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Cisco Systems announced a sponsorship of MIT Media Lab's Digital Life Consortium, further expanding its strategic relationship with MIT.

Through this sponsorship, Cisco gains access to the Media Lab's unique environment for exploring cutting-edge research in digital technology and the subsequent applications emerging at the intersection of computation, communications and human expression. Charles Giancarlo, chief technology officer, Cisco Systems, Inc., joined Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab, at MIT to announce the expanded relationship and discuss the intersection of business and academic research as it relates to technological innovation.

Cisco engineers and scientists, led by Cisco's Technology Center team, will collaborate with MIT Media Lab researchers across a wide range of disciplines, including intelligent software agents, viral communications, integrated sensor networks, wearable computers, user interface design, object-oriented video and advanced digital expression. As a result of this sponsorship, Cisco expects to increase its visibility into emerging technology and market trends in the area of digital communications and to accelerate the development of longer-term, strategic technologies.

"Our relationship with the MIT Media Lab provides us with a window into the rapidly developing world of digital technology and enables us to gain increased visibility into emerging technology and market trends," said Charles Giancarlo, chief technology officer, Cisco Systems. "We see our collaboration with MIT as an important element in our overall strategy on innovation, helping to integrate technology into people's everyday lives."

The Digital Life Consortium sponsorship is the latest in a series of engagements between Cisco and MIT. Cisco has been a sponsor of the MIT Center for eBusiness since 2000 and was the lead sponsor of Erik Brynjolfsson's distinguished research exploring the inter-relationship between IT spending and productivity. Cisco was also founding sponsor of the MIT Sloan School of Management-initiated Information Work Productivity Center. Cisco has also recently joined MIT's Communications Futures Program (CFP), a new relationship between universities and industry, designed to define the roadmap for communications and its impact on industry.

"Collaboration with Cisco is in perfect keeping with the Media Lab's view that telecommunications will become a viral phenomenon," explained Nicholas Negroponte, chairman and co-founder of the MIT Media Lab. "We see a future where every object and device, large and small, will have a router in it."

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