MIT Reports to the President 2000–2001

Media Laboratory

In This Report Research Achievements Collaborations within MIT Media Lab Europe Sponsors Research Sponsors Corporate Research Partners Consortia Special Interest Groups Special Funds Gifts of Equipment Personnel Media Lab Sponsors

For the Media Laboratory, 2000-2001 can be characterized as a year of expanding boundaries—both intellectual and global. While continuing to develop technologies that make the digital world more meaningful, livable, and responsive to our everyday needs, the Lab is also focusing on ways to make these technologies-and the societal benefits they can bring-accessible to the most remote areas of the world. As part of this effort, in June 2001 the Lab announced a one-year exploratory project with the government of India to create Media Lab Asia. The goal is to work with the government of India and local non-government organizations to apply the most sophisticated emerging technologies to the daily problems of India's poorest and least educated people.

Eight months earlier, in October, more than 200 people from nearly 40 nations came to the Lab to launch Digital Nations, a new consortium focused on helping people in developing areas become fluent in digital technologies. The goal is for people from all walks of life to use these technologies to develop innovative local solutions to local problems. Other ongoing initiatives with global outreach include LINCOS, a joint project with the Costa Rican Foundation for Sustainable Development, which brings wireless "digital town centers" to remote areas of Latin America; ThinkCycle, a "grassroots" initiative by several Lab graduate students to create an online database to enable open-source, technical problem solving among university students everywhere; and the Center for Digital Culture, a joint Media Lab/Telmex initiative in Mexico City, which is seeking opportunities for technological advances that derive naturally from cross-cultural exchange, where the potential for human application is greatest.

The past year has also brought significant changes to the administration of the Lab. In September, Nicholas Negroponte, director since the Lab's founding in 1980, announced that he would take on the newly created position of senior director, a "chairman-like" role that more accurately reflects his increased attention to external and international relations. Walter Bender, a researcher at the Lab since its inception and head of the Electronic Publishing group, was named executive director, with a focus on internal growth and development of the Lab's research and sponsor relations. Sony Career Development Professor John Maeda, head of the Aesthetics and Computation group, was named associate director, and will focus on design and communication.

The Lab has also experienced numerous physical moves—including a newly established "outpost" at One Cambridge Center—as temporary measures to handle its considerable growth over the past several years. The long-term solution involves a major expansion that includes the construction of a seven-story building designed by Fumihiko Maki, and a complete renovation of the Lab's current building. The project, which will roughly double the current footprint of the Lab, is slated for completion in 2004.

Research Achievements

A sampling of 2000-2001 Media Laboratory research accomplishments includes:

The microfabrication of an interferometric accelerometer that offers advantages over existing accelerometers in terms of resolution, size, and potentially low cost. Lab researchers have manufactured 14 accelerometer devices capable of detecting accelerations at the micro-g and nano-g levels, on a single 4-inch silicon wafer.

A new technology to mass-produce super-cheap transistors by printing them directly onto a plastic substrate using a solution of cadmium selenide nanocrystals.

Expressive Footwear (sneakers to be exact) that sport a wireless suite of sensors, a microcomputer, and a data link that measure more than a dozen different parameters of motion and feed this information wirelessly into a PC, which uses a unique program to turn the movements into sound. This project won a 2000 Discover Magazine Award for Technical Innovation.

Periscope, a browsing device that allows a user to explore the physical world by navigating its digital shadow—in this case, Web pages situated at the places they represent in the real world.

A prototype for a hand-held, human-powered generator that creates five watts of power by being twirled over a person's head by a string. The device has implications for providing affordable power for simple computers in the poorest and most remote areas of the globe.

Wireless "digital town centers," capable of providing even the most remote and underdeveloped areas of the world with telephone, e-mail, and Web access. The centers are designed to bring new forms of medical care, education, entertainment, and commerce to the remote areas.

Wearable computing, which allows us to move beyond PCs and laptops and wear our computers as we would eyeglasses or clothing. One project, MIThril, combines light-weight RISC processors, a single-cable power/data "body bus" and high-bandwidth wireless networking in a package that is nearly as light, comfortable, and unobtrusive as ordinary street clothing.

Expressive synthetic characters that inhabit virtual environments and interact autonomously in response to users' actions, appearing to have minds of their own.

