You've built a prototype of the next-generation laptop, which reads minds and automatically generates ice cream. Now sponsors want hundreds, CNN's picked up on it, and people from Australia to Zimbabwe want them. How can you manufacture them to share with the world, ranging from other academics to Fortune 500 companies, with a minimum of fuss? A panel of Media Lab faculty, staff, and students will explore the process of getting innovations out into the world rapidly, from small scale manufacturing to starting companies to open source hardware. Focus will be on generating copies of a device that has been prototyped at the Media Lab, for sharing with collaborators, and getting into the hands of the public.

A panel of students who have used the Commonsense technology in some way, but who are NOT in the Software Agents group. The panel will allow students from outside to group to give feedback, commentary, and lessons learned: something that is normally not common.

Urban environments are increasingly filled with digital display systems that are inflexible, flat, bounded, high-resolution, and unresponsive. In this paper, we explore the potential of physically instantiated pixels that enable flexible, reconfigurable, unbounded, low-resolution, and responsive urban displays. Urban Pixels are nodes in a wireless network of physical pixels for urban spaces. Each pixel unit includes a microcontroller, RF transceiver (433 MHz), LED module (ten bright, white LEDs), rechargeable Li-Ion battery pack, IR sensor and renewable energy source such as photo-voltaic cells. Two acrylic half-spheres (4-inch diameter) protect the components from the elements. No additional wiring is needed for communication and the units can be mounted individually to any surface. A small-scale prototype network of fifty Urban Pixels was displayed on a façade of Eden Court Theater in Inverness, Scotland from June 1 ? June 7, 2008. The public was encouraged to change display patterns via SMS or to interact with individual units via flashlights. We observed and informally interviewed theater guests and passers-by interacting with the façade for several nights. Based on these results, we outline an exciting problem space for designing displays and lighting systems in cities.

Information storage and storage sharing are key components of modern networked computer systems. Mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones normally have very limited storage capacities compared with PCs or laptops, while storing a large number of media objects (such as e-books, pictures and videos, etc.) on mobile devices could take a lot of space. In this project, we study collaborative storage with mobile devices, where contributory storage infrastructure is constructed among a group of mobile devices for P2P (peer-to-peer) media sharing. We analyze the design tradeoffs of the collaborative storage system with mobile devices via concrete application examples in different settings. We experimentally verify the performance and feasibility of the constructed prototype of a shared e-library with a collection of e-books, pictures and videos based upon the paradigm of collaborative storage with mobile devices.

Today, imaging technology is deeply related with various fields such as robotics, healthcare, entertainment and leaning. The technology is changing our world very rapidly with the wide spread use and development of imaging products. Also, it is playing an important role in several research projects at Media Lab. In the accordance with this trend, opinions from experts in diverse fields will be very helpful to prospect what imaging technology will bring us in the future. Panel will consist of group leaders and will discuss the future impact of imaging technology from various viewpoints.

A working model of interaction to facilitate story telling exhibit design. Interaction design is a mostly subjective process, the model I will propose allows for the interaction to be instrumented such that data may be collection with the context of the interaction. The model help the designer think through the interaction experience in a way that extends beyond the specific encounter and allows of persistence of choices made by the individual actors and the possibility of learning behaviors demonstrated by the exhibits. The model applies to a broad range of physical and virtual interactions ranging from robotics to retail space from web sites to informational displays. The model presumes that a set of sensors and actuators enable easy assembly of an interactive exhibit using a standard toolkit and easy software components. The working session will explore the application of the proposed model to discover how it may be apply to a design process. The Model borrows from learning theory, design principles, CHI, story telling, commoditization of components, fabrication, and assemblage. The use of such a model provide to a richer analysis of data collected from the instrumentation of exhibits that can be analyzed to understand the experience that people have with using the affordances. This work is part of an on-going research project I am a part of at the University of Arizona.

The Center for Future Banking (CFB) is starting its second year at the Media Lab and we are not completely aligned in our understanding of what to expect from the Media Lab research nor does the Media Lab yet fully understand why CFB was formed. Our first formative year was active with visits and discussions but short on specifics. We would like to present to the ML Community what our very broad Macro Themes are, why they are enabling to the Media Lab, and where some of the current work fits within these themes. The Themes are complemented by a focus on computational capabilities and we will put this in an overall framework context. We also wish to dispel any myths about banking or CFB in terms of our commitment and relevancy of the research. Our panel will answer questions, challenges, or suggestions from the ML Community to help shape the '09 research year.

