Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 85-91). / Measuring the mechanical properties of soft tissue can be an important method to detect pathology. Concerning the brain in particular, correlation between abnormal tissue stiffness and morbidity has been reported for Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease and brain tumors, among others. On a more fundamental level, the nature and behavior of the brain from a mechanical standpoint is relatively understudied, in comparison to those from the chemical, electromagnetic and optical perspective. Current techniques fall into two main categories: one establishes direct contact to measure the deformation of tissue under various mechanical loads, the other solves the inverse problem based on the tissue displacement data collected through a number of imaging modalities. Both categories, however, have their limitations in providing ideal mechanical measurement of the brain, ranging from form factor compatibility, spatiotemporal resolution and accuracy. In this light, this work aims at developing an implantable measurement device that can bypass these limitations and provide in situ, in vivo, real-time, long-term monitoring of soft tissue biomechanics. The initial goal is to create a functional sensor front-end that can differentiate materials of different stiffness. As this project is to continue beyond the thesis, this thesis will present the current development progress, issues encountered and corresponding counter-measures, and discuss the prospective work in the future. / by Zijun Wei. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 87-93). / Embodied theories of language propose that the way we communicate verbally is grounded in our body. Nevertheless, the way a second language is conventionally taught does not capitalize on embodied modalities. The tracking and immersive capabilities of virtual reality systems can enable a change in the way students learn language by engaging them in kinesthetic activities that explicitly use body movement to encode knowledge. The body can also be used implicitly to alter a student's perception of themselves in order to enhance the way they approach learning in immersive environments. In this work, we seek to explore the potential of both explicit and implicit embodied language learning using virtual reality as a platform. For the purpose of this thesis we focus on vocabulary acquisition to assess the potential impact these methodologies can have on language education. Two systems were developed that afford explicit (Words in Motion) and implicit (Inner Child) embodied learning. Both systems were evaluated separately during controlled experiments with 6o participants each. Explicit embodied learners displayed enhanced retention positively correlated with performing actions in the Words in Motion platform. Our findings from the implicit embodied study highlight the importance of having a body in virtual reality. Inner Child successfully increased word retention when inducing a subjective age reduction that correlated with the feeling of ownership of a virtual child avatar. These results support the hypothesis that virtual reality can deeply impact language learning by leveraging the body explicitly and implicitly. / by Christian David Vázquez Machado. / S.M.

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 185-191). / In a future where every physical object has the ability to compute and connect with other physical things, we have to rethink our present user interfaces and interaction metaphors. The desktop metaphor used in personal computers and smartphones was invented for data organization and is not well suited for interaction with things in the physical world. As a result, the growing number of interconnected things (or Internet of Things devices) surrounding us are becoming hard to operate. Each IoT device requires a different app to control it and forces the user to memorize a unique connection and interface. In addition, connected things made by different companies cannot easily be connected to one another. This thesis introduces a novel, directly mapped user interface for connected things built upon World Wide Web technology, a decentralized networking infrastructure for connected things to talk to each other, and a simple, visual user interface for understanding and controlling the connected things around us. The overall system is called the Reality Editor, an open-source, freely and publicly available tool for creating ecosystems of interconnected things. The thesis discusses the design of the Reality Editor, its core ideas and implementation details and a series of real world prototypes that were built to evaluate and improve the tool. / by Valentin Heun. / Ph. D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 143-146). / This thesis is an attempt to bring fresh insights to current understandings of cinematic space and the relationship between film, architecture, and the city. That attempt is situated in relation to recent work by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Saskia Sassen, and others on the importance of the city in the current global framework, along with the growing body of literature on film, architecture, and urban space. Michel De Certeau's threefold critique of the city, set forth in The practices of Everyday Life, structures a comparative analysis of six primary films, aired as follows, with one air for each of three chapters-Jacques Tati's lay Time and Edward Yang's Yi Yi, Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves and Wang Xiaoshuai's Beijing Bicycle, and Franqois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay!. Along with De Certeau's notions of satial ractice, walking rhetorics, and the pedestrian speech act, the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze-including work from the Cinema texts and A Thousand plateaus-is developed in relation to existent film theory on movement, time, and space. / (cont.) The analysis operates as a kind of mediation between an active set of spatial theories-a mediation which uses traditional techniques of film analysis and critical theory to instigate a negotiation around the topic of (cinematic) space. That negotiation implies a common ground on which the film texts and theories are read against and in addition to one another, allowing each to contribute in its own right to the setting u of a series of terms-what I refer to as a "spatial grammar"-proper to both film and theory. The spatial grammar thus comprises a more abstract theoretical lane-a palimpsest on which resides a classic body of work on cinematic space (including Andre Bazin, Stephen Heath, and Kristin Thomson), and on which I layer the work of De Certeau, Deleuze, Fredric Jameson, and others. / by Brian R. Jacobson. