Gabrielle Wood, a junior at Howard University majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to improve the sustainability and life cycles of natural resources and materials. Her work in the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity (MICRO) program has given her hands-on experience with many different aspects of research, including MATLAB programming, experimental design, data analysis, figure-making, and scientific writing.

Wood is also one of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities around the United States to participate in the first MICRO Summit earlier this year. The internship program, developed by the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow, providing even more opportunities for non-MIT undergraduate students — including the MICRO Summit and the program’s expansion to include Northwestern University.

“I think one of the most valuable aspects of the MICRO program is the ability to do research long term with an experienced professor in materials science and engineering,” says Wood. “My school has limited opportunities for undergraduate research in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to gain valuable experience in this field, which I would not otherwise have.”

Like Wood, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry major at Manhattan College, values the exposure to materials science, especially since she is not able to learn as much about it at her home institution.

“I learned a lot about crystallography and defects in materials through the MICRO curriculum, especially through videos,” says Garcia. “The research itself is very valuable, as well, because we get to apply what we’ve learned through the videos in the research we do remotely.”

Expanding research opportunities

From the beginning, the MICRO program was designed as a fully remote, rigorous education and mentoring program targeted toward students from underserved backgrounds interested in pursuing graduate school in materials science or related fields. Interns are matched with faculty to work on their specific research interests.

Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that research projects for the interns are designed to be work that they can do remotely, such as developing a machine-learning algorithm or a data analysis approach.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just about what the program and faculty are bringing to the student interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. “The students are doing real research and work, and creating things of real value. It’s very much an exchange.”

Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, had helped to establish MICRO at MIT from the very beginning. Once at Northwestern, she quickly realized that expanding MICRO to Northwestern would offer even more research opportunities to interns than by relying on MIT alone — leveraging the university’s strong materials science and engineering department, as well as offering resources for biomaterials research through Northwestern’s medical school. The program received funding from 3M and officially launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Approximately half of the MICRO interns are now in the program with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wood and Garcia both participate in the program via Northwestern.

“By expanding to another school, we’ve been able to have interns work with a much broader range of research projects,” says Chazot. “It has become easier for us to place students with faculty and research that match their interests.”

Building community

The MICRO program received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for three days of presentations, workshops, and campus tours — including a tour of the MIT.nano building — as well as various community-building activities.

“A big part of MICRO is the community,” says Chazot. “A highlight of the summit was just seeing the students come together.”

The summit also included panel discussions that allowed interns to gain insights and advice from graduate students and professionals. The graduate panel discussion included MIT graduate students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The career panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vice president and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior process engineer at 6K.

Students also had an opportunity to share their work with each other through research presentations. Their presentations covered a wide range of topics, including: developing a computer program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers used in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle analysis of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental impact in comparison to a standard silicon microchip; and applying machine learning algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy images of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic material. 

“The summit was wonderful and the best academic experience I have had as a first-year college student,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who is pursuing a major in chemistry and dual degree biomedical engineering at Spelman College and participates in MICRO through MIT. “I got to meet so many students who were all in grades above me … and I learned a little about how to navigate college as an upperclassman.” 

“I actually have an extremely close friendship with one of the students, and we keep in touch regularly,” adds La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave valuable advice about applications and recommendation letters that will be useful when I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate schools.”

Looking to the future, MICRO organizers hope to continue to grow the program’s reach.

“We would love to see other schools taking on this model,” says Sandland. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. The more departments, research groups, and mentors that get involved with this program, the more impact it can have.”

Stop for a second and think about the Internet without digital images or video. There would be no faces on Facebook. Instagram and TikTok probably wouldn’t exist. Those Zoom meetings that took the place of in-person gatherings for school or work during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic? Not an option.

Digital audio’s place in our Internet-connected world is just as important as still images and video. It has changed the music business—from production to distribution to the way fans buy, collect, and store their favorite songs.

What do those millions of profiles on LinkedIn, dating apps, and social media platforms (and the inexhaustible selection of music available for download online) have in common? They rely on a compression algorithm called the discrete cosine transform, or DCT, which played a major role in allowing digital files to be transmitted across computer networks.

“DCT has been one of the key components of many past image- and video-coding algorithms for more than three decades,” says Touradj Ebrahimi, a professor at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, who currently serves as chairman of the JPEG standardization committee. “Only a few image-compression standards not using DCT exist today,” he adds.

The Internet applications people use every day but largely take for granted were made possible by scientists and engineers who, for the most part, toiled in anonymity. One such “hidden figure” is Nasir Ahmed, the Indian-American engineer who figured out an elegant way to cut down the size of digital image files without sacrificing their most critical visual details.

Ahmed published his seminal paper about the discrete cosine transform compression algorithm he invented in 1974, a time when the fledgling Internet was exclusively dial-up and text-based. There were no pictures accompanying the words, nor could there have been, because Internet data was transmitted over standard copper telephone landlines, which was a major limitation on speed and bandwidth.

“Only a few image-compression standards not using DCT exist today.” –Touradj Ebrahimi, EPFL

These days, with the benefit of superfast chips and optical-fiber networks, data download speeds for a laptop with a fiber connection reach 1 gigabit per second. So, a music lover can download a 4-minute song to their laptop (or more likely a smartphone) in a second or two. In the dial-up era, when Internet users’ download speeds topped out at 56 kilobits per second (and were usually only half that fast), pulling down the same song from a server would have taken nearly all day. Getting a picture to appear on a computer’s screen was a process akin to watching grass grow.

Ahmed was convinced there had to be a way to cut down the size of digital files and speed up the process. He set off on a quest to represent with ones and zeros what is critical to an image being legible, while tossing aside the bits that are less important. The answer, which built on the earlier work of mathematician and information-theory pioneer Claude Shannon, took a while to come into focus. But because of Ahmed’s determination and unwavering belief in the value of what he was doing, he persevered even after others told him that it was not worth the effort.

Raised to Love Technology

It seemed almost preordained that Ahmed would have a career in one of the STEM fields. Nasir, who was born in Bengaluru, India, in 1940, was raised by his maternal grandparents. Ahmed’s grandfather was an electrical engineer who told him that he had been sent to the United States in 1919 to work at General Electric‘s location in Schenectady, N.Y. He shared tales of his time in the United States with his grandson and encouraged young Nasir to emigrate there. In 1961, after earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering at the University of Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, in Bengaluru, Ahmed did just that, leaving India that fall for graduate school at the University of New Mexico, in Albuquerque. Ahmed earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering in 1963 and 1966, respectively.

During his first year in Albuquerque, he met Esther Parente, a graduate student from Argentina. They soon became inseparable and were married while he was working toward his doctorate. Sixty years later, they are still together.

The Seed of an Idea

In 1966, Ahmed, fresh out of grad school with his Ph.D., was hired as a principal research engineer at Honeywell’s newly created computer division. While there, Ahmed was first exposed to Walsh functions, a technique for analyzing digital representations of analog signals. The fast algorithms that could be created based on Walsh functions had many potential applications. Ahmed focused on using these signal-processing and analysis techniques to reduce the file size of a digital image without losing too much of the visual detail in the uncompressed version.

That research focus remained his primary interest when he returned to academia, taking a job as a professor in the electrical and computer engineering department at Kansas State University, in 1968.

Ahmed, like dozens of other researchers around the globe, was obsessed with finding the answer to a single question: How do you create a mathematical formula for deciphering which of the ones and zeros that represent a digital image need to be kept and which can be thrown away? The things he’d learned at Honeywell gave him a framework for understanding the elements of the problem and how to attack it. But the majority of the credit for the eventual breakthrough has to go to Ahmed’s steely determination and willingness to take a gamble on himself.

In 1972, he sought grant funding that would let him afford to spend the months between Kansas State’s spring and fall semesters furthering his ideas. He applied for a U.S. National Science Foundation grant, but was denied. Ahmed recalls the moment: “I had a strong intuition that I could find an efficient way to compress digital signal data. But to my surprise, the reviewers said the idea was too simple, so they rejected the proposal.”

Undaunted, Ahmed and his wife worked to make the salary he earned during the nine-month school year last through the summer so he could focus on his research. Money was tight, the couple recalls, but that moment of financial belt-tightening only seemed to heighten Ahmed’s industriousness. They persevered, and Ahmed’s long days and late nights in the lab eventually yielded the desired result.

DCT Compression Comes Together

Ahmed took a technique for turning the array of image-processing data representing an image’s pixels into a waveform, effectively rendering it as a series of waves with oscillating frequencies, and combined it with cosine functions that were already being used to model phenomena such as light waves, sound waves, and electric current. The result was a long string of numbers with values bounded by 1 and –1. Ahmed realized that by quantizing this string of values and performing a Fourier transformation to break the function into its constituent frequencies, each pixel’s data could be represented in a way that was helpful for deciding what data points must be kept and what could be omitted. Ahmed observed that the lower-frequency waves corresponded to the necessary or “high information” regions of the image, while the higher-frequency waves represented the bits that were less important and could therefore be approximated. The compressed-image files he and his team produced were one-tenth the size of the originals. What’s more, the process could be reversed, and a shrunken data file would yield an image that was sufficiently similar to the original.

After another two years of laborious testing, with he and his two collaborators running computer programs written on decks of data punch cards, the trio published a paper in IEEE Transactions On Computers titled “Discrete Cosine Transform” in January 1974. Though the paper’s publication did not make it immediately clear, the worldwide search for a reliable method of doing the lossy compression that Claude Shannon had postulated in the 1940s was over.

JPEGs, MPEGs, and More

It wasn’t until 1983 that the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) began working on the technology that would allow photo-quality images to accompany text on the screens of computer terminals. To that end, ISO established the Joint Photographic Experts Group, better known by the ubiquitous acronym JPEG. By the time the first JPEG standard was published in 1992, DCT and advances made by a cadre of other researchers had come to be recognized by the group as basic elements of their method for the digital compression and coding of still images. “This is the beauty of standardization, where several dozen bright minds are behind the success of advances such as JPEG,” says Ebrahimi.

And because video can be described as a succession of still images, Ahmed’s technique was also well suited to making video files smaller. DCT was the compression technique of choice when ISO and the international Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) established the Moving Picture Experts Group, or MPEG, for the compression and coding of audio, video, graphics, and genomic data in 1988. When the first MPEG standard was published in 1993, the World Wide Web that now includes Google Maps, dating apps, and e-commerce businesses was just four years old.

The ramping up of computer speeds and network bandwidth during that decade—along with the ability to transmit pictures and video via much smaller files—quickly transformed the Internet before anyone knew that Amazon would eventually let readers judge millions of books by their covers.

Having solved the problem that had monopolized his time and attention for several years, Ahmed resumed his career in academia. In 1993, the year the first MPEG standard went on the books, Ahmed left Kansas State and returned to the University of New Mexico. There he was a presidential professor of electrical and computer engineering until 1989, when he was promoted to chair of the ECE department. Five years after that, he became dean of UNM’s school of engineering­. Ahmed held that post for two years until he was named associate provost for research and dean of graduate studies. He stayed in that job until he retired from the university in 2001 and was named professor emeritus.

Gabrielle Wood, a junior at Howard University majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to improve the sustainability and life cycles of natural resources and materials. Her work in the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity (MICRO) program has given her hands-on experience with many different aspects of research, including MATLAB programming, experimental design, data analysis, figure-making, and scientific writing.

Wood is also one of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities around the United States to participate in the first MICRO Summit earlier this year. The internship program, developed by the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow, providing even more opportunities for non-MIT undergraduate students — including the MICRO Summit and the program’s expansion to include Northwestern University.

“I think one of the most valuable aspects of the MICRO program is the ability to do research long term with an experienced professor in materials science and engineering,” says Wood. “My school has limited opportunities for undergraduate research in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to gain valuable experience in this field, which I would not otherwise have.”

Like Wood, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry major at Manhattan College, values the exposure to materials science, especially since she is not able to learn as much about it at her home institution.

“I learned a lot about crystallography and defects in materials through the MICRO curriculum, especially through videos,” says Garcia. “The research itself is very valuable, as well, because we get to apply what we’ve learned through the videos in the research we do remotely.”

Expanding research opportunities

From the beginning, the MICRO program was designed as a fully remote, rigorous education and mentoring program targeted toward students from underserved backgrounds interested in pursuing graduate school in materials science or related fields. Interns are matched with faculty to work on their specific research interests.

Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that research projects for the interns are designed to be work that they can do remotely, such as developing a machine-learning algorithm or a data analysis approach.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just about what the program and faculty are bringing to the student interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. “The students are doing real research and work, and creating things of real value. It’s very much an exchange.”

Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, had helped to establish MICRO at MIT from the very beginning. Once at Northwestern, she quickly realized that expanding MICRO to Northwestern would offer even more research opportunities to interns than by relying on MIT alone — leveraging the university’s strong materials science and engineering department, as well as offering resources for biomaterials research through Northwestern’s medical school. The program received funding from 3M and officially launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Approximately half of the MICRO interns are now in the program with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wood and Garcia both participate in the program via Northwestern.

“By expanding to another school, we’ve been able to have interns work with a much broader range of research projects,” says Chazot. “It has become easier for us to place students with faculty and research that match their interests.”

Building community

The MICRO program received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for three days of presentations, workshops, and campus tours — including a tour of the MIT.nano building — as well as various community-building activities.

