Archive for the 'Newsletter' Category

Zoë Corbyn, Times Higher Education

Credit: Pieter Franken/Andy Ryan

Joichi Ito does not have the kind of background that would normally catch the eye of an appointment committee searching for someone to head a prestigious university research lab. To start with, he is not an academic – he is an internet entrepreneur, a venture capitalist and a former disc jockey. And, if that were not enough against him, he dropped out of university. Twice.

But not every lab is like the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which turned 25 last year, is world famous for its “renegade” research environment and creative and wacky projects that combine design with cutting-edge technology. It is responsible for, among other things, the electronic ink technology that e-readers use to simulate printed paper; for Guitar Hero, the hit video game in which players simulate playing the guitar in rock songs; for Lego Mindstorms robotics building kits and for the XO-1 laptop, a budget computer designed to be distributed to children in developing countries around the world as part of the One Laptop per Child project.

Nicholas Negroponte set up the Media Lab to explore human-machine interaction and the life-enhancing possibilities of new technology. He led it from its start until he stepped down as director in 2000. Ito, who took over in September, is the third person to head the lab since the departure of its founder; he took the reins from Frank Moss, professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT. More…

Harry McCracken, Technologizer

Over at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal has an exceptionally good post with an exceptionally good title: “The Triumph of Kodakery.” Inspired by the sad news that Eastman Kodak may be on the verge of bankruptcy, he points out that the dream the company was built on–making photography so effortless that it’s everywhere, and enjoyed by everybody–is hardly in trouble. It’s just that its purest expression today is the camera phone, not a Kodak camera that takes Kodak film that’s processed by a Kodak lab.

The dream originated in the brain of the gentleman in the above photo, George Eastman (1854-1932). He was the founder of Eastman Kodak, and he didn’t just start one of the most important companies in the history of consumer technology products. He played as important a role as anyone in inventing the idea of consumer technology products.

Even more than such other pioneering technologist-entrepreneurs as Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Ford, Eastman seems astoundingly contemporary. If he showed up in Silicon Valley today, he’d be right at home. (Actually, he might have as good a shot as anyone at fixing what ails Kodak.) More…

Image via Technologizer.com

By Steve Lohr, The New York Times

THE Internet likes you, really likes you. It offers you so much, just a mouse click or finger tap away. Go Christmas shopping, find restaurants, locate partying friends, tell the world what you’re up to. Some of the finest minds in computer science, working at start-ups and big companies, are obsessed with tracking your online habits to offer targeted ads and coupons, just for you.

But now — nothing personal, mind you — the Internet is growing up and lifting its gaze to the wider world. To be sure, the economy of Internet self-gratification is thriving. Web start-ups for the consumer market still sprout at a torrid pace. And young corporate stars seeking to cash in for billions by selling shares to the public are consumer services — the online game company Zynga last week, and the social network giant Facebook, whose stock offering is scheduled for next year.

As this is happening, though, the protean Internet technologies of computing and communications are rapidly spreading beyond the lucrative consumer bailiwick. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care and food distribution. The consumer Internet can be seen as the warm-up act for these technologies.

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Image via The New York Times

By Steve Lohr, The New York Times

Dharmendra S. Modha of I.B.M. leads a team developing chips that structurally resemble the brain.

Ever since the early days of modern computing in the 1940s, the biological metaphor has been irresistible. The first computers — room-size behemoths — were referred to as “giant brains” or “electronic brains,” in headlines and everyday speech. As computers improved and became capable of some tasks familiar to humans, like playing chess, the term used was “artificial intelligence.” DNA, it is said, is the original software.

For the most part, the biological metaphor has long been just that — a simplifying analogy rather than a blueprint for how to do computing. Engineering, not biology, guided the pursuit of artificial intelligence. As Frederick Jelinek, a pioneer in speech recognition, put it, “airplanes don’t flap their wings.”

Yet the principles of biology are gaining ground as a tool in computing. The shift in thinking results from advances in neuroscience and computer science, and from the prod of necessity.

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Image: Tony Avelar/Bloomberg News