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MIT Media Lab Europe: An Obituary
David R writes "Media Lab Europe, offspring of the famous MIT Media Lab, is closing its doors forever, as announced today. The corporate funding strategy hasn't worked out. Strangled by the stopped river of Irish government funding, the lab ceases its operations. Having worked there for quite some time, I can give you the gory details and a lot of background on MLE's closure. It has sure been the fanciest, geekiest and most open work, research and play environment I've seen. The moral? I think it is questionable whether basic or visionary, interdisciplinary (and often badly evaluated) research will be funded by private corporations. But secondly, European companies need a culture of sponsorship, which has existed in America for a long time."
You can't live on beer and potatoes alone.
You will be missed.
The real reason that it closed was that damn Metric system, all of their research had to be converted by 5/9 or 9/5 or 273 or something to be read by the MIT in Mass. This was just too much of a pain.
Thanks for putting the image of that damn Riverdance in my brain.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Sounds like a .com. And one wonders why it didn't work out.
Perhaps being right next to the Guinness brewery explains why not much work was done there.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
America has something Europe needs for once? That feels kind of good...
Dis is no need! Vee need Gupta and Singh! Code fast! For less!
Are you actually saying America does something BETTER than Europe?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
I must prefix my bashing with an apology. I have friends at Media Lab Europe and they are nice, smart, and fun people. I hope you all find new jobs.
The media lab concept is to make a pretty toy with an amusing concept, and call it brilliant (demo or die!). The painful part is that despite looking really cool, many of these toys and instruments are nothing more than that, toys. All of the crap musical instruments, and artistic looking mobiles, as far as I'm concerned are worthless other then kitch value. Most of the concepts are not new and other than eye candy aspects have been done more completely. The end result has been that they have failed to push boundaries, failed to advance the state of the art, and seemingly failed to have any lasting value, other than to inflate the already gigantic ego of the institution.
I hear your cries already. " But what about this one example yada yada yada..." The fact of the matter is the world doesn't need a bunch of hyped egos running around spending unimaginable sums of money. The research community can do better than the media lab. We are doing better. With less money, less ego, and in the name of science, not profit. I spose we don't all have machined plastic demos with videos of children happily playing across internet 2 in 4 countries.
Oh well, RIP
You can't just take American things and slap Euro* on them and expect them to work. Remember Euro Disney?
I went to school in the UK for four years, and I didn't see any signs that Europe has less sponsorship by business. Quite a lot of Universities had labs tied to businesses, research students were paid by businesses, and so forth.
My Photography - http://ian-x.com
The Deathlings (comic) - http://thedeathlings.com
And they als0 code better....
European companies will never get into sponsorship so long as they have to endure Socialism.
If a sponsor is offering a funding with no string attached, we welcome it. Otherwise, we'd better not accepting them.
If a corporate sponsor looks to identify a future employee through their sponsoring researches, I'd think that is fair. But if a corporate looks to identify ideal research outcome through its sponsorship, it's not a good thing for science and engineering.
Universities should not be operating product development labs for corporations.
Strangled by the stopped river of Irish government funding [...]
Maybe "drowned" by? But wait, the funding has stopped. Ooh, "dehydrated to death by"!
Privately owned companies have a responsibility to deliver to their shareholders. The true test of whether a company is a monopoly or not is whether there is a willingness to fund basic research science without a myopic focus on the bottom line. Monopolies can afford this.
The evidence supporting is TJ Watson, Bell Labs, and Xerox Parc. Sadly, as the monopoly is eliminated so is the research.
And while their output hasn't been earth shattering yet, this is further evidence of Microsoft's monopoly.
There's no reason they shouldn't. Besides, it saves the university a lot of money.
1. It's an institute, not a university;
2. It's an institvte, not an institute;
3. Without Emacs, MIT stops.
Cretin - a powerful and flexible CD reencoder
Analyzing this, I believe that Negroponte's vision of conducting research cannot work out in times of short-term revenue expectations.
Translate this into: Systems based on short-term revenue expectations will ultimately fall back into a state of mediocrity. Germany (where I live) gives good examples.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
The most telling evidence in the case is the thriving existence of Mac OS, *BSD, *Nix/*nux, etc etc etc. By definition, these cannot exist if Microsoft is a monopoly.
Was the "Irish Need Not Apply" sign they hung on the front door.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
""Media Lab Europe, offspring of the famous MIT Media Lab, is closing its doors forever, as announced today. The corporate funding strategy hasn't worked out. Strangled by the stopped river of Irish government funding, the lab ceases its operations. "
So are you telling us the patron sytem doesn't actually work?
on wings of pastrami.
