 Media Studies program, and I'm filling in here today for David Thorburn, the director of the communications forum here at MIT, which is the host of this event. David is away in Utrecht on leave this term, and I've sort of been left manning the ship for on his behalf. But it gives me the great pleasure to be able to host today this public conversation with Frank Moss, the recently appointed director of the MIT Media Lab. It's been a year. It's a year. Wow, how fast the time flies. Holy mackerel, you know. Well, compared to the long reign of your predecessor, it seems like a very brief moment so far. Yeah, if this is a brief moment, go ahead. So anyway, according to the sheet in front of me, which may or may not be right, in addition to being director of the media lab, he's a Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Technology, and his honors include Ernest and Young's Entrepreneur of the Year Award and being one of Forbes magazine's leaders for tomorrow. So Frank, tell us a little bit of how you came to be the director of the media lab. What's your background? What brought you into this operation? OK, it's a long story. I'll try and keep it short. But Henry, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here. I welcome everyone. And I just want to open up by saying, too, that I think the fact that we're here together talking, I think, is an indication of kind of a new era at the media lab a bit, one where the media lab, which in some ways had been its isolated island at the other end of Ames Street, is opening up to MIT and the rest of the world. So I'm really glad that you're here. And I look forward to sharing the story of the media lab and where we're going in the future. So I'm not an academic, although I got my degree here at MIT about 30 years ago, PhD in Aeronautical Engineering. And that was a time when aeronautical engineers were not in good shape, but they were pumping tasty frees in California. The moon program was winding down and had it winded down. So I was playing around with computers as part of my thesis at the Draper Lab here and headed off to a career in computers and software. Began my career at IBM Research. And then after that left, when it was not a popular time to leave IBM back in 1984 and got excited about the world of entrepreneurship and startups, I started off at a company called Apollo Computer. Anybody here heard of Apollo Computer? Oh, good. OK, we had the world's first workstations and then blew it. But that was a great experience. And other such companies, by the 90s, I had the opportunity to lead a company called Tivoli Systems in Austin, Texas. And enjoyed Texas as well as forming this company and sold it in 1996 to IBM. And then took it public before that, sold it to IBM, and then merged it. And then by the end of the 90s, decided to come back here to Boston. And which time I turned 50? So this is a long story I told you, but I'm 50 already, so it's not too bad. And when I turned 50, at my birthday party, my kids looked at me and they said, well, you've been selling software to fat white guys in IT departments for all of your life. That was, girl, something you really want to hear from your kids. But they netted it out pretty well, I think. They're pretty sharp. And they reduced this to a simple thing. They said, when are you going to do something for people? To really get back to society. And this is a true story. And I had been thinking about this and talking about with them. So I really took time off for about a year and explored really what opportunities I had, given my background in technology and running businesses, to really make a difference. I began to read about the Human Genome Project and how information technology was being applied there and got interested in that, hooked up with folks here at MIT and elsewhere, and co-founded a drug discovery company called Infinity Pharmaceuticals here in town in Cambridge, which today has three cancer drugs in clinical trial. And it was one of the best experiences of my life, being able to apply my knowledge to really make a difference for people. And that went very well. The company actually went public about two or three months ago, but about a year and a half ago, I began to realize that since I'm not a chemist or a biologist, that maybe my contribution at Infinity had really reached the steepest point. And I began to look around for something else to do when I got a call from people at the MIT Media Lab, actually a headhunter saying, how would you like to be director of the MIT Media Lab? And I laughed. I mean, I'd known the Media Lab from the past as many people had in one way or another for its idiosyncratic reputation, both for better or for worse. And I hung up. But quite seriously, at first, I really didn't think this would be a good idea for someone who had actually spent 30 years in the industry. But they handed me. They had a committee of people from the Media Lab who were looking for a new director. I came in. And after one or two visits, it occurred to me that this might be the platform, the opportunity to work with young people at MIT, terrific young people, but also to have a platform for how technology can help people, a place where the research being done is not only cool and not only weird and wonderful, but really can have a deeper impact on people. And I said yes. And it's been a year, and it's been very interesting. So I was getting ready for this. I went back to Stuart Brand's book on the Media Lab written more than 20 years ago, I think, when the lab was just starting. And I thought it might be interesting to read a few passages from it and talk about where the lab has gone since that time and where you see it going. But the place to begin is this title, the Media Lab Inventing the Future at MIT. And when we talked the other day, you said you had a new spin on what that phrase meant. So do you want to share a little of that? Well, sure. I haven't read the book. I mean, I think somebody told me if I read that book, I might never take the job. But I look forward to reading some passages there. It'd be interesting. People talked about the Media Lab inventing the future. Well, actually, it wasn't the Media Lab. It's the graduate students at the Media Lab who do that and the undergraduates who come through. We have three of them sitting here today. One of the secrets of the Media Lab is the faculty, as wonderful as they are, are not the people who invent the future. The future is invented by the students who come through the Media Lab and are exposed to this enormously creative and open and, in some sense, a kind of classic environment and then just go and do crazy things. They go and do what they wish. And they follow their interests. They follow their excitement. And they build instead of think. So they talked about inventing the future. Well, the future's been invented in some way. The future that Nicholas Negroponte envisioned, which was that actually early on, I think this is in the book, that television and print media and telephone would converge. And I guess it sounded very crazy back then, but that's it. And so that's happened. And the other wonders in communications technology and human user interface technology that the Media Lab researched, I think, have happened. But right now, I think there's an opportunity at the Media Lab to look at inventing a better future. And I think it's wonderful that we all can communicate with anybody else at any given time at any place that we can access any piece of entertainment on any device, that we can buy anything online and do all those wonderful things. It's changed our life. But I think you really have to ask the question. A couple of questions was, one is, has technology really impacted us at a deep level? And another question I often ask audiences, and I will, this audience here, is given the technology that has come out of this wave of innovation over the past 20 years, is your life fundamentally better today than it was 20 years ago? So I'll look for a raise of hands here. Is your life fundamentally better today than 20 years ago? Some of these were six, and in kindergarten, you didn't even know. Yeah. OK, so we'll only take anyone who's greater than 20 years old. OK, there's one. OK, we got a couple here. OK. Well, my average group, who average greater than 20 years old, the number of people who raise their hands is surprisingly small. And I find that curious, and I keep doing this, and of course I ask why when we have the time. And people are stressed. People, in some sense, have a very concerned view about the future today. People are concerned about the future. People, in some sense, are afraid of the future. When I was growing up, people were excited about the future. And I just don't say that as an old timer, saying things were great. But it's really true. There was a lot of anticipation and a lot of positive feeling for what technology was going to do, but where the Sputnik was out there and it dates me, doesn't it? And people were very optimistic. But today, for all the wonders that we have, and it's like unbelievable, people are afraid of the future. And so I see the opportunity to take a platform like the Media Lab, to take the unbelievable resource we have available in the students and the faculty, the sponsors who we have, and then to direct this toward a proposition for inventing a better future, a way in which technology can impact people at a deeper level. And I think that really begins with people who are disabled, either mentally or physically, perhaps developmentally, people who are disadvantaged socially, economically, or people who are disenfranchised from the system in some way. And I firmly believe when you look across the Media Lab, you'll see a lot of projects that target those, including this thing that came out of the Media Lab, the $100 laptop. And so I believe that by targeting the disabled and the disadvantaged, the disenfranchised, we're going to really actually end up inventing a number of the great advances that impact society as a whole, but at the same time be doing the right thing. I call that translational technologies, the idea that you begin here. And that's kind of interesting because in the past, people have really taken technologies, they try and find technologies that apply broadly, and then ultimately they're brought down to the disadvantaged. And they find their way down the system in the end. So that's a long answer to your question, Henry, to give one word change, which is inventing a better future, beginning in many cases with the disabled and the disadvantaged and then looking for applications to a broader society. So as we go along, we're going to be seeing some examples of the kind of work that comes out of this idea of inventing a better future. But just to spend a moment on the past and sort of this is the past when it was about to be the future, this is the passage from the introduction to Stuart Brandsbook. He says, the Media Lab aims to reframe the way the individual addresses the world and the world addresses the individual. Is that hardware proceeding a creation or substituting for it? Sponsors have put millions into place expecting long range but nevertheless commercial innovations or information. Are they getting their money's worth? If there is a clear idea at the heart of the Media Lab's research goals, will it emerge crystalline and focusing or blend back into the blur of technological drift? What is that clear idea exactly? The Media Lab is a huge public bet by MIT, by the Mayer sponsors, by the researchers who are risking major portions of their careers. The idea that communication technologies are converging in the world, there's that converging idea. The idea of convening communication disciplines in MIT under one conceptual roof. The specific people that are gathering to work on it, they all have to be right to get a win, demo or die. And that's how he ends the introductory chapter, the book. So looking back 20 years, I wonder are we closer to answering the sorts of questions that Stuart Brand poses? How would you describe the process that the lab's gone through over that time? Well, I'm probably not the best to go back through the history step by step, but I'll just give you the impression that one gets coming in. And then looking back at the history, there are a couple of things that Stuart Brand addressed there. And I think certainly behind it was the fact that the Media Lab is sponsored almost 100% by industry. And in that sense, it's different from the rest of MIT, which is sponsored by about $500 million worth of government money, roughly speaking. There is some industry money. But the opposite true of the Media Lab. So even going back to Negropanti's original vision was that corporations, in order to discover the future as it were, in order to kind of understand what the possibilities were, would pay handsomely anywhere from $200,000 to $750,000 a year as a membership to come into the Media Lab and to observe what is going on, to really rub shoulders with the students, rub shoulders with the faculty. And I think the method that emerged, maybe even beginning then, was that students would express their ideas in terms of demos. And that, in fact, that would be the communication mechanism in many ways. And that through this process of serendipity and I've heard Nicholas use that term and I've heard that term used many times by our faculty at the Media Lab, that things would happen. That although the student might not be demoing something that would be informed by the sponsor's particular problems, the sponsor would look at it and go, wow, that's really cool. And there are great examples of that that happened in the 20 years after that. One example was a motion table that was a sensor table that was developed for Penn and Teller so that it could actually, they sit in the table and one of them would make motions and kind of gesture and sensors, which were then in their early stage, would pick that up and translate that into images which would be used for entertainment or as part of their act. Well, an automobile, a company that provided automobile parts and equipment, saw that and ended up putting that into the passenger side airbag sensor system that's used in every car today. That's serendipity. The students who produced that or the faculty had no idea. And there are other examples of that. Lego Mindstorms came out of a project in lifelong kindergarten. I don't think anybody had envisioned Lego early on or had envisioned that kind of application. And I think that worked very well. If you think about the 80s and the 90s, this might have been a little bit before some of your time. Particularly in the 90s, people were companies, and I was in a company at that time. I was in the, we're saying, what is all this digital stuff? I'm afraid. What's the impact of this? What's going on? Is commerce going to change? And therefore, I think the value proposition of just coming into the Media Lab, hanging out, seeing the demos, participating in sponsor demonstrations in weeks were great. And I think that was a model that worked very well. And during the 90s, the Media Lab was flourishing. In fact, they had to really shut down sponsorship because so many people wanted to come in and just rub shoulders with the students and the faculty and just be part of this. 2001 hits, and I think that's probably a milestone point in the development of a lot of things, including the Media Lab. And companies are now looking at all this from a different perspective. They're not saying, gee, do I want to pay a whole bunch of money to hang out and see what happens? They're having to justify investments based on that dreaded acronym ROI, Return on Investment, and impact on products. It provides a real challenge to the Media Lab because we are not set up to actually respond to particular product needs, nor if we did, would that preserve the value of the Media Lab or would these students here probably want to be part of this if what they were handed when they came in was a directed project from a sponsor saying, go build this or that. So it becomes a real challenge as we move forward in the Media Lab to maintain the same vision that Negra Ponte and Wiesner had at the very beginning to have this open, very creative environment informed but not directed by industry to meet their needs, to continue the funding and the support which allows us to do these projects, but provide the environment to the students and to the faculty that is unique about the Media Lab. That's my job, essentially, is to achieve that balance. I'm optimistic. It's tough. And there are a number of sponsors who will not go along with this new way of doing things, but we're fortunate in some sense. And I think this is important for all of us here at MIT that due to the economy and due to the way things have developed, most companies have begun to cut off their front end of the pipeline, the very basic research, advanced research. So there's need for MIT. There's need for the MIT Media Lab. Ideas need to be generated. They're places, but we have to work very hard to create a connection between sponsors and this kind of research. And it's working quite well. It requires us to do things differently than the Media Lab did it back in 1987, but we can still do it and maintain, I think, the environment. So I think that's one aspect of that passage that's stuck out for me, Henry. I don't know if you've heard of it. That's very much on target. The second one's very brief, but it follows exactly on what you were just talking about. Brand wrote, again, at the beginning of the lab's history, the Media Lab has a different function than a business. Chasing horizons is its job. It sells not what works, but what might work. And that's sort of, again, this notion of what you can do inside an academic research center that's different from what you do pursuing a bottom line ROI in a company space. Absolutely. What is the measure of that? I mean, when sponsors come in, what do they hope to get out of it? And what I say, every time I begin a sponsor presentation and we bring people in, is the Media Lab is successful after the end of the day or a week or a month or a year if you're asking questions that you didn't think about asking when you entered the room, when you began working. And I think it's kind of that simple. Coming from business, a 30-year career, I guess I found that we really screwed up in business if we didn't ask the right questions at the right time. Not that we didn't develop a particular thing, but if you're asking the right questions. And I think that's really the role of basic research in general. And I think that continues to be the role of the Media Lab. And I think we will continue to measure ourselves by are we enabling our sponsors to ask the right questions that they wouldn't have thought of asking? The third passage I wanted to read comes from the very end of the book. And this is a passage that upset most of my colleagues in the humanities very much when the book first came out. And I think it poses some questions. I knew this would happen. So this is about the title of the section was Humanism Through Machines. And it's sort of described this idea. And I'll just get to the core of it. It says, the Media Lab is inventing the technology of diversity. Some institutions and enjoyed industrial side uniformity will no doubt regard it as a technology of perversity. This happened with personal computers. Corporations fought them. Unions fought them. Soviet Union still is finding them. Personal computers were a technology of separation originally. Current Media Lab technologies enhance connectedness, yet it also manages to enhance autonomy. Connecting, diversifying, increasing human complexity rather than reducing it, these are the instruments of culture. And what had happened at the time, the reason humanists I think reacted to that passage was we sort of thought we were in the business of studying culture and creating culture and engaged with it. And here is this group in the Media Lab that hadn't necessarily been connected with the faculty in our school. That was sort of laying claim that through technology they were inventing the future of culture. And I think you and I have talked a lot about the vision you have of the future where the Media Lab is much more connected to the rest of MIT, including our school than it has been previously. Well, I guess there are a number of layers to that, responding to that. What is the connection between technology and culture at the deepest level? But one thing is for sure, that connection cannot be completely invented at the Media Lab or any place else. I mean, the Media Lab I think serves a very useful purpose in that it brings together a wide diversity of people, and it does. Within the halls of the Media Lab we have social scientists, we have artists, we have designers, we have engineers, we have neuroscientists, our most recent faculty member. And so we're able to bring all those things together and explore the possibilities of technology and people in a way that I think is quite rare because you can bring all those people together in one place. However, that doesn't mean because you can bring all those people together in one place that there isn't important to interact with all the other places because there's a tremendous amount to be learned. And I think at the bottom of your question, and maybe the concern, was that the Media Lab maybe, and I'm only speculating here, tended to see itself as an island where by getting all this together, it could give the answers. And I guess I'm not sure whether that was what they thought or not, but having come from industry over the year where collaboration is important and connections on the outside, I fundamentally don't buy that concept. And so you're proud of what you have, you believe that you have something different than elsewhere, but we need to reach out at the Media Lab to not only your department, but the bioengineering department, brain and cognitive sciences, we have connections here. We're working, believe it or not, with CSAIL and I understand that my predecessors often had a little bit of trouble getting along with those guys. I can't imagine why. And I think we only benefit from it. I think everyone else too. The real goal is to provide our students, we have a couple of customers, if you will. First and foremost is our students. If the Media Lab does not provide the most, one of the most unique and a truly unique experience for students, it will not exist. And so if these guys or their predecessors don't want to come, what do you have? And the students want to collaborate. The students want to collaborate not only within the Media Lab, they want to connect out to the rest of MIT, they want to connect out to other universities, other organizations. So you've got to collaborate if you want to meet the needs of your students. The sponsors want that as well, I think the faculty should. So a big theme for me and the Media Lab over the next five, 10 years is to create as many contacts as many connections as much collaboration as we possibly can. We're going to work together to invent a better future. That's great. I think everyone in the room is excited to hear the opportunity of building bridges with the Media Lab and the rest of MIT. It's, so the term media was probably one of, when I spoke to Necroponte some years ago, he said he had to fight for that word when the Media Lab was being established, that people weren't sure media was the core issue for the time that you were living through or maybe adequately described what the lab did. We've obviously lived in the last 20 years of development as one in which media has become absolutely more and more central to every change that's taken place in the society. So I'm wondering today if we would describe what the Media Lab stands for, what does that mean to you as a director of the lab? That's a good question. Well, at some point, you look at a name and you don't try and do too much to make it make sense. I mean, it has a meaning at one time, but it may lose that meaning. I know when I was at IBM, there was a debate as to whether or not we should continue to call IBM international business machines. That seemed quite outmoded, especially since most of its revenue was not coming from business machines anymore. But yet, people value the name and it meant something. I've heard it expressed that what the Media Lab is working on is technology mediated experiences. And so I don't think just of media here meaning newspapers, magazines, television, film, I think of media as meeting new uses of technology to mediate experiences between people and other people and between people in the world. And in many ways, I think the Media Lab is dedicated to changing the way in which people interact with one another, in which they communicate, in which they socialize, in which they study, in which they produce, and in other ways, I think mediating the relationship of them to the world around them. And there are many, many new technologies that are taking place today that enable that mediation to be more intimate. And I think the intimacy of the mediation between people and the world between people and people is another way of faking it to say the word Media Lab still makes sense. Did that play at all? That sounds good to me. Okay, how did that sound? So. Fair, I think. Say I get a five for that one. Well, when we said we're gonna have this conversation, everyone said you're gonna ask him about the $100 laptop, the one laptop for a child, and you brought one here. So I wondered, that's becoming the flagship project, what everyone knows the Media Lab's involved with. So why don't you tell us just a little bit about what's going on with that and what you see as the future of that project? Well, it's a good story. It's got a little bit of drama, maybe a lot of drama. And it's got people and events and things that surround this baby here. But actually, when I got that call, would you like to join the Media Lab? The first thing I did was hop on the Media Lab website and I saw the $100 laptop. And at that time, it was a Media Lab project. This was late 2005. And this had originally come out of a long history of research at the Media Lab related to kids and learning, basically. Seymour Papert kind of coined the term constructivism, and you probably know that better than I do, which is one of the best ways to learn and to create is by doing. And that was a tremendous focus of the Media Lab over the years, the lifelong kindergarten project and so forth. And I think at some point, Nicholas DeGrapanti and others at the Media Lab concluded that if they were going to implement that idea or theory at large scale, something would have to be done to put in the hands of kids in a more broad way technology that they could use to actually experiment with that. And at $1,000 or $2,000 a pop, the laptops that we have today were not possible. So to make a long story short, Nicholas and the folks at the Media Lab cooked up not just a technology idea, which was, I think they probably just said they picked a number of $100. And they said if it's $100, then I could probably sell a million of these or more, maybe millions of these to governments. $100 million, that's a reachable number. And then they could distribute it to their kids and then we could begin to, in a sense, experiment with this. And the amazing thing is, this is about to happen. And so it's happening in a little bit different way that was anticipated. What was decided organizationally was that because this was actually building a production piece of hardware and software that in the wisdom of MIT, primarily, that this would be spun off as a not-for-profit organization and not further developed in the Media Lab. I think the concern on the part of MIT, and it was reasonable, was that if you're competing, if you're producing something like this, you might be competing with Dell or you might be competing with Microsoft or competing with HP or whatever. And that also it's kind of not the job of MIT to develop products. That's the job of other folks. So for whatever reason, it was spun off as a not-for-profit called One Laptop per Child. A number of people went from the Media Lab to One Laptop per Child at the time I came. And they've been busy developing this piece of hardware and software. And it's about to go into its Beta 2 version pretty soon. This was a Beta 1 version. And if you come into the Media Lab, you'll see dozens of these around as they're being played with. And as you probably know from what you've read, Nicholas and the One Laptop per Child, people have managed to connect with a number of governments and countries and actually have them commit to large-scale shipments. This is being produced and designed here in Cambridge but produced in China. And the number, as I understand it now, is about 125 bucks. So they didn't quite reach the $100 level. It received a great deal of controversies, as I'm sure you're probably aware of at first. And I think that the primary controversy arose from is the best way to spend money in developing countries, $100 to give kids laptops. Or is that a waste of money? And a number of countries have said that's not the right way to go. Others have embraced the idea. But what's interesting for me, I think, and I'm gonna turn this on, although it's gonna be almost impossible to see what goes on here, is the principle that I talked about before. By setting out to produce something for kids in developing countries, they actually have created here what I think are technologies that are gonna be standard in our laptop computers within less than five years. And when you hear about these things, you'll probably say, I can't believe that laptops don't have that today. So I think this is the quintessential example of where by targeting, say, a fringe in society of one sort or another. And so the first thing you see, she's booting up now, so this is real here. It'll take a while. This is a beta one version. Or these rabbit ears. And these rabbit ears are antennas that enable a mesh connection network between the laptops themselves. So if kids are sitting out in a village in Africa somewhere or in South America, and they're separated by less than a kilometer or so, they can actually communicate directly with one another. This can be intermediately routed to somewhere else, and ultimately, you can be connected with a satellite connection at the center of town somewhere. And so this concept of peer-to-peer networking in the absence of, in the absence of a centralized communication infrastructure, I think it's not just a good idea if you're in a third world country, but I think it's a good idea here. And this was developed originally in the viral communication group at the Media Lab. It's been around for a while, and now it's finding its implementation in a system that costs $125 a piece. I think it's amazing. Second thing that you'll notice, and it's still taking time to boot up, but if we can get this, is a daylight readable display. How many of you folks have taken your laptop outside to the beach, whatever, and tried to read it or do work? I mean, totally frustrating. But if you're sitting outside in a village in Africa somewhere, you don't even have shelter or a home. You have to have a daylight readable display. They confronted the problem, and this came out of technology developed by Mary Lou Jepsen, who is a display, does research and displays at the Media Lab, for how you can incorporate both a color display, a dual mode display, one is color, and the other is black and white, high resolution black and white, that's daylight readable. I don't know if we're there yet. So the second major innovation, daylight readable displays, that I'm sure will be seeing in laptops within four or five years, and I will welcome that. Third innovation, around power. Duh, when the screen is not changing, power is not being drawn. And they looked across the board at functions within this computer that seek to minimize the amount of power that's drawn and to maximize the amount of time that you can operate on the battery. And I'm told that we're looking at eight hours right now for a battery charge. That's excellent. The laptop actually gets a lot more publicity for its original hand crank, and now they're looking at different technologies for producing power here. But I think this power conservation schemes that are in here will be in use in laptops, maybe even mobile phones throughout the world. Another innovation, which I think is probably going to be the most profound, is the user interface. And I'm not sure I'll be able to give you or show a demo here today, but the user interface is a complete rethinking of how you interact with computers that puts the child at the center. And so, this is not a desktop metaphor. What you have on your computer with Windows and other operating systems is desktop metaphor. This is a metaphor that pictures yourself at the center and a network of other people that you're communicating with. And the kinds of functions, whether it's social networking, whether it's communications, whether it's sharing homework, whether it's accessing books or whatever that you want to be involved in. And I'm really impressed by this user interface. We're working with OLPC to advance this and to enhance this kind of interface, but I think there's a possibility that the One Laptop for Child project will produce a brand new paradigm for user interface in a way that hasn't been introduced in over 25 years. Other cool things about it is the physical configuration. Turn it like this, and you have a book kind of configuration. And I won't show it here, but you can actually rotate it and push a button here. You can use it vertically. You can use it horizontally. So the three functions of this at the end of the day are as a book where you can have every book that you'd ever want to have here as a communication device with yourself at the center. And then third as really a vehicle for experimenting with the concepts of constructivism and how kids can learn outside of schools with technology such as this. Tell us about the green plastic there. I mean, it seems to me this automatically changes the way we think about this technology and we have something that has the kind of plastic we associate with a child's toy as opposed to the metallic that we've sort of come to think of this fragile device that we carry around with. Well, I'm not the expert. I think, you know, Walter Bender or Nicholas could probably give you a better idea, but they spent a lot of time with designers. And the whole idea is to make this as comfortable and as approachable for children as you possibly can. And so this is what comes out of it. Many studies that they've had with kids and a lot of focus on the design of this. I think it's a mealab sensibility. And I think they brought many years of experience that they brought in some of the world's most respected designers and created this. Great. Well, you brought some of your graduate students with us today. So why don't we, what's on first? Why don't you tell us a little bit about one of the projects? Okay, well, I'm getting pointed to Adam who probably, okay, they're pointing to one another. So I'll spin this here. Well, let me tell you about, you know, maybe one way to begin this is to talk a little bit about some of the major areas that the media lab is involved with. So from a big picture, we're trying to invent a better future. And we're looking for design principles and basic ideas that we can explore and that others can explore that enable technology to contribute to a better future. And I think the first design principle that I'd really like to point to is intimacy or intimate interfaces. For years, the media lab and others have been looking at the interfaces between people and technology. But given advances in silicon technology and in biotechnology and nanotechnology, the opportunity to create a more intimate interface between people and technology between people in the world is there. And we have a number of projects at the media lab that look at intimate interfaces in a number of different ways. And one of, I think the great examples is the Biomechatronics group, which we have represented here today, which actually looks at an interface between a person and a prosthetic, if you will, and other devices that can become part of the person and actually enable them to an amputee to achieve normal mobility or others to achieve augmented mobility. So intimate interfaces of all types, tangible media is one of our groups. We have groups that look at interfaces at various different levels. And we have that represented here and we'll talk about that briefly and I guess we'll get a little presentation from Helmut. Another major area that we look at is kind of new and interesting applications of the same theory that led to the $100 laptop is that how can creativity and learning influence and change our lives in a different way? The Opera of the Future group, the group that gave rise to a project called Hyper Instruments, has been exploring how the creation of music can actually influence many different aspects of our life. And Adam Boulanger is gonna talk about that in a bit. So it's really pushing the envelope on the concept of creativity, learning, and its impact on people and the arts. Third area is just what I call simplicity and design. How can we look at a lot of the common elements that we have in our environment and rethink them through in new and simple ways? And one of the most, they're all amazing, but one of the most amazing projects at the Media Lab for me looks at simplicity from the point of view of how do we reinvent the automobile? How do we think about new, simple design principles that can change the way we think about transportation in the automobile, and then ultimately even think about simpler and much more profound ways in which the automobile integrates with the city? And that's Ryan, he'll be telling us about that. So with that, why don't we just turn it over to these folks? Adam, do you wanna start? Okay, great, you wanna take this? Or are you gonna do it from here? Okay, great. Adam, you wanna introduce yourself a little bit. Sure. A minute or two would be great. Great, so my name's Adam Blanche and I'm a PhD student at the Media Lab coming from the Opera of the Future Group. My background actually is in music technology and healthcare applications. So what I'm looking at is how not only we can create sort of new experiences in music with facilitative instruments and composing softwares, but actually how we can interject those into a treatment and intervention scenario and actually rely on those same technologies to generate information on what's taking place cognitively, physically, within that intervention. But I'm getting a little bit ahead of myself, basically. How I wanted to start is just by sort of giving an opinion is that one area where sort of technology and the pervasiveness of technology has, in my opinion, absolutely failed, is to make us fundamentally more expressive and creative people. When you think about sort of expression, the difference between expression and communication, you realize that there's something lacking in the artworks and the people that are making artworks at this point in time and the audience and artist's relationship and our opinions of what it is to be an artist and what the opportunities are for anybody to become an artist, things really haven't changed. And in our work in the Hyper Instruments Group, we're developing facilitative technologies to really break this mold. And so it's not just sort of demos of interesting gadgets, it's sort of new opportunities with toys, but really it's sort of a system of thinking. How can we fundamentally change the culture of what it means to be creative and express it with technology? And the Hyper Instruments Group or Opera of the Future Group really sort of cut its stuff. With projects where we're outfitting virtuosic musicians with very sort of high and sophisticated sensor systems to create sort of a new generation of instruments to extend their capabilities. So here is the idea that let's work with experts, such as Yoyoma and develop an instrument where every nuance of his position and movement is being recorded and then use that to drive sort of new, new composition opportunities where he can drive computerized music in addition to being the sort of expert interpreter that he is. And this project really sort of exposed that with these types of technologies, you can create new opportunities, but really what's the scope of the use of that technology if it's for virtuoso, if it's for an expert. So the sort of other side of this paradigm is taking place now where we're developing tools for everybody, facilitative composition instruments and applying them into very diverse communities. So actually my work at the group started at the Tuxbury State Hospital where I was working with Todd McOver and a software system called Hyperscore, which is a composing tool and applying that composing tool in workshops with physical health and patients in the mental health department as well. So to give you a quick idea about what Hyperscore is, basically allows you to paint compositions. So what you see in the top are sort of little note drop melodies that each get assigned a color and then you're painting those melodies in line in the interface. Now this of course wouldn't make sense because the notes just stack up and would be sort of a harmonic mess, but the person who developed Hyperscore with Todd Murray Farwood, her research interests were really in sort of complex modeling of the rules of harmony. Basically she shrunk the entire scope of Western music harmonic practice down into algorithms that could fit compositions to that theory. So basically it helps you make good sounding music. And what we're gonna hear here are two compositions by 10 year old students as part of this toy symphony project where we'd work with orchestras, with children with little to no music experience. And through a series of workshops, a couple of weeks later would end up producing, the students would end up producing these types of compositions. So here's this piece of music from Hyperscore and I'll just play a quick section of it. These are compositions made by 10 year old kids who had little to no music experience after working with this interface for on average about four or five weeks. And it's a type of thing where it's a facilitative instrument, it's incredibly useful to sort of allow an entirely other level of music discussion to take place very quickly. So we come in and we're talking about what makes an interesting piece of music. How do you maintain interest over time? What type of form are you going to be interested in? And this is a type of stuff that usually you don't get at until years and years of sort of working in exclusively the rules of Western harmony. But in a hospital environment, this meant something entirely different. Let's see. So here's video from Tuxbury. So here's a workshop format in a Department of Mental Health and you'll also see some video from the Department of Physical Health Interjected. Basically we're working with individuals with disease that diverse as major schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, cerebral palsy, Alzheimer's disease, spina bifida, being sort of a group of collaborative format. Now Tuxbury Hospital is the kind of place where it's a residential hospital, all the patients are living there, they don't have a lot of access to resources. And basically our role there was not only to sort of create an intervention where people were expressing themselves and using this sort of facility of composing environment, but the result was much broader than that. It was really a culture shift in the hospital. Eventually patients from the physical health side were being supported by patients of the mental health side to sort of use each other's advantages over their disadvantages to create this music. We brought in doctors, occupational therapists, physical therapists to start looking at how patients, despite having massive physical disabilities, were motivated to overcome these fine motor and motor control issues to navigate the interface and compose this music. What I'm gonna show you here at this last clip is someone that I worked with very closely, Dan. And Dan has cerebral palsy, he's paralyzed from the neck down, and what he's doing here is playing his hyper score composition for us for the first time. And we developed an interface, this IR, this infrared pointer, what you see on his head, where he was able to paint with hyper score and compose these pieces of music where otherwise he can't speak. So for him, really what we're talking about is a creativity prosthesis. This hyper score, which he's worked with now for the past year and a half, has become sort of a premier communicative outlet for him. He does composing workshops, he has jobs teaching in the community, students how to use this interface, and has become a spokesperson at the hospital for what people with these sorts of really not good prognosis, he's not going to improve in his motor function, it's a neurodegenerative disease, what they can do, what it means to be a person in that type of condition, and what it means to learn in that environment, and what it means to express yourself creatively. But hyper score was not, it was created as part of this Toy Symphony project, and I believe that these types of tools can be a lot smarter than sort of in a traditional music therapy context, you know, just providing an intervention that's facilitative that can bring about, sort of rely on the social aspect of music, the power of music to bring about new modes of interaction, new sort of social interactions and empowerment. So what I actually envision is an era where these types of tools are more sophisticated to actually do the measurement and sensing of the clinical measures that are relevant to the patients that we're working with. So two areas that I'm working on, and this idea is autism and Alzheimer's disease, and I think what we're talking about as far as the culture of research and autism, a focus on autism, then make a quick note about Alzheimer's. You know, in autism we're talking about a series of disabilities and social interaction, communication, repetitive behaviors, and what I have here is a timeline that's looking at sort of the research going on, the research that really defined this disease. And from the 1970s, looking at sort of the beginning of genetic implications with this primarily social disorder, all the way to where we are now, where MIT is contributing to major research with an autism initiative that I really feel will bring out the fundamentals of the genetics and neurobiology of this primarily social disorder. But the question is, what then? What's the application of that research? Will these people live better lives? Will they live better lives as part of the interventions that they undergo? And can the tools in their environment, the social tools, the creative tools, their communicative tools, leverage what's being discovered in the sciences and actually drive their creative and expressive lives. And so the approach basically is to hit the cognitive and neuroscience literature to find domains where these individuals are actually sort of better than the general population. So we identify cognitive markers on that and then move into a development phase where we develop tools that measure for these cognitive markers all while composing music. So what you're seeing here are sort of melodic and rhythmic games that are actually performing sort of neuropsychological and cognitive tests, but it's invisible to the user. So we're in Tooksbury, we have these types of interventions we're showing that you can rely on the social aspect of music to create sort of very interesting advances over someone's disease. Now that same tool that's allowing that facilitation and composition is actually documenting how that person's developing or improving cognitively and physically. So basically it's assessment inside of our creative and expressive tools. And I guess for the sake of time, I'll just say that the emphasis on autism is definitely intervention, but we have similar goals in Alzheimer's disease for developing and bringing to clinical trial softwares that are doing early assessment and detection of the disease. So basically in summary, I wanted to put up this slide, which is a state-of-the-art technological neuropsychological test. This is the type of thing that's a good test. This is from this Cambridge battery of cognitive tests for detection of Alzheimer's disease. These types of things are being brought to PDAs, two patient bed sides, and are good at distinguishing Alzheimer's disease from other types of diseases. But when you think about what healthcare is gonna be five years from now, 10 years from now, this isn't it. It's going to be relying on the pervasiveness of technologies in the homes, the social networking that's available to us that we know already. And I believe it's going to rely on our creative tools, what makes us human, the things that we use, that everyone in the population used to develop themselves, their idea of themselves. I no longer think of the healthcare market as a marginalized population where the interventions and technologies implied for the diagnosis of that population are different. What I'm trying to show is the marriage of creative tools and new technologies for that population to increase expression just as any of us would as artists. All right, thank you. Thank you very much. All right. Thanks Adam, that was great. There are a number of other, before I introduce the next speaker, there are a number of other projects in the Media Lab that actually relate to interventions and use of technology in this way for autism. One that you might have read is our social-emotional prosthetic, which is derived from the notion of effective computing, which enables computers to understand people's emotions and others in tangible mediums and so forth. I think this is a profound area that not only the Media Lab will engage in, but a lot of others. You know, the US or the World Healthcare System is so focused on cures. We spent 90% of our money on cures, maybe 10% on rehab, and then almost 0% on how to improve people's quality of lives in the long run. I think there's a real opportunity to change that equation. Now, that's also true of not only neurodegenerative diseases, but other disabilities that occur, and I'm going to introduce Hartmut right now. Let's say, Ryan, do you want to go next? Okay, Ryan's going to go next. I was in the middle of a great transition, which Ryan just interrupted, but that's okay, we're nothing if not adaptable. I'm going to let Ryan Chen. Ryan is a graduate student, but sometimes I think he's more project manager or king in many ways of the smart cities group, and Ryan, why don't you take it away? Yeah, thanks, sorry for the interruption we were trying to get to. That's okay, I'll pick it up later. Yeah, so thanks. My name is Ryan Chen. I'm a PhD candidate at the Media Lab in the smart cities group. The group is run by Professor Bill Mitchell. He's the former dean of the School of Architecture and now head of the smart cities group, and the smart cities group is primarily focused on how design and technology can change the way cities might operate in the future and how we could better live in them, and so that's really the context in which we operate and how we question things that we do. The one area that we've been very much focused on is the question of mobility in urban contexts, and that's a big problem that a lot of people face today. How do we get around in cities and how does that affect the way we design cities? So the primary project that I'll talk about today is called the city car project, which is a collaboration between MIT Media Lab and General Motors, and this is a project that many people have been working on, which I'll try to represent here today. So this is the slide just showing you a kind of early concept of this city car that we've been designing over the last few years. This is a design from a couple, a year and a half ago, and it gives you a kind of sense of the relationship between the automobile and the city, and what we're very interested in is looking at the connection between this individual unit and the rest of the city in terms of mass transportation. So this kind of relationship was very, very important for us to think about. One of the issues that we've been very much looking at is, and these are problems that everyone's looking at, both in school and in industry, is the question of urban density. How do we control this? How do we maintain that? How do we make sure that densities are in the right level? Pollution, the issues of global warming, the amount of carbon emissions. Everyone must have seen the movie by Al Gore recently. These are very pertinent right now. In congestion, the lifelong problem of congestion just being a problem that we all face today and in the past. Interestingly, there are a number of phenomenon that are sort of emerging that we can sort of take as an opportunity to look at. One is emerging connectivity. I think Frank talked about the fact that the cell phone is now such a ubiquitous item. Well, we can take the same assumption for the vehicle and for the city itself. So the emergence of cellular networks and the emergence of Wi-Fi networks and thinking about the car as a connected element of the city is a very important assumption to make. The other aspect is that the reason why we live in cities is the resources of the city. Resources include the people. Resources include cultural institutions. Resources include parking, for example. That's a big resource that we also want to be able to access. And this is a big issue. So those resources are sort of the binding element for which the car should really connect us to. The last one is cities itself. Cities have infrastructure. A lot of cities are basically the same. If you ask the question of what Washington, D.C. looked like 50 years ago, it basically looks like what it is today with a few improvements, obviously. So cities aren't gonna change overnight. We want to design something that isn't disruptive, but certainly complementary to what already exists. So some facts to consider before I get into the actual design of the car. Interestingly, the growth of cities is a big factor. Many people, much of the earth is moving towards developing city centers. The urbanization is a big aspect to look at. Most of the growth is going to be happening in cities. 