This is the final part of a three-part series about age verification in the European Union. In part one, we give an overview of the political debate around age verification and explore the age verification proposal introduced by the European Commission, based on digital identities. Part two takes a closer look at the European Commission’s age verification app, and part three explores measures to keep all users safe that do not require age checks. 

When thinking about the safety of young people online, it is helpful to remember that we can build on and learn from the decades of experience we already have thinking through risks that can stem from content online. Before mandating a “fix,” like age checks or age assurance obligations, we should take the time to reflect on what it is exactly we are trying to address, and whether the proposed solution is able to solve the problem.

The approach of analyzing, defining and mitigating risks is a helpful one in this regard as it allows us to take a holistic look at possible risks, which includes thinking about the likelihood of a risk materializing, the severity of a certain risk and how risks may affect different groups of people very differently. 

In the context of child safety online, mandatory age checks are often presented as a solution to a number of risks potentially faced by minors online. The most common concerns to which policymakers refer in the context of age checks can be broken down into three categories of risks:

• Content risks: This refers to the negative implications from the exposure to online content that might be age-inappropriate, such as violent or sexually explicit content, or content that incites dangerous behavior like self-harm. 
• Conduct risks: Conduct risks involve behavior by children or teenagers that might be harmful to themselves or others, like cyberbullying, sharing intimate or personal information or problematic overuse of a service.
• Contact risks: This includes potential harms stemming from contact with people that might pose a risk to minors, including grooming or being forced to exchange sexually explicit material. 

Taking a closer look at these risk categories, we can see that mandatory age checks are an ineffective and disproportionate tool to mitigate many risks at the top of policymakers’ minds.

Mitigating risks stemming from contact between minors and adults usually means ensuring that adults are barred from spaces designated for children. Age checks, especially age verification depending on ID documents like the European Commission’s mini-ID wallet, are not a helpful tool in this regard as children routinely do not have access to the kind of documentation allowing them to prove their age. Adults with bad intentions, on the other hand, are much more likely to be able to circumvent any measures put in place to keep them out.

Conduct risks have little to do with how old a specific user is, and much more to do with social dynamics and the affordances and constraints of online services. Differently put: Whether a platform knows a user’s age will not change how minor users themselves decide to behave and interact on the platform. Age verification won’t prevent users from choosing to engage in harmful or risky behavior, like freely posting personal information or spending too much time online. 

Finally, mitigating risks related to content deemed inappropriate is often thought of as shutting minors out from accessing certain information. Age check mandates seek to limit access to services and content without much granularity. They don’t allow for a nuanced weighing of the ways in which accessing the internet and social media can be a net positive for young people, and the ways in which it can lead to harm. This is complicated by the fact that although arguments in favour of age checks claim that the science on the relationship between the internet and young people is clear, the evidence on the effects of social media on minors is unsettled, and researchers have refuted claims that social media use is responsible for wellbeing crises among teenagers. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t consider the risks that may be associated with being young and online. 

But it’s clear that banning all access to certain information for an entire age cohort interferes with all users’ fundamental rights, and is therefore not a proportionate risk mitigation strategy. Under a mandatory age check regime, adults are also required to upload identifying documents just to access websites, interfering with their speech, privacy and security online. At the same time, age checks are not even effective at accomplishing what they’re intended to achieve. Assuming that all age check mandates can and will be circumvented, they seem to do little in the way of protecting children but rather undermine their fundamental rights to privacy, freedom of expression and access to information crucial for their development. 

At EFF, we have been firm in our advocacy against age verification mandates and often get asked what we think policymakers should do instead to protect users online. Our response is a nuanced one, recognizing that there is no easy technological fix for complex, societal challenges: Take a holistic approach to risk mitigation, strengthen user choice, and adopt a privacy-first approach to fighting online harms. 

Taking a Holistic Approach to Risk Mitigation 

In the European Union, the past years have seen the adoption of a number of landmark laws to regulate online services. With new rules such as the Digital Services Act or the AI Act, lawmakers are increasingly pivoting to risk-based approaches to regulate online services, attempting to square the circle by addressing known cases of harm while also providing a framework for dealing with possible future risks. It remains to be seen how risk mitigation will work out in practice and whether enforcement will genuinely uphold fundamental rights without enabling overreach. 

Under the Digital Services Act, this framework also encompasses rights-protective moderation of content relevant to the risks faced by young people using their services. Platforms may also come up with their own policies on how to moderate legal content that may be considered harmful, such as hate speech or violent content. Robust enforcement of their own community guidelines is one of the most important tools at the disposal of online platforms, but unfortunately often lacking – also for categories of content harmful to children and teenagers, like pro-anorexia content. 

To counterbalance potential negative implications on users’ rights to free expression, the DSA puts boundaries on platforms’ content moderation: Platforms must act objectively and proportionately and must take users’ fundamental rights into account when restricting access to content. Additionally, users have the right to appeal content moderation decisions and can ask platforms to review content moderation decisions they disagree with. Users can also seek resolution through out-of-court dispute settlement bodies, at no cost, and can ask nonprofits to represent them in the platform’s internal dispute resolution process, in out-of-court dispute settlements and in court. Platforms must also publish detailed transparency reports, and give researchers and non-profits access to data to study the impacts of online platforms on society. 

