Projects

We bring together humanists and technologists to tackle some of the most complex communication challenges facing the media, education, public health, and government. Projects at the Center range from exploratory research in the lab to field pilots of advanced prototypes with potential for scale.

Some of our work within the research lab and the prototyping workshop is highlighted below.

PHD CANDIDATE SUYASH FULAY EXPLAINS WORK THAT EXPLORES HOW BEST TO LEVERAGE MACHINE-LEARNING TECHNIQUES TO IDENTIFY AND COMBAT ONLINE POLARIZATION. PHOTO BY ARTEMISIA LUK.

AI-Assisted Sensemaking

Archived

Human-in-the-loop tooling to surface insights across conversations

Research

Sensemaking, Generative AI

Analogia

A story-telling card game connecting community values with lived experiences

Research

Generative AI, Conversation Design, Listening, Design, Narrative, Game Design

Person Over Position

Unpacking the Impacts of Experience-Sharing on Social Evaluations, Emotions, and Engagement in Opinionated Discourse

Research

Bridging, Listening, Deliberation, Narrative, Conflict Resolution, Social Psychology

Voice Anonymization

Archived

Producing speech that de-identifies the speaker’s voice characteristics while preserving naturalness, intelligibility, and paralinguistic features like emotion + prosody.

Research

Communication, Speech Processing

Closer Worlds

Archived

A 2-person digital experience which supports intimate conversation by visualizing shared values using a text-to-image model.

Research

Generative AI, Conversation Facilitation, Listening, Design, Human-Computer Interaction

realtalk@Boston

A new civic infrastructure in Boston grounded in dialogue as a way to building “civic muscle” of democracy

Pilots & Programs

Research, Sensemaking, Conversation Facilitation, Participatory Research, Listening

Real Talk Summer Internship Program

Archived

Collaborating with students to shape a new online dialogue app

Pilots & Programs

Research, Civic Engagement, Youth Engagement, Youth Dialogue, Cortico, Participatory Research, Listening, Social Media

Tech-Enhanced Deliberative Assemblies Pop-Up Lab

Archived

Tech-enhanced Citizens’ Assemblies toward a more inclusive, healthy, and constructive democracy

Pilots & Programs

Bridging, Communication, Conversation Design, Conversation Facilitation, Civic Engagement, DemocracyNext, Deliberative Assembly

Measuring Affective Polarization in Online Spaces with Language Models

Archived

Outgroup Animosity Has Risen for Politicians, Journalists, and a Sample of Partisan Users on Twitter and Reddit

Research

Affective Polarization, Computational Social Science, LLM Bias and Equity, Social Media Analytics

MIT Student Assembly

Tech-enhanced & Student-Focused Deliberative Assemblies

Pilots & Programs

Generative AI, Conversation Design, Conversation Facilitation, Youth Engagement, Youth Dialogue, Participatory Research, Deliberative Assembly, Deliberation

Project Odessa

Project Odessa builds on theoretical designs and provides a mobile app sandbox for such experimental implementations.

Research

Conversation Health, Participatory Research, Decentralized Systems, System Governance

Assessing Affective Engagement with Narratives of Invisible Disability

Archived

Deconstructing and reducing situational stigma on the basis of visual and semantic assumption mechanisms.

Research

Affective Polarization, Conversation Health, Identity Representation, Narrative, Social Psychology

A Basis for Narrative Reframing Agents

Archived

Design of narrative agents to assist in reframing traumatic experiences

Research

Conversation Design, Conversation Facilitation, Human-Computer Interaction, Narrative, Social Psychology

Narrativity Rating Scale

Development of annotation-based scale to identify, isolate, and measure the emotional-behavioral effects on reader-listeners based on narrative-form elements within written or spoken texts of any type.

Research

City meeting transcript analysis

Can discussions at city council meetings (the LocalView corpus) be used to explain/predict social measures of the cities where they occur? Can it be useful in other CCC projects?

Scaffolding