• cargo ship with containers in the sea

    MIT Maritime Consortium

    A new international collaboration unites MIT and maritime industry leaders to develop nuclear propulsion technologies, alternative fuels, data-powered strategies for operation, and more.

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  • BREIT leader Ivo Saona stands on MIT's Killian Court sporting a jacket that reads BREIT Advanced Program in Data Science & Global Skills

    Building networks of data science talent

    Through partnerships with organizations like BREIT in Peru, IDSS is upskilling hundreds of learners around the world in data science and machine learning.

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  • Mapping Affordability across the US

    Who Can Afford to Buy a Home in America?

    Owning a home is one of the most important ways of building wealth in America. As rises in home prices outpace rises in income, fewer and fewer Americans can afford to buy a home, causing the generational wealth gap to widen. Housing assistance programs are imperative to expand access to homeownership – particularly for Black Americans, who have historically been excluded from stable homeowning through policies and practices including redlining and exclusionary zoning. Designing effective housing assistance requires understanding where gaps in affordability currently exist for potential homeowners. Read more.

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  • OpenTSS: Countering Tenant Screening

    OpenTSS aims to develop a crowdsourcing tool and/or campaign to audit tenant screening services and reveal the patterns of their inner algorithms, data structures, and representations, by collecting tenant screening reports, as well as denied renters’ experiences. Read more.

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  • Race-Neutral vs Race-Conscious: Using Algorithmic Methods to Evaluate the Reparative Potential of Housing Programs

    The racial wealth gap in the US remains a persistent issue; white individuals possess six times more wealth than Black individuals. Leading scholars and public figures have pointed to slavery and post-slavery discrimination as root cause factors, and called for reparations. Yet the institutionalization of race-neutral ideologies in policies and practices hinders a reparative approach to closing the racial wealth gap. Read more.

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  • iBuyers and “Race for Profit”

    iBuyers use automated valuation algorithms and streamlined home-buying processes, including exemption of repairs before selling and cash offers, to purchase homes. Previous literature has examined the roles and limitations of iBuyers in the housing market, but there is a lack of empirical research on the racial implications of these algorithmic home-buying processes. Using spatial lag model, this study identifies spatial clustering of iBuyer profit margins and a statistically significant and positive correlation between profit margins and the rise in the proportion of Black or Latinx residents within a given neighborhood tract. This work will be submitted to Journal of Urban Affairs. Read more.

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  • Surveillance camera

    Studying the impact of police surveillance on racial bias using open data

    Using data from 2000+ police departments, this project measures the effects of policing technologies, including face recognition, drones, body-worn cameras, predictive policing, and home security partnerships, on racial biases in law enforcement.

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  • The Police or the Public? 911 Calls and Racial Discriminations in Policing

    A large proportion of police-citizen interactions are initiated by 911, and thus pairing 911 call data with police stop data provides a step toward a more systematic causal framework for estimating racial bias.

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  • Tradeoffs in Hotspot Predictive Policing

    Predictive policing systems use narrowly scoped data and narrowly defined objectives that lead to 'hotspot' policing — disproportionate policing of small areas. What impact does this have on communities beyond how it effects crime? We examine how algorithms can lead to changes in police practices and policies.

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  • Understanding the Causal Effect of Race in the Criminal Justice System

    Applying a systematic framework to causally understand the effect of race on policing, the policing team looks at linked data quantitatively to estimate how different races benefit or suffer differently from the same policy interventions.

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Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) is committed to addressing complex societal challenges by advancing education and research at the intersection of statistics, data science, information and decision systems, and social sciences.

News

MIT News | October 2, 2025

Accounting for uncertainty to help engineers design complex systems

MIT researchers including Gioele Zardini develop a new framework to help engineers design systems that are more robust against unpredictable challenges.


MIT News | September 22, 2025

Meet the 2025 tenured professors in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

IDSS faculty Naoki Egami one of six faculty granted tenure in the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.


MIT Media Lab | September 22, 2025

Textile-Based Ultrasound Wearable Wins MIT HEALS Innovator Grant

IDSS faculty Dava Newman a member of one of nineteen teams across MIT to receive funding to catalyze discovery, innovation, and impact for human health.


Upcoming 2

Statistics and Data Science Seminar Series

TBD

Stefan Wager (Stanford University)
E18-304
IDSS Academic Programs

SES Admissions Q&A

Fotini Christia, Jessika Trancik (IDSS)
Zoom
IDSS Distinguished Seminar Series

TBD

Aaron Clauset (University of Colorado Boulder & SFI)
E18-304

MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
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