New ways of joining the physical environment and cyberspace by making "tangible bits" accessible through everyday physical surfaces like walls or desktops, and eventually through household surfaces like refrigerator doors. One new project, ComTouch, focuses on providing haptic, interpersonal communication to help those who are the deaf and blind communicate through touch.

A new class of low-cost, wireless sensors that can be used to bring digital functionality to low-cost consumer products. An example would be a 5-cent wireless temperature sensor that could be embedded in cookware or packaging for food or medicine.

More effective, meaningful online news services. These range from Time Frames, a tool to make online news more relevant by augmenting a general news source with small amounts of temporally correlated information, to Brico, a computer knowledge base that utilizes the meaning of words to create "sense tagging" for multilingual translations.

Autonomous agents capable of having a real-time, face-to-face conversation with a human. These agents are human in form and communicate using both verbal and non-verbal modalities.

Chat Circles, an abstract graphical interface for synchronous conversation, creating a richer environment for online discussions.

New techniques for information hiding, including the groundbreaking use of mid-level vision models and the placement of unique identifiers on physical objects.

Toy Symphony, a three-year project involving children, soloists, composers, and symphony orchestras around the world, which aims to radically alter how children are introduced to music, and to redefine the relationship between professional musicians and young people.

A handheld digital mirror that serves as a simple, everyday diagnostic imaging tool for people to "photograph" health indicators, such as blood sugar levels or heart rate.

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Collaborations within MIT

In addition to the more than 250 research projects under way within the Lab's more than 30 research groups, numerous research initiatives involve a broader MIT collaboration. These include:

The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project (funded by the Carnegie Corporation), which seeks to provide the first comprehensive study of voting technology to be completed in the wake of the 2000 U.S. national election.

Joint efforts with the Program in Science, Technology, and Society, the Sloan School of Management, and other MIT departments and programs in developing Media Lab Asia.

A major collaborative bioengineering project with the Departments of Chemical Engineering, Biology, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the Division of Bioengineering and Environmental Health, to develop three novel devices to detect molecular activity: a single-electron transistor, a scanning-probe potentiometer, and a cantilever stress sensor.

Media Lab Europe

Media Lab Europe (MLE) was launched in Dublin on 24-25 July 2000, with a major symposium attended by some 400 invitees from the academic, business, and arts communities. In December, Rudolph Burger, an expert in digital photography and a former Xerox Corporation vice president, was named chief executive officer and director, replacing Nicholas Negroponte who had served as interim CEO and who remains as chairman of the Board of Directors.

MLE expects its research staff and graduate student population (many of whom have come from the Media Lab) to number approximately 40 by September 2001. Current research groups include Affective Feedback, Nanostructures, and Everyday Learning. In addition, MLE has initiated more than 10 collaborative projects with Irish universities-ranging from "Intelligent Sensing Systems for Science Education and Bio-Monitoring" to "A Multilingual Development Environment for Speech Technologies." On June 21 MLE hosted a major event, Cross Currents, attended by some 120 representatives of European corporations, at which researchers from both MLE and the MIT Media Lab presented their work. Four other workshops involving MIT faculty were held this past spring: Software Agents, Context-Aware Computing, Narrative, and e-Communities.

MLE sponsors are eircom, Ericsson, Intel, Allied Irish Bank, BBC, RTE (Irish Broadcaster), and 360networks. Equipment donors include Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, and Motorola.

Sponsors

In Fiscal Year 2001, the Media Laboratory received a total of $36.1 million from sponsors, an increase of 18 percent over Fiscal Year 2000. Corporate sponsors provided over $34.6 million of that amount; the remaining $1.5 million came from government funding, non-profit organizations, and subcontracts with other universities.

Research Sponsors

New directed-research sponsors included Eastman Kodak, which supported the work of Henry Lieberman on common-sense knowledge, and France Telecom, which supported Professor Justine Cassell and her Gesture and Narrative Language research group.

The Media Laboratory was awarded government grants for several directed research projects in FY'01. These include:

• "Foundations for Quantum Algorithms" (Professor Isaac Chuang), from the Army Research Office
• "Micro and Nanoscale Electronic Devices for Analyzing DNA and Proteins" (Professor Scott Manalis), from AFOSR
• Four DARPA-funded projects: "Modeling, Creation, and Analysis of Adaptive Agent Systems" (Oliver Selfridge), "Architectures and Applications for Scalable Quantum Information Systems" (Professor Isaac Chuang), RF (Radio Frequency) Nixels" (Professor Joseph Jacobson), and "Cell Biological Decision Processes" (Professor Scott Manalis)

In addition, the National Science Foundation provided grants to Professor Deb Roy for "Multimodal Learning for Assistive Aids," to Professor Rosalind Picard for "The Role of Emotion in Propelling the Learning Process," and to Professor Mitchel Resnick for "The PIE Network."

