“The thing that really struck me when I came to MIT and strikes me every single day is the stuff that’s going on here is amazing. The science, the engineering… every day I hear something that makes my jaw drop,” remarked President Sally Kornbluth during a live discussion with Lizzie O’Leary of Slate’s “What Next: TBD” podcast.

Kornbluth spoke about everything from the importance of curiosity-driven science and why basic science is critical to our nation’s future, to AI and education, and even bravely joined O’Leary in a rendition of the Williams College song, “The Mountains,” in honor of their shared alma mater.

“We are in this time of incredible uncertainty,” said Kornbluth of the current state of higher education and funding for scientific research. “What we are trying to do is keep the science robust.”

Bouncing back to her time at Duke and her love of college basketball, she noted it’s a combination of zone coverage and man-to-man defense when trying to address skepticism about higher education in Washington, D.C. She emphasized: “As one of the top institutions in the world it’s part of our responsibility to articulate the importance of science. Behind the scenes, I am – along with many other [university] presidents – I am in D.C. all the time now. I want to speak to Congressmen and women, Senators, people in the executive branch to explain the importance of what we are doing.”

Kornbluth emphasized that the pipeline of basic science that flows from U.S. universities is a critical asset for our country, cautioning that to keep straining this pipeline could have enormous negative ramifications for the U.S. down the line.

“If you think about research done in this country, it’s done in in universities, it’s done in national labs, and it’s done in industry,” said Kornbluth. Universities are where most of the science with a long pathway to impact, requiring patience, starts. She pointed to immunotherapy for cancer, which began 30-40 years ago in basic immunotherapy research, as an example. With that pipeline being drained, what does the future hold for new cancer therapies or new AI and quantum technologies?

Kornbluth also underscored that uncertainty and lost funding are having a “huge impact on the talent pipeline,” delving into the unique role universities play in training graduate students, who are the next generation of scientific researchers. “We hear, ‘Oh it would be okay if research was more in industry.’ I say, ‘Would you fly on a plane with a pilot who had never flown?’ How do they think people learn how to do research? We are training the next generation… and we are losing funding for them.” She added: “I think we are going to see reverberations for many decades if we don’t rectify that issue.”

When asked how she and her colleagues are working to keep research moving forward, Kornbluth explained that at MIT, “we have tried to find alternative ways to elevate the science. We have a series of presidential initiatives that cut across the whole campus in things like health and life sciences, quantum, humanities and social sciences. The notion is that we are trying to create new opportunities.”

Still, she acknowledged that losses from the endowment tax and diminished federal funding are painful. “There are only four schools right now that are subject to the 8% endowment tax, which is a tax on our earnings. For us, that means $240 million dollars a year plus other losses in grants. So, let’s say the whole thing is, we budgeted for a loss of $300 million a year on a $1.7 billion budget… That has definitely had an impact on us. No question about it. 

“The other thing about it is again there’s all this uncertainty. Our investigators are writing a ton of grants. They don’t know if they’re going off into the void or they really have the sort of competitive opportunities they’ve always had in the past.”

Asked why universities did not see this moment coming, Kornbluth offered a few thoughts. “Look at MIT – 30,000 companies have come from MIT. When you look at something like that, why would you think any government that wants economic flourishing in their country would come after MIT?” she reflected. “It just never would have occurred to us.”

Turning towards the rapid advances in AI, and how the field is impacting education, Kornbluth noted that at MIT and other universities, “we have to focus on the human element, we have to educate our students, they need to know how to write and do mathematics…they have to view AI as a tool to augment their capabilities. That is how we are thinking about it.”

In the course of the conversation, Kornbluth also expressed her unwavering support for international students, noting that most want the opportunity to stay and contribute to research in the U.S. after graduation. “The talent brought to us through our international community is unbelievable. We can attract the very best in the world. You can bet when they talk about competitiveness with China, for example, in AI, quantum, etc., they are not sitting around in China saying, ‘Oh it’s great America is taking all our students.’ They’re thinking, ‘It’s great that America doesn’t want to take as many of our students anymore because we can train them.’ It’s a competitive issue that we really should lean into.”

