The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI), a research unit of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, brings together researchers from across MIT and combines their diverse expertise to understand intelligence through tightly coupled scientific investigation and rigorous engineering. These researchers work collaboratively across science, engineering, the humanities, and more.
SQI seeks to understand how the brain generates intelligence and how it can be replicated in artificial systems to address real-world problems that are beyond the capabilities of current artificial intelligence technologies.
“At SQI, we study intelligence scientifically and generally, with the hope that by studying the neuroscience and behavior of humans and animals, and by studying what we can build as intelligent engineering artifacts, we will understand the fundamental principles of intelligence,” said Leslie Pack Kelbling, SQI research director and Panasonic Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“We at SQI believe that understanding human intelligence is one of the greatest unsolved questions in science, concerning the origin of the universe and our place within it, as well as the origin of life. There are two parts to the problem of human intelligence. “How does it work? And where does it come from? If we can understand that, we will be able to achieve results far beyond what we currently imagine,” says Jim DiCaro, director of SQI and the Peter de Flores Professor of Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognition. Science.
Explore the great mysteries of the heart
The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence was recently renamed to commemorate a generous gift from the Siegel Family Endowment that will enable further growth of SQI’s research and activities.
SQI’s efforts are organized around missions – long-term collaborative projects rooted in fundamental intelligence questions and supported by platforms – systems and software that enable new research and create benchmarking and testing interfaces.
“Our department is the only department at MIT dedicated to building the scientific understanding of intelligence, collaborating with researchers across the institute,” DiCarlo says. “While we have made remarkable advances in AI over the past decade, we believe the next decade will bring even greater advances in our understanding of human intelligence and advances that will reshape what we call AI. David Siegel, the Siegel Family Foundation, and other donors are demonstrating confidence in our approach by supporting us.”
A legacy of interdisciplinary support
In 2011, David Siegel SM ’86, PhD ’91 established the Siegel Family Foundation (SFE) to support organizations working at the intersection of learning, workforce, and infrastructure. SFE funds organizations tackling society’s most important challenges and supports the innovative citizens and community leaders, social entrepreneurs, researchers, and others who advance this work. Siegel is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. While in graduate school in MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he worked on robotics with an emphasis on sensing and grasping in the group of Tomás Lozano Perez (currently Distinguished Professor of Education in the School of Engineering). He then co-founded Two Sigma with the belief that innovative technology, AI, and data science can help discover the value of the world’s data. Today, Two Sigma is driving transformation across the financial services industry in investment management, venture capital, private equity, and real estate.
“The human brain is probably the most complex physical system in the universe, but most people don’t have much interest in how it works. People take the mind for granted, but they are very curious about other scientific mysteries, such as the origin of the universe. That’s where my interest in the brain and the interface between brain and artificial intelligence comes from. This exploration We don’t care whether there are commercial applications for it. Instead, we should pursue research like the one done at MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence to advance our research.”We hope that by uncovering more about human intelligence, we will not only advance artificial intelligence, but also lay the foundation for extending our own thinking. ”
David Siegel is a longtime champion of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), a National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary collaborative research institute, and as one of the first donors to the MIT Quest for Intelligence, he helped lay the foundation for ongoing research. In early 2024, he founded Open Athena, a nonprofit organization that bridges the gap between academic research and the cutting edge of AI. Open Athena provides universities with elite AI and data engineering talent to accelerate breakthrough discoveries at scale. Siegel is a member of the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, vice chairman of the Scratch Foundation, and a member of the Cornell Tech Council. He also serves on the boards of Re:Build Manufacturing, Khan Academy, NYC FIRST, and Carnegie Hall.
Catalyst for global collaboration
MIT President Sally Kornbluth said, “Of all the donors and supporters whose generosity has powered the Quest for Intelligence from the beginning, none has been more important than David Siegel. Without his years of commitment to CBMM and support for the Quest, this commission would not have been possible.” There is good reason to think that David’s recent gift, which renames the Quest for Intelligence and also supports the Schwarzman College of Computing, will be even more powerful in the years to come.” It will shape the future of this work and the field itself. She continued, “Supported by the transformational gift of our generous donors, especially David Siegel, SQI is poised to take on an even more significant role.”
SQI scientists and engineers collaborate with disciplinary colleagues within the Institute and at universities and institutions around the world to widely publish their research, publish papers, and develop new tools and technologies used in research institutions around the world. DiCarlo explains, “We are part of the Schwarzman College of Computing, a nexus between people who are interested in biology and different forms of intelligence and people who are interested in AI. We collaborate with other universities, nonprofits, and industry partners. We can’t do it alone.”
“Fundamentally, we are not an AI effort; we are a human intelligence effort using the tools of engineering,” DiCarlo said. “This not only gives us very useful insights, especially around human learning and health, but it also gives us very useful tools for AI, including AI that works better in the human world.”
The entire SQI community of faculty, students, and staff is excited to face new challenges in our efforts to understand the fundamentals of intelligence.
A new mission and the next horizon
SQI research is expanding: Mission principal investigators are integrating efforts across areas of interest and increasing impact on the field. In the coming months, the organization plans to launch a new social intelligence mission.
“We need to focus on problems that reflect natural and artificial intelligence. We need to make sure we are evaluating new models on tasks that reflect what humans and other natural intelligences can do,” said Nick Roy, director of systems engineering at SQI and professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. He predicts that future research in SQI will depend on asking the right questions. “We’re very good at choosing tasks to test computational models, and we’re very good at choosing tasks that match what the model can already do, but we also need to be even better at choosing tasks and benchmarks that elicit something about natural intelligence,” he says.
On November 24, 2025, faculty, staff, students, and supporters gathered for an event titled “The Next Horizon: Quest’s Future” to celebrate SQI’s next chapter. The event consisted of an afternoon of research updates, panel discussions, and poster sessions on new and evolving research, and was attended by David Siegel, representatives of the Siegel Family Foundation, and various members of the MIT Corporation. A recording of the event presentation is available on SQI’s YouTube channel.
