MIT's Media Lab, a Media Darling, Seeks Global Role and New Missions

If you don't think technology research is glamorous, take a tour of the Massachusetts

ALSO SEE: In the Works at the Media Lab ALSO HEAR: Listen to audio excerpts (each about two minutes long) of an interview with Nicholas Negroponte, senior director of MIT's Media Lab: Why create Media Labs in other countries? What are the benefits for those countries? Have other countries expressed interest? Is the Media Lab frivolous? Looking back on Being Digital Is the Media Lab getting too big? Or listen to all the excerpts together (about 12 minutes long). Requires RealPlayer. To obtain the software, visit the Real Networks Web site. Additional help with installing and using that software is available at http://service.real.com.

Institute of Technology's Media Laboratory. On a recent afternoon, one professor was posing for a photo shoot for Details magazine, a student was schmoozing with a visiting businessman while sitting on stylish contemporary couches, and a parrot was babbling away as part of a research project to help computers better mimic language.

In many ways, the Media Lab is itself a kind of research project on how to design an idea factory for computer technology. For more than 20 years, the laboratory has crafted a reputation -- through a mixture of media savvy and influential work -- as a rich intellectual playground with an unorthodox approach to conducting and paying for its cutting-edge research. Now its charismatic founder, Nicholas Negroponte, is leading an effort to clone the Media Lab around the globe.

If you walk past the parrot to a lounge on the third floor of the headquarters here, you'll see early signs of the Media Lab's budding empire. A big projection-television screen hanging from the ceiling displays live Webcam images of researchers at the year-old Media Lab Europe, in Dublin. Soon, that screen might also feature scenes from Media Lab Asia, which is being built in India, or from proposed outposts in South Korea and Latin America.

The outposts are part of a two-pronged strategy that Media Lab officials talk about with a missionary zeal.

MEDIA LAB'S TOP SPONSORS MIT's Media Lab offers different levels of sponsorship, which grant the companies varying levels of access to the laboratory and its researchers. Twelve companies participate at the highest level, meaning they contribute $5-million or more. The companies are: BT Eircom Hewlett-Packard Company Intel Learning Lab Denmark The Lego Group MasterCard International Motorola Swatch AG Telmex United States Postal Service United Technologies Corporation SOURCE: MIT Media Lab

The first goal: to spread the lab's model for conducting research. The second: to save the world -- or, at least, to explore ways that technology can be used to help developing nations. The idea is not just to give word processors, Palm pilots, and other technology to people in remote villages, but to explore how digital technology could be used in practical ways to improve the health and lives of people in impoverished areas.

"We think the Media Lab is a good idea and a good model, and we want to see it spread," says Walter Bender, executive director of the Media Lab. "Academia is a fairly conservative place, and to get change to happen, oftentimes you need an external agent."

But as the Media Lab expands abroad, some observers wonder whether this technological playground is simply a novelty, or whether it is -- as its leaders say -- a model that could help spark innovation, even change the culture of research in other regions of the world.

Leaders of some countries seem sold on the Media Lab's system, or at least on the power of its name to draw publicity and financial sponsors for its international offshoots. The governments of India and Ireland have each given the lab millions of dollars in exchange for its help in setting up research facilities, and many more countries have expressed serious interest in doing so.

Researchers in one of those countries, however, are already crying foul, arguing that their government's money could have been better spent directly supporting local universities. Meanwhile, the laboratory is experiencing growing pains back home as it prepares to break ground on a second Media Lab building here. Such growth has some at MIT worried that their enterprise is getting too big to keep its edge.

Media Lab 1.0

The architecture of the Media Lab's five-story headquarters here, designed by I.M. Pei, is meant to set the tone for the laboratory and to encourage collaboration. Open spaces are full of couches, and interior offices and conference rooms are surrounded by glass. Mr. Negroponte was trained as an architect, but it was his interest in the design elements of computers that led him to start the Media Lab in 1980.

The laboratory was an early adopter of the idea of getting researchers from various disciplines to play together. "This place was a collection of all of MIT's misfits," says Mr. Negroponte, who now serves as the lab's senior director. "So when I started this place with Jerry Weisner, everybody said, 'It's all yours. You've just listed the things we don't care about.'"

Probably the most unusual thing about the Media Lab, however, is its business model, which is closely tied to its mission to break down boundaries between business and academe.

