The Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) was established in 2001 in the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

. It is currently run by

Neil Gershenfeld Neil Adam Gershenfeld (born December 1, 1959) is an American professor at MIT and the director of MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms, a sister lab to the MIT Media Lab. His research studies are predominantly focused in interdisciplinary studies ...

. This cross-disciplinary center broadly looks at the intersection of information to its physical representation. From the original NSF proposal:

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. These simple, profound questions date back to the beginning of modern manufacturing and before that to the origins of natural science, but they have revolutionary new implications that follow from the recognition of the computational universality of physical systems. We can no longer afford to ignore nature's capabilities that have been neglected by conventional digital logic; it is at the boundary between the content of information and its physical representation that many of science's greatest technological, economic, and social opportunities and obstacles lie.

Research

One of the early projects of the Center which has grown to become a global

meme A meme ( ) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture and often carries symbolic meaning representing a particular phenomenon or theme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ...

was the

Fab lab A fab lab (''fabrication laboratory'') is a small-scale workshop offering (personal) digital fabrication. A fab lab is typically equipped with an array of flexible computer-controlled tools that cover several different length scales and vari ...

—a model lab that could be set up quickly and inexpensively to provide basic fabrication capability for rapid prototyping of almost anything. The idea was that these labs would become easy enough to create that they could be set up almost anywhere in the world, and could be both self-sufficient and of use to the local community to support whatever engineering or fabrication projects they could imagine. Since the first fab lab in 2001, a global community of supporters has grown up, including a FabFolk charitable organization.See th
FabFolk website
and related services. Roughly 100 groups calling themselves fab labs have grown up around the world, many supported at some stage by the CBA.

Academics/classes

The Center for Bits and Atoms is not a degree-granting department but does offer

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...

courses within the MAS department at the graduate level. * MAS.863: How to Make (Almost) Anything * MAS.961: How to Make Something That Makes (Almost) Anything * MAS.864: The Nature of Mathematical Modeling * MAS.862: The Physics of Information Technology

References

External links

Center for Bits and Atoms
{{DEFAULTSORT:Center For Bits And Atoms Massachusetts Institute of Technology