The battle is over and the final economic recovery and stimulus bill preserves $15 billion for basic science and over $50 billion for upgrading America’s technology infrastructure. These expenditures will put people to work immediately, provide a foundation for steady economic growth, and set the stage for discoveries that address longstanding human problems.

As a technologist also concerned about the state of society I should be happy. Most of my colleagues in high tech, biotech, and academia are ecstatic. But for me something important is missing.

If we are not only to survive but also thrive in the years ahead, basic science and infrastructure upgrades alone are not enough. We must also invest in radical innovations that deliver venture-capital type returns for both the economy and society. By this I mean returns on investment of up to a thousand to one in less than seven years—in dollars and human good.

To illuminate the kind of possibilities I have in mind, consider a huge segment of society: the disabled, disadvantaged and dismissed.

For all the wonders of the digital age, these people remain at the tail end of the technology adoption cycle. Amazing advances at the intersection of the biological, information and social sciences could change this. Soon all technologies—from nanochips to mobile devices to robots—will learn from people, understand them and augment their physical and cognitive abilities.

At the MIT Media Lab, as at many other academic and industrial research organizations, we are exploring how this human/technology collaboration will enable the less fortunate overcome their challenges in ways previously thought impossible. In the course of this research we have discovered that many of our innovations intended for the disabled, disadvantaged and dismissed of society have the potential to benefit virtually everyone, simultaneously creating huge economic growth opportunities and vast human good.

This phenomenon is rooted in history. Some of the most pervasive technologies in the world emerged from inquiries into human deficits. The first typewriter proven to work was built by Pelligrino Turri to enable his blind friend to write. The invention of the telephone originated with Alexander Graham Bell’s attempt to assimilate his deaf mother into the world of sound.

Here are three examples of research at the Media Lab today which illustrate this:

* There are approximately 10 million amputees in the world today. Professor Hugh Herr and his team aspire to enable each of them to return to complete mobility by inventing smart robotic limbs that mimic human motion. What if we could leverage their innovations to equip every elderly person with an inexpensive and simple exoskeleton that prevents falls? Herr believes this is possible. Falls among people over 65 are projected to account for direct costs of $55 billion a year by 2020 and untold suffering of victims and their families. Eliminating them would provide enormous economic and societal benefit.

* One of every 150 individuals in the US today is diagnosed with autism. Professor Rosalind Picard and her team are inventing novel ways for people with autism to communicate emotion and cognition with others using simple wearable sensors. What if we could adapt these sensors to help businesses truly understand and empathize with customers? Picard is working with many companies to do just that. This is the Holy Grail of commerce and could catalyze huge economic growth and create millions of jobs.

* Patients with rare diseases number 25 million in the US today, but these diseases receive little attention from the biomedical establishment. PhD candidate Ian Eslick is inventing new ways to empower patients to self-organize into communities that discover therapies based on their “everyday experiments” of living with their rare diseases. What if we could extend this model to accelerate discovery for mainstream diseases such as cancer? Eslick’s collaborators in the biomedical world are optimistic. The benefits would be enormous – bringing new medicines to market takes ten years and costs $1 billion today.

In this spirit, I propose we now devote just $1 billion out of the basic science and infrastructure budgets to technologies like those above that offer both innovative approaches to the challenges of the less fortunate and also the potential to translate rapidly to commercial opportunities of scale. Awards ranging from $50,000 to $1 million would go to anyone with the desire to address pressing human needs and the determination to turn concepts into reality.

I realize a proposal like this, coming from the director of the MIT Media Lab, could appear like a bid for a share of the stimulus cash. But the Media Lab derives the vast majority of our funding from private industry (less than 10 percent from government), and our researchers would have to compete on an even footing with everyone.

My point is this. The kind of passion and ingenuity that drove Alexander Graham Bell to find a way to communicate with his deaf mother resides in the hearts and minds of millions of people today—from ordinary citizens to entrepreneurs to academic and industrial researchers—waiting to be unleashed.

Invoking the words of President Obama, this is not a Democrat solution nor a Republican solution, but an American solution.

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I might just have figured out the worst corner in Kendall Square and the best company to have there…It’s a beautiful day here, so I was taking a leisurely after-lunch stroll when I spotted MIT Media Lab director and Xconomist Frank Moss sauntering equally leisurely on the other side of Binney Street at the corner of Third Street. I waited for him as he crossed over to where I was at the southwest corner of the intersection and we started chatting.

