Nature Climate Change, Published online: 13 June 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02352-8

Integrated assessment model-based scenarios are commonly used to project future emission pathways but suffer from submission biases and high computational cost. Here researchers develop a deep learning framework to generate synthetic scenarios and replicate key variables across a wide range of mitigation ambitions.

This is news:

A data broker owned by the country’s major airlines, including Delta, American Airlines, and United, collected U.S. travellers’ domestic flight records, sold access to them to Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and then as part of the contract told CBP to not reveal where the data came from, according to internal CBP documents obtained by 404 Media. The data includes passenger names, their full flight itineraries, and financial details.

Another article.

U.S. sanctions on Syria have for several decades not only restricted trade and financial transactions, they’ve also severely limited Syrians’ access to digital technology. From software development tools to basic cloud services, Syrians were locked out of the global internet economy—stifling innovation, education, and entrepreneurship.

EFF has for many years pushed for sanctions exemptions for technology in Syria, as well as in Sudan, Iran, and Cuba. While civil society had early wins in securing general licenses for Iran and Sudan allowing the export of communications technologies, the conflict in Syria that began in 2011 made loosening of sanctions a pipe dream.

But recent changes to U.S. policy could mark the beginning of a shift. In a quiet yet significant move, the U.S. government has eased sanctions on Syria. On May 23, the Treasury Department issued General License 25, effectively allowing technology companies to provide services to Syrians. This decision could have an immediate and positive impact on the lives of millions of Syrian internet users—especially those working in the tech and education sectors.

A Legacy of Digital Isolation

For years, Syrians have found themselves barred from accessing even the most basic tools. U.S. sanctions meant that companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon—either by law or by cautious decisions taken to avoid potential penalties—restricted access to many of their services. Developers couldn’t access GitHub repositories or use Google Cloud; students couldn’t download software for virtual classrooms; and entrepreneurs struggled to build startups without access to payment gateways or secure infrastructure.

Such restrictions can put users in harm’s way; for instance, not being able to access the Google Play store from inside the country means that Syrians can’t easily download secure versions of everyday tools like Signal or WhatsApp, thus potentially subjecting their communications to surveillance.

These restrictions also compounded the difficulties of war, economic collapse, and internal censorship. Even when Syrian tech workers could connect with global communities, their participation was hampered by legal gray zones and technical blocks.

What the Sanctions Relief Changes

Under General License 25, companies will now be able to provide services to Syria that have never officially been available. While it may take time for companies to catch up with any regulatory changes, it is our hope that Syrians will soon be able to access and make use of technologies that will enable them to more freely communicate and rebuild.

For Syrian developers, the impact could be transformative. Restored access to platforms like GitHub, AWS, and Google Cloud means the ability to build, test, and deploy apps without the need for VPNs or workarounds. It opens the door to participation in global hackathons, remote work, and open-source communities—channels that are often lifelines for those in conflict zones. Students and educators stand to benefit, too. With sanctions eased, educational tools and platforms that were previously unavailable could soon be accessible. Entrepreneurs may also finally gain access to secure communications, e-commerce platforms, and the broader digital infrastructure needed to start and scale businesses. These developments could help jumpstart local economies.

Despite the good news, challenges remain. Major tech companies have historically been slow to respond to sanctions relief, often erring on the side of over-compliance to avoid liability. Many of the financial and logistical barriers—such as payment processing, unreliable internet, and ongoing conflict—will not disappear overnight.

Moreover, the lifting of sanctions is not a blanket permission slip; it’s a cautious opening. Any future geopolitical shifts or changes in U.S. foreign policy could once again cut off access, creating an uncertain digital future for Syrians.

Nevertheless, by removing barriers imposed by sanctions, the U.S. is taking a step toward recognizing that access to technology is not a luxury, but a necessity—even in sanctioned or conflict-ridden countries.

For Syrian users, the lifting of tech sanctions is more than a bureaucratic change—it’s a door, long closed, beginning to open. And for the international tech community, it’s an opportunity to re-engage, responsibly and thoughtfully, with a population that has been cut off from essential services for too long.

EPA contradicts itself — and legal precedent — in its bid to undo Biden-era limits on power plant pollution.

Court rulings and two Trump administrations have derailed regulators' attempts to forestall rising temperatures, while scientists' warnings grow more dire.