Good caregivers are often in short supply, but after the Covid-19 pandemic hit the U.S. in early 2020, staff levels at nursing homes dropped by 10 percent. What was a simple personnel shortage has moved closer to being a nursing-care crisis.

“We have an aging population, care for them is labor-intensive, and there are shortages everywhere in that supply chain,” says MIT economist Jonathan Gruber.

As it happens, about one-fifth of health care support workers in the U.S. are immigrants. And as a newly published study of the nation’s metro areas shows, changes in immigration levels can affect how much nursing care the elderly receive.

“When immigration rises in a city, it significantly increases the health care workforce,” says Gruber, co-author of the study and a paper detailing its findings.

Overall, Gruber and his colleagues determined that when there is more immigration, registered nurses and other aides work more hours at nursing homes, without displacing already-employed caregivers, while patient outcomes improve. Essentially, a 10 percent increase in female immigrants in a given metro area leads to a 1.1 percent increase in hours that registered nurses spend with elderly patients, while hospitalizations for those patients drop, among other things.

“Even if immigration actually increases labor supply to the medical sector, it was an open question if that would improve outcomes, and it does,” adds Gruber, the Ford Professor of Economics and head of the MIT Department of Economics.

The paper, “Immigration, the Long-Term Care Workforce, and Elder Outcomes in the U.S.,” appears in the American Journal of Health Economics. The authors are Gruber; David C. Grabowski, a professor in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School; and Brian E. McGarry, an assistant professor in the Department of Medicine and the Department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Rochester.

More care, fewer hospitalizations

To conduct the study, the researchers tapped into multiple data sources, including immigration information from 2000 to 2018 appearing in the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Extensive nursing home data came from different types of reports that facilities are required to file in order to maintain Medicare and Medicaid eligibility, allowing the scholars to examine care staffing levels and patient outcomes.

All told, the study encompasses 16 million Medicare beneficiaries in over 13,000 nursing homes in metropolitan statistical areas of the U.S., and evaluates immigrations flows for two decades.

“One of the key groups that’s taking care of our nation’s elders is immigrants,” Gruber says. “So I thought it would be fascinating to understand how much does immigration actually matter for elder care.”

More specifically, the scholars find that for every 10 percent increase in immigration above the norm in metro areas, in addition to the 1.1 percent increase in registered nurse hours, there is a 0.7 percent increase in hours of care provided by certified nurse assistants. There is a 0.6 percent decline in hospitalizations for patients making short-term stays, of up to a month, in nursing homes.

Beyond that, the study yielded other markers showing that patient outcomes improve in these situations. The roughly 1 percent increase in hours of care was accompanied by a decline in the use of physical restraints needed for patients, who also needed less psychiatric medication prescriptions and had fewer urinary tract infections, among other things.   

The fact that those outcomes improved in more immigrant-staffed situations is among the new insights provided by the research.

“There’s a lot of evidence that providing more labor supply to the elderly sector improves patient outcomes,” Gruber says. “But it wasn’t clear whether more immigrants would work the same way, because of language issues or other factors.”

A new lens

The study comes as immigration policy has become a major issue in the U.S., something that Gruber says helped spur his curiosity about its health care implications — although he did not know what the study would reveal, one way or another. In this case, he notes, the impact of immigration on eldercare may be another factor to be considered in the larger debates about the subject.

“I think it provides a new lens on the debate over immigration,” Gruber says. “The debate over immigration has been solely about what will it do to native workers, what will it do to the crime rate, what will it do to tax collection. This adds a new element, which is: What will it do to our citizens’ care? By having more immigration, we provide more care.”

Gruber, Grabowski, and McGarry are continuing to study this issue. In a new working paper, released in February, they found that increases in immigration are consistent with a reduction in the mortality rate, in part by allowing more elderly people the opportunity to receive care at home.

Gruber recognizes that there will continue to be sharp policy disagreements over immigration. Still, as the just-published paper states, to this point, when it comes to nursing care, the “results paint a consistent picture of improved quality of care resulting from increased immigration.”

