This October, we’re inviting stakeholders to help shape the creation of a new program at the MIT Media Lab focused on responsibly advancing research and development in decentralized technologies.
As with the internet, this next wave of decentralized technologies is likely to reshape society. To ensure we realize the greatest opportunities, and mitigate the greatest risks, of these emerging technologies at scale, we’re bringing together leaders from across the globe including open source communities, technology companies, nonprofits, local, state, and federal governments, as well as researchers in academia and industry. The Media Lab program is currently focused on three emerging areas:
- Digital Currencies
- Decentralized AI
- Computational Privacy and Security
Despite the promise of these technologies, uncertainty remains around crucial use cases, as well as around scalability and security. Proponents envision a future that is designed to be more resilient, equitable, secure, participatory, and open. This future requires a neutral place for public and private-sector leaders to effectively engage with leading academics on a range of complex questions, choices, and trade offs.
A lack of coordinated academic leadership could limit the potential of these emerging technologies in the domains of digital health, supply-chain logistics, and climate science, as well as block them from addressing some of the most challenging problems and inequities in our centralized tech platforms and financial systems. Academic leadership will also help address systemic risk in the space.
The program will support several scientists and students at MIT. The activities of the program span five areas (1) Research in the three pillars with an emphasis on responsible innovation and shared prosperity (2) Code base and shared data sets among the members (3) APIs, standards and case studies in the emerging areas, (4) Roundtable meetings with stakeholders and events and (5) Entrepreneurial ecosystem of startups, foundations and corporate ventures.
Faculty
Ramesh Raskar
MIT Media LabAssociate Director and Associate Professor at MIT Media Lab
Alex 'Sandy' Pentland
MIT Media LabDirector of MIT Connection Science and Professor at MIT Media Lab
Neha Narula
Digital Currency InitiativeDirector of the Digital Currency Initiative and a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab
Affiliate faculty
Joe Jacobson
MIT Media LabAssociate Professor at MIT Media Lab
Andy Lippman
MIT Media LabAssociate Director at MIT Media Lab
Jinhua Zhao
MIT Mobility InitiativeAssociate Professor at MIT and Director at MIT Mobility Initiative
Research pillars
Digital Currencies
The demand for digitizing currency has become imminent with Web3, ushering rapid innovation in the financial sector with the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies. A decentralized society, therefore, must be able to move value across the Internet as seamlessly as it moves information.
Decentralized AI
The long-term goal of combining Web3 with AI is to develop and deploy a digital solution to answering a specific type of query—one that requires the sharing of edge data, with which computation must be performed, among disconnected and distrusting entities.
Computational Privacy and Security
Now that we are beginning to run our entire society on decentralized digital networks, the conventional approaches to security and privacy have proven insufficient. Subsequently, our overarching goal for this research pillar is to develop privacy-preserving techniques for decentralized systems, and address the security concerns around Web3.
Partner programs