Beyond these specific obligations on platforms regarding content moderation, the protection of user rights, and improving transparency, the DSA obliges online platforms to take appropriate and proportionate measures to protect the privacy, security and safety of minors. Upcoming guidelines will hopefully provide more clarity on what this means in practice, but it is clear that there are a host of measures platforms can adopt before resorting to approaches as disproportionate as age verification.

The DSA also foresees obligations on the largest platforms and search engines – so called Very Large Online Platforms (VLOPs) and Very Large Search Engines (VLOSEs) that have more than 45 million monthly users in the EU – to analyze and mitigate so-called systemic risks posed by their services. This includes analyzing and mitigating risks to the protection of minors and the rights of the child, including freedom of expression and access to information. While we have some critiques of the DSA’s systemic risk governance approach, it is helpful for thinking through the actual risks for young people that may be associated with different categories of content, platforms and their functionalities.

However, it is crucial that such risk assessments are not treated as mere regulatory compliance exercises, but put fundamental rights – and the impact of platforms and their features on those rights – front and center, especially in relation to the rights of children. Platforms would be well-advised to use risk assessments responsibly for their regular product and policy assessments when mitigating risks stemming from content, design choices or features, like recommender systems, ways of engaging with content and users and or online ads. Especially when it comes to possible negative and positive effects of these features on children and teenagers, such assessments should be frequent and granular, expanding the evidence base available to both platforms and regulators. Additionally, platforms should allow external researchers to challenge and validate their assumptions and should provide extensive access to research data, as mandated by the DSA. 

The regulatory framework to deal with potentially harmful content and protect minors in the EU is a new and complex one, and enforcement is still in its early days. We believe that its robust, rights-respecting enforcement should be prioritized before eyeing new rules and legal mandates. 

Strengthening Users’ Choice 

Many online platforms also deploy their own tools to help families navigate their services, including parental control settings and apps, specific offers tailored to the needs of children and teens, or features like reminders to take a break. While these tools are certainly far from perfect, and should not be seen as a sufficient measure to address all concerns, they do offer families an opportunity to set boundaries that work for them. 

Academic and civil society research underlines that better and more granular user controls can also be an effective tool to minimize content and contact risks: Allowing users to integrate third-party content moderation systems or recommendation algorithms would enable families to alter their childrens’ online experiences according to their needs. 

The DSA takes a first helpful step in this direction by mandating that online platforms give users transparency about the main parameters used to recommend content to users, and to allow users to easily choose between different recommendation systems when multiple options are available. The DSA also obliges VLOPs that use recommender systems to offer at least one option that is not based on profiling users, thereby giving users of large platforms the choice to protect themselves from the often privacy-invasive personalization of their feeds. However, forgoing all personalization will likely not be attractive to most users, and platforms should give users the choice to use third-party recommender systems that better mirror their privacy preferences.

Giving users more control over which accounts can interact with them, and in which ways, can also help protect children and teenagers against unwanted interactions. Strengthening users’ choice also includes prohibiting companies from implementing user interfaces that have the intent or substantial effect of impairing autonomy and choice. This so-called “deceptive design” can take many forms, from tricking people into giving consent to the collection of their personal data, to encouraging the use of certain features. The DSA takes steps to ban dark patterns, but European consumer protection law must make sure that this prohibition is strictly enforced and that no loopholes remain. 

A Privacy First Approach to Addressing Online Harms 

While rights-respecting content moderation and tools to strengthen parents’ and childrens’ self-determination online are part of the answer, we have long advocated for a privacy-focused approach to fighting online harms. 

We follow this approach for two reasons: On the one hand, privacy risks are complex and young people cannot be expected to predict risks that may materialize in the future. On the other hand, many of the ways in which children and teenangers can be harmed online are directly linked to the accumulation and exploitation of their personal data. 

Online services collect enormous amounts of personal data and personalize or target their services – displaying ads or recommender systems – based on that data. While the systems that target and display ads and curate online content are distinct, both are based on the surveillance and profiling of users. In addition to allowing users to choose a recommender system, settings for all users should by default turn off recommender systems based on behavioral data. To protect all users’ privacy and data protection rights, platforms should have to ask for users’ informed, specific, voluntary, opt-in consent before collecting their data to personalize recommender systems. Privacy settings should be easily accessible and allow users to enable additional protections. 

Data collection in the context of online ads is even more opaque. Due to the large number of ad tech actors and data brokers involved, it is practically impossible for users to give informed consent for the processing of their personal data. This data is used by ad tech companies and data brokers to profile users to draw inferences about what they like, what kind of person they are (including demographics like age and gender), and what they might be interested in buying, seeing, or engaging with. This information is then used by ad tech companies to target advertisements, including for children. Beyond undermining children’s privacy and autonomy, the online behavioral ad system teaches users from a young age that data collection, tracking, and profiling are evils that come with using the web, thereby normalizing being tracked, profiled, and surveilled. 

