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. 109-113). / Geospatial tools and information play an important role in urban planning and policymaking, and maps have diverse uses in legal, environmental, political, land rights, and social arenas. Widespread participation in mapmaking and access to its benefits is limited by obscure and expensive tools and techniques. This has resulted in poor or nonexistent maps for much of the world's population, especially in areas of urban poverty. In particular, public access to recent and high-resolution satellite imagery is largely controlled by government and large industry. This thesis proposes balloon and kite aerial photography as a low-cost and easy to learn means to collect aerial imagery for mapping, and introduces a novel open-source online tool for orthorectifying and compositing images into maps. A series of case studies where such tools and techniques were used by communities and activists in Lima, Peru and during the 2010 BP oil spill highlight the empowering role broader participation in cartography can play in advocacy, and the potential for increased cartographic literacy to level the playing field in territorial self-determination for small communities. Compared to other efforts to democratize mapmaking, which focus primarily on the presentation and interpretation of existing map data, this project emphasizes participation in the creation of new data at its source - direct imaging of the earth's surface. Accompanying educational materials and workshops with adults and youth, as well as an active online community of participants, have ensured wide adoption of Grassroots Mapping practices. / by Jeffrey Yoo Warren. / S.M.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 129-133). / by Tomoko Koka. / 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. 99-104). / Expression as complex and personal as music is not adequately represented by the signal alone. We define and model meaning in music as the mapping between the acoustic signal and its contextual interpretation - the 'community metadata' based on popularity, description and personal reaction, collected from reviews, usage, and discussion. In this thesis we present a framework for capturing community metadata from free text sources, audio representations general enough to work across domains of music, and a machine learning framework for learning the relationship between the music signals and the contextual reaction iteratively at a large scale. Our work is evaluated and applied as semantic basis functions - meaning classifiers that are used to maximize semantic content in a perceptual signal. This process improves upon statistical methods of rank reduction as it aims to model a community's reaction to perception instead of relationships found in the signal alone. We show increased accuracy of common music retrieval tasks with audio projected through semantic basis functions. We also evaluate our models in a 'query-by-description' task for music, where we predict description and community interpretation of audio. These unbiased learning approaches show superior accuracy in music and multimedia intelligence tasks such as similarity, classification and recommendation. / by Brian A. Whitman. / Ph.D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-71). / Obesity in the United States has reached epidemic proportions and inactivity is a key factor in this health problem. One difficulty in promoting an active lifestyle is the idea that getting enough "exercise" means jogging, going to the gym, or riding an exercise bike for half and hour every day. While these activities are helpful, they can be daunting for an inactive person and difficult to plan into a busy schedule. Alternatively, many regular activities such as using stairs or walking to work can also provide healthy exercise. To bring attention to the exercise present in everyday activities, I created visualizations of full-time measurements of heart rate. These visualizations were designed to improve a person's sense of control over physical fitness. They show how everyday activities can accumulate into significant amounts of exercise. I conducted a pilot test of this device on a small number of subjects. These tests indicate that feedback of all-day heart rate measurements may lead to changes in beliefs about exercise. / by Timothy David Hirzel. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-79). / Social robots (personal robots) emphasize individualized social interaction and communication with people. To maximize communication capacity of a personal robot, designers make it more anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic), and people tend to interact more naturally with such robots. However, adapting anthropomorphism (or zoomorphism) in social robots makes morphology of a robot more complex; thus, it becomes harder to control robots with existing interfaces. The Huggable is a robotic Teddy bear platform developed by the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. It has its specific purpose in healthcare, elderly care, education, and family communication. It is important that a user can successfully convey the meaningful context in a dialogue via the robot's puppeteering interface. I investigate relevant technologies to develop a robotic puppetry system for a zoomorphic personal robot and develop three different puppeteering interfaces to control the robot: the website interface, wearable interface, and sympathetic interface. The wearable interface was examined through a performance test and the web interface was examined through a user study. / by Jun Ki Lee. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004. / Page 79 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-78). / Developing a design methodology that accounts for system- and component-level parameters in the design of products is a challenge for design and manufacturing organizations. Designed products like automobiles, personal electronics, mass-customized homes, and apparel follow design processes that have evolved over time into compartmentalized approaches toward design synthesis. Many products are designed "by committee" because the nature of the problem is sufficiently sophisticated that isolating the different disciplines of engineering, design, manufacturing, and marketing has become the only way to produce a product. This thesis rethinks design methods by critically analyzing design rules and their role in product development. Systematic and unbiased mapping of possible configurations is a method employed in generative design systems. A mapping of a solution space is achieved by parameterizing the constraints of the problem in order to develop a feasible envelope of possibilities at the component and system level. Once parametric modeling begins, then a flexible hierarchical and associative assembly must be put in place to integrate components into the product structure. What results is a complex tree structure of the possible solutions that can be optimized to ergonomic, structural, aerodynamic, manufacturing and material perspectives. The tree structure is organized so that any changes in the component structure can be accommodated at any level. Subsystems can then be easily substituted in order to fit to mass-customization preferences. / by Ryan C.C. Chin. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [115]-118). / Elements within the physical space are transformed through natural processes that change their properties over time. These transformations are part of our everyday experiences that are often informative, influential or controversial. We are increasingly replacing interactions of the physical space to the Web, possibly losing opportunities for experiencing subtleties within these physical transformations. The goal of the thesis is to develop, understand and evaluate a framework for defining transformations on the Web; and establish a guideline to inspire visual and software design on the Web to leverage their socially influenced, time-based behavior. / by Takashi Okamoto. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-77). / Anthropomorphic visualization is a new approach to presenting information about participants in online spaces using the human form as the basis for the visualization. Various data about an individual's online behavior are mapped to different parts of a humanoid yet abstract form. I hypothesized that using a humanoid form to visualize data about people in online social spaces could serve two purposes simultaneously: communicate statistics about the individuals and evoke a social response. Using the human form in this way has both benefits and drawbacks. Users can quickly scan a set of humanoid representations and get a sense of the character of a group, and may respond socially to the other participants in the group. However, the information we are able to represent is somewhat limited, and a humanoid representation style might lead users to make incorrect assumptions about the people being represented. To investigate these tradeoffs, I created a test- bed application that visualized data from messages written in Usenet newsgroups. I conducted user studies to evaluate how users interpreted the data from the visualizations and responded to messages shown with visualizations. In this thesis, I discuss the challenges of designing effective anthropomorphic visualizations and offer guidelines to consider when using the human form to visualize information about participants in online conversations. / by Ethan Lewis Perry. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-73). / (cont.) working model of simulation theory (informed by scientific studies of autism, imitation, and the development of theory of other minds) that is able to infer the intention behind observable action and its effects. This is an important step towards building robots that can begin to understand human behavior in terms of the mental states that generate it, rather than only upon observable surface behavior. This understanding is key for cooperating with robots instead of using them as tools. / New applications are bringing robots into environments where they will have the opportunity to cooperate with humans as capable partners. A crucial element of cooperation is the ability to infer actions and goals of another by observing them. The ability to understand the intention being enacted by another is very important for anticipating the needs of and providing timely assistance to them. This thesis presents an approach to building a robot that is capable of action and goal inference that is based on the concept of Simulation Theory (a dominant theory in philosophy for how people do this). Simulation Theory argues that we exploit our own psychological responses in order to simulate others' minds to infer their mental states. With respect to action recognition and goal inference this implies that the ability to perform an action helps one to recognize when the same action is performed by others. It further implies that a robot could leverage its own action/goal representation to infer goals of others based on their actions. This implementation addresses the task of acquiring perceptual data about the physical motion of another agent and the context in which is it performed and mapping it onto the robot's own perceptual and movement repertoire. This implementation then addresses how to achieve the simulation to recognize the actions and infer the goals of the observed agent based on this movement and perceptual data. I demonstrate this skill by having the robot exhibit behaviors that address the inferred goal being enacted by the human. In principle this approach could be extended to not only infer the intentions of others, but other mental states as well (motivations, emotions, desires, beliefs, etc.). The main contribution of this work is a plausible / by Jesse V. Gray. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 64-66). / Despite rapid technological advancement and improvement in network bandwidth, people still like to use text for remote communication. Simplicity, directness and anonymity make textual chat the most popular method of communication in the technology-mediated world. In face-to-face communication, people can use gestures, facial expressions, eye gaze and other body languages to alter, emphasize or strengthen their spoken words. Unfortunately, current textual platforms do not have a proper channel for these cues and signals. These non-linguistic cues are able to convey social and emotional information accompanied by the spoken words. I argue that a well-designed textual communication system can increase the expressiveness of text-based chat environments, and we need to have a better chat interface to improve our social interactions in the digital world. Cheiro is an exploration of user-centered gesture-based interfaces that enable expressive textual communication. / (cont.) My approach is to use common input devices, such as mouse or keyboard, as the gestural interface to amplify or change the tone and meaning of the text, and send non-linguistic signals using graphical elements and anthropomorphized kinetic typography. The goal of this thesis is to find an intuitive mapping between the user's gestural input and the graphically enhanced text output, which constructs a novel expressive textual communication platform. / Francis Lam. / S.M.