August 10, 2015, Los Angeles—Joichi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, talked about the interdisciplinary research center, and how it works to transcend boundaries. The Lab considers R & D as a function for learning without the normal constraints of departments and fields of study.
The Lab is comprised of 24 groups, each with a single faculty member chosen from the ranks of associate professors who are considered likely to become future superstars. The overriding philosophy is to take the intersections of art, science, design, and engineering to innovate. The starting point is the ideas. This intellectual property is augmented through cross-disciplinary interactions and the underlying fundamental technologies and practices.
Before the Internet, change and innovation was slow and predictable, but now is open to multiple worlds and interconnected people who can be gathered together at the click of a button. The Internet enables permission-less innovation and allows users to change communications from prohibitive costs and effort to affordable. These low-cost networks and datacenters are enabled by free and open-source software leading to open innovation.
The latest systems have disassociated the hardware and software stacks to allow the creation of a function with very little investment, unlike earlier times where the project funding dominated all efforts. Only after getting funding would project development proceed.
For example, after the Fukushima earthquake there was a great need for low-cost Geiger counters to map the radiation patterns. It took about a week to gather design experts, money, and off-the-shelf components to make mobile Geiger counters. This ability to pull people and functions together in a short time is the cornerstone of the new design, development, and deployment era. The availability of open-source hardware and software reduces the development costs and time for both the hardware and software.
The Media Lab has evolved its philosophy from demo or die to deploy or die, and has partnered with fast prototype shops in Shenzhen to provide the manufacturing capabilities. They address the issues of IP protection by taking advantage of the fast-turn capabilities of their manufacturing partner. Innovation on the hardware only costs about $1k for retooling. This agile base lets hardware approach software in development and change times and costs.
Ito reviewed the efforts and results of a few groups within the Lab, noting the overwhelming prevalence of cross-disciplinary work and knowledge transfers. Insights and novel applications of traditional processes have engendered many technologies and applications. For example, synthetic biology is moving towards an open-source building block approach for new applications. Changes and improving capabilities are growing at a rate 4-5 times that of Moore's law.
The greatest challenge is that the new technologies could create an extinction event, the creation of a pathogen that can kill all living things. Within a laboratory setting, there are safeguards and kill switches in the gene sequences, but the technology is available to anyone with Web access. Crowd-sourced "street" labs can proceed much faster than corporate R & D centers.
These examples allow the comparison and contrast of the various approaches of the underlying groups. Artists take data and add some use, scientists take data and convert to knowledge. Engineers use that knowledge and add functions and utility and the designers try to find ways to extract use from functions and utility. All these people are working to make information into something physical.
The Lab exists to facilitate the interactions between the various groups to help these people work outside their areas of expertise. The ongoing developments across all fields, and especially in computers, lets the researchers address many areas that were previously unattainable. The power of computers can help to address many issues of representations in the real world and improve and enhance the interactions of specialties as diverse as biology and computer-based simulation.
The ability to integrate information across diverse technologies increases the overlap with adjacent communities. Biology will become a key driver in many areas and will eventually have as large an impact as semiconductors and computers. The ability to mash together technologies forces the students to be involved in all aspects of life, and these people will bring their new approaches to the rest of the planet.