New Beginnings for MDI in 2025
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 2025 new beginnings at the end of January. As you venture into your own new beginnings, I want to share some of MDI’s:
- BUILDING TECHNOLOGIES: MDI is partnering with different NGOs, researchers, advocates, and faculty to build technologies to improve access to data, collect and share open data, and assess the quality of data. This year, we are increasing the size of our technical team in order to increase our capacity to create different pipelines, tools, and software in order to better support researchers and the public more broadly. We thank all of our sponsors for the funding that will enable us to do this. Thank you!!
- NEW DIVERSE DATA POLICY FOCUS: This year, we are widening our policy focus to incorporate policy research and recommendations for data used for training AI models, data generated using AI models, and other diverse, non-traditional data. Our first policy brief of the year will come out next week. It discusses the tension between privacy and personally identifiable data for fine-tuning AI models.
- NEW ON-CAMPUS COMPUTE INFRASTRUCTURE: Last year, we heard from faculty seeking MDI’s support to build an on-campus compute infrastructure because using the Cloud compute infrastructure for building AI models was becoming cost-prohibitive. MDI has just launched our new on-premise compute infrastructure to complement the Cloud Infrastructure. We are working with faculty who need this larger compute power to access and build out these resources. If you’re curious to learn more about these compute resources, please reach out to mdiresearch@georgetown.edu. We hope that this infrastructure will be the seed for a new generation of compute resources at Georgetown.
- NEW MDI STUDENT RESEARCH COHORT: We welcomed our Spring 2025 MDI Scholars cohort of 28 Master’s and undergraduate students. Our MDI Scholars are working with faculty across campus to advance research in areas ranging from environmental sustainability to education policy to generative AI analysis and privacy tool development. This experiential learning program has attracted students and faculty from four schools and 15 disciplines. We also welcome back Sonneborn and Fritz students who are working on projects related to forced displacement, law and linguistics, and immigration. In total, we have 42 students working on research at MDI this spring.
- NEW MDI DATA WORKSHOP SERIES: Our Spring 2025 Data Workshop Series began earlier this week. Each semester, MDI sponsors a series of technical workshops for Georgetown faculty, staff, and students to introduce our community to state-of-the-art methods, programming paradigms, and technologies. This spring, our MDI Fellows will lead five workshops each with different flavors and we will be hosting them on both the Hilltop campus and the Capitol campus.
- NEW SIGNATURE EVENT: During our staff retreat, the MDI team brainstormed and voted on a new signature event in 2025. I do not want to spoil the surprise, so I will just say – keep an eye out for a new event (premiering in 2025) that we have not hosted before.
This new year brings a number of new directions and expansions of work done the last few years. One of the main reasons I enjoy being the MDI Director is my love of data – big data, little data, quirky data, patterned data… The list goes on. When we work with these multitudes of data, we need to care for them, value them, and work to make them usable for improving societal outcomes. Sometimes, we also need to NOT use data that may be rich, but sensitive.
At MDI, we care deeply about developing safeguards (both innovative technical and policy) to ensure that we store, share, and use data responsibly, ethically, and fairly. Last year at MDI, we adapted the tagline “massive data made meaningful” and I believe this call to action is even more relevant this year. It is not only a reminder that the existence of the data is not what makes it valuable – it is the meaning we get from it and the value we add to it.
If you have ideas, innovations, and research results to help shape this conversation, we hope you connect with us. We love thinking critically about how we can use data to inform decision making. We love making massive data meaningful.
Wishing you Happy New Beginnings!
Lisa
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