LocationBartos Theatre, MIT Media Lab DescriptionDr. C. Otto Scharmer is a senior lecturer at MIT, the founding chair of the Presencing Ins…

LocationSheraton Austin, Capitol ABCD, 701 E. 11th St. Description

Kumar, I. K. (2023). FOSTERING WELL-BEING: Designing Technology to Improve the Psychological Well-being of Foster-Involved Youth (thesis).

Lecamwasam, K., Bartleet, B. L., Ortiz, T., & Koebner, I. (2025). Promoting the well-being of infants and caregivers through music: insights from the lullaby project’s international convening. Arts & Health, 1-11.

The research on Community-based Social Innovation focuses on the reshaping of urban spaces by human social behavior, incorporating an analy…

Dykes, G., Groff, J., Renfrew-Knight, H., & Sutch, D. (2010). Driving Social Innovation in Education. An HP white paper.

The third salon in our series aimed at advancing interdisciplinary lunar policy thinking relevant to near term lunar activity.

C. Breazeal, A. Thomaz

Hope, Alexis. (2021). Social Change through Community Innovation: Feminist and Participatory Design Approaches to Organizing Inclusive, Equitable, and Joyful Hackathons (Doctoral dissertation, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA).

News coverage of a research collaboration with OpenAI investigating how chatbots affect users' social and emotional wellbeing

As of 2021, the MIT Media Lab's Social Machines group has merged with the MIT Center for Constructive Communication. The Laboratory fo…

We’re starting to get a better sense of how chatbots are affecting us—but there’s still a lot we don’t know.

Lecamwasam, K.H.M. (2023). Pharmamusicology: Exploring the Impact of Music on the Physiology and Psychology of Anxiety Disorders and Well-Being. Master's Thesis, MIT Media Lab.

T. Nishikata, T. Hardjono and A. Pentland, Social Capital Accounting, October 2018.

LocationMIT Media Lab Description Host/Chair: (Unpublished) John Moore

LocationMIT Media Lab Description Additional Featured Research By (Unpublished) New Media Medicine Host/Chair: (Unpublished) John Moore

LocationMIT Media Lab, 3rd Floor Atrium DescriptionJohn Ratey will address the connection between exercise and the brain's performance and …

LocationMIT Media Lab, E14-633 DescriptionPhysical and biological needs of the brain must be met as a precondition for "higher" functions t…

LocationMIT Media Lab, E14-633 DescriptionMarko Ahtisaari is a technology entrepreneur and designer. For the last four years he was executi…

The following Media Lab students joined the MIT India Initiative in Mumbai for this workshop.

LocationE15 Bartos Auditorium DescriptionWhy do we reach for a cookie when we know an apple is better for us, even if we’re trying to lose …

Tuesday, April 1st 2025

Despite living in an increasingly connected world, loneliness and social isolation are prevalent issues today. While social robots have bee…

Special lecture by psychologist Barbara FredricksonAre the moments of positive interpersonal connection we experience positive health behav…

Pataranutaporn, P., Danry, V., Leong, J. et al. AI-generated characters for supporting personalized learning and well-being. Nat Mach Intell (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-021-00417-9

Kubzansky LD, Kim ES, Boehm JK, Davidson RJ, Huffman JC, Loucks EB, Lyubomirsky S, Picard RW, Schueller SM, Trudel-Fitzgerald C, VanderWeele TJ, Warran K, Yeager DS, Yeh CS, Moskowitz JT. Interventions to Modify Psychological Well-Being: Progress, Promises, and an Agenda for Future Research. Affect Sci. 2023 Mar 3;4(1):174-184. doi: 10.1007/s42761-022-00167-w. PMID: 37064816; PMCID: PMC9982781.

Orii, L., Alonso, L. and Larson, K., 2020. Methodology for Establishing Well-Being Urban Indicators at the District Level to be Used on the CityScope Platform. Sustainability, 12(22), p.9458.

LocationMIT Media Lab, E14-633 DescriptionDigital self-tracking, sometimes called "life hacking" or "personal analytics," involves parsing …

LocationMIT Media Lab, E15-LL, Bartos Theater DescriptionThe human brain is made up of neurons, highly sophisticated and stable cellular st…

MIT has developed an extension that allows knowing the emotional impact caused by the content that everyone creates and consumes on Twitter.

