On May 6, MIT AgeLab’s Advanced Vehicle Technology (AVT) Consortium, part of the MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, celebrated 10 years of its global academic-industry collaboration. AVT was founded with the aim of developing new data that contribute to automotive manufacturers, suppliers, and insurers’ real-world understanding of how drivers use and respond to increasingly sophisticated vehicle technologies, such as assistive and automated driving, while accelerating the applied insight needed to advance design and development. The celebration event brought together stakeholders from across the industry for a set of keynote addresses and panel discussions on critical topics significant to the industry and its future, including artificial intelligence, automotive technology, collision repair, consumer behavior, sustainability, vehicle safety policy, and global competitiveness.

Bryan Reimer, founder and co-director of the AVT Consortium, opened the event by remarking that over the decade AVT has collected hundreds of terabytes of data, presented and discussed research with its over 25 member organizations, supported members’ strategic and policy initiatives, published select outcomes, and built AVT into a global influencer with tremendous impact in the automotive industry. He noted that current opportunities and challenges for the industry include distracted driving, a lack of consumer trust and concerns around transparency in assistive and automated driving features, and high consumer expectations for vehicle technology, safety, and affordability. How will industry respond? Major players in attendance weighed in.

In a powerful exchange on vehicle safety regulation, John Bozzella, president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, and Mark Rosekind, former chief safety innovation officer of Zoox, former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and former member of the National Transportation Safety Board, challenged industry and government to adopt a more strategic, data-driven, and collaborative approach to safety. They asserted that regulation must evolve alongside innovation, not lag behind it by decades. Appealing to the automakers in attendance, Bozzella cited the success of voluntary commitments on automatic emergency braking as a model for future progress. “That’s a way to do something important and impactful ahead of regulation.” They advocated for shared data platforms, anonymous reporting, and a common regulatory vision that sets safety baselines while allowing room for experimentation. The 40,000 annual road fatalities demand urgency — what’s needed is a move away from tactical fixes and toward a systemic safety strategy. “Safety delayed is safety denied,” Rosekind stated. “Tell me how you’re going to improve safety. Let’s be explicit.”

Drawing inspiration from aviation’s exemplary safety record, Kathy Abbott, chief scientific and technical advisor for the Federal Aviation Administration, pointed to a culture of rigorous regulation, continuous improvement, and cross-sectoral data sharing. Aviation’s model, built on highly trained personnel and strict predictability standards, contrasts sharply with the fragmented approach in the automotive industry. The keynote emphasized that a foundation of safety culture — one that recognizes that technological ability alone isn’t justification for deployment — must guide the auto industry forward. Just as aviation doesn’t equate absence of failure with success, vehicle safety must be measured holistically and proactively.

With assistive and automated driving top of mind in the industry, Pete Bigelow of Automotive News offered a pragmatic diagnosis. With companies like Ford and Volkswagen stepping back from full autonomy projects like Argo AI, the industry is now focused on Level 2 and 3 technologies, which refer to assisted and automated driving, respectively. Tesla, GM, and Mercedes are experimenting with subscription models for driver assistance systems, yet consumer confusion remains high. JD Power reports that many drivers do not grasp the differences between L2 and L2+, or whether these technologies offer safety or convenience features. Safety benefits have yet to manifest in reduced traffic deaths, which have risen by 20 percent since 2020. The recurring challenge: L3 systems demand that human drivers take over during technical difficulties, despite driver disengagement being their primary benefit, potentially worsening outcomes. Bigelow cited a quote from Bryan Reimer as one of the best he’s received in his career: “Level 3 systems are an engineer’s dream and a plaintiff attorney’s next yacht,” highlighting the legal and design complexity of systems that demand handoffs between machine and human.

In terms of the impact of AI on the automotive industry, Mauricio Muñoz, senior research engineer at AI Sweden, underscored that despite AI’s transformative potential, the automotive industry cannot rely on general AI megatrends to solve domain-specific challenges. While landmark achievements like AlphaFold demonstrate AI’s prowess, automotive applications require domain expertise, data sovereignty, and targeted collaboration. Energy constraints, data firewalls, and the high costs of AI infrastructure all pose limitations, making it critical that companies fund purpose-driven research that can reduce costs and improve implementation fidelity. Muñoz warned that while excitement abounds — with some predicting artificial superintelligence by 2028 — real progress demands organizational alignment and a deep understanding of the automotive context, not just computational power.

Turning the focus to consumers, a collision repair panel drawing Richard Billyeald from Thatcham Research, Hami Ebrahimi from Caliber Collision, and Mike Nelson from Nelson Law explored the unintended consequences of vehicle technology advances: spiraling repair costs, labor shortages, and a lack of repairability standards. Panelists warned that even minor repairs for advanced vehicles now require costly and complex sensor recalibrations — compounded by inconsistent manufacturer guidance and no clear consumer alerts when systems are out of calibration. The panel called for greater standardization, consumer education, and repair-friendly design. As insurance premiums climb and more people forgo insurance claims, the lack of coordination between automakers, regulators, and service providers threatens consumer safety and undermines trust. The group warned that until Level 2 systems function reliably and affordably, moving toward Level 3 autonomy is premature and risky.

While the repair panel emphasized today’s urgent challenges, other speakers looked to the future. Honda’s Ryan Harty, for example, highlighted the company’s aggressive push toward sustainability and safety. Honda aims for zero environmental impact and zero traffic fatalities, with plans to be 100 percent electric by 2040 and to lead in energy storage and clean power integration. The company has developed tools to coach young drivers and is investing in charging infrastructure, grid-aware battery usage, and green hydrogen storage. “What consumers buy in the market dictates what the manufacturers make,” Harty noted, underscoring the importance of aligning product strategy with user demand and environmental responsibility. He stressed that manufacturers can only decarbonize as fast as the industry allows, and emphasized the need to shift from cost-based to life-cycle-based product strategies.

Finally, a panel involving Laura Chace of ITS America, Jon Demerly of Qualcomm, Brad Stertz of Audi/VW Group, and Anant Thaker of Aptiv covered the near-, mid-, and long-term future of vehicle technology. Panelists emphasized that consumer expectations, infrastructure investment, and regulatory modernization must evolve together. Despite record bicycle fatality rates and persistent distracted driving, features like school bus detection and stop sign alerts remain underutilized due to skepticism and cost. Panelists stressed that we must design systems for proactive safety rather than reactive response. The slow integration of digital infrastructure — sensors, edge computing, data analytics — stems not only from technical hurdles, but procurement and policy challenges as well. 

Reimer concluded the event by urging industry leaders to re-center the consumer in all conversations — from affordability to maintenance and repair. With the rising costs of ownership, growing gaps in trust in technology, and misalignment between innovation and consumer value, the future of mobility depends on rebuilding trust and reshaping industry economics. He called for global collaboration, greater standardization, and transparent innovation that consumers can understand and afford. He highlighted that global competitiveness and public safety both hang in the balance. As Reimer noted, “success will come through partnerships” — between industry, academia, and government — that work toward shared investment, cultural change, and a collective willingness to prioritize the public good.

Anantha Chandrakasan, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science who has held multiple leadership roles at MIT, has been named the Institute’s new provost, effective July 1.

Chandrakasan has served as the dean of the School of Engineering since 2017 and as MIT’s inaugural chief innovation and strategy officer since 2024. Prior to becoming dean, he headed the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), MIT’s largest academic department, for six years.

“Anantha brings to this post an exceptional record of shaping and leading important innovations for the Institute,” wrote MIT President Sally Kornbluth, in an email announcing the decision to the MIT community today. “I am particularly grateful that we will be able to draw on Anantha’s depth and breadth of experience; his nimbleness, entrepreneurial spirit and boundless energy; his remarkable record in raising funds from outside sources for important ideas; and his profound commitment to MIT’s mission.”

The provost is MIT’s senior academic and budget officer, with overall responsibility for the Institute’s educational programs, as well as for the recruitment, promotion, and tenuring of faculty. With the president and other members of the Institute’s senior leadership team, the provost establishes academic priorities, manages financial planning and research support, and oversees MIT’s international engagements.

“I feel deeply honored to take on the role of provost,” says Chandrakasan, who is also the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “Looking ahead, I see myself as a key facilitator, enabling faculty, students, postdocs, and staff to continue making extraordinary contributions to the nation and the world.”

Investing in excellence

Chandrakasan succeeds Cynthia Barnhart, who announced her decision to step down from the role in February. As dean of engineering, Chandrakasan worked with Barnhart closely during her tenure as provost and, before that, chancellor.

“Cindy has been a tremendous mentor,” he says. “She is always very thoughtful and makes sure she hears all the viewpoints, which is something I will strive to do as well. I so admire how deftly she approaches complex problems and supports a variety of perspectives and approaches.”

As MIT’s chief academic officer, Chandrakasan will focus on three overarching priorities: understanding institutional needs and strategic financial planning, attracting and retaining top talent, and supporting cross-cutting research, education, and entrepreneurship programming. On all of these fronts, he plans to seek frequent input from across the Institute.

“Recognizing that each school and other academic units operate within a unique context, I plan to engage deeply with their leaders to understand their challenges and aspirations. This will help me refine and set the priorities for the Office of the Provost,” Chandrakasan says.

He also plans to establish a provost faculty advisory group to hear on an ongoing basis from faculty across the five schools and the college, as well as student/postdoc advisory groups and an external provost advisory council.

“My goal is to continue to facilitate excellence at MIT at all levels,” Chandrakasan says.

He adds: “There is a tremendous opportunity for MIT to be at the center of the innovations in areas where the United States wants to lead. It’s about AI. It’s about semiconductors. It’s about quantum, the biosecurity and biomanufacturing space — but not only that. We need students who can do more than just code or design or build. We really need students who understand the human perspective and human insights. This is why collaborations between STEM fields and the humanities, arts and social sciences, such as through the new MIT Human Insights Collaborative, are so important.”

