Research
Space Exploration Initiative

Space Exploration Initiative
Article Research

Study shows how pandemic decreased income diversity of urban encounters, even after lockdowns

GeekWire reports on research that people were less likely to visit socioeconomically different areas while returning to pre-pandemic habits.
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Space Enabled

Advancing justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space
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City Science

Looking beyond smart cities
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Media Lab Research Theme: Future Worlds

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

Theme | CityScope

City Science researchers are developing a slew of tangible and digital platforms dedicated to solving spatial design and urban planning cha…
Project Research

City Science Network

MIT City Science has developed an international network of cooperative City Science LabsWe are developing concepts and key technology that …
Project Research

Theme | Mobility On-Demand

Urban populations around the world are rapidly growing. To improve livability, urban residents must reduce dependency on fossil fuels and p…
Project Research

Can autonomy make bike-sharing more sustainable?

Autonomous bicycles have recently been proposed as a new and more efficient approach to bicycle-sharing systems, but how do they compare fr…
Project Research

City Science Lab @ Andorra

Andorra and the City Science research group at the MIT Media Lab are taking on the challenge of turning Andorra into an “Internationally Re…
Project Research

Autonomous micro-mobility study for food delivery

Could we substitute cars by shared autonomous lightweight vehicles for food delivery? We have developed an agent-based simulation model tha…
Article Research

Americans have become less willing to explore their own cities

In a new study, researchers from MIT and other universities show that personal mobility during the Covid-19 pandemic hasn't fully recovered.
Article Research

Could self-driving bikes change how we use cities?

Kent Larson, head of the Media Lab’s City Science group, and PhD student Naroa Coretti Sánchez talk about the group's work and philosophy.
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Human Dynamics

Exploring how social networks can influence our lives in business, health, governance, and technology adoption and diffusion
Post Research

City Science Lab @ Shanghai to continue cooperation with MIT City Science and the City Science Network

Representatives from the City Science Lab @ Shanghai (Tongji University) visited the MIT Media Lab to sign a continuation of their cooperat…
Article Research

Study: Covid-19 has reduced diverse urban interactions

Mobility-related data show the pandemic has had a lasting effect, limiting the breadth of places people visit in cities.
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

Persuasive Electric Vehicle (PEV)

An Alternative Autonomous Revolution System design for emerging urban contexts and societal aspirationsThe Persuasive Electric Vehicle…
Inventing the future of digitally augmented objects and environments.
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Project Research

Autonomous micro-mobility simulation study

What will be the impact of shared autonomous micro-mobility systems? Will autonomy make the micro-mobility systems even more attractive?&nb…
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Project Research

City Science Lab @ Aalto

Aalto University, Finland, and the MIT Media Lab’s City Science group are co-developing a version of the MIT CityScope platform for urban a…
Archived
Article Research

Autonomous shared micro-mobility systems could be the next revolution in urban mobility

City Science researchers Naroa Coretti, Iñigo Martinez, Luis Alonso, and Kent Larson discuss their research on autonomous shared bicycles.
Publication Research

Can autonomy make bicycle-sharing systems more sustainable? An environmental impact analysis

Naroa Coretti Sanchez, Luis Alonso Pastor, Kent Larson, Can autonomy make bicycle-sharing systems more sustainable? An environmental impact analysis, Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, Volume 113, 2022, 103489, ISSN 1361-9209, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2022.103489
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Scalable Cooperation

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

Changing storytelling, communication, and everyday life through sensing, understanding, and new interface technologies
Article Research

Best New Ideas in Money: The road ahead for public transit

A discussion of the future of public transportation, with a highlight of the Autonomous Bicycle project led by PhD student Naroa Coretti.
Article Research

2021 was the year space tourism opened up. But for whom?

Space Exploration Initiative director Ariel Ekblaw speaks with WIRED’s Ramin Skibba about the beginning and future of space tourism.
How buildings and cities can become more intelligently responsive to the needs and desires of their inhabitants.
Archived
Project Research

The Power of Without

The Power of WITHOUT is a research theme in the City Science group. The theme proposes that heavy infrastructure solutions are not financia…
Project Research

The MIT Autonomous Bicycle Project

A lightweight research platform to develop autonomous technology Designed to transform bicycle-sharing systems into an on-demand mobil…
Article Research

A dispatch and routing platform to improve deliveries

Wise Systems has grown from an MIT class project to a company helping multinationals improve last-mile logistics.
Article Research

City Science Lab @ Taipei

NTUT, MIT sign ‘smart’ development agreement
Article Research

Driving commuters toward sustainable options

How data from Access MIT informs flexible, sustainable commutes as staff returns to campus.
Publication Research

