Research
Tangible Media

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

Advance human wellbeing by developing new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion
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Viral Communications

Creating scalable technologies that evolve with user inventiveness
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

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

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

Artificial listener with social intelligence

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

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
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Space Enabled

Advancing justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space
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City Science

Looking beyond smart cities
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.
Research
Digital Currency Initiative (DCI)

Digital Currency Initiative
Article Research

Grey Mirror #8 Kate Darling, MIT: A systemic view on regulation and gender roles in tech

Kate Darling and Rhys Lindmark discuss the balances in regulating tech , how her research has evolved, and other topics.
Research
Lifelong Kindergarten

Engaging people in creative learning experiences
Project Research

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...
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Human Dynamics

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

Space Exploration Initiative
Article Research

The death of curiosity

How your company is killing innovation.
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.
Article Research

‘Atlas of Inequality’ maps where rich, poor do and don’t mix

Visiting professor Esteban Moro talks to Next City about the Atlas of Inequality.
Article Research

The Future's Coming: Why we need to prepare for sci-fi tomorrows today

Teleportation may have to wait.
Research
Synthetic Neurobiology

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

'Atlas Of Inequality' shows income segregation around Boston

Esteban Moro talks to WBUR about the Human Dynamics group's Atlas of Inequality.
Project Research

The Atlas of Inequality

Segregation is hurting our societies and especially our cities. But economic inequality isn't just limited to neighborhoods. The restaura...
Research
Civic Media

Creating technology for social change
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

Designing social robots for older adults

Most countries are projected to see their 65 and older population surpass the number of people under the age of 15 by 2050. The...
Article Research

Visualizing where rich and poor people really cross paths—or don’t

These maps show “place inequality"—or why people of different income levels are at different coffee shops.
Project Research

How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences

Communication technologies, from printing to social media, affect our historical records by changing the way ideas are spread and recorde...
Article Research

The 'Atlas of Inequality' maps micro-level segregation

MIT Media Lab’s new interactive “Atlas of Inequality” shows that “segregation is not just about where you live, but what you do."
Article Research

Augmented Democracy: César Hidalgo at TED2018

A bold idea to replace politicians
Article Research

Making a path to ethical, socially-beneficial artificial intelligence

Leaders from government, philanthropy, academia, and industry say collaboration is key to make sure AI serves the public good.
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...
Publication Research

How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences

Jara-Figueroa C, Yu AZ, Hidalgo CA (2019) How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences. PLoS ONE 14(2): e0205771. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205771
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...
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Camera Culture

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

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

Enhancing human physical capability
Article Research

Artificial intelligence has a problem with gender and racial bias. Here’s how to solve it.

Joy Buolamwini’s essay is featured in the Optimists issue of Time, guest-edited by Ava DuVernay.
Project Research

Actionable Auditing: Coordinated bias disclosure study

Algorithmic auditing has emerged as a key strategy to expose systematic biases embedded in software platforms, yet scholarship on the imp...
Post Research

Neil Gaikwad chosen as a 2019 Facebook Fellow

Neil Gaikwad, a third-year PhD student in the Space Enabled research group, has been selected as one of the 2019 Facebook Fellows.
Research
Scalable Cooperation

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

Rhythm: Open measurement and feedback tools for human interaction

Rhythm is a collection of open-source tools to make it easier for researchers to examine, analyze, and augment human interaction. Rh...
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.
Publication Research

Open Badges: A Low-Cost Toolkit for Measuring Team Communication and Dynamics

Lederman, O., Calacci, D., MacMullen, A., Fehder, D. C., Murray, F. E., & Pentland, A. ". (2016). Open Badges: A Low-Cost Toolkit for Measuring Team Communication and Dynamics, 2016 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation , Washington DC, USA, June 28-July 1, 2016.
Research
Collective Learning

Transforming data into knowledge
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.
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 next great (digital) extinction

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

Integrated Complex Systems Modeling

One of the six research methods used by the Space Enabled research group is creating models of complex systems by drawing on techniques f...
Research
Personal Robots

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

Advancing Wellbeing
Archived
Research
Emerging Worlds

Emerging Worlds
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.
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.
Publication Research

Social Capital Accounting

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

Tools for mapping the molecular architecture and wiring of the brain

Complex biological systems such as brain circuits are extended 3-D structures made out of nanoscale building blocks such as proteins, RNA...
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!
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.
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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

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
Article Research

Diana Orghian – The Optimism Bias

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

Agonist-antagonist Myoneural Interface (AMI)

Humans can accurately sense the position, speed, and torque of their limbs, even with their eyes shut. This sense, known as proprioceptio...