Even the Sky May Not Be the Limit for A.I. Data Centers

In The New York Times, Benjamin Lee explains that space-based data centers would face major technical hurdles, as modern chips aren’t designed to withstand radiation or operate without air to dissipate heat, requiring entirely new approaches to cooling and reliability.

• Computer and Information Science
• Electrical and Systems Engineering

Data: Air Traffic Turmoil, Offshoring Optics, and AI’s Creativity Constraints

Gad Allon’s advice to airport decision-makers? “Treat a near-accident as an accident.” Allon emphasizes the need for a long-term solution to the nationwide shortage of air traffic controllers, referencing incidents at Newark Liberty International Airport this past spring when numerous planes were essentially “flying blind.”

• Operations Information and Decisions

William Nelson Cromwell Foundation Article of the Year

Congratulations to Sandy Mayson, who was named a recipient of the 2025 Legal History Article of the Year Prize by the William Nelson Cromwell Foundation for “Bail at the Founding,” published in the Harvard Law Review.

• Law

Warren Center Faculty Affiliates at NeurIPS 2025

Fifty-five papers from Warren Center faculty affiliates, including four Spotlight papers, have been accepted to the Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2025). A huge congratulations to these affiliates for their impressive research.

Why Nurturing Connection Is Good for Your Health

WHYY's The Pulse spoke with Emily Falk about why maintaining relationships often falls to the bottom of our to-do lists, and how understanding our brain’s reward system can help us change that.

• Communication
• Marketing
• Psychology

How Might AI Shape the Future of Work?

Konrad Kording and Ioana Marinescu have developed an interactive model to predict how AI will affect wages, jobs, and the overall economy. Their model demonstrates how intelligence saturation fundamentally constrains AI’s long-term economic impact.

• Bioengineering
• Computer and Information Science
• Neuroscience

Surbhi Goel Named 2025 Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow

Surbhi Goel has been named a 2025 Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellow, which will fund her research to understand unpredictable errors resulting from the “black-box” nature of many AI systems.

• Computer and Information Science

Air Travel Quandary: Gad Allon and Megan Ryerson on Challenges and Solutions

The recent government shutdown exposed long-standing issues facing commercial air travel, including shortages of air traffic controllers and security screeners. Ahead of the busy Thanksgiving travel period, Penn Today spoke with Gad Allon about the need for long-term solutions to reliability and infrastructure issues.

• Operations Information and Decisions

AI Scientists Can’t Optimize Worsening Energy Efficiency: Why Behind-the-Scenes AI Is Costing You

AI is booming right now and it’s causing utility costs for everyday consumers to reach unprecedented highs. “There is increasing deployment of AI technologies behind the scenes, and that is definitely driving up these energy costs,” said Benjamin Lee to MSNBC.

• Computer and Information Science
• Electrical and Systems Engineering

(Artificial) Intelligence Saturation and the Future of Work

In Konrad Kording and Ioana Marinescu's new Brookings Institution working paper, they consider how to model an economy with rapidly increasing intelligence capital but slowly increasing physical capital in order to generate meaningful predictions of AI’s wage and output impacts.

• Bioengineering
• Neuroscience