If you're a maker, you've probably noticed that it's useful to step back and reflect on your making process, noticing patterns like generative failures and emotional trajectories. I'll demo my reflection toolkit, a system designed to help people reflect as they learn how to program in Scratch.

This poster will present results from new interdisciplinary research on some unexpected intersections between the placebo effect, the psychology of money, and the experience of free will. My research has combined interviews with individuals who have had experience switching between brand-name and generic medications, with psychological experiments on how free will to choose between such medications can influence how people experience their efficacy. I situate the findings of this research within the cultural studies of medical identity in advanced capitalist contexts, and pose new interventions to allow individuals to be fuller participants in their own health care.

uCom aims at creating an always-on visual connection between remote architectural spaces to foster a sense of shared presence. It overlaps the spaces by portraying several different views of the remote space to local displays placed on the periphery of the users' attention, creating multiple live video portals. The implementation will also create an intermediary visual representation portraying an estimate of the 3D position of the cameras viewpoints and image planes, enabling users to better understand the geometry and spatial arrangement of the remote space so they can map those remote views to the displays available locally. The evaluation will investigate uCom's ability to enhance user's perception of a remote workspace's geometry, and if it can improve a sense of shared presence.

OpenCV is a useful library for computer vision applications and can be used on mobile platforms. This project demonstrates many different ways that computer vision technology leverages the functionality of mobile phones. Since iPhone provides comprehensive and comfortable development environment, the demo is implemented on the iPhone. For example, iPhone camera can recognize human faces using OpenCV face detector. Machine learning library of OpenCV can also train iPhone to recognize other objects; it can be trained to recognize rock, scissors, and paper in "Rock, Scissors and Paper game". In this way, camera can be used as a game input interface of mobile phones. Also, camera can see what human eyes cannot see such as infrared light. Thus, camera of the iPhone can read heart beat signal from the infrared LED that displays heart beat signal. In addition, iPhone can show the real-time physiology data and save the data in our day-to-day lives when the phone is hooked up to the sensor.

The aim of the high-low tech group is to engage diverse groups of people in designing and building their own technologies. To achieve this goal we situate computation in new cultural and material contexts and develop tools to democratize engineering. We believe that the future of technology will be largely determined by end-users who will design, build, and hack their own devices, and we strive to inspire, shape, support, and understand these communities. To this end, we explore the intersection of computation, physical materials, manufacturing processes, traditional crafts, and design.

This presentation will introduce the high-low tech group to the Media Lab community, presenting a variety of ongoing projects including including LilyPad Arduino--a construction kit that enables novices to build fabric-based wearable computers--and paper computing--an exploration of paper and paint-based interfaces.

For a long time, pixels have been just thought of as basic building blocks for digital images. The aim of our research at Camera Culture is to give a novel interpretation of pixels. We have shown that they can be a measure of angular information, spectrum or different properties of light. We will give an overview of our research which will demonstrate how pixels can have diverse representations. It will also cover our group’s recent research including coded computational photography, second skin, femtosecond transient imaging, high-speed tomography and bokcode.

Imagine if the applications we truly care about, those that are integrated into our lives, and support creative and enriching environments, could directly engage with our health. Such applications simply do not exist. In rehabilitation environments, the need is even more pronounced. Technology is capable of structuring rehabilitation efforts and providing access to creative environments. This session will explore the feasibility of developing a new generation of medical devices, situated in the home. The purpose of these devices is to simultaneously enhance long-term chronic care, rehabilitate motor function, and discover the relationship between multisensory integration and sensorimotor rehabilitation as part of everyday creativity tools. At the session outset, the presenter will outline supporting rationale, and propose an example application. Critical discussion will be structured to develop potential barriers and opportunities for this application space.

This brainstorming session will explore three NASA + Media Lab projects in data sonification and will provide opportunities for ML researchers to critique early models and mappings. Sonification (aka auditory display) is the use of non-speech audio to convey information. NASA is interested in using the human auditory system's powers of organizing and deconstructing sound for the purposes of scientific research and exploratory data analysis. Faced with increasingly voluminous and complex multimodal data sets, sonification researchers are seeking novel ways to maximize and optimize processes of representing and communicating its information. Most of the session will be devoted to the Aurrery Project, a new variation on the traditional orrery, soliciting feedback on preliminary mock-ups of physical, virtual, and sonic representations of the solar system. Other projects to be discussed include the sonification of the new ML data sensor network and planetary science computational analysis algorithms.

