Center for Civic Media
Center for Future Storytelling
Center for Mobile Learning
The Center for Mobile Learning invents and studies new mobile technologies to promote learning anywhere anytime for anyone. The Center focuses on mobile tools that empower learners to think creatively, collaborate broadly, and develop applications that are useful to themselves and others around them. The Center's work covers location-aware learning applications, mobile sensing and data collection, augmented reality gaming, and other educational uses of mobile technologies. The Center’s first major activity will focus on App Inventor, a programming system that makes it easy for learners to create mobile apps by fitting together puzzle piece-shaped “blocks” in a web browser.
City Science
The world is experiencing a period of extreme urbanization. In China alone, 300 million rural inhabitants will move to urban areas over the next 15 years. This will require building an infrastructure equivalent to the one housing the entire population of the United States in a matter of a few decades. In the future, cities will account for nearly 90% of global population growth, 80% of wealth creation, and 60% of total energy consumption. Developing better strategies for the creation of new cities, is therefore, a global imperative. Our need to improve our understanding of cities, however, is pressed not only by the social relevance of urban environments, but also by the availability of new strategies for city-scale interventions that are enabled by emerging technologies. Leveraging advances in data analysis, sensor technologies, and urban experiments, City Science will provide new insights into creating a data-driven approach to urban design and planning. To build the cities that the world needs, we need a scientific understanding of cities that considers our built environments and the people who inhabit them. Our future cities will desperately need such understanding.
Communications Futures Program
Connection Science and Engineering
Our lives have been transformed by networks that combine people and computers in new ways. They have revolutionized the nature of the economy, business, government, politics, and our day-to-day existence. But there is little understanding of the fundamental nature of these networks precisely because the combination of human and technological elements poses a host of conceptual and empirical challenges. Our goal is to forge the foundations of an integrated framework for understanding the connected world we live in. This requires a multidisciplinary, interdepartmental effort that leverages and supports existing disciplinary network projects. The Center is jointly directed by Asu Ozdaglar (EECS) and Alex 'Sandy' Pentland.