This is why we have long advocated for a ban of online behavioral advertising. Banning behavioral ads would remove a major incentive for companies to collect as much data as they do. The DSA already bans targeting minors with behavioral ads, but this protection should be extended to everyone. Banning behavioral advertising will be the most effective path to disincentivize the collection and processing of personal data and end the surveillance of all users, including children, online. 

Similarly, pay-for-privacy schemes should be banned, and we welcome the recent decision by the European Commission to fine Meta for breaching the Digital Markets Act by offering its users a binary choice between paying for privacy or having their personal data used for ads targeting. Especially in the face of recent political pressure from the Trump administration to not enforce European tech laws, we applaud the European Commission for taking a clear stance and confirming that the protection of privacy online should never be a luxury or privilege. And especially vulnerable users like children should not be confronted with the choice between paying extra (something that many children will not be able to do) or being surveilled.

On a recent Friday afternoon, Marine Corps Major and U.S. Congressman Jake Auchincloss stood in the front of a crowded MIT classroom in Building 1 and made his case for modernizing America’s military to counter the threat from China. Part of his case involved shifting resources away from the U.S. Army to bolster the Marines, Navy, and Air Force.

When it was time for questions, several hands shot up. One person took exception to Auchincloss’ plans for the Army, although he admitted his views were influenced by the fact that he was an active member of the Army’s Special Forces. Another person had a question about the future of wartime technology. Again, the questioner had some personal experience: He sits on the board of a Ukrainian drone-manufacturing company. Next up was an MIT student with a question about artificial intelligence.

Course 15.362/6.9160 (Engineering Innovation: Global Security Systems) is not your typical MIT class. It teaches students about the most pressing problems in global security and challenges them to build functioning prototypes over the course of one whirlwind semester. Along the way, students hear from high-ranking members of the military, MIT professors, government officials, startup founders, and others to learn about the realities of combat and how best to create innovative solutions.

“As far as I know, this is the only class in the world that works in this way,” says Gene Keselman MBA ’17, a lecturer in the MIT Sloan School of Management and a colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserves who helped start the class. “There are other classes trying to do something similar, but they use intermediaries. In this course, the Navy SEALs are in the classroom working directly with the students. By teaching students in this way, we’re giving them exposure to something they’d never otherwise be exposed to.”

In the beginning of the semester, students split into interdisciplinary groups that feature both undergraduate and graduate students. Each group is assigned mentors with deep military experience. From there, students learn to take a problem, map out a set of possible solutions, and pitch their prototypes to the active members of the armed services they’re trying to help.

They get feedback on their ideas and iterate as they go through a series of presentation milestones throughout the semester.

“The outcomes are twofold,” says A.J. Perez ’13, MEng ’14, PhD ’23, a lecturer in the MIT School of Engineering and a research scientist with the Office of Innovation, who built the course’s engineering design curriculum. “There are the prototypes, which could have real impact on war fighters, and then there are the learnings students get by going through the process of defining a problem and building a prototype. The prototype is important, but the process of the class leads to skills that are transferable to a multitude of other domains.”

The class’s organizers say although the course is only in its second year, it aligns with MIT’s long legacy of working alongside the military.

“MIT has these incredibly fruitful relationships with the Department of Defense going back to World War II,” says Keselman. “We developed advanced radar systems that helped win the war and launched the military-industrial complex, including organizations like MIT Lincoln Laboratory and MITRE. It’s in our ethos, it’s in our culture, and this is another extension of that. This is another way for MIT to lead in tough tech and work on the world’s hardest problems. We couldn’t do this class in another university in this country.”

Tapping into student interest

Like many things at MIT, the class was inspired by a hackathon. For several years, college students in the U.S. Armed Forces’ Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) program came to MIT from across the country for a weekend hackathon focused on solving specific military problems.

Last year, Keselman, Perez, and others decided to create the class to give MIT’s ROTC cadets more time to work on the projects and give them the opportunity to earn course credit. But when Keselman and Perez announced a class geared toward solving problems in the armed forces, many non-ROTC MIT students enrolled.

“We realized there was a lot of interest in national security at MIT beyond the ROTC cadets,” Keselman explains. “National security is obviously important to a lot of people, but it also offers super interesting problems you can’t find anywhere else. I think that attracted students from all over MIT.”

About 25 students enrolled the first year to work on a problem that prevented U.S. Navy SEALs from bringing lithium-ion batteries onto submarines. This year, the organizers who include senior faculty members Fiona Murray, Sertac Karaman, and Vladimir Bulovic, couldn’t fit everyone who showed up, so they expanded to room 1-190, a lecture hall. They also added graduate-level credits and were more prepared for student interest.

More than 70 students registered this year from 15 different MIT departments, Harvard College, the Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Kennedy School. Student groups contain undergraduates, graduates, engineers, and business students. Many have military experience, and each group has access to mentors from places including the Navy, Air Force, Special Operations, and the Massachusetts State Police.

“Last year a student said, ‘This class is weird, and that’s exactly why it needs to stick around,’” Keselman says. “It is weird. It’s not normal for this many disciplines to come together, to have a Congressman showing up, Navy Seals, and members of the Army’s Special Forces all sitting in a room. Some are active-duty students, some are mentors, but it’s an incredible melting pot. I think it’s exactly what MIT embodies.”

