All talks at the Media Lab, unless otherwise noted, are open to the public.
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We have long assumed that being face-to-face is the best environment for social interaction. But is "being there" the best we can aspire to?

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A key challenge of data-driven social science is the gathering of high quality multi-dimensional datasets. A second challenge relates to the design and execution of social experiments in the real world that are as reliable as those within a controlled laboratory, yet yield more practical results. We introduce the Social Functional Mechanism-design and Relationship Imaging, or “Social fMRI”–an approach that enhances existing computational social science methodologies by bridging rich data collection strategies with experimental interventions.

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Computing has become a facet of ordinary life–a powerful resource for people, places, and things. It has migrated from the backrooms, to our living rooms, our pockets, and now, into the ether of life. Let’s discuss this evolving human-machine interface, our evolving relationship with ever-smarter things, and the social implications of our new life inside the computer.

We will also discuss how the product-design business has evolved over last 50 years, and how this new software-based, connected world is radically changing how products are designed and built.

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"No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…."
–John Donne, 17th-century English poet

Economies are networks of businesses, just as businesses are networks of people, and people are networks of cells. Networks are everywhere, and the Media Lab’s fall sponsor event will celebrate their ubiquity by exploring how these structured interactions affect our economy, businesses, health, and even the way we understand ourselves.

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A conversation between Tim Brown and Joi Ito, discussing questions submitted by the Media Lab community.

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An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and angel investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral part in building many of today’s leading consumer-technology businesses. Hoffman was a founding board member and executive at PayPal before he launched LinkedIn from his living room in 2003. By the end of the first month, LinkedIn had 4,500 members; today it has over 100 million. Hoffman was also an early investor in such successful enterprises as Facebook, Zynga, Digg, and Flickr.

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The internet enables unprecedented connections across international borders. Whether we read a daily newspaper from India, send technical drawings to a factory in China, or use Skype video to meet a friend's child in Japan, we are engaged in activity that would have been impossible or prohibitively expensive two decades ago. Much of the discourse around globalizing technologies suggests that we're experiencing a inexorable flattening of the world, interacting with an increasingly diverse mix of people and ideas from around the world.

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Creating an appropriate indoor climate is essential to worker productivity and personal happiness. It is also an area of large expenditure for building owners. And, with rising fuel costs, finding ways of reducing energy consumption is more important than ever. This idea is promoted further by the notion that most buildings are currently being run inefficiently, due to the non-adaptable nature of their control systems. Not just the occupants, but also the buildings themselves have ever changing needs, for which a single setpoint is inadequate.

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