In her email to the MIT community, Kornbluth also noted that Institute Professor Paula Hammond, currently vice provost for faculty, will take on an expanded portfolio with the new title of executive vice provost, and Deputy Dean of Engineering Maria Yang will serve as interim dean until the new dean is in place.

Advancing the president’s vision

In February 2024, Chandrakasan was appointed at MIT’s first chief innovation and strategy officer, to help develop and implement plans to advance research, education, and innovation in areas that President Kornbluth identified as her top priorities.

Working closely with the president, Chandrakasan oversaw MIT’s launch of several Institute-wide initiatives, including the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative (MIT HEALS), the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium (MGAIC, or “magic”), the MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing (INM), and multiple energy- and climate-related initiatives including the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance.

These initiatives bring together MIT faculty, staff, and students from across the Institute, as well as industry partners, supporting bold, ground-breaking research and education to address pressing problems. In launching them, Chandrakasan was responsible for the “full stack” of tasks, from developing the vision to finding funding to implementing the programming — a significant undertaking on top of his other responsibilities.

“People consider me intense, which might be true,” he says, with a chuckle. “The reality is that I’m deeply passionate about the academic mission of MIT to create breakthrough technologies, educate the next generation of leaders, and serve the country and the world.”

New models for collaboration

During his time as dean of engineering, Chandrakasan played a key role in advancing a variety of historic Institute-wide initiatives, including the founding of the MIT Schwarzman College of computing and the development of the MIT Fast Forward plan for addressing climate change. He also served as the inaugural chair of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health and as the co-chair of the academic workstream for MIT’s Task Force 2021. Earlier, he led an Institute-wide working group to guide the development of policies and procedures related to MIT’s 2016 launch of The Engine, an incubator and accelerator for tough tech, and also served on its inaugural board.

He implemented a variety of interdisciplinary programs within the School of Engineering, creating new models for how academia and industry can work together to accelerate the pace of research. This work led to multiple new initiatives, such as the MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, the MIT-Takeda Program, the MIT and Accenture Convergence Initiative, the MIT Mobility Initiative, the MIT Quest for Intelligence, the MIT AI Hardware Program, the MIT-Northpond Program, the MIT Faculty Founder Initiative, and the MIT-Novo Nordisk Artificial Intelligence Postdoctoral Fellows Program.

Chandrakasan also welcomed and supported 110 new faculty members to the School of Engineering, including in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, which jointly reports between the School of Engineering and the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing. He also oversaw 274 faculty and senior researcher promotion cases in Engineering Council.

One of his priorities as dean was to bolster the School of Engineering’s sense of community, launching several programs to give students and staff a more active role in shaping the initiatives and operations of the school, including the Staff Advice and Implementation Committee (SAIC), the undergraduate Student Advisory Group, the Graduate Student Advisory Group (GradSage), and the MIT School of Engineering Postdoctoral Fellowship Program for Engineering Excellence. Working closely with GradSage, Chandrakasan also played a key role in establishing the Daniel J. Riccio Graduate Engineering Leadership Program.

A champion for EECS research and education

Chandrakasan earned his BS, MS, and PhD in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California at Berkeley. After joining the MIT faculty, he was the director of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories from 2006 until 2011, when he became the EECS department head.

An active researcher throughout his time at MIT, Chandrakasan has led the MIT Energy-Efficient Circuits and Systems Group even while taking on new administrative roles. The group works on the design and implementation of integrated systems, from ultra-low-power wireless sensors and multimedia devices to biomedical systems. Chandrakasan has more than 120,000 citations and has advised or co-advised and graduated 78 PhD students. He says this experience will help him succeed as provost.

“To understand the pain points of our researcher scholars, you have to be in the trenches,” he says.

While at the helm of EECS, Chandrakasan also launched a number of initiatives on behalf of the department’s students. For example, the Advanced Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, more commonly known as “SuperUROP,” is a year-long independent research program that launched in EECS in 2012 and expanded to the whole School of Engineering in 2015.

Chandrakasan also initiated the Rising Stars program in EECS, an annual event that convenes graduate and postdoc women for the purpose of sharing advice about the early stages of an academic career. Another program for EECS postdocs, Postdoc6, aimed to foster a sense of community for postdocs and help them develop skills that will serve their careers.

As higher education faces new challenges, Chandrakasan says he is looking forward to helping MIT position itself for the future. “I'm not afraid to try bold things,” he says.

In the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, ELISA tests provide critical quality control during drug development and manufacturing. The tests can precisely quantify protein levels, but they also require hours of work by trained technicians and specialized equipment. That makes them prohibitively expensive, driving up the costs of drugs and putting research testing out of reach for many.

Now the Advanced Silicon Group (ASG), founded by Marcie Black ’94, MEng ’95, PhD ’03 and Bill Rever, is commercializing a new technology that could dramatically lower the time and costs associated with protein sensing. ASG’s proprietary sensor combines silicon nanowires with antibodies that can bind to different proteins to create a highly sensitive measurement of their concentration in a given solution.

The tests can measure the concentration of many different proteins and other molecules at once, with results typically available in less than 15 minutes. Users simply place a tiny amount of solution on the sensor, rinse the sensor, and then insert it into ASG’s handheld testing system.

“We’re making it 15 times faster and 15 times lower cost to test for proteins,” Black says. “That’s on the drug development side. This could also make the manufacturing of drugs significantly faster and more cost-effective. It could revolutionize how we create drugs in this country and around the world.”

Since developing its sensor, ASG’s team has received inquiries from a long list of people interested in using them to develop new therapeutics, help elite athletes train, and understand soil concentrations in agriculture, among other applications.

For now, though, the small company is focusing on lowering barriers in health care by selling its low-cost sensors to companies developing and manufacturing drugs.

“Right now, money is a limiting factor in researching and creating new drugs,” explains Marissa Gillis, a member of ASG’s team. “Making these processes faster and less costly could dramatically increase the amount of biologic testing and creation. It also makes it more viable for companies to develop drugs for rare conditions with smaller markets.”

A family away from home

Black grew up in a small town in Ohio before coming to MIT for three degrees in electrical engineering.

“Going to MIT changed my life,” Black says. “It opened my eyes to the possibilities of doing science and engineering to make the world a better place. Also, just being around so many amazing people taught me how to dream big.”

For her PhD, Black worked with the late Institute Professor Mildred Dresselhaus, a highly acclaimed physicist and nanotechnology pioneer who Black remembers for her mentorship and compassion as much as her contributions to our understanding of exotic materials. Black couldn’t always afford to go home for holidays, so she’d spend Thanksgivings with the Dresselhaus family.

“Millie was an amazing person, and her family was a family away from home for me,” Black says. “Millie continued to be my mentor — and I hear she did this with a lot of students — until the day she died.”

For her thesis, Black studied the optical properties of nanowires, which taught her about the nanostructures and optoelectronics she’d eventually use as part of the Advanced Silicon Group.

Following graduation, Black worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory before founding the company Bandgap Engineering, which developed efficient, low-cost nanostructured solar cells. That technology was subsequently commercialized by other companies and became the subject of a patent dispute. In 2015, Black spun out the Advanced Silicon Group to apply a similar technology to protein sensing.

ASG’s sensors combine known approaches for sensitizing silicon to biological molecules, using the photoelectric properties of silicon nanowires to detect proteins electrically.

“It’s basically a solar cell that we functionalize with an antibody that’s specific to a certain protein,” Black says. “When the protein gets close, it brings an electrical charge with it that will repel light carriers inside the silicon, and doing that changes how well the electron and the holes can recombine. By looking at the photocurrent when you’re exposed to a solution, you can tell how much protein is bound to the surface and thus the concentration of that protein.”

ASG was accepted into MIT.nano’s START.nano startup accelerator and MIT’s Office of Corporate Relations Startup Exchange Program soon after its founding, which gave Black’s team access to cutting-edge equipment at MIT and connected her with potential investors and partners.

Black has also received broad support from MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service and worked with researchers from MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratories (MTL), where she conducted research as a student.

“Even though the company is in Lowell, [Massachusetts], I’m constantly going to MIT and getting help from professors and researchers at MIT,” Black says.

Biosensing for impact

From extensive discussions with people in the pharmaceutical industry, Black learned about the need for a more affordable protein-measurement tool. During drug development and manufacturing, protein levels must be measured to detect problems such as contamination from host cell proteins, which can be fatal to patients even at very low quantities.

“It can cost more than $1 billion to develop a drug,” Black says. “A big part of the process is bioprocessing, and 50 to 80 percent of bioprocessing is dedicated to purifying these unwanted proteins. That challenge leads to drugs being more expensive and taking longer to get to market.”

ASG has since worked with researchers to develop tests for biomarkers associated with lung cancer and dormant tuberculosis and has received multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and the commonwealth of Massachusetts, including funding to develop tests for host cell proteins.

This year, ASG announced a partnership with Axogen to help the regenerative nerve repair company grow nerve tissue.

“There’s a lot of interest in using our sensor for applications in regenerative medicine,” Black says. “Another example we envision is if you’re sick in rural India and there’s no doctor nearby, you can show up at a clinic, nurses can give this to you and test for the flu, Covid-19, food poisoning, pregnancy, and 10 other things all at once. The results come in 15 minutes, then you could get what you need or teleconference a doctor.”

ASG is currently able to produce about 2,000 of its sensors on 8-inch chips per production line in its partner’s semiconductor foundry. As the company continues scaling up production, Black is hopeful the sensors will lower costs at every step between drug developers and patients.

