MIT Media Lab

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Established	1985
Budget	$50 million
Field of research	Technology, multimedia, sciences, art, design
Director	Joi Ito
Location	Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Website	media.mit.edu

The MIT Media Lab is an interdisciplinary research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from technology, media, science, art and design. As of 2014, Media Lab's research groups include neurobiology, biologically inspired fabrication, socially engaging robots, emotive computing, bionics, and hyperinstruments.

The Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT President Jerome Wiesner, and is housed in the Wiesner Building (designed by I. M. Pei), also known as Building E15. The Lab has been written about in the popular press since 1988, when Stewart Brand published The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T., and its work was a regular feature of technology journals in the 1990s. In 2009, it expanded into a second building.

Administration

The founding director of the lab was Nicholas Negroponte, who directed it until 2000. Later directors were Walter Bender (2000–2006), Frank Moss (2006–2011), and Joi Ito (2011-present).

As of 2014, the Media Lab had roughly 70 administrative and support staff members. Associate Directors of the Lab were Hiroshi Ishii and Andrew Lippman. Pattie Maes and Mitchel Resnick were co-heads of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, and the Lab's Chief Knowledge Officer was Henry Holtzman. 

The Media Lab has at times had regional branches in other parts of the world, such as Media Lab Europe and Media Lab Asia, each with their own staff and governing bodies.

Funding model

The Lab's primary funding comes from corporate sponsorship. Rather than accepting funding on a per-project or per-group basis, the Lab asks sponsors to fund general themes; sponsors can then connect with Media Lab research. Specific projects and researchers are also funded more traditionally through government institutions including the NIH, NSF, and DARPA. Also, consortia with other schools or other departments at MIT are often able to have money that does not enter into the common pool.

Intellectual property

Companies sponsoring the Lab can share in the Lab's intellectual property without paying license fees or royalties. Non-sponsors cannot make use of Media Lab developments for two years after technical disclosure is made to MIT and Media Lab sponsors. The Media Lab generates approximately 20 new patents every year.

Research at the Lab

Some recurring themes of work at the Media Lab include human adaptability, human computer interaction, education and communication, artistic creation and visualization, and designing technology for the developing world. Other research focus includes machines with common sense, sociable robots, prosthetics, sensor networks, musical devices, city design, and public health. Research programs all include iterative development of prototypes which are tested and displayed for visitors.

Each of these areas of research may incorporate others. Interaction design research includes designing intelligent objects and environments. Educational research has also included integrating more computation into learning activities - including software for learning, programmable toys, and artistic or musical instruments. Examples include Lego Mindstorms, the PicoCricket, and One Laptop per Child.

Research groups

As of 2017, the MIT Media Lab has the following research groups:

• Affective Computing: "advancing wellbeing by using new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion"
• Biomechatronics: "enhancing human physical capability."
• Camera Culture: "making the invisible visible – inside our bodies, around us, and beyond – for health, work, and connection"
• City Science: "looking beyond smart cities"
• Civic Media: "creating technology for social change"
• Collective Learning: "transforming data into knowledge"
• Conformable Decoders": "converting the patterns of nature and the human body into beneficial signals and energy"
• Fluid Interfaces: "designing wearable systems for cognitive enhancement"
• Human Dynamics: "exploring how social networks can influence our lives in business, health, governance, and technology adoption and diffusions"
• Lifelong Kindergarten: "engaging people in creative learning experiences"
• Mediated Matter: "designing for, with, and by nature"
• Molecular Machines: "engineering at the limits of complexity with molecular-scale parts"
• Nano-Cybernetic Biotrek: "inventing disruptive technologies for nanoelectronic computation and creating new paradigms for life-machine symbiosis"
• Object-Based Media: "changing storytelling, communication, and everyday life through sensing, understanding, and new interface technologies"
• Opera of the Future: "extending expression, learning, and health through innovations in musical composition, performance, and participation"
• Personal Robots: "building socially engaging robots and interactive technologies to help people live healthier lives, connect with others, and learn better"
• Poetic Justice: "exploring new forms of social justice through art"
• Responsive Environments: "augmenting and mediating human experience, interaction, and perception with sensor networks"
• Scalable Cooperation: "reimagining human cooperation in the age of social media and artificial intelligence"
• Sculpting Evolution: "exploring evolutionary and ecological engineering"
• Signal Kinetics: "extending human and computer abilities in sensing, communication, and actuation through signals and networks"
• Social Machines: "promoting deeper learning and understanding in human networks"
• Space Enabled: "advancing justice in Earth's complex systems using designs enabled by space"
• Synthetic Neurobiology: "revealing insights into the human condition and repairing brain disorders via novel tools for mapping and fixing brain computations"
• Tangible Media: "seamlessly coupling the worlds of bits and atoms by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation"
• Viral Communications: "creating scalable technologies that evolve with user inventiveness"

Academic program

The Media Arts and Sciences program is a part of MIT's School of Architecture and Planning, and includes three levels of study: a doctoral program, a master's of science program, and a program that offers an alternative to the standard MIT freshman year as well as a set of undergraduate subjects that may form the basis for a future joint major. All graduate students are fully supported (tuition plus a stipend) from the outset, normally by appointments as research assistants at the Media Laboratory, where they work on research programs and faculty projects, including assisting with courses. These research activities typically take up about half of a student's time in the degree program. 

The Media Arts and Sciences academic program have a close relationship with the Media Lab. Most Media Lab faculty are professors of Media Arts and Sciences. Students who earn a degree in Media Arts and Sciences have been predominantly in residence at the Media Lab, taking classes and doing research. Some students from other programs at MIT, such as Mechanical Engineering, or Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, do their research at the Media Lab, working with a Media Lab/Media Arts and Sciences faculty advisor, but earn their degrees (such as MEng or an MS in EECS) from other departments.

Buildings

The new Media Lab expansion (Building E14). Original Wiesner Building (E15) is visible at left.

 

In addition to the Media Lab, the combined original Wiesner building (E15) and new (E14) buildings also host the List Visual Arts Center, the School of Architecture and Planning's Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), and MIT's Program in Comparative Media Studies. 

In 2009, the Media Lab expanded into a new building designed by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki. The local architect of record was Leers Weinzapfel Associates, of Boston. The Maki building has predominantly glass walls, with long lines of sight through the building, making ongoing research visible and encouraging connections and collaboration.

Faculty and academic research staff

Media Arts and Sciences faculty and academic research staff are principal investigators/heads of the Media Lab's various research groups. They also advise Media Arts and Sciences graduate students and mentor MIT undergraduates. "Most departments accept grad students based on their prospects for academic success; the Media Lab attempts to select ones that will best be able to help with some of the ongoing projects."

As of 2014, there are more than 25 faculty and academic research staff members, including a dozen named professorships. A full list of Media Lab faculty and academic research staff, with bios and other information, is available via the Media Lab Website.

Selected publications

Books

• Cesar A. Hidalgo: Why Information Grows (Basic Books, 2015)
• Cynthia L. Breazeal: Designing Sociable Robots, Biologically Inspired Intelligent Robots (co-editor with Yoseph Bar-Cohen)
• Dan Ariely: Predictably Irrational (HarperCollins 2008)
• David Shrier: New Solutions for Cybersecurity (MIT Press, 2018)
• Frank Moss: The Sorcerers and Their Apprentices: How the Digital Magicians of the MIT Media Lab Are Creating the Innovative Technologies That Will Transform Our Lives
• Idit Harel Caperton: Children Designers
• John Maeda: The Laws of Simplicity, Design by Numbers
• Joichi Ito and Jeffrey Howe: "Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future" (Hachette, 2016)
• Kent Larson: Louis I. Kahn: Unbuilt Masterworks
• Marvin Minsky, Seymour Papert: Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry
• Marvin Minsky: The Emotion Machine: Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence, and the Future of the Human Mind, Society of Mind
• Mitchel Resnick: Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds
• Neil Gershenfeld: When Things Start to Think
• Nicholas Negroponte: Being Digital
• Rosalind W. Picard: Affective Computing
• Seymour Papert: The Children's Machine: Rethinking School in the Age of the Computer, Mindstorms: Children, Computers, and Powerful Ideas
• Stephen A. Benton and V. Michael Bove, Jr.: Holographic Imaging (Wiley 2008)
• Vanessa Stevens Colella, Eric Klopfer, Mitchel Resnick: Adventures in Modeling: Exploring Complex, Dynamic Systems with StarLogo
• William J. Mitchell: Imagining MIT: Designing a Campus for the Twenty-First Century, Me++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City

