Emergency services were still searching for a couple whose off-road vehicle was washed away when they were driving across their property in the municipality of Constantina, an official said.

When it comes to food, beef contributes by far the most emissions fueling climate change. Yet demand for beef around the world is only expected to grow.

Its authors identify ways low-income and communities of color can build water and wastewater systems to withstand extreme weather.

A hospital that wants to use a cloud computing service to perform artificial intelligence data analysis on sensitive patient records needs a guarantee those data will remain private during computation. Homomorphic encryption is a special type of security scheme that can provide this assurance.

The technique encrypts data in a way that anyone can perform computations without decrypting the data, preventing others from learning anything about underlying patient records. However, there are only a few ways to achieve homomorphic encryption, and they are so computationally intensive that it is often infeasible to deploy them in the real world.

MIT researchers have developed a new theoretical approach to building homomorphic encryption schemes that is simple and relies on computationally lightweight cryptographic tools. Their technique combines two tools so they become more powerful than either would be on its own. The researchers leverage this to construct a “somewhat homomorphic” encryption scheme — that is, it enables users to perform a limited number of operations on encrypted data without decrypting it, as opposed to fully homomorphic encryption that can allow more complex computations.

This somewhat homomorphic technique can capture many applications, such as private database lookups and private statistical analysis.

While this scheme is still theoretical, and much work remains before it could be used in practice, its simpler mathematical structure could make it efficient enough to protect user data in a wider range of real-world scenarios.

“The dream is that you type your ChatGPT prompt, encrypt it, send the encrypted message to ChatGPT, and then it can produce outputs for you without ever seeing what you are asking it,” says Henry Corrigan-Gibbs, the Douglas Ross Career Development Professor of Software Technology in the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a co-author of a paper on this security scheme. “We are a long way from getting there, in part because these schemes are so inefficient. In this work, we wanted to try to build homomorphic encryption schemes that don’t use the standard tools, since different approaches can often lead to more efficient, more practical constructions.”

His co-authors include Alexandra Henzinger, an EECS graduate student; Yael Kalai, an Ellen Swallow Richards (1873) Professor and professor of EECS; and Vinod Vaikuntanathan, the Ford Professor of Engineering and a principal investigator in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The research will be presented at the International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques.

Balancing security and flexibility

MIT researchers began theorizing about homomorphic encryption in the 1970s. But designing the mathematical structure needed to securely embed a message in a manner flexible enough to enable computation proved to be enormously challenging. The first homomorphic encryption scheme wasn’t designed until 2009.

“These two requirements are very much in tension. On the one hand, we need security, but on the other hand, we need this flexibility in the homomorphism. We have very few mathematical pathways to get there,” says Henzinger.

Essentially, homomorphic schemes add noise to a message to encrypt it. As algorithms and machine-learning models perform operations on that encrypted message, the noise inevitably grows. If one computes for too long, the noise can eventually overshadow the message.

“If you run a deep neural network on these encrypted data, for instance, by the time you get to the end of the computation, the noise might be a billion times larger than the message and you can’t actually figure out what the message says,” Corrigan-Gibbs explains.

There are two main ways to get around this problem. A user could keep operations to a minimum, but this restricts how the encrypted data can be used. On the other hand, a user could add extra steps to reduce noise, but these techniques require a massive amount of additional computation.

Somewhat homomorphic encryption seeks to meet users somewhere in the middle. They can use the technique to perform secure operations on encrypted data using a specific class of functions that keep the noise from growing out of hand.

These functions, known as bounded polynomials, are designed to prevent excessively complex operations. For instance, the functions allow many additions, but only a few multiplications on encrypted data to avoid generating too much extra noise.

Greater than the sum of their parts

The researchers built their scheme by combining two simple cryptographic tools. They started with a linear homomorphic encryption scheme, which can only perform additions on encrypted data, and added one theoretical assumption to it.

This cryptographic assumption “lifts” the linear scheme into a somewhat homomorphic one that can operate with a broader class of more complex functions.

“On its own, this assumption doesn’t give us much. But when we put them together, we get something much more powerful. Now, we can do additions and some bounded number of multiplications,” Henzinger says.

The process for performing homomorphic encryptions is quite simple. The researchers’ scheme encrypts each piece of data into a matrix in a way that the matrix provably hides the underlying data. Then, to perform additions or multiplications on those encrypted data, one only needs to add or multiply the corresponding matrices.

The researchers used mathematical proofs to show that their theoretical encryption scheme provides guaranteed security when operations are limited to this class of bounded polynomial functions.

Now that they have developed this theoretical approach, one next step will be making it practical for real-world applications. For that, they will need to make the encryption scheme fast enough to run certain types of computations on modern hardware.

“We haven’t spent 10 years trying to optimize this scheme yet, so we don’t know how efficient it could get,” Henzinger says.

In addition, the researchers hope to expand their technique to allow more complex operations, perhaps moving closer to developing a new approach for fully homomorphic encryption.

“The exciting thing for us is that, when we put these two simple things together, something different happened that we didn’t expect. It gives us hope. What else can we do now? If we add something else, maybe we can do something even more exciting,” Corrigan-Gibbs says.

This research was funded, in part, by Apple, Capital One, Facebook, Google, Mozilla, NASDAQ, MIT’s FinTech@CSAIL Initiative, the National Science Foundation (NSF), and a Simons Investigator Award.

David Schmittlein, an MIT professor of marketing and the MIT Sloan School of Management’s longest-serving dean and a visionary and transformational leader, died March 13, following a long illness. He was 69.