So, the fine article sounds interesting, but when I click on the link, the article has an annoying alpha-blended background peeking through onto the text. Sure, that's cool in a geeky way, but annoying enough so that I can't even finish reading the text. I wonder if this is a metaphor for the Media Lab in general -- stuff that's geeky for the sake of being cool, but kind of a flop when it hits the real world.
Yeah, and they give awesome customer service too..........
Universities wouldn't survive without Industry, but the control is definitely in Industry's hands. In other words, if someone wants such-and-such a product, or needs such-and-such information, then the lecturer will adapt what they are doing to fit. It is extremely rare for a University to do "pure" research any more, unless it's funded via the Government.
In the end, pure research will NEVER be funded by industry, because (by definition) you don't know what the outcome is. Applied research, where you know a great deal about the results in advance, but maybe not everything about the method, is not what many people would call "real research", but it is what gets the big money.
It is partly this reason that the British are very good at inventing new things but useless at exploiting the ideas. There's no bridge between the pure and the applied. It is rare for an idea to successfully cross from one realm into the other.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
What they need to do is fund it by first producing a massively popular search engine, then encourage its engineers to spend one day a week working on personal projects on company time.
This flies in the face of science.
I think it's a pretty cool effect. Doesn't work so well in IE :)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I gather that you are refering to how the US government misappropriates the earnings of its citizens to pay for research that many don't care about, fewer would support given the option they are rightfully due, and many find morally objectionable. No, I don't think it's a good idea to go down that road in Europe, too. Let the market determine the nature of research funding, and let individuals decide how to allocate their scarce resources themselves.
he was referring to sponsership from companies.
Get off your high horse and pay attention.
Also, much of the research is needed, and leads to scientific break throughs. I, for one, support government research.
eith your plan, nothing would ever get done.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"It has sure been the fanciest, geekiest and most open work, research and play environment I've seen."
Then you don't know Pixar or the salt mines in Africa.
I fail to see how educational research should be funded by government/taxpayers.
Before 1940, almost no government funding went to research.
The problem is that it's just too expensive. MIT ex-president Vest had a very dot-com attitude towards spending, having investing a lot of the Universities money in very questionable companies with a lot of prestige, and many projects of quaint but questionable utility. Anyone who knows the story of the Stata building (a.k.a. the Gates building), that expensive, ugly, leaking monstrosity, can tell you MIT has made mistakes.
My feeling is the MLE was one of them. Dublin has become a VERY expensive place to live and do business. This is especially true if your capital pool is is dollars. Cambridge (Massachusetts, home of MIT) is expensive too, but not as expensive as Dublin.
Back in the 1960s, the Media Lab was a place of innovation because of the people involved, not the amount of money thrown at it. Since then, there have been a number of prima donnas who want the newest, best stuff. The formerly very drrop pockets of MIT made them used to getting what they demanded. But the pockets are light now. It's no surprise that the most remote wings of the organization will be the first to get clipped.
If I were running an organization such as the Media Lab, what I would do is NOT to try to shift focus on more commercially viable projects. There's enough commercial labs out there, doing a good job on this. What I would do is find a way run it on a shoestring budget. For instance, just up the street from that horrible Stata building are the old, empty and decaying Polaroid buildings. Those could have been bought and made useable for a fraction of the money it took to build Stata (yes, I know, State is an endowed building. Still, they could have done it). Instead of picking Dublin for RLE, pick a cheaper part of Europe that is less likely to skyrocket in costs because of its small size. But a country that is stable and has a good infrastructure. Someplace like the eastern part of Germany where you can buy land really cheap, and the government has a very long-term view towards helping the economy.
And trim down those salaries! There's no need to be demanding $130k/year when you can buy a nice house for $80k.
To summarize: cheaper area, less glitz, lower salaries, but still a playground for the mind.
Seriously, I'm trying not to be a negative-Nelly, but...
I've been hearing about the brilliance of MIT's Meda Lab for a decade or so. Yet I can't finger anything of even moderate success (i.e., widely-adopted) that's come out of there, other than gushing articles in mags like Wired, complete with unreadable graphics and typography.
Is there even one "But what about this one example yada yada yada..." ?
I don't know about European waterways, but here in Canada our rivers do not strangle anyone, even when stopped. It's like a bad line from VH1's Behind The Music (see: Simpsons parody).
I never notice such things, sometimes to my loss I guess, because rather that put up with the hard to read sites I have my bowser override the text and background colors on web pages.
It's at least an option to consider.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
...and put the money to far more useful IT teaching and research.