My back was to the street, when suddenly Moss grabbed my shoulders and said, “Watch out,” pulling me farther away from traffic. I turned around to see the body of a big truck that was having trouble making the turn onto Third roll into the curb near where I had been standing. Whew! (Thoughts of Xconomy’s “key man” insurance policy danced in my head.)

Not a minute after we had resumed chatting (and yes, maybe I was dumb for turning my back to the street again), Moss reached for me again. This time it was a truck with a crane (or was it a backhoe?) having trouble with the same turn—and the pointy part was aimed right at my head. Did I mention there’s a lot of construction going on in Kendall Square these days?

Now, today wasn’t the first time the Media Lab’s head honcho has bailed me out. Earlier this spring, I was on my way to moderate a panel at the Deshpande Center Ideastream conference when my taxi got into an accident with another cab on Beacon Street in Boston. As the two cabbies were arguing over who was at fault and I was fretting about being late for the conference, I was able to reach Moss on his cell (he was on my panel) and he swooped by in his cab and whisked me to the conference.

Thanks Frank, again.

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Last week saw new filings for both an IPO and an SPO. Could the climate for exits be getting a little better? (Seems like it would be hard for it to get much worse.) Here’s the news on those filings, and the rest of the recent deals.

—Codon Devices, a Cambridge, MA-based startup focusing on applications of synthetic biology, settled a patent suit it filed last March against Bothell, WA-based Blue Heron Biotechnology.

—MIT Media Lab and Bank of America inked a five-year deal worth $15 to $25 million to create a research center at the Lab to study the future of the banking industry. Media Lab director Frank Moss and MIT professor Deb Roy told Wade the deal was perhaps the biggest corporate sponsorship win in the lab’s history.

—Woburn, MA’s BioTrove, an MIT spinoff that makes tools for life sciences research, filed for an IPO worth up to $75 million. BioTrove’s investors include Catalyst Health and Technology Partners, CB Health Ventures, Zero Stage Capital, Echelon Ventures, and Fletcher Spaght.

—Hopkinton, MA-based EMC (NYSE: EMC) announced it would shell out about $84 million for the UK-based consulting firm Conchango, which specializes in custom implementations of Microsoft enterprise software.

—Monotype Imaging (NASDAQ: TYPE) of Woburn, MA, filed for a secondary offering worth up to $101 million; all the proceeds will go to selling stockholders of the text-imaging firm.

—Cambridge, MA-based speech-recognition startup Vlingo raised $20 million in a Series B funding round led by Yahoo.

—Radius Health, also of Cambridge, raised $28.3 million in second Series C closing from MPM Capital, The Wellcome Trust, HealthCare Ventures, Oxford Bioscience Partners, BB Biotech Ventures, and Scottish Widows Investment Partnership. The new financing, which brings the total raised in the round to $67.5 million, was a planned reward for Radius finishing enrollment in a Phase 2 trial of its lead drug candidate, a treatment for osteoporosis.

—Merrimack, NH’s GT Solar signed $91 million contract with The Silicon Mine, a Dutch photovoltaic manufacturer, to supply equipment for the Netherlands’ first solar-grade silicon plants.

—East Providence, RI-based medical device maker IlluminOss Medical closed a Series B financing from New Leaf Ventures and Foundation Medical Partners worth $11.02 million, according to a report in PE Hub.

—An auction of the assets of the defunct Cambridge, MA, e-commerce startup N2N, scheduled for April 11, was postponed until May 2. Before ceasing operations around Christmas last year, N2N had raised $30 million from General Catalyst Partners and Limited Brands (from which it spun off).

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The Center for Future Banking announced yesterday by the MIT Media Lab and Bank of America is the trailblazing computer lab’s biggest corporate funding win in years—perhaps its biggest ever. But it also represents a new type of industry-academic collaboration for the Media Lab, one in which the company footing the bill will have more say over the questions researchers are studying than previous Media Lab sponsors have been afforded.

That’s the word from Media Lab director Frank Moss and MIT professor Deb Roy, the center’s founding director and principal investigator. I spoke with Moss and Roy yesterday, shortly after MIT released the news that Bank of America will commit at least $15 million, and possibly up to $25 million, over the next five years for research on the future of the banking industry—particularly the ways technology is changing consumers’ experiences of banking and their behavior around saving, spending, risk, and planning. Projects funded through the new center will involve areas as disparate as architect William Mitchell’s studies of the changing ways people interact inside network- and sensor-saturated public buildings and cognitive psychologist (and best-selling author) Dan Ariely’s work on why we often spend money unwisely and other forms of “predictably irrational” behavior. But in a break with past practices with sponsors, Bank of America will help choose the specific questions the researchers consider, and will send visiting fellows to participate directly in the research, according to Moss.

