Sun, Mar 30, 2003 page12

• In slower economy, innovative MIT lab struggles to keep buzz

  • By Barnaby Feder / THE NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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  Call it buzz, cool, magic or whatever -- the Media Lab at the Massa-chusetts Institute of Technology cannot thrive without it.

  But like many businesses that flourished during the 1990s technology boom, the lab -- the place where researchers talked about cyberspace, multimedia and virtual reality long before those words became household terms -- has struggled to generate excitement and reposition itself now that the bubble has burst.

  In the rambunctiously creative years after its founding in 1985, the Media Lab was celebrated for its insights into how new technology might change traditional forms of communication and everyday life.

  These days, other research institutions are competing with the lab to create prototypes of the communication technologies of the future. Newer subjects of interest like atomic and molecular studies, overseas expansion, and new links to other parts of MIT threaten to blur its image. And raising money from corporate sponsors, who have in the past provided almost all the lab's funding, is tougher.

  "There's lots of competition now," said Robert Buderi, an editor at MIT's Technology Review magazine and an expert on corporate research.

  "I can see many of the same concepts demonstrated at places like Carnegie-Mellon, Microsoft, Xerox PARC, IBM and U.C. Berkeley." he said.

  Organizationally, at least, the Media Lab is still in a league of its own. In the last few years, it has given birth to sister labs in India and Ireland, as well as the Center for Bits and Atoms, a federally funded research center that concentrates on physics and chemistry projects and is housed in the lab's I.M. Pei-designed building. All now operate under the umbrella of a new organization called Media Labs, headed by Nicholas Negroponte, the famously outspoken founding director of the Media Lab.

  "Fundamentally, we bet on people and then continually experiment with how to organize it," said Walter Bender, who succeeded Negroponte as director of the original lab in September 2000.

  "I don't think that anyone has as diverse a collection of activities and the real magic of the place is the interaction," he said.

  Unlike other major university research institutions, the original Media Lab here has always relied on its ability to attract corporate sponsors. Until the recession, the success of that model was the envy of other institutions.

  "There was a culture there of spending money like water," said Aaron Bobick, who left the Media Lab in 1999 to become director of the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center at Georgia Tech.

  "It used to be that money wasn't a reason that things couldn't get done," he said.

  The Media Lab still has plenty of corporate fans. More than 75 percent of this year's US$40 million budget comes from 120 companies, who share access to the technology developed at the lab.

  But attracting cash has been a struggle in recent years, prompting the lab to turn increasingly to government and foundation funding sources it once ignored. Foreign governments account for most of the budgets of the sister labs overseas, and the US$13.75 million grant from the National Science Foundation in late 2001 to set up the Center for Bits and Atoms dwarfed any previous contribution from Washington.

  The new sources have not been enough to avoid sobering cutbacks. In 2001, the lab imposed sharp reductions in travel, restrictions on free meals and, eventually, the layoffs of 40 support employees, the first such cuts in its history.

  Bender said the corporate share of the Media Lab's budget is likely to fall to about 60 percent in the com-ing years. Still, many of the lab's sponsors are strongly committed to its mission. Companies like BT, the former British Telecom, and Motor-ola, both of which donate more than US$1 million annually to the lab, view it as both a window into new business opportunities and an insurance policy against getting blindsided by technology developments they did not anticipate.

  Critics have long said that so much of the lab's research is fanciful and impractical that investing in it is foolish. Basic membership costs US$100,000 annually for a minimum of three years. And there is no ques-tion that the lab has provided grist for the critics since it opened.

  Negroponte, a charismatic professor from the Department of Architecture, recruited a diverse collection of free thinkers in setting up the lab, including Marvin Minsky, a specialist in machine intelligence, and Seymour Pappert, a well-known learning theorist. The graduate students they brought came from design, computer programming and sociology backgrounds to receive degrees in a new discipline they called "media arts and science."
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