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Norman

We present Norman, world's first psychopath AI. Norman was inspired by the fact that the data used to teach a machine learning algorithm ca…

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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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MyGoodness

There are over one million registered charities in the United States alone, and many more worldwide. How do you choose among them? MyG…

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Shelley: Human-AI Collaborated Horror Stories

Project website: shelley.ai Human-AI collaborated stories: stories.shelley.ai Follow @shelley_ai to collaborate wi…

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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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How Fresh Is Your Feed?

How Fresh Is Your Feed? Social media promises to show you what's happening right now. We checked. It isn’t.

Tech companies tried to help us spend less time on our phones. It didn’t work.

Ethan Zuckerman and other experts contextualize the real risks of the mobile internet.

Twitter and Facebook want to shift power to users. Or do they?

DCI head Neha Narula offers perspective on the draw of decentralization.

Building a more honest internet

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

Whose deaths matter? New research on Black Lives Matter and media attention

New research published in the International Journal of Communication

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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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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.

Perspectives on Libra

Essays and testimonies on Facebook's proposed cryptocurrency

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…

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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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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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…

Conversation Trees

An alternative viewing experience for large-scale conversations on Twitter. Each conversation tree visualizes the structure of replies to a…

The next great (digital) extinction

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

MIT’s new tool erases anything (or anyone) from old photos

The reality distortion field is real, and it’s getting better every day.

Sydney Levine – Encoding Morality into Machines

The morality of preschoolers, trolleys, cookie-eating squirrels, and attempting to define “the consensus” with the Moral Machine Project.

The Story Learning Machine

The Storytelling project uses machine-based analytics to identify the qualities of engaging and marketable media. By developing models with…

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The Spread of True and False Information Online

We investigated the spread of all of the verified news stories–verified as either true or false–distributed on Twitter from 2006 to 2017.Wi…

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Rumor Gauge: Automatic Detection and Verification of Rumors on Twitter

The spread of malicious or accidental misinformation in social media, especially in time-sensitive situations, such as real-world emergenci…

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What is innovation in local TV news? Andrew Heyward’s new mission is to find out

Andrew Heyward has a plan for finding and identifying innovation in local TV news.

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Shout!

Can I borrow your network? Shout! is a marketplace for retweets that allows people to exchange micro-contracts for future retweets. Shout! …

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Mission Wildlife

Mission Wildlife is a research collaboration between San Diego Zoo Global and the MIT Center for Civic Media to explore the poten…

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Machines now know how to terrorise humans

The Shelley Project studies how to produce horror stories as a result of collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence.

Fear, surprise, disgust: Fake news spreads faster than some real news on Twitter

Plus: A big overview of all the research that we have so far.

It's not just you: Dark clouds are linked with darker moods

Weather really can affect our mood—or at least the way we express our emotions on social media, according to a study published Wednesday in…

The Spread of True and False News Online

S. Vosoughi, D. Roy, S. Aral. (2018). The spread of true and false news online. Science. Vol 359, Iss 6380. Mar 09 2018.

Anxious about climate change? There’s a cow-farting-methane emoji for that.

Move aside, smiley faces, clapping hands and dancing ladies. Emoji are finally ready to tackle serious issues....The project may be the fir…

AI is working to make moviegoers more emotional

An AI algorithm can predict which parts of a film will generate the greatest emotional responses in audiences.

Validating Bayesian truth serum in large-scale online human experiments

Frank, M. R., Cebrian, M., Pickard, G., & Rahwan, I. (2017). Validating Bayesian truth serum in large-scale online human experiments. PloS one, 12(5), e0177385.

MIT trained an AI to tug at your heartstrings (and purse strings)

Researchers want to know what images make us feel more attached to other people. They call their project “Deep Empathy.”

"El robot que escribe libros de terror" Oppenheimer Presenta # 1741

Research scientist Manuel Cebrian discusses Shelley with CNN en Español host Andrés Oppenheimer.

AI is learning how to make you cry at the movies

New research can predict how plots, images, and music affect your emotions while watching a movie.

AI in storytelling: Machines as cocreators

Computers don’t cry during sad stories, but they can tell when we will.

A team of MIT scientists taught an AI to get emotional over movies

Artificial intelligence (AI) may not be ready to write the next blockbuster movie, but a team of AI researchers from the Massachusetts…

Climate Conversations, S2E3: How will Human Beings Adapt to a Changing Climate?

