There is a great deal of innovation underway in the manufacturing sector in the field of design automation. Perhaps the most interesting research underway is at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms(CBA) where they are researching the intersection between information theory and industrial design. MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms is an ambitious interdisciplinary initiative that is looking beyond the end of the Digital Revolution to ask how a functional description of a system can be embodied in, and abstracted from, a physical form.

CBA was founded by Profs. Isaac Chuang, Neil Gershenfeld, Joseph Jacobson, and Scott Manalis, with Marvin Minsky. The origins of the CBA program lay in seminal studies by Leo Szilard introducing the bit as a unit of information about the location of a gas molecule (1929), Claude Shannon showing that encoding information digitally can create a threshold allowing for perfect communication over a noisy channel (1948), by John von Neumann (1952), and Shmuel Winograd and Jack Cowan (1963), extending this result to prove that reliable digital computation can be done by unreliable analog components, and by von Neumann (1957) on self-reproducing machines.

Some of the research questions being discussed are imagine a machine that can manufacture anything - and it is located in your living room. Five years ago, the National Science Foundation awarded the CBA $14 million to build a manufacturing lab full of futuristic hardware. This includes a nanobeam writer that can etch microscopic patterns on metal, and a supersonic waterjet cutter that generates 60,000 pounds of water pressure, en ought to shear through almost any material. The CBA Fab Factory is working on turning out anything from the smallest semiconductor to an entire building.

One of the founding profs, Neil Cershenfeld has a very interesting book out called When Things Start to Think and has further gone on to found a consortium of researchers to do research on when things start to think

Things That Think is inventing the future of digitally augmented objects and environments. Research projects include creating bottles that have emotions to working to simplify consumer electronic devices interface experience. A project called Event Net, is developing a commonsense reasoning plan recognizer (an interface that has knowledge about a user’s intentions. This knowledge for example could be integrated into a living room set that knows how to configure itself to watch the news. This leads to a more human like interaction with these devices.For more information on these innovation research initiatives, you can email: jhe@media.mit.edu