The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI) is a community of scientists, engineers, faculty, students, staff, and supporters that aim to understand intelligence – how brains produce it and how it can be replicated in artificial systems.  Together, we approach intelligence as a single grand challenge requiring the organized, collaborative efforts of science, engineering, the humanities, and beyond.  To achieve this vision, scientific theories of natural intelligence must be developed, computational models must be created, and these models must be compared against the capabilities and neural mechanisms of natural intelligence and tested on real-world problems. 

Laura Schulz is the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Cognitive Sciences and Associate Department Head in MIT's Brain and Cognitive Sciences department. Her research focuses on the infrastructure of human cognition that develops during early childhood, and as the principal investigator of the Early Childhood Cognition Lab she seeks to understand the fundamental underpinnings of human reasoning using behavioral studies and computational models.

Josh Tenenbaum is a Professor in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department at MIT and serves as SQI's Director of Science. He studies the underlying logic that supports humans' ability to create reliable generalizations from limited data at a young age, and seeks to build more powerful learning machines based on the same principles. With the Computational Cognitive Science lab at BCS, he studies the computational basis of human learning and inference using mathematical modeling, computer simulation, and behavioral experiments.