DUBLIN, Ireland -- Ireland's year-old MediaLabEurope (MLE) -- the $150 million independent spinoff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's well-known Media Lab -- now bears all the hallmarks of a Nicholas Negroponte undertaking.
Digital pundit and Media Lab co-founder Negroponte has persuaded U2's Bono to join the board of directors, along with 3Com founder Bob Metcalf and Siemens CEO Gerhard Schulmeyer.
Like its parent Media Lab in Massachusetts, MLE has stated its intention of pursuing and funding "mad" and "wacky" ideas out on the edge of technology, art, business and culture. MLE also will throw people of varied disciplines together, a founding tenet of Media Lab.
But as Negroponte steps down as MLE's interim chief executive (he remains the chairman of its board), the new man at the helm is staking out his own vision for the lab. Rudolph Burger -- a technologist born in America but raised in Britain, who pursued university degrees and business experience in both countries -- is the new chief executive of the European lab, located in a former Guinness brewery grain warehouse in Dublin.
The amiable and energetic Burger has a Ph.D. in digital imaging from Cambridge University and work experience with technology companies ranging from IBM, Xerox and NEC Packard Bell to several digital media firms he founded and managed in the U.K. and United States. Coupled with his practical experience is a fascination with the philosophy and culture of technology -- he's a man given to drawing diagrams to explain economic, computing and philosophical concepts.
A particular interest is one that also captivated Negroponte at Media Lab: the man/machine interface. It's an area he'd like to pursue at MLE. Burger draws a diagram that shows the interface as a wall between man and machine.
"The interface between the two is not permeable; it's finite. What's happening is the two pieces are beginning to merge, to become something that exists in a single space," he said. "So far, technology has been forced upon us without any thought of how people want to interact with it and with each other."
He said he wants to explore ways of finding a more seamless experience -- particularly in the way people conduct business interactions online.
When it was launched in November 1999, one of MLE's designated areas of focus was going to be "e-commerce," but Burger said that a focus on e-commerce -- in a narrow, commercial sense -- is not really appropriate anymore.
"We're not interested in incrementally tweaking the way goods and services are exchanged over the Internet. But we hope to catalyze and re-think these fairly broken models and the way e-commerce is integrated into people's lives," he said.
"We'd like to see technology in the service of human expression. There's such a huge mismatch between the ways people want to express themselves and the technologies people are given to do that."
MLE's other focus -- reflected in its first two faculty members, who for the moment, work back and forth between Media Lab and MLE -- is technology and the arts. At MIT's Media Lab, "there has been a significant involvement with the arts and the arts community," he said.
"The primary focus has been on the creation of tools that in some sense empower the artist. It may be that MLE pushes that out from tools to the production arena -- film, video, photography, music -- or even none of the above. This could create a living lab for us."
At any rate, he said, "It's at the intersection of the artists and technology that we think the magic happens."
MLE is the anchor tenant in an ambitious Irish government plan to take the dilapidated area around the Guinness brewery and turn it into a cutting-edge digital district for research, business and the arts.
"There's a very high expectation -- which I'm comfortable with -- of MLE being the catalyst for the whole digital hub," Burger said.
MLE will work to bring in companies and organizations that will galvanize the district: "It's clearly to MLE's benefit to get a high level of synergistic energy going in the hub," Burger said.
MLE has also been under attack from a segment of the Irish academic community for receiving £28 million ($41,000,000) of government funding at a time when research has been grossly under-supported in the Republic, and for not having to adhere to time-honored academic procedures such as project peer reviews.
Burger sighs. "The role of MLE is quite unlike anything that happens in academia or industry," he said.
Each tends to be a "closed system," while MLE will act as a bridge, he said. MLE is also a European, not an Irish, laboratory, he argues. It will not be maintained by the Irish state but must obtain its estimated $22 million annual operating costs from corporate sponsorship.
"Our peer review system is bringing industry in, and if industry doesn't approve, our sponsorship dries up," Burger said.
Media Lab has 180 corporate sponsors who pump in $30-40 million annually in sponsorship funds, and Burger expects MLE to acquire some of those.
He points out that sponsors of MLE or Media Lab get access to the intellectual property generated by both. "MLE is clearly the beneficiary of that in early days," he said.
He acknowledges that the Irish government took a risk in funding the lab, and shrugs. "In order to achieve anything worthwhile, you have to take risks," he said.
MLE currently draws a flow of MIT students crossing the Atlantic on short-term exchanges, and an initial set of collaborative projects between Irish universities and the lab has received £1 million in funding. Burger's top priority is hiring a handful of researchers with "passion and (an) ability to take risks."
Eventually, the lab should have 30 researchers overseeing a range of projects, and some 200 international students.
The risk of the unknown ultimately defines the role of MLE for Burger: "MLE is about anything that should be, but isn't," he said.
