Struggling to Regain Technological Buzz After Bubble's Burst

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Struggling to Regain Technological Buzz After Bubble's Burst

March 29, 2003
By BARNABY J. FEDER




 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Call it buzz, cool, magic or whatever -
the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
cannot thrive without it.

But like many of the businesses that flourished during the
1990's technology boom, the lab - where researchers talked
about cyberspace, multimedia and virtual reality long
before those words became household terms - has struggled
to generate excitement and reposition itself now that the
bubble has burst. 

In the rambunctiously creative years after its founding in
1985, the Media Lab was celebrated for its insights into
how technology might change traditional forms of
communication and everyday life.

These days, other research institutions are competing with
the lab to create prototypes of the communication
technologies of the future. Newer subjects of interest like
atomic and molecular studies, as well as overseas expansion
and new links to other parts of M.I.T., threaten to blur
the lab's image. And raising money from corporate sponsors,
who have in the past provided almost all the lab's
financing, has become tougher.

"There's lots of competition now," said Robert Buderi, an
editor at Technology Review, a magazine published by
M.I.T., and an expert on corporate research. "I can see
many of the same concepts demonstrated at places like
Carnegie Mellon, Microsoft, Xerox PARC, I.B.M. and U.C.
Berkeley." 

Organizationally, at least, the Media Lab is still in a
league of its own. In the last few years, it has given
birth to sister labs in India and Ireland, as well as the
Center for Bits and Atoms, a federally financed research
center that concentrates on physics and chemistry projects
and is housed in the lab's building, which was designed by
I. M. Pei. All of them now operate under the umbrella of a
new organization called Media Labs, headed by Nicholas
Negroponte, the famously outspoken founding director of the
Media Lab. 

"Fundamentally, we bet on people and then continually
experiment with how to organize it," said Walter Bender,
who succeeded Dr. Negroponte as director of the original
lab in September 2000. "I don't think that anyone has as
diverse a collection of activities, and the real magic of
the place is the interaction."

Unlike other major university research institutions, the
Media Lab has always relied on its ability to attract
corporate sponsors. Until the recession, the success of
that approach was the envy of other institutions.

"There was a culture there of spending money like water,"
said Aaron Bobick, who left the Media Lab in 1999 to become
the director of the Graphics, Visualization and Usability
Center at Georgia Tech. "It used to be that money wasn't a
reason that things couldn't get done."

The Media Lab still has plenty of corporate fans. More than
75 percent of this year's $40 million budget comes from 120
companies, which share access to the technology developed
at the lab. 

But attracting cash has been a struggle in recent years,
leading the lab to turn increasingly to governments and
foundations - sources that it once ignored. Foreign
governments account for most of the budgets of the sister
labs overseas, and the $13.75 million grant from the
National Science Foundation in late 2001 to set up the
Center for Bits and Atoms far exceeded any previous
contribution from Washington.

The new sources have not been enough to avoid sobering
cutbacks. In 2001, the lab imposed sharp reductions in
travel, restrictions on free meals and, eventually, the
layoffs of 40 support employees, the first such cuts in its
history. 

Dr. Bender said the corporate share of the Media Lab's
budget was likely to fall to about 60 percent in the coming
years. Still, many of the lab's sponsors are strongly
committed to its mission. Companies like BT, the former
British Telecom, and Motorola, which have each donated more
than $1 million annually to the lab, view it as both a
window into new business opportunities and an insurance
policy against being blindsided by technology developments
they did not anticipate.

Motorola, for example, has been closely following the
research of Andrew Lippman and others on so-called viral
networks, which spread information without the central
coordination typical of the kinds of networks built by
Motorola and other phone equipment companies.

Dr. Lippman says he believes that cellphones may become
such a decentralized network. In his view, it may soon be
feasible for cellphones to locate nearby phones that are on
and bounce a message from phone to phone until it reaches
its destination - and sets a phone ringing or vibrating -
without ever passing through a huge base station.

He has concluded that the phone industry is headed down an
expensive technological dead end by investing heavily in
new high-capacity networks of antennas and transmission
stations. 

Motorola does not necessarily agree with this theory,
according to Matthew I. Growney, managing director of a
Motorola unit that invests in new ventures. "But to go
around and ignore someone like Andy would be foolish," he
said. 

Critics have long said that so much of the lab's research
is fanciful and impractical that investing in it is
foolish. Basic membership costs $100,000 annually for a
minimum of three years. And there is no question that the
lab has provided grist for the critics since it opened.

Dr. Negroponte, a charismatic professor from the department
of architecture, recruited a diverse collection of
free-thinkers in setting up the lab, including notables
like Marvin Minsky, a specialist in machine intelligence,
and Seymour Pappert, a well-known learning theorist. The
graduate students they brought came from design, computer
programming and sociology backgrounds to receive degrees in
a new discipline called media arts and science.

Faculty members and students alike concentrated on creating
physical models or demonstrations of their concepts of how
electronics could change human expression and everyday
life. "Demo or die" was the motto.

The results were diverse, including models for the
children's computer clubs that Intel now sponsors around
the world. Lab researchers also created computer systems
that gave rise to LEGO Mindstorms, and programming now
embedded in standards for sharing music over computers. But
for every clearly useful result, there were 10 odd kitchen
implements, strange musical instruments or computerized
pieces of clothing that left most people scratching their
heads. 

The critiques were humorously summed up in a 1995 parody of
Dr. Negroponte in VooDoo, an M.I.T. humor magazine. In an
actual demonstration, the lab showed off a prototype of a
"holographic television" that created a faint
three-dimensional motion picture using rapidly revolving
lasers and mirrors. The effect was so indistinct that Life
magazine had to photograph the image against a backdrop of
smoke. The magazine parody had Dr. Negroponte gloating, "We
have created a demo literally from smoke and mirrors, and
the corporate world bought it."

But the Media Lab culture has proved surprisingly hardy.
Indeed, the Center for Bits and Atoms, led by Neil
Gershenfeld, represents an attempt to extend the lab's
culture into what might seem unpromising ground. The new
center is so math, physics and chemistry intensive that it
attracts a very different kind of student and requires much
more defined experimental goals. And, as a nationally
financed research center, it has many links to researchers
outside the Media Lab.

But Dr. Gershenfeld said that he believed deeply in the
Media Lab's approach to educating researchers and students
through project work and the building of prototypes that
embody concepts. 

Staying within the Media Lab family, he said, encourages
the center's researchers to consider applying their
research to real-world needs like building desktop
manufacturing systems for remote areas.

And Dr. Negroponte certainly does not see any need to take
fewer risks to avoid ridicule. "The fairest criticism is
that we are spread too thin," he said. If he were to rename
the expanded lab today, he said, he would call it simply
"Other" in the hope that it would be known for doing things
"that are not bandwagons, fashions or fields, but work at
the edges and in the intersections of disciplines."


http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/29/technology/29LABS.html?ex=1049959576&ei=1&;
en=9066f43ae763b2a9



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