Schmittlein, the John C Head III Dean from 2007 to 2024, guided MIT Sloan through a financial crisis, a global pandemic, and numerous school-wide milestones. During those 17 years, Schmittlein led initiatives introducing several new degree programs, redesigning the academic program portfolio while maintaining the MBA as the flagship degree, and diversifying executive offerings. Under his guidance, the school enhanced alumni engagement, increased philanthropic support, expanded the faculty, oversaw numerous campus capital projects, and opened several international programs. He also championed a centennial celebration of Course 15 — MIT’s designation for management — and led a branding and marketing effort that cemented MIT Sloan’s reputation as a place for smart, open, grounded, and inventive leaders.

In all, he brought MIT Sloan’s value to managers, organizations, and the world into clear focus, positioning and preparing the school to lead in a new era of management education.

“Dave transformed the MIT Sloan School of Management from a niche player to a top five business school and, in the process, drew us closer to the Institute in ways that all of the faculty, staff, and students welcome and support,” says MIT professor of finance Andrew W. Lo. “He greatly expanded our visibility internationally [and] also expanded our footprint from a research and educational and outreach perspective. Really, it gave us the opportunity to define ourselves in ways that we weren’t doing prior to his joining.”

In a letter to the MIT community, President Sally Kornbluth wrote, “Dave helped build MIT Sloan’s reputation and impact around the globe, worked with faculty to create first-rate new management education programs, and substantially improved current students’ educational opportunities.”

Kornbluth, who was appointed MIT president in 2023, noted that she didn’t overlap with Schmittlein for very long before he stepped down in February 2024 due to his illness. But during that year, his “wise, funny, judicious counsel left a lasting impression,” Kornbluth wrote. “I knew I could always call on him as a sounding board and thought partner, and I did.”

Professor Georgia Perakis, who was appointed the John C Head III Dean (Interim) when Schmittlein left last year, says, “Dave was not only an incredible leader for MIT Sloan, but also a mentor, teacher, and friend. Under his leadership, he took MIT Sloan to new heights. I will always be grateful for his guidance and support during my time as interim dean. I know the legacy of his contributions to MIT and MIT Sloan will always stay with us.”

Before coming to MIT Sloan, Schmittlein was a professor of marketing and deputy dean at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he spent 27 years. Schmittlein, who grew up in Northampton, Massachusetts, viewed his appointment as the eighth dean of MIT Sloan as a homecoming in 2007.

From modest roots, and the oldest of six siblings, Schmittlein graduated from Brown University, where he earned a BA in mathematics, and Columbia University, where he was awarded both an MPhil in business and a PhD in marketing.

“Growing up in Massachusetts, MIT was always an icon for me,” Schmittlein later wrote.

“MIT picks an outsider to lead Sloan School”

As The Boston Globe headline announcing his arrival made clear, Schmittlein’s appointment as dean was unusual. He was the first to come from outside MIT since the school’s founding dean, E. Pennell Brooks, was appointed. But, in 2007, Institute leadership determined that there was a need for a fresh perspective at MIT Sloan.

“While most of Dean Schmittlein’s MIT predecessors had risen through the MIT faculty ranks, I directed the search committee to search broadly to identify a leader who could amplify the MIT Sloan School’s impact and extend its reach,” says President Emerita Susan Hockfield, who led MIT from 2004 to 2012. “David Schmittlein emerged with his unusual combination of cerebral and collaborative talents, along with his academic experience at the highest level.”

By the time Schmittlein arrived, the MIT Sloan School, which had its origins in 1914 as an undergraduate major called Engineering Administration, was at an exciting crossroads. Schmittlein’s predecessor, Richard Schmalensee, who had served as dean for nearly a decade, had secured donor funding for the construction of a new central building and established a concise mission statement that would guide the school in the coming decades. MIT’s management school was at a point of reflection and growth.

“I acknowledged head-on that I was coming from a very different school — not to change MIT, but to help it be the best version of its distinctive self,” Schmittlein wrote recently.

Schmittlein quickly identified several critical tasks. In 2007, the school had a group of 96 tenure-line faculty members, but they often left for peer schools, and the small faculty size meant that one person’s exit affected an entire department. There was no real mechanism for highlighting MIT Sloan expert faculty insights. The flagship MBA program was successful, but had challenges with selectivity and scale. And the comparatively small class size meant that the alumni community was challenged in networking, particularly in finance.

Financial crisis and MFin degree

Schmittlein collaborated with the school’s finance faculty to launch the Master of Finance degree program in 2008. Nobel laureate Robert C. Merton, who had begun his career at MIT Sloan but had decamped to Harvard University, returned to the school in 2010 to be involved in the one-year program. Today, the MFin program — known for its selectivity and rigor — offers a range of quantitative courses and features an 18-month option in addition to the original one-year curriculum.

Schmittlein’s arrival at MIT coincided with the global financial crisis of 2007–09. “The entire Institute was reeling from the meltdown,” Lo remembers. “We had to respond … and one of the most impressive things Dave did was to acknowledge the problems with the financial crisis and the financial system. But instead of de-emphasizing finance, he encouraged the finance group to do research on the crisis and to come up with a better version of finance that acknowledged these potential dangers.”

In turn, program enrollment increased, and “a number of our students ultimately went off to regulatory positions, as well as to industry, with a new knowledge of how to deal with financial crises more systematically,” Lo says.

Expansion of executive and other degree programs

In 2010, the long-standing full-time MIT Sloan Fellows MBA program attracted mid-career leaders and managers from around the world to MIT Sloan. That year, Schmittlein shepherded the launch of the 20-month part-time MIT Executive MBA program. This program opened up more opportunities for U.S.-based executives to earn a degree without having to leave their jobs for a full-time program.

