Eight MIT researchers are among the 128 new members and 22 international members recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for 2025. Thirteen additional MIT alumni were also elected as new members.

One of the highest professional distinctions for engineers, membership in the NAE is given to individuals who have made outstanding contributions to “engineering research, practice, or education, including, where appropriate, significant contributions to the engineering literature” and to “the pioneering of new and developing fields of technology, making major advancements in traditional fields of engineering, or developing/implementing innovative approaches to engineering education.”

The eight MIT electees this year include:

Martin Zdenek Bazant, the E.G. Roos (1944) Chair Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering, was honored for contributions to nonlinear electrochemical and electrokinetic phenomena, including induced charge electroosmosis, shock electrodialysis, capacitive desalination, and energy storage applications.

Moshe E. Ben-Akiva SM ’71, PhD ’73, the Edmund K. Turner Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, was honored for advances in transportation and infrastructure systems modeling and demand analysis. 

Charles L. Cooney SM ’67, PhD ’70, professor emeritus of the Department of Chemical Engineering, was honored for contributions to biochemical and pharmaceutical manufacturing that propelled the establishment and growth of the global biotechnology industry. 

Yoel Fink PhD ’00, a professor in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), was honored for the design and production of structured photonic fibers, enabling surgeries and the invention of fabrics that sense and communicate. 

Tomás Lozano-Pérez ’73, SM ’77, PhD ’80, the School of Engineering Professor of Teaching Excellence in the Department of EECS and a principal investigator in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, was honored for contributions to robot motion planning and molecular design. 

Kristala L. Prather ’94, the Arthur Dehon Little Professor and head of the Department of Chemical Engineering, was honored for the development of innovative approaches to regulate metabolic flux in engineered microorganisms with applications to specialty chemicals production. 

Eric Swanson SM ’84, research affiliate at the Research Laboratory of Electronics and mentor for the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, was honored for contributions and entrepreneurship in biomedical imaging and optical communications. 

Evelyn N. Wang ’00, MIT's vice president for climate and Ford Professor of Engineering in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, was honored for contributions to clean energy, water technology, and nanostructure-based phase change heat transfer, and for service to the nation.

“I am thrilled that eight MIT researchers, along with many others from our broader MIT community, have been elected to the National Academy of Engineering this year,” says Anantha P. Chandrakasan, dean of the School of Engineering, MIT’s chief innovation and strategy officer, and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. “This is a well-deserved recognition of their outstanding contributions to the field of engineering, and I extend my heartfelt congratulations to them all.”

Thirteen additional alumni were elected to the National Academy of Engineering this year. They are: Gregg T. Beckham SM ’04, PhD ’08; Douglas C. Cameron PhD ’87; Long-Qing Chen PhD ’90; Jennifer R. Cochran PhD ’01; Christopher Richard Doerr ’89, ’90, SM ’90, PhD ’95;  Justin Hanes PhD ’96; Elizabeth Ann Holm SM ’89; Denise C. Johnson SM ’97; Wayne R. Johnson ’68, SM ’68, ScD ’70; Concetta LaMarca '81; Maja J. Matarić SM ’90, PhD ’94; David V. Schaffer PhD ’98; and Lixia Zhang PhD ’89.

Campaign Aims to Ensure that People Can Access Reproductive Rights Information Through Social Media

SAN FRANCISCO—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Repro Uncensored coalition on Wednesday launched the #StopCensoringAbortion campaign to ensure that people who need reproductive health and abortion information can find and share it. 

Censorship of this information by social media companies appears to be increasing, so the campaign will collect information to track such incidents.  

“This censorship is alarming, and we’re seeing it take place across popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, where abortion-related content is often flagged or removed under vague ‘community guideline’ violations, despite the content being legal and factual,” said EFF Legislative Activist Rindala Alajaji. “This lack of transparency leaves organizations, influencers, and individuals in the dark, fueling a wider culture of online censorship that jeopardizes public access to vital healthcare information.” 

Initially, the campaign is collecting stories from people and organizations who have faced censorship on these platforms. This will help the public and the companies understand how often this is happening, who is affected, and with what consequences. EFF will use that information to demand that censorship stop and that the companies create greater transparency in their practices, which are often obscure and difficult to track. Tech companies must not silence critical conversations about reproductive rights.  

"We are not simply raising awareness—we are taking action to hold tech companies accountable for their role in censoring free speech around reproductive health. The stories we collect will be instrumental in presenting to the platforms the breadth of this problem, drawing a picture of its impact, and demanding more transparent policies,” Alajaji said. “If you or someone you know has had abortion-related content taken down or shadowbanned by a social media platform, your voice is crucial in this fight. By sharing your experience, you’ll be contributing to a larger movement to end censorship and demand that social media platforms stop restricting access to critical reproductive health information.” 

