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 36-37). / In this work, we designed and implemented several distinct and combined behavior stimuli experimental setups, which were used to characterize larval zebrafish behavior at various stimuli parameters. Tested stimuli was chosen from the perspective of eventual fluorescent neural imaging, so as to be both compatible with, and aware of the stimulating aspects of, a conventional florescence microscope incorporating an excitation laser. Despite the high variance of typical zebrafish behavioral responses, we were able to draw several conclusions. We characterized some optimal stimuli parameters for eliciting consistent responses, from time between stimuli trials to the speed at which a motion stimuli should be moved. We found that the presence of higher temperatures heavily mediates stimuli response, from startle to food-seeking behavior. We characterized a method of distinguishing between a behavioral movement response in reaction to an externally induced shock stimuli, and a directly-induced muscle contraction from the same stimuli. From an imaging perspective, when performing imaging using a typical, stimulating, florescence microscope laser, it appears that visual stimuli response is mediated, but not the nonvisual stimuli of a shock. In the future, observed transitions between behavioral states in response to thresholds of chosen stimuli parameters may be used as tools to explore how decisions are made at these junctures. / by Michael Alexander Skuhersky. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-165). / This thesis is a study of the Fisher Price PXL 2000 camera and the artists and amateurs who make films and videos with this technology. The Pixelvision camera records video onto an audiocassette; its image is low-resolution, black and white. Fisher Price marketed the PXL 2000 to children in 1987, but withdrew the camera after one year. Despite its lack of commercial success, the camera became popular with avant-garde artists, amateur film- and videomakers and collectors, sparking a renewed interest in the obsolete camera. An online community has built up around the format, providing its members with information on how to modify the camera to make it compatible with contemporary digital equipment. Although Pixelvision garners little recognition from mainstream culture, the camera's hipster cachet and perceived rarity has driven up prices in the community and in auctions. This thesis examines the position of the PXL 2000 camera within the history of moving image technology, and in the context of today's digital video equipment. How has this obsolete video camera made the transition from analog to digital? The thesis also explores Pixelvision's position in the cultural hierarchy of media, as well as the motivations of artists and users who are creating with the camera today, as it moves further and further into its obsolescence. / by Andrea Nina McCarty. / 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 57-61). / Road repair expenditure comprises a significant portion of US federal and municipal budgets. Inspection and timely maintenance are crucial preventative measures against pavement distress formation that can lower the monetary burden of repairs. Yet state of the art road inspection techniques still employ technicians to perform distress measurements manually. These methods are often too costly, time-consuming, labor-intensive and require technical expertise. Meanwhile, autonomous systems are increasingly deployed in place of human operators where tasks are monotonous and where risk of exposure to hostile conditions is great. As a time-consuming but highly repetitive task, road inspection presents a promising candidate for task automation. Automating road inspection can present significant efficiency gains that can aid agencies in responding to early signs of erosion in a timely manner. In this work, I explore the capacity of drones to perform autonomous pavement inspections. I develop a system that dispatches drones to survey an area, diagnose the presence of pavement distress in real time, and record imagery and coordinates of locations requiring repair. This system presents an alternative to on-ground inspections and tools that draw on crowd-sourced mechanisms to identify potholes. It builds on other recent technological solutions that employ remote sensing to collect and interpret data on pavement health. The results from this mission will be visualized through a web platform that can not only aid cities in consolidating a fragmented and costly data collection process, but also in minimize human error in the identification and prioritization of problem areas. / by Mia Petkova. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., 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 67-72). / This thesis documents the development of an "expert-free" device in order to realize a system for scalable screening of the eye fundus. The goal of this work is to demonstrate enabling technologies that remove dependence on expert operators and explore the usefulness of this approach in the context of scalable health screening. I will present a system that includes a novel method for eye self-alignment and automatic image analysis and evaluate its effectiveness when applied to a case study of a diabetic retinopathy screening program. This work is inspired by advances in machine learning that makes accessible interactions previously confined to specialized environments and trained users. I will also suggest some new directions for future work based on this expert-free paradigm. / by Tristan Breaden Swedish. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-66). / What game design opportunities do we create when we extend massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) to cell phones? MMOs allow us to create representations of our own increasing mastery, and mobile gives us better access to this mastery and allows us to integrate it more fully into the ways we see ourselves. MMOs motivate mastery by making that mastery personally and socially relevant, and visibly showing it increase. Virtual worlds that make players feel physically and socially present increase motivation to achieve mastery. MMOs that convince players their avatars represent some aspect of their personalities increase motivation to invest in and experiment with different constructions of self. I apply these principles to an analysis of two games: Labyrinth, a game I helped create, and World of Warcraft, the current leading MMO. With Labyrinth, I explain the design decisions we made and their impact. With World of Warcraft, I described how altering the design could accommodate mobile play and better motivate increasing mastery. / by Daniel Roy. / 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]-63). / It's long been known that humans, like many animals, exhibit patterns of behavior that appear to balance exploration of new opportunity and resources with exploitation of already-found safe bets. Humans seem to leverage exploration not only to find quality resources, but also to find quality sources of information, such as people or communities. In this thesis, I explore how exploration behavior and the information diversity afforded by such behavior relates to learning and discovery. I first take a theoretical and algorithmic approach to show how considering exploration behavior and information diversity in deep reinforcement learning systems can lead to improved learning. I then present brief observational studies of exploration behavior in two real-world human systems: a social trading network and human mobility in a major U.S. metro area. In the social trading network, I show that users who fail to seek out diverse information far from their local network are more likely to receive low returns from their portfolios. In the case of human mobility, I find that people tend to have more exploratory relationships with places that are more economically diverse. These studies show that information diversity is closely linked to human exploration behavior, and that inefficient exploration can lead to poorer decision-making. Together, the contributions in this thesis paint a preliminary picture of the importance of information diversity in dynamic networks of learners, be they people or machines. / by Dan Calacci. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 174-176). / An examination of the changing representation of male homosexuality in American superhero comics between the years 1986 and 2003. The thesis gives some theoretical attention to problems of epistemology, and the uses of connotative as opposed to denotative representation and reading. It traces the history of the discourse to the paranoia and anxiety generated by Fredric Wertham's 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which has led to an anxiety about "the gay-Batman reading" that has affected the shape of the genre's evolution. In Part One, the thesis examines the ways in which superhero comics have historically discussed homosexuality, using metaphors or symbolic "tropes," which variously imagine the superhero as a costume fetishist, as flamboyant, as sadomasochistic, as suspiciously homosocial, or as a pedophile. In Part Two, close readings of contemporary instances of gay characters in superhero texts offers insights into current trends in representation. The close readings examine Northstar, of the Marvel comics Alpha Flight and Uncanny X-Men; Apollo and the Midnighter, of the comics Stormwatch and The Authority, variously published by Wildstorm and DC Comics; and the character Terry Berg in Green Lantern, published by DC Comics. / by Susannah Mandel. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 121-128). / For several decades, secure multiparty computation has been the topic of extensive research, as it enables computing any functionality in a privacy-preserving manner, while ensuring correctness of the outputs. In recent years, the field has seen tremendous progress in terms of efficiency, although most results remained impractical for real applications concerning complex functionalities or significant data. When privacy is not a concern and we are only interested in achieving consensus in a distributed computing environment, the rise of cryptocurrencies, specifically Bitcoin, has presented an efficient and robust solution that exceeds the limits imposed by prior theoretical results. Primarily, Bitcoin's relative efficiency and superiority in achieving consensus is due to its inclusion of incentives. By doing so, it extends the standard cryptographic model to one that reasons about security through rationality of the different players. Inspired by this idea, this thesis focuses on the development of an efficient, general-purpose secure computation platform that relies on blockchain and cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin) for efficiency and scalability. Similar to how Bitcoin transformed the idea of distributed consensus, the goal in this work is to take secure multi-party computation from the realm of theory to practice. To that end, a formal model of secure computation in an environment of rational players is developed and is used to show how in this framework, efficiency is improved compared to the standard cryptographic model. The second part of this thesis deals with improving secure computation protocols over the integers and fixed-point numbers. The protocols and tools developed are a significant improvement over the current state-of-the-art, with an optimally efficient secure comparison protocol (for up to 64-bit integers) and better asymptotic bounds for fixed-point division. / by Guy Zyskind. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, February 2004. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-143). / The US Army developed multiplayer online First Person Shooter video game, America's Army, was examined as the first instance of an entirely state-produced and directed enterprise leveraging video game popular culture. Specifically, this study is concerned with the potential of the America's Army gamespace as a US civilian-military public sphere of the Information Age, as assessed through Habermasian theories of democratic communication. Interview fieldwork was carried out in several America's Army game communities including those of real-life military personnel, Christian Evangelicals, and hackers. The political activities of these exceptional game communities are considered for the ways they escape and transcend current critical theories of Internet-based public spheres. / by Zhan Li. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, September 2008. / "August 2008." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 150-153). / This thesis argues that slapstick is a mode of comedy that has become a tradition because its basic principles of physical violence and disruption, and its conventions of grotesque movement and of mockery and abuse of the body, have been developed across media, cultures, and eras. Accordingly, this thesis examines the comic routines or lazzi -independent and modular micronarratives- where the slapstick principles and conventions have been formalized, and explores their different reinterpretations: from Commedia dell'Arte to American Vaudeville to American live-action comedy to American animation. Since sound plays a major role inside the lazzi, the analysis focuses on the sound practices and technologies that have been used across media to produce comic effects. In addition, this thesis claims that the theatrical animated cartoons -Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies- made at Termite Terrace between 1937 and 1943 embody the slapstick tradition, reinvigorate it, and transform it. The thesis explains the production processes (technologies and practices) that led up to the creation of an energetic audiovisual rhythm and the sophisticated orchestration of all the sound elements (music, voices, sound-effects) in complex soundtracks. Finally, an audiovisual analysis of seven animated shorts reveals a sonic vocabulary for depicting the cartoon body and shows the schizophonic mimesis that takes place when using it. All in all, the study of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies of this time period reveals the interplay between convention and innovation that characterizes the slapstick style of Termite Terrace, a style that years later became the trademark of Warner Bros. animation. / by Andres Alberto Lombana Bermudez. / S.M.