Last week, the House voted on the KIDS Act, a disjointed package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package combines a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), with several other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Different parts of the bill pressure online services to impose different age-gating schemes, using different standards. EFF opposed this bill, along with many of our members and supporters.

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Tell Congress: no internet age-gates

The bill passed the House, 267-117. It now heads to the Senate, where its fate remains uncertain. But this fight is not over. Even if you took our earlier action to contact the House, we need you to reach out to your Senators today. 

The KIDS Act Will Lead to Mandatory Age Checks 

Many of the bills in the KIDS Act share the same premise: that children and teenagers should have different experiences online than adults. In practice, that requires websites and apps to determine who is under 18—and who isn’t. That’s where the problems with the KIDS Act start. 

EFF certainly supports giving all users better privacy and safety tools online. But those protections should not, and do not need to, come at the expense of privacy or free expression. Unfortunately, that’s exactly the tradeoff the KIDS Act makes.

There is no way to determine a user’s age online that is both privacy protective and accurate. Some age verification processes may rely on collecting government-issued ID, while others may use biometric scans. Others will use algorithms to guess a user’s age based on facial images or online behavior. But no matter the method, every system demands users hand over sensitive personal information that links their offline identity to their online activity. And then, once that valuable data is collected, it can be leaked, hacked, or misused. In fact, we’ve already seen several breaches of age verification providers.

The Bill Still Regulates Online Speech

The revised KOSA language within the KIDS Act still pressures companies to police lawful speech online. Platforms must “establish, implement, maintain, and enforce” policies that address content like gambling or the use of alcohol or cannabis. This encourages platforms to broadly restrict speech on these topics, which could include a teen seeking advice on a parent’s gambling problem or searching for substance abuse recovery resources. When platforms are required to create and enforce content moderation policies that regulators can sue them over, they will often err on the side of deleting speech. 

Protect Privacy For Everyone

There is a better way to protect young people online. Instead of encouraging a complicated system of age checks, more monitoring, and more restrictions on access to information, Congress could finally pass a strong, comprehensive privacy law that benefits all users. A great place to start would be to ban behavioral advertising that tracks us across the web—again, for users of all ages. 

We urge the Senate to oppose the KIDS Act and instead focus on a strong, bipartisan privacy package for all users. 

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Tell the senate to reject the kids act

Users are always seeking more control over their social networking experience to make it better, whether to improve privacy or enhance flexibility. Interoperability between social networking platforms like Facebook and TikTok has so many benefits that solve those issues.  

Say you’re on multiple platforms because you have friends you follow on different networks, but you’ve decided to choose one platform with better privacy practices. With interoperability, you could switch and still interact with friends who remain on larger platforms. It could also enable independent apps with better privacy controls and more user choice. These are the untapped possibilities that could benefit users in the European Union under the 2022 Digital Markets Act (DMA).  

Yet, the European Commission, in its first review of the DMA, announced in April it had decided not to extend the DMA’s interoperability mandate to social networking and didn’t give a deadline or a timeline for enforcing that part of the Act. The Commission said “there is no clear demand” from users and businesses for social networking interoperability and, in any case, it’s too technically complex at the moment. Meanwhile, the Big Tech platforms that have been slow-walking interoperability over the last two years, erecting a myriad of hurdles for users seeking more freedom to choose other platforms, get a pass.

This is a huge disappointment and a missed opportunity by the Commission. Interoperability dismantles one of the biggest barriers faced by users who want to leave the tech giants’ platforms: the choice between changing to a platform you prefer or staying behind on a platform where all your friends, communities, and customers are.

The DMA, which went into force in 2024, aims to foster more choices for European Union users and encourage competition and innovation by forcing so-called gatekeeper platforms like Meta, Apple, and Google, to open their ecosystems to competitors. The regulation does a great deal to foster the integration of competing services and devices with the ecosystems of very large online platforms that act as gatekeepers. It even requires interoperability for messaging services, despite the significant technical and privacy challenges involved.

So, it’s odd that the Commission is using complexity as a shield against taking on social networking interoperability. The internet already runs on complex interoperable systems. Approaches like ActivityPub, the decentralized networking protocol behind the “Fediverse,” which gave rise to decentralized networks like Mastodon, already exist. The DMA shouldn’t mandate a specific protocol, but it can require meaningful interoperability outcomes.

The argument that there’s no real demand for social networking interoperability also falls flat. Users want the ability to move across platforms, choose the content they’d like to see from platforms, and not be tied down to a single platform. But there’s no way to get there—the platforms are doing little to open their social networking ecosystems. And now you have the DMA’s enforcer saying it’s not going to make them change. Demand for alternatives won’t materialize at scale until users see real progress towards interoperability, something the Commission has the power to do.

Having decided there’s little demand and too much complexity to proceed with mandating social networking interoperability, the Commission said it “will continue to monitor and assess how these services evolve.” This wait-and-see-posture only hurts users and strengthens and further entrenches Big Tech incumbents.

The DMA is supposed to center on the rights of technology users and be the pathway to an internet experience where you decide which software runs on your devices, where it’s easy to find the best products and services, and where you can leave a platform for a better one without forfeiting your social relationships.

Meanwhile, Big Tech is also resisting the DMA’s openness requirements. For example, Apple is supposed to be opening up iOS devices to rival app stores. Yet, the smartphone giant’s plan for opening its App Store levies junk fees and onerous conditions on app makers and is effectively impossible for any competitor to use.

It’s not just Apple pushing back against DMA enforcement. Meta's response is a “pay for privacy “system, in which users who do not consent to Meta’s surveillance will have to pay to use the service, or be blocked from it. Whether their plan complies with the DMA remains under review.

Nowhere in the DMA does it say social networking companies get to install a toll booth for users seeking to benefit from privacy rights the regulation grants them. The future EU Digital Fairness Act is another opportunity to protect users from such practices by declaring them unfair.

The Commission has responded to these developments with investigations, preliminary rulings, and fines. Meanwhile, users are missing out on greater choice and flexibility in how they communicate and connect online.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Loons, gulls, puffins, and petrels are some of the 100 species of birds that can both fly and swim. These diving birds can plunge in water to swim after prey, and leap back into the air to fly away. 

Inspired by these naturally aquatic aviators, engineers at MIT and EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, have designed a robot that can swim underwater, then flap out of the water to continue flying through air, much like diving birds. 

The “flapping-wing aerial-aquatic vehicle,” or FAAV, weighs less than 300 grams (about half a pound) and is designed to help scientists study the mechanics that enable diving birds to fly through air and water. 

The robot has a central body, or fuselage; two flexible, flapping wings; and a steerable tail. The wings and tail can be swapped out for different sizes. In experiments carried out in a water tank and at a local lake, the engineers identified combinations of wing size, flapping frequency, and tail angle that enable the robot to smoothly transition from swimming through water to breaking through the surface to flying through the air.

Their results, which appear today in the journal Science, could help scientists understand how diving birds adapt their flight mechanics to move through air and water — mediums with very different physical properties. The design could also launch a new class of aerial-aquatic drones and vehicles. The researchers envision such winged robots could be deployed in oceanography to fly to and sample from aquatic regions that would otherwise be too dangerous for traditional ocean vessels to access.

“Our dream vision is for oceanographers, marine biologists, and members of coastal communities to launch this robot from a boat, or from shore, and it would fly close to the area of interest, such as an iceberg or a port facility, or over a pod of whales,” says Raphael Zufferey, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT. “It would dive into the water to take a measurement or collect a sample, and fly back to deliver the data at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Then it could go back out to dive for more.” 

Zufferey is the lead author of the new study, which includes co-authors from EPFL and Northwest Indian College in Bellingham, Washington.