“A big part of MICRO is the community,” says Chazot. “A highlight of the summit was just seeing the students come together.”

The summit also included panel discussions that allowed interns to gain insights and advice from graduate students and professionals. The graduate panel discussion included MIT graduate students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The career panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vice president and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior process engineer at 6K.

Students also had an opportunity to share their work with each other through research presentations. Their presentations covered a wide range of topics, including: developing a computer program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers used in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle analysis of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental impact in comparison to a standard silicon microchip; and applying machine learning algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy images of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic material. 

“The summit was wonderful and the best academic experience I have had as a first-year college student,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who is pursuing a major in chemistry and dual degree biomedical engineering at Spelman College and participates in MICRO through MIT. “I got to meet so many students who were all in grades above me … and I learned a little about how to navigate college as an upperclassman.” 

“I actually have an extremely close friendship with one of the students, and we keep in touch regularly,” adds La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave valuable advice about applications and recommendation letters that will be useful when I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate schools.”

Looking to the future, MICRO organizers hope to continue to grow the program’s reach.

“We would love to see other schools taking on this model,” says Sandland. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. The more departments, research groups, and mentors that get involved with this program, the more impact it can have.”

Gabrielle Wood, a junior at Howard University majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to improve the sustainability and life cycles of natural resources and materials. Her work in the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity (MICRO) program has given her hands-on experience with many different aspects of research, including MATLAB programming, experimental design, data analysis, figure-making, and scientific writing.

Wood is also one of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities around the United States to participate in the first MICRO Summit earlier this year. The internship program, developed by the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow, providing even more opportunities for non-MIT undergraduate students — including the MICRO Summit and the program’s expansion to include Northwestern University.

“I think one of the most valuable aspects of the MICRO program is the ability to do research long term with an experienced professor in materials science and engineering,” says Wood. “My school has limited opportunities for undergraduate research in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to gain valuable experience in this field, which I would not otherwise have.”

Like Wood, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry major at Manhattan College, values the exposure to materials science, especially since she is not able to learn as much about it at her home institution.

“I learned a lot about crystallography and defects in materials through the MICRO curriculum, especially through videos,” says Garcia. “The research itself is very valuable, as well, because we get to apply what we’ve learned through the videos in the research we do remotely.”

Expanding research opportunities

From the beginning, the MICRO program was designed as a fully remote, rigorous education and mentoring program targeted toward students from underserved backgrounds interested in pursuing graduate school in materials science or related fields. Interns are matched with faculty to work on their specific research interests.

Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that research projects for the interns are designed to be work that they can do remotely, such as developing a machine-learning algorithm or a data analysis approach.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just about what the program and faculty are bringing to the student interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. “The students are doing real research and work, and creating things of real value. It’s very much an exchange.”

Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, had helped to establish MICRO at MIT from the very beginning. Once at Northwestern, she quickly realized that expanding MICRO to Northwestern would offer even more research opportunities to interns than by relying on MIT alone — leveraging the university’s strong materials science and engineering department, as well as offering resources for biomaterials research through Northwestern’s medical school. The program received funding from 3M and officially launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Approximately half of the MICRO interns are now in the program with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wood and Garcia both participate in the program via Northwestern.

“By expanding to another school, we’ve been able to have interns work with a much broader range of research projects,” says Chazot. “It has become easier for us to place students with faculty and research that match their interests.”

Building community

The MICRO program received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for three days of presentations, workshops, and campus tours — including a tour of the MIT.nano building — as well as various community-building activities.

“A big part of MICRO is the community,” says Chazot. “A highlight of the summit was just seeing the students come together.”

The summit also included panel discussions that allowed interns to gain insights and advice from graduate students and professionals. The graduate panel discussion included MIT graduate students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The career panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vice president and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior process engineer at 6K.

Students also had an opportunity to share their work with each other through research presentations. Their presentations covered a wide range of topics, including: developing a computer program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers used in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle analysis of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental impact in comparison to a standard silicon microchip; and applying machine learning algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy images of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic material. 

“The summit was wonderful and the best academic experience I have had as a first-year college student,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who is pursuing a major in chemistry and dual degree biomedical engineering at Spelman College and participates in MICRO through MIT. “I got to meet so many students who were all in grades above me … and I learned a little about how to navigate college as an upperclassman.” 

“I actually have an extremely close friendship with one of the students, and we keep in touch regularly,” adds La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave valuable advice about applications and recommendation letters that will be useful when I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate schools.”

Looking to the future, MICRO organizers hope to continue to grow the program’s reach.

“We would love to see other schools taking on this model,” says Sandland. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. The more departments, research groups, and mentors that get involved with this program, the more impact it can have.”

Gabrielle Wood, a junior at Howard University majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to improve the sustainability and life cycles of natural resources and materials. Her work in the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity (MICRO) program has given her hands-on experience with many different aspects of research, including MATLAB programming, experimental design, data analysis, figure-making, and scientific writing.

Wood is also one of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities around the United States to participate in the first MICRO Summit earlier this year. The internship program, developed by the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow, providing even more opportunities for non-MIT undergraduate students — including the MICRO Summit and the program’s expansion to include Northwestern University.

“I think one of the most valuable aspects of the MICRO program is the ability to do research long term with an experienced professor in materials science and engineering,” says Wood. “My school has limited opportunities for undergraduate research in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to gain valuable experience in this field, which I would not otherwise have.”

Like Wood, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry major at Manhattan College, values the exposure to materials science, especially since she is not able to learn as much about it at her home institution.

“I learned a lot about crystallography and defects in materials through the MICRO curriculum, especially through videos,” says Garcia. “The research itself is very valuable, as well, because we get to apply what we’ve learned through the videos in the research we do remotely.”

Expanding research opportunities

From the beginning, the MICRO program was designed as a fully remote, rigorous education and mentoring program targeted toward students from underserved backgrounds interested in pursuing graduate school in materials science or related fields. Interns are matched with faculty to work on their specific research interests.

Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that research projects for the interns are designed to be work that they can do remotely, such as developing a machine-learning algorithm or a data analysis approach.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just about what the program and faculty are bringing to the student interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. “The students are doing real research and work, and creating things of real value. It’s very much an exchange.”

Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, had helped to establish MICRO at MIT from the very beginning. Once at Northwestern, she quickly realized that expanding MICRO to Northwestern would offer even more research opportunities to interns than by relying on MIT alone — leveraging the university’s strong materials science and engineering department, as well as offering resources for biomaterials research through Northwestern’s medical school. The program received funding from 3M and officially launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Approximately half of the MICRO interns are now in the program with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wood and Garcia both participate in the program via Northwestern.

“By expanding to another school, we’ve been able to have interns work with a much broader range of research projects,” says Chazot. “It has become easier for us to place students with faculty and research that match their interests.”

Building community

The MICRO program received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for three days of presentations, workshops, and campus tours — including a tour of the MIT.nano building — as well as various community-building activities.

“A big part of MICRO is the community,” says Chazot. “A highlight of the summit was just seeing the students come together.”

The summit also included panel discussions that allowed interns to gain insights and advice from graduate students and professionals. The graduate panel discussion included MIT graduate students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The career panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vice president and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior process engineer at 6K.

Students also had an opportunity to share their work with each other through research presentations. Their presentations covered a wide range of topics, including: developing a computer program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers used in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle analysis of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental impact in comparison to a standard silicon microchip; and applying machine learning algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy images of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic material. 

“The summit was wonderful and the best academic experience I have had as a first-year college student,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who is pursuing a major in chemistry and dual degree biomedical engineering at Spelman College and participates in MICRO through MIT. “I got to meet so many students who were all in grades above me … and I learned a little about how to navigate college as an upperclassman.” 

“I actually have an extremely close friendship with one of the students, and we keep in touch regularly,” adds La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave valuable advice about applications and recommendation letters that will be useful when I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate schools.”

Looking to the future, MICRO organizers hope to continue to grow the program’s reach.

“We would love to see other schools taking on this model,” says Sandland. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. The more departments, research groups, and mentors that get involved with this program, the more impact it can have.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s response to the horrifying shootings in Buffalo in 2022 was not to look for ways to limit access to guns or improve mental health care. It was not to look into why law enforcement ignored the threats that the shooter had made, which they were aware of. It was not to figure out why the 911 dispatcher who answered the first call about the shooting hung up on the caller after getting mad at them for whispering.

No, it was to blame the internet.

Blaming the internet is a very convenient scapegoat for politicians who are in over their heads with societal-level problems.

On Thursday, Hochul became the living embodiment of the “won’t someone please think of the children” meme. She gleefully signed an easily unconstitutional bill that will not protect children, and which will likely do real harm. She signed the SAFE For Kids Act, which bans algorithmic feeds for kids. In signing the bill she literally said:

“Today, we save our children.”

There are just a few problems with this, all of which Hochul’s office (and the sponsors of this bill) have been told about, only to be dismissed as “talking points from big tech.”

Problem 1: There remains no study showing that algorithmic feeds are somehow “addictive” or even a problem. It’s all based on vibes (and adults who seem unable to put down their own phones).

Problem 2: What actual studies show is that if you force chronological feeds on people, a few things happen, none of which “save our children.” First, users get annoyed because they see less of the stuff they go to social media for. This doesn’t make them use less social media, it just makes them switch to other social media. It also exposes those on the chronological feed to more untrustworthy content and disinformation. I’m not sure why Kathy Hochul thinks that exposing kids to more disinformation is “saving our children,” but someone should ask her.

Problem 3: This bill requires age verification, which has already been ruled to be unconstitutional by multiple courts. It is also a privacy nightmare, as has been described multiple times in the past. Creating a world that puts kids’ private data at risk is not “saving our children.”

Problem 4: The requirement about how websites can order content is just a blatantly obvious First Amendment infringement. I mean, just imagine if the NY legislature told a newspaper that it could no longer prioritize some headlines over others and had to lay out the newspaper in the order the stories were written? Everyone would immediately recognize the First Amendment problems with such a law. But this is no different.

Problem 5: Algorithms are a hugely important tool in keeping kids safe online, by minimizing or hiding more harmful or problematic content. And Hochul and the NY legislature are telling social media companies that such tools must be removed from their arsenal.

Hochul told a reporter, “we’ve checked to make sure, we believe it’s constitutional.” And, that’s just laughable. Checked with whom? Every attempt I saw to call out these concerns was brushed off as “just spewing big tech’s talking points.”

The Constitution is not a “big tech talking point.” What the actual research shows is not a “big tech talking point.”

I’m not against chronological feeds as a general concept. They’re great for those that want them. Lots of services already offer them as an option. But mandating them, and especially mandating them for certain ages (necessitating dangerous age verification), doesn’t solve any legitimate problem and makes it harder for trust & safety teams to actually help protect kids.

I recognize that this signing happened the same day that Hochul’s approval ratings and favorability hit all-time lows. So, it’s no surprise that she’s trying populist nonsense and embracing moral panics. But perhaps she should try actually doing things to actually help, rather than things already proven harmful?

Gabrielle Wood, a junior at Howard University majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to improve the sustainability and life cycles of natural resources and materials. Her work in the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity (MICRO) program has given her hands-on experience with many different aspects of research, including MATLAB programming, experimental design, data analysis, figure-making, and scientific writing.

Wood is also one of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities around the United States to participate in the first MICRO Summit earlier this year. The internship program, developed by the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow, providing even more opportunities for non-MIT undergraduate students — including the MICRO Summit and the program’s expansion to include Northwestern University.

“I think one of the most valuable aspects of the MICRO program is the ability to do research long term with an experienced professor in materials science and engineering,” says Wood. “My school has limited opportunities for undergraduate research in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to gain valuable experience in this field, which I would not otherwise have.”

Like Wood, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry major at Manhattan College, values the exposure to materials science, especially since she is not able to learn as much about it at her home institution.

“I learned a lot about crystallography and defects in materials through the MICRO curriculum, especially through videos,” says Garcia. “The research itself is very valuable, as well, because we get to apply what we’ve learned through the videos in the research we do remotely.”

Expanding research opportunities

From the beginning, the MICRO program was designed as a fully remote, rigorous education and mentoring program targeted toward students from underserved backgrounds interested in pursuing graduate school in materials science or related fields. Interns are matched with faculty to work on their specific research interests.

Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that research projects for the interns are designed to be work that they can do remotely, such as developing a machine-learning algorithm or a data analysis approach.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just about what the program and faculty are bringing to the student interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. “The students are doing real research and work, and creating things of real value. It’s very much an exchange.”

Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, had helped to establish MICRO at MIT from the very beginning. Once at Northwestern, she quickly realized that expanding MICRO to Northwestern would offer even more research opportunities to interns than by relying on MIT alone — leveraging the university’s strong materials science and engineering department, as well as offering resources for biomaterials research through Northwestern’s medical school. The program received funding from 3M and officially launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Approximately half of the MICRO interns are now in the program with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wood and Garcia both participate in the program via Northwestern.

“By expanding to another school, we’ve been able to have interns work with a much broader range of research projects,” says Chazot. “It has become easier for us to place students with faculty and research that match their interests.”

Building community

The MICRO program received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for three days of presentations, workshops, and campus tours — including a tour of the MIT.nano building — as well as various community-building activities.

“A big part of MICRO is the community,” says Chazot. “A highlight of the summit was just seeing the students come together.”