“We really want to lower the barriers for testing so that everyone has access to good health care,” Black says. “Beyond that, there are so many applications for protein sensing. It’s really where the rubber hits the road in biology, agriculture, diagnostics. We’re excited to partner with leaders in every one of these industries.”

Researchers from the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART), MIT’s research enterprise in Singapore, along with colleagues from KK Women's and Children's Hospital (KKH), have developed a first-of-its-kind device to profile the immune function of newborns.   Using a single drop of blood, the BiophysicaL Immune Profiling for Infants (BLIPI) system provides real-time insights into newborns’ immune responses, enabling the early detection of severe inflammatory conditions and allowing for timely interventions. This critical innovation addresses the urgent and unmet need for rapid and minimally invasive diagnostic tools to protect vulnerable newborns, especially those born prematurely. Critical unmet need in newborn care Premature infants are particularly vulnerable to life-threatening conditions such as sepsis and necrotizing enterocolitis (NEC). Newborn sepsis — a bloodstream infection occurring in the first weeks of life — is a major global health challenge, causing up to 1 million infant deaths worldwide annually. NEC, a serious intestinal disease that causes severe inflammation, is one of the leading causes of death in premature babies — up to 50 percent of low-birth -eight neonates who get NEC do not survive. Infants can show vague symptoms, making diagnosis of these conditions challenging. However, both conditions can worsen rapidly and require immediate medical intervention for the best chance of recovery. Current diagnostic methods to detect and prevent these serious conditions in newborns rely on large blood samples — up to 1 milliliter, a significant quantity of blood for a newborn — and lengthy laboratory processes. This is not ideal for newborns whose total blood volume may be as little as 50 ml among very premature infants less than 28 weeks old, which limits repeated or high-volume sampling and can potentially lead to anemia and other complications. At the same time, conventional tests — such as blood cultures or inflammatory panels — may take hours to days to return actionable results, limiting prompt targeted clinical interventions. The novel BLIPI device addresses these challenges by requiring only 0.05 ml of blood and delivering results within 15 minutes. Revolutionizing newborn care In a study, “Whole blood biophysical immune profiling of newborn infants correlates with immune responses,” published in Pediatric Research, the researchers demonstrated how BLIPI leverages microfluidic technology to measure how immune cells change when fighting infection by assessing their size and flexibility. Unlike conventional tests that only look for the presence of germs, BLIPI directly shows how a baby’s immune system is responding. The cell changes that BLIPI detects align with standard tests doctors rely on, including C-reactive protein levels, white blood cell counts, and immature-to-total neutrophil ratios. This testing format can quickly reveal whether a baby’s immune system is fighting an infection. In the study, BLIPI was used to screen 19 infants at multiple time points — eight full-term and 11 preterm — and showed clear differences in how immune cells looked and behaved between the babies. Notably, when one premature baby developed a serious blood infection, the device was able to detect significant immune cell changes. This shows its potential in detecting infections early. The work was led by researchers from the Critical Analytics for Manufacturing Personalized-Medicine (CAMP) and Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) interdisciplinary research groups within SMART. Just one drop of blood BLIPI is a portable device that can give results at the ward or the neonatal intensive care units, removing the need for transporting blood samples to the laboratory and making it easily implementable in resource-limited or rural health-care settings. Significantly, BLIPI needs just one drop of blood, and 1/20 the blood volume than what existing methods require. These swift results can help clinicians make timely, lifesaving decisions in critical situations such as sepsis or NEC, where early treatment is vital. “Our goal was to create a diagnostic tool that works within the unique constraints of neonatal care — minimal blood volume, rapid turnaround, and high sensitivity. BLIPI represents a major step forward by providing clinicians with fast, actionable immune health data using a noninvasive method, where it can make a real difference for newborns in critical care,” says Kerwin Kwek, research scientist at SMART CAMP and SMART AMR, and co-lead author of the study. “BLIPI exemplifies our vision to bridge the gap between scientific innovation and clinical need. By leveraging microfluidic technologies to extract real-time immune insights from whole blood, we are not only accelerating diagnostics but also redefining how we monitor immune health in fragile populations. Our work reflects a new paradigm in point-of-care diagnostics: rapid, precise, and patient-centric,” says MIT Professor Jongyoon Han, co-lead principal investigator at SMART CAMP, principal investigator at SMART AMR, and corresponding author of the paper. “KKH cares for about two-thirds of all babies born weighing less than 1,500 grams in Singapore. These premature babies often struggle to fight infections with their immature immune systems. With BLIPI, a single prick to the baby’s finger or heel can give us rapid insights into the infant’s immune response within minutes. This allows us to tailor treatments more precisely and respond faster to give these fragile babies the best chance at a healthy start not just in their early days, but throughout their lives,” says Assistant Professor Yeo Kee Thai, senior consultant at the Department of Neonatology at KKH, and senior author of the study. Future research will focus on larger clinical trials to validate BLIPI’s diagnostic accuracy across diverse neonatal populations with different age groups and medical conditions. The researchers also plan to refine the device’s design for widespread adoption in hospitals globally, bringing a much-needed diagnostic solution for vulnerable infants at their cot side. Beyond hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and researchers may also leverage BLIPI in clinical trials to assess immune responses to neonatal therapies in real-time — a potential game-changer for research and development in pediatric medicine. The research conducted at SMART is supported by the National Research Foundation Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise program. This collaboration exemplifies how Singapore brings together institutions as part of interdisciplinary, multi-institution efforts to advance technology for global impact. The work from KKH was partially supported by the Nurturing Clinician Scientist Scheme under the SingHealth Duke-NUS Academic Clinical Programme.

MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI), a pioneering cross-disciplinary body that helped give a major boost to sustainability and solutions to climate change at MIT, will close as a separate entity at the end of June. But that’s far from the end for its wide-ranging work, which will go forward under different auspices. Many of its key functions will become part of MIT’s recently launched Climate Project. John Fernandez, head of ESI for nearly a decade, will return to the School of Architecture and Planning, where some of ESI’s important work will continue as part of a new interdisciplinary lab.

When the ideas that led to the founding of MIT’s Environmental Solutions Initiative first began to be discussed, its founders recall, there was already a great deal of work happening at MIT relating to climate change and sustainability. As Professor John Sterman of the MIT Sloan School of Management puts it, “there was a lot going on, but it wasn’t integrated. So the whole added up to less than the sum of its parts.”

ESI was founded in 2014 to help fill that coordinating role, and in the years since it has accomplished a wide range of significant milestones in research, education, and communication about sustainable solutions in a wide range of areas. Its founding director, Professor Susan Solomon, helmed it for its first year, and then handed the leadership to Fernandez, who has led it since 2015.

“There wasn’t much of an ecosystem [on sustainability] back then,” Solomon recalls. But with the help of ESI and some other entities, that ecosystem has blossomed. She says that Fernandez “has nurtured some incredible things under ESI,” including work on nature-based climate solutions, and also other areas such as sustainable mining, and reduction of plastics in the environment.

Desiree Plata, director of MIT’s Climate and Sustainability Consortium and associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, says that one key achievement of the initiative has been in “communication with the external world, to help take really complex systems and topics and put them in not just plain-speak, but something that’s scientifically rigorous and defensible, for the outside world to consume.”

In particular, ESI has created three very successful products, which continue under the auspices of the Climate Project. These include the popular TIL Climate Podcast, the Webby Award-winning Climate Portal website, and the online climate primer developed with Professor Kerry Emanuel. “These are some of the most frequented websites at MIT,” Plata says, and “the impact of this work on the global knowledge base cannot be overstated.”

Fernandez says that ESI has played a significant part in helping to catalyze what has become “a rich institutional landscape of work in sustainability and climate change” at MIT. He emphasizes three major areas where he feels the ESI has been able to have the most impact: engaging the MIT community, initiating and stewarding critical environmental research, and catalyzing efforts to promote sustainability as fundamental to the mission of a research university.

Engagement of the MIT community, he says, began with two programs: a research seed grant program and the creation of MIT’s undergraduate minor in environment and sustainability, launched in 2017.

ESI also created a Rapid Response Group, which gave students a chance to work on real-world projects with external partners, including government agencies, community groups, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses. In the process, they often learned why dealing with environmental challenges in the real world takes so much longer than they might have thought, he says, and that a challenge that “seemed fairly straightforward at the outset turned out to be more complex and nuanced than expected.”

The second major area, initiating and stewarding environmental research, grew into a set of six specific program areas: natural climate solutions, mining, cities and climate change, plastics and the environment, arts and climate, and climate justice.

These efforts included collaborations with a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, three successive presidential administrations from Colombia, and members of communities affected by climate change, including coal miners, indigenous groups, various cities, companies, the U.N., many agencies — and the popular musical group Coldplay, which has pledged to work toward climate neutrality for its performances. “It was the role that the ESI played as a host and steward of these research programs that may serve as a key element of our legacy,” Fernandez says.

The third broad area, he says, “is the idea that the ESI as an entity at MIT would catalyze this movement of a research university toward sustainability as a core priority.” While MIT was founded to be an academic partner to the industrialization of the world, “aren’t we in a different world now? The kind of massive infrastructure planning and investment and construction that needs to happen to decarbonize the energy system is maybe the largest industrialization effort ever undertaken. Even more than in the recent past, the set of priorities driving this have to do with sustainable development.”

Overall, Fernandez says, “we did everything we could to infuse the Institute in its teaching and research activities with the idea that the world is now in dire need of sustainable solutions.”

Fernandez “has nurtured some incredible things under ESI,” Solomon says. “It’s been a very strong and useful program, both for education and research.” But it is appropriate at this time to distribute its projects to other venues, she says. “We do now have a major thrust in the Climate Project, and you don’t want to have redundancies and overlaps between the two.”

