Center for Bits and Atoms

The Center for Bits and Atoms (CBA) was established in 2001 in the MIT Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1] It is currently run by Neil Gershenfeld. This cross-disciplinary center broadly looks at the intersection of information to its physical representation.

From the original NSF proposal:[2]

MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms is an ambitious interdisciplinary initiative that is looking beyond the end of the Digital Revolution to ask how a functional description of a system can be embodied in, and abstracted from, a physical form. These simple, profound questions date back to the beginning of modern manufacturing and before that to the origins of natural science, but they have revolutionary new implications that follow from the recognition of the computational universality of physical systems. We can no longer afford to ignore nature's capabilities that have been neglected by conventional digital logic; it is at the boundary between the content of information and its physical representation that many of science's greatest technological, economic, and social opportunities and obstacles lie.

  1. ^ "Media Lab creates Center for Bits and Atoms with NSF grant - MIT News Office". Web.mit.edu. 28 November 2001. Retrieved 2008-11-06.
  2. ^ "CBA: About". Cba.mit.edu. Retrieved 2008-11-06.