From projects to military programs

This year’s class project challenges students to develop countermeasures for autonomous drone systems, which either travel by air or sea. Over the course of the semester, teams have built solutions that achieve early drone detection, categorization, and countermeasures. The solutions also must integrate AI and consider domestic manufacturing capabilities and supply chains.

One group is using sensors to detect the auditory signature of drones in the air. In the class, they gave a live demo that would only signal a threat when it detected a certain steady pitch associated with the electric motor of an air drone.

“Nothing motivates MIT students like a problem in the real world that they know really matters,” Perez says. “At the core of this year’s problem is how we protect a human from a drone attack. They take the process seriously.”

Organizers have also talked about extending the class into a year-long program that would allow the teams to build their projects into real products in partnership with groups at places like Lincoln Laboratory.

“This class is spreading the seeds of collaboration between academia and government,” Keselman says. “It’s a true partnership as opposed to just a funding program. Government officials come to MIT and sit in the classroom and see what’s actually happening here — and they rave about how impressive all the work is.”

Pavements form the backbone of our built environment. In the United States, almost 2.8 million lane-miles, or about 4.6 million lane-kilometers, are paved. They take us to work or school, take goods to their destinations, and much more.

To secure a more sustainable future, we must take a careful look at the long-term performance and environmental impacts of our pavements. Haoran Li, a postdoc at the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is deeply invested in studying how to give stakeholders the information and tools they need to make informed pavement decisions with the future in mind. Here, he discusses life-cycle assessments for pavements as well as research from MIT in addressing pavement sustainability.

Q: What is life-cycle assessment, and why does it matter for pavements?

A: Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a method that helps us holistically assess the environmental impacts of products and systems throughout their life cycle — everything from the impacts of raw materials to construction, use, maintenance, and repair, and finally decommissioning. For pavements, up to 78 percent of the life-cycle impact comes from the use phase, with the majority stemming from vehicle fuel use impacted by pavement characteristics, such as stiffness and smoothness. This phase also includes the sunlight reflected by pavements: Lighter, more reflective pavement bounces heat back into the atmosphere instead of absorbing it, which can help keep nearby buildings and streets cooler. At the same time, there are positive use phase impacts like carbon uptake — the natural process by which cement-based products like concrete roads and infrastructure sequester CO2 [carbon dioxide] from the atmosphere. Due to the sheer area of our pavements, they offer a great potential for the sustainability solution. Unlike many decarbonization solutions, pavements are managed by government agencies and influence the emissions from vehicles and surrounding buildings, allowing for a coordinated push toward sustainability through better materials, designs, and maintenance.

Q: What are the gaps in current pavement life-cycle assessment methods and tools and what has the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub done to address them so far?

A: A key gap is the complexity of performing pavement LCA. Practitioners should assess both the long-term structural performance and environmental impacts of paving materials, considering the pavements’ interactions with the built environment. Another key gap is the great uncertainty associated with pavement LCA. Since pavements are designed to last for decades, it is necessary to handle the inherent uncertainty through their long-term performance evaluations.

To tackle these challenges, the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub (CSHub) developed an innovative method and practical tools that address data intensity and uncertainty while offering context-specific and probabilistic LCA strategies. For instance, we demonstrated that it is possible to achieve meaningful results on the environmentally preferred pavement alternatives while reducing data collection efforts by focusing on the most influential and least variable parameters. By targeting key variables that significantly impact the pavement’s life cycle, we can streamline the process and still obtain robust conclusions. Overall, the efforts of the CSHub aim to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of pavement LCAs, making them better aligned with real-world conditions and more manageable in terms of data requirements.

Q: How does the MIT Concrete Sustainability Hub’s new streamlined pavement life-cycle assessment method improve on previous designs?

A: The CSHub recently developed a new framework to streamline both probabilistic and comparative LCAs for pavements. Probabilistic LCA accounts for randomness and variability in data, while comparative LCA allows the analysis of different options simultaneously to determine the most sustainable choice.

One key innovation is the use of a structured data underspecification approach, which prioritizes the data collection efforts. In pavement LCA, underspecifying can reduce the overall data collection burden by up to 85 percent, allowing for a reliable decision-making process with minimal data. By focusing on the most critical elements, we can still reach robust conclusions without the need for extensive data collection.

To make this framework practical and accessible, it is being integrated into an online LCA software tool. This tool facilitates use by practitioners, such as departments of transportation and metropolitan planning organizations. It helps them identify choices that lead to the highest-performing, longest-lasting, and most environmentally friendly pavements. Some of these solutions could include incorporating low-carbon concrete mixtures, prioritizing long-lasting treatment actions, and optimizing the design of pavement geometry to reduce life-cycle greenhouse gas emissions.

Overall, the CSHub’s new streamlined pavement LCA method significantly improves the efficiency and accessibility of conducting pavement LCAs, making it easier for stakeholders to make informed decisions that enhance pavement performance and sustainability.

