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MIT Media Lab / Personal Robots group
Personal Robots group
Today's children will live in a world saturated with artificial intelligence. Understanding the key idea behind the functioning of intellig…
Empathy is a driving force in our connection to others, our mental well-being, and our resilience to challenges. The human capacity for emp…
Despite living in an increasingly connected world, loneliness and social isolation are prevalent issues today. While social robots have bee…
In a series of design workshops, the HRI Equitable Design framework from previous work (see Ostrowski et al. 2022) was expanded to a worksh…
We are building autonomous agents that are socially and emotionally saturated in single-person (child-robot) or multi-party (child-parent-r…
We create and employ ethical design frameworks to work towards equitable and inclusive HRI research and technologies.
An embodied virtual agent is a promising oracle for delivering appropriate just-in time interventions. We aim to build a system and design …
How can we make embodied agents have multimodal conversation with individual and group users that is not only natural, but also relational,…
We seek to empower everyone to become conscientious consumers, ethical engineers, creative problem solvers, and informed advocates for resp…
Emotional wellbeing is an important indicator of overall health and poor emotional wellbeing can equally adversely affect one's overal…
S.P.A.R.K.I. (Students' Personal Assistant for Reinforcing Knowledge and Innovation) is a GPT-powered chatbot that scaffolds children's wo…
Today’s artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are changing how many people play, work, learn, and govern themselves. Due to this rapid …
The social robot intelligence benchmark is a large-scale multimodal dataset comprising of many diverse contexts, tasks and environments to …
Recognizing and interpreting group behaviors is much more challenging than that of individual behaviors. Firstly, the system must perform w…
When people listen to stories, the words are colored with emotions conveyed through prosodic features beyond the text alone. Visual font d…
The most meaningful connections between people are often formed through expression of shared vulnerability and emotional experiences. Despi…
The underrepresentation of minoritized groups, particularly African Americans, is the longstanding reality of computing fields. Computing h…
An essential element of K-12 AI literacy is educating learners about the ethical and societal implications of AI systems. Previous work in …
With the advent of real-time photorealism (RTPR), virtual environments are now able to achieve higher degrees of engagement than ever befor…
Depending on the operational environment of an autonomous system, a great deal of perceptual uncertainty may be introduced to an object det…
With the emergence of social robots in people’s daily lives, their interactions with people need to consider not only engaging with in…
Navigation for autonomous UAVS (unmanned aerial vehicles) is a complex problem and physical field testing of associated tasks introduces a …
Research MotivationCan we become more socially connected with one another through the facilitation of a socially embodied agent? What types…
Technologies designed with personalities and social interfaces are entering our homes in the form of social robots such as Jibo and Cozmo. …
Many tasks are not easily defined and/or too complex for supervised machine learning approaches. For these reasons, a technique known as&nb…
Audio-visual data set containing around 21.6 hours of parent-child interaction during story reading.The DAMI-P2C dataset consists of audio-…
Increasingly, devices designed with artificial intelligence (AI), such as robots or smart speakers, are entering people’s homes, workspaces…
We take as a starting point for our work the recent scholarship by Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice, in which she described design jus…
Policymakers, practitioners, and researchers are grappling with some herculean questions regarding kids' safety online. Homemade slime…
Dyadic Speech-based Affect Recognition using DAMI-P2C Parent-child Multimodal Interaction Dataset
Social robots equipped with AI and designed with users’ social, emotional, and relational interactions in mind are increasingly being highl…
Doodle Bot is a robot-based creative AI learning platform for high school students. It consists of an introduction to robotics, hardware, s…
Families with ASD often struggle with social and emotional communication. This work explores the role of an embodied agent (a social robot)…
As the presence of artificial intelligence expands significantly in children’s lives of learning and play, it is critical that students lea…
Children’s creativity—the ability to come up with novel, surprising, and valuable ideas—has been known to contribute to their learning outc…
Tega is a new robot platform designed to support long-term, in-home interactions with children, with applications in early-literacy educati…
An affective robotic ring which allows users to interact with multiple robots using finger gestures.- Runs on Robotic Operating System (ROS…
How to Train Your Robot is a curriculum for students in 5-8th grade to explore artificial intelligence and ethics. In this course, students…
How do we raise conscientious consumers and designers of AI?Children today live in the age of artificial intelligence. On average, US child…
InspirationSleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a thir…
Voice-user interfaces (VUIs), such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, are increasingly becoming present in domestic environments. Us…
Artificial intelligence (AI) agents in an embodied form, such as Jibo, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home, are increasingly becoming part of our…
Embodied voice-based agents, such as Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, and Jibo, are becoming increasingly present in the home environment. For m…
The Jibo Research Platform is an in-the-field deployable Social Robotics experimentation and data collection infrastructure. Built upon the…
Text-to-Motion generates a sequence of contingent robot animations to accompany the sentiment analyzed from an input sentence and its spoke…
Cognimates is a platform where parents and children (7-10 years old) participate in creative programming activities in which they lea…
Realtime detection of social cues in children’s voicesIn everyday conversation, people use what are known as backchannels to signal to some…
Social robots are increasingly being developed for long-term interactions with children in domains such as healthcare, education, therapy, …
Most countries are projected to see the number of people ages 65 and older surpass the population under the age of 15 by 2050. The limitati…
Early literacy plays an important role in a child's future. However, the reality is that over 57 million children have no access to a schoo…
Understanding social-emotional behaviors in storytelling interactions plays a critical role in the development of interactive and education…
Could a social robot collaboratively exchange stories with children as a peer and help improve their linguistic and storytelling skills? We…
Young Learner's Companion Developing robots' growth mindset and pro-curious behavior and fostering the same in young learners via long…
The process by which children learn native languages is markedly different from the process of learning a second, or non-native, language. …
Thank you for your interest in our Data Activism program. All available spots for this program have been filled. If you would li…