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Center for Bits and Atoms

Massachusetts Institute of Technology research institutes

The Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) was established in 2001 in the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is currently run by Neil Gershenfeld. This cross-disciplinary center broadly looks at the intersection of information to its physical representation. From the original NSF proposal: MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms is an ambitious interdisciplinary initiative that is looking beyond the end of the Digital Revolution to ask how a functional description of a system can be embodied in, and abstracted from, a physical form. These simple, profound questions date back to the beginning of modern manufacturing and before that to the origins of natural science, but they have revolutionary new implications that follow from the recognition of the computational universality of physical systems. We can no longer afford to ignore nature's capabilities that have been neglected by conventional digital logic; it is at the boundary between the content of information and its physical representation that many of science's greatest technological, economic, and social opportunities and obstacles lie.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Center for Bits and Atoms (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors).

Center for Bits and Atoms
Amherst Street, Cambridge East Cambridge

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N 42.3604 ° E -71.087 °
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E14 Media Lab (Building E14)

Amherst Street 75
02139 Cambridge, East Cambridge
Massachusetts, United States
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MIT Media Lab
MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from technology, media, science, art, and design. As of 2014, Media Lab's research groups include neurobiology, biologically inspired fabrication, socially engaging robots, emotive computing, bionics, and hyperinstruments.The Media Lab was founded in 1985 by Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT President Jerome Wiesner, and is housed in the Wiesner Building (designed by I. M. Pei), also known as Building E15. The Lab has been written about in the popular press since 1988, when Stewart Brand published The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T., and its work was a regular feature of technology journals in the 1990s. In 2009, it expanded into a second building.The Media Lab came under scrutiny in 2019 due to its acceptance of donations from convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This led to the resignation of its director, Joi Ito, and the launch an "immediate, thorough and independent" investigation into the "extremely serious" and "deeply disturbing allegations about the engagement between individuals at the Media Lab and Jeffrey Epstein" by President of MIT.In December 2020, Dava Newman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics and former deputy administrator of NASA under Obama, was named the new director of the MIT Media Lab.

Wiesner Building
Wiesner Building

The Wiesner building (Building E15) houses the MIT Media Lab and the List Visual Arts Center and is named in honor of former MIT president Jerome Wiesner and his wife Laya. The building is very box-like, a motif that is consistently repeated in both the interior and exterior design evoking a sense of boxes packed within each other.The building is notable for the level of collaboration between the architect and artists. It stands apart from the surrounding neighborhood with its flat, gridded skin make of white, modular metal panels. The building's exterior was designed by Kenneth Noland is meant as a metaphor of technology through the grids of graph paper and number matrices while also quoting the corridor-like morphology of the rest of the MIT campus. Scott Burton, Alan Shields, and Richard Fleischner also collaborated extensively in the final design of the internal atria and external landscaping.The Wiesner Building in Cambridge, Massachusetts houses the MIT Media Lab, the Center for Bits and Atoms (Neil Gershenfeld's lab), the Department of Architecture's Program in Art, Culture and Technology (ACT, formerly the Visual Arts Program), the Comparative Media Studies (CMS) program and the List Visual Arts Center. It was designed by I.M. Pei & Partners. It is named in honor of former MIT president Jerome Wiesner and his wife Laya and was dedicated in 1985. The Wiesner Building is also known to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology community as Building E15.