Research
Space Enabled

Advancing justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space
Project Research

The Power of Without

The Power of WITHOUT is a research theme in the City Science group. The theme proposes that heavy infrastructure solutions are not financ...
Research
City Science

Looking beyond smart cities
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Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
Research
Poetic Justice

Exploring new forms of social justice through art
Publication Research

Defund Big Tech, Refund Community: Anti-Trust is Not Enough, Another Tech is Possible

Barendregt, W., Becker, C., Cheon, E., Clement, A., Reynolds-Cuéllar, P., Schuler, D., & Suchman, L. (2021). Defund Big Tech, Refund Community. Tech Otherwise. https://doi.org/10.21428/93b2c832.e0100a3f
Research
PlusMinus

PlusMinus
Project Research

Curriculum: Power + AI

Check out the project site here. The pursuit of justice in AI requires more than just tweaking the numbers. It requires us to “study up”...
Research
Biomechatronics

Enhancing human physical capability
Research
Personal Robots

Building intelligent personified technologies that collaborate with people to help them learn, thrive, and flourish.
Center for Civic Media
Archived
Project Research

Theme | Mobility On-Demand

Urban populations around the world are rapidly growing. To improve livability, urban residents must reduce dependency on fossil fuels and...
Project Research

Resilience Across Scales

Resilience Across Scales is a research theme that encompasses the work of a few Media Lab Principal Investigators and their research grou...
Project Research

[bike] swarm

As bikes navigate city streets after dark, they are often equipped with lights. The lights make the bikes visible to cars or other bikers...
Research
Camera Culture

Making the invisible visible–inside our bodies, around us, and beyond–for health, work, and connection
Archived
Project Research

Viral Vote

Climate change and the domino effect it creates will require coordination at scales we haven’t seen and new forms of organization to addr...
Archived
Project Research

Gobo

Your social media. Your rules.Gobo is an experiment, not a startup. We’re building it to change the conversation on social media and imag...
Research
Viral Communications

Creating scalable technologies that evolve with user inventiveness
Archived
Project Research

Voter Education through Network Analytics

In “normal” times, the process of voting can be confusing enough for many Americans -- from whether and where they’re registered, to abse...
Archived
Research
Human Dynamics

Exploring how social networks can influence our lives in business, health, governance, and technology adoption and diffusion
Archived
Research
Design Fiction

Sparking discussion about the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies through design and storytelling
Archived
Research
Civic Media

Creating technology for social change
Archived
Research
Object-Based Media

Changing storytelling, communication, and everyday life through sensing, understanding, and new interface technologies
Archived
Research
Collective Learning

Transforming data into knowledge
Article Research

Literati CTO Finds “Tech for Good” in Boxes of Books

Civic Media alum Charlie DeTar talks to the MIT Alumni Association about his work with Literati, using technology for social good, and more.
Archived
Project Research

Streetchange

Computer vision uncovers predictors of physical urban change

Archived
Project Research

Private Location Data for the Public Good and Urban Understanding

There is a continuous and ubiquitous collection of precise, timestamped, geolocation data from apps and devices, being amassed by private...
Project Research

Algorithmic Justice League

www.ajl.orgAn unseen force is rising—helping to determine who is hired, granted a loan, or even how long someone spends in prison. This f...
Article Research

Episode 89: Chelsea Barabas

Joshua B. Hoe interviews Chelsea Barabas of MIT about criminal justice monitoring, surveillance, and algorithms
Research
Sculpting Evolution

Cultivating wisdom through evolutionary and ecological engineering
Post Research

City Science team wins Best Student Paper Award at Computing Conference 2020

Congratulations to City Science researchers Alex Berke, Jason Nawyn, Thomas Sanchez Lengeling, and group head Kent Larson!
Archived
Research
Scalable Cooperation

Reimagining human cooperation in the age of social media and artificial intelligence
Archived
Project Research

Moral Machine

The Moral Machine is a platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving c...
Archived
Article Research

AI researchers say scientific publishers help perpetuate racist algorithms

“This is why we keep seeing race science emerging time and again," writes Chelsea Barabas. "It’s because publishers publish it."
Publication Research

Contact Tracing Technologies: Methods and trade-offs

Alex Berke and Kent Larson, City Science group, MIT Media Lab (2020).
Project Research

Theme | CityScope

City Science researchers are developing a slew of tangible and digital platforms dedicated to solving spatial design and urban planning c...
Project Research

ChampScope

Virtual CityScope Champs-Élysées is an interactive and immersive platform that explores the future of Paris’ most important street.
Post Research

Media Lab @ Design, Technology + Social Innovation Workshop 2020

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

City Science Lab Hamburg

MIT City Science is working with HafenCity University to develop CityScope for the neighborhood of Rothenburgsort in Hamburg, Germany. Th...
Article Research

Building a more honest internet

What would social media look like if it served the public interest?
Post Research

Joy Buolamwini and Amanda Nguyen chosen for TIME 100 Next 2019

Congratulations to Joy Buolamwini and Amanda Nguyen for being recognized in the "Advocates" category.
Article Research

Artificial intelligence can be biased. Here’s what you should know.

