on the receiver.

He is joined on the paper by Mohammad Barzgari, a postdoc in the MIT Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE); Haibo Yang, an EECS graduate student; and senior author Negar Reiskarimian, the X-Window Consortium Career Development Assistant Professor in EECS at MIT and a member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories and RLE. The research was recently presented at the IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.

A new standard

A receiver acts as the intermediary between an IoT device and its environment. Its job is to detect and amplify a wireless signal, filter out any interference, and then convert it into digital data for processing.

Traditionally, IoT receivers operate on fixed frequencies and suppress interference using a single narrow-band filter, which is simple and inexpensive.

But the new technical specifications of the 5G mobile network enable reduced-capability devices that are more affordable and energy-efficient. This opens a range of IoT applications to the faster data speeds and increased network capability of 5G. These next-generation IoT devices need receivers that can tune across a wide range of frequencies while still being cost-effective and low-power.

“This is extremely challenging because now we need to not only think about the power and cost of the receiver, but also flexibility to address numerous interferers that exist in the environment,” Araei says.

To reduce the size, cost, and power consumption of an IoT device, engineers can’t rely on the bulky, off-chip filters that are typically used in devices that operate on a wide frequency range.

One solution is to use a network of on-chip capacitors that can filter out unwanted signals. But these capacitor networks are prone to special type of signal noise known as harmonic interference.

In prior work, the MIT researchers developed a novel switch-capacitor network that targets these harmonic signals as early as possible in the receiver chain, filtering out unwanted signals before they are amplified and converted into digital bits for processing.

Shrinking the circuit

Here, they extended that approach by using the novel switch-capacitor network as the feedback path in an amplifier with negative gain. This configuration leverages the Miller effect, a phenomenon that enables small capacitors to behave like much larger ones.

“This trick lets us meet the filtering requirement for narrow-band IoT without physically large components, which drastically shrinks the size of the circuit,” Araei says.

Their receiver has an active area of less than 0.05 square millimeters.

One challenge the researchers had to overcome was determining how to apply enough voltage to drive the switches while keeping the overall power supply of the chip at only 0.6 volts.

In the presence of interfering signals, such tiny switches can turn on and off in error, especially if the voltage required for switching is extremely low.

To address this, the researchers came up with a novel solution, using a special circuit technique called bootstrap clocking. This method boosts the control voltage just enough to ensure the switches operate reliably while using less power and fewer components than traditional clock boosting methods.

Taken together, these innovations enable the new receiver to consume less than a milliwatt of power while blocking about 30 times more harmonic interference than traditional IoT receivers.

“Our chip also is very quiet, in terms of not polluting the airwaves. This comes from the fact that our switches are very small, so the amount of signal that can leak out of the antenna is also very small,” Araei adds.

Because their receiver is smaller than traditional devices and relies on switches and precharged capacitors instead of more complex electronics, it could be more cost-effective to fabricate. In addition, since the receiver design can cover a wide range of signal frequencies, it could be implemented on a variety of current and future IoT devices.

Now that they have developed this prototype, the researchers want to enable the receiver to operate without a dedicated power supply, perhaps by harvesting Wi-Fi or Bluetooth signals from the environment to power the chip.

This research is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation.