Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February, 2021 / Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 85-95). / Virtual representations of ourselves can influence the way we think, feel and behave. While this phenomenon has been explored heavily in the realm of Virtual Reality, little is known about the utility of synthetic media and real-time camera filters to reshape the perspective we have of ourselves and our capabilities. At the same time, the prevalence and popularity of these technologies have surged, coupled with greater usage of online communication tools. Motivated by a desire for self-improvement in an age of online digital communication, this thesis aims to investigate how synthetic media and real-time camera filters can be used to influence performance in target tasks, particularly in the realm of communication and creativity. This work encompasses the results of an extensive online survey (174 respondents) regarding the professional use of video-based online communication tools. It unveiled that there is an interest in self-improvement in this context and that the self-view feature of such tools may serve as a potential channel for helpful user input. Building upon this, a user study was conducted (28 participants) in which generative AI was used to synthesize videos of participants excelling in confident communication. It was found that exposure to this form of personalized media may alter feelings of confidence and stress and be implicitly helpful to some by serving as personalized role-models and guides. Following this, a second user study was conducted to explore real-time self-image manipulation via real-time camera filters (21 participants) in video calls. It was observed that applying such filters may trigger various responses in people with regards to mood, embodiment, and creativity. This thesis extends research into the topic of self-image manipulation and opens up a novel perspective that such technologies may help to serve as accessible and scalable approaches to manipulating one's self-view to nurture personal growth. / by Joanne S.L. Leong. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018 / "June 2018." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 97-104). / Today's children are growing up with artificial intelligence (AI) devices such as voice personal assistants, home robots, and internet connected "smart" toys. In previous research, we have seen that children lack understanding of how modern Al devices work, making it difficult for them to engage in reflective and constructive interactions with the Al-enabled technology (Druga, Williams, Breazeal, & Resnick, 2017). This thesis explores how young children explore and create with Al, and how such activities influence children's perceptions of Al and their attitudes about themselves as engineers. First, I discuss the design of PopBots -- the first hands-on toolkit developed for children ages 4-6 to explore and learn about Al. The social robot serves as both a programmable artifact as well as a window into understanding the machine learning algorithms. Accompanying this toolkit, I also developed a novel, developmentally-appropriate Preschool-Oriented Programming (POP) curriculum. The PopBots curriculum expands existing computational thinking curriculums by using creative learning activities to teach children three core Al concepts: rule-based systems, generative Al, and supervised machine learning. Next, I evaluated the PopBots toolkit and curriculum with 80 pre-K and Kindergarten aged children from local schools. I found that young children can understand most of the Al concepts presented in the toolkit, but sometimes developmental factors like grade and Theory of Mind skills made a difference. After completing the PopBots curriculum, children developed an understanding of robots as "learning" machines. They also gained confidence in their ability to build their own robots. Overall, this work provided a highly engaging opportunity for children to explore robotics, Al and programming -- and ultimately see Al-based technology as something they can play a role in not just using but also creating. / by Randi Williams. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February, 2021 / Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis. Each leaf consists of 2 pages (side by side). Page number at left side margin of the left page. / Includes bibliographical references. / Shared transnational challenges are connecting people in unprecedented ways. Crises such as the 2020 pandemic proved that the world is a single organism and no issue is only a local issue. If social and technological trends continue toward increased globalization, people of different cultures must find new ways to better understand the needs and values of communities that we are unlikely to experience first-hand. To build this understanding, this work conducts a natural experiment to increase cross-cultural awareness through a medium all can relate to: food and its attendant social rituals. The goal is to create a novel way to understand and communicate urban specificities by using the table rituals as a microcosm of community. The research looks for a connection between the act of procuring food, preparing food and eating together and the structures of the communities people live in. This thesis is a two-part inquiry comprising: (1) A comparative study conducted with field research at rapidly urbanizing areas of Port Harcourt, Cairo and Guadalajara, and (2) an immersive video installation and multimedia book for communicating this content. / by Gabriela Bila Bandeira Advincula. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February, 2021 / Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 302-308). / Self-driving cars and micro-mobility services are among the most important trends in the mobility landscape. While robo-taxi services are still in the pilot phase, residents in many cities today are adopting micro-mobility services as a more affordable and energy-efficient last-mile alternative to traditional forms of transportation. This dissertation proposes a new genre of urban mobility by bringing together the advantages of micro-mobility with those of the self-driving car. This dissertation presents a novel vehicle design that leverages the safety and autonomous navigation capabilities of a self-driving car while remaining ecologically responsible, lightweight, and affordable. In addition, the novel design enables new types of urban mobility services with the ability to operate autonomously in bike lanes and low-speed urban environments, and to provide door-to-door mobility delivery of both people and goods. / The proposed autonomous vehicle design takes a bottom-up approach, piecing together modularized hardware components and software blocks and giving rise to autonomous functionality. During the development of these systems, multiple full-scale working prototypes were completed, each designed to explore a specific research goal. The testing and evaluation of these prototypes were conducted within urban living labs, using the bike lanes of Cambridge, Taipei, and Andorra. Each prototype concluded with a public exhibition demonstrating the validity of these systems when applied to hypothetical mobility scenarios of the future. This dissertation includes the following five contributions: 1. A new genre of mobility that enables novel mobility services of the future. 