Forging connections between human and machine intelligence research, its applications, and its bearing on society.

The MIT Quest for Intelligence (The Quest) will advance the science and engineering of both human and machine intelligence. Launched on February 1, 2018, this effort seeks to discover the foundations of human intelligence and drive the development of technological tools that can positively influence virtually every aspect of society.

The Institute’s culture of collaboration will encourage life scientists, computer scientists, social scientists, and engineers to join forces to investigate the societal implications of their work as they pursue hard problems lying beyond the current horizon of intelligence research. By uniting diverse fields and capitalizing on what they can teach each other, we seek to answer the deepest questions about intelligence.

Imagine if we really knew how the brain produces intelligent behavior — and how to replicate that intelligence in machines.

Tomaso Poggio, Nancy Kanwisher, Matt Wilson, and Bob Desimone are among the 140 researchers at MIT’s Center for Brains, Minds & Machines developing a computational understanding of human intelligence.

Imagine if AI was socially and emotionally intelligent enough to empower everyone to flourish — from individuals to societies.

Cynthia Breazeal, Sandy Pentland, Rosalind Picard, and Iyad Rahwan develop and deploy systems that respond to human emotions, enhance interpersonal dynamics and learning, promote our well-being, and support collaborative and moral decision making.

Imagine if we could build a machine that grows into intelligence the way a person does — that starts like a baby and learns like a child.

Rebecca Saxe, Laura Schulz, and Josh Tenenbaum study how human beings learn, form theories about the world, and process information. Their work could point to the next form of deep learning.

Imagine if we could prevent deaths from cancer by using deep learning for early detection and personalized treatment.

Regina Barzilay develops models that utilize diverse patient data to predict models of disease progression and support early cancer detection.

Imagine if the next breakthrough in artificial intelligence came from the root of intelligence itself: the human brain.

Edward Adelson, Bill Freeman, Josh McDermott, and Antonio Torralba are researching how to make machines see, hear, and touch to improve how artificially intelligent systems work alongside us.

Imagine if we could design and automate molecular pathways to make new pharmaceuticals and nutraceuticals.

Regina Barzilay, William Green, Tommi Jaakkola, and Klavs Jensen are developing systems to synthesize and build any molecule from common buyable compounds.

Imagine the insights and societal benefits we could derive from the aggregation of data across organizational boundaries. Now imagine we could do this respecting privacy concerns.

Andrew Lo and Vinod Vaikuntanathan are using cyber-intrusion data to benchmark risk and create a multiparty platform that collects data safely.

A message from MIT President L. Rafael Reif

We are setting out to answer two big questions: How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? And how can we use that deep grasp of human intelligence to build wiser and more useful machines, to the benefit of society?

Drawing on MIT’s deep strengths and signature values, culture, and history, the MIT Quest for Intelligence promises to make important contributions to understanding the nature of intelligence, and to harnessing it to make a better world.

This is our quest.

Sixty years ago, at MIT and elsewhere, big minds lit the fuse on a big question: What is intelligence, and how does it work? The result was an explosion of new fields — artificial intelligence, cognitive science, neuroscience, linguistics, and more. They all took off at MIT and have produced remarkable offshoots, from computational neuroscience, to neural nets, to empathetic robots.

And today, by tapping the united strength of these and other interlocking fields and capitalizing on what they can teach each other, we seek to answer the deepest questions about intelligence — and to deliver transformative new gifts for humankind.

Some of these advances may be foundational in nature, involving new insight into human intelligence, and new methods to allow machines to learn effectively. Others may be practical tools for use in a wide array of research endeavors, such as disease diagnosis, drug discovery, materials and manufacturing design, automated systems, synthetic biology, and finance.

Along with developing and advancing the technologies of intelligence, our researchers will also investigate the societal and ethical implications of advanced analytical and predictive tools. There are already active projects and groups at the Institute investigating autonomous systems, media and information quality, labor markets and the work of the future, innovation and the digital economy, and the role of AI in the legal system.

In all its activities, The Quest is intended to take advantage of — and strengthen — the Institute’s culture of collaboration. It will connect and amplify existing excellence across labs and centers already engaged in intelligence research.

