Research
Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
Research
Scalable Cooperation

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

Measuring kids’ relationships with robots

Exploring how the relational features of robots impact children’s engagement and learning.
Research
ML Learning

ML Learning
Research
Personal Robots

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

Defining the dilemmas of artificial intelligence

Media Lab researchers are part of a growing movement at MIT to explore the regulatory frontiers of AI—in society and in our hearts and minds
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

Personalized Robot Storytelling Companion

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

Designing Social Robots for Elders

The increasing geographical separation and the technological divide has made it more difficult for elders to interact with their families. ...
Project Research

Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams to Augment Human Creativity

Sleep is a forgotten country of the mind: A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a third of our ...
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...
Research
Affective Computing

Advancing wellbeing by using new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion
Project Research

Realtime Detection of Social Cues

Realtime detection of social cues in children’s voicesIn everyday conversation, people use what are known as backchannels to signal to so...
Project Research

Predicting Trust Between People

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

Preschool Oriented Programming Toolkit

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

Emotionally Aware Robot Teammates

Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
Project Research

Artificial Listener with Social Intelligence

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

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

RoboChain: A Secure Data-Sharing Framework for Human-Robot Interaction

Eduardo Castello Ferrer, Ognjen Rudovic, Thomas Hardjono, Alex Pentland, “RoboChain: A Secure Data-Sharing Framework for Human-Robot Interaction” eTELEMED 2018.
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...
Gallery Research

RoboChain Project Figures
Publication Research

P2PSTORY: Dataset of Children Storytelling and Listening in Peer-to-Peer Interactions

Nikhita Singh, Jin Joo Lee, Ishaan Grover, and Cynthia Breazeal (2018). P2PSTORY: Dataset of Children Storytelling and Listening in Peer-to-Peer Interactions. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
Publication Research

Measuring Young Children’s Long-Term Relationships with Social Robots

Kory Westlund, J. M., Park, H., Williams, R., & Breazeal, C. (2018). Measuring Young Children’s Long-term Relationships with Social Robots. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC). ACM: New York, NY.
Project Research

EngageME: Machine Learning for Autism Therapy

Machine learning and humanoid robots for measuring engagement of children with autismEngageME is a project aimed at building a new techno...
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. "Personalized Machine Learning for Robot Perception of Affect and Engagement in Autism Therapy," Pre-print on arXiv. Feb 2018.
Article Research

Kids can pick up attitude from robots they play and learn with

“The goal is to have a companion that has all of the behaviors that we want to instill and promote in the child”
Research
Advancing Wellbeing

Advancing Wellbeing
Post Research

Making new (robot) friends: Further reading

For the interested reader:If you'd like to learn more about the topics covered in my post,  Making new (robot) friends: Understandin...
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

The new robot in school

Meet Tega—one of the newest creations from the Personal Robots Group (PRG), led at the MIT Media Lab by associate professor of ...
Publication Research

Tega, A Social Robot

Kory Westlund, J. M., Lee, J., Plummer, L., Faridia, F., Gray, J., Berlin, M., Quintus-Bosz, H., Harmann, R., Hess, M., Dyer, S., dos Santos, K., Adalgeirsson, S., Gordon, G., Spaulding, S., Martinez, M., Das, M., Archie, M., Jeong, S., & Breazeal, C. (2016). Tega: A Social Robot. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction: Video Presentations.
Publication Research

Detecting the Trustworthiness of Novel Partners in Economic Exchange

D DeSteno, C Breazeal, R Frank, D Pizarro, J Baumann, L Dickens, JJ Lee (2012). Detecting the Trustworthiness of Novel Partners in Economic Exchange. Psychological Science.
Project Research

Human-Robot Trust

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

Telling Stories to Robots: The Effect of Backchanneling on a Child's Storytelling

Hae Won Park, Mirko Gelsomini, Jin Joo Lee, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2017. Telling Stories to Robots: The Effect of Backchanneling on a Child's Storytelling. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '17).
Publication Research

Children use non-verbal cues to learn new words from robots as well as people

Kory Westlund., J. M., Dickens, L., Jeong, S., Harris, P. L., DeSteno, D., & Breazeal, C. L. (2017). Children use non-verbal cues to learn new words from robots as well as people. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction.
Project Research

Relational AI

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

They’re alive! Are smart toys changing how children interact with humans?

It’s cute when a kid asks, “Alexa, did you farted?,” but as the realm of smart technology quickly evolves from household voice assistants...
Article Research

Should children form emotional bonds with robots?

When I brought the robot home from the Apple Store, I knew I was inviting a new kind of strangeness into our lives. My wife worried ...
Project Research

Social Robots in Space: Initial Explorations

Can we enable social connectivity between astronauts and people on Earth through an embodied agent?Astronauts actively communicate with t...
Project Research

Magic Robot Interaction

Can a magician and a robot collaborate on stage to create a believable, evocative performance?We are studying how th...
Archived
Publication Research

Engaging Robots: Easing Complex Human-Robot Teamwork Using Backchanneling.

MF Jung, JJ Lee, N DePalma, S Adalgeirsson, et al (2013). "Engaging Robots: Easing Complex Human-Robot Teamwork using Backchanneling." In Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social (San Antonio, Texas).
Project Research

Intentional Inference of Emotions

Emotion recognition modeled as a goal-directed process!
Thesis Research

Modeling the Dynamics of Nonverbal Behavior on Interpersonal Trust for Human-Robot Interactions

Jin Joo Lee. Modeling the Dynamics of Nonverbal Behavior on Interpersonal Trust for Human-Robot Interactions. Masters Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2011.
Thesis Research

A Bayesian Theory of Mind Approach to Nonverbal Communication for Human-Robot Interactions

Jin Joo Lee. A Bayesian Theory of Mind Approach to Nonverbal Communication for Human-Robot Interactions. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017.
Publication Research

Backchannel Opportunity Prediction for Social Robot Listeners

HW Park, M Gelsomini, JJ Lee, T Zhu, and C Breazeal (2017). Backchannel Opportunity Prediction for Social Robot Listeners. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
Publication Research

How to Train Your DragonBot: Socially Assistive Robots for Teaching Children About Nutrition Through Play

E Short, K Swift-Spong, J Greczek, A Ramachandran, A Litoiu, E Grigore, D Feil- Seifer, S Shuster, JJ Lee, et al (2014). "How to Train Your DragonBot: Socially Assistive Robots for Teaching Children About Nutrition Through Play." In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (Edinburgh, UK).
Article Research

Do Robots Need a Code of Ethics?

What are the legal rights of a robot? This is one of the many questions MIT Media Lab researcher Kate Darling contemplates as part of her...
Article Research

Robots for kids: designing social machines that support children's learning

If we want socially assistive robots instead of robot overlords, well, that’s on us.
Article Research

What interacting with robots might reveal about human nature

The most urgent question for people is not whether machines will take their jobs but how machines will change the way they behave in society
Post Research

Making new (robot) friends

Understanding children's relationships with social robots
Article Research

Can robots teach us what it means to be human?

"Are you real?"If you've seen the TV series Westworld, you may remember this line. A man named William has just arrived at Westworld, a s...
Archived
Project Research

Children Use Nonverbal Cues to Learn from Robots

When learning from human partners, infants and young children will pay attention to nonverbal signals, such as gaze and bodily orientatio...
Archived
Archived
Project Research

Socially Assistive Robotics: An NSF Expedition in Computing

Our mission is to develop the computational techniques that will enable the design, implementation, and evaluation of "relational" robots...
Archived
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
Archived
Project Research

Robotic Learning Companions

The language and literacy skills of young children entering school are highly predictive of their long-term academic success. Children fr...
Archived
Post Research

Kids, AI devices, and intelligent toys

What do children think about machines that think?
Publication Research

Social agent or machine? The framing of a robot affects people's interactions and expressivity

Kory, J. & Kleinberger, R. (2014). Social agent or machine? The framing of a robot affects people's interactions and expressivity. 2nd Workshop on Applications for Emotional Robots held in conjunction with the 9th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
Publication Research

Deception, Secrets, Children, and Robots: What’s Acceptable?

Kory Westlund, J., & Breazeal, C. (2015). Deception, Secrets, Children, and Robots: What’s Acceptable? Workshop on The Emerging Policy and Ethics of Human-Robot Interaction, held in conjunction with the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.
Publication Research

Effects of Framing a Robot as a Social Agent or as a Machine on Children's Social Behavior

Kory Westlund, J. M., Martinez, M., Archie, M., Das, M., & Breazeal, C. (2016). Effects of Framing a Robot as a Social Agent or as a Machine on Children's Social Behavior. In S. Y. Okita, T. Shibata, & B. Mutlu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 688-693). IEEE: Washington, DC.
Publication Research

Flat versus expressive storytelling: young children's learning and retention of a social robot's narrative

Kory Westlund, J., Jeong, S., Park, H. W., Ronfard, S., Adhikari, A., Harris, P. L., David DeSteno, & Breazeal, C. (2017). Flat versus expressive storytelling: young children's learning and retention of a social robot's narrative. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
Publication Research

A Comparison of children learning from robots, tablets, and people

Kory Westlund, J., Dickens, L., Jeong, S., Harris, P., DeSteno, D., & Breazeal, C. (2015). A Comparison of children learning from robots, tablets, and people. In Proceedings of New Friends: The 1st International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education.
Archived
Project Research

Robotic Language Learning Companions

Young children learn language not through listening alone, but through active communication with a social actor. Cultural immersion and c...
Archived
Publication Research

Growing Growth Mindset with a Social Robot Peer

Hae Won Park, Rinat Rosenberg-Kima, Maor Rosenberg, Goren Gordon, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2017. Growing Growth Mindset with a Social Robot Peer. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '17). ACM, New York
Publication Research

Twitter: who gets caught? observed trends in social micro-blogging spam

Almaatouq, Abdullah, et al. "Twitter: who gets caught? observed trends in social micro-blogging spam." Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science. ACM, 2014.