In addition to a portal for reporting incidents of online abortion censorship, the campaign’s landing page provides links to reporting and research on this censorship. Additionally, the page includes digital privacy and security guides for abortion activists, medical personnel, and patients. 

With reproductive rights under fire across the U.S. and around the world, access to accurate abortion information has never been more critical. Reproductive health and rights organizations have turned to online platforms to share essential, sometimes life-saving guidance and resources. Whether they provide the latest updates on abortion laws, where to find clinics, or education about abortion medication, online spaces have become a lifeline particularly for those in regions where reproductive freedoms are under siege.  

But a troubling trend is making it harder for people to access vital abortion information: Social media platforms are censoring or removing abortion-related content, often without a clear justification or policy basis. A recent example surfaced last month when Instagram posts by Aid Access, an online abortion services provider, were either blurred out or prevented from loading entirely. This sparked concerns in the press about how recent content moderation policy changes by Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, would affect availability of reproductive health information. 

For the campaign landing page: https://www.eff.org/pages/stop-censoring-abortion  

Contact:  RindalaAlajajiLegislative Activistrin@eff.org

With reproductive rights under fire across the U.S. and globally, access to accurate abortion information has never been more critical—especially online. 

That’s why reproductive health and rights organizations have turned to online platforms to share essential, sometimes life-saving, guidance and resources. Whether it's how to access information about abortion medication, where to find clinics, or the latest updates on abortion laws, these online spaces have become a lifeline, particularly for those in regions where reproductive freedoms are under siege. But there's a troubling trend making it harder for people to access vital abortion information: social media platforms are increasingly censoring or removing abortion-related content—often without clear justification or policy basis. 

A recent example surfaced last month when a number of Instagram posts by Aid Access, an online abortion services provider, were either blurred out or unable to load entirely. This sparked concerns in the press about how recent content moderation policy changes by Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, would affect the availability of reproductive health information. The result? Crucial healthcare information gets erased, free expression is stifled, and people are left in the dark about their rights and healthcare options.

This censorship is alarming, and we’re seeing it take place across popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, where abortion-related content is often flagged or removed under vague "community guideline" violations, despite the content being perfectly legal and factual. This lack of transparency leaves organizations, influencers, and individuals in the dark, fueling a wider culture of online censorship that jeopardizes public access to vital healthcare information.

#StopCensoringAbortion: An EFF and Repro Uncensored Collaboration

In response to this growing issue, EFF has partnered with the Repro Uncensored coalition to call attention to instances of reproductive health and abortion content being removed or suppressed by social media platforms. 

We are collecting stories from individuals and organizations who have faced censorship on these platforms to expose the true scale of the issue. Our goal is to demand greater transparency in tech companies' moderation practices and ensure that their actions do not silence critical conversations about reproductive rights. 

We are not simply raising awareness—we are taking action to hold tech companies accountable for their role in censoring free speech around reproductive health. 

Share Your Story

If you or someone you know has had abortion-related content taken down or shadowbanned by a social media platform, your voice is crucial in this fight. By sharing your experience, you’ll be contributing to a larger movement to end censorship and demand that social media platforms stop restricting access to critical reproductive health information. These stories will be instrumental in presenting to the platforms the breadth of this problem, drawing a picture of its impact, and demanding more transparent policies.

If you’re able to spend five minutes reporting your experience, EFF and the rest of the Repro Uncensored coalition will do our best to help: https://www.reprouncensored.org/report-incident 

Even If You Haven’t Been Censored, You Can Still Help!

Not everyone has experienced censorship, but that doesn’t mean you can’t contribute to the cause. You can still help by spreading the word. 

Share the #StopCensoringAbortion campaign on your social media platforms and visit our landing page for more resources and actions. 

Follow Repro Uncensored and EFF on Instagram, and sign up for email updates about this campaign. The more people who are involved, the stronger our collective voice will be.

Together, we can amplify the message that information about reproductive health and rights should never be silenced—whether in the real world or online.

Cynthia Barnhart SM ’86, PhD ’88 will step down as MIT’s provost, effective July 1, President Sally Kornbluth announced today. Barnhart, who served as MIT’s chancellor for more than seven years before becoming provost in 2022, will return to the faculty following a sabbatical.

Barnhart led a variety of efforts to enhance academics and research at the Institute during her tenure as provost, which bridged a transition between two MIT presidents. She drew from deep-rooted experience in the MIT community, first as a graduate student and then as a faculty member for more than 30 years, serving in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and in the MIT Sloan School of Management, with affiliations in the Operations Research Center and the Center for Transportation and Logistics.

Barnhart is only the second MIT administrator, following Julius Stratton, to serve as both chancellor and provost. She is also the first woman to serve in each of these roles.

