Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 163-169). / A paintable computer is defined as an agglomerate of numerous, finely dispersed, ultra-miniaturized computing particles; each positioned randomly, running asynchronously and communicating locally. Individual particles are tightly resource bound, and processing is necessarily distributed. Yet computing elements are vanishingly cheap and are regarded as freely expendable. In this regime, a limiting problem is the distribution of processing over a particle ensemble whose topology can vary unexpectedly. The principles of material self-assembly are employed to guide the positioning of "process fragments" - autonomous, mobile pieces of a larger process. These fragments spatially position themselves and reaggregate into a running process. We present the results of simulations to show that "process self-assembly" is viable, robust and supports a variety of useful applications on a paintable computer. We describe a hardware reference platform as an initial guide to the application domain. We describe a programming model which normatively defines the term process fragment and which provides environmental support for the fragment's mobility, scheduling and data exchange. The programming model is embodied in a simulator that supports development, test and visualization on a 2D particle ensemble. Experiments on simple combinations of fragments demonstrate robustness and explore the limits of scale invariance. Process fragments are shown interacting to approximate conservative fields, and using these fields to implement scaffolded and thermodynamic self-assembly. / (cont.) Four applications demonstrate practical relevance, delineate the application domain and collectively illustrate the paintable's capacity for storage, communication and signal processing. These four applications are Audio Streaming, Holistic Data Storage, Surface Bus and Image Segmentation. / by William Joseph Butera. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 181-186). / Virtuosic bowed string performance in many ways exemplifies the incredible potential of human physical performance and expression. Today, a great deal is known about the physics of the violin family and those factors responsible for its sound capabilities. However, there remains much to be discovered about the intricacies of how players control these instruments in order to achieve their characteristic range and nuance of sound. Today, technology offers the ability to study this player control under realistic, unimpeded playing conditions to lead to greater understanding of these performance skills. Presented here is a new methodology for investigation of bowed string performance that uses a playable hardware measurement system to capture the gestures of right hand violin bowing technique. Building upon previous Hyperstring research, this measurement system was optimized to be small, lightweight, and portable and was installed on a carbon fiber violin bow and an electric violin to enable study of realistic, unencumbered violin performances. Included in the system are inertial and force sensors, and an electric field position sensor. In order to maximize the applicability of the gesture data provided by this system to related fields of interest, all of the sensors were calibrated in SI units. / (cont.) The gesture data captured by these sensors are recorded together with the audio data from the violin as they are produced by violinists in typical playing scenarios. To explore the potential of the bowing measurement system created, a study of standard bowing techniques, such as detache, martele and spiccato, was conducted with expert violinist participants. Gesture data from these trials were evaluated and input to a classifier to examine physical distinctions between bowing techniques, as well as between players. Results from this analysis, and their implications on this methodology will be presented. In addition to this examination of bowing techniques, applications of the measurement system for study of bowed string acoustics and digital music instrument performance, with focus on virtual instruments created from physical models, will be discussed. / by Diana Young. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-92). / A person's communicative intent can be better understood by either a human or a machine if the person's gestures are understood. This thesis project demonstrates an expansion of both the range of co-verbal gestures a machine can identify, and the range of communicative intents the machine can infer. We develop an automatic system that uses realtime video as sensory input and then segments, classifies, and responds to co-verbal gestures made by users in realtime as they converse with a synthetic character known as REA, which is being developed in parallel by Justine Cassell and her students at the MIT Media Lab. A set of 670 natural gestures, videotaped and visually tracked in the course of conversational interviews and then hand segmented and annotated according to a widely used gesture classification scheme, is used in an offline training process that trains Hidden Markov Model classifiers. A number of feature sets are extracted and tested in the offline training process, and the best performer is employed in an online HMM segmenter and classifier that requires no encumbering attachments to the user. Modifications made to the REA system enable REA to respond to the user's beat and deictic gestures as well as turntaking requests the user may convey in gesture. / (cont.) The recognition results obtained are far above chance, but too low for use in a production recognition system. The results provide a measure of validity for the gesture categories chosen, and they provide positive evidence for an appealing but difficult to prove proposition: to the extent that a machine can recognize and use these categories of gestures to infer information not present in the words spoken, there is exploitable complementary information in the gesture stream. / by Lee Winston Campbell. / 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. 