While most university research facilities get money from private or public grants, or by doing specific research projects for individual companies, the Media Lab receives more than 90 percent of its $38-million annual budget from a diverse group of 170 corporate sponsors that include many of the world's best-known companies. The sponsors, which are required to give at least $100,000 a year for at least three years, have remarkably little say in the laboratory's research agenda. Nor do they get exclusive rights to what's created here -- any company that is a member can license any invention in the lab for use in the company's products.

What sponsors do get is membership in an exclusive club -- and an open invitation to visit the clubhouse. Officials of sponsor corporations are encouraged to drop in at the laboratory to pick the brains of its 35 faculty members and hundreds of students. To entertain the corporate guests -- there are three to five visits on a typical day -- students and professors stage high-tech demonstrations of their latest ideas or research projects. The mantra here, many say, is "Demo or die."

The lab's leaders argue that the continual contact with business people keeps their researchers' work relevant. "When people come to the laboratory, they don't just come to the laboratory to find out what we have to say, but hopefully there's a richness and an interaction," says Mr. Bender. "We also write journal articles and we do all the usual things, but we don't think that's efficient." Among the things that researchers learn from these meetings, he says, is whether the technology they dream up can be easily fabricated using existing factory infrastructure. "We do our armchair work, but we also roll up our sleeves and get our hands dirty."

Yael Maguire, a second-year doctoral student who is focusing on applied physics, says he gives at least one demo a week, sometimes as many as three or four. The laboratory is both a degree-granting program within MIT and a research center, and Mr. Maguire says he chose to do his graduate work there because of its focus on experimentation rather than sitting in the classroom. But he worries that he spends too much time on projects rather than classes: "It's sometimes hard to develop the full academic rigor that you'd find in another department."

On the other hand, he says, giving demonstrations has greatly improved his ability to communicate his ideas.

What's the corporations' return on their hefty contributions?

Arthur R. Tauder, a strategic consultant for McCann-Erickson Worldwide, an advertising company, says being a sponsor gives the company a research-and-development arm that it would not be able to set up on its own. The relationship also allows Mr. Tauder and any of his colleagues to consult MIT researchers and students to get advice on which technologies the company should invest in.

"We were being bombarded with numerous presentations on new media technologies, and these presentations were characterized by a lot of smoke and mirrors," he says. "We didn't have the expertise to be able to cut through that and to be able to sort through what was smoke."

Mr. Tauder says he regularly calls or corresponds by e-mail with faculty members and students at the Media Lab, and visits from his office in New York once or twice a month. McCann-Erickson, however, has not yet adopted any device invented at the laboratory.

Media Lab, the Sequel

One sign of the Media Lab's success is the massive construction project that is about to begin next door. A fence surrounds MIT's former brain- and cognitive-sciences building, which will be torn down next month to make way for a second Media Lab building, scheduled to open in 2004. It will be twice the size of the current facility, and is estimated to cost $115-million.

One reason the lab is able to grow is that its ability to attract news-media buzz has helped it lure companies eager to give money. While researchers on most campuses toil in relative obscurity, the Media Lab has often sought press coverage by staging media-ready events like fashion shows of "wearable computers" and collaborations with popular artists including Yo-Yo Ma, the cellist, and Penn and Teller, the magicians.

It helps that Mr. Negroponte, the co-founder, has become something of a celebrity himself, through his columns in Wired magazine and his best-selling book, Being Digital (Vintage Books, 1995), which predicted the explosion of the information age.

"Nicholas Negroponte is to running a research lab what Steve Jobs is to running a computer company," says Randy Pausch, co-director of the entertainment-technology center at Carnegie Mellon University. "He's an executive that works outside the box."

The Media Lab's high profile has led some critics to argue that its research favors style over substance, and that some of the inventions it has helped produce are frivolous. But Mr. Negroponte says the laboratory's track record proves that his system works. Its inventions include items both playful and practical. Robotic Lego blocks, for instance, are intended to help children learn about computers. Designs for the wearable computers could one day allow people to check their e-mail or surf the Web through devices embedded in their clothing and eyeglasses. The lab also developed standards for digital video.

"You can't fool people for very long," says Mr. Negroponte. "I mean, if this were all icing and no cake -- and that's certainly what people accused us of in the early '80s -- we'd be gone by now. So something's right. We're not charlatans who speak a good line and wear good suits and tell funny stories after dinner. What people are realizing is that the substance is, in fact, in the surprising results that come from the juxtaposition of really different people."

