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.

Analogia

A story-telling card game generated from community data which helps make speaking personally and emotionally easy and fun

In Progress | Spaces

Closer Worlds

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

In Progress | Spaces

Narrative Reframing Agents

Design of narrative agents to assist in reframing traumatic experiences.

Planning | Spaces

Real Talk Living Lab in Boston

A new civic infrastructure in Boston grounded in dialogue as a way of building up our “civic muscles” of democracy

In Progress | Spaces

Real Talk@MIT

A community-based civic space for nuanced and authentic dialogue among the MIT community

In Progress | Spaces

CCC High School Internship Program

Empowering student leaders to design and facilitate constructive conversation spaces

In Progress | Scaffolding

A tech-enhanced Citizens’ Assembly pop-up lab

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

In Progress | Spaces

Project Odessa: Decentralized social systems in theory and implementation

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

In Progress | Spaces

Voice Anonymization

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

In Progress | Scaffolding

Tolerance Lab

Exploring the ways in which we respond differently to statements of opinion and statements of experience.

In Progress | Scaffolding

Assessing Affective Engagement with Narratives of Invisible Disability

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

Complete | Scaffolding

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.

In Progress | Scaffolding

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?

In Progress | Scaffolding

Bridging Dictionary

Exploring LLM capabilities to explain concepts/definitions to various audiences

In Progress | Scaffolding

LLMs to characterize groups

Using LLMs (originally trained / fine tuned, now prompted) to answer questions about group beliefs.

Early Exploration | Scaffolding

Chinese Restaurant Names

Using Language Models to Investigate Cultural Adaptation of Chinese Immigrants from Parallel Chinese Restaurant Names in the United States

In Progress | Scaffolding

AI Sensemaking (Prototyping)

Exploring how LLMs can be utilized to build AI power tools that can assist in a human-led AI-assisted sensemaking process

In Progress | Scaffolding

RealTalk Themes

Discover conversation themes via clustering, relate those to human generated highlights, and explore temporal patterns in how conversations develop.

Early Exploration | Scaffolding

Conversation Flowers

Exploring conversation health and dynamics using natural language processing and data visualization

Early Exploration | Scaffolding

Visualizing Dialogue

Visualizing conversations based on themes

In Progress | Scaffolding

Understanding LLM cultural and demographic knowledge

Probing LLMs to understand gaps in their knowledge around certain traits (gender, race, etc.)

In Progress | Maps

Data Provenance for AI

A massive audit of 1800+ AI text datasets, tracing their provenance and composition from origin to creation.

Early Exploration | Maps

Affective polarization

Characterizing affective polarization on Twitter and Reddit – how it has evolved over time and which topics incite more polarized responses.

In Progress | Maps

ConGraT

Developing a new joint model combining graph + text representations. Evaluated on social media (Twitter), citation networks (Pubmed) and Wikipedia.

In Progress | Maps

Social Media vs Radio

Exploring how social media and radio react to news events

In Progress | Maps

Beat The Virus

How could we deliver trusted public health information to millions of people in engaging ways in the pandemic’s very noisy early days? Our answer – #BeatTheVirus (…

March 2020 – October 2020 | Prototype Workshop