MIT Media Laboratory
The outline of the MIT Media Laboratory was formed in 1980 by Professor Nicholas Negroponte and former MIT President Jerome Wiesner, growing out of the work of MIT's Architecture Machine Group, and building on the seminal work of faculty members in a range of other disciplines, from cognition and learning to electronic music and holography. The Media Laboratory opened its doors in the Wiesner Building, designed by I.M. Pei, in 1985. In its first decade, much of the Laboratory's activity centered around abstracting electronic content from its traditional physical representations, helping to create now-familiar areas such as digital video and multimedia. The success of this agenda is now leading to a growing focus on how electronic information overlaps with the everyday physical world. The Laboratory pioneered collaboration between academia and industry, and provides a unique environment to explore basic research and applications, without regard to traditional divisions among disciplines.

National Center for Digital Government
The National Center for Digital Government is based at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, the largest professional school of public policy in the world. The National Center is designed to strengthen the network of researchers and practitioners engaged in building and using technology and government, to build global research capacity, and to advance practice. This field trip will give visitors a sense of the vitality of the National Center as well as a host of related research centers and cutting-edge projects in several policy domains such as domestic preparedness, innovations in government and international development sure to be of interest to digital government researchers and practitioners.

John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center
The Volpe Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is an internationally recognized center of transportation and logistics expertise. Through research and development, engineering, and analysis, the Volpe Center helps decision-makers define problems and pursue solutions to lead transportation into the 21st century. In essence, the Volpe Center is a catalyst for innovation-a source of critical insight necessary to realize transportation's promising future.