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Austin, Texas is a major tech hub with a population that’s engaged in advocacy and paying attention. Since 1991, EFF-Austin an independent nonprofit civil liberties organization, has been the proverbial beacon alerting those in central Texas to the possibilities and implications of modern technology. It is also an active member of the Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA). On a recent visit to Texas, I got the chance to speak with Kevin Welch, President of EFF-Austin, about the organization, its work, and what lies ahead for them:

How did EFF-Austin get started, and can you share how it got its name?

EFF-Austin is concerned with emerging frontiers where technology meets society. We are a group of visionary technologists, legal professionals, academics, political activists, and concerned citizens who work to protect digital rights and educate the public about emerging technologies and their implications. Similar to our namesake, the national Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), “the dominion we defend is the vast wealth of digital information, innovation, and technology that resides online.” EFF-Austin was originally formed in 1991 with the intention that it would become the first chapter of the national Electronic Frontier Foundation. However, EFF decided not to become a chapters organization, and EFF-Austin became a separately-incorporated, independent nonprofit organization focusing on cyber liberties, digital rights, and emerging technologies.

What's the mission of EFF-Austin and what do you promote?

EFF-Austin advocates for establishment and protection of digital rights and defense of the wealth of digital information, innovation, and technology. We promote the right of all citizens to communicate and share information without unreasonable constraint. We also advocate for the fundamental right to explore, tinker, create, and innovate along the frontier of emerging technologies.

EFF-Austin has been involved in a number of initiatives and causes over the past several years, including legislative advocacy. Can you share a few of them?

We were one of the earliest local organizations that began to call out the Austin City Council over their use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs). After several years of fighting, EFF-Austin was proud to join the No ALPRs coalition as a founding member with over thirty local and state activist groups. Through our efforts, Austin decided not to renew our ALPR pilot project, becoming one of the only cities in America to reject ALPRs. Building on this success, the coalition is broadening its scope to call out other uses of surveillance in Austin, like proposed contracts for park surveillance from Liveview Technologies, as well as data privacy abuses more generally, such as the potential partnership with Valkyrie AI to non-consensually provide citizen data for model training and research purposes without sufficient oversight or guardrails. In support of these initiatives, EFF-Austin also partnered with the Austin Technology Commission to propose much stricter oversight and transparency rules around how the city of Austin engages in contracts with third party technology vendors.

EFF-Austin has also provided expert testimony on a number of major technology bills at the Texas Legislature that have since become law, including the Texas Data Privacy And Security Act (TDPSA) and the Texas Responsible AI Governance Act (TRAIGA).

How can someone local to central Texas get involved?

We conduct monthly meetups with a variety of speakers, usually the second Tuesday of each month at 7:00pm at Capital Factory (701 Brazos St, Austin, TX 78701) in downtown Austin. These meetups can range from technology and legal explainers to digital security trainings, from digital arts profiles to shining a spotlight on surveillance. In addition, we have various one-off events, often in partnership with other local nonprofits and civic institutions, including our fellow EFA member Open Austin. We also have annual holiday parties and SXSW gatherings that are free and open to the public. We don't currently have memberships, so any and all are welcome.

While EFF-Austin events are popular and well-attended, and our impact on local technology policy is quite impressive for such a small nonprofit, we have no significant sustained funding beyond occasional outreach to our community. Any local nonprofits, activist organizations, academic initiatives, or technology companies who find themselves aligned with our cause and would like to fund our efforts are encouraged to reach out. We also always welcome the assistance of those who wish to volunteer their technical, organizational, or legal skills to our cause. In addition to emailing us at info@effaustin.org, follow us on Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Meetup, and visit us at our website at https://effaustin.org.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Investment Management Company (MITIMCo) announced today that MIT’s unitized pool of endowment and other MIT funds generated an investment return of 14.8 percent during the fiscal year ending June 30, 2025, as measured using valuations received within one month of fiscal year end. At the end of the fiscal year, MIT’s endowment funds totaled $27.4 billion, excluding pledges. Over the 10 years ending June 30, 2025, MIT generated an annualized return of 10.7 percent.

The endowment is the bedrock of MIT’s finances, made possible by gifts from alumni and friends for more than a century. The use of the endowment is governed by a state law that requires MIT to maintain each endowed gift as a permanent fund, preserve its purchasing power, and spend it as directed by its original donor. Most of the endowment’s funds are restricted and must be used for a specific purpose. MIT uses the bulk of the income these endowed gifts generate to support financial aid, research, and education.

