MIT Media Lab
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The MIT Media Lab in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engages in education and research in the digital technology used for expression and communication. It was founded in 1985 by MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT President Jerome Wiesner (now deceased) and opened its doors in the Wiesner Building (designed by I.M. Pei), or the E15 building at MIT in 1985. On February 1, 2006, Frank Moss assumed the role of lab director. Moss succeeds previous directors Nicholas Negroponte and Walter Bender.
[edit] Research
The Media Lab focuses on interdisciplinary research. The research generally does not involve directly developing core technologies, but rather developing applications of those technologies, or combining those technologies in new and interesting ways. Indeed, several of the projects at the Media Lab are almost purely artistic in nature. Core technology projects exist (see Center for Bits and Atoms), but are a minority at the Lab.
A large number of research groups focus on topics related to human computer interaction. While this includes traditional user interface design, most groups working on this take a broader view. Several groups are working on adding sensors and actuators of different sorts to common objects in the environment, to create "intelligent objects" that are aware of their surroundings, capable of predicting the user's goals and emotional state, and so can assist the user in a more effective way. An example of this type of research can be found in the work of Prof. Ted Selker whose research into context awareness ranges from the electronic voting machines [1] to hybrid search engines.
The Media Lab also does research into integrating more computational intelligence into learning activities. This includes software for learning but also "smart" educational toys such as programmable bricks like the cricket. A number of groups are pursuing hybrid art-engineering projects, in developing new tools, media, and instruments for music and other forms of art.
Several groups are working on the physics of computation. This includes quantum computing, as well as other modes of computation. One group, for instance, is developing a hydraulic computer, in which computing is done with flowing water rather than electricity.
One of the founding focuses of the Media Lab is technology for the developing world, such as the Fab Labs at the Center for Bits and Atoms and the Hundred Dollar Laptop project.
Several groups work on traditional artificial intelligence projects.
[edit] Research groups
The Media Lab is made up of numerous research groups. Below is a description of each group and its project leaders.
[edit] eRationality: Dan Ariely
This group studies how people behave and make day-to-day decisions, particularly in electronic environments. They investigate rationality, semi-rationality, bounded rationality, and just plain irrationality. They take an experimental psychology approach in trying to understand the reasons for different types of behaviors (such as choice, shopping, or procrastination), and attempt to build tools that reformulate the options available to people so that they can maximize their own happiness.[2]
[edit] Electronic Publishing: Walter Bender
In a sense, Information Technology has come of age. Although not all the necessary infrastructure is in place, the capacity for efficient distribution of information electronically is a fait accompli. This infrastructure provides a vehicle for individuals to voice their observations and experiences to a broader audience, but do we use this capacity to communicate effectively? Providing tools for the creation of and access to content is not sufficient to guarantee effective communication. Neither a message delivered but ignored, nor a message ingested but not digested are useful. In order to inform, the "recipient" must find the message content engaging and relevant. It is the contention of the electronic publishing group that effective communication requires distribution of messages that are rich in description. These descriptions, when taken with consideration of the context of both individuals and communities creating and receiving them, can result in messages that are both engaging and useful. The critical underlying technologies of information technology are the technologies that afford access and relevancy: machine understanding of content, observation of context, and instructive mediation between message provider and message recipient.
[edit] Object-Based Media: V. Michael Bove, Jr.
This group explores the creative and technological applications and implications of audio and video communication systems in which intelligent processes "understand" the inputs, producing a scene description in terms of constituent objects and metadata. They also develop new hardware and software architectures for collaborating ecosystems of smart input and output devices, and novel display technologies, particularly 3-D. Students should have backgrounds in signal processing, machine vision, computer graphics, electro-optics, user interface, television production or post-production, and/or real-time programming.[3]
[edit] Robotic Life: Cynthia Breazeal
This group develops robots that physically interact with, communicate with, and learn from people through social interaction. Inspired by animal and human behavior, their goal is to build socially intelligent, capable robotic creatures that partake in people's daily lives in rich and rewarding ways. Given the multi-disciplinary nature of this endeavor, their research explores novel mechanical designs, new sensing technologies (such as sensitive skin for robots), active perceptual systems (e.g., vision, auditory, tactile, etc.), speech recognition and synthesis, expressive motion, social learning (e.g., imitation, interactive games, scaffolding, etc.), and psychological modeling (attention, motivation, memory, decision making, etc.).
