**Mediating Technologies

Peng Chang
Shuheng Zhou

We were planning to present some very technical and solid down-to-the-earth research work until we hit the MIT 
media lab website and browsed through their research topics with those attractive subjects:
        News in the Future
        Things that Think
        Digital Life
        Society of Mind
        ...
We realized it is our obligation to present even just a little bit of these creative ideas to the class since that is the sole reason of our passion: working hard for the fancinating information age!

Here is the quote from their webpage: "If anything can be certain about the future, it is that the influence of technology, especially digital technology, will continue to grow, and to profoundly change how we express ourselves, how we communicate with each other, and how we perceive, think about, and interact with our world. These "mediating technologies" are only in the first stages of their modern evolution; they are still crude, unwieldy, and unpersonalized, poorly matched to the human needs of their users. Their fullest development in those terms is emerging as one of the principal technical and design challenges of the emerging information age."

For a modest and realistic course seminar, we would try to base our presentation on some technical topics related to these cool ideas. Through the course, we have learned various technologies on media coding and transmission. Therefore, We intend to introduce several novel research themes which naturally emerged from the recent advances in multimedia processing, networking, computer vision and maching learning technologies. Some candidates are object- based media and intelligent media. Also, if time permitted, topics on sociable media and personal information architure are also exciting for us too, since that is way how the media is going to influence everyone's life.