LocationMIT Media Lab, E14-525 (Nagashima Conference Room) DescriptionPART 1: Investigating Well-being and Character in PsychologyPART 2: D…

DescriptionJP Onnela is an assistant professor in the Department of Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is interested …

Ostrowski, A.K., DiPaola, D., Partridge E., Park, H.W., & Breazeal, C. (2019). Older Adults Living with Social Robots: Promoting Social Connectedness in Long-Term Communities. IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine. doi: 10.1109/MRA.2019.2905234

Emotional wellbeing is an important indicator of overall health and poor emotional wellbeing can equally adversely affect one's overal…

When they’re valued as design research partners, older adults feel empowered to contribute to technology design.

People use AI chatbots like ChatGPT in many ways—asking questions, sparking creativity, solving problems, and even for personal interaction…

Das, M., Ostrowski, A.K., Ben-David, S., Roeder, G.J., Kimura, K., D’Ignazio, C., Breazeal, C., Yang, M, & Verma, A. Auditing design justice: The impact of social movements on design pedagogy at a technology institution. Design Studies.

This project aimed at enhancing the social-emotional and educational experiences of Arabic-speaking refugee children. The project leverages…

ESG+Community

Nosakhare, E., Picard, R. W. Probabilistic Latent Variable Modeling for Assessing Behavioral Influences on Well-Being," ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’19), August 4–8, 2019, Anchorage, AK, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292500.3330738

Resonance at low frequencies strongly influences a room's perception of sound, which can enhance or deteriorate the acoustic experience. Pr…

We are exploring how social robots can be used to improve connection to others and are looking for participants age 18+ located in the US

Former Media Lab Professor Ethan Zuckerman speaks with The New York Times about the future of social media.

Over 600,000 youth in the United States experience abuse or neglect each year. Youth who are deemed to be at risk of significant harm in th…

DescriptionThis talk is part of the Advancing Wellbeing seminar series at the MIT Media Lab. For information about future talks, please joi…

Narain, J.*, Quach, T.*, Davey, M.*, Park, H., Braezeal, C., and Picard, R. "Promoting Wellbeing with Sunny, a Chatbot that Facilitates Positive Messages within Social Groups". Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Accepted. *Equal Contribution.

Shen, J., Lee, A., Alghowinem, S., Adkins, R., Breazeal, C., & Park, H. W. (2025). Social robots as social proxies for fostering connection and empathy towards humanity. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2025), Melbourne, Australia. ACM.

Nosakhare, E., and Picard. R. 2019. Toward Assessing and Recommending Combinations of Behaviors for Improving Health and Well-Being. ACM Trans. Comput. Healthcare 1, 1, Article 4 (December 2019), 29 pages.

Director; Apollo Professor of Astronautics

In Scientific American, Dr. Alex Lipton and Media Lab Professor Alex ‘Sandy’ Pentland call for the creation of new banking regulations.

Biomimicry looks to living organisms to create the future of sustainable engineering.

The Huggable is a new type of robotic companion for health care, education, and social communication applications. The Huggable is much mor…

Four out of eleven selected research projects were from the Media Lab community.

Leong, Joanne, et al. "Social Wormholes: Exploring Preferences and Opportunities for Distributed and Physically-Grounded Social Connections." Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 7.CSCW2 (2023): 1-29.

Sawhney, N. "Cooperative Innovation in the Commons: Rethinking Distributed Collaboration and Intellectual Property for Sustainable Design Innovation"

Ouko, L. "Documentation: A Reflective Practice Approach"

Hawkins, R.D., Berdahl, A.M., Pentland, A.‘. et al. Flexible social inference facilitates targeted social learning when rewards are not observable. Nat Hum Behav (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01682-x

Innovation dynamics of emerging co-creation practices: What are the impacts on inclusion?

Researchers present a user-centered design approach to creating intelligent social technologies to empower and help older adults at home.

I. Rahwan (2017). Towards Scalable Governance: Sensemaking and Cooperation in the Age of Social Media. Philosophy & Technology. 30(2), 161-178

M. Ehsan Hoque