“It has been a privilege to serve and to support our community’s efforts to lead in education, research, and impact in the world,” Barnhart says.

MIT’s provost is the Institute’s chief academic and budget officer, responsible for leading efforts to establish academic priorities, managing financial planning and research support, and overseeing MIT’s international engagements. The provost works closely with the president, school and college deans, vice provosts, executive vice president and treasurer (EVPT), faculty officers, and many other leaders to recruit and retain the best talent and then, as Barnhart puts it, “create the conditions for them to thrive and do their best work at MIT.”

“Cindy has been a wonderful partner in thinking and doing, and I will be forever grateful for having been able to tap her knowledge of the Institute’s people, culture, practices and institutional systems,” Kornbluth wrote in an email to the MIT community.

The next chapter

L. Rafael Reif named Barnhart provost as he was stepping down as MIT’s 17th president, citing her “values, skills, vision, and collaborative spirit.” Her appointment provided the Institute with continuity and helped to sustain momentum during the transition and the first years of Kornbluth’s presidency.

“A good provost is constantly solving problems over the widest range of scales, thinking at the level of systems and structures but also digging deep when needed. Cindy has brought discipline, commitment, and heart to this role, and it's been a privilege to work with her,” says Faculty Chair Mary Fuller.

As she proceeds with a long-planned sabbatical, Barnhart will focus on a project she has been working on as provost. The effort centers around creating a flexible, affordable educational experience and curriculum in order to dramatically increase the size of the nation’s science- and technology-based workforce.

Creating conditions for faculty to thrive

As chief budget officer, Barnhart worked closely with EVPT Glen Shor, Vice President for Finance Katie Hammer, and colleagues across the Institute to provide essential resources for the Institute’s education and research enterprises. She cites as points of pride implementing new central support for MIT’s under-recovery system, closing the NASA and U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) fellowship tuition and stipend shortfalls, and expanding the number of Office of the Provost professorship chairs to 230, an increase of more than 20 percent.

“The review of the Institute’s budget process that we launched last year is critical to the Institute’s effective response to emerging financial constraints,” Barnhart says.

“It’s about providing our community with access to the tools needed to develop strategic, creative ways to deploy our resources so that, even in the face of budget challenges, we can help people do what they came here to do — discover, invent, innovate, and problem solve, all in service to the nation and the world,” she says.

Responding to calls for more faculty involvement in searches to identify faculty leaders in the Office of the Provost, Barnhart established best practices for search advisory committees. Over the course of her tenure, these faculty-led groups assisted with the appointments of Vice Provost for Faculty Paula Hammond, Vice Provost for Open Learning Dimitris Bertsimas, Vice Provost for International Activities Duane Boning, MIT Sloan School of Management Dean Rick Locke, and Interim CEO and Director of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Bruce Tidor. In addition, Barnhart convened a search committee to identify a new leader to steward MIT’s research enterprise, which informed President Kornbluth’s appointment of Vice President for Research Ian A. Waitz last year.

“MIT’s next provost is going to be working with an exceptional team,” says Barnhart. “The Provost’s Office is positioned to ensure the faculty have what they need to make big impacts in research and education.”

Barnhart took several steps to provide her leadership team and faculty more broadly with professional development and career advancement opportunities. She standardized appointment and reappointment terms, created 360-degree feedback mechanisms, and formalized reappointment review processes for deans and vice provosts. In partnership with Hammond, new programs were launched on establishing positive department climates, generating impactful research funding proposals, and fostering effective graduate student mentoring.

“Cindy has always cared greatly about the faculty experience, and this deep regard is evident in all that she has done,” Hammond says. “She has sought to understand how we might better build a supportive environment that fosters faculty success and has invested in meaningful programs and policies that help to address faculty needs while developing tools for faculty to accomplish their professional and leadership goals.”

Barnhart and Hammond also partnered with Fuller, the MIT Institutional Research team, and other colleagues to assess MIT’s progress on addressing the findings of two landmark reports: the 1999 Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT and the 2010 Report on the Initiative for Faculty Race and Diversity.

Barnhart shared the group’s analysis and corresponding response plan with the entire faculty. In her message, Barnhart highlighted how “the original reports’ power sprang from the rigorous analysis the authors conducted and from how openly our community reflected on the problems they identified. For MIT to foster the diverse breadth of faculty excellence that is critical to our mission, we need that same collective embrace of data and transparency, dialogue and action again.”

Advancing 21st-century education and research

Barnhart is committed to making MIT’s education accessible and affordable to a much broader set of learners. With Bertsimas, Barnhart launched the next phase of MIT Open Learning, which involves ambitious plans to extend MIT’s commitment to providing global access to the Institute’s brand of education.

“With her good judgement, open mindedness, passion for quality education in the world, and love and deep knowledge of MIT, Cindy has been a great partner in reshaping the strategy for open learning,” Bertsimas says. “I look forward to continuing our partnership in the years to come.”