142-145). / Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have fueled our imagination about the future of computational user experience by coupling physical objects and activities with digital information. Despite their conceptual popularity, TUIs are still difficult and time-consuming to construct, requiring custom hardware assembly and software programming by skilled individuals. This limitation makes it impossible for end users and designers to interactively build TUIs that suit their context or embody their creative expression. OnObject enables novice end users to turn everyday objects into gestural interfaces through the simple act of tagging. Wearing a sensing device, a user adds a behavior to a tagged object by grabbing the object, demonstrating a trigger gesture, and specifying a desired response. Following this simple Tag-Gesture-Response programming grammar, novice end users are able to transform mundane objects into gestural interfaces in 30 seconds or less. Instead of being exposed to low-level development tasks, users are can focus on creating an enjoyable mapping between gestures and media responses. The design of OnObject introduces a novel class of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): gestural programming of situated physical objects. This thesis first outlines the research challenge and the proposed solution. It then surveys related work to identify the inspirations and differentiations from existing HCI and design research. Next, it describes the sensing and programming hardware and gesture event server architecture. Finally, it introduces a set of applications created with OnObject and gives observations from user participated sessions. / by Keywon Chung. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 89-96). / Hero Reports extends the rationale of New York City's "See Something, Say Something" campaign-an alert public can be a good security measure. The current political climate within the United States translates the MTA's tactics into ones of fear. Instead of fostering collective security, these calls for vigilance create rifts between people and communities. An unhealthy impact of the "See Something, Say Something" campaign encourages people to look at each other with heightened and prejudicial suspicion. Although other projects have sought to interrogate the tactics of such citizen-detective campaigns, they do not provide productive alternatives. Because of this, projects seeking to deflect fear, only serve to reify and preserve its power. An alternative technology is needed to effectively destabilize the message of fear inherent in the MTA campaign. Hero Reports counterbalances the vigilance associated with suspicion and Othering with measures of positive and contextual alertness. It is a technology that builds communities that are truly, and collectively, empowering. Hero Reports provides this alternative first by aggregating stories of everyday heroism, and then by thematically, geographically and temporally mapping them. By linking and contextualizing discrete moments of heroism, Hero Reports promotes a public discourse about how we create, enforce and value social norms. Balancing the empirical ways we measure crime, Hero Reports provides the groundwork for determining the empirical parameters for heroism. / Alyssa Pamela Wright. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [109]-[110]). / This thesis describes the design and development of a system that is aimed for enhancing safety and security using cellular phones. This system has two main components: a master phone application to assist people who need to take care of their loved ones, and a slave phone application to provide help to care-recipients who need attention from their caregivers. This system applies location awareness (GPS), awareness of social activities (communication activity and proximity with close peers,) and peer-to-peer data communication as its core technologies. There are three sub-components that are implemented the system: First component is for providing a set of information in order to enhance awareness of crime around users' surrounding areas. This component is used to assess risk on users themselves as well as their property. The second component is a sub-system that is dedicated for detecting a possible abnormal transit behavior. Consequently, the system alerts this abnormality to both the system users and their caregivers. Third component detects nearby phone to cultivate social activities with the system user's peers. / (cont.) The purpose of finding contacts is to get remote help from friends of the care-recipients. All the functions provided by the system fall into the gray area in between the state in which care-recipients are completely safe, and that in which care-recipients had an accident severe enough to require help from authorities. / by Jae-woo Chung. / 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. 159-163). / To create everyday art monuments through which we express ourselves--whether in the form of a self-portrait or a life-story--is human nature. Our drive to do so is evident in the natural artistry of young children--representing themselves, people and things around them-through a variety of expressions such as drawing, storytelling, and construction with objects. Yet these creations with diverse media decrease dramatically as traditional forms of literacy take over in school, emphasizing decontextualized and depersonalized forms of expressions. This thesis is about how people, particularly children, create and interact with everyday art monuments, with an emphasis on techniques to support the narrative connection between the creator, creation, and material the creation is made of. This thesis introduces the concept of building visual art projects with elements extracted directly from the artist's personal objects and his/her immediate environment, thus allowing child and adult artist alike to turn their world into a palette of color. For example, by picking up a texture from his pet dog's fur, movements of his own blinking eye, color from his favorite yellow shirt, and by combining these elements into a unique drawing, an artist can not only create a thoroughly personalized piece, but also breathe a new kind of life into the canvas. A number of key design features of the system were developed through observing both adult and child artists using the novel tools over the course of two years. / (cont.) During the final five-week study in a kindergarten classroom, the tools supported children's individual creative styles (e.g. 