Digital social media is revolutionizing the way people socialize and create/share information. Understanding and shaping this revolution calls for a new hybrid of research in technology, design, media, sociology, business, and economics. Yang will address how the two primary motifs in social media space—information and social dynamics—have been shaped by the complex interaction between incentive design and cultural context. In particular, in this talk she will discuss findings from several settings, including online forums, community based Q&A sites, and crowdsourcing websites.

Golan Levin is interested in the medium of response, and in the conditions that enable people to experience creative feedback with reactive systems. This presentation will discuss a wide range of his projects, with a particular attention to how the use of gestural interfaces, visual abstraction, and information visualization can support new modes of interaction, play, self-discovery, and critical inquiry.

What are the challenges in creating interfaces that allow a user to intuitively express his/her intentions? Today's HCI systems are limited, and exploit only visual and auditory sensations. However, in daily life, we exploit a variety of input and output modalities, and modalities that involve contact with our bodies can dramatically affect our ability to experience and express ourselves in physical and virtual worlds.

Tim Wu will talk about his new book, The Master Switch, and more generally about the cycles in innovation and invention in the media and computing industries.

In the past few years, we have seen a tremendous growth in public human communication and self-expression, through blogs, microblogs, and social networks. In addition, we are beginning to see the emergence of a social technology stack on the web, where profile and relationship information gathered by some applications can be used by other applications. This technology shift, and the cultural shift that has accompanied it, offers a great opportunity for computer scientists, artists, and sociologists to study (and organize) people at scale.

Josh Klein has practiced and was trained, both formally and informally, in hacking—social systems, computer networks, institutions, consumer hardware, animal behavior, and, most recently, the publishing industry. When he's not taking things apart or putting them back together again he speaks, writes, and consults on new and emerging technologies that improve people's lives—and has tremendous fun doing it.

A view of speech as the interaction of acoustic energy sources weakly coupled to a filter system is the key conceptual basis for remarkable progress over the last half century in automatic speech understanding and text-to-speech systems. Starting in the 1960s here at MIT and continuing to the present day, Wayne Slawson has attempted to apply the source-filter model and the "terminal analog" speech synthesizers that follow from the model to the invention of a plausible way of making music in which timbre is as prominent and intricately controllable as pitch.

Music | MACHINES will be a full day and evening experience at MIT’s new Media Lab Complex celebrating the Institute’s unique tradition and future plans at the convergence of music, science and engineering.

The MIT Media Lab and the College of Engineering, Pune are hosting the first Design & Innovation workshop in Pune, India on 24-28 January, 2011. This workshop aims to engage and inspire students across all disciplines in Indian universities in inventing the future. The week-long workshop will engage students in ideation, design, and implementation of prototypes together with Media Lab and local mentors.

Why Design Now? is the fourth installation in the National Design Triennial exhibition series launched by Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in 2000. The Triennial provides a sample of contemporary innovation, looking at what progressive designers, engineers, entrepreneurs, and citizens are doing in diverse fields and at different scales around the world. Included are practical solutions already in use as well as experimental ideas designed to inspire further research. A few projects will provoke controversy, answering some questions while raising others.