[edit] Computing Culture: Chris Csikszenthmihályi
Computing Culture is an art and technology group, based on the premise that artists often invent new media out of necessity. Their research results in specific works of art, but also helps further an understanding of the relationships between art, technology, and cultural production. Some of the strategies they practice include interventions in contemporary consumer electronics, creating special events for public situations, and applying technical development to cultural agendas that wouldn't normally receive it. Their central interest is in physically embodied (rather than screen-based) work.[4]
[edit] Sociable Media: Judith Donath
This group explores new directions in the design of virtual social environments. They look at questions relating to identity and society in the networked world: How do we perceive other people on-line? What might a virtual crowd look like? How can the underlying technology shape the evolution of on-line culture? Their emphasis is on design: we build experimental interfaces and installations that explore new forms of social interaction in the mediated world.[5]
[edit] Physics and Media: Neil Gershenfeld
This group explores the relationship between the content of information and its physical representation. This effort builds on basic work on the physics of information and computation (such as creating a molecular quantum computer, and analog coding circuits) to develop devices and algorithms for the interface between people and machines (including contact and non-contact sensing, and efficient real-time modeling), and finds application in collaborations ranging from creating virtuosic musical instruments to appropriate information technology for developing countries.[6]
[edit] Tangible Media: Hiroshi Ishii
This group explores the Tangible Bits vision to design seamless interfaces between people, digital information, and physical environments, by giving physical form to digital information and computation so that users can directly manipulate information with their hands. They are designing tangible user interfaces that employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information and computation exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia. They also explore ambient media as reflections of digital activity at the periphery of human awareness.[7]
[edit] Molecular Machines: Joseph Jacobson
This group is developing novel chemistries and means for creating both logic and machines from molecular-scale parts. The group's composition is highly multidisciplinary comprising students with backgrounds in electrical engineering, physics, chemistry, and mechanical engineering.[8]
[edit] Software Agents: Henry Lieberman
Software agents are programs that act as assistants to a user of an interactive interface, in contrast to most conventional programs, which act as tools. Software agents are typically long-lived, semi-autonomous, proactive, and adaptive. This group builds prototype software agents in a wide variety of application domains, including text and graphical editing, web browsing, matchmaking, electronic commerce, groupware, and more.[9]
[edit] Viral Communications: Andrew B. Lippman
Great periods of innovation occur when the system intelligence is moved to the leaves. That effect is multiplied if the technological leap is in synchrony with social goals. Examples are autos versus trains, and PCs versus mainframes. We call such systems viral. They are defined by (nearly) infinite scaling, independent addition of elements, and incremental value as each element is added. This view of communications where additional nodes support each other instead of interfere is a new research domain whose applications range from wired to wireless to social and economic structures. This group explores this principle with respect to networks and radio: how can we build socially responsive neworks that are unregulated, have no limit to their size or capability, and where each new node adds capacity to the whole? The tip of this iceberg is WiFi and Napster, but the generalizations bear out the theory that network capacity can grow with the number of members.
[edit] Opera of the Future: Tod Machover
This group has a special interest in inventing musical instruments that "understand" the artistic intentions of the performer, allowing for the enhancement and extension of musical expression. They design these instruments for use by highly skilled performers, as well as for students, novices and amateurs. They also explore how new media technology can modify music itself, and how such concepts can in turn be applied to interactive intermedia art and entertainment forms, of which opera is a particularly sophisticated example. Current directions in the group are to develop creative experiences and "musical toys" for children from ages 6 to 12, and to design future performance spaces that measure and react to performer sound, gesture, and intention.[10]
[edit] Physical Language Workshop: John Maeda
The Physical Language Workshop designs tools for creating digital content in a networked environment, and the means by which the content can be leveraged as creative capital within an experimental online micro-economy that is called OpenStudio. Their primary impact targets are in the areas of general digital media service architectures, global e-commerce, distance education, and visual information display systems.
