Added: 12/13/2005 |
MIT Media Laboratory of MIT is an Important Player in Introducing of New Digital TechnologiesMIT Media Laboratory brings together such disciplines as graphic design, cognition, electronic music, holography and video. Its multidisciplinary approach lies in the focus on invention, study and use of digital technologies. Alongside with MIT Mathematics and MIT Physics Departments, MIT Media Lab is a leading contributor to the development of research.
MIT Media Laboratory differs from other laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology due to its combination of a research program and a degree granting program in Media Arts and Sciences. The faculty of the Laboratory is comprised of 46 scholars and researchers, who are actively engaged in a wide range of collaborations within the university.
MIT Media has the enrolment of 130 graduate students with 80 taking a Master's degree and 50 Doctoral students. In addition to this there are approximately 15 students, who belong to other departments of the university, but who choose to pursue research in the MIT Media Laboratory. Admissions to the graduate research program comprise two stages: first, students are admitted to the Master's Program and within two years they may apply for the Ph.D. program. Nearly 200 undergraduates work in the Laboratory annually through Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program. Today the lab houses 30 research groups, involved in more than 300 projects and funded mainly by corporate sponsors. The majority of research groups focus on topics, dedicated to the human computer interaction. Several groups aim at creating "intelligent objects" aware of their surroundings and able to predict the emotional state of the user. Such objects range from hybrid search engines to electronic voting machines. Some research groups develop new instruments for music, while others focus on quantum computing and other modes of computation. The research doesn't imply the development of new technologies, but rather the application of existing technologies in new ways.
Among the major focuses of MIT Media Laboratory is the Hundred Dollar Laptop project, in which Media Lab researchers collaborate with the non-profit organization "One Laptop per Child". The laptop give-away is targeted at one billion schoolchildren in primary and secondary schools and is designed particularly for remote areas without connectivity. The initiative to develop the program was expressed at the World Economic Forum by the Chairman of MIT Media Laboratory Nicholas Negroponte.
The faculty and former students of the MIT Media Laboratory publish a great number of articles, including Affective Computing by Rosalind Picard, Being Digital by Nicholas Negroponte, the Coming Revolution on Your Desktop by Neil Gershenfeld, Design by Numbers by John Maeda and Adventures in Modeling by Vanessa Stevens Colella.
A number of technologies developed by the laboratory are used by many like toy companies and IBM laptops. However, MIT Media Lab is often criticized for being an industrialized rather than academic institution due to the great property rights on the part of its sponsors. Some criticism is also on the research quality and treatment of students.
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