Research
Personal Robots

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

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

Advancing Wellbeing
Archived
Research
Emerging Worlds

Emerging Worlds
Research
Camera Culture

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

Data for refugees

Data for refugees is a big data challenge whereby Turk Telekom opens a large dataset of anonymized mobile phone records to research group...
Project Research

Social Capital Accounting

To better understand and improve the quality of our lives, there has been a need for measuring non-economic capital such as social capita...
Post Research

Congratulations to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honorees

The 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list includes at least three members of the Media Lab community.
Project Research

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...
Project Research

Designing social robots for older adults

The increasing geographical separation and technological divide between generations have made it more difficult for older adults to inter...
Article Research

30 Under 30 In Enterprise Tech: Drone School, AI Accountability And Buying Cars From Home

Joy Buolamwini identifies bias in algorithms and develops practices for accountability during design.
Research
Viral Communications

Creating scalable technologies that evolve with user inventiveness
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...
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
Research
Affective Computing

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

Social Capital Accounting

T. Nishikata, T. Hardjono and A. Pentland, Social Capital Accounting, October 2018.
Research
Collective Learning

Transforming data into knowledge
Project Research

Future of Work: Automation, Labor & Cities

As advances in robotics and artificial intelligence revive concerns about the impact of automation on jobs, a question looms: How will au...
Research
Civic Media

Creating technology for social change
Project Research

Artificial Listener with Social Intelligence

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

A-pops

A design project done in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab and the Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City), Mexico City's...
Archived
Project Research

Human-Robot Trust

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

Emotionally Aware Robot Teammates

Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
Research
Space Enabled

Advancing justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space
Research
Opera of the Future

Extending expression, learning, and health through innovations in musical composition, performance, and participation
Post Research

Apops: Pilot Installation, Mexico City, December 2017

APOPS was presented at the Connected Learning Summit at the MIT Media Lab in Aug 2018. The slides from that presentation can be found below.
ML_logo_160W
Inventing the future of digitally augmented objects and environments.
Archived
Project Research

FiftyNifty

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

Black Rock Atlas

Burning Man is a magical place that gets the best of human creativity and collaboration to flourish. To further understand what makes thi...
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...
Article Research

The next great (digital) extinction

We’re in a modern Cambrian era, sorting through an explosion of technologies enabled by the Internet.
Project Research

Measuring and Reducing Social Segregation in Cities

We use high-resolution geospatial data collected from mobile phones to measure social segregation at an unprecedented resolution in citie...
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
Research
Living Mobile

Enhancing mobile life through improved user interactions
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

Diana Orghian – The Optimism Bias

Growing up in a foreign country, the optimism-mystique connection and making data digestible.
Project Research

Civic Entertainment

Civic Entertainment is a project based at the Center for Civic Media that explores the intersection of civic engagement with film, televi...
Project Research

Identifying the Human Impacts of Climate Change

Climate change is going to alter the environments that we depend on in myriad ways. We're using data to identify and quantify these poten...
Research
Synthetic Neurobiology

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

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

DeepMoji

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

Seamlessly coupling the worlds of bits and atoms by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation
Article Research

The limits of explainability

Academics, economists, and AI researchers often undervalue the role of intuition in science. Here's why they're wrong.
Article Research

The paradox of universal basic income

Liberals and conservatives alike love—and fear—the idea of giving free money to everyone. But we have to try it anyway.
Thesis Research

Evaluating Civic Technology Design for Citizen Empowerment

Graeff, Erhardt (2018). Evaluating Civic Technology Design for Citizen Empowerment. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Post Research

2018 GSC Graduate Teaching Award

Neil Gaikwad, a PhD student in the Media Lab's Space Enabled research group, has received the GSC Graduate Teaching Award, an Institute A...
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

Personalized Interaction for Language Learning

The process by which children learn native languages is markedly different from the process of learning a second, or non-native, language...
Publication Research

Weather impacts expressed sentiment

Baylis P, Obradovich N, Kryvasheyeu Y, Chen H, Coviello L, et al. (2018) Weather impacts expressed sentiment. PLOS ONE 13(4): e0195750.
Project Research

Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles

Adoption of self-driving, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) promises to dramatically reduce the number of traffic accidents, but some inevitable ...
Project Research

Algorithmic Justice League

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

Media Cloud

Media Cloud is a platform for studying media ecosystems. By tracking millions of stories published online, the system allows researchers ...
Center for Civic Media
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...
Project Research

GUI3D

GUI3D Template is a generic implementation of the GUI components that anyone might want for a 3D simulation in Processing 3. Compone...
Project Research

ARTextiles: Promoting Social Interactions Around Personal Interests

Abstract data visualizations for enhancing social interactions through clothing and augmented reality.
Publication Research

ARTextiles: Promoting Social Interactions Around Personal Interests Through Augmented Reality

Fuste, Anna, and Chris Schmandt. "ARTextiles: Promoting Social Interactions Around Personal Interests Through Augmented Reality." Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2017.
Publication Research

Optimal diversification strategies in the networks of related products and of related research areas

Alshamsi A, Pinheiro FL, & Hidalgo CA. "Optimal diversification strategies in the networks of related products and of related research areas." Nature Communications (2018) 9:1328. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03740-9.
Project Research

TuringBox: Democratizing the study of AI

TuringBox is a platform that makes it easier for social and behavioral scientists to study Artificial Intelligence algorithms. ...
Project Research

AI Ethics and Governance

This project will support social scientists, philosophers, and policy and legal scholars who undertake research that aims to impact how a...
Publication Research

Small cities face greater impact from automation

Small cities face greater impact from automation Morgan R. Frank, Lijun Sun, Manuel Cebrian, Hyejin Youn, Iyad Rahwan J. R. Soc. Interface 2018 15 20170946; DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2017.0946. Published 7 February 2018
Project Research

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...
Publication Research

Rhythm: A Unified Measurement Platform for Human Organizations
Publication Research

Shooting Low or High: Do Countries Benefit from Entering Unrelated Activities?

Pinheiro, Flávio L., et al. "Shooting Low or High: Do Countries Benefit from Entering Unrelated Activities?" arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.05352 (2018).
Publication Research

Local Wealth Redistribution Promotes Cooperation in Multiagent Systems

Pinheiro, F. L., Santos, F. (2018). Local Wealth Redistribution Promotes Cooperation in Multiagent Systems, forthcoming Proc. of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2018)
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.