Outputs and spin-offs

Some Media Lab-developed technologies made it into products or public software packages, such as the Lego Mindstorms, LEGO WeDo and the pointing stick in IBM laptop keyboards, the Benton hologram used in most credit cards, the Fisher-Price's Symphony Painter, the Nortel Wireless Mesh Network, the NTT Comware Sensetable, the Taito's Karaoke-on-Demand Machine. A 1994 device called the Sensor Chair used to control a musical orchestra was adapted by several car manufacturers into capacitive sensors to prevent dangerous airbag deployments.

The MPEG-4 SA project developed at the Media Lab made structured audio a practical reality and the Aspen Movie Map was the precursor to the ideas in Google Street View. 

In 2001, two research centers were spun off: 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 a disagreement. Media Lab Europe, based in Dublin, Ireland, was founded with a similar concept in association with Irish universities and government, and 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.

Launched in 2003, Scratch is a block-based programming language and community developed for children 8-16, and used by people of all ages to learn programming. Millions of people have created Scratch projects in a wide variety of settings, including homes, schools, museums, libraries, and community centers. 

In January 2005, the Lab's chairman emeritus Nicholas Negroponte announced at the World Economic Forum a new research initiative to develop a $100 laptop computer. A non-profit organization, One Laptop per Child, was created to oversee the actual deployment, MIT did not manufacture or distribute the device. 

The Synthetic Neurobiology group created reagents and devices for the analysis of brain circuits are in use by hundreds of biology labs around the world. 

In 2011, Ramesh Raskar's group published their femto-photography technique, that is able to image the movement of individual light pulses.

Spin-offs

Media Lab industry spin-offs include:

• Affectiva, Inc., commercializing software that detects emotions in pictures of faces
• Ambient Devices, which produces glanceable information displays
• Dimagi, a company that develops software for healthcare in the developing world.
• E Ink, which makes electronic paper displays that power the Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook.
• Elance
• EyeNetra, which makes eye tests as $2 clip-ons for mobile phones, including potential use to correct vision for virtual reality displays.
• Formlabs makes high-resolution, desktop 3D printers (spin out from Center for Bits and Atoms)
• Groundhog Technologies, global leader in mobility intelligence and its applications on geo-analytics, geo-marketing, and network optimization.
• Harmonix, game company creator of Rock Band and Guitar Hero.
• Holosonics selling "audio spotlight" speakers using sound from ultrasound technology
• Oblong Industries, creators of the digital screen used by Tom Cruise in Minority Report
• One Laptop per Child's XO laptop
• Potion Design, an interactive design firm
• RadioSherpa, an online guide for HD Radio stations. acquired by Tune-in.
• reQall, a memory aid company.
• Salient Stills, a video resolution enhancement and video forensics company founded in 1996, acquired by DAC in 2013. The combined entity has been rebranded Salient Sciences.
• Sifteo, a company that has developed a tabletop gaming platform that grew out of Siftables.
• Squid Labs, engineering consulting company
• The Echo Nest, a music intelligence platform
• Zebra Imaging, a digital holographic display company
• First Mile Solutions, bringing communications infrastructure to rural communities
• Nanda, a company that markets the Clocky alarm clock
• Physiio International, merged with Empatica; manufacturer of wearable medical sensors
• Supermechanical, manufacturer of Twine, a wifi interface for various environmental sensors; and Range, a smartphone-connected thermometer
• Wireless 5th Dimensional Networking, Inc. (acquired in 2006), which developed the first hybrid search engine