60% of the population will be there. Over 80% of the wealth of the planet will be in cities. So that's something to consider. And therefore, the use of energy within these networks is an important consideration. Here, the second fact talks about transportation and building operations, taking roughly about 60% of all the energy resources that are available. That's a big, big number. That's something that if we wanted to make some changes, that would be the one number to focus on. This last number is actually very interesting. It starts looking at congested areas in Manhattan, looking for a parking space. Over 40% of gasoline used at condition times in Manhattan is wasted just looking for a parking space. So this is what I call a gross misappropriation of priority. I mean, how are we solving this problem? This is something that we all consider. The other thing that happens in cities is... I think 50% of murders are also... That's right. That's right. That's right. Don't forget that. The other thing to consider is that where people live and where people work are not necessarily in the same place. The big urban trend now is to have mixed use. But a lot of cities don't have that sort of infrastructure and we're very much stuck into this sort of separation between the energy grid, transportation, where people live. So for us, the challenge was to look at reinventing urban personal transportation. We really thought that that was an area to focus on. So this is a more recent design of the car, the city car. It's a two-passenger, shared electric vehicle that folds up and the reason why it folds up is that we wanna save on footprint. And so the basic idea is really kind of like a shopping cart. So when you need a shopping cart, you take one out of the stack and then when you're done, you put it in the back of another stack somewhere else. The vehicles charge electrically when they're in the stack themselves. Some features about the car. We started to even look at the wheels. So we started looking at reinventing the wheel. Everyone says that we shouldn't do that, but we started to do that actually. This is, I think, part of the role of the media lab. So the wheels of the vehicle actually have in-wheel motors placed at every wheel. So we have steering, we have suspension, we have all the mechanisms that drive and propel and navigate the vehicle inside each wheel. So each wheel becomes a kind of separate module, a kind of mobility module that you attach to the vehicle. This vehicle has what we call 360 degree, well, we have omnidirectional ability. This vehicle can spin on its own axis. The wheels can turn 90 degrees and we can translate the car sideways into a parking space. This is something Detroit wouldn't consider because they don't have the parallel park there. Here we do. So this is something that we really wanted to build into the vehicle. So the use case, when you need one, you take your credit card and you swipe it and therefore it identifies who you are. It perhaps checks if you have a license and have a financial record. And then you can take the car. When you're done, you put it back to another car. What happens here is that the charging happens when it's in the stack. And there's a couple of ways to do that. One is inductively, the other is conductively, which is basically plugging it in. What happens here is that recharging happens whenever it's in the stack. And therefore, by doing that, having stacks throughout the city in convenient locations reduces the amount of batteries you might need on the vehicle. Therefore, the range can be extended because you have multiple stacks within the city. So I'll talk basically for the rest of the talk on the efficiencies that we get and how that affects the way we design the car. First of all, the car is very small. It's very, very tiny. When it folds up, it's actually only half the length of a smart car, which is roughly about four feet. And we could achieve that by actually tilting up the cabin itself. The efficiency, the urban planners will talk a lot about this because now we start to change the way you might design the road. It might change the way you design a parking structure, for example. You might be able to reduce the amount of parking spaces and add more green into the city, perhaps. So these are things to think about. The electric vehicle allows the vehicle to be very silent, very quiet, and not polluting at the tailpipe. And that's something that's very important for us. We'd like to be able to use the vehicle in order to promote renewable energy sources. And now we'll talk a little bit about that later. The biggest change is that the vehicle is not owned by anybody. It is shared use. It's a community vehicle. So the big kind of shift there is to think of the car as not a product, but as a service, as a kind of service that provides mobility. And this is a big, big, big thing that is very difficult for the auto industry to actually think about because they are in a commodity business. So here's a video. This is a video that we did here. We shot this in the State Center. This is a video just showing how the vehicle operates as a basic concept. It does have doors. We took it off for the sake of the animation. And as you can see here, Will is one of our students. The car comes in. When it parks, the back of the vehicle folds up. So it takes very little space. You notice the color is also going to change as well. The next car comes in and plugs in behind it. Now you have a series charge vehicle inductively. Suzanne, who comes out of the vehicle, now parks the car. You notice the color changes. The reason why we're interested in that is we want to be able to personalize every car to each person. So the green perhaps is our favorite color, but that's maybe a trivial thing. The more important thing is we want to be able to configure the car to each person, meaning ergonomics, meaning driving characteristics, meaning your location of your friends within the city. So start thinking about social networks. Here you can see Suzanne, who comes back. She takes the first car, which is a different car that she took coming into the spot. And then she will swipe her credit card. She gets into the vehicle and then off she goes. She moves the stack forward one so that the second car is now the first car in the queue, and then you're ready to go. Here, we're just showing you how we filmed the whole thing. Some people thought that the car was a real thing, so we had to make sure that they knew it was animation. So how does this affect the city? So one thing that happens is that if you have electric vehicles and you're placing a lot of electric vehicles into the city, you have a lot of battery capacity. And it could be a mixture of batteries or supercapacitors, but if we're choosing to move down that path, we're putting a lot of energy storage into the grid, which means that the city could utilize this at different times of the day. So one thing that we could imagine is placing solar collectors on top of buildings that are very close to the stacks, therefore reducing the transmission losses between the source and the sink, this being the car. The electric car allows us to actually give power back to the grid, therefore we could store it and charge at the appropriate time. So one example would be at solar noon at the height of the day and the mid-afternoon. That's a great time to be charging your vehicle, but that's not the time that people will be using their cars. They'll be using them a few hours later. At nighttime, you might want to charge the vehicles because the cost of electricity is lower. So you can imagine that the car has a dual purpose. It's not only providing mobility, but it also is part of a greater energy system for the city and the city becomes sort of a virtual power plant to the whole thing. And I'll talk more about that later. The interior, we started to think more about the car, not as a traditional car with a steering wheel because we have all this omnidirectional driving capability, but more as a computer on wheels. The car should have access to all the things that you would have on your desktop. Of course, we have to consider the distraction, but the car is kind of a concierge of the city, getting you to where you need to go. To start thinking of a map-based system for the interface of the car, you don't necessarily care how fast you're going, but you do care about where the parking spaces might be or where your friends are or how do you navigate through an unfamiliar part of the city. So you want to think of the car more like that. But very quickly, this is what the car, the current design looks like. This is the basic folding chassis. This is an exoskeleton shell. And then this is what the exterior looks like. We started, it's part of our job at the lab to build things. So we started building prototypes of this. This is a prototype built by one of the students. And this is a half-scale prototype of what we call the wheel robot. It has all the drive mechanisms inside it. And this is a sort of testing platform. This will work, it will operate. And our goal is to move from this half-scale prototype to a full-scale prototype within this year. This is what the folding chassis looks like. And that's what it looks like when it's unfolded. So you might ask the question, well, why do you want to fold the car? There is a lot of complexity to that. And that might be sort of a gimmick. But we did do some urban studies on this. And this is a typical Manhattan block, which fits about 82 cars, theoretically. That's if you take away fire hydrants and loading zones, you'd get 82 regular cars. With the city car, we did a rough estimate. You could fit 504 cars in the same block. And that's because the car is small. You're stacking them, and you're also folding them up. So that kind of ratio, which is 6 to 1 on-street parking, has dramatic implications on the urban design of any city in the future. We asked the question of parking structures. Parking structures are actually quite wasteful. This particular one is a 90-degree parking structure. You'd notice that most of the space in the parking structure is dedicated not to the storage of cars, but to the aisle, because you need to get a particular car out. Well, the one on the right just talks about how that space is now dramatically reduced because you have a community vehicle. And this really changes the way you might design buildings as well. The last series of slides talks about the urban implications. This is New York City. The dots, the black dots, represent subway stations. And this is what most people know about this. But as you go further out in the city, you have less access to public transportation systems. So where the car plays a big role is how does this affect the periphery of the city? The next slide starts to speculate on where the placement of these cars would be. Should they be at every subway stop? Should they be at other locations throughout the city? If you put stacks of cars at the very last stop of every line, take L-Wife Station here in Boston, for example, and put a 10-mile radius, this is the kind of coverage that you'll get of Greater New York. And I'll get back to that in a second. The other big issue in cities is going to the center and back out. This is a big problem that happens in New York. If you wanted to go from one part of Brooklyn to another, often if you want to take the subway, you have to go back into the city and back out again. So you have this sort of virtual ring that you can't transverse. In this case, you have to cross the East River two times to just stay on the same side of the river. So with this, and this happens in many cities, placing a city car there starts to eliminate this sort of problem. This is a slide from the New York Times, just talks about who drives in Manhattan. The darker areas represent where the car drivers are. You notice that they're all in the periphery, except for that little anomaly on the upper east side. That's for all the rich people that can afford a car up in Manhattan. But by overlaying this diagram with the one I just showed two slides ago, you start to see where the reduction of personal cars comes into play. We ask the question, well, how does this fit in other cities? Think of a multi-center city like Los Angeles, where no one thinks that public transportation could ever work. Well, one thing that we could speculate on is a neighborhood car, a car that doesn't go from