The center’s overall mission is to help the banking industry (and Bank of America in particular) look beyond innovations such as online banking and prepare for the field’s long-term future. “If you look at the big picture of banking for the past decade or 15 years, they have been in the process of re-architecting from the back office on out, with a new focus on consumer banking and consumer services,” Moss says. “They’ve done a great job at Bank of America and other banks of providing self-service access to back-office things that were previously only in the realm of people inside the bank. But the whole world that their customers are in is changing—and what those customers are doing is dramatically changing, as they change their social habits and engage in social networks, and communicate in different ways—and they are asking the question, ‘What is the next step beyond giving customers access to information?’ How can banks be a new factor in the lives of customers?”

These are exactly the kinds of question the Media Lab is used to asking about other industries, such as the news business, robotics, education, and entertainment. But beginning with the Bank of America partnership, it may be investigating these questions with a slightly more practical bent.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, under the leadership of co-founder Nicholas Negroponte (now director of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation), the Media Lab attracted a flood of industry research dollars—all in spite of a tradition of “open IP” that bars sponsors from having exclusive access to the work produced. But after Negroponte gave up executive leadership of the organization in 2000—and especially after the dot-com bust brought the days of abundant funding to an end—it appeared to many outsiders that the Media Lab was without a single strong leader who could sway contributors to loosen their purse-strings unconditionally.

When Moss was appointed director in February 2006, he said it was time to apply a business leader’s sensibility to solving the lab’s financial problems, and to better accommodate the needs of the lab’s sponsors. “What has changed over the past seven or eight years is that simply coming here and rubbing shoulders with very smart, creative people is often not enough for our sponsors,” Moss told MIT’s Technology Review magazine shortly after his appointment. “They need us to help them make a connection between …Next Page »

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A couple of weeks ago, I had the great honor of attending Xconomy Forum: The Future of Innovation in New England. As I met some fantastic angel investors and shook hands with iRobot CEO Helen Greiner, I felt the strange euphoric giddiness once only reserved for Christmas mornings. What was I, a lowly and unproven student, doing in the company of giants?

As the forum progressed, my purpose became clear (to me, anyway). The question at hand was what can we do to build more billion-dollar technology companies in Massachusetts? I heard talk of providing free housing, eliminating capital gains taxes, and scratching out non-compete clauses. All of this made sense, and formed an exciting new viewpoint for me. However, where was the talk about connecting with students, sourcing ideas out of academic institutions, and retaining talent? These ideas were raised—mainly by MIT Media Lab head Frank Moss—but never fleshed out. Well, ladies and gentleman (by which I really mean investors), you can’t escape the truth (or a driven undergrad on a late-night sugar high). I present to you my one-man discourse on the following question: “How do I make connections with students, and why should I even care?”

First off, let me give you a peek into the student psyche. Mind you, this reflects the understanding and assumptions of just one MIT senior in Material Science and Engineering. With that disclaimer/personal pitch taken care of, here are some interesting facts:

1. A significant portion of my MIT friends (of which Facebook meaninglessly counts 459) have expressed interest in starting their own businesses. Very few have acted on that interest.
2. Today’s mainstream, aspiring student aims for a job in:
   • Glamorous, lucrative, ambition-drenched Wall Street
   • Prestigious, door-opening, generalist-friendly consulting
   • Young, hip, cool Google/Apple
3. You have networks. So do we.
   • All the entrepreneurs in each class know who each other are.
   • We go to dinners together. We brainstorm with each other. We share our dreams of bootstrapping a billion-dollar startup with one another.
   • We host mini conferences together. You probably haven’t heard of them. Maybe you never will.

So, you may ask, “what does this all mean to me?” Well, note that you are not involved in any of the above hopes, dreams, or activities—all of which can profoundly affect whether and how today’s students become tomorrow’s innovators and entrepreneurs. I take great pride in knowing that my fellow MIT students are going to be the world’s best scientists and engineers. Unfortunately, most of these students are not likely to help you in your efforts to make money, change the world, or whatever else it is that drives you. Why is that? Because the vast majority of students fall into one of the following four categories:

1. They don’t know you exist
2. They don’t trust you (read: vulture capitalists)
3. They are intimidated by you
4. They haven’t had the opportunity to meet you

Now, I am not suggesting that you, as a venture capitalist or angel investor, should chill at MIT looking to meet students. We both know that you don’t have the time for that. Instead, I am suggesting that you connect with major network nodes within the MIT student-entrepreneur community. Get to know the student who knows all the entrepreneurs and has the talent and drive to make something of himself/herself, and you get the value of their network as well. And as technology continues to evolve, disciplines continue to merge, and systems become more complex, the value of that student network will continually increase.

