|
HomePage |
|
|
|
|
Research at MIT
"The Media Lab has long been
recognized as a leader in probing beyond the boundaries of the
current and conventional understanding of systems technologies and
their interactions with people, and for articulating its findings and
innovative results across a wide span of media."
–IBM Systems Journal
The MIT Media Laboratory occupies a unique position in the rapidly evolving landscape of new media and information technologies. It was founded by MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte and the late Jerome Wiesner, who foresaw the coming convergence of computing, publishing, and broadcast, fueled by changes in the communications industry. As this convergence accelerated, it spurred interconnected developments in the unusual range of disciplines that the Laboratory brought together, including cognition, electronic music, graphic design, video, and holography, as well as work in computation and human-machine interfaces.
True to the vision of its founders, today's Laboratory continues to focus on the study, invention, and creative use of digital technologies to enhance the ways that people think, express, and communicate ideas, and explore new scientific frontiers.
Program in Media Arts and Sciences
Unlike other laboratories at MIT, the Media Laboratory comprises both a degree-granting academic program (the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, or "MAS") and a research program. A predominantly atelier-style teaching and research structure allows students and faculty to work together, with the Laboratory as a studio, exploring the technical, cognitive, and aesthetic bases of successful, technologically mediated human interaction.
Graduate enrollment totals almost 150, split almost evenly between masters and doctoral students. In addition, another 25 graduate students are formally based in other MIT departments, but carry out their research at the Media Laboratory. More than 200 undergraduates come to work at the Laboratory each year through MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). The Laboratory also offers an experimental alternative freshman-year program, where freshmen do their recitations at the Laboratory, do a UROP, and are immersed in the fundamentals of computational media design, i.e., the principles of analysis and synthesis in the computational medium.
Looking Forward
The Media Laboratory vision of "enabling technology for learning and expression by people and machines" emphasizes technologies that assist people in constructing their own tools for expression. The Laboratory advocates a process that includes both imagination and realization, and criticism and reflection.
The Laboratory's early focus was on media convergence; this theme was explored from both the point of view of infrastructure and application (including seminal work on digital television and the personalization of media content). Today, the Laboratory has seven research foci: Viral Communications, Machines with Common Sense, Arts and Invention, Embodied Learning, Extreme Interfaces, eDevelopment, and Bits and Atoms. As described below, these themes outline a future where, mediated by technology as diverse as robotic assistants, artificial skin, and renegade radios, innovation becomes the domain of all and is guided by human social, expressive, and intellectual activities.
1. Viral Communications
The communications industry is about to undergo as radical a change as the computer industry did after the advent of the PC: communications will become diffused, embedded in everyday things, personally owned, and incrementally changed - a consumer industry versus a universal infrastructure. As with the Internet, disruptive innovations will emerge from surprising corners by new players. Viral Communications is the organizing principle for new work in the areas of sensing, data representation, human economic behavior, and interaction.
2. Machines with Common Sense
Marvin Minsky says, "Commonsense thinking is actually more complex than many of the intellectual accomplishments that attract more attention and respect, because the mental skills we call 'expertise' often engage large amounts of knowledge but usually employ only a few types of representations. In contrast, common sense involves many kinds of representations and thus requires a larger range of different skills." To give computers common sense is not to give them in-depth reasoning skills; rather, it is to imbue them with the breadth of knowledge about the physical, social, sensory, emotional, and psychological relationship people have with the world around them.
3. Arts and Invention
State-of-the-art technology allows us to invent almost anything one can imagine. The trick, therefore, is in the imagining. Because innovations migrate quickly from the engineering bench to the public at large, that public becomes an early partner in the process - not just as consumers, but as re-inventors. We are exploring how human creativity, learning, social and physical interactions, and a sense of place guide the inventive process in domains from products to purely expressive activities.
4. Embodied Learning
How do we build machines that work with us in tasks from helping your grandmother climb stairs to buying a house? Curious machines (machines with embodied learning) are sometimes robots, sometimes agents, and occasionally just lightweight gizmos that we encounter in everyday life. Imbued with cognitive, social, and emotional intelligence, we build into them an inquisitive nature so that they learn by working with us and teach by helping out.
5. Extreme Interfaces (in collaboration with Media Lab Europe, our European research partner in Dublin, Ireland)
Research on the development of technologies at the intersection of information technology and the human body, in order to transform our abilities to perceive, understand, and interact with the world around us. Intimate sensory and cognitive connections between humans and digital systems augment our existing senses, and can also help us develop a new human sense that is complementary to, but unbounded by, our five biological senses. We are developing technologies that not only remove barriers of space and time but also help establish understanding between people.
6. eDevelopment (in collaboration with Media Lab Asia, our research partner in India)
In an era where tragic acts of terrorism trigger reflection about how little the world's people know about each other, the Media Laboratory continues to look outward - examining ways that digital technologies can contribute to a connected world population. Numerous international programs are focused on developing sustainable and culturally appropriate solutions for improving health-care delivery, connectivity, and economic development for some of world's poorest and most remote populations. Specifically, we are addressing how to bring digitally enabled services to everyone on earth and developing grassroots design initiatives with the goal to create a sustainable digital ecology that maintains traditional values and community while opening economic and expressive opportunities.
7. Bits and Atoms
The Center for Bits and Atoms (NSF-ITR) is researching projects ranging from printing active electronics to painting computers to programming molecular machines. Its central focus is the creation of engineered systems on an unprecedented scale, i.e., the development of a theory of engineering emergence that can guide the creation of enormously complex systems without explicitly specifying how they work, so that success rather than failure can be an emergent property.
Passions
The Media Lab is ultimately about people, not projects. In conclusion, I've quoted two of our faculty regarding their passions:
"Now more than ever we need people who can lead humanity towards technologies that improve society rather than technologies that simply improve over technology itself. I was attracted back to MIT from my career as a designer in Japan by the words of President Vest, 'Engineering will be the humanities of the twenty-first century.' I believe that as MIT continues to redefine itself-not only as a center for world-class technology developments, but also as an institution dedicated to significant cultural developments-bold initiatives must be undertaken to realize this opportunity." –John Maeda, Aesthetics + Computation group
"E.B. White said 'If the world were
merely seductive that would be easy. If it were merely challenging
that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a
desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This
makes it hard to plan the day.' At its best the Media Lab offered
me-and I believe others as well-some days when these two passionate
desires came together."
–Seymour Papert, Future of Learning group
|
HomePage |
|
|
|
|