It's the first time in three decades that the United States will miss the annual global warming conference.

State regulators are reviewing plans for more than 100 new gas-fired energy projects.

Groups are split over using market revenue for highway widening. Some say it would undercut climate efforts by increasing carbon emissions.

A data center developers group filed testimony in Florida Power & Light's $2.5 billion rate request pending before the Public Service Commission.

Fossil fuel power plants and producers of iron, steel and cement will be covered under the initial phase, according to a government report.

The Swedish climate activist and fellow boat passengers were mocked and deprived of sleep, Baptiste André claimed.

Eastern Cape officials said at least 58 schools and 20 hospitals were damaged by floodwaters.

Back in 1676, a Dutch cloth merchant with a keen interest in microscopes, Antony van Leeuwenhoek, discovered microbes and began cataloging them. Two hundred years later, a German doctor in current-day Poland, Robert Koch, identified the anthrax bacterium, a crucial step toward modern germ theory. Those two signal advances, with others, have helped create the conditions of modern living as we know it.

After all, germ theory led to modern medical advances that have drastically limited deaths from infectious diseases. In the U.S. in 1900, the leading causes of death were pneumonia, influenza, tuberculosis, and gut infection, which combined for close to half of the country’s fatalities. For that matter, due to the threat of disease, childhood was a precarious thing more or less from the start of civilization until the last half-century.

“The world we’ve experienced since the 1950s, and really since the 1970s, is unprecedented in human history,” says MIT Professor Thomas Levenson. “Think of all the grandparents able to dance at their grandkids’ weddings who would not have been able to, because either they or the kids would have died from one of these diseases. Human flourishing has come from this extraordinary scientific development.”

To Levenson, two things about this historical trajectory stand out. One is that it took 200 years to develop germ theory. Another is our ability to combat these diseases so thoroughly — something he believes we should not take for granted.

Now in a new book, “So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs — and May Still Lose the War against Infectious Disease,” published by Penguin Random House, Levenson explores both these issues, crafting a historically rich narrative with relevance today. In writing about the development of germ theory, Levenson says, he is aiming to better illuminate “the single most lifesaving tool that human ingenuity has ever come up with.”

A 200-year incubation period

The starting point of Levenson’s research was the simple fact that van Leeuwenhoek’s discovery — accompanied by his illustrations of microbes we can identify today — did not lead to concrete advances for a long, long time.

“It’s almost exactly 200 years between the discovery of bacteria and the definitive proof that they matter to us in life-and-death ways,” Levenson says. “Infectious disease is a big deal and yet it took two centuries to get there. And I wanted to know why.”

Among other things, a variety of ideas, often about the structure of society, blocked the way. The common notion of a “great chain of being” steered people away from the idea that microorganisms could affect human health. Still, some people did recognize the possibility that tiny creatures might be spreading disease. In the late 1600s, the Puritan clergyman Cotton Mather wondered if specific types of “animacules” might each be responsible for spreading different diseases.

Into the 19th century, a few intellectually lonely figures recognized the significance of microbes in the spread of infectious disease, without their ideas gaining much traction. An 18th-century physician in Aberdeen, Scotland, Alexander Gordon, traced the spread of puerperal fever — a disease that killed new mothers — to something doctors and midwives carried on their hands as they delivered babies. A few decades later a doctor in Vienna, Ignaz Semmelweis, deduced that doctors performing autopsies were spreading illness into maternity wards. But skeptics doubted that respectable, gentlemanly doctors could be vectors of disease, and for decades, little was done to prevent the spread of infection.

Eventually, as Levenson chronicles, more scientists, especially Louis Pasteur in France, accumulated enough evidence to establish bacteriology as a field. Medicine advanced through much of the 20th century to the point where, in the postwar years in the U.S., vaccines and antibiotics had enormously reduced human deaths and suffering.

Ultimately, acceptance of new ideas like microbes causing disease involve “how strong cultural presuppositions are and how strong the hierarchical organization of society is,” Levenson says. “If you think you’ve shown that doctors can carry infections from patient to patient, but other people can’t entertain that insight because of other assumptions, that tells you why it took so long to arrive at germ theory. The facts of the science may win out in the end, but even if they do, the end can be delayed.”

He adds: “It can happen when a solution then gets entangled with things that have nothing to do with science.”