2. A software framework for autonomous navigation that utilizes low-cost sensors and computers. 3. / A set of human-machine interactions using state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle perception as input for establishing effective Vehicle-to-Pedestrian communications. 4. A new methodology for road tests and evaluation of these systems i n the living environment. 5. The introduction of a possible decentralized community-based mobility industry. This dissertation will describe the research story of successful cooperation across academic institutions, cities, industries, and borders. / by Michael Chia-Liang Lin. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February, 2021 / Cataloged from the official PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 99-103). / The Augmented Geometrically Spaced Transform (AGST) is an auditory model that is based on an inversion of the acoustic piano, where the piano produces music and the transform analyses it. In contrast with the standard spectrogram, which is a complex frequency vector versus time, the AGST is based around a matrix of frequencies, known as the AGST Frequency Matrix, where for every frequency in the matrix, a spectral envelope is computed using a Single Channel Frequency Estimator (SCFE). The core invention of the thesis is the algorithm for the SCFE, which computes spectral envelopes with maximally high definition in a computationally efficient manner. A bank of SCFEs is assembled into a constant Q transform, known as a Geometrically Spaced Transform (GST). The GST can be used to visualize harmonics inside of musical notes, or audio in general, in a constant Q fashion. It is then shown that the AGST is a good front-end model for computational pitch perception. For example, it can be used to solve an important problem in auditory perception, the case of the missing fundamental. The entire thesis is framed in the context of building artificially intelligent music systems, including synthetic listeners (machines that listen in the way that people do), and synthetic performers (machines that allow for interactive music performance). / by Jonathan Michael Feldman. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, May, 2020 / Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 176-183). / Narrative is a powerful core component of human development. Our ability to tell stories has been credited as one of the major influences for the success of the human species. We communicate, think, encode memories, dream, and learn about the world around us through stories. As story-beings, we need to recognize and harness the power of narrative as an educational tool. Despite the importance of narratives, there are significant gaps in the literature for understanding children's narrative development and designing interventions to support growth. Unlike literacy, there are no state-reported statistics of the rates of narrative development for children, nor are there established consistent methods with comprehensive metrics to systematically document narrative progress or evaluate interventions. These gaps are perpetuated by the complex space of narrative, specifically in the form of the content and the social, cultural, and individual context. / In response to these gaps, we developed Learning Loops, a novel digitally-mediated family learning system for documenting and supporting children's narratives. Embedded in the Learning Loops system is StoryBlocks, an open-ended storytelling app for children ages six to ten. While children play in StoryBlocks, their fine-grained interaction data is captured and streamed to a human coach, who uses a custom-built tool to analyze play and identify narrative trends. Coaches use this analysis to scaffold children's narrative process through direct feedback and promote caregiver co-engagement through text message updates and activities. This system is unique in that it: 1) documents children's stories as a basis for a comprehensive narrative analysis system, and 2) incorporates the important social role in children's learning by using digital tools to augment and support human social engagement in the narrative process. / Through presenting Learning Loops, this work explores the roles that both technology and humans play within these digitally-mediated systems to support narrative development within the child's social context. This dissertation proposes the Two-Lens Approach, a holistic theoretical framework for studying the form, content, and context of children's narratives. This approach is applied to critique the current design and guide future iterations to improve the program's ability to document, analyze, and support children's narrative capacity. / by Anneli Rane Woolf. / Ph. D. / Ph.D. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, May, 2020 / Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / This thesis outlines a framework for sustainable design and fabrication bounded by the synthesis and decomposition of matter by ecosystems. In this methodology, matter is only temporarily diverted from the continuity of organic processes. Motivated by the immense power of ecosystems to efficiently produce and consume matter, this work proposes that both human and non-human systems can be made more efficient and powerful when industrial processes are embedded within ecosystems. This proposition is supported through case studies of three prototypical structures composed partially or entirely of organic matter. In each of these case studies, the framework is applied as a general strategy whereby computational tools simultaneously tailor the properties of abundant biopolymers and geometric designs to minimize discrepancies between the digital representation and physical manifestation of a fabricated object. Methods from a variety of disciplines are applied including energy analysis, mapping material flows, digital design, and additive manufacturing. The effect of this workflow is that abundant materials generally considered to be ill suited for fabrication are augmented with properties that allow them to meet design constraints. Efficacy is analyzed through the consideration of their impact at various scales of deployment, mapping of the material flows required to sustain such processes, quantification of each structure's energy and exergy, and the performative characteristics of designed objects as related to structural properties and biocompatibility. Through these cases and their analyses, this framework is broadly applied as a strategy for sustainable design with the ability to empower ecosystem resource cycles rather than deplete them. The impact of this framework is not limited to manufacturing and fabrication technologies but extends to materials engineering, biology, and ecology. / by Nicolas Lee. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, May, 2020 / Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 75-77). / Recent attempts to fuse design with biologically-based building materials -- even living organisms -- / are enabling us with opportunities to augment natural processes, resulting in new and potentially mutualistic relationships between us and the ecologies that surround us. Yet, the deep conceptual mismatch between the built and the grown has rendered such attempts to join large-scale design and biology a rarity. Extraction, refinement, and discrete handling of materials are still needed in design and fabrication environments, which makes a mutually beneficial relationship with nature difficult to achieve. This calls for a radically different approach to interfacing between machines and organisms across natural and artificial fabrication platforms. In this thesis, I propose using an actuated/responsive interaction architecture, designed to mediate between stakeholders involved in a building process. / I hypothesize that kinetic organism-machine interfaces of this sort will enable us to connect natural and artificial fabrication processes and products into architectural-scale co-fabrication. Focusing on two insect species known to additively produce and modify their environment, I study Bombyx mori (silkworms) and Apis mellifera (honey bees) and present two model environments embodying -- and expressing -- / lessons learned and guidelines established. Exploring a selection of imaging and sensing environments, and analyzing bees and silkworms under various environmental conditions, I lay the groundwork for the development of two interactive scenarios between organisms and machines. I demonstrate the design and realization of a biologically and robotically controlled kinetic fabrication environment with silkworms as fiber-spinning agents, to produce large-scale architectural structures. The experiments conducted as part of this thesis demonstrate that the co-fabrication of large scale structures using responsive, kinetic production platforms is possible and suggests that there is potential for future work to contribute to this fabrication approach. Finally, I investigate what type of interspecific relationship is established in the process and how it may be conceptually represented in a unifying framework. / by Felix Kraemer. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2019 / Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 42-43). / Synthetic biology is a burgeoning field with applications in medicine, agriculture, chemistry, and other fields. Synthetic biology aims to rationally engineer novel functionality into organisms, from the molecular level to whole genome scale. As an engineering discipline, synthetic biology development follows a canonical design-build-test cycle. In a typical workflow, designs are generated in computer programs, and specified at the DNA level. Subsequently, DNA encoding the design must be built to specification and tested for desired functionality in vivo or in vitro. In current practice, building DNA, by de novo DNA synthesis and related methods, is a rate limiting and costly bottleneck for researchers. State of the art de novo DNA Synthesis technologies, are trial-and-error, nondeterministic processes where turnaround times for specified DNA range on the order of weeks, and cost up to several thousand dollars per gene, multigene order. Of the many challenges inherent to building novel DNA sequences is the occurrence of truncation errors (failure to extend), and damaging side reactions during synthesis of short DNA oligonucleotide (100bp) precursors used in DNA assembly. There are also challenges in assembling oligonucleotides due to the tendency of DNA to form secondary structures and undesired annealing products during assembly reactions. Consequently, DNA synthesis companies spend upwards of 80 percent of manufacturing time sequencing thousands of DNA assemblies until a correct DNA assembly is found. This thesis describes a method for rapid, scalable, de novo DNA synthesis embodied as highly parallelized single molecule enzymatic synthesis of 10KB sequences with real time in situ sequence verification. / by Kettner J.F. Griswold Jr. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2019 / [mu] appeared in title on title page appears as lower case Greek letter. Cataloged from the official PDF of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 157-166). / We often perform activities that situationally impair us, decreasing our ability to interact with mobile devices when needed. These impairments manifest physically, by preventing us from using our hands and eyes when already being devoted to other ongoing processes (i.e., biking, driving, etc), and socially, by making certain interaction modalities inappropriate given social norms, etiquette, and rules of engagement. Researchers have investigated using jaw and teeth microgestures as a discreet hands-and- eyes-free solution for mobile device interaction while situationally impaired. However, an opportunity remains to investigate ways to wirelessly and unobtrusively sense these gestures, and further explore and evaluate the design space for jaw and teeth microgestures in the context of general-purpose Human Computer Interaction. This thesis makes four major contributions to the exploration of jaw and teeth microgestures. Through an iterative prototyping process, the work contributes attachable, miniaturized, wireless sensor nodes that are placed bilaterally behind the ears to unobtrusively sense jaw-teeth microgestures with 88% accuracy in a stationary context. The thesis also presents a hyper-personalized mobile application that permits training jaw-teeth gestures and mapping them to mobile device commands. The work further contributes a universal teeth contact and jaw-teeth gesture taxonomy, which is evaluated for its comfort and usability. Finally, it contributes an exploration of the potential use cases of jaw-teeth-gesture-based mobile device interaction. / Tomás Alfonso Vega Gálvez. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences