Project Research

Crypto Voting + US Elections: Reality and Science Fiction

This is a two-part project. One part is about reality. The other part is science fiction. Both are about mobile, blockchain, and cryptograp…
Article Research

Study uses physics to explain democratic elections

US elections have become more “unstable,” sometimes swinging in the opposite direction from the greater electorate’s preferences.
Article Research

How to solve climate change and make life more awesome

We already have all the tools we need to fix climate change. We just need to use them.
Article Research

MIT Computational Law: "A Perspective on Legal Algorithms"

The first MIT Computational Law report features an essay by Sandy Pentland, head of the Human Dynamics group.
Project Research

Paper Dreams

Paper Dreams explores how human creativity can be supported by artificial intelligence.Prior research on AI and creativity has primarily fo…
Article Research

In wargaming exercise, a digital yuan neuters US sanctions and North Korea buys nukes

Neha Narula and Gary Gensler participated in a simulated “digital currency war” at Harvard’s Belfer Center.
Article Research

Students push to speed up artificial intelligence adoption in Latin America

To help the region catch up, students organize summit to bring Latin policymakers and researchers to MIT.
Post Research

Joy Buolamwini and Amanda Nguyen chosen for TIME 100 Next 2019

Congratulations to Joy Buolamwini and Amanda Nguyen for being recognized in the "Advocates" category.
Project Research

RadioTalk

The RadioTalk corpus includes speech recognition transcripts sampled from talk radio broadcasts in the United States between October of 201…
Article Research

Investigating the power of group think

Political science doctoral student Clara Vandeweerdt studies how identity shapes beliefs on complex political topics such as climate change.
Article Research

World's 100 most influential people in digital government 2019

Commending a formidable variety of international change-makers driving digital transformation in government.
Article Research

When politicians play web designers

Opinion: The push to ban unwanted “dark patterns” from apps and sites may also take away certain features users want.
Article Research

A story in images: the abortion media storm of 2019

Cindy Sherman Bishop developed a new method for image analysis to analyze the spring 2019 abortion legislation and related news coverage.
Project Research

Schoenberg in Hollywood: A new opera by Tod Machover

“Can a man know the truth and tell it to the greatest number and still be misunderstood? Can one man be of the many and still be known?” Sc…
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Research
CE 2.0

CE 2.0
Post Research

Alum Erhardt Graeff receives Best Dissertation Award

The Association of Internet Researchers has recognized alum Erhardt Graeff, now an assistant professor of social and computer science at Ol…
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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 Vall…
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Research
Advancing Wellbeing

Advancing Wellbeing
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Research
Music, Mind and Machine

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

Innovative composer hopes to unify the Koreas: Through his work, Tod Machover has shown the power of music, technology

Opera of the Future head Tod Machover talks to Korea JoongAng Daily about “Symphony for the Koreas.”
Project Research

Symphony for the Koreas

Symphony for the Koreas will be the latest installment of the celebrated City Symphony series. Over the next few years, Tod Machover and hi…
Article Research

Peace workshop, concert connect experts, youth on Jeju Island

Opera of the Future head Tod Machover reflects on the recent peace workshop and concert on Jeju Island
Article Research

Beyond the Vast Wasteland: briefing Congresspeople for the Aspen Institute

Ethan Zuckerman speaks at a gathering of Senators and Representatives who came to MIT for an Aspen Institute event in May, 2019.
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.
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 microgra…
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 individuals …
Article Research

Space exploration and the age of the Anthropocosmos

Joi Ito calls for responsible stewardship of the commons beyond our planet.
Article Research

It's OK that Amazon will (likely) get the .amazon domain

Ito shares his thoughts on the difficulty of making the right decisions in the face of what, to the public, appears to be obviously wrong.
Article Research

French media is polarizing. But not in the way we expected.

Ethan Zuckerman reflects on a year of research with collaborators to determine how the French media landscape differs from that of the US.
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Project Research

Bias by us

Bias by us envisions a future of media diversity by understanding the bias of today.Our work seeks to understand how the US media ecos…
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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 and…
Article Research

Microgravity research after the International Space Station

Researchers say new facilities in space should be available to scientists from any country.
Article Research

Augmented Democracy: César Hidalgo at TED2018

A bold idea to replace politicians
Communications Futures Program
Archived
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.
Counter Intelligence
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Future Storytelling
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Consumer Electronics Laboratory
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Project Research

EqualAIs: Facial Recognition, Adversarial Attacks and Policy Choice

This 2018 AI and Governance Assembly project, EqualAIs, was a multifaceted investigation into the technical, policy and societal questions …
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Article Research

Your front row seat to the trade war

This is what a trade war looks like.
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
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Thesis Research

Evaluating Civic Technology Design for Citizen Empowerment

Graeff, Erhardt (2018). Evaluating Civic Technology Design for Citizen Empowerment. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Research
Electronic Publishing

How to distill meaning from complex everyday experiences.
Publication Research

Detecting reciprocity at a global scale

Frank, M. R., Obradovich, N., Sun, L., Woon, W. L., LeVeck, B. L., & Rahwan, I. (2018). Detecting reciprocity at a global scale. Science Advances, 4(1), eaao5348.
Post Research

Designing for Monitorial Citizenship

On April 26, 2017, Erhardt Graeff spoke about "Designing for Monitorial Citizenship" at The Impact of Civic Technology Conference (TICTeC) …
Publication Research

Inferring Population Preferences via Mixtures of Spatial Voting Models

Ali Nahm, Sandy Pentland, Peter Krafft. (2016). Inferring Population Preferences via Mixtures of Spatial Voting Models. The 8th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo).
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 scalable global networks are changing our media, our communities, and our businesses.
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Research
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 computational tools help to capture, visualize, and analyze human experiences.
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Research
Grassroots Invention

How to engineer and disseminate powerful, low-cost design and fabrication technologies at a grassroots level.
How various phenomena of mind emerge from the interactions among many kinds of highly evolved brain mechanisms.
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Research
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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Research
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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How artists and engineers can refigure technology for the full range of human experience.
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Research
SIMPLICITY
Visible Language Workshop
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How to design machines that use what we do, where we are, and how we feel to add to our social, educational, and functional success.
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How simplifying the basic tools for digital expression will lead to a new creative digital economy. For more Physical Language Workshop projects, see Henry Holtzman.
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NEXT
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How to create seamless and pervasive connections between our physical environments and information resources.
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Center for Future Banking
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