Fernandez says “one of the missions of the Climate Project is really acting to coalesce and aggregate lots of work around MIT.” Now, with the Climate Project itself, along with the Climate Policy Center and the Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy, it makes more sense for ESI’s climate-related projects to be integrated into these new entities, and other projects that are less directly connected to climate to take their places in various appropriate departments or labs, he says.

“We did enough with ESI that we made it possible for these other centers to really flourish,” he says. “And in that sense, we played our role.”

As of June 1, Fernandez has returned to his role as professor of architecture and urbanism and building technology in the School of Architecture and Planning, where he directs the Urban Metabolism Group. He will also be starting up a new group called Environment ResearchAction (ERA) to continue ESI work in cities, nature, and artificial intelligence. 

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.”

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.

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.

Art restoration takes steady hands and a discerning eye. For centuries, conservators have restored paintings by identifying areas needing repair, then mixing an exact shade to fill in one area at a time. Often, a painting can have thousands of tiny regions requiring individual attention. Restoring a single painting can take anywhere from a few weeks to over a decade.

In recent years, digital restoration tools have opened a route to creating virtual representations of original, restored works. These tools apply techniques of computer vision, image recognition, and color matching, to generate a “digitally restored” version of a painting relatively quickly.

Still, there has been no way to translate digital restorations directly onto an original work, until now. In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, Alex Kachkine, a mechanical engineering graduate student at MIT, presents a new method he’s developed to physically apply a digital restoration directly onto an original painting.

The restoration is printed on a very thin polymer film, in the form of a mask that can be aligned and adhered to an original painting. It can also be easily removed. Kachkine says that a digital file of the mask can be stored and referred to by future conservators, to see exactly what changes were made to restore the original painting.

“Because there’s a digital record of what mask was used, in 100 years, the next time someone is working with this, they’ll have an extremely clear understanding of what was done to the painting,” Kachkine says. “And that’s never really been possible in conservation before.”

As a demonstration, he applied the method to a highly damaged 15th century oil painting. The method automatically identified 5,612 separate regions in need of repair, and filled in these regions using 57,314 different colors. The entire process, from start to finish, took 3.5 hours, which he estimates is about 66 times faster than traditional restoration methods.

Kachkine acknowledges that, as with any restoration project, there are ethical issues to consider, in terms of whether a restored version is an appropriate representation of an artist’s original style and intent. Any application of his new method, he says, should be done in consultation with conservators with knowledge of a painting’s history and origins.

“There is a lot of damaged art in storage that might never be seen,” Kachkine says. “Hopefully with this new method, there’s a chance we’ll see more art, which I would be delighted by.”

Digital connections

The new restoration process started as a side project. In 2021, as Kachkine made his way to MIT to start his PhD program in mechanical engineering, he drove up the East Coast and made a point to visit as many art galleries as he could along the way.

“I’ve been into art for a very long time now, since I was a kid,” says Kachkine, who restores paintings as a hobby, using traditional hand-painting techniques. As he toured galleries, he came to realize that the art on the walls is only a fraction of the works that galleries hold. Much of the art that galleries acquire is stored away because the works are aged or damaged, and take time to properly restore.

“Restoring a painting is fun, and it’s great to sit down and infill things and have a nice evening,” Kachkine says. “But that’s a very slow process.”

As he has learned, digital tools can significantly speed up the restoration process. Researchers have developed artificial intelligence algorithms that quickly comb through huge amounts of data. The algorithms learn connections within this visual data, which they apply to generate a digitally restored version of a particular painting, in a way that closely resembles the style of an artist or time period. However, such digital restorations are usually displayed virtually or printed as stand-alone works and cannot be directly applied to retouch original art.

“All this made me think: If we could just restore a painting digitally, and effect the results physically, that would resolve a lot of pain points and drawbacks of a conventional manual process,” Kachkine says.

“Align and restore”

For the new study, Kachkine developed a method to physically apply a digital restoration onto an original painting, using a 15th-century painting that he acquired when he first came to MIT. His new method involves first using traditional techniques to clean a painting and remove any past restoration efforts.

“This painting is almost 600 years old and has gone through conservation many times,” he says. “In this case there was a fair amount of overpainting, all of which has to be cleaned off to see what’s actually there to begin with.”

He scanned the cleaned painting, including the many regions where paint had faded or cracked. He then used existing artificial intelligence algorithms to analyze the scan and create a virtual version of what the painting likely looked like in its original state.

Then, Kachkine developed software that creates a map of regions on the original painting that require infilling, along with the exact colors needed to match the digitally restored version. This map is then translated into a physical, two-layer mask that is printed onto thin polymer-based films. The first layer is printed in color, while the second layer is printed in the exact same pattern, but in white.

“In order to fully reproduce color, you need both white and color ink to get the full spectrum,” Kachkine explains. “If those two layers are misaligned, that’s very easy to see. So I also developed a few computational tools, based on what we know of human color perception, to determine how small of a region we can practically align and restore.”

Kachkine used high-fidelity commercial inkjets to print the mask’s two layers, which he carefully aligned and overlaid by hand onto the original painting and adhered with a thin spray of conventional varnish. The printed films are made from materials that can be easily dissolved with conservation-grade solutions, in case conservators need to reveal the original, damaged work. The digital file of the mask can also be saved as a detailed record of what was restored.

For the painting that Kachkine used, the method was able to fill in thousands of losses in just a few hours. “A few years ago, I was restoring this baroque Italian painting with probably the same order magnitude of losses, and it took me nine months of part-time work,” he recalls. “The more losses there are, the better this method is.”

He estimates that the new method can be orders of magnitude faster than traditional, hand-painted approaches. If the method is adopted widely, he emphasizes that conservators should be involved at every step in the process, to ensure that the final work is in keeping with an artist’s style and intent.

“It will take a lot of deliberation about the ethical challenges involved at every stage in this process to see how can this be applied in a way that’s most consistent with conservation principles,” he says. “We’re setting up a framework for developing further methods. As others work on this, we’ll end up with methods that are more precise.”

This work was supported, in part, by the John O. and Katherine A. Lutz Memorial Fund. The research was carried out, in part, through the use of equipment and facilities at MIT.Nano, with additional support from the MIT Microsystems Technology Laboratories, the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering, and the MIT Libraries.

Today, 2.2 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. In the United States, more than 46 million people experience water insecurity, living with either no running water or water that is unsafe to drink. The increasing need for drinking water is stretching traditional resources such as rivers, lakes, and reservoirs.

To improve access to safe and affordable drinking water, MIT engineers are tapping into an unconventional source: the air. The Earth’s atmosphere contains millions of billions of gallons of water in the form of vapor. If this vapor can be efficiently captured and condensed, it could supply clean drinking water in places where traditional water resources are inaccessible.

With that goal in mind, the MIT team has developed and tested a new atmospheric water harvester and shown that it efficiently captures water vapor and produces safe drinking water across a range of relative humidities, including dry desert air.

The new device is a black, window-sized vertical panel, made from a water-absorbent hydrogel material, enclosed in a glass chamber coated with a cooling layer. The hydrogel resembles black bubble wrap, with small dome-shaped structures that swell when the hydrogel soaks up water vapor. When the captured vapor evaporates, the domes shrink back down in an origami-like transformation. The evaporated vapor then condenses on the the glass, where it can flow down and out through a tube, as clean and drinkable water.

The system runs entirely on its own, without a power source, unlike other designs that require batteries, solar panels, or electricity from the grid. The team ran the device for over a week in Death Valley, California — the driest region in North America. Even in very low-humidity conditions, the device squeezed drinking water from the air at rates of up to 160 milliliters (about two-thirds of a cup) per day.

The team estimates that multiple vertical panels, set up in a small array, could passively supply a household with drinking water, even in arid desert environments. What’s more, the system’s water production should increase with humidity, supplying drinking water in temperate and tropical climates.

“We have built a meter-scale device that we hope to deploy in resource-limited regions, where even a solar cell is not very accessible,” says Xuanhe Zhao, the Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT. “It’s a test of feasibility in scaling up this water harvesting technology. Now people can build it even larger, or make it into parallel panels, to supply drinking water to people and achieve real impact.”

Zhao and his colleagues present the details of the new water harvesting design in a paper appearing today in the journal Nature Water. The study’s lead author is former MIT postdoc “Will” Chang Liu, who is currently an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). MIT co-authors include Xiao-Yun Yan, Shucong Li, and Bolei Deng, along with collaborators from multiple other institutions.

Carrying capacity

Hydrogels are soft, porous materials that are made mainly from water and a microscopic network of interconnecting polymer fibers. Zhao’s group at MIT has primarily explored the use of hydrogels in biomedical applications, including adhesive coatings for medical implants, soft and flexible electrodes, and noninvasive imaging stickers.

“Through our work with soft materials, one property we know very well is the way hydrogel is very good at absorbing water from air,” Zhao says.

Researchers are exploring a number of ways to harvest water vapor for drinking water. Among the most efficient so far are devices made from metal-organic frameworks, or MOFs — ultra-porous materials that have also been shown to capture water from dry desert air. But the MOFs do not swell or stretch when absorbing water, and are limited in vapor-carrying capacity.

Water from air

The group’s new hydrogel-based water harvester addresses another key problem in similar designs. Other groups have designed water harvesters out of micro- or nano-porous hydrogels. But the water produced from these designs can be salty, requiring additional filtering. Salt is a naturally absorbent material, and researchers embed salts — typically, lithium chloride — in hydrogel to increase the material’s water absorption. The drawback, however, is that this salt can leak out with the water when it is eventually collected.

