Andrew Lippman
Associate Director, MIT MediaLab. Senior Research Scientist Co-Director, Digital Life.
and digital life.
In his more than 35 years at MIT's world-famous MediaLab, Dr. Andrew Lippman has been one of the world's foremost researchers on the evolution and impact of digital technology and media on business, society and everyday life.
He is one of the world’s foremost authorities on viral communication and how infrastructure-free communications systems will transform society, the communications industry and business in general. His focus:
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Make information alive—communication that is fully embedded in our daily lives.
Make digital social networks work like real social networks—social networks and systems that work as fluidly as natural contact in a village.
Dr. Andrew Lippman is the founding associate director of MIT’s internationally influential Media Laboratory.
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He is Creator & director of the Viral Communications program, Co-director, Communications Futures program, and Creator & director of the Digital Life consortium.
He is co-principal investigator of the Television of Tomorrow research program and principal investigator of the Media Bank Program.
Andy has nine patents and helped develop the MPEG audio and video standards that play both HDTV pictures and MP3 audio.
Innovation
Andrew's work at the MediaLab is transforming several important areas besides communication:
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Invention—the MediaLab is reinventing invention, moving beyond research on products to transform product platforms and architectures
Healthcare—he is helping to create a social-medical network that helps people treat themselves.
Finance—he is a researcher at MIT's Center for Future Banking, exploring how emerging technologies and insights into human behavior can transform the role of banks in people's lives.
Positions
Andrew has eleven patents and has worked on IP lawsuits for six others, and he helped develop the MPEG audio and video standards that play both HDTV pictures and MP3 audio. He’s been associated with startups in areas as diverse as animation and radio ID tags, and is on the board of WaveExpress.
He has testified at Congressional Committees on communications, American competitiveness and the future of television. He is a Diamond-Cluster Fellow.
He has served on advisory boards of technology start-ups and advises companies and nonprofits, congressional subcommittees, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Academy of Sciences.
He has written both technical and lay articles about our digital future and given over 250 presentations throughout the world on the future of information and its commercial and social impact.
Viral Ideas
Viral Ideas are grassroots innovations that start at the edges of networks and industries, take only small investments to begin, yet build through social and technical opportunism to swamp entrenched, vertically integrated companies. True virality scales without bound, entails small startup costs, and grows in power with adoption.
As head of MIT’s Viral Communications Program, Andrew studies
- the basic technologies of personal communications,
- the social climate that gives them viral force, and
- the economics that permits them to thrive.
Viral communication. This edge-based innovation is poised to revitalize and transform communications in ways similar to the PC revolution in computing:
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Each unit will function as a new node in new emerging networks that use unlicensed spectrum without restriction without an infrastructure. For example, each cell phone will be an ad hoc tower passing messages through the network.
Digital Life
The interconnection between bits, people, and things in an on-line world.
Lippman established and directs the Digital Life consortium, a multi-sponsor, Media Lab-wide research consortium conducting basic research on technologies and techniques that spur expression as well as social and economic activity. Currently, the program has three broad directions:
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Organic Networks—a re-examination of the physics of radio to construct viral communications systems.
10X—technologies that can improve human activity by an order of magnitude, including bionics, robotic and cognitive assistants, and human learning..
Common-Sense Computing—a new approach to artificial intelligence.
Innovation today happens
at the edges.
Credentials
- Associate Director, MIT Media Lab
- Director, Digital Life Consortium
- Director, Viral Communications Program, MIT Media Lab
- Co-director, Communications Futures Program
- Principal investigator, Media Bank Program
- Co-principal investigator, Television of Tomorrow program
- Nine patents; developed MPEG/MP3 audio standards and HDTV video standards
- Diamond Technology Fellow
- Founder, Presto Technology
- Board member, WaveExpress
- Fleet Captain, Corinthian Yacht Club
- B.S., MIT
- M.S., MIT
- Ph.D., EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland
Lippman has directed research programs on digital pictures, personal computers, entertainment, and graphics, and he has served on advisory boards of technology start-ups. Currently, he is on the science councils of both non-profit and for-profit companies addressing global information infrastructures.