Flight mechanics

At MIT, Zufferey heads up the AURA Lab, where he and his students engineer aerial and aquatic vehicles inspired by biomechanics in nature. The robots they build are small in size and designed to unobtrusively explore and monitor the health of oceans and waterways. 

For their new work, the team aimed to design a vehicle that can fly in the air and underwater. Any such vehicle would have to adapt to and transition between two very different substances. Water is 1,000 times denser than air, and moving through one or the other requires very different mechanics. Or so people might assume.

“You have to do some adaptation to make that transition work. But there’s a solution that exists in nature,” Zufferey says. “Birds like puffins can fly very fast through the air, and can dive and swim through water at speeds of 3 meters per second. They’re able to do pretty amazing things. So we knew is was possible. Just no one had tried this in a mobile robotic system.”

To get an idea for how diving birds fly, the team looked through the scientific literature and pulled together available data on puffins, petrels, kingfishers, and other diving birds. They observed that smaller birds flap their wings around 10 times per second when flying through air, and around four times per second when swimming through water. Larger birds have a slightly lower flapping frequency through both air and water due to their wider wingspans. 

With the biomechanics of birds in mind, the team developed a winged robot designed to flap at similar frequencies to that of actual diving birds. 

Making the leap

The new robot roughly resembles a bird, with a body, two wings, and a tail. The body contains a battery and waterproof electric motor that drives a crankshaft, which in turn pumps the wings up and down at preset frequencies. The wings are made of thin membranes that are coated with hydrophobic nanoparticles to help wick away water. And the tail is motorized, enabling it to change its angle to help the robot fly up or dive down. 

The wings can be swapped out for different sizes. The researchers fabricated and tested three sets of wings: small (60 centimeters wide), medium (80 centimeters), and large (100 centimeters). They carried out experiments first in a small water tank, then in Lake Geneva in Switzerland.

In their tests, they placed the robot underwater, about half a meter below the surface. They programmed the wings to flap at certain frequencies and the tail to pitch at certain angles throughout the robot’s flight. They then observed under what conditions the robot successfully swam up toward the surface, out of the water and into the air. 

The robot flew multiple flights with different wing sizes, flapping frequencies, and tail angles. Overall, the team found the robot was able to reliably fly, swim, and transition between water and air when it flew with medium-sized wings. Flexibility in the wings is key; the wings need to be flexible enough to minimize flapping amplitude in water and also firm enough to keep the robot aloft in the air. 

The researchers also found the robot could swim through water at speeds of almost 1 meter per second when it flapped with a frequency of around 5 herz, or five flaps per second. The robot could fly through the air at around 6 meters per second, when flapping at a similar frequency. The speeds and flapping frequencies of the robot were similar to that of actual diving birds. 

To make the leap from water to air, they found the robot should be pitched at 70 degrees — a relatively steep angle that keeps the robot’s wingtips from touching the water’s surface as it flaps up and into the air. Any steeper, and the robot would tip back into the water.

Interestingly, this combination of wing size, flap frequency, and tail pitch enabled the robot to swim underwater, launch off the surface, and fly, without something that many diving birds require: feet. When birds such as puffins and ducks take off from the water’s surface, they paddle their feet, along with flapping their wings and pitching their tails. Surprisingly, Zufferey and his colleagues found that, at least in robotics, the act of flying out of water doesn’t necessarily require a paddling maneuver. 

“If you look at birds, most birds need to paddle at the surface to take off. And the question was, do we need the same for robots? And it turns out we don’t,” Zufferey says.

Going forward, the team is improving the design of the wings to enable them to turn in addition to flapping up and down. They will also test the robot’s performance under turbulent conditions, such as swimming out of choppy waters and flying through wind. Then, they hope to deploy the vehicle to help answer questions in ocean science.

“One of the major challenges in ocean science is collecting data both frequently and across many locations, which is something this robot could do in the future,” Zufferey says. “You could send this out not just every week, but every hour. It could fly out at high speeds, dive in fly back, deliver its data, and go back out, multiple times.”

This work was supported, in part, by a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship grant.

In southwestern Bangladesh, where extreme heat and severe tropical cyclones threaten the lives of millions of people, a new kind of climate refuge has opened its doors.

At the Baradal Aftab Uddin Collegiate School in the Satkhira district, the Jameel Observatory Climate Resilience Early Warning System Network (Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet) opened its first “adaptation fortress,” a solar-powered community shelter designed to protect residents from extreme heat and tropical storms.

A year-round refuge

When the heat arrives in southwestern Bangladesh, people have traditionally looked for relief under the shade of trees or near bodies of water. Now, during heatwaves, temperatures can reach 44 degrees Celsius (111 degrees Fahrenheit), levels at which shade is no longer enough.

A school by day and refuge from disaster, the adaptation fortress transforms the traditional concept of a cyclone shelter into a permanent year-round community resilience hub.

The facility offers residents protection from two of the region’s fastest-growing climate threats. During government-declared heat emergencies, it can host up to 200 people in four air-conditioned rooms supplied with clean drinking water. As a cyclone shelter, it can accommodate up to 500 people in additional rooms.

For the 30 million residents in southwestern Bangladesh, caught in a compounding cycle of cyclones and record-breaking heatwaves, the fortress represents something larger: a shift from reacting to disasters to preparing for them.

From forecast to fortress

That shift is the founding premise of the Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet project, which develops climate-resilience solutions that help vulnerable communities prepare for and adapt to life-altering conditions. 

The opening of the adaptation fortress marks a milestone for the project, and for MIT’s broader climate mission. Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet was one of MIT's five Climate Grand Challenges flagship projects, selected to translate climate research into tangible solutions for underserved communities facing some of the world’s most urgent climate threats. 

The project started in 2022 with Community Jameel and a research team at MIT led by Elfatih Eltahir, the H.M. King Bhumibol Professor of Hydrology and Climate in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, along with John Aldridge, assistant leader of the Human Resilience Technology Group at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and Deborah Campbell, senior staff scientist at MIT Lincoln Laboratory.  

Working in collaboration with BRAC International, a Bangladesh-founded nonprofit organization, the project combines advanced climate and socioeconomic forecasting with practical adaptation solutions. The adaptation fortress extends the project’s mission from forecasting climate threats to building permanent protection against them.

“When we launched the Jameel Observatory-CREWSnet, our goal was to close the gap between what climate science tells us is coming and what communities can actually do about it,” says Eltahir. “The adaptation fortress is that idea made concrete. Our models project more intense heatwaves for this region, and now residents of Satkhira have a place built to withstand them.”

The project’s climate modeling gives the fortress its urgency. Developed over decades in Eltahir’s research group, the models predict increasingly intense heatwaves across southwestern Bangladesh in the years ahead — dangerous heat layered on top of the cyclone risks they already endure. 

That same evidence shaped who gets through the door first. A priority access list focuses on those the heat endangers most: the elderly, people with respiratory conditions such as asthma, expectant mothers and mothers with infants, and students of the Baradal school.

Built to outlast the grid

The building was designed to weather climate shocks. A rooftop solar array powers the building as its primary energy source, with a battery backup that keeps it fully operational during grid outages. Solar grid-based air conditioning units combat extreme heat, and windows of glass encased in iron protect against breakage while sealing in the cool air.

The facility also integrates rainwater harvesting to mitigate the severe salinity that plagues local groundwater, and is designed to help cover its own upkeep. A net-metering interface allows surplus electricity generated during low-occupancy periods to be sold back to the national grid, creating a circular revenue stream that funds long-term maintenance.

The fortress is built with the community. A school committee oversees day-to-day operations and emergency protocols in partnership with BRAC, formalized through a signed memorandum of understanding to ensure long-term sustainability. The facility is supported by a comprehensive user guide translated into Bangla to empower local management.

Engineered to scale 

The Satkhira adaptation fortress is a pilot, and will be rigorously assessed. Remote sensors will track temperature, humidity, and power consumption. The findings will directly inform a second adaptation fortress planned for a secondary school in the Jashore district, where construction is scheduled to begin before the end of 2026.

If the evidence supports the model’s effectiveness, the concept could ultimately scale to as many as 1,250 fortresses across southwestern Bangladesh.

“From the start, our vision for this project has been a capability that could extend far beyond any single community,” says Campbell. “The adaptation fortress is a model we can learn from and refine in Satkhira, then carry to the many other places facing these same compounding climate threats.”

The work is supported by Community Jameel for Jameel Observatory CREWSnet, and by MIT Climate Grand Challenges.

The path to launching and growing a startup can be full of twists and turns. For a budding entrepreneur, gaining perspective from those who have already experienced the journey can be incredibly valuable, and highly inspirational. 

“There are so many amazing entrepreneurial stories among our alumni. We want to bring those stories to our students and our community and build networks with our incredible alumni founders,” says John Hart, the Class of 1922 Professor and head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE). “Through the Founder’s Journey class and other new programs, we want to cultivate interest in entrepreneurship among our students and expand opportunities to bring MechE-born technologies to the world.” 

According to a 2015 report on MIT’s global entrepreneurial impact, there are more than 30,000 active companies founded by MIT alumni worldwide, employing some 4.6 million people. Marina Hatsopoulos SM ’93, founding CEO of Z Corp., an early market leader in 3D printing, said one of the aims of the course was to show students they don’t need to reinvent everything. “So much of this has been done before. I want them to understand that this is a well-trod path.” 

Class 2.S977/2.S979 (Founder’s Journey: Launching and Scaling Hardware Startups) explores real-life challenges of startups focused on building and scaling hardware technologies. First held in spring 2025, the inaugural class invited students to “find and activate their entrepreneurial energy” through the lens of challenges faced by founders and their teams at various stages in development of new hardware-focused companies — ranging from fundraising to supply chain development, and much more. 

Each week of the class was structured around a key challenge faced during the development and growth of a hardware startup, presented by the instructors and guest speaker. The speakers were founders of companies in robotics, energy, 3D printing, consumer products, and other frontier technologies. Students engaged through preparing questions for the speakers and participating in follow-on discussions and reflective exercises throughout the semester. 

Ken Zolot, senior lecturer at MIT, and Hatsopoulous co-led the class and developed it along with Hart. Hart, who was among the alumni speakers in the course’s first iteration, also spoke to the class about his experience as a co-founder of VulcanForms, which began through collaboration with fellow co-founder Martin Feldmann MEng ’14. 

The other alumni speakers included Mick Mountz (Kiva/Amazon); Jon Hirschtick (Solidworks/Onshape); Max Lobovsky (Formlabs); Elise Strobach (Aeroshield); Greg Mark (Markforged); Seemantini Nadkarni (Coalesenz); Eran Egozy (Harmonix); Renuka Babu (DOTS Technology); Davide Marini (Inkbit); Loewen Cavill (Amira); and Colin Angle (iRobot).

Colin Angle ’89, SM ’91, co-founder of iRobot

Colin Angle ’89, SM ’91, co-founder and former CEO of iRobot, now CEO and co-founder of Familiar Machines and Magic, identified a passion for building things early on. 

“This idea that you can create something from nothing, that you can have an idea and not just draw it, but build it and make it real, is something I’ve always loved,” he says. “MIT had such a strong, hands-on ethos, and that really, powerfully resonated.”

While living in the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity house at MIT, Angle watched several companies get their start (by his count, five multimillion-dollar companies were started by his fraternity brothers during his time in the house). Seeing others do it helped to demystify the process. 

He started iRobot in his living room, beginning at first not with a product concept, but a grand vision. “We’re supposed to have robots. So, if not us, who? And if not now, when? It was a magical day.” 

iRobot may be best known for the Roomba, an autonomous robotic vacuum cleaner, but through the years the company also sent robots to Afghanistan (saving thousands of lives with the Pack Bot tactical mobile robot) and explored the Great Pyramid in Giza live on National Geographic. 

“The joy I have taken from my entrepreneurial journey has been the ability to build bigger things, from building teams to building a company capable of building something far beyond what I could have ever imagined doing myself … we created inventions that no one thought possible, simply because we believed we could.”

Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20, CEO and co-founder of AeroShield

Elise Strobach SM ’17, PhD ’20 is CEO and co-founder of AeroShield Materials. The company, co-founded with Kyle Wilke PhD ’19 and Aaron Baskerville-Bridges SM ’20, MBA ’20, develops super-insulating transparent window inserts with technology based on transparent silica aerogels developed by Strobach while she was completing her PhD in Professor Evelyn Wang’s lab.

“I wasn’t thinking of myself as an entrepreneur at that time, but looking back, that’s definitely where that seed was planted,” says Strobach. As entrepreneurs, she says, “We have the … freedom to find the best problem to solve and to continue to seek the best way to solve that problem.”

Aerogels, which were first invented almost 100 years ago and were first commercialized by NASA to insulate equipment in space, had a hazy blue tint that limited their use in certain applications. The aerogel material created by Strobach and her team is completely see-through, creating a variety of new everyday applications. The company recently achieved another milestone, with their work on display at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

“You don’t have to know everything to start. You just have to know that this is what you want to do and just get started.”

Maxim Lobovsky SM ’11, CEO and co-founder of FormLabs

Maxim Lobovsky SM ’11 was already working on 3D printers when he came to MIT to study at the MIT Media Lab. As he was finishing his master’s degree, he saw an opportunity to build something new.  

Lobovsky, with fellow Media Lab graduates David Cranor SM ’11 and Natan Linder SM ’11, founded Formlabs, a developer and manufacturer of 3D printing technology. The trio set out to build a professional-level 3D printer, but a significant cost reduction and one that would be easier to use than what was then available on the market. At a time when 3D printers could cost $100,000 or more, Formlabs’ product started around $3,000.

“We definitely built Formlabs in a classic, disruptive innovation path,” Lobovsky says. They achieved the cost reduction through several different ways, including replacing technology developed in the 1980s with modern consumer electronics components like the laser diodes that were developed for Blu-ray Disc players, and with “just a lot of clever engineering.” 

It was a long grind to raise the first round of funding, he says. The team participated in MIT’s 100K competition and pitched their idea to many potential investors (with limited success, initially). Their big break came in the form of an overheard conversation. 

“As someone who is naturally introverted, shy engineer … a really important lesson [was] that, sometimes, you can get lucky,” he says. “Sometimes talking loudly at a restaurant is actually a good way to get things going.” 

Lobovsky and one of his co-founders were having dinner with a potential investor at Legal Seafoods in Harvard Square. The pitch to the initial investor didn’t go well, but Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Software and an early pioneer in the PC industry overheard the conversation, and he ended up leading Formlabs’ first round of funding. 

Today, Formlabs is the largest supplier of professional stereolithography and selective laser sintering 3D printers in the world. 

Jon Hirschtick ’83, SM ’83, co-founder of SolidWorks and Onshape

Jon Hirschtick ’83, SM ’83, co-founder of SolidWorks and Onshape, says the first time he can remember thinking about starting a company was when he was an undergraduate. 

“I had heard about startups, and it sounded like a lot of things that I was drawn to … a sense of being able to realize your vision, express yourself; a sense of excitement, of making money, and even the idea of a chaotic environment,” he says. 

Hirschtick has spent over four decades building computer-aided design (CAD) software, starting as an intern at MIT in 1981 and continuing that work today. “I thought, ‘hey, the world could use this software.’ It’ll be a better place with the software that I envisioned.”