Malibu to Oridge County. But that stays in that particular neighborhood and that we start promoting bus rapid transit, perhaps. By doing that, you're connecting the car, using the car as a kind of last mile connector between major nodes that subways and other mass transit systems serve very well. But you don't live at the node. You don't live at self-station. You don't live at Grand Central Station. You live somewhere else close to that node. So start to think about connecting that. That red line there actually represents the entire transit authority for LA. And the subway only goes from Hollywood to LA. So you see geographically the disparity of connectivity. Second to last slide, congestion, pricing zone in London. Most people are familiar with this. It just got expanded, I think, a few days ago, westward. And when you cross over to this congestion pricing zone, you obviously have to pay more. We speculated on placing vehicles, stacks of vehicles, at the tube stations and giving it a five-minute walking distance. And the red circle represents just five-minute walking. So by placing them throughout the congestion pricing zone, you can get pretty much full coverage of the whole zone within five to 10 minutes of walking. This slide, MIT has a co-gen plant. And so we started speculating on how this would work on MIT's campus. And if you combine, and we started doing some early calculations, we can get roughly almost 100% benefit. Not 100%, but 50% reduction in the energy used per day per person commuting by combining both electric vehicles that stack in the way that we've suggested with renewables and the co-generation. Last slide. In the end, the car is a kind of Julius product. When it's moving, it's providing mobility to the citizens of the city. When it's stationary, it's being charged, and it's also providing energy storage. Therefore, you can start thinking about a greater collaboration between the citizens of the city and those that sort of run it. This is the last slide. This is just the credit slide. These are the students, the many students and faculty that have been working on the project. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. That was great. From these speakers, you conclude some recent trends at the Media Lab. One is that we're living in an era where the students are both better dressers and more articulate than the director. That's one thing. The other is I would like to point out that just about everything you've seen or will be seeing was built largely in the Media Lab. And this is something I didn't understand when I first came. But when students come to the Media Lab, they're taught to build anything, and there's a magnificent set of facilities in the lower level of the basement that enables them to build everything from prosthetic devices to robot wheeled vehicles on and on and on. I think that that's one of the major distinguishing characteristics of the lab. But let's get on to our last speaker right now. Hartmuth, not a student, but sort of a postdoc, I guess, or a staff member at the Media Lab. I'll let you introduce yourself. But this, I think, you'll find a magnificent project and will really push the question of what does media mean? I think you'll see how far we've moved into new directions. Well, thank you very much for the introduction. My name is Hartmuth Skyer, and I'm visiting postdoc at the Biomechatronics Group. But rather than speaking of my project at this group, I would like to give you an overview of what we are trying to achieve within this group. And the Biomechatronics Group bases its research on two things. And the first is biomechanical modeling, so understanding fundamental principles of legged systems or how we function. And the second part is to apply this fundamental understanding to augmentation and prosthetic devices. For instance, leg knee prosthesis or ankle prosthesis. And I will start, I cannot speak about all the projects we are presuming, but I will pick out four examples. And I will start with the rear knee prosthesis, which is, I think, one of our oldest projects. And what you can see here, it is the commercialized version by a prosthetics company called IZOR. And it's basically, if you explode it and look into the exploded view, it is the knee prosthesis whose major function is to dampen the knee while it's in stance. And to let it move freely forward while it is in swing. And how we achieve this is with using magnetorheological fluids. And it works in a way that you apply electrical currents and have small iron particles. The currents produce magnetic fields. The iron particles form a chain. And you have this chain running between disks that break the system and dampen the leg. So what you see here is a passive system. And if you move this on, and I just want to show you a video of a subject veering this prosthesis when it was still at MIT before it got commercialized. And what you can see implemented in the control how this current is applied is also some biomechanical knowledge about how we change our gates and how much force or how much breaking force our legs need during stance at different speeds in walking. But what I showed you there was just basically a passive system. It has only damping. And if you move on to the next step, you can see that we also develop active leg prosthesis. And this is the second project I want you to point on. And this is an ankle prosthesis having a motor. And here in this picture, you see it a little bit better. So it's an ankle joint driven by a motor attached to a commercial flex foot prosthesis. And for now, I just show you how the head of the lab, Professor Her, is veering this active prosthesis. And it helps him to move upstairs and the short story is that most of our energy that we need to put in while we locomote needs to be put in at the ankle joints, especially when we want to walk upstairs. Well, this is basic mechanical or electromechanical research and engineering. How does it connect to the human? Well, in this case, you again see the head of the lab and one of the PhD students who was primarily developing this active ankle joint. And what you see here is that the student is moving his leg and his feet, especially. And Professor Her tries to move his non-existing phantom limb in the same way as the student does. And what you see here on this slide, what we are, what we are using, we are recording the muscle activities that the amputee still has and try to match these activities that are excited by his imagined movement of his limbs to the actual limb movement. And you can see maybe barely see the actual movement is in red. And after some neural network processing, the blue curve tracks this red new movement. And the source of this neural network is, in fact, the electrode signals that were taken from the residual limb of the amputee. So now you can imagine how this connects to the human. And what he can do with this you see in this video. It is one thing to move upstairs with prosthesis. What you need is energy. It is another thing to go downstairs. Usually, we move our leg, our foot, to tilt it downward. And what you see in this video is that he goes up and down. And while he's going down, before he's getting to the next step, he is tilting the prosthesis by his muscular activity. In a similar fashion, as you have seen before in the video in the diagram that I showed you. Well, and one future direction that this research might lead to is a kind of human machine connection where you actually implant electrodes into nerve fibers and use this nerve. You record these nerve signals and use it to control prosthesis. Or on the other way, you can send signals from the prosthesis to the sensory nerve fibers so that maybe as a amputee veering this, you can feel what you are stepping on. Maybe it's sent. Maybe it's concrete. And you might get a response and feel what you are stepping on. OK. Well, all these technical developments that I showed you are, to some extent, based on biomechanical and motor control research that informs our technical devices. And what we are looking on in particular is the mechanics of balance control, some muscle reflex control, which, for instance, for this ankle prosthesis, we might use if we understand how the ankle is controlled with muscle reflexes in humans. We might be able to apply this to ankle prosthesis. And in another project, we can test control ideas that we develop on actual muscle physiological test environments with real muscle tissue that can be stimulated. And using sensors, we get also some feedback response. And just as one example, and this is my second last slide, indeed, I would like to show you one of the neuromechanical models that we developed. And what you can see here is a model that represents a human with similar mass distributions. And each leg is activated by eight muscles. And all these muscles are controlled just by local reflex loops. And what this means is you may be able, just by local control loops in ankle prosthesis, to let it behave like it behaves in this model. That is, you might be able to walk upstairs, downstairs, without really putting in too much control, pretty much an emergent behavior. All right. And this is a slide showing all the people in the group. It is a huge effort. We have engineers, building systems. We have biomechanists or physicists finding fundamental control principles. And we have many students and all the technicians taking part in this whole enterprise. And with that, I thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much. So I think, I mean, seeing those demos, we have a much better sense of what you mean by inventing a better future at MIT. Well, it's a really exciting time. I mean, I think we're entering an era right now where in a not too distant future, we're going to really change our most fundamental notions of human abilities and disabilities and see a much broader impact of technology on people and on humanity. And it's just exciting to be associated with that enterprise. With that in mind, I'd like to open up the floor to questions. We would ask if you could make your way to the mic, because this is being recorded by a variety of media for web transmission. And we want to make sure that your voices are heard. Those of us in the room could probably hear you speak loudly, but the other media may not capture it. So if you have questions, please walk to a mic and identify yourself and join the conversation. Well, David always brags that the questions are the best part of a communication forum that our audiences are so intelligent that they ask really smart things. So don't let me down just because David's at it now. I'm Chester Fernandez. I'm from the Systems, Design, and Management program from the ESD department. My question is, how do you power that laptop in a village? I'm sorry, could you repeat that? How would you recharge the battery on that laptop in a village environment? Well, that's been one of the major focus areas of research. It originally started off with the idea of a hand crank that could be used, and that was a concept. Well, first of all, I think one of the things that they found is that in not all cases are you without power, and so what you want to do is optimize the power that you have. And I think that's why so much focus was given to optimizing power and lengthening the life of the battery. But a number of different proposals are being put forward and explored right now, one of which is coming out of Hughes Group right now, which is looking at a hand-powered kind of pull because it maximizes the biomechanics and the opportunity to use your power in your upper body. So they're looking at that. They're looking at foot power. So I don't think there's a final answer, but a number of different proposals being prototyped right now for human power. Kestrel? Hi, I'm Kestrel. I'm a relatively recent graduate of CMS, and my work is actually in disability and technology. I was really enamored with your sort of upsetting that whole disability and technology triangle of cure rehabilitation and actually improving the quality of life for people with disabilities. And I'm intrigued by your involvement of various people with disabilities in media lab projects. Could you explain a little bit more about how you get people with disabilities from the community involved in these projects? Well, I think that's a good question. I mean, there are a number of different vehicles for that. I might even push that question over to Adam because he's been doing that. Maybe, Adam, if you want to comment on that a bit and what you've been doing with your group? I think something that's going to come up. I'm here to mic. Thanks. Sorry to let the mechanics of this dictate, but it is going to be helpful later. Yes. I think this is something that's had to change. And it's had to change very quickly about the lab. So groups are, I mean, there's no real immediate infrastructure within the lab to rely on a subject population that's consistent, that exhibits many in diverse set of disabilities based on the types of things that we're trying to tackle as problems. So what's happening in my group and other groups, certainly Ross Card's group and quite a few groups at the lab, is that we're trying to form collaborations at MIT in scientific departments that have connections to patient populations. But also, I think one of the benefits of being in the Cambridge environment is that there's such a wealth and network of interested