But some of the lab's efforts are admittedly frivolous. One of the 400 research projects going on now, for instance, is "interactive scratch and sniff." According to a statement by the four researchers pursuing it: "We don't consider this a serious application, but it starts to explore possible uses for computer-controlled scent."

The Media Lab's leaders say their approach creates a greater amount of freedom for the researchers than is usual in academe. Mr. Maguire, the doctoral student, says he has been encouraged to spend a third of his time on projects that have no direct connection to his primary research. Along with four colleagues, he created a Web site called ThinkCycle that lets engineering students use their spare time volunteering design advice to nonprofit groups that need assistance (http://www.thinkcycle.org).

Media Lab Goes to Europe

The Media Lab's facility in Dublin -- which Irish officials hope will spark technology research in that country -- is housed in an old Guinness brewery. Visitors to the new laboratory note that you can still smell the beer.

Media Lab Europe, as it is called, opened in July 2000 and is now the home of 40 researchers (http://www.medialabeurope.org). MIT received about $10-million from the Irish government to help set it up. The facility, which has so far attracted seven sponsors of its own who contribute a total of $7.5-million per year, is in some ways a wing of the Media Lab at MIT. Mr. Negroponte is on the board of Media Lab Europe, and researchers from MIT regularly visit and work with the professors in Ireland. In fact, any sponsor of Media Lab Europe can license research produced in either Dublin or Cambridge. The Media Lab's contract keeps it from setting up similar operations in Europe for 10 years.

Brendan Tuohy, secretary general of the Irish government's department of public enterprise, says it was worth the money to jump-start the country's effort to strengthen its information-technology research. "Part of it is, you piggyback on the benefits of having access to their experience and their expertise," he says. The government also hopes that MIT's reputation will help strengthen Ireland's position as an emerging center for technology business. "MIT Media Lab itself has a brand name, and it attracted the right kind of researchers," he says.

But the deal was made despite objections from some Irish professors, who complained that the money would have been better spent at home. "No one institution should be given favored status," says Conor Long, dean of research at Dublin City University. "I felt that the same rigor wasn't being applied to the funds that were being disbursed to Media Lab Europe" as to money spent by Irish universities.

And in Cambridge, some Media Lab professors were reluctant to participate because they were busy with other projects, according to Mr. Negroponte. "It took two years to negotiate, and by the time the whole thing was done, I turned around and found there was nobody behind me anymore. We had to do some damage control to get some people more enthused and more active, and that's really starting to happen now."

Failed Expansion Attempts

The Media Lab has been trying to replicate itself on foreign soil for more than a decade -- and for many years it had met with more failure than success. Its first attempt came in 1987, when it arranged with a university and a businessman in Japan to set up a research facility in Tokyo. But the deal collapsed under both internal and external pressure. Critics accused MIT of selling secrets to the Japanese that could threaten American companies -- especially since, at the time, many Americans felt that the Japanese were dominating technology businesses and buying up assets in the United States. Meanwhile, the Japanese benefactor and the university were bickering over details of the arrangement, says Mr. Negroponte, who adds that the experience taught him how difficult it is to coordinate large international projects.

More recently, the laboratory has suffered false starts on proposed offshoots in Germany and Sweden. "You cannot name a country in Europe that we have not been asked to do a Media Lab of some sort," says Mr. Negroponte, who now spends nearly all of his time on international collaborations. "And, I would suspect, of the European countries, I have met with the head of state of at least a third of them on that very topic."

Mr. Tuohy, of the Irish government, and Media Lab officials call the experiment in Dublin a success so far, though they point out that it is only now getting under way.

One of the toughest challenges, says Mr. Bender, the Media Lab's executive director, is establishing good communications between the laboratories. One proposal involves setting up distance-education courses between Cambridge and Dublin. "Whether the distance education will be in the form of a videoconference or whether it will be in another form," he says, "is something we're trying to understand."

Officials do not expect last month's terrorist attacks and subsequent restrictions on air travel to throw a wrench into their plans. "So far, I have not seen it curtailing travel or activity or plans," says Alexandra Kahn, press liaison for the lab, who notes that one professor has already traveled to India since the attacks. Some of these parts of the world were never considered necessarily places that the average citizen would travel, she adds. "They're rural, or they're not necessarily on people's radar -- but that's where a lot of the need is."

