Joseph Paradiso thinks that probably the most engaging research questions often span disciplines.
Paradiso was trained as a physicist and accomplished his PhD in experimental high-energy physics at MIT in 1981. His father was a photographer and filmmaker working at MIT, MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and the MITRE Corporation, so he grew up in a house where artists, scientists, and engineers commonly gathered and interesting music was at all times playing.
That blend of influences led him to the MIT Media Lab, where he’s the Alexander W. Dreyfoos Professor, academic head of the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, and director of the Responsive Environments research group.
On the Media Lab, Paradiso conducts research that engages sensing of various kinds and applies it across diverse and sometimes extreme applications. He works on developing technologies that may efficiently capture and process multiple sensing modalities, and leverages this capability in application domains just like the web of things, medicine, environmental sensing, space exploration, and artistic expression. These efforts use that information to assist people higher understand the world, express themselves, and connect with each other.
Joe Paradiso reflects on a lifetime of music, physics, and sensing.
Video: MIT Media Lab
Early in his profession, Paradiso helped pioneer the sector of wireless wearable sensing. He built many systems with multiple embedded sensors that would send information from the human body in real-time. Certainly one of his early flagship projects on this area was a pair of shoes fielded in 1997 for real-time augmented dance performance that embedded 16 sensors in each shoe, allowing wearers’ movements to directly generate music through algorithmic mapping. And Paradiso’s research on the Media Lab has consistently focused on sensing and using that information in recent ways.
“Once I would list all of the sensors … people would laugh. But now, my watch is measuring most of this stuff,” Paradiso notes. “The world has moved.”
That progression from early prototypes to on a regular basis technology helped lay the groundwork for devices people now use commonly to trace activity, health, and performance.
As sensing systems improved, Paradiso expanded his work from individuals to groups. He developed platforms that allowed dance ensembles to create music together through their collective motion. Achieving this required Paradiso and his team to develop recent ways for compact wearable devices to speak wirelessly at high speed, in addition to recent approaches to real-time data processing and increasing the range of obtainable microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) sensors.
Those self same sensing platforms were later adapted for sports medicine in 2006. Working with doctors who support elite athletes, his array of compact, wearable sensors captured large amounts of high-speed motion data from multiple points on the body, aimed toward helping clinicians assess injury risk, performance, and recovery on the go, without the complex equipment typically related to biomechanical monitoring and clinical settings.
More recently, Paradiso’s research has prolonged beyond humans. Through collaborations with National Geographic Explorers, his team has deployed sensors in distant environments to check animal behavior, including low-power compact wearable devices to detect the environmental conditions across the animal in addition to track them (currently on lions and hyenas in Botswana and goats in Chile), and acoustic sensors with onboard AI to detect and monitor populations of endangered honeybees in Patagonia. This work provides recent ways to know how ecosystems function and the way the planet is changing.
Paradiso was named an IEEE Fellow in January, recognizing his achievement in wireless wearable sensing and mobile energy harvesting. That is the best grade of membership in IEEE, the world’s leading skilled association dedicated to advancing technology for the advantage of humanity.
Across art, health, and the natural world, Paradiso’s work reflects how foundational research at MIT can seed technologies that ripple outward over time, shaping recent applications and opening recent fields. As advances in wearable technologies drive the push toward the ever-more-connected human, a persistent existential query lurks.
“Where do I stop, versus others begin?” Paradiso asks.
For him, the aim shouldn’t be novelty for its own sake, but amplification: using technology to assist people grow to be more perceptive, higher connected, and more aware of their place in a bigger system.
