New Beginnings for MDI in 2026

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

It is that time of year again – time to wish you “Happy New Beginnings!” At MDI, it is our tradition to be an outlier and send out a new beginnings message at the end of January instead of an end of the year message in December or “Happy New Year” message in early January. 

MDI continues to grow and make important impacts within Georgetown and beyond. I am excited to share some of our new beginnings with you:

• BUILDING TECHNOLOGIES: One of our passions is building tools, data sets, and software that help with data collection, data sharing and safeguarding data. While we do a lot in this space, I will highlight one new pilot that just launched – #PublicDebtIsPublic. MDI began a partnership with the Sovereign Debt Forum to create the first centrally-collated web-based sovereign debt documentation and data commons. This is an example of the types of assets our technical team builds.

• NEW RESEARCH FUNDING: I do not pause to recognize new funds enough. But in an era where getting funding for the type of work we do has become very complicated, I want to highlight a few new awards. Big shout out to Amy for a multi-award fall.
  • Renee DiResta – Hewlett Foundation – User-Centric Infrastructure for Trustworthy Digital Publics
  • Amy O’Hara – Gates Foundation: FrontierK12 – Program Management for Education-Specific Digital Public Goods for AI
  • Amy O’Hara – National Science Foundation: Innovations to Inform the Next-Generation of Federal Statistics (INFS) National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES – NSF)
  • Amy O’Hara – National Science Foundation: Measuring Large Language Model Understanding of Federal Statistical Data National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES – NSF)
  • Jake Pasner & Sejin Paik – Gates Foundation: Policy-to-the-People (P2P) – Democratizing policy access through AI
  • Mahlet Tadesse, Lisa Singh, Mike Bailey, Purna Gamage, & Britt He – National Science Foundation: Training Students and Educators in Hands-On Data Science 

• NEW STUDENT RESEARCH: Our number of students participating in our MDI Scholars program continues to be strong. We have over 30 students who will be working with us this spring to conduct research with our faculty. A number of the projects involve the role AI is playing in different fields, from education to health to the economy.

• NEW TECHNICAL INFRASTRUCTURE TO SUPPORT AI RESEARCH: As more and more faculty want to engage in building large-scale statistical models or generative models, the cost of Cloud options is rising rapidly. To support this type of research, MDI continues to expand its on-premise high-performance computing infrastructure. We have just begun a partnership with MSB and computational linguistics faculty to increase our support for large-scale GPU systems. 

• INCREASING CONVENINGS: As data continue to disappear, AI is being unleashed (often recklessly), and democratic processes are unraveling. Bringing together thought leaders and changemakers to reimagine where we focus our attention and how we engage is more important that ever. From a distinguished lecture by Susan Athey presenting advanced computational methods for measuring the heterogeneous impact of worker layoffs to co-hosting a panel about local civic engagement, participation and representation to hosting an annual forum on best practices for using education data with new privacy-enhancing technologies to benefit students and education institutions, our MDI team is actively engaging and leading important conversations. While convenings are not new for us, our focus on urgent topics of the day are. This spring, we will engage in many important conversations, including AI and its environmental impact, the readiness of government broadly and states more specifically for integrating AI technologies, and the role social media plays in toxic online conversation. 

• TRAINING OUR COMMUNITY: Not only do we conduct research using the innovative technologies of the day, we also teach others about them. We continue our workshop series (on two campuses) and the MDI Summer Institute. The Summer Institute trains technical and policy staff from state education agencies on privacy-enhancing technologies in education and the workforce. Finally, we begin a new training program this coming summer, Data Science Corps, training high school teachers and undergraduates about data science research and how to integrate data science learning modules into high school curriculum. 

It would be impossible for me to highlight all the different research and policy impacts we have in this brief note. However, I want to call out the importance of this research at this moment. A moment where deep thinking and rigorous analysis are not being valued as much as short nuggets that have limited depth and empirical analysis. This work is hard and necessary. We will continue to engage in this hard work and find new ways to translate it to broader audiences. 

Finally, as we begin a new year, I am reminded about how new beginnings sometimes come unexpectedly. Every day we witness different things breaking around us, things that we have taken for granted. This can be very unsettling, especially as one gets older (yes, I am referring to myself). But when things break, we have an opportunity to rebuild them to be better than they originally were. So as we see things we care about break, I hope we take time this year to rethink and reimagine how we can rebuild them to be resilient in the new world we live in. I know that will be something we are actively doing at MDI.  

Wishing you Happy New Beginnings! 
Lisa