Next, MIT Sloan launched the Master of Science in Management Studies program, which allowed graduates and current students from several international partner schools, including Fudan University and Tsinghua University in China, to earn a master’s degree from MIT in nine months.

Rounding out the portfolio of academic programs introduced during Schmittlein’s tenure is the MIT Sloan Master of Business Analytics program, launched in 2016. The program, which bridged MIT Sloan’s classes with MIT’s offerings in computer science, became one of the most competitive master’s degree programs at the Institute.

One distinction for MIT Sloan was “its integration with the university within which it lives,” Schmittlein said in a 2008 interview. “We are different from other schools in that regard. Most other leading schools of management wall off their teaching programs and their research programs from the rest of the university. We simply don’t do that.”

“MIT Sloan in 2025 is very much ‘the house that Dave built,’” says Professor Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan.

“This is nothing short of astonishing, given that Dave came to Sloan from another business school with a distinct mission and culture … What’s more, Sloan was hardly broken — it had several strong deans leading up Dave’s arrival, a sterling reputation, and very proud traditions,” Zuckerman Sivan says.

Zuckerman Sivan, who served as MIT Sloan’s deputy dean and then as an associate dean for teaching and learning from 2015 to 2021, says it was a tremendous privilege to work for Schmittlein, and he notes that Schmittlein often saw potential in others before they saw it in themselves, including him.

“Personally, I hadn’t given a thought to becoming a dean … when Dave popped the question to me. I’m so glad he did, though, because I learned so much from the experience, not least from being able to consult with Dave and see how he thought about different managerial challenges,” Zuckerman Sivan says.

Faculty, capital projects, and international ties

Schmittlein invested in faculty compensation, and by 2012 the MIT Sloan faculty count had grown to 112.

“Dave recognized early on that growth was essential for Sloan to retain and recruit the very best faculty,” Zuckerman Sivan says. “And every move he made, especially with regard to the degree programs, was done in close and deliberate collaboration with faculty leaders. This was absolutely key. He got senior faculty at Sloan on board with the moves that he had recognized were essential for the school, such that now the moves seem obvious and organic.”

Schmittlein also oversaw several capital projects, some of which were already underway when he joined MIT Sloan. When Building E62 opened in 2010, for the first time in history all of MIT Sloan’s faculty members were housed under one roof. The Gold-certified LEED building also included six new classrooms and an executive education suite. Following that, the landmark historic buildings E60 and E52 were renovated and refreshed.

President Emerita Hockfield says that Schmittlein advanced the school in many dimensions. One area that resonates with her was his agility in building and maintaining relationships with international partners and donors. During Schmittlein’s tenure, the MIT Sloan Latin America Office opened in Santiago, Chile, in 2013, and the Asia School of Business was launched in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2015. Schmittlein also helped to lay the groundwork for the launch of the MIT Sloan Office for Southeast Asian Nations, which opened in October 2024 in Bangkok.

The international collaborations increased the school’s visibility throughout the world. Hockfield notes that those international relationships benefited MIT Sloan students.

“For any leader today — being able to foster international relationships has to be a critical part of anyone’s toolkit,” she says. “And [for MIT Sloan students] to see that up close and personal, they can understand how they can make that happen as business leaders.”

Indeed, some MIT Sloan students were introduced firsthand to global business leaders under the guidance of both Hockfield and Schmittlein, who, for the past several years, co-taught an elective course, Corporations at the Crossroads, that featured guest speakers discussing management, strategy, and leadership.

“It was inspiring and just a lot of fun to teach that course with him … Dave possessed the wonderful combination of a brilliant intellect and a profound kindness. While he generously shared both, he more eagerly shared his kindness than his brilliance,” Hockfield says.

Ideas Made to Matter

During Schmittlein’s tenure, MIT Sloan launched a brand identity project with new messaging and the tagline “Ideas Made to Matter,” accompanied by a new website and logo. In the early 2000s, at Wharton, he had championed the online business journal Knowledge at Wharton, which went on to be a standout thought leadership publication. Under Schmittlein’s helm, MIT Sloan launched Ideas Made to Matter, a publication bringing practical insights from MIT Sloan’s faculty to global business leaders.

Hockfield recalls how Schmittlein deftly brought marketing insights to MIT Sloan. “He really understood organizational communications … and he was brilliant [at getting the MIT Sloan story out] with just the right tone,” she says.

Legacy: Principled, innovative leaders who improve the world

Lo says that Schmittlein embodied the example of a principled leader. “He was not only an amazing leader, but he was an amazing human being. He inspired all of us, and will continue to inspire all of us for years to come,” he says.

“Dave gave the Sloan School and MIT a great gift,” Lo continues. “We are now perfectly positioned to reach the next inflection point of changing the role of management education, not only at MIT but around the world.”

Hockfield says, “One of the things I deeply admired about Dave is that his personal ambitions were always secondary or tertiary to his ambitions for the school, the faculty, and the students. And that’s just a wonderful thing to behold. It brings out the best in people … I’m just so grateful that MIT had the benefit of his brilliance and curiosity for the time that we did. It’s a huge loss.”

“We are heartbroken,” MIT Provost Cynthia Barnhart says. “For nearly 17 years, the MIT community relied on and benefited from Dave Schmittlein’s inspiring vision, skillful leadership, and kind and collaborative nature. He worked tirelessly to advance MIT Sloan’s mission of developing principled, innovative leaders, all while strengthening the school’s ties to the rest of campus and building partnerships across the country and globe. He will be deeply missed by his friends and colleagues at MIT.”