He refers to CAD as a meta product design. “We’re designing a product that other people use to design products, and that’s just really cool to me.” 

“I think startups just fit me,” he says. “The excitement, the idea of trying to solve a lot of problems at the same time. MIT is a place of problem-solving ... and a startup is a place where there’s lots of problems to solve.” He adds that a lot of big companies are doing new things, but “startups are always doing things.”

He says most anything today that is a manufactured product is modeled in CAD first. “If you’re interested and excited by product development, then building a CAD system lets you get involved in the world’s product development.”

“Nobody knows for sure when they start a company whether it’s going to be successful or not. If it were, if there was a way of knowing for sure, then there wouldn’t be all these classes in entrepreneurship. They’d just tell you the secret. There’s always risk. Visions and hallucinations, they look and feel the same. You only find out which is which once you really try to realize them.”

A version of this story appears in the 2026 issue of MechE Connects, the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s magazine. 

Researchers at MIT Lincoln Laboratory have designed a throwable, baseball-sized sensor that can remotely detect hazardous vapors and aerosols. 

Called the Tactical Optical Spherical Sensor for Interrogating Threats (TOSSIT), the sensor is designed to alert military service members, first responders, and law enforcement to the presence of chemical threats like nerve and blister agents, industrial chemical accidents, or fentanyl dust. 

Users can simply toss, drone-drop, or launch TOSSIT into an area of concern. To detect chemicals, the sensor samples the air and uses an internal camera to observe color changes on a removable dye card.

If certain chemicals are present, TOSSIT alerts users via an app or alarms in the sensor.

"TOSSIT fills an unmet need, providing a low-cost sensing option for vapors and solid aerosol threats — think toxic dust particles — that would otherwise not be detectable by small deployed sensor systems,” says principal investigator Richard Kingsborough.

After extensive testing in the field, the technology is being transferred to the U.S. military.

Most people think of the waterfront as the edge of the city. A team of MIT researchers sees it as a dynamic, Lego-like construction site.

Their new system, called “FloatForm,” is a swarm of small square robotic boats that assemble themselves into larger structures on the water, break apart, and reassemble into something new, all with minimal human direction. 

Each robot, about the size of a dinner plate at 21 centimeters square, is a self-contained vessel with its own thrusters, sensors, and magnetic latches. Together, they hint at a future in which floating infrastructure could become more adaptive: a temporary platform after an emergency, a market on a canal, or a stage that appears for a festival and dissolves when the crowd goes home.

“Our FloatForm projects envisions a future where the waterfront becomes a programmable extension of the city, where autonomous boats can self-organize into bridges, platforms, and other useful structures on demand,” says Daniela Rus, the Panasonic Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). “This kind of distributed robotics opens new possibilities for mobility, emergency response, public space, and infrastructure on water.”

“With FloatForm, we are essentially turning static water surfaces into dynamic, programmable spaces,” says Wei Wang, lead author of a new paper on the project and a former MIT research scientist who now leads the Marine Robotics Lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “Imagine an urban environment where public space isn’t fixed, but can autonomously expand, contract, or reconfigure on demand.” 

“We see it as forming infrastructure on the water, using a modular system to create one larger system,” says Alejandro Gonzalez-Garcia, a former researcher with MIT CSAIL and the Senseable City Lab. “If there’s an emergency, you could form a new bridge to alleviate traffic in the city. Or you could create floating markets and floating stages. If you want a more livable city, you want to use the water, too.”

The open-access work, published today in Nature Communications, comes from the labs of Rus and Carlo Ratti, professor of practice of urban technologies and planning at MIT and director of the Senseable City Lab, and grows out of Roboat, their joint project with the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions that put full-size autonomous vessels on Amsterdam’s canals. Those canals once carried the city’s goods; today, they mostly carry tourists. 

“We explored whether the canals could be used for waste collection, or for transport, to offload some of the stress on the roads back onto the water,” says Niklas Hagemann, an MIT graduate student in architecture, CSAIL affiliate, and former Senseable City Lab researcher who has worked on the project since its early stages. “Urban areas are getting denser, so could you expand public space onto water that’s currently underutilized?”

FloatForm shrinks that vision down to tabletop scale to answer a harder question: How do you get dozens, and eventually thousands, of floating robots to organize themselves?

Lessons from the ant raft

The team found its answer in biology. Fire ants famously survive floods by linking their bodies into living rafts, with no leader choreographing the assembly. Each ant follows simple local rules, and a resilient structure emerges.

“Each ant is an independent agent,” says Gonzalez-Garcia. “We wanted each robot to have its own capabilities, the same way ant colonies form a raft.”

Most existing self-assembling robot systems, on water and elsewhere, rely on a central computer dictating every move. That approach is vulnerable to single points of failure and scales poorly: The planning math balloons as robots are added, and the swarm must assemble sequentially, with most robots idling while they wait their turn. FloatForm flips the balance. A lightweight central planner steps in only sparingly, assigning each robot a final position to perfect the lattice, a level of geometric precision that purely distributed methods struggle to guarantee. Everything else, including navigating toward the target shape, avoiding collisions, and adapting to disturbances, runs on the robots themselves, which coordinate by exchanging positions with their immediate neighbors. The whole swarm moves at once.

That parallelism is what sets the work apart. The planning complexity of FloatForms approach depends only on a robot’s local neighbors, not the total size of the swarm. “What we’re trying to do is to have minimal central intervention, and have them all move together at the same time,” says Gonzalez-Garcia.

In experiments at MIT, a fleet of eight robots repeatedly gathered from random positions into a target shape, latched into a rigid structure, broke apart on command, reassembled into a new configuration, and then drove across the pool as a single vessel, with each run taking four to eight minutes. In that final mode, called collective transport, a planner charts a trajectory for the whole structure and each robot computes its own contribution. “Every robot becomes an actuator,” Gonzalez-Garcia explains. Simulations showed the framework scaling smoothly to swarms of 64.

“The beauty of this largely decentralized approach is that the computation doesn’t get bogged down as the swarm grows,” says Wang. “Whether you are working with eight boats or 80, the entire fleet coordinates and moves simultaneously. Because the overall assembly time doesn’t significantly increase in principle, the system remains highly scalable.” 

There's a physical payoff to sticking together, too. “Our boats become more stable by joining together, like the ant raft, if you have waves or currents,” Hagemann says.

An origami handshake

The robots connect through a latching mechanism hidden entirely inside each hull. A single servo motor at the center drives an origami-inspired auxetic structure, a geometry that contracts uniformly in all directions at once, pulling permanent magnets on all four sides inward to release, or pushing them outward to grab a neighbor across gaps of 10 to 15 centimeters. The magnets are arranged with alternating polarities, so the boats reliably click into clean square lattices.

The elegant part is what the mechanism doesn’t do: consume (much) power. A 3D-printed gearbox holds the latch in either state with the motor switched off. “It uses energy to latch and de-latch, but in between those states, it doesn’t use any energy,” says Hagemann. For infrastructure that might hold a configuration for hours, that matters. “Because the robots are so small, you can only have a battery so big,” adds Gonzalez-Garcia. “If they use less energy on latching, they can use more on computation, or on actually moving.”

Getting there took some humbling engineering. Four miniature thrusters arranged in an “X” give each robot omnidirectional motion, including turning in place, but they pack large forces relative to the robots’ tiny inertia, which made early prototypes twitchy and prone to aggressive spins at low speeds. The team added stabilizing fins to increase hydrodynamic drag and tuned the controllers to stay robust across robots that, at this scale, are never quite identical. The magnets posed their own problem: They held on so well that de-latching sometimes required the robots to twist themselves free.