[edit] Ambient Intelligence: Pattie Maes
The goal of the Ambient Intelligence research group is to radically rethink our interface to the digital world by designing interfaces that are pervasive, intuitive, and intelligent. They investigate ways of augmenting the everyday objects and spaces around us, making them responsive to our attention and actions. The resulting augmented environments offer opportunities for learning and interaction and ultimately expand our minds.[11]
[edit] Responsive Environments: Joseph Paradiso
This group develops new sensing modalities and enabling technologies that create new forms of interactive experience and expression. Their work is highlighted in diverse application areas, which range from interactive music systems and wearable computers to smart highways and medical instrumentation.[12]
[edit] Human Dynamics: Alex (Sandy) Pentland
Human communities are increasingly a mixture of people and machines, with technology like cell phones and e-mail strongly influencing how we interact and even who we are. The human design group focuses on inventing technology that can produce qualitatively better lives and societies, by both augmenting individual's capabilities and by providing better mediation for human networks. Example applications include: wearable devices for support of elderly in their homes, for coordinating emergency workers, or for coordinating health care in developing nations.[13]
[edit] Affective Computing: Rosalind Picard
This group is involved in basic research aimed at building computers that can sense, recognize, communicate, and respond intelligently to human emotion. Their work primarily involves signal processing, pattern recognition, and machine learning, but sometimes it involves designing new sensors (often wearable or tangible) and new means of adapting to or communicating with people (agent dialogues, regulatory computer designs, interface design).[14]
[edit] Lifelong Kindergarten: Mitchel Resnick
This group is developing new technologies that engage people (especially children and teens) in creative learning experiences. In particular, they are developing new programmable tools (such as computerized LEGO bricks and media-authoring environments) that extend the range of what people can design, create, and learn. They try out our ideas and technologies in classrooms, museums, and after-school settings, focusing especially on under-served communities.[15]
[edit] Cognitive Machines: Deb Roy
The goal of this group is to create machines that learn to communicate on human terms. They focus on the problem of grounding the meaning of natural spoken language in perception and action. This is accomplished by developing new methods of knowledge representation and machine learning that enable machines to learn to talk about what they see and do. They work with state-of-the-art methods drawn from speech recognition / understanding, computational linguistics, machine vision, machine learning, and interactive robotics. Much of their work is inspired by models of human cognition and learning. They are actively applying their work to building a wide range of human-machine interfaces.[16]
[edit] Speech Interfaces: Chris Schmandt
Their research focuses on voice in human-computer interaction, making digital audio recordings a viable hyperdocument medium and the role of computers in mediating human to human voice communication. They combine voice processing technologies (text-to-speech, recognition, time-scaling, etc.) to create conversational systems based on human communication techniques. They emphasize the user interface design issues specific to speech at the desktop, over the telephone, or in hand-held devices. Current emphasis is on speech for highly mobile applications and for applications in the home.[17]
[edit] Context-Aware Computing: Ted Selker
This group investigates the integration of sensing, reasoning, and memory for user interfaces. They work to integrate virtual experiences relative to the contextual reality of situations, and they create scenarios for demonstrating context-aware computing. With sensors and embedded intelligence, they want to reduce or eliminate symbolic transcription as the pre-eminent form for describing things to computers.
[edit] Music, Mind and Machine: Barry Vercoe
The Music, Mind and Machine group is developing new audio technologies for future interactive media applications. This ranges from automatic sensing of features in existing audio content to extremely compact representations of sound for efficient transmission and control in a networked future.[18]
[edit] Academics
The Media Laboratory has a master's and PhD program and no undergraduate program. Technically, the program is in "Media, Arts and Sciences" (MAS). Admissions to the graduate program is normally a two stage process. Students are first admitted into the Master's Program, and after two years, can apply for the Ph. D program. Students that have a Master's degree already may, however, be accepted directly into the Ph. D program. A new Media Lab Freshman undergraduate program was recently developed.
[edit] Accomplishments
In January 2005, the Lab's chairman Nicholas Negroponte announced at the World Economic Forum a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop, a technology that could revolutionize how the world's children are educated. A non-profit organization, One Laptop Per Child, has been created to oversee the actual deployment, i.e., MIT is not making the $100 Laptop.
Publications from Media Laboratory Faculty and former students include Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, Affective Computing by Rosalind Picard, FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop by Neil Gershenfeld, Design by Numbers by John Maeda, Designing Sociable Robots by Cynthia Breazeal, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas; The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer; and The Connected Family: Bridging the Digital Generation Gap by Seymour Papert, Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky, and Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo by Vanessa Stevens Colella, Eric Klopfer, and Mitchel Resnick.
As of 2005, the Media Lab is responsible for filing for about 100 patents[citations needed].
The MPEG-4 SA project developed at the Media Lab made Structured Audio a practical reality.
Large numbers of Media Lab-developed technologies made it into sponsor products, in particular for toy companies (e.g. Lego Mindstorms developed), as well as some IBM laptops[citations needed].
