Our purpose is to understand how computer networks are affecting political participation in the United States, both traditional (campaigning and voting) and electronic (e-mail letters and online petitions). The Project, affiliated with the Intelligent Information Infrastructure Project at the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, is non-profit and non-partisan.
The Intelligent Information Infrastructure Project seeks to develop an extremely general system for distributing and retrieving information that will work over major Internet protocols. The early phases involve building automated tools for managing outbound and inbound communications flows for large organizations, whether via email, distributed hypermedia, or other electronic media. After an initial phase of developing servers along these lines, the project will turn to interactive tools for wide-area communication, including a number of approaches to natural language understanding.