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Research
Space Enabled

Advancing justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space
Research
Viral Communications

People and intelligent machines in a creative loop
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Research
Media Lab Research Theme: Life with AI

Life with AI | Designing the future of smart systems to improve the human experience
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Media Lab Research Theme: Future Worlds

Future Worlds | Design and action for the future we want to live in
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Media Lab Research Theme: Decentralized Society

Decentralized Society | Architecting the new internet for the good of the people
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Media Lab Research Theme: Cultivating Creativity

Cultivating Creativity | Catalyzing a global movement enabling everyone to unlock and unleash their individual and collective creativity
Thesis Research

Return Paths: Tracing the Sound of Black, Asian, and Indigenous Technologies

Briët, Kayla. Return Paths: Tracing the Sound of Black, Asian, and Indigenous Technologies. Master’s Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Media Lab, 2025.
Research
Human Dynamics

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

Pantheon

What if we could look at the entire history of humanity at once? Pantheon aims to create a data-driven view of history by collecting, …
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Archived
Research
Social Machines

Promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks
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Collective Learning

Transforming data into knowledge
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Research
Open Ocean

Open Ocean
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Research
Object-Based Media

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

My Deep Sea, My Backyard

Seventy percent of nations have deep-sea environments within their maritime Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), yet only 16 percent of them ar…
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Article Research

Mars on Earth: What can Victorian-era polar exploration teach us about space travel?

Tom Standage and Seth Stevenson talk to a range of experts about what Victorian-era polar exploration can teach us about space travel.
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Project Research

The universal decay of collective memory and attention

Collective memory and attention are sustained by two channels: oral communication (communicative memory) and the physical recording of info…
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Project Research

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

Communication technologies, from printing to social media, affect our historical records by changing the way ideas are spread and recorded.…
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Research
Disobedience Award

Disobedience Award
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Research
Ethics

Ethics Initiative
Article Research

Beyond Bias: Contextualizing “ethical AI” within the history of exploitation and innovation in medical research

"It’s time for us to move beyond 'bias' as the anchor point for our efforts to build ethical and fair algorithms."
Article Research

From famous to forgotten

Collective Learning head César Hidalgo talks to Innovation Hub about cultural knowledge, and how our collective memories form and fade.
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
Article Research

I'm Joi Ito, Director of the MIT Media Lab. I'm leading the selection committee for the Media Lab's Disobedience Award. Ask me anything!

I'm here to answer your questions about the award, my views on disobedience, and, of course, anything else.
Article Research

How we’ll forget John Lennon

César Hidalgo considers the role technology plays in how people and events enter, and fade from, collective memory.
Article Research

My Deep Sea, My Backyard: Empowering nations to study the deep

The deep sea is the common heritage of all of humankind and we must all share in the responsibility to be good stewards of it.
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Research
Living Mobile

Enhancing mobile life through improved user interactions
Article Research

Structural and temporal patterns of the first global trading market

We investigate the structure and dynamics of a network representative of the global trading market that emerged during the 16th century.
Project Research

Grounded Language Learning and Understanding

Language is grounded in experience. Unlike dictionaries which define words in terms of other words, humans understand many basic words in t…
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Project Research

Artifacts of the Presence Era

Like the visible layers of a canyon, the layers in Artifacts of the Presence Era tell a story of past events. The images and sounds produce…
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Project Research

WatchMe

Communication is much more than the direct transfer of information. It is an interactive collaborative act including potentially rich verba…
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Project Research

Sensetable

Sensetable is a system that wirelessly, quickly, and accurately tracks the positions of multiple objects on a flat display surface. The tra…
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Project Research

Squish: Using Toys to Direct Interactive Characters

Joysticks are a natural interface for controlling F-11s. Mice and keyboards suffice for document preparation. But what is the right interfa…
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Project Research

AlphaWolf

AlphaWolf presents a synthetic wolf pack comprised of autonomous and semi-autonomous wolves who interact with each other much as real wolve…
Archived