From the tank to the canal

Across 10 trials, the system completed its missions without human intervention 90 percent of the time with four robots and 70 percent with eight. When things did go wrong, the architecture showed its resilience: A robot that briefly lost its bearings could rejoin the structure on its own, without bringing the whole swarm to a halt, and robots stuck in formation deadlocks learned to shake themselves free and retry.

Moving from a controlled indoor tank to a real canal or harbor will take more than confidence. “There’s always a relationship between the size of a boat and the magnitude of the disturbance it can handle,” says Gonzalez-Garcia. “These boats are very small, so in very disturbed water, they cannot work.” Scaling up will mean reinforcing the latches, potentially with mechanical interlocking like the full-size Roboat used, and trading the lab’s ultrasonic indoor positioning for GPS or vision-based sensing. Helpfully, the coordination algorithm was designed to be sensor-agnostic: swap the sensors, keep the logic.

The team envisions applications well beyond city canals, from forming temporary platforms for offshore inspection and maintenance to adaptive sensor networks for studying migratory species to reconfigurable docking stations for emergency response in hard-to-reach areas. There is also potential for offshore and remote operations, from temporary construction platforms to environmental monitoring and scientific expeditions.

And the geography is wide open. “Venice, the Netherlands, Belgium, the fjords and lakes of Norway, really any city with a river can take advantage of this,” says Gonzalez-Garcia. “The project uses spaces where water is already important, but it also raises the question: Where else can water be used for something more?” 

“This is an exciting step forward in realizing distributed collective behaviors on water,” says University of Michigan Assistant Professor Steven Ceron, who wasn’t involved in the research. “Assembly, self-reconfiguration, and collective motion are difficult enough in dry environments, but achieving these behaviors in a predominantly distributed fashion on water represents a serious additional challenge, and this team has credibly overcome it. By shifting the computational burden onto the robots themselves, they have built a more resilient system that in the near future could enable robot collectives like this to be deployed in open-water environments for search operations, environmental monitoring, and reconfigurable marine infrastructure.”

Gonzalez-Garcia, Hagemann, and Wang wrote the paper with senior authors Ratti, who is also a professor at Politecnico di Milano, and Rus. Gonzalez-Garcia is additionally affiliated with the MECO Research Team at KU Leuven. The research was supported by a grant from the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Metropolitan Solutions, with additional support from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. The team thanks MIT Sea Grant and Professor Michael Triantafyllou for providing the test tank.

Because of the way they are trained, large language models capture only a slice of human language. They’re trained on the written word, from textbooks to social media posts, and our speech as captured in movies and on television. These models have minimal access to the unscripted conversations we have face to face or voice to voice. This is the vast majority of speech, and a vital component of human culture.

There’s a risk to this. The increased use of large language models means we humans will encounter much more AI-generated text. We humans, in turn, will begin to adopt the linguistic patterns and behaviors of these models. This will affect not just how we communicate with one another, but also how we ...

Tech companies face a fundamental choice with no winning answer for keeping data centers cool.

The office that produces the National Climate Assessment has been reconstituted, after the administration gutted it last year.

The depletion of Lake Mead and Lake Powell is just one result of intense drought that has damaged crops and spread wildfires.

They don't always have access to the same safety net as farmers of traditional commodity crops such as corn and soybeans when extreme weather hits, experts say.

Cumulative monsoon rainfall across India was 38 percent below normal this year through July 1, according to the India Meteorological Department.

The tech firm entered a 10-year agreement with Singapore-based carbon developer Thryve.Earth to purchase credits generated from an agroforestry project on the island of Sulawesi.

In southern China's Guangxi region, severe flooding inundated cities and stranded residents after heavier-than-expected rainfall from a tropical storm.

Google owes its existence to the open web, but today, its technological “innovations” have much to do with locking users into a “walled garden.” The latest of these is “reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification,” an experimental initiative that will let companies block users if they are running independent, "de-googled" versions of Android. These “indie Android” versions are favored by people who want to protect their privacy and their attention by blocking trackers and ads. Worse, this is just the latest in a line of similarly user-hostile measures. 

Long before “agentic AI,” we had the idea that software would act as your agent on the internet. That's why the old-fashioned technical term for a browser is a “user agent.” Your browser acts on your behalf to retrieve information and then show it to you, in the format you choose. It's your agent. 

This is a powerful and profound idea. It is because browsers are our “agents” that we expect them to accept our directives, say, by blocking pop-ups, or by turning off autoplay sound, or by blocking commercial surveillance trackers. 

Your browser does all that because your browser works for you. The reason your browser can work for you is that the web is an open, standardized technology. In theory, anyone who follows the standards published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) can make a browser, and that web browser can connect to any web server. Browsers and servers are interoperable. It's the same force that means you can put anyone's gas in your gas-tank, or anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, or anyone's milk on your cereal. 

But what if manufacturers could dictate those choices to you? What if your light socket refused to use a lightbulb unless it was officially blessed by the socket's manufacturer? What if your dishwasher refused to wash your dishes unless you bought them from one of the manufacturer's “dish partners?” What if your toaster refused to toast “unauthorized bread?” 

It's hard to see how a company could win its market with this strategy. After all, if the dishes are really better than the competition's, you'd buy them voluntarily, without any need for law or technology to force the matter. The only reason to make a dishwasher that refuses a rival's dishes is if the manufacturer's own dishes are ugly, expensive, and/or badly made. 

But once a company owns the market—once they've achieved dominance by buying out their rivals; by bribing potential competitors to stay out of their lane; and by engaging in deceptive conduct to trap key suppliers and customers—they can cement their dominance by blocking interoperability, keeping out rival dishes, milk, gas, lightbulbs, shoelaces and bread, capturing their whole market and squeezing it. 

That's what Google has done, and that's what Google wants to do more of Google's commercial behavior has been so unethical, deceptive and abusive that the company just lost three federal antitrust cases. This thrice-convicted monopolist paid Apple—more than $20b/year— to stay out of the search market: It cheated app vendors, ripping them off with sky-high junk fees and onerous conditions that raised prices while lowering the share of your spending that went to the companies whose products you were paying for. It cheated advertisers, rigging the ad market to gouge businesses on ad prices and underinvesting to fight rampant ad-fraud, sucking hundreds of billions out of the productive economy for overpriced ads that no one saw. 

Google wasn't always this way. The “don't be evil” company owes its very existence to the open web ecosystem. When the company started to index the web in 1998, it was playing on an open field, where any web server could talk to any “user agent,” even one whose user was a startup like Google, that was making a copy of every page on the server. 

For years, Google thrived on the open web, and built open technologies. Android—the mobile operating system that Google bought in 2005 —was presented as an “open” alternative to existing mobile offerings, and as the mobile market collapsed into two companies—Google and Apple—Google always presented Android as the open alternative to Apple's “walled garden.” But there were always ways in which Google's “open” Android wasn't exactly open. The company engaged in illegal “tying” arrangements that forced hardware vendors and carriers to lock out versions of Android that were created by Google's competitors. 

In other words, even though Google offered a mobile platform that was (mostly) technically open, it found other ways to try to choke off the market oxygen for alternative Android versions that tried to capitalize on that technical openness. 

But life finds a way. The existence of an open, modifiable, tinkerer-friendly mobile operating system meant Android hackers could create alternatives to Google's (de facto) walled garden, which thrived in the cracks in that garden wall. Operating systems like CalyxOS, PureOS and Graphene offered a more private, more secure Android experience, one that was largely “de-Googled,” blocking Google's relentless acquisition of your private data. 

