Led by Planet Texas 2050's Dev Niyogi, the UT-City Climate CoLab — a collaborative effort between the city’s Offices of Sustainability and Resilience and researchers at UT — made significant strides in its first full year in 2024.

Planet Texas 2050’s RISE project uses cutting-edge tools, from acoustic sensors to AI, to monitor and protect the state's increasingly endangered ecosystems.

Good Systems' "Being Watched" project is tackling the ethical challenges of smart city surveillance by balancing public safety, privacy and equity through innovative frameworks and community-focused solutions.

Austin Mayor Kirk Watson discusses how the city is exploring and deploying various AI technologies. Good Systems is a key partner in many of these endeavors, including the development of smart hand tools that might be useful to City of Austin workers, the use of digital twins to aid real-time fire tracking and smoke analysis, and the development of standards and guidelines that help ensure the city utilizes AI ethically and responsibly.

Researchers from Good Systems' Information Integrity core project are hard at work building tools to combat the deleterious effects of mis- and disinformation, which, thanks to AI, now spreads faster and more convincingly than ever before.

Throughout this tumultuous election season, dis- and misinformation have spread rapidly, blurring the line between fact and fiction. Viral posts, often misleading or false, impact public political understanding, challenging platforms' abilities to curb disinformation. Good Systems' Josephine Lukito is just one of many UT Austin researchers emphasizing the need for critical media literacy to navigate this evolving digital landscape.

Mis- and disinformation are growing challenges, particularly with the rise of generative AI, which amplifies false information online. Good Systems' Josephine Lukito and Matthew Lease highlight how emotionally charged content spreads faster and emphasize the need for media literacy and AI tools to combat misinformation. In this election season especially, students must critically evaluate content and advocate for fact-checking systems to counteract these issues.

From generating research questions to analyzing data to running simulations, AI could affect every aspect of the scientific process, but experts like Good Systems' Matt Lease say accuracy and sustainability should be part of the conversation.

We asked some of our researchers and partners to share their insights on what we should know about AI today, innovative applications of AI for social good, how we can all influence technology design and deployment and take agency over the ways AI shows up in our lives, and what they are most looking forward to from Good Systems this year.

Read letters from outgoing Executive Team chair Sherri Greenberg and incoming chair Luis Sentis as they reflect on the last year and look ahead.