Each Media Laboratory faculty member and senior research scientist leads a research group that includes a number of graduate student researchers and often involves undergraduate researchers.
How new technologies can help people better communicate, understand, and respond to affective information.
How technology can be used to enhance human physical capability.
How to create new ways to capture and share visual information.
How to build machines that learn to use language in human-like ways, and develop tools and models to better understand how children learn to communicate.
How artists and engineers can refigure technology for the full range of human experience.
How to enhance understanding, enable creativity, and ease our interactions with the technological environment.
How we can understand human behavior (rationality, semi-rationality, bounded rationality, and just plain irrationality) in day-to-day behaviors, and in particular in electronic environments.
How to integrate the world of information and services more naturally into our daily physical lives, enabling insight, inspiration, and interpersonal connections.
How to engage diverse audiences in creating their own technology by situating computation in new contexts and building tools to democratize engineering.
How social networks can influence our lives in business, health, and governance, as well as technology adoption and diffusion.
How to create seamless and pervasive connections between our physical environments and information resources.
How to engage people in creative learning experiences.
How to engineer at the limits of complexity with molecular-scale parts.
How to build intelligent music systems out of interacting audio-processing agents.
How radical new collaborations between doctors, patients, and communities will catalyze a revolution in human health.
How to create communication systems that gain an understanding of the content they carry and use it to make richer connections among users.
How musical composition, performance, and instrumentation can lead to innovative forms of expression, learning, and health.
How to build social robots that interact, collaborate, and learn with people as partners.
How sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction, and perception.
How buildings and cities can become more intelligently responsive to the needs and desires of their inhabitants.
How software can act as an assistant to the user rather than a tool, by learning from interaction and by proactively anticipating the user's needs.
How speech technologies and portable devices can enhance communication.
How to engineer intelligent neurotechnologies to repair pathology, augment cognition, and reveal insights into the human condition.
How to design seamless interfaces between humans, digital information, and the physical environment.
How to construct agile, scalable, collaborative systems.