The team’s new design significantly limits salt leakage. Within the hydrogel itself, they included an extra ingredient: glycerol, a liquid compound that naturally stabilizes salt, keeping it within the gel rather than letting it crystallize and leak out with the water. The hydrogel itself has a microstructure that lacks nanoscale pores, which further prevents salt from escaping the material. The salt levels in the water they collected were below the standard threshold for safe drinking water, and significantly below the levels produced by many other hydrogel-based designs.

In addition to tuning the hydrogel’s composition, the researchers made improvements to its form. Rather than keeping the gel as a flat sheet, they molded it into a pattern of small domes resembling bubble wrap, that act to increase the gel’s surface area, along with the amount of water vapor it can absorb.

The researchers fabricated a half-square-meter of hydrogel and encased the material in a window-like glass chamber. They coated the exterior of the chamber with a special polymer film, which helps to cool the glass and stimulates any water vapor in the hydrogel to evaporate and condense onto the glass. They installed a simple tubing system to collect the water as it flows down the glass.

In November 2023, the team traveled to Death Valley, California, and set up the device as a vertical panel. Over seven days, they took measurements as the hydrogel absorbed water vapor during the night (the time of day when water vapor in the desert is highest). In the daytime, with help from the sun, the harvested water evaporated out from the hydrogel and condensed onto the glass.

Over this period, the device worked across a range of humidities, from 21 to 88 percent, and produced between 57 and 161.5 milliliters of drinking water per day. Even in the driest conditions, the device harvested more water than other passive and some actively powered designs.

“This is just a proof-of-concept design, and there are a lot of things we can optimize,” Liu says. “For instance, we could have a multipanel design. And we’re working on a next generation of the material to further improve its intrinsic properties.”

“We imagine that you could one day deploy an array of these panels, and the footprint is very small because they are all vertical,” says Zhao, who has plans to further test the panels in many resource-limited regions. “Then you could have many panels together, collecting water all the time, at household scale.”

This work was supported, in part, by the MIT J-WAFS Water and Food Seed Grant, the MIT-Chinese University of Hong Kong collaborative research program, and the UM6P-MIT collaborative research program.

The human brain is very good at solving complicated problems. One reason for that is that humans can break problems apart into manageable subtasks that are easy to solve one at a time.

This allows us to complete a daily task like going out for coffee by breaking it into steps: getting out of our office building, navigating to the coffee shop, and once there, obtaining the coffee. This strategy helps us to handle obstacles easily. For example, if the elevator is broken, we can revise how we get out of the building without changing the other steps.

While there is a great deal of behavioral evidence demonstrating humans’ skill at these complicated tasks, it has been difficult to devise experimental scenarios that allow precise characterization of the computational strategies we use to solve problems.

In a new study, MIT researchers have successfully modeled how people deploy different decision-making strategies to solve a complicated task — in this case, predicting how a ball will travel through a maze when the ball is hidden from view. The human brain cannot perform this task perfectly because it is impossible to track all of the possible trajectories in parallel, but the researchers found that people can perform reasonably well by flexibly adopting two strategies known as hierarchical reasoning and counterfactual reasoning.

The researchers were also able to determine the circumstances under which people choose each of those strategies.

“What humans are capable of doing is to break down the maze into subsections, and then solve each step using relatively simple algorithms. Effectively, when we don’t have the means to solve a complex problem, we manage by using simpler heuristics that get the job done,” says Mehrdad Jazayeri, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the senior author of the study.

Mahdi Ramadan PhD ’24 and graduate student Cheng Tang are the lead authors of the paper, which appears today in Nature Human Behavior. Nicholas Watters PhD ’25 is also a co-author.

Rational strategies

When humans perform simple tasks that have a clear correct answer, such as categorizing objects, they perform extremely well. When tasks become more complex, such as planning a trip to your favorite cafe, there may no longer be one clearly superior answer. And, at each step, there are many things that could go wrong. In these cases, humans are very good at working out a solution that will get the task done, even though it may not be the optimal solution.

Those solutions often involve problem-solving shortcuts, or heuristics. Two prominent heuristics humans commonly rely on are hierarchical and counterfactual reasoning. Hierarchical reasoning is the process of breaking down a problem into layers, starting from the general and proceeding toward specifics. Counterfactual reasoning involves imagining what would have happened if you had made a different choice. While these strategies are well-known, scientists don’t know much about how the brain decides which one to use in a given situation.

“This is really a big question in cognitive science: How do we problem-solve in a suboptimal way, by coming up with clever heuristics that we chain together in a way that ends up getting us closer and closer until we solve the problem?” Jazayeri says.

To overcome this, Jazayeri and his colleagues devised a task that is just complex enough to require these strategies, yet simple enough that the outcomes and the calculations that go into them can be measured.

The task requires participants to predict the path of a ball as it moves through four possible trajectories in a maze. Once the ball enters the maze, people cannot see which path it travels. At two junctions in the maze, they hear an auditory cue when the ball reaches that point. Predicting the ball’s path is a task that is impossible for humans to solve with perfect accuracy.

“It requires four parallel simulations in your mind, and no human can do that. It’s analogous to having four conversations at a time,” Jazayeri says. “The task allows us to tap into this set of algorithms that the humans use, because you just can’t solve it optimally.”

The researchers recruited about 150 human volunteers to participate in the study. Before each subject began the ball-tracking task, the researchers evaluated how accurately they could estimate timespans of several hundred milliseconds, about the length of time it takes the ball to travel along one arm of the maze.

For each participant, the researchers created computational models that could predict the patterns of errors that would be seen for that participant (based on their timing skill) if they were running parallel simulations, using hierarchical reasoning alone, counterfactual reasoning alone, or combinations of the two reasoning strategies.

The researchers compared the subjects’ performance with the models’ predictions and found that for every subject, their performance was most closely associated with a model that used hierarchical reasoning but sometimes switched to counterfactual reasoning.

That suggests that instead of tracking all the possible paths that the ball could take, people broke up the task. First, they picked the direction (left or right), in which they thought the ball turned at the first junction, and continued to track the ball as it headed for the next turn. If the timing of the next sound they heard wasn’t compatible with the path they had chosen, they would go back and revise their first prediction — but only some of the time.

Switching back to the other side, which represents a shift to counterfactual reasoning, requires people to review their memory of the tones that they heard. However, it turns out that these memories are not always reliable, and the researchers found that people decided whether to go back or not based on how good they believed their memory to be.

“People rely on counterfactuals to the degree that it’s helpful,” Jazayeri says. “People who take a big performance loss when they do counterfactuals avoid doing them. But if you are someone who’s really good at retrieving information from the recent past, you may go back to the other side.”

Human limitations

To further validate their results, the researchers created a machine-learning neural network and trained it to complete the task. A machine-learning model trained on this task will track the ball’s path accurately and make the correct prediction every time, unless the researchers impose limitations on its performance.

When the researchers added cognitive limitations similar to those faced by humans, they found that the model altered its strategies. When they eliminated the model’s ability to follow all possible trajectories, it began to employ hierarchical and counterfactual strategies like humans do. If the researchers reduced the model’s memory recall ability, it began to switch to hierarchical only if it thought its recall would be good enough to get the right answer — just as humans do.

“What we found is that networks mimic human behavior when we impose on them those computational constraints that we found in human behavior,” Jazayeri says. “This is really saying that humans are acting rationally under the constraints that they have to function under.”

By slightly varying the amount of memory impairment programmed into the models, the researchers also saw hints that the switching of strategies appears to happen gradually, rather than at a distinct cut-off point. They are now performing further studies to try to determine what is happening in the brain as these shifts in strategy occur.

The research was funded by a Lisa K. Yang ICoN Fellowship, a Friends of the McGovern Institute Student Fellowship, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, the Simons Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the McGovern Institute.

For many patients with schizophrenia, other psychiatric illnesses, or diseases such as hypertension and asthma, it can be difficult to take their medicine every day. To help overcome that challenge, MIT researchers have developed a pill that can be taken just once a week and gradually releases medication from within the stomach.

In a phase 3 clinical trial conducted by MIT spinout Lyndra Therapeutics, the researchers used the once-a-week pill to deliver a widely used medication for managing the symptoms of schizophrenia. They found that this treatment regimen maintained consistent levels of the drug in patients’ bodies and controlled their symptoms just as well as daily doses of the drug. The results are published today in Lancet Psychiatry.

“We’ve converted something that has to be taken once a day to once a week, orally, using a technology that can be adapted for a variety of medications,” says Giovanni Traverso, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, an associate member of the Broad Institute, and an author of the study. “The ability to provide a sustained level of drug for a prolonged period, in an easy-to-administer system, makes it easier to ensure patients are receiving their medication.”

Traverso’s lab began developing the ingestible capsule studied in this trial more than 10 years ago, as part of an ongoing effort to make medications easier for patients to take. The capsule is about the size of a multivitamin, and once swallowed, it expands into a star shape that helps it remain in the stomach until all of the drug is released.

Richard Scranton, chief medical officer of Lyndra Therapeutics, is the senior author of the paper, and Leslie Citrome, a clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at New York Medical College School of Medicine, is the lead author. Nayana Nagaraj, medical director at Lyndra Therapeutics, and Todd Dumas, senior director of pharmacometrics at Certara, are also authors.

Sustained delivery

Over the past decade, Traverso’s lab has been working on a variety of capsules that can be swallowed and remain in the digestive tract for days or weeks, slowly releasing their drug payload. In 2016, his team reported the star-shaped device, which was then further developed by Lyndra for clinical trials in patients with schizophrenia.