Science and society

Understanding that entanglement, between science and society, is a key part of “So Very Small,” as it is in Levenson’s numerous books and other works. Science almost never stands apart from society. The question is how they interact, in any given circumstance.

“One of the themes of my work is how science really works, as opposed to how we’re told it works,” Levenson says. “It’s not simply an ongoing iterative machine to generate new knowledge and hypotheses. Science is a huge human endeavor. The human beings who do it have their own beliefs and cultural assumptions, and are part of larger societies which they interact with all the time, and which have their own characteristics. Those things matter a lot to what science gets done, and how. And that’s still true.”

To be sure, infectious diseases have never entirely been a thing of the past. Some are still prevalent in developing countries, while Covid and the HIV/AIDS epidemics are cases where new medical treatments needed to be developed to staunch emerging illnesses. Still, as Levenson observes in the book, the interplay of science and society may produce yet more uncertainties for us in the future. Antibiotics can lose effectiveness over time, for one thing.

“If we want new antibiotics that can defeat bacterial infections, we need to fund research into them and market them and regulate them,” Levenson says. “That isn’t a political statement. Bacteria do what they do, they evolve when they are challenged.” Meanwhile, he notes, while “there has always been [human] resistance to vaccines,” the greater prevalence of that today introduces new questions about how widely vaccines will be available and used.

“So Very Small” has earned strongly positive reviews in major publications. The Wall Street Journal stated that “With extraordinary detail and authoritative prose … What Mr. Levenson’s book makes clear is that the battle against germs never ends.” The New York Review of Books has called it “an elegant, wide-ranging history of the discovery of microorganisms and their relation to disease.”

Ultimately, Levenson says, “Science both gives us the material power that drives changes in society, that drives history, and science is done by people who are embedded in places and times. Looking at that is a wonderful way into bigger questions. That’s true of germ theory as well. It tells you a great deal about what societies value, and probes the society we now live in.”

Join us for our next EFFecting Change livestream this Thursday! We're talking about emerging laws and platform policies that affect the digital privacy and free expression rights of the LGBT+ community, and how this echoes the experience of marginalized people across the world.

EFFecting Change Livestream Series:
Pride in Digital Freedom
Thursday, June 12th
4:00 PM - 5:00 PM Pacific - Check Local Time
This event is LIVE and FREE!

Join our panel featuring EFF Senior Staff Technologist Daly Barnett, EFF Legislative Activist Rindala Alajaji, Chosen Family Law Center Senior Legal Director Andy Izenson, and Woodhull Freedom Foundation Chief Operations Officer Mandy Salley while they discuss what is happening and what should change to protect digital freedom.

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We hope you and your friends can join us live! Be sure to spread the word, and share our past livestreams. Please note that all events will be recorded for later viewing on our YouTube page.

Want to make sure you don’t miss our next livestream? Here’s a link to sign up for updates about this series: eff.org/ECUpdates.

State, federal, and international regulators are increasingly concerned about the harms they believe the internet and new technology are causing to users of all categories. Lawmakers are currently considering many proposals that are intended to provide protections to the most vulnerable among us. Too often, however, those proposals do not carefully consider the likely unintended consequences or even whether the law will actually reduce the harms it’s supposed to target. That’s why EFF supports Rep. Sara Jacobs’ newly reintroduced “My Body, My Data" Act, which will protect the privacy and safety of people seeking reproductive health care, while maintaining important constitutional protections and avoiding any erosion of end-to-end encryption. 

Privacy fears should never stand in the way of healthcare. That's why this common-sense bill will require businesses and non-governmental organizations to act responsibly with personal information concerning reproductive health care. Specifically, it restricts them from collecting, using, retaining, or disclosing reproductive health information that isn't essential to providing the service someone requests.

The bill would protect people who use fertility or period-tracking apps or are seeking information about reproductive health services.

These restrictions apply to companies that collect personal information related to a person’s reproductive or sexual health. That includes data related to pregnancy, menstruation, surgery, termination of pregnancy, contraception, basal body temperature or diagnoses. The bill would protect people who, for example, use fertility or period-tracking apps or are seeking information about reproductive health services. 