So how do you find these superstars? You don’t! Truth is, they find you. All you need to do is eliminate category four above and create the opportunity from them to find you. Now this is where I propose a groundbreaking and immense concept that will change this ecosystem…internships! Silly? I think not. Anticlimactic? Probably, but just listen a little longer. Establishment of a very selective internship program at your firm or angel group will:

1. Boost your reputation at MIT
2. Encourage entrepreneurship at MIT
3. Establish student connections that will provide great returns
4. Increase the quality and number of ideas making it through your filters

Are these investments in the MIT community worth it? Frank Moss has challenged VCs to spend 0.1% of their funds on students. Will it kill you to do that, or maybe even to increase that to 0.2%? Internships really do make a difference. I did an internship at incTANK Ventures my sophomore summer, and I can honestly say that you wouldn’t be reading this right now if it wasn’t for the mentorship of firm partners Karl Ruping and Chad Jackson. Whether that’s a good thing or bad thing, I’ll let you decide.

Ultimately, I just want to point out that coaxing growth in this region’s entrepreneurial ecosystem requires a multi-pronged approach, so while you’re thinking about housing and contracts, taxes and billion-dollar companies, I’d like to send out a friendly reminder not to overlook the students. Of course, I’m just an undergrad—and what do we know? My guess is it would benefit you, us, and the innovation ecosystem if you found out.

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The surge of major researchers leaving Cambridge’s Mitsubushi Electric Research Laboratory, which we first reported in July, was only the beginning of what’s looking like a steady flow.

Today, we have three more departures to report:

• Ramesh Raskar, an expert in computational photography who will join the Media Lab in the spring of 2008 as an associate professor of media arts and sciences.

• Kathy Ryall, former leader of MERL’s Diamond Touch project, which created a widely emulated multi-user, touch-activated tabletop display. Ryall has joined BAE Systems in Burlington, MA.

• Jonathan Westhues, whose work at MERL focused on building-wide sensor networks, is leaving for a position at Microsoft. At the SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego, Westhues presented work on a system called Buzz that allowed users to visualize the locations of crowds on the conference floor. Westhues is also famous for exposing security flaws in Verichip’s implantable RFID chips.

The latest trio of MERL departures join two previous waves that followed the firing of former research director Joe Marks in October 2006. The first exodus included Paul Dietz, James Frankel, Wojciech Matusik, Baback Moghaddam, Hanspeter Pfister, Chuck Rich, Candy Sidner, and Benjamin Vigoda, all of whom we reported on in late July and early August. Then, in late August we reported that Matusik and two more MERL researchers, Paris Smaragdis and Shai Avidan, had joined the Newton, MA, office of Adobe Systems.

Of the latest departures, Raskar is perhaps the highest-profile—and he was one of the MERL researchers most hotly pursued by outside institutions.

Raskar first became widely known for his work between 1998 and 2003 on systems that meld the images from multiple video projectors into a single seamless image, even on a curved surface such as a dome. More recently, his experiments using specialized aperture masks and digitally timed exposures to selectively block the light that hits a digital camera’s CCD sensor have shown that, in essence, less is more: the less light a camera receives, the more easily the information from the CCD can be reprocessed to achieve effects such as motion deblurring and focus deblurring. Raskar is described by former MERL colleague Baback Moghaddam as “brilliant” and “by many people’s estimation, the rising star in computer graphics.”

At the Media Lab, where he already has an online faculty profile, Raskar is expected to lead the new “Camera Culture” research group, which will work on new types of cameras with “unusual optical elements, programmable illumination, digital wavelength control, and femtosecond analysis of light transport.” The group will look at tools to “decompose pixels into perceptually meaningful components,” according to the site.

Media Lab director Frank Moss says he is “extremely excited” about Raskar’s hiring, for several reasons. “First, his research interests are truly transformational at the human level—capturing and sharing the visual experience beyond traditional photography and video. Ramesh envisions game-changing approaches such as an imperceptible wearable ’second skin’ and novel cameras for capturing human motion in multiple dimensions. Also, Ramesh is a hands-on type of researcher that will try anything by building it—this is a super addition to our ‘build to learn and learn to build’ culture and will be a big hit with both students and sponsors.”

