“We’re here to talk about really substantive changes, and we want you to be a participant in that,” said Desirée Plata, the School of Engineering Distinguished Professor of Climate and Energy in MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, at Energizing@MIT: the MIT Energy Initiative’s (MITEI) Annual Research Conference that was held on Sept. 9-10.

Plata’s words resonated with the 150-plus participants from academia, industry, and government meeting in Cambridge for the conference, whose theme was “tackling emerging energy challenges.” Meeting such challenges and ultimately altering the trajectory of global climate outcomes requires partnerships, speakers agreed.

“We have to be humble and open,” said Giacomo Silvestri, chair of Eniverse Ventures at Eni, in a shared keynote address. “We cannot develop innovation just focusing on ourselves and our competencies … so we need to partner with startups, venture funds, universities like MIT and other public and private institutions.” 

Added his Eni colleague, Annalisa Muccioli, head of research and technology, “The energy transition is a race we can win only by combining mature solutions ready to deploy, together with emerging technologies that still require acceleration and risk management.”

Research targets

In a conference that showcased a suite of research priorities MITEI has identified as central to ensuring a low-carbon energy future, participants shared both promising discoveries and strategies for advancing proven technologies in the face of shifting political winds and policy uncertainties.

One panel focused on grid resiliency — a topic that has moved from the periphery to the center of energy discourse as climate-driven disruptions, cyber threats, and the integration of renewables challenge legacy systems. A dramatic case in point: the April 2025 outage in Spain and Portugal that left millions without power for eight to 15 hours. 

“I want to emphasize that this failure was about more than the power system,” said MITEI research scientist Pablo Duenas-Martinez. While he pinpointed technical problems with reactive power and voltage control behind the system collapse, Duenas-Martinez also called out a lack of transmission capacity with Central Europe and out-of-date operating procedures, and recommended better preparation and communication among transmission systems and utility operators.

“You can’t plan for every single eventuality, which means we need to broaden the portfolio of extreme events we prepare for,” noted Jennifer Pearce, vice president at energy company Avangrid. “We are making the system smarter, stronger, and more resilient to better protect from a wide range of threats such as storms, flooding, and extreme heat events.” Pearce noted that Avangrid’s commitment to deliver safe, reliable power to its customers necessitates “meticulous emergency planning procedures.”

The resiliency of the electric grid under greatly increased demand is an important motivation behind MITEI’s September 2025 launch of the Data Center Power Forum, which was also announced during the annual research conference. The forum will include research projects, webinars, and other content focused on energy supply and storage, grid design and management, infrastructure, and public and economic policy related to data centers. The forum’s members include MITEI companies that also participate in MIT’s Center for Environmental and Energy Policy Research (CEEPR).

Storage and transportation: Staggering challenges

Meeting climate goals to decarbonize the world by 2050 requires building around 300 terawatt-hours of storage, according to Asegun Henry, a professor in the MIT Department of Mechanical Engineering. “It’s an unbelievably enormous problem people have to wrap their minds around,” he said. Henry has been developing a high-temperature thermal energy storage system he has nicknamed “sun in a box.” His system uses liquid metal and graphite to hold electricity as heat and then convert it back to electricity, enabling storage anywhere from five to 500 hours.

“At the end of the day, storage provides a service, and the type of technology that you need is a function of the service that you value the most,” said Nestor Sepulveda, commercial lead for advanced energy investments and partnerships at Google. “I don't think there is one winner-takes-all type of market here.”

Another panel explored sustainable fuels that could help decarbonize hard-to-electrify sectors like aviation, shipping, and long-haul trucking. Randall Field, MITEI’s director of research, noted that sustainably produced drop-in fuels — fuels that are largely compatible with existing engines — “could eliminate potentially trillions of dollars of cost for fleet replacement and for infrastructure build-out, while also helping us to accelerate the rate of decarbonization of the transportation sectors."

Erik G. Birkerts is the chief growth officer of LanzaJet, which produces a drop-in, high-energy-density aviation fuel derived from agricultural residue and other waste carbon sources. “The key to driving broad sustainable aviation fuel adoption is solving both the supply-side challenge through more production and the demand-side hurdle by reducing costs,” he said.

“We think a good policy framework [for sustainable fuels] would be something that is technology-neutral, does not exclude any pathways to produce, is based on life cycle accounting practices, and on market mechanisms,” said Veronica L. Robertson, energy products technology portfolio manager at ExxonMobil.