Corporate Research Partners

Learning Lab Denmark joined the Media Laboratory in Fiscal Year 2001 at the Strategic Research Partner level, which gives them membership in all of the Lab's consortia and special interest groups.

Consortia

In FY'01 the Lab announced the formation of a new consortium, Digital Nations, which addresses major social challenges through the innovative design and use of new technologies. Its ultimate goal is to empower people in all walks of life to invent new opportunities for themselves and their societies.

The News in the Future consortium is now information: organized (I:O), to reflect its broader focus on how information is described, presented, and used. LG Career Development Professor Brian Smith is the consortium's new head.

New sponsors joining the Lab's consortia include:

• Digital Life: 360networks, Inc., Deutsche Telekom AG, Hallmark Cards, Inc., and Sprint/United Management Company
• information: organized: McGraw-Hill
• Things That Think: Consignia PLC, engeneOS, Inc., France Telecom, Pitney Bowes, Inc., and Zyomyx, Inc.

Special Interest Groups

A new Health special interest group (SIG), was established in Fiscal Year'01. Combining research in the areas of nanotechnology, biosensors, body networks and smart homes, it explores ways to give consumers the tools to take control of their health and maintain their lifestyle. Research areas include: development of microfabricated biosensors for health and lifestyle maintenance; wearable systems and smart environments; data-rich, personalized medical science; and feedback systems for reinforcing healthy behavior and medical compliance, and for promoting self-knowledge.

Penny PC has spun off into three more specialized SIGs:

• IPID, which looks beyond low-cost tags to ask how billions of inexpensive communicating objects can be tied together into coherent systems, and which serves as an interface for sponsors to participate in activities of MIT's Auto-ID Center;
• Silicon Biology, which explores how micro- and nanoscale fabrication technologies offer fundamentally new ways to probe, understand, and ultimately control complex biological systems
• Personal Fabrication, which focuses on making things, and the future of how things are made, from nano- to macroscale. It has two basic goals: first, to involve members in learning new fabrication techniques (CAD tools, 3-D printing, laser cutting, vacuum forming, AFM assemblers), and to introduce them to the latest developments in rapid and desktop fabrication; and second, to explore the future of the desktop fabrication.

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Special Funds

Several of the Laboratory's most generous sponsors continued to support the Laboratory through corporate fellows programs. In total, ten corporations supported fellowship programs during FY'01.

Four sponsors—Intel, Mattel, National Geographic Society, and Telmex—funded new fellowship programs, while BT, eircom, IBM, LEGO, McDonald's, Motorola, and Toshiba continued ongoing programs, supporting the following fellows:

• BT: Aggelos Bletsas, Vanessa Colella, Paulo Rocha e Oliveira, Joseph Pompei, Nitin Sawhney, Edison Thomaz, and Jim Youll
• eircom: Constantine Christakos, Aisling Kelliher, Jonah Peretti, Jung-Hoon Seo, Ramesh Srinivasan, and Sean Wheeler
• IBM: Mark Feldmeier, Vadim Gerasimov, Karrie Karahalios, Jeremy Levitan, Casey Reas, Casey Smith, Brygg Ullmer, and Sunil Vemuri
• Intel: Bill Butera, Danah Boyd, Ben Piper, Jared Schiffman, and Dimitris Vyzovitis
• LEGO: Mike Ananny, Rahul Bhargava, and Claudia Urrea
• Mattel: Catherine Vaucelle
• McDonald's: LaShaun Collier, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, Wendy Ju, and Daniel Stevenson
• Motorola: Barbara Barry, Rick Borovoy, Rich Fletcher, Nin Loh, Cameron Marlow, Matt Reynolds, and Adam Smith
• National Geographic Society: Andrew Wheeler
• Telmex: Ernesto Arroyo, Marco Escobedo, José María González Pinto, Jorge Martínez, Marco Monroy, Selene Mota, and Juan Rivas
• Toshiba: Ari Benbasat, Angela Chang, and Rich DeVaul

Gifts of Equipment

In Fiscal Year 2001, United Technologies Corporation signed an agreement to provide the Media Lab with more than $5 million worth of equipment to be part of the infrastructure of the new Media Laboratory building. In recognition of this, these systems will be known as the United Technologies Corporation Intelligent Building Infrastructure Testbed Laboratory.

