Massachusetts Institute of Technology

To make sure that the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act's Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program funding is used efficiently and not misallocated, it is important that National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) rules for allocating those funds be based on sound economic and policy principles. Unfortunately, that is not the case presently. As framed, the BEAD Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) is heavily biased to favor and fund Fiber to the Premises (FTTP) projects.

Social media companies are often accused of anti-conservative bias, particularly in terms of which users they suspend. Here, we evaluate this possibility empirically. We begin with a survey of 4,900 Americans, which showed strong bipartisan support for social media companies taking actions against online misinformation. We then investigated potential political bias in suspension patterns and identified a set of 9,000 politically engaged Twitter users, half Democratic and half Republican, in October 2020, and followed them through the six months after the U.S. 2020 election.

A new study by MIT researchers finds that the growing practice of compiling massive, anonymized datasets about people’s movement patterns is a double-edged sword: While it can provide deep insights into human behavior for research, it could also put people’s private data at risk. Companies, researchers, and other entities are beginning to collect, store, and process anonymized data that contains “location stamps” (geographical coordinates and time stamps) of users.

On March 8, 2017, MIT announced that R. David Edelman, former White House Special Assistant to the President for Technology & Economic Policy, will join the Institute, effective immediately. At MIT, Dr. Edelman will direct the new Project on Technology, the Economy, and National Security, holding a joint appointment with the Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and the Department of Political Science’s Center for International Studies (CIS). An international relations Ph.D. whose scholarship has focused on cybersecurity and law, Dr. Edelman comes to MIT following six years at the White House — where he was the only policymaker to serve on President Obama’s National Economic Council, the National Security Council, and in the Office of Science and Technology Policy. He was most recently responsible for government-wide policy development and coordination on all matters of the digital economy, and in previous roles at the NSC, United Nations, and State Department, was a lead author of the U.S. government’s Internet and cyber foreign policy doctrine.

[Commentary] While the continued expansion of the Internet has often prompted calls for a major overhaul, this latest sputter doesn’t mean it is nearing a breaking point.

The infrastructure can often be upgraded on a piecemeal basis rather than overhauled to deal with growing pains. Fears over the Internet’s health are overblown.

With permission from a local road agency, researchers in Michigan hacked into nearly 100 wirelessly networked traffic lights, highlighting security issues that they say are likely to pervade networked traffic infrastructure around the country.

The team found three major weaknesses in the traffic light system: unencrypted wireless connections, the use of default usernames and passwords that could be found online, and a debugging port that is easy to attack.

The Michigan researchers found that anyone with a computer that can communicate at the same frequency as the intersection radios -- in this case, 5.8 gigahertz -- could access the entire unencrypted network. It takes just one point of access to get into the whole system. More than 40 states currently use such systems to keep traffic flowing as efficiently as possible.

These days there's perhaps no hotter tech topic than wearable sensors. Earlier in June, for instance, Apple announced a new “Health Kit” app for smartphones that tracks a person's health.

But events such as Fitbit's recent recall of more than 1 million fitness bands over user skin irritations -- and research contending that health-trackers may be no more effective than a $25 pedometer -- suggest that wearables have their drawbacks. Imagine, then, if there was a technology that monitors your vital signs without touching your body -- potentially even from another room.

Such science-fiction fantasies are becoming a reality, thanks to research conducted at MIT’s Wireless Center, hosted in the Computer Science and Artificial intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Their latest report demonstrates that they can now detect gestures as subtle as the rise and fall of a person’s chest. From that, they can determine a person's heart rate with 99 percent accuracy. The research could be used for health-tracking apps, baby monitors, and for the military and law enforcement.