This grant provides two years of support to build on the Independent Media Initiative’s successful launch of the Sloan Science Online program. Funded initiatives include the annual Sloan Science Prizes for YouTube – a $100,000 prize for nonfiction and $50,000 for fiction – which are selected by a jury of creators and scientists. The grant also provides incubation and support for one emerging YouTube channel each year and an annual Sloan-sponsored panel exploring the intersection of science and media at IMI Fest. Independent Media Initiative (IMI) is an Austin-based non-profit devoted to creating a new public media ecosystem that focuses on supporting high quality YouTube creators. 

A new interdisciplinary research center at MIT, led by economist Sendhil Mullainathan, will focus on using artificial intelligence to augment—rather than mimic or replace—human decision-making. The center will bring together experts in the economic, computational, and behavioral sciences to create systems optimized for the complementary strengths of human and artificial intelligence.  Initial plans call for developing algorithms and tools that work alongside people to address challenges in education, economic mobility, and scientific discovery.  By emphasizing AI as a tool that amplifies human intelligence, the center seeks to shift the research narrative away from automation and toward augmentation.  The goal is not only to produce scholars, experiments, and publications that draw deeply on both computational techniques and behavioral research, but ultimately to design systems that can function as “bicycles for the mind.”

The United States needs reliable, timely, and trustworthy statistics about its economic performance. Beginning with its role in the development of GDP by Simon Kuznets, the National Bureau of Economic Research has been helping answer this need for over a century. Since 2024, the Sloan Foundation has been helping NBER plan launch and incubate a new Economic Measurement Research Institute. The current grant is another step in that process. Former Treasury official Karen Dynan of Harvard will organize a series of research workshops for experts from government, academia, industry, along with other potential funders. These workshops will address stress points in the current production of economic measures, including data gaps caused by declining survey response rates. They will also explore how alternative data sources from the private-sector or from state and local governments could be put to better use. A key example is the Sloan-supported project called RESET (Re-Engineering Statistics using Economic Transactions), which will receive funding for further work on how machine learning can facilitate hedonic price adjustments when calculating inflation and consumption indicators.

The vulnerability of energy system infrastructure to extreme weather events—such as wildfires, floods, severe storms, and freezes—has been highly salient in recent years, with the impacts of climate change on energy system operations only likely to be exacerbated going forward. Complicating such challenges is the interdependence of these systems, with failures in one component of the system’s architecture cascading and propagating throughout the network, often in unexpected ways. This grant funds a collaborative effort led by Timon McPhearson (New York University), Mikhail Chester (Arizona State University) and David Iwaniec (Georgia State University) to investigate linkages associated with power systems, transportation networks, and water facility operations. Looking first at urban systems and then extending their analysis to the regional level, the team will examine how cascading network failures might occur at key connection points across these infrastructure systems. Cities to be modeled include New York City, Phoenix, and Atlanta. Grant funds will support the creation or extension of infrastructure models for each city that combine real world and simulated data to represent municipal power, transit, and water systems. The team will then interview and survey city stakeholders to inform the design of their planned disaster simulations, probing such topics as where flooding might occur, how extended heat waves might impact different parts of a city’s power and transportation infrastructure, or where storms could do the most damage. These inputs will then be used in the design of a series of simulations of likely future extreme weather events that will aim to identify potential cascading impacts in each city and to highlight potential points of failure propagation. Extending beyond this urban analysis, the team will examine the risks associated with interconnected cascading infrastructure failures across the Southeast United States. At the project’s conclusion, the team will hold a day-long, in-person workshop that will bring together key academics, local officials, disaster preparedness planners, utility representatives, and transportation organizations to discuss findings and disseminate results.