Key MIT Personnel

V. Michael Bove, Jr. (Principal Investigator), head of the Media Laboratory's Object-Based Media group, is the author or co-author of over 40 papers on digital television systems, video processing hardware/software design, multimedia, scene modeling, and optics. He holds patents on inventions relating to video recording and hardcopy, is on the Board of Editors of the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, served as general chair of the 1996 ACM multimedia conference, and is listed in the current edition of Who's Who in Entertainment.

Walter Bender is a senior scientist at the MIT Media Laboratory and director of the Lab's Electronic Publishing group.

Steve Benton is the Head of the Spatial Imaging group at the Media Laboratory, and the director of the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He worked with Edwin Land at the Polaroid Corporation since his MIT undergraduate days. There, he invented the white-light viewable "rainbow" hologram, often seen on credit cards and magazine covers. In 1982, he joined the start-up team for the Media Lab at MIT, where he and his students are developing three-dimensional visual interfaces to computer data. Recently, he and his students have invented the world's first interactive holographic video system.

Bruce Blumberg is head of the Synthetic Characters group at the MIT Media Laboratory, whose research focuses on developing an ethologically-inspired architecture for building autonomous animated creatures which live in virtual 3-D environments.

Glorianna Davenport is the director of the Interactive Cinema group at the MIT Media Laboratory. Trained as a documentary filmmaker, Davenport has achieved international recognition for her work in the new media forms. Her research explores fundamental issues related to the collaborative co-construction of digital media experiences, where the task of narration is split among authors, consumers, and computer mediators.

Andrew Lippman is associate director of the Media Lab and organizer of the Digital Life consortium. Before that, he has challenged broadcasters throughout the world by pioneering interactive and digital extrapolations of television via the MIT Television of Tomorrow Program and the Advanced Television Research Program. These included early exemplars of scalable digital encodings, on-demand structuring of video, archiving, and interactivity.

Brian K. Smith's Explanation Architecture group develops conceptual and technological tools for people to learn by asking "how" and "why" questions about the world. Smith's background is in knowledge-based artificial intelligence and educational multimedia systems. His primary interest in Broadercasting is using this experience to enhance learning from video content by making broadcast consumers into broadcast producers.

Barry Vercoe was educated in New Zealand and the US, and holds degrees in mathematics and music composition. A founding member of the MIT Media Lab, he has directed research in machine listening and audio understanding. His group's Structured Audio language (SAOL) has recently been adopted as the kernel of the new MPEG-4 audio standard, enabling the efficient transmission of symbolic audio. He is also actively developing new methods for rendering symbolic audio in embedded systems.