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 75-77). / In this thesis we present ShowMe++, an immersive mobile collaboration system that allows a remote user to communicate with a peer using video, audio and hand gestures. We explore the use of a Head Mounted Display (HMD), depth camera and wearable haptic devices to create a system that (1) enables a remote user to be immersed in another first-person's point of view, (2) offers a new way for the remote expert to provide guidance through three dimensional, real-time hand gestures and voice, (3) allows natural interactions with interfaces of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and (4) provides haptic feedback when interacting with remote or virtual interfaces. Using our system, both users feel present in the same physical environment and can perceive realtime communication from one another in the form of 2-handed gestures and voice. We discuss the design and implementation of the system as well as applications scenarios such as remote maintenance, 3D exploration and remote ghost presence. The user study demonstrates that hand transmission, first person point of view and immersion improve the feeling of co-presence and make remote teaching more effective. / by Xavier Benavides Palos. / 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 94-98). / Plants are photosynthetic eukaryotes with a billion years of evolutionary history. While primarily sessile, they have developed distinctive abilities to adapt to the environment. They are self-powered, self-fabricating, self-regenerating and active signal networks. They carry highly advanced systems to sense and respond to the environment. We strive for such sensing and responses in our electronics; self growing or self repairing abilities in our architecture; and being sustainable at scale in general. The industrial and technological thought process has mostly been devising artificial means or replicating natural systems synthetically. However, I propose a convergent view of technological evolution with our ecology where techno-plant hybrids are created. The approach is to formulate symbiotic associations and to place the technology in conjunction with the plant function(s). In this thesis, I go from the outside to inside the plants in conceiving such synergetic processes and present case studies of their implementation and analysis. I begin with a robot-plant hybrid where the robotic device adds mobility and is triggered with the plant's own signals. Next, lead (II) detection nanosensors are presented which reside inside the leaf of a plant and continuously sample through plant hydraulics. This is followed with a design study for plants with new conductive channels grown inside them and their subsequent use as inconspicuous motion sensors. I conclude with a symbiotic robot that lives on a sunflower plant and automatically trains or directs its growth with onboard lighting. The end result is an augmented-plant society where technology adds non-native functions or redirects the natural processes.. / by Harpreet Sareen. / S.M.

Thesis: Ph. D., 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 156-160). / State of the art technology has made it possible to monitor various physiological signals for prolonged periods. Using wearable sensors, individuals can be monitored; sensor data can be collected and stored in digital format, transmitted to remote locations, and analyzed at later times. This technology may open the door to a multitude of exciting and innovative applications. We could learn the effects of the environment and of our day-to-day choices on our physiology. Does the number of hours we sleep affect our mood during the following day? Is our performance impacted by the times we schedule our recreational activities? Does physical activity affect our quality of sleep? Do these choices have an impact on chronic conditions? This proliferation of smart phones and wearable sensors is creating very large data sets that may contain useful information. Gartner claims that the Internet of Things Install Base Will Grow to 26 Billion Units By 2020. However, the magnitude of generated data creates new challenges as well. Processing and analyzing these large data sets in an efficient manner requires advanced computational tools. The challenge is that as more data are collected, it becomes more computationally expensive to process requiring novel algorithmic techniques and parallel architectures. Traditional analysis techniques do not scale adequately and in many cases researchers are required to create customized environments. This thesis explores and extends the affordances of warehouse scale computing for interactivity and pliability of large-scale time series data sets. In the first part of the thesis, I describe a theoretical framework for distributed processing of time-series data that is implementation invariant and may be implemented on an existing distributed computation infrastructure. Next, I present a detailed architecture and implementation of the theoretical framework, which was deployed on several clusters, as well as indepth analysis of the user-interface design considerations and the user experience design process. In the second part of the thesis, I present a system evaluation that consists of two parts. The first part is a quantitative characterization of the system performance in a variety of scenarios that included different dataset and cluster sizes. The second part contains the results of a qualitative user study: researchers were asked to use the system to analyze data that they had collected in their own studies and to participate in an ethnographic study on their experience. This study reveals that distributed computing holds great potential for accelerating scientific research utilizing large scale sensor data sets, providing new ways to see patterns in large sets of data, and much speedier analyses. / by Yadid Ayzenberg. / Ph. D.

