Joichi Ito Chosen as Next Media Lab Director
Today the MIT Media Lab announced that Joichi "Joi" Ito will join the Lab as its new director.
An influential thinker, speaker, and seed investor driving the international development of the Internet, Ito is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost writers on innovation, global technology policy, and the role of the Internet in transforming society in substantial and positive ways. Through his leadership role in key Internet organizations such as ICNN and Creative Commons, his venture funding, and his advocacy of Internet freedom, he continues to expand his influence worldwide.
His honors include: TIME magazine’s "Cyber-Elite” listing in 1997 (at age 31), selection by the World Economic Forum in 2001 as one of the "Global Leaders for Tomorrow," and Newsweek magazine's "Leaders of The Pack" in 2005. BusinessWeek named him one of the “25 Most Influential People on the Web” in 2008.
The full press release is available at the MIT News site.
Media Lab Projects Are Semi-Finalists in $100K Contest
Congratulations to five groups with Media Lab members who have made it to the finals in The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
The projects include:
All Cows Eat Grass (Mihir Sarkar, Robin Bose, Sean Leow), an online platform for real-time private music lessons. The system connects music instructors and students using a low-latency audio and video link, provides motivational support to practice between lessons, and lowers the barrier to learn music.
Barter (Dawei Shen, Marshall Van Alstyne, Joe Milton, Neel Madhvani), an information market for addressing organizational challenges, such as knowledge sharing and innovation creation.
BiDi Screen (Matt Hirsch, Tiago Wright), an example of a new type of I/O device that possesses the ability to both capture images and display them.
Convexic (Roarke Horstmeyer, Otkrist Gupta, Kamran Khan, Cameron Levy), a unique recommendation algorithm to help people find jobs where they are most likely to be happy and successful.
VisualizeMe (Matt Blackshaw, Tony DeVincenzi, Dávid Lakatos), a new perspective on your social life. By presenting your social graph as a moving picture, VisualizeMe breaks free from the text-centric interfaces of today's social networks by offering a fresh, holistic perspective. Unseen trends, before lost in mountains of text, can be better understood, providing an organic and evolving view of your relationships.
Media Lab Research at White House Conference on Bullying Prevention
On Thursday, March 10, 2011 Henry Lieberman, head of the Media Lab's Software Agents research group, along with Karthik Dinakar and Birago Jones, first-year master's students working with Lieberman, joined President and Mrs. Obama, Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at The White House for a Conference on Bullying Prevention.
The conference brought together students, parents, teachers, and others from communities from across the nation who have been affected by bullying, as well as those who are taking action to address it. Participants had the opportunity to talk with the President and representatives from the highest levels of his Administration about how all communities can work together to prevent bullying.
Dinakar, Jones, and Lieberman have created a project, "Computational Empathy: Tackling Cyberbullying" to address the scourge of cyberbullying, which has assumed worrisome proportions with an ever-increasing number of adolescents admitting to having dealt with it either as a victim or bystander. Anonymity and the lack of meaningful supervision in the electronic medium are two factors that have exacerbated this social menace. The project explores computational methods from natural language processing and reflective user interfaces to alleviate this problem. The project is in collaboration with Formspring, a social networking website used by a primarily teenage audience.
