During day 2 of SIIA NetGain delegates will visit three leading innovators in the Boston area. Stop 2 – MIT Media Lab, will give us an inside look on creative projects and research in the information space. These sessions are only available by attending NetGain. Register Now:

Fluid Interfaces
Speaker: Pattie Maes, Associate Professor of Media Technology

The Fluid Interfaces research group is radically rethinking the ways we interact with digital information and services. They design interfaces that are more intuitive and intelligent, and better integrated in our daily physical lives. They investigate ways to augment the everyday objects and spaces around us, making them responsive to our attention and actions. The resulting augmented environments offer opportunities for learning and interaction and, ultimately, for enriching our lives.

Software Agents
Speaker: Henry Lieberman, Research Scientist

The Software Agents group investigates a new paradigm for software that acts like an assistant to a user of an interactive interface rather than simply as a tool. Agent software can learn from interaction with the user, and proactively anticipate the user’s needs. They build prototype agent systems in a wide variety of domains, including text and graphic editing, Web browsing, e-commerce, information visualization, and more.

Information Ecology
Speaker: Henry Holtzman, Research Scientist, Chief Knowledge Officer, Co-Director, Digital Life

We have become reliant on digital information for communication, commerce, and entertainment. This information must be readily available, whether stored locally on our computers, on enterprise servers at work, or via third-party services like GMail. Most importantly, we should have choices beyond desktop computers or smartphones to access it. The Information Ecology group explores ways to connect our physical environments with information resources. Through the use of low-cost, ubiquitous technologies such as sensors and consumer electronics, they are creating seamless and pervasive ways to interact with our information-and with each other.

Comparative Media Studies
Speaker: Ian Condry, Associate Professor of Global Media, Director, Social Media Initiative

Using analytical tools and creative production of the social sciences, arts, and humanities to understand the impact of media in society and the ways social practices transform the uses of media technologies. Comparative Media Studies is an interdisciplinary group of faculty exploring the frontiers of media and society. Through international, ethnographic, computational, historical, and artistic methods, we examine how social worlds contextualize and alter the potentials of media. For example, the Social Media Initiative aims to activate the emerging possibilities of the social in media, extending analysis away from technological platforms themselves towards questions of how social innovation emerges through technology’s use in living social networks amid the diversity of human experience.

Lifelong Kindergarten
Speaker: Mitchel Resnick, LEGO Papert Professor of Learning Research, Academic Head, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, Co-Director, Center for Future Civic Media

The Lifelong Kindergarten group is sowing the seeds for a more creative society by engaging people in creative, lifelong learning experiences. They develop new technologies that, in the spirit of the blocks and fingerpainting of kindergarten, expand the range of what people design, create, and invent and what they learn in the process. The group’s ultimate goal is a world full of playfully creative people, who are constantly inventing new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

Be prepared to be wowed!