This week, the U.S. House Energy and Commerce Committee moved forward with a proposal in its budget reconciliation bill to impose a ten-year preemption of state AI regulation—essentially saying only Congress, not state legislatures, can place safeguards on AI for the next decade.

We strongly oppose this. We’ve talked before about why federal preemption of stronger state privacy laws hurts everyone. Many of the same arguments apply here. For one, this would override existing state laws enacted to mitigate against emerging harms from AI use. It would also keep states, which have been more responsive on AI regulatory issues, from reacting to emerging problems.

Finally, it risks freezing any regulation on the issue for the next decade—a considerable problem given the pace at which companies are developing the technology. Congress does not react quickly and, particularly when addressing harms from emerging technologies, has been far slower to act than states. Or, as a number of state lawmakers who are leading on tech policy issues from across the country said in a recent joint open letter, “If Washington wants to pass a comprehensive privacy or AI law with teeth, more power to them, but we all know this is unlikely.”

Even if Congress does nothing on AI for the next ten years, this would still prevent states from stepping into the breach.

Even if Congress does nothing on AI for the next ten years, this would still prevent states from stepping into the breach. Given how different the AI industry looks now from how it looked just three years ago, it’s hard to even conceptualize how different it may look in ten years. State lawmakers must be able to react to emerging issues.

Many state AI proposals struggle to find the right balance between innovation and speech, on the one hand, and consumer protection and equal opportunity, on the other. EFF supports some bills to regulate AI and opposes others. But stopping states from acting at all puts a heavy thumb on the scale in favor of companies.

Stopping states will stop progress. As the big technology companies have done (and continue to do) with privacy legislation, AI companies are currently going all out to slow or roll back legal protections in states.

For example, Colorado passed a broad bill on AI protections last year. While far from perfect, the bill set down basic requirements to give people visibility into how companies use AI to make consequential decisions about them. This year, several AI companies lobbied to delay and weaken the bill. Meanwhile, POLITICO recently reported that this push in Washington, D.C. is in direct response to proposed California rules.

We oppose the AI preemption language in the reconciliation bill and urge Congress not to move forward with this damaging proposal.

Montana has done something that many states and the United States Congress have debated but failed to do: it has just enacted the first attempt to close the dreaded, invasive, unconstitutional, but easily fixed “data broker loophole.” This is a very good step in the right direction because right now, across the country, law enforcement routinely purchases information on individuals it would otherwise need a warrant to obtain.

What does that mean? In every state other than Montana, if police want to know where you have been, rather than presenting evidence and sending a warrant signed by a judge to a company like Verizon or Google to get your geolocation data for a particular set of time, they only need to buy that same data from data brokers. In other words, all the location data apps on your phone collect —sometimes recording your exact location every few minutes—is just sitting for sale on the open market. And police routinely take that as an opportunity to skirt your Fourth Amendment rights.

Now, with SB 282, Montana has become the first state to close the data broker loophole. This means the government may not use money to get access to information about electronic communications (presumably metadata), the contents of electronic communications, contents of communications sent by a tracking devices, digital information on electronic funds transfers, pseudonymous information, or “sensitive data”, which is defined in Montana as information about a person’s private life, personal associations, religious affiliation, health status, citizen status, biometric data, and precise geolocation. This does not mean information is now fully off limits to police. There are other ways for law enforcement in Montana to gain access to sensitive information: they can get a warrant signed by a judge, they can get consent of the owner to search a digital device, they can get an “investigative subpoena” which unfortunately requires far less justification than an actual warrant.

Despite the state’s insistence on honoring lower-threshold subpoena usage, SB 282 is not the first time Montana has been ahead of the curve when it comes to passing privacy-protecting legislation. For the better part of a decade, the Big Sky State has seriously limited the use of face recognition, passed consumer privacy protections, added an amendment to their constitution recognizing digital data as something protected from unwarranted searches and seizures, and passed a landmark law protecting against the disclosure or collection of genetic information and DNA. 

SB 282 is similar in approach to  H.R.4639, a federal bill the EFF has endorsed, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden, called the Fourth Amendment is Not for Sale Act. H.R.4639 passed through the House in April 2024 but has not been taken up by the Senate. 

Absent the United States Congress being able to pass important privacy protections into law, states, cities, and towns have taken it upon themselves to pass legislation their residents sorely need in order to protect their civil liberties. Montana, with a population of just over one million people, is showing other states how it’s done. EFF applauds Montana for being the first state to close the data broker loophole and show the country that the Fourth Amendment is not for sale. 

At this moment, there are approximately 35,000 tracked human-generated objects in orbit around Earth. Of these, only about one-third are active payloads: science and communications satellites, research experiments, and other beneficial technology deployments. The rest are categorized as debris — defunct satellites, spent rocket bodies, and the detritus of hundreds of collisions, explosions, planned launch vehicle separations, and other “fragmentation events” that have occurred throughout humanity’s 67 years of space launches. 

The problem of space debris is well documented, and only set to grow in the near term as launch rates increase and fragmentation events escalate accordingly. The clutter of debris — which includes an estimated 1 million objects over 1 centimeter, in addition to the tracked objects — regularly causes damage to satellites, requires the repositioning of the International Space Station, and has the potential to cause catastrophic collisions with increasing frequency. 