Schmittlein continually searched for ways to invent and innovate. He often quoted Alfred P. Sloan, the original benefactor of MIT Sloan, who said in 1964, “I hope we all recognize that the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management is not finished. It never will be finished. It is only on its way. Nothing is finished in a world that is moving so rapidly forward …”

Schmittlein is survived by his wife of nearly 33 years, Barbara Bickart, and their children, Brigitte Schmittlein and Gabriel Schmittlein, as well as his siblings, in-laws, several nieces and nephews, and a host of lifelong friends and colleagues.

MIT Sloan is developing plans for a future celebration of Schmittlein’s life, with details for the community to come. To read more about his life and contributions, read his obituary online.

Ben Vinson III, president of Howard University, made a compelling call for artificial intelligence to be “developed with wisdom,” as he delivered MIT’s annual Karl Taylor Compton Lecture on campus Monday. 

The broad-ranging talk posed a series of searching questions about our human ideals and practices, and was anchored in the view that, as Vinson said, “Technological progress must serve humanity, and not the other way around.”

In the course of his remarks, Vinson offered thoughts about our self-conception as rational beings; the effects of technological revolutions on human tasks, jobs, and society; and the values and ethics we want our lives and our social fabric to reflect.   

“Philosophers like Cicero argue that the good life centers on the pursuit of virtue and wisdom,” Vinson said. “Can AI enhance our pursuit of virtue and wisdom? Does it risk automating critical aspects of human reflection? Does a world that increasingly defers to AI for decision-making and artistic creation, and even ethical deliberation, does that reflect a more advanced society? Or does it signal a quiet surrender of human agency?”

Vinson’s talk, titled “AI in an Age After Reason: A Discourse on Fundamental Human Questions,” was delivered to a large audience in MIT’s Samberg Conference Center.

He also suggested that universities can serve as an “intellectual compass” in the development of AI, bringing realism and specificity to the topic and “separating real risks from speculative fears, ensuring that AI is neither demonized nor blindly embraced but developed with wisdom, with ethical oversight, and with societal adaptation.”

The Compton lecture series was introduced in 1957, in honor of Karl Taylor Compton, who served as MIT’s ninth president, from 1930 to 1948, and as chair of the MIT Corporation from 1948 to 1954.

In introductory remarks, MIT President Sally A. Kornbluth observed that Compton “helped the Institute transform itself from an outstanding technical school for training hands-on engineers to a truly great global university. A renowned physicist, President Compton brought a new focus on fundamental scientific research, and he made science an equal partner with engineering at MIT.”

Beyond that, Kornbluth added, “through the war, he helped invent a partnership between the federal government and America’s research universities.”

Introducing Vinson, Kornbluth described him as an academic leader who projects a “wonderful sense of energy, positivity, and forward movement.”

Vinson became president of Howard University in September 2023, having previously served as provost and executive vice president of Case Western Reserve University; dean of George Washington University's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences; and vice dean for centers, interdisciplinary studies, and graduate education at Johns Hopkins University. A historian who has studied the African diaspora in Latin America, Vinson is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former president of the American Historical Association.

Using history as a guide, Vinson suggested that AI has potential to substantially influence society and the economy, even if it may not fully deliver all of the advances it is imagined to bring.

“It serves as a Rorschach test for society’s deepest hopes and anxieties,” Vinson said of AI. “Optimists, they see it as a productivity revolution and a leap in human evolution, while pessimists warn of mass surveillance, bias, job displacement, and even existential risk. The reality, as history suggests, will likely fall somewhere in between. AI will likely evolve through a cycle of inflated expectations, disillusionment, and eventual pragmatic inspiration.”

Still, Vinson suggested there were substantial differences between AI and some of our earlier technological leaps — the industrial revolution, the electrical revolution, and the digital revolution, among others.

“Unlike previous technologies that have extended human labor, again, AI targets cognition, creativity, decision-making, and even emotional intelligence,” Vinson said.

In all cases, Vinson said, people should be active about discussing the profound effects technological change can have upon society: “AI is not just about technological progress, it is about power, it is about justice, and the very essence of what it means to be human.”

At a few times, Vinson’s remarks looped back to the subject of education and the impact of AI. Howard, one of the nation’s leading historically Black colleges and universities, has recently achieved an R1 designation as a university with a very high level of research activity. At the same time, it has thriving programs in the humanities and social sciences that depend on individual cognition and inquiry.

But suppose, Vinson remarked, that AI eventually ends up displacing a portion of humanistic scholarship. “Does a world with fewer humanities truly represent human progress?” he asked.

All told, Vinson proposed, as AI advances, we have a responsibility to engage with the advances and potential of the field while keeping everyday human values in mind.

“Let’s guide the world through this transformative age with more wisdom, with foresight, and with an unwavering dedication to the common good,” Vinson said. “This is not just a technological moment. It is a moment that calls for a form of intellectual courage and moral imagination. Together, we can shape an AI future that honors dignity for everyone, and at the same time, advances the ideals of humanity itself.”

It’s difficult to build devices that replicate the fluid, precise motion of humans, but that might change if we could pull a few (literal) strings.

At least, that’s the idea behind “cable-driven” mechanisms in which running a string through an object generates streamlined movement across an object’s different parts. Take a robotic finger, for example: You could embed a cable through the palm to the fingertip of this object and then pull it to create a curling motion.

While cable-driven mechanisms can create real-time motion to make an object bend, twist, or fold, they can be complicated and time-consuming to assemble by hand. To automate the process, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed an all-in-one 3D printing approach called “Xstrings.” Part design tool, part fabrication method, Xstrings can embed all the pieces together and produce a cable-driven device, saving time when assembling bionic robots, creating art installations, or working on dynamic fashion designs.

In a paper to be presented at the 2025 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2025), the researchers used Xstrings to print a range of colorful and unique objects that included a red walking lizard robot, a purple wall sculpture that can open and close like a peacock’s tail, a white tentacle that curls around items, and a white claw that can ball up into a fist to grab objects.

