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Interview with:
Professor Joseph A. Paradiso PhD '81
Joseph A. Paradiso PhD '81, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, is director of the Responsive Environments Group and co-director of the Media Lab's Things That Think Consortium. His work has been shown internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art and, as an avant-garde electronic music producer, he built one of the world's largest modular synthesizers. What potential attracts students to Media Lab research on thinking things and responsive environments? Graduate students come to the Media Lab for many reasons. Prime among them is our environment, which gives them a chance to really push their creative edge and think out-of-the-box while also pursuing the extremes of a particular technology. At the same time, they ground themselves through interaction with our many corporate sponsors, who often visit and suggest practical, nearer-term implementations. The Lab is one of the few places where you have it all — artistic and technical, blue-sky and practical realization. Graduate students come to my group to work at the frontier where sensor technologies meet the human-computer interface. We conceive and build systems that open up new channels of human-machine interaction, then develop applications (both on our own and through collaboration with other, more content-oriented groups and affiliates) to explore their consequences. My group is very much at the center of the Media Lab's interdisciplinary universe; we interface with artists and architects as often as we do with engineers and physicists. MIT undergraduates come to my group as UROPs for similar reasons as well as to learn practical skills. As we're always making devices for demos and to support our research, we teach nearly all our students how to be proficient in analog and digital electronics, embedded computing, and sensors. Hands-on experience at this level can be rare these days — even at MIT. Undergraduates tend to get very involved in our projects — the best of them continue on to do their M.Eng. with us or enter the Media Arts and Sciences Program as SM candidates. What technical edges are you and your students pushing in Responsive Environment projects? We've been working in sensor networks, but instead of pushing towards the building or battlefield scale that is the norm in this field, we're looking at reducing these systems down to extremely dense structures, perhaps approaching something like an electronic skin, where the network samples, characterizes, and routes multimodal information across nodes spaced some millimeters apart. As a start at intermediate scale, we've built a pushpin computer, a dynamically configurable wallboard with over a hundred insertable sensor nodes that talk with their neighbors — a research tool for collectively processing sensor stimuli. We've also been developing wireless, multimodal sensor packages for other purposes. Sensing has become so inexpensive and compact that one can begin to routinely overdetermine an application. For example, add many more sensor degrees of freedom than are required, allowing the data to be combined in different ways to capture many relevant features, so that instead of sharp shooting one or two sensed targets, we get everything with a broad buckshot. This is the philosophy behind the shoe that Stacy Morris (a PhD student finishing with my group and HST) is developing with the biomotion group at Massachusetts General Hospital. By making many measurements at the foot over an extended period with a compact wearable platform, we hope to be able to diagnose and characterize walking difficulties that now require an expensive gait lab, perhaps also offering interactive therapy. A variation of this sensor platform (the configurable stack) is being developed for interactive dance — after doing stage performances with many solo dancers using our Expressive Footwear platform (the predecessor to Stacy's shoe), we plan to return to dance again, but this time looking at ensembles, acquiring real-time data from multimodal packages at the hands and feet of roughly five dancers, and promptly fusing the hundreds of pieces of information that arrive every 10 milliseconds into higher-level features that an artist can use to compose. We've also been developing very simple, inexpensive, and low-power (or self-powered) devices for applications from interactive entertainment with large groups to batteryless key fobs. One activity that we're involved in at the moment is MIT's PlaceLab, a collaboration between the Department of Architecture and the Media Lab. PlaceLab is retrofitting a condo in Cambridge as a laboratory to study applications of smart-home sensor technology and ubiquitous computing approaches for health monitoring of elderly or chronically ill inhabitants. We are now designing extremely simple wireless sensors that can be distributed throughout this space to generate a pattern of activity as the inhabitants go about their daily routines. When a disruption is detected, next-of-kin can be contacted to look in, or, depending on the circumstances, more immediate action can be sought. How have you applied your musical interests to responsive computing tools and environments? My musical interests and background in electronic music first brought me to the Media Lab. Indeed, my first projects were trackers for violin bows and sensor chairs that measured the gesture of seated participants with electric fields — these were all interfaces for music systems that my colleague at the Lab, Tod Machover used in many performances. The Responsive Environments Group grew out of the team I assembled to design the interfaces for the Brain Opera, a large, touring multimedia installation that we first put together in 1996 — essentially a collection of musical environments. I went on from there to do many different novel musical controllers, including Expressive Footwear, Musical Trinkets, Magic Carpet (now a permanent installation at the MIT Museum), and several others. When we are exploring a new kind of sensor modality for an interface application, a musical context can often provide considerable insight into its potential and performance, as well as make a compelling demo. Likewise, now that music synthesis is a somewhat mature technology, more attention is being devoted to the control of digital music — new controllers are needed to fully harness the full expressive potential of computer-based musical instruments. Accordingly, I co-organized the first international conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression at Media Lab Europe in Dublin last year.
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Copyright ©2003 Massachusetts
Institute of Technology