I met up with co-workers Janice and Kathy early Friday morning so that I could take them to see the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center (1). We entered the [Bill] Gates wing and walked around the ground floor. Then back outside and around to the top of the amphitheater to look at the wacky metal clad geometric solids at the core of the building (2). A short walk from the Stata brought us to the lab, where we grabbed breakfast before John started

the day's program (3). Lab sponsors presented products or visions of the future and three student panels prepared critiques of the sponsor talks during lunch. Pictured here is one of the student panels led by Ben Dalton (4), and John listening from the front row (5). Two things that we particularly interesting to me were Tod Machover's work at Tewksbury

State Hospital is using music to help Alzheimers patients retrieve their memories, and Chris Csikszentmihályi's screenings of hilarious advertising videos of the

50s available free from the Prelinger Archives.

After the workshop program, we got an impromptu tour of the lab from Sarah Page, who among other areas, took us to the Robotic Life Group to see Leonardo, the sociable robot (6) and some huggables. We had to end the tour quickly to catch a taxi to the airport, and we were lucky that there wasn't any bad traffic or bad weather--we had an easy flight home (7).

- mike lee - wheaton, md