To fabricate these eye-catching mechanisms, Xstrings allows users to fully customize their designs in a software program, sending them to a multi-material 3D printer to bring that creation to life. You can automatically print all the device’s parts in their desired locations in one step, including the cables running through it and the joints that enable its intended motion.

MIT CSAIL postdoc and lead author Jiaji Li says that Xstrings can save engineers time and energy, reducing 40 percent of total production time compared to doing things manually. “Our innovative method can help anyone design and fabricate cable-driven products with a desktop bi-material 3D printer,” says Li.

A new twist on cable-driven fabrication

To use the Xstrings program, users first input a design with specific dimensions, like a rectangular cube divided into smaller pieces with a hole in the middle of each one. You can then choose which way its parts move by selecting different “primitives:” bending, coiling (like a spring), twisting (like a screw), or compressing — and the angle of these motions.

For even more elaborate creations, users can incorporate multiple primitives to create intriguing combinations of motions. If you wanted to make a toy snake, you could include several twists to create a “series” combo, in which a single cord drives a sequence of motions. To create the robot claw, the team embedded multiple cables into a “parallel” combination, where several strings are embedded, to enable each finger to close up into a fist.

Beyond fine-tuning the way cable-driven mechanisms move, Xstrings also facilitates how cables are integrated into the object. Users can choose exactly how the strings are secured, in terms of where the “anchor” (endpoint), “threaded areas” (or holes within the structure that the cord passes through), and “exposed point” (where you’d pull to operate the device) are located. With a robot finger, for instance, you could choose the anchor to be located at the fingertip, with a cable running through the finger and a pull tag exposed at the other end.

Xstrings also supports diverse joint designs by automatically placing components that are elastic, compliant, or mechanical. This allows the cable to turn as needed as it completes the device’s intended motion.

Driving unique designs across robotics, art, and beyond

Once users have simulated their digital blueprint for a cable-driven item, they can bring it to life via fabrication. Xstrings can send your design to a fused deposition modeling 3D printer, where plastic is melted down into a nozzle before the filaments are poured out to build structures up layer by layer.

Xstrings uses this technique to lay out cables horizontally and build around them. To ensure their method would successfully print cable-driven mechanisms, the researchers carefully tested their materials and printing conditions.

For example, the researchers found that their strings only broke after being pulled up and down by a mechanical device more than 60,000 times. In another test, the team discovered that printing at 260 degrees Celsius with a speed of 10-20 millimeters per second was ideal for producing their many creative items.

“The Xstrings software can bring a variety of ideas to life,” says Li. “It enables you to produce a bionic robot device like a human hand, mimicking our own gripping capabilities. You can also create interactive art pieces, like a cable-driven sculpture with unique geometries, and clothes with adjustable flaps. One day, this technology could enable the rapid, one-step creation of cable-driven robots in outer space, even within highly confined environments such as space stations or extraterrestrial bases.”

The team’s approach offers plenty of flexibility and a noticeable speed boost to fabricating cable-driven objects. It creates objects that are rigid on the outside, but soft and flexible on the inside; in the future, they may look to develop objects that are soft externally but rigid internally, much like humans’ skin and bones. They’re also considering using more resilient cables, and, instead of just printing strings horizontally, embedding ones that are angled or even vertical.

Li wrote the paper with Zhejiang University master’s student Shuyue Feng; Tsinghua University master’s student Yujia Liu; Zhejiang University assistant professor and former MIT Media Lab visiting researcher Guanyun Wang; and three CSAIL members: Maxine Perroni-Scharf, an MIT PhD student in electrical engineering and computer science; Emily Guan, a visiting researcher; and senior author Stefanie Mueller, the TIBCO Career Development Associate Professor in the MIT departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering, and leader of the HCI Engineering Group.

This research was supported, in part, by a postdoctoral research fellowship from Zhejiang University, and the MIT-GIST Program.

Within the human brain, a network of regions has evolved to process language. These regions are consistently activated whenever people listen to their native language or any language in which they are proficient.

A new study by MIT researchers finds that this network also responds to languages that are completely invented, such as Esperanto, which was created in the late 1800s as a way to promote international communication, and even to languages made up for television shows such as “Star Trek” and “Game of Thrones.”

To study how the brain responds to these artificial languages, MIT neuroscientists convened nearly 50 speakers of these languages over a single weekend. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers found that when participants listened to a constructed language in which they were proficient, the same brain regions lit up as those activated when they processed their native language.

“We find that constructed languages very much recruit the same system as natural languages, which suggests that the key feature that is necessary to engage the system may have to do with the kinds of meanings that both kinds of languages can express,” says Evelina Fedorenko, an associate professor of neuroscience at MIT, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research and the senior author of the study.

The findings help to define some of the key properties of language, the researchers say, and suggest that it’s not necessary for languages to have naturally evolved over a long period of time or to have a large number of speakers.

“It helps us narrow down this question of what a language is, and do it empirically, by testing how our brain responds to stimuli that might or might not be language-like,” says Saima Malik-Moraleda, an MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper, which appears this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Convening the conlang community

Unlike natural languages, which evolve within communities and are shaped over time, constructed languages, or “conlangs,” are typically created by one person who decides what sounds will be used, how to label different concepts, and what the grammatical rules are.

Esperanto, the most widely spoken conlang, was created in 1887 by Ludwik Zamenhok, who intended it to be used as a universal language for international communication. Currently, it is estimated that around 60,000 people worldwide are proficient in Esperanto.