The summit also included panel discussions that allowed interns to gain insights and advice from graduate students and professionals. The graduate panel discussion included MIT graduate students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The career panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vice president and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior process engineer at 6K.

Students also had an opportunity to share their work with each other through research presentations. Their presentations covered a wide range of topics, including: developing a computer program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers used in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle analysis of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental impact in comparison to a standard silicon microchip; and applying machine learning algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy images of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic material. 

“The summit was wonderful and the best academic experience I have had as a first-year college student,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who is pursuing a major in chemistry and dual degree biomedical engineering at Spelman College and participates in MICRO through MIT. “I got to meet so many students who were all in grades above me … and I learned a little about how to navigate college as an upperclassman.” 

“I actually have an extremely close friendship with one of the students, and we keep in touch regularly,” adds La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave valuable advice about applications and recommendation letters that will be useful when I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate schools.”

Looking to the future, MICRO organizers hope to continue to grow the program’s reach.

“We would love to see other schools taking on this model,” says Sandland. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. The more departments, research groups, and mentors that get involved with this program, the more impact it can have.”

Gabrielle Wood, a junior at Howard University majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to improve the sustainability and life cycles of natural resources and materials. Her work in the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity (MICRO) program has given her hands-on experience with many different aspects of research, including MATLAB programming, experimental design, data analysis, figure-making, and scientific writing.

Wood is also one of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities around the United States to participate in the first MICRO Summit earlier this year. The internship program, developed by the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow, providing even more opportunities for non-MIT undergraduate students — including the MICRO Summit and the program’s expansion to include Northwestern University.

“I think one of the most valuable aspects of the MICRO program is the ability to do research long term with an experienced professor in materials science and engineering,” says Wood. “My school has limited opportunities for undergraduate research in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to gain valuable experience in this field, which I would not otherwise have.”

Like Wood, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry major at Manhattan College, values the exposure to materials science, especially since she is not able to learn as much about it at her home institution.

“I learned a lot about crystallography and defects in materials through the MICRO curriculum, especially through videos,” says Garcia. “The research itself is very valuable, as well, because we get to apply what we’ve learned through the videos in the research we do remotely.”

Expanding research opportunities

From the beginning, the MICRO program was designed as a fully remote, rigorous education and mentoring program targeted toward students from underserved backgrounds interested in pursuing graduate school in materials science or related fields. Interns are matched with faculty to work on their specific research interests.

Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that research projects for the interns are designed to be work that they can do remotely, such as developing a machine-learning algorithm or a data analysis approach.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just about what the program and faculty are bringing to the student interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. “The students are doing real research and work, and creating things of real value. It’s very much an exchange.”

Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, had helped to establish MICRO at MIT from the very beginning. Once at Northwestern, she quickly realized that expanding MICRO to Northwestern would offer even more research opportunities to interns than by relying on MIT alone — leveraging the university’s strong materials science and engineering department, as well as offering resources for biomaterials research through Northwestern’s medical school. The program received funding from 3M and officially launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Approximately half of the MICRO interns are now in the program with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wood and Garcia both participate in the program via Northwestern.

“By expanding to another school, we’ve been able to have interns work with a much broader range of research projects,” says Chazot. “It has become easier for us to place students with faculty and research that match their interests.”

Building community

The MICRO program received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for three days of presentations, workshops, and campus tours — including a tour of the MIT.nano building — as well as various community-building activities.

“A big part of MICRO is the community,” says Chazot. “A highlight of the summit was just seeing the students come together.”

The summit also included panel discussions that allowed interns to gain insights and advice from graduate students and professionals. The graduate panel discussion included MIT graduate students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The career panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vice president and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior process engineer at 6K.

Students also had an opportunity to share their work with each other through research presentations. Their presentations covered a wide range of topics, including: developing a computer program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers used in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle analysis of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental impact in comparison to a standard silicon microchip; and applying machine learning algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy images of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic material. 

“The summit was wonderful and the best academic experience I have had as a first-year college student,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who is pursuing a major in chemistry and dual degree biomedical engineering at Spelman College and participates in MICRO through MIT. “I got to meet so many students who were all in grades above me … and I learned a little about how to navigate college as an upperclassman.” 

“I actually have an extremely close friendship with one of the students, and we keep in touch regularly,” adds La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave valuable advice about applications and recommendation letters that will be useful when I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate schools.”

Looking to the future, MICRO organizers hope to continue to grow the program’s reach.

“We would love to see other schools taking on this model,” says Sandland. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. The more departments, research groups, and mentors that get involved with this program, the more impact it can have.”

Gabrielle Wood, a junior at Howard University majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to improve the sustainability and life cycles of natural resources and materials. Her work in the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity (MICRO) program has given her hands-on experience with many different aspects of research, including MATLAB programming, experimental design, data analysis, figure-making, and scientific writing.

Wood is also one of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities around the United States to participate in the first MICRO Summit earlier this year. The internship program, developed by the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow, providing even more opportunities for non-MIT undergraduate students — including the MICRO Summit and the program’s expansion to include Northwestern University.

“I think one of the most valuable aspects of the MICRO program is the ability to do research long term with an experienced professor in materials science and engineering,” says Wood. “My school has limited opportunities for undergraduate research in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to gain valuable experience in this field, which I would not otherwise have.”

Like Wood, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry major at Manhattan College, values the exposure to materials science, especially since she is not able to learn as much about it at her home institution.

“I learned a lot about crystallography and defects in materials through the MICRO curriculum, especially through videos,” says Garcia. “The research itself is very valuable, as well, because we get to apply what we’ve learned through the videos in the research we do remotely.”

Expanding research opportunities

From the beginning, the MICRO program was designed as a fully remote, rigorous education and mentoring program targeted toward students from underserved backgrounds interested in pursuing graduate school in materials science or related fields. Interns are matched with faculty to work on their specific research interests.

Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that research projects for the interns are designed to be work that they can do remotely, such as developing a machine-learning algorithm or a data analysis approach.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just about what the program and faculty are bringing to the student interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. “The students are doing real research and work, and creating things of real value. It’s very much an exchange.”

Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, had helped to establish MICRO at MIT from the very beginning. Once at Northwestern, she quickly realized that expanding MICRO to Northwestern would offer even more research opportunities to interns than by relying on MIT alone — leveraging the university’s strong materials science and engineering department, as well as offering resources for biomaterials research through Northwestern’s medical school. The program received funding from 3M and officially launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Approximately half of the MICRO interns are now in the program with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wood and Garcia both participate in the program via Northwestern.

“By expanding to another school, we’ve been able to have interns work with a much broader range of research projects,” says Chazot. “It has become easier for us to place students with faculty and research that match their interests.”

Building community

The MICRO program received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for three days of presentations, workshops, and campus tours — including a tour of the MIT.nano building — as well as various community-building activities.

“A big part of MICRO is the community,” says Chazot. “A highlight of the summit was just seeing the students come together.”

The summit also included panel discussions that allowed interns to gain insights and advice from graduate students and professionals. The graduate panel discussion included MIT graduate students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The career panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vice president and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior process engineer at 6K.

Students also had an opportunity to share their work with each other through research presentations. Their presentations covered a wide range of topics, including: developing a computer program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers used in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle analysis of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental impact in comparison to a standard silicon microchip; and applying machine learning algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy images of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic material. 

“The summit was wonderful and the best academic experience I have had as a first-year college student,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who is pursuing a major in chemistry and dual degree biomedical engineering at Spelman College and participates in MICRO through MIT. “I got to meet so many students who were all in grades above me … and I learned a little about how to navigate college as an upperclassman.” 

“I actually have an extremely close friendship with one of the students, and we keep in touch regularly,” adds La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave valuable advice about applications and recommendation letters that will be useful when I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate schools.”

Looking to the future, MICRO organizers hope to continue to grow the program’s reach.

“We would love to see other schools taking on this model,” says Sandland. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. The more departments, research groups, and mentors that get involved with this program, the more impact it can have.”

Gabrielle Wood, a junior at Howard University majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to improve the sustainability and life cycles of natural resources and materials. Her work in the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity (MICRO) program has given her hands-on experience with many different aspects of research, including MATLAB programming, experimental design, data analysis, figure-making, and scientific writing.

Wood is also one of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities around the United States to participate in the first MICRO Summit earlier this year. The internship program, developed by the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow, providing even more opportunities for non-MIT undergraduate students — including the MICRO Summit and the program’s expansion to include Northwestern University.

“I think one of the most valuable aspects of the MICRO program is the ability to do research long term with an experienced professor in materials science and engineering,” says Wood. “My school has limited opportunities for undergraduate research in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to gain valuable experience in this field, which I would not otherwise have.”

Like Wood, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry major at Manhattan College, values the exposure to materials science, especially since she is not able to learn as much about it at her home institution.

“I learned a lot about crystallography and defects in materials through the MICRO curriculum, especially through videos,” says Garcia. “The research itself is very valuable, as well, because we get to apply what we’ve learned through the videos in the research we do remotely.”

Expanding research opportunities

From the beginning, the MICRO program was designed as a fully remote, rigorous education and mentoring program targeted toward students from underserved backgrounds interested in pursuing graduate school in materials science or related fields. Interns are matched with faculty to work on their specific research interests.

Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that research projects for the interns are designed to be work that they can do remotely, such as developing a machine-learning algorithm or a data analysis approach.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just about what the program and faculty are bringing to the student interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. “The students are doing real research and work, and creating things of real value. It’s very much an exchange.”

Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, had helped to establish MICRO at MIT from the very beginning. Once at Northwestern, she quickly realized that expanding MICRO to Northwestern would offer even more research opportunities to interns than by relying on MIT alone — leveraging the university’s strong materials science and engineering department, as well as offering resources for biomaterials research through Northwestern’s medical school. The program received funding from 3M and officially launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Approximately half of the MICRO interns are now in the program with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wood and Garcia both participate in the program via Northwestern.

“By expanding to another school, we’ve been able to have interns work with a much broader range of research projects,” says Chazot. “It has become easier for us to place students with faculty and research that match their interests.”

Building community

The MICRO program received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for three days of presentations, workshops, and campus tours — including a tour of the MIT.nano building — as well as various community-building activities.

“A big part of MICRO is the community,” says Chazot. “A highlight of the summit was just seeing the students come together.”

The summit also included panel discussions that allowed interns to gain insights and advice from graduate students and professionals. The graduate panel discussion included MIT graduate students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The career panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vice president and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior process engineer at 6K.

Students also had an opportunity to share their work with each other through research presentations. Their presentations covered a wide range of topics, including: developing a computer program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers used in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle analysis of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental impact in comparison to a standard silicon microchip; and applying machine learning algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy images of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic material. 

“The summit was wonderful and the best academic experience I have had as a first-year college student,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who is pursuing a major in chemistry and dual degree biomedical engineering at Spelman College and participates in MICRO through MIT. “I got to meet so many students who were all in grades above me … and I learned a little about how to navigate college as an upperclassman.” 

“I actually have an extremely close friendship with one of the students, and we keep in touch regularly,” adds La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave valuable advice about applications and recommendation letters that will be useful when I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate schools.”

Looking to the future, MICRO organizers hope to continue to grow the program’s reach.

“We would love to see other schools taking on this model,” says Sandland. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. The more departments, research groups, and mentors that get involved with this program, the more impact it can have.”

Gabrielle Wood, a junior at Howard University majoring in chemical engineering, is on a mission to improve the sustainability and life cycles of natural resources and materials. Her work in the Materials Initiative for Comprehensive Research Opportunity (MICRO) program has given her hands-on experience with many different aspects of research, including MATLAB programming, experimental design, data analysis, figure-making, and scientific writing.

Wood is also one of 10 undergraduates from 10 universities around the United States to participate in the first MICRO Summit earlier this year. The internship program, developed by the MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering (DMSE), first launched in fall 2021. Now in its third year, the program continues to grow, providing even more opportunities for non-MIT undergraduate students — including the MICRO Summit and the program’s expansion to include Northwestern University.

“I think one of the most valuable aspects of the MICRO program is the ability to do research long term with an experienced professor in materials science and engineering,” says Wood. “My school has limited opportunities for undergraduate research in sustainable polymers, so the MICRO program allowed me to gain valuable experience in this field, which I would not otherwise have.”

Like Wood, Griheydi Garcia, a senior chemistry major at Manhattan College, values the exposure to materials science, especially since she is not able to learn as much about it at her home institution.

“I learned a lot about crystallography and defects in materials through the MICRO curriculum, especially through videos,” says Garcia. “The research itself is very valuable, as well, because we get to apply what we’ve learned through the videos in the research we do remotely.”

Expanding research opportunities

From the beginning, the MICRO program was designed as a fully remote, rigorous education and mentoring program targeted toward students from underserved backgrounds interested in pursuing graduate school in materials science or related fields. Interns are matched with faculty to work on their specific research interests.

Jessica Sandland ’99, PhD ’05, principal lecturer in DMSE and co-founder of MICRO, says that research projects for the interns are designed to be work that they can do remotely, such as developing a machine-learning algorithm or a data analysis approach.

“It’s important to note that it’s not just about what the program and faculty are bringing to the student interns,” says Sandland, a member of the MIT Digital Learning Lab, a joint program between MIT Open Learning and the Institute’s academic departments. “The students are doing real research and work, and creating things of real value. It’s very much an exchange.”