MITEI plans a major expansion of its research on sustainable fuels, announcing a two-year study, “The future of fuels: Pathways to sustainable transportation,” starting in early 2026. According to Field, the study will analyze and assess biofuels and e-fuels.

Solutions from labs big and small

Global energy leaders offered glimpses of their research projects. A panel on carbon capture in power generation featured three takes on the topic: Devin Shaw, commercial director of decarbonization technologies at Shell, described post-combustion carbon capture in power plants using steam for heat recovery; Jan Marsh, a global program lead at Siemens Energy, discussed deploying novel materials to capture carbon dioxide directly from the air; and Jeffrey Goldmeer, senior director of technology strategy at GE Vernova, explained integrating carbon capture into gas-powered turbine systems.

During a panel on vehicle electrification, Brian Storey, vice president of energy and materials at the Toyota Research Institute, provided an overview of Toyota’s portfolio of projects for decarbonization, including solid-state batteries, flexible manufacturing lines, and grid-forming inverters to support EV charging infrastructure.

A session on MITEI seed fund projects revealed promising early-stage research inside MIT’s own labs. A new process for decarbonizing the production of ethylene was presented by Yogesh Surendranath, Donner Professor of Science in the MIT Department of Chemistry. Materials Science and Engineering assistant professor Aristide Gumyusenge also discussed the development of polymers essential for a new kind of sodium-ion battery.

Shepherding bold, new technologies like these from academic labs into the real world cannot succeed without ample support and deft management. A panel on paths to commercialization featured the work of Iwnetim Abate, Chipman Career Development Professor and assistant professor in the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering, who has spun out a company, Addis Energy, based on a novel geothermal process for harvesting clean hydrogen and ammonia from subsurface, iron-rich rocks. Among his funders: ARPA-E and MIT’s own The Engine Ventures.

The panel also highlighted the MIT Proto Ventures Program, an initiative to seize early-stage MIT ideas and unleash them as world-changing startups. “A mere 4.2 percent of all the patents that are actually prosecuted in the world are ever commercialized, which seems like a shocking number,” said Andrew Inglis, an entrepreneur working with Proto Ventures to translate geothermal discoveries into businesses. “Can’t we do this better? Let’s do this better!”

Geopolitical hazards

Throughout the conference, participants often voiced concern about the impacts of competition between the United States and China. Kelly Sims Gallagher, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University and an expert on China’s energy landscape, delivered the sobering news in her keynote address: “U.S. competitiveness in low-carbon technologies has eroded in nearly every category,” she said. “The Chinese are winning the clean tech race.”

China enjoys a 51 percent share in global wind turbine manufacture and 75 percent in solar modules. It also controls low-carbon supply chains that much of the world depends on. “China is getting so dominant that nobody can carve out a comparative advantage in anything,” said Gallagher. “China is just so big, and the scale is so huge that the Chinese can truly conquer markets and make it very hard for potential competitors to find a way in.”

And for the United States, the problem is “the seesaw of energy policy,” she says. “It’s incredibly difficult for the private sector to plan and to operate, given the lack of predictability and policy here.”

Nevertheless, Gallagher believes the United States still has a chance of at least regaining competitiveness, by setting up a stable, bipartisan energy policy, rebuilding domestic manufacturing and supply chains; providing consistent fiscal incentives; attracting and retaining global talent; and fostering international collaboration.

The conference shone a light on one such collaboration: a China-U.S. joint venture to manufacture lithium iron phosphate batteries for commercial vehicles in the United States. The venture brings together Eve Energy, a Chinese battery technology and manufacturing company; Daimler, a global commercial vehicle manufacturer; PACCAR Inc., a U.S.-based truck manufacturer; and Accelera, the zero-emissions business of Cummins Inc. “Manufacturing batteries in the U.S. makes the supply chain more robust and reduces geopolitical risks,” said Mike Gerty, of PACCAR.

While she acknowledged the obstacles confronting her colleagues in the room, Plata nevertheless concluded her remarks as a panel moderator with some optimism: “I hope you all leave this conference and look back on it in the future, saying I was in the room when they actually solved some of the challenges standing between now and the future that we all wish to manifest.”

MIT and GE Vernova launched the MIT-GE Vernova Energy and Climate Alliance on Sept. 15, a collaboration to advance research and education focused on accelerating the global energy transition.