Personnel

New appointments

Sherry Lassiter was appointed as program manager for the Things That Think consortium in March 2001. A recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT in 1993-94, Lassiter has also worked as a science documentary television producer, writer, and director in the Boston area, and on national television series such as Scientific American Frontiers.

The Lab made several new administrative appointments during the past year: Ariane Martins was given a three-year appointment as program manager for the Toy Symphony Opera, Peter Rombult was appointed as a grants administrator for the Lab, Stacie Slotnick was appointed writer/content manager in the Office of Communications and Sponsor Relations, and Robert Hayden, David Lieberman, and Keith Odom as Lab fiscal officers.

The Lab also made several research staff appointments during FY '01: David Cavallo was given a three-year appointment as research scientist in the Future of Learning group; Ryan Chin was given a one-year appointment as research specialist in the CC++ special interest group; and Diane Willow was given a three-year appointment as learning projects designer in the Lifelong Kindergarten group.

Four technical staff members were hired: Stephen Berezansky, a desktop computing specialist; Thomas Greene, a systems engineering/support specialist; and Will Glesnes and Jon Ferguson, both whom resigned last year to join start-up companies, returned to the Lab this past spring.

Promotions

Several administrative assistants were promoted to staff during Fiscal Year '01: Melissa Corley was promoted to project coordinator of Information:Organized; Joanna Hills was promoted to administrative coordinator of the Human Resources Office; Meg Kelly-Savic was promoted to administrative coordinator for the Program in Media Arts and Sciences headquarters' office; Colleen Lefebvre was promoted to fiscal office manager; Karen Navarro was promoted to project coordinator for the Health Special Interest Group; and Connie Van Rheenen was promoted to executive coordinator in the Associate Director's Office.

There were several promotions of staff during the past year: James Blanchflower, who has served as fiscal officer for the Lab since 1993, was promoted to associate director for accounting; Susan Bottari was promoted to executive assistant for the Things That Think consortium; John DiFrancesco was promoted to fabrications resources manager; Julie Fresina was promoted to facilities manager; Betty Lou McClanahan was promoted to executive director of the CC++ special interest group; and Greg Tucker was promoted to director of facilities.

New visitors and affiliates

Anna Pandolfo was appointed as visiting scholar in the information: organized group from July 1, 2000 through July 1, 2002.

Ed Hammond was appointed as research affiliate for the Media Lab/Media Lab Europe collaboration from September 1, 2000 through August 31, 2001.

Mario Fromow Rangel from Telmex was appointed research affiliate from October 1, 2000 to June 30, 2001.

Magda Ismail was appointed as visiting scientist for the Harvard/Digital Nations collaboration from November 27, 2000 through November 27, 2001.

Rudy Burger, Chief Executive Officer of Media Lab Europe, was appointed research affiliate from December 1, 2000 through November 30, 2001.

Eleanora Badilla-Saxe was appointed as visiting scientist for the Digital Nations Consortium from January 1, 2001 to December 31, 2002.

The following researchers from BT Laboratories were appointed to the Media Lab as research affiliates: Ian Neild, from December 1, 2000 through November 30, 2001; and Steven Whittaker, from February 1, 2001 to January 31, 2002.

Two employees from the U.S. Postal Service were appointed to the Media Lab as research affiliates: Pat McGee, from April 1, 2001 to March 31, 2002; and Kenneth Paul from April 16, 2001 through April 15, 2002.

Susumu Kubota from Toshiba Corporation was appointed as research affiliate from April 14, 2001 to April 13, 2002.

Jae-Chol Lee was appointed as visiting scientist from June 11, 2001 to August 31, 2001.

Tom Gardos from Intel was reappointed as research affiliate for a second year from June 14, 2001 to June 14, 2002.

Resignations

Tanya Pfeffer, administrative computing support specialist, left the Lab to relocate to Minnesota; Chad Brustin, project coordinator of the Arts and Expression group, left the Lab to relocate to Arizona.

Walter Bender

More information about the Media Laboratory can be found at http://www.media.mit.edu/.

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