Interactive decorative animation: a stylized artificial neural network made of
glowing dots (nodes) joined by thin connecting lines, evoking the lab's focus on
artificial intelligence. As you move the mouse, nearby nodes drift toward the
cursor and the connections light up; clicking releases floating "thought bubble"
words that rise and fade. The words represent the lab's research themes and
include:
big ideas, big systems, big creations, big collaborations, big crowdsourcing, big data, big impact, big accessibility, big intelligence, big research, big innovation, big solutions, big thinking, big learning, big discovery, big science, big algorithms, big networks, big computing, big vision, big progress, big breakthroughs, big challenges, big questions, big answers, big futures, big robots, big lab, big products, big responsibility, bigham!.
This animation is purely visual and decorative.
Beneficial
Intelligence
Group
Making Artificial Intelligence Useful for Everyone.
The Beneficial Intelligence Group (BIG) is a research laboratory within the School of Computer Science
at Carnegie Mellon University. We connect advances in artificial intelligence to hard problems in computer science and society.
Artificial Intelligence + Human Computation = Beneficial Intelligence
Our work combines machine learning with people in the loop to develop new algorithms, techniques, and systems that advance research and practice. We contribute technologies that support productivity, expand accessibility, improve trust and transparency, and inform how intelligent systems are built and used. Our work spans language, vision, and robotics, with an emphasis on reliability and scale beyond the lab.
Our work has advanced methods in AI and technical HCI, influenced technologies adopted in industry, and continues to inform systems used in practice. Along the way, we tackle bigger questions about what it means for intelligent technologies to be useful: How can systems adapt to diverse users? How should they fail gracefully? And how do we ensure that people, not just algorithms, remain central to the design of future technologies?
Accessibility is a central focus of BIG—not only for its immediate impact, but because people with disabilities are often first adopters of new technologies, revealing challenges and opportunities that will eventually matter to everyone.
The Beneficial Intelligence Group is led by Jeffrey Bigham and includes members from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute
, the Language Technologies Institute
, the Robotics Institute
, and the Computer Science Department
. Before CMU, the lab was based at the University of Rochester
.
