Research
We work where ideas collide:
- textiles that move
- listening for vanishing species
- soft mesh building blocks
- the scent of a memory
- architecture beyond the Earth
- pain relief you can wear
- leaving no trace in orbit
- wearables for cells
- stories from a changing planet
- a mini-robot on the Moon
- ultrasound that moves with you
- a new approach to amputation
- artificial muscles without motors
- turning ideas into matter
- inventing new ways to play
- diagnosing ecosystems
Groups and Centers Communities built around shared questions.
All Groups and CentersInitiatives and Programs Where groups converge around shared challenges.
All Initiatives and ProgramsProjects Where ideas take form
All Projects
Social Simulation Arena
Social Simulation vs. The Real Future.Social simulation is now a product. Evaluation still has no common standard.Persona-prompted populations. Digital twins. Silicon samples. Synthetic populations. Worlds of a billion agents. There are more ways than ever to simulate human behavior, but still no c…
Ocean of Dreams
“What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”― bell hooks, All About Love
Seeing Is Not Believing
Seeing Is Not Believing: Realistic AI Videos Disrupt Confidence in Authentic Videos and Perceived RealityVisual media has long served as a reference for what feels real, but generative video models now produce synthetic footage closely resembling real-world scenes. Such media increasingly appears i…
OctoStudio
OctoStudio is available for free at octostudio.orgOctoStudio is a free creative coding app that lets you create animations, games, and other interactive projects using photos, drawings, and sounds from the world around you. Use coding blocks to bring your ideas to life. OctoStudio is available on …
Jordan Rudess + jam_bot: A Human-AI Musical Dialogue
The Responsive Environments group at the MIT Media Lab is collaborating with GRAMMY-winning keyboardist and CAST Visiting Artist Jordan Rudess to produce jam_bot, a Generative AI Music System developed with Rudess to support real-time human-AI co-created improvisation, and trained on his playing. A…
Heatmap
Heatmap is a tool to help qualitative researchers identify and curate significant moments from large corpuses of recorded conversation audio. Each ribbon represents a conversation,and each tile represents a speaker turn. The brightness of each tile represents its 'salience,' which can be scored by …
Performing Performance Spaces
Throughout history, our relationships with the places we inhabit have been inseparable from their auditory imprints, like reverberation in a Gothic cathedral, chatter in a bustling marketplace, or a birthday song in a kitchen. These sonic signatures serve as markers of what's familiar, and frame ou…
Open Benchmark of AI Impact on Humans
The first open benchmark measuring AI's impact on human well-being across physical, psychological, and societal dimensions.Measuring AI's impact on peopleToday's AI benchmarks measure what models can do: accuracy, reasoning, task completion. They say almost nothing about what AI does to the people …
Sleep and Wellbeing
By establishing correlations between sleep parameters and wellbeing indicators, our project hopes to further understanding of fluctuations in wellbeing and inform the development of wearables that monitor sleep patterns. We begin by identifying the impact of different combinations and transformatio…
Extreme Sensing with Single Photons
Reimagining machine perception by using ultra-sensitive single-photon imaging to see farther, faster, and in conditions where conventional sensors fail.Extreme Sensing with Single Photons explores how next-generation imaging systems can extract meaningful information from the smallest possible amou…
Cyber Subin: Human-AI Co-Dancing
Evolving Cultural Heritage through Collaborative Choreography with Generative Virtual CharactersThis project aims to develop new methods for preserving and extending intangible cultural heritage through AI and computational modeling, specifically by translating the embodied knowledge of traditional…
filescape
filescape is a next-generation file explorer designed to reimagine the way you interact with your personal files.Files are arrayed as navigable information clusters where each item is shown literally as well as iconically based on content as well as time and title. One view can be your photo collec…
[Al]legory of the Cave
In Plato's Allegory of the Cave, prisoners chained to a wall perceive only shadows—and mistake them for reality. We extend this concept in our piece Plato's [Al]legory of the Cave, an interactive installation featuring an LLM-controlled character who exists only as a shadow. The piece begins dark. …
Neural Control of Upper Extremity Prostheses
Existing upper extremity prosthesis controllers have limited functionality and place high cognitive demands on users, both of which contribute to the high rates of device abandonment seen in this group.This project investigates methods of translating the intentions of someone with upper extremity …
TeleAbsence
People die twice.First, when they die.Then when they are forgotten.Rokusuke Ei (1933-2016)
An implantable piezoelectric ultrasound stimulator (ImPULS) for deep brain activation
