Henry Holtzman, Chief Knowledge Officer of the Media Lab, co-director of the Digital Life consortium, and Director of the Information Ecology research group at MIT will participate in a panel on Digital Convergence - Trends, Challenges and Opportunities on October 19, 2009, at Aurora '09, a technology conference and showcase by Infosys held at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
Thursday, October 1, at 12pm
Wiesner Conference Room (E15-209), Media Lab building (E15)
Open to the Public
It was May 28th 2009, I remember stepping off the plane in Ahmadabad Gujarat to begin what would later be one of the most memorable journeys of my life, a 100km trek through villages in Gujarat in search of grassroots innovations. Our walk was led by Professor Anil Gupta of the Indian Institute of Management. His message of green conscious and grassroots innovation have spread all throughout India during his many Shodh Yatras (discovery walks). Prof. Gupta is the founder of Sristi, an organization focused discovering grassroots innovations and herbal remedies. All of his research and findings are documented in what’s known as the HoneyBee Network database. Sristi also partners with various educational institutions, designers and manufacturers to further build out the technologies and potentially create a sustainable industry in the rural villages he visits.
Monday, August 24, at 12pm
Roth Conference Room (E15-283A), Media Lab building (E15)
Open to the Public
By Jay Silver, Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab
It was a dusty, crowded day at the open air electronics market on SJB road in Bangalore, and everything was dirt cheap. I had just finished buying everything I would need for a super simple soldering station. I walked into OM Electronics and bought several kits: heart beat detector, musical harmonium, I.R. beam break detector, etc. I intuited that each of these kits could lead to something with investigating the environment using sensors, my basic mission, though I didn’t know how I would use them yet. I spent the evening soldering them together, but most of them didn’t work. I took some pictures and emailed them to a friend for some help; it was my first time soldering “through whole” components. The next night I got one of them working, the harmonium, and played with it. The harmonium kit had several metal pads that could be touched with a metal wand to make a sound (kind of like piano keys). I noticed that if I held the wand and touched the keys with my hand, my body acted as a conductor and the piano still worked. Actually, not just my body, but any object that conducted electricity at all seemed to connect the circuit and make a sound if I just touched the object to the two sides of the circuit: wires, pennies, water, tea, dahl, plant leaves.
By Rishi Dixit, India Initiatives
Imagine a prosthetic leg that enables the wearer to walk, run, and jump without any indication of a disability. Today, a prosthesis like this is expensive, but undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology D-lab, working with the Jaipur Foot Organization, are trying to change that. D-Lab is a series of classes for undergraduates in every major that offers them the experience and the opportunity to make a device for developing country. Past projects include a pedal generator, forced air cooker, and well-head chlorination.
SixthSense is a wearable, gestural interface that augments our physical world with digital information, and lets us use natural hand gestures to interact with that information. “Other than letting some of you live out your fantasy of looking as cool as Tom Cruise in ‘Minority Report’ it can really let you connect as a sixth sense device with whatever is in front of you,” said MIT researcher Patty Maes.
Hello, and Welcome to the India Initiatives at the MIT Media Lab website. This front page will keep you up to date on the ground-breaking research going on at the Media Lab, along with other updates from the Initiative. Enjoy!
