- Cyborg Psychology
Pat Pataranutaporn, Ph.D. is an assistant professor, technologist, and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is the founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group. He also serves as co-director of the MIT Media Lab Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) Research Program.
His research lies at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction, where he focuses on inventing, investigating, and inspiring next-generation human-AI systems for human flourishing. As founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, he leads a team of interdisciplinary researchers to develop personalized AI systems informed by human psychology and behavioral science, augmenting human capabilities in decision-making, critical thinking, and learning. His group investigates emerging phenomena through empirical studies examining how AI reshapes cognition, emotion, and behavior, from emotional dependence on AI companions and cognitive manipulation to false memory implantation, placebo effects of human-AI interaction, and the co-evolution of human and machine intelligence. Through collaborations with humanists, artists, and filmmakers, Pataranutaporn and his team create speculative artifacts and experiences that inspire critically optimistic futures, envisioning radically pluralistic cyborg cultures that offer nuanced alternatives to dystopian and utopian extremes while honoring diverse cultural values and ways of knowing.
Pataranutaporn’s research contributions have been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and conferences, such as Nature Machine Intelligence, IEEE, ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM ISWC, and ACM Augmented Humans. His work has been highlighted by the United Nations AI for Good forum, and has been featuredin MIT Tech Review, the Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, the Atlantic, Scientific American, Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, and more. Pataranutaporn’s work has also been honored as one of TIME’s “Best Inventions of 2023” and was included in Fast Company’s “2023 World Changing Ideas.”
Pataranutaporn has been awarded fellowships and grants by multiple research agencies and corporations, including NASA, OpenAI, and KBTG. He has also collaborated with researchers from both academia and industry, including researchers from Stanford Medicine, Harvard, Mass General Brigham, UCSB, UCLA, UC Irvine, Microsoft Research, OpenAI, NTT Data, and more.
Pat’s projects have been exhibited at the MIT Museum (Massachusetts), Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland Art Gallery, Australia), The Art Gallery of Western Australia (Australia) MAXXI – National Museum of 21st Century Art (Italy), Bangkok Art Biennale (Thailand), Bangkok City Gallery (Thailand), National Museum of Singapore (Singapore), Essex Peabody Museum (USA), London Design Festival (UK), Transmediale Festival (Germany), National Taiwan Science Education Center (Taiwan), IDEA Museum (Arizona), Mesa Arts Center (Arizona), Autodesk Gallery (California), SIGGRAPH Asia (Tokyo), Ars Electronica (Virtual) and more.
Pataranutaporn co-designed and taught one of the first MIT courses on “Generative AI,” developed to provide students with the essential knowledge and skills required to navigate the frontiers of this emerging field and he co-organized the first workshop on virtual AI humans, attended by over 1600 remotely and over 200 in person in 2021.
Pat also serve as the co-creator and writer for the Netflix sci-fi anthology series “Tomorrow and i” premiered in 2024.
(Updated on October 1, 2025)