06/23/97 MIT: TWO BIG RIVALS ON CAMPUS

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MIT: TWO BIG RIVALS ON CAMPUS
Far apart in style and approach, the teams are alike in influence
Massachusetts Institute of Technology has a split personality when it comes to computer science. MIT's Media Laboratory and its rival, the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS), seem worlds apart: ''When LCS has a party, it's a box of cookies and a bunch of grad students talking about Star Trek,'' says one researcher with ties to both facilities. ''The Media Lab will throw a huge bash with waiters serving oysters and champagne, and Nastassia Kinski will be there.''
Ask folks at the Media Lab what's going on over at LCS, and they'll profess not to care. Pose the question at LCS, and researchers will diss the Media Lab for largely missing the Internet--duh!--while LCS snared Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist credited with inventing the World Wide Web.
If the rivalry has any real impact, however, it has been to drive both labs even harder to map out the future of computing. While there is some overlap, LCS, established in 1963, stays true to its origins: pioneering concepts in computer architecture. Consider David K. Gifford's work. His research on computers based on DNA molecules rather than silicon has a time horizon of a couple of decades. Yet it holds intriguing potential.
The goal is to take advantage of DNA's ability to contain vast amounts of information in a tiny amount of space. The trick is accessing and processing the information. Gifford's simple molecular computer starts with a strand of DNA. Pieces of the strand represent the ''1s'' and ''0s'' of a computer. Gifford and co-worker Alexander J. Hartemink then use the normal machinery of biology to copy the strand. But instead of copying the strand exactly, as cells typically do, they replace one of the pieces with a different string of DNA, thus flipping the ''bit'' from 0 to 1.
So far, the DNA computer is able to count from one to three. That's a long way from the power of silicon chips. ''Intel doesn't have to worry about it replacing the Pentium yet,'' says Hartemink. But Gifford believes the approach will work with more complex logic operations, paving the way to a more capable database or computer. ''It's so new, we don't even know yet what the applications will be,'' he says.
Across campus, the 11-year-old Media Lab already has had an impact on multimedia products, such as digital television. And it has become a beacon for bright nonconformists like Hiroshi Ishii. As a scientist at Japanese telecom giant NTT Corp., the 41-year-old Ishii bridged physical and virtual worlds with a ''whiteboard'' that allows engineers in different locations to work on the same drawing simultaneously.
DESK SET. At MIT, this new approach to human interfaces evolved into a ''wall of the future'' that saves users' drawings on data-storage cards. Any networked computer can use the cards to replay the drawing sessions. At first, the output was limited to digital pen strokes. But Ishii wanted to come closer to his mother's abacus by embedding bits of data in physical objects that can actually be grasped and manipulated.
So Ishii and his team next built an ''active desk.'' It has a transparent panel and an array of optical, mechanical, and electromagnetic sensors beneath the surface. The sensors can read data that has been coupled to physical objects. To demonstrate how it works, Ishii places a model of MIT's famous dome on the desk. The transparent panel flickers to life and displays a map of the MIT campus, properly scaled so the dome sits in the middle where it belongs. When Ishii moves the dome, the map moves too. By scanning a bar code attached to the dome model, the desk links the dome to data about what's inside--from faculty office listings to a schedule of events. The idea, Ishii says, is to build a computer that interacts in a human sort of way rather than force people to adapt to the computer.
With so much talent clustered in the two labs, there's a good chance one or the other will come up with part of the blueprint for the digital future. So who's keeping score?
By Paul C. Judge in Cambridge, Mass.

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