Cécile Chazot PhD ’22, now an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University, had helped to establish MICRO at MIT from the very beginning. Once at Northwestern, she quickly realized that expanding MICRO to Northwestern would offer even more research opportunities to interns than by relying on MIT alone — leveraging the university’s strong materials science and engineering department, as well as offering resources for biomaterials research through Northwestern’s medical school. The program received funding from 3M and officially launched at Northwestern in fall 2023. Approximately half of the MICRO interns are now in the program with MIT and half are with Northwestern. Wood and Garcia both participate in the program via Northwestern.

“By expanding to another school, we’ve been able to have interns work with a much broader range of research projects,” says Chazot. “It has become easier for us to place students with faculty and research that match their interests.”

Building community

The MICRO program received a Higher Education Innovation grant from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab, part of MIT Open Learning, to develop an in-person summit. In January 2024, interns visited MIT for three days of presentations, workshops, and campus tours — including a tour of the MIT.nano building — as well as various community-building activities.

“A big part of MICRO is the community,” says Chazot. “A highlight of the summit was just seeing the students come together.”

The summit also included panel discussions that allowed interns to gain insights and advice from graduate students and professionals. The graduate panel discussion included MIT graduate students Sam Figueroa (mechanical engineering), Isabella Caruso (DMSE), and Eliana Feygin (DMSE). The career panel was led by Chazot and included Jatin Patil PhD ’23, head of product at SiTration; Maureen Reitman ’90, ScD ’93, group vice president and principal engineer at Exponent; Lucas Caretta PhD ’19, assistant professor of engineering at Brown University; Raquel D’Oyen ’90, who holds a PhD from Northwestern University and is a senior engineer at Raytheon; and Ashley Kaiser MS ’19, PhD ’21, senior process engineer at 6K.

Students also had an opportunity to share their work with each other through research presentations. Their presentations covered a wide range of topics, including: developing a computer program to calculate solubility parameters for polymers used in textile manufacturing; performing a life-cycle analysis of a photonic chip and evaluating its environmental impact in comparison to a standard silicon microchip; and applying machine learning algorithms to scanning transmission electron microscopy images of CrSBr, a two-dimensional magnetic material. 

“The summit was wonderful and the best academic experience I have had as a first-year college student,” says MICRO intern Gabriella La Cour, who is pursuing a major in chemistry and dual degree biomedical engineering at Spelman College and participates in MICRO through MIT. “I got to meet so many students who were all in grades above me … and I learned a little about how to navigate college as an upperclassman.” 

“I actually have an extremely close friendship with one of the students, and we keep in touch regularly,” adds La Cour. “Professor Chazot gave valuable advice about applications and recommendation letters that will be useful when I apply to REUs [Research Experiences for Undergraduates] and graduate schools.”

Looking to the future, MICRO organizers hope to continue to grow the program’s reach.

“We would love to see other schools taking on this model,” says Sandland. “There are a lot of opportunities out there. The more departments, research groups, and mentors that get involved with this program, the more impact it can have.”

A few months ago, we wondered if Wired had fired its entire fact-checking staff because it published what appeared to be a facts-optional article co-authored by professional consistently wrong Jaron Lanier and an academic I’d not come across before, Allison Stanger. The article suggested that getting rid of Section 230 “could save everything.” Yet the article was so far off-base that it was in the “not even wrong” category of wrongness.

I’m not going to review all the reasons it was wrong. You can go back to my original article for that, though I will note that the argument seemed to suggest that getting rid of Section 230 would both lead to better content moderation and, at the same time, only moderation based on the First Amendment. Both of those points are obviously wrong, but the latter one is incoherent.

Given his long track record of wrongness, I had assumed that much of the article likely came from Lanier. However, I’m going to reassess that in light of Stanger’s recent performance before the House Energy & Commerce Committee. Last week, there was this weird hearing about Section 230, in which the Committee invited three academic critics of Section 230, and not a single person who could counter their arguments and falsehoods. We talked about this hearing a bit in this week’s podcast, with Rebecca MacKinnon from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Stanger was one of the three witnesses. The other two, Mary Anne Franks and Mary Graw Leary, presented some misleading and confused nonsense about Section 230. However, the misleading and confused nonsense about Section 230 at least fits into the normal framework of the debate around Section 230. There is confusion about how (c)(1) and (c)(2) interact, the purpose of Section 230, and (especially) some confusion about CSAM and Section 230 and an apparent unawareness that federal criminal behavior is exempted from Section 230.

But, let’s leave that aside. Because Stanger’s submission was so far off the mark that whoever invited her should be embarrassed. I’ve seen some people testify before Congress without knowing what they’re talking about, but I cannot recall seeing testimony this completely, bafflingly wrong before. Her submitted testimony is wrong in all the ways that the Wired article was wrong and more. There are just blatant factual errors throughout it.

It is impossible to cover all of the nonsense, so we’re just going to pick some gems.

Without Section 230, existing large social media companies would have to adapt. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, (DAOs) such as BlueSky and Mastodon, would become more attractive. The emergent DAO social media landscape should serve to put further brakes on virality, allowing a more regional social media ecosystem to emerge, thereby creating new demand for local media. In an ideal world, networks of DAOs would comprise a new fediverse (a collection of social networking servers which can communicate with each other, while remaining independently controlled), where users would have greater choice and control over the communities of which they are a part.

So, um. That’s not what DAOs are, professor. You seem to be confusing decentralized social media with decentralized autonomous organizations, which are a wholly different thing. This is kind of like saying “social security benefits” when you mean “social media influencers” because both begin with “social.” They’re not the same thing.

A decentralized social media site is what it says on the tin. It’s a type of social media that isn’t wholly controlled by a single company. Different bits of it can be controlled by others, whether its users or alternative third-party providers. A DAO is an operation, often using mechanisms like cryptocurrency and tokens, to enable a kind of democratic voting, or (possibly) a set of smart contracts, that determine how the loosely defined organization is run. They are not the same.

In theory, a decentralized social media site could be run by a DAO, but I don’t know of any that currently are.

Also, um, decentralized social media can only really exist because of Section 230. “Without Section 230,” you wouldn’t have Bluesky or Mastodon, because they would face ruinous litigation for hosting content that people would sue over. So, no, you would not have either more decentralized social media (which I think is what you meant) or DAOs (which are wholly unrelated). You’d have a lot less, because hosting third-party speech would come with way more liability risk.

Also, there’s nothing inherent to decentralized social media that means you’d “put the brakes on virality.” Mastodon has developed to date in a manner designed to tamp down virality, but Bluesky hasn’t? Nor have other decentralized social media offerings, many of which hope to serve a global conversation where virality is a part of it. And that wouldn’t really change with or without Section 230. Mastodon made that decision because of the types of communities it wanted to foster. And, indeed, its ability to do that is, in part, due to intermediary liability protections like Section 230, that enable the kind of small, more focused community moderation Mastodon embraces already.

It’s really not clear to me that Professor Stanger even knows what Section 230 does.

Non-profits like Wikipedia are concerned that their enterprise could be shut down through gratuitous defamation lawsuits that would bleed them dry until they ceased to exist (such as what happened with Gawker). I am not convinced this is a danger for Wikipedia, since their editing is done by humans who have first amendment rights, and their product is not fodder for virality….

Again, wut? The fact that their editing is “done by humans” has literally no impact on anything here. Why even mention that? Humans get sued for defamation all the time. And, if they’re more likely to get sued for defamation, they’re less likely to even want to edit at all.

And people get mad about their Wikipedia articles all the time, and sometimes they sue over them. Section 230 gets those lawsuits thrown out. Without it, those lawsuits would last longer and be more expensive.

Again, it’s not at all clear if Prof. Stanger even knows what Section 230 is or how it works.

The Facebook Files show that Meta knew that its engagement algorithms had adverse effects on the mental health of teenage girls, yet it has done nothing notable to combat those unintended consequences. Instead, Meta’s lawyers have invoked Section 230 in lawsuits to defend itself against efforts to hold it liable for serious harms

Again, this is just wrong. What the crux of the Facebook Files showed was that Meta was, in fact, doing research to learn about where its algorithms might cause harm in order to try to minimize that harm. However, because of some bad reporting, it now means that companies will be less likely to even do that research, because people like Professor Stanger will misrepresent it, claiming that they did nothing to try to limit the harms. This is just outright false information.

Also, the cases where Meta has invoked Section 230 would be unrelated to the issue being discussed here because 230 is about not being held liable for user content.

The online world brought to life by Section 230 now dehumanizes us by highlighting our own insignificance. Social media and cancel culture make us feel small and vulnerable, where human beings crave feeling large and living lives of meaning, which cannot blossom without a felt sense of personal agency that our laws and institutions are designed to protect. While book publishers today celebrate the creative contributions of their authors, for-profit Internet platforms do not.

I honestly have no idea what’s being said here. “Dehumanizes us by highlighting our own insignificance?” What are you even talking about? People were a lot more “insignificant” pre-internet, when they had no way to speak out. And what does “cancel culture” have to do with literally any of this?

Without Section 230, companies would be liable for the content on their platforms. This would result in an explosion of lawsuits and greater caution in such content moderation, although companies would have to balance such with first amendment rights. Think of all the human jobs that could be generated!

Full employment for tort lawyers! I mean, this is just a modern version of Bastiat’s broken window fallacy. Think of all the economic activity if we just break all the windows in our village!

Again and again, it becomes clear that Stanger has no clue how any of this works. She does not understand Section 230. She does not understand the internet. She does not understand the First Amendment. And she does not understand content moderation. It’s a hell of a thing, considering she is testifying about Section 230 and its impact on social media and the First Amendment.

At a stroke, content moderation for companies would be a vastly simpler proposition. They need only uphold the First Amendment, and the Courts would develop the jurisprudence to help them do that, rather than to put the onus of moderation entirely on companies.

That is… not at all how it would work. They don’t just need to “uphold the First Amendment” (which is not a thing that companies can even do). The First Amendment’s only role is in restricting the government, not companies, from passing laws that infringe on a person’s ability to express themselves.

Instead, as has been detailed repeatedly, companies would face the so-called “moderator’s dilemma.” Because the First Amendment requires distributors to have actual knowledge of content violating the law to be liable, a world without Section 230 would incentivize one of two things, neither of which is “upholding the First Amendment.” They would either let everything go and do as little moderation as possible (so as to avoid the requisite knowledge), or they’d become very aggressive in limiting and removing content to avoid liability (even though this wouldn’t work and they’d still get hit with tons of lawsuits).

We’ve been here before. When government said the American public owned the airwaves, so television broadcasting would be regulated, they put in place regulations that supported the common good. The Internet affects everyone, and our public square is now virtual, so we must put in place measures to ensure that our digital age public dialogue includes everyone. In the television era, the fairness doctrine laid that groundwork. A new lens needs to be developed for the Internet age.

Except, no, that’s just factually wrong. The only reason that the government was able to put regulations on broadcast television was because the government controlled the public spectrum which they licensed to the broadcasters. The Supreme Court made clear in Red Lion that without that, they could not hinder the speech of media companies. So, the idea that you can just apply similar regulations to the internet is just fundamentally clueless. The internet is not publicly owned spectrum licensed to anyone.

While Section 230 perpetuates an illusion that today’s social media companies are common carriers like the phone companies, they are not. Unlike Ma Bell, they curate the content they transmit to users

Again, it appears the Professor is wholly unaware of Section 230 and how it works. The authors of Section 230 made it clear over and over again that they wrote 230 to be the opposite of common carriers. No one who supports Section 230 thinks it makes platforms into common carriers, because it does not. The entire point was to free up companies to choose how to curate content, so as to allow those companies to craft the kinds of communities they wanted. They only people claiming the “illusion” of common carrierness are those who are trying to destroy Section 230.

So there is no “illusion” here, unless you don’t understand what you’re talking about.

The repeal of Section 230 would also be a step in the right direction in addressing what are presently severe power imbalances between government and corporate power in shaping democratic life. It would also shine a spotlight on a globally disturbing fact: the overwhelming majority of global social media is currently in the hands of one man (Mark Zuckerberg), while nearly half the people on earth have a Meta account. How can that be a good thing under any scenario for the free exchange of ideas?

I mean, we agree that it’s bad that Meta is so big. But if you remove Section 230 (as Meta itself has advocated for!), you help Meta get bigger and harm the competition. Meta has a building full of lawyers. They can handle the onslaught of lawsuits that this would bring (as Stanger herself gleefully cheers on). It’s everyone else, the smaller sites, such as the decentralized players (not DAOs) who would get destroyed.

Mastodon admins aren’t going to be able to afford to pay to defend the lawsuits. Bluesky doesn’t have a building full of lawyers. The big winner here would be Meta. The cost to Meta of removing Section 230 is minimal. The cost to everyone trying to eat away at Meta’s marketshare would be massive.

The new speech is governed by the allocation of virality in our virtual public square. People cannot simply speak for themselves, for there is always a mysterious algorithm in the room that has independently set the volume of the speaker’s voice. If one is to be heard, one must speak in part to one’s human audience, in part to the algorithm. It is as if the constitution had required citizens to speak through actors or lawyers who answered to the Dutch East India Company, or some other large remote entity. What power should these intermediaries have? When the very logic of speech must shift in order for people to be heard, is that still free speech? This was not a problem foreseen in the law.

