Following Through on its Promise of a New Interdisciplinary Model, Interactive Technology Network Continues to Take Campus by Storm Pinning down Media X to one location on campus, or to one area of research, or to one collection of students and faculty is not an easy task. Interactive technology is the program’s reason for being, but contributors to the advancement of such technologies at Stanford are a diverse lot, and it’s tough to assemble them all in one place. For this reason, Media X has positioned itself as a mediator of sorts. Media X reaches out to student and faculty researchers who might benefit from interdisciplinary collaboration, and it simply connects them with others working on new information and communication technologies on campus, in industry, or in government. In a matter of months, Media X-mediated partnerships have given birth to a wide variety of projects that will shape the future of interactive technology. The Media X program, which began its life as an initiative of several researchers at CSLI (the Center for the Study of Language and Information), is now a campus-wide network devoted to interactive technologies. It flourishes due to the simplicity of its approach. Unlike traditional interdisciplinary programs, which tend to pull talented faculty away from their home departments (thus making these faculty into ‘interdisciplinarians’ themselves), Media X unassumingly sets into motion an evolving forum where students, faculty, and industry members can interact. With its unique decentralized approach, it creates opportunities for faculty and students of all disciplines to explore new ideas and provide new innovative solutions to the many questions that surround interactive technologies. The supporters of Media X span as wide a spectrum of research as the program’s university participants. Prominent industry partners include Cisco, ATR, Epson, IBM, KDDI, Microsoft, Macromedia, Charles Schwab, NHK, NTT, Omron, Philips, SAP, Reuters, and SRI. Media X provides its supporters “with a single portal to a broad and constantly growing range of research about the design and use of interactive technology.” Media X tends to fund research projects with a strong humanistic and user focus. Represented technologies include p2p networking, internet audio, medical information retrieval, electronic customer relationship management, natural language processing, voice user interfaces, information visualization, collaborative work and learning environments, hand-held devices, automatic language translation, wearable computing, interactive toys, and distance learning applications. Keith Devlin, the Executive Director of Media X and known to KQED listeners as the man who can explain high-level mathematics to Joe Public, asks us to “Think of the traditional liberal arts as the collection of intellectual topics that should be studied in order to be reasonably well equipped to play a full role in a culture dominated by the written word. In this vein, Media X is the collection of topics that should be studied in order to be reasonably well equipped to play a full role in a culture dominated by interactive media.” (1) The law plays a central role in this culture increasingly dominated by interactive media. Legal education will have to provide future lawyers with the vocabulary necessary to understand the challenges interactive media pose for the legal system and for our society at large. We therefore very much welcome the opportunity to become actively involved in the Media X project. (1) From “Media X: The New Liberal Arts?” On the Horizon, Vol. 10, No. 2 (2002), pp. 15-17, Emerald Publishing, UK. Media X funds research projects across the campus. Departments and centers associated with Media X, in which Media X sponsored projects may be carried out, include: Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
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