To address this issue, in 2019 the World Economic Forum selected a team co-led by MIT Associate Professor Danielle Wood’s Space Enabled Research Group at the MIT Media Lab to create a system for scoring space mission operators on their launch and de-orbit plans, collision-avoidance measures, debris generation, and data sharing, among other factors that would allow for better coordination and maintenance of space objects. The team has developed a system called the Space Sustainability Rating (SSR), and launched it in 2021 as an independent nonprofit. 

“Satellites provide valuable services that impact everyone in the world by helping us understand the environment, communicate globally, navigate, and operate our modern infrastructure. As innovative new missions are proposed that operate thousands of satellites, a new approach is needed to provide space traffic management. National governments and space operators need to design coordination approaches to reduce the risk of losing access to valuable satellite missions,” says Wood, who is jointly appointed in the Program in Media Arts and Sciences and the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AeroAstro). “The Space Sustainability Rating plays a role by compiling internationally recognized responsible on-orbit behaviors, and celebrating space actors that implement them.” 

France-based Eutelsat Group, a geostationary Earth orbit and low Earth orbit satellite operator, signed on as the first constellation operator with a large deployment of satellites to undergo a rating. Eutelsat submitted a mission to SSR for assessment, and was rated on a tiered scoring system based on six performance modules. Eutelsat earned a platinum rating with a score exceeding 80 percent, indicating that the mission demonstrated exceptional sustainability in design, operations, and disposal practices.

As of December 2024, SSR has also provided ratings to operators such as OHB Sweden AB, Stellar, and TU Delft. 

In a new open-access paper published in Acta Astronautica, lead author Minoo Rathnasabapathy, Wood, and the SSR team provide the detailed history, motivation, and design of the Space Sustainability Rating as an incentive system that provides a score for space operators based on their effort to reduce space debris and collision risk. The researchers include AeroAstro alumnus Miles Lifson SM '20, PhD '24; University of Texas at Austin professor and former MIT MLK Scholar Moriba Jah; and collaborators from the European Space Agency, BryceTech, and the Swiss Institute of Technology of Lausanne Space Center (eSpace).

The paper provides transparency about the inception of SSR as a cross-organizational collaboration and its development as a composite indicator that evaluates missions across multiple quantifiable factors. The aim of SSR is to provide actionable feedback and a score recognizing operators’ contributions to the space sustainability effort. The paper also addresses the challenges SSR faces in adoption and implementation, and its alignment with various international space debris mitigation guidelines. 

SSR draws heavily on proven rating methodologies from other industries, particularly Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) in the building and manufacturing industries, Sustainability Assessment of Food and Agriculture systems (SAFA) in the agriculture industry, and Sustainability Tracking, Assessment and Rating System (STARS) in the education industry. 

“By grounding SSR in quantifiable metrics and testing it across diverse mission profiles, we created a rating system that recognizes sustainable decisions and operations by satellite operators, aligned with international guidelines and industry best practices,” says Rathnasabapathy. 

The Space Sustainability Rating is a nongovernmental approach to encourage space mission operators to take responsible actions to reduce space debris and collision risk. The paper highlights the roles for private sector space operators and public sector space regulators to put steps in place to ensure such responsible actions are pursued. 

The Space Enabled Research Group continues to perform academic research that illustrates the benefits of space missions and government oversight bodies enforcing sustainable and safe space practices. Future work will highlight the need for a sustainability focus as practices such as satellite service and in-space manufacturing start to become more common. 

Dimitris Bertsimas SM ’87, PhD ’88, a leading figure in operations research, has been named the recipient of the 2025-26 James R. Killian Jr. Faculty Achievement Award. It is the highest honor the MIT faculty grants to its own professors.

Bertsimas is the Boeing Professor of Operations Research at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he has made substantial contributions to business practices in many fields. He has also been a prolific advisor of graduate students and an enterprising leader of academic programs, serving as the inaugural faculty director of the Master of Business Analytics (MBAn) program since 2016, associate dean of business analytics since 2019, and vice provost for open learning since 2024.

“To be recognized among the group of Killian Award winners is a very humbling experience,” Bertsimas says. “I love this institution. This is where I have spent the last 40 years of my life. We don’t do things at MIT to get awards; we do things here because we believe they are important. It’s definitely something I’m proud of, but I’m also humbled to be in the company of many of my heroes.”

The Killian Award citation states that Bertsimas, “through his remarkable intellectual breadth and accomplishments, incredible productivity, outstanding contributions to theory and practice, and educational leadership, has made enormous contributions to his profession, the Institute, and the world.” It also notes that his “scholarly contributions are both vast and groundbreaking.”

Bertsimas received his BS in electrical engineering and computer science from the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. He moved to MIT in 1985 for his graduate work, earning his MS in operations research and his PhD in applied mathematics and operations research. After completing his doctoral work in 1988, Bertsimas joined the MIT faculty, and has remained at the Institute ever since.

A powerhouse researcher, Bertsimas has tackled a wide range of problems during his career. One area of his work has focused on optimization, the development of mathematical tools to help business operations be as efficient and logical as possible. Another focus of his scholarship has been machine learning and its interaction with optimization as well as stochastic systems. Overall, Bertsimas has developed the concepts and tools of “robust optimization,” allowing people to make better decisions under uncertainty.

At times in his career, Bertsimas has focused on health care issues, examining how machine learning can be used to develop more tools for personalized medical care. But all told, Bertsimas’ work has long been applied across many industries, from medicine to finance, energy, and beyond. The fingerprints of his research can be found in financial portfolios, school bus routing, supply chain logistics, energy use, medical data mining, diabetes management, and more.

“My strategy has been to address significant challenges that the world faces, and try to make progress,” Bertsimas says.

A dedicated educator, Bertsimas has been the principal doctoral thesis advisor to 103 MIT PhD students as of this spring. Lately he has been advising about five doctoral students per year, a remarkable number.

“Working with my doctoral students is my principal and most favorite activity,” Bertsimas says. “Second, in my research, I’ve tried to address problems that I think are important. If you solve them, something changes, in what we teach or in industry, and in short order. Not in 50 years, but in two years. Third, I feel it’s my obligation to educate — not only to create new knowledge, but to transmit it.”

As such, Bertsimas has been the founder and driving force behind MIT Sloan’s leading-edge MBAn program, and has thrown himself into leading MIT’s Open Learning efforts over the past year. He has also founded 10 data analytics companies during his career, while co-authoring hundreds of papers and eight graduate-level textbooks on data analytics.

The Killian Award was founded in 1971 in recognition of “extraordinary professional accomplishments by full-time members of the MIT faculty,” as the citation notes. The award is named after James R. Killian Jr., who served as president of MIT from 1948 to 1959 and as chair of the MIT Corporation from 1959 to 1971.

By tradition, Bertsimas will give a lecture in spring 2026 about his work.

The Killian Award is the latest honor in Bertsimas’ career. In 2019, he received the John von Neumann Theory Prize from INFORMS, the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science, for his contributions to the theory of operations research and the management sciences. He also received the INFORMS President’s Award in 2019 for his contributions to societal welfare. Bertsimas was elected to be a member of the National Academy of Engineering at age 43.

Reflecting on his career so far, Bertsimas emphasizes that he operates on a philosophy centered around positive thinking, high aspirations, and a can-do attitude applied to making a difference in the world for other people. Bertsimas praised MIT Sloan and the Operations Research Center as ideal places for him to pursue his work, due to its interdisciplinary nature, the quality of the students, and its openness to founding firms based on breakthrough work.

“I have been very happy at Sloan,” Bertsimas says. “It gives me the opportunity to work on things that are important with exceptional students predominantly from the Operations Research Center, and encourages my entrepreneurial spirit. Being at MIT Sloan and at the Operations Research Center has made a material difference in my career and my life.”

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking (remotely) at the Sektor 3.0 Festival in Warsaw, Poland, May 21-22, 2025.

The list is maintained on this page.

MIT alumnus Steven Troung ’20 has been awarded a 2025 Knight-Hennessy Scholarship and will join the eighth cohort of the prestigious fellowship. Knight-Hennessy Scholars receive up to three years of financial support for graduate studies at Stanford University.

Knight-Hennessy Scholars are selected for their independence of thought, purposeful leadership, and civic mindset. Troung is dedicated to making scientific advances in metabolic disorders, specifically diabetes, a condition that has affected many of his family members.

Truong, the son of Vietnamese refugees, originally hails from Minneapolis and graduated from MIT in 2020 with bachelor’s degrees in biological engineering and creative writing. During his time at MIT, Truong conducted research on novel diabetes therapies with professors Daniel Anderson and Robert Langer at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and with Professor Douglas Lauffenburger in the Department of Biological Engineering.

Troung also founded a diabetes research project in Vietnam and co-led Vietnam’s largest genome-wide association study with physicians at the University of Medicine and Pharmacy in Ho Chi Minh City, where the team investigated the genetic determinants of Type 2 diabetes.

In his senior year at MIT, Truong won a Marshall Scholarship for post-graduate studies in the U.K. As a Marshall Scholar, he completed an MPhil in computational biology at Cambridge University and an MA in creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. Troung is currently pursuing an MD and a PhD in biophysics at the Stanford School of Medicine.

In addition to winning a Knight-Hennessy Scholarship and the Marshall Scholarship, Truong was the recipient of a 2019-20 Goldwater Scholarship and a 2023 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.

Students interested in applying to the Knight-Hennessy Scholars program can contact Kim Benard, associate dean of distinguished fellowships in Career Advising and Professional Development. 

The winner of this year’s MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is helping advanced therapies reach more patients faster with a new kind of drug-injection device.

CoFlo Medical says its low-cost device can deliver biologic drugs more than 10 times faster than existing methods, accelerating the treatment of a range of conditions including cancers, autoimmune diseases, and infectious diseases.

