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. 

Melissa Klein Struhl is the Executive Director of Children Helping Science (CHS) and a Research Scientist at MIT's Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She also heads Lookit, a website that lets families participate in cognitive development experiments from home. Her work at CHS broadly seeks to understand the origins of children's early commonsense understanding of the world.