Associate Professor, Media Lab, MIT
About
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Iyad Rahwan is the AT&T Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences at the MIT Media Lab, where he leads the Scalable Cooperation group. A native of Aleppo, Syria, Rahwan holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia, and is an affiliate faculty at the MIT Institute of Data, Systems and Society (IDSS). Rahwan's work lies at the intersection of the computer and social sciences, with a focus on collective intelligence, large-scale cooperation, and the social aspects of Artificial Intelligence. He led the winning team in the US State Department's Tag Challenge, using social media to locate individuals in remote cities within 12 hours using only their mug shots. Recently, he crowdsourced 30 million decisions from people worldwide about the ethics of AI systems. Rahwan's work appeared in major academic journals, including Science and PNAS, and features regularly in major media outlets, including the New York Times, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal.
Research Interests: Computational Social Science; Artificial Intelligence; Ethics; Cognitive Science; Game Theory; Behavioral Economics; Crowdsourcing; Social Media; Collective Intelligence; Cooperation; Argumentation;
News
- (21-Mar-2017) Our new preprint Cooperating with Machines is out. We pose a new grand challenge for AI: cooperation (not competition) with humans. Also read some coverage of this work in Science.
- (14-Feb-2017) New post-doc position in my group.
- (20-Jan-2017) Here is the syllabus of my new seminar course Cooperation Machines.
- (28-Nov-2016) My TEDxCambridge talk on the Social Dilemma of Diverless Cars is now out.
- (3-Nov-2016) See my New York Times op-ed on Whose Life Should Your Car Save?, co-authored with Azim Shariff and Jean-Francois Bonnefon.
- (12-Oct-2016) President Obama and Media Lab Director Joi Ito discuss our study on the social dilemma of autonomous vehicles, and AI and government more generally, in a special Frontiers issue of Wired Magazine.
- (15-Sep-2016) Try out the Moral Machine site, built by my students Edmond Awad and Sohan Dsouza. Some coverage of the site: MIT Sloan Management Review, Vice, Spiegel (German), CNET, World Economic Forum, Slate, The Verge.
- (24-June-2016) See our new paper "The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles". Here is a nice video illustration made by Science Magazine:
- (24-June-2016) Great New York Times article about our paper "The social dilemma of autonomous vehicles". Check out the accompanying video. Other media coverage of the paper includes: Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Scientific American, Time, CNN, The Guardian, Gizmag, Wired, LA Times, IEEE Spectrum, Forbes
- (31-Mar-2016) Post-doctoral position in Machine Learning and Social Media. Details here.
- (31-Mar-2016) See our new Communications of the ACM viewpoint "Beyond Viral". Here is a nice video illustration of the article:
- (30-Mar-2016) Our new story "Seaching for Someone" chronicles the history of searching social networks, together with Alex 'Sandy' Pentland, Manuel Cebrian, Esteban Moro, and others.
- (1-Feb-2016) Four post-doctoral positions available in my group as part of a new and exciting Data Science, AI & Society initiative. I am looking for strong candidates in the fields of Machine Learning, Data Science, AI, Social Network Analysis, Behavioral Game Theory, etc. Details here.
- (1-Nov-2015) Our preprint on the use of experimental ethics for autonomous vehicle has been covered by various media outlets, sparking much fascinating discussion among the public.
- (6-Sep-2015) Two post-doctoral positions available in my group and Cesar Hidalgo's group. Details here.
- (24-Mar-2015) Check out my new cartoons and sketches page.
- (9-Feb-2015) In-depth article about our DARPA Shredder Challenge paper just appeared in Backchannel, titled How a Lone Hacker Shredded the Myth of Crowdsourcing. The article is followed by great counter-argument from Harper Reed titled Crowdsourcing isn’t broken.
- (23-Oct-2014) My article in Nautilus Magazine on How Crowdsourcing Turned On Me is published. The article is accompanied by screenshots and videos from the DARPA Shredder Challenge. See UCSD press release "Looking Back at CSE's Crowdsourcing Experiment in the DARPA Shredder Challenge".
- (2-Apr-2014) Our team was one of ten finalists (out of 652 teams) in the Telecom Italia Big Data Challenge. A summary of our submission can be found here. Congratulations to students of the Social Computing and Artificial Intelligence Lab for an amazing job. See press coverage in The National and Gulf Today.
- (6-Feb-2014) New paper on the limits of social learning in networks, with psychologists Azim Shariff and Jean-Francois Bonnefon, just appeared in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. See media coverage by Royal Society, Phys.org, Live Science and Daily Mail.
- (30-Jan-2014) My work with Alex 'Sandy' Pentland has been featured in his new book Social Physics.
- (29-Jan-2014) Our new paper with James Fowler, exploring cooperation, peer punishment, institutions and corruption, just appeared in Journal of the Royal Society Interface. A nice write-up about it appeared in the Anti-Corruption Research Network, which is part of Transparency International.
- (2-Jan-2014) An 8-minute summary of my work on social mobilization, as part of a collection of videos on our Social Physics blog.
- (14-Oct-2013) BBC Radio 4 show "Digital Human" featured Masdar City and my lab.
- (1-Oct-2013) Great article by Sandy Pentland in Scientific American magazine, including a description of our joint work on social incentives.
- (1-May-2013) New coverage of our work in Foreign Policy by Joshua Keating, titled ""Can 'Verily' build a smarter social media for disasters?".
- (26-Apr-2013) Coverage of our recent paper: Crowdsourcing in manhunts can work, by Philip Ball. The story also got published by Scientific American.
- (24-Apr-2013) Our work on crowdsourcing and information verification was featured in MIT Technology Review:
- (23-Apr-2013) Our work on crowdsourcing and information verification was featured in New Scientist in the article "Nowhere to hide: The next manhunt will be crowdsourced".
- (5-Apr-2013) I was a panelist on the Crowdsourcing Research: How to recruit citizen scientists for discovery webinar, organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). [Video here]
- (2-Apr-2013) Our PNAS paper was featured by NBC News in an article titled "Facebook passes research test for quick responses, collaboration".
- (1-Apr-2013) Check out our new PNAS paper on the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge here.
- (1-Sep-2012) My work on the Balloon Challenge and Tag Challenge was featured in The Economist.
- (1-Apr-2012) Our team CrowdScanner has won the Tag Challenge! Read about it on Nextgov, New Scientist, Popular Science, The National.
- (28-Oct-2011) DARPA Red Balloon Challenge paper published. Some press about it: MSNBC,
Popular Mechanics,
MIT News,
Science News.
Check out the visualization of the recruitment cascade analyzed in the paper.
- (March 2011) My younger brother, Talal Rahwan, won the 2010 "AI's 10 to Watch" award, given by IEEE Intelligent Systems to the top-ten young AI scientists in the world.
Other Announcements
- Submit to "Argument & Computation" journal here.
- Call for "Tutorial Articles" for the Knowledge Engineering Review here.
- Web site for the International Workshop on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems (ArgMAS) series.
- My course syllabi (always subject to changes):