Communicating the best research and data to understand big global problems and make progress against them.

Poverty, disease, hunger, climate change, war, existential risks, and inequality: The world faces many great and terrifying problems. Our World in Data focuses on communicating the best research and data that helps us understand and find solutions to the world’s largest problems.

Our World in Data publishes an open-access publication where users can understand the state of the world today, where we are making progress and where we are falling behind. Through interactive data visualizations we can see how the world has changed; by summarizing the scientific literature we can understand why. We cover everything from global poverty to natural disasters, education and health, democracy; we have over 3500 charts across 300 topics.

Our World in Data is free, open-source and provided as a public good. It has millions of users every month, and is cited in research and media across the world every day. This allows millions of people to understand the large problems the world is facing, and how we can solve them. 

Our World in Data

Tor Project

A new initiative to advance forecasting and epistemics for the aim of improving the long term future of humanity.

We research systematic practices to specify and estimate the most important parameters for the most important or scalable decisions. Research areas include forecasting, epistemics, evaluations, ontology, and estimation. We emphasize technological solutions that can heavily scale in the next 5 to 30 years.

We believe that humanity’s success in the next few hundred years will lie intensely on its ability to coordinate and make good decisions. If important governmental and philanthropic bodies become significantly more effective, this will make society far more resilient to many kinds of challenges ahead.

Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute

We defend your civil liberties in a digital world.

The first line of defense when your rights in the digital world come under attack. EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. We work to ensure that rights and freedoms are enhanced and protected as our use of technology grows.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

Protecting free expression and enabling secure global communication through open source privacy technology.

Long before we knew that it would be called Signal, we knew what we wanted it to be. Instead of teaching the rest of the world cryptography, we wanted to see if we could develop cryptography that worked for the rest of the world. At the time, the industry consensus was largely that encryption and cryptography would remain unusable, but we started Signal with the idea that private communication could be simple.

Since then, we’ve made some progress. We’ve built a service used by millions, and software used by billions. The stories that make it back to us and keep us going are the stories of people discovering each other in moments where they found they could speak freely over Signal, of people falling in love over Signal, of people organizing ambitious plans over Signal. When we ask friends who at their workplace is on Signal and they respond “every C-level executive, and the kitchen staff.” When we receive a subpoena for user data and have nothing to send back but a blank sheet of paper. When we catch that glimpse of “Signal blue” on a metro commuter’s phone and smile.

However, we’ve always wanted to do much more, and our limitations have often been challenging. Over the lifetime of the project, there have only been an average of 2.3 full-time software developers, and the entire Signal team has never been more than 7 people. With three client platforms to develop, a service to build and run, a growing list of integrations to assist with, and millions of users to support, that has often left us wanting.

Even so, Signal has never taken VC funding or sought investment, because we felt that putting profit first would be incompatible with building a sustainable project that put users first. As a consequence, Signal has sometimes suffered from our lack of resources or capacity in the short term, but we’ve always felt those values would lead to the best possible experience in the long term. The Signal Foundation completes our vision of Signal operating as part of a full 501(c)(3).

Signal Technology Foundation

We do foundational mathematical research to ensure smarter-than-human artificial intelligence has a positive impact.

The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a research nonprofit studying the mathematical underpinnings of intelligent behavior. Our mission is to develop formal tools for the clean design and analysis of general-purpose AI systems, with the intent of making such systems safer and more reliable when they are developed.

The field of AI has a reputation for overselling its progress. In the “AI winters” of the late 1970s and 1980s, researchers’ failures to make good on ambitious promises led to a collapse of funding and interest in AI. Although the field is now undergoing a renaissance, overconfidence is still a major fear; discussion of the possibility of human-equivalent general intelligence is still largely relegated to the science fiction shelf.

At the same time, researchers largely agree that AI is likely to begin outperforming humans on most cognitive tasks in this century. Given how disruptive domain-general AI could be, we think it is prudent to begin a conversation about this now, and to investigate whether there are limited areas in which we can predict and shape this technology’s societal impact.

Researchers at MIRI tend to be relatively agnostic about how the state of the art in AI will change over the coming decades, and how many years off smarter-than human AI systems are. 

Machine Intelligence Research Institute

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