http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7718 Tue, 21 May 2013 23:19:09 GMT 2013-05-21T23:19:09Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78207 "This is the fluffy robot that only speaks French" : language use between preschoolers, their families, and a social robot while sharing virtual toys Freed, Natalie Anne This thesis proposes an approach to language learning for preschool aged children using social robots as conversation partners within a shared play context for children and their families. It addresses an underserved age for language learning, where early learning can greatly impact later educational success, but that cannot benefit from text-based interventions. With the goal of establishing a shared physical context between multiple participants without absorbing all of the children's focus onto digital content, a hybrid physical and digital interface was iteratively designed and play-tested. This interface took the form of a "café table" on which the child and robot could share food. A robot was programmed to introduce itself and name foods in French, eat some foods and express dislike towards others, respond with distress to a new object, show its focus of attention through gaze, and in one experimental condition, express feedback about its comprehension when spoken to in French or English. The study found that some children as young as 3 years old would treat a social robot as an agent capable of understanding them and of perceiving a shared physical context, and would spontaneously modify their use of language and gesture in order to communicate with it - particularly when the robot communicated confusion. The study also found that parents tended to frame their scaffolding of the children's behavior with the robot in a social context, and without prompting aligned their guidance and reinforcement with language learning goals. After one exposure to the robot and new French vocabulary, children did not retain the robot's utterances, but engaged in communicative and social behaviors and language mimicry throughout the interaction. The system appeared to support multi-user social participation, including both caretakers and siblings of the participants. Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2012.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-68). Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78207 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78206 FEEL : a system for acquisition, processing and visualization of biophysiological signals and contextual information Ayzenberg, Yadid If we are to learn the effects of the environment and our day-to-day actions, and choices on our physiology, we must develop systems that will label biophysiological senor data with contextual information. In this thesis I first present an architecture and implementation of FEEL: a system for the acquisition, processing and visualization of biophysiological signals and contextual information. The system comprises a mobile client application (FMC) and a backend server, The mobile client collects contextual information: phone call details, email reading details, calendar entries, and user location at a fixed interval that is transmitted to the backend server. The backend server stores the contextual information and biophysiological signal data that is uploaded by the user, processes the information and provides a novel interface for viewing the combined data. Next, I present the results of a 10-day user study in which users wore Electrodermal Activity (EDA) wrist sensors that measured their autonomic arousal levels. These users were requested to upload the sensor data and annotate it at the end of the day at first, and then after two days. One group of users had access to both the signal and the full contextual information collected by the mobile phone and the other group could only access the bio physiological signal. At the end of the study the users were asked to fill in a System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire, a user experience survey and a Toronto-Alexithymia (TAS-20) questionnaire. My results show that the FEEL system enables the users to annotate bio-physiological signals at a greater effectiveness than the current state of the art. Finally, I showed that there is a correlation between a person's ability to determine their own arousal level and their score on the Toronto-alexithymia test: the less alexythymic they were, the better their correlation between the EDA and their self-reported arousal. Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2012.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 69-73). Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78206 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78205 The Huggable : a socially assistive robot for pediatric care Santos, Kristopher B. dos The purpose of this thesis is to present the design and evaluation of a new type of socially assistive robot, one that can interact with people and collect various types of sensory input while being small enough to hold in one's arms. This project is a completely new revision of the Huggable project created by Dan Stiehl and Cynthia Breazeal, which features a new mechanical design, a revamped electronics structure, and a polished control system based off of its sister project, DragonBot (developed by Adam Setapen). This thesis describes the process of how this new design came to be, and provides extensive content on how it was designed, along with all major components that were included. An evaluation is also presented as a test run for the new Huggable, in the form of an online survey. The results, along with much of the work done with the initial prototype, showed that there is still much work to be done to be convincing as a robust research robot. Improvements are listed, as well as its future work with Boston Children's Hospital. This new design hopes to finally bring the Huggable project out into the field for actual use with people. Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2012.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-81). Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78205 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78204 An updatable three-dimensional display via direct optical fringe writing of computer - generated holographic stereograms in photorefractive polymer Jolly, Sundeep (Sundeep Kumar) This thesis aims to assess the feasibility of an updatable three-dimensional display based on the direct fringe writing of computer-generated holographic gratings into a novel photorefractive polymer. The photorefractive polymer in question has been developed by Nitto Denko Technical Corporation and has many attractive properties for the 3-D display application, including long image persistence, rapid erasure, high diffraction efficiency, and large area; however, current holographic display systems based around its use involve interference methods that complicate their optical and computational architectures. The direct fringe writing architecture under question is poised as a simplifying and enhancing alternative to previous demonstrations of updatable holographic displays in photorefractive polymeric materials based around such conventional interference-based holographic stereogram techniques. In addition to simplifying optical architectures, direct fringe writing can allow for complete control of recorded hologram characteristics; interference fringes can be computed to simulate any arbitrary reference beam geometry and wavefront curvature. The system concept - comprised of fringe pattern generation on computer, fringe pattern transfer from SLM to photorefractive polymer, and spatial multiplexing for large-image generation - reintroduces accommodation cues to the resulting holographic images and represents a reduction of system footprint, complexity, and cost relative to the current interference-based systems. The adaptation of the Diffraction Specific Coherent Panoramagram fringe computation method - originally developed to drive AOM-based holographic displays at video rates while preserving all depth cues, including accommodation - to the current display architecture is presented and methods for direct fringe transfer from SLM to photorefractive polymer are depicted. Such methods for direct fringe writing are explored in simulation and experiment. Theoretical arguments for system performance are formulated in the context of a wave optics-based system analysis. Preliminary results of horizontal parallax-only images on this display are presented and directions for performance improvements and system extensions are explored. Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2012.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 77-80). Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/78204 2012-01-01T00:00:00Z