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If doctors make the worst patients, does a user community of supreme techies translate into the worst kind of nightmare for an IT director? Not according to Jack Costanza.

Costanza is IT director for the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He runs "t!g" - shorthand for "the infrastructure group" - a lean, eight-person team responsible not only for implementing and managing CSAIL's central computing and network services but also for providing help desk support to certain CSAIL research groups.

The latter is no easy task. Some pretty heavyweight users, with unconventional ideas, populate these research groups. From sensor networks and microprocessor design to robotics and image-guided surgery, their projects regularly tap into CSAIL's network infrastructure.

For example, last year a group of researchers launched Roofnet, an 802.11b mesh network of more than 50 nodes atop Cambridge apartment buildings. This rooftop wireless network provides Internet service while letting its creators research scalable routing protocols.

Yes, tying Roofnet into CSAIL's core network means more work for t!g, particularly on the security front. But Costanza, 44, accepts this and other network add-ons as par for the course, opting to invite rather than exclude. "We try not to build large walls on our borders, as much as protect what we end up with," he says. "We really don't know from day to day what users are going to throw at us, but that's what makes the place interesting."

Over the past two years, Costanza's job has been even more interesting than usual. The t!g team faced three major tasks: merging two distinct user communities, building an entirely new network infrastructure and physically moving to new quarters.

The merger refers to the combining of MIT's Lab for Computer Science (LCS) and Artificial Intelligence Lab (AIL). Costanza has a history with both labs - he joined LCS in 1984 before moving to AIL in 1996.

The new entity, CSAIL, is one of the main tenants of a funky new building designed by renowned architect Frank Gehry. Dedicated in May, the 730,000-square-foot Ray and Maria Stata Center also houses the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems and the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.