How well have humans adapted to the current climate, and how will we adapt to new climate complexities?This week, the Climate Conversations…

The robots are coming

…We may have helped create the AI monster here in the Hub, but it turns out we’re also the ones fighting to keep it on a leash, with a Just…

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Deep Empathy

What would your city look like after a disaster? Deep Empathy is a collaboration between the Scalable Coopera…

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AI and the future of work

At EmTech 2017, Iyad Rahwan discusses how can we anticipate and respond to major disruptions from artificial intelligence, the web, and soc…

An artificial intelligence bot writes stories of the macabre

“Shelley” is an artificial intelligence bot who writes stories inspired by a subreddit of aspiring horror writers.

MIT researchers trained an AI to write horror stories based on 140,000 Reddit posts

Sometimes the scariest place to be is your own mind. Or Reddit at night.Shelley is an AI program that generates the beginnings of horror st…

Think AI is scary already? This software writes its own horror stories

Shelley's artificial neural network takes turns with humans in collaborative storytelling.

MIT researchers bring a horror fiction-writing robot named Shelley to life

With its increasingly humanlike design, artificial intelligence gives many people the creeps—though usually not intentionally. But a new ro…

These horror stories created by artificial intelligence are the stuff of nightmares

An artificial intelligence is creating worlds where possessed dolls and other creatures chase after frightened, helpless hum…

Can artificial intelligence learn to scare us?

With Shelley, the world’s first artificial intelligence-human horror story collaboration, MIT researchers aim for goosebumps.

Can AI learn to scare us? With Shelley, MIT researchers aim for goosebumps

Introducing Shelley: the world’s first AI-human horror story collaboration

An Algorithm Trained on Emoji Knows When You’re Being Sarcastic on Twitter

Understanding sarcasm could help AI fight racism, abuse, and harassment.

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Research

Playful Systems

Designing systems that become experiences to transcend utility and usability

The FiftyNifty challenge

FiftyNifty.org takes the hassle out of calling your lawmakers.

If it looks like a spammer and behaves like a spammer, it must be a spammer: analysis and detection of microblogging spam accounts

Almaatouq, Abdullah, Erez Shmueli, Mariam Nouh, Ahmad Alabdulkareem, Vivek K. Singh, Mansour Alsaleh, Abdulrahman Alarifi, and Anas Alfaris. "If it looks like a spammer and behaves like a spammer, it must be a spammer: analysis and detection of microblogging spam accounts." International Journal of Information Security 15, no. 5 (2016): 475-491.

Centralized, Parallel, and Distributed Information Processing during Collective Sensemaking

Peter Krafft, Kaitlyn Zhou, Isabelle Edwards, Kate Starbird, Emma Spiro. (2017). Centralized, Parallel, and Distributed Information Processing during Collective Sensemaking. ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI).

Twitter: who gets caught? observed trends in social micro-blogging spam

Almaatouq, Abdullah, et al. "Twitter: who gets caught? observed trends in social micro-blogging spam." Proceedings of the 2014 ACM conference on Web science. ACM, 2014.

Beyond Viral

The golden age of social media coincides with a worldwide leadership crisis, manifested by our seeming inability to address any major globa…

How to create better online environments and interfaces for human communication.

What We Should Do Before the Social Bots Take Over: Online Privacy Protection and the Political Economy of Our Near Future

Graeff, E. 2013. ‘What We Should Do Before the Social Bots Take Over: Online Privacy Protection and the Political Economy of Our Near Future.’ Presented at Media in Transition 8: Public Media, Private Media, MIT, Cambridge, May 5.

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Who Answers Questions on Twitter?

Many Twitter users post questions with hashtags like #twoogle or #lazyweb. Is this an effective way to find expert answers beyond one's net…

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Crowdsourcing Search: The Red Balloon Challenge

In 2009, DARPA launched the Network Challenge to explore the roles the Internet and social networking play in the timely communication, wid…

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Captions++

Modern web presentations such as Youtube feature videos with commentary appended at the bottom. In our new imagining of Videotext, we put t…

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Reach

Reach merges inherently local communications with user requests or offers of services. It is built atop data from services users already us…

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Comm.unity

Comm.unity is a platform that implements a wireless, device-to-device information system that bypasses the need for any centralized servers…

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Crowdsourcing a Manhunt

People often say that we live in a small world. In a brilliant experiment, legendary social psychologist Stanley Milgram proved the six deg…

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