I mean, this is just ahistorical nonsense. Historically, most people had no way to get their message out at all. You could talk to your friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors, and that was about it. If you wanted to reach beyond that small group, you required some large gatekeeper (a publisher, a TV or radio producer, a newspaper) to grant you access, which they refused for the vast majority of people.

The internet flipped all that on its head, allowing anyone to effectively speak to anyone. The reason we have algorithms is not “Section 230” and the algorithms aren’t “setting the volume,” they came in to deal with the simple fact that there’s just too much information, and it was flooding the zone. People wanted to find information that was more relevant to them, and with the amount of content available online, the only way to manage that was with some sort of algorithm.

But, again, the rise of algorithms is not a Section 230 issue, even though Stanger seems to think it is.

Getting rid of the liability shield for all countries operating in the United States would have largely unacknowledged positive implications for national security, as well as the profit margins for US-headquartered companies. Foreign electoral interference is not in the interests of democratic stability, precisely because our enemies benefit from dividing us rather than uniting us. All foreign in origin content could therefore be policed at a higher standard, without violating the first amendment or the privacy rights of US citizens. As the National Security Agency likes to emphasize, the fourth amendment does not apply to foreigners and that has been a driver of surveillance protocols since the birth of the Internet. It is probable that the Supreme Court’s developing first amendment jurisprudence for social media in a post-230 world would embrace the same distinction. At a stroke, the digital fentanyl that TikTok represents in its American version could easily be shut down, and we could through a process of public deliberation leading to new statutory law collectively insist on the same optimization targets for well-being, test scores, and time on the platform that Chinese citizens currently enjoy in the Chinese version of TikTok (Douyin)

Again, this is a word salad that is mostly meaningless.

First of all, none of this has anything to do with Section 230, but rather the First Amendment. And it’s already been noted, clearly, that the First Amendment protects American users of foreign apps.

No one is saying “you can’t ban TikTok because of 230,” they’re saying “you can’t ban TikTok because of the First Amendment.” The Supreme Court isn’t going to magically reinvent long-standing First Amendment doctrine because 230 is repealed. This is nonsense.

And, we were just discussing what utter nonsense it is to claim that TikTok is “digital fentanyl” so I won’t even bother repeating that.

There might also be financial and innovation advantages for American companies with this simple legislative act. Any commercial losses for American companies from additional content moderation burdens would be offset by reputational gains and a rule imposed from without on what constitutes constitutionally acceptable content. Foreign electoral interference through misinformation and manipulation could be shut down as subversive activity directed at the Constitution of the United States, not a particular political party.

This part is particularly frustrating. This is why internet companies already moderate. Stanger’s piece repeatedly seems to complain both about too little moderation (electoral interference! Alex Jones!) and too much moderation (algorithms! dastardly Zuck deciding what I can read!).

She doesn’t even seem to realize that her argument is self-contradictory.

But, here, the supposed “financial and innovation advantages” from American companies being able to get “reputational gains” by stopping “misinformation” already exists. And it only exists because of Section 230. Which Professor Stanger is saying we need to remove to get the very thing it enables, and which would be taken away if it were repealed.

This whole thing makes me want to bang my head on my desk repeatedly.

Companies moderate today to (1) make users’ experience better and (2) to make advertisers happier that they’re not facing brand risk from having ads appear next to awful content. The companies that do better already achieve that “reputational benefit,” and they can do that kind of moderation because they know Section 230 prevents costly, wasteful, vexatious litigation from getting too far.

If you remove Section 230, that goes away. As discussed above, companies then are much more limited in the kinds of moderation they can do, which means users have a worse experience and advertisers have a worse experience, leading to reputational harm.

Today, companies already try to remove or diminish the power of electoral interference. That’s a giant part of trust & safety teams’ efforts. But they can really only do it safely because of 230.

The attention-grooming model fostered by Section 230 leads to stupendous quantities of poor-quality data. While an AI model can tolerate a significant amount of poor-quality data, there is a limit. It is unrealistic to imagine a society mediated by mostly terrible communication where that same society enjoys unmolested, high-quality AI. A society must seek quality as a whole, as a shared cultural value, in order to maximize the benefits of AI. Now is the best time for the tech business to mature and develop business models based on quality.

I’ve read this paragraph multiple times, and I still don’t know what it’s saying. Section 230 does not lead to an “attention-grooming model.” That’s just how society works. And, then, when she says society must seek quality as a whole, given how many people are online, the only way to do that is with algorithms trying to make some sort of call on what is, and what is not, quality.

That’s how this works.

Does she imagine that without Section 230, algorithms will go away, but good quality content will magically rise up? Because that’s not how any of this actually works.

Again, there’s much more in her written testimony, and none of it makes any sense at all.

Her spoken testimony was just as bad. Rep. Bob Latta asked her about the national security claims (some of which were quoted above) and we got this word salad, none of which has anything to do with Section 230:

I think it’s important to realize that our internet is precisely unique because it’s so open and that makes it uniquely vulnerable to all sorts of cyber attacks. Just this week, we saw an extraordinarily complicated plot that is most likely done by China, Russia or North Korea that could have blown up the internet as we know it. If you want to look up XZ Utils, Google that and you’ll find all kinds of details. They’re still sorting out what the intention was. It’s extraordinarily sophisticated though, so I think that the idea that we have a Chinese company where data on American children is being stored and potentially utilized in China, can be used to influence our children. It can be used in any number of ways no matter what they tell you. So I very much support and applaud the legislation to repeal, not to repeal, but to end TikToks operations in the United States.

The national security implications are extraordinary. Where the data is stored is so important and how it can be used to manipulate and influence us is so important. And I think the next frontier that I’ll conclude with this, for warfare, is in cyberspace. It’s where weak countries have huge advantages. They can pour resources into hackers who could really blow up our infrastructure, our hospitals, our universities. They’re even trying to get, as you know, into the House. This House right here. So I think repealing Section 230 is connected to addressing a host of potential harms

Nothing mentioned in there — from supply chain attacks like xz utils, to a potential TikTok ban, to hackers breaking into hospitals — has anything whatsoever to do with Section 230. She just throws it in at the end as if they’re connected.

She also claimed that Eric Schmidt has come out in favor of “repealing Section 230,” which was news to me. It also appears to be absolutely false. I went and looked, and the only thing I can find is a Digiday article which claims he called for reforms (not a repeal). The article never actually quotes him saying anything related to Section 230 at all, so it’s unclear what (if anything) he actually said. Literally the only quotes from Schmidt are old man stuff about how the kids these days just need to learn how to put down their phones, and then something weird about the fairness doctrine. Not 230.

Later, in the hearing, she was asked about the impact on smaller companies (some of which I mentioned above) and again demonstrates a near total ignorance of how this all works:

There is some concern, it’s sometimes expressed from small businesses that they are going to be the subject of frivolous lawsuits, defamation lawsuits, and they can be sued out of business even though they’ve defamed no one. I’m less concerned about that because if we were to repeal section (c)(1) of Section 230 of those 26 words, I think the First Amendment would govern and we would develop the jurisprudence to deal with small business in a more refined way. I think if anything, small businesses are in a better position to control and oversee what’s on their platforms than these monolithic large companies we have today. So with a bit of caution, I think that could be addressed.

The First Amendment always governs. But Section 230 is the “more refined way” that we’ve developed to help protect small businesses. The main function of Section 230 is to get cases, that would be long and costly if you had to defend them under the First Amendment, tossed out much earlier at the motion to dismiss stage. Literally that’s Section 230’s main purpose.

If you had to fight it out under the First Amendment, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars and a much longer case. And that cost is going to lead companies to (1) refuse to host lots of protected content, because it’s not worth the hassle, and (2) be much more open to pulling down any content that anyone complains about.

This is not speculative. There have been studies on this. Weaker intermediary laws always lead to massive overblocking. If Stanger had done her research, or even understood any of this, she would know this.

So why is she the one testifying before Congress?

I’ll just conclude with this banger, which was her final statement to Congress:

I just want to maybe take you back to the first part of your question to explain that, which I thought was a good one, which is that we have a long history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this country that in effect has been stopped by Section 230. In other words, if you review, if you remove (c)(1), that First Amendment jurisprudence will develop to determine when it is crime fire in a crowded theater, whether there’s defamation, whether there’s libel. We believe in free speech in this country, but even the First Amendment has some limits put on it and those could apply to the platforms. We have a strange situation right now if we take that issue of fentanyl that we were discussing earlier, what we have right now is essentially a system where we can go after the users, we can go after the dealers, but we can’t go after the mules. And I think that’s very problematic. We should hold the mules liable. They’re part of the system.

Yeah. So. She actually went to the whole fire in a crowded theater thing. This is the dead-on giveaway that the person speaking has no clue about the First Amendment. That’s dicta from a case from over 100 years ago, in a case that is no longer considered good law, and hasn’t been in decades. Even worse, that dicta came in a case about jailing war protestors.

She also trots out yet another of Ken “Popehat” White’s (an actual First Amendment expert) most annoying tropes about people opining on the First Amendment without understanding it: because the First Amendment has some limits, this new limit must be okay. That’s not how it works. As Ken and others have pointed out, the exceptions to the First Amendment are an established, known, and almost certainly closed set.

The Supreme Court has no interest in expanding that set. It refused to do so for animal crush videos, so it’s not going to magically do it for whatever awful speech you think it should limit.

Anyway, it was a shame that Congress chose to hold a hearing on Section 230 and only bring in witnesses who hate Section 230. Not a single witness who could explain why Section 230 is so important was brought in. But, even worse, they gave one of the three witness spots to someone who was spewing word salad level nonsense, that didn’t make any sense at all, was often factually incorrect (in hilariously embarrassing ways), and seemed wholly unaware of how any relevant thing worked.

Do better, Congress.

A few months ago, we wondered if Wired had fired its entire fact-checking staff because it published what appeared to be a facts-optional article co-authored by professional consistently wrong Jaron Lanier and an academic I’d not come across before, Allison Stanger. The article suggested that getting rid of Section 230 “could save everything.” Yet the article was so far off-base that it was in the “not even wrong” category of wrongness.

I’m not going to review all the reasons it was wrong. You can go back to my original article for that, though I will note that the argument seemed to suggest that getting rid of Section 230 would both lead to better content moderation and, at the same time, only moderation based on the First Amendment. Both of those points are obviously wrong, but the latter one is incoherent.

Given his long track record of wrongness, I had assumed that much of the article likely came from Lanier. However, I’m going to reassess that in light of Stanger’s recent performance before the House Energy & Commerce Committee. Last week, there was this weird hearing about Section 230, in which the Committee invited three academic critics of Section 230, and not a single person who could counter their arguments and falsehoods. We talked about this hearing a bit in this week’s podcast, with Rebecca MacKinnon from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Stanger was one of the three witnesses. The other two, Mary Anne Franks and Mary Graw Leary, presented some misleading and confused nonsense about Section 230. However, the misleading and confused nonsense about Section 230 at least fits into the normal framework of the debate around Section 230. There is confusion about how (c)(1) and (c)(2) interact, the purpose of Section 230, and (especially) some confusion about CSAM and Section 230 and an apparent unawareness that federal criminal behavior is exempted from Section 230.

But, let’s leave that aside. Because Stanger’s submission was so far off the mark that whoever invited her should be embarrassed. I’ve seen some people testify before Congress without knowing what they’re talking about, but I cannot recall seeing testimony this completely, bafflingly wrong before. Her submitted testimony is wrong in all the ways that the Wired article was wrong and more. There are just blatant factual errors throughout it.

It is impossible to cover all of the nonsense, so we’re just going to pick some gems.

Without Section 230, existing large social media companies would have to adapt. Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, (DAOs) such as BlueSky and Mastodon, would become more attractive. The emergent DAO social media landscape should serve to put further brakes on virality, allowing a more regional social media ecosystem to emerge, thereby creating new demand for local media. In an ideal world, networks of DAOs would comprise a new fediverse (a collection of social networking servers which can communicate with each other, while remaining independently controlled), where users would have greater choice and control over the communities of which they are a part.

So, um. That’s not what DAOs are, professor. You seem to be confusing decentralized social media with decentralized autonomous organizations, which are a wholly different thing. This is kind of like saying “social security benefits” when you mean “social media influencers” because both begin with “social.” They’re not the same thing.

A decentralized social media site is what it says on the tin. It’s a type of social media that isn’t wholly controlled by a single company. Different bits of it can be controlled by others, whether its users or alternative third-party providers. A DAO is an operation, often using mechanisms like cryptocurrency and tokens, to enable a kind of democratic voting, or (possibly) a set of smart contracts, that determine how the loosely defined organization is run. They are not the same.

In theory, a decentralized social media site could be run by a DAO, but I don’t know of any that currently are.

Also, um, decentralized social media can only really exist because of Section 230. “Without Section 230,” you wouldn’t have Bluesky or Mastodon, because they would face ruinous litigation for hosting content that people would sue over. So, no, you would not have either more decentralized social media (which I think is what you meant) or DAOs (which are wholly unrelated). You’d have a lot less, because hosting third-party speech would come with way more liability risk.

