At Media Lab, less whiz, more bang

CAMBRIDGE -- The storied MIT Media Lab, a hub of the 1990s digital revolution, is reinventing itself in a bid for relevance in a new era.

A high-tech beehive with 28 faculty members and a $32 million annual budget, the lab has been shifting its focus from multimedia and technology convergence to more everyday concerns like aging and healthcare. It's also been working more closely with business ``sponsors" that fund its research and casting a wider net for new corporate backers.

The changes are being orchestrated by new director Frank Moss , 57, the technology entrepreneur who took over in February as the first outsider to run the Kendall Square research lab. In meetings with sponsors and a Cape Cod retreat with faculty members this summer, Moss has stressed the need for new ideas and approaches.

Moss, in an interview, said he seeks to intensify the lab's concentration on technologies that address the problems of society's ``disadvantaged, disabled, and disenfranchised," from $100 laptops to digitally controlled prosthetic limbs to robotic elder care.

``If we direct our research at these kind of problems, we're setting the stage for breakthroughs that apply to everybody," he said.

In its heyday during the tech boom of the 1990s, the lab was celebrated for its freewheeling focus on exotic fields ranging from electronic ink to wearable computer gear to laser-based ``holographic" video. Today, though, there is more interest in projects with practical applications.

A veteran Boston-area businessman who has run computer software and life sciences companies, Moss has created a ``buddy system" requiring the lab's faculty members to forge stronger ties with sponsors and develop plans to help address companies' problems.

At a time when financial support from corporations is flat, Moss has also opened discussions with philanthropic groups, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, that might be drawn to the lab's work in healthcare or aging. He's also pushing to consolidate hundreds of disparate research projects into a smaller number of broad groups like common-sense computing or homes of the future. ``If we bring these ideas together, we can do bigger things on a larger scale," Moss said.

The changes follow a period of retrenchment at a lab that helped pioneer new technologies in the 1990s with cutting-edge research in wireless networks and field sensing for navigation. When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, the Media Lab saw its flow of contributions slow, both for industry-sponsored research and for a planned new building next door to the current five-story structure on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's campus. The building project, designed by the Japanese modernist architect Fumihiko Maki , was put on hold.

After opening satellite labs in Ireland in 2000 and in India in 2002, only to close both in disputes with government officials, Media Lab cofounder and director Nicholas Negroponte cut back on his day-to-day management of the lab and continued spending much of his time overseas. Negroponte is now leading the One Laptop per Child program, an effort to bring inexpensive computers to the developing world.

Moss has yet to cancel any research programs. But he has held brainstorming sessions with the lab's faculty and students over the lab's direction, including one last month at the Ocean Edge Resort in Brewster. During the meeting, he welcomed research ideas, but banned grousing about the new-building delay or fund-raising woes. In a nod to the lab's history, Moss invited Negroponte to join in the powwow.

Faculty members acknowledge the need for change. While some researchers are now immersed in health-related projects, and grappling with concerns of sponsors, others continue to work on blue-sky research in energy, solar cars, and the future of media.

``We're entering a new period, and we need a new balance," said Tod Machover , who heads the lab's hyper-instruments research group that uses computers to improve musical instruments. ``Frank was brought in to challenge things, and it's only natural that certain things will be emphasized and certain things deemphasized. All of us have to find a balance between the crazy, long-term research projects and research that can be used by our sponsors on a shorter-term basis."

In some ways, Moss is formalizing a direction in which many of the lab's researchers have been moving in recent years, said Hugh Herr , director of the biomechatronics research group that develops ``smart" prosthetics. ``To a great extent, the outside world still views the Media Lab as what it was years ago," he added.

While faculty members appear to be in agreement with the changes, at least so far, some outside critics fear moves like the ``buddy system" are part of a trend toward academic research organizations aligning their work more closely with the agendas of corporate sponsors than they did in the past -- and compromising their research mission.

``It raises questions," said Diane Farsetta , senior researcher at the Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit watchdog group in Madison, Wis. ``If the research is directed by parties that have a stake, do you lose the unexpected insights you might get from more free-ranging research? And are you hurting the research experience of your students to service the needs of your funders?"

But technology consultant Esther Dyson , editor of the newsletter Release 1.0 in New York, applauds the Media Lab's new focus. ``It's a very big challenge to take an exciting organization that's past the stage where it's an enfant terrible into a new era," she said. ``Health and education are the most interesting problems today."

For the sponsors themselves, the Media Lab's heightened attentiveness to their business goals is appreciated. But some sponsors say the lab's greatest value can't be measured in the short term. ``The reason we're there is to get connected to the longer-term thinking," said Tom O'Donnell , a business development manager for Cisco Systems Inc., who has an office at the lab. ``It's the stuff they're doing that we don't know about, that's what we want to get tied into."

Robert Weisman can be reached at weisman@globe.com.