After leaving a promising career in particle physics, Joe Paradiso of MIT’s Media Lab is helping to usher in a new era of computing.
Eric Smalley
In Joe Paradiso’s vision of the future, tiny sensors and microchips are embedded in virtually every object: from clothing, building walls, and packing crates to cars, trees, and even people. The devices would collect information and feed it to computers, providing real-time information about nearly every situation, from city traffic to the state of your health.
This vision, dubbed “ubiquitous computing” by technologists, is beginning to take shape, thanks to Paradiso’s research. As director of the Responsive Environments Group in MIT’s Media Lab, he is a leader in developing inexpensive sensors that can be distributed throughout the environment and communicate with each other to form networks.
“[Paradiso] and his students have consistently pushed the boundary of possibilities, showing how embedded sensing can produce novel interaction phenomena,” says Gregory Abowd, a computing professor at Georgia Tech in Atlanta and director of the school’s Ubiquitous Computing Research Group.
The Boston native began his career not as an engineer but as a physicist, working with some of the world’s largest particle accelerators. However, the chance to contribute to ubiquitous computing was irresistible, says Paradiso. “I had the opportunity to follow another of my dreams,” he says.
As a postdoctoral researcher in the early 1980s, Paradiso worked on precision particle accelerator equipment at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He joined the Draper Lab in Cambridge, MA, in 1984 to work on space systems with the team that developed the orbital control software for the space shuttle. Some members of that team were also responsible for writing software used in the Apollo missions. “They had some of the most inspirational stories that I’ve ever heard,” says Paradiso.
Paradiso was so inspired that he applied to become a mission specialist astronaut. A bout with thyroid cancer during his days as an MIT physics graduate student disqualified him, but Paradiso still had the opportunity at Draper to collaborate with people at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
Later on at the Draper Lab, Paradiso returned to particle physics in the early 1990s when he joined the legion of physicists building the Superconducting Super Collider, an $8 billion particle accelerator then under construction in Texas.
“I’ve always been interested in the big questions that physics raises,” Paradiso says.
In 1993, Congress decided to stop funding the project amid concerns of rising costs and weak support from other countries. Its demise caused Paradiso to question his future in particle physics.
It turned out that Paradiso’s longtime hobby—building electronic musical instruments–would open the door to a new career. Paradiso has been inventing musical instruments since childhood. He made synthesizers in his spare time while working at the Draper Lab, including one for jazz musician Lyle Mays.
This led to collaborations with researchers at MIT’s Media Lab. Through these collaborations, Paradiso received an offer in 1994 to do research on interactive media and computer interfaces full time at the Media Lab.
“Although moving from a secure and established job at Draper Lab to a one-year trial post at the Media Lab was risky and less immediately lucrative, there was no doubt that this was the move that I needed to make,” says Paradiso.
And though some of Paradiso’s physics colleagues were surprised by his career change, the move was not a radical departure for him, he says. “Physicists by nature tend to think out of the box and are captivated by new ideas, cross-disciplinary thinking, technical challenges, and creativity,” says Paradiso. “Those who knew me well understood the move.”
He has since thrown himself into his second career, developing, for example, wireless wearable sensors. His long-term vision of ubiquitous computing includes putting sensor networks on and even inside the body. The networks would give computers an idea of your state of mind by tracking the way you speak and move, and ultimately let computers anticipate your needs and interests, he says.
This may sound like science fiction, but this scenario will soon become reality as more and more devices in the home and office come equipped with sensors and the ability to communicate with each other, says Paradiso. “Ubiquitous computing will sneak up on us the way the Web did.”
Paradiso says he sometimes misses physics, but he doesn’t regret the decisions he made. “Although sometimes I took a roundabout path, it very much made me what I am,” he says. “Knowledge is never wasted.”