In today’s hospitals and clinics, a dermatologist may use an artificial intelligence model for classifying skin lesions to assess if the lesion is at risk of developing into a cancer or if it is benign. But if the model is biased toward certain skin tones, it could fail to identify a high-risk patient.

Perhaps one of the best known and most persistent challenges that AI research continues to reckon with is bias. Bias is often discussed in relation to training data, but model architecture can also contain and amplify bias, negatively influencing model performance in real-world settings. In high-stakes medical scenarios, the very real consequences of poor performance have made bias into a quintessential safety issue.

A new paper from researchers at MIT, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and Google that was accepted to the 2026 International Conference for Learning Representations proposes a novel debiasing approach called “Weighted Rotational DebiasING” (i.e., WRING) that can be applied to vision language models (VLMs), like OpenAI’s OpenCLIP.

VLMs are multi-modal models that can understand and interpret different data modalities like video, image, and text simultaneously. While debiasing approaches for VLMs do exist, the most commonly used approach is known as “projection debiasing,” which leads to what has been termed the “Whac-A-Mole dilemma”, an empirical observation that was formally introduced to AI research in 2023.

Projection debiasing is a post-processing approach that removes the undesirable, biased information from model embeddings by “projecting” the subspace out of a representation space of relationships, thereby cutting out the bias. But this approach has its drawbacks.

“When you do that, you inadvertently squish everything around,” says Walter Gerych, the paper’s first author, who conducted this research last year as a postdoc at MIT. “All the other relationships that the model learns change when you do that.”

Gerych, who is now an assistant professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, is joined on the paper by MIT graduate students Cassandra Parent and Quinn Perian; Google’s Rafiya Javed; and MIT associate professors of electrical engineering Justin Solomon and Marzyeh Ghassemi, who is an affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning and Health and the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. 

While projection debiasing stops the model from acting upon the bias that’s been projected out of the subspace, it can end up amplifying and creating other biases, hence the Whac-A-Mole dilemma. According to Ghassemi, the unintended amplification of model biases is “both a technical and practical challenge. For instance, when debiasing a VLM that retrieves images of clinical staff — if racial bias is removed — it could have the unintended consequence of amplifying gender bias.” 

WRING works by moving certain coordinates within the high-dimensional space of a model — the ones that appear to be responsible for bias — to a different angle, so the model can no longer distinguish between different groups within a certain concept. This changes the representation within a specific space while leaving the model’s other relationships intact. And like projection debiasing, WRING is a post-processing approach, which means it can be applied “on the fly” to a pre-trained VLM. 

“People already spent a lot of resources, a lot of money, training these huge models, and we don’t really want to go in and modify something during training because then you have to start from scratch,” Gerych explains. “[WRING is] very efficient. It doesn’t require more training of the model and it’s minimally invasive.”

In their results, the researchers found that WRING significantly reduced bias for a target concept without increasing bias in other areas. But for now, the approach is somewhat limited to Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) models, a type of VLM that connects images to language for search or classification.

“Extending this for ChatGPT-style, generative language models, is the reasonable next step for us,” says Gerych.

This work was supported, in part, by a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, AI2050 Award Early Career Fellowship, Sloan Research Fellow Award, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Award, and MIT-Google Computing Innovation Award.

The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 recently announced a study addressing the killings and attacks against Palestinian journalists and media workers, the destruction of media infrastructure in Gaza, and the production and dissemination of narratives that may enable, justify, or incite international crimes. 

As part of this consultation, EFF contributed a submission that identifies a significant deterioration of press freedom and free expression in the period since October 2023, including an increase in censorship and wave of killings of journalists; adding to an already pervasive censorship and surveillance regime for Palestinians. 

In particular, concerns raised in our submission relate to:

1. Government takedown requests 
2. Disinformation and content moderation
3. Attacks on internet infrastructure

The concerns about censorship in Palestine are ever increasing, and include multiple international forums. Ending the deliberate digital isolation of the Palestinian people is critical to protecting fundamental human rights.

Read the briefing in full here.

