Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 83-86). / In the past few years, the worldwide adoption of digital devices such as computers, cell phones, media players and personal organizers skyrocketed. Due to advances in networking and computation technologies, we now have the opportunity to allow our devices to communicate and collaborate with each other in order to create an entirely new set of distributed user-centric services. An example of a distributed service would be a cell phone that learns more about social communication patterns by communicating with an email client application. This thesis demonstrates how we could develop such a system. I built a telephone application that benefits from the exchange of context information with a personal information manager to help users prioritize calls and make better-informed decisions about them. The application is based on a lower level specification that serves as the foundation for the design of sensible distributed services. / by Edison Thomaz, Junior. / 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 113-116). / Full-Contact Poetry is a digital play space for children's poetic expression. It is a software environment in which children can express their poetic thoughts, create their interpretations of writing by others and also share these expressions. The environment combines ideas from literary theory and analysis with constructionism to extend tools for poetic expression. Children can experience poetry by playing with words as objects, experimenting with typographic effects, moving words through space and navigating into and through the text, while also being able to incorporate and reconfigure sound and image. In this thesis, I first describe the Full-Contact Poetry environment then continue with a discussion of a workshop I led for six weeks with a small group of teenagers from Boston. The workshop raised many important issues that fall under the interconnected themes of: finding a voice, creating a language and negotiating context. The experience required negotiations at many levels from our small group. Each member needed to find an individual voice both as part of the group and as a poet. As a group, we needed to develop a language with which we could discuss the work that we were creating since the traditional language regarding poetry, or even workshops, did not quite apply. Finally, we were faced with new contexts. The workshop setting encouraged a classroom feeling, yet it was not a classroom. We were working with technology, but not in the way the children were accustomed-likewise with poetry. The thesis explores the challenges of facilitating an environment to support children's expression and the role that personal models play in shaping that environment. / Anindita Basu. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-139). / In the early 1990s, quantum computing proved to be an enticing theoretical possibility but a extremely difficult experimental challenge. Two advances have made experimental quantum computing demonstrable: Quantum error correction; and bulk, thermal quantum computing using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Simple algorithms have been implemented on large, commercial NMR spectrometers that are expensive and cumbersome. The goal of this project is to construct a table-top quantum computer that can match and eventually exceed the performance of commercial machines. This computer should be an inexpensive, easy-to-use machine that can be considered more a computer than its "supercomputer" counterparts. For this thesis, the goal is to develop a low-cost, table-top quantum computer capable of implementing simple quantum algorithms demonstrated thus far in the community, but is also amenable to the many scaling issues of practical quantum computing. Understanding these scaling issues requires developing a theoretical understanding of the signal enhancement techniques and fundamental noise sources of this powerful but delicate system. Complementary to quantum computing, this high performance but low cost NMR machine will be useful for a number of medical, low cost sensing and tagging applications due the unique properties of NMR: the ability to sense and manipulate the information content of materials on macroscopic and microscopic scales. / Yael G. Maguire. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 102-106). / Wireless communication has fundamental impairments due to multi-path fading, attenuation, reflections, obstructions, and noise. More importantly, it has historically been designed to mimic a physical wire; in concept other communicators in the same region are viewed as crossed wires. Many systems overcome these limitations by either speaking more loudly, or subdividing the space to mimic the effect of a separate wire between each pair. This thesis will construct and test the value of a cooperative system where the routing and transmission are done together by using several of the radios in the space to help, rather than interfere. The novel element is wireless, cooperative multicast that could be the basis for a new broadcast distribution paradigm. In the first part of the thesis,. we investigate efficient ways to construct multicast trees by exploring cooperation among local radio nodes to increase throughput and conserve energy (or battery power), whereby we assume single transmitting node is engaged in a one-to-one or one-to-many transmission. In the second part of the thesis, we further investigate transmit diversity in the general context of cooperative routing, whereby multiple nodes are allowed for cooperative transmissions. Essentially, the techniques presented in the second part of the thesis can be further incorporated in the construction of multicast trees presented in the first part. / by Fulu Li. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 44-45). / The Sound Transformer is a new type of musical instrument. It looks a little like a saxophone, but when you sing or "kazoo" into it, astonishing transforms and mutations come out. What actually happens is that the input sound is sent via 802.11 wireless link to a net server that transforms the sound and sends it back to the instrument's speaker. In other words, instead of a resonant acoustic body, or a local computer synthesizer, this architecture allows sound to be sourced or transformed by an infinite array of online services, and channeled through a gesturally expressive handheld. Emerging infrastructures (802.11, Bluetooth, 3G and 4G, etc) seem to aim at this new class of instrument. But can such an architecture really work? In particular, given the delays incurred by decoupling the sound transformation from the instrument over a wireless network, are interactive music applications feasible? My thesis is that they are. To prove this, I built a platform called WAI-KNOT (for Wireless Audio Interactive Knot) in order to examine the latency issues as well as other design elements, and test their viability and impact on real music making. The Sound Transformer is a WAI-KNOT application. / Adam Douglas Smith. / 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. 71-72). / Artificial Intelligence (Al) has shown competence in helping people with complex cognitive decisions like air traffic control and playing chess. The goal of this work is to demonstrate that Al can help people with social decisions. In this work Artificial Intelligence of Social Networks is used to improve human-human communication, recognizing the social characteristics of human relations in order to achieve a more natural online communication interface. Can a computer learn to understand the value of communication? It is shown here that a first attempt at social context classification performs with almost 70% reliability. Could a computer use this to help a person relate to other people through technology? The addition of social context to an email interface is shown to have a positive effect in a user's online communication behavior. Email is a tool that people use practically every day, making an implicit statement about their relationships with other people, and providing an opportunity for a computer to learn about their social network. Furthermore, over the years people have come to utilize and depend on email more in their daily lives, but the tool has hardly changed to help people deal with the overwhelming amount of information. Many of the social cues that allow people to naturally function with their social network are not inherent or obvious in Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). This work offers automatic social network analysis as a means to bring these cues to CMC and to foster the user's coherent understanding of the people and resources of their communication network. / by Andrea Lyn Lockerd. / S.M.

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. / Economic views of trust, grounded in repeated game theory and behavioral economics experiments, largely ignore social factors such as personal relationships between subjects. In this study, we designed a new experimental procedure, the "Social Lending Game", in which aspects of trust are measured as a function of differing social contexts. The procedure harnesses real-world social relationships while keeping subjects' identities confidential. We developed relationship mining methods that categorize social connections into trustful ties, distrustful ties, and neutral ties. Subjects in the Social Lending Game were led to believe they were paired up with a stranger with real social connections to them. The perceived social connections were systematically manipulated to different types and strengths of social ties to measure the effect of social perception on trusting behavior. Surprisingly, we found that people trust strangers as much as they trust a friend's friend. In contrast, people distrust strangers when they are told that there exists no social connection to the strangers. These methods and results point to a number of future research topics that leverage social networks to reinvestigate utility theory, trust-based decisions and risk-taking behaviors in social contexts. / by Sheng-Ying Pao. / 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 100-102). / This thesis presents Convivo, a VoIP system designed to provide reliable voice communication for poor quality networks, especially those found in rural areas of the developing world. Convivo introduces an original approach to maintain voice communication interaction in presence of poor network performance: an Interface-Adaptation mechanism that suggests adjusting the application user interface to conform to one of three voice communication modalities (full duplex, half duplex, and voice messaging). The thesis proposes that changes in communication modality are an option to sustain voice communication interaction despite poor network performance. The goals of the changes in communication modality are to reduce the impact of high latency and low bandwidth on voice communication interaction, to facilitate turn taking for a high latency connection, and to sustain voice communication for extremely low bandwidth or high error links. The system was tested via a user study in Bohechio, a small village in the Dominican Republic. The study found that Interface-Adaptation helped users to maintain voice communication interaction when network performance degrades. Transitions from full duplex to voice messaging were found particularly valuable. Initial results suggest that as users get more experience with the application they would like to manually control transitions based on feedback provided by the application and their own perceived voice quality. / by Marco Antonio Escobedo Gonzalez Maiz. / 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. 