Research — MIT Media Lab

Artificial listener with social intelligence

A social robot modifies its behavior to change what you think about it!

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Media Cloud

Media Cloud is a platform for studying media ecosystems. By tracking millions of stories published online, the system allows researchers ...

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...

Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence

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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 Va...

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Advancing Wellbeing

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.

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.

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...

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

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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...

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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...

FiftyNifty

This is a grassroots challenge to get friends to participate in democracy by making calls to congresspeople in all 50 states. Live phone ...

Footwear x Mental Health: A Collaboration

How do your kicks collaborate with mental health?

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...

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.

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.

Understanding machine behaviour

CIFAR Fellows Hugo Larochelle and Matthew Jackson argue for a new scientific discipline to study the broad effects of AI.

The Future's Coming: Why we need to prepare for sci-fi tomorrows today

Teleportation may have to wait.

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.

Studying the behavior of AI

A new paper frames the emerging interdisciplinary field of machine behavior

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.

The death of curiosity

How your company is killing innovation.

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.

‘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.

'Atlas Of Inequality' shows income segregation around Boston

Esteban Moro talks to WBUR about the Human Dynamics group's Atlas of Inequality.

The Atlas of Inequality

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

Civic Entertainment

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

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.

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."

Augmented Democracy: César Hidalgo at TED2018

A bold idea to replace politicians

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.

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

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...

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.

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...

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...

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.

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.

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.

The limits of explainability

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

The next great (digital) extinction

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

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Emerging Worlds

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.

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.

Social Capital Accounting

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

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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...

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Inventing the future of digitally augmented objects and environments.

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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Living Mobile

Enhancing mobile life through improved user interactions