India and the Developing World

So far, the Media Lab's outpost in India -- which is part of its effort to play a part in the developing world -- exists only in a series of blueprints and government documents. But leaders of Media Lab Asia, a joint project with the Indian government that was announced in June, hope that the laboratory will become the world's leading site of research into using technology to help poor regions.

India has allocated $12-million for Media Lab Asia, and the total budget of the project is expected to exceed $1-billion over the next 10 years.

"The core idea, from an action point of view, is to bring the notion of R&D to development -- which hasn't been done," says Alex P. Pentland, a professor at the Media Lab who is leading the effort to set up the first Asian outpost. "The history of development projects -- of the World Bank, and the U.N., and the U.S. AID -- is, We know what to do, we're going to go down there and build a dam. Or, We're going to go down there and build an electric-generation plant."

Mr. Pentland hopes that the laboratory's projects will involve more than getting computers and Internet connections to people in remote areas. "The trouble is that things that we have today aren't useful to them. I mean, who needs a bloody PC if you're in the village? What are you going to do, desktop publishing and spreadsheets?"

Unlike the laboratories in Cambridge and Dublin, Media Lab Asia will consist of several small research facilities throughout the country, with a central office outside Bombay. And it will not share patent rights with the other operations, though some Media Lab researchers will work on projects with those in India.

Though it will have a different structure than the one in Cambridge, Media Lab Asia will try to promote the same innovative spirit and to promote links among diverse groups, including scholars and representatives of nongovernmental organizations, says Mr. Pentland. "Concretely, it's a meeting place where the universities, the NGO's, the villages, the industry" can get together, he says.

Media Lab leaders are also working on proposals for at least two more Media Labs -- the ones in Latin America and in South Korea. Mr. Negroponte says decisions on those locations will be made by the end of the year.

Media Lab Latin America would, like its Asian counterpart, focus on creating technology for the poor. Rather than a single building, it would consist of several sites connected by satellites, says Mr. Negroponte. Government officials in Spain have expressed interest in supporting the Latin America project, he adds, noting that Spain is the largest investor in the region.

The proposal for a site in South Korea, tentatively dubbed Media Lab East, still must be fleshed out. Mr. Pentland, who has been involved with planning for the project, says its Korean backers are looking to spur innovation. "Korean universities are absolutely first-rate, but they don't feel like they're creative or generative the way they would like to be. What they're interested in is reinventing themselves to be more generative, innovative, and that's one of the things they're interested in working with us on."

Mr. Negroponte does not rule out setting up more Media Labs, naming Australia as another possible site, though no discussions are under way.

"We're not building franchises. We're not sort of taking this thing and putting it somewhere else," says Mr. Bender, noting that each laboratory will have different specialties and variations on the original's operating structure. "Rather, we're trying to influence the approach in other places to research, and influence the relationship between academia and governments, industry, NGO's, etc., and try to change that whole relationship."

Mr. Negroponte says the driving force behind the Media Lab's expansion is his belief that one of the most important roles of technology in the near future will be helping the developing world. People in those countries have an incentive to create innovative technologies to help them improve their lives, he says. "And I think you're going to see a lot of creative energy coming out of countries that we think of as followers, not leaders."

Where the Media Lab Is Not

While Media Lab officials are clearly proud of their model, few if any colleges and universities have copied its quirky practices in research and financing. In fact, professors at other academic laboratories who focus on digital technology say they are not interested in replicating the high-profile lab.

"The Media Lab took a particular approach, which was very interesting, in that they deliberately set out to make themselves a brand name in the popular consciousness and the corporate culture," says Ken Perlin, director of New York University's Media Research Laboratory. "By becoming a brand name, they were able to get a lot of corporate money to conduct some research. But I don't think a lot of people have followed that."

Aaron Bobick, an associate professor of computer science at the Georgia Institute of Technology who once taught at the Media Lab, says it would probably be difficult for another university to win the same level of corporate sponsorship, even if it tried. "It is hard to convince a company that is a member of the Media Lab to also be a member of another big, expensive media lab," he says.

As for the buzz -- the photo shoots, the celebrity events -- not every researcher lives for that. Mr. Perlin, for instance, says he is particularly resistant to giving demonstrations or continually talking to reporters. "In this lab," he says, "it would just be a distraction."