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 10-11). / Organizational maps can help teams and organizations improve how they manage their human and social capital. Yet, keeping track of the relationships in an organization is a complex, labor-intensive, and time-consuming task. Here I present MITeams: an automated visualization tool for quick organizational mapping. MITeams uses email metadata to map the pattern of communications within an team and combines this information with demographic and psychological variables collected from externally validated surveys included in MITeams. These capacities allow MITeams to create maps of teams and organizations, combining communication and psychological variables, in a matter of hours. I present several use cases of MITeams with the user experience of a research team. User study is conducted with another research team to validate MITeams's the ability in mapping the communication pattern and assisting members learn team knowledge. Our results show that MITeams can be used to quickly map organizations, and help their members get a deeper understanding about team communication network and dynamics in a short time. / by Jingxian Zhang. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 59-67). / Empathy is a fundamental socio-emotional human ability. It allows us to regulate our emotions in reference to other's emotions, to understand and interpret others' emotional states, and to act accordingly. Recent studies show how levels of empathy, particularly across young populations in the United States, are on a steady decline (Konrath, O'Brien, & Hsing, 2011). Although numerous interventions to address this issue have been tested, to the best of my knowledge, no work to date has explored the potential of social robots to support behavior, understanding and expression of human empathy among children. In this thesis, I present the results of an experiment with children from two countries, exploring how social robots can help in further understand and support the development of empathy in this particular population. In light of the challenge of decreasing levels of empathy, I raised the question of how interactions with social robots can help foster empathic skills in children with aggressive tendencies. I also stressed the importance of cross-cultural studies in order to broaden our understanding of the potential this technology holds for this specific application. I developed a novel interaction using two social robots, geared towards tapping into children's empathic models; evoking empathy and capturing relevant information either through behavior, understanding or physiology metrics. I found that empathy interventions using robotic companions can be an efficient tool to engage children. I also found significant differences in a cross-cultural sample, showing the importance of this approach. I present results indicating how through interaction with social robots, behaviorally-challenged children can successfully perceive, act, reflect, and practice empathy. These findings are encouraging when considering the potential of this technology for future interventions. / by Pedro Reynolds-Cuéllar. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages [102]-104). / Millions of young people around the world are increasingly engaging on digital platforms in learning computer programming to create and share interactive projects, and connect with others online. Not surprisingly, this has also led to a growing interest in designing tools and methods that can automatically assess children's progress in computational learning by analyzing the data being generated by their participation. Many of these approaches are looking at children's data with a narrow lens, often using it to generate dashboards that are primarily designed for educators, and focus exclusively on evaluating specific computational concepts in children's projects. In this thesis, I design and offer an alternative approach - one that utilizes children's data for empowering children themselves to celebrate, discover, and reflect on the full range of their contributions as members of a creative community. I introduce Scratch Memories, a new web-based visualization system I developed to enable children to reflect on their creative journey with Scratch, the world's largest online programming community for children. The system dynamically generates personalized visualizations highlighting a child's key moments, diverse creations, and collaborative experiences with others since the time they first joined the community. I share my own creative journey and the iterative development process behind this work. Based on observations and semi-structured interviews, I describe how the system not only sparked children to reflect on their personal trajectories, but also to feel inspired to make new memories. I conclude by describing future work through what I call my explorable explorations - a set of new in-progress tools and ideas that I hope can inspire others to create positive reflective experiences with data that celebrate, rather than evaluate, children's creative selves. / by Shruti Dhariwal. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Through an archaeology of text-generating mechanisms, the present work excavates the deep history of reading and writing as material, combinatory practices. On the one hand, by positing the physical manipulation of language as a form of reading and writing, this archaeology answers Roger Chartier's call for book historians to "take on the task of retracing forgotten gestures and habits" that do not fit "the genealogy of our own contemporary manner of reading," a call echoed in much recent work on the "use" of early modem books. It thus challenges our assumptions about how readers and writers of the past made meaning from printed texts and, more broadly, the expressive potentials of the printed book itself. Yet this archaeology of ars combinatoria, the art of combination, also presents a imaginative challenge to historians of the book. For if we accept physically cutting paper or spinning a volvelle as a readerly and writerly act, then we must also erase the boundaries we have drawn between "the book" as a material form and "the digital" as an epistemology, reconsidering the various literacies each facilitates or forecloses. In keeping with the spirit of media archaeology, which seeks to defamiliarize the past, the present work on text-generating mechanisms exists as a web-based text-generating mechanism. On the one hand, this medium allows me to present a comparative history without compromising specificity or reducing the complexity of one moment to a mere reflection of another; yet it still strives for thematic cohesion by using our digital present quite literally as a map for exploring programmatic epistemologies in our past. It lives on the web at: http://www.whitneyannetrettien.com/thesis/ Since MIT Libraries requires a paper copy of a thesis, all HTML pages and code used to produce this thesis are copied in the space below. / by Whitney Anne Trettien. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 62-64). / This study explores questions of media change, negotiation of literary value and postcolonial hybridity through a study of The Wondering Minstrels, a largely South-Asian community on the Web dedicated to the celebration of English poetry. I aim to demonstrate how an online community like Minstrels can unsettle hierarchies such as those between writer and reader, high art and fandom, and between metropole and margin, even as it often seems rooted in this logic. While print-culture and literary values are often conflated, this new kind of platform celebrates poetry using the interactive and participatory possibilities of the Web. It garbles protocols of literary appreciation by discussing canonical poetry in an idiosyncratic, personal manner. As a group dominated by South-Asian techno-managerial workers, this is also an account of ways in which globalization and postcoloniality intersect and the new networked society complicates the center-periphery model of cultural traffic. In choosing to informally engage with English poetry as bookmarks for their own lives and remaking the rules of engagement, the Wondering Minstrels is an act of cultural translation, another way of telling the literary legacy of colonialism. In addition to analyzing the conversation on the website, I draw on selected theoretical work relating to new media, middlebrow culture, reception theory, postcolonial studies and globalization. / by Amulya Gopalakrishnan. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages [209]-215). / Air pollution is responsible for :1/8 of deaths around the world. While the importance of air quality has led to a boom in inexpensive air sensors, studies have shown that the status quo of sparse, fixed sensors cannot accurately capture personal exposure levels of nearby populations. Especially in urban landscapes, pollutant concentrations can vary over just a few seconds or a few meters. Unfortunately, the portable monitors that are capable of accurately measuring these pollutants cost thousands of dollars. That hasn't stopped a deluge of cheap, portable consumer devices from entering the market. These solutions frequently claim better accuracy, but universally fail under real-world validation. Instead of competing to build a more accurate sensor, we take the approach of trying to predict when we can trust the cheap sensor we have, based on ambient conditions and measurements. Well-designed, sub-$100 sensors have recently started to perform with high precision and accuracy. While their fundamental operation is sound, these affordable sensors cannot incorporate costly, industry standard techniques for mitigating issues like cross-sensitivity, dynamic airflow, or high humidity. Fortunately, if the core principles of the device are robust, machine learning techniques should be able to predict systematic measurement failure based on a handful of related indicators. In this thesis, we test and demonstrate the potential for logistic regression machine learning techniques to predict and classify sensor measurements as 'correct' or 'incorrect' with high reliability. These techniques are also useful for quantifying sensor precision as well as cross-seasonal prediction strength. After demonstrating the value of this approach, we implement a scalable database solution using a semantic web technology know as ChainAPI. The tools developed for this framework allow automatic learning algorithms to crawl through the database, access the most recent data, update their training model, and populate the database with the processed data for other crawling scripts to interact with. This backend has implications for air quality data storage, interaction, and exchange. Finally, we build a portable, Bluetooth enabled air quality device that connects to ChainAPI through a mobile phone app, and takes advantage of the machine learning algorithms running in its backend. This device improves the reliability of sensor data compared with similar-cost systems. The learnAir device empowers individuals to trust their personal air quality data, and provokes a dialog about sensor reliability in the citizen sensing community. Its novel database architecture promotes new ways of interacting with large, dynamic datasets, and new tools to characterize affordable sensors and devices. Finally, applied logistic regression algorithms assure the accuracy of cheap, distributed sensor data- creating a trusted way for researchers to collaborate with citizen scientists from around the world. / by David B. Ramsay. / S.M.