Digital Life Consortium

Digital Life Sponsor Meeting
MIT Media Laboratory
Monday, April 14th, 2003

For information, contact dw@media.mit.edu

All sponsors are also invited to stay for the MIT program on "Extreme Communications"
MIT Kresge Auditorium
Tuesday-Wednesday, April 15-16, 2003
E.C Program Agenda

Sponsors, visit insite for webcast and presentation archive.

7:00 AM:		Registration & Continental Breakfast Media Lab Atrium
7:30 AM:		Prospective Sponsors Breakfast Walter Bender, Room 054
7:30 AM:		e-Rationality Sponsors Breakfast Dan Ariely, Roth Room
8:30 AM:		Welcome & Meeting Overview Andy Lippman, Bruce Blumberg
8:45-9:45 AM:		Curious Machines Research Presentations Bruce Blumberg Matt Berlin, Synthetic Characters Andrew Brooks, Robotic Life Kai-yuh Hsaio, Cognitive Machines TBA, Affective Computing
9:45-10:00 AM:		Break
10:00-11:00 AM:		Creative Computing Research Presentations Mitchel Resnick Simon Greenwold, Aesthetics & Computation Gili Weinberg, Opera of the Future Nyssim Lefford, Music, Mind and Machine Chris Hancock, Lifelong Kindergarten
11:00-11:15:		Break
11:15-12:30:		e-Markets Research Presentations Dan Ariely and e-Rationality RAs, with guest Sloan students Mark Williamson, Ethan Phillips, Ryan Wener, Richard Lee
12:30-2:00:		Lunch
2:00-3:00:		Commonsense Computing Research Presentations Walter Bender Marvin Minsky, Problem Description Push Singh, Open Mind Peter Gorniak, Cognitive Machines Hugo Liu, Software Agents Barbara Barry, Open Mind Experiences
3:00-6:00:		Media Lab Open House 20 Ames Street: Floors LL, 3, 4 1 Cambridge Center: Floor 5
7:00:		Cocktail Reception
8:00:		Dinner Topic Tables
Room 054:		Extreme Communications (Andy Lippman, Dave Clark, David Reed, Charlie Fine)
Cube Conf. Rm:		Preparing for the Creative Society (Mitchel Resnick, John Maeda)
Roth Room:		e-Markets (Dan Ariely)
Wiesner Room:		Friends & Family (Chris Schmandt)
Room 235:		Tangible User interfaces for Collaborative Design (Hiroshi Ishii)
Room 335:		Industrial Design Intelligence (Ted Selker)
Garden Conf.Room:		Device Ecologies (Mike Bove, Joe Paradiso)
Reef Room:		Viral Communications (Media & Networks RAs)
Orange & Green Rm:		Commonsense (Walter Bender, Marvin Minsky, Push Singh)
1 CC Conf. Room:		Curious Machines(Bruce Blumberg)

7:30 AM:	Prospective Sponsors Breakfast
	Walter Bender, Room 054

	If you would like to learn more about the benefits of sponsoring the Media Lab, please join Media Lab Director Walter Bender for this meeting. You may also want to attend if you are with a current sponsor company but a first-time visitor to the Media Lab as an orientation to how the Media Lab works and what to expect from the meeting.

7:30 AM:	e-Rationality Sponsors Breakfast
	Dan Ariely, Room 235

	An early morning session seems to be fitting the questions of rationality (why are we up so early, for example). Asking people to commit to attend this breakfast long in advance brings another question to mind -- why can't people predict their future preferences. For example, why is it that long in advance we are willing to commit to waking up early for a breakfast meeting, yet on the day of the meeting we can't understand what made us commit to it. During breakfast we will talk about mistakes in predicating presences due to time distance from the experience and due to varying emotional states. We will talk about the implications of these from the perspective of market research, consumer behavior, and management behavior. We will also talk about the value of commitment mechanisms ;)

8:00 PM:	Dinner Topic Tables
Room 054:	Extreme Communications
	Andy Lippman, Dave Clark, David Reed, Charlie Fine

	This meeting is for prospective sponsors of the Communications Futures Programs, a joint venture of the MIT Media Lab, MIT Sloan School of Management, and the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science. The program will have its kick-off meeting on April 15-16 at MIT's Kresge Auditorium. See the agenda at: http://ilp.mit.edu/ilp/Conferences/Agenda/IT2003Agenda.pdf, and register at: http://web.mit.edu/conf-serv/www/infotech.html

Cube Conf. Rm	Preparing for the Creative Society
	Mitchel Resnick, John Maeda

	In the past two decades, there has been much talk about the transition from an Industrial Society to an Information Society or a Knowledge Society. Information and knowledge are undoubtedly important. But success in the future -- for individuals, for communities, for companies, for nations as a whole -- will be based not so much on how much we know, but rather on our ability to think and act creatively. This session will discuss what types of technologies, activities, and organizations we should be developing to thrive in a Creative Society.

Roth Rm:	e-Markets
	Dan Ariely

	Dinner will be divided into two parts. In the first part we will have a team of students from MIT Sloan School of Management reflecting on the demos shown during Open House, analyzing what they see as the ideas with the best market opportunities. There will also be some time for Q&A and discussion of the demos presented during the day. In the second part of dinner we will try to promote the idea of fast and easy experimentations as a simple way for ROI (EROI?). We will give a few examples of such experiments but we would like to ask you for help -- if you have questions about your consumers that you want to know the answers for, send me (ariely@media.mit.edu) an email with the question and during dinner we will try to use these as examples of questions that can be answered by simple and fast experimentation.

Wiesner Rm:	Friends & Family
	Chris Schmandt

	Chris Schmandt, who heads the Speech Interfaces group, will lead a discussion on emerging communications for domestic life.

Room TBA:	Tangible User Interfaces for Collaborative Design
	Hiroshi Ishii

	Hiroshi Ishii heads the Tangible Media group. Description TBA.

Room 335:	Industrial Design Intelligence
	Ted Selker

	Ted Selker heads the Context-Aware Computing group. Description TBA.

Garden Conf. Rm:	Device Ecologies
	Mike Bove, Joe Paradiso

	When we aggregate not just the communication capacity of individual devices but also their computational power and knowledge, we create an ecosystem of smart sensing devices that performs new sorts of collaborative intelligent tasks. Mobile microphones or cameras can agree among themselves how to distribute themselves around a space in order to solve an observation problem, and building materials whose integral sensors and displays discover one another can coordinate their activities to become a seamless "smart room". Going further, this vision of ubiquitous sensing scales down onto the surfaces of the objects themselves. Ultradense multimodal sensor/processor networks, acting like the receptors and neurons of skin, will capture activity with fine detail, working to blur the boundary between the fabricated and the animate. Even in the guise of very familiar devices, the viral computation approach creates considerable added value: imagine all the digital cameras on a tour bus coordinating their activities and constructing a panorama or 3D model of a landmark, or an automotive cruise control that for more reliability negotiates not only with the vehicles directly in front and behind but with those some distance away as well.

Reef Conf. Rm:	Viral Communications
	Media & Networks RAs

	The Media & Networks Research Assistants of Andy Lippman and David Reed will lead this dinner. Description TBA.

Orange & Green Rm:	Commonsense
	Walter Bender, Marvin Minsky, Push Singh

	Walter Bender is Director of the Media Lab and heads the Electronic Publishing group. Marvin Minsky heads the Society of Mind group where he works with Research Assistant Pushpinder Singh. Description TBA

1 CC Conf. Rm:	Curious Machines
	Bruce Blumberg

	Bruce Blumberg is Co-Director of Digital Life and heads the Synthetic Characters group. Description TBA