Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 76). / by Frank Kao. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 149-151). / Structure distinguishes music from noise. When formulating that structure, musical artists rely on both mental representations and sensory perceptions to organize pitch, rhythm, harmony, timbre and dynamics into musical patterns. The generative process may be compared to playing a game, with goals, constraints, rules and strategies. In this study, games serve as a model for the interrelated mechanisms of music creation, and provide a format for an experimental technique that constrains creators as they generate simple rhythmic patterns. Correlations between subjects' responses and across experiments with varied constraints provide insight into how structure is defined in situ and how constraints impact creators' perceptions and decisions. Through the music composition games we investigate the nature of generative strategizing, refine a method for observing the generative process, and model the interconnecting components of a generative decision. The patterns produced in these games and the findings derived from observing how the games are played elucidate the roles of metric inference, preference and the perception of similarity in the generative process, and lead us to a representation of generative decision tied to a creator's perception of structure. / M. Nyssim Lefford. / Ph.D.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 82). / by Richard Ribon Fletcher. / M.S.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006. / "September 2006." / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-65). / Low-level sensors can provide surprisingly high-level information about social interactions. The goal of this thesis is to define the components of a framework for sensing social context with mobile devices. We describe several sensing technologies - including infrared transceivers, radio frequency scanners, and accelerometers - that both capture social signals and meet the design constraints of mobile devices. Through the analysis of several large datasets, we identify features from these sensors that correlate well with the underlying social structure of interacting groups of people. We then detail the work that we have done creating infrastructure that integrates social sensors into social applications that run on mobile devices. / by Jonathan Peter Gips. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 273-278). / Creating an appropriate indoor climate is essential to worker productivity and personal happiness. It is also an area of large expenditure for building owners. And, with rising fuel costs, finding ways of reducing energy consumption is more important than ever. This idea is promoted further by the notion that most buildings are currently being run inefficiently, due to the non-adaptable nature of their control systems. Not just the occupants, but also the buildings themselves have ever changing needs, for which a single setpoint is inadequate. This dissertation presents a novel air-conditioning control system, focused around the individual, which remedies these inefficiencies through the creation of personalized environments. To date, the measurement of thermal preference has been limited to either a complex set of sensors attempting to determine a Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) value, or to direct polling of the user. The former is far too cumbersome and expensive for practical application, and the latter places an undue burden on the user. To overcome these limitations, an extremely low power, light weight, wireless sensor is developed which can measure temperature, humidity, activity and light level directly on the user's body. These data are used to immediately infer user comfort level, and to control an HVAC system in an attempt to minimize both cost and thermal discomfort. Experimental results are presented from a building under continual usage, modified with a wireless network with multiple sensing and actuating modalities. / (cont.) For four weeks, ten building occupants, in four offices and one common space, are thermally regulated via wristworn sensors controlling the local air-conditioning dampers and window operator motors. Comparisons are made to the previous four week period of standard air-conditioning control, showing an increase in comfort, while decreasing energy usage at the same time. The difficult problems of control adaptation, comfort determination, and user conflict resolution are addressed. Finally, the limitations of this format of control are discussed, along with the possible benefits and requirements of this proactive architecture. / by Mark Christopher Feldmeier. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 109-112). / Making systems that understand language has long been a dream of artificial intelligence. This thesis develops a model for understanding language about space and movement in realistic situations. The system understands language from two real-world domains: finding video clips that match a spatial language description such as "People walking through the kitchen and then going to the dining room" and following natural language commands such as "Go down the hall towards the fireplace in the living room." Understanding spatial language expressions is a challenging problem because linguistic expressions, themselves complex and ambiguous, must be connected to real-world objects and events. The system bridges the gap between language and the world by modeling the meaning of spatial language expressions hierarchically, first capturing the semantics of spatial prepositions, and then composing these meanings into higher level structures. Corpus-based evaluations of how well the system performs in different, realistic domains show that the system effectively and robustly understands spatial language expressions. / by Stefanie Anne Tellex. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 59-61). / Physiological arousal is an important part of occupational therapy for children with Sensory Processing Disorder (SPD) but therapists do not have a way to objectively measure how therapy affects arousal. We hypothesized that when children with SPD participate in guided activities within an occupational therapy setting, informative changes in electrodermal activity (EDA) can be detected using iCalm. iCalm is a small, wireless sensor developed at MIT that measures EDA and motion, worn on the wrist or above the ankle. Twenty-two children (ages 3-10) with a clinical diagnosis of SPD participated. EDA was measured from the backs of the children's ankles. Concurrent video recordings allowed for comparison of therapeutic activities and children's EDA. Overall, we measured 77 therapy sessions. All measurements were in-situ, during regularly scheduled therapy sessions. Statistical analysis describing how equipment affects EDA was inconclusive, suggesting that many factors play a role in how a child's EDA changes. Case studies provided examples of how occupational therapy affected children's EDA. This is the first study of the effects of occupational therapy's in-situ activities using continuous physiologic measures. The results suggest that careful case-study analyses of the relation between therapeutic activities and physiological arousal may inform clinical practice. / by Elliott B. Hedman. / S.M.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 122-126). / by Nuno Miguel Borges de Pinho Cruz de Vasconcelos. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 325-344). / by Marc Eliot Davis. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-73). / "There is no progress with out progress of the catastrophe." Virilio. This thesis project proposes that technological solutions in the design of our systems are not enough to prevent 'man-made' accident. Social, organisational and political means are needed to understand the causes of disaster in the twenty-first century. This project conducts an autopsy on an historic technological disaster case examining the build up to the accident. The object of the experiment (artwork) is to examine the inevitability of accidents, highlight to the viewer that risk is intrinsic to our world, and that technological disaster will be an integral part in our lives in the 21st century. / by Saoirse Higgins. / S.M.