Through the alliance — an industry-academia initiative conceived by MIT Provost Anantha Chandrakasan and GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik — GE Vernova has committed $50 million over five years in the form of sponsored research projects and philanthropic funding for research, graduate student fellowships, internships, and experiential learning, as well as professional development programs for GE Vernova leaders.

“MIT has a long history of impactful collaborations with industry, and the collaboration between MIT and GE Vernova is a shining example of that legacy,” said Chandrakasan in opening remarks at a launch event. “Together, we are working on energy and climate solutions through interdisciplinary research and diverse perspectives, while providing MIT students the benefit of real-world insights from an industry leader positioned to bring those ideas into the world at scale.”

The energy of change

An independent company since its spinoff from GE in April 2024, GE Vernova is focused on accelerating the global energy transition. The company generates approximately 25 percent of the world’s electricity — with the world’s largest installed base of over 7,000 gas turbines, about 57,000 wind turbines, and leading-edge electrification technology.

GE Vernova’s slogan, “The Energy of Change,” is reflected in decisions such as locating its headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts — in close proximity to MIT. In pursuing transformative approaches to the energy transition, the company has identified MIT as a key collaborator.

A key component of the mission to electrify and decarbonize the world is collaboration, according to CEO Scott Strazik. “We want to inspire, and be inspired by, students as we work together on our generation’s greatest challenge, climate change. We have great ambition for what we want the world to become, but we need collaborators. And we need folks that want to iterate with us on what the world should be from here.”

Representing the Healey-Driscoll administration at the launch event were Massachusetts Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Rebecca Tepper and Secretary of the Executive Office of Economic Development Eric Paley. Secretary Tepper highlighted the Mass Leads Act, a $1 billion climate tech and life sciences initiative enacted by Governor Maura Healey last November to strengthen Massachusetts’ leadership in climate tech and AI.

“We're harnessing every part of the state, from hydropower manufacturing facilities to the blue-to-blue economy in our south coast, and right here at the center of our colleges and universities. We want to invent and scale the solutions to climate change in our own backyard,” said Tepper. “That’s been the Massachusetts way for decades.”

Real-world problems, insights, and solutions

The launch celebration featured interactive science displays and student presenters introducing the first round of 13 research projects led by MIT faculty. These projects focus on generating scalable solutions to our most pressing challenges in the areas of electrification, decarbonization, renewables acceleration, and digital solutions. Read more about the funded projects here.

Collaborating with industry offers the opportunity for researchers and students to address real-world problems informed by practical insights. The diverse, interdisciplinary perspectives from both industry and academia will significantly strengthen the research supported through the GE Vernova Fellowships announced at the launch event.

“I’m excited to talk to the industry experts at GE Vernova about the problems that they work on,” said GE Vernova Fellow Aaron Langham. “I’m looking forward to learning more about how real people and industries use electrical power.”

Fellow Julia Estrin echoed a similar sentiment: “I see this as a chance to connect fundamental research with practical applications — using insights from industry to shape innovative solutions in the lab that can have a meaningful impact at scale.”

GE Vernova’s commitment to research is also providing support and inspiration for fellows. “This level of substantive enthusiasm for new ideas and technology is what comes from a company that not only looks toward the future, but also has the resources and determination to innovate impactfully,” says Owen Mylotte, a GE Vernova Fellow.

The inaugural cohort of eight fellows will continue their research at MIT with tuition support from GE Vernova. Find the full list of fellows and their research topics here.

Pipeline of future energy leaders

Highlighting the alliance’s emphasis on cultivating student talent and leadership, GE Vernova CEO Scott Strazik introduced four MIT alumni who are now leaders at GE Vernova: Dhanush Mariappan SM ’03, PhD ’19, senior engineering manager in the GE Vernova Advanced Research Center; Brent Brunell SM ’00, technology director in the Advanced Research Center; Paolo Marone MBA ’21, CFO of wind; and Grace Caza MAP ’22, chief of staff in supply chain and operations.

The four shared their experiences of working with MIT as students and their hopes for the future of this alliance in the realm of “people development,” as Mariappan highlighted. “Energy transition means leaders. And every one of the innovative research and professional education programs that will come out of this alliance is going to produce the leaders of the energy transition industry.”

The alliance is underscoring its commitment to developing future energy leaders by supporting the New Engineering Education Transformation program (NEET) and expanding opportunities for student internships. With 100 new internships for MIT students announced in the days following the launch, GE Vernova is opening broad opportunities for MIT students at all levels to contribute to a sustainable future.

