What do bubbles, SPICE, genes, mazes, and programs have in common? CBA's workshop on Coding and Computation in Microfluidics. Advances in modern microfluidics are leading to renewed interest in fluidic mechanisms for coding and computation, aimed at integrating the logic of control systems with the materials that they manipulate. This meeting on May 24 brought together researchers who are scaling fluidic logic down in size and up in complexity with prospective users in a wide range of application areas, to explore this emerging intersection of physical science and computer science. Presentations are available online at
http://cba.mit.edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/events/07.05.fluid/
Energy is on CBA's agenda. In the US, roughly 40% of the total energy (and 70% of the electricity) is consumed by buildings, with the greatest demand being for heating, cooling, and lighting. Preliminary trials have found that as much as 30% of this can be recovered by intelligent infrastructure. Building on CBA's Internet 0 initiative, on May 25 a group of researchers from MIT and partner companies and institutions met to review the background and discuss planning for a proposed large-scale testbed, initially on MIT's campus as part of MIT's energy initiative, to collaboratively develop, deploy and evaluate the impact of intelligent infrastructure for energy efficiency. Called "I2E" (Intelligent Infrastructure for Energy Efficiency), this effort will span from enabling research to rapid-prototyping of solutions to scalable commercial implementations. The presentations from this meeting are at
http://cba.mit.edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/events/07.05.energy/
CBA's fab lab program continues to spread around the world. In June a CNN film crew joined a team from CBA and counterparts from Iceland to Kenya at the Norwegian fab lab for a week of work (and not much sleep, thanks to the midnight sun), as part of their Principal Voices project. Their coverage includes publication of a whitepaper in Time and Fortune, and upcoming broadcast of a documentary. In July a CBA team launched a flagship fab lab at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, where it will be joined by a new mobile fab lab at Fab 4, the Fourth International Fab Lab Forum and Symposium on Digital Fabrication, held the week of August 20. Along with workshops for fab lab participants there will be a reception and exhibition at MSI on the evening of August 22, followed by a research meeting at the University of Chicago on August 23. The agenda is at
http://cba.mit.edu.ezproxy.canberra.edu.au/events/07.08.fab/
To register for this please contact kelly.maenpaa@cba.mit.edu. After the Chicago Fab 4 meeting the mobile lab will visit sites in the Midwest, make a guest appearance at the Gadgetoff gathering in New York, and finally land at the Sustainable South Bronx project where the mobile lab will be used to create a permanent SSBX fab lab.

This is an occasional newsletter on the activities of CBA and its partners; to be added or removed from this list, or to submit items, please contact CBA's Program Manager Sherry Lassiter <sherry.lassiter@cba.mit.edu>.