A U.S. citizen who teaches Persian poetry classes online is suddenly unable to receive payments or access funds when his account is flagged and frozen by Paypal and its subsidiary Venmo. A Muslim city councilwoman in New York City has a Venmo payment blocked because she uses the name of a Bangladeshi restaurant in the transaction. Online hubs for erotic storytelling repeatedly lose their payment accounts. Others active in drug legalization fights struggle to keep their bank accounts.

These may sound like one-off issues, but they are not. They occur with frightening regularity, as former EFF Activism Director and Chief Program Officer, Rainey Reitman, who left EFF in 2022, describes in her new book, Transaction Denied. The book sheds new light on a serious problem that often hides in the shadows, and pushes us to ask an increasingly important question: “Is it ever OK for financial intermediaries to act as the arbiters of online expression?"  

Both a storyteller and an advocate, Rainey exposes hidden systems of power that shape our choices, our speech, and, ultimately, our society. - Cindy Cohn

Reitman makes her case about the impact of financial institutions and payment intermediaries shutting down accounts and inhibiting transactions through compelling individual stories, some of which have not been shared before. The people impacted are diverse: authors, teachers, journalists, elected politicians, and more are suddenly unable to retrieve or receive funds, with little explanation, transparency, or recourse. Reitman shows the reasons are frequently speech-related, resulting often from arbitrary corporate policy, a broad (mis)interpretation of the law, or in response to pressure from anti-speech advocates. 

In the example of the Persion poetry teacher, the blocking is due to the highly risk averse interpretation of U.S. sanctions on Iran—sanctions aimed at deterring weapons development or terrorism instead snared a poetry professor and a New York city councilwoman.  Reitman demonstrates how these sanctions, and others, have an outsized impact on Muslims.

But Transaction Denied is also a guide for those interested in fighting for free speech. The book covers over a decade of successful campaigns and shows that advocacy can win the day—and is sometimes necessary to counter pro-censorship campaigns. Reitman offers a behind-the-scenes view of the campaign to help restore the Stripe account of the Nifty Archive Alliance, a nonprofit which supports the Nifty Archive, a hub of erotic storytelling for the queer community since 1992. She covers EFF's successful coalition and campaign to restore the PayPal account of Smashwords, a hub for self-published fiction. And in what has become a critical moment for free speech and free press, she describes how several EFF staff members and two EFF board members became the seed for a new nonprofit, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which continues to partner with EFF today in advancing the rights of journalists.

It’s a banner time for books by EFF staff members and friends. If you're concerned about how online privacy has changed over the last three decades, read EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn's book, Privacy Defender, released in May. (All proceeds from the sale of hard copies of Privacy’s Defender are being donated to EFF, so your book order will help EFF continue fighting for the principles Cindy holds dear.) If you are worried about the individuals trapped in a system where massive financial companies can shut down their individual accounts, effectively locking up their access to money, based entirely on their speech, grab Transaction Denied, released earlier this month, at Beacon Press, Amazon, and Bookshop.org. (Half of the author proceeds go to Freedom of the Press Foundation.) 

More likely—you'll want both books on your shelf. Happy reading! 

A new immersive sound installation at Oulu Cathedral, Finland, brings the research of MIT astrophysicist and associate professor of physics Kiyoshi Masui into a striking sensory form, transforming more than 4,000 cosmic signals into spatial audio.

With its grand opening on April 4, “The Logos” project invites visitors to experience deep-space phenomena not as distant abstractions, but as something immediate and resonant. The work is led by artist and creative technologist Andrew Melchior in collaboration with Masui, philosopher Timothy Morton, and cathedral dean Satu Saarinen. Together, they treat the cathedral, built in 1832, not just as a setting but as part of the instrument itself. Its stone surfaces and reverberant acoustics give physical presence to signals that have traveled from distant galaxies.

At the heart of the installation are data gathered by the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) radio telescope, which detects fast radio bursts (FRBs). FRBs are immensely energetic flashes lasting only milliseconds and originating in distant galaxies across the observable universe. The Logos represents one of the most extensive artistic sonifications of FRB data to date. Each day at noon, the cathedral is filled with a one-hour procedural composition derived from these bursts. Some bursts are singular events, never repeating, while others pulse again and again from unknown sources. These patterns remain one of astrophysics’ most compelling mysteries.