“GE Vernova has been a tremendous collaborator every step of the way, with a clear vision of the technical breakthroughs we need to affect change at scale and a deep respect for MIT’s strengths and culture, as well as a hunger to listen and learn from us as well,” said Betar Gallant, alliance director who is also the Kendall Rohsenow Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “Students, take this opportunity to learn, connect, and appreciate how much you’re valued, and how bright your futures are in this area of decarbonizing our energy systems. Your ideas and insight are going to help us determine and drive what’s next.”

Daring to create the future we want

The launch event transformed MIT’s Lobby 13 with green lighting and animated conversation around the posters and hardware demos on display, reflecting the sense of optimism for the future and the type of change the alliance — and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts — seeks to advance.

“Because of this collaboration and the commitment to the work that needs doing, many things will be created,” said Secretary Paley. “People in this room will work together on all kinds of projects that will do incredible things for our economy, for our innovation, for our country, and for our climate.”

The alliance builds on MIT’s growing portfolio of initiatives around sustainable energy systems, including the Climate Project at MIT, a presidential initiative focused on developing solutions to some of the toughest barriers to an effective global climate response. “This new alliance is a significant opportunity to move the needle of energy and climate research as we dare to create the future that we want, with the promise of impactful solutions for the world,” said Evelyn Wang, MIT vice president for energy and climate, who attended the launch.

To that end, the alliance is supporting critical cross-institution efforts in energy and climate policy, including funding three master’s students in MIT Technology and Policy Program and hosting an annual symposium in February 2026 to advance interdisciplinary research. GE Vernova is also providing philanthropic support to the MIT Human Insight Collaborative. For 2025-26, this support will contribute to addressing global energy poverty by supporting the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in its work to expand access to affordable electricity in South Africa.

“Our hope to our fellows, our hope to our students is this: While the stakes are high and the urgency has never been higher, the impact that you are going to have over the decades to come has never been greater,” said Roger Martella, chief corporate and sustainability officer at GE Vernova. “You have so much opportunity to move the world in a better direction. We need you to succeed. And our mission is to serve you and enable your success.”

With the alliance’s launch — and GE Vernova’s new membership in several other MIT consortium programs related to sustainability, automation and robotics, and AI, including the Initiative for New Manufacturing, MIT Energy Initiative, MIT Climate and Sustainability Consortium, and Center for Transportation and Logistics — it’s evident why Betar Gallant says the company is “all-in at MIT.”

The potential for tremendous impact on the energy industry is clear to those involved in the alliance. As GE Vernova Fellow Jack Morris said at the launch, “This is the beginning of something big.”

Around 5,000 years ago, people living in what is now Iran began extracting copper from rock by processing ore, an activity known as smelting. This monumental shift gave them a powerful new technology and may have marked the birth of metallurgy. Soon after, people in different parts of the world were using copper and bronzes (alloys of copper and tin, or copper and arsenic) to produce decorative objects, weapons, tools, and more.

Studying how humans produced such objects is challenging because little evidence still exists, and artifacts that have survived are carefully guarded and preserved.

In a paper published in PLOS One, MIT researchers demonstrated a new approach to uncovering details of some of the earliest metallurgical processes. They studied 5,000-year-old slag waste, a byproduct of smelting ore, using techniques including X-ray computed tomography, also known as CT scanning. In their paper, they show how this noninvasive imaging technique, which has primarily been used in the medical field, can reveal fine details about structures within the pieces of ancient slag.

“Even though slag might not give us the complete picture, it tells stories of how past civilizations were able to refine raw materials from ore and then to metal,” says postdoc Benjamin Sabatini. “It speaks to their technological ability at that time, and it gives us a lot of information. The goal is to understand, from start to finish, how they accomplished making these shiny metal products.”

In the paper, Sabatini and senior author Antoine Allanore, a professor of metallurgy and the Heather N. Lechtman Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, combined CT scanning with more traditional methods of studying ancient artifacts, including cutting the samples for further analysis. They demonstrated that CT scanning could be used to complement those techniques, revealing pores and droplets of different materials within samples. This information could shed light on the materials used by and the technological sophistication of some of the first metallurgists on Earth.

