Living Labs

With our novel “Living Labs” paradigm for research in the field, MIT Connection Science brings together interdisciplinary experts to develop, deploy, and test - in actual living environments - new technologies and strategies built on safe, trusted, data sharing.
 

A key issue today is that data is siloed, whether it's personal data, data inside an organization, or data sharing across different organizations. Data discovery and integration is difficult and presents complex technical, organizational and policy challenges. A Living Lab allows MIT to be a microcosm for many big data efforts whether in government or in industry. One of our goals is to work with organizations in opening up repositories of information that contain the data needed to discover valuable new insights about important topics such as inclusive finance and health services, innovation, learning and sustainability. MIT is well positioned to take a leadership role in demonstrating not only how organizations can leverage data in the future, but how we collect, manage, and use personal information, from setting appropriate privacy policies to demonstrating AI systems that can implement it in practice.

 

Current MIT Living Labs

Adelaide, South Australia

An alliance of banking, telecom, health, and transportation industries working through the government funded Lot 14 incubator.
Australia and Mexico (in progress)

The Atlas of Opportunity works to better understand how social interaction and economic behavior impact future outcomes of communities across South Australia.

Learn more at https://dti.sa.gov.au/mit-bigdata-living-lab
Colombia

Created an open data resource to better manage challenges of COVID-19 and Venezuelan refugee crisis.
At Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Practicing what we preach, MIT has set up a Living Lab on its own campus.  By integrating health, financial and sensor data, MIT will be able to create holistic profiles of communities, subgroups and individuals, to better understand behavior, community and the science of innovation.
Massachusetts General Hospital

In collaboration with Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT is conducting a comprehensive analysis of health and behavior by linking behavioral data with personal health records to understand and identify opportunities to improve population health & well being.
Switzerland

Helping to deploy blockchain and advanced data systems (such as the Swiss Trust Chain) to improve the finance and trade systems.
Trento Territory in Italy

The Mobile Territorial Lab (MTL) integrates into the real life of the Trento territory in Italy. In particular, the Lab is focused on exploiting the sensing capabilities of mobile phones to track and understand human behaviors (e.g., families’ spending behaviors, lifestyles, mood and stress patterns, etc.),  to empower individual and collective lifestyles and to investigating new paradigms in personal data management and sharing.
University of Luxembourg

In collaboration with the University of Luxembourg, MIT is exploring sustainable cloud-based digital ecologies, using of computation in legal and business processes, and exploration of how to build new trust networks, particularly around the area of finance.

Previous MIT Living Labs

Beijing

Created an open data resource to effectively promote innovation.                                                                     

  

  
Israel

The Great Ashdod Initiative for Public Smart Transportation - Helped design a national testbed for transportation innovation.

Learn more at https://www.ashdodlivinglab.com/
MENA Region, Europe and North America

We have living labs planned in 2015 for the MENA region, Europe and North America exploring modalities such as public health, city management, innovation culture, and social behavior surrounding adoption of new platforms.
Turkey

Created on open-source data resource to better stimulate more inclusive financial growth and help manage the Syrian refugee crisis.