We are proud to join Center for Democracy and Technology, Electronic Privacy Information Center, National Partnership for Women & Families, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Reproductive Freedom for All, Physicians for Reproductive Health, National Women’s Law Center, National Abortion Federation, Catholics for Choice, National Council for Jewish Women, Power to Decide, United for Reproductive & Gender Equity, Indivisible, Guttmacher, and National Network of Abortion Funds, and All* Above All in support of this bill. 

In addition to the restrictions on company data processing, this bill also provides people with necessary rights to access and delete their reproductive health information. Companies must also publish a privacy policy, so that everyone can understand what information companies process and why. It also ensures that companies are held to public promises they make about data protection and gives the Federal Trade Commission the authority to hold them to account if they break those promises. 

The bill also lets people take on companies that violate their privacy with a strong private right of action. Empowering people to bring their own lawsuits not only places more control in the individual's hands, but also ensures that companies will not take these regulations lightly. 

Finally, while Rep. Jacobs' bill establishes an important national privacy foundation for everyone, it also leaves room for states to pass stronger or complementary laws to protect the data privacy of those seeking reproductive health care. 

We thank Rep. Jacobs and Sens. Mazie Hirono and Ron Wyden for taking up this important bill and using it as an opportunity not only to protect those seeking reproductive health care, but also highlight why data privacy is an important element of reproductive justice. 

The long-term aspirational goal of the Paris Agreement on climate change is to cap global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, and thereby reduce the frequency and severity of floods, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme weather events. Achieving that goal will require a massive reduction in global carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions across all economic sectors. A major roadblock, however, could be the industrial sector, which accounts for roughly 25 percent of global energy- and process-related CO2 emissions — particularly within the iron and steel sector, industry’s largest emitter of CO2.

Iron and steel production now relies heavily on fossil fuels (coal or natural gas) for heat, converting iron ore to iron, and making steel strong. Steelmaking could be decarbonized by a combination of several methods, including carbon capture technology, the use of low- or zero-carbon fuels, and increased use of recycled steel. Now a new study in the Journal of Cleaner Production systematically explores the viability of different iron-and-steel decarbonization strategies.

Today’s strategy menu includes improving energy efficiency, switching fuels and technologies, using more scrap steel, and reducing demand. Using the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis model, a multi-sector, multi-region model of the world economy, researchers at MIT, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering Co. evaluate the decarbonization potential of replacing coal-based production processes with electric arc furnaces (EAF), along with either scrap steel or “direct reduced iron” (DRI), which is fueled by natural gas with carbon capture and storage (NG CCS DRI-EAF) or by hydrogen (H2 DRI-EAF).

Under a global climate mitigation scenario aligned with the 1.5 C climate goal, these advanced steelmaking technologies could result in deep decarbonization of the iron and steel sector by 2050, as long as technology costs are low enough to enable large-scale deployment. Higher costs would favor the replacement of coal with electricity and natural gas, greater use of scrap steel, and reduced demand, resulting in a more-than-50-percent reduction in emissions relative to current levels. Lower technology costs would enable massive deployment of NG CCS DRI-EAF or H2 DRI-EAF, reducing emissions by up to 75 percent.

Even without adoption of these advanced technologies, the iron-and-steel sector could significantly reduce its CO2 emissions intensity (how much CO2 is released per unit of production) with existing steelmaking technologies, primarily by replacing coal with gas and electricity (especially if it is generated by renewable energy sources), using more scrap steel, and implementing energy efficiency measures.

“The iron and steel industry needs to combine several strategies to substantially reduce its emissions by mid-century, including an increase in recycling, but investing in cost reductions in hydrogen pathways and carbon capture and sequestration will enable even deeper emissions mitigation in the sector,” says study supervising author Sergey Paltsev, deputy director of the MIT Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy (MIT CS3) and a senior research scientist at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI).

This study was supported by MIT CS3 and ExxonMobil through its membership in MITEI.

In Washington, where conversations about Russia often center on a single name, political science doctoral candidate Suzanne Freeman is busy redrawing the map of power in autocratic states. Her research upends prevailing narratives about Vladimir Putin’s Russia, asking us to look beyond the individual to understand the system that produced him.

“The standard view is that Putin originated Russia’s system of governance and the way it engages with the world,” Freeman explains. “My contention is that Putin is a product of a system rather than its author, and that his actions are very consistent with the foreign policy beliefs of the organization in which he was educated.”

