2024 – 2025 Academic Year Recap

Written by Lisa Singh, MDI Director, Sonneborn Chair, Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science and Professor in the McCourt School of Public Policy

Now that the summer is fully underway, I want to take a moment to reflect on the Massive Data Institute (MDI) accomplishments this last academic year. I am continually amazed at all the research, policy, and data driven technologies MDI faculty, staff, and students work on. While we have a number of long-term projects, we have also found ourselves pivoting to meet the moment. It is a complicated time for research institutes to keep their research agendas going, but we are finding ways to move projects forward even when funding is being cut and basic research is being questioned. At MDI, we will continue to work on basic research that informs policy and we will strive to pivot when the need arises. 

Collaborating on Cross-disciplinary Research: Institutes like MDI engage with our community and beyond in many different ways. First, we conduct research, in our case, impactful, cross-disciplinary research. This past academic year, our 8 core and 50 affiliated faculty engaged approximately 75 students in research through the MDI Scholars, the MDI Impact Scholars, the Sonneborn Fellows, the Georgetown University Research Opportunities Program (GUROP), and the Research Experience for Undergraduate program. Our students, along with our 5 Policy Fellows, and 6 Postdoctoral Fellows worked hard to support our faculty, pushing research forward in artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, civil justice, climate change, firearm law, educational assessment, elections, immigration, privacy-enhancing technologies, and many other critical research areas. 

Researching Policy Implications: Second, we connect our research to impact the policies of the day. This includes engaging with our first group of Non-Residential Fellows to write an Impact Brief and submitting public comments to government agencies when they ask for feedback. 

Expanding our Technical Capacity: Third, we develop and share software and technical expertise to support the Institute’s research agenda. This includes building tools that collect data from social media platforms in ad hoc ways and with consent, developing machine learning models for predicting health outcomes, exploring encryption strategies in privacy enhancing technologies, building advanced search tools, and advancing deep learning models to identify misinformation and deep fakes. We also work with many Georgetown partners, including the Beeck Center, Edunomics, the Health Care Financing Initiative (HCFI), Institute for the Study of International Migration, Center on Privacy and Technology, the Sovereign Debt Forum, and the Justice Lab to analyze data, set up databases, build search engines, deploy applications, and advance generative AI technologies. We not only build and share these tools and technologies, we also think about how these technologies can be designed and deployed to improve outcomes for people of all backgrounds and income levels, institutions (both public and private), and society more broadly. 

But most importantly, at MDI, we meet the moment. In a rapidly changing world, we engage – even when it is easier (and perhaps safer) not to.

• When government data was taken down, we organized our first data preservation efforts to “Save the Data.” We built a Save the Data Crew and hosted our second event this summer. Our goal is not only to save data, but to teach others how to save open data from deletion. We are also hosting the first administrative data research conference in the US, ADRCon, later this summer to understand how different people are using administrative data to improve social outcomes. 
• As we see the continued rise of misinformation and deep fakes, we partnered with the Technology and Public Policy program (TPP) to bring True Media to Georgetown and launched an initiative to improve our information ecosystem. 
• We host large and small events that connect to the issues of the day: gender equity, privacy, administrative data for good, AI hazards, and election misinformation.
• For graduating MDI Scholars whose offers were rescinded or who had difficulty finding positions, we began the MDI Impact Scholars program to keep them engaged in research for one additional summer. 

It is easy to sit on the sidelines and hope this chaotic moment disappears on its own. But unfortunately, the chaos is increasing every day with new, unexpected challenges. The assault on open inquiry and intellectual thought is real. We cannot ignore it. At MDI, we will not ignore it. We will continue to find ways to meet the moment and help those who are being impacted by the actions and evolving policies of the day. 

I thank all of you who are already engaged in different ways to meet the moment and I hope all of us will continue to make progress on the challenges of the day. 

Lisa