As computing has become increasingly integral to many disciplines, the creation of interdisciplinary computing courses through The Common Ground, degrees that blend computing with another field, and interdisciplinary computing faculty hires have expanded the forefront of MIT education and research. With Barnhart as a strong champion, the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing has been at the center of these efforts.

“Embracing the college’s efforts to broaden and deepen MIT’s world-leading strengths in interdisciplinary education and research is, simply put, in Barnhart’s DNA,” says Dan Huttenlocher, dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing.

By design, the Institute’s strategic initiatives in climate, humanities, and life sciences also lean into this interdisciplinary approach. Barnhart worked alongside Kornbluth, Chief Innovation and Strategy Officer Anantha Chandrakasan, and many other faculty on the development of these efforts throughout her tenure.

“It has been a privilege working with Provost Barnhart and President Kornbluth to advance the Institute’s wide range of strategic initiatives,” says Chandrakasan. “With a sense of urgency that these initiatives demand, Provost Barnhart was instrumental in defining the vision for these missions, promoting broad engagement from the MIT community and beyond while paving critical pathways for seed funding and fundraising. It would have been impossible to launch these initiatives without her inspiring ideas, creative solutions, and incredible support.”

A systems thinker

After earning her PhD in transportation systems in 1988 at MIT, Barnhart joined the operations research faculty at the School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech. She returned to MIT four years later in 1992 and has been at the Institute ever since. Her research, which she has continued throughout her time in leadership roles, focuses on the development of optimization models and methods for designing, planning, and operating transportation systems.

“I’m a systems thinker, an optimizer, and a problem solver,” Barnhart says. “That is one of the reasons I have enjoyed serving as provost, a role in which there certainly is no shortage of opportunity to apply my decision-making and problem-solving mindset.”

Barnhart became associate dean of the MIT School of Engineering in 2007 and served as acting dean in 2010-2011. As chancellor, she was responsible for “all things students” at MIT, including student life, undergraduate admissions, graduate student support, the first-year educational experience, and more. She also participated in strategic planning, faculty appointments, resource development, and campus planning as chancellor.

Barnhart has been an undergraduate adviser and has supervised graduate and undergraduate theses of students across the Institute, including in the departments of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Aeronautics and Astronautics, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science; in the Engineering Systems Division; in the MIT Sloan School of Management; in the Operations Research Center; and in the Center for Transportation and Logistics. She has taught subjects jointly listed in these units on optimization and operations research, with applications to transportation operations, planning, and control.

Kornbluth will work with a group of faculty members drawn from each school and the college to help her in selecting the next provost. 

This isn’t new, but it’s increasingly popular:

The technique is known as device code phishing. It exploits “device code flow,” a form of authentication formalized in the industry-wide OAuth standard. Authentication through device code flow is designed for logging printers, smart TVs, and similar devices into accounts. These devices typically don’t support browsers, making it difficult to sign in using more standard forms of authentication, such as entering user names, passwords, and two-factor mechanisms.

Rather than authenticating the user directly, the input-constrained device displays an alphabetic or alphanumeric device code along with a link associated with the user account. The user opens the link on a computer or other device that’s easier to sign in with and enters the code. The remote server then sends a token to the input-constrained device that logs it into the account...

A new initiative will offer faculty in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) the opportunity to participate in a semester-long internal fellows program.

The SHASS Faculty Fellows program, administered by the MIT Human Insight Collaborative (MITHIC), will provide faculty with time to focus on their research, writing, or artistic production, and to receive collegial support for the same; to foster social and intellectual community within SHASS, including between faculty and students beyond the classroom; and provide informal opportunities to develop intergenerational professional mentorships.

“SHASS faculty have been eager for a supportive, vibrant internal community for the nearly 35 years I’ve been at MIT,” says Anne McCants, the Ann F. Friedlaender Professor of History, and Faculty Fellows Program committee chair. “By providing participants with UROPs [Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program projects] and other opportunities to interact with students, we’re demonstrating our commitment to fostering an environment in which faculty can recharge and sustain the high-quality teaching and service our community has come to expect and appreciate.”

The creation of the program was one of the recommendations included in a May 2024 SHASS Programming Initiative Report, an effort led by Keeril Makan, SHASS associate dean for strategic initiatives, and the Michael (1949) and Sonja Koerner Music Composition Professor.

The inaugural group of fellows for Spring 2026 includes:

• Héctor Beltrán, Class of 1957 Career Development Associate Professor, MIT Anthropology
• Volha Charnysh, Ford Career Development Associate Professor, Department of Political Science
• Kevin Dorst, assistant professor, MIT Philosophy
• Richard Nielsen, associate professor, Department of Political Science
• Emily Richmond Pollock, associate professor, MIT Music
• Jessica Ruffin, assistant professor, MIT Literature
• Robin Scheffler, associate professor, Program in Science, Technology, and Society

Tenure-line faculty are eligible to apply, with a maximum of 12 members selected per year, or roughly six participants per term.

