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Article Research

Neuroscientists warn advertisers are trying to 'weaponize sleep' by plugging into your dreams

“The potential for misuse of these technologies is as ominous as it is obvious.”
Article Research

"Dream glove" boosts creativity during sleep

In a new study, researchers from the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces group & Harvard Medical School find that brief naps can enhance creativity
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Behind the veil of hypnagogic sleep

Media Lab postdoc Adam Haar Horowitz discusses using “dream engineering” techniques to give people more control over their dreams.
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Project Research

Masca

InspirationDreams are fascinating personally, therapeutically, and scientifically. Who hasn't woken up in the morning and wondered how they…
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Essence Wearables: Biometric Olfactory Interfaces for Day and Night

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has traditionally focused on designing and investigating interfaces that provide explicit visual, auditory…
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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 thir…
Thesis Research

Pharmamusicology: Exploring the Impact of Music on the Physiology and Psychology of Anxiety Disorders and Well-Being

Lecamwasam, K.H.M. (2023). Pharmamusicology: Exploring the Impact of Music on the Physiology and Psychology of Anxiety Disorders and Well-Being. Master's Thesis, MIT Media Lab.
Article Research

Placebo effect shapes how we see AI

Research from the Fluid Interfaces group finds that users' perceptions of an AI chatbot influence their interactions with the technology.
Article Research

The assumptions you bring into conversation with an AI bot influence what it says

In Scientific American, PhD student Pat Pataranutaporn talks about how a user's impressions of AI chatbots may influence their interactions.
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Influencing human–AI interaction by priming beliefs about AI can increase perceived trustworthiness, empathy, and effectiveness

AbstractAs conversational agents powered by large language models become more human-like, users are starting to view them as companions rat…
Article Research

Does dream inception work?

Using Dormio, a project from the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces research group, poet Will Dowd set out to pioneer a new reading experience.
Article Research

Unlocking the Power of Goosebumps: The Surprising Emotional Effects of Aesthetic Chills

A new study suggests that experiencing aesthetic chills, or goosebumps, during stimuli like music and films can lead to increased emotions.
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Research
Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
Project Research

Towards a Congruent Hybrid Reality without Experiential Artifacts

​Situated VR: Towards a Congruent Hybrid RealityThe vision of Extended Reality (XR) systems is living in a hybrid reality or "Metaverse" wh…
Inventing the future of digitally augmented objects and environments.
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Collective Learning

Transforming data into knowledge
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New Study Highlights Opportunities for Artificial Emotional Intelligence

MIT uses affective computing in efforts to improve human mental health.
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ML Learning

ML Learning
Center for Civic Media
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Object-Based Media

Changing storytelling, communication, and everyday life through sensing, understanding, and new interface technologies
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The Science Behind Creativity

Seli is an assistant professor at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and also an artist. He uses Dormio to tap into hypnagogia.
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Project Research

SPRING: A Smart Platform for Research, Intervention, and Neurodevelopmental Growth

SPRING is a custom-built hardware and software platform for children with neuro-differences. The system automates data acquisition, optimiz…
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Article Research

Podcast: Night Shifts

Perchance to dream engineer: on new research into our sleeping minds
Article Research

Night Shifts

In the April issue, Michael W. Clune writes about the profound insights offered by the Dormio: "Can technology shape our dreams?"
Article Research

The consequences of hacking our dreams

Advertisers are beginning to explore ways to market products to people while they sleep. A group of scientists talked to NPR about the risks
How buildings and cities can become more intelligently responsive to the needs and desires of their inhabitants.
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Project Research

Multi-SPRING

OverviewWe have created a new customizable, multi-user research-through-play platform designed to facilitate social skill development for c…
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Article Research

Advertisers are hijacking your dreams, scientists say

This is the actual stuff of nightmares.
Article Research

Companies are ready to experiment with advertising in your dreams, and experts are sounding the alarm