How can we get computers to learn from text when reading itself requires knowledge? Human writings are semantically compressed and rely on commonsense knowledge to fill in omitted details. In order to use commonsense knowledge bases for machine reading, current techniques (keyword search) fall short of retrieving only the knowledge *relevant* to a particular text. Our solution is to associate the semantic knowledge with procedural plan representations, thereby making the language understanding problem a two step problem of plan recognition and automated planning, where plans guide which inferences should be made about the text. I am working on learning a commonsense corpus of plans from multiple examples, a corpus of simple English narratives, so that the reading program can bootstrap its knowledge to learn from increasingly compressed text.

In this tutorial, I will talk about my work on this plan-based approach to reading and survey the current state of machine reading and some machine learning approaches for inferring hidden relational states (situation models) in sequential processes (events).

A discussion about the space of and around interfaces that people can readily improvise. The discussion will be seeded by a few facilitators.

Which user interfaces are reconfigurable in more ways than can be predictable? Can just about anyone jump in and improvise their own interface? Which types of expression and which modes of input to said expression are the best for scaffolding an experience that is wide open in terms of creative possibility, but also constrained enough to provide a fixed medium that is comprehensible and playful?

How can communities of ordinary people leverage the tools of science to help build a better world? I am building tools to explore a middle ground between the formal methodologies of scientific investigation and the more anecdotal discourse that occurs among non-experts. This session will introduce the key philosophical commitments of the model, demo some exploratory tools, and present a design challenge for group brainstorming. The goal is to identify key user-computer-community interaction and visual design elements that support the presented model.

While I have a particular focus on communities of patients with specific diseases, I believe this is a general problem of moving the discourse of ordinary people from that of loud opinions and singleton anecdotes to one that more directly driven by data.

Humans are fundamentally social animals. We are natural born masters at perceiving and sending the vast array of signals used to communicate with those around us. Why not design cars to leverage this natural propensity for social interaction and understanding?

The Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab is working with Audi and the Senseable Cities group to redefine the relationship between car, driver, and passengers. We are currently developing a new type of in-car system that acts as a partner or friend, providing important information, and intelligently responding to the mood and behavior of the driver. Led by Cynthia Breazeal, the Personal Robots group has pioneered the study and development of machines designed to interact with people in a social way. The appearance and behavior of our robots - ranging in form from expressive lamps to cutting edge humanoid machines – draws from a vast body of psychological research on the human mind, behavior, and social interaction. By applying this understanding to the interaction between humans and cars, we stand to make the driving experience significantly more effective, safe, and enjoyable.

We are designing a system in the car that is able to interact and sense in many of the ways that people do. The system would be able to express, and even perceive emotion. It would behave in a socially intelligent way, providing important information related to the driving experience when appropriate, while keeping distractions to a minimum otherwise. We strongly believe that this kind of social intelligence, combined with the type of communication that humans naturally understand, will lead to a stronger bond, and more positive relationship between car and driver. Ultimately, the goal is to fundamentally improve the driving experience by redefining the relationship between car and driver.

Visualizing computation needs an aesthetic that matches the cognitive functions of the viewer. Animating programming code while it is executing is an area for which research is needed. After spending many years programming and managing programmers and understanding the difficulties of crafting code that is both optimal for the machine to process and easy for others to maintain I've concluded that this is an art which remains mis-understood and not discussed enough to help advance the state of programming. Computation is inaccessible to programmers and users of applications and makes it very difficult to develop a sense of correctness, design, beauty, an aesthetic that would enable one to improve the state of the art. We may review some code that the audiences think is particularly poetic or expressive and evaluate how one might visualize its execution. The workshop brainstorm around this challenge and suggest approached that may be feasible and possibly interesting for someone to adopt as a research thesis.Visualizing computation needs an aesthetic that matches the cognitive functions of the viewer. Animating programming code while it is executing is an area for which research is needed. After spending many years programming and managing programmers and understanding the difficulties of crafting code that is both optimal for the machine to process and easy for others to maintain I've concluded that this is an art which remains mis-understood and not discussed enough to help advance the state of programming. Computation is inaccessible to programmers and users of applications and makes it very difficult to develop a sense of correctness, design, beauty, an aesthetic that would enable one to improve the state of the art. We may review some code that the audiences think is particularly poetic or expressive and evaluate how one might visualize its execution. The workshop brainstorm around this challenge and suggest approached that may be feasible and possibly interesting for someone to adopt as a research thesis.