In previous work, Fedorenko and her students have found that computer programming languages, such as Python — another type of invented language — do not activate the brain network that is used to process natural language. Instead, people who read computer code rely on the so-called multiple demand network, a brain system that is often recruited for difficult cognitive tasks.

Fedorenko and others have also investigated how the brain responds to other stimuli that share features with language, including music and nonverbal communication such as gestures and facial expressions.

“We spent a lot of time looking at all these various kinds of stimuli, finding again and again that none of them engage the language-processing mechanisms,” Fedorenko says. “So then the question becomes, what is it that natural languages have that none of those other systems do?”

That led the researchers to wonder if artificial languages like Esperanto would be processed more like programming languages or more like natural languages. Similar to programming languages, constructed languages are created by an individual for a specific purpose, without natural evolution within a community. However, unlike programming languages, both conlangs and natural languages can be used to convey meanings about the state of the external world or the speaker’s internal state.

To explore how the brain processes conlangs, the researchers invited speakers of Esperanto and several other constructed languages to MIT for a weekend conference in November 2022. The other languages included Klingon (from “Star Trek”), Na’vi (from “Avatar”), and two languages from “Game of Thrones” (High Valyrian and Dothraki). For all of these languages, there are texts available for people who want to learn the language, and for Esperanto, Klingon, and High Valyrian, there is even a Duolingo app available.

“It was a really fun event where all the communities came to participate, and over a weekend, we collected all the data,” says Malik-Moraleda, who co-led the data collection effort with former MIT postbac Maya Taliaferro, now a PhD student at New York University.

During that event, which also featured talks from several of the conlang creators, the researchers used fMRI to scan 44 conlang speakers as they listened to sentences from the constructed language in which they were proficient. The creators of these languages — who are co-authors on the paper — helped construct the sentences that were presented to the participants.

While in the scanner, the participants also either listened to or read sentences in their native language, and performed some nonlinguistic tasks for comparison. The researchers found that when people listened to a conlang, the same language regions in the brain were activated as when they listened to their native language.

Common features

The findings help to identify some of the key features that are necessary to recruit the brain’s language processing areas, the researchers say. One of the main characteristics driving language responses seems to be the ability to convey meanings about the interior and exterior world — a trait that is shared by natural and constructed languages, but not programming languages.

“All of the languages, both natural and constructed, express meanings related to inner and outer worlds. They refer to objects in the world, to properties of objects, to events,” Fedorenko says. “Whereas programming languages are much more similar to math. A programming language is a symbolic generative system that allows you to express complex meanings, but it’s a self-contained system: The meanings are highly abstract and mostly relational, and not connected to the real world that we experience.”

Some other characteristics of natural languages, which are not shared by constructed languages, don’t seem to be necessary to generate a response in the language network.

“It doesn’t matter whether the language is created and shaped over time by a community of speakers, because these constructed languages are not,” Malik-Moraleda says. “It doesn’t matter how old they are, because conlangs that are just a decade old engage the same brain regions as natural languages that have been around for many hundreds of years.”

To further refine the features of language that activate the brain’s language network, Fedorenko’s lab is now planning to study how the brain responds to a conlang called Lojban, which was created by the Logical Language Group in the 1990s and was designed to prevent ambiguity of meanings and promote more efficient communication.

The research was funded by MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, the Simons Center for the Social Brain, the Frederick A. and Carole J. Middleton Career Development Professorship, and the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

Really interesting research: “How WEIRD is Usable Privacy and Security Research?” by Ayako A. Hasegawa Daisuke Inoue, and Mitsuaki Akiyama:

Abstract: In human factor fields such as human-computer interaction (HCI) and psychology, researchers have been concerned that participants mostly come from WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) countries. This WEIRD skew may hinder understanding of diverse populations and their cultural differences. The usable privacy and security (UPS) field has inherited many research methodologies from research on human factor fields. We conducted a literature review to understand the extent to which participant samples in UPS papers were from WEIRD countries and the characteristics of the methodologies and research topics in each user study recruiting Western or non-Western participants. We found that the skew toward WEIRD countries in UPS is greater than that in HCI. Geographic and linguistic barriers in the study methods and recruitment methods may cause researchers to conduct user studies locally. In addition, many papers did not report participant demographics, which could hinder the replication of the reported studies, leading to low reproducibility. To improve geographic diversity, we provide the suggestions including facilitate replication studies, address geographic and linguistic issues of study/recruitment methods, and facilitate research on the topics for non-WEIRD populations...

The HHS secretary has fought mercury pollution for years. He’s now in an administration that wants to make it easier for industries to dump it into the air and water.

The Trump administration says it terminated $20 billion of Biden-era grants because some recipients have senior staffers who served in the Biden or Obama administrations.

Legislation sponsored by a former Duke Energy executive would eliminate a 2030 emissions goal.

Pierre Poilievre is likely to run against Liberal Prime Minister Mark Carney, who just removed a carbon tax. Poilievere pledged Monday to kill a second carbon fee.

The insurance company is trying to prevent a “dire” financial situation that executives say could force them to drop more California policies.

Former track star Sebastian Coe said he stood “full square” with 400 athletes who urged International Olympic Committee candidates to treat climate as a priority.

Climate change raises risks for farmers: Hotter weather hurts yields and longer rainy seasons trigger the spread of fungus and deadly pests.

The country's concern is that a debt-for-nature swap could “send the wrong message to the markets and make our financial situation worse.”

Prototyping large structures with integrated electronics, like a chair that can monitor someone’s sitting posture, is typically a laborious and wasteful process.

One might need to fabricate multiple versions of the chair structure via 3D printing and laser cutting, generating a great deal of waste, before assembling the frame, grafting sensors and other fragile electronics onto it, and then wiring it up to create a working device.

