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Walking into MIT’s Media Lab is like walking into a digital candy store. On the third floor, you're greeted by an HD display with “Emotional Weather” (data mined from Twitter using an intelligent agent that shows you the emotional content of tweets on any given topic). Walk a little further and you’re standing next to the office of the guy who developed the codices for the mp3 standard. You see computers and computer monitors of all shapes and sizes, digital clothing, robots, walls that respond to hand movement, and cybernetic flora interspersed with biological plant life and comfortable leather couches.

I'm here to grab a quick interview with Pattie Maes. Maes’ “SixthSense” presentation – wearable access to the Internet, spearheaded by graduate student Pranav Mistry using a few inexpensive off-the-shelf parts – was the buzz of TED in February 2009. (See the h+ article Wearing the Internet -- in Resources)

Maes has a passion for empowering people by providing “fluid interfaces” that bring materials to digital life — books, clothes, sticky notes, portraits, walls, tables, and so on. The world she envisions magically responds to you with information where and when you need it, “enabling insight, inspiration, and interpersonal connections.”

An associate professor in MIT's Program in Media Arts and Sciences, she founded and directs the Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces group. She holds bachelor's and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. Her areas of expertise are human-computer interaction, intelligent interfaces, and ubiquitous computing.

In the late nineties, Maes founded Firefly. The company developed technology widely in use on the Internet today that assesses buying and browsing habits of users and then offers purchase recommendations. Microsoft bought Firefly for a rumored $40 million in 1998. Maes has been listed on Newsweek's 100 most important people to watch, the World Economic Forum's 100 people to listen to, People's 50 most beautiful people, and the Association for Computing Machinery's 15 most perspicacious visionaries.

In addition to Pattie, the Lab’s luminaries include Marvin Minsky (the “father of AI”), Deb Roy (Cognitive Machines), Edward Boyden (Synthetic Biology), and Cynthia Breazeal (Personal Robots), to name just a few.

I was lucky enough to catch Pattie in her third floor office between meetings.

h+: Perhaps we could start with your background developing software agents. You had a $100 million company, Firefly. Is that still around?

Pattie Maes: No, Microsoft bought the company in '98, more than ten years ago. These were recommendation systems. We invented some of the ideas behind software that recommends things to people based on similar interests and tastes, stuff that you now see in a lot of places today – Amazon, Netflix, and others.

h+: How did that evolve into your current work?

Pattie Maes: I was interested in helping people to find information that is relevant to whatever they are thinking about. So, I feel like I really haven't changed what I've been working on. Initially with the recommendation system software agents, I was looking at helping people sitting in front of a computer. You're reading an article about something and somebody mentions something in an email, and it's great if you have immediate relevant information offered proactively by the software about that topic.

We're really doing the same thing now in the Fluid Interfaces Group, but in the physical setting. We’re trying to help people find things in the world that are related to everything they are doing –- objects, people, places, and problems that they're trying to solve. The vision is whatever knowledge, or information, or services that might be relevant to you, given the things that you are currently doing, will be sort of magically available to you.

h+: I'm particularly interested in how your research is bringing materials to life. Projects like Blossom, ioMaterials, Life in a Comic, Moving Portraits, Pulp-Based Computing, Intelligent Sticky Notes, and thirdEye, to name a few.

Pattie Maes: There are a lot of different projects, actually. I have a fairly large group of 7-8 students and I give them a lot of freedom. They come up with what they want to work on. There are some projects that are at the core of what we're trying to do, and then there are others that are a bit further away. Pretty much all of the projects relate to the theme of helping people and integrating digital information into the physical world.

h+: I'm reminded of Neal Stephenson's fiction: the character Nell with the adaptive book in Diamond Age [required reading for most Media Lab students along with J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series] that makes up stories about her and her surroundings.

Pattie Maes: Yeah. People keep telling me that I should read Neal Stephenson's fiction, but working with such technology is pretty much what I do every day at work. At night, I want to do completely different things -- like read historical novels -- that are very unlike what I do during the day. So maybe that's why I haven't read it yet.

h+: The Media Lab appears to have modified its charter somewhat since the mid-80s when Nicholas Negroponte first created it. “Media Lab 2.0” seems to emphasize work that aids the "disabled, disadvantaged, and disenfranchised" as the first-adopters of technologies that will ultimately benefit all of humankind.

Pattie Maes: The Media Lab was originally founded to study the convergence of media, networks, and computers – and that basically happened. We indeed did have to come up with a new or related theme. The theme of the Media Lab is to invent new technologies that empower people -- whether an individual or a group of people -- to either learn more effectively or to express themselves in more effective ways or to take care of their own health, that is, to empower them. That's the common theme: we want to improve quality of life through technology, or think of technologies that will improve the quality of life and that would benefit people -- as opposed to organizations, governments, or whatever.

Negroponte started the One Laptop Per Child initiative. He's currently on leave from MIT because his non-profit takes his full attention.

h+: Do you have much interaction with other MIT Media Lab faculty, for example, affective computing, biomechatronics, cognitive machines, computing culture, design ecology, and so forth? Do you collaborate with these teams?

Pattie Maes: Yes. The Media Lab is a collaborative place, actually. It's a very interdisciplinary place. For many of the projects we approach we need a variety of skills to implement or realize them. In this kind of setting, it's very easy to collaborate with people who have a different set of skills or slightly different interests, and so on to collaborate on the same end goal or project. So there's a lot of collaboration.

I wouldn't say that we are converging towards a particular technology, however. Ideas come through this place and get adopted by other groups and played with. It isn't like we are all converging towards the same solutions. But there are a wide variety of approaches to explore similar problems.

h+: Your “SixthSense” technology was quite a hit at TED. Are you planning to do any more TED presentations?

Pattie Maes: I did one 10 years ago and then I did the one this year. I didn't realize the talk would have such an impact.

h+: People gave you and your graduate student Pranav Mistry a standing ovation.

Pattie Maes: Yeah, but actually the big impact was afterwards. After several weeks, they told me that "over two million people have downloaded your video!" Unfortunately, I included my email at the end of the video. And the people who were really into the presentation saw my email address at the end, and I got a lot of response. So it's been very busy around here.

Here’s the video of Pattie’s 2009 TED presentation:

h+: I'm sure you must have a very sophisticated filter on your email.

Pattie Maes: (Laughs) Ah, no. Not really. But it's been very busy.

h+: Are there plans to commercialize the “SixthSense” technology?

Pattie Maes: Not at the moment. Although we work with our sponsors. The Lab is different from other university labs in that we're primarily funded by industry. So a lot of consumer electronics and content companies – a little bit of everything, really – actually work with us. Sometimes we actually do a startup. But, at the moment, I don't have the energy for that.

h+: I would love to have that technology.

Pattie Maes: Well, what we are doing, is to make the information available online -- the whole spectrum of how to build it, the software and everything, so that people can build it in their garage or wherever, and then maybe improve some aspects of the system, whether hardware or software. We're making it more like an Open Source project where we invite others to help improve the technology and to think about other applications and other form factors.

h+: There's a commercial product now called Layer that incorporates GPS using Android or iPhone technology to allow users to overlay reality with information. It seems similar to your Photowhere project.

Pattie Maes: That's an old project, actually. Almost ten years old. It's interesting because a lot of the things we’ve explored in the past have become reality, especially through Google. A lot of the stuff that they use comes from here. Yeah, that was an old project.

h+: How do you see humans interacting with the Internet in 10 years?

Pattie Maes: I think we are all increasingly dependent upon the Internet. Our vision is one where the digital information, and the applications that we rely on so much, become more integrated into our daily lives so that it is a seamless integration of the digital world with the physical world. Right now, it's not at all integrated. For example, I have to go to my laptop to look something up, my cell phone or land line to make a phone call, and so forth – all these gadgets with different form factors. It would be better if digital information and interactivity is embedded into day-to-day materials. Then the real world responds to you. The goal is to make it all very simple. A lot of my motivation comes from the fact that I actually don't like gadgets. If I have a problem with my computer, I often don't want to take the time to fix it even though I have a Ph.D. in computer science. It's just a pain to deal with all the gadgets we have in our lives right now. Information should just be easier and more seamless and accessible.

h+: What are your views on strong AI –- for example, the feasibility of Henry Markram's Blue Brain project, and AIs passing the Turing Test? Do you think such AIs will be friendly?

Pattie Maes: I'm very skeptical about that. I started out in artificial intelligence and then moved away from it many years ago. I found that I was much more interested in augmenting people. I don't necessarily want a robot in my house that is more intelligent than a person – it would cause a lot of trouble in my household! I'm more of a pessimist. Even a friendly AI, I wouldn't want that either. I just want to make myself and other people more "powerful” –- to make it easier to absorb and process information. It's much more interesting for me to think of how you can empower people and help them overcome their limitations rather than creating artificial beings that are different from us.

h+: Would you consider something like a "SixthSense” implant if it was available?

Pattie Maes: That was a sort of joke at the end of my TED talk (laughs). Well, personally, I would like that. I mean, I buy so many books and I can never read them all. And I'm interested in so many articles. So I've always wished that I could lie down on my pillow and put a book under it and then magically that knowledge would be available to me in the morning. I do think it would be really nice if you could more easily just absorb information. I'm a very curious person. I want to learn about everything – not just technology. So it would be wonderful if it were just that easy to learn.