Research
Lifelong Kindergarten

Engaging people in creative learning experiences
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Scalable Cooperation

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

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
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Affective Computing

Advance human wellbeing by developing new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion
Project Research

How to Train Your Robot

How to Train Your Robot Companion is a curriculum for students in 5-8th grade to explore artificial intelligence and ethics. In this cour...
Article Research

Bringing artificial intelligence into the classroom, research lab, and beyond

MIT Quest for Intelligence shares AI-focused UROP projects, including senior Nicole Thumma's work with the Personal Robots group.
Research
ML Learning

ML Learning
Project Research

Personalized Robot Storytelling Companion

Could a social robot collaboratively exchange stories with children as a peer and help improve their linguistic and storytelling skills? ...
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Human Dynamics

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

Teachers, the robots are coming. But that's not a bad thing

Can robots help teachers improve classroom learning?
Project Research

Jibo Social Robotic Research Platform

The Jibo Research Platform is an in-the-field deployable Social Robotics experimentation and data collection infrastructure. Built upon t...
Article Research

The Rise of Social Robots: How AI can help us flourish

"I don’t think that AI will have fulfilled its full potential unless it can help us unlock human potential.”
Project Research

Tega: A New Social Robot Platform

Tega is a new robot platform designed to support long-term, in-home interactions with children, with applications in early-literacy educa...
Article Research

Bringing artificial intelligence and MIT to middle school classrooms

MIT researchers and collaborators have developed an open-source curriculum to teach young students about ethics and artificial intelligence.
Article Research

Discovering You: Engineering Your World - Hae Won Park

Labber Hae Won Park talks to NBC News Learn about how social robots can help children develop language skills.
Research
Biomechatronics

Enhancing human physical capability
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...
Project Research

Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

InspirationSleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a th...
Project Research

Creativity with Social Robots

Children’s creativity—the ability to come up with novel, surprising, and valuable ideas—has been known to contribute to their learning ou...
Publication Research

Can Children Learn Creativity from a Social Robot?

Ali, S., Moroso, T., Breazeal, C. (2019). Can Children Learn Creativity from a Social Robot? In Proceedings of ACM Creativity and Cognition 2019.
Archived
Project Research

Relational AI

Creating long-term interpersonal interaction and shared experiences with social robots Many of our current projects explore the use ...
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Predicting Trust Between People

Machine learning model outperforms human judgementOur computational trust model is capable of predicting—above human accuracy—the degree ...
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Intentional Inference of Emotions

Emotion recognition modeled as a goal-directed process!
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Human-Robot Trust

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

Emotionally Aware Robot Teammates

Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Artificial listener with social intelligence

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

I, Robot: Our changing relationship with technology

Kate Darling and other experts consider how our interactions with robots may change the way we engage not only with robots, but also people.
Project Research

Engagement with Voice-User Interface Agents

Voice-user interfaces (VUIs), such as Amazon Echo and Google Home, are increasingly becoming present in domestic environments. ...
Article Research

Mabu the pint-sized robot wants to manage your health

Mabu is about the size of a kitchen appliance and assists with day-to-day healthcare needs through daily "conversations."
Project Research

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...
Research
Civic Media

Creating technology for social change
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Personal Robots

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

Advancing Wellbeing
Post Research

Robots, Gender, and the Design of Relational Technology

My latest research in Cynthia Breazeal's Personal Robots group has been on relational technology.
Post Research

Social robots as social catalysts: Collaborating with older adults as design research partners

When they’re valued as design research partners, older adults feel empowered to contribute to technology design.
Article Research

Meet 'Huggable,' the robot bear who's helping hospitalized kids

Cynthia Breazeal, head of the Personal Robots group, and her collaborators talk to US News about Huggable.
Project Research

Affective Robotic Ring

An affective robotic ring which allows users to interact with multiple robots using finger gestures.- Runs on Robotic Operating System (R...
Archived
Project Research

Huggable: A social robot for pediatric care

The Huggable is a new type of robotic companion for health care, education, and social communication applications. The Huggable is much m...
Article Research

Study: Social robots can benefit hospitalized children

Interacting with a robotic teddy bear invented at MIT boosted young patients’ positive emotions, engagement, and activity level.
Project Research

Designing social robots for older adults

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 limita...
Project Research

PopBots: An early childhood AI curriculum

How can we add the missing "T" and "E" in preschool STEAM education?
Project Research

Machine Behavior

Machines powered by artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly mediate our social, cultural, economic, and ...
Article Research

It's time to study machines the way we study humans

A paper introduces machine behavior: the interdisciplinary study of AI systems as a new class of actors with unique behavioral patterns.
Project Research

Personalized Emotional Wellness Coach

The diagnosis and tracking of mood disorders still rely on clinical assessments, originating more than 50 years ago, of self-reported dep...
Archived
Project Research

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...
Project Research

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...
Project Research

Tools to investigate societal impacts of robots and AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents in an embodied form, such as Jibo, Amazon Alexa, and Google Home, are increasingly becoming part of o...
Project Research

Assessing Children's Relationships with Social Robots

Social robots are increasingly being developed for long-term interactions with children in domains such as healthcare, education, therapy...
Post Research

Announcing the 2019 LEGO Papert Fellows

The LEGO Papert Fellowships support three graduate students working at the intersection of creativity, play, learning, and new technology.
Article Research

Why we should show machines some respect

Kate Darling explores the human implications of the ways we treat robots and other machines.
Thesis Research

Talking Machines: Democratizing the Design of Voice-Based Agents for the Home
Research
Synthetic Neurobiology

Revealing insights into the human condition and repairing brain disorders via novel tools for mapping and fixing brain computations
Article Research

Can you murder a robot?

Rosalind Picard and Kate Darling join other experts to discuss how and why humans empathize with machines.
Article Research

Robots are becoming classroom tutors. But will they make the grade?

Mechanical mentors try to find their place as teacher’s helpers.
Article Research

Designing social robots for older adults

Researchers present a user-centered design approach to creating intelligent social technologies to empower and help older adults at home.
Post Research

EngageME chosen as an EU Research success story

The technology being developed can enable personalized interactions with an autistic child, helping therapists to engage their attention.
Archived
Project Research

Robot Expressiveness Affects Children's Learning

Prior research with preschool children has established that book reading, especially when children are encouraged to actively process the...
Archived
Project Research

Personalized Machine Learning for Autism Therapy

EngageME: Personalized machine learning and humanoid robots for measuring affect and engagement of children with autismEngageME is a proj...
Article Research

Teaching AI to preschoolers with Randi Williams

In the inaugural episode of the TWiML & AI Podcast’s Black in AI series, PhD student Randi Williams discusses her work with PopBots.
Publication Research

Personalized Machine Learning for Robot Perception of Affect and Engagement in Autism Therapy

Rudovic, O., Lee, J., Dai, M., Schuller, B. , Picard, R. W., " Personalized machine learning for robot perception of affect and engagement in autism therapy," Science Robotics, June 2018.
Article Research

Hae Won Park, Personal Robots Group: Social robots for long-term interaction

Hae Won develops interactive social machines that deeply personalize to their users through long-term interaction.
Article Research

An interview with Cynthia Breazeal: IEEE VIC Summit 2018

Cynthia Breazeal sits down for an interview with Glenn Zorpette at the 2018 IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit.
Article Research

Intelligent robots could prove to be a boon for autism therapies

Social robots could potentially aid therapists working with autistic children in the future.
Article Research

Social robots will become family members in the homes of the future

Home robots won’t just be helpers and cleaners—they’ll be teachers and trainers, too.
Article Research

Can artificial intelligence create art?

Click looks at whether AI could ever create an artistic masterpiece.
Post Research

10+ years of Human 2.0

Revisit Human 2.0, a 2007 Media Lab symposium focused on the future of human adaptability.
Project Research

Talking Machines: Democratizing the design of voice-based agents for the home

Embodied voice-based agents, such as Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, and Jibo, are becoming increasingly present in the home environment. For...
Article Research

Personalized “deep learning” equips robots for autism therapy

Machine learning network offers personalized estimates of children’s behavior.
Article Research

The Robots Are Coming! The Robots Are Coming!

“I’m not worried so much about robots developing their own agenda and taking over the world."