If the prototype fails, the maker will likely have no choice but to discard it and go back to the drawing board.

MIT researchers have come up with a better way to iteratively design large and sturdy interactive structures. They developed a rapid development platform that utilizes reconfigurable building blocks with integrated electronics that can be assembled into complex, functional devices. Rather than building electronics into a structure, the electronics become the structure.

These lightweight three-dimensional lattice building blocks, known as voxels, have high strength and stiffness, along with integrated sensing, response, and processing abilities that enable users without mechanical or electrical engineering expertise to rapidly produce interactive electronic devices.

The voxels, which can be assembled, disassembled, and reconfigured almost infinitely into various forms, cost about 50 cents each.

The prototyping platform, called VIK (Voxel Invention Kit), includes a user-friendly design tool that enables end-to-end prototyping, allowing a user to simulate the structure’s response to mechanical loads and iterate on the design as needed.

“This is about democratizing access to functional interactive devices. With VIK, there is no 3D printing or laser cutting required. If you just have the voxel faces, you are able to produce these interactive structures anywhere you want,” says Jack Forman, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences and affiliate of the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) and the MIT Media Lab, and co-lead author of a paper on VIK.

Forman is joined on the paper by co-lead author and fellow graduate student Miana Smith; graduate student Amira Abdel-Rahman; and senior author Neil Gershenfeld, an MIT professor and director of the CBA. The research will be presented at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Functional building blocks

VIK builds upon years of work in the CBA to develop discrete, cellular building blocks called voxels. One voxel, an aluminum cuboctahedra lattice (which has eight triangular faces and six square faces), is strong enough to support 228 kilograms, or about the weight of an upright piano.

Instead of being 3D printed, milled, or laser cut, voxels are assembled into largescale, strong, durable structures like airplane components or wind turbines that can respond to their environments.

The CBA team merged voxels other work in their lab centered on interconnected electrical components, yielding voxels with structural electronics. Assembling these functional voxels generates structures that can transmit data and power, as well as mechanical forces, without the need for wires.

They used these electromechanical building blocks to develop VIK.

“It was an interesting challenge to think about adapting a lot of our previous work, which has been about hitting hard engineering metrics, into a user-friendly system that makes sense and is fun and easy for people to work with,” Smith says.

For instance, they made the voxel design larger so the lattice structures are easier for human hands to assemble and disassemble. They also added aluminum cross-bracing to the units to improve their strength and stability.

In addition, VIK voxels have a reversible, snap-fit connection so a user can seamlessly assemble them without the need for additional tools, in contrast to some prior voxel designs that used rivets as fasteners.

“We designed the voxel faces to permit only the correct connections. That means that, if you are building with voxels, you are guaranteed to be building the correct wiring harness. Once you finish your device, you can just plug it in and it will work,” says Smith.

Wiring harnesses can add significant cost to functional systems and can often be a source of failure.

An accessible prototyping platform

To help users who have minimal engineering expertise create a wide array of interactive devices, the team developed a user-friendly interface to simulate 3D voxel structures.

The interface includes a Finite Element Analysis (FEA) simulation model that enables users to draw out a structure and simulate the forces and mechanical loads that will be applied to it. It adds colors to an animation of the user’s device to identify potential points of failure.

“We created what is essentially a ‘Minecraft’ for voxel applications. You don’t need a good sense of civil engineering or truss analysis to verify that the structure you are making is safe. Anyone can build something with VIK and have confidence in it,” Forman says.

Users can also easily integrate off-the-shelf modules, like speakers, sensors, or actuators, into their device. VIK emphasizes flexibility, enabling makers to use the types of microcontrollers they are comfortable with.

“The next evolution of electronics will be in three-dimensional space and the Voxel Invention Kit (VIK) is the stepping stone that will enable users, designers, and innovators a way to visualize and integrate electronics directly into structures,” says Victor Zaderej, manager of advanced electronics packaging technology at Molex, a manufacturer of electronic, electrical, and fiber optic connectivity systems. “Think of the VIK as the merging of a LEGO building kit and an electronics breadboard. When creative engineers and designers begin thinking about potential applications, the opportunities and unique products that will be enabled will be limitless.”

Using the design tool for feedback, a maker can rapidly change the configuration of voxels to adjust a prototype or disassemble the structure to build something new. If the user eventually wishes to discard the device, the aluminum voxels are fully recyclable.

This reconfigurability and recyclability, along with the high strength, high stiffness, light weight, and integrated electronics of the voxels, could make VIK especially well-suited for applications such as theatrical stage design, where stage managers want to support actors safely with customizable set pieces that might only exist for a few days.

And by enabling the rapid-prototyping of large, complex structures, VIK could also have future applications in areas like space fabrication or in the development of smart buildings and intelligent infrastructure for sustainable cities.

But for the researchers, perhaps the most important next step will be to get VIK out into the world to see what users come up with.

“These voxels are now so readily available that someone can use them in their day-to-day life. It will be exciting to see what they can do and create with VIK,” adds Forman.

California legislators have begun debating a bill (A.B. 412) that would require AI developers to track and disclose every registered copyrighted work used in AI training. At first glance, this might sound like a reasonable step toward transparency. But it’s an impossible standard that could crush small AI startups and developers while giving big tech firms even more power.

A Burden That Small Developers Can’t Bear

The AI landscape is in danger of being dominated by large companies with deep pockets. These big names are in the news almost daily. But they’re far from the only ones – there are dozens of AI companies with fewer than 10 employees trying to build something new in a particular niche. 