Also, there’s nothing inherent to decentralized social media that means you’d “put the brakes on virality.” Mastodon has developed to date in a manner designed to tamp down virality, but Bluesky hasn’t? Nor have other decentralized social media offerings, many of which hope to serve a global conversation where virality is a part of it. And that wouldn’t really change with or without Section 230. Mastodon made that decision because of the types of communities it wanted to foster. And, indeed, its ability to do that is, in part, due to intermediary liability protections like Section 230, that enable the kind of small, more focused community moderation Mastodon embraces already.

It’s really not clear to me that Professor Stanger even knows what Section 230 does.

Non-profits like Wikipedia are concerned that their enterprise could be shut down through gratuitous defamation lawsuits that would bleed them dry until they ceased to exist (such as what happened with Gawker). I am not convinced this is a danger for Wikipedia, since their editing is done by humans who have first amendment rights, and their product is not fodder for virality….

Again, wut? The fact that their editing is “done by humans” has literally no impact on anything here. Why even mention that? Humans get sued for defamation all the time. And, if they’re more likely to get sued for defamation, they’re less likely to even want to edit at all.

And people get mad about their Wikipedia articles all the time, and sometimes they sue over them. Section 230 gets those lawsuits thrown out. Without it, those lawsuits would last longer and be more expensive.

Again, it’s not at all clear if Prof. Stanger even knows what Section 230 is or how it works.

The Facebook Files show that Meta knew that its engagement algorithms had adverse effects on the mental health of teenage girls, yet it has done nothing notable to combat those unintended consequences. Instead, Meta’s lawyers have invoked Section 230 in lawsuits to defend itself against efforts to hold it liable for serious harms

Again, this is just wrong. What the crux of the Facebook Files showed was that Meta was, in fact, doing research to learn about where its algorithms might cause harm in order to try to minimize that harm. However, because of some bad reporting, it now means that companies will be less likely to even do that research, because people like Professor Stanger will misrepresent it, claiming that they did nothing to try to limit the harms. This is just outright false information.

Also, the cases where Meta has invoked Section 230 would be unrelated to the issue being discussed here because 230 is about not being held liable for user content.

The online world brought to life by Section 230 now dehumanizes us by highlighting our own insignificance. Social media and cancel culture make us feel small and vulnerable, where human beings crave feeling large and living lives of meaning, which cannot blossom without a felt sense of personal agency that our laws and institutions are designed to protect. While book publishers today celebrate the creative contributions of their authors, for-profit Internet platforms do not.

I honestly have no idea what’s being said here. “Dehumanizes us by highlighting our own insignificance?” What are you even talking about? People were a lot more “insignificant” pre-internet, when they had no way to speak out. And what does “cancel culture” have to do with literally any of this?

Without Section 230, companies would be liable for the content on their platforms. This would result in an explosion of lawsuits and greater caution in such content moderation, although companies would have to balance such with first amendment rights. Think of all the human jobs that could be generated!

Full employment for tort lawyers! I mean, this is just a modern version of Bastiat’s broken window fallacy. Think of all the economic activity if we just break all the windows in our village!

Again and again, it becomes clear that Stanger has no clue how any of this works. She does not understand Section 230. She does not understand the internet. She does not understand the First Amendment. And she does not understand content moderation. It’s a hell of a thing, considering she is testifying about Section 230 and its impact on social media and the First Amendment.

At a stroke, content moderation for companies would be a vastly simpler proposition. They need only uphold the First Amendment, and the Courts would develop the jurisprudence to help them do that, rather than to put the onus of moderation entirely on companies.

That is… not at all how it would work. They don’t just need to “uphold the First Amendment” (which is not a thing that companies can even do). The First Amendment’s only role is in restricting the government, not companies, from passing laws that infringe on a person’s ability to express themselves.

Instead, as has been detailed repeatedly, companies would face the so-called “moderator’s dilemma.” Because the First Amendment requires distributors to have actual knowledge of content violating the law to be liable, a world without Section 230 would incentivize one of two things, neither of which is “upholding the First Amendment.” They would either let everything go and do as little moderation as possible (so as to avoid the requisite knowledge), or they’d become very aggressive in limiting and removing content to avoid liability (even though this wouldn’t work and they’d still get hit with tons of lawsuits).

We’ve been here before. When government said the American public owned the airwaves, so television broadcasting would be regulated, they put in place regulations that supported the common good. The Internet affects everyone, and our public square is now virtual, so we must put in place measures to ensure that our digital age public dialogue includes everyone. In the television era, the fairness doctrine laid that groundwork. A new lens needs to be developed for the Internet age.

Except, no, that’s just factually wrong. The only reason that the government was able to put regulations on broadcast television was because the government controlled the public spectrum which they licensed to the broadcasters. The Supreme Court made clear in Red Lion that without that, they could not hinder the speech of media companies. So, the idea that you can just apply similar regulations to the internet is just fundamentally clueless. The internet is not publicly owned spectrum licensed to anyone.

While Section 230 perpetuates an illusion that today’s social media companies are common carriers like the phone companies, they are not. Unlike Ma Bell, they curate the content they transmit to users

Again, it appears the Professor is wholly unaware of Section 230 and how it works. The authors of Section 230 made it clear over and over again that they wrote 230 to be the opposite of common carriers. No one who supports Section 230 thinks it makes platforms into common carriers, because it does not. The entire point was to free up companies to choose how to curate content, so as to allow those companies to craft the kinds of communities they wanted. They only people claiming the “illusion” of common carrierness are those who are trying to destroy Section 230.

So there is no “illusion” here, unless you don’t understand what you’re talking about.

The repeal of Section 230 would also be a step in the right direction in addressing what are presently severe power imbalances between government and corporate power in shaping democratic life. It would also shine a spotlight on a globally disturbing fact: the overwhelming majority of global social media is currently in the hands of one man (Mark Zuckerberg), while nearly half the people on earth have a Meta account. How can that be a good thing under any scenario for the free exchange of ideas?

I mean, we agree that it’s bad that Meta is so big. But if you remove Section 230 (as Meta itself has advocated for!), you help Meta get bigger and harm the competition. Meta has a building full of lawyers. They can handle the onslaught of lawsuits that this would bring (as Stanger herself gleefully cheers on). It’s everyone else, the smaller sites, such as the decentralized players (not DAOs) who would get destroyed.

Mastodon admins aren’t going to be able to afford to pay to defend the lawsuits. Bluesky doesn’t have a building full of lawyers. The big winner here would be Meta. The cost to Meta of removing Section 230 is minimal. The cost to everyone trying to eat away at Meta’s marketshare would be massive.

The new speech is governed by the allocation of virality in our virtual public square. People cannot simply speak for themselves, for there is always a mysterious algorithm in the room that has independently set the volume of the speaker’s voice. If one is to be heard, one must speak in part to one’s human audience, in part to the algorithm. It is as if the constitution had required citizens to speak through actors or lawyers who answered to the Dutch East India Company, or some other large remote entity. What power should these intermediaries have? When the very logic of speech must shift in order for people to be heard, is that still free speech? This was not a problem foreseen in the law.

I mean, this is just ahistorical nonsense. Historically, most people had no way to get their message out at all. You could talk to your friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors, and that was about it. If you wanted to reach beyond that small group, you required some large gatekeeper (a publisher, a TV or radio producer, a newspaper) to grant you access, which they refused for the vast majority of people.

The internet flipped all that on its head, allowing anyone to effectively speak to anyone. The reason we have algorithms is not “Section 230” and the algorithms aren’t “setting the volume,” they came in to deal with the simple fact that there’s just too much information, and it was flooding the zone. People wanted to find information that was more relevant to them, and with the amount of content available online, the only way to manage that was with some sort of algorithm.

But, again, the rise of algorithms is not a Section 230 issue, even though Stanger seems to think it is.

Getting rid of the liability shield for all countries operating in the United States would have largely unacknowledged positive implications for national security, as well as the profit margins for US-headquartered companies. Foreign electoral interference is not in the interests of democratic stability, precisely because our enemies benefit from dividing us rather than uniting us. All foreign in origin content could therefore be policed at a higher standard, without violating the first amendment or the privacy rights of US citizens. As the National Security Agency likes to emphasize, the fourth amendment does not apply to foreigners and that has been a driver of surveillance protocols since the birth of the Internet. It is probable that the Supreme Court’s developing first amendment jurisprudence for social media in a post-230 world would embrace the same distinction. At a stroke, the digital fentanyl that TikTok represents in its American version could easily be shut down, and we could through a process of public deliberation leading to new statutory law collectively insist on the same optimization targets for well-being, test scores, and time on the platform that Chinese citizens currently enjoy in the Chinese version of TikTok (Douyin)

Again, this is a word salad that is mostly meaningless.

First of all, none of this has anything to do with Section 230, but rather the First Amendment. And it’s already been noted, clearly, that the First Amendment protects American users of foreign apps.

No one is saying “you can’t ban TikTok because of 230,” they’re saying “you can’t ban TikTok because of the First Amendment.” The Supreme Court isn’t going to magically reinvent long-standing First Amendment doctrine because 230 is repealed. This is nonsense.

And, we were just discussing what utter nonsense it is to claim that TikTok is “digital fentanyl” so I won’t even bother repeating that.

There might also be financial and innovation advantages for American companies with this simple legislative act. Any commercial losses for American companies from additional content moderation burdens would be offset by reputational gains and a rule imposed from without on what constitutes constitutionally acceptable content. Foreign electoral interference through misinformation and manipulation could be shut down as subversive activity directed at the Constitution of the United States, not a particular political party.

This part is particularly frustrating. This is why internet companies already moderate. Stanger’s piece repeatedly seems to complain both about too little moderation (electoral interference! Alex Jones!) and too much moderation (algorithms! dastardly Zuck deciding what I can read!).

She doesn’t even seem to realize that her argument is self-contradictory.

But, here, the supposed “financial and innovation advantages” from American companies being able to get “reputational gains” by stopping “misinformation” already exists. And it only exists because of Section 230. Which Professor Stanger is saying we need to remove to get the very thing it enables, and which would be taken away if it were repealed.

This whole thing makes me want to bang my head on my desk repeatedly.

Companies moderate today to (1) make users’ experience better and (2) to make advertisers happier that they’re not facing brand risk from having ads appear next to awful content. The companies that do better already achieve that “reputational benefit,” and they can do that kind of moderation because they know Section 230 prevents costly, wasteful, vexatious litigation from getting too far.

If you remove Section 230, that goes away. As discussed above, companies then are much more limited in the kinds of moderation they can do, which means users have a worse experience and advertisers have a worse experience, leading to reputational harm.

Today, companies already try to remove or diminish the power of electoral interference. That’s a giant part of trust & safety teams’ efforts. But they can really only do it safely because of 230.

The attention-grooming model fostered by Section 230 leads to stupendous quantities of poor-quality data. While an AI model can tolerate a significant amount of poor-quality data, there is a limit. It is unrealistic to imagine a society mediated by mostly terrible communication where that same society enjoys unmolested, high-quality AI. A society must seek quality as a whole, as a shared cultural value, in order to maximize the benefits of AI. Now is the best time for the tech business to mature and develop business models based on quality.

I’ve read this paragraph multiple times, and I still don’t know what it’s saying. Section 230 does not lead to an “attention-grooming model.” That’s just how society works. And, then, when she says society must seek quality as a whole, given how many people are online, the only way to do that is with algorithms trying to make some sort of call on what is, and what is not, quality.

That’s how this works.

Does she imagine that without Section 230, algorithms will go away, but good quality content will magically rise up? Because that’s not how any of this actually works.

Again, there’s much more in her written testimony, and none of it makes any sense at all.

Her spoken testimony was just as bad. Rep. Bob Latta asked her about the national security claims (some of which were quoted above) and we got this word salad, none of which has anything to do with Section 230:

I think it’s important to realize that our internet is precisely unique because it’s so open and that makes it uniquely vulnerable to all sorts of cyber attacks. Just this week, we saw an extraordinarily complicated plot that is most likely done by China, Russia or North Korea that could have blown up the internet as we know it. If you want to look up XZ Utils, Google that and you’ll find all kinds of details. They’re still sorting out what the intention was. It’s extraordinarily sophisticated though, so I think that the idea that we have a Chinese company where data on American children is being stored and potentially utilized in China, can be used to influence our children. It can be used in any number of ways no matter what they tell you. So I very much support and applaud the legislation to repeal, not to repeal, but to end TikToks operations in the United States.

The national security implications are extraordinary. Where the data is stored is so important and how it can be used to manipulate and influence us is so important. And I think the next frontier that I’ll conclude with this, for warfare, is in cyberspace. It’s where weak countries have huge advantages. They can pour resources into hackers who could really blow up our infrastructure, our hospitals, our universities. They’re even trying to get, as you know, into the House. This House right here. So I think repealing Section 230 is connected to addressing a host of potential harms

Nothing mentioned in there — from supply chain attacks like xz utils, to a potential TikTok ban, to hackers breaking into hospitals — has anything whatsoever to do with Section 230. She just throws it in at the end as if they’re connected.

She also claimed that Eric Schmidt has come out in favor of “repealing Section 230,” which was news to me. It also appears to be absolutely false. I went and looked, and the only thing I can find is a Digiday article which claims he called for reforms (not a repeal). The article never actually quotes him saying anything related to Section 230 at all, so it’s unclear what (if anything) he actually said. Literally the only quotes from Schmidt are old man stuff about how the kids these days just need to learn how to put down their phones, and then something weird about the fairness doctrine. Not 230.