Selected faculty will spend a semester outside the classroom while still holding time for sustained interaction with a small cohort of colleagues. Fellows can work with the dedicated students in UROP to advance their research projects while investing in a unique, cross-disciplinary set of conversations.

“I was honored to help design the Fellows Program and to serve on the review committee,” says Arthur Bahr, a professor in the Literature Section and a member of the Faculty Fellows Program Selection Committee. “I was fortunate to have wonderful mentors within Literature, but would have loved the opportunity to get to know and learn from colleagues in other fields, which the Fellows Program will offer.”

“What excites me about the Faculty Fellows Program — beyond the opportunity for faculty to connect with each other across disciplines and units — is that it will spotlight the excellence and centrality of the humanities, arts, and social sciences at MIT,” says Heather Paxson, SHASS associate dean for faculty, and the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology. “I look forward to hearing about new ideas sparked, and new friendships made, through participation in the program.”

Organizers say the program signals that MIT takes its investment in the humanities, arts and social sciences as seriously as its peer institutions, most of which have internal fellows programs.

“Given the strong demand for something like this, getting the program up and running is an important signal to SHASS faculty that Dean [Agustín] Rayo hears their concerns and is committed to supporting this type of community development,” McCants notes.

This post is part three in a series of posts about EFF’s work in Europe. Read about how and why we work in Europe here. 

EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world. While our work has taken us to far corners of the globe, in recent years we have worked to expand our efforts in Europe, building up a policy team with key expertise in the region, and bringing our experience in advocacy and technology to the European fight for digital rights.  

In this blog post series, we will introduce you to the various players involved in that fight, share how we work in Europe, and discuss how what happens in Europe can affect digital rights across the globe. 

Implementing a Privacy First Approach to Fighting Online Harms

Infringements on privacy are commonplace across the world, and Europe is no exemption. Governments and regulators across the region are increasingly focused on a range of risks associated with the design and use of online platforms, such as addictive design, the effects of social media consumption on children’s and teenagers’ mental health, and dark patterns limiting consumer choices. Many of these issues share a common root: the excessive collection and processing of our most private and sensitive information by corporations for their own financial gain. 

One necessary approach to solving this pervasive problem is to reduce the amount of data that these entities can collect, analyze, and sell. The European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is central to protecting users’ data protection rights in Europe, but the impact of the GDPR ultimately depends on how well it is enforced. Strengthening the enforcement of the GDPR in areas where data can be used to target, discriminate, and undermine fundamental rights is therefore a cornerstone in our work. 

Beyond the GDPR, we also bring our privacy first approach to fighting online harms to discussions on online safety and digital fairness. The Digital Services Act (DSA) makes some important steps to limit the use of some data categories to target users with ads, and bans targeteds ads for minors completely. This is the right approach, which we will build on as we contribute to the debate around the upcoming Digital Fairness Act. 

Age Verification Tools Are No Silver Bullet

As in many other jurisdictions around the world, age verification has become a hotly debated topic in the EU, with governments across Europe seeking to introduce them. In the United Kingdom, legislation like the Online Safety Act (OSA) was introduced to make the UK “the safest place” in the world to be online. The OSA requires platforms to prevent individuals from encountering certain illegal content, which will likely mandate the use of intrusive scanning systems. Even worse, it empowers the British government, in certain situations, to demand that online platforms use government-approved software to scan for illegal content. And they are not alone in seeking to do so. Last year, France banned social media access for children under 15 without parental consent, and Norway also pledged to follow a similar ban. 

Children’s safety is important, but there is little evidence that online age verification tools can help achieve this goal. EFF has long fought against mandatory age verification laws, from the U.S. to Australia, and we’ll continue to stand up against these types of laws in Europe. Not just for the sake of free expression, but to protect the free flow of information that is essential to a free society. 

Challenging Creeping Surveillance Powers

For years, we’ve observed a worrying tendency of technologies designed to protect people's privacy and data being re-framed as security concerns. And recent developments in Europe, like Germany’s rush to introduce biometric surveillance, signal a dangerous move towards expanding surveillance powers, justified by narratives framing complex digital policy issues as primarily security concerns. These approaches invite tradeoffs that risk undermining the privacy and free expression of individuals in the EU and beyond.