The endowment supports 50 percent of undergraduate tuition, helping to enable the Institute’s need-blind undergraduate admissions policy, which ensures that an MIT education is accessible to all qualified candidates regardless of financial resources. MIT works closely with all families of undergraduates who qualify for financial aid to develop an individual affordability plan tailored to their financial circumstances. In 2024-25, the average need-based MIT undergraduate scholarship was $62,127. Fifty-seven percent of MIT undergraduates received need-based financial aid, and 39 percent of MIT undergraduate students received scholarship funding from MIT and other sources sufficient to cover the total cost of tuition.

Effective in fiscal 2026, MIT enhanced undergraduate financial aid, ensuring that all families with incomes below $200,000 and typical assets have tuition fully covered by scholarships, and that families with incomes below $100,000 and typical assets pay nothing at all for their students’ MIT education. Eighty-eight percent of seniors who graduated in academic year 2025 graduated with no debt.

MITIMCo is a unit of MIT, created to manage and oversee the investment of the Institute’s endowment, retirement, and operating funds.

MIT’s Report of the Treasurer for fiscal year 2025, which details the Institute’s annual financial performance, was made available publicly today.

AI agents are now hacking computers. They’re getting better at all phases of cyberattacks, faster than most of us expected. They can chain together different aspects of a cyber operation, and hack autonomously, at computer speeds and scale. This is going to change everything.

Over the summer, hackers proved the concept, industry institutionalized it, and criminals operationalized it. In June, AI company XBOW took the top spot on HackerOne’s US leaderboard after submitting over 1,000 new vulnerabilities in just a few months. In August, the seven teams competing in DARPA’s AI Cyber Challenge ...

Soot emissions from power plants rose nearly 20 percent above average when enforcement stalled during the shutdown seven years ago.

Lawmakers said the cases threaten to “bankrupt” the energy industry.

Several GOP senators have expressed interest in attending the climate talks, Utah Sen. John Curtis said.

The facility would be among the world's biggest direct air capture hubs. It comes as President Trump has slashed subsidies for the industry in the U.S.

A new approach to forecasting would give local authorities more information as they prepare for deadly heat waves.

The governor ordered “any and all steps” to permit wind and solar development before federal subsidies expire.

The new laws encourage fire-resistant landscaping, expand insurance for mobile homes and expand insurer access to financing.

Brussels has signaled it won’t yield to U.S. pressure to ignite a bonfire to green regulations as part of their trade deal, a top official tells diplomats.

Researchers are exploring possibilities for using "metal-organic frameworks" to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and pollution from industrial sites or to harvest moisture from desert air.

The debut was marred by the company’s worst trading day since going public in 2016.

The cyclical La Niña will likely last through February 2026, the U.S. Climate Prediction Center said.

Adaptation projects have so far only won a fraction of climate finance, with investors and banks focusing on decarbonization technologies.

Innovator, futurist, and author Ray Kurzweil ’70 emphasized his optimism about artificial intelligence, and technological progress generally, in a lecture on Wednesday while accepting MIT’s Robert A. Muh Alumni Award from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS).

Kurzweil offered his signature high-profile forecasts about how AI and computing will entirely blend with human functionality, and proposed that AI will lead to monumental gains in longevity, medicine, and other realms of life.

“People do not appreciate that the rate of progress is accelerating,” Kurzweil said, forecasting “incredible breakthroughs” over the next two decades.

Kurzweil delivered his lecture, titled “Reinventing Intelligence,” in the Thomas Tull Concert Hall of the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building, which opened earlier in 2025 on the MIT campus.

The Muh Award was founded and endowed by Robert A. Muh ’59 and his wife Berit, and is one of the leading alumni honors granted by SHASS and MIT. Muh, a life member emeritus of the MIT Corporation, established the award, which is granted every two years for “extraordinary contributions” by alumni in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

Robert and Berit Muh were both present at the lecture, along with their daughter Carrie Muh ’96, ’97, SM ’97.

Agustín Rayo, dean of SHASS, offered introductory remarks, calling Kurzweil “one of the most prolific thinkers of our time.” Rayo added that Kurzweil “has built his life and career on the belief that ideas change the world, and change it for the better.”

Kurzweil has been an innovator in language recognition technologies, developing advances and founding companies that have served people who are blind or low-vision, and helped in music creation. He is also a best-selling author who has heralded advances in computing capabilities, and even the merging of human and machines.

The initial segment of Kurzweil’s lecture was autobiographical in focus, reflecting on his family and early years. The families of both of Kurzweil’s parents fled the Nazis in Europe, seeking refuge in the U.S., with the belief that people could create a brighter future for themselves.

“My parents taught me the power of ideas can really change the world,” Kurzweil said.

Showing an early interest in how things worked, Kurzweil had decided to become an inventor by about the age of 7, he recalled. He also described his mother as being tremendously encouraging to him as a child. The two would take walks together, and the young Kurzweil would talk about all the things he imagined inventing.

“I would tell her my ideas and no matter how fantastical they were, she believed them,” he said. “Now other parents might have simply chuckled … but she actually believed my ideas, and that actually gave me my confidence, and I think confidence is important in succeeding.”

He became interested in computing by the early 1960s and majored in both computer science and literature as an MIT undergraduate.

Kurzweil has a long-running association with MIT extending far beyond his undergraduate studies. He served as a member of the MIT Corporation from 2005 to 2012 and was the 2001 recipient of the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, an award for innovation, for his development of reading technology.

“MIT has played a major role in my personal and professional life over the years,” Kurzweil said, calling himself “truly honored to receive this award.” Addressing Muh, he added: “Your longstanding commitment to our alma mater is inspiring.”

After graduating from MIT, Kurzweil launched a successful career developing innovative computing products, including one that recognized text across all fonts and could produce an audio reading. He also developed leading-edge music synthesizers, among many other advances.

In a corresponding part of his career, Kurzweil has become an energetic author, whose best-known books include “The Age of Intelligent Machines” (1990), “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (1999), “The Singularity Is Near” (2005), and “The Singularity Is Nearer” (2024), among many others.

Kurzweil was recently named chief AI officer of Beyond Imagination, a robotics firm he co-founded; he has also held a position at Google in recent years, working on natural language technologies.

In his remarks, Kurzweil underscored his view that, as exemplified and enabled by the growth of computing power over time, technological innovation moves at an exponential pace.

“People don’t really think about exponential growth; they think about linear growth,” Kurzweil said.

This concept, he said, makes him confident that a string of innovations will continue at remarkable speed.

“One of the bigger transformations we’re going to see from AI in the near term is health and medicine,” Kurweil said, forecasting that human medical trials will be replaced by simulated “digital trials.”

Kurzweil also believes computing and AI advances can lead to so many medical advances it will soon produce a drastic improvement in human longevity.

“These incredible breakthroughs are going to lead to what we’ll call longevity escape velocity,” Kurzweil said. “By roughly 2032 when you live through a year, you’ll get back an entire year from scientific progress, and beyond that point you’ll get back more than a year for every year you live, so you’ll be going back into time as far as your health is concerned,” Kurweil said. He did offer that these advances will “start” with people who are the most diligent about their health.

Kurzweil also outlined one of his best-known forecasts, that AI and people will be combined. “As we move forward, the lines between humans and technology will blur, until we are … one and the same,” Kurzweil said. “This is how we learn to merge with AI. In the 2030s, robots the size of molecules will go into our brains, noninvasively, through the capillaries, and will connect our brains directly to the cloud. Think of it like having a phone, but in your brain.”

“By 2045, once we have fully merged with AI, our intelligence will no longer be constrained … it will expand a millionfold,” he said. “This is what we call the singularity.”

To be sure, Kurzweil acknowledged, “Technology has always been a double-edged sword,” given that a drone can deliver either medical supplies or weaponry. “Threats of AI are real, must be taken seriously, [and] I think we are doing that,” he said. In any case, he added, we have “a moral imperative to realize the promise of new technologies while controlling the peril.” He concluded: “We are not doomed to fail to control any of these risks.” 

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02449-0

It has been argued that air temperatures over mountain glaciers are decoupled from surrounding warming, which could slow down melting. Here the authors show that this effect will weaken with future glacier retreat, leading to a recoupling of temperatures from the 2030s onwards.

Nature Climate Change, Published online: 10 October 2025; doi:10.1038/s41558-025-02457-0

Unclear emissions and ice-sheet processes drive uncertainties in future sea-level rise. The authors show that the timing of emissions reductions drives the uncertainties during the twenty-first century, but geophysical uncertainties become more important with time, especially under optimistic scenarios.