'visualizers' versus 'dramatizers'), and children's work reflected upon the aspects of objects and interactions with these objects that were dear to them. In addition, evidence suggests the children acquired an expanded view of art, associating features in paintings with attributes in their environment. The potential of this new medium that allows artistic expression using attributes taken from the real world is discussed. / Kimiko Ryokai. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 72-76). / Traditionally, communication devices are designed to overcome distance in space or time. How can personal mobile tools augment local interaction and promote spontaneous collaboration between users in proximity? Mobile ad hoc collaboration is an emerging framework that attempts to answer this question. This thesis reviews current research in mobile ad hoc collaboration, explores its precedents in art, and examines the enabling wireless communication and location sensing technology. It then proceeds to consider location, proximity and spatial organization as major factors in the development of interfaces and applications within the framework. The importance of seamless transitions between face-to-face communication and mediated communication is emphasized, and the principle of ad hoc communication group formation on the basis of proximity is proposed. The principle is demonstrated in a prototype wearable system for synchronous voice messaging. / by Ivan Sergeyevich Chardin. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-51). / The picture element, or pixel, is a conceptual unit of representation for digital information. Like all data structures of the computer, pixels are invisible and therefore require an output device to be seen. The physical unit of display, or physical pixel, can be any form that makes the pixel visible. Pixels are often represented as the electronically addressable phosphors of a video monitor, but the potential for different visualizations inspires the development of novel phenotypes. Four new systems of physical pixels are presented: Nami, Peano, the Digital Palette and 20/20 Refurbished. In each case, the combination of material, hardware and software design results in a unique visualization of computation. The chief contribution of this research is the articulation of a mode of artistic practice in which custom units of representation integrate physical and digital media to engender a new art. / by Kelly Bowman Heaton. / 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. 258-273). / Reading and writing have become the predominant way of acquiring and expressing intellect in Western culture. Somewhere along the way, the ability to write has become completely identified with intellectual power, creating a graphocentric myopia concerning the very nature and transfer of knowledge. One of the effects of graphocentrism is a conflation of concepts proper to knowledge in general with concepts specific to written expression. The words 'literate' and 'literacy' themselves are a simple case: their connotations sometimes focus on the process of reading text and sometimes on the kinds of knowledge that happen to be associated in our culture with people who read many books. This thesis has a conceptual and an empirical component. On the conceptual side a central task is to disengage certain concepts that have become conflated by defining new terms. Our vocabulary is insufficient to describe alternatives that serve some or all of the functions of writing and reading in a different modality. As a first step, I introduce a new word to provide a counterpart to writing in a spoken modality: speak + write = sprite. Spriting in its general form is the activity of speaking 'on the record' that yields a technologically-supported representation of oral speech with essential properties of writing such as permanence of record, possibilities of editing, indexing, and scanning, but without the difficult transition to a deeply different form of representation such as writing itself. This thesis considers a particular (still primitive compared with might come in the future) version of spriting in the form of two technology-supported representations of speech: (1) the speech ·in audible form, and (2) the speech in visible form. / (cont.) The product of spriting is a kind of 'spoken' document, or talkument. As one reads a text, one may likewise aude a talkument. In contrast, I use the word writing for the manual activity of making marks, while text refers to the marks made. Making these distinctions is a small step towards envisioning a deep change in the world that might go beyond graphocentrism and come to appreciate spriting as the first step--but just the first--towards developing ways of manipulating spoken language, exemplified by turning it into a permanent record, permitting editing, indexing, searching and more. The empirical side of the thesis is confined to exploring implications of spriting in educational settings. I study one group of urban adults who are at elementary levels of reading and writing, and two groups of urban elementary school children who are of different ages, cultures and socioeconomic status, and who have appropriated writing as a tool for thought and expression to greater or lesser extents. One effect of graphocentrism in our culture is the very limited and constrained developmental path of literacy and learning. This has not always been the case. And it does not need to be so in the future. This thesis discusses some small ways in which we might re-value modes of expression in education closer to oral language than to writing. This thesis recognizes three ways in which spriting is relevant to education: (1) spriting can serve as a stepping stone to writing skills, (2) it can in some circumstances serve as a substitute for writing, and (3) it provides a window onto cognitive processes that are present but less apparent in the context of producing text. / Tara Michelle Rosenberger Shankar. / Ph.D.