Research — MIT Media Lab

We are an interdisciplinary research lab working to invent the future of

art
health
human-machine interaction
learning
artificial intelligence
robotics
architecture
consumer electronics
kids
design
technology
music
networks
politics
wearable computing
entertainment
economy
history
bioengineering
cognition
archives
storytelling
social science
machine learning
human-computer interaction
data
interfaces
sensors
space
computer science
developing countries
prosthetics
environment
social robotics
wellbeing
privacy
engineering
ethics
social media
civic technology
synthetic biology
civic media
imaging
neurobiology
urban planning
virtual reality
communications
augmented reality
affective computing
covid19
transportation
energy
biology
industry
public health
data visualization
social change
3d printing
biotechnology
food
computer vision
community
blockchain
alumni
manufacturing
biomechanics
agriculture
zero gravity
gaming
genetics
government
behavioral science
prosthetic design
banking and finance
fashion
systems
medicine
open source
social networks
construction
ocean
crowdsourcing
cryptocurrency
security
wiesner
data science
collective intelligence
makers
internet of things
racial justice
neural interfacing and control
performance
language learning
ecology
perception
women
mapping
nonverbal behavior
climate change
autonomous vehicles
materials
bionics
fabrication
interactive
extended intelligence
startup
visualization
human augmentation
creativity
gesture interface
physiology
long-term interaction
civic action
holography
networking
point of care
sports and fitness
trust
orthotic design
diversity
hacking
mechanical engineering
autism research
electrical engineering
cognitive science
pharmaceuticals
natural language processing
primary healthcare
member company
trade
clinical science
academia
nanoscience
water
clinical trials
gender studies
member event
rfid
marginalized communities
physics
open access
mechatronics
soft-tissue biomechanics
voice
chemistry
real estate
randomized experiment
biomedical imaging
microbiology
gis
publishing
event
exhibit
cartography
microfabrication
metamaterials
installation

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 ...

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

City Science Lab Aalto

Aalto University, Finland, and the MIT Media Lab’s City Science group are co-developing a version of the MIT CityScope platform for urban...

Project Research

Big Ocean, Big Data

More ocean data has been collected in the last two years than in all previous years combined, and we are on a path to continue to break t...

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

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

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...

Project Research

Recurrent neural network in context-free next-location prediction

Location prediction is a critical building block in many location-based services and transportation management. This project explores the...

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...

Archived

Project Research

News Graph

This project aims to show a different picture of the data behind the news, looking at how we analyze, represent, and interact with it.&nb...

Archived

Project Research

Dynamic Traffic Prediction in Andorra: a Bayesian network approach

Data Fusion for Dynamic Traffic PredictionTraffic congestion has huge negative impacts on the productivity, health and personal live...

Project Research

Curious Learning: Understanding learning behaviors for early literacy

Early literacy plays an important role in a child's future. However, the reality is that over 57 million children have no access to a sch...

Project Research

CityScope PlayGround: MIT East Campus

This project depicts the design, deployment and operation of a Tangible Regulation Platform, a physical-technological apparatus made for ...

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...

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.

Project Research

Urban Swarms

Modern cities have to respond to the growing demands of more efficient and sustainable urban development, as well as an increased quality...

Article Research

The Process of Making Lasting Memories: Mostafa (Neo) Mohsenvand and Hannah Campbell at TEDxYouth@CEHS

Neo Mohsenvand and filmmaker/singer/songwriter Hannah Campbell contemplate memory, data, and the future at TEDxYouth@CEHS.

Article Research

What the California wildfires can teach us about data sharing

The 2017 and 2018 fires in California were the air quality equivalent of the Daiichi nuclear disaster.

Article Research

What tech will look like in 2039

We asked futurists, tech execs, academics, researchers, and a sci-fi writer to imagine our tech-driven society in 20 years.

Article Research

Give way to droids, bots, and drones: the driverless city will look like this

An NYC exhibit imagines driverless buses and mobile medical units resembling Popemobiles.

Project Research

Pantheon

What if we could look at the entire history of humanity at once? Pantheon aims to create a data-driven view of history by collecting...

Project Research

The role of industry, occupation, and location-specific knowledge in the survival of new firms

How do regions acquire the knowledge they need to diversify their economic activities? How does the migration of workers among firms and ...

Post Research

Build a Personal Food Computer

OpenAg is committed to changing the way the world thinks about farming and food—and we need your help! As an open source project, we beli...

Publication Research

Personal Food Computer: A New Device for Controlled-Environment Agriculture

Castelló Ferrer E. et al. (2019) Personal Food Computer: A New Device for Controlled-Environment Agriculture. In: Arai K., Bhatia R., Kapoor S. (eds) Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2018. FTC 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 881. Springer, Cham

Project Research

The Constant Atlas

An interactive atlas of census data for direct consumption by individual citizens.

Publication Research

The blockchain: a new framework for robotic swarm systems

Castelló Ferrer E. (2019) The Blockchain: A New Framework for Robotic Swarm Systems. In: Arai K., Bhatia R., Kapoor S. (eds) Proceedings of the Future Technologies Conference (FTC) 2018. FTC 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 881. Springer, Cham

Project Research

cityIO

Cloud-Based Urban Data PlatformcityIO (input/output) is a cloud- and database-driven platform which allows remote participation, database...