Joy Buolamwini talks to Frontline about bias in AI, and what can be done about it.
Article Research

World's 100 most influential people in digital government 2019

Commending a formidable variety of international change-makers driving digital transformation in government.
Project Research

Income, Race, Bikes

Is the placement of bike-share docks equitable?This interactive map explores the question visually.The map shows the addition of bike-sha...
Post Research

Alum Erhardt Graeff receives Best Dissertation Award

The Association of Internet Researchers has recognized alum Erhardt Graeff, now an assistant professor of social and computer science at ...
Archived
Project Research

Empowerment-based design and evaluation of civic technology

Civic technology should empower us as citizens. But despite its breadth as a field, civic technology often takes its lead from Silicon Va...
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Let's play: Waste at MIT

Let's play: Waste at MIT is a game about trash; it’s also a game about understanding civic infrastructure. This project explores the use ...
Archived
Project Research

CivilServant: User-led randomized trials online

The CivilServant project supports online communities to run their own experiments on the effects of moderation practices on antisocial be...
Archived
Project Research

Boycott!

A web browser extension that reveals less well-known aspects of corporate public behavior such as environmental respect and political bia...
Archived
Project Research

RelatiVotey

Many people think their vote doesn't count—that a single vote would not change an election's outcome—and they stay home on Election Day. ...
Project Research

LinkedOut: Codesigning societal reentry with returning citizens

LinkedOut aims to define and build solutions to facilitate societal reentry for formerly incarcerated individuals.In collaboration with t...
Project Research

CityScope PlayGround: MIT East Campus

This project depicts the design, deployment and operation of a Tangible Regulation Platform, a physical-technological apparatus made for ...
Article Research

Face recognition researcher fights Amazon over biased AI

Joy Buolamwini talks to the AP about her work on algorithmic bias.
Article Research

On recent research auditing commercial facial analysis technology

An open letter asking Amazon to stop selling Rekognition to law enforcement agencies.
Article Research

AI experts question Amazon’s facial-recognition technology

More than three dozen AI researchers have signed an open letter asking Amazon to stop selling Rekognition to law enforcement agencies.
Article Research

‘Atlas of Inequality’ maps where rich, poor do and don’t mix

Visiting professor Esteban Moro talks to Next City about the Atlas of Inequality.
Article Research

'Atlas Of Inequality' shows income segregation around Boston

Esteban Moro talks to WBUR about the Human Dynamics group's Atlas of Inequality.
Project Research

The Atlas of Inequality

Segregation is hurting our societies and especially our cities. But economic inequality isn't just limited to neighborhoods. The restaura...
Article Research

Visualizing where rich and poor people really cross paths—or don’t

These maps show “place inequality"—or why people of different income levels are at different coffee shops.
Article Research

The 'Atlas of Inequality' maps micro-level segregation

MIT Media Lab’s new interactive “Atlas of Inequality” shows that “segregation is not just about where you live, but what you do."
Article Research

Artificial intelligence has a problem with gender and racial bias. Here’s how to solve it.

Joy Buolamwini’s essay is featured in the Optimists issue of Time, guest-edited by Ava DuVernay.
Project Research

Actionable Auditing: Coordinated bias disclosure study

Algorithmic auditing has emerged as a key strategy to expose systematic biases embedded in software platforms, yet scholarship on the imp...
Article Research

Defense of Amazon's face recognition tool undermined by its only known police client

So far Amazon’s frontline defense against advocates and academics has been: Researchers are setting the search parameters incorrectly.
Article Research

Amazon is pushing facial technology that a study says could be biased

Amazon’s system had more difficulty identifying the gender of female and darker-skinned faces than similar services from IBM and Microsoft.
Article Research

Give way to droids, bots, and drones: the driverless city will look like this

An NYC exhibit imagines driverless buses and mobile medical units resembling Popemobiles.
Article Research

Should we be worried about computerized facial recognition?

The technology could revolutionize policing, medicine, even agriculture—but its applications can easily be weaponized.
Article Research

Capturing Challenges

MIT Media Lab professor Ramesh Raskar talks about how his high-tech inventions and initiatives can help solve real-world problems.
Project Research

CityMatrix

An Urban Decision-Support System Augmented by Artificial IntelligenceThe decision-making process in urban design and urban planning is ou...