In contrast to traditional purely dissipative prosthetic knees, we propose a biomimetic variable-impedance knee prosthesis with two series-elastic actuators arranged in parallel in an agonist-antagonist architecture. The prosthesis mimics human knee mechanics during level-ground walking, even though the prosthesis’ motors never perform positive work throughout the gait cycle. Because of the variable-impedance nature of the prosthesis, electrical power requirements are modest while walking, allowing for an energetically-economical powered knee system. The objective of this adaptive powered prosthetic device is to improve gait and metabolic energy consumption of above-knee amputees on variant terrain conditions

Smart Cities would like to present our latest invention, the GreenWheel Bicycle, at the ML conference. The GreenWheel is a human-hybrid bicycle that utilizes an in-wheel electric motor to provide electric assistance to the rider. The modular design has integrated batteries, electric motor, and controllers inside the hub of the bicycle wheel. The GreenWheel can be retrofitted to any type of bicycle and it can be controlled wirelessly using a throttle switch on the handlebar, therefore requiring no wires from the frame to the wheel motor. The GreenWheel will enable longer travel distances and make hill-climbing easier, thus opening up bicycling to more people of all ages and physical abilities. The presentation will showcase the design origins, technological development, current and future functionality.

The students of Tod Machover's MAS826 (Projects in Music and Media) would like to give a performance/demonstration of a variety of music and media works to be developed during the course of the class. Ideally, this performance would take place in the lower atrium, where we would have room to set up large structures including music-making robots. This informal performance would be followed by a discussion with the audience about the works presented and about issues in the future of music and performance.

Through the work done in this class, we are hoping to start developing a rich Media Lab music/performance community. In particular, with the upcoming completion of E14, we believe the Media Lab has an opportunity to reinvent the presence of performance at the lab. Looking toward this goal, it would be useful for us to showcase some of this work and the surrounding discussion in a more public forum.

Panel to present new work using gesture, objects, body, and physical space to interact with the digital world. We ask the questions: 1) What are gestural interfaces? 2) What are they good for? 3) Where do they fail? The format is in two sections of short presentations followed by moderated discussions between panelists and the audience.

It seems that modern technology pushes us further away from ourselves and our environment: TV, Cellphones, Fast Food, etc. But this is only by choice, how can we make technology that actually encourages us to reflect back on ourselves?

This "reflection" can occur on many levels- Looking at your personal bank statement, getting instant feedback on your heart rate, seeing where you have traveled on googlemaps, etc.

The question we want to brainstorm is: How can technology help people grow their self-awareness? We will quickly show some research going on this subject and then ask participants for idea generating suggestions. Is a futuristic journal the inevitable way to go? Do we need to install morning showers in everyone's office? What makes you self-aware? Why is that important to you?

Complex data – such as brain physiology and biomedical data, human behavior data, internet data, and sensor network data – are extremely difficult to analyze because of the dynamic nature of the high-dimensional set of interacting processes that generate the data. Accordingly, traditional statistical and data analysis methods – clustering, correlation, and so forth – can rarely create models sophisticated enough to explain the data, without fitting noise, demanding astronomically-sized datasets, or requiring enormous amounts of hand-tuning by insightful labor. We propose to design and develop a system that continuously generates novel data-modeling hypotheses and evaluates them in real time, testing models of ever-increasing complexity on data as it comes in. The system will be designed to take advantage of recently-developed, inexpensive massively-parallel supercomputer technologies.

In this paper, we present the Open Transaction Network (OTN) that allows a community of consumers to collaboratively sense the market from a mobile device, enabling more informed financial decisions in geo-local context. The mobile application allows one to log one's wish list and itemized list of transactions to form a social network around the list of interests. Individuals can share this data to inform and guide others in a timely, personal and contextual manner when they are shopping for a product or seeking a service. It can also help people connect opportunistically in a local area to make group purchases, to pick up an item for a friend, and to perform reverse auctions. We simulate a social network with three months of existing credit/debit card transaction data in various geographical areas to analyze the mutual information and recommendations that can be shared among networked consumers. We also present the design, architecture, concept prototype and results from 3 month trial among 20 users.

