Research
Biomechatronics

Enhancing human physical capability
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Civic Media

Creating technology for social change
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Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
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Lifelong Kindergarten

Engaging people in creative learning experiences
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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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Affective Computing

Advance human wellbeing by developing new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion
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Tangible Media

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

Looking beyond smart cities
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Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence

Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence
Archived
Research
Collective Learning

Transforming data into knowledge
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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
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Responsive Environments

Augmenting and mediating human experience, interaction, and perception with sensor networks
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Space Exploration Initiative

Space Exploration Initiative
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Space Enabled

Advancing justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space
Archived
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
Archived
Research
Advancing Wellbeing

Advancing Wellbeing
Research
Beyond the Cradle

Beyond the Cradle
Article Research

The world is complex. Measuring charity has to be too

We must, however, make changes in the way we fund potential solutions so that it supports a diversity of disciplines and approaches.
Research
Human Dynamics

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

Humanizing AI in Law (HAL)

The  Humanizing AI in Law (HAL) project aims to build the technical and legal foundations necessary to establish a due-pro...
Article Research

Algorithm using racist drug war data to determine Missourians’ freedom

Pretrial risk assessments draw from “deeply flawed data" generated from arrest and conviction records, say researchers.
Post Research

Technical Flaws of Pretrial Risk Assessments Raise Grave Concerns

By Chelsea Barabas, Karthik Dinakar and Colin Doyle
Project Research

Accessibility of the microgravity research ecosystem

For decades, the International Space Station (ISS) has operated as a bastion of international cooperation and a unique testbed for microg...
Publication Research

Understanding Socio-Technical Issues Affecting the Current Microgravity Research Marketplace

C. Joseph and D. Wood, "Understanding Socio-Technical Issues Affecting the Current Microgravity Research Marketplace," 2019 IEEE Aerospace Conference, Big Sky, MT, USA, 2019, pp. 1-10. doi: 10.1109/AERO.2019.8742202
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...
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

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...
Research
Scalable Cooperation

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

Social Physics of Unemployment

Earlier studies proved that behavior is highly shaped and constrained by one's social networks, and demonstrated ways in which individual...
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 ...
Post Research

Footwear x Mental Health: A Collaboration

How do your kicks collaborate with mental health?
Project Research

Kicks x Cliques

Leveraging sneaker culture to influence civic engagement. Marginalized groups have influence on digital platforms but are often unhe...
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 ...
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

AI researchers want to study AI the same way social scientists study humans

Maybe we don’t need to look inside the black box after all. We just need to watch how machines behave, instead.
Article Research

Open or closed? The answer is both.

Joi Ito tells Reid Hoffman what he learned about management, diversity, and openness from being a DJ in Chicago in the ‘80s.
Project Research

Machine Behavior

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

Understanding machine behaviour

CIFAR Fellows Hugo Larochelle and Matthew Jackson argue for a new scientific discipline to study the broad effects of AI.
Article Research

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

Teleportation may have to wait.
Publication Research

Machine behaviour

Rahwan, Iyad, Manuel Cebrian, Nick Obradovich, Josh Bongard, Jean-François Bonnefon, Cynthia Breazeal, Jacob W. Crandall, et al. “Machine Behaviour.” Nature 568, no. 7753 (April 2019): 477. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1138-y.
Post Research

Studying the behavior of AI

A new paper frames the emerging interdisciplinary field of machine behavior
Research
Digital Currency Initiative (DCI)

Digital Currency Initiative
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

The Electome: Measuring responsiveness in the 2016 election

The Electome: Where AI meets political journalismThe Electome project is a machine-driven mapping and analysis of public sphere content a...
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...
Project Research

The Ripple Effect: You are more influential than you think

The well-known "small-world" phenomenon indicates that an individual can be connected with any other in the world through a limited numbe...
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

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

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...
Research
Viral Communications

Creating scalable technologies that evolve with user inventiveness
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

Artificial listener with social intelligence

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

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.
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...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...