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, 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, 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.

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. / Kendall Square, home to MIT, a world-class university and a district known globally for its reputation as an epicenter of ideas and innovation, has recently seen a new wave of development seeking to turn it into a place for people. Typically, multiple developers and private investors will bid on developing the area. The competitive nature of this process suggests that involved parties have varying and potentially conflicting objectives. For example, the soaring office and residential rents in Kendall Square make it attractive to private developers looking for monetary gains. Furthermore, in an area with an already high employment density, the addition of more office and commercial spaces could increase the stress on the public transportation system that is struggling to keep up with current demand. This becomes a design problem with no optimal solution. The question becomes, how do we design districts to be more livable for people? In this research we propose a computational evaluation decision support platform to facilitate collaborations between stakeholders in their interactions within the contexts of urban planning. Whether planned interventions or new developments, the aim of this research is to give stakeholders the ability to weigh the implications from these interventions on the vitality of districts. Chapter 1 lays the foundation of the theoretical contributions put forth by Jane Jacobs regarding urban vitality. Chapter 2 discusses the four-diversity conditions for urban vitality and early attempts to validate these conditions. Chapter 3 presents an overview of the urban elements of both Kendall Square and Harvard Square as a case study. In chapter 4 we apply Jacobs' vitality conditions to both case studies. We find that Harvard Square is balanced in terms of Jacobs' conditions, while Kendall Square suffered form an imbalance in residential density. Chapter 5 presents the computational evaluation platform "CityMatrix" and uses the Volpe and MIT development sites as examples of urban interventions. We find that the current plan, approximately 16,000 employees and 3,500 residents is not enough to increase the population density to make Kendall Square a more vital district. Lastly, chapter 6 provides a conclusion and future steps for this research. / by Waleed F. Gowharji. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2017. / Page 85 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 81-84). / This thesis aims to utilize an output method for popup fabrication, using chemical inflation as a technique for instant, hardware-free shape change. By applying state-changing techniques as a medium for material activation, we provide a framework for a two-part assembly process, starting from the manufacturing side, whereby a structural body is given its form, through to the user side, where the form potential of a soft structure is activated and a form becomes complete. The process discussed in this thesis is similar in nature to existing chemical reaction home-activation kits, such as hand warmers or cold packs, however, with the inclusion of volume-change and automatic assembly, this method gives way to alternative application possibilities and component-free construction. Along with structural configuration, this thesis provides material development for the application of volume changing membranes for the purpose of material surprise and transformation.` / by Penelope Eugenia Webb. / 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 101-108). / This thesis introduces PubPub, a complete publishing system that is consonant with the way software and research ideas are developed. It is author-driven, continuous, collaborative, and allows for data and code to be directly integrated into the document. PubPub is optimized for collaboration and iterative document creation; taking inspiration from the software development cycle it allows for more participatory forms of review. We hypothesize that by changing the scientific review process from one of static critique to one of interactive collaboration we can increase the error-detection rate of scientific review. We present an experiment to test this hypothesis by measuring error detection rates across several interactive and non-interactive documents. This work is motivated by a growing recognition that in many fields, notably those that rely on data analysis and computing, the existing review process is not sufficiently fair, accurate, or timely. / by Travis Rich. / Ph. D.

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 116-120). / Computational thinking has been described as a basic skill that should be included in the educational curriculum. Several online screen-based platforms for learning computational thinking have been developed during the past decades. In this thesis we propose the concept of Embodied Spatial Programming as a new and potentially improved programming paradigm for learning computational thinking in space. We have developed HyperCubes, an example Augmented Reality authoring platform that makes use of this paradigm. With a set of qualitative user studies we have assessed the engagement levels and the potential learning outcomes of the application. Through space, the physical environment, creativity and play the user is able to tinker with basic programming concepts that can lead to a better adoption of computational thinking skills. / by Anna Fusté Lleixà. / S.M.