Transistors, the building blocks of modern electronics, are typically made of silicon. Because it’s a semiconductor, this material can control the flow of electricity in a circuit. But silicon has fundamental physical limits that restrict how compact and energy-efficient a transistor can be.

MIT researchers have now replaced silicon with a magnetic semiconductor, creating a magnetic transistor that could enable smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient circuits. The material’s magnetism strongly influences its electronic behavior, leading to more efficient control of the flow of electricity. 

The team used a novel magnetic material and an optimization process that reduces the material’s defects, which boosts the transistor’s performance.

The material’s unique magnetic properties also allow for transistors with built-in memory, which would simplify circuit design and unlock new applications for high-performance electronics.

“People have known about magnets for thousands of years, but there are very limited ways to incorporate magnetism into electronics. We have shown a new way to efficiently utilize magnetism that opens up a lot of possibilities for future applications and research,” says Chung-Tao Chou, an MIT graduate student in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and Physics, and co-lead author of a paper on this advance.

Chou is joined on the paper by co-lead author Eugene Park, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE); Julian Klein, a DMSE research scientist; Josep Ingla-Aynes, a postdoc in the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center; Jagadeesh S. Moodera, a senior research scientist in the Department of Physics; and senior authors Frances Ross, TDK Professor in DMSE; and Luqiao Liu, an associate professor in EECS, and a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics; as well as others at the University of Chemistry and Technology in Prague. The paper appears today in Physical Review Letters.

Overcoming the limits

In an electronic device, silicon semiconductor transistors act like tiny light switches that turn a circuit on and off, or amplify weak signals in a communication system. They do this using a small input voltage.

But a fundamental physical limit of silicon semiconductors prevents a transistor from operating below a certain voltage, which hinders its energy efficiency.

To make more efficient electronics, researchers have spent decades working toward magnetic transistors that utilize electron spin to control the flow of electricity. Electron spin is a fundamental property that enables electrons to behave like tiny magnets.

So far, scientists have mostly been limited to using certain magnetic materials. These lack the favorable electronic properties of semiconductors, constraining device performance.

“In this work, we combine magnetism and semiconductor physics to realize useful spintronic devices,” Liu says.

The researchers replace the silicon in the surface layer of a transistor with chromium sulfur bromide, a two-dimensional material that acts as a magnetic semiconductor.

Due to the material’s structure, researchers can switch between two magnetic states very cleanly. This makes it ideal for use in a transistor that smoothly switches between “on” and “off.”

“One of the biggest challenges we faced was finding the right material. We tried many other materials that didn’t work,” Chou says.

They discovered that changing these magnetic states modifies the material’s electronic properties, enabling low-energy operation. And unlike many other 2D materials, chromium sulfur bromide remains stable in air.

To make a transistor, the researchers pattern electrodes onto a silicon substrate, then carefully align and transfer the 2D material on top. They use tape to pick up a tiny piece of material, only a few tens of nanometers thick, and place it onto the substrate.

“A lot of researchers will use solvents or glue to do the transfer, but transistors require a very clean surface. We eliminate all those risks by simplifying this step,” Chou says.

Leveraging magnetism

This lack of contamination enables their device to outperform existing magnetic transistors. Most others can only create a weak magnetic effect, changing the flow of current by a few percent or less. Their new transistor can switch or amplify the electric current by a factor of 10.

They use an external magnetic field to change the magnetic state of the material, switching the transistor using significantly less energy than would usually be required.

The material also allows them to control the magnetic states with electric current. This is important because engineers cannot apply magnetic fields to individual transistors in an electronic device. They need to control each one electrically.

The material’s magnetic properties could also enable transistors with built-in memory, simplifying the design of logic or memory circuits.

A typical memory device has a magnetic cell to store information and a transistor to read it out. Their method can combine both into one magnetic transistor.

“Now, not only are transistors turning on and off, they are also remembering information. And because we can switch the transistor with greater magnitude, the signal is much stronger so we can read out the information faster, and in a much more reliable way,” Liu says.

Building on this demonstration, the researchers plan to further study the use of electrical current to control the device. They are also working to make their method scalable so they can fabricate arrays of transistors.

This research was supported, in part, by the Semiconductor Research Corporation, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Army Research Office, and the Czech Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports. The work was partially carried out at the MIT.nano facilities.

In 2026, five faculty were granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

Volha Charnysh is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science. She studies the role of identity in state-building and economic development and the effects of violence. Her first book, “Uprooted: How post-WWII Population Transfers Remade Europe” (Cambridge University Press, 2024), focuses on the enduring consequences of mass displacement and resulting cultural heterogeneity. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2017 and joined the MIT faculty in 2018.

Grisha Coleman is a full professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Her research explores tensions between our physiological, technological, and ecological systems; human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. Her practice engages an interdisciplinary approach to these explorations. She earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts. She joined the MIT faculty in 2026.

Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. A poet and a scholar of digital media, he is the author of five books, most recently “Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection” (MIT Press, 2022), “A Prehistory of the Cloud” (MIT Press, 2015), and “Greenhouses, Lighthouses” (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Hu is interested in how concepts such as race and normal language became measurable, governable objects in the form of datasets. He earned a BA in comparative literature from Princeton University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in film studies from the University of California at Berkeley. He joined the MIT faculty in 2026. 

Tobias Salz is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. He works in the field of industrial organization and studies how digital platforms and other intermediaries shape competition and market outcomes. The applications of his research span digital markets, transportation, and artificial intelligence, and often combine economic theory with novel data and field experiments. His recent work examines market power in web search, personalized platform pricing, and how human experts and AI can work together in medical diagnosis. He received his PhD in economics from New York University in 2016 and joined the MIT faculty in 2019.

Christian Wolf is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. His research is primarily concerned with the question of how monetary and fiscal policy can be used to stabilize the economy. A key aim of his work is to learn as much as possible about such stabilization policy directly from micro- and macroeconomic data, rather than through reliance on structural models. Wolf joined the MIT faculty in 2021 after earning his PhD in economics from Princeton University.

Each year, faculty and researchers across the MIT School of Engineering are recognized with prestigious awards for their contributions to research, technology, society, and education. To celebrate these achievements, the school periodically highlights select honors received by members of its departments, institutes, labs, and centers. The following individuals were recognized in spring 2026:

Faez Ahmed, the Esther and Harold E. Edgerton Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received a 2025 Air Force Office of Scientific Research Young Investigator Program Award. The award provides early-career U.S. scientists and engineers with up to $450,000 over three years to support innovative research.

Navid Azizan, the Alfred Henry (1929) and Jean Morrison Hayes Career Development Professor and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Yet-Ming Chiang, the Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was named a Boston Globe Tech Power Player 2026. The annual list highlights the impact of local leaders on technology and business.

Samantha Coday, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received a 2025 ARPA-E IGNIITE Award. The award aims to support early-career innovators seeking to convert disruptive and unconventional ideas into impactful new technologies across the full spectrum of energy applications.

Srini Devadas, the Edwin Sibley Webster Professor and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2026 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award, which recognizes contributions to computer and digital systems architecture.

Joel Emer, professor of the practice in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2026 ACM SIGARCH/IEEE TCCA Influential Paper Award. This award recognizes the paper from the ISCA Proceedings 20 years earlier that has had the most impact on the field (in terms of research, development, products, or ideas) during the intervening years.

Chuchu Fan, an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, received the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation. The award recognizes academics who have made an identifiable contribution or contributions that have had a major impact on the robotics and/or automation fields.

Yoel Fink, the Danae and Vasilis (1961) Salapatas Professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received the American Physical Society Andrei Sakharov Prize, which recognizes outstanding leadership and achievements of scientists in upholding human rights.

Aristide Gumyusenge, an assistant professor the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, received the 2026 Early Investigator Award from the American Chemical Society's Polymeric Materials: Science and Engineering Division. Honorees are chosen from early-career emerging leaders who have made significant contributions in their respective fields within polymer materials science and engineering.

Paula Hammond, dean of the School of Engineering and an Institute Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, received the AIChE 2026 John M. Prausnitz Institute Lecture Award. The Prausnitz AIChE Institute Lectureship is awarded to a distinguished member of AIChE who has made significant contributions to chemical engineering in their field of specialization.

Robert Langer, the David H. Koch (1962) Institute Professor in the departments of Biological Engineering (BE) and Chemical Engineering, received the 2026 Robert A. Welch Award in Chemistry from the Welch Foundation. This prestigious prize recognizes important research contributions that have had a significant and positive impact on humankind.

Gareth McKinley, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Innovation and a professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Awardees are recognized by their peers for their outstanding contributions to research in the natural and social sciences.

Farnaz Niroui, Robert J. Shillman (1974) Career Development Professor in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and an associate professor, received the Rising Star of Microsystems Award from the Transducer Research Foundation, which is intended to highlight the next generation of innovators shaping the future of microsystems, microfabrication, MEMS, micro/nanomanufacturing, and closely related fields.

Tomás Palacios, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2026 Quantum Devices Award from the International Symposium on Compound Semiconductors for significant advancements in wide bandgap semiconductors and nanostructures to improve electronics and pave the way for heterogeneous integration with silicon CMOS.

Ritu Raman, the Eugene Bell Career Development Professor of Tissue Engineering and an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received a Grainger Foundation Frontiers of Engineering Grant from the National Academy of Engineering. The grants provide seed funding for participants at U.S.-based institutions to support further pursuit of new interdisciplinary research and projects stimulated by interactions at the U.S. Frontiers of Engineering symposium.

Lindsey Raymond, an assistant professor in the departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and of Economics, was named a 2025 Early Career Fellow by Schmidt Sciences AI2050. AI2050 issues awards to enable and encourage bold and ambitious research, often multidisciplinary, that is typically hard to fund but socially beneficial. Awards are given for exceptional work tackling one or multiple items from a working list of hard problems.

Daniela Rus, the Panasonic Professor and a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received the 2026 High-Tech Prize of the Bavarian Minister-President. This prize is the most highly endowed award for technology and engineering in Germany.

Afreen Siddiqi, a research scientist in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, received a 2026 Guggenheim Fellowship. Working across 55 disciplines, the fellows were selected from almost 5,000 applicants for “prior career achievement and exceptional promise.”

Vincent Sitzmann, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, received both a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation and the Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI) Young Researcher Award from the IEEE Computer Society. The PAMI Young Researcher Award is given to a researcher within seven years of completing their PhD for outstanding early career research contributions.

Loza Tadesse, the Latham Family Career Development Professor and an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was named to Chemical & Engineering News’ 2026 Talented 12. This annual list recognizes early-career researchers who are rising stars in chemistry, selected for their innovative work and growing impact in the field.

Kripa Varanasi, the Maher A. Elmasri Professor of Mechanical Engineering, accepted a United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization Global Award on behalf of his startup, AgZen. The award recognizes the company’s efficient agrochemical spraying patent portfolio.

A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their First Amendment rights, EFF argued this week.

The case, Meta v. Bonta, challenges SB 976, which requires that teen social media users get their parents’ permission before seeing other users’ recommended speech on their social media feeds. The legal challenge to SB 976 has largely centered on how the law violates social media services’ First Amendment rights to curate user-generated content and present it as they see fit.

But the friend-of-of the-court brief EFF filed along with the Center for Democracy & Technology and the Wikimedia Foundation shows that the law violates teen users’ First Amendment rights, too.

“SB 976 frustrates young people’s ability to use the internet to its full potential, prohibiting them from relying on tools that disseminate their speech and help them view and interact with other users’ speech,” the brief argues.

Recommendation systems have a dual purpose on social media: they help all users discover speech and content by other users, and to get their own speech in front of a wider audience.

“SB 976 creates significant, constitutionally violative, burdens on young users’ ability to read and comment on the news, discuss politics, find and share art, share their religious beliefs, or even practice their religion with fellow members of their faith,” the brief argues. “There is simply too much content on services for users to sift through manually, and young users may not know what to search for or even how to find content.”

Because SB 976 creates such broad burdens on teens’ ability to distribute and receive speech, it should be struck down on First Amendment grounds. But as EFF’s brief argues, the First Amendment doesn’t stop California and other states from passing laws that help all users, regardless of age, avoid major social media services’ harmful surveillance business models.

“One could imagine a law that required services to minimize the amount of data they collect, or limit using more invasive data analysis practices, such as tracking users across multiple services, analyzing keystrokes, and other surveillance-intensive practices,” the brief argues. “Such restrictions likely would serve the state’s aim of protecting all internet users—including minors—and would be more narrowly tailored to addressing the harms those practices cause than SB 976.”

At a moment when global alliances are shifting, technological change is accelerating, and the boundaries between science and geopolitics are dissolving, understanding the world demands new ways of thinking. 

For 75 years, the MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) has helped meet that challenge — bringing together engineers, social scientists, and policy practitioners to confront the most pressing global challenges of their time. From developing the foundations of modern international security to redefining how the United States engages with the world, CIS has not only studied global affairs, it has helped shape them. 

What distinguishes CIS is not just the scope of its work, but the way it approaches it. 

At MIT, international studies does not sit apart from science and technology, it is embedded within it. This proximity has enabled generations of scholars to tackle geopolitical problems with tools and perspectives rarely found in traditional academic and policy environments. 

“Being situated within the world’s leading technical institution enables a lot of exciting possibilities,” says Evan Lieberman, the director of CIS and the Total Professor of Political Science and Contemporary Africa. “We focus on critical problems in international development and security — always with an eye towards the challenges and opportunities presented by technological change. Beyond that, a big part of our mission is to provide global perspectives and engagement avenues relevant to scientists and engineers.” 

Established during the dawn of the Cold War, CIS pioneered a new understanding of global power: that science, technology, and geopolitics were becoming deeply intertwined. From the beginning, it convened faculty across disciplines — economics, political science, engineering, and beyond — setting a template that has since become a model for institutions around the world. Over the decades, this approach has produced an outsized impact. 

In 1961, a memorandum to President John F. Kennedy from MIT economist Max Millikan — the inaugural director of CIS — helped inspire the creation of the Peace Corps, fundamentally reshaping how the United States engages in global development. 

CIS scholars such as Lincoln Bloomfield and William “Bill” Kaufman played a central role in establishing security studies as a rigorous academic field in the late 1950s. Less than two decades later, Jack Ruina and George Rathjens founded the center’s Arms Control and Defense Policy Program (now known as the MIT Security Studies Program), which has influenced generations of policymakers and trained generations of scholars.

The study of modernization and political development has also long been central to the work of the center, with notable luminaries such as Lucian Pye and Myron Weiner helping to lead the way. 

A legacy of global exchange 

At the same time, CIS has reshaped how knowledge flows across borders. The MIT International Science and Technology Initiatives (MISTI), launched in 1983 by Institute Professor Suzanne Berger, has sent thousands of MIT students abroad to work, study, and conduct research alongside international partners — experiences that extend far beyond traditional study abroad. In doing so, it helped change longstanding assumptions about the United States’ role in the world, demonstrating that learning is most powerful when it is reciprocal. 

That ethos of mutual exchange continues to define CIS today. Through initiatives such as the Global Seed Funds, MIT faculty, researchers, and their students collaborate with academic partners around the world to advance shared research agendas. 

The connection between these initiatives can be traced to Richard Samuels, Ford International Professor of Political Science and director of CIS from 2000 until 2023. His creation of the MIT-Japan Program in 1981 served as the model for MISTI. He was also the visionary behind the launch of the Global Seed Funds in 2008. 

Together, these programs reflect a consistent vision: that the strongest ideas emerge through sustained engagement with partners around the world. 

Expertise in action 

Drawing on deep regional expertise, CIS also serves as a platform for global engagement across MIT, mobilizing cross-disciplinary knowledge to respond to unfolding international crises and inform both scholarly and policy debates. 

Its MIT-MENA Program, led by Richard Nielsen, associate professor of political science, recently convened experts to assess the energy and security implications of disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz; the MIT-Ukraine Program, under the direction of Elizabeth Wood, Ford International Professor of History, brings together scientific, technical, and academic expertise to design sustainable solutions for a nation at war; and the MIT-China Program, directed by Yasheng Huang, professor of global economics and management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is creating a hub for scholars and policy experts focused on balancing the Institute’s engagement with China. 

Scholarship that shapes security 

For decades, the MIT Security Studies Program, directed since 2019 by Taylor Fravel, the Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, has been a leading incubator of ideas that have shaped debates on grand strategy, nuclear policy, civil conflict and Asian security. Its affiliated scholars, fellows, and graduate students have produced policy relevant research that continues to inform policymakers grappling with an increasingly complex international security challenges. 

Building on that legacy, SSP recently established the Center for Nuclear Security Policy (CNSP) — made possible by a $45 million gift from the Stanton Foundation. Directed by Vipin Narang, the Frank Stanton Professor of Nuclear Security and Political Science, the CNSP aims to expand MIT’s leadership in addressing one of the most urgent challenges of our time: managing the risks posed by nuclear weapons in a rapidly evolving and uncertain geopolitical environment. 

Another cornerstone of CIS’s security work is Seminar XXI, currently led by Kelly Greenhill, who holds faculty appointments at MIT and Tufts University. The annual, nine-month program brings together rising leaders from across the U.S. government, military, and national security community. In three decades, more than 2,500 participants have engaged deeply with issues such as nationalism, technological disruption, and global conflict — developing new frameworks for decision-making in high-stakes environments. 

Advancing research, expanding dialogue beyond its anchor programs, CIS continues to invest in the next generation of scholars and practitioners. Undergraduate research initiatives, postdoctoral fellowships, and visiting scholar programs — including the Robert E Wilhelm Fellowship — create space for emerging and established leaders to explore critical questions, from governance and corruption to political reform and social change. 

It also prioritizes policy-relevant research by supporting conferences, workshops, labs, and research initiatives on key problems in international affairs. 

Finally, CIS plays a vital role in connecting MIT to the broader world. Through public events like the Starr Forum, the center brings leading global voices to campus, fostering dialogue on issues that shape international politics and policy. 

The next 75 years 

As CIS looks to the future, its mission is evolving to meet a dramatically changing global landscape. 

“The moment we’re in now is so different from the Cold War era,” says Lieberman. “We’re seeing a much more complex global system, with new actors and new kinds of challenges.” 

In what Lieberman describes as CIS 2.0, the center is sharpening its focus on the forces that will define the coming decades. This includes the geopolitical implications of artificial intelligence, the future of global cooperation in an era of climate crisis, and the evolving role of the United States within an increasingly contested international order. 

Addressing these challenges will require exactly the kind of interdisciplinary, globally engaged approach that has defined CIS for the past 75 years. It will also require a renewed commitment to collaboration — across fields, across institutions, and across countries. 

“A key source of our value added is to convene complementary sources of expertise,” Lieberman says. “It’s about bringing people together who might not otherwise be in the same room, and asking how we can have the greatest possible impact.” 

Seventy-five years after its founding, CIS remains guided by a simple but powerful idea: that understanding the world — and improving it — demands more than any single discipline, perspective, or nation can offer alone.

The CIS’s 75th anniversary symposium, taking place Oct. 15-16, will explore the defining challenges of today with leading thinkers.

Nearly 170 interns recently dispersed from MIT Lincoln Laboratory to return to their undergraduate or advanced degree programs. For Anna Raymaker and Vivek Jagadeesh, however, the work is just getting started. They are among more than two dozen interns staying on as student technical assistants, continuing to support the laboratory's national security research during the 2026-27 academic year.

"Our summer research program is a key pathway for developing talent to support defense-critical programs," says Robert Loynd, executive officer in the Director's Office. "Interns are embedded in R&D teams across nearly all mission areas, from missile defense and cyber operations to advanced communications and quantum technologies."

In 2026, the laboratory's intern program was named to Yello and WayUp's Top 100 Internship Program list and received the organizations' Public Service Award. This award recognizes programs that demonstrate exceptional commitment to meaningful intern engagement that benefits the public good. 

Anna Raymaker: Securing maritime infrastructure

Anna Raymaker found her bearings when she began researching maritime security. Four years ago, the PhD student at Georgia Tech had just started her cybersecurity studies, but hadn't yet settled on a focus area. When her advisor offered a project building a boat test bed, the Florida native was hooked.

As she began presenting her test bed research at academic cybersecurity conferences, she noticed a gap: "No one was really looking at shipping security," she says. That realization led her to speak directly with mariners to learn about the cybersecurity issues they faced.

One issue mariners repeatedly raised was the security of the Automatic Identification System (AIS), a device that helps ships avoid collisions by broadcasting their location, speed, and course. International regulations require all ships over 300 gross tons — such as cargo, tanker, and cruise ships — to transmit their identity via AIS at all times. 

"Mariners told me that AIS is their source of truth, so it was very scary when they experienced it being manipulated in the wild," Raymaker says. For example, so-called "ghost fleets" could use AIS to disguise themselves as other vessel types to evade sanctions. Such deception is possible because AIS does not require identity verification.

This summer, Raymaker examined AIS security firsthand at Lincoln Laboratory. Her goal was to analyze the trust assumptions built into the system and identify where those assumptions could be exploited. Her research revealed several methods of interfering with AIS, including radio-based "spoofing," in which false messages can appear to come from a legitimate device. Spoofed messages could, for instance, instruct ships to switch transmission channels or report a fake vessel position, potentially causing ships to change course. Working with her Lincoln Laboratory advisor, Hamed Okhravi, she then explored defenses against these false signals.

"Recent events have demonstrated that AIS security is not merely a theoretical concern, as manipulation or spoofing of maritime positioning data can directly affect navigation, safety, and global shipping. Anna's work directly contributes to understanding and mitigating these emerging risks," Okhravi says. "She built a new experimental test bed from scratch, conducted detailed experiments, analyzed the results, and helped turn the work into a publication, demonstrating excellent hands-on technical and research skills."

Raymaker says she has been both surprised and encouraged by the laboratory's collaborative culture. Mentioning her AIS project in a hallway conversation would prompt staff to offer help or connect her with relevant experts. "The opportunity to network with all these experts and see what other groups do is extremely unique. Any student would benefit from that kind of exposure," she says. 

As a student technical assistant, Raymaker will research other dimensions of maritime security. She's particularly interested in preventing the malicious cutting of undersea cables, which has become a major geopolitical security concern. "Ships are big and slow. If we have data on where they're moving, maybe we could use it to predict when a ship is going to do something bad," she says.

After graduation in the spring, she hopes to keep working through the problems she heard from mariners: "I want to go one by one down that list to create solutions that might help. Their job at sea is hard, and they deserve to be protected."

Vivek Jagadeesh: Readying cyber technology for industry adoption

Vivek Jagadeesh is a master's student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His path to Lincoln Laboratory came together naturally. After interviewing for a summer position, he learned that his advisor had a connection with staff in the Secure Resilient Systems and Technology Group. That connection gave him the confidence that the laboratory was the right fit for his interests. As it turned out, the group's work aligned closely with the problems Jagadeesh was tackling in his research: securing operating systems.

Specifically, Lincoln Laboratory researchers have been developing Hardware-Assisted Kernel Compartmentalization (HAKC). The core software of an operating system, a kernel typically has the highest level of access to a computer's hardware. Because of that access, a single bug in kernel code can lead to catastrophic security failures. HAKC mitigates this risk by dividing kernel code into smaller components, each separated by access-control checks. The team anticipates that the technology can resolve vulnerabilities in Linux kernels, which power most of the world's devices.

Jagadeesh's focus has been on supporting HAKC's transition to industry. "The idea is to make the technology less proprietary, so that any of the big distributors of Linux, like Red Hat, or Canonical, can use it," he says. Those distributors, however, need clear insight into how HAKC modifies the kernel code. To enable this insight, Jagadeesh developed a tool called a source-to-source compiler, or transpiler. 

A compiler converts C source code into binary for machines to execute. Different compilers process code differently, and the compiler HAKC uses differs from the compiler used frequently by the greater Linux community. Modifications to code are usually done at an intermediate stage — a translated version of the code that compilers use before generating binary — but interfacing with the code at this stage varies by compiler, making modifications hard to transfer between systems. To avoid this problem, Jagadeesh's transpiler inserts HAKC code directly into the original C source file, while preserving the source file's original information and making additions easily identifiable. As a result, any developer can audit the changes HAKC implements, and HAKC can cleanly integrate into the complicated build systems used by kernel developers and distributors.  

"Creating a transpiler is a non-trivial task, but that is nevertheless what Vivek achieved. His transpiler is capable of transforming the entire Linux kernel, a key milestone we need to bring HAKC to industry," says his Lincoln Laboratory advisor, Derrick McKee, who began developing HAKC as a student researcher himself five years ago.

According to McKee, the transpiler will serve as the foundation for the next iteration of HAKC. That new version is planned for release under the Open Resilient Compartmentalization Alliance, a Linux Foundation initiative dedicated to bringing compartmentalization technology to Linux systems.

Jagadeesh says he felt strongly supported throughout the internship, meeting with the project's two principal investigators at least twice a week. "It felt like we were working on this together in a big way — and I got a lot of support from everyone responsible for it," he says. He looks forward to working on other aspects of system security in the group this fall. 

For students considering a laboratory internship, Jagadeesh offers this perspective: "You get to work on real things that have an actual impact. It's work that, after you go back to school, you'll apply to more research going forward."

More information on Lincoln Laboratory's summer research program and other student opportunities can be found here. 

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian.

There are plenty of signs that AI will make all of our experiences of the US midterm elections worse. Voters have anxiety about AI’s impacts on the country. Politicos are using AI deepfakes to spread lies. The White House is posting slopaganda.

Meanwhile, candidates are missing a real opportunity to use AI to make campaigning better. The technology can help candidates listen more deeply to voters’ concerns, engage constituents more inclusively, and formulate policy platforms that are more responsive to our input. There are vanishingly few examples of this in ...

Every new generation of phone display, television screen, and solar panel is a result of precision optics experiments, which use lasers and other light sources to measure the optical properties of candidate materials. These experiments can take months to run, requiring scientists to meticulously angle and adjust delicate light sources, mirrors, cameras, and other components, in a careful and constant tuning that can be physically tedious and time-consuming. 

But MIT scientists say the whole process of building and running an optics experiment could one day be fully automated. Taking a step toward such a future, they have developed a reconfigurable, robotic optics laboratory. 

The new robotic lab autonomously assembles standard optical components into desired configurations. It can then tune the angle and position of mirrors and lenses with micron-scale precision to produce beams of light with specific properties. The system can also safely dismantle an experiment and reassemble the parts into an entirely new setup. 

The team showed that the robotic system could autonomously build and fine-tune a tabletop laser cavity — a key element of most optics experiments. The system could also precisely manipulate components to perform several optical tasks, such as centering a laser beam, aligning multiple beams, and automatically stabilizing the beams in response to physical disturbances.

“We start with randomly placed components,” says Sachin Vaidya, a postdoc in MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics. “At the end, we have a fully functioning laser that the robot has built.”

The researchers are expanding the robotic lab, in a physical and virtual sense. In addition to improving the system’s physical sensing, maneuvering, and overall space, they are developing a cloud-based application that gives users virtual access to the physical robot. They envision that one day, scientists from anywhere will be able to remotely access robotic optics labs and virtually submit experimental protocols or queries that the labs would then set up and run autonomously. 

“There are many things this could enable,” says Marin Soljacic, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor of Physics at MIT. “A robot isn’t going to get bored. It can work 365 days, 24 hours a day, on very boring things. That will free up so much creativity and time for scientists to then push theories and see what we can do. Science could progress much faster.”

The MIT team will present the details of the new system at the Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) conference later this month. Along with Soljacic and Vaidya, project team members include co-lead Seou Choi, Caio Silva, and Shrish Choudhury from MIT, Shiekh Uddin of Nokia Bell Labs, and Sajib Shuvo of Arizona State University.

A city of light

A tabletop optics experiment can resemble a miniature city of densely packed mirrors, lenses, and light sources. Scientists manually arrange and align the various components in precise configurations, then shine light into the experiment. The lenses and mirrors bounce and focus the beam into a desired wavelength, frequency, or intensity that can then be used to probe or manipulate a given material. 

“Sometimes this manual setup takes days or months depending on the complexity of the experiment,” Soljacic says. “It’s meticulous work that has to be done again and again for each experiment.”

Most labs do incorporate some level of automation in an optics setup, such as motorized tuners that mechanically turn knobs to precisely angle a mirror. 

“These components can automate the most tedious parts of an experiment,” Vaidya notes. “But no one has built a full system that goes from no setup to a completely aligned setup in one tool. That was our goal, to show complete automation through all the steps that go into an optics experiment.”

Auto-tuned optics

The team’s robotic lab centers around a robotic arm with seven moveable joints that is attached to a metallic tabletop. The robot picks and places lenses, mirrors, and other optical components, each of which the researchers installed in its own 3D-printed plastic housing. 

The housings are designed such that the robot can easily and safely grip and move each component. The researchers etched the top of each housing with a QR code containing information about the component within the housing (such as whether it is a lens versus a mirror, and its exact dimensions and capabilities). Each housing has a magnetic base that helps stabilize a component once the arm places it down on the metallic tabletop. 

The researchers designed a Wi-Fi-enabled “fine-adjustment tool” that clips onto the mount of standard optical components. The motorized tool can be wirelessly controlled to turn a component’s knobs, for instance to angle a mirror. 

“The way humans do this tuning is by feel, and based on a lot of intuition,” Vaidya says. “This tool is at least as precise as a human, but in reality it is much more precise.”

The team also installed a pair of cameras over the entire setup that provides a birds-eye view of the tabletop experiment. Finally, they developed a “software stack,” or a set of programs that enables the robot to navigate through every step of setting up and continuously tuning an experiment. These steps include recognizing a specific component, knowing how to safely approach and pick it up, where to move it, and how to avoid collisions with other parts of the experiment along the way. 

Finally, they designed a simple virtual user interface to allow an experimenter to remotely direct the robot. For instance, when a user drags the icon for a mirror from one spot to another, and clicks a button to confirm, the robot responds by picking up the actual mirror and placing it down at the corresponding location on the table. 

As a demonstration, they directed the robot to assemble various components into a laser cavity. A laser cavity consists of two mirrors arranged on either side of a crystal. When a beam of light is shone into the setup, it pings back and forth between the two mirrors. With each pass, the light also passes through the crystal, which amplifies the light’s intensity, to a point that whatever light escapes, is intense enough to form a laser. 

“We wanted to pick a demonstration in optics that’s reasonably challenging,” says co-lead author Seou Choi, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science. “This is not something a new trainee could do in an afternoon. It requires a lot of alignment and component experience.”

In the end, the robot successfully built a functional laser cavity by autonomously carrying out 50 maneuvers, all within 30 minutes. When the researchers introduced physical disturbances to the setup, such as randomly moving a component on the table, the system automatically readjusted components to maintain the laser’s intensity. 

“Even tiny vibrations or temperature changes can degrade an optics experiment,” Vaidya says. “An autonomous lab could continuously monitor its own performance and repair the alignment before valuable data is lost.”

The researchers envision that robotic labs like theirs could be paired with a nearby library of physical components that another robot could fetch and deliver to a tabletop robot to arrange into an experiment. Such a system could work to build and run experiments, then break them down and set up new ones on demand, or continuously run an experiment that requires active 24/7 monitoring.

“A system like this could help industry test prototypes faster, for everything from cameras and displays to solar cells and AR/VR goggles,” Vaidya says. 

For their part, the researchers are applying the new robot lab to test promising carbon-capture materials. By shining light with specific properties at these materials, they can get information about how a material absorbs carbon dioxide. 

“Experimental optics is the backbone of many important fields,” Vaidya says. “Our work takes the first step toward optical labs that can operate faster, more reliably, and without manual intervention in a domain that demands extreme precision and diversity of experimental setups.”

This research was supported, in part, by the Korea Foundation for Advanced Studies Overseas PhD Scholarship, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Army DEVCOM ARL Army Research Office, Parviz Tayebati, the MIT Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium (MGAIC), and Shell International Exploration and Production Inc.

 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed internet users and programmers a big win today, by rejecting an attempt to stretch a narrow provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into a new source of copyright liability.  

The case involves Section 1202 of the DMCA, which prohibits intentionally removing copyright management information (CMI) like an author’s name or a copyright notice, from a copyrighted work. Open AI and Microsoft used code from Github as part of the training data for their LLMs, along with billions of other works. A group of anonymous Github contributors sued, alleging the new code coming out of these LLMs was similar to theirs—but with the CMI stripped out.  

The Ninth Circuit correctly agreed with what we said in our brief: removing copyright information from a copyrighted work is fundamentally different from creating a new work that didn't have CMI in the first place. Section 1202 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was intended to serve as a backstop for traditional copyrights in the digital age—not to create a new, more expansive right to inhibit otherwise non-infringing uses. 

As we also explained, accepting the Does’ theory would have created a brand-new source of liability for otherwise perfectly lawful activities, undermining creativity and innovation far beyond the specific context of AI development. Copyright holders would be able to file costly lawsuits against all kinds of legitimate users, such as artists making remixes based on older works, teachers adapting works for a classroom presentation, engineers reverse engineering code to understand it better, and search engines that help us all navigate the web. The risks would have fallen especially hard on independent software developers and other small creators. Large companies can afford to litigate these claims in federal court for years, if necessary. But an independent programmer facing massive statutory damages may simply have to settle, even when their underlying use is completely lawful. That’s why EFF fights to make sure courts don’t expand copyright beyond what Congress authorized.  

Copyright law still protects programmers when their work is unlawfully copied. They can still bring copyright infringement claims if someone uses a model to reproduce their code. Additionally, the plaintiffs’ contract claims against the AI companies are still in play. The specific holding here was narrow but important: that the absence of copyright information from a new work does not mean, by itself, that someone illegally removed it.  

That’s the correct result. New technologies will keep raising hard questions about copyright. Courts should answer those questions by applying the rights that Congress actually authorized, not by inventing new rights that could harm expression and lawful use for everyone.  

Additional Reading:  

• 9th Circuit Opinion in Doe v. GitHub 
• EFF’s Amicus Brief in Doe v. GitHub 

Jay Wilcoxson, counsel in the MIT Office of General Counsel (OGC), does not shy away from a crisis. In fact, he enjoys navigating uncertainty to steer a conflict toward an outcome that is beneficial to the Institute. Drawing on his background in private law practice and his love for problem-solving, Wilcoxson ensures his work supports MIT's mission and principles. 

After attending Boston University School of Law, Wilcoxson joined the Boston law firm Goodwin Procter LLP, specializing in commercial business litigation. While the work was interesting and challenging, there were aspects of law firm life that he didn’t love, and he expected to eventually shift to a role as an in-house lawyer. He had always believed in the mission of higher education, and as universities are complex organizations with many moving parts, he was drawn to the range of issues they present. The challenge was that legal jobs in higher education are rare — people get them and don’t leave. 

For several years, Wilcoxson kept his eye on openings and met with general counsels at several universities, who reiterated how competitive these roles can be. One also mentioned something that stuck with him: Being a lawyer in higher education requires a high tolerance for ambiguity, which can be counterintuitive, as legal work is typically focused on applying the law to a set of facts to reach a clear outcome. In 2007, he opened Mass Lawyers Weekly and saw that MIT was looking for a lawyer with a background in litigation and other disputes at his level of seniority, so he applied. He was hired in August of that year as the first new lawyer to join the recently-created OGC. Before the office was established in January 2007, lawyers at MIT were not centralized in one office, but instead spread across several units on campus. 

Since joining MIT, Wilcoxson jokes that he is a “reformed litigator” because, unlike in private practice where he was often in court and managing the day-to-day of active lawsuits, much of his work now is focused on avoiding litigation. He works to identify potential friction points and reduce the risk of conflict or legal disputes before they escalate. His work is strategic and collaborative — working with clients across campus to identify and prevent potential areas of conflict and thinking broadly about how a case should be defended and whether there are opportunities to resolve it. 

Although Wilcoxson’s practice is very broad, his primary focus is on student life. He works regularly with the Division of Student Life, the Office of the Chancellor, the Office of Graduate Education, and the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office, among other departments, laboratories, centers, and institutes. If an issue comes to the OGC and the client isn’t sure about whom to contact, Wilcoxson and his colleagues confer to ensure that it makes its way to the lawyer best suited to handle it. As he notes, it is not the community’s responsibility to find the right lawyer — the OGC team makes sure each matter lands with the right person. 

Wilcoxson credits the team in the OGC for building an office that people want to work with. He believes the community sees him and his colleagues as trusted thought partners and teammates. All members of the MIT community — faculty, staff, and sometimes even students — can reach out for guidance on Institute legal issues. As lawyers, Wilcoxson and his colleagues approach problems differently than engineers, scientists, or those in the humanities, offering a distinct perspective on how to navigate complex issues. 

The advice Wilcoxson received before starting his job at MIT, that he would need a high tolerance for ambiguity, turned out to be the best guidance he received, and, to his surprise after 19 years at the Institute, is one of his favorite things about his job. “I really like the uncertainty,” he says. “That’s what makes the job interesting.” 

Soundbytes 

Q: What about your job brings you the most joy? 

A: The relationships I’ve developed. Part of what brought me to MIT is also what keeps me here, the development of deep relationships. There are some people I have talked to every day for almost 20 years. There’s a mutual appreciation for how we help each other move MIT’s agenda forward. Those relationships are important because helping resolve conflicts and disputes affects people’s lives, so the pressure can be high. Having people you know and trust, who have your back, and you have theirs, is what really helps you get through when things are stressful. 

Q: How would you describe the community at MIT? 

A: There’s no one word to describe it; I get to work with so many different types of people, all bringing different life experiences and expertise. “Quirky” comes to mind. “Brilliant” comes to mind. Ultimately, what draws me most are problem-solvers. I work with many people, but I have one client: MIT. That's easy to say, hard to explain, and really hard to put into practice. On any given day my client is whoever is acting on behalf of MIT. It could be a faculty member, it could be a dean, department head, or vice president, or maybe even a graduate student. 

I love MIT and am immensely proud to be part of this amazing institution. I’m not inventing things, I’m not solving the climate crisis, I’m not creating cleaner energy, but I am helping people do that. I hope I can take things off their plates so they can focus on their work. 

Q: Are you involved in any other areas of the Institute that are not directly related to your job? 

A: What I really try to do is find ways to be part of the community. I go to faculty meetings and lectures, and I’ve brought my family to weekend events. I’m on a lot of committees with students, many of which focus on developing a policy or how to approach an issue that might be the subject of rules or policy. I also often serve on search committees for leadership roles on campus. 

My favorite side hustle is being a name reader at Commencement. I’ve been doing it for close to 10 years. We used to have one huge ceremony, where eight of us stood on stage in Killian Court and read the name of every graduate. What’s really cool is that when I read a graduate’s name, they’re handed their actual diploma with their actual name on it, thanks to an incredible effort by the registrar’s office and a large team of volunteers. We used to read all 3,500 names live and we spent a lot of time practicing.   

Although Commencement is now broken into smaller ceremonies, we still read names live at the Undergraduate Commencement in Killian Court. Each of us reads about 200 names. It's a fun group of about six of us who have been reading for years, and we all love coming back to do it year after year. 

I also was recently asked to serve on the Presidential Committee on Distinguished Fellowships. This is the Institute committee that works with students who are applying for various international scholarships, such as Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships. I’m very excited to work with and mentor these talented students as they pursue these amazing opportunities. 

Mohammad Imran Khan Mewati teaches grades 6-12 at a school in rural India. His students are largely from economically disadvantaged families, and the school itself has limited resources. But the biggest problem, he says, is absenteeism. 

“If a student is not coming into your class, how are you going to teach?” says Mewati, a teacher for 26 years. “That’s why I’m using technology in my classroom and outside the classroom, so that they can learn a little bit using their smartphones.” 

MIT Open Learning’s free educational resources have been a boon for Mewati as he develops Hindi-language digital resources for his students. 

“I am a self-taught app developer,” he explains. “MIT Open Learning has had a deep and practical impact on my professional life as a teacher. Many concepts I learned influenced how I design digital learning activities, simple educational games, and classroom strategies. My students may not know they are indirectly benefiting from MIT, but they are.”

Through MIT Open Learning, Mewati has used in his classroom OpenCourseWare’s free, online library of educational resources from more than 2,500 courses spanning the MIT undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Learners can browse content at their own pace, watch lectures, read course notes, and hear from faculty experts. All materials can be downloaded for offline use, and the website is fully responsive for smartphone use. These materials are also available on MIT Learn, an AI-enabled platform for all of MIT’s lifelong learning opportunities.

Mewati started using OpenCourseWare resources in the early 2010s and cites programming courses as the most useful. He dove deep into Introduction to CS and Programming Using Python, Introduction to C and C++, and Introduction to Programming Using Java. Introduction to Computational Thinking helped him bring together problem-solving approaches from mathematics and computer science as he built apps.  

Closing the gap with technology

Mewati’s school is located 15 miles from the city of Alwar in Rajasthan, a state in northwestern India. Most of the students do not have access to desktop or laptop computers, but the majority live in a home where at least one person has a smartphone. Taking advantage of this technology, Mewati creates classroom groups on WhatsApp so that he can share resources with his students, regardless of whether they can make it to class. 

Mewati began incorporating technology into his teaching in the early 2010s, when he had to engage 180 students in a lesson about the moon landing and Neil Armstrong. Mewati created a simple HTML page that included many iconic images — the American flag planted on the moon, the Apollo 11 spacecraft, the footprint on the moon’s surface — with Hindi explanations. Once he created it, he could use it again and again. When he tested students on what they’d learned, they got better results than when he’d taught the material using his previous approach. 

“This is the incident that confirmed to me that technology can play an important role in the lives of the students, and particularly for the rural students, for the students who do not have equal opportunities,” says Mewati. “Technology is the equalizer.”

That belief has driven Mewati’s efforts to build his school’s technological resources. Through crowdfunding, he secured 15 used computers to create a computer lab, and teachers now share the responsibility for creating mobile hotspots so students can connect to the internet. Mewati’s mobile apps provide additional opportunities for students to explore topics in greater depth or catch up on lessons they may have missed.

Referring to his apps as his favorite topic, Mewati explains that he has developed several types to meet a variety of goals. Some allow students to play games that develop their math skills, while others include syllabi, reading recommendations, and class notes. Other apps help students prepare for exams required for government jobs. He also builds apps for audiences beyond his school, such as an app that provides Hindi-language resources related to maternal health, a topic he says is not openly discussed in India. The app has been popular, he explains, because it provides honest information that people can view privately.

“If I see an issue, I think, ‘Yes, let’s create an app,’” he says. 

Collaboration, open sharing, and lifelong learning

Mewati shares the apps he has created, and the MIT Open Learning resources that support him, with a network of teachers across India. He has connected with other educators through India’s National Teacher Awards and earlier this year, he traveled to Dubai for the Global Teacher Prize.

“We share things with each other,” he says. “We have a huge group — more than 1,000 teachers connected across India. So, if we see resources, or useful things for a class, we’ll share. All the time, I talk about open-source materials, like MIT courses, for educational purposes.”

Through this culture of collaboration and open sharing, Mewati is able to bring new learning opportunities to his students. The apps he has built — made possible by what he has learned through MIT Open Learning — help extend access to educational resources beyond the classroom. As an educator, he says he’s happy about that. But he is also a learner, and it’s his journey as a learner that he wants people to know. 

“I am from a rural area. My parents are not educated at all. And I am a Fulbright Scholar. I can reach the Global Teacher Prize stage. The reason is simple,” he says. “It is because I continued my learning, whenever possible, with the use of technology and availability of free courses from MIT.”

To anyone who is curious, who wants to learn, to push themselves or build something new, he says that with MIT Open Learning, the resources are out there.

“We should use it, we should grab it, and we should share it as much as we can,” says Mewati. “Because that’s how humanity can flourish.”

MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI) is launching a pilot artist-in-residence program to facilitate cross-disciplinary dialogue between art, science, and the public. 

MKI is a world-leading institution for research in astrophysics, combining more than 60 years of expertise in space and ground-based instrumentation development with the intellectual energy of MIT’s faculty, research and technical staff, and students in the departments of Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering; Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences; and Physics.

During the 2026-27 academic year, internationally acclaimed ultra-contemporary artist Amy Karle will work as the program’s inaugural artist-in-residence alongside MKI researchers to explore the research and processes behind cutting-edge astrophysical discoveries and instrumentation, and to translate this experience into an immersive, multimedia installation available for public display beginning in early 2028. Karle is known for her work as an artist, designer, and researcher whose projects explore how science and technology shape humanity, evolution, and the future across scales and systems, from cells to cosmos. 

“We are excited to work with Amy in this collaborative environment” says MKI Director Robert Simcoe, the Bruno B. Rossi Professor of Experimental Physics at MIT. “Her approach is unlike anything we have previously experienced at MKI and presents many opportunities to challenge the way we, as scientists and engineers, think about our study of the universe. At the same time, the resulting artwork will be shaped by the deep research we do, and the wide-ranging scientific and technical perspectives of the MKI community.” 

Karle’s proposal, which envisions astrophysical research and data as a co-creative experience toward embodied understanding of cosmic phenomena and touches on themes of scientific observation, signals, and inference, was selected by an interdisciplinary committee of astronomers, museum curators, and art-science practitioners. Reviewers praised Karle’s ambitious-yet-grounded approach to engagement, her attention to audience experience, her unique approach to science communication through art and technology, and the collaborative potential of her artistic vision. 

“I am thrilled to be partnering with MKI,” says Karle, whose practice over the years has included dedicated art-science collaborations with Copernicus Science Centre, the Interstellar Foundation, and Studio Quantum, as well as multiple installations for museums, festivals, and public spaces across the globe. “My first job was at a public observatory. I still remember showing strangers Saturn’s rings through a telescope and watching awe and understanding arrive as felt experience. That has shaped my work since. What MKI does at the frontier of astrophysics, translating faint signals into knowledge through instruments, computation, and human judgment, is a profound expression of that same process. I am excited to be in dialogue with that work and with MKI scientists to create art that makes this tangible and deeply felt, inviting people into the threshold where our ways of knowing the universe reshape how we understand ourselves.”

The residency begins with a one-month exploratory period in the fall semester, centered on meetings with MKI researchers, attendance at seminars and classes, and a public presentation to the MKI community. The project will then move from conceptualization to development, shaped through continued exchange with MKI researchers and complementary independent work in Karle’s California studio throughout 2027. 

In March, Karle and selected scientific collaborators will be in residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA, a national and international residency program embedded within one of the world’s largest and liveliest museums dedicated to contemporary art. During their time in residence, Karle and collaborators will test ideas, exchange knowledge, and engage with a multidisciplinary cohort of 16 other artists from across the globe.

“MASS MoCA [the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art] is pleased to be part of MKI’s artist-in-residence program and to contribute to the meaningful exchange between art and science,” says Susan Cross, MASS MoCA director of curatorial affairs. “We look forward to welcoming artist Amy Karle and collaborators from MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research to our campus, and to the Studios at MASS MoCA.”

The residency is supported by the Kavli Foundation’s Kavli Innovation Fund. The initiative seeks to develop new modes of public engagement with astrophysical research and discovery, and deepen emotional connections across the interplay of science and art.

“We are grateful for the Kavli Foundation’s support,” says Simcoe, “as it allows us to push boundaries and engage new audiences in the wonder of the universe and the process of science.” 

Karle’s work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including Centre Pompidou, Mori Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the Museum of Modern Art, Ars Electronica, ArtScience Museum, Triennale Milano, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, with works on the moon and in space. She collaborates with and presents at scientific, technological, and cultural institutions including NASA, CERN, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Autodesk, HP Labs, and NVIDIA. 

She was honored as one of BBC’s 100 Most Inspiring and Influential Women, a Pioneer in Design, and one of the Most Influential Women in 3D Printing. Karle also served as an American Arts Incubator U.S. Department of State artist diplomat. Her first job was at a public observatory, where she began asking fundamental questions about space and witnessing the wonder it can awaken in people, an early experience that continues to inspire her to create works that allow people to feel how we come to know the universe and our place within it.

To learn more about Karle's work, visit amykarle.com. As the project develops, MKI will be seeking museum and festival partners to host the installation in 2028 and beyond. 

MIT researchers have created a new computing platform that could be used to develop intelligent and adaptive next-generation electronics that can simultaneously perform multiple functions, like computing and memory, all within one extremely compact, energy-efficient device.

Such a platform opens opportunities for low-power edge computing applications, interactive medical and environmental monitoring systems, and smart robots.

The researchers accomplished this by leveraging the unique mechanical response of soft polymers at the nanoscale. A mechanical response is how a structure changes when a force is applied to it. 

They harnessed this response to create tiny mechanical devices that use reconfigurable motion to remember and process information in a way that mimics how neurons behave in the brain.

Because key computing functions are built into the intrinsic properties of the soft polymer material, the number of components needed to perform the functions are minimized, enabling a compact and versatile platform for information processing. 

“Complex and coupled nanoscale phenomena can provide tremendous opportunities for new approaches to information processing and integrating multiple functionalities, such as computing, sensing, and actuation. This could enable levels of energy efficiency, autonomy, and reconfigurability in nanoscale devices and systems that are challenging to achieve with conventional computing platforms,” says Farnaz Niroui, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), a member of the Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE), and senior author of a paper on this device. “Here, we harness the intrinsic mechanical properties of materials to engineer device-level dynamics, such that the material building blocks play a much more active role in defining device functionality than conventionally considered.”

She is joined on the paper by co-lead authors Peter Satterthwaite and Sarah Spector, EECS graduate students; as well as Jeremiah Johnson, the A. Thomas Guertin Professor of Chemistry at MIT; Maxwell Conte, a graduate student in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; Teddy Hsieh, an EECS graduate student; postdoc Eduard Bobylev; and Srinidhi Venkatesh ’25. The research appears today in Science Advances. 

Bioinspired computation

Biological systems can leverage physical changes, like motion or deformation, to process information efficiently and without needing access to a central controller. 

For instance, an octopus has a highly distributed nervous systems, with about two-thirds of its neurons spread throughout its arms. This allows the octopus to sense and process information about its environment locally and generate responses without requiring access to the central brain.

As an example, an octopus can mechanically change the color cells in its skin, enabling it to go through a rapid and context-specific camouflage process.

“You can think of an octopus as continuous computing matter, with computing, memory, sensing, and actuation distributed throughout its body,” Niroui adds.

Inspired by such performance, the researchers sought to develop a platform that can compute using mechanical transformations at the nanoscale. In mechanical computing, calculations are performed through physical transformations like movement and compression. 

While bioinspired mechanical computing platforms have been developed at the micro and macro scales, the MIT researchers shrunk their device to the nanoscale. At this scale, even minute mechanical transformations can lead to drastic changes in a material’s properties. This can enable complex computing in an energy-efficient platform.

But achieving the reversible nanomechanical transformations needed for such computing is a fundamental challenge. When two surfaces come very close, they experience strong adhesive forces that pull the surfaces together, making them impossible to unstick. 

To overcome this fundamental challenge, the researchers built a device with a super-thin film of the soft polymer polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) sandwiched between two metal electrodes. This soft spacer balances the adhesive forces between the two metal surfaces, keeping the electrodes from crashing together in an irreversible way.

“The soft material in serves as a ‘nano-spring,’ to help balance the forces to achieve nanoscale mechanical reconfiguration in a controlled and reversible manner,” Niroui explains.

When the researchers apply a voltage to the device, the two metal plates attract to one another, compressing the soft material and altering the electrical current flowing through the device. 

“PDMS is viscoelastic, which means that after being compressed, it takes time to return to its original state. This allows the devices to dynamically remember the history of forces and voltages applied to them, and convert that history into an electrical response,” says Satterthwaite.

They researchers used this performance to demonstrate an artificial neuron.

Brain-inspired information processing

In the brain, each neuron accumulates an electrical charge a little bit at a time until it reaches a threshold and fires, passing information to other neurons in the network. 

The researchers’ device mirrors this behavior. As voltage is applied over time, it accumulates stimulus as the electrodes gradually compress the PDMS. After crossing a threshold, it “fires” like a neuron before relaxing back to its original state.

“We have this complex functionality, which is the basis of biological computing, all contained in one nanoscale device,” Satterthwaite says.

Since computing and memory are incorporated within a single device with no need for external components, like capacitors or complex circuitry, this platform can achieve high energy efficiency with a small footprint. 

“The performance highly relies on the memory introduced using the soft polymer. We can intentionally engineer this over a large design space to meet the requirements of the desired applications,” Spector says.

The device can also be compatible with biological systems, Spector adds. For instance, it could be useful in applications like smart prosthetics that can rapidly process tactile data or low-power wearable patches that collect and analyze health indicators in real-time.

In the future, the researchers want to expand this work to further integrate sensing with computing and memory to realize nanomechanical computing matter with applications in intelligent and adaptive systems. 

This work was funded, in part, by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), an MIT EECS MathWorks Fellowship, and the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Device fabrication was carried out, in part, using MIT.nano facilities.

Courts have for two decades found that linking and embedding someone else’s web content, be it a photo, music, or an article, doesn’t violate copyright law–the entity that controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work, not the user or website that merely directs others to it, is directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing.

News publisher Emmerich Newspapers sought to convince the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to chart a new and dangerous course, arguing that an aggregator website that published links to its copyrighted articles was in effect “displaying” them and can be directly liable for infringement. EFF, along with several other public interest organizations and trade associations, filed a brief urging the court to follow multiple other circuits and reject that theory.

Fortunately, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals did just that. While it rejected the server test–the rule courts have used to determine copyright liability rests with whoever serves up the content–the court came to the same practical conclusion by focusing on who is responsible for transmitting content. 

Applying that test, the court found that pointing or directing a user’s browser to request and receive the copyright owner’s own copy residing on its computers does not involve transmitting or communicating the content. “Although we take different routes to get there, both the server test and the test we announce end up in a similar place: a website cannot transmit a work that it does not have,” the court said. 

We told the court that accepting Emmerich's theory would make the common act of embedding links a legally fraught activity, one that many websites might be unwilling to risk, which would seriously damage the internet as a tool for creating and disseminating ideas and knowledge,

We applaud the court’s decision–even though it applied a different test, it correctly concluded that a user linking pictures, video, or articles isn’t in charge of transmitting that content to the world. The user doesn’t control what’s located on the other end of the link—that’s up to the person who controls the server.

Emmerich also claimed linking violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), arguing its URLs were copyright management information (CMI) and when the aggregator displayed Emmerich’s articles under its own URL, it tampered with Emmerich’s CMI, which violates the DMCA. 

Under that logic, unsuspecting internet users could face ruinous legal risk for doing something as simple as using a link shortener, particularly given potential statutory penalties of up to $25,000 per violation.  

In our brief, we told the court that URLs don’t necessarily equate to a copyrighted work or provide sufficient information about the nature of the underlying content, making it highly unlikely that anyone would expect a URL to contain CMI. Quoting EFF’s brief, the court concluded that URLs are first and foremost a locational reference tool and while it may be possible for a URL to contain CMI, the bar to that conclusion is high.

Overall, this was a good and sensible decision that will protect ordinary online expression, communication, and access to knowledge. Hopefully this issue is laid to rest at last.

Related Cases: Emmerich Newspapers v. Particle Media

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce today that Alexander "amac" Macgillivray — a former White House official who also served in top legal capacities at Twitter and Google — has joined EFF’s Board of Directors. 

Macgillivray served in the Biden Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and earlier had held a similar position in the Obama Administration. Macgillivray was one of the co-authors of the Biden Administration’s Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and oversaw many of the Administration’s AI initiatives, such as organizing its AI CEO convening, leading its working group on federal AI policy, and overseeing the creation of the National AI Research and Development Strategic Plan and National AI Research Resource. 

He was Twitter's General Counsel from 2009 to 2013, leading the Corporate Development, Public Policy, Communications, and Trust & Safety teams. Before that he was Deputy General Counsel at Google from 2003 to 2009, where he created the Product Counsel team.  

“One of the things I am currently focused on is positively impacting AI development," MacGillivray said. The EFF is uniquely situated for that purpose because it combines top-notch legal, technical and advocacy staff with a long history of fighting for people’s rights while encouraging the positive development of technology. I’m thrilled to be joining the board.”

Macgillivray joins a dynamic EFF Board led by Board Chair Gigi Sohn and Vice Chair Brian Behlendorf, and including fellow Board Members Erica Astrella, Anil Dash, Sarah Deutsch, Tadayoshi Kohno, Pamela Samuelson, Bruce Schneier, James Vasile, Tarah Wheeler, and Jonathan Zittrain.

“The EFF Board is thrilled to have Alex join our ranks," Sohn said. "I’ve worked with Alex for over two decades and have always been impressed not only with his intelligence and grace, but also his ability to think outside the box. His deep experience with non-profit boards will be invaluable as EFF enters a new and exciting chapter.”

Macgillivray currently also serves on the boards of The Trust & Safety Foundation, The Trust & Safety Professional Association and Public Resource. He is an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Macgillivray earned a law degree from Harvard, a bachelor’s degree in Reasoning & Decision Making from Princeton University, and a New Jersey Teaching Certificate. 

“The vanguard leadership of EFF Board members to ensure technology supports rights, justice, freedom, and innovation for all people has never been more critical," EFF Executive Director Nicole Ozer said. "Many of the threats that once seemed hypothetical are now reality and the work of our EFF community is fundamental to the future of our countries, our livelihoods, and literally our lives. I feel fortunate to have amac join as a Board member as I begin my tenure as Executive Director. His diverse expertise will be invaluable to make sure that EFF is stronger than ever to meet this moment.” 

Members of the Board of Directors ensure the managerial and financial health of the organization.  EFF is the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Learn more about our cutting-edge work on AI issues, and please donate today to help keep us fighting for a brighter digital future.

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Mass surveillance isn't a joke. But police are treating it like one when using automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering a new EFF report on how officers across the country are routinely logging completely nonsensical "reasons" for their Flock searches, including "LOL," "LMAO," and even (yuck) "Sexy."

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For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberties, and the law. This issue covers a settlement enshrining Meta's harmful surveillance into law, states pushing back against ALPR, and how police are turning our privacy into a punchline.

Prefer to listen in? EFFector is now available on all major podcast platforms. This time we're asking EFF's Adam Schwartz what has united people against Flock cameras — and how we can make sure that today's backlash leads to lasting change. You can find the episode and subscribe on your podcast platform of choice:

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Want to protect your right to digital privacy? Sign up for EFF's EFFector newsletter for updates, ways to take action, and new merch drops. You can also fuel the fight for privacy and free speech online when you support EFF today!

Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization. Yet, people’s access to these platforms is increasingly coming under threat from courts and legislatures under the guise of protecting young people online—presenting a significant hindrance to youth organizing.  

In a major recent example, Meta settled in a lawsuit with 52 states and territories regarding the use of Instagram and Facebook by young people. The settlement will require Meta, and pressure other non-Meta owned platforms like TikTok and YouTube, to embed age gating practices into every product while also requiring restrictions on the accounts of people under-18, such as a two-hour daily time limit and content restrictions.   

Youth Power on Social Media 

Young people have been using social media for political advocacy and community organizing for more than a decade. From organizing protests speaking out against police brutality, to organizing nationwide school walkouts demanding safety in schools from gun violence, and striking to demand lawmakers take action to protect the climate, social media has become an instrumental tool for youth to both speak out and connect with other young activists.  

Instagram has become especially useful for activism online by young people. The features on the app make it a helpful tool for being able to efficiently and quickly spread awareness, which is especially important when people need to share real-time information. For example, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s video on Facebook showed the world the murder of George Floyd. 

The impact of youth activism online is also evident on non-Meta owned platforms, with services like TikTok and YouTube being particularly prevalent spaces for young people to share their stories, build movements, and amplify collective engagement.

However, in a digital world operating under the settlement’s new guidelines, young people risk not being able to read crucial news due to the content being labeled as “age-inappropriate,” which has already happened for teenagers in Australia under its social media ban.  

A two-hour daily time limit and a block on Meta’s apps between midnight and 6am leaves little room for young activists to organize rapid response efforts. Being unable to see likes on a post will make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns.   

Add to this what we already know about Meta’s content policies which claim to “protect children” and keep sites “family-friendly” but instead label content like LGBTQ+ content as “adult” or “harmful,” youth will be left with no choice in what content they see once the ‘age-appropriate’ content filter is turned on by default. One recent report noted that Meta had hidden posts that reference LGBTQ+ hashtags like #lesbian, #bisexual, #gay, #trans, and #queer for users with the sensitive content filter on. This would specifically curtail the efforts of young activists doing work on comprehensive sex education.   

Global Trends 

Measures like this are being discussed across the globe, but not all courts have taken such a short-sighted approach. In August, the French Constitutional Council got a lot right in its decision to strike down the country’s legislation banning under-15s from social media for infringing free expression and communication for everyone online, not just young people.  

The French Court also called attention to its infringement on privacy as the legislation would have forced people of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information to prove their age and access online content.  

Requiring this much data from users puts activists in danger of even more surveillance. Meta has already previously complied with demands from law enforcement to hand over the messages of users. The amount of personal information that will be logged and that could be demanded via a warrant from police to stifle or investigate activists’ actions or plans could cause a chilling effect, forcing advocates to pause or terminate their work.  

This is egregious because these systems misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their chosen name or align with what the system expects them to look like upon verification. And it’s often these communities that benefit from online organizing the most, especially for marginalized youth as social media can often be the only place to organize and build community. 

What Young People Deserve 

The settlement generates headlines, but it will not solve the core problem. Instead of tackling Meta’s surveillance capitalism business model that turns all online content into potential profit and centers lining the company’s pockets over protecting the speech and privacy of users, this settlement gives the tech giant an opportunity to carve out a new digital world that prioritizes its own needs, not those of young people.  

As we’ve been calling attention to in other contexts, this will force young people into digital isolation—curtailing vital access to news and resources for health and development. It also completely ignores the calls of youths themselves who favor digital literacy and education over surveillance and government control.   

Young people deserve a better internet than one regulated through panic. They deserve better than the government or Big Tech getting to decide how they use social media and what they can or cannot be exposed to or learn about. They deserve better than having their right to free expression minimized. This must not be lost in the pursuit of building a better and safer online ecosystem and environment.   

Researchers created a new technique that accurately and rapidly matches X-rays captured during surgery with a patient’s preoperative 3D medical scan. This method could make it easier for clinicians to precisely pilot minimally invasive surgical tools, leading to faster and safer procedures.

Clinicians perform many minimally invasive surgeries using real-time X-rays to help them steer devices like catheters and endoscopes through tiny incisions. But since X-rays are flat images, it can be challenging to determine exactly where surgical tools are located and oriented within the patient’s body, increasing the risk of complications.

To help localize surgical devices, clinicians may manually align X-rays with preoperative 3D medical images, such as CT scans or MRIs. Artificial intelligence tools designed to streamline this process struggle to align images robustly for all patients, making them infeasible in practice.

This new system, developed by scientists and clinicians at MIT and collaborating institutions, uses an AI model that adapts to each patient in only about five minutes. The model automatically matches one patient’s X-rays with 3D scans in a matter of seconds, and with sub-millimeter precision.

Named xvr (which stands for X-ray volume registration), it outperformed existing AI methods by an order of magnitude across a wide range of patients, body parts, and medical procedures.

“A majority of Americans live more than an hour away from a center that can perform noninvasive procedures, like emergency stroke interventions. An hour in stroke time is incredibly substantial. Making these procedures easier by combining 2D and 3D information enables these types of highly specialized life-saving procedures to be more accessible to much broader parts of the population,” says Vivek Gopalakrishnan, a postdoc in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); a recent graduate of the Harvard-MIT Program in Health Sciences and Technology; and lead author of a paper on xvr, which appears today in Nature.

He is joined on the paper by his advisor Polina Golland, the Sunlin and Priscilla Chou Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), a principal investigator in CSAIL, the leader of the Medical Vision Group, and co-senior author of the paper; and Neel Dey, a former postdoc in the Medical Vision Group who is now an investigator at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital as well as co-senior author on the paper. Additional co-authors include David-Dimitris Chlorogiannis, a researcher and clinician at Harvard Medical School; Andrew Abumoussa, a neurosurgeon at St. Luke’s Marion Bloch Neuroscience Institute; Anna M. Larson, a pediatric clinician at Shriners Children’s Hospital; Nazim Haouchine, an assistant professor of radiology at Harvard and Brigham and Women’s Hospital; Darren B. Orbach, a physician and scientist at Boston Children’s Hospital; and Sarah Frisken, an associate professor of radiology at Harvard.

Making X-rays more informative

In many minimally invasive surgical procedures, like angioplasty to open blocked arteries, clinicians insert instruments through a tiny incision and use a high-speed mobile X-ray scanner to generate images that allow them to visualize the procedure from any angle. 

But to guide surgical tools without accidentally damaging other tissue, clinicians must align real-time X-rays with the patient’s preoperative MRI or CT scan. This process, called registration, helps them determine where the tool is in relation to anatomical structures. 

“It takes decades of training for a clinician to become skilled enough to see grainy, 2D images and understand how everything is oriented. We want to make these 2D X-rays more informative, so it becomes safer and easier to do these life-saving procedures,” Gopalakrishnan says.