This bill demands that creators of any AI model–even a two-person company or a hobbyist tinkering with a small software build– identify copyrighted materials used in training.  That requirement will be incredibly onerous, even if limited just to works registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. The registration system is a cumbersome beast at best–neither machine-readable nor accessible, it’s more like a card catalog than a database–that doesn’t offer information sufficient to identify all authors of a work,  much less help developers to reliably match works in a training set to works in the system.

Even for major tech companies, meeting these new obligations  would be a daunting task. For a small startup, throwing on such an impossible requirement could be a death sentence. If A.B. 412 becomes law, these smaller players will be forced to devote scarce resources to an unworkable compliance regime instead of focusing on development and innovation. The risk of lawsuits—potentially from copyright trolls—would discourage new startups from even attempting to enter the field.

A.I. Training Is Like Reading And It’s Very Likely Fair Use 

A.B. 412 starts from a premise that’s both untrue and harmful to the public interest: that reading, scraping or searching of open web content shouldn’t be allowed without payment. In reality, courts should, and we believe will, find that the great majority of this activity is fair use. 

It’s now bedrock internet law principle that some forms of copying content online are transformative, and thus legal fair use. That includes reproducing thumbnail images for image search, or snippets of text to search books. 

The U.S. copyright system is meant to balance innovation with creator rights, and courts are still working through how copyright applies to AI training. In most of the AI cases, courts have yet to consider—let alone decide—how fair use applies. A.B. 412 jumps the gun, preempting this process and imposing a vague, overly broad standard that will do more harm than good.

Importantly, those key court cases are all federal. The U.S. Constitution makes it clear that copyright is governed by federal law, and A.B. 412 improperly attempts to impose state-level copyright regulations on an issue still in flux. 

A.B. 412 Is A Gift to Big Tech

The irony of A.B. 412 is that it won’t stop AI development—it will simply consolidate it in the hands of the largest corporations. Big tech firms already have the resources to navigate complex legal and regulatory environments, and they can afford to comply (or at least appear to comply) with A.B. 412’s burdensome requirements. Small developers, on the other hand, will either be forced out of the market or driven into partnerships where they lose their independence. The result will be less competition, fewer innovations, and a tech landscape even more dominated by a handful of massive companies.

If lawmakers are able to iron out some of the practical problems with A.B. 412 and pass some version of it, they may be able to force programmers to research–and effectively, pay off–copyright owners before they even write a line of code. If that’s the outcome in California, Big Tech will not despair. They’ll celebrate. Only a few companies own large content libraries or can afford to license enough material to build a deep learning model. The possibilities for startups and small programmers will be so meager, and competition will be so limited, that profits for big incumbent companies will be locked in for a generation. 

If you are a California resident and want to speak out about A.B. 412, you can find and contact your legislators through this website. 

The MIT women's track and field team won its first NCAA Division III National Championship in program history on Saturday, March 15, at the 2025 NCAA Division III Track and Field Championships, hosted by Nazareth College in Rochester, New York.

The Engineers, who entered the meet as the top-ranked team in the nation, scored the most points ever scored by an MIT women's team at a national indoor meet. They finished with 49 points, which earned them a first place finish in a field of 62. They were ahead of Washington University, with 45.5 points; the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, with 37 points; Loras College, with 32 points; and the State University of New York at Geneseo, with 29 points.

“This was such a fun and exciting outcome, and what our team has been working toward all year,” says Julie Heyde, MIT director of track and field and head coach of cross country and track and field. “Since last year, even, the team knew they had a possibility of being national champs. We didn't gear only toward this goal; we have been very process-driven, and that's why this team win is so special. Each and every person competed for each other, representing a total team culture.” 

Field events

Senior Alexis Boykin's (Clayton, Ohio) third attempt in the shot put was the mark to beat, as the defending national champion registered a mark of 15.31 meters. Boykin also repeated as the indoor national champion in the shot put, which gave her two titles on the weekend and her seventh individual NCAA national championship. 

Senior Emily Ball (Des Moines, Iowa) set a new personal record with a mark of 14.19m (46 feet, 6-3/4 inches) to finish in sixth and earn All-American honors. Ball's second throw was the best attempt for the MIT senior, earning the Engineers three valuable points in the team standings. 

Junior Nony Otu Ugwu (Katy, Texas) finished ninth in the first flight of the triple jump and did not advance to the final. Otu Ugwu's best mark came on her second jump with a mark of 11.78m (38 feet, 7-3/4 inches).

Running events

Graduate student Gillian Roeder (Delmar, New York) finished fifth in the mile event in a hard-fought race, earning All-America honors with a time of 4:51.97.

With MIT on the verge of clinching the national title, Roeder, senior Christina Crow (Mercer Island, Washington), and juniors Rujuta Sane (Chandler, Arizona) and Kate Sanderson (West Hartford, Connecticut) took to the track in the 3,000-meter event. Sane finished 20th in 10:02.86, with Roeder taking 16th in 9:56.02. Crow and Sanderson held in the middle of the pack for most of the race before Sanderson made a late move, taking over sixth place with just a few laps remaining. Sanderson would hold the position to earn three points and clinch the national championship. Crow took 11th in 9:44.99.

Other numbers of note

Otu Ugwu was making her second appearance at indoor nationals and her third overall NCAA appearance. She was 14th in the triple jump at both the indoor and outdoor national championship last year. Roeder was running in the final in the mile for the first time since 2023 indoor nationals, where she also finished fifth. Sanderson qualified for indoor nationals in the 5,000 meters in both 2023 and 2024, but Saturday was her first All-American after finishing 16th in 2024 and 20th in 2023.

MIT will head outside in two weeks, opening the outdoor track and field season Thursday-Saturday, March 27-29, at the Raleigh Relays, hosted by North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

A version of this article first appeared on the MIT Athletics website.