“The Early Bronze Age is one of the earliest reported interactions between mankind and metals,” says Allanore, who is also director of MIT’s Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology. “Artifacts in that region at that period are extremely important in archaeology, yet the materials themselves are not very well-characterized in terms of our understanding of the underlying materials and chemical processes. The CT scan approach is a transformation of traditional archaeological methods of determining how to make cuts and analyze samples.”

A new tool in archaeology

Slag is produced as a molten hot liquid when ores are heated to produce metal. The slag contains other constituent minerals from the ore, as well as unreacted metals, which are commonly mixed with additives like limestone. In the mixture, the slag is less dense than the metal, so it can rise and be removed, solidifying like lava as it cools.

“Slag waste is chemically complex to interpret because in our modern metallurgical practices it contains everything not desired in the final product — in particular, arsenic, which is a key element in the original minerals for copper,” says Allanore. “There’s always been a question in archaeometallurgy if we can use arsenic and similar elements in these remains to learn something about the metal production process. The challenge here is that these minerals, especially arsenic, are very prone to dissolution and leaching, and therefore their environmental stability creates additional problems in terms of interpreting what this object was when it was being made 6,000 years ago.”

For the study, the researchers used slag from an ancient site known as Tepe Hissar in Iran. The slag has previously been dated to the period between 3100 and 2900 BCE and was loaned by the Penn Museum to Allanore for study in 2022.

“This region is often brought up as one of the earliest places where evidence of copper processing and object production might have happened,” Allanore explains. “It is very well-preserved, and it’s an early example of a site with long-distance trade and highly organized society. That’s why it’s so important in metallurgy.”

The researchers believe this is the first attempt to study ancient slag using CT scanning, partly because medical-grade scanners are expensive and primarily located in hospitals. The researchers overcame these challenges by working with a local startup in Cambridge that makes industrial CT scanners. They also used the CT scanner on MIT’s campus.

“It was really out of curiosity to see if there was a better way to study these objects,” Sabatini said.

In addition to the CT scans, the researchers used more conventional archaeological analytical methods such as X-ray fluorescence, X-ray diffraction, and optical and scanning electron microscopy. The CT scans provided a detailed overall picture of the internal structure of the slag and the location of interesting features like pores and bits of different materials, augmenting the conventional techniques to impart more complete information about the inside of samples.

They used that information to decide where to section their sample, noting that researchers often guess where to section samples, unsure even which side of the sample was originally facing up or down.

“My strategy was to zero in on the high-density metal droplets that looked like they were still intact, since those might be most representative of the original process,” Sabatini says. “Then I could destructively analyze the samples with a single slice. The CT scanning shows you exactly what is most interesting, as well as the general layout of things you need to study.”

Finding stories in slag

In previous studies, some slag samples from the Tepe Hissar site contained copper and thus seemed to fit the narrative that they resulted from the production of copper, while others showed no evidence of copper at all.

The researchers found that CT scanning allowed them to characterize the intact droplets that contained copper. It also allowed them to identify where gases evolved, forming voids that hold information about how the slags were produced.

Other slags at the site had previously been found to contain small metallic arsenide compounds, leading to disagreements about the role of arsenic in early metal production. The MIT researchers found that arsenic existed in different phases across their samples and could move within the slag or even escape the slag entirely, making it complicated to infer metallurgical processes from the study of arsenic alone.

Moving forward, the researchers say CT scanning could be a powerful tool in archaeology to unravel complex ancient materials and processes.

“This should be an important lever for more systematic studies of the copper aspect of smelting, and also for continuing to understand the role of arsenic,” Allanore says. “It allows us to be cognizant of the role of corrosion and the long-term stability of the artifacts to continue to learn more. It will be a key support for people who want to investigate these questions.”

This work was supported, in part, by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC).

Feeling thirsty? Why not tap into the air? Even in desert conditions, there exists some level of humidity that, with the right material, can be soaked up and squeezed out to produce clean drinking water. In recent years, scientists have developed a host of promising sponge-like materials for this “atmospheric water harvesting.”

But recovering the water from these materials usually requires heat — and time. Existing designs rely on heat from the sun to evaporate water from the materials and condense it into droplets. But this step can take hours or even days. 

Now, MIT engineers have come up with a way to quickly recover water from an atmospheric water harvesting material. Rather than wait for the sun to evaporate water out, the team uses ultrasonic waves to shake the water out.