Moss compares Raskar to Ed Boyden, another recent Media Lab faculty addition who focuses on non-invasive brain-machine interfaces. Boyden and Raskar are both “right at the intersection of the biological, physical and information sciences, the hot spot for future innovation that will improve the human condition and drive commercial innovation in the next decade,” says Moss.

Raskar himself declined to comment for this story. But Joe Marks, the former director of MERL’s research wing, tells Xconomy that Raskar “was among the top talent in the old MERL Research group.” Several industrial labs and universities were competing to hire Raskar away from MERL, Marks says. “I’m sure the MIT Media Lab folks are thrilled to get him, and I’m glad he has landed at a place where he can continue to pursue his research agenda with great colleagues and students.”

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I don’t know if the cold medicine was getting to me or what, but venture capitalist Michael Greeley was sounding awfully like a socialist for a minute there last night at the Xconomy Forum.

Greeley—a general partner at IDG Ventures, president of the New England Venture Capital Association, and an Xconomist—was moderating a spirited discussion on the future of innovation in New England. He had lit a fire under the tushes assembled in the MIT Media Lab’s Bartos Theatre by offering prizes for the most provocative question and for the most lively question. (The latter is a bit of an inside joke; I’ll explain in a bit.)

Taking the prize for most provocative—a Roomba generously donated by iRobot 
co-founder and chairman Helen Greiner, who was one of the panelists joining Greeley on stage—was a question from Cambridge Innovation Center cofounder Tim Rowe directed at each of the speakers. Noting that Tito Jackson, Industry Director of Information Technology at the Massachusetts Office of Business Development, was in the audience, Rowe asked, roughly: If you were the governor of Massachusetts, what you would do to spark innovation and address the fact that there aren’t more billion-dollar companies being formed in Massachusetts? (The billion-dollar-company issue was a central focus of last night’s discussion.)

Here’s where Greeley went momentarily pink on us, suggesting that the state should offer free housing for all graduates of Harvard, MIT, and the like. “It’s a tragedy that we educate these people and they leave,” he added. Of course, Greeley also said that as governor he’d take the capital gains tax to 0 percent, which was much more in line with what I’d expect from a VC, if a bit of an expansion of gubernatorial power.

Media Lab Director Frank Moss, another of last night’s panelists (and another Xconomist), went in the opposite direction on this question, though to similarly provocative effect. “I don’t think that the opportunities we have in front of us are going to be much influenced by government policy,” Moss said. What Moss advocated instead was, among other things, for the venture community to forge a new relationship with academia, getting involved with budding inventors and entrepreneurs by supporting them in some fashion while they are still students. With government and industry funding for basic research falling, Moss said, …Next Page »

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Innovation springs from diversity. And bringing together people and ideas from diverse backgrounds, fields, and experience to help explore and drive innovation is core to Xconomy’s mission. We’re trying to do that online, through both our editorial coverage and our Xconomist Forum, which we hope add a fresh, more personal, and insightful dimension to the innovation landscape here in New England. But we also seek to do that person-to-person through our event series, which began last week with our gala launch party.

Now, though, we’re moving into higher gear, announcing our first Xconomy Forum: The Future of Innovation in New England. The forum will be held on December 5, at the MIT Media Lab. Our premise is that New England is home to the world’s greatest concentration of elite universities, large corporations and startups, venture-capital and business leadership, great research hospitals, and science and technology expertise spanning everything from life sciences to energy to robotics and IT. But how well do we collaborate and share ideas? How well do we identify and tackle the challenges that are critical to the region’s future and the planet’s? In short, is our region living up to its full potential—and how can we reach the next level of success?

We’ve put together a fantastic group of leaders from the local innovation community to discuss this critical subject. They are a trio of entrepreneurs who each have created public companies worth hundreds of millions of dollars that are making the world a safer, more efficient, and healthier place: Helen Greiner, co-founder and chairman, iRobot (NASDAQ: IRBT); Frank Moss, director of the MIT Media Lab and co-founder of Infinity Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: INFI) and several IT companies; and Christoph Westphal, CEO and co-founder of Sirtris Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SIRT), who’s also co-founded Alnylam Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ALNY) and Momenta Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: MNTA).

Moderating this great group will be IDG Ventures general partner Michael Greeley, president of the New England Venture Capital Association, who has made it part of his NEVCA mission to help spur local entrepreneurs and company leaders to take on bigger challenges and create new, billion-dollar businesses.

It’s bound to be a fun and informative discussion, and we hope you can join us. Registration is free, but limited, so sign up fast. Click here to register.

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