Media Tech Tonic: Seminars for designers, artists, and media makers held at MassArt

This spring Media Tech Tonic brings you an all-star line-up of innovative thinkers, we hope you can join us for one or more of these talks.

Media Tech Tonic #13: High-Low Tech
Leah Buechley, Director, High-Low Tech Group, MIT Media Lab, Thursday, March 18, 2010, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. North Building, Pozen Center, MassArt.

Media Tech Tonic #14: The Hand
Frank R. Wilson, Medical Director, Peter F. Ostwald Health Program for Performing Artists at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco. Tuesday, March 23, 2010, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Room 406, Kennedy Building, MassArt.

Media Tech Tonic #15: Simulation and its Discontents
Sherry Turkle, Director, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self Program in Science, Technology, and Society. Wednesday, April 14, 2010, 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Room 406, Kennedy Building, MassArt.

Details on each of these Media Tech Tonic talks will be sent out in subsequent posts. If someone has forwarded this information to you, please consider visiting our web site where you can subscribe to receive Media Tech Tonic announcements via e-mail or subscribe to our RSS feed. These events are hosted by the Dynamic Media Institute (DMI) at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Media Tech Tonic #13: High-Low Tech is co-presented with the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM). Media Tech Tonic #15: Simulation and its Discontents is the MassArt DMI Annual Lecture which is being “Cross Listed” as Media Tech Tonic #15.

Our first speaker for the Fall of 2009 will be Ramesh Raskar, Associate Professor, MIT Media Lab, Camera Culture Group Leader and Co-Director of the Center for Future Storytelling. The title of his presentation is “Computational Photography – The Future Starts Now”. The lecture is free and open to the public.

Though revolutionary in many ways, digital photography is essentially electronically implemented film photography. By contrast, computational photography exploits plentiful low-cost computing and memory, new kinds of digitally enabled sensors, optics, probes, smart lighting, and communication to capture information far beyond just a simple set of pixels. It promises a richer, even a multilayered, visual experience that may include depth, fused photo-video representations, or multispectral imagery. Professor Raskar will discuss and demonstrate advances he is working on in the areas of generalized optics, sensors, illumination methods, processing, and display, and describe how computational photography will enable us to create images that break from traditional constraints to retain more fully our fondest and most important memories, to keep personalized records of our lives, and to extend both the archival and the artistic possibilities of photography.

Event Details
Free and and open to the public.
RSVP: Please let us know if you’re planning to attend this event.
Location: MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Room: 312, Tower Building
Date: Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Time:6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Directions: By car | By T | Campus map (PDF)
Parking Information: at the end of this post

Speaker Biography
Ramesh Raskar joined the Media Lab from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab’s Camera Culture research group. He received his PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he introduced “Shader Lamps,” a novel method for seamlessly merging synthetic elements into the real world using projector-camera based spatial augmented reality. In 2004, Raskar received the TR100 Award from Technology Review, which recognizes top young innovators under the age of 35, and in 2003, the Global Indus Technovator Award, instituted at MIT to recognize the top 20 Indian technology innovators worldwide. In 2009, he was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. He holds 30 US patents and has received three Mitsubishi Electric Invention Awards. He is currently co-authoring a book on computational photography.

Parking and Driving Directions
Parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:45pm and 6:45pm. If you’re driving, take a close look at a Google Map of the area, finding the Ward Street Lot can be tricky the first time.

If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue from Downtown, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue from Bringham Circle, take a right at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, then a quick left and right and you’re on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

A presentation and Q&A with Joseph Paradiso who will talk about his work on sensor networks and how they can augment and mediate human experience, interaction, and perception. Joe Paradiso is Director of the Responsive Environments Group at the MIT Media Laboratory and also co-directs the Things That Think Consortium exploring the extreme fringe of embedded computation, communication, and sensing.

Location: MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Room: Alumni Room, 11th Floor Tower Building
Date: Wednesday, October 15, 2008
Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm
Directions: By car | By T | Campus map (PDF)
Access: Free and open to the public
RSVP: Please REGISTER if you plan to attend using our contact form, we need to have an idea of how many people to expect
Note: If you’re driving, take a look at the additional driving directions at the end of this post.