Even though their access to data has never been broader, law enforcement authorities across Europe continue to peddle the tale of the world “going dark.” With EDRi, we criticized the EU high level group “going dark” and sent a joint letter warning against granting law enforcement unfettered capacities that may lead to mass surveillance and violate fundamental rights. We have also been involved in Pegasus spyware investigations, with EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn participating in an expert hearing on the matter. The issue of spyware is pervasive and intersects with many components of EU law, such as the anti-spyware provisions contained within the EU Media Freedom Act. Intrusive surveillance has a global dimension, and our work has combined advocacy at the UN with the EU, for example, by urging the EU Parliament to reject the UN Cybercrime Treaty.

Rather than increasing surveillance, countries across Europe must also make use of their prerogatives to ban biometric surveillance, ensuring that the use of this technology is not permitted in sensitive contexts such as Europe’s borders. Face recognition, for example, presents an inherent threat to individual privacy, free expression, information security, and social justice. In the UK, we’ve been working with national groups to ban government use of face recognition technology, which is currently administered by local police forces. Given the proliferation of state surveillance across Europe, government use of this technology must be banned.

Protecting the Right to Secure and Private Communications

EFF works closely on issues like encryption to defend the right to private communications in Europe. For years, EFF fought hard against an EU proposal that, if it became law, would have pressured online services to abandon end-to-end encryption. We joined together with EU allies and urged people to sign the “Don’t Scan Me” petition. We lobbied EU lawmakers and urged them to protect their constituents’ human right to have a private conversation—backed up by strong encryption. Our message broke through, and a key EU committee adopted a position that bars the mass scanning of messages and protects end-to-end encryption. It also bars mandatory age verification whereby users would have had to show ID to get online. As Member States are still debating their position on the proposal, this fight is not over yet. But we are encouraged by the recent European Court of Human Rights ruling which confirmed that undermining encryption violates fundamental rights to privacy. EFF will continue to advocate for this to governments, and the corporations providing our messaging services.

As we’ve said many times, both in Europe and the U.S., there is no middle ground to content scanning and no “safe backdoor” if the internet is to remain free and private. Either all content is scanned and all actors—including authoritarian governments and rogue criminals—have access, or no one does. EFF will continue to advocate for the right to a private conversation, and hold the EU accountable to the international and European human rights protections that they are signatories to. 

Looking Forward

EU legislation and international treaties should contain concrete human rights safeguards, robust data privacy standards, and sharp limits on intrusive surveillance powers, including in the context of global cooperation. 

Much work remains to be done. And we are ready for it. Late last year, we put forward comprehensive policy recommendations to European lawmakers and we will continue fighting for an internet where everyone can make their voice heard. In the next—and final—post in this series, you will learn more about how we work in Europe to ensure that digital markets are fair, offer users choice and respect fundamental rights.

After firing 200 probationary employees this weekend, FEMA was directed "to make a list" of anyone who worked on climate or equity.

At an emotional meeting, National Science Foundation officials announced layoffs for about 10 percent of their workforce and warned of more firings to come.

The agency is supposed to tell President Donald Trump on Wednesday whether it plans to challenge the landmark finding that underpins its climate rules.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright told a conservative conference that the net-zero effort is “impoverishing citizens in pursuit of a delusion.”

Kathleen Sgamma has led the Western Energy Alliance in litigation to push for more fossil fuel production on public lands.

A judge sided with the state in a climate case, breaking a spate of rulings that have tossed out efforts to hold the industry responsible for rising temperatures.

The California Republican said he plans to introduce a measure Friday to review the state’s electrification rules.

With the U.S. retreating from global climate efforts, countries across the world are looking to Germany to help close the gap. That may be wishful thinking.

It marks an end to Japan's nuclear energy phaseout policy adopted after the 2011 meltdown crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant.

The program includes funding to get tools and technology onto farms that will help to cut emissions, as well as cash rewards for high achievers.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 19 February 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02249-6

Climate research centres provide valuable support to scholars wanting to engage with interdisciplinary research. Fully leveraging this support requires strategic individual efforts. We outline how scholars can achieve collaborative synergy at the intersection of top-down institutional support and bottom-up individual action.

While early language models could only process text, contemporary large language models now perform highly diverse tasks on different types of data. For instance, LLMs can understand many languages, generate computer code, solve math problems, or answer questions about images and audio.   

MIT researchers probed the inner workings of LLMs to better understand how they process such assorted data, and found evidence that they share some similarities with the human brain.

Neuroscientists believe the human brain has a “semantic hub” in the anterior temporal lobe that integrates semantic information from various modalities, like visual data and tactile inputs. This semantic hub is connected to modality-specific “spokes” that route information to the hub. The MIT researchers found that LLMs use a similar mechanism by abstractly processing data from diverse modalities in a central, generalized way. For instance, a model that has English as its dominant language would rely on English as a central medium to process inputs in Japanese or reason about arithmetic, computer code, etc. Furthermore, the researchers demonstrate that they can intervene in a model’s semantic hub by using text in the model’s dominant language to change its outputs, even when the model is processing data in other languages.