The media lab concept was born of the 90's "ooh aah!" fascination with the Internet. It was a way to try and continue the glory of MIT's Project Athena days in the 80's (which DID produce brilliant, useful work that we all benefit from to this day), but it was poorly concieved, yielded little real benefit, and wasted a lot of money. It should have been strangled in it's crib, but dot com dollars kept it afloat while MIT polished it's reputation as a hip place to go to school. In stark contrast to the serious work at MIT and Berkeley in the 80's, the Media Lab took on more of a chic aura, kind of a Studio 54 for geeks.
Thankfully, like disco itself, these kinds of places are dying out. It's just a shame that individuals, families, and corporations that shelled out millions of dollars have watched it all dissapear into a black hole, into what was essentially a university sponsored dot com scheme.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
This says most of what you need to know about the Media Lab, I suspect.
Originally, a large proportion of the Irish government's funding for university science research was going to be diverted into MLE. (Although to be fair the total funding was going to be enlarged as well.) Good riddance. Blame Irish prime minister Bertie Ahern. Evidently he got high on the media lab's promotional vapours. (Another gullible suit.) This isn't the first time he's pushed a grandiose, expensive, misconcieved pet project which eventually dies in an embarrassing fashion.
Or did anyone else notice the contradiction in these two sentences:
---
I think it is questionable whether basic or visionary, interdisciplinary (and often badly evaluated) research will be funded by private corporations.
But secondly, European companies need a culture of sponsorship, which has existed in America for a long time."
---
First he claims corporate sponsorship of research is not possible, then, immediately after he acknowledges that non-government-sponsored research does exist in America.
In fact, it thrives. You can criticize or castigate the corporate sponsorship of basic and applied research in America, but it is significant.
You mean no companies want to pay for this valuable research? I am shocked. Shocked!
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
It seems that this is the latest in a seris of misteps for the Media Lab. A similar effort in India, Media Lab Asia, was wrestled away from the Lab by the Indian Gov't. Then there's also the empty lot next to the building where a new Media Lab was supposed to have been errected some years ago.
I think at the base the problem is that lab's are not just created overnight. It takes years of laboring together (and sometimes years going to school together) before you get a cohesive faculty that can make a lab like this "go."
It is my hope that the Media Lab introspects a bit and stops attempting overly ambitious things and instead does what it's really good at: making cool interfaces between bits and atoms.
.. that Americans lack taste and handfull of Europeans like bad music and this is what I found:
D. Hasselhoff iPod
The Media Lab was an amalgamation of the MIT Architecture studios and the Computer Science Lab. Both places had used the "playpen" environments since the 1960s. The architecture labs inter-penetrated the top floor of Building 7 Borg infiltrating the Enterprise. People built interconnected, multi-level cubby holes and common areas for their art studios and classrooms.
Many dot.coms adopted this style of goofy shared spaces. You still see this at Google, Pixar, etc.
This atmosphere has recently extended to the newly opened "Dr. Suess" Computer Science Department (Strata) building at MIT. This building looks like a bunch of twisty towers. Theres a lot weird looking offices, common spaces and passage ways. Plus its own gym and cafeteria, so students rarely need to return home.
I've been following http://opengov.media.mit.edu/ for a year or more, and it was a brilliant initiative, and pretty smart way to go about things. Sadly updates weren't coming much lately, then the website slowed/disappeared, now I see " opengov is not currently maintained." .. Bummer, I wish this project would be done elsewhere.
[DavidR]
Besides MLE, MIT Media Lab has created another research lab: Media Lab Asia. This attempt failed as well - the river of funding Indian government went dry. MLA has a different model now, without MIT.
[/DavidR]
Asia lab was scrapped not because of funding issue. It was due to failure to produce any significant results. Govt had pumped close to $20m in the project. Consider the fact that Media Lab asked a sum of $5m just to use the name "Media Lab". That was exhorbitant by for a country like India.
Wish MLE had looked at the closure of MLA more closely.
Once again, the Irish Goverment proves that they don't have a clue!!
:-(
Was listening to RTE new on the way home this evening, and it
seems that the Irish Goverment wanted it to be self-financing and expected it to work on more "commerical" research to fund its self!
They don't seem to understand the whole consept of long term R+D.
Sad day for Ireland
__
Sigs are like arse-holes, everybody has one
No, that's a scam. They add you to spam lists, and never send the machine.
He was big in Germany, singing in German. His voice wasn't so bad and suits German vocals well. He had some good songwriters. Lots of middle aged mothers liked his songs, just how middle aged mothers in the UK tend to like Cliff Richard. I'm puzzled that you find this so surprising.
of their funding. It's a big misnomer to think that Media Lab US was kept going by forward thinking US corporations, it's the Japanese money that funded the Media Lab over the last 10 years or so.
