Research — MIT Media Lab

Advancing Wellbeing

Civic Media

Creating technology for social change

Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks

City Science

Looking beyond smart cities

Poetic Justice

Exploring new forms of social justice through art

Open Agriculture (OpenAg)

Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg)

Human Dynamics

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

Designing wearable systems for cognitive enhancement

What is the optimal way to diversify an economy?

One of the eternal challenges of economic development is how to identify the economic activities that a country, city, or region should t...

Theme | CityScope

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

Scalable Cooperation

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

P2PSTORY: Dataset of children as storytellers and listeners in peer-to-peer interactions

Understanding social-emotional behaviors in storytelling interactions plays a critical role in the development of interactive and educati...

Social Physics of Unemployment

Earlier studies proved that behavior is highly shaped and constrained by one's social networks, and demonstrated ways in which individual...

FiftyNifty

This is a grassroots challenge to get friends to participate in democracy by making calls to congresspeople in all 50 states. Live phone ...

Public Library Innovation Exchange

Public libraries are one of most trusted public institutions in the US and increasingly provide a broad range of education services, rang...

DeepMoji

Emotional content is an important part of language. There are many use cases now showing that natural language processing is becoming an ...

City Science Lab Andorra

Andorra and the City Science research group at the MIT Media Lab are taking on the challenge of turning Andorra into an “Internationally ...

Personal Food Computer

The OpenAg™ Personal Food Computer is a tabletop-sized, controlled environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems ...

The Guardians

The Guardians project aims to use the same game design principles used in mobile game platforms to create greater engagement with individ...

City Science Lab Aalto

Aalto University, Finland, and the MIT Media Lab’s City Science group are co-developing a version of the MIT CityScope platform for urban...

Community Biotechnology

Big Ocean, Big Data

More ocean data has been collected in the last two years than in all previous years combined, and we are on a path to continue to break t...

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...

The Electome: Measuring responsiveness in the 2016 election

The Electome: Where AI meets political journalismThe Electome project is a machine-driven mapping and analysis of public sphere content a...

SPRING: A Smart Platform for Research, Intervention, and Neurodevelopmental Growth

SPRING is a custom-built hardware and software platform for children with neuro-differences. The system automates data acquisition, optim...

Predicting students' wellbeing from physiology, phone, mobility, and behavioral data

The goal of this project is to apply machine learning methods to model the wellbeing of MIT undergraduate students. Extensive data is obt...

The Ripple Effect: You are more influential than you think

The well-known "small-world" phenomenon indicates that an individual can be connected with any other in the world through a limited numbe...

RoboChain: A secure data-sharing framework for human-robot interaction

A learning framework for secure, decentralized, computationally efficient data and model sharing among multiple robot units installed at...

Recurrent neural network in context-free next-location prediction

Location prediction is a critical building block in many location-based services and transportation management. This project explores the...

Blockchain: A new framework for robotic swarm systems

Swarms of robots will revolutionize many applications, from targeted material delivery to farming. However, the characteristics that make...

Augmented Eternity and Swappable Identities

Have you ever wondered what a friend would do if she was in your decision-making situation? Or thought about where a family mem...

News Graph

This project aims to show a different picture of the data behind the news, looking at how we analyze, represent, and interact with it.&nb...

Viral Communications

Creating scalable technologies that evolve with user inventiveness

Dynamic Traffic Prediction in Andorra: a Bayesian network approach

Data Fusion for Dynamic Traffic PredictionTraffic congestion has huge negative impacts on the productivity, health and personal live...

Curious Learning: Understanding learning behaviors for early literacy

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 sch...

Artificial listener with social intelligence

A social robot modifies its behavior to change what you think about it!

CityScope PlayGround: MIT East Campus

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

AI, Automation, Labor, and Cities: How to map the future of work

Should workers worry about automation and AI?Many workers, policy makers, and researchers are asking themselves exactly this question. Bu...

Publication Research

Toward understanding the impact of artificial intelligence on labor

Frank, Morgan R., David Autor, James E. Bessen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Manuel Cebrian, David J. Deming, Maryann Feldman, et al. “Toward Understanding the Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Labor.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 25, 2019, 201900949. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900949116.

Reversed Urbanism

Predicting Urban Performance through Behavioral Patterns in Temporal Telecom DataThis study explores a novel method to analyze diverse be...

Responsive Environments

Augmenting and mediating human experience, interaction, and perception with sensor networks

Ultimate Media

The Process of Making Lasting Memories: Mostafa (Neo) Mohsenvand and Hannah Campbell at TEDxYouth@CEHS

Neo Mohsenvand and filmmaker/singer/songwriter Hannah Campbell contemplate memory, data, and the future at TEDxYouth@CEHS.

Collective Learning

Transforming data into knowledge

What the California wildfires can teach us about data sharing

The 2017 and 2018 fires in California were the air quality equivalent of the Daiichi nuclear disaster.

What tech will look like in 2039

We asked futurists, tech execs, academics, researchers, and a sci-fi writer to imagine our tech-driven society in 20 years.

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.

Pantheon

What if we could look at the entire history of humanity at once? Pantheon aims to create a data-driven view of history by collecting...

The role of industry, occupation, and location-specific knowledge in the survival of new firms

How do regions acquire the knowledge they need to diversify their economic activities? How does the migration of workers among firms and ...

Personal Robots

Building socially engaging robots and interactive technologies to help people live healthier lives, connect with others, and learn better

Post Research

Build a Personal Food Computer

OpenAg is committed to changing the way the world thinks about farming and food—and we need your help! As an open source project, we beli...

Publication Research

Personal Food Computer: A New Device for Controlled-Environment Agriculture

Castelló Ferrer E. et al. (2019) Personal Food Computer: A New Device for Controlled-Environment Agriculture. In: Arai K., Bhatia R., Kapoor S. (eds) Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2018. FTC 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 881. Springer, Cham

The Constant Atlas

An interactive atlas of census data for direct consumption by individual citizens.

Publication Research

The blockchain: a new framework for robotic swarm systems

Castelló Ferrer E. (2019) The Blockchain: A New Framework for Robotic Swarm Systems. In: Arai K., Bhatia R., Kapoor S. (eds) Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2018. FTC 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 881. Springer, Cham

cityIO

Cloud-Based Urban Data PlatformcityIO (input/output) is a cloud- and database-driven platform which allows remote participation, database...

The laws of forgetting II: How death and exogenous events shape our collective memory

In order to understand how exogenous shocks, like death, impact memorability by remembering, we use a data-set of biographies from Wikipe...

Managing Travel Demand: Location recommendation for system efficiency

Growth in leisure travel has become increasingly significant economically, socially, and environmentally. However, flexible but uncoordin...

Immersion

The current interface of emails is designed around time and messages, pushing people to focus on what is more recent rather than importan...

Human-Robot Trust

Unconventional mixing of research fields introduces a new method to study human behavior using social robots.

Archived

Panorama

An interface for smashing filter bubbles, Panorama is built to allow open, transparent, and collaborative exploration of news from a...

Archived