That organization — the KGB and its successor agencies — stands at the center of Freeman’s dissertation, which examines how authoritarian intelligence agencies intervene in their own states’ foreign policy decision-making processes, particularly decisions about using military force.

Dismantling the “yes men” myth

Past scholarship has relied on an oversimplified characterization of intelligence agencies in authoritarian states. “The established belief that I’m challenging is essentially that autocrats surround themselves with ‘yes’ men,” Freeman says. She notes that this narrative stems in great part from a famous Soviet failure, when intelligence officers were too afraid to contradict Stalin’s belief that Nazi Germany wouldn’t invade in 1941.

Freeman’s research reveals a far more complex reality. Through extensive archival work, including newly declassified documents from Lithuania, Moldova, and Poland, she shows that intelligence agencies in authoritarian regimes actually have distinct foreign policy preferences and actively work to advance them.

“These intelligence agencies are motivated by their organizational interests, seeking to survive and hold power inside and beyond their own borders,” Freeman says.

When an international situation threatens those interests, authoritarian intelligence agencies may intervene in the policy process using strategies Freeman has categorized in an innovative typology: indirect manipulation (altering collected intelligence), direct manipulation (misrepresenting analyzed intelligence), preemption in the field (unauthorized actions that alter a foreign crisis), and coercion (threats against political leadership).

“By intervene, I mean behaving in some way that’s inappropriate in accordance with what their mandate is,” Freeman explains. That mandate includes providing policy advice. “But sometimes intelligence agencies want to make their policy advice look more attractive by manipulating information,” she notes. “They may change the facts out on the ground, or in very rare circumstances, coerce policymakers.”

From Soviet archives to modern Russia

Rather than studying contemporary Russia alone, Freeman uses historical case studies of the Soviet Union’s KGB. Her research into this agency’s policy intervention covers eight foreign policy crises between 1950 and 1981, including uprisings in Eastern Europe, the Sino-Soviet border dispute, and the Soviet-Afghan War.

What she discovered contradicts prior assumptions that the agency was primarily a passive information provider. “The KGB had always been important for Soviet foreign policy and gave policy advice about what they thought should be done,” she says. Intelligence agencies were especially likely to pursue policy intervention when facing a “dual threat:” domestic unrest sparked by foreign crises combined with the loss of intelligence networks abroad.

This organizational motivation, rather than simply following a leader’s preferences, drove policy recommendations in predictable ways.

Freeman sees striking parallels to Russia’s recent actions in Ukraine. “This dual organizational threat closely mirrors the threat that the KGB faced in Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and Poland from 1980 to 1981,” she explains. After 2014, Ukrainian intelligence reform weakened Russian intelligence networks in the country — a serious organizational threat to Russia’s security apparatus.

“Between 2014 and 2022, this network weakened,” Freeman notes. “We know that Russian intelligence had ties with a polling firm in Ukraine, where they had data saying that 84 percent of the population would view them as occupiers, that almost half of the Ukrainian population was willing to fight for Ukraine.” In spite of these polls, officers recommended going into Ukraine anyway.

This pattern resembles the KGB’s advocacy for invading Afghanistan using the manipulation of intelligence — a parallel that helps explain Russia’s foreign policy decisions beyond just Putin’s personal preferences.

Scholarly detective work

Freeman’s research innovations have allowed her to access previously unexplored material. “From a methodological perspective, it’s new archival material, but it’s also archival material from regions of a country, not the center,” she explains.

In Moldova, she examined previously classified KGB documents: huge amounts of newly available and unstructured documents that provided details into how anti-Soviet sentiment during foreign crises affected the KGB.

Freeman’s willingness to search beyond central archives distinguishes her approach, especially valuable as direct research in Russia becomes increasingly difficult. “People who want to study Russia or the Soviet Union who are unable to get to Russia can still learn very meaningful things, even about the central state, from these other countries and regions.”

From Boston to Moscow to MIT

Freeman grew up in Boston in an academic, science-oriented family; both her parents were immunologists. Going against the grain, she was drawn to history, particularly Russian and Soviet history, beginning in high school.

“I was always curious about the Soviet Union and why it fell apart, but I never got a clear answer from my teachers,” says Freeman. “This really made me want to learn more and solve that puzzle myself." 

At Columbia University, she majored in Slavic studies and completed a master’s degree at the School of International and Public Affairs. Her undergraduate thesis examined Russian military reform, a topic that gained new relevance after Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.

