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 73-76). / Educational games and digital learning environments provide opportunities to collect fine-grained data on how learners engage with these technologies. The number of technologies targeted at literacy learning for children is increasing. However, the majority of them are structured and reward-based. Therefore, the users' behavior and data collected from them have the same limits. In this thesis, however, we assess children's engagement with a constructionist literacy learning app. The open ended nature of play in such an environment gives us the opportunity to analyze children's play not only through what they made while playing but also how they did it. This thesis provides an analytics pipeline from data acquisition to modeling behavioral patterns. This systematic way of capturing significant events in children's play can be used to inform stakeholders such as parents, peers and teachers and engage them with the learning process. It also gives the learning environment more intelligence on when and what to provide scaffolding on. To collect data, we ran two pilot studies and gathered audio and video recordings of play sessions. In addition, all of the children's interactions within the app were automatically logged. The fine-grained longitudinal data collected during the pilot studies provides a rich yet raw corpus. To reveal the patterns hidden in the data, the analytics pipeline parses logs of low-level interactions into abstract representations for sequences of actions in a word construction process. Next, it visualizes the process for each play session and the entire play history. Using the visualizations, I identified and annotated repeated motifs for more intentional sequences of actions during play and used supervised learning models to capture those patterns. The results of this analytical pipeline are currently being used by literacy experts to provide feedback to parents and suggest activities based on the child's process. / by Mina Soltangheis. / 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 68-77). / Eye exams via a slit lamp are critical in screening for conditions such as cataracts, corneal opacities and pterygia early on to avert vision loss. The slit lamp, however, is a purely qualitative optical device that is bulky, expensive, can cause eye discomfort due to light sensitivity. It also requires a trained physician to operate, making it unsuitable for large-scale screening in resource-constrained settings. In this thesis, we propose a spectrum of portable anterior segment imaging solutions that can be operated by minimally trained health workers. On one end, we present a smartphone attachment with minimal optics and no electronic components beyond what is present in the smartphone itself to examine and image the anterior segment of the eye. This cost-effective, easily scalable solution would help extend the reach of anterior segment examination to extremely resource constrained settings, such as mass-screening camps, mobile ophthalmology clinics, war zones etc. On the other end, we propose purely solid-state instrumentation that employs programmable illumination and light steering optics to simulate the motion of a slit on the eye, thereby exhibiting functionality similar to that of a slit lamp with no moving parts. Finally, we discuss potential deployment strategies for two implementations of this technology in the specific cases of two contrasting healthcare systems in India. / by Shantanu Sinha. / 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 41-43). / It is inevitable that personal architectural environments in the future will contain dozens, if not hundreds, of connected devices that will require human control. Currently, most interactions involve standalone devices, each with a unique and often non-intuitive interface, which places an unacceptable cognitive load on the occupants. To address this challenge, I propose to develop a framework that enables the devices to understand and react to the user's intentions towards the environment using pattern recognition coupled with a single user interface that is consistent across output modes. The system, designed to work within complex transformable environments, will allow the user to control furniture configuration, lighting, transparency, audio, fragrance, health systems, etc. Using machine learning, the system will correlate the user's preferences to those of others who have exhibited similar patterns of behavior in order to predict appropriate settings for novel situations. Overall, the system is expected to reduce the amount of time and cognitive load required to configure an environment for optimal comfort and utility. The proposed framework will be tested and validated in a small, re-configurable workplace environment designed to accommodate private work, phone calls, conversations, napping, and meditating. Occupants will be able to tune many parameters of the environment in response to context-aware transformations triggered by their ongoing activities. The proposed system will have an architecture based on a database infrastructure, sensor data collection, and algorithms for activity and pattern recognition. / by Lucas Cassiano Pereira Silva. / 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. Due to the condition of the original material with text runs off the edges of the pages, the reproduction may have unavoidable flaws. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 167-172). / Generative models are venerated as full probabilistic models that randomly generate observable data given a set of latent variables that cannot be directly observed. They can be used to simulate values for variables in the model, allowing analysis by synthesis or model criticism, towards an iterative cycle of model specification, estimation, and critique. However, many datasets represent a combination of several viewpoints - different ways of looking at the same data that leads to various generalizations. For example, a corpus that has data generated by multiple people may be mixtures of several perspectives and can be viewed with different opinions by others. It isn't always possible to represent the viewpoints by clean separation, in advance, of examples representing each perspective and train a separate model for each point of view. In this thesis, we introduce lensing, a mixed-initiative technique to (i) extract lenses or mappings between machine-learned representations and perspectives of human experts, and (2) generate lensed models that afford multiple perspectives of the same dataset. We explore lensing of latent variable model in their configuration, parameter and evidential spaces. We apply lensing to three health applications, namely imbuing the perspectives of experts into latent variable models that analyze adolescent distress and crisis counseling. / by Karthik Dinakar. / 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 116-118). / In architecture, the building skin is the primary interface for mediating the environment of the external with the internal. But today, this mediation is mechanical, deterministic, and static-often seeing the human as a generalizable and problematic input. With advances in material science however, there is great potential to disrupt these traditional manufactured environments of architecture and turn them into responsive mediated environments. What this thesis aims to explore is this idea of the receptive skin-a sensate and dynamic multimaterial interface for environmental mediation. This suggests that by departing from the view that buildings are static artifacts, we may instead begin to see buildings as organic, living entities. Through the development of a working prototype, this thesis explores how such an interface may manifest itself, through dynamic material composites, instead of mechanical and electronic means. The final prototype is a "proof of concept," a built example of this novel design methodology, which unites material performance with sensate technologies, as a way to enable new interactions between building and environment. / by Chrisoula Kapelonis. / S.M.