53-56). / A variety of legacy and emerging health applications are designed to monitor sensed information about a person's physiological signals over time. Such applications include systems for tracking heart conditions that have been in use by cardiologists for decades to recent prototypes for monitoring elders in cognitive decline. This thesis focuses on addressing the challenges inherent in an interactive monitoring system - how and when to interact with a user. This research aims to improve these systems in two main ways: 1) explore how to interact through social-emotional, relational dialogue, and 2) explore when to interact by adjusting the timing of these interruptions. An interactive, health application has been developed for data collection, annotation, and feedback that is part of a longer-term research plan for gathering data to understand more about stress, the physiological signals involved in its expression, and the interplay between stress and interruptibility. The system has been developed on a mobile platform and uses affect and interruption-sensitive strategies to engage users and allow for real-time annotation of stress, activity and timing information through text and audio input. The platform supports continuous, wireless, and non-intrusive collection of heart signal data, accelerometer, and pedometer information, as well as automatic labeling of location information from context beacons. This system is the first of its kind to be affect and interruption-responsive - to use physiological data to adjust the timing of interruptions, as well as to adaptively respond with dialogue and relational strategies that specifically address the user's stress levels and the disruption the device may be incurring upon the user. / (cont.) The system has been evaluated with seven subjects who used either the responsive or non- responsive system for four days, then used the opposite system for another four days, and finally, were asked to choose which system to continue interacting with for the last four days. The affect and interruption responsive system was rated as significantly less stressful on users, and five out of seven of the subjects chose to continue working with the responsive system. This study has demonstrated that designing platforms that are relational and responsive to a person's affect can facilitate a less frustrating and more enjoyable experience over time, even in tasks that are highly disruptive. Overall, this thesis has contributed not only a new system for gathering annotations useful for studies of stress, but also provided new insights into the value of using relational and attentional strategies in a task that involves a large number of interruptions. / by Karen Kay-Lynn Liu. / S.M.

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. 107-110). / How do characteristics of caregiver speech contribute to a child's early word learning? What is the relationship between a child's language development and caregivers' speech? Motivated by these general questions, this thesis comprises a series of computational studies on the fined-grained interactions of caregiver speech and one child's early linguistic development, using the naturalistic, high-density longitudinal corpus collected for the Human Speechome Project. The child's first productive use of a word was observed at about 11 months, totaling 517 words by his second birthday. Why did he learn those 517 words at the precise ages that he did? To address this specific question, we examined the relationship of the child's vocabulary growth to prosodic and distributional features of the naturally occurring caregiver speech to which the child was exposed. We measured fundamental frequency, intensity, phoneme duration, word usage frequency, word recurrence and mean length of utterances (MLU) for over one million words of caregivers' speech. We found significant correlations between all 6 variables and the child's age of acquisition (AoA) for individual words, with the best linear combination of these variables producing a correlation of r = -. 55(p < .001). We then used these variables to obtain a model of word acquisition as a function of caregiver input speech. This model was able to accurately predict the AoA of individual words within 55 days of their true AoA. We next looked at the temporal relationships between caregivers' speech and the child's lexical development. This was done by generating time-series for each variables for each caregiver, for each word. These time-series were then time-aligned by AoA. This analysis allowed us to see whether there is a consistent change in caregiver behavior for each of the six variables before and after the AoA of individual words. The six variables in caregiver speech all showed significant temporal relationships with the child's lexical development, suggesting that caregivers tune the prosodic and distributional characteristics of their speech to the linguistic ability of the child. This tuning behavior involves the caregivers progressively shortening their utterance lengths, becoming more redundant and exaggerating prosody more when uttering particular words as the child gets closer to the AoA of those words and reversing this trend as the child moves beyond the AoA. This "tuning" behavior was remarkably consistent across caregivers and variables, all following a very similar pattern. We found significant correlations between the patterns of change in caregiver behavior for each of the 6 variables and the AoA for individual words, with their best linear combination producing a correlation of r = -. 91(p < .001). Though the underlying cause of this strong correlation will require further study, it provides evidence of a new kind for fine-grained adaptive behavior by the caregivers in the context of child language development. / by Soroush Vosoughi. / S.M.