Before beginning her doctoral studies at MIT, Freeman worked at the Russia Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College, researching Russian military strategy and doctrine. There, surrounded by scholars with political science and history PhDs, she found her calling.

“I decided I wanted to be in an academic environment where I could do research that I thought would prove valuable,” she recalls.

Bridging academia and public education

Beyond her core research, Freeman has established herself as an innovator in war-gaming methodology. With fellow PhD student Benjamin Harris, she co-founded the MIT Wargaming Working Group, which has developed a partnership with the Naval Postgraduate School to bring mid-career military officers and academics together for annual simulations.

Their work on war-gaming as a pedagogical tool resulted in a peer-reviewed publication in PS: Political Science & Politics titled “Crossing a Virtual Divide: Wargaming as a Remote Teaching Tool.” This research demonstrates that war games are effective tools for active learning even in remote settings and can help bridge the civil-military divide.

When not conducting research, Freeman works as a tour guide at the International Spy Museum in Washington. “I think public education is important — plus they have a lot of really cool KGB objects,” she says. “I felt like working at the Spy Museum would help me keep thinking about my research in a more fun way and hopefully help me explain some of these things to people who aren’t academics.”

Looking beyond individual leaders

Freeman’s work offers vital insight for policymakers who too often focus exclusively on autocratic leaders, rather than the institutional systems surrounding them. “I hope to give people a new lens through which to view the way that policy is made,” she says. “The intelligence agency and the type of advice that it provides to political leadership can be very meaningful.”

As tensions with Russia continue, Freeman believes her research provides a crucial framework for understanding state behavior beyond individual personalities. “If you're going to be negotiating and competing with these authoritarian states, thinking about the leadership beyond the autocrat seems very important.”

Currently completing her dissertation as a predoctoral fellow at George Washington University’s Institute for Security and Conflict Studies, Freeman aims to contribute critical scholarship on Russia’s role in international security and inspire others to approach complex geopolitical questions with systematic research skills.

“In Russia and other authoritarian states, the intelligence system may endure well beyond a single leader’s reign,” Freeman notes. “This means we must focus not on the figures who dominate the headlines, but on the institutions that shape them.” 

In 15 TED Talk-style presentations, MIT faculty recently discussed their pioneering research that incorporates social, ethical, and technical considerations and expertise, each supported by seed grants established by the Social and Ethical Responsibilities of Computing (SERC), a cross-cutting initiative of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. The call for proposals last summer was met with nearly 70 applications. A committee with representatives from every MIT school and the college convened to select the winning projects that received up to $100,000 in funding.

“SERC is committed to driving progress at the intersection of computing, ethics, and society. The seed grants are designed to ignite bold, creative thinking around the complex challenges and possibilities in this space,” said Nikos Trichakis, co-associate dean of SERC and the J.C. Penney Professor of Management. “With the MIT Ethics of Computing Research Symposium, we felt it important to not just showcase the breadth and depth of the research that’s shaping the future of ethical computing, but to invite the community to be part of the conversation as well.”

“What you’re seeing here is kind of a collective community judgment about the most exciting work when it comes to research, in the social and ethical responsibilities of computing being done at MIT,” said Caspar Hare, co-associate dean of SERC and professor of philosophy.

The full-day symposium on May 1 was organized around four key themes: responsible health-care technology, artificial intelligence governance and ethics, technology in society and civic engagement, and digital inclusion and social justice. Speakers delivered thought-provoking presentations on a broad range of topics, including algorithmic bias, data privacy, the social implications of artificial intelligence, and the evolving relationship between humans and machines. The event also featured a poster session, where student researchers showcased projects they worked on throughout the year as SERC Scholars.

Highlights from the MIT Ethics of Computing Research Symposium in each of the theme areas, many of which are available to watch on YouTube, included:

Making the kidney transplant system fairer

Policies regulating the organ transplant system in the United States are made by a national committee that often takes more than six months to create, and then years to implement, a timeline that many on the waiting list simply can’t survive.

Dimitris Bertsimas, vice provost for open learning, associate dean of business analytics, and Boeing Professor of Operations Research, shared his latest work in analytics for fair and efficient kidney transplant allocation. Bertsimas’ new algorithm examines criteria like geographic location, mortality, and age in just 14 seconds, a monumental change from the usual six hours.

