Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 179-182). / Too often, learners in constructionist learning environments stop too early in their design process. They imagine what is possible and then realize their vision, but they don't reflect on the results-that is, they don't take a step back from their work to get a deeper understanding of how and why they do what they do. Without reflection learners miss out on many important opportunities to improve their creations, discover new things, and share their ideas with others. In this thesis I describe and discuss Behind the Screens, a workshop which I developed to foster the practice of reflection among young people engaged in a constructionist learning environment. Over three months, twenty teenagers aged 12 to 18 at two Computer Clubhouse afterschool centers constructed digital videos about themselves or their "learning stories." I describe the set of tools, activities, and contexts used, and I examine the successes and challenges the workshops presented. Through analysis of the resulting stories, individual interviews, and transcripts of workshop discussions, I propose strategies for spreading the use of digital storytelling for reflective practice to other constructionist environments, especially among adolescents. More broadly, I also consider the role of mentoring and its relationship to the activities of the Clubhouse. I conclude with design suggestions for new software tools, activities, and contexts for creating, editing, and sharing digital video stories.These support the development of a culture of reflection among constructionist learners by promoting the creation of short digital video pieces produced by and for these youth. / by Michelle Iva Hlubinka. / S.M.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-75). / by Bruce Alan McHenry. / M.S.

Thesis (S.M.)--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. 50-51). / A single neural circuit, such as the network of neural populations involved in learning, expressing, and regulating fear, may spread across many brain regions and show functional heterogeneity among spatially overlapping cell types within each region. These populations, represented as discrete circuit elements in models of circuit function, may also show different patterns of activity and connectivity within the circuit over time. More effective therapies for fear related diseases such as anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder could be achieved if the populations responsible for the pathology were known and could be precisely controlled to restore healthy behavior. The algae- and bacteria-derived light-activated ion channels Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) and Halorhodopsin (Halo) could be used to treat circuit pathologies because they enable bidirectional control of transfected neurons with high temporal and spatial resolution. Virally delivered to mammalian neurons and expressed under cell-class specific promoters, they can be used to address neural populations which share similar morphology, connectivity, electrophysiology, and, likely, function. Furthermore, the fear circuit may be reverse-engineered by perturbing neural populations, both individually and combinatorially, over many points in the timecourse of fear behavior, to see their effect on both behavior and the electrophysiological function of other neural populations. This requires a tool for multisite optical activation in the freely-moving rodent behaviors used to study fear, which is impossible to achieve with current laser-based optical systems. We developed LED-Coupled Optical Fiber Arrays whose high power output (>200mW/mm2 at fiber tip), high packing density (>1 fiber/mm 2), low cost (~$2/fiber), low weight (1-2gms), and modular design enable highly scalable, rapid customization for networks with many circuit elements and large structures requiring many points of optical delivery for full coverage. We found that optical activation of pyramidal cells in the medial prefrontal cortex can facilitate fear extinction in mice who have learned tone-shock association, a resulted strongly suggested but unproved by electrical stimulation experiments which could not differentiate between cell classes. We also demonstrate that the Fiber Arrays are compatible with simultaneous neural recording by properly shielding electrodes and neural amplifiers from the large (-Amp) nearby LED-driving currents. Fiber Arrays constitute a flexible platform for simultaneous neural modulation and observation with exceptional temporal, spatial, and functional resolution. / by Jacob Bernstein. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 98-100). / In the United States, there is a widening gap between a citizen's ability to monitor his or her government and the government's ability to monitor a citizen. Average citizens have limited access to important government records, while available information is often illegible. Meanwhile, the government's eagerness and means to oversee a citizen's personal activity is rapidly increasing. As the government broadens internal surveillance, and collaborates with private institutions to access data on the public, it is crucial that we maintain a symmetry of accountability. If we believe the United States should be a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" it is of central importance to provide citizens with the power to oversee their government. At least as much effort should be spent building tools to facilitate citizens supervising their government as tools to help the government monitor individuals. In this thesis, I discuss the motivations, design, and implementation of Government Information Awareness, a citizen run database on our government. Fundamentally, this system relies on an organizational structure that accepts information from an anonymous population, stores it, and represents it with enough context to maintain legibility. My work in this thesis is offering a framework for a system that could help citizens pool their collective knowledge, and through this process, create a more informed public capable of self-rule. / Ryan McKinley. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-167). / Today's cellphones are passive communication portals. They are neither aware of our conversational settings, nor of the relationship between caller and callee, and often interrupt us at inappropriate times. This thesis is about adding elements of human style social intelligence to our mobile communication devices in order to make them more socially acceptable to both user and local others. I suggest the concept of an Autonomous Interactive Intermediary that assumes the role of an actively mediating party between caller, callee, and co-located people. In order to behave in a socially appropriate way, the Intermediary interrupts with non-verbal cues and attempts to harvest 'residual social intelligence' from the calling party, the called person, the people close by, and its current location. For example, the Intermediary obtains the user's conversational status from a decentralized network of autonomous body-worn sensor nodes. These nodes detect conversational groupings in real time, and provide the Intermediary with the user's conversation size and talk-to-listen ratio. The Intermediary can 'poll' all participants of a face-to-face conversation about the appropriateness of a possible interruption by slightly vibrating their wirelessly actuated finger rings. / (cont.) Although the alerted people do not know if it is their own cellphone that is about to interrupt, each of them can veto the interruption anonymously by touching his/her ring. If no one vetoes, the Intermediary may interrupt. A user study showed significantly more vetoes during a collaborative group-focused setting than during a less group oriented setting. The Intermediary is implemented as a both a conversational agent and an animatronic device. The animatronics is a small wireless robotic stuffed animal in the form of a squirrel, bunny, or parrot. The purpose of the embodiment is to employ intuitive non-verbal cues such as gaze and gestures to attract attention, instead of ringing or vibration. Evidence suggests that such subtle yet public alerting by animatronics evokes significantly different reactions than ordinary telephones and are seen as less invasive by others present when we receive phone calls. The Intermediary is also a dual conversational agent that can whisper and listen to the user, and converse with a caller, mediating between them in real time. / (cont.) The Intermediary modifies its conversational script depending on caller identity, caller and user choices, and the conversational status of the user. It interrupts and communicates with the user when it is socially appropriate, and may break down a synchronous phone call into chunks of voice instant messages. / by Stefan Johannes Walter Marti. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-216). / Distributed sensor networks offer many new capabilities for monitoring environments with applicability to medical, industrial, military, anthropological, and experiential fields. By making such systems mobile, we increase the application-space for the distributed sensor network mainly by providing dynamic context-dependent deployment, continual relocatabililty, automatic node recovery, and a larger area of coverage. In existing models, the addition of actuation to sensor network nodes has exacerbated three of the main problems with these types of systems: power usage, node size, and node complexity. This work proposes a solution to these problems in the form of parasitically actuated nodes that gain their mobility and local navigational intelligence by selectively engaging and disengaging from mobile hosts in their environment. This body of work evaluates parasitically actuated sensor networks as a solution to these problems through extensive software simulation and by designing, implementing, and demonstrating a parasitically mobile sensor network. / by Matthew Joel Laibowitz. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 75-77). / AgoraPhone is a communications sculpture combining private and public social mores. Utilizing the existing telephone infrastructure, AgoraPhone allows people to call from any phone anywhere and engage the installation's physical public space. This thesis describes the process of designing, making, and installing the project, as well as some observations of AgoraPhone in use. The work is in relation to the culture's contemporary zeitgeist that reflects a society of people who on the one hand highly value a private lifestyle, and on the other hand produce and subscribe to a media culture which is characterized by extreme sacrifice of privacy; the push-pull relationship of private and public life establishes the setting for AgoraPhone. / Kelly Dobson. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-119). / Programmable matter is a proposed digital material having computation, sensing, actuation, and display as continuous properties active over its whole extent. Programmable matter would have many exciting applications, like paintable displays, shape-changing robots and tools, rapid prototyping, and sculpture-based haptic interfaces. Programmable matter would be composed of millimeter-scale autonomous microsystem particles, without internal moving parts, bound by electromagnetic forces or an adhesive binder. Particles can dissipate 10 mW heat, and store 6 J energy in an internal zinc-air battery. Photovoltaic cells provide 300 [mu]W outdoors and 3.0 [mu]W indoors. Painted systems can store battery reactants in the paint binder; 6 J / mm3 can be stored, and diffusion is fast enough to transport reactants to the particles. Capacitive power transfer is an efficient method to transfer power to sparse, randomly placed particles. Power from capacitive transfer is proportional to VDD 2: 100[mu]W at 3.3V and 12 mW at 35V. Inter-particle communication is possible via optical, near-field, and far-field electromagnetic systems. Optical systems allow communication with low area (sub-mm) particles, and 24 pJ/bit. Near-field electromagnetic gives precisely controlled neighborhoods, localization capability, and 37 pJ/bit. Far-field radio communication between widely spaced particles may be possible at 60 GHz; antennas that fit inside 1 mm3 exist; complete transceivers do not. A 32-bit CPU uses less than 0.26 mm2 die area, 256K x 8 SRAM uses 1.1 mm2, and 256K x 8 FLASH uses 0.32 mm2. Direct-drive electric and magnetic field systems allow actuation without moving parts inside the particles. Magnetic surface-drive motors designed for operation without bearings are not power-efficient, and parasitic interactions between permanent magnets may limit their usefulness at millimeter particle dimensions. Electrostatic surface-drive motors are power-efficient, but practical only at particle dimensions below a few millimeters. We constructed a prototype paintable display; a distributed PostScript rendering system with 1000 randomly-placed 3.4 cm nodes, each with a CPU, IR communications, and LED. The system is used to render the letter "A." We present a design, not yet constructed, for a literal paintable display, with 1.0 mm rendering particles, each with a microprocessor and memory, and 110 [mu]m display particles, with tri-color LED's and simpler circuitry. Storage of zinc-air battery reactants in the paint binder would provide an 8 hour battery life, and capacitive power distribution would allow continuous operation. We constructed a prototype sliding-cube modular robot, with 3.4 cm nodes. The system uses magnetic surface-drive actuation. We demonstrate horizontal lattice-unit translation. We describe a design, not yet constructed, for a sliding-cube modular robot with 2 mm nodes. The cubes use standard-process CMOS IC's, inserted into a cubic space frame and wire-bonded together. Arrays of passivated electrodes, 1 [mu]m from the surface of the cubes, are used for electrostatic surface-drive actuation, zero-power latching, power transfer, localization, and communication. The design allows actuation from any contacting position. Energy is stored in a standard SMT capacitor inside each node, which is recharged by power transfer through chains of contacting nodes. / by Ara N. Knaian. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 101-105). / The problem of finding someone who might be able to help with a particular task or knowledge area exists everywhere, be it in groups of students or corporate settings. Time and effort are spent looking for relevant information when another person in the community could easily provide assistance. Our approach to addressing this problem is to use software agents to assist the search for expertise. Previous research on this topic has been mostly in the areas of information marketplaces, referral systems or information repositories. We built a system, called Expert Finder, which provides a testbed for ideas and techniques developed in the context of this thesis. Expert Finder analyzes previous work of both the novice and the expert to automatically categorize expertise and match it with the user's problem while providing a community-based incentive mechanism. We present alternative profiling and incentive mechanisms to those that had been presented in previous work. We chose the Java Programming domain for our initial implementation and testing of the system. Expert Finder uses each user's Java source files to determine their expertise and uses a Java domain model to match questions and experts. It keeps track of users' willingness to help out as a measure of the social capital in the community. We ran some tests using the prototype system to assess how well these ideas worked, and results are also reported in this thesis. / by Adriana Santarosa Vivacqua. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 104-109). / Our desire to have common experiences with other people leads us to share media such as photographs and music. With computer networks as the media delivery system we create new opportunities for recording media utilization and ownership. Using traditional and responsive media we explore systems that enable enhanced shared experiences through modeling groups of users. A series of prototypes built with an experimental framework, MediaConnector, help us document observations and behaviors of participants. MediaConnector is a peer-to-peer media-sharing framework that allows people to develop new peer-to-peer media sharing application. Through engendering each node with its own historical audit trail we can take a crawler approach and dynamically build group profiles and perform trend analysis. Theoretical and practical work that leads to the final framework design is discussed. In particular experiments with GPS enabled cameras that explore metadata interrelationships, networked tables to share photos and two construction tests of the MediaConnector framework in dynamic group level personalization of television and audio content. It is intended that a "constructionist" approach together with new behavioral analysis will foster new and novel sharing applications to emerge. MediaConnector is evaluated by its ability to support the above approach in a community of users. / by Surjit Savji Patel. / S.M.