Sleep and dream researchers are urging for an advance tightening of advertising law to nip all this in the bud before it starts in earnest.
Article Research

Nightmare scenario: Alarm as advertisers seek to plug into our dreams

After Coors sought to steer unconscious minds to thoughts of beer, scientists have called for curbs on ‘targeted dream incubation.’
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Project Research

SeqCLR: Self-supervised learning of features for time-series data

Interpreting human electroencephalogram (EEG) is a challenging task and requires years of medical training. We present a framework for lear…
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Article Research

Scientists engineer dreams to understand the sleeping brain

Researchers in the Fluid Interfaces group and elsewhere are hoping to learn more about how and why dreams are generated, and their effects.
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SkipNorm

Skip Norm is a new and flexible building block for Deep Learning that serves as a skip connection and normalization block simultaneously. I…
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Research
Synthetic Neurobiology

Revealing insights into the human condition and repairing brain disorders via novel tools for mapping and fixing brain computations
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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, RNAs,…
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New Media Medicine

How radical new collaborations will catalyze a revolution in health.
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Modeling Auditory Memory

When we form memories, not everything that we perceive is noticed; not everything that we notice is remembered. Humans are excellent at f…
How to build characters that have the everyday common sense, the ability to learn, and the sense of empathy that one finds in animals such a
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Digital Life
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Project Research

Relational AI

Creating long-term interpersonal interaction and shared experiences with social robots Many of our current projects explore the use of…
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CE 2.0

CE 2.0
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Advancing Wellbeing

Advancing Wellbeing
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Music, Mind and Machine

How to build intelligent music systems out of interacting audio-processing agents.
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Digital Synesthesia

Digital Synesthesia looks to evolve the idea of human-computer interfacing and give way for human-world interacting. It aims to find a way …
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Article Research

Ed Boyden on minding your brain

A conversation between Ed Boyden and Tyler Cowen on optogenetics and expansion microscopy to storytelling and the nature of consciousness.
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Cognimates: Collaborative creative learning with embodied intelligent agents

Cognimates is a platform where parents and children (7-10 years old) participate in creative programming activities in which they lea…
Article Research

Lighting the path

Luminaries in computing and cognition discuss their journeys and share their insights.
Communications Futures Program
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e-markets
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Future Storytelling
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Consumer Electronics Laboratory
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Project Research

Masque

 When the body senses itself internally and localizes its actions, it provides the basis for a material sense of self-existence. At th…
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FaceSense: Affective-Cognitive State Inference from Facial Video

People express and communicate their mental states–such as emotions, thoughts, and desires–through facial expressions, vocal nuances, gestu…
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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: Understanding …
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Electronic Publishing

How to distill meaning from complex everyday experiences.
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Making new (robot) friends

Understanding children's relationships with social robots
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Some amazing facts about your unbelievable brain

Why was Einstein’s brain so good at some things and not others? Why is yours?
Project Research

Mindful Photons: Context-Aware Lighting

Light enables our visual perception. It is the most common medium for displaying digital information. Light regulates our circadian rhythms…
How people and objects can tell tales of their experience and learn from others as they navigate through the vast media fabric made up of intertwining storied threads.
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How everything from interface agents to toys can be designed to respond with human-like, full-body linguistic and social competencies.
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eRationality

How we can understand human behavior (rationality, semi-rationality, bounded rationality, and just plain irrationality) in day-to-day behaviors, and in particular in electronic environments.
How to give computers human-like intuition so they can better understand us.
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How to engage diverse audiences in creating their own technology by situating computation in new contexts and building tools to democratize engineering.
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How to enhance understanding, enable creativity, and ease our interactions with the technological environment.
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How various phenomena of mind emerge from the interactions among many kinds of highly evolved brain mechanisms.
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Future of Learning

How to redefine and expand the conceptual framework and language of learning by creating new technologies and spheres of practice.
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Physics and Media

How to bring the programmability of the digital world to the physical world.

How to create better online environments and interfaces for human communication.
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