Bertsimas and his team work closely with the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a nonprofit that manages most of the national donation and transplant system through a contract with the federal government. During his presentation, Bertsimas shared a video from James Alcorn, senior policy strategist at UNOS, who offered this poignant summary of the impact the new algorithm has:

“This optimization radically changes the turnaround time for evaluating these different simulations of policy scenarios. It used to take us a couple months to look at a handful of different policy scenarios, and now it takes a matter of minutes to look at thousands and thousands of scenarios. We are able to make these changes much more rapidly, which ultimately means that we can improve the system for transplant candidates much more rapidly.”

The ethics of AI-generated social media content

As AI-generated content becomes more prevalent across social media platforms, what are the implications of disclosing (or not disclosing) that any part of a post was created by AI? Adam Berinsky, Mitsui Professor of Political Science, and Gabrielle Péloquin-Skulski, PhD student in the Department of Political Science, explored this question in a session that examined recent studies on the impact of various labels on AI-generated content.

In a series of surveys and experiments affixing labels to AI-generated posts, the researchers looked at how specific words and descriptions impacted users’ perception of deception, their intent to engage with the post, and ultimately if the post was true or false.

“The big takeaway from our initial set of findings is that one size doesn’t fit all,” said Péloquin-Skulski. “We found that labeling AI-generated images with a process-oriented label reduces belief in both false and true posts. This is quite problematic, as labeling intends to reduce people’s belief in false information, not necessarily true information. This suggests that labels combining both process and veracity might be better at countering AI-generated misinformation.”

Using AI to increase civil discourse online

“Our research aims to address how people increasingly want to have a say in the organizations and communities they belong to,” Lily Tsai explained in a session on experiments in generative AI and the future of digital democracy. Tsai, Ford Professor of Political Science and director of the MIT Governance Lab, is conducting ongoing research with Alex Pentland, Toshiba Professor of Media Arts arts Sciences, and a larger team.

Online deliberative platforms have recently been rising in popularity across the United States in both public- and private-sector settings. Tsai explained that with technology, it’s now possible for everyone to have a say — but doing so can be overwhelming, or even feel unsafe. First, too much information is available, and secondly, online discourse has become increasingly “uncivil.”

The group focuses on “how we can build on existing technologies and improve them with rigorous, interdisciplinary research, and how we can innovate by integrating generative AI to enhance the benefits of online spaces for deliberation.” They have developed their own AI-integrated platform for deliberative democracy, DELiberation.io, and rolled out four initial modules. All studies have been in the lab so far, but they are also working on a set of forthcoming field studies, the first of which will be in partnership with the government of the District of Columbia.

Tsai told the audience, “If you take nothing else from this presentation, I hope that you’ll take away this — that we should all be demanding that technologies that are being developed are assessed to see if they have positive downstream outcomes, rather than just focusing on maximizing the number of users.”

A public think tank that considers all aspects of AI

When Catherine D’Ignazio, associate professor of urban science and planning, and Nikko Stevens, postdoc at the Data + Feminism Lab at MIT, initially submitted their funding proposal, they weren’t intending to develop a think tank, but a framework — one that articulated how artificial intelligence and machine learning work could integrate community methods and utilize participatory design.

In the end, they created Liberatory AI, which they describe as a “rolling public think tank about all aspects of AI.” D’Ignazio and Stevens gathered 25 researchers from a diverse array of institutions and disciplines who authored more than 20 position papers examining the most current academic literature on AI systems and engagement. They intentionally grouped the papers into three distinct themes: the corporate AI landscape, dead ends, and ways forward.

“Instead of waiting for Open AI or Google to invite us to participate in the development of their products, we’ve come together to contest the status quo, think bigger-picture, and reorganize resources in this system in hopes of a larger societal transformation,” said D’Ignazio.

The 2024 regulation required existing coal-burning power plants to begin capturing their carbon dioxide pollution in the 2030s.

As more connected devices demand an increasing amount of bandwidth for tasks like teleworking and cloud computing, it will become extremely challenging to manage the finite amount of wireless spectrum available for all users to share.

Engineers are employing artificial intelligence to dynamically manage the available wireless spectrum, with an eye toward reducing latency and boosting performance. But most AI methods for classifying and processing wireless signals are power-hungry and can’t operate in real-time.