Filmography: leaves 85-86. / Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-95). / Film dances, or filmed dance sequences accompanying film songs, are an important part of popular Indian cinema. Over the years, Hindi film dance has evolved from a cinematically simplistic, filmed documentation of performance traditions, to a recognized and increasingly respected dance category emulated in staged performances in India and abroad. Despite their significance, dances in Indian popular films have not been systematically analyzed, and their movement, history, cultural influence and migration remain largely unexplored. The ubiquitous presence and under-theorization of film dances raises many questions about why these dances emerged as key ingredients of film, how their production, dance and cinematic content has evolved over time and, finally, how these dances are received and reinterpreted by audiences outside India. The objective of my investigation here is to set the foundation for an analytical framework for understanding dances in popular Hindi films. Using the relationship between dance sequences in films and their re-staging as Bollywood dances at South Asian cultural shows as a point of departure, I explore the analytical challenges of exploring dances in Hindi films as a first step towards a larger study of the cyclical migration of these dances to be conducted at a later date. My rather formalist approach to Hindi film dances provides a foundation for investigating these dances in way that will allow me to expand on this research in the future. Most importantly, however, I believe my approach to Hindi film dances enables me to explore "Bollywood dance" as a site of reception of Hindi film dances as they move from films to stage. / by Sangita Shresthova. / S.M.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2016. / "September 2016." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references. / (lm)possible Baby is a speculative design project which aims to stimulate discussions about the social, cultural and ethical implications of emerging biotechnologies that could enable same-sex couples to have their own, genetically related children. Delivering a baby from same-sex parents is starting to not look like a sci-fi dream anymore recent developments in genetics and stem cell research, such as the achievements of scientists from Cambridge University in England and Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science 1 have made this dream much closer to reality. Jacob Hanna, the specialist leading the project's Israeli arm, said it may be possible to use the technique to create a baby in just two years. "It has already caused interest from gay groups because of the possibility of making egg and sperm cells from parents of the same sex," he said."2 Is creating a baby from same-sex parents the ethical thing to do? Who has the right to decide this, and how? This project aims to design and inspire debate about the bioethics of producing babies from same-sex couples. In this project, the DNA data of a lesbian couple was analyzed using 23andMe to simulate and visualize their potential children, and then we created a set of fictional, "what if' future family photos using this information to produce a hardcover album which was presented to the couple as a gift. To achieve more public outreach, we worked with the Japanese national television service, NHK, to create a 30-minute documentary film following the whole process, which aired in October 2015. / by Ai Hasegawa. / 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. / We live in a culture that depends on technologies to record our behavior and coordinate our actions with billions of other connected people. In this computational culture, humans and machines continue to perpetuate deep-seated injustices. Our abilities to observe and intervene in other people's lives also allow us to govern, forcing us to ask how to govern wisely and who should be responsible. In this dissertation, I argue that to govern wisely, we need to remake large-scale social experiments to follow values of democracy. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, I spent time with hundreds of communities on the social news platform reddit and learned how they govern themselves. I designed CivilServant, novel experimentation software that communities have used to evaluate how they govern harassment and misinformation. Finally, I examined the uses of this evidence in community policy deliberation. As we develop ways to govern behavior through technology platforms, we have an opportunity to ensure that that the benefits will be enjoyed, questioned, and validated widely in an open society. Despite common views of social experiments as scarce knowledge that consolidates the power of experts, I show how community experiments can scale policy evaluation and expand public influence on the governance of human and machine behavior. / by J. Nathan Matias. / Ph. D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2009. / "June 2009." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 114-125). / In an age of globalization, texts increasingly migrate not only out of their native medium, but their native countries as well. Within the East Asian region, a booming television program trade circulates television texts, both as programs and as formats for re-making within the native culture industry. In this paper, I examine the program Hana Yori Dango, a Japanese manga turned television program that has been produced in Taiwan, Japan, and recently Korea. In particular, the Korean adaptation called Boys over Flowers, which simultaneous caters to a national and export market, exists in cultural and historical tension with the originating authority of the Japanese version. Texts then, in this process of industrial adaptation and cultural indigenization, may be understood as contact zones where asymmetries of historical power battle. Examining the mismatch of Korean form and Japanese narrative in this television melodrama, the narrative traversal of modern spaces, and the reparative capacity of nostalgia in fiction, I expose a contested process of adaptation that defies the easy descriptor of "hybridity." Reading the text historically and comparatively, I locate not only the cultural specificities and anxieties that mark this program as Korean, but also the phantom of a common, regional imaginary of the Asian modern. / by Lan Xuan Le. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 153-159). / (cont.) This thesis examines the evidence of community among listeners to three radio programs, who gather online to discuss radio programming in blogs, message boards and discussion forums provided by those programs. The three programs of focus are Air America Radio's The Majority Report, ABC Radio Networks' Sean Hannity Show, and National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation. The shows are analyzed in terms of how they perform by a new standard of interactive radio, whose benchmark has been established by The Majority Report. First identified in this thesis, the concept of high-interactivity radio brings together both vertical (between audience and broadcaster) and horizontal (intra-audience) interactivities. The relative success of high-interactivity radio is judged by a comparative analysis of the evidence of community in radio-online discussion areas, and the use of these online spaces by show producers as a vehicle for listener feedback, interaction, and content generation. The observations made in these three radio-online discussion areas can be practically applied to the work of broadcasters. Toward this end, the thesis closes with a brief ethnographic description of Open Source, a new public radio program currently attempting to develop its own version of high-interactivity radio. / by Joellen Easton. / S.M.