“The fast flashes will echo as snare-like beats bouncing through the cathedral,” says Masui. “The sweeping dispersion of the signal — where different radio frequencies arrive at slightly different times — creates harmonies between high and low tones. It should feel rich and layered, while also revealing something real about how these signals travel across billions of years of cosmic space before reaching Earth.”

By converting FRB data into a shared listening experience, the collaboration suggests a different way of understanding the universe: not only through analysis, but through attention.

Running through April 2027 to mark the cathedral’s 250th anniversary, The Logos will feature as part of Oulu2026 European Capital of Culture and the Lumo Art and Tech Festival. 

Cherry Tang, a master of science in real estate development student at the MIT Center for Real Estate, recently participated in an experiential learning opportunity in Panama working with Conservatorio, a development firm based in Casco Viejo. What began as a modeling exercise quickly became a deeper exploration of how development, community, and environment intersect, shaped as much by people and culture as by the work itself.

“I went in expecting to build a financial model. I didn’t expect that the experience would fundamentally reshape how I think about development,” Tang reflects.

The project centered on Santa Catalina, a remote surf town on Panama’s Pacific coast. The development comprises approximately 140 residential units across condos, villas, and homes, along with vacant lots, four retail spaces, a surf school with a stadium, and a restaurant with a pool — all envisioned as the town’s first true center.

At first glance, Tang says, Santa Catalina didn’t resemble a typical “prime” development market. It had limited infrastructure, low density, and no established core.

“What it does have is something powerful: world-class surf and access to Coiba National Park, a premier diving destination,” Tang says. “Here, the ocean becomes the anchor tenant.”

The project is designed as an open, walkable master-planned community that integrates seamlessly with the existing town. Anchored by surfing and diving, it introduces a diverse product mix and a 600-meter linear park, positioning it as the future heart of Santa Catalina and a differentiated alternative to both local developments and traditional resort-style communities.

Tang saw this as a different vision of place-making. “It wasn’t about building a resort. It was about building a center of gravity for a community that has never really had one.”

Tang’s primary role was to build the project’s financial model from the ground up. The capital structure, with land contributed as equity and sales deposits used to fund construction, required a different way of thinking than the institutional frameworks she had used in previous roles in Toronto and Boston.

“It was more than a technical exercise,” she explains. “It reinforced how financial, physical, and strategic decisions are deeply interconnected, and how thoughtful structuring can unlock projects that might otherwise not be feasible.”

Working directly with KC Hardin, founder and CEO of Conservatorio, and the broader leadership team, Tang gained firsthand exposure to real-time development decision-making. She presented her financial model to leadership and prospective investors, and her assumptions helped shape conversations around phasing, design, and construction.

“Development is a feedback loop between underwriting and the built environment,” Tang says.

Throughout the month, Tang and her colleagues met with a range of people shaping the project’s future. They spent time with local developers and brokers, learning about infrastructure improvements and ongoing real estate activity in the region. 

Tang described meeting one family with long-standing ties to the area as one of the more memorable moments.

“Their coastline conservation work in Panama is deeply inspiring,” she says.

They also met with scientists from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, trekking through mangroves and learning about coastal ecosystems and the long-term environmental implications of development.

“It was a vivid reminder that development decisions don’t exist in isolation,” says Tang.

Outside of work, Panama had its way of leaving an impression. Sailing through the Panama Canal ... watching cargo ships pass through landscapes filled with monkeys and sloths ... living in Casco Viejo — each added another layer to the experience for Tang. The neighborhood itself served as a real-life case study in thoughtful, community-oriented development.

“What stayed with me most was Conservatorio’s approach to revitalization, not through displacement, but through deep engagement, trust-building, and creating pathways for local residents to be part of the area’s transformation.”

That same spirit was reflected in everyday moments, from co-workers who went out of their way to make interns feel welcome.

“Strangers greeted us like neighbors,” says Tang. “The level of warmth and hospitality defined the experience as much as the work itself.”