Manual registration methods are slow and burdensome, requiring the clinician to guess the position of a surgical instrument by punching numbers into a computer or clicking anatomical landmarks on a screen. 

To streamline the process, researchers are developing AI models that can predict 2D/3D registration. But people have such diverse anatomy that a model which works well for some patients may fail for others. 

A lack of high-quality annotated medical image data makes it difficult to train a deep-learning model robust enough to adapt to many patients, Gopalakrishnan says.

Rather than trying to make a machine-learning model that can be applied to all patients, the researchers built a model designed to adapt extremely well for the specific patient.

“We tailor this one specific model for this one specific patient, and it doesn’t matter if it works on other people because there will be different models for those people,” Gopalakrishnan adds.

Patient-specific machine learning

Xvr takes one patient’s preoperative 3D scan, like an MRI or CT, and uses it to generate thousands of synthetic X-rays from many angles, producing about 1,000 images each second. It uses a physics-based simulation of the X-ray process to ensure these synthetic images are realistic.

“Instead of generating data from nothing, like some types of generative AI, this physics simulation is entirely based on the CT scan or MRI from this patient. Because xvr creates patient-specific data in a purely physics-based manner, there is no room for hallucinations,” Gopalakrishnan says.

The xvr framework uses these simulated data to train an AI model that can accurately align this patient’s 2D X-rays with their 3D image scan in a matter of seconds.

But while such a registration model is highly accurate, it would take about 12 hours to train from scratch for each patient, making it impossible to deploy in an emergency. To make the process faster, the researchers used xvr to pretrain a more versatile AI system, called a foundation model, that can quickly adjust to each new patient. 

They collected whole-body 3D medical scans from more than 2,000 patients covering a wide range of ages, image modalities, and regions. Xvr used these diverse data to generate synthetic X-rays and train a foundation model to perform 2D/3D registration.

This pretrained model can adapt to a new patient in about five minutes, and performs registration with the same accuracy as if it had been trained from scratch. 

“So now you can get patient-specific accuracy but also in a very rapid time frame,” Gopalakrishnan says.

The team tested the model on the largest available dataset of real 2D/3D registrations, incorporating data from five hospitals that covered dozens of bones and organ systems in adult and pediatric patients. 

Xvr significantly outperformed other AI-based methods in accuracy and robustness, while operating fast enough for emergency surgeries. The model could also be used to improve the performance of robotic surgery technologies. 

In the future, the researchers hope to focus on making xvr faster for real-time deployment, conducting further studies to verify its reliability in additional situations, and extending the system to handle more complex scenarios, like moving body parts. 

“For the past two years, we’ve been carefully developing this algorithm and validating it. Now, we are collaborating closely with surgical robotics companies and clinical groups to turn this research into useful tools for navigation or deployment,” Gopalakrishnan says.

This work was funded, in part, but the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the MIT CSAIL-Wistron Program, the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, the MIT Jameel Clinic, the MIT Health and Life Sciences Collaborative, and the Chou Family Transformative Research Fund.

New variant of an old scam: Use the framing of a CAPTCHA to get an unsuspecting user to download and run a malicious program.

The annual “Demo Day” event at MIT, which marks the end of the delta v startup accelerator, fell on the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks this year, giving MIT entrepreneurs a chance to honor the memory of those lost that day while presenting their startup progress in the program.

Each year, the event celebrates all that students achieved while working full-time on their ventures over the summer with support and guidance from the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.

But the usually boisterous night started with the program’s military veterans asking for a moment of silence.

“Today is a day of remembrance, but also a day of celebration,” founder and MIT graduate student Kevin Power MAP ’25 told the audience in opening remarks. “It’s about building to create a better world. Today, we honor those lost the way we believe they would want: by being humble, taking care of each other, and building something worthy of the people who never had this chance. In this room, people are taking on the hardest problems in health care, cybersecurity, defense, robotics, and manufacturing.”

Now in its 15th year, delta v Demo Day gives MIT entrepreneurs a chance to share their work and inspire classmates to adopt the entrepreneurial mindset. The companies that presented were whittled down from an initial list of over 200, twice the amount that applied in 2025.

Across a whirlwind 90 minutes inside a jam-packed Kresge Auditorium, 13 teams presented their startups to the audience in two-minute presentations. Many shared business milestones and progress in line with what a typical company would achieve over multiple years, including customer partnerships, prototype deployments, and even revenue.

Each team received mentorship and support along with $75,000 in equity-free funding, a dramatic increase from years past. This year’s cohort featured undergraduates, graduate students, and postdocs, from across all of MIT’s schools.

“One of the things I love about delta v is it brings students from all across our community together to approach challenges with different perspectives,” Paula Hammond, dean of the MIT School of Engineering, told the audience. “Their companies are just as wide-ranging. They are working in AI, robotics, health care, aerospace, financial technology, biotech, cybersecurity, and more. At their core, they all share a desire to tackle difficult problems and improve people’s lives.”

This year the Trust Center also announced a new partner model for the delta v program, composed of over 125 leading founders from companies like HubSpot, Okta, and Kayak, along with industry experts and early-stage investors.

The event’s occurrence at the start of the semester is no coincidence: It is timed to attract the next generation of entrepreneurs on campus.

“This is my favorite day of the year,” said Bill Aulet, the managing director of the Trust Center and MIT’s Ethernet Inventors Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “Today is about building organizations that will solve the world’s most intractable problems. It’s about more than making money. These presentations will inspire you and make you proud to be a part of the MIT community.”

Artificial intelligence featured prominently in this year’s cohort of companies, which are applying the technology to solve major problems in cybersecurity and manufacturing, improve health care spending, design advanced metal parts, and more.

The company Neural Physics, for instance, is building AI models for manufacturing and other hardware applications. The company’s models are designed to accelerate product design and validation workflows for companies building things like cars, equipment, and machine parts.

“AI can build software overnight,” said co-founder and PhD candidate Mohamed Elrefaie. “AI for software has been solved. The next revolution is physical AI. Design takes too long, and it costs billions. In 1907, it took Henry Ford five years to develop the first Ford car model. Today, it still takes the Ford Motor Company five years to go from design to production. The U.S. advanced manufacturing sector loses roughly $245 billion annually due to engineer delays… [Most] of that time is spent running simulations or making engineering decisions. At Neural Physics, we are building foundation physics models to accelerate those processes.”

Another company, Cerebrus AI, has built a system for detecting when AI agents deviate from approved behavior. The solution builds a baseline of behavior for each deployed agent and monitors their activity to flag unusual behavior that could lead to problems.

“The rollout of revolutionary technology is being held up by three key questions that every executive is asking: Where are my agents? What are they doing? What do they have access to?” co-founder and MBA student Griffin Potrock said. “Security teams want to say yes, but they can’t trust what they can’t see. Cerebrus AI can help those teams.”

The company Talys uses AI agents to help health care organizations find opportunities to lower spending on things like pharmacies, operational processes, and third-party services. The company is already working with health systems and has processed $325 million in spending.

“Decades of attempts to reign in health care spending have fallen short — until now,” co-founder and MBA student Nicolas Berzin said “Why is it so hard? Analytics and dashboards give you pictures of the problem, but not the solution. Meanwhile, consultants are slow and expensive. There are thousands of spend categories, tens of thousands of procedures, and millions of items. Who knows how to save on all of these things? Imagine if you could classify every line, benchmark every item, find every substitution, triage every unprofitable case, and model every scenario across multiple contracts and thousands of procedures and categories like an expert. Talys is a margin-execution system that runs 24/7 to optimize procurement, reduce leakage, and improve case economics.”

Other delta v teams also presented impressive hardware solutions. RBT Resources presented a portable device that simplifies and speeds up blood transfusions, which could be used in hospitals and at the site of traumatic injuries like highways or battlefields.

“Transfusion at the point of injury is an extremely manual process with three key inefficiencies: They are time dependent, gravity dependent, and labor intensive,” explained CEO Anthony Capuano MBA ’26, a former U.S. Navy Seal. “Our goal at RBT Resources is to make transfusions faster and simpler for all medics.”

Gander Robotics developed a low-cost drone submarine that can be used when someone falls overboard on a ship. The hand-thrown, autonomous vessel can sense and travel to the person at sea and give them something to hold onto at the surface, all while providing rescue crews with its exact location.

So-called “man-overboard” situations are surprisingly common on military boats and cruise ships. The device was developed over two years at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. “Our autonomous rescue swimmer uses a proprietary technique to search with sonar from underneath the surface, where it’s nice and calm even if there’s a storm raging above,” CEO Michael Autery MBA ’26 explained.

The other teams presenting included:

Alpaca is building an integrated ecosystem of hardware and software to allow individuals to host their own frontier AI models without a subscription.

Banzai is building an AI-powered agent to help homeowners, property managers, and asset managers diagnose home repairs faster, improve repair accuracy, and reduce maintenance costs.

Bizon Labs is building a platform for engineering lipid nanoparticles to deliver advanced medicine anywhere in the body.

Cortheon uses AI design optimization to help foundries make complex metal parts at lower cost and with the design freedom of 3D printing.

Exo AI is helping financial institutions automate back-office processes using AI-native software capable of analyzing messy data and connecting fragmented workflows.

Pixology is using agentic AI to help sales teams create visual, engaging pitch materials faster for media rights deals.

Robox is using AI to develop a design engine for physical automation inside systems integrators, robotics firms, and manufacturers.

The Trade Lab is helping importers navigate shifting tariff regulations across the globe and optimize supply chains.