At MIT, an ongoing commitment to intellectual understanding | MIT News

The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence (SQI), a research unit at the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, brings together researchers from across MIT who combine their diverse expertise to understand intelligence through rigorous scientific inquiry and rigorous engineering. These researchers engage in collaborative efforts that span the sciences, engineering, 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 both scientifically and normatively, hoping that by studying neuroscience and behavior in humans and animals, and by studying what we can build as intelligent engineering artifacts, we will be able to understand the basic principles of intelligence,” said Leslie Pack Kaelbling, SQI director of the Department of Electrical Engineering and SQI Professor of the Department of Computer Engineering

“We at SQI believe that understanding human intelligence is one of the biggest open questions in science – right there with the origin of the universe and our place in it, and the origin of life. The question of human intelligence has two parts: how it works, and where it comes from. If we understand those, we will see benefits beyond our current thoughts,” said Jim DiCarlo and SQI’s director of Descience Jim DiCarlo, director of SQI’s Department of Psychology Jim DiCarlo And the mind.

Exploring the great mysteries of the mind

The MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence was recently renamed in honor of a major gift from the Siegel Family Endowment that allows for further growth in SQI research and activities.

SQI efforts are organized around machines – long-term, collaborative projects based on fundamental intellectual questions and supported by platforms – systems, and software that enable new research and create benchmarks and evaluations.

“Ours is the only unit at MIT dedicated to building scientific understanding in intellectuals while working with researchers across the Institute,” DiCarlo said. “There have been incredible advances in AI over the past decade, but I believe the next decade will bring even greater advances in our understanding of human intelligence — advances that will reshape what we call AI. By supporting us, David Siegel, the Siegel Family Endowment, and our other sponsors show confidence in our path.”

Inheritance of interdisciplinary support

In 2011, David Siegel SM ’86, PhD ’91 established the Siegel Family Endowment (SFE) to support organizations working at the intersection of learning, staff, and infrastructure. SFE funds organizations that address the most important societal challenges while supporting community leaders and creative community leaders, social entrepreneurs, researchers, and others who advance this work. Siegel is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and philanthropist. While in graduate school at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, he worked on robotics in the group of Tomás Lozano-Pérez – currently a School of Engineering Distinguished Teaching Fellow – focusing on hearing and grasping. Later, he founded Two Sigma with the belief that new technologies, AI, and data science can help bring out the value of the world’s data. Today, Two Sigma is driving change throughout the financial services industry in investment management, corporate finance, private equity, and real estate.

Siegel explains, “The human brain may be the most complex system in the universe, but most people have not shown much interest in how it works. We have pursued research like the one conducted in the MIT Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence to improve our understanding of ourselves. As we uncover more about human intelligence, I hope that we will lay the foundation not only for developing artificial intelligence but also for expanding our thinking.”

As a longtime champion of the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines (CBMM), a National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary research center, and one of the original contributors to the MIT Quest for Intelligence, David Siegel helped lay the groundwork for the research that continues today. In early 2024, he founded Open Athena, a non-profit organization that bridges the gap between academic research and the cutting edge of AI. Open Athena equips universities with elite AI and data engineering talent to accelerate breakthroughs at scale. Siegel serves on the MIT Corporation Executive Committee, is vice-chair of the Scratch Foundation, and is a member of the Cornell Tech Council. He also sits on the boards of Re:Build Manufacturing, Khan Academy, NYC FIRST, and Carnegie Hall.

A Catalyst for Global Collaboration

MIT President Sally Kornbluth says, “Of all the donors and supporters whose generosity has inspired the Quest for Intelligence, none has been more important from the beginning than David Siegel. Without his long-term commitment to CBMM and his support of the Quest, this community may never have been formed. There is every reason to think that David’s latest gift, which also renames the Intelligence Quest of the College. Computing, will be even more powerful in shaping the future of this program and the industry itself.” He continues, “Encouraged by generous donors – especially David Siegel’s transformative gift – SQI is poised to take on a more important role.”

SQI scientists and engineers present their work widely, publish papers, and develop new tools and technologies used in research institutions around the world, as they collaborate with colleagues in the Center’s supervisory fields and at universities and institutions around the world. DiCarlo explains, “We’re part of the Schwarzman College of Computing, at the interface between people interested in the biological and intellectual sciences and people interested in AI. We work with partners at other universities, in nonprofits, and in industry — we can’t do it alone.”

“In reality, we’re not an AI effort. We’re an human ingenuity effort using engineering tools,” DiCarlo said. “That gives us, among other things, very useful insights into human learning and life, but also very useful tools for AI – including AI that will just work better in the human world.”

The entire SQI community of faculty, students, and staff is excited to face new challenges in efforts to understand the foundations of intelligence.

New missions and horizons follow

SQI research is growing: Mechanical principal investigators are combining their efforts in areas of interest, increasing their impact in the field. In the coming months, the organization plans to launch a new Social Intelligence Mission.

“We need to focus on problems that demonstrate natural and artificial intelligence — make sure we test new models for tasks that reflect what humans and other natural intelligence can do,” said Nick Roy, SQI’s director of systems engineering and professor of aeronautical engineering and astronautics at MIT. He predicts that future SQI research will depend on asking the right questions: “[While] we are good at choosing tasks that test our computer models, and we are very good at choosing tasks that match what our models can already do, we need to do better at choosing tasks and benchmarks that also incorporate natural intelligence,” he said.

On November 24, 2025, faculty, staff, students, and supporters gathered at an event titled “The Next Horizon: The Future of Quest” to celebrate SQI’s next chapter. The event included an afternoon of research updates, a panel discussion, and a poster session on new and emerging research, and was attended by David Siegel, representatives of the Siegel Family Endowment, and various members of the MIT Corporation. A recording of the presentation of the event is available on the SQI YouTube channel.