These findings could help scientists train future LLMs that are better able to handle diverse data.

“LLMs are big black boxes. They have achieved very impressive performance, but we have very little knowledge about their internal working mechanisms. I hope this can be an early step to better understand how they work so we can improve upon them and better control them when needed,” says Zhaofeng Wu, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on this research.

His co-authors include Xinyan Velocity Yu, a graduate student at the University of Southern California (USC); Dani Yogatama, an associate professor at USC; Jiasen Lu, a research scientist at Apple; and senior author Yoon Kim, an assistant professor of EECS at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). The research will be presented at the International Conference on Learning Representations.

Integrating diverse data

The researchers based the new study upon prior work which hinted that English-centric LLMs use English to perform reasoning processes on various languages.

Wu and his collaborators expanded this idea, launching an in-depth study into the mechanisms LLMs use to process diverse data.

An LLM, which is composed of many interconnected layers, splits input text into words or sub-words called tokens. The model assigns a representation to each token, which enables it to explore the relationships between tokens and generate the next word in a sequence. In the case of images or audio, these tokens correspond to particular regions of an image or sections of an audio clip.

The researchers found that the model’s initial layers process data in its specific language or modality, like the modality-specific spokes in the human brain. Then, the LLM converts tokens into modality-agnostic representations as it reasons about them throughout its internal layers, akin to how the brain’s semantic hub integrates diverse information.

The model assigns similar representations to inputs with similar meanings, despite their data type, including images, audio, computer code, and arithmetic problems. Even though an image and its text caption are distinct data types, because they share the same meaning, the LLM would assign them similar representations.

For instance, an English-dominant LLM “thinks” about a Chinese-text input in English before generating an output in Chinese. The model has a similar reasoning tendency for non-text inputs like computer code, math problems, or even multimodal data.

To test this hypothesis, the researchers passed a pair of sentences with the same meaning but written in two different languages through the model. They measured how similar the model’s representations were for each sentence.

Then they conducted a second set of experiments where they fed an English-dominant model text in a different language, like Chinese, and measured how similar its internal representation was to English versus Chinese. The researchers conducted similar experiments for other data types.

They consistently found that the model’s representations were similar for sentences with similar meanings. In addition, across many data types, the tokens the model processed in its internal layers were more like English-centric tokens than the input data type.

“A lot of these input data types seem extremely different from language, so we were very surprised that we can probe out English-tokens when the model processes, for example, mathematic or coding expressions,” Wu says.

Leveraging the semantic hub

The researchers think LLMs may learn this semantic hub strategy during training because it is an economical way to process varied data.

“There are thousands of languages out there, but a lot of the knowledge is shared, like commonsense knowledge or factual knowledge. The model doesn’t need to duplicate that knowledge across languages,” Wu says.

The researchers also tried intervening in the model’s internal layers using English text when it was processing other languages. They found that they could predictably change the model outputs, even though those outputs were in other languages.

Scientists could leverage this phenomenon to encourage the model to share as much information as possible across diverse data types, potentially boosting efficiency.

But on the other hand, there could be concepts or knowledge that are not translatable across languages or data types, like culturally specific knowledge. Scientists might want LLMs to have some language-specific processing mechanisms in those cases.

“How do you maximally share whenever possible but also allow languages to have some language-specific processing mechanisms? That could be explored in future work on model architectures,” Wu says.

In addition, researchers could use these insights to improve multilingual models. Often, an English-dominant model that learns to speak another language will lose some of its accuracy in English. A better understanding of an LLM’s semantic hub could help researchers prevent this language interference, he says.

“Understanding how language models process inputs across languages and modalities is a key question in artificial intelligence. This paper makes an interesting connection to neuroscience and shows that the proposed ‘semantic hub hypothesis’ holds in modern language models, where semantically similar representations of different data types are created in the model’s intermediate layers,” says Mor Geva Pipek, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science at Tel Aviv University, who was not involved with this work. “The hypothesis and experiments nicely tie and extend findings from previous works and could be influential for future research on creating better multimodal models and studying links between them and brain function and cognition in humans.”

This research is funded, in part, by the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab.

Biology is never simple. As researchers make strides in reading and editing genes to treat disease, for instance, a growing body of evidence suggests that the proteins and metabolites surrounding those genes can’t be ignored.

The MIT spinout ReviveMed has created a platform for measuring metabolites — products of metabolism like lipids, cholesterol, sugar, and carbs — at scale. The company is using those measurements to uncover why some patients respond to treatments when others don’t and to better understand the drivers of disease.

