IDSS

Institute for Data, Systems, and Society

Website Faculty

We use data science tools across domains and disciplines to find new insights and approaches to societal challenges involving complex systems - challenges like climate change, traffic congestion, misinformation, and human health.

Technical Skills

  • Data science
  • Data analysis
  • Machine learning

Common Careers

  • Data Scientist
  • Quantitative Researcher
  • Policy Analyst / Professor
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A 3D reconstruction of a workspace with computers and robotic heads, overlaid with a path of camera positions shown as boxes and arrows, depicting a cameras movement and captured images in the scene.

About

The mission of the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS) is to use the power of data to bring new insights to complex societal challenges. As an interdisciplinary part of both the School of Engineering and Schwarzman College of Computing, IDSS advances education and research in state-of-the-art analytical methods in statistics and data science, information and decision systems, and the social sciences, and applies these methods to address challenges in a diverse set of areas such as energy systems, transportation, urbanization, social networks, finance, and health.

As technology advances scale the size and complexity of interconnected systems and networks, these systems are generating masses of data that can lead to new insights. Research at IDSS aims to understand and analyze data from across these systems, which present unique and substantial challenges due to scale, complexity, and the difficulties of extracting clear, actionable insights.

IDSS spans all five schools at MIT and embraces the collision and synthesis of ideas and methods from analytical disciplines including statistics, data science, information theory and inference, systems and control theory, optimization, economics, human and social behavior, and network science.

Academic Programs

Degrees
Online Education

Our ability to collect data is already well beyond our ability to understand what it could tell us. IDSS is bringing together mathematical, behavioral, and empirical sciences to capitalize on their shared interest in tackling complex societal problems.

IDSS Stories

Podcast

In the Data Nation podcast, IDSS faculty engage in conversations with industry experts on how to find solutions for these problems. Each episode unpacks a different example of how data can be used to lead, mislead, manipulate, and inform the public’s viewpoints and decisions.

Find new episodes here every month, or subscribe to the podcast feed on Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.