http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7898 Wed, 19 Jun 2013 12:30:48 GMT 2013-06-19T12:30:48Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79306 ReflectOns : mental prostheses for self-reflection Sadi, Sajid H. (Sajid Hassan) Since the time of the first philosophers, logic and observed human behavior have stood somewhat in contradiction. More recently, scientist have started to delve into decision making to understand why the way we act differs from rational choice, and indeed from our own desires. We believe that it is possible to use just-in-time feedback drawn from machine-observable behavior to help align behavior with personal goals. This dissertation presents mental prosthetics, a model for distributed, embodied, design-embedded, just-in-time interfaces that augment the human judgment process. Drawing information from the activity of the user around them, mental prostheses analyze behavioral patterns in a way orthogonal to human cognition. Unlike persuasive interfaces, mental prostheses attempt to align choices with personal goals by cueing the user with just-in-time information. Lastly, these devices provide calm yet understandable feedback to draw the user's attention at the correct time to the information available to them. This dissertation provides several prototypes and design explorations as a means of sampling the various approaches to data collection, synthesis, and feedback. Focusing on self-reflection, these sample designs form a subclass of mental prostheses that we term reflectOns. We show through the studies carried out in the course of this dissertation that these systems are effective in changing behavior to be better aligned with user goals. Lastly, this dissertation provides a set of design guidelines that assist in the creation of new mental prostheses. While we discuss a variety of scenarios in this work, it is only the beginning of the exploration. The design guidelines provide insight into both the critical aspects of the design of such systems, as well as possible input and feedback methodologies. These guidelines, together with the reflectOns themselves, provide a basis for future work in this area. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February 2013.; "September 2012." Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 113-118). Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79306 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79305 Materializing interaction Coelho, Marcelo At the boundary between people, objects and spaces, we encounter a broad range of surfaces. Their properties perform functional roles such as permeability, comfort or illumination, while conveying information such as an object's affordances, composition, or history of use. However, today surfaces are static and can neither adapt to our changing needs, nor communicate dynamic information and sense user input. As technology advances and we progress towards a world imbued with programmable materials, how will designers create physical surfaces that are adaptive and can take full advantage of our sensory apparatus? This dissertation looks at this question through the lens of a three-tier methodology consisting of the development of programmable composites; their application in design and architecture; and contextualization through a broader material and surface taxonomy. The focus is placed primarily on how materials and their aggregate surface properties can be used to engage our senses. A series of design probes and four final implementations are presented, each addressing specific programmable material and surface properties. Surflex, Sprout 1/O, and Shutters are continuous surfaces which can change shape to modify their topology, texture and permeability, and Six-Forty by Four-Eighty is a light-emitting display surface composed of autonomous and reconfigurable physical pixels. The technical and conceptual objectives of these designs are evaluated through exhibitions in a variety of public spaces, such as museums, galleries, fairs, as well as art and design festivals. This dissertation seeks to provide contributions on multiple levels, including: the development of techniques for the creation and control of programmable surfaces; the definition of a vocabulary and taxonomy to describe and compare previous work in this area; and finally, uncovering design principles for the underlying development of future programmable surface aesthetics. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, February 2013.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. "September 2012."; Includes bibliographical references (p. 141-148). Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79305 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79304 Collective artificial intelligence : simulated role-playing from crowdsourced data Orkin, Jeffrey David Collective Artificial Intelligence (CAl) simulates human intelligence from data contributed by many humans, mined for inter-related patterns. This thesis applies CAI to social role-playing, introducing an end-to-end process for compositing recorded performances from thousands of humans, and simulating open-ended interaction from this data. The CAI process combines crowdsourcing, pattern discovery, and case-based planning. Content creation is crowdsourced by recording role-players online. Browser-based tools allow nonexperts to annotate data, organizing content into a hierarchical narrative structure. Patterns discovered from data power a novel system combining plan recognition with case-based planning. The combination of this process and structure produces a new medium, which exploits a massive corpus to realize characters who interact and converse with humans. This medium enables new experiences in videogames, and new classes of training simulations, therapeutic applications, and social robots. While advances in graphics support incredible freedom to interact physically in simulations, current approaches to development restrict simulated social interaction to hand-crafted branches that do not scale to the thousands of possible patterns of actions and utterances observed in actual human interaction. There is a tension between freedom and system comprehension due to two bottlenecks, making open-ended social interaction a challenge. First is the authorial effort entailed to cover all possible inputs. Second, like other cognitive processes, imagination is a bounded resource. Any individual author only has so much imagination. The convergence of advances in connectivity, storage, and processing power is bringing people together in ways never before possible, amplifying the imagination of individuals by harnessing the creativity and productivity of the crowd, revolutionizing how we create media, and what media we can create. By embracing data-driven approaches, and capitalizing on the creativity of the crowd, authoring bottlenecks can be overcome, taking a step toward realizing a medium that robustly supports player choice. Doing so requires rethinking both technology and division of labor in media production. As a proof of concept, a CAI system has been evaluated by recording over 10,000 performances in The Restaurant Game, automating an Al-controlled waitress who interacts in the world, and converses with a human via text or speech. Quantitative results demonstrate how CAI supports significantly more open-ended interaction with humans, while focus groups reveal factors for improving engagement. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 173-178). Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79304 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79303 The birth of a word Roy, Brandon C. (Brandon Cain) A hallmark of a child's first two years of life is their entry into language, from first productive word use around 12 months of age to the emergence of combinatorial speech in their second year. What is the nature of early language development and how is it shaped by everyday experience? This work builds from the ground up to study early word learning, characterizing vocabulary growth and its relation to the child's environment. Our study is guided by the idea that the natural activities and social structures of daily life provide helpful learning constraints. We study this through analysis of the largest-ever corpus of one child's everyday experience at home. Through the Human Speechome Project, the home of a family with a young child was outfitted with a custom audio-video recording system, capturing more than 200,000 hours of audio and video of daily life from birth to age three. The annotated subset of this data spans the child's 9-24 month age range and contains more than 8 million words of transcribed speech, constituting a detailed record of both the child's input and linguistic development. Such a comprehensive, naturalistic dataset presents new research opportunities but also requires new analysis approaches - questions must be operationalized to leverage the full scale of the data. We begin with the task of speech transcription, then identify "word births" - the child's first use of each word in his vocabulary. Vocabulary growth accelerates and then shows a surprising deceleration that coincides with an increase in combinatorial speech. The vocabulary growth timeline provides a means to assess the environmental contributions to word learning, beginning with aspects of caregiver input speech. But language is tied to everyday activity, and we investigate how spatial and activity contexts relate to word learning. Activity contexts, such as "mealtime", are identified manually and with probabilistic methods that can scale to large datasets. These new nonlinguistic variables are predictive of when words are learned and are complementary to more traditionally studied linguistic measures. Characterizing word learning and assessing natural input variables can lead to new insights on fundamental learning mechanisms. Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2013.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (p. 185-192). Tue, 01 Jan 2013 00:00:00 GMT http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/79303 2013-01-01T00:00:00Z