Three experts from the MIT Media Lab will present a panel discussion, “Tomorrow’s Media: Fast, Simple and Available to All?” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 22 in the Mancheski Executive Seminar Room of the Lender School of Business Center. This event is free and open to the public.
Walter Bender, executive director of the MIT Media Lab, and his colleagues Jack Driscoll, editor-in-residence, and Barbara Barry, developer of a smart video camera, will discuss their leading-edge research into how people will communicate in the future. School of Communications Professor Paul Janensch invited them to the campus for this event.
Bender is a senior research scientist, and director of the electronic publishing group, and a member of the laboratory’s information organized consortium. Bender also directs Gray Matters, a special interest group which focuses on technology’s impact on the aging population.
A founding member of the Media Laboratory, Bender studies new information technologies, particularly those that affect people directly. Much of the research addresses the idea of building upon the interactive styles associated with existing media and extending them into domains where a computer is incorporated into the interaction. He has participated in much of the pioneering research in the field of electronic publishing and personalized interactive multimedia.
Driscoll has been editor-in-residence at the MIT Media Laboratory since 1995. Previously he was at the Boston Globe for nearly 40 years, seven as editor. His main areas of concentration have been in electronic publishing and community computing.
Driscoll has worked on a variety of projects at the Media Lab, including FishWrap, MUSIC, Salient Stills, Audio Notebook, NewsMaker and two MediaStreams undertakings in connection with the Gulf War and Boston’s Central Artery.
Barry’s academic and creative accomplishments include a 1991 BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and a career in performance and video art that culminated in a work presented at the 1994 New York Film and Video Festival. Currently a Ph.D. candidate at the MIT Media Lab, Barry is focusing her research on computational storytelling systems and documentary filmmaking. Her current research work explores how techniques in artificial intelligence for story understanding and generation can be used to create new tools for documenting life.
The School of Communications and the Department of Computer Science and Interactive Digital Design in the College of Liberal Arts at Quinnipiac are sponsoring the event. For more information, please visit www.media.mit.edu or call 203-582-8652.