And Google's data-hunger is relentless. Android exfiltrates a chunk of your personal and behavioral data every five minutes. The “resting heartbeat” of Android surveillance pulses and pulses, irrespective of whether you're using your device, and the instant you unlock your screen, that heartbeat quickens, sending even more data to the company. All that data has proven irresistible to authoritarian governments. Donald Trump's enforcers have seized on Google data as a vital source of information about the identity of protesters and the location of migrants hunted by ICE. 

So there are plenty of reasons why users would seek out these de-Googled alternatives to Android, finding them in spite of Google's efforts to block access to competing technologies. The worse it got, the better those alternatives looked. 

Perhaps this explains Google's years-long effort to increase the technical barriers to using modified versions of Android, beefing these up to match the commercial restrictions that stand in the way of a de-Googled existence. 

Back in 2023, Google floated the idea of “Web Environment Integrity” (WEI), a set of modifications to web standards that would force your computer to disclose its operating environment to the web servers it connected to, even if you objected to this disclosure. 

WEI was a form of “remote attestation.” That's when your device uses a sub-processor (sometimes called a “Technical Protection Module” or “TPM”) or a walled off part of its main processor (sometimes called a “secure enclave”) to produce a cryptographically signed description of your device and its configuration: which hardware, software, plug-ins, and settings you're running. 

When you connect to a server, it demands that your device send this “attestation” before it handles your request. If your device won't provide this data, or if the server doesn't like (or recognize) your device and its details, it can refuse to deal with you. And because the attestation is prepared by a TPM or a secure enclave that you can't modify or override, you don't get to decide which facts about your device it's allowed to see. 

Practically speaking, this means that remote attestation lets a server refuse to deal with you until you turn off your ad-blocker and your tracker-blocker. It means that the server can discriminate against users who block auto-play sound and video, who block pop-ups, who put the tab in the background when it's playing a mandatory pre-roll ad. 

WEI was especially disturbing in light of Google's plan to kill ad-blockers and privacy blockers through updates to Chrome, an effort that continues to this day. 

These blockers are an important part of the dynamic between web publishers and their users. In the real world, when you get an offer, you can make a counter-offer. That's all an ad-blocker is: a way for users to respond to a server whose opening bid is, “How about you give me all your data and let me take over your computer in exchange for showing you this page?” with “How about 'Nah?'”

We didn't get rid of pop-up ads by making them illegal, or by boycotting advertisers who used them. We got rid of pop-up ads when web users installed pop-up blockers, which made pop-up ads pointless. Take away our ability to block obnoxious digital content and you guarantee that we will be flooded with it. 

These kinds of modifications aren't just used to block ads—they're also key to accessibility. People who have photosensitive epilepsy or suffer from low-contrast vision problems use add-ons to reformat pages so they can safely and legibly access them. 

WEI's creators said they were only trying to put the web on a level playing field with apps, which routinely disclose facts about your device to the companies whose servers you connect to, without asking you, and even if you don’t want them to. Apps are a source of bottomless enshittification, not least because (unlike the web), they enjoy special, dangerous legal protections that make it very legally risky to modify them. WEI wasn't an effort to level the playing field between apps and the web—it was a race to the bottom, an attempt to make the web as enshittification-friendly as apps. 

Public outrage to WEI killed the project, but Google's commitment to augmenting its illegal commercial lockdown efforts with technical lockdowns never ended. Now, Google has rolled out an experimental “reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification” that uses an app, your camera, and your device's TPM or secure enclave to produce an attestation about your Android device. 

This will make it much easier for the apps and other services you interact with to block your device if you run an Android alternative, or if you install a mod that overrides the actions of Google's stock Android. 

This is a terrible idea—it's every bit as bad as WEI was. In an age in which Big Tech is ever-more tied to authoritarian governments, redesigning our devices to tell strangers things we don't want them to know isn't just shortsighted, it's inexcusable. 

 

 

With Boston serving as a host city for the FIFA World Cup, the whole Bay State has soccer fever, including Henry Wang. As a child growing up in Dallas, sports were everything to him. Today, Wang is working on research that could impact some of the biggest sporting events in the world, including future World Cups.

The first such event that made a big impression on Wang involved a different form of football.

“The first ever sports game I remember watching was Super Bowl XLII in 2008,” he says. “I was really drawn to the competition, and the way it was presented. It’s this whole big spectacle.”

Wang, a fourth-year PhD candidate in social and engineering systems within MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, studies how data and technology can improve the way sports are played, analyzed, and refereed. Working in the MIT Sports Lab in collaboration with FIFA, he develops systems with the goals of helping referees make faster, more accurate decisions and expanding access to performance analytics across the globe.

Now in the final stretch of his doctoral program and preparing to defend his thesis at the end of this year, Wang has spent nearly a decade at MIT. After earning his undergraduate degree in 2023 with a double major in computer science, economics, and data science and business analytics, he transitioned directly into graduate school. Sports have been a constant throughout that journey.

A competitive swimmer since age 7, Wang says athletics shaped both his identity and his community.

“Athletic competition was always a really big part of my life,” he says. “It’s kind of how I made a lot of friends, around the pool, and now at school, or in the lab and office.”

Ironically, swimming entered his life not because of a burning passion for sports, but because of a doctor’s recommendation.

“I don’t really come from a huge sports family,” Wang says. When he was diagnosed with asthma as a child, his pediatrician suggested swimming to strengthen his lungs. 

His parents, both scientific researchers in radiology and medical physics, supported his growing passion. That support eventually led Wang to MIT, where he served as captain of the men’s swimming and diving team. In tandem, he continued pursuing research opportunities that merged his technical interests with his love of sports.

His first sports analytics project began with a cold email.

As a first-year student, Wang reached out to MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Lecturer Ben Shields to see if he could assist Shields with his research on sports strategy and analytics. Shields later connected Wang with a coach he knew who was interested in analyzing the two-point conversion strategy for MIT’s football team.

The project revealed that MIT could benefit from attempting two-point conversions much more frequently. The experience opened the door to the MIT Sports Lab, where Wang found mentors including Lecturer Christina Chase, Professor Anette “Peko” Hosoi, and former research scientist Ferran Vidal-Codina.

His research now focuses on two central questions: How can technology democratize access to sports data, and how can it help officials make better decisions?

Wang works with FIFA Innovation, the group within soccer’s global governing body that leads the development and testing of match technology used on the field. His research explores automatic event detection and officiating technologies designed to assist referees without disrupting the fan experience.

In one recent project, Wang helped develop a semi-automated system that uses players’ skeletal data and ball tracking to determine which player last touched the ball before it goes out of bounds. The research prototype aims to assist goal kick and corner kick decisions while minimizing interruptions to the game.

For Wang, success means that referees find the tools helpful, and fans barely notice it at all.

“A ball goes out of bounds, and we can immediately tell the referee it’s a corner kick,” he says. “The fans don’t even notice it.”

Alongside his doctoral research, Wang has gained experience across professional sports, spending two years with the Boston Red Sox’s baseball sciences team before accepting a role as a senior data scientist in basketball research and development with the Philadelphia 76ers, where he will continue working after graduation.

Despite his demanding schedule, he says the work rarely feels like work.

“I enjoy it so much,” he says. “I really don’t know what else I would be doing.”

Outside the lab, sports continue to anchor his life. Swimming at MIT provided structure and community during challenging moments.

“MIT can be pretty hard,” Wang says. “Having a consistent 5-to-7 o’clock swim practice every day definitely helped a lot.”

For Wang, sports have always been more than competition. They have shaped his friendships, inspired his research, and guided his career trajectory.

Now, as he works to build technologies that could change how billions of people experience the world’s most popular games, he is still driven by the same sense of love he felt watching sports as a child.

“I want every kid who plays sports to have the best experience possible, because I know how meaningful that can be toward someone’s life journey,” Wang says.

Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. ALPRs are promoted as tools for keeping communities safe by finding missing persons and locating stolen vehicles, but this case showed how ALPRS can be weaponized to investigate people’s private healthcare decisions. And these aren’t the only tools in the surveillance arsenal: others include location tracking tools like Locate X, which can show a person’s visit to an abortion clinic, or search histories which might be used as evidence of a person’s interest in obtaining abortion pills. Taken together, these tools create a dangerous surveillance pipeline that threatens everyone’s health privacy. 

Too often, though, the public is unaware of the threat, and one nonprofit is working to change that. Following EFF and 404 Media’s report on Texas’s use of Flock cameras, eye-catching billboards popped up in Houston, warning drivers that if they’re pregnant, the state of Texas could be tracking them.  

Photo provided by Mayday Health

These billboards came from Mayday Health, a nonprofit dedicated to sharing information about abortion pills, birth control, and gender-affirming care. We spoke with Leo Raisner, Executive Director of Mayday Health, about the billboards to learn more about the campaign and organization and to discuss how surveillance affects reproductive freedom. 

***

THOMAS: Why did Mayday Health start this campaign in Texas?  

RAISNER: Well, we read the incredible reporting coming from EFF about Texas's surveillance. We want Texans to know their rights, to know their options, and to know that there are organizations and people who have their back. So we decided to put up a few billboards around the Houston area to remind people that they still have options.  

Digital advertising in the space, as I know you're well aware of, faces enormous platform restrictions from Meta and Google, whereas billboards reach people in the physical world without algorithmic gatekeeping and without requiring anyone to search for information. So at the very least, if a driver's passing by the billboard, we’re spreading information that they should be careful that they might be surveilled, and also there are different options. There's a website where they can come learn more about those options. 

THOMAS: And how have the billboards been received so far? Have you heard anything from folks in the Houston area yet?    

RAISNER: Yeah, we've heard some messages of support on social media DMs. We're just thrilled about how many drivers these messages are going to reach. They'll be up for 4 weeks, and are expected to hit over 1,000,000 drivers during that 4-week campaign period.    

THOMAS: Are there other ways that Mayday Health has seen surveillance systems impact people seeking healthcare?  

RAISNER: You know, we go all over the country and talk to folks who are seeking reproductive healthcare options in states where clinics are banned, and we direct folks to our website where they can learn more about abortion pills. We make privacy very central to how we operate. Privacy is not just an afterthought for us. When people arrive at our website, we direct them to the Digital Defense Fund, which offers people privacy and security resources as they're navigating reproductive healthcare in states where they might be being surveilled. We don't collect cookies, we don't collect identifying information from visitors to our site. We want people to know their options, and we don't have any interest in knowing who they are.  

THOMAS: Why do you think the work of the digital rights movement is so important to the work of the reproductive health rights and justice movement?  

RAISNER: I mean, those two movements are inextricably linked. The anti-abortion movement is using every tool in their toolbox to prevent people from getting the healthcare access they need, whether that's surveilling people online or closing down brick-and-mortar clinics, but we encourage people to visit Mayday Health and learn that they still have options no matter where they live.  

THOMAS: Is there anything else that you would like the readers of our blog to know about Mayday Health?    

RAISNER: I'd love for people to know that abortion pills are FDA approved. They're safe, they're effective, and they're available through the mail. 

*** 

EFF has said it time and time again – surveillance and reproductive freedom cannot coexist. Whether the tracking occurs over the internet or through license plate reader systems with over 83,000 cameras, it is an invasion of privacy. Protecting our digital privacy is more critical now than ever. Help EFF fight back against this digital dragnet and protect reproductive freedom for all by making a donation. 

Ana Miljački looks back at her nearly 20 years teaching in the MIT Department of Architecture and says that one thing was perfectly clear to her on arrival: the caliber of her students.

“I appreciated immediately that these were students comfortable being at the edge of the discipline, eager to push and transform it,” says Miljački. “They didn’t necessarily seek the spotlight, but understood the value of participating in important transformations.”

Transformations are forthcoming for Miljački, the Francis White Davis Professor of Architecture: She became head of the Department of Architecture for the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) on July 1, and the architecture department itself will move to the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse (the Met) in late summer. 

Miljački takes the reins from Nicholas de Monchaux, the Weber-Shaughness Professor, who helped significantly advance the department’s commitment to studio-based research and impact, particularly around climate resilience and sustainability. He also helped catalyze and deepen the ongoing exchange between MIT and Tuskegee University rooted in the legacy of Robert R. Taylor.

In announcing Miljački’s new role, SA+P Dean Hashim Sarkis noted that Miljački has directed two of the department’s specialized graduate degree programs: the Master of Science in Architecture Studies program (2023-25) and the Master of Architecture program (2016-20), and played a central role in shaping the department’s academic and pedagogical culture.

“Ana has led many of the department’s academic programs with dedication, advancing experimentation in pedagogy, encouraging critical thinking, and linking research and learning in a manner that is distinctly MIT,” says Sarkis. “She teaches history, theory, and design, and her work is internationally recognized for its contributions to architectural discourse, pedagogy, and institutional critique. I look forward to seeing her bring this vision to the department as a whole.”

Building a career at MIT

Having taught at Columbia University, City College in New York, and Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Miljački quickly recognized the value of being at MIT as a young faculty member. She found generous support for her research — humanities-driven historical scholarship, criticism, and her curatorial work. 

“When junior faculty are supported to produce their own work, they also support students who are helping them,” says Miljački. “That is not something I had encountered until coming to MIT. The way the Institute has historically treated young faculty is unmatched by any other institution.”

She launched a distinguished career as a scholar and curator examining the organization, politics, authorship, and cultural production of architecture from Cold War-era Eastern Europe to contemporary architectural practice. In 2014, she co-curated the U.S. Pavillion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, which featured the exhibition “OfficeUS.” 

In 2018, Miljački founded the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT, with a goal to cultivate tools necessary for critical practice, including the capacity to grapple with complexity, nuance, and politics of architectural production. Intervening in the world but operating from within the protections of academic life, its broadcasting and curatorial work remains insulated from special interests and its members retain the freedom to speak critically. The lab has made important contributions to São Paulo and Seoul biennials, as well as to the Great Repair exhibition in Berlin. It mounted a solo exhibition and an accompanying discussion at the Museum of Yugoslavia in Serbia in 2025. 

Last year, Miljački co-curated, with Nicholas de Monchaux and Calvin Zhong, work from the Department of Architecture that examines diverse responses to the global climate crisis. The exhibition — The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology — was one of the collateral events of the Venice Biennale’s 19th International Architecture Exhibition. The vibrant presentation of MIT Architecture’s work in progress highlighted both the direct and circuitous narratives that link all of the department’s research and production to our contemporary climate crisis and possible responses to it.

Criticism as a core element of education

“I Would Prefer Not To” is Miljački’s podcast, conceived and produced by the Critical Broadcasting Lab in collaboration with the Architectural League of New York, and currently in its fifth season. The series sheds light on an unexamined part of architecture: why an architect turns down a commission. For Miljački, the podcast and all of her work as a critic and curator are forms of exhibition-making. Last year, her podcast won the Architecture in Media Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Students, says Miljački, are the reason she gets up every day. Even with her new responsibilities as department head, she will continue to teach class 4.210 (Positions: Cultivating Critical Practice), the History, Theory, and Criticism course required for incoming MArch students. The course, which transforms every year to include the most urgent topics of the moment, explores the recent past of architectural discourse, enables students to locate their own concerns, and is oriented toward the future. She sees the course as less of an opportunity to deliver a fixed body of knowledge and more as a process of shaping how students engage with ideas and one another. The class “intellectually socializes” incoming students, creating a shared framework that allows them to become meaningful interlocutors for each other over time. 