Join our quest.

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FAQ

What is the MIT Quest for Intelligence?

The Quest will address two fundamental questions: How does human intelligence work, in engineering terms? And how can we use that deep grasp of human intelligence to build wiser and more useful machines, to the benefit of society?

As we seek those answers, we will also develop customized AI tools for non-AI researchers, which could accelerate progress in virtually every field and eventually spin off technological tools that can positively influence virtually every aspect of society.

We see an opportunity to achieve a deeper understanding of intelligence through the kind of basic research that leads to unexpected breakthroughs. We aspire for our new knowledge and newly built tools to serve the public good, in our nation and around the world.

Why launch the MIT Quest for Intelligence now?

It’s hard to name a field AI hasn’t touched already. Machine learning is the new literacy. Still, many of the breakthroughs driving current machine intelligence technology are actually decades old. We’re looking for the next great leap that will unlock innovations that today’s entrepreneurs haven’t even begun to dream about.

The last few decades have seen a revolution in the powers of computation, and in our understanding of the human brain. More recently, we have experienced a similar revolution in the acquisition of data at massive scales.

We have access to more information than ever before, but the tools for making sense of it need to take a giant leap forward. That’s part of what The Quest will do.

Why should MIT embark on this quest?

We begin with a baseline of exceptional talent: more than 200 MIT investigators already work directly on the science and engineering of intelligence.

In the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT has cultivated a community of systems, molecular, cognitive, and computational neuroscientists that is perhaps the most influential and extensive in the world. The Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, the largest lab at MIT, is among the most important centers of information technology research worldwide. And the MIT Media Lab conducts world-leading research on human-computer-machine interaction in real-world environments and at scale.

By bringing these communities together with people and ideas from fields like biology, chemistry, physics, math, design, management, economics, and others, we can spark new collaborations and accomplish things none of those fields could do on their own — things we couldn’t even conceive of 20 years ago.

It is MIT’s ambition to advance all of these fields because they are all connected.

What exactly are the people going to work on?

Our biggest ambitions are on the broadest topics. The Quest will be — like the brain itself — a perpetual learning machine, structured to seek feedback and learn from it, in every relevant domain.

Brain scientists will work with and learn from machine learning experts, and vice versa. Hands-on users will feed back field data to inform investigators on the frontier of understanding. Engineers building new algorithms will collaborate with those inventing the hardware optimized to run them.

We are also thinking seriously about the work and workplace of the future. We want to develop technologies that create opportunities and enhance our society.

Together, we will get a lot more intelligent about the challenges of intelligence and the opportunities they present.

How will the MIT Quest for Intelligence address the ethical issues of AI?

Researchers at MIT always have a responsibility to think about the ethical implications of their work, and intelligence work comes with some very charged questions.

MIT is committed to making a better world, and we must be diligent in that mission. There are real consequences to the decisions we make in our labs about how machines behave, both on their own and in interactions with humans. We take that responsibility seriously, and consider that thoughtfully in our research.

One important current area of MIT research involves how we improve interactions between humans and machines, especially in manufacturing and healthcare environments. There are tasks that machines are simply better at than people (such as seeing detail, waiting, remembering, following directions), just as there are tasks that machines may simply never be able to accomplish. We need to capitalize on these differences — while being very careful about how they balance out in their final expression, for instance, at a patient’s bedside in the hospital, or on the factory floor.

Who will join MIT on this quest?

The goal of The Quest is to create a community that is dedicated to unlocking the very nature of intelligence, and harnessing it to make a better world. The scale of the impact we wish to have can only be unleashed in collaboration with forward-looking companies and individuals from around the world, and we seek connections to those who share our vision.

A key to the success of the effort will be identifying industry allies who share our passion for tackling big, real-world problems. That work is already underway: we have forged a number of collaborative projects with industry, such as the MIT–IBM Watson AI Lab.

The Quest will also rely on the foresight and passion of philanthropists who see the promise of using advances in intelligence to solve humanity’s greatest problems.

Given the long-term, original nature of the work we will pursue, we need collaborators who have the appetite to help us build a venture of historic and global importance.