The region relies almost exclusively on technology to produce fresh water that sustains cities, hotels, industry and some agriculture.

Lots of articles about this.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

The MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS) and Dean Agustín Rayo recently welcomed six new professors to the MIT community. They arrive with diverse backgrounds and vast knowledge in their areas of research.

Grisha Coleman is a full professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Her research explores tensions between our physiological, technological, and ecological systems; human movement, our machines, and the places we inhabit. Her practice engages an interdisciplinary approach to these explorations. Coleman received the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Arts Technologies Lab Award. Her work has been supported by Carnegie Mellon University’s STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Creative Capital, the Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, the MAP Fund, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, Pioneer Works, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Stanford University’s Mohr Visiting Artist program, and the Surdna Foundation. Coleman was previously a professor at Northeastern University and an associate professor at Arizona State University. She earned an MFA in music composition and integrated media from California Institute of the Arts.

Tung-Hui Hu is an associate professor with tenure in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. A poet and a scholar of digital media, he is the author of five books, most recently “Digital Lethargy: Dispatches from an Age of Disconnection” (MIT Press, 2022), “A Prehistory of the Cloud” (MIT Press, 2015), and “Greenhouses, Lighthouses” (Copper Canyon Press, 2013). Hu is interested in how concepts such as race and normal language became measurable, governable objects in the form of datasets. His research on data centers, artificial intelligence, burnout, and visual art has been featured in places such as CBS News, BBC Radio 4, WIRED, and MoMA R&D. He has been awarded fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy in Berlin. Prior to joining MIT, he was a faculty member at the University of Michigan.

Claire Luchette is an assistant professor in the Comparative Media Studies/Writing program. Luchette is the author of the novel “Agatha of Little Neon.” The winner of a Whiting Award and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree, Luchette has received fellowships from the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, MacDowell, Yaddo, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Their writing appears in Best American Short Stories, Ploughshares, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. Their second novel, “Swans,” and a story collection, “Big Whoop,” are forthcoming.

Shota Momma is an associate professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. Momma is a specialist in psycholinguistics and its interaction with linguistic theory — with a particular focus on the mechanisms of sentence production. Previously, Momma taught as an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He earned a PhD in linguistics from the University of Maryland and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California San Diego. 

Lindsey Raymond PhD ’24 is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics, holding an MIT Schwarzman College of Computing shared position with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Her research examines how new technologies shape labor markets and market competition, and how insights from economics can inform algorithm design. She is a Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow and served as a staff economist at the White House Council of Economic Advisers in 2021–22. Before joining MIT, Raymond was a postdoc at Microsoft Research. She earned her PhD from MIT and her BA from Yale University.

Makoto Harris Takao is the Class of 1957 Career Development Professor in the Music and Theater Arts Section. Working at the intersection of cultural history, religious studies, and musicology, Takao maps Japan’s entanglement with other world regions over the past 500 years. His current book project, “The Clef and the Cross: Music and Kirishitan Transculturation in Sixteenth-Century Japan,” asks what early modern Japanese Catholicism sounded like and how it was understood and expressed through Buddhist frameworks of sound, music, and movement. His work to date has appeared in such venues as Early Music, Journal of Music History Pedagogy, Journal of Religious History, Journal of Jesuit Studies, Zeithistorische Forschungen, and Oxford Bibliographies in Music. A player of the viola da gamba, Takao completed a joint PhD in history and musicology at the University of Western Australia. Before joining MIT, he was an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Ever since she was a child playing on her family’s farmland in Wisconsin, Bailey Flanigan was guided by her own selective, yet wide-ranging, curiosity. Describing her young self as spirited and a bit unruly, she directed her energies to everything from building booby traps to doing experimental construction projects to exploring an intense interest in medicine to writing fiction and music to planning nonprofit organizations to help lessen social inequality.

By high school, Flanigan was intensely drawn to particular subjects.

“I found myself unmotivated to take all the AP [advanced placement] classes for the sake of it. My interest was captured by classes where I could be creative — where I could use math to solve real-world problems, creatively write, make music, connect distant ideas, or deeply explore the humanities — and I worked on such classes obsessively, as an opportunity to explore my intuitions and interests,” she says. “Instead of joining clubs, I ended up spending a lot of time thinking and creating on my own, and trying to understand what I enjoyed.”

Today Flanigan is a shared faculty member between the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing and the MIT departments of Political Science and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and a principal investigator in the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. She has been involved in research at the University of Wisconsin, the National Institutes of Health, Google, and Carnegie Mellon, Drexel, Harvard, Princeton, and Stanford universities. Her current work focuses on using computational and mathematical tools to create new avenues for meaningful democratic participation.

