Project Research

Media Cloud

Media Cloud is a platform for studying media ecosystems. By tracking millions of stories published online, the system allows researchers ...
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 educati...
Research
Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence

Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence
Archived
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 Va...
Archived
Archived
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 microg...
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
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 thi...
Archived
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 individual...
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 ...
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 limita...
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

CivilServant: User-led randomized trials online

The CivilServant project supports online communities to run their own experiments on the effects of moderation practices on antisocial be...
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 a...
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 numbe...
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 citie...
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 group...
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 o...
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.
Project Research

The Atlas of Inequality

Segregation is hurting our societies and especially our cities. But economic inequality isn't just limited to neighborhoods. The restaura...
Project Research

Civic Entertainment

Civic Entertainment is a project based at the Center for Civic Media that explores the intersection of civic engagement with film, televi...
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."
Article Research

Augmented Democracy: César Hidalgo at TED2018

A bold idea to replace politicians
Article Research

Making a path to ethical, socially-beneficial artificial intelligence

Leaders from government, philanthropy, academia, and industry say collaboration is key to make sure AI serves the public good.
Publication Research

How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences

Jara-Figueroa C, Yu AZ, Hidalgo CA (2019) How the medium shapes the message: Printing and the rise of the arts and sciences. PLoS ONE 14(2): e0205771. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205771
Project Research

Personalized Machine Learning for Autism Therapy

EngageME: Personalized machine learning and humanoid robots for measuring affect and engagement of children with autismEngageME is a proj...
Article Research

Artificial intelligence has a problem with gender and racial bias. Here’s how to solve it.

Joy Buolamwini’s essay is featured in the Optimists issue of Time, guest-edited by Ava DuVernay.
Project Research

Actionable Auditing: Coordinated bias disclosure study

Algorithmic auditing has emerged as a key strategy to expose systematic biases embedded in software platforms, yet scholarship on the imp...
Project Research

Rhythm: Open measurement and feedback tools for human interaction

Rhythm is a collection of open-source tools to make it easier for researchers to examine, analyze, and augment human interaction. Rh...
Publication Research

Personalized Machine Learning for Robot Perception of Affect and Engagement in Autism Therapy

Rudovic, O., Lee, J., Dai, M., Schuller, B. , Picard, R. W., " Personalized machine learning for robot perception of affect and engagement in autism therapy," Science Robotics, June 2018.
Publication Research

Open Badges: A Low-Cost Toolkit for Measuring Team Communication and Dynamics

Lederman, O., Calacci, D., MacMullen, A., Fehder, D. C., Murray, F. E., & Pentland, A. ". (2016). Open Badges: A Low-Cost Toolkit for Measuring Team Communication and Dynamics, 2016 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation , Washington DC, USA, June 28-July 1, 2016.
Article Research

The paradox of universal basic income

Liberals and conservatives alike love—and fear—the idea of giving free money to everyone. But we have to try it anyway.
Article Research

The limits of explainability

Academics, economists, and AI researchers often undervalue the role of intuition in science. Here's why they're wrong.
Article Research

The next great (digital) extinction

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

Emerging Worlds
Post Research

Congratulations to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 honorees

The 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list includes at least three members of the Media Lab community.
Article Research

30 Under 30 In Enterprise Tech: Drone School, AI Accountability And Buying Cars From Home

Joy Buolamwini identifies bias in algorithms and develops practices for accountability during design.
Publication Research

Social Capital Accounting

T. Nishikata, T. Hardjono and A. Pentland, Social Capital Accounting, October 2018.
Archived
Project Research

A-pops

A design project done in collaboration with the MIT Media Lab and the Laboratorio para la Ciudad (Laboratory for the City), Mexico City's...
Archived
Post Research

Apops: Pilot Installation, Mexico City, December 2017

APOPS was presented at the Connected Learning Summit at the MIT Media Lab in Aug 2018. The slides from that presentation can be found below.
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Inventing the future of digitally augmented objects and environments.
Archived
Archived
Research
Living Mobile

Enhancing mobile life through improved user interactions
Article Research

Diana Orghian – The Optimism Bias

Growing up in a foreign country, the optimism-mystique connection and making data digestible.
Thesis Research

Evaluating Civic Technology Design for Citizen Empowerment

Graeff, Erhardt (2018). Evaluating Civic Technology Design for Citizen Empowerment. PhD Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Project Research

Realtime Detection of Social Cues

Realtime detection of social cues in children’s voicesIn everyday conversation, people use what are known as backchannels to signal to so...
Project Research

Personalized Interaction for Language Learning

The process by which children learn native languages is markedly different from the process of learning a second, or non-native, language...
Publication Research

Weather impacts expressed sentiment

Baylis P, Obradovich N, Kryvasheyeu Y, Chen H, Coviello L, et al. (2018) Weather impacts expressed sentiment. PLOS ONE 13(4): e0195750.
Project Research

Gender Shades

The Gender Shades project pilots an intersectional approach to inclusive product testing for AI.Algorithmic Bias PersistsGender Shades is...
Project Research

GUI3D

GUI3D Template is a generic implementation of the GUI components that anyone might want for a 3D simulation in Processing 3. Compone...
Project Research

ARTextiles: Promoting Social Interactions Around Personal Interests

Abstract data visualizations for enhancing social interactions through clothing and augmented reality.
Publication Research

ARTextiles: Promoting Social Interactions Around Personal Interests Through Augmented Reality

Fuste, Anna, and Chris Schmandt. "ARTextiles: Promoting Social Interactions Around Personal Interests Through Augmented Reality." Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2017.
Publication Research

Optimal diversification strategies in the networks of related products and of related research areas

Alshamsi A, Pinheiro FL, & Hidalgo CA. "Optimal diversification strategies in the networks of related products and of related research areas." Nature Communications (2018) 9:1328. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-018-03740-9.
Publication Research

Small cities face greater impact from automation

Small cities face greater impact from automation Morgan R. Frank, Lijun Sun, Manuel Cebrian, Hyejin Youn, Iyad Rahwan J. R. Soc. Interface 2018 15 20170946; DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2017.0946. Published 7 February 2018
Publication Research

Rhythm: A Unified Measurement Platform for Human Organizations
Publication Research

Shooting Low or High: Do Countries Benefit from Entering Unrelated Activities?

Pinheiro, Flávio L., et al. "Shooting Low or High: Do Countries Benefit from Entering Unrelated Activities?" arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.05352 (2018).
Publication Research

Local Wealth Redistribution Promotes Cooperation in Multiagent Systems

Pinheiro, F. L., Santos, F. (2018). Local Wealth Redistribution Promotes Cooperation in Multiagent Systems, forthcoming Proc. of the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2018)
Publication Research

Detecting the Trustworthiness of Novel Partners in Economic Exchange

D DeSteno, C Breazeal, R Frank, D Pizarro, J Baumann, L Dickens, JJ Lee (2012). Detecting the Trustworthiness of Novel Partners in Economic Exchange. Psychological Science.
Publication Research

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.