Happy Birthday MIT Media Lab!

Update: Wired's Oct. 24 article:"Building The Next Big Thing: 25 Years of MIT’s Media Lab"

Portal to the future. Perhaps that’s an apt image for the MIT Media Lab, which has been a fount of new ideas on how technology can enable better lives for everyday people for 25 years now. And they do it in a rather radical, open-atelier way with academic disciplines melding together and physical walls disappearing, especially in their new headquarters. If you missed the Oct. 15-16 event, you can still tune in:

Watch all six Media Lab 25th Anniversary sessions or select appealing speakers or topics. For example, check out a panel on the Soul of the Lab I, moderated by John Hockenberry, the host of NPR’s "The Takeaway," who suggested the Media Lab’s essence “has to do with…street fights—the ability to fight the tradition ways of doing things.” Speakers included Google head Eric Schmidt and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky who recommended that to cultivate fresh thinking, “You don’t study subjects, you study thinkers.”

Media highlights:

The BBC coverage focuses on Natan Linder of the Fluid Interfaces group who explains why his LuminAR lamp can change the way individuals access the internet.

Listen to the NPR podcast of Ira Flatow’s "Science Friday" to hear Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte '66, MAR '66 describing the birth and future of the lab and researchers comment on current projects.

Former Technology Review editor Bob Buderi shared his tips from the day on his Xconomy blog post—such as a vision of a future Media Lab in space and a snapshot of ideas from new faculty including synthetic neurobiology and a camera that can operate at a trillion frames per second.

Forbes was most impressed with Professor Rosalind Picard’s work on measuring emotional responses for uses such as measuring facial expressions for market research or signaling caretakers about rising stress levels of children who have autism spectrum disorders.

Read The Tech for more, including Schmidt's pivotal question:  “What happens when you have a powerful browser in the hands of people who have never seen anything except television...”