By the end of the month, the experience left her with more than technical skills — she had a shift in perspective.

“I began to see development less as a formula and more as a system,” she explains. “One that sits at the intersection of finance, design, environment, and community.”

Her takeaway is that value can be created in unconventional ways, and leadership in real estate is grounded in trust, curiosity, and a deep respect for place.

Tang arrived in Panama to build a model. She left with a deeper understanding of what it means to build thoughtfully — as a developer, and as a steward of place.

Government lawyers sided with gas companies urging the justices to revisit a decision by a lower bench that upheld the rules.

Delegates pointed to the Iran war — and the resulting energy crisis — as a reason to transition away from fossil fuels.

The final report could propose transformations to federal disaster aid. But it comes as the president has eased his criticism of the emergency response agency.

Ocean Winds agreed to cancel two developments in a deal with the administration. But the developer's most viable project is still on the table.

Elected officials heard hours of testimony over two days as they seek to bolster emergency plans after devastating floods last summer.

“We can only move at the speed of trust,” said one official with the state's Department of Housing and Community Development.

It's part of the Pennsylvania governor's carrots-over-sticks approach to energy policy.

Nearly all of the continent was warmer than average in 2025, scientists found.

The new figures are incompatible with the government’s green targets, campaigners say.

The nation’s first green sovereign bond offering last April raised $879 million to fund activities including climate change mitigation, biodiversity preservation and pollution control.

Where electric vehicle sales are bubbling up, analysts point to a cocktail of two ingredients: elevated gas prices and affordable new models from China.

That’s a lot. No, it’s an extraordinary number:

Since February, the Firefox team has been working around the clock using frontier AI models to find and fix latent security vulnerabilities in the browser. We wrote previously about our collaboration with Anthropic to scan Firefox with Opus 4.6, which led to fixes for 22 security-sensitive bugs in Firefox 148.

As part of our continued collaboration with Anthropic, we had the opportunity to apply an early version of Claude Mythos Preview to Firefox. This week’s release of Firefox 150 includes fixes for 271 vulnerabilities identified during this initial evaluation...

The following is a joint announcement by the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and IBM.

IBM and MIT today announced the launch of the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab, advancing their long-standing collaboration to shape the next era of computing. The new lab expands its scope to include quantum computing, alongside foundational artificial intelligence research, with the goal of unlocking new computational approaches that go beyond the limits of today’s classical systems.

The MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab builds on a distinguished history of scientific excellence at the intersection of research and academia. Evolving from the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab, which originated in 2017 on MIT’s campus, the new lab reflects a transformed technology landscape — one which AI has entered mainstream deployment, and quantum computing is rapidly advancing toward practical impact. Together, MIT and IBM aim to help lead research in AI and quantum and to redefine mathematical foundations across both domains.

“We expect the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab to emerge as one of the world’s premier academic and industrial hubs accelerating the future of computing,” says Jay Gambetta, director of IBM Research and IBM Fellow, and IBM chair of the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab. “Together, the brightest minds at MIT and IBM will rethink how models, algorithms, and systems are designed for an era that will be defined by the sum of what’s possible when AI and quantum computing come together.”

“For a decade, the collaboration between MIT and IBM has produced leading-edge research and innovation, and provided mentorship and supported the professional growth of researchers both at MIT and IBM,” says Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT’s provost, who, as then-dean of the School of Engineering, spearheaded the creation of the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab and will continue as MIT chair of the lab. “The incredible technical achievements sets the bar high for our work together over the next 10 years. I look forward to another decade of impact.”

Addressing the next frontiers in computation

The MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab will serve as a focal point for joint research between MIT and IBM in AI, algorithms, and quantum computing, as well as the integration of these technologies into hybrid computing systems. The lab is designed to accelerate progress toward powerful new computational approaches that take advantage of rapid advances in AI and quantum-centric supercomputing, including those that combine maturing quantum hardware with classical systems and advanced AI methods.

