- Cyborg Psychology
Pat Pataranutaporn, PhD is an assistant professor, technologist, and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he is the founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group. He also serves as co-director of the MIT Media Lab Advancing Humans with AI (AHA) Research Program.
His research lies at the intersection of AI and human-computer interaction, where he focuses on inventing, investigating, and inspiring next-generation human-AI systems for human flourishing, applying insights from human psychology to AI and understanding how AI impacts human psychology. His research has been translated into real-world impact, ranging from Future You, a widely adopted AI digital twin for supporting long-term thinking that has been used in over 100 countries worldwide, to research that has shaped legislation protecting children from companion AI, and leading efforts to develop the first open benchmark for the human impact of AI in collaboration with leaders across academia, industry, and government. He also serves as an advisor to the Psychology of Technology Institute and Partnership on AI.
As founding director of the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, he leads a team of interdisciplinary researchers to develop and study how AI can both augment and diminish human learning, decision-making, critical thinking, creativity, and other critical dimensions of human experience. His group is among the first to investigate emerging phenomena through empirical studies examining how AI reshapes cognition, emotion, and behavior, from emotional dependence on AI companions and cognitive manipulation to false memory implantation, placebo effects of human-AI interaction, and the co-evolution of human and machine intelligence.
Pataranutaporn's research contributions have been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals and conferences, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Nature Machine Intelligence, IEEE, ACM SIGCHI, ACM SIGGRAPH, ACM ISWC, and ACM Augmented Humans. His work has been highlighted by the United Nations AI for Good forum and featured in MIT Technology Review, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Forbes, the Atlantic, Scientific American, the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, and more. His work has also been honored as one of TIME's "Best Inventions of 2023" and was included in Fast Company's "2023 World Changing Ideas."
Pataranutaporn has collaborated with researchers from both academia and industry, including teams from NASA, Stanford Medicine, Harvard, Mass General Brigham, UCSB, UCLA, UC Irvine, Microsoft Research, OpenAI, NTT Data, KBTG, and more.
His projects have been exhibited at the MIT Museum (Massachusetts), Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland Art Gallery, Australia), The Art Gallery of Western Australia (Australia), MAXXI: National Museum of 21st Century Art (Italy), Bangkok Art Biennale (Thailand), Bangkok City Gallery (Thailand), National Museum of Singapore (Singapore), Peabody Essex Museum (USA), London Design Festival (UK), Transmediale Festival (Germany), National Taiwan Science Education Center (Taiwan), IDEA Museum (Arizona), Mesa Arts Center (Arizona), Autodesk Gallery (California), SIGGRAPH Asia (Tokyo), Ars Electronica (Virtual), and more.
Pataranutaporn co-designed and taught one of the first MIT courses on Generative AI, developed to equip students with the essential knowledge and skills to navigate the frontiers of this emerging field. He also co-organized the first workshop on virtual AI humans, attended by over 1,600 participants remotely and more than 200 in person in 2021.
He also served as co-creator and writer of the Netflix sci-fi anthology series Tomorrow and I, which premiered in 2024.
