MIT Media Lab

Watch: In this 2010 video, William Mitchell, then a Media Lab professor and former dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, tells the Story of E14—the Media Lab extension designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki, who died last week at the age of 95. See the whole video at https://lnkd.in/gna26HjE

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Fumihiko Maki, who died last week at the age of 95, was known worldwide for designs as diverse as the gleaming tower of 4 World Trade Center and the curving lines of the Fujisawa Municipal Gymnasium. He employed both sharp angles and floating forms for the Media Lab's Building E14—an extension of the original Media Lab building designed by I.M. Pei. In all of his work, the Washington Post notes, Maki endeavored to discover “the ‘body of wisdom,’ or collective memory, from a site and [translate] that into a design.” At the Media Lab, that “body of wisdom” includes I.M. Pei’s Wiesner Building, which features a cube-shaped lab space surrounded by offices.That design was further developed in Building E14, where two-story lab spaces are encircled by offices that open onto balconies. Maki said that Building E14, which opened in 2010, was intended to help people and ideas circulate. Its glass-enclosed lab spaces and internal courtyards are connected by floating staircases that offer surprising glimpses of the work going on inside. Learn more about E14 and its architect, Fumihiko Maki: https://lnkd.in/gna26HjE Images: 1) Fumihiko Maki at the MIT Media Lab in 2010. Credit: jeanbaptisteparis 2) Exterior of Building E14. Credit: Andy Ryan 3) Interior of Building E14. Credit: Andy Ryan 4) Sketch of E14. Credit: Maki and Associates

Keeley Erhardt is an MIT-Pillar AI Collective Fellow in the MIT Media Lab whose research interests lie in the transformative potential of AI in network analysis, particularly for entity correlation and hidden link detection within and across domains. She has designed machine learning algorithms to identify and track temporal correlations and hidden signals in large-scale networks, uncovering online influence campaigns originating from multiple countries. Her work has the potential for many applications such as detecting fraud, propaganda, money laundering, and other covert activity in the finance, energy, and national security sectors.

On CNA's “Becoming Human,” presenter Chua Enlai talks to Media Lab researcher Nikhil Singh and alum Aruna Sankaranarayanan and to alum Matthew Groh about different ways that deepfakes may affect the 2024 elections. The segments begin just past the 10-minute mark.

The Living Knitwork Pavilion—a modular shade structure made up of 3D knitted yarns containing sensors that allow the material to change color and light up in response to changes in the environment—received a special mention at the 2024 Architizer A+ Awards in the Plus: Architecture + Innovation category. This architectural piece was developed and built by a team of researchers from the Media Lab and the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, led by Media Lab PhD student Irmandy Wicaksono.

"I think art in general is about making something out of nothing, and I fell in love with code for that reason: you are making something (movement) out of something that feels like nothing (words)." Media Lab Professor Zach Lieberman talks about his artistic practice, his daily digital sketches, and his approach to new technologies.

MicroPET, an interdisciplinary collaboration with researchers from the Media Lab’s Space Exploration Initiative, Weill Cornell Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Seed Health, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), has been included in the Stellar Scape Exhibition at Le Pavillon in Namur, Belgium. This project, which was launched to the International Space Station in November 2022, is investigating the use of biological processes to upcycle plastic.

In Nature Scientific Data (Nature Portfolio), Media Lab PhD student Alex Berke, alum Daniel Calacci, PhD student Robert Mahari, and Media Lab Professors Kent Larson and Alex 'Sandy' Pentland present a first-of-its-kind, crowdsourced dataset of purchase histories from US Amazon consumers, published with the participants' informed consent. The dataset, which contains information similar to that collected by public agencies and, increasingly, by private companies in the US, was published in an effort towards democratizing access to the types of rich data sources routinely used by companies.

Media Lab spinoff Augmental is developing input devices to help people with movement impairments use computers, smartphones, and tablets. Its first product, the MouthPad, is a pressure-sensitive touchpad that sits on the roof of the mouth, and translates tongue and head gestures into cursor scrolling and clicks in real time via Bluetooth. “Our hope is to create an interface that is multimodal, so you can choose what works for you,” says co-founder Tomás Vega, an alum of the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces research group. “We want to be accommodating to every condition.”

Media Lab Principal Research Scientist Shuguang Zhang and collaborators from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, the MIT Center for Bits + Atoms, and MIT Department of Chemistry have created a water-soluble version of an important bacterial enzyme, histidine kinase. While this enzyme is a promising target for new classes of antibiotics, it has been difficult to target, as it is “hydrophobic” in its natural state, and loses its structure when removed from the cell membrane. The water-soluble version Dr. Zhang and his colleagues developed, by contrast, could make it possible to rapidly screen potential drugs that might interfere with the enzyme’s functions. “Each year, more than 1 million people die from antibiotic-resistant infections,” Dr. Zhang says. “This protein is a good target because it’s unique to bacteria and humans don’t have it.” The work was published today in Nature Communications (Nature Portfolio).