Now, MIT researchers have developed a novel AI hardware accelerator that is specifically designed for wireless signal processing. Their optical processor performs machine-learning computations at the speed of light, classifying wireless signals in a matter of nanoseconds.

The photonic chip is about 100 times faster than the best digital alternative, while converging to about 95 percent accuracy in signal classification. The new hardware accelerator is also scalable and flexible, so it could be used for a variety of high-performance computing applications. At the same time, it is smaller, lighter, cheaper, and more energy-efficient than digital AI hardware accelerators.

The device could be especially useful in future 6G wireless applications, such as cognitive radios that optimize data rates by adapting wireless modulation formats to the changing wireless environment.

By enabling an edge device to perform deep-learning computations in real-time, this new hardware accelerator could provide dramatic speedups in many applications beyond signal processing. For instance, it could help autonomous vehicles make split-second reactions to environmental changes or enable smart pacemakers to continuously monitor the health of a patient’s heart.

“There are many applications that would be enabled by edge devices that are capable of analyzing wireless signals. What we’ve presented in our paper could open up many possibilities for real-time and reliable AI inference. This work is the beginning of something that could be quite impactful,” says Dirk Englund, a professor in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, principal investigator in the Quantum Photonics and Artificial Intelligence Group and the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and senior author of the paper.

He is joined on the paper by lead author Ronald Davis III PhD ’24; Zaijun Chen, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the University of Southern California; and Ryan Hamerly, a visiting scientist at RLE and senior scientist at NTT Research. The research appears today in Science Advances.

Light-speed processing  

State-of-the-art digital AI accelerators for wireless signal processing convert the signal into an image and run it through a deep-learning model to classify it. While this approach is highly accurate, the computationally intensive nature of deep neural networks makes it infeasible for many time-sensitive applications.

Optical systems can accelerate deep neural networks by encoding and processing data using light, which is also less energy intensive than digital computing. But researchers have struggled to maximize the performance of general-purpose optical neural networks when used for signal processing, while ensuring the optical device is scalable.

By developing an optical neural network architecture specifically for signal processing, which they call a multiplicative analog frequency transform optical neural network (MAFT-ONN), the researchers tackled that problem head-on.

The MAFT-ONN addresses the problem of scalability by encoding all signal data and performing all machine-learning operations within what is known as the frequency domain — before the wireless signals are digitized.

The researchers designed their optical neural network to perform all linear and nonlinear operations in-line. Both types of operations are required for deep learning.

Thanks to this innovative design, they only need one MAFT-ONN device per layer for the entire optical neural network, as opposed to other methods that require one device for each individual computational unit, or “neuron.”

“We can fit 10,000 neurons onto a single device and compute the necessary multiplications in a single shot,” Davis says.   

The researchers accomplish this using a technique called photoelectric multiplication, which dramatically boosts efficiency. It also allows them to create an optical neural network that can be readily scaled up with additional layers without requiring extra overhead.

Results in nanoseconds

MAFT-ONN takes a wireless signal as input, processes the signal data, and passes the information along for later operations the edge device performs. For instance, by classifying a signal’s modulation, MAFT-ONN would enable a device to automatically infer the type of signal to extract the data it carries.

One of the biggest challenges the researchers faced when designing MAFT-ONN was determining how to map the machine-learning computations to the optical hardware.

“We couldn’t just take a normal machine-learning framework off the shelf and use it. We had to customize it to fit the hardware and figure out how to exploit the physics so it would perform the computations we wanted it to,” Davis says.

When they tested their architecture on signal classification in simulations, the optical neural network achieved 85 percent accuracy in a single shot, which can quickly converge to more than 99 percent accuracy using multiple measurements.  MAFT-ONN only required about 120 nanoseconds to perform entire process.

“The longer you measure, the higher accuracy you will get. Because MAFT-ONN computes inferences in nanoseconds, you don’t lose much speed to gain more accuracy,” Davis adds.

While state-of-the-art digital radio frequency devices can perform machine-learning inference in a microseconds, optics can do it in nanoseconds or even picoseconds.

Moving forward, the researchers want to employ what are known as multiplexing schemes so they could perform more computations and scale up the MAFT-ONN. They also want to extend their work into more complex deep learning architectures that could run transformer models or LLMs.

This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Air Force, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, and the National Science Foundation.