Workshop on NASA workstation technology

RIACS hosted a workshop which was designed to foster communication among those people within NASA working on workstation related technology, to share technology, and to learn about new developments and futures in the larger university and industrial workstation communities. Herein, the workshop is documented along with its conclusions. It was learned that there is both a large amount of commonality of requirements and a wide variation in the modernness of in-use technology among the represented NASA centers

NewsTalk--a speech interface to a personalized information agent

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts & Sciences, 1995.Includes bibliographical references (p. 79-87).Jeffrey Alan Herman.M.S

THERAPIST: Towards an Autonomous Socially Interactive Robot for Motor and Neurorehabilitation Therapies for Children

Neurorehabilitation therapies exploiting the use-dependent plasticity of our neuromuscular system are devised to help patients who suffer from injuries or diseases of this system. These therapies take advantage of the fact that the motor activity alters the properties of our neurons and muscles, including the pattern of their connectivity, and thus their functionality. Hence, a sensor-motor treatment where patients makes certain movements will help them (re)learn how to move the affected body parts. But these traditional rehabilitation processes are usually repetitive and lengthy, reducing motivation and adherence to the treatment, and thus limiting the benefits for the patients

Mobile sound: media art in hybrid spaces

The thesis explores the relationships between sound and mobility through an examination of sound art. The research engages with the intersection of sound, mobility and art through original empirical work and theoretically through a critical engagement with sound studies. In dialogue with the work of De Certeau, Lefebvre, Huhtamo and Habermas in terms of the poetics of walking, rhythms, media archeology and questions of publicness, I understand sound art as an experimental mobile and public space. The thesis establishes and situates the emerging field of mobile sound art by mapping three key traditions of mobile sound art - locative art, sound art and public art - and creates a taxonomy of mobile sound art by defining four categories: 'placing sounds', 'sound platforms', 'sonifying mobility' and 'musical instruments' (each represented by one case study). In doing so it develops a methodology that is attentive to the specifics of the sonic and mobile of media experience. I demonstrate how sonic interactions and embodied mobility are designed and experienced in specific ways in each of the four case studies - 'Aura' by Symons (UK), 'Pophorns' by Torstensson and Sandelin (Sweden), 'SmSage' by Redfern and Borland (US) and 'Core Sample' by Rueb (US) (all 2007). In tracing the topos of the musical telephone, discussing the making and breaking of relevant micro publics, accounting for the polyphonies of footsteps and unwrapping bundles of rhythms, this thesis contributes to understanding complex media experiences in hybrid spaces. In doing so it critically sheds light on the quality of sonic artistic experiences, the audience engagement with urban, public and networked spaces and the relationship between sound art and everyday media experience. My thesis provides valuable insight into auditory ways of mobilising and making public spaces, non-verbal and embodied media practices, and rhythms and scales of mobile media experiences

Sticky Knowledge in Copyright

Knowledge is sticky because it adheres to people along social routes, lodged within relational and collective modalities, as well as through copyright\u27s proverbial fixed works that can be transacted more freely. Sticky knowledge may in fact constitute a much larger body of knowledge than we usually acknowledge in intellectual property and may intersect with copyright in unexpected ways. This Article delves into sticky knowledge, which has been referenced often outside of intellectual property and sometimes within the laws of patents and trade secrets but almost not at all within copyright law. Under what circumstances will sticky knowledge encourage robust knowledge transmission-or copyright\u27s goal of encouragement of learning ? Understanding the scope and reach of this kind of knowledge may point to optimal means to encourage knowledge spillovers and reliability

Conservation of Limited Resources: Design Principles for Security and Usability on Mobile Devices

Mobile devices have evolved from an accessory to the primary computing device for an increasing portion of the general population. Not only is mobile the primary device, consumers on average have multiple Internet-connected devices. The trend towards mobile has resulted in a shift to “mobile-first” strategies for delivering information and services in business organizations, universities, and government agencies. Though principles for good security design exist, those principles were formulated based upon the traditional workstation configuration instead of the mobile platform. Security design needs to follow the shift to a “mobile-first” emphasis to ensure the usability of the security interface. The mobile platform has constraints on resources that can adversely impact the usability of security. This research sought to identify design principles for usable security for mobile devices that address the constraints of the mobile platform. Security and usability have been seen as mutually exclusive. To accurately identify design principles, the relationship between principles for good security design and usability design must be understood. The constraints for the mobile environment must also be identified, and then evaluated for their impact on the interaction of a consumer with a security interface. To understand how the application of the proposed mobile security design principles is perceived by users, an artifact was built to instantiate the principles. Through a series of guided interactions, the importance of proposed design principles was measured in a simulation, in human-computer interaction, and in user perception. The measures showed a resounding difference between the usability of the same security design delivered on mobile vs. workstation platform. It also reveals that acknowledging the constraints of an environment and compensating for the constraints yields mobile security that is both usable and secure. Finally, the hidden cost of security design choices that distract the user from the surrounding environment were examined from both the security perspective and public safety perspective

Participation as media: a compositional system for staging participation with reflective scenography

The practice-led research develops a compositional system for staging participation within reflective scenographies, and suggests an artistic concept of 'participation as media', which propose the participatory involvement as compositional material in itself. The research takes a starting point in the author's expert practice as a performer and director, and identifies key compositional problems from analysis of previous productions of participatory artworks. The practice-led research processes were organised into two laboratory events, a series of method investigations, and the production of two participatory installation artworks Mirror-Zone-Site and Zen- Sofa Arrangement. The approach is to rethink theatre as a complex communicational system of reflective operations, and to recognise performer technique as several simultaneously working levels of self-referential communicative operations, that can be staged as a participatory condition by reflective scenography. From a compositional perspective the question is how to externalise the performer's technique as abstracted mediating structures, and implement them by the use of responsive and mediating technology embedded in the reflective operations of a scenography. The compositional system consists of design parameters, compositional strategies, and a postprogressive dramaturgy. The design parameters framing, channelling, and coupling, organise a calibration of the staged feedback operations. The compositional strategies, which derive from practices of performer technique, organise scenarios of introvert, extrovert and social referencing operations. The postprogressive dramaturgy informs the performative engagement of the participant as a process of experiential narrativation. The system enables a capability to navigate the compositional process into the complex creation of participatory engagement as a media in itself, and enables a structured overview on the compositional process, argued in an interdisciplinary context. The research investigates events that involve the visitor in the realisation of the work, to an extent where the media of the artwork is the activity of participation in itself and the participatory engagement forms a main site of the emergence of the artwork. Through the visitor's acts of participation, she releases the potential of the artwork, and as such, occupies a crucial position in the constitution of the work These artworks are suggested to stage the participant in structures of communication and include her as an operator in a communication device