Precise neurostimulation can revolutionize therapies for neurological disorders. Electrode-based stimulation devices face challenges in achieving precise and consistent targeting due to the immune response and the limited penetration of electrical fields. Ultrasound can aid in energy propagation, b…
Wandering Through Bird Image Archives
I usually work with code that creates images, which I means I can easily explore the system using more code. Here, I wanted to see what I could do with exploring an existing images.I collected two image archives: one on public domain images of birds in visual art, and another on my personal photogr…
Autonomous and Surgery-free Brain-Computer Interface (BCI)
What if clinicians could place tiny electronic chips inside the brain without the need for any surgery but with a simple injection in the arm?This could help to treat deadly and devastating brain diseases which drugs/chemicals cannot fix and eliminate surgery risks as well as 100,000 dollars of sur…
The Atlas of Inequality
Segregation is hurting our societies and especially our cities. But economic inequality isn't just limited to neighborhoods. The restaurants, stores, and other places we visit in cities are all unequal in their own way. The Atlas of Inequality shows the income inequality of people who visit differ…
AI Guidance and Policy in K-12 Schools
As generative AI tools become increasingly present in classrooms, schools face difficult questions about how to guide their use. This project reimagines technology policy in K-12 schools, shifting from rigid, rule-based approaches to more flexible ones grounded in shared values.We have created two,…
RiboGen: RNA Sequence and Structure Co-Generation
RNA is a fundamental biomolecule that stands at the intersection of modern biology and the origins of life. It carries genetic instructions, regulates cellular processes, and participates in countless biological mechanisms through its complex 3D structures. Therefore, understanding and designing RN…
Towards Socially-Intelligent Nonverbal Foundation Models
If we want AI to engage with us naturally—in classrooms, therapy, eldercare, and beyond—it needs to understand us, with or without words. While today’s multimodal AI excel at language-based social tasks, can they understand humans without words?In this project, we aim to address a limitation in cur…
Augmented Reality with X-Ray Vision
X-AR is an augmented reality (AR) system that gives humans "X-Ray Vision" X-AR is a new AR headset that enables users to see things that are hidden. This new headset helps users find items that are inside closed boxes, under piles, or behind occlusions. The headset uses holograms to guide users to…
Co-designing Generative AI for Healthy Aging
The rapid advancement of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies presents new opportunities to support daily living for older adults. This project aims to understand the needs, concerns, and ideas regarding GenAI and develop GenAI technologies for healthy aging.
Flexible automation for robotic bioengineering
Liquid handling robots are key components of modern biotechnology labs, but they largely function to spare humans from laborious or repetitive protocols. We decided they could do more.Upgrading Hamilton robotsMany companies offer superb liquid-handling robots, but their software is narrowly designe…
Using satellites to monitor deforestation due to mining and forest management in Ghana
Gold mining has played a significant role in Ghana's economy for centuries. Regulation of this industry has varied over time and while industrial mining is prevalent in the country, the expansion of artisanal mining, or Galamsey has escalated in recent years. Many of these artisanal mines are not o…
How to Grow (Almost) Anything - A New Model for Global Synthetic Biology Education
A Distance Learning Model for Global Laboratory-Based Synthetic Biology Education
DCI Global
We’re creating a new global research network to understand how cryptocurrencies and digital currencies help people financially flourish—and where they might cause harm? This work cannot be done effectively from any one place alone; it depends on joint effort with regional collaborators who have dee…
Lunar Research in Lanzarote
The MIT Space Exploration Initiative explores Lunar analog sites on Spain’s Canary Island of Lanzarote.During a 10-day field program in February, SEI will work in the geological and environmental conditions of Lanzarote’s volcanic landscape testing technologies for the exploration of the Moon and h…
Pharmamusicology: Exploring the Impact of Music on the Physiology and Psychology of Mental Health
As of 2020, approximately 40 million adults, or 18.1% percent of the adult population, in the United States suffer from anxiety disorders, making them the country’s most common mental health condition.Nonetheless, only 36.9% of this population receive treatment [1]. Traditionally, interventions su…
Publications What the work teaches us.
All PublicationsSustaining the benefits of live music engagement: immediate and enduring influences of awe at Carnegie Hall’s Well-Being Concerts
The Journal of Positive Psychology
Capable language models can outgrow the benefits of collaboration
Nature Machine Intelligence
Electrospun Fields: 3D Nano-Fiber Material Computation as Design Method
via the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