In 2001, MIT Media Lab collaborated to create two spinoffs, these were Media Lab Asia and Media Lab Europe. Media Lab Asia, based in India, was a result of cooperation with the Government of India but eventually broke off in 2003 after disagreement. Media Lab Europe, based in Dublin, Ireland, was founded with a similar concept in association with Irish universities and government. Media Lab Europe closed in January, 2005.
Created collaboratively by the Computer Museum and the Media Lab, the Computer Clubhouse, a worldwide network of after-school learning centers, focuses on youth from underserved communities who would not otherwise have access to technological tools and activities.
There are numerous Media Lab industry spinoffs. These include:
- eInk, which makes slow, high-resolution, paper-quality displays
- First Mile Solutions, which brings communications infrastructure to rural communities
- Ambient Devices, which produces glanceable information displays
- nTag Interactive, which makes interactive name tags
- Mobule, an application for mobile phones that can instigate interactions between people.
- Squid Labs, engineering consulting company
- ThingMagic, specializes in RFIDs and embedded computers
- Wireless 5th Dimensional Networking, Inc. [19] (acquired in 2006 [20]), which developed the first hybrid search engine
MIT maintains a list of Media Lab spinoffs.
The Media Lab web site has a section "Annual report to the president" that shows major achievements on a year-to-year basis.
[edit] Criticism
Since sponsors have greater intellectual property rights to research done at the Media Lab than at other academic institutions, the lab has been dismissed as industry front-end, rather than an academic institution[citations needed]. Students, though they will own any patents on their work, must share access to IP with the sponsors.
The Media Lab has been criticized for not contributing to undergraduate education, but this criticism may be deceptive and somewhat out-of-date. The lab has a growing Freshman Year program, which involves undergraduates in the Media Lab community early and encourages them to become involved in research. In addition, it generally is one of the more active participants in the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP), a program that supports undergraduates' work on academic research projects. On the other hand, the Media Lab does not have an undergraduate degree program. As a result few undergraduate Media Lab classes exist and few classes from the Media Lab's class offerings teach fundamentals of the nature found in an undergraduate curriculum. Critics contend that supervising undergraduates in assisting with research is far less work, and far less involved, than teaching classes[verification needed], while proponents believe that mentoring undergraduates can be both personally rewarding and time-consuming[verification needed].
The Media Lab also receives some criticism about the quality of its research. Critics claim that the Media Lab engages in research that is technically simplistic and mathematically non-rigorous, and also criticize the Media Lab for using previously developed algorithms or engineering techniques[citations needed]. Defenders argue this critique is based on a misunderstanding of the objectives of the research and that some of their work is designed to develop high level concepts (machine-user interaction, etc.) through the application of existing technology in a novel way or to a new field. For example, the cricket is a robotics platform that is not technologically new, but it allows children to play with robotics in a new way[citations needed].
The Media Lab also receives some criticism about treatment of students[citations needed]. Historically, the Media Lab has had a problem with theft of credit for work[citations needed]. Graduate students would claim publication rights to undergraduate work, and similarly, professors would sometimes take credit for graduate student work[citations needed]. This was mostly or entirely cleaned up under the leadership of Walter Bender[citations needed].
The Media Lab has also been criticized for excessive publicity-seeking and "playing to the gallery." Critics contend that Media Lab researchers expend more effort on media and public relations than on performing rigorous academic research. For example, the dictum for students is to 'demo or die', referring to the frequent demonstrations of work to sponsors[citations needed]. The Media Lab has been derisively referred to as the marketing department of MIT by some within the MIT community[citations needed].
[edit] Funding model
Funding for the Media Lab works differently from most academic institutions in that the Media Lab receives a great deal of corporate sponsorship. The Media Lab receives substantial funding from a consortium of commercial partners, who gain access to the intellectual property generated at the lab. Rather than accepting funding on a per-project or per-group basis, the Media Lab asks sponsors to fund general themes of the lab. Sponsors have some access to all the work done at the lab, and the money goes into a common pot that is then divided internally at the Media Lab. In this way, researchers at the lab can pursue more radical, risky projects that would otherwise not be able to find funding.
In addition, specific projects and researchers are funded more traditionally through government institutions including NSF and DARPA. Also, consortia with other schools or other departments at MIT, such as the Center for Bits and Atoms, are often able to have money that does not enter into the common pool.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- MIT Media Lab homepage
- Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte
- The Media Lab : Inventing the Future at M. I. T. by Stewart Brand, ISBN 0-14-009701-5
- The Lab that Fell to Earth by Brendan I. Koerner, Wired Magazine
- Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT
