Research — MIT Media Lab

Advancing Wellbeing

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Music, Mind and Machine

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

Robots, Gender, and the Design of Relational Technology

My latest research in Cynthia Breazeal's Personal Robots group has been on relational technology.

Generation AI: Teaching a new kind of tech savvy

This summer, the Personal Robots group will be hosting a week-long workshop at the MIT Media Lab to teach kids about AI and ethics!

Assessing Children's Relationships with Social Robots

Social robots are increasingly being developed for long-term interactions with children in domains such as healthcare, education, therapy...

Optimize algorithms to support kids online, not exploit them

Joi Ito considers how to best protect children online while encouraging them learn and grow.

The Seeds That Seymour Sowed

Seymour Papert’s ideas about children, computers, and learning inspired many.

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 l...

Thesis Research

SCRATCH ♥ MEMORIES: Visualizations that empower children to celebrate and reflect on their creative trajectories

Thesis: Shruti Dhariwal. SCRATCH ♥ MEMORIES: Visualizations that empower children to celebrate and reflect on their creative trajectories. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. September 2018.

Robots are becoming classroom tutors. But will they make the grade?

Mechanical mentors try to find their place as teacher’s helpers.

I embraced screen time with my daughter—and I love it

Joi Ito ponders the fearmongering and lack of rigorous research surrounding kids and screen time.

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Robot Expressiveness Affects Children's Learning

Prior research with preschool children has established that book reading, especially when children are encouraged to actively process the...

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MIT student develops brain-analyzing wizard hat project

The project can determine what a person is thinking about and use the information to sort them into a Hogwarts house in one test.

Communications Futures Program

This MIT post-doc created a sorting hat like the one from ‘Harry Potter’

Nataliya Kos'myna created a “Thinking Cap” that looks like the Sorting Hat from the popular “Harry Potter” series.

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Ecology, Evolution, and Engineering for Empowered Brains

EEEeb Spring 2019: Urban OceansMarch 24, April 7 and 21, May 19, June 2 To register, please visit this lin...

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Consumer Electronics Laboratory

Social Computing

Creating sociotechnical systems that shape our urban environments

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Code Next : Cultural Resonation

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Scratch Memories

Scratch Memories is a web-based visualization tool that empowers children to celebrate and reflect on their creative journey with Scratch...

ScratchBit

ScratchBit is an effort to enable children to create more seamlessly in both the physical and digital world by creating a dedicated physi...

Andorra | Energy + Environment

View the main City Science Andorra project profile.

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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...

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Inventing the future of digitally augmented objects and environments.

Scratch Day

Scratch Day (day.scratch.mit.edu) is a network of face-to-face local gatherings, on the same day in all parts of the world, where people ...

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Persuasive Electric Vehicle (PEV)

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

How software can act as an assistant to the user rather than a tool, by learning from interaction and by proactively anticipating the user's

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...

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Family Creative Learning

In Family Creative Learning, we engage parents and children in workshops to design and learn together with creative technologies, like th...

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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...

Center for Civic Media

Measuring Young Children’s Long-Term Relationships with Social Robots

Kory Westlund, J. M., Park, H., Williams, R., & Breazeal, C. (2018). Measuring Young Children’s Long-term Relationships with Social Robots. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC). ACM: New York, NY.

Hands-On Ecology: Fostering Neuroinclusivity in STEM Education

What counts here—first and last—is not so-called knowledge of so-called facts, but vision—seeing. Seeing here implies Schauen [to see] (a...

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: Understandin...

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Electronic Publishing

How to distill meaning from complex everyday experiences.

Telling Stories to Robots: The Effect of Backchanneling on a Child's Storytelling

Hae Won Park, Mirko Gelsomini, Jin Joo Lee, and Cynthia Breazeal. 2017. Telling Stories to Robots: The Effect of Backchanneling on a Child's Storytelling. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI '17).

Children use non-verbal cues to learn new words from robots as well as people

Kory Westlund., J. M., Dickens, L., Jeong, S., Harris, P. L., DeSteno, D., & Breazeal, C. L. (2017). Children use non-verbal cues to learn new words from robots as well as people. International Journal of Child-Computer Interaction.

Thesis Research

A Bayesian Theory of Mind Approach to Nonverbal Communication for Human-Robot Interactions

Jin Joo Lee. A Bayesian Theory of Mind Approach to Nonverbal Communication for Human-Robot Interactions. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017.

Backchannel Opportunity Prediction for Social Robot Listeners

HW Park, M Gelsomini, JJ Lee, T Zhu, and C Breazeal (2017). Backchannel Opportunity Prediction for Social Robot Listeners. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).

How to Train Your DragonBot: Socially Assistive Robots for Teaching Children About Nutrition Through Play

E Short, K Swift-Spong, J Greczek, A Ramachandran, A Litoiu, E Grigore, D Feil- Seifer, S Shuster, JJ Lee, et al (2014). "How to Train Your DragonBot: Socially Assistive Robots for Teaching Children About Nutrition Through Play." In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (Edinburgh, UK).

Thesis Research

Algorithmically Supported Moderation in Children’s Online Communities

Tan, Flora. Algorithmically Supported Moderation in Children’s Online Communities. Thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2017.

1:1 Laptops: Learning with the Hundred-Dollar Laptop

Suppose that one could put a connected, portable computer into the hands of all the children of the world who lack access to the kind of ...

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Making new (robot) friends

Understanding children's relationships with social robots

Montessori Was the Original Personalized Learning. Now, 100 Years Later, Wildflower Is Reinventing the Model

For a classroom of a dozen 3- through 6-year-olds, things are surprisingly quiet inside Wildflower Montessori. The most audible sounds, t...

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Playful Systems

Designing systems that become experiences to transcend utility and usability

Code Lab for Anki Cozmo

Anki collaborates with the MIT Scratch Team to bring robotics programming to kids.

Projects, passion, peers and play: Seymour Papert’s vision for learning

Mitchel Resnick—on the power of Papert's ideas for learning.

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Children Use Nonverbal Cues to Learn from Robots

When learning from human partners, infants and young children will pay attention to nonverbal signals, such as gaze and bodily orientatio...

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Socially Assistive Robotics: An NSF Expedition in Computing

Our mission is to develop the computational techniques that will enable the design, implementation, and evaluation of "relational" robots...

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Storytelling Companion

Children’s oral language skills in preschool can predict their academic success later in life. Helping children improve their language an...

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Robotic Learning Companions

The language and literacy skills of young children entering school are highly predictive of their long-term academic success. Children fr...

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Kids, AI devices, and intelligent toys

What do children think about machines that think?

Deception, Secrets, Children, and Robots: What’s Acceptable?

Kory Westlund, J., & Breazeal, C. (2015). Deception, Secrets, Children, and Robots: What’s Acceptable? Workshop on The Emerging Policy and Ethics of Human-Robot Interaction, held in conjunction with the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction.

Effects of Framing a Robot as a Social Agent or as a Machine on Children's Social Behavior

Kory Westlund, J. M., Martinez, M., Archie, M., Das, M., & Breazeal, C. (2016). Effects of Framing a Robot as a Social Agent or as a Machine on Children's Social Behavior. In S. Y. Okita, T. Shibata, & B. Mutlu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (pp. 688-693). IEEE: Washington, DC.

Flat versus expressive storytelling: young children's learning and retention of a social robot's narrative

Kory Westlund, J., Jeong, S., Park, H. W., Ronfard, S., Adhikari, A., Harris, P. L., David DeSteno, & Breazeal, C. (2017). Flat versus expressive storytelling: young children's learning and retention of a social robot's narrative. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

A Comparison of children learning from robots, tablets, and people

Kory Westlund, J., Dickens, L., Jeong, S., Harris, P., DeSteno, D., & Breazeal, C. (2015). A Comparison of children learning from robots, tablets, and people. In Proceedings of New Friends: The 1st International Conference on Social Robots in Therapy and Education.

HUBweek Change Maker: Andrew Sliwinski

Completely unexpected moments of expression and creativity can spring from the humble tools we design.

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Robotic Language Learning Companions

Young children learn language not through listening alone, but through active communication with a social actor. Cultural immersion and c...

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