“Historically, we’ve been able to measure a few hundred metabolites with high accuracy, but that’s a fraction of the metabolites that exist in our bodies,” says ReviveMed CEO Leila Pirhaji PhD ’16, who founded the company with Professor Ernest Fraenkel. “There’s a massive gap between what we’re accurately measuring and what exists in our body, and that’s what we want to tackle. We want to tap into the powerful insights from underutilized metabolite data.”

ReviveMed’s progress comes as the broader medical community is increasingly linking dysregulated metabolites to diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s, and cardiovascular disease. ReviveMed is using its platform to help some of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world find patients that stand to benefit from their treatments. It’s also offering software to academic researchers for free to help gain insights from untapped metabolite data.

“With the field of AI booming, we think we can overcome data problems that have limited the study of metabolites,” Pirhaji says. “There’s no foundation model for metabolomics, but we see how these models are changing various fields such as genomics, so we’re starting to pioneer their development.”

Finding a challenge

Pirhaji was born and raised in Iran before coming to MIT in 2010 to pursue her PhD in biological engineering. She had previously read Fraenkel’s research papers and was excited to contribute to the network models he was building, which integrated data from sources like genomes, proteomes, and other molecules.

“We were thinking about the big picture in terms of what you can do when you can measure everything — the genes, the RNA, the proteins, and small molecules like metabolites and lipids,” says Fraenkel, who currently serves on ReviveMed’s board of directors. “We’re probably only able to measure something like 0.1 percent of small molecules in the body. We thought there had to be a way to get as comprehensive a view of those molecules as we have for the other ones. That would allow us to map out all of the changes occurring in the cell, whether it's in the context of cancer or development or degenerative diseases.”

About halfway through her PhD, Pirhaji sent some samples to a collaborator at Harvard University to collect data on the metabolome — the small molecules that are the products of metabolic processes. The collaborator sent Pirhaji back a huge excel sheet with thousands of lines of data — but they told her she’s better off ignoring everything beyond the top 100 rows because they had no idea what the other data meant. She took that as a challenge.

“I started thinking maybe we could use our network models to solve this problem,” Pirhaji recalls. “There was a lot of ambiguity in the data, and it was very interesting to me because no one had tried this before. It seemed like a big gap in the field.”

Pirhaji developed a huge knowledge graph that included millions of interactions between proteins and metabolites. The data was rich but messy — Pirhaji called it a “hair ball” that couldn’t tell researchers anything about disease. To make it more useful, she created a new way to characterize metabolic pathways and features. In a 2016 paper in Nature Methods, she described the system and used it to analyze metabolic changes in a model of Huntington’s disease.

Initially, Pirhaji had no intention of starting a company, but she started realizing the technology’s commercial potential in the final years of her PhD.

“There’s no entrepreneurial culture in Iran,” Pirhaji says. “I didn’t know how to start a company or turn science into a startup, so I leveraged everything MIT offered.”

Pirhaji began taking classes at the MIT Sloan School of Management, including Course 15.371 (Innovation Teams), where she teamed up with classmates to think about how to apply her technology. She also used the MIT Venture Mentoring Service and MIT Sandbox, and took part in the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship’s delta v startup accelerator.

When Pirhaji and Fraenkel officially founded ReviveMed, they worked with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office to access the patents around their work. Pirhaji has since further developed the platform to solve other problems she discovered from talks with hundreds of leaders in pharmaceutical companies.

ReviveMed began by working with hospitals to uncover how lipids are dysregulated in a disease known as metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis. In 2020, ReviveMed worked with Bristol Myers Squibb to predict how subsets of cancer patients would respond to the company’s immunotherapies.

Since then, ReviveMed has worked with several companies, including four of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies, to help them understand the metabolic mechanisms behind their treatments. Those insights help identify the patients that stand to benefit the most from different therapies more quickly.

“If we know which patients will benefit from every drug, it would really decrease the complexity and time associated with clinical trials,” Pirhaji says. “Patients will get the right treatments faster.”

Generative models for metabolomics

Earlier this year, ReviveMed collected a dataset based on 20,000 patient blood samples that it used to create digital twins of patients and generative AI models for metabolomics research. ReviveMed is making its generative models available to nonprofit academic researchers, which could accelerate our understanding of how metabolites influence a range of diseases.

“We’re democratizing the use of metabolomic data,” Pirhaji says. “It’s impossible for us to have data from every single patient in the world, but our digital twins can be used to find patients that could benefit from treatments based on their demographics, for instance, by finding patients that could be at risk of cardiovascular disease.”

The work is part of ReviveMed’s mission to create metabolic foundation models that researchers and pharmaceutical companies can use to understand how diseases and treatments change the metabolites of patients.

“Leila solved a lot of really hard problems you face when you’re trying to take an idea out of the lab and turn it into something that’s robust and reproducible enough to be deployed in biomedicine,” Fraenkel says. “Along the way, she also realized the software that she’s developed is incredibly powerful by itself and could be transformational.”