MIT has extensive facilities for research, some of which are unique among educational institutions. There are more than 40 different laboratories on campus operated by various departments. In addition to laboratories organized within departments, there are a large number of interdepartmental laboratories and centers established to facilitate work in fields that cross the lines of traditional disciplines.

Center for Real Estate (CRE)

MIT/CRE aims to improve the quality of the built environment through education programs that increase the skills, knowledge, and creativity of those in the real estate industry; through research which creates useful knowledge about real estate and leads to more informed professional practice; and through facilitating communication among members of the real estate community worldwide, both with each other and with the academic community.

The center's education programs include a one-year Master's degree in real estate development, investment, and management; a summer institute of short professional development courses; and special seminars for industry and academic participants. Current research covers a broad range of topics including real estate performance and financial returns, real estate capital markets, and globalization; issues in the management of corporate real estate; and property markets. The center also serves as a forum for the real estate industry. The current membership of 85 firms includes nationally and internationally known developers, investment advisors, banks, pension funds, public agencies, and nonprofit organizations from the US, Europe, and the Pacific Rim.

For more information, please visit the CRE web site:

http://web.mit.edu/cre

Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU)

The Center for Advanced Urbanism (CAU) provides a home for faculty and studnets interested in collaborative research projects that will engage student participation. CAU is the umbrella for various existing research laboratories and faculty projects. It organizes collaborations between these labs and other MIT groups in order to foster a cross-disciplinary expertise.

See: http://dusp.mit.edu/cdd/project/center-advanced-urbanism

SENSEable City Lab

The SENSEable City Laboratory's research focuses on studying and predicting how digital technology is changing the way we describe, design, and occupy cities.

Interconnected computational elements are increasingly saturating the built environment (whether small-scale mobile devices, or larger-scale infrastructural microprocessors). This new condition allows us to design technology that could function as an interface between people and the city.

Projects carried out at the lab are intended to help us learn how the cities are used and thus make better use of their resources and improve their design.

The Lab's researchers come from various disciplines such as physics, architecture, urban planning, the arts, electrical engineering, and computer science. This allows performing technological development with an emphasis on behavior as well as functionality and form, and evaluating design in terms of both emotion and use.

Research opportunities

The SENSEable City Laboratory has funded positions for PhD students and post-doctoral fellows.

Successful candidates would have interest and expertise in one or several of the following: human-computer interaction, data fusion (e.g. semantic web), signal processing, city planning, and design. Applicants with other backgrounds will be considered as well.

Students are expected to be physically based at the Lab and to develop their thesis as part of one of the Lab's research projects. For more information on submitting an application, please send an email with a brief description of yourself to senseable-applicants@mit.edu

For more information about the Lab, please visit our web site at: http://senseable.mit.edu

Community Innovators Lab (CoLab)

The Community Innovators Lab supports the mission of DUSP by bringing together the best thinking in planning and information technology with the learned experience of community practitioners.

CoLab is a research and development (R&D) institute focused on understanding the relationships among reflective practice, community development and social change. Its work explores technological infrastructure and community information systems as intrinsic components of that research agenda. CoLab brings R&D in reflective practice to community work to effect social change, and brings community practitioners to MIT to enrich the learning environment for students and faculty. CoLab uses community-based knowledge, academic resources, and information technologies as tools to transform community development practice.

In addition to its work with communities, CoLab supports opportunities for leading community practitioners to attend seminars at MIT to learn how to bring reflection into their work. CoLab also works with grant-making organizations to promote learning practices with grantees working to effect community change.

For more information, please visit the CoLab web site:

http://colab.mit.edu/

MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program

PDP is based at the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School (PON). PON is an inter-university consortium (Harvard, MIT, and Tufts) devoted to improving the theory and practice of dispute resolution. It was created in the early 1980s to make it easier for scholars from a variety of disciplines to work together and for scholars and practitioners to interact more effectively. Many of the students and faculty who work with PDP are also based in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT -one of the three departments in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

While PDP intervenes in the world in various ways, it is basically an applied research operation. Our goal is to build "grounded theory" through careful reflection on practice. While we take on actual dispute resolution assignments from time to time, we are not a consulting organization and our goal is primarily theory-building (although as our colleague Roger Fisher likes to say, "There is nothing so practical as a good theory!"). To apply the ideas developed at PON and PDP effectively, we have spun off The Consensus Building Institute (CBI). This is a not-for-profit firm, established in 1993, that provides dispute resolution services around the world. CBI has a full time staff of 14 and a global network of almost 30 senior consultants. CBI is managed by three vice presidents, two of whom are Associate Directors of PDP - David Fairman and Patrick Field.

For more information, please visit:

http://web.mit.edu/publicdisputes

P-REX

P-REX is a project founded in 2002 under the guidance of Alan Berger, Associate Professor of Urban Design and Landscape Architecture. P-REX partners with like-minded groups to implement its transdisciplinary research and consultation. Partner institutions include, municipalities, state and federal agencies, universities, foundations, and corporations involved in the planning and design of the natural and built environment.

The project focuses on the concept of "Systemic Design," which implies that there are larger scale forces in the built and natural environment that, if properly understood, will lead to more intelligent project scenarios as opposed to superficial cosmetics. Systemic Design merges the existing stresses on a landscape with multi-layered, time-based strategies that work to reclaim value and increase sustainability in the built environment. Systemic Design seeks to interact with the environmental, economical, and programmatic stresses across regional territories.

For more information, please visit the P-REX web site:

http://www.theprex.net

CTL: The Center for Transportation and Logisitcs

This center was established to facilitate innovative research in transportation, to promote interdepartmental cooperation, and to provide a focal point for transportation studies at MIT. The center's research emphasis is on problem-oriented multimodal research. Ongoing projects include travel demand analysis, institutional analysis of transportation policy and planning, intelligent transportation systems, trucking industry structure, transportation technology, and integrated supply-chain management. The center offers an MST in transportation, which can be taken as a dual degree with the MCP, as well as an independent PhD in transportation studies.

For more information, please visit the CTL web site:

http://ctl.mit.edu/

The Media Lab

The Media Laboratory is concerned with people, computers, and the quality of life in the electronic age. Today's research agenda focuses on how bits meet atomshow electronic information overlaps with the everyday physical world. It is one of the few places in the world where computers outnumber people by a significant margin.

Approximately 170 corporate sponsors from throughout the world support the laboratory's work, which focuses on software agents, physics and media, how children learn, human and machine vision, audition, speech interfaces, wearable computers, affective computing, advanced interface design, object-oriented video, interactive cinema, digital expressions, and new approaches to spatial imaging, fitting into three sponsor-supported consortia: Digital Life, News in the Future, and Things That Think, as well as several smaller Special Interest Groups.

Research at the Media Laboratory is tightly coupled with the graduate academic Program in Media Arts and Sciences, which offers Master's and doctoral degrees.

For more information, please visit the Media Lab web site:

http://www.media.mit.edu/