That is just nasty.
Free Mac Mini Yeah, it's
On the other hand, I remember fondly being there (the regular non-MLE MeejaLab) when the early ideas for what became both social filtering and "dance dance revolution" (among a number of other things) were created.
gnet
to bad rubbish. Hopefully the MIT Media Labs is next... What a waste of money.
And this isn't a Troll ??
WTF ! ?
Moderator assholes go stick a potato up your ass !
The emperor has no clothes ... Again !!!
Well done Bono and Co. !
Keep it up you rich tosser and don't forget to cuddle up to Bill Gates eeechh.
You can find a link to it - here.
No, it's the other way round: European countries have to go back to statal founding, because we always want to make it the American Way(tm), forgetting that what works in the USA doesn't always work in the Old Continent.
If you say that European countries need a culture of private sponsorship, it means that you haven't lived in Europe long enough. Private founding works for some time, but it will always concentrate where the flow cash come.
America follows this profit-tied system, and it's okay, since we (Europeans) counter-balance the thing with some "no profit aimed" research. So everyone goes on with his/her business and we have both research done "for money" and research done because it's "right to do it".
Europe is really far different than USA. We should stop wanting to take them as a model. This doesn't mean that they should take us as a model for them - just that different cultures needs to follow different paradigms, and that an equilibrium is needed between things. I'm not a cold-war nostalgic (the other way round, actually), but I admit it had its purposes.
Beside that, if private founding is present in Europe scenario it's a good thing, just it hasn't to be the ONLY one (here in Italy, we haven't either kind of sponsorship anymore, and so the impact on our economy is huge, because the State stops giving money to research, Italian managers don't invest in it, and capable people escape from the country).
42.
A side impact of this will probably be a reevaluation of the so-called Digital Hub in the St Jame's Gate area of Dublin, where the Lab was located. Apart from a lot of wind, not much has actual been done (apart from, I'm presu,ming, generous grants to companies). The area itself is rather isolated; I know of one company that has relocated simply because they felt the area didn't give a great impression of businesses there; a friend of mine felt quite frightened walking to work there at any time, and she said that the frequent burnt-out cars beside the building didn't exactly impress customers. And it doesn't help that, mainly thanks to Eircom, Ireland's broadband infrastructure lags behind most other developed countries.
P.
Also, Graduate students at MLE hasd to get their degrees awarded from a local universities (UCD, Trinity etc...), not MIT Why would a local university want to award degrees the students at MLE when they had there own students to look after. Ridiculous Anyone every read Nicholas Neagroponte book, digital something or other, biggest load of stating the obvious crap ever
It has been and is still at CSAIL, successor to AI and computer science at MIT. They're at the new Stata center, just a stone's throw away from the Media Lab. The odd thing thing is that, as I heard, Stallman was moved into an office in the William H. Gates building.
Lets face it..MIT media Lab is nothing but a snooty organisation where very talented people are just focussed on publishing their research papers. Truth is that nothing of great significance ever came out of MIT media Lab recently considering the amount of money different governments have wasted over MIT media labs recently. Europe is not the only place where MIT media lab failed.
I've been reading that hoary old Bubble classic, _Being Digital_, by past Wired lastword columnist and ex-director of the (Boston) MIT Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte. I remember reading his column in the 1990s, wondering how long his sham of "revolutionary", and practically always exactly wrong, punditry could last. But I always thought that maybe I just didn't get the longrange implications of the digital revolution, though I was building it every day. HA! His childishly naive assumptions have grown crusty and anachronistic, revealing the truth: Negroponte was a babbling brook of stupidity, a leader of the worst excesses of Bubble smoke and mirrors. If he could lead the Media Lab, any fate of it, or any of its offspring, cannot truly surprise. That place must be wackier than a funhouse mirror.
--
make install -not war
you are SO wrong, in all of your points. 1. there were no grad students at MLE in that sense, since MLE was not a degree-granting institutions. 2. there were researchers working at MLE that got their degress from somewhere else. a) local universities DID grant MLE people degrees, including the author of this post and many other. b) MIT had just extended their program in Media Arts & Sciences to MLE folks -- some people are in that program now. 3. Negroponte's best-seller Being Digital stated things that are obvious today and to you, but very novel and visionary at the time it was published.
As another ex-MLE'er, I'm hardly surprised that the lab closed and I haven't shed any tears for it. I honestly hope that a more commercially-focused lab finds a home in Ireland but hopefully not in Dublin (yes, that's right folks, there's more to Ireland than Dublin!).
I won't waffle any more here as I've rambled on enough about it on my blog.