Associate Professor Gene-Wei Li has accepted the position of associate head of the MIT Department of Biology, starting in the 2025-26 academic year. 

Li, who has been a member of the department since 2015, brings a history of departmental leadership, service, and research and teaching excellence to his new role. He has received many awards, including a Sloan Research Fellowship (2016), an NSF Career Award (2019), Pew and Searle scholarships, and MIT’s Committed to Caring Award (2020). In 2024, he was appointed as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Investigator. 

“I am grateful to Gene-Wei for joining the leadership team,” says department head Amy E. Keating, the Jay A. Stein (1968) Professor of Biology and professor of biological engineering. “Gene will be a key leader in our educational initiatives, both digital and residential, and will be a critical part of keeping our department strong and forward-looking.” 

A great environment to do science

Li says he was inspired to take on the role in part because of the way MIT Biology facilitates career development during every stage — from undergraduate and graduate students to postdocs and junior faculty members, as he was when he started in the department as an assistant professor just 10 years ago. 

“I think we all benefit a lot from our environment, and I think this is a great environment to do science and educate people, and to create a new generation of scientists,” he says. “I want us to keep doing well, and I’m glad to have the opportunity to contribute to this effort.” 

As part of his portfolio as associate department head, Li will continue in the role of scientific director of the Koch Biology Building, Building 68. In the last year, the previous scientific director, Stephen Bell, Uncas and Helen Whitaker Professor of Biology and HHMI Investigator, has continued to provide support and ensured a steady ramp-up, transitioning Li into his new duties. The building, which opened its doors in 1994, is in need of a slate of updates and repairs. 

Although Li will be managing more administrative duties, he has provided a stable foundation for his lab to continue its interdisciplinary work on the quantitative biology of gene expression, parsing the mechanisms by which cells control the levels of their proteins and how this enables cells to perform their functions. His recent work includes developing a method that leverages the AI tool AlphaFold to predict whether protein fragments can recapitulate the native interactions of their full-length counterparts.  

“I’m still very heavily involved, and we have a lab environment where everyone helps each other. It’s a team, and so that helps elevate everyone,” he says. “It’s the same with the whole building: nobody is working by themselves, so the science and administrative parts come together really nicely.” 

Teaching for the future

Li is considering how the department can continue to be a global leader in biological sciences while navigating the uncertainty surrounding academia and funding, as well as the likelihood of reduced staff support and tightening budgets.

“The question is: How do you maintain excellence?” Li says. “That involves recruiting great people and giving them the resources that they need, and that’s going to be a priority within the limitations that we have to work with.” 

Li will also be serving as faculty advisor for the MIT Biology Teaching and Learning Group, headed by Mary Ellen Wiltrout, and will serve on the Department of Biology Digital Learning Committee and the new Open Learning Biology Advisory Committee. Li will serve in the latter role in order to represent the department and work with new faculty member and HHMI Investigator Ron Vale on Institute-level online learning initiatives. Li will also chair the Biology Academic Planning Committee, which will help develop a longer-term outlook on faculty teaching assignments and course offerings. 

Li is looking forward to hearing from faculty and students about the way the Institute teaches, and how it could be improved, both for the students on campus and for the online learners from across the world. 

“There are a lot of things that are changing; what are the core fundamentals that the students need to know, what should we teach them, and how should we teach them?” 

Although the commitment to teaching remains unchanged, there may be big transitions on the horizon. With two young children in school, Li is all too aware that the way that students learn today is very different from what he grew up with, and also very different from how students were learning just five or 10 years ago — writing essays on a computer, researching online, using AI tools, and absorbing information from media like short-form YouTube videos. 

“There’s a lot of appeal to a shorter format, but it’s very different from the lecture-based teaching style that has worked for a long time,” Li says. “I think a challenge we should and will face is figuring out the best way to communicate the core fundamentals, and adapting our teaching styles to the next generation of students.” 

Ultimately, Li is excited about balancing his research goals along with joining the department’s leadership team, and knows he can look to his fellow researchers in Building 68 and beyond for support.

“I’m privileged to be working with a great group of colleagues who are all invested in these efforts,” Li says. “Different people may have different ways of doing things, but we all share the same mission.”