people in academic and also non-academic health care centers. So we've been working with not just teaching hospitals, Harvard Medical School, HST types of things, but really also looking at state hospitals, Tuxbury hospitals, the state hospital, and just working with practitioners and also families. So I know a lot of the students that have projects in this area are constantly out giving talks to caregiver support groups, to parent groups, in addition to finding academics to work with us and collaborate directly on the research itself. And as I go out and talk about this new direction for the media lab, I get incredible interest in a number of emails from patient groups, support groups, research groups from around the country and around the world who want to work with us. So the demand is there, and the opportunities are now there where they weren't in the past. And we're really reaching out to test these technologies at scale in real world environments. It's the only way to understand them and to measure them. Over here. Yeah, I had a question about the city car. It was two questions, actually. One, how does it deal with crashing? So it's a pretty small vehicle. How's it going to deal with a Cadillac Escalade that just rams into it? And the second is, how do people actually park into it and behind? Because I would imagine people aren't really all that good at it. So there are other tracks on the ground, so just figuring out how that might actually work. Yeah, if you can go to one of the microphones, it'd be helpful. OK. I'll start with the second one on parking. We theorize that there's a couple of ways to do it. One is that when you come to the stack, to the back, there would be a zone that you'd park to, and then you'd just get out, and the car would do the rest. Because we have digitally controlled wheels. Each wheel is controlled independently, both to drive the car and to also stack up the car. So to stack up the car, you lock up the front two wheels and you drive the back, and it basically lifts the car up. So that would be probably one way to do it. We figured that if we made the stack as simple as possible, that you wouldn't have to do anything. You just drop the car off at the back, and then you would leave. So we would align that wirelessly, perhaps. On the crash question, interestingly, if you look at the vehicle architecture, the car is very small. And the challenge, of course, is that not making it. The challenge is not to make a car safe at that level. It's about perceived safety. You can make a very safe safety cell for the vehicle, especially when you have very small structures, like very, very small volume. The vehicle architecture places drive motors in each of the wheels at the corner. So you have protection at the corner. You don't have an engine block in the front, just like a traditional car, which would take up a lot of space. Therefore, we can use that space that was where the engine was formerly at, and provide a much more safer crash structure, because now we can utilize that space by using other materials as well. So the greater question about perceived safety, that's another issue, which can be designed, can be addressed by the actual physical design of the car. There was a hiccup recently, where a lot of people started to buy hybrids, as we started to reduce the amount of SUVs out there. I think that there is also the question of whether, in congestion price zone places like London, perhaps there should not be any other vehicles, and that this would live by itself in its own zone. So I think these are very open, and they're very context specific, depending on where you are in the world. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. I'm intrigued by the functionality and the design of the electric vehicle, and I guess my question is, you've designed a vehicle for high density areas for kind of size is small, is the best way. What about kind of larger sprawling cities where larger vehicles that kind of serve as a room, kind of a mobile environment, so you look at the Houston's, the Phoenix, those cities of the world, where you pull up to a Starbucks, there's five times as much retail space in the parking lot than in the store itself, and what you envision in terms of the car becoming a multifunctional place for individuals, and how that fits into your group's work. It was philosophical, really. We decided not to do a multi-purpose vehicle. We wanted to address some of the major issues that were very concerning to us, which was basically dense urban areas. We weren't so focused on particular cities. We knew that the East Coast and the West Coast and parts of Europe and very dense areas of Asia would be the most impactful places to look at. The question of the suburban version of this car did come up, though, because if you take a subway station, it's very good at conveying a high-density amount of people from one station to the next. The question is, how do you get home on one side to the next? So there could be a suburban version of this car which might be a completely different business case where you take this car, you bring it home, and you leave it at night, and then when you come back to, say, the commuter rail, you leave it there, and then it's available for someone else. So, of course, this is a big logistics thing. I don't think we were trying to tackle the one-size-fits-all car. I think that there's plenty of solutions for that. I think eventually we're gonna be moving towards denser concentrations anywhere, just looking at how the global trends are. So if you look at the amount of vehicles that are available out there, there's thousands of vehicles available out there, I think this one is addressing a particular need. And in the case of the city car, if you wanted to take that long trip, you would either rent a car or have a personal car that you would use. So I don't think personal cars would go away. I think that this is a new vehicle type. It's not a taxi cab, it's not your personal car, it's not a sports car, it's a function that fits. It's serving a function that fits in the city. In America, a lot of people own three, four, five, six, 10 cars. Perhaps a family that has five cars can go down to four now and use this one car when they're in the city. So you start thinking about use cases and that's really what we've tried to address. Okay, over here and then we'll go. Hi, my name is Aetang Glider, I'm a new grad student with the teacher education program and my question is for Adam actually on the music creation software that you were showing before. Specifically, you had one slide where you had two bars and I guess lots of drawings with different colors on it and I guess the program must take those drawings and interpret them and translate them into music, right? Right. So I'm kind of interested in how the program does that. Is it kind of like other music creation software out there or does it deal with colors and stuff as well? And furthermore, if it's being used for younger kids, how does it deal with noise when the kid kind of draws something but it's not exactly what they were going for? Right, so firstly, if anybody's interested in the software, I recommend you check out harmingline.com, the program's called Hyperscore and there are demo videos and all those sorts of things there. And it's also the type of project where it's a successful project that's come out of the Media Lab, the student who created, graduated and now that's being further developed and they're really aggressively looking at exactly how it's being used in education settings and the types of interaction that's most useful if you want to support if you're developing it in communities or really marketing it for communities and these sorts of things. But to quickly answer your question, basically what you see is what you get as far as notes and then painting into this score. So there are two formats, there are sort of two palettes in which you work. One, you're laying out no material and the pitch height in the window is the pitch value that you're going to get and then you assign that group of notes of color and then when you paint a color into your window, the only sort of translation that's taking place is that if you draw a curved line like an arc or a line going up, it then remaps your melody to the direction of that line. As far as how, and so basically your stacks of notes are getting mapped to the lines that you're drawing. And since that would create sort of an inharmonic mess, what the software does is helps organize the harmony and there's quite a lot of nuance into how it does that. But what we rely on with kids is just play. They get into this interface and they're drawing and you can quickly draw and redraw and really what we do when we're mentoring is sort of a hands off model, we just encourage kids to play, to try out different things and to ask themselves critical questions like, do you like what you hear? Is this interesting to you? Is this what you want to accomplish? And that dialogue, when you think about maybe your sort of piano lessons with the woman with the blue hair and the beads and with the ruler on your wrists and all these sorts of things is very different. But yeah, it's an encouraging sort of interaction I think. Thanks. All right, over here. My name is Cabell Gathman. I'm a PhD student in sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but I'm a visiting student in CMS this semester. My question is actually also about the cars. I was wondering if you have, it sounds like in your description of it that you're talking about these as being something that would be used by people who do have personal cars the way cars are now. Certainly you're talking about people with credit cards. I'm wondering if you've thought at all about the social meaning of the car? Because certainly in Los Angeles, it is the case that the public transit is very bad, but it's also the case that there is a social stigma attached to using the public transit that is hard to disentangle from how bad the public transit is now. And it seems to me that you might actually have an adoption problem convincing people to use these cars, not just because they may perceive them to be unsafe as was also raised, but just because of the sort of meaning of your own car versus these cars. I wondered if you thought about that. We did think a lot about the issue of personal ownership and how people feel connected to their vehicles. I think that there's a developing idea behind that, which is when you have a shared experience like a shared car, we're not pushing for socialism necessarily. I think we're pushing for how technology can mediate personalization. And personalization not as a physical thing as in here's a physical car, this is my particular space and no one else can use it. What I mean by that is by replacing as much hardware out of the system, replacing it with software, when you start to personalize the things that you actually care about that are not physical, like your favorite radio station, the ergonomic position of the seating, all those things. There are also a number of technologies coming out of the lab and other places that talk about displays. So start thinking about the changing of the colors of the vehicle as well. I think that's a big thing. I don't think we're gonna get people out of their cars, especially the people that love their cars in LA. They're just gonna be stuck in the jam the whole time, which is fine, that's the mentality that they have and that's the part of the culture. Car sharing is actually quite an old idea. It's been around since the 50s. It came out of Zurich, it's moved into Germany now in the United States and throughout the world. I think that the greater trade-off here is are you providing mobility and are you providing flexibility? A lot of people in the city don't own a car because they just can't afford it or insurance is too much or parking is impossible. I think that this vehicle is available to anybody. And in fact, we had some discussions about how this would play in developing nations as well. Can we start to democratize mobility is the big question here. And a lot of people, we take South America for example, a lot of folks in that area of the world do not have access to mobility at all. They have to take a bus three hours one way. And so if we're providing mobility to them in some way, we're reducing their time of travel, therefore basically enhancing their lives. There is a correlation between your economics and your mobility. And I think they're closely tied. So democratizing that becomes a big thing. There are lots of challenges of course. So yeah, we did think a lot about that. Just one little thing then. When you say customizations, are you thinking user profiles that would actually remember information for repeat users? No, I think that the big privacy issue is a big one. I think we want to protect the privacy of the users. We want to be able to personalize of course for each person that comes in. We want to reduce the need to actually physically change anything. We want to have the right security measures for this, of course. One question that did come up for the car is that we want to track where the car is moving because we need to know where the cars are going. The reason why that's the case is because when you have a one way travel, one way shared system, all the cars might end up in the wrong places and therefore you need to bring them back. And