Bits to Atoms (and Atoms to Bits)
In MIT's Fab Lab, Neil Gershenfeld has already come up with $1 Internet nodes. Now he's looking toward fungible servers and personal fabrication.
Computerworld - Neil Gershenfeld says we're on the threshold of the third digital revolution, one in which matter and information merge. He has kicked off the revolution in a fabrication laboratory, dubbed the Fab Lab, at MIT, where he's the director of the Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA). In the Fab Lab, students design and manufacture their own products using inexpensive fabrication and electronics tools driven by open-source software and programs written by MIT researchers. Other "fab labs" based on these principles are spreading around the world, especially in less-developed countries. Gershenfeld, who has laid out the precepts of personal fabrication in his book Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your DesktopFrom Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (The Perseus Books Group, 2005), recently explained the mission of the CBA to Computerworld's Gary Anthes.

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Neil Gershenfeld, director of MITs Center for Bits and Atoms
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One of the CBA's "grand challenges" is to create "it from bit." What does that mean? The research we are doing is looking at how you go, quite literally, from bits to atoms and from atoms to bits. If you have a description, how do you turn it into a thing, and if you have a thing, how do you turn it into a description? What are emerging are principles for how to do exactly that.
WHO IS HE? Neil Gershenfeld TITLE WHERE DOES HE WORK? WHAT IS HE KNOWN FOR?
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Director of MITs Center for Bits and Atoms
MITs fabrication laboratory, also known as the Fab Lab
He has kicked off a revolution in digital fabrication.


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