Perhaps not surprisingly, her path has crossed huge expanses of subject matter and specialties — from medicine and bioengineering to public health, and from economics to her joint appointment at MIT in computer science and political science, which began in fall 2025.

“My trajectory across disciplines was just a result of me chasing down the problems I felt were most pressing or inspiring at the time. Along the way, I wound up in a lot of situations where I was less well-trained or qualified in the standard ways. While this was sometimes precarious, it was also incredibly fun, and it cultivated my ability to learn the languages of new disciplines more easily — a skill pretty much essential to my current research and job.”

In college at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Flanigan worked in a wet lab on therapeutic targets in cancer and computationally on tumor genetics. She says she found the research intellectually interesting, but eventually began to wonder about whether it would have the kind of impact she wanted.

“At the time, I started to worry that the science I was developing might only, in the best case, be used by a small, relatively wealthy fraction of the world, when there were people suffering from much more-preventable diseases in much larger numbers,” she says.

So Flanigan moved toward public health, where she researched microfluidic devices for HIV detection that could be used in low-resource settings. Still bothered by the circumstances driving these settings’ limited resources to begin with, she then started to dabble in economics.

Around the same time, Flanigan’s academic advisors were chipping away at preconceptions she held about her own abilities.

Steven Wright, a professor of law and creative writing at UW-Madison, served as Flanigan’s informal mentor throughout college, and they worked together on a case at the Wisconsin Innocence Project.

“He guided me through my evolving interests in science, social inequality, and economics,” she says. “He was one of the people most responsible for convincing me that I could aim higher in my career, and that I could actually go to places like MIT or Harvard.”

Also while she was in college, the two heads of the UW-Madison scholarship office, Debbie Berger and Julie Stubbs, sent Flanigan repeated emails, encouraging her to apply for a Goldwater Scholarship.

“I kept deleting their emails, thinking they were spam — I didn’t think I was the kind of person that would apply for something like that. Their persistence convinced me to apply, and in the process, the horizons I perceived for myself started to change,” she says.

After graduating from UW-Madison, Flanigan worked as a predoctoral research assistant in economics at Princeton. There, Professor Evita Nestoridi, now an associate professor at Stony Brook University, also provided a pivotal moment of support, letting Flanigan audit her real analysis class.

“Evita’s class was my first real exposure to formal mathematics and proofs, and I loved it so much that it completely changed my career trajectory,” Flanigan says. “Despite my initial doubts, she convinced me that I could do math at the graduate level; because of her encouragement, I applied to computer science PhD programs the subsequent fall.”

Choosing Carnegie Mellon for her PhD, Flanigan began research on social choice and democratic decision-making, serving her dual passions for technical research and the issue of “who gets what and why,” she says, quoting Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth. 

Flanigan has developed algorithms that randomly choose participants of citizens’ assemblies, designed for the common case where willing participants self-select in ways that do not reflect the larger population. In a policy brief, Flanigan gave a hypothetical  example of an assembly on artificial intelligence, whose willing participants might skew toward younger, more educated citizens with an interest in technology, leaving other groups underrepresented despite their stake in the issue. The tools Flanigan has developed help balance representation with such features of the selection process as equality among individuals’ chances to participate, resistance to manipulation of the process, and transparency — all of which can affect the general perception of a decision-making group’s legitimacy.

Flanigan’s work is now deployed on panelot.org, a widely used open-access website hosting algorithms for randomly selecting citizen assembly participants.

“The site basically walks practitioners through a series of otherwise very technical trade-offs, making those trade-offs legible and then optimizing according to the priorities practitioners dictate,” she says.

Flanigan says she is motivated to improve how the public makes political decisions, “because if any political solution is going to be viable, the public needs to feel that it was arrived at via a legitimate political process — at least under the forms of government I find most appealing.”

Beyond her work on citizens’ assemblies, Flanigan’s research is exploring new avenues related to how to more systematically get public input on complex decisions, and how the format of questions we ask people in preference elicitation contexts can affect the substance of what we conclude.

“I feel so lucky to be studying these questions from within both political science and EECS, because I have the freedom to explore both the political and technical substance of tools for more direct governance as deeply as I want,” she says.

Flanigan’s curiosity-driven journey through widely varying terrain feels right in the MIT environment, she says.

“From the beginning, I got this sense of belonging at MIT — like my ways of thinking and problem-solving, which had seemed peculiar in many situations, actually made me belong more,” she says. “This was a super refreshing feeling, and it has been 100 percent borne out since I arrived.”