I look like a monster. The elegant and poised MIT professor resembles a blowfish in the footage. She's scuba diving in Hawaii, having slipped out of a computing conference to pet moray eels and feed sea turtles. She seems excited showing off reef life and embarrassed talking about herself. She's also completely unfazed by the phalanx of industry reps making their way around the murky room looking at demos from the Things to Think With program while catching sneak peeks of the video.
Demos are interesting, but, hey, there's a woman in a bathing suit flitting in their periphery.
Earlier, as she was making the five-minute walk between her offices at the Media Lab and those of her fledgling software company, Firefly Network Inc., Maes mused about the possibilities presented by cuttlefish. The elephantine cephalopods shift their coloring and markings in milliseconds, instantly changing from zebra stripes to blank slate to marbleized pebble skin. It's pure Maes. One foot in an ecosystem, the other in an application - both feet firmly planted. Which, given her growing fame, would seem hard to maintain.