Cisco Partners With MIT Media Lab For Cutting Edge Communications Research

In a move that signals its intent to integrate cutting-edge communications technologies into networking products, Cisco has become a sponsor of the MIT Media Lab's Digital Life Consortium.

Under the terms of the sponsorship, Cisco will gains access to the Media Lab's digital technology research, and its applications at the intersection of computation, communications, and human expression.

Cisco engineers and scientists, led by Cisco's Technology Center team, will collaborate with MIT Media Lab researchers across a wide range of disciplines, including intelligent software agents, viral communications, integrated sensor networks, wearable computers, user interface design, object-oriented video and advanced digital expression.

"Our relationship with the MIT Media Lab provides us with a window into the rapidly developing world of digital technology and enables us to gain increased visibility into emerging technology and market trends," Charles Giancarlo, chief technology officer, Cisco Systems, said in a statement. "We see our collaboration with MIT as an important element in our overall strategy on innovation, helping to integrate technology into people's everyday lives."

"Collaboration with Cisco is in perfect keeping with the Media Lab's view that telecommunications will become a viral phenomenon," Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, added. "We see a future where every object and device, large and small, will have a router in it."The Digital Life Consortium sponsorship extends an already close relationship between Cisco and MIT. Cisco has been a sponsor of the MIT Center for eBusiness since 2000 and was the lead sponsor of Erik Brynjolfsson's distinguished research exploring the inter-relationship between IT spending and productivity. Cisco was also founding sponsor of the MIT Sloan School of Management-initiated Information Work Productivity Center. Cisco has also recently joined MIT's Communications Futures Program (CFP), a new relationship between universities and industry, designed to define the roadmap for communications and its impact on industry.