“For patients battling these diseases, every hour matters,” said Simon Rufer SM ’22 in the winning pitch. “Biologic drugs are capable of treating some of the most challenging diseases, but their administration is unacceptably time-consuming, infringing on the freedom of the patient and effectively leaving them tethered to their hospital beds. The requirement of a hospital setting also makes biologics all but impossible in remote and low-access areas.”

Today, biologic drugs are mainly delivered through intravenous fusions, requiring patients to sit in hospital beds for hours during each delivery. That’s because many biologic drugs are too viscous to be pushed through a needle. CoFlo’s device enables quick injections of biologic drugs no matter how viscous. It works by surrounding the viscous drug with a second, lower-viscosity fluid.

“Imagine trying to force a liquid as viscous as honey through a needle: It’s simply not possible,” said Rufer, who is currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. “Over the course of six years of research and development at MIT, we’ve overcome a myriad of fluidic instabilities that have otherwise made this technology impossible. We’ve also patented the fundamental inner workings of this device.”

Rufer made the winning pitch to a packed Kresge Auditorium that included a panel of judges on May 12. In a video, he showed someone injecting biologic drugs using CoFlo’s device using one hand.

Rufer says the second fluid in the device could be the buffer of the drug solution itself, which wouldn’t alter the drug formulation and could potentially expedite the device’s approval in clinical trials. The device can also easily be made using existing mass manufacturing processes, which will keep the cost low.

In laboratory experiments, CoFlo’s team has demonstrated injections that are up to 200 times faster.

“CoFlo is the only technology that is capable of administering viscous drugs while simultaneously optimizing the patient experience, minimizing the clinical burden, and reducing device cost,” Rufer said.

Celebrating entrepreneurship

The MIT $100K Competition started more than 30 years ago, when students, along with the late MIT Professor Ed Roberts, raised $10,000 to turn MIT’s “mens et manus” (“mind and hand”) motto into a startup challenge. Over time, with sponsor support, the event grew into the renown, highly anticipated startup competition it is today, highlighting some of the most promising new companies founded by MIT community members each year.

The Monday night event was the culmination of months of work and preparation by participating teams. The $100K program began with student pitches in December and was followed by mentorship, funding, and other support for select teams over the course of ensuing months.

This year more than 50 teams applied for the $100K’s final event. A network of external judges whittled that down to the eight finalists that made their pitches.

Other winners

In addition to the grand prize, finalists were also awarded a $50,000 second-place prize, a $5,000 third-place prize, and a $5,000 audience choice award, which was voted on during the judge’s deliberations.

The second-place prize went to Haven, an artificial intelligence-powered financial planning platform that helps families manage lifelong disability care. Haven’s pitch was delivered by Tej Mehta, a student in the MIT Sloan School of Management who explained the problem by sharing his own family’s experience managing his sister’s intellectual disability.

“As my family plans for the future, a number of questions are keeping us up at night,” Mehta told the audience. “How much money do we need to save? What public benefits is she eligible for? How do we structure our private assets so she doesn’t lose those public benefits? Finally, how do we manage the funds and compliance over time?”

Haven works by using family information and goals to build a personalized roadmap that can predict care needs and costs over more than 50 years.

“We recommend to families the exact next steps they need to take, what to apply for, and when,” Mehta explained.

The third-place prize went to Aorta Scope, which combines AI and ultrasound to provide augmented reality guidance during vascular surgery. Today, surgeons must rely on a 2-D X-ray image as they feed a large stent into patients’ body during a common surgery known as endovascular repair.

Aorta Scope has developed a platform for real-time, 3-D implant alignment. The solution combines intravascular ultrasound technology with fiber optic shape sensing. Tom Dillon built the system that combines data from those sources as part of his ongoing PhD in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Finally, the audience choice award went to Flood Dynamics, which provides real-time flood risk modeling to help cities, insurers, and developers adapt and protect urban communities from flooding.

Although most urban flood damages are driven by rain today, flood models don’t account for rainfall, making cities less prepared for flooding risks.

“Flooding, and especially rain-driven flooding, is the costliest natural hazard around the world today,” said Katerina Boukin SM ’20, PhD ’25, who developed the company’s technology at MIT. “The price of staying rain-blind is really steep. This is an issue that is costing the U.S. alone more than $30 billion a year.”

Google has extended its Advanced Protection features to Android devices. It’s not for everybody, but something to be considered by high-risk users.

Wired article, behind a paywall.

The president has been making moves that could lead to an exit from the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Democratic attorneys general say it's illegal for the administration to require states to assist with immigration operations in order to receive FEMA aid.

Facing a lawsuit, the Department of Agriculture says it will restore climate-related websites the agency erased after President Donald Trump took office.

Democrats had their own forum on insurance Tuesday, with a focus on climate change.

Less wealthy countries are among the most vulnerable to potential unintended side effects from climate interventions.

RMI -- formerly known as the Rocky Mountain Institute -- is citing funding uncertainty and "volatility."

Friends of the Earth Netherlands will ask a court to block the company from developing 700 oil and gas fields that it fears Shell will tap.

The status of the Florida Hurricane Catastrophe Fund is important to Floridians regardless of where they live.

Markets have failed to provide adequate pricing signals for the real risks that lie ahead, said Cambridge scholars.