Abstract

We are witnessing the dawn of a ubiquitous networked sensor infrastructure, leveraged by the increasingly low cost of microelectronics, sensors, and wireless technologies. As these now independent application-silo systems begin to converge through common standards, the world becomes covered by a seamless electronic “nervous system,” that extends across things, places, and people. One of the biggest challenges facing researchers is how to appropriately interface humans with this wealth of real-time information. Immediate applications of such an augmented awareness are readily evident in areas like supply chain and logistics management, urban optimization (e.g., transportation and energy), factory & plant operation, etc. Taking a broad perspective, however, this transition is profound - one’s interface into this environment can be envisioned as an extension of human perception, augmenting our five senses well beyond the canonical “here and now” and redefining the meaning of presence. 

One way to connect people to such information is through online virtual world browsers, where sensed phenomena and features manifest as metaphoric constructs and animations, and where a user can easily shift the scale, location, and granularity of represented data. Similarly, a user in virtual space can “appear” through devices and actuators in the real world.  We term the translation of sensed phenomena into the virtual space and the manifestation of virtual phenomena into the real world “Cross Reality,” where sensor/actuator networks tunnel information across the real/virtual divide. Going beyond Cross Reality is “Scalable Virtuality,” where the manifestation of virtual phenomena in the real world becomes a function of available and appropriate information portals, and the representation of real-world data in virtual space is dependent on dynamic privacy settings and local context.  

Joseph Paradiso’s talk will overview recent work in embedded sensing by him and his students in the Responsive Environments Group at the MIT Media Lab that address this broad theme. The technical areas that he will touch on include high-bandwidth, wireless multimodal sensor clusters, massively distributed, ultra-low-power” featherweight” sensor nodes, parasitic energy scavenging and dynamic power management techniques.  The impact of these technologies will be illustrated through several application examples involving cross-reality, affect-driven media queires, controllers for interactive media, active RFID for logistics management, biomotion capture, smart objects, human-computer interfaces and instrumented social interaction.

Biography

Joseph Paradiso is the Sony Career Development Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he directs the Responsive Environments group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception, and co-directs the Things That Think Consortium, a group of industry sponsors and Media Lab researchers who explore the extreme fringe of embedded computation, communication, and sensing.  After receiving a BS in Electrical Engineering and Physics summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1977, Paradiso became a K.T. Compton fellow at the Lab for Nuclear Science at MIT, receiving his PhD in physics there in 1981 for research conducted at CERN in Geneva.  After two years developing precision drift chambers at the Lab for High Energy Physics at ETH in Zurich, he joined the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, MA in 1984, where his research encompassed spacecraft control systems, image processing algorithms, underwater sonar, and precision alignment sensors for large high-energy physics detectors. He joined the Media Lab in 1994, where his current research interests include embedded sensing systems and sensor networks, wearable and body sensor networks, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, localization systems, passive and RFID sensor architectures, human-computer interfaces, and interactive media. His honors include the 2000 Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation, and he has authored 200 articles and technical reports on topics ranging from computer music to power scavenging.

Additional Parking and Driving Directions

Parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:45pm and 6:45pm. If you’re driving, take a close look at a Google Map of the area, finding the Ward Street Lot can be tricky the first time.

If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue from Downtown, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue from Bringham Circle, take a right at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, then a quick left and right and you’re on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

For our next meeting, Mike Golembewski will discuss the potential of technology as a powerful tool for artists and designers.  Too often the use of creative technologies becomes centered around the use of commercial software and hardware packages designed for workflow efficiency, rather than for free exploration.  Mike will discuss how emerging technologies can become tools for the expression of high concept and real emotion, rather than just tools for creative production.

He will present some contemporary projects that he feels makes excellent use of technology as an expressive medium, and use this presentation to begin an open discussion of the roles that technology might play in creative practice.  Mike will be showing work from artists, scientists, and researchers at Yale, Goldsmiths University, Imperial College, the Royal College of Art, Troika UK, and his own scanner photography project.

Mike Golembewski is a practicing artist and interaction designer and currently visiting faculty with the Dynamic Media Institute at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.  His work explores the ways in which artists use emerging technologies, and has been widely published and exhibited internationally.

Join us for this very exciting meeting. We would appreciate an RSVP using our contact form so we have an idea on how many people to expect, but RSVP is not required.

Location: Alumni Room, 11th Floor Tower Building, Massaschusetts College of Art & Design (driving directions | T directions | campus map PDF)

Date: Wednesday, September 24th. Please note that this month we’re meeting on the fourth Wednesday instead of the third Wednesday.

Time: 6:30pm to 8:30pm or so

Note to drivers: parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:45pm and 6:45pm.

If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light onto Longwood Avenue, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.

If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue, right at the light onto Longwood Avenue, then a quick left and right and you’re on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.