therefore the car needs to have GPS in it. So if you're willing to trade a little bit of privacy in terms of knowing where the vehicle is, you might get a lot of gain in terms of access to an available vehicle. So these are games of trade-offs and a lot of people don't realize how much privacy they actually don't have anyway. So that's part of the system. Thank you. Okay, over here. I guess the title of Smart City is kind of intrigued me and I'm a reporter for Small News Papers in Boston and I was wondering if the Media Lab is doing anything with civic engagement, media, communications. Yes, we don't have it represented here but looking at patterns, we have Chris Chicks-Mahai, one of our professors is looking at the impact of media in kind of the cultural environments in terms of expression in many different contexts. So the more traditional interpretation of media and culture and so forth is something that's probably not as pervasive as the Media Lab as it was, but still exists. Thanks. And still we tend to attract students who are interested in those issues and we find that it gives a fine age, I think, to a lot of the things that we do. Okay, over here. Yes, my name is Mary Nekorov. I'm a media specialist and I work with, there's more than between 70 and 100 user groups, they're called special interest groups, cross the board, high-end, newbies, any subjects just about you could name in the whole metro area, a lot of which meet in the major Boston and Cambridge area. The car, I have a personal interest in cars, I was born and raised in Detroit, Motown, Michigan. So that's like the big three were giants that were not keeping up with what the user needed and the Japanese were going out and asking, including half the population who buys their cars, that's the women. So for example, one thing that comments that was ignored was a space for what you need to carry and actually hide when it's parked so it could be called a place under the seat or in the middle that actually is covered, not going all the way back to the trunk, but you're carrying something that you don't want to have your purse or something that looks like a person, it's really just groceries or something like that or your laptop or your personal items. So to allow the design to have a drawer that you can take the drawer out and put it into a rented vehicle, for example, and still have access to it. So that's the question of storage is not just about a small drawer either, it's about the fact that routine use of a vehicle includes carrying things. When you have children, that happens to be things like strollers. When you want to help the transportation puzzle, you want to carry your bike. When you have a presentation to give, you have a portfolio or a suitcase or a backpack. And I don't see in these drawings the possibility at this point of much, quote, storage room that is routine use, not weird use. So this is one of the sort of questions that is a partial solution. What in the beginning version can be a hook to allow for a trailer, a mini trailer? So you could still have your car stacked up but have your, basically it would be a lockable little trailer, any possibility? Oh, Ryan has an answer to that question. Yeah, so why don't you speak to this question of storage? So I guess there's two questions. Yeah, sure. The trailer idea is actually doable. There's this idea called, and it's been around for a while, virtual towing. So being able to tow one car by tying the control system of one to the next. A lot of people in the artificial intelligence world have been looking at this already. When you have a digitally controlled wheel and you're controlling all four wheels in one vehicle, you can imagine that one driver could be in one vehicle and pass by another vehicle that's parked on the side of the road. And then that vehicle activate and follow it wirelessly. And I think that's a very feasible thing. We did think a lot about that and we're working on this. We have a live demo. If you ever wanna come to the lab, we'll show it to you. And that's really there for vehicle fleet management. But now you could imagine perhaps if you have a family of more than two that you can have just one driver have three cars follow behind. So this is really a real possibility. I think some of the logistics and all the legal issues might get in the way. But technologically, that's not the problem. I think that it's really about implementation. On the storage issue, we thought a lot about that. And the reason why these renderings don't have them is because we didn't put them in there. But we did consider storage in a vehicle like this. Typically what you would need is amount of space to go shopping. So if you wanted to go shopping, you would need to have grocery shopping. You would need to have probably eight bags of storage somewhere in the vehicle. If you wanted to take an airplane, you would need to have enough room for two carry-ons plus two big large suitcases. So these are some of the parameters that we've been very much concerned with and we're gonna be implementing into the car. The idea of keeping stuff in your car, I think it's an old idea actually. I think you want to, especially if you're in the mode of using a community vehicle. Because if the vehicle's available all the time, why would you have to carry stuff with you all everywhere you go? I think that there is a need, especially for folks that live in the city, to reduce the amount of things that you're carrying around, especially for environmental reasons. I had in my car a box of just junk that I drove around for a year. And I realized I don't need to carry this stuff because none of it is useful. So my gasoline usage actually reduced because I took that thing out. So you could make an argument that perhaps you don't want to carry so much stuff around. I understand that a lot of people do need strollers and all those type of things that you want to carry around with you. That we want to accommodate into the car as well. Okay, next question. Here go ahead. Hi, I'm Renee O'Leary. I'm a professor at Teachers College, Columbia, and I'm visiting at Harvard this spring. As an educator and as someone interested in creativity, I'm really interested in the extension of the music project. Especially when you're working with people with severe mental illness. And what happens after you begin this process? Have you found or have you been able to look over time at whether depression is alleviated or what are some of the possibilities that go beyond the particular? Do you have any longitudinal data or? So I think the possibilities are one of, is probably the possibility for culture change in a large scale deployment of really creative technologies in a place like a state hospital is probably one of the most interesting avenues for follow-up research that we're pursuing right now. So it's about a year and a half later since we used this hyper score sort of collaboration format at Tootsbury State Hospital. Now, hyper score sessions get prescribed and documented in patient charts by the primary physicians. It was written in as a intervention, partly responsible for discharge of most of the patients that we worked with in the mental health department as they moved into the next stages of their treatment away from a residential and long-term a chronic care facility. There are now hyper score groups that are completely self-sufficient as the patients are mentors to one another. And then also I think at the hospital, one thing that doesn't appear in the video is just the change. And not the change in patients as far as functional abilities and on markers related to depression and these types of things, but really the change in everybody involved with the project, the practitioners, the patients socially, the patients and how they're related to their community, how they wanted to fulfill roles of leadership and mentorship to patients that have completely different sets of cognitive and physical disabilities than they would even identify with. So I think that this is definitely something that is not totally uncommon to music and the use of music in these types of settings, but what is different is the fact that we're using a technology to mediate that type of change. And the opportunity then is that since we're working in this world of sophistication and interaction and data that's technologically mediated, then can we capture that data and start assigning the parts of the interaction and the parts of technology that are responsible for those types of cultural changes and changes related to disease and intervention markers. So that is something that we're looking at now in a new collaboration with Toxbury as we follow up with some case studies and developing sort of the next phase of technologies for their patient population. And just to give you a taste of what that is, so we have this composing and facilitative tool, but now we're trying to put patients in the roles of sort of virtuosic and expert performers. The idea is you've composed this material, now can you express it in real time like a violinist would express their melodic line. So that will have new implications for use and also the type of data we can get from it. But the answer is yes, those things are happening and I think they're very interesting. Yes, thank you. Okay, one last question here. First of all, I just think this is tremendously exciting stuff. This is really great things that are going on here. My question has to do with resistance, particularly in the case of the car and you mentioned in the case of the computer having a nonprofit to not compete with whatever. What kind of resistance do you encounter or expect to encounter from, let's say in the case of the car, from auto companies, from cities who don't want to change the way parking is arranged, parking lot operators, from God knows who, as you move into these things, I don't know if you're at the stage where you are considering that, but I'm curious whether you're trying to deal with that sort of issue and what it seems to look like at this point. Yeah, well I'm going to answer that quickly and maybe if Ryan or Adam or others want to talk about that. I've been in advanced research all of my career and there are always a million reasons why technology shouldn't be considered and people who protect the status quo. And in the case of the automobile industry, in the case of many of the industries that we deal with, there are many reasons why the status quo needs to be protected. I think the purpose of the Media Lab is to demonstrate the possibilities to stimulate the imagination of those who are willing to think differently. And occasionally you can even get those who are not willing to think differently to think a little bit differently and I've noticed that since I've been at the lab. I mean the car itself might literally change the idea of what a car is to being a consumer electronics device. And you're not going to get automobile manufacturers who are invested in the idea that a car is a big, expensive, dedicated device to adopt that immediately. But we do have people who have come through the lab from automobile manufacturers who are chartered with thinking out in the future who are beginning to absorb that idea. And we even have consumer electronics manufacturers from Japan and Korea who are now looking at the automobiles. So lots of resistance, lots of resistance to change. But I think our job is to inspire people to think differently and not worry about those who would resist change in some ways. You guys want to comment on that? Okay, apparently I handled that one okay. Okay. Great, final question now because we've got to let... Just quickly if you can talk about it a little bit more about why you're wearing around your neck Okay, great. Oh, you forgot to ask me about the device, you know. Yeah, no, you shouldn't show up. A media lab person shouldn't show up without some gizmo, you know, this is the latest gizmo. Professor Sandy Pentland from the Human Dynamics Group is interested in how mobile technology can be used to measure group dynamics within corporations or with other social organizations. So as I'm wearing this right now, it's recording not what I'm saying but the fact that I'm talking is recording those I'm interacting with. It's recording my motions. It's feeding that back wirelessly, not in this building but in our test situations to a centralized system that can now analyze the interaction and dynamics between people and groups. Hopefully within companies to encourage greater collaboration, Hitachi is working with us in order to explore that so as IBM but ultimately to look at other social situations like older people who are living alone and seeing what their patterns are. Ultimately to be able to detect depression and lack of social interaction before it occurs. So this is our latest wireable gizmo and I think we're gonna be hearing a lot more from it. Thanks for asking that. I don't wanna wear the gizmo without talking. We just thought it was a strange fashion statement that you were making. I try. But thank you very much for a great discussion. I think we've got a lot to look forward to in the coming years coming out of the lab and the lab's relationship to other parts of MIT and it's been great just having a chance to share some of this with the audience for today. So thanks to Frank and to the media lab grad students who were able to participate tonight. Thank you. Thank you, Henry.