Project Research

The laws of forgetting II: How death and exogenous events shape our collective memory

In order to understand how exogenous shocks, like death, impact memorability by remembering, we use a data-set of biographies from Wikipe...

Project Research

Managing Travel Demand: Location recommendation for system efficiency

Growth in leisure travel has become increasingly significant economically, socially, and environmentally. However, flexible but uncoordin...

Project Research

Immersion

The current interface of emails is designed around time and messages, pushing people to focus on what is more recent rather than importan...

Archived

Project Research

Panorama

An interface for smashing filter bubbles, Panorama is built to allow open, transparent, and collaborative exploration of news from a...

Archived

Project Research

CityMatrix

An Urban Decision-Support System Augmented by Artificial IntelligenceThe decision-making process in urban design and urban planning is ou...

Project Research

Quantizer: Sonification Platform for High-Energy Physics Data

Inspired by previous work in the field of data sonification, we built a data-driven composition platform that enables users to map collis...

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...

Article Research

Diana Orghian – The Optimism Bias

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

Project Research

Persuasive Electric Vehicle (PEV)

An Alternative Autonomous Revolution System design for emerging urban contexts and societal aspirationsThe Persuasive Electric Vehic...

Post Research

Skillscape: How skills affect your job trajectory, and their implications for automation by AI

This blog post summarizes the key findings of our new paper Unpacking the polarization of workplace skills published in Science Advances ...

Project Research

Talking Machines: Democratizing the design of voice-based agents for the home

Embodied voice-based agents, such as Amazon’s Echo, Google Home, and Jibo, are becoming increasingly present in the home environment. For...

Project Research

Andorra | Innovation

View the main City Science Andorra project profile.The MIT Media Lab's City Science research group, the University of Andorra, and nation...

Project Research

DIVE

DIVE is a web-based data exploration system that lets non-technical users create stories from their data without writing code. DIVE ...

Project Research

The LearningGraph

Content and curriculum lie at the heart of every educational system, learning environment, and learning technology. Yet the infrastructur...

Archived

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

Data Culture Project

Struggling to build your organization's ability to work with data? Use our hands-on learning program to kickstart your data culture.datac...

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.

Article Research

Networks of robots and blockchains: here's how they will transform our lives

Project Research

BayesDB

BayesDB is open-source AI software that lets any programmer answer data analysis questions in seconds or minutes with a level of rigor th...

Project Research

QuantifyMe

Unlike traditional randomized controlled trials that generalize relationships in large groups of people, single-case experiments seek to ...

Project Research

DataBasic

DataBasic is a suite of web-based tools that give people fun and relevant ways learn how to work with data. Existing tools focus on opera...

Center for Civic Media

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.

Thesis Research

CityMatrix: An Urban Decision Support System Augmented by Artificial Intelligence

Zhang, Yan. “CityMatrix – An Urban Decision Support System Augmented by Artificial Intelligence.” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017.

Archived

Project Research

Ant-Based Modeling

Ant-Based Modeling explores the possibility of implementing agent-based modeling with living ants and external stimuli such as ...

Archived

Project Research

ARTextiles: Promoting Social Interactions Around Personal Interests

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

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.

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

Article Research

Microfluidics for the masses

New open-source website features blueprints for lab-on-a-chip devices.

Publication Research

Data Sculptures as a Playful and Low-Tech Introduction to Working with Data

Bhargava, R., & D’Ignazio, C. (2017). Data Sculptures as a Playful and Low-Tech Introduction to Working with Data. Presented at the Designing Interactive Systems, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Publication Research

Approaches to Building Big Data Literacy

D’Ignazio, C., & Bhargava, R. (2015). Approaches to Building Big Data Literacy. In Bloomberg Data for Good Exchange 2015. New York, NY, USA.

Publication Research

The International Affiliation Network of YouTube Trends

Platt, E. L., Bhargava, R., & Zuckerman, E. (2015). The International Affiliation Network of YouTube Trends.

Publication Research

CLIFF-CLAVIN: Determining Geographic Focus for News Articles

D’Ignazio, C., Bhargava, R., Zuckerman, E., & Beck, L. (2014). CLIFF-CLAVIN: Determining geographic focus for news. In NewsKDD: Data Science for News Publishing, at KDD 2014. New York, NY, USA.

Thesis Research

POWERSTRUCTURES : the urban form of regulations

POWERSTRUCTURES : the urban form of regulations, Noyman, Ariel, Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2015.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 232-236).

Project Research

Shelley: Human-AI Collaborated Horror Stories

Project website: shelley.ai Human-AI collaborated stories: stories.shelley.ai Follow @shelley_ai to collaborate ...

Article Research

Can artificial intelligence learn to scare us?

With Shelley, the world’s first artificial intelligence-human horror story collaboration, MIT researchers aim for goosebumps.

Publication Research

Ant-Based Modeling: Agent-Based City Simulation with Ants

Ho, P. H., Smuts, C., Kayser, M. A., Hernandez, J. 2017. Ant-Based Modeling: Agent-Based City Simulation with Ants. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘17).

Archived

Project Research

Mapping Higher Education Option Space

The mismatch between the supply of graduates’ skills and the needs of the labor market has become increasingly obvious and problematic ov...

Archived

Project Research

Last Mile Logistics

Developed by Ira Winder with the MIT Centre for Transportation and Logistics, the model seeks to use real population data and create a si...

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.