The device contains six arms that can be folded in, allowing it to fit inside a capsule. The capsule dissolves when the device reaches the stomach, allowing the arms to spring out. Once the arms are extended, the device becomes too large to pass through the pylorus (the exit of the stomach), so it remains freely floating in the stomach as drugs are slowly released from the arms. After about a week, the arms break off on their own, and each segment exits the stomach and passes through the digestive tract.

For the clinical trials, the capsule was loaded with risperidone, a commonly prescribed medication used to treat schizophrenia. Most patients take the drug orally once a day. There are also injectable versions that can be given every two weeks, every month, or every two months, but they require administration by a health care provider and are not always acceptable to patients.

The MIT and Lyndra team chose to focus on schizophrenia in hopes that a drug regimen that could be administered less frequently, through oral delivery, could make treatment easier for patients and their caregivers.

“One of the areas of unmet need that was recognized early on is neuropsychiatric conditions, where the illness can limit or impair one’s ability to remember to take their medication,” Traverso says. “With that in mind, one of the conditions that has been a big focus has been schizophrenia.”

The phase 3 trial was coordinated by researchers at Lyndra and enrolled 83 patients at five different sites around the United States. Forty-five of those patients completed the full five weeks of the study, in which they took one risperidone-loaded capsule per week.

Throughout the study, the researchers measured the amount of drug in each patient’s bloodstream. Each week, they found a sharp increase on the day the pill was given, followed by a slow decline over the next week. The levels were all within the optimal range, and there was less variation over time than is seen when patients take a pill each day.

Effective treatment

Using an evaluation known as the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS), the researchers also found that the patients’ symptoms remained stable throughout the study.

“One of the biggest obstacles in the care of people with chronic illnesses in general is that medications are not taken consistently. This leads to worsening symptoms, and in the case of schizophrenia, potential relapse and hospitalization,” Citrome says. “Having the option to take medication by mouth once a week represents an important option that can assist with adherence for the many patients who would prefer oral medications versus injectable formulations.”

Side effects from the treatment were minimal, the researchers found. Some patients experienced mild acid reflux and constipation early in the study, but these did not last long. The results, showing effectiveness of the capsule and few side effects, represent a major milestone in this approach to drug delivery, Traverso says.

“This really demonstrates that what we had hypothesized a decade ago, which is that a single capsule providing a drug depot within the GI tract could be possible,” he says. “Here what you see is that the capsule can achieve the drug levels that were predicted, and also control symptoms in a sizeable cohort of patients with schizophrenia.”

The investigators now hope to complete larger phase 3 studies before applying for FDA approval of this delivery approach for risperidone. They are also preparing for phase 1 trials using this capsule to deliver other drugs, including contraceptives.

“We are delighted that this technology which started at MIT has reached the point of phase 3 clinical trials,” says Robert Langer, the David H. Koch Institute Professor at MIT, who was an author of the original study on the star capsule and is a co-founder of Lyndra Therapeutics.

The research was funded by Lyndra Therapeutics.

As the frequency and severity of extreme weather events grow, it may become increasingly necessary to employ a bolder approach to climate change, warned Emily A. Carter, the Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment at Princeton University. Carter made her case for why the energy transition is no longer enough in the face of climate change while speaking at the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition seminar on the MIT campus.

“If all we do is take care of what we did in the past — but we don’t change what we do in the future — then we’re still going to be left with very serious problems,” she said. Our approach to climate change mitigation must comprise transformation, intervention, and adaption strategies, said Carter. 

Transitioning to a decarbonized electricity system is one piece of the puzzle. Growing amounts of solar and wind energy — along with nuclear, hydropower, and geothermal — are slowly transforming the energy electricity landscape, but Carter noted that there are new technologies farther down the pipeline.  

“Advanced geothermal may come on in the next couple of decades. Fusion will only really start to play a role later in the century, but could provide firm electricity such that we can start to decommission nuclear,” said Carter, who is also a senior strategic advisor and associate laboratory director at the Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. 

Taking this a step further, Carter outlined how this carbon-free electricity should then be used to electrify everything we can. She highlighted the industrial sector as a critical area for transformation: “The energy transition is about transitioning off of fossil fuels. If you look at the manufacturing industries, they are driven by fossil fuels right now. They are driven by fossil fuel-driven thermal processes.” Carter noted that thermal energy is much less efficient than electricity and highlighted electricity-driven strategies that could replace heat in manufacturing, such as electrolysis, plasmas, light-emitting diodes (LEDs) for photocatalysis, and joule heating. 

The transportation sector is also a key area for electrification, Carter said. While electric vehicles have become increasingly common in recent years, heavy-duty transportation is not as easily electrified. The solution? “Carbon-neutral fuels for heavy-duty aviation and shipping,” she said, emphasizing that these fuels will need to become part of the circular economy. “We know that when we burn those fuels, they’re going to produce CO2 [carbon dioxide] again. They need to come from a source of CO2 that is not fossil-based.” 

The next step is intervention in the form of carbon dioxide removal, which then necessitates methods of storage and utilization, according to Carter. “There’s a lot of talk about building large numbers of pipelines to capture the CO2 — from fossil fuel-driven power plants, cement plants, steel plants, all sorts of industrial places that emit CO2 — and then piping it and storing it in underground aquifers,” she explained. Offshore pipelines are much more expensive than those on land, but can mitigate public concerns over their safety. Europe is exclusively focusing their efforts offshore for this very reason, and the same could be true for the United States, Carter said.  

Once carbon dioxide is captured, commercial utilization may provide economic leverage to accelerate sequestration, even if only a few gigatons are used per year, Carter noted. Through mineralization, CO2 can be converted into carbonates, which could be used in building materials such as concrete and road-paving materials.  

There is another form of intervention that Carter currently views as a last resort: solar geoengineering, sometimes known as solar radiation management or SRM. In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted and released sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, which caused a temporary cooling of the Earth by approximately 0.5 degree Celsius for over a year. SRM seeks to recreate that cooling effect by injecting particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight. According to Carter, there are three main strategies: stratospheric aerosol injection, cirrus cloud thinning (thinning clouds to let more infrared radiation emitted by the earth escape to space), and marine cloud brightening (brightening clouds with sea salt so they reflect more light).  

“My view is, I hope we don't ever have to do it, but I sure think we should understand what would happen in case somebody else just decides to do it. It’s a global security issue,” said Carter. “In principle, it’s not so difficult technologically, so we’d like to really understand and to be able to predict what would happen if that happened.” 

With any technology, stakeholder and community engagement is essential for deployment, Carter said. She emphasized the importance of both respectfully listening to concerns and thoroughly addressing them, stating, “Hopefully, there’s enough information given to assuage their fears. We have to gain the trust of people before any deployment can be considered.” 

A crucial component of this trust starts with the responsibility of the scientific community to be transparent and critique each other’s work, Carter said. “Skepticism is good. You should have to prove your proof of principle.” 

MITEI Presents: Advancing the Energy Transition is an MIT Energy Initiative speaker series highlighting energy experts and leaders at the forefront of the scientific, technological, and policy solutions needed to transform our energy systems. The series will continue in fall 2025. For more information on this and additional events, visit the MITEI website.

Travel agents help to provide end-to-end logistics — like transportation, accommodations, meals, and lodging — for businesspeople, vacationers, and everyone in between. For those looking to make their own arrangements, large language models (LLMs) seem like they would be a strong tool to employ for this task because of their ability to iteratively interact using natural language, provide some commonsense reasoning, collect information, and call other tools in to help with the task at hand. However, recent work has found that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with complex logistical and mathematical reasoning, as well as problems with multiple constraints, like trip planning, where they’ve been found to provide viable solutions 4 percent or less of the time, even with additional tools and application programming interfaces (APIs).

Subsequently, a research team from MIT and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab reframed the issue to see if they could increase the success rate of LLM solutions for complex problems. “We believe a lot of these planning problems are naturally a combinatorial optimization problem,” where you need to satisfy several constraints in a certifiable way, says Chuchu Fan, associate professor in the MIT Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro) and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). She is also a researcher in the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab. Her team applies machine learning, control theory, and formal methods to develop safe and verifiable control systems for robotics, autonomous systems, controllers, and human-machine interactions.

Noting the transferable nature of their work for travel planning, the group sought to create a user-friendly framework that can act as an AI travel broker to help develop realistic, logical, and complete travel plans. To achieve this, the researchers combined common LLMs with algorithms and a complete satisfiability solver. Solvers are mathematical tools that rigorously check if criteria can be met and how, but they require complex computer programming for use. This makes them natural companions to LLMs for problems like these, where users want help planning in a timely manner, without the need for programming knowledge or research into travel options. Further, if a user’s constraint cannot be met, the new technique can identify and articulate where the issue lies and propose alternative measures to the user, who can then choose to accept, reject, or modify them until a valid plan is formulated, if one exists.

“Different complexities of travel planning are something everyone will have to deal with at some point. There are different needs, requirements, constraints, and real-world information that you can collect,” says Fan. “Our idea is not to ask LLMs to propose a travel plan. Instead, an LLM here is acting as a translator to translate this natural language description of the problem into a problem that a solver can handle [and then provide that to the user],” says Fan.

Co-authoring a paper on the work with Fan are Yang Zhang of MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, AeroAstro graduate student Yilun Hao, and graduate student Yongchao Chen of MIT LIDS and Harvard University. This work was recently presented at the Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Breaking down the solver

Math tends to be domain-specific. For example, in natural language processing, LLMs perform regressions to predict the next token, a.k.a. “word,” in a series to analyze or create a document. This works well for generalizing diverse human inputs. LLMs alone, however, wouldn’t work for formal verification applications, like in aerospace or cybersecurity, where circuit connections and constraint tasks need to be complete and proven, otherwise loopholes and vulnerabilities can sneak by and cause critical safety issues. Here, solvers excel, but they need fixed formatting inputs and struggle with unsatisfiable queries.  A hybrid technique, however, provides an opportunity to develop solutions for complex problems, like trip planning, in a way that’s intuitive for everyday people.