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 122-131). / This thesis introduces computer vision algorithms that harness street-level imagery to conduct automated surveys of the built environment and populations at an unprecedented resolution and scale. We introduce new tools for computing quantitative measures of urban appearance and urban change. First, we describe Streetscore, an algorithm that quantifies how safe a street block looks to a human observer, using computer vision and crowdsourcing. We extend this work with an efficient convolutional neural network-based method that is capable of computing several perceptual attributes of the built environment from thousands of cities from all six inhabited continents. Second, we introduce a computer vision algorithm to compute Streetchange-a metric for change in the built environment-from time-series street-level imagery. A positive Streetchange is indicative of urban growth; while negative Streetchange is indicative of decay. We use these tools to introduce new datasets. We use the Streetscore algorithm to generate the largest dataset of urban appearance to date, which covers more than 1 million street blocks from 21 American cities. We use the Streetchange algorithm to also generate a dataset for urban change containing more than 1.5 million street blocks from five large American cities. These datasets have enabled research studies across fields such as economics, sociology, architecture, urban planning, and public health. We utilize these datasets to provide new insights on important research questions. With the dataset on urban appearance, we show that criminal activity has a robust positive correlation with the spatial variation in architecture within neighborhoods. With the dataset on urban change, we show that positive urban change occurs in geographically and physically attractive areas with dense, highly-educated populations. Taken together, the tools, datasets, and insights described in this thesis demonstrate that computer vision-driven surveys of people and places have the potential to massively scale up studies in social science, to change the way cities are built, and to improve the design, execution, and evaluation of policy and aid interventions. / by Nikhil Naik. / Ph. D.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 131-132). / An audience's satisfaction with an entertainment product is dependent on how well their expectations are fulfilled. This study delves into the implicit contract that is formed between the purveyor of an entertainment property and their audience, as well as the consequences of frustrating audience expectations. Building on this model of the implicit contract, the creation of expectations through marketing, character and world development, and the invocation of genre discourses are examined through the lens of the television shows House M.D. and Veronica Mars. The issues surrounding the dynamic equilibrium between novelty and stability in serial entertainment and entertainment franchises brought up by these initial case studies are examined in further detail through the collectible card game Magic: the Gathering, and the complexity of the interactions between different types of expectations are demonstrated via a study of the superhero comics serials 52 and Civil War. / by Alexander Chance Austin. / 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 69-77). / Artificial intelligence algorithms are becoming an increasingly important part of human life with many chat bots and digital personal assistants now interacting directly with us through natural language. Such human-computer interaction can be made more useful by enriching the underlying algorithms with a detailed sense of emotion. In my thesis I propose new ways to detect, encode and modify emotional content in text. First, I show how we can leverage the vast amount of texts on social media with emojis to train a classifier that can accurately detect various kinds of emotional content in text. Secondly, I introduce a state-of-the-art domain adaptation method that is explicitly designed to tackle issues occurring in the messy real-world text data that existing NLP methods struggle with. Lastly, I propose a new algorithm that could be used to decompose text inputs into disentangled representations and then manipulate these representations in a controlled manner to obtain a modified version of the input. / by Bjarke Felbo. / 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 26-28). / Many behaviors spread through social contact. However, different behaviors seem to require different degrees of social reinforcement to spread within a network. Some behaviors spread via simple contagion, where a single contact with an "activated node" is sufficient for transmission, while others require complex contagion, with reinforcement from multiple nodes to adopt the behavior. But why do some behaviors require more social reinforcement to spread than others? Here we hypothesize that learning more difficult behaviors requires more social reinforcement. We test this hypothesis by analyzing the programming language adoption of hundreds of thousands of programmers on the social coding platform Github. We show that adopting more difficult programming languages requires more reinforcement from the collaboration network. This research sheds light on the role of collaboration networks in programming language acquisition. / by Sanjay Guruprasad. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-71). / This thesis explores the practices of filmmakers of color in the United States who employ strategies to circumvent industrial, financial and cultural barriers to production and distribution. To overcome these barriers, many filmmakers of color in the United States operate as independents, which can allow them to route around Hollywood or forge a new space within. For most contemporary independent minority filmmakers, such as those from Latin, Asian, Pacific, Native and African American communities, an amalgam of political, industrial, economic and technological shifts have both facilitated and hindered access to crucial funding and distribution opportunities, which in turn impacts their ability to control and shape their imagery and identity. The result of these impediments inspires a mix of endeavors by those who seek mainstream access and success, those who seek independent status, and the hybrid practices of those who increasingly negotiate between the two. Hybrid Cinematics describes practices of those who negotiate such strategies to not only overcome persistent barriers, but also to strengthen their presence and authority within the American motion picture industry. / by Tracy K. Daniels. / 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. / Training Transhumanism is a psycho-physical training regimen for evolving the future of the human, developed in collaboration with the choreographer luciana achugar. The regimen seeks to develop within the human new sensitivities and capacities for a world marked by everincreasing ecological and technological change, based on the model of the cephalopod. We focus on three main traits: (1) Embodied and tactile awareness and cognition; (2) The resiliency of camouflage, defined as a hyper-awareness of one's local environment and the flexibility to respond swiftly by morphing one's perceived identity; and (3) a distributed intelligence (positing that the future of the human may include more than one "body" - how to then develop our abilities to push past negotiation, collaboration and into the forming of a single intention and/or organism with one or more people). Training Transhumanism is rooted in a body of research aimed towards developing an ecological, embodied and ethical approach towards the "the future". Using the cephalopod rather than the machine as the model for the future of the human, the work embraces the capacities residing in the biological human body and the pleasures rooted in bodily labors; explores the possibilities for mythological, embodied and indigenous knowledge for the project of innovation; posits the "model species" as a role model for a kind of humanity rather than only an instrument for science; and embraces training as a technology is rooted in practice, development of internal abilities, and equity in access. / by Miriam Simun. / 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 77-82). / Pintail is a mobile companion application for guided storytelling. To inspire and augment story creation, Pintail uses priming as a technique by showing the user what others feel or have drawn about the places s/he is visiting. These Pintail prompts are synthesized from online travel reviews and doodle books. Some prompts are displayed in an ambient manner on a second screen. Users can use the Pintail story-creation tools to remix, reflect and create their own stories. The stories created by Pintail have an analog form. They are printed on a re-purposed mobile receipt printer. They are designed to catalyze in person-conversations. Pintail tries to balance between the story creation activity and the actual travel experience. Pintail provides the users with the structure and tools for storytelling that are aware of the short attention span of today's audience. / by Sujoy Kumar Chowdhury. / S.M.