This research initiative will include improving capabilities and integrating AI with traditional computing, alongside pursuing advances in small, efficient, modular language model architectures, novel AI computing paradigms, and enterprise-focused AI systems designed for deployment in real-world environments, where reliability, transparency, and trust are essential.

In parallel, the lab will rethink the mathematical and algorithmic foundations that underpin the next era of computing by accelerating the development of novel quantum algorithms for complex problems, with impacts in areas such as materials science, chemistry, and biology.

Additionally, the lab will investigate mathematical and algorithmic foundations of machine learning, optimization, Hamiltonian simulations, and partial differential equations, which are used to approximate the behaviors of dynamical systems that currently stump classical systems beyond limited scales and accuracy. Innovations from the lab could have wide implications for global industries, from more accurate weather and air turbulence prediction to better forecasts of financial market performance. Similarly, with improved optimization approaches, research from the lab could help lower risks in areas like finance, predict protein structures for more targeted medicine, and streamline global supply chains.

With its focus on AI, algorithms, and quantum, the MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab will complement and enhance the work of two of MIT’s strategic initiatives, the MIT Generative AI Impact Consortium and the MIT Quantum Initiative. MIT President Sally Kornbluth launched these strategic initiatives to broaden and deepen MIT’s impact in developing solutions to serious global challenges. The MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab will also leverage IBM’s longtime leadership and expertise in quantum computing. As part of its ambitious roadmap, IBM has laid out a clear path to delivering the world’s first fault-tolerant quantum computer by 2029, and is working across industries to drive value from quantum-centric supercomputing, tightly integrating quantum computers with high-performance computing and AI accelerators to solve the world’s toughest problems.

Deep integration with scientific domains

The MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab will also continue to serve as a foundation for training the next generation of computational scientists and innovators. It will do so by engaging faculty and students across MIT departments, enabling new computational approaches to accelerate discoveries in the physical and life sciences.

The lab will continue to be co-directed by Aude Oliva, senior research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and David Cox, vice president of AI Foundations at IBM Research. MIT and IBM have appointed leads for each of the lab’s three focus areas — AI, algorithms, and quantum. Jacob Andreas, associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Kenney Ng, principal research scientist at IBM Research and the MIT-IBM science program manager, will co-lead AI; Vinod Vaikuntanathan, the Ford Foundation Professor of Engineering in EECS, and Vasileios Kalantzis, IBM Research senior research scientist, will co-lead algorithms; and Aram Harrow, professor of physics, and Hanhee Paik, IBM director of Quantum Algorithm Centers, will co-lead quantum.

“The MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab reflects an important expansion of the collaboration between MIT and IBM and the increasing connections across AI, algorithms, and quantum. This deepened focus also underscores a strong alignment with the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing’s mission to advance the forefront of computing and its integration across disciplines,” says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and MIT co-chair of the lab. “I’m excited about what this next chapter will enable in these three areas, and their impact broadly.”

Building on nearly a decade of collaboration

The MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab helped pioneer a model for academic-industry research collaboration, aligning long-term scientific inquiry with real-world impact. Since its inception, the lab has funded over 210 research projects involving over 150 MIT faculty members and over 200 IBM researchers. Collectively, the projects have led to over 1,500 peer-reviewed articles. The lab also helped shape the career growth of a number of MIT students and junior researchers, funding more than 500 students and postdocs.

“The true measure of this lab is not just innovation, but transformation of a field. Hundreds of students have contributed to thousands of publications in top conferences and journals, demonstrating their capabilities to address meaningful problems,” says Oliva. “The MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab builds on an extraordinary legacy of impact to advance a trusted collaboration that will redefine the future of AI and quantum computing in a way never seen before.”

“By coupling academic rigor with industrial scale, the lab aims to define the computational foundations that will power the next generation of AI, quantum, and scientific breakthroughs,” says Cox. “By bringing together advances in AI, algorithms, and quantum computing under one integrated research effort, we’re creating the conditions to rethink the mathematical and computational foundations of science and engineering.”

The MIT-IBM Computing Research Lab will capitalize on this foundation, expanding both the scientific scope and the ecosystem of collaborators across the Cambridge-Boston region and beyond.