The researchers have developed an ultrasonic device that vibrates at high frequency. When a water-harvesting material, known as a “sorbent,” is placed on the device, the device emits ultrasound waves that are tuned to shake water molecules out of the sorbent. The team found that the device recovers water in minutes, versus the tens of minutes or hours required by thermal designs.

Unlike heat-based designs, the device does require a power source. The team envisions that the device could be powered by a small solar cell, which could also act as a sensor to detect when the sorbent is full. It could also be programmed to automatically turn on whenever a material has harvested enough moisture to be extracted. In this way, a system could soak up and shake out water from the air over many cycles in a single day.

“People have been looking for ways to harvest water from the atmosphere, which could be a big source of water particularly for desert regions and places where there is not even saltwater to desalinate,” says Svetlana Boriskina, principal research scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Now we have a way to recover water quickly and efficiently.”

Boriskina and her colleagues report on their new device in a study appearing today in the journal Nature Communications. The study’s first author is Ikra Iftekhar Shuvo, an MIT graduate student in media arts and sciences, along with Carlos Díaz-Marín, Marvin Christen, Michael Lherbette, and Christopher Liem.

Precious hours

Boriskina’s group at MIT develops materials that interact with the environment in novel ways. Recently, her group explored atmospheric water harvesting (AWH), and ways that materials can be designed to efficiently absorb water from the air. The hope is that, if they can work reliably, AWH systems would be of most benefit to communities where traditional sources of drinking water — and even saltwater — are scarce.

Like other groups, Boriskina’s lab had generally assumed that an AWH system in the field would absorb moisture during the night, and then use the heat from the sun during the day to naturally evaporate the water and condense it for collection.

“Any material that’s very good at capturing water doesn’t want to part with that water,” Boriskina explains. “So you need to put a lot of energy and precious hours into pulling water out of the material.”

She realized there could be a faster way to recover water after Ikra Shuvo joined her group. Shuvo had been working with ultrasound for wearable medical device applications. When he and Boriskina considered ideas for new projects, they realized that ultrasound could be a way to speed up the recovery step in atmospheric water harvesting.

“It clicked: We have this big problem we’re trying to solve, and now Ikra seemed to have a tool that can be used to solve this problem,” Boriskina recalls.

Water dance

Ultrasound, or ultrasonic waves, are acoustic pressure waves that travel at frequencies of over 20 kilohertz (20,000 cycles per second). Such high-frequency waves are not visible or audible to humans. And, as the team found, ultrasound vibrates at just the right frequency to shake water out of a material.

“With ultrasound, we can precisely break the weak bonds between water molecules and the sites where they’re sitting,” Shuvo says. “It’s like the water is dancing with the waves, and this targeted disturbance creates momentum that releases the water molecules, and we can see them shake out in droplets.”

Shuvo and Boriskina designed a new ultrasonic actuator to recover water from an atmospheric water harvesting material. The heart of the device is a flat ceramic ring that vibrates when voltage is applied. This ring is surrounded by an outer ring that is studded with tiny nozzles. Water droplets that shake out of a material can drop through the nozzle and into collection vessels attached above and below the vibrating ring.

They tested the device on a previously designed atmospheric water harvesting material. Using quarter-sized samples of the material, the team first placed each sample in a humidity chamber, set to various humidity levels. Over time, the samples absorbed moisture and became saturated. The researchers then placed each sample on the ultrasonic actuator and powered it on to vibrate at ultrasonic frequencies. In all cases, the device was able to shake out enough water to dry out each sample in just a few minutes.

The researchers calculate that, compared to using heat from the sun, the ultrasonic design is 45 times more efficient at extracting water from the same material.

“The beauty of this device is that it’s completely complementary and can be an add-on to almost any sorbent material,” says Boriskina, who envisions a practical, household system might consist of a fast-absorbing material and an ultrasonic actuator, each about the size of a window. Once the material is saturated, the actuator would briefly turn on, powered by a solar cell, to shake out the water. The material would then be ready to harvest more water, in multiple cycles throughout a single day.

“It’s all about how much water you can extract per day,” she says. “With ultrasound, we can recover water quickly, and cycle again and again. That can add up to a lot per day.”

This work was supported, in part, by the MIT Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab and the MIT-Israel Zuckerman STEM Fund.

This work was carried out in part by using MIT.nano and ISN facilities at MIT.

Determining the least expensive path for a new subway line underneath a metropolis like New York City is a colossal planning challenge — involving thousands of potential routes through hundreds of city blocks, each with uncertain construction costs. Conventional wisdom suggests extensive field studies across many locations would be needed to determine the costs associated with digging below certain city blocks.