Ego represents a paradigm-shift in managing and sharing personal information. Rather than posting your interests and social connections to Facebook, your professional connections to LinkedIn, your location to Google Latitude and your status to Twitter, post it all to yourself. You produce such data over a lifetime: you should own it, control access to and set the price for it.

We present a next-generation social networking platform that is distributed and provides users complete ownership over their data and social connections. We propose and demonstrate a society of "agents" representing both humans and non-humans (i.e. screens) to each other and to Web 2.0 applications. Agents leverage their social network through user applications. Two example applications are: a) Creating contextual information by using sensors (eg. Bluetooth) that feed data back to agents, b) A food-tracking application that predicts when food will be in the kitchen by using sensed data from conference rooms.

My research involves developing toolkits that help children invent interfaces between physical objects and computer programs (e.g., an acrylic Axe for chopping virtual trees). I explore how they learn in the process of creating their interfaces. I also explore how other toolkits give novices opportunities to make their own interfaces. You'll have a chance to explore creating your own interfaces.

I'll provide a multitude of materials: a few Phidgets, lots of LEGO WeDos, several Scratch Boards, an assortment of Arduinos, and a collection of crafts. I'll introduce example projects. Then, I'll let Labbers (of all experience levels) explore creating with the supplied goods. The workshop concludes with a brief discussion about the ways in which computational toolkits affect our learning landscapes.

An old fire dept. support vehicle has been purchased and is ready to be outfitted with music gear, computers, instruments, and other materials for making sounds. The vision is that we will debut the truck this summer around town, teaching groups of kids (scout troops, after-school programs, youth groups, etc.) how to make their own music. The truck will be resident at MIT through November and we will be assembling a team of interested hackers to brainstorm how we might build it out. One idea is that it could itself be an evolving musical instrument, making/recording sounds as it moves that can then be sampled and assembled into music by the kids. The sky is the limit with this raw asset, and it stands ready to serve! Come join the team of music superheros ­ contribute ideas, materials, time, test out your new musical interfaces, or be one of the mobile mentors. The truck will be available for some hands-on activity.

Cameras and imaging algorithms are an integral part of research projects at Media Lab. However, we all encounter some or the other roadblock in getting them to work. In this session, we hope to gather and discuss ways for managing such problems. We will setup a Wiki and collect a list of problems and other questions that ML members may have about cameras. During the session, we will discuss solutions to most common problems. Plus, participants will have a chance to help others by sharing their solution for similar problems.

I wish to present an idea on "Internal Knowledge Market". It is an idea that is being proposed and developed. No significant/demonstrable progress has been made. I wish to do a presentation on this idea, and receive feedbacks/critiques from others. It is a project more closely to CFB, and if at all possible, it can be integrated to CFB-related sessions. Here is a research summary of the project:

The purpose of this study is to explore the creation of Internal Knowledge Markets. Our goal is to bring an electronic distributed market (decentralized information creation) inside the firm in an effort to (i) measure the value of knowledge created and (ii) link this to productivity and/or profits. The main questions we will seek to answer are:

1) How can we launch an internal information marketplace, while solving the adoption and critical mass problem?

2) What incentives generate participation and contribution?

3) Can we value the resulting new information resources either directly in terms of dollar value or indirectly in terms of increased performance?

4) Can we motivate people to keep information in more reusable form in order that it can be traded on the market?

5) Is it possible to measure the productivity impact of a prediction market?

6) For complex "strategic" problems, is it possible to assemble dynamic teams to generate answers?

A key advantage of this study will be a direct appeal to information economic theory to design an information market. In particular, we will appeal to "two-sided network theory," principles of "information asymmetry," and also "price theory." We seek to bring the rigor of this discipline to real world application and measure the results.

Fabric printed circuit boards or "fabric PCBs" are soft, flexible, textile-based circuit boards. This hands-on tutorial will describe how to use a laser cutter, conductive cloth and a heat activated adhesive to build fabric PCBs. It will explain how to construct the circuit boards, how to solder components to them, and how to protect fabric-to-component solder joints. The tutorial will also describe how the same construction technique can be used to quickly build beautiful, multi-layered PCBs on a variety of substrates including paper, acrylic, glass, and wood. Over the course of the workshop everyone will build a fabric LilyPad Arduino. Bring a nice soldering iron, tweezers, and a TQFP ATmega168 if you can. Limited to 10 participants.