Today's visit to the lab was near perfect--a good blend of demo time and time for discussion and reflection. With me today was much of the staff and vendor team that runs our web site discussion boards. Here are just captions and some reference links for the photos you see here:

1) Professor John Maeda greets us in the 2nd floor boardroom. 3, 4) Ernesto Arroyo, Research Assistant in Ted Selker's Context-Aware Computing group demoed, among other things, Counter Intelligence, a smart kitchen of the future with a machine that can vacu-form dishes on demand and recycle them after use and a rubber sink that won't break dropped dishes. 5) Kelly Dobson of the Computing Culture group demoed some of her group's projects as well as her own work in "machine therapy" and wearable body organs. 7) Interesting detour: our group got stuck in the elevator for about 15 minutes. Here I am with John's assistant Vinnie. 8, 9) Dan Stiehl, of the Robotic Life group demonstrates a prototype Huggable Robot that is slated to go on clinical trials in a hospital in January 2006. 10) Carlos Rocha of the Physical Language Workshop (John's lab), demonstrates a new Sensetable prototype which has been ported to work with Mac OS X. 11) The letters P-L-W built up in Pixel Blocks. 12) Jon Gips demos the latest version of the Ubiquitous Experimental Research (UbER) badge which can map social networks that occur in real time between a group of people in a meeting wearing these badges. Not pictured were research updates from Push Singh,Pattie Maes, and Dan Ariely. John facilitated some closing discussion and then we were on our way back to the airport, my guests glowing from their big dose of unmitigated innovation.

- mike lee - washington, dc