Because these studies are costly to conduct, a city planner would want to perform as few as possible while still gathering the most useful data for making an optimal decision.

With almost countless possibilities, how would they know where to start?

A new algorithmic method developed by MIT researchers could help. Their mathematical framework provably identifies the smallest dataset that guarantees finding the optimal solution to a problem, often requiring fewer measurements than traditional approaches suggest.

In the case of the subway route, this method considers the structure of the problem (the network of city blocks, construction constraints, and budget limits) and the uncertainty surrounding costs. The algorithm then identifies the minimum set of locations where field studies would guarantee finding the least expensive route. The method also identifies how to use this strategically collected data to find the optimal decision.

This framework applies to a broad class of structured decision-making problems under uncertainty, such as supply chain management or electricity network optimization.

“Data are one of the most important aspects of the AI economy. Models are trained on more and more data, consuming enormous computational resources. But most real-world problems have structure that can be exploited. We’ve shown that with careful selection, you can guarantee optimal solutions with a small dataset, and we provide a method to identify exactly which data you need,” says Asu Ozdaglar, Mathworks Professor and head of the MIT Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), deputy dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, and a principal investigator in the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS).

Ozdaglar, co-senior author of a paper on this research, is joined by co-lead authors Omar Bennouna, an EECS graduate student, and his brother Amine Bennouna, a former MIT postdoc who is now an assistant professor at Northwestern University; and co-senior author Saurabh Amin, co-director of Operations Research Center, a professor in the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and a principal investigator in LIDS. The research will be presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems.

An optimality guarantee

Much of the recent work in operations research focuses on how to best use data to make decisions, but this assumes these data already exist.

The MIT researchers started by asking a different question — what are the minimum data needed to optimally solve a problem? With this knowledge, one could collect far fewer data to find the best solution, spending less time, money, and energy conducting experiments and training AI models.

The researchers first developed a precise geometric and mathematical characterization of what it means for a dataset to be sufficient. Every possible set of costs (travel times, construction expenses, energy prices) makes some particular decision optimal. These “optimality regions” partition the decision space. A dataset is sufficient if it can determine which region contains the true cost.

This characterization offers the foundation of the practical algorithm they developed that identifies datasets that guarantee finding the optimal solution.

Their theoretical exploration revealed that a small, carefully selected dataset is often all one needs.

“When we say a dataset is sufficient, we mean that it contains exactly the information needed to solve the problem. You don’t need to estimate all the parameters accurately; you just need data that can discriminate between competing optimal solutions,” says Amine Bennouna.

Building on these mathematical foundations, the researchers developed an algorithm that finds the smallest sufficient dataset.

Capturing the right data

To use this tool, one inputs the structure of the task, such as the objective and constraints, along with the information they know about the problem.

For instance, in supply chain management, the task might be to reduce operational costs across a network of dozens of potential routes. The company may already know that some shipment routes are especially costly, but lack complete information on others.

The researchers’ iterative algorithm works by repeatedly asking, “Is there any scenario that would change the optimal decision in a way my current data can't detect?” If yes, it adds a measurement that captures that difference. If no, the dataset is provably sufficient.

This algorithm pinpoints the subset of locations that need to be explored to guarantee finding the minimum-cost solution.

Then, after collecting those data, the user can feed them to another algorithm the researchers developed which finds that optimal solution. In this case, that would be the shipment routes to include in a cost-optimal supply chain.

“The algorithm guarantees that, for whatever scenario could occur within your uncertainty, you’ll identify the best decision,” Omar Bennouna says.

The researchers’ evaluations revealed that, using this method, it is possible to guarantee an optimal decision with a much smaller dataset than would typically be collected.

“We challenge this misconception that small data means approximate solutions. These are exact sufficiency results with mathematical proofs. We’ve identified when you’re guaranteed to get the optimal solution with very little data — not probably, but with certainty,” Amin says.

In the future, the researchers want to extend their framework to other types of problems and more complex situations. They also want to study how noisy observations could affect dataset optimality.

“I was impressed by the work’s originality, clarity, and elegant geometric characterization. Their framework offers a fresh optimization perspective on data efficiency in decision-making,” says Yao Xie, the Coca-Cola Foundation Chair and Professor at Georgia Tech, who was not involved with this work.