Later, in the hearing, she was asked about the impact on smaller companies (some of which I mentioned above) and again demonstrates a near total ignorance of how this all works:

There is some concern, it’s sometimes expressed from small businesses that they are going to be the subject of frivolous lawsuits, defamation lawsuits, and they can be sued out of business even though they’ve defamed no one. I’m less concerned about that because if we were to repeal section (c)(1) of Section 230 of those 26 words, I think the First Amendment would govern and we would develop the jurisprudence to deal with small business in a more refined way. I think if anything, small businesses are in a better position to control and oversee what’s on their platforms than these monolithic large companies we have today. So with a bit of caution, I think that could be addressed.

The First Amendment always governs. But Section 230 is the “more refined way” that we’ve developed to help protect small businesses. The main function of Section 230 is to get cases, that would be long and costly if you had to defend them under the First Amendment, tossed out much earlier at the motion to dismiss stage. Literally that’s Section 230’s main purpose.

If you had to fight it out under the First Amendment, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars and a much longer case. And that cost is going to lead companies to (1) refuse to host lots of protected content, because it’s not worth the hassle, and (2) be much more open to pulling down any content that anyone complains about.

This is not speculative. There have been studies on this. Weaker intermediary laws always lead to massive overblocking. If Stanger had done her research, or even understood any of this, she would know this.

So why is she the one testifying before Congress?

I’ll just conclude with this banger, which was her final statement to Congress:

I just want to maybe take you back to the first part of your question to explain that, which I thought was a good one, which is that we have a long history of First Amendment jurisprudence in this country that in effect has been stopped by Section 230. In other words, if you review, if you remove (c)(1), that First Amendment jurisprudence will develop to determine when it is crime fire in a crowded theater, whether there’s defamation, whether there’s libel. We believe in free speech in this country, but even the First Amendment has some limits put on it and those could apply to the platforms. We have a strange situation right now if we take that issue of fentanyl that we were discussing earlier, what we have right now is essentially a system where we can go after the users, we can go after the dealers, but we can’t go after the mules. And I think that’s very problematic. We should hold the mules liable. They’re part of the system.

Yeah. So. She actually went to the whole fire in a crowded theater thing. This is the dead-on giveaway that the person speaking has no clue about the First Amendment. That’s dicta from a case from over 100 years ago, in a case that is no longer considered good law, and hasn’t been in decades. Even worse, that dicta came in a case about jailing war protestors.

She also trots out yet another of Ken “Popehat” White’s (an actual First Amendment expert) most annoying tropes about people opining on the First Amendment without understanding it: because the First Amendment has some limits, this new limit must be okay. That’s not how it works. As Ken and others have pointed out, the exceptions to the First Amendment are an established, known, and almost certainly closed set.

The Supreme Court has no interest in expanding that set. It refused to do so for animal crush videos, so it’s not going to magically do it for whatever awful speech you think it should limit.

Anyway, it was a shame that Congress chose to hold a hearing on Section 230 and only bring in witnesses who hate Section 230. Not a single witness who could explain why Section 230 is so important was brought in. But, even worse, they gave one of the three witness spots to someone who was spewing word salad level nonsense, that didn’t make any sense at all, was often factually incorrect (in hilariously embarrassing ways), and seemed wholly unaware of how any relevant thing worked.

Do better, Congress.

Connectomics, the ambitious field of study that seeks to map the intricate network of animal brains, is undergoing a growth spurt. Within the span of a decade, it has journeyed from its nascent stages to a discipline that is poised to (hopefully) unlock the enigmas of cognition and the physical underpinning of neuropathologies such as in Alzheimer’s disease. 

At its forefront is the use of powerful electron microscopes, which researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Samuel and Lichtman Labs of Harvard University bestowed with the analytical prowess of machine learning. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, the integrated AI serves as a “brain” that learns a specimen while acquiring the images, and intelligently focuses on the relevant pixels at nanoscale resolution similar to how animals inspect their worlds. 

“SmartEM” assists connectomics in quickly examining and reconstructing the brain’s complex network of synapses and neurons with nanometer precision. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, its integrated AI opens new doors to understand the brain's intricate architecture.

The integration of hardware and software in the process is crucial. The team embedded a GPU into the support computer connected to their microscope. This enabled running machine-learning models on the images, helping the microscope beam be directed to areas deemed interesting by the AI. “This lets the microscope dwell longer in areas that are harder to understand until it captures what it needs,” says MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Nir Shavit. “This step helps in mirroring human eye control, enabling rapid understanding of the images.” 

“When we look at a human face, our eyes swiftly navigate to the focal points that deliver vital cues for effective communication and comprehension,” says the lead architect of SmartEM, Yaron Meirovitch, a visiting scientist at MIT CSAIL who is also a former postdoc and current research associate neuroscientist at Harvard. “When we immerse ourselves in a book, we don't scan all of the empty space; rather, we direct our gaze towards the words and characters with ambiguity relative to our sentence expectations. This phenomenon within the human visual system has paved the way for the birth of the novel microscope concept.” 

For the task of reconstructing a human brain segment of about 100,000 neurons, achieving this with a conventional microscope would necessitate a decade of continuous imaging and a prohibitive budget. However, with SmartEM, by investing in four of these innovative microscopes at less than $1 million each, the task could be completed in a mere three months.

Nobel Prizes and little worms  

Over a century ago, Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal was heralded as being the first to characterize the structure of the nervous system. Employing the rudimentary light microscopes of his time, he embarked on leading explorations into neuroscience, laying the foundational understanding of neurons and sketching the initial outlines of this expansive and uncharted realm — a feat that earned him a Nobel Prize. He noted, on the topics of inspiration and discovery, that “As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.”

Progressing from these early stages, the field has advanced dramatically, evidenced by efforts in the 1980s, mapping the relatively simpler connectome of C. elegans, small worms, to today’s endeavors probing into more intricate brains of organisms like zebrafish and mice. This evolution reflects not only enormous strides, but also escalating complexities and demands: mapping the mouse brain alone means managing a staggering thousand petabytes of data, a task that vastly eclipses the storage capabilities of any university, the team says. 

Testing the waters

For their own work, Meirovitch and others from the research team studied 30-nanometer thick slices of octopus tissue that were mounted on tapes, put on wafers, and finally inserted into the electron microscopes. Each section of an octopus brain, comprising billions of pixels, was imaged, letting the scientists reconstruct the slices into a three-dimensional cube at nanometer resolution. This provided an ultra-detailed view of synapses. The chief aim? To colorize these images, identify each neuron, and understand their interrelationships, thereby creating a detailed map or “connectome” of the brain's circuitry.

“SmartEM will cut the imaging time of such projects from two weeks to 1.5 days,” says Meirovitch. “Neuroscience labs that currently can't be engaged with expensive and long EM imaging will be able to do it now,” The method should also allow synapse-level circuit analysis in samples from patients with psychiatric and neurologic disorders. 

Down the line, the team envisions a future where connectomics is both affordable and accessible. They hope that with tools like SmartEM, a wider spectrum of research institutions could contribute to neuroscience without relying on large partnerships, and that the method will soon be a standard pipeline in cases where biopsies from living patients are available. Additionally, they’re eager to apply the tech to understand pathologies, extending utility beyond just connectomics. “We are now endeavoring to introduce this to hospitals for large biopsies, utilizing electron microscopes, aiming to make pathology studies more efficient,” says Shavit. 

Two other authors on the paper have MIT CSAIL ties: lead author Lu Mi MCS ’19, PhD ’22, who is now a postdoc at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Shashata Sawmya, an MIT graduate student in the lab. The other lead authors are Core Francisco Park and Pavel Potocek, while Harvard professors Jeff Lichtman and Aravi Samuel are additional senior authors. Their research was supported by the NIH BRAIN Initiative and was presented at the 2023 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Workshop on Computational Biology. The work was done in collaboration with scientists from Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Google Chrome, a leading web browser, is at the forefront of testing innovative technologies to enhance web performance. One such advancement is the implementation of ...

The post Google Chrome begins testing shared dictionary compression technology appeared first on Gizchina.com.

Connectomics, the ambitious field of study that seeks to map the intricate network of animal brains, is undergoing a growth spurt. Within the span of a decade, it has journeyed from its nascent stages to a discipline that is poised to (hopefully) unlock the enigmas of cognition and the physical underpinning of neuropathologies such as in Alzheimer’s disease. 

At its forefront is the use of powerful electron microscopes, which researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Samuel and Lichtman Labs of Harvard University bestowed with the analytical prowess of machine learning. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, the integrated AI serves as a “brain” that learns a specimen while acquiring the images, and intelligently focuses on the relevant pixels at nanoscale resolution similar to how animals inspect their worlds. 

“SmartEM” assists connectomics in quickly examining and reconstructing the brain’s complex network of synapses and neurons with nanometer precision. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, its integrated AI opens new doors to understand the brain's intricate architecture.

The integration of hardware and software in the process is crucial. The team embedded a GPU into the support computer connected to their microscope. This enabled running machine-learning models on the images, helping the microscope beam be directed to areas deemed interesting by the AI. “This lets the microscope dwell longer in areas that are harder to understand until it captures what it needs,” says MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Nir Shavit. “This step helps in mirroring human eye control, enabling rapid understanding of the images.” 

“When we look at a human face, our eyes swiftly navigate to the focal points that deliver vital cues for effective communication and comprehension,” says the lead architect of SmartEM, Yaron Meirovitch, a visiting scientist at MIT CSAIL who is also a former postdoc and current research associate neuroscientist at Harvard. “When we immerse ourselves in a book, we don't scan all of the empty space; rather, we direct our gaze towards the words and characters with ambiguity relative to our sentence expectations. This phenomenon within the human visual system has paved the way for the birth of the novel microscope concept.” 

For the task of reconstructing a human brain segment of about 100,000 neurons, achieving this with a conventional microscope would necessitate a decade of continuous imaging and a prohibitive budget. However, with SmartEM, by investing in four of these innovative microscopes at less than $1 million each, the task could be completed in a mere three months.

Nobel Prizes and little worms  

Over a century ago, Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal was heralded as being the first to characterize the structure of the nervous system. Employing the rudimentary light microscopes of his time, he embarked on leading explorations into neuroscience, laying the foundational understanding of neurons and sketching the initial outlines of this expansive and uncharted realm — a feat that earned him a Nobel Prize. He noted, on the topics of inspiration and discovery, that “As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.”

Progressing from these early stages, the field has advanced dramatically, evidenced by efforts in the 1980s, mapping the relatively simpler connectome of C. elegans, small worms, to today’s endeavors probing into more intricate brains of organisms like zebrafish and mice. This evolution reflects not only enormous strides, but also escalating complexities and demands: mapping the mouse brain alone means managing a staggering thousand petabytes of data, a task that vastly eclipses the storage capabilities of any university, the team says. 

Testing the waters

For their own work, Meirovitch and others from the research team studied 30-nanometer thick slices of octopus tissue that were mounted on tapes, put on wafers, and finally inserted into the electron microscopes. Each section of an octopus brain, comprising billions of pixels, was imaged, letting the scientists reconstruct the slices into a three-dimensional cube at nanometer resolution. This provided an ultra-detailed view of synapses. The chief aim? To colorize these images, identify each neuron, and understand their interrelationships, thereby creating a detailed map or “connectome” of the brain's circuitry.

“SmartEM will cut the imaging time of such projects from two weeks to 1.5 days,” says Meirovitch. “Neuroscience labs that currently can't be engaged with expensive and long EM imaging will be able to do it now,” The method should also allow synapse-level circuit analysis in samples from patients with psychiatric and neurologic disorders. 

Down the line, the team envisions a future where connectomics is both affordable and accessible. They hope that with tools like SmartEM, a wider spectrum of research institutions could contribute to neuroscience without relying on large partnerships, and that the method will soon be a standard pipeline in cases where biopsies from living patients are available. Additionally, they’re eager to apply the tech to understand pathologies, extending utility beyond just connectomics. “We are now endeavoring to introduce this to hospitals for large biopsies, utilizing electron microscopes, aiming to make pathology studies more efficient,” says Shavit. 

Two other authors on the paper have MIT CSAIL ties: lead author Lu Mi MCS ’19, PhD ’22, who is now a postdoc at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Shashata Sawmya, an MIT graduate student in the lab. The other lead authors are Core Francisco Park and Pavel Potocek, while Harvard professors Jeff Lichtman and Aravi Samuel are additional senior authors. Their research was supported by the NIH BRAIN Initiative and was presented at the 2023 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Workshop on Computational Biology. The work was done in collaboration with scientists from Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Connectomics, the ambitious field of study that seeks to map the intricate network of animal brains, is undergoing a growth spurt. Within the span of a decade, it has journeyed from its nascent stages to a discipline that is poised to (hopefully) unlock the enigmas of cognition and the physical underpinning of neuropathologies such as in Alzheimer’s disease. 

At its forefront is the use of powerful electron microscopes, which researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Samuel and Lichtman Labs of Harvard University bestowed with the analytical prowess of machine learning. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, the integrated AI serves as a “brain” that learns a specimen while acquiring the images, and intelligently focuses on the relevant pixels at nanoscale resolution similar to how animals inspect their worlds. 

“SmartEM” assists connectomics in quickly examining and reconstructing the brain’s complex network of synapses and neurons with nanometer precision. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, its integrated AI opens new doors to understand the brain's intricate architecture.