“The solver is really the key here, because when we develop these algorithms, we know exactly how the problem is being solved as an optimization problem,” says Fan. Specifically, the research group used a solver called satisfiability modulo theories (SMT), which determines whether a formula can be satisfied. “With this particular solver, it’s not just doing optimization. It’s doing reasoning over a lot of different algorithms there to understand whether the planning problem is possible or not to solve. That’s a pretty significant thing in travel planning. It’s not a very traditional mathematical optimization problem because people come up with all these limitations, constraints, restrictions,” notes Fan.

Translation in action

The “travel agent” works in four steps that can be repeated, as needed. The researchers used GPT-4, Claude-3, or Mistral-Large as the method’s LLM. First, the LLM parses a user’s requested travel plan prompt into planning steps, noting preferences for budget, hotels, transportation, destinations, attractions, restaurants, and trip duration in days, as well as any other user prescriptions. Those steps are then converted into executable Python code (with a natural language annotation for each of the constraints), which calls APIs like CitySearch, FlightSearch, etc. to collect data, and the SMT solver to begin executing the steps laid out in the constraint satisfaction problem. If a sound and complete solution can be found, the solver outputs the result to the LLM, which then provides a coherent itinerary to the user.

If one or more constraints cannot be met, the framework begins looking for an alternative. The solver outputs code identifying the conflicting constraints (with its corresponding annotation) that the LLM then provides to the user with a potential remedy. The user can then decide how to proceed, until a solution (or the maximum number of iterations) is reached.

Generalizable and robust planning

The researchers tested their method using the aforementioned LLMs against other baselines: GPT-4 by itself, OpenAI o1-preview by itself, GPT-4 with a tool to collect information, and a search algorithm that optimizes for total cost. Using the TravelPlanner dataset, which includes data for viable plans, the team looked at multiple performance metrics: how frequently a method could deliver a solution, if the solution satisfied commonsense criteria like not visiting two cities in one day, the method’s ability to meet one or more constraints, and a final pass rate indicating that it could meet all constraints. The new technique generally achieved over a 90 percent pass rate, compared to 10 percent or lower for the baselines. The team also explored the addition of a JSON representation within the query step, which further made it easier for the method to provide solutions with 84.4-98.9 percent pass rates.

The MIT-IBM team posed additional challenges for their method. They looked at how important each component of their solution was — such as removing human feedback or the solver — and how that affected plan adjustments to unsatisfiable queries within 10 or 20 iterations using a new dataset they created called UnsatChristmas, which includes unseen constraints, and a modified version of TravelPlanner. On average, the MIT-IBM group’s framework achieved 78.6  and 85 percent success, which rises to 81.6 and 91.7 percent with additional plan modification rounds. The researchers analyzed how well it handled new, unseen constraints and paraphrased query-step and step-code prompts. In both cases, it performed very well, especially with an 86.7 percent pass rate for the paraphrasing trial.

Lastly, the MIT-IBM researchers applied their framework to other domains with tasks like block picking, task allocation, the traveling salesman problem, and warehouse. Here, the method must select numbered, colored blocks and maximize its score; optimize robot task assignment for different scenarios; plan trips minimizing distance traveled; and robot task completion and optimization.

“I think this is a very strong and innovative framework that can save a lot of time for humans, and also, it’s a very novel combination of the LLM and the solver,” says Hao.

This work was funded, in part, by the Office of Naval Research and the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

Research that crosses the traditional boundaries of academic disciplines, and boundaries between academia, industry, and government, is increasingly widespread, and has sometimes led to the spawning of significant new disciplines. But Munther Dahleh, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, says that such multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work often suffers from a number of shortcomings and handicaps compared to more traditionally focused disciplinary work.

But increasingly, he says, the profound challenges that face us in the modern world — including climate change, biodiversity loss, how to control and regulate artificial intelligence systems, and the identification and control of pandemics — require such meshing of expertise from very different areas, including engineering, policy, economics, and data analysis. That realization is what guided him, a decade ago, in the creation of MIT’s pioneering Institute for Data, Systems and Society (IDSS), aiming to foster a more deeply integrated and lasting set of collaborations than the usual temporary and ad hoc associations that occur for such work.

Dahleh has now written a book detailing the process of analyzing the landscape of existing disciplinary divisions at MIT and conceiving of a way to create a structure aimed at breaking down some of those barriers in a lasting and meaningful way, in order to bring about this new institute. The book, “Data, Systems, and Society: Harnessing AI for Societal Good,” was published this March by Cambridge University Press.

The book, Dahleh says, is his attempt “to describe our thinking that led us to the vision of the institute. What was the driving vision behind it?” It is aimed at a number of different audiences, he says, but in particular, “I’m targeting students who are coming to do research that they want to address societal challenges of different types, but utilizing AI and data science. How should they be thinking about these problems?”

A key concept that has guided the structure of the institute is something he refers to as “the triangle.” This refers to the interaction of three components: physical systems, people interacting with those physical systems, and then regulation and policy regarding those systems. Each of these affects, and is affected by, the others in various ways, he explains. “You get a complex interaction among these three components, and then there is data on all these pieces. Data is sort of like a circle that sits in the middle of this triangle and connects all these pieces,” he says.

When tackling any big, complex problem, he suggests, it is useful to think in terms of this triangle. “If you’re tackling a societal problem, it’s very important to understand the impact of your solution on society, on the people, and the role of people in the success of your system,” he says. Often, he says, “solutions and technology have actually marginalized certain groups of people and have ignored them. So the big message is always to think about the interaction between these components as you think about how to solve problems.”

As a specific example, he cites the Covid-19 pandemic. That was a perfect example of a big societal problem, he says, and illustrates the three sides of the triangle: there’s the biology, which was little understood at first and was subject to intensive research efforts; there was the contagion effect, having to do with social behavior and interactions among people; and there was the decision-making by political leaders and institutions, in terms of shutting down schools and companies or requiring masks, and so on. “The complex problem we faced was the interaction of all these components happening in real-time, when the data wasn’t all available,” he says.

Making a decision, for example shutting schools or businesses, based on controlling the spread of the disease, had immediate effects on economics and social well-being and health and education, “so we had to weigh all these things back into the formula,” he says. “The triangle came alive for us during the pandemic.” As a result, IDSS “became a convening place, partly because of all the different aspects of the problem that we were interested in.”

Examples of such interactions abound, he says. Social media and e-commerce platforms are another case of “systems built for people, and they have a regulation aspect, and they fit into the same story if you’re trying to understand misinformation or the monitoring of misinformation.”

The book presents many examples of ethical issues in AI, stressing that they must be handled with great care. He cites self-driving cars as an example, where programming decisions in dangerous situations can appear ethical but lead to negative economic and humanitarian outcomes. For instance, while most Americans support the idea that a car should sacrifice its driver rather than kill an innocent person, they wouldn’t buy such a car. This reluctance lowers adoption rates and ultimately increases casualties.

In the book, he explains the difference, as he sees it, between the concept of “transdisciplinary” versus typical cross-disciplinary or interdisciplinary research. “They all have different roles, and they have been successful in different ways,” he says. The key is that most such efforts tend to be transitory, and that can limit their societal impact. The fact is that even if people from different departments work together on projects, they lack a structure of shared journals, conferences, common spaces and infrastructure, and a sense of community. Creating an academic entity in the form of IDSS that explicitly crosses these boundaries in a fixed and lasting way was an attempt to address that lack. “It was primarily about creating a culture for people to think about all these components at the same time.”

He hastens to add that of course such interactions were already happening at MIT, “but we didn’t have one place where all the students are all interacting with all of these principles at the same time.” In the IDSS doctoral program, for instance, there are 12 required core courses — half of them from statistics and optimization theory and computation, and half from the social sciences and humanities.

Dahleh stepped down from the leadership of IDSS two years ago to return to teaching and to continue his research. But as he reflected on the work of that institute and his role in bringing it into being, he realized that unlike his own academic research, in which every step along the way is carefully documented in published papers, “I haven’t left a trail” to document the creation of the institute and the thinking behind it. “Nobody knows what we thought about, how we thought about it, how we built it.” Now, with this book, they do.

The book, he says, is “kind of leading people into how all of this came together, in hindsight. I want to have people read this and sort of understand it from a historical perspective, how something like this happened, and I did my best to make it as understandable and simple as I could.”

Suppose you were shown that an artificial intelligence tool offers accurate predictions about some stocks you own. How would you feel about using it? Now, suppose you are applying for a job at a company where the HR department uses an AI system to screen resumes. Would you be comfortable with that?

A new study finds that people are neither entirely enthusiastic nor totally averse to AI. Rather than falling into camps of techno-optimists and Luddites, people are discerning about the practical upshot of using AI, case by case.

“We propose that AI appreciation occurs when AI is perceived as being more capable than humans and personalization is perceived as being unnecessary in a given decision context,” says MIT Professor Jackson Lu, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the study’s results. “AI aversion occurs when either of these conditions is not met, and AI appreciation occurs only when both conditions are satisfied.”

The paper, “AI Aversion or Appreciation? A Capability–Personalization Framework and a Meta-Analytic Review,” appears in Psychological Bulletin. The paper has eight co-authors, including Lu, who is the Career Development Associate Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

New framework adds insight

People’s reactions to AI have long been subject to extensive debate, often producing seemingly disparate findings. An influential 2015 paper on “algorithm aversion” found that people are less forgiving of AI-generated errors than of human errors, whereas a widely noted 2019 paper on “algorithm appreciation” found that people preferred advice from AI, compared to advice from humans.

