Special Interest Groups, Initiatives, and Working Groups

Smaller, more focused special interest groups (SIGs), initiatives, and working groups deal with particular subject areas.

  • Advancing Wellbeing

    With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), Cisco, Deloitte, LKK Health Products Group, and Steelcase, the Media Lab's Advancing Wellbeing initiative addresses the role of technology in shaping our health, and explores new approaches and solutions to wellbeing. The program is built around education and student mentoring; prototyping tools and technologies that support physical, mental, social, and emotional wellbeing; and community initiatives that will originate at the Media Lab, but be designed to scale.

  • CE 2.0

    Most of us are awash in consumer electronics (CE) devices: from cellphones, to TVs, to dishwashers. They provide us with information, entertainment, and communications, and assist us in accomplishing our daily tasks. Unfortunately, most are not as helpful as they could and should be; for the most part, they are dumb, unaware of us or our situations, and often difficult to use. In addition, most CE devices cannot communicate with our other devices, even when such communication and collaboration would be of great help.

  • Code Next

    Code Next, a Media Lab collaboration with Google, aims to create a new generation of computer scientists, innovators, and inventors and have them emerge from the underserved 8-12th grade Black and Latino populations. The pilot launched in January 2016 with two laboratories, one in NYC and one in Oakland. Curricula is being developed by the Media Lab. Code2b's first year of tutorials and maker activities are focusing on several domains: fabrication and design, digital music and interactive media, and game design.

  • Connection Science

    MIT Connection Science aims to revolutionize technology-mediated human networks through analysis, prediction, data-driven design, and evaluation. Examples of such networks range from Facebook to the energy grid, managing behavior in modalities such as financial transactions, human health, urbanization and other trends influencing and influenced by society. As more of our personal and public lives become infused and shaped by data from sensors and computing devices, the lines between the digital and the physical have become increasingly blurred.

  • Digital Currency Initiative

    The Internet enabled people to easily call each other without a phone company, send a document without a mail carrier, or publish an article without a newspaper. As a result, more than 2.9 billion people depend on a decentralized communications protocol–the Internet–to more efficiently communicate with one another. Similarly, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin enable permisionless innovation for entrepreneurs and technologists to build world-changing applications that answer the demand for global transactions that has been created by global communication.

  • Emerging Worlds

    The Emerging Worlds SIG is focused on emerging opportunities to address pressing challenges, and leapfrog existing solutions. Emerging Worlds are vibrant ecosystems where we are rolling out new and innovative citizen-based technologies using a framework that supports the wide-ranging needs of urban populations. It is a co-innovation initiative to solve problems in areas such as health, education, financial inclusion, food and agriculture, housing, transportation, and local business.

  • Ethics Initiative

    The mission of MIT Media Lab’s new Ethics Initiative is to foster multi-disciplinary program designs and critical conversations around ethics, wellbeing, and human flourishing. The initiative seeks to create collaborative platforms for scientists, engineers, artists, and policy makers to optimize designing for humanity.

  • Future of News

    The Future of News is designing, testing, and making creative tools that help newsrooms move ahead aggressively in a time of rapid change. As traditional news models erode, we need new models and techniques to reach a world hungry for news, but whose reading and viewing habits are increasingly splintered. Newsrooms need to create new storytelling techniques, recognizing that the way users consume news continues to change. Readers and viewers expect personalized content, deeper context and information that enables them to influence and change their world.

  • ML Learning

    The Media Lab's Learning Initiative explores new approaches to learning. We study learning across many dimensions, ranging from neurons to nations, from early childhood to lifelong scholarship, and from human creativity to machine intelligence. The program is built around a cohort of learning innovators from across the diverse Media Lab groups. We are designing tools and technologies that change how, when, where, and what we learn; and developing new solutions to enable and enhance learning everywhere, including at the Media Lab itself.

  • Open Agriculture (OpenAg)

    At the MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture (OpenAg) Initiative we are on a mission to create healthier, more engaging, and more inventive future food systems. We believe the precursor to a healthier and more sustainable food system will be the creation of an open-source ecosystem of food technologies that enable and promote transparency, networked experimentation, education, and hyper-local production.

  • Pixel Factory

    Data is ubiquitous in a world where our understanding of it is not. The Pixel Factory is a special interest group working to help people understand their data by making tools to transform data into stories. The Pixel Factory is led by the Macro Connections group, a group experienced in the creation of data visualization engines including: The Observatory of Economic Complexity, Immersion, and Pantheon.

  • Space Exploration

    The public grand-opening of Space draws near. Much as biology has witnessed an explosion of DIY bio-hacking in recent years, the dropping costs of space launches and cubesats enable a new mode of engagement in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) and beyond. What was once an exclusive, expensive and indubitably serious pursuit begins to thaw. With the dawn of “New Space,” a burgeoning group of private, commercial space companies excites a new philosophy of involvement with space technology.

  • Ultimate Media

    Visual Media is going through fundamental changes. It has irretrievability lost its lock on the audience but has gained unprecedented opportunity to evolve the platform by which it is communicated. Evolving apps are as important as ever-changing content, and the social context in which those apps are used is deeply different from the couch-potato model of the past. The silos that segregated media industries and formats is likewise dissolving: people today tune in to ideas more than channels. They move fluidly between text, audio, and video, and between devices and viewing situations.