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 membe…
Project Research

Voyage Viewer

Voyage Viewer is an online, open source interactive tool especially designed to visualize and study human mobility and migration.
Publication Research

Achieving Grassroots Innovation Through Multi-Lateral Collaborations: Evidence from the Field

Guzmán, Silvia Buitrago, and Pedro Reynolds-Cuellar. "Achieving grassroots innovation through multi-lateral collaborations: evidence from the field." (2020).
Article Research

National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator awards two grants to MIT

MIT received two Convergence Accelerator grants from the NSF—one of which is for the Smart Oceans 2020 conference co-hosted by the Media Lab
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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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Project Research

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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Archived
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 recorded.…
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Archived
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 tar…
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Publication Research

The Design of Pseudo-Participation

Victoria Palacin, Matti Nelimarkka, Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar, and Christoph Becker. 2020. The Design of Pseudo-Participation. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020 - Participation(s) Otherwise - Volume 2 (PDC '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 40–44.
Publication Research

Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility: The Past, Present and Future Values of Participatory Design

Becker, C., Light, A., Frauenberger, C., Walker, D., Palacin, V., Ahmed, S. I., ... & Nemer, D. (2020, June). Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility: The Past, Present and Future Values of Participatory Design. In Proceedings of the 16th Participatory Design Conference 2020-Participation (s) Otherwise-Volume 2 (pp. 181-184).
Project Research

Algorithmic Justice League

www.ajl.orgAn unseen force is rising—helping to determine who is hired, granted a loan, or even how long someone spends in prison. This for…
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Project Research

Machine Behavior

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

Honest Crowds

The Honest Crowds project addresses shortcomings of traditional survey techniques in the modern information and big data age. Web survey pl…
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Archived
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 in…
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Archived
Project Research

Evolution of the Social Contract

Political constitutions describe the fundamental principles by which nation-states are governed, the political and legal state institutions…
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Archived
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 potenti…
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Archived
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Global Cooperation

Measuring Cooperation at Scale
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Moral Machine

The Moral Machine is a platform for gathering a human perspective on moral decisions made by machine intelligence, such as self-driving car…
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Project Research

Kicks x Cliques

Leveraging sneaker culture to influence civic engagement. Marginalized groups have influence on digital platforms but are often unhear…
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Project Research

SuperGlue Kinesics

The relationship between news content and its presentation has been a long-studied problem in the communications domain. Often, channe…
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Article Research

(Re)Building the Economy | Alex (Sandy) Pentland | TEDxMIT

With each major crisis, be it pandemic, war, or major new technology, there has been the need to reinvent our society.
Article Research

MIT Sloan research shows adaptive networks promote better collective intelligence

Study cautions against using static org charts during COVID-19 crisis.
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.
Thesis Research

Founders’ Dynamics – Interpersonal Relationships and Between-Team Interaction in Early Startups
Article Research

C-3PO and the rise of robots, with Anthony Daniels

Kate Darling joins Anthony Daniels, Chuck Nice, and Neil deGrasse Tyson to talk about the rise of robotics and the cultural impact of C-3P0.
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Project Research

Ethics of Autonomous Vehicles

This work is being continued through The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.Adoption of self-driving, …
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Project Research

AI Ethics and Governance

This work is being continued through The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.This project will support …
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Project Research

Humanizing AI in Law (HAL)

This work is being continued through The Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT.The  Humanizing …
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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.
Project Research

Jibo Social Robotic Research Platform

The Jibo Research Platform is an in-the-field deployable Social Robotics experimentation and data collection infrastructure. Built upon the…
Project Research

Social Capital Accounting

To better understand and improve the quality of our lives, there has been a need for measuring non-economic capital such as social capital …
Article Research

Building a more honest internet

What would social media look like if it served the public interest?
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.
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.
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Project Research

Predicting Trust Between People

Machine learning model outperforms human judgementOur computational trust model is capable of predicting—above human accuracy—the degree of…
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Intentional Inference of Emotions

Emotion recognition modeled as a goal-directed process!
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Project Research

Human-Robot Trust

Unconventional mixing of research fields introduces a new method to study human behavior using social robots.
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Emotionally Aware Robot Teammates

Emotionally supportive robots improve overall team functioning!
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Artificial listener with social intelligence

A social robot modifies its behavior to change what you think about it!
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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 education…
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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
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.
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.
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…
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
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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 this …
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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 …
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 ca…
Post Research

Footwear x Mental Health: A Collaboration

How do your kicks collaborate with mental health?
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 limitati…
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.
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
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…
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 number …
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 cities …
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 groups …
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 our…
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.
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.
Article Research

'Atlas Of Inequality' shows income segregation around Boston

Esteban Moro talks to WBUR about the Human Dynamics group's Atlas of Inequality.
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.
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."