Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-93). / Nicholas Anthony Montfort. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005. / Page 158 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-145). / Much existing affective computing research focuses on systems designed to use information related to emotion to benefit users. Many technologies are used in situations their designers didn't anticipate and would not have intended. This thesis discusses several adversarial uses of affective computing: use of systems with the goal of hindering some users. The approach taken is twofold: first experimental observation of use of systems that collect affective signals and transmit them to an adversary; second discussion of normative ethical judgments regarding adversarial uses of these same systems. This thesis examines three adversarial contexts: the Quiz Experiment, the Interview Experiment, and the Poker Experiment. In the quiz experiment, participants perform a tedious task that allows increasing their monetary reward by reporting they solved more problems than they actually did. The Interview Experiment centers on a job interview where some participants hide or distort information, interviewers are rewarded for hiring the honest, and where interviewees are rewarded for being hired. In the Poker Experiment subjects are asked to play a simple poker-like game against an adversary who has extra affective or game state information. / (cont.) These experiments extend existing work on ethical implications of polygraphs by considering variables (e.g. context or power relationships) other than recognition rate and using systems where information is completely mediated by computers. In all three experiments it is hypothesized that participants using systems that sense and transmit affective information to an adversary will have degraded performance and significantly different ethical evaluations than those using comparable systems that do not sense or transmit affective information. Analysis of the results of these experiments shows a complex situation in which the context of using affective computing systems bears heavily on reports dealing with ethical implications. The contribution of this thesis is these novel experiments that solicit participant opinion about ethical implications of actual affective computing systems and dimensional metaethics, a procedure for anticipating ethical problems with affective computing systems. / by Carson Jonathan Reynolds. / Ph.D.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-133). / Important ideas, practices and artifacts often fail to reach their target population efficiently or fail to reach altogether. Surprisingly, most projects aimed to bring technology to underserved communities of the world lack an explicit diffusion strategy and/or lack an implementation strategy that acknowledges the social structure that binds together the members of the targeted community. Without the knowledge of social structures efficient diffusion of technological innovations becomes an unreachable goal. Socioeconomic and behavioral information can be combined with sparse social structure data to derive quantitative estimates of a community's social dynamics, allowing improved understanding and management of diffusion processes. We found that patterns of advice and use of media provide and effective way to identify the influential members of a community. We set up a large scale experiment in a rural community using our model and tested our proposed method of intervention and found strong evidence of an improved diffusion process which is significantly related to the communities' network of advice. The adoption of an idea, practice or artifact is heavily influenced by social context, through both conscious and unconscious mechanisms. By targeting social networks, not social classes, age, gender groups or institutions, we can create the basis for the emergence of local organizations and businesses that organically provide the necessary support to achieve effective diffusion of technological innovations. In our experiment, the introduction of a few powerful ideas at the core of the communities' social networks helped to create a social context where the new innovations created economic and social value. In addition, these new business create a richer social context from which further new innovations are expected to emerge. / by Juan Carlos Barahona. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 133-134). / by M. Nyssim Lefford. / S.M.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1993. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Susan C. Imholz. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 51-53). / The hi-end tools available to today's sound designers give them almost limitless control over audio processing. Devices such as Yamaha's new digital mixers and Digidesign's Pro-Tools computerized editing workstations allow users in a small studio to accomplish tasks which would have required racks full of gear only seven years ago in a professional studio. However, the evolution of the interfaces used with these systems have not kept pace with the improvements in functionality. With all of their complexity, the new digital mixing consoles still look like the old analog mixers, with the addition of an LCD screen. This thesis will introduce a new type of concept called Multi-Modal Mixing that aims to enhance current systems and point to a new standard of audio control. / by Edward Vickers Hammond. / S.M.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-143). / Matthew Richard Grenby. / M.S.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-76). / by Ravikanth Srinivasa Pappu. / M.S.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 127-139). / Machines have the power and potential to make expressive music on their own. This thesis aims to computationally model the process of creating music using experience from listening to examples. Our unbiased signal-based solution models the life cycle of listening, composing, and performing, turning the machine into an active musician, instead of simply an instrument. We accomplish this through an analysis-synthesis technique by combined perceptual and structural modeling of the musical surface, which leads to a minimal data representation. We introduce a music cognition framework that results from the interaction of psychoacoustically grounded causal listening, a time-lag embedded feature representation, and perceptual similarity clustering. Our bottom-up analysis intends to be generic and uniform by recursively revealing metrical hierarchies and structures of pitch, rhythm, and timbre. Training is suggested for top-down un-biased supervision, and is demonstrated with the prediction of downbeat. This musical intelligence enables a range of original manipulations including song alignment, music restoration, cross-synthesis or song morphing, and ultimately the synthesis of original pieces. / by Tristan Jehan. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-65). / Minerva, a video assistant for cooking, is controlled by the actions of the user. Specifically, the content and format of the video shown on Minerva's display are decided by the food that one places on the kitchen counter. Thus, it aims to develop new ways of interactivity and control for media that solve the problem of content choice in an innovative and useful manner. In parallel, it is a study of the applicability of a generalized image-matching algorithm [1] [21 and into reflecting a program's awareness of the context of its execution in its behavior. Minerva is, for the user, a personalized kitchen assistant, a culinary knowledge-base and a cooking tutor, all built into it by design rather than by accident. Minerva tackles problems faced by current computer systems, including trade-offs between automatic program execution and user control, access mechanisms for media from large databases, retrieval techniques for recipes and cooking information, and embedding computing systems in the home environment with useful features without compromising on non-obtrusiveness. The system has a camera that looks at the kitchen counter and a recognition engine that analyses the ingredient placed under the camera. Together, they form part of the input that decides the choice for the content of the media displayed. Contextual variables, including the user's identity and preferences form the other part of this input. A database look-up program that returns the location of the video and recipe image appropriate for these input forms the retrieval sub-system and a player for the cooking video retrieved displays the media chosen. Automatic control for the media is enabled wherever possible, allowing for prior information about the user to affect the choice and format of the cooking video displayed. This thesis describes the motivations, concept and implementation of Minerva, ending with an evaluation of its performance and impact, as well as directions for future work. / by Shyam Krishnamoorthy. / S.M.