To reconcile these mixed findings, Lu and his co-authors conducted a meta-analysis of 163 prior studies that compared people’s preferences for AI versus humans. The researchers tested whether the data supported their proposed “Capability–Personalization Framework” — the idea that in a given context, both the perceived capability of AI and the perceived necessity for personalization shape our preferences for either AI or humans.

Across the 163 studies, the research team analyzed over 82,000 reactions to 93 distinct “decision contexts” — for instance, whether or not participants would feel comfortable with AI being used in cancer diagnoses. The analysis confirmed that the Capability–Personalization Framework indeed helps account for people’s preferences.

“The meta-analysis supported our theoretical framework,” Lu says. “Both dimensions are important: Individuals evaluate whether or not AI is more capable than people at a given task, and whether the task calls for personalization. People will prefer AI only if they think the AI is more capable than humans and the task is nonpersonal.”

He adds: “The key idea here is that high perceived capability alone does not guarantee AI appreciation. Personalization matters too.”

For example, people tend to favor AI when it comes to detecting fraud or sorting large datasets — areas where AI’s abilities exceed those of humans in speed and scale, and personalization is not required. But they are more resistant to AI in contexts like therapy, job interviews, or medical diagnoses, where they feel a human is better able to recognize their unique circumstances.

“People have a fundamental desire to see themselves as unique and distinct from other people,” Lu says. “AI is often viewed as impersonal and operating in a rote manner. Even if the AI is trained on a wealth of data, people feel AI can’t grasp their personal situations. They want a human recruiter, a human doctor who can see them as distinct from other people.”

Context also matters: From tangibility to unemployment

The study also uncovered other factors that influence individuals’ preferences for AI. For instance, AI appreciation is more pronounced for tangible robots than for intangible algorithms.

Economic context also matters. In countries with lower unemployment, AI appreciation is more pronounced.

“It makes intuitive sense,” Lu says. “If you worry about being replaced by AI, you’re less likely to embrace it.”  

Lu is continuing to examine people’s complex and evolving attitudes toward AI. While he does not view the current meta-analysis as the last word on the matter, he hopes the Capability–Personalization Framework offers a valuable lens for understanding how people evaluate AI across different contexts.

“We’re not claiming perceived capability and personalization are the only two dimensions that matter, but according to our meta-analysis, these two dimensions capture much of what shapes people’s preferences for AI versus humans across a wide range of studies,” Lu concludes.

In addition to Lu, the paper’s co-authors are Xin Qin, Chen Chen, Hansen Zhou, Xiaowei Dong, and Limei Cao of Sun Yat-sen University; Xiang Zhou of Shenzhen University; and Dongyuan Wu of Fudan University.

The research was supported, in part, by grants to Qin and Wu from the National Natural Science Foundation of China. 

MIT has an unparalleled history of bringing together interdisciplinary teams to solve pressing problems — think of the development of radar during World War II, or leading the international coalition that cracked the code of the human genome — but the challenge of climate change could demand a scale of collaboration unlike any that’s come before at MIT.

“Solving climate change is not just about new technologies or better models. It’s about forging new partnerships across campus and beyond — between scientists and economists, between architects and data scientists, between policymakers and physicists, between anthropologists and engineers, and more,” MIT Vice President for Energy and Climate Evelyn Wang told an energetic crowd of faculty, students, and staff on May 6. “Each of us holds a piece of the solution — but only together can we see the whole.”

Undeterred by heavy rain, approximately 300 campus community members filled the atrium in the Tina and Hamid Moghadam Building (Building 55) for a spring gathering hosted by Wang and the Climate Project at MIT. The initiative seeks to direct the full strength of MIT to address climate change, which Wang described as one of the defining challenges of this moment in history — and one of its greatest opportunities.

“It calls on us to rethink how we power our world, how we build, how we live — and how we work together,” Wang said. “And there is no better place than MIT to lead this kind of bold, integrated effort. Our culture of curiosity, rigor, and relentless experimentation makes us uniquely suited to cross boundaries — to break down silos and build something new.”

The Climate Project is organized around six missions, thematic areas in which MIT aims to make significant impact, ranging from decarbonizing industry to new policy approaches to designing resilient cities. The faculty leaders of these missions posed challenges to the crowd before circulating among the crowd to share their perspectives and to discuss community questions and ideas.

Wang and the Climate Project team were joined by a number of research groups, startups, and MIT offices conducting relevant work today on issues related to energy and climate. For example, the MIT Office of Sustainability showcased efforts to use the MIT campus as a living laboratory; MIT spinouts such as Forma Systems, which is developing high-performance, low-carbon building systems, and Addis Energy, which envisions using the earth as a reactor to produce clean ammonia, presented their technologies; and visitors learned about current projects in MIT labs, including DebunkBot, an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that can persuade people to shift their attitudes about conspiracies, developed by David Rand, the Erwin H. Schell Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Benedetto Marelli, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who leads the Wild Cards Mission, said the energy and enthusiasm that filled the room was inspiring — but that the individual conversations were equally valuable.

“I was especially pleased to see so many students come out. I also spoke with other faculty, talked to staff from across the Institute, and met representatives of external companies interested in collaborating with MIT,” Marelli said. “You could see connections being made all around the room, which is exactly what we need as we build momentum for the Climate Project.”

Researchers from the Disruptive and Sustainable Technologies for Agricultural Precision (DiSTAP) interdisciplinary research group within the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology have developed the world’s first near-infrared fluorescent nanosensor capable of real-time, nondestructive, and species-agnostic detection of indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) — the primary bioactive auxin hormone that controls the way plants develop, grow, and respond to stress.

Auxins, particularly IAA, play a central role in regulating key plant processes such as cell division, elongation, root and shoot development, and response to environmental cues like light, heat, and drought. External factors like light affect how auxin moves within the plant, temperature influences how much is produced, and a lack of water can disrupt hormone balance. When plants cannot effectively regulate auxins, they may not grow well, adapt to changing conditions, or produce as much food. 

Existing IAA detection methods, such as liquid chromatography, require taking plant samples from the plant — which harms or removes part of it. Conventional methods also measure the effects of IAA rather than detecting it directly, and cannot be used universally across different plant types. In addition, since IAA are small molecules that cannot be easily tracked in real time, biosensors that contain fluorescent proteins need to be inserted into the plant’s genome to measure auxin, making it emit a fluorescent signal for live imaging.

SMART’s newly developed nanosensor enables direct, real-time tracking of auxin levels in living plants with high precision. The sensor uses near infrared imaging to monitor IAA fluctuations non-invasively across tissues like leaves, roots, and cotyledons, and it is capable of bypassing chlorophyll interference to ensure highly reliable readings even in densely pigmented tissues. The technology does not require genetic modification and can be integrated with existing agricultural systems — offering a scalable precision tool to advance both crop optimization and fundamental plant physiology research. 

By providing real-time, precise measurements of auxin, the sensor empowers farmers with earlier and more accurate insights into plant health. With these insights and comprehensive data, farmers can make smarter, data-driven decisions on irrigation, nutrient delivery, and pruning, tailored to the plant’s actual needs — ultimately improving crop growth, boosting stress resilience, and increasing yields.

“We need new technologies to address the problems of food insecurity and climate change worldwide. Auxin is a central growth signal within living plants, and this work gives us a way to tap it to give new information to farmers and researchers,” says Michael Strano, co-lead principal investigator at DiSTAP, Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT, and co-corresponding author of the paper. “The applications are many, including early detection of plant stress, allowing for timely interventions to safeguard crops. For urban and indoor farms, where light, water, and nutrients are already tightly controlled, this sensor can be a valuable tool in fine-tuning growth conditions with even greater precision to optimize yield and sustainability.”

The research team documented the nanosensor’s development in a paper titled, “A Near-Infrared Fluorescent Nanosensor for Direct and Real-Time Measurement of Indole-3-Acetic Acid in Plants,” published in the journal ACS Nano. The sensor comprises single-walled carbon nanotubes wrapped in a specially designed polymer, which enables it to detect IAA through changes in near infrared fluorescence intensity. Successfully tested across multiple species, including Arabidopsis, Nicotiana benthamiana, choy sum, and spinach, the nanosensor can map IAA responses under various environmental conditions such as shade, low light, and heat stress. 

“This sensor builds on DiSTAP’s ongoing work in nanotechnology and the CoPhMoRe technique, which has already been used to develop other sensors that can detect important plant compounds such as gibberellins and hydrogen peroxide. By adapting this approach for IAA, we’re adding to our inventory of novel, precise, and nondestructive tools for monitoring plant health. Eventually, these sensors can be multiplexed, or combined, to monitor a spectrum of plant growth markers for more complete insights into plant physiology,” says Duc Thinh Khong, research scientist at DiSTAP and co-first author of the paper.

“This small but mighty nanosensor tackles a long-standing challenge in agriculture: the need for a universal, real-time, and noninvasive tool to monitor plant health across various species. Our collaborative achievement not only empowers researchers and farmers to optimize growth conditions and improve crop yield and resilience, but also advances our scientific understanding of hormone pathways and plant-environment interactions,” says In-Cheol Jang, senior principal investigator at TLL, principal investigator at DiSTAP, and co-corresponding author of the paper.

Looking ahead, the research team is looking to combine multiple sensing platforms to simultaneously detect IAA and its related metabolites to create a comprehensive hormone signaling profile, offering deeper insights into plant stress responses and enhancing precision agriculture. They are also working on using microneedles for highly localized, tissue-specific sensing, and collaborating with industrial urban farming partners to translate the technology into practical, field-ready solutions. 

The research was carried out by SMART, and supported by the National Research Foundation of Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence And Technological Enterprise program.