“We have to think critically about this present that we occupy: how we got here. What it means to practice architecture today. How might we do it differently?” she says. “Sometimes we forget that we make the reality. It matters to what end we do it, how we understand the context in which we operate, and how it has already shaped us.”

A 19th century warehouse for the 21st century

Adding a new dimension to her tenure as department head is that, in August, the Department of Architecture moves into its new home — the Met (W41). Faculty and students have for generations worked on Building 7’s fourth floor, which skirts around the building’s dome. The fragmented space is not optimal for building community and spontaneously sharing work designed in the various studios. The Met will provide a unified home for MIT Architecture — and for most of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning — where the disciplines and their research on the built environment may overlap.

“I think it’s a really exciting moment to transform physically where we are and how we relate to one another,” says Miljački. “I have brilliant colleagues in the department, but we’ve been spending too much time circling around the dome looking for each other. The new building provides a place for us to gather, to see each other’s work, and thus truly conduct our research and teaching in each other’s presence.

“Also, importantly, we will be in a building that is a great example of adaptive reuse by the architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Reusing, recycling, and maintaining the existing architectural stock is what we need to figure out how to do well in the field of architecture right now. To be able to didactically read this building every day will be very important. Our move will literally help guide us in teaching and learning while it also signals both internally and externally our commitment to this necessary shift in the discipline.”

Histories and timelines

Miljački sees the project of an architectural school as a collective cultivation of utopia. Over the years and in various leadership roles at MIT, she has forged how she thinks of leadership itself. 

“I now think that leadership importantly involves narrating stories in which we can all recognize ourselves,” she says. “For me, it may be primarily about fostering a sense of collective purpose in the face of an unacceptable status quo.

“Recently, I’ve been describing the school as a series of material, human, and other timelines, all unfolding at different speeds and tangling together to consequentially meet and materialize in the aging walls that surround us, in our care and labor protocols, in our pedagogies, collective and individual political investments, joys and heartaches. Cycles of global catastrophes and major weather events that arrive in the form of black and red clouds we all breathe in, connect us back to more- and less-recent forms of extraction here and elsewhere on the planet. Architectural fashions, and sometimes technical expertise, travel the same channels by which political action spreads. And importantly, learning and enabling of all sorts of action happen in many more ways that are not codified than those that are. Every school is its own version of this mesh of timelines, people, and things. I am humbled daily to take part in the MIT version of it, and to now take the helm on behalf of this collective.”

Some people find it useful to talk through their problems — but language isn’t necessary for logical reasoning, cognitive neuroscientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research say. 

In research published this week in the journal PNAS, researchers led by MIT associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences Evelina Fedorenko have shown that people can perform well on tasks that require logical reasoning even if their language abilities are severely impaired. What’s more, brain imaging shows that language-processing parts of the brain are not called on for logical reasoning.

Philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists have debated the relationship between language and thought for thousands of years, with many arguing that we use language to think. There are good reasons to suspect a close relationship between logic and language, acknowledges Hope Kean, a postdoc and former K. Lisa Yang Integrative Computational Neuroscience (ICoN) Center graduate fellow in Fedorenko’s lab. “Abstract thinking has properties that look a lot like language,” Kean says, pointing to structural similarities. “You can decompose a thought into subcomponents, like little atoms of logical propositions, and you can combine them in a hierarchical manner to make more complex structured rules, very akin to language.”

But she and Fedorenko, who is also a McGovern Institute investigator, suspected that while we largely depend on language to communicate about logical reasoning — from presenting a problem to explaining how we have arrived at conclusions — the brain might use a separate system for the reasoning itself. 

“There are aspects of thinking that seem to go beyond some of the limitations of language,” Kean explains. Logical reasoning demands precision that language often lacks. And language is linear, progressing one word at a time, whereas evaluating available information to reach logical conclusions can require thinking in less linear ways.

Logical reasoning

These observations left Kean curious about how the brain handles logical reasoning. It’s a particularly difficult question to answer scientifically, because it’s hard to take language out of the equation when working with human study participants. But Fedorenko’s team did just that by collaborating with Rosemary Varley, a neuroscientist at University College London who studies acquired language disorders, and her team.

Together, the scientists worked with two patients who had experienced stroke that damaged language-processing parts of their brains, leaving them with severe impairments in both understanding and producing language. They designed language-free logic games in which participants were asked to infer relationships between sets of numbers. Given two lists, they had to figure out the hidden rule that turned one list into the other, such as reversing the digits or removing numbers above a certain value. Once they thought they’d discovered the rule, they had to apply it to new examples. In a second game, participants were presented a set of geometric patterns and asked to identify another pattern to complete the matrix.

As participants solved increasingly difficult puzzles, it became clear that people don’t need language for this kind of reasoning. Patients with language impairments solved the problems as well as a control group, and were even able to communicate the rules they inferred using gestures, or with a sketch. “It really upends a theory that says that symbolic rule induction is not possible without linguistic capacities,” says Kean.

Alongside this part of the study, Kean and colleagues also used functional brain imaging to study what happens in the brains of healthy adults when they are engaged in logical reasoning. Participants in this part of the study visited MIT for a series of MRI scans, which captured images of their brain activity during an array of tasks. In addition to completing different kinds of logic games inside the scanner, participants were asked to engage in tasks designed to map the language-processing parts of their brain. Another set of tasks was used to map each person’s so-called “multiple demand network” — a distributed brain system that supports complex problem-solving.

These neurotypical participants completed logic games similar to those used with the language-impaired patients. They were also presented with problems that required syllogistic reasoning, using “if-then” statements such as “if the ball is red, then it is big. The ball is red. Is the ball big?” The team varied the difficulty of the logic puzzles so they could see which brain areas became more active when the need for logical reasoning intensified. Likewise, they looked for changes in brain activity when participants had to infer a hidden rule, versus simply applying a rule they’d been given.

Here, too, a separation between language and logic was clear: The MRI scans showed the brain’s language system is not engaged for either inductive reasoning (when participants identified hidden rules) or deductive reasoning (when they assessed the validity of syllogistic conclusions). Surprisingly, the multiple demand network, which many scientists had suspected was important for logical reasoning, was engaged during inductive reasoning, but didn’t seem to get involved in deductive reasoning — a finding Kean is building on in her ongoing work.

For Fedorenko and Kean, the findings are strong support for a separation of logic and language in the brain. They add to previous findings from Fedorenko’s lab showing that other types of thinking, such as object categorization and social reasoning, also do not rely on language.

Acquired language impairments and AI

The researchers say these findings have important implications for how we think about acquired language impairments, or aphasia. Specialists who work with people with aphasia have long recognized that loss of language does not mean loss of intelligence. People with aphasia can continue to enjoy playing chess, solving sudoku puzzles, or being in charge of the family’s finances. But it is common for others to confuse their communicative difficulties with thinking difficulties.

“This research adds to a growing body of work establishing that even severely aphasic individuals can preserve their ability for abstract logical thought — a defining feature of our species,” Fedorenko says. “We should continue to educate the public that linguistic difficulties — in aphasia, but also in those with developmental language conditions, such as stuttering, or those who do not speak English natively — are not indicative of how smart or capable someone is.”

There could be implications for artificial intelligence, too. Large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are trained entirely on text and use text as their output — yet they convincingly simulate some kinds of human reasoning. Exploring the differences between these models and the human brain, where language and abstract logical thought are distinct, might offer useful insights to inform future models, Kean says.

When it comes to understanding how the human brain reasons, Kean calls this a new frontier in the geography of thought — and she says it’s one she is eager to explore.