Research
Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
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Fluid Interfaces

Designing systems for cognitive support
Post Research

Participate in the Our Social Robot Study!

Anyone who is age 60+, speaks English, lives in the US, and has access to Wi-Fi is eligible.
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Affective Computing

Advancing human wellbeing by developing new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion
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Biomechatronics

Enhancing human physical capability
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...
Archived
Project Research

Robotic Positive Psychology Coach for College Students

A significant number of college students suffer from mental health issues that impact their physical, social, and occu...
Archived
Project Research

Robot Policy Design Toolkit

Increasingly, devices designed with artificial intelligence (AI), such as robots or smart speakers, are entering people’s homes, workspac...
Post Research

Anastasia Ostrowski and Daniella DiPaola receive an award from the Harold Horowitz (1951) Student Research Fund

Established in 1999, the Harold Horowitz (1951) Student Research Fund makes awards on an annual basis to students in SA+P.
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...
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

Career Girls Role Models: Randi Williams

Randi Williams talks about her work. Her advice to girls is never to be afraid to make yourself heard; your ideas are essential.
Article Research

Robots will be tools for older adults and care givers in the future

Anastasia Ostrowski talks to the Digital Future Society about her work in this Q+A.
Archived
Research
ML Learning

ML Learning
Article Research

Six researchers who are shaping the future of artificial intelligence

Nature profiles researchers from a variety of different fields, including the Lab’s own Cynthia Breazeal, who are shaping the future of AI.
Research
Personal Robots

Building intelligent personified technologies that collaborate with people to help them learn, thrive, and flourish.
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

[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...
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Human Dynamics

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

Storytelling Companion

Children’s oral language skills in preschool can predict their academic success later in life. Helping children improve their language an...
Archived
Post Research

Personal Robots and Affective Computing team win Best Paper Award at IEEE RO-MAN 2020

For the paper: "A Robotic Positive Psychology Coach to Improve College Students’ Wellbeing"
Archived
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Synthetic Neurobiology

Revealing insights into the human condition and repairing brain disorders via novel tools for mapping and fixing brain computations
Archived
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Civic Media

Creating technology for social change
Archived
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Scalable Cooperation

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

Machine Behavior

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

Meet the 2017 LEGO Papert Fellows

The LEGO Papert Fellowship program was officially launched in 2017.
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.
Project Research

Robot Mindset and Curiosity

Young Learner's Companion Developing robots' growth mindset and pro-curious behavior and fostering the same in young learners via lo...
Archived
Project Research

PopBots: An early childhood AI curriculum

How can we add the missing "T" and "E" in preschool STEAM education?
Archived
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.
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? ...
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.
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.
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...
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.
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...
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

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

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...
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
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.