The integration of hardware and software in the process is crucial. The team embedded a GPU into the support computer connected to their microscope. This enabled running machine-learning models on the images, helping the microscope beam be directed to areas deemed interesting by the AI. “This lets the microscope dwell longer in areas that are harder to understand until it captures what it needs,” says MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Nir Shavit. “This step helps in mirroring human eye control, enabling rapid understanding of the images.” 

“When we look at a human face, our eyes swiftly navigate to the focal points that deliver vital cues for effective communication and comprehension,” says the lead architect of SmartEM, Yaron Meirovitch, a visiting scientist at MIT CSAIL who is also a former postdoc and current research associate neuroscientist at Harvard. “When we immerse ourselves in a book, we don't scan all of the empty space; rather, we direct our gaze towards the words and characters with ambiguity relative to our sentence expectations. This phenomenon within the human visual system has paved the way for the birth of the novel microscope concept.” 

For the task of reconstructing a human brain segment of about 100,000 neurons, achieving this with a conventional microscope would necessitate a decade of continuous imaging and a prohibitive budget. However, with SmartEM, by investing in four of these innovative microscopes at less than $1 million each, the task could be completed in a mere three months.

Nobel Prizes and little worms  

Over a century ago, Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal was heralded as being the first to characterize the structure of the nervous system. Employing the rudimentary light microscopes of his time, he embarked on leading explorations into neuroscience, laying the foundational understanding of neurons and sketching the initial outlines of this expansive and uncharted realm — a feat that earned him a Nobel Prize. He noted, on the topics of inspiration and discovery, that “As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.”

Progressing from these early stages, the field has advanced dramatically, evidenced by efforts in the 1980s, mapping the relatively simpler connectome of C. elegans, small worms, to today’s endeavors probing into more intricate brains of organisms like zebrafish and mice. This evolution reflects not only enormous strides, but also escalating complexities and demands: mapping the mouse brain alone means managing a staggering thousand petabytes of data, a task that vastly eclipses the storage capabilities of any university, the team says. 

Testing the waters

For their own work, Meirovitch and others from the research team studied 30-nanometer thick slices of octopus tissue that were mounted on tapes, put on wafers, and finally inserted into the electron microscopes. Each section of an octopus brain, comprising billions of pixels, was imaged, letting the scientists reconstruct the slices into a three-dimensional cube at nanometer resolution. This provided an ultra-detailed view of synapses. The chief aim? To colorize these images, identify each neuron, and understand their interrelationships, thereby creating a detailed map or “connectome” of the brain's circuitry.

“SmartEM will cut the imaging time of such projects from two weeks to 1.5 days,” says Meirovitch. “Neuroscience labs that currently can't be engaged with expensive and long EM imaging will be able to do it now,” The method should also allow synapse-level circuit analysis in samples from patients with psychiatric and neurologic disorders. 

Down the line, the team envisions a future where connectomics is both affordable and accessible. They hope that with tools like SmartEM, a wider spectrum of research institutions could contribute to neuroscience without relying on large partnerships, and that the method will soon be a standard pipeline in cases where biopsies from living patients are available. Additionally, they’re eager to apply the tech to understand pathologies, extending utility beyond just connectomics. “We are now endeavoring to introduce this to hospitals for large biopsies, utilizing electron microscopes, aiming to make pathology studies more efficient,” says Shavit. 

Two other authors on the paper have MIT CSAIL ties: lead author Lu Mi MCS ’19, PhD ’22, who is now a postdoc at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Shashata Sawmya, an MIT graduate student in the lab. The other lead authors are Core Francisco Park and Pavel Potocek, while Harvard professors Jeff Lichtman and Aravi Samuel are additional senior authors. Their research was supported by the NIH BRAIN Initiative and was presented at the 2023 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Workshop on Computational Biology. The work was done in collaboration with scientists from Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Should data scientists be in the business of fingering Americans for crimes they could commit, someday? Last month, a group of federal lawmakers asked the Department of Justice to stop funding such programs—at least until safeguards can be built in. It's just the latest battle over a controversial field of law enforcement that seeks to peer into the future to fight crime.

"We write to urge you to halt all Department of Justice (DOJ) grants for predictive policing systems until the DOJ can ensure that grant recipients will not use such systems in ways that have a discriminatory impact," reads a January letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland from U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) and Rep. Yvette Clarke (D–N.Y.), joined by Senators Jeff Merkley (D–Ore.), Alex Padilla, (D–Calif.), Peter Welch (D–Vt.), John Fetterman, (D–Penn.), and Ed Markey (D–Mass.). "Mounting evidence indicates that predictive policing technologies do not reduce crime. Instead, they worsen the unequal treatment of Americans of color by law enforcement."

The letter emphasizes worries about racial discrimination, but it also raises concerns about accuracy and civil liberties that, since day one, have dogged schemes to address crimes that haven't yet occurred.

Fingering Criminals-To-Be

Criminal justice theorists have long dreamed of stopping crimes before they happen. Crimes prevented mean no victims, costs, or perpetrators to punish. That's led to proposals for welfare and education programs intended to deter kids from becoming predators. It's also inspired "predictive policing" efforts that assume crunching numbers can tell you who is prone to prey on others. It's an intriguing idea, if you ignore the dangers of targeting people for what they might do in the future.

"For years, businesses have used data analysis to anticipate market conditions or industry trends and drive sales strategies," Beth Pearsall wrote in the Department of Justice's NIJ Journal in 2010. "Police can use a similar data analysis to help make their work more efficient. The idea is being called 'predictive policing,' and some in the field believe it has the potential to transform law enforcement by enabling police to anticipate and prevent crime instead of simply responding to it."

Interesting. But marketers targeting neighborhoods for home warranty pitches only annoy people when they're wrong; policing efforts have much higher stakes when they're flawed or malicious.

"The accuracy of predictive policing programs depends on the accuracy of the information they are fed," Reason's Ronald Bailey noted in 2012. "We should always keep in mind that any new technology that helps the police to better protect citizens can also be used to better oppress them."

Predictive Policing in (Bad) Action

People worried about the dangers of predictive policing often reference the 2002 movie Minority Report, in which a science-fiction take on the practice is abused to implicate innocent people. Recent years, though, have delivered real-life cautionary tales about misusing data science to torment people for crimes they haven't committed.

"First the Sheriff's Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts," the Tampa Bay Times reported in 2020 of Pasco County, Florida's predictive policing program. "Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime."

In practice, as a former deputy described the program's treatment of those it targeted: "Make their lives miserable until they move or sue."

Sue they did, with many plaintiffs represented by the Institute for Justice. Last year, with legal costs mounting, the sheriff's office claimed in court documents that it discontinued predictive policing efforts.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

A big problem with predictive policing is that it relies heavily on honesty and dispassion in people who create algorithms and enter data. As recent arguments over biases in internet search results and artificial intelligence reveal, the results that come out of a data-driven system are only as good as what goes in.

"One foundational problem with data-driven policing is that it treats information as neutral, ignoring how it can reflect over-policing and historical redlining," the Brennan Center for Justice's Ángel Díaz wrote in 2021. He added that tech vendors dealing with the NYPD's predictive policing program "proposed relying on data such as educational attainment, the availability of public transportation, and the number of health facilities and liquor licenses in a given neighborhood to predict areas of the city where crime was likely to occur."

Are those real predictors of criminal activity? Maybe. Or maybe they're excuses for making people's lives miserable until they move or sue, as happened in Pasco County.

Forecasts Fueled by the Feds

As with so many big ideas with scary potential, impetus for development and implementation comes from government funding and encouragement.

"The National Institute of Justice, the DOJ's research, development and evaluation arm, regularly provides seed money for grants and pilot projects to test out ideas like predictive policing," American University law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson commented earlier this month. "It was a National Institute of Justice grant that funded the first predictive policing conference in 2009 that launched the idea that past crime data could be run through an algorithm to predict future criminal risk."

Of course, it's not bad to seek innovation and to look for new tools that could make the public safer. But hopefully, those funding such research want it to make the world a better place, not worse. And when lawmakers asked the Justice Department in 2022 for some documentation on predictive policing, officials admitted they didn't really know how money was being spent, let alone its impact.

"It remains an unanswered [question], for example, to what degree such tools are, or ever have ever been, assessed for compliance with civil rights law," Gizmodo's Dell Cameron wrote at the time.

Hence the letter from Wyden and company. After years of haphazard funding and development, warnings from civil libertarians, and abuses by police, some lawmakers want the federal government to stop funding predictive policing efforts until due diligence is done and safeguards are in place.

You have to wonder if predictive policing programs predicted the field's own current troubles.

The post Lawmakers Want Pause on Federal Funds for Predictive Policing appeared first on Reason.com.

Connectomics, the ambitious field of study that seeks to map the intricate network of animal brains, is undergoing a growth spurt. Within the span of a decade, it has journeyed from its nascent stages to a discipline that is poised to (hopefully) unlock the enigmas of cognition and the physical underpinning of neuropathologies such as in Alzheimer’s disease. 

At its forefront is the use of powerful electron microscopes, which researchers from the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Samuel and Lichtman Labs of Harvard University bestowed with the analytical prowess of machine learning. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, the integrated AI serves as a “brain” that learns a specimen while acquiring the images, and intelligently focuses on the relevant pixels at nanoscale resolution similar to how animals inspect their worlds. 

“SmartEM” assists connectomics in quickly examining and reconstructing the brain’s complex network of synapses and neurons with nanometer precision. Unlike traditional electron microscopy, its integrated AI opens new doors to understand the brain's intricate architecture.

The integration of hardware and software in the process is crucial. The team embedded a GPU into the support computer connected to their microscope. This enabled running machine-learning models on the images, helping the microscope beam be directed to areas deemed interesting by the AI. “This lets the microscope dwell longer in areas that are harder to understand until it captures what it needs,” says MIT professor and CSAIL principal investigator Nir Shavit. “This step helps in mirroring human eye control, enabling rapid understanding of the images.” 

“When we look at a human face, our eyes swiftly navigate to the focal points that deliver vital cues for effective communication and comprehension,” says the lead architect of SmartEM, Yaron Meirovitch, a visiting scientist at MIT CSAIL who is also a former postdoc and current research associate neuroscientist at Harvard. “When we immerse ourselves in a book, we don't scan all of the empty space; rather, we direct our gaze towards the words and characters with ambiguity relative to our sentence expectations. This phenomenon within the human visual system has paved the way for the birth of the novel microscope concept.” 

For the task of reconstructing a human brain segment of about 100,000 neurons, achieving this with a conventional microscope would necessitate a decade of continuous imaging and a prohibitive budget. However, with SmartEM, by investing in four of these innovative microscopes at less than $1 million each, the task could be completed in a mere three months.

Nobel Prizes and little worms  

Over a century ago, Spanish neuroscientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal was heralded as being the first to characterize the structure of the nervous system. Employing the rudimentary light microscopes of his time, he embarked on leading explorations into neuroscience, laying the foundational understanding of neurons and sketching the initial outlines of this expansive and uncharted realm — a feat that earned him a Nobel Prize. He noted, on the topics of inspiration and discovery, that “As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain will also be a mystery.”

Progressing from these early stages, the field has advanced dramatically, evidenced by efforts in the 1980s, mapping the relatively simpler connectome of C. elegans, small worms, to today’s endeavors probing into more intricate brains of organisms like zebrafish and mice. This evolution reflects not only enormous strides, but also escalating complexities and demands: mapping the mouse brain alone means managing a staggering thousand petabytes of data, a task that vastly eclipses the storage capabilities of any university, the team says. 

Testing the waters

For their own work, Meirovitch and others from the research team studied 30-nanometer thick slices of octopus tissue that were mounted on tapes, put on wafers, and finally inserted into the electron microscopes. Each section of an octopus brain, comprising billions of pixels, was imaged, letting the scientists reconstruct the slices into a three-dimensional cube at nanometer resolution. This provided an ultra-detailed view of synapses. The chief aim? To colorize these images, identify each neuron, and understand their interrelationships, thereby creating a detailed map or “connectome” of the brain's circuitry.

“SmartEM will cut the imaging time of such projects from two weeks to 1.5 days,” says Meirovitch. “Neuroscience labs that currently can't be engaged with expensive and long EM imaging will be able to do it now,” The method should also allow synapse-level circuit analysis in samples from patients with psychiatric and neurologic disorders. 

Down the line, the team envisions a future where connectomics is both affordable and accessible. They hope that with tools like SmartEM, a wider spectrum of research institutions could contribute to neuroscience without relying on large partnerships, and that the method will soon be a standard pipeline in cases where biopsies from living patients are available. Additionally, they’re eager to apply the tech to understand pathologies, extending utility beyond just connectomics. “We are now endeavoring to introduce this to hospitals for large biopsies, utilizing electron microscopes, aiming to make pathology studies more efficient,” says Shavit. 

Two other authors on the paper have MIT CSAIL ties: lead author Lu Mi MCS ’19, PhD ’22, who is now a postdoc at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and Shashata Sawmya, an MIT graduate student in the lab. The other lead authors are Core Francisco Park and Pavel Potocek, while Harvard professors Jeff Lichtman and Aravi Samuel are additional senior authors. Their research was supported by the NIH BRAIN Initiative and was presented at the 2023 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) Workshop on Computational Biology. The work was done in collaboration with scientists from Thermo Fisher Scientific.