Research
City Science

Looking beyond smart cities
Research
MIT Center for Constructive Communication

Designing tools, methods and systems that connect rather than divide us to create a healthier society
Research
Media Lab Research Theme: Future Worlds

Future Worlds | Design and action for the future we want to live in
Research
Viral Communications

People and intelligent machines in a creative, symbiotic loop
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Media Lab Research Theme: Cultivating Creativity

Cultivating Creativity | Catalyzing a global movement enabling everyone to unlock and unleash their individual and collective creativity
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Personal Robots

Building intelligent personified technologies that collaborate with people to help them learn, thrive, and flourish.
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Space Exploration Initiative

Space Exploration Initiative
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Signal Kinetics

Inventing, building, and deploying wireless sensor technologies to address complex problems in society, industry, and ecology
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Responsive Environments

Augmenting and mediating human experience, interaction, and perception with sensor networks
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Media Lab Research Theme: Connected Mind + Body

Connected Mind + Body | Revolutionizing the future of mental and physical wellbeing
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Human Dynamics

Exploring how social networks can influence our lives in business, health, governance, and technology adoption and diffusion
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Media Lab Research Theme: Decentralized Society

Decentralized Society | Architecting the new internet for the good of the people
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Media Lab Research Theme: Life with AI

Life with AI | Designing the future of smart systems to improve the human experience
Project Research

Ocean Connectivity at Ultra-Low Power

Van-Atta Acoustic Backscatter (VAB) is the first technology for ultra-low-power underwater networking and communication, which can transmit…
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 t…
Publication Research

Implications of COVID-19 vaccination heterogeneity in mobility networks

Yuan, Y., Jahani, E., Zhao, S. et al. Implications of COVID-19 vaccination heterogeneity in mobility networks. Commun Phys 6, 206 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42005-023-01325-7
Research
Digital Currency Initiative (DCI)

Digital Currency Initiative
Archived
Research
Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
Publication Research

The Networked Sensory Landscape: Capturing and Experiencing Ecological Change Across Scales

Mayton, Brian, et al. "The networked sensory landscape: Capturing and experiencing ecological change across scales." PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 26.2 (2017): 182-209.
Article Research

On Social Media, Sharing Mindset Makes People Worse at Judging Accuracy

Newly published research shows that a focus on sharing can make it harder for social media users to tell whether content is accurate.
How computational tools help to capture, visualize, and analyze human experiences.
Archived
Inventing the future of digitally augmented objects and environments.
Archived
Archived
Research
Collective Learning

Transforming data into knowledge
Article Research

History's Great Recommenders: From ancient times to tomorrow

Michael Schrage considers the past, present, and future of recommendation engines, including Pattie Maes's advances in software agents.
Project Research

SensorNets

SensorNets: Towards Reconfigurable Multifunctional Fine-grained  Soft and Stretchable Electronic Skins.SensorNets is a bioin…
Article Research

Dust, costumes, weirdness — and science: Burning Man is back

Ziv Epstein talks about his latest research project, which will attempt to "map the networks of cooperation and serendipity at Burning Man."
Archived
Research
Scalable Cooperation

Reimagining human cooperation in the age of social media and artificial intelligence
Center for Civic Media
Archived
Archived
Research
Civic Media

Creating technology for social change
Article Research

The Internet Needs You-Are-Here Maps

In Wired, Deb Roy, director of the MIT CCC, and postdoc Nabeel Gillani make the case for "you-are-here" maps for the internet.
Post Research

Fadel Adib wins ACM SIGMOBILE Rockstar Award

He was recognized for his innovative contributions to wireless sensing and for networking advances in challenging environments.
Project Research

Living Observatory: Sensor networks for documenting and experiencing ecology

Living Observatory is an initiative for documenting and interpreting ecological change that will allow people, individually and collectivel…
How buildings and cities can become more intelligently responsive to the needs and desires of their inhabitants.
Archived
Publication Research

Robotic Grasping of Fully-Occluded Objects using RF Perception

Boroushaki, Tara, et al. "Robotic Grasping of Fully-Occluded Objects using RF Perception." IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2021).
Project Research

Scaling Science: Using Data to Find “Hidden Gem” Research

The current system of scientific recognition and funding has significant bias towards work published in the top few percent of journal…
Project Research

RF-Grasp: Robotic Grasping of Hidden Objects

 Can robots find and grasp hidden objects?Robots are not capable of handling tasks as simple as restocking grocery store shelves as th…
Project Research

Battery-Free Subsea Internet-of-Things

We present Piezo-Acoustic Backscatter (PAB), the first technology that enables backscatter networking in underwater environments. PAB relie…
Project Research

[bike] swarm

As bikes navigate city streets after dark, they are often equipped with lights. The lights make the bikes visible to cars or other bikers, …
Project Research

Scalable and Ultra-Low Power Ocean IoT

We present the design, implementation, and evaluation of 𝑈2𝐵, a technology that enables scalable ad ultra-low power ocean IoT.  At the…
Article Research

How to send underwater messages without batteries

A new device extracts energy from ambient noise
Project Research

Corporate surveillance of the commons + Amazon Ring

As of August 2020, Ring has active partnerships with over 1400 law enforcement agencies across the US. These partnerships allow law enforce…
Archived
Project Research

Voter Education through Network Analytics

In “normal” times, the process of voting can be confusing enough for many Americans -- from whether and where they’re registered, to absent…
Archived
Project Research

PubPub

PubPub reinvents publication to align with the way the web was designed: collaborative, evolving, and open. PubPub uses a graphical format …
Archived
Archived
Research
New Media Medicine

How radical new collaborations will catalyze a revolution in health.
Project Research

Reversed Urbanism

Predicting Urban Performance through Behavioral Patterns in Temporal Telecom DataThis study explores a novel method to analyze diverse beha…
Archived
Project Research

Global Cooperation

Measuring Cooperation at Scale
Archived
Project Research

Wireless communication from underwater to the air

Did you know that submarines today still cannot wirelessly communicate with airplanes? For decades, communicating between underwater and th…
Project Research

Low-power wireless environmental sensor network

Tidmarsh is a 600-acre former cranberry farm near Plymouth, MA that has undergone a restoration to wetland. We have instrumented the site w…
How to build characters that have the everyday common sense, the ability to learn, and the sense of empathy that one finds in animals such a
Archived
Hundred Dollar Laptop
Archived
Digital Life
Archived
Publication Research

Urban Swarms: A new approach for autonomous waste management

A. L. Alfeo et al., "Urban Swarms: A new approach for autonomous waste management," 2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Montreal, QC, Canada, 2019, pp. 4233-4240.
Article Research

Underwater energy harvesting with a data-link twist

A novel acoustic-based backscatter design offers an innovative scheme for underwater energy harvesting and data transmission.
Article Research

Ring’s hidden data let us map Amazon's sprawling home surveillance network

By Dell Cameron and Dhruv MehrotraAs reporters raced this summer to bring new details of Ring’s law enforcement contracts to…
Project Research

INSPIRE

INSPIRE: Intelligence Never Seeks Perfection, Instead Requires Effort.Stories help us expand our sense of what's possible: by hearing from …
Project Research

RadioTalk

The RadioTalk corpus includes speech recognition transcripts sampled from talk radio broadcasts in the United States between October of 201…
Archived
Research
CE 2.0

CE 2.0
Archived
Research
Ultimate Media

Ultimate Media
Archived
Research
Music, Mind and Machine

How to build intelligent music systems out of interacting audio-processing agents.
Archived
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 …
Archived
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 m…
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. …
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 lives …
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 o…
Communications Futures Program
Archived
Article Research

The next great (digital) extinction

We’re in a modern Cambrian era, sorting through an explosion of technologies enabled by the Internet.
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.