Autonomous Bicycles: A New Approach To Bicycle-Sharing Systems

Sanchez, Naroa Coretti, Luis Alonso Pastor, and Kent Larson. "Autonomous Bicycles: A New Approach To Bicycle-Sharing Systems." 2020 IEEE 23rd International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC). IEEE, 2020.
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, …
Architecture Machine Group
Archived
Post Research

City Science team wins Best Student Paper Award at Computing Conference 2020

Congratulations to City Science researchers Alex Berke, Jason Nawyn, Thomas Sanchez Lengeling, and group head Kent Larson!
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New Media Medicine

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

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…
Archived
Project Research

ChampScope

Virtual CityScope Champs-Élysées is an interactive and immersive platform that explores the future of Paris’ most important street.
Digital Life
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Project Research

CityScope Volpe

CityScope Volpe is demonstrating most of the urban planning, analysis, and prediction features developed for the CityScope project. The sit…
Article Research

How private companies are changing the future of space exploration

Ariel Ekblaw and Charles Bolden consider the future of human spaceflight.
Publication Research

Bike Swarm

Berke, A., Sanchez Lengeling, T., Nawyn, J., & Larson, K. (2019, November). Bike Swarm. In Conference Companion Publication of the 2019 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (pp. 1-4). ACM.
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Research
CE 2.0

CE 2.0
Project Research

MoCho: Mobility choices and societal impacts

MoCho (short for "Mobility Choices") is a CityScope module focused on mobility choices and societal impacts. This tool helps pred…
Project Research

Recurrent neural network in context-free next-location prediction

Location prediction is a critical building block in many location-based services and transportation management. This project explores the i…
Communications Futures Program
Archived
Article Research

Give way to droids, bots, and drones: the driverless city will look like this

An NYC exhibit imagines driverless buses and mobile medical units resembling Popemobiles.
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Social Computing

Creating sociotechnical systems that shape our urban environments
Future Storytelling
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Consumer Electronics Laboratory
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Project Research

Andorra | Energy + Environment

View the main City Science Andorra project profile.
Project Research

Managing Travel Demand: Location recommendation for system efficiency

Growth in leisure travel has become increasingly significant economically, socially, and environmentally. However, flexible but uncoordinat…
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
Archived
Post Research

The hackable bike and the future of the MamaChari

Rapid urbanization causes a need for new mobility modes which may not be totally dependent on cars.
Project Research

Hackable Bike

To explore future mobility modes, the City Science group is working with Media Lab member company Panasonic to explore the use and potentia…
Gallery Research

School and Energy Awareness, City Science Andorra

SCHOOL, ENERGY AWARENESSUsing TerMITes in the Santa Coloma School in Andorra we want to help students understand the relation between the e…
Publication Research

Roadmap for Autonomous Cities: Sustainable Transformation of Urban Spaces

Noyman, Ariel, Agnis Stibe, and Kent Larson. "Roadmap for Autonomous Cities: Sustainable Transformation of Urban Spaces." (2017).
Gallery Research

Persuasive Electric Vehicle

The Persuasive Electric Vehicle (PEV) is an agile, on-demand, shared, and functionally hybrid tricycle.
Post Research

PEV: videos
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Project Research

CityCar

The CityCar electric automobile, developed and prototyped by Smart Cities, is designed to meet the demand for enclosed personal mobility – …
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Project Research

Andorra Living Lab

The Andorra Living Lab project combines different research topics (Tourism, Innovation, Energy & Environment, Mobility, Dynamic urban p…
Publication Research

Analysis of Tourism Dynamics and Special Events through Mobile Phone Metadata

Y. Leng, A. Noriega, A.S. Pentland, I. Winder, N. Lutz, L. Alonso: "Analysis of Tourism Dynamics and Special Events through Mobile Phone Metadata". 2016. Proceedings of Data for Good Exchange (D4GX) 2016. New York, NY.
Publication Research

Managing travel demand: Location recommendation for system efficiency based on mobile phone data

Y. Leng, L. Rudolph, A.S. Pentland, J. Zhao, H.N. Koutsopolous: "Managing travel demand: Location recommendation for system eciency based on mobile phone data". 2016. Proceedings of Data for Good Exchange (D4GX) 2016. New York, NY.
Publication Research

The City Browser: Utilizing Massive Call Data to Infer City Mobility Dynamics

Alhasoun, Fahad, et al. "The City Browser: Utilizing Massive Call Data to Infer City Mobility Dynamics." 3rd International Workshop on Urban Computing (UrbComp 2014). UrbComp: New York, NY. 2014.
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 storytelling form can be best achieved using new computational approaches for the creator and user of media such as video, cinema, and photography.
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