Red Ink : open source financial analytics for people & communities

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2010.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references.Red Ink is an open source social-financial web-service that enables people to share, aggregate, analyze, visualize and publish their financial transactions as individuals and ad-hoc groups, through data sharing campaigns. Virtual and geographic communities of financial data sharers can form on Red Ink to create new sources of information for self-knowledge and understanding of complex personal, community, economic, environmental, and civic concerns and how to better coordinate their solutions. Red Ink posits that just like volunteering time or donating money, personal financial data is itself an asset that people can share to gain group leverage. Further, in the hands of everyday people, the data and tools of corporate scale consumer analysis will be reborn to serve larger and more personally meaningful goals.by Ryan O'Toole.S.M

"It feels like I'm managing myself": HIV+ people tracking their personal health information

Nearly 37 million people live with HIV globally and recent advances in medicine have transformed HIV to a chronic disease, if managed. Previous research in Personal Health Informatics has investigated how people self-manage other chronic conditions, such as diabetes, by tracking and reflecting on their health information but there is little knowledge of how people do so for complex and socially stigmatized diseases like HIV. A better understanding of their specialized needs could lead to the development of more appropriate tools to self-manage their condition. Our paper introduces an iterative process model of Personal Health Informatics. We then describe the results of an empirical study involving HIV+ adults aimed at understanding their issues, concerns and actions in each of the stages of this process model. We provide implications for the design of personal informatics tools and open research directions that can lead to better self-management for people living with HIV

The broadcast marketplace : Designing a more efficient local marketplace for goods and services

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. 71-74).Today's online marketplaces for goods and services are imperfect. Participants make an initial post expressing their intention to buy or sell an object, but all offers on this post are private. These offers can be seen as expressions of other participants' intentions to buy or sell the same item. What if these offers were as public as the initial post? Would this decrease market friction and enable participants to close transactions more efficiently? What if every post and offer were tagged with a location enabling a real-time proximal picture of supply and demand? In this thesis, we explore a different kind of marketplace, a broadcast marketplace, where a combination of public post, proximal awareness and mobility decrease the friction of information flow and facilitate efficiency. This thesis explores the design, implementation and deployment of a system which enables users to efficiently view, understand and act upon this proximal picture of supply and demand. To test the viability of the broadcast marketplace we deployed Peddl, an implementation of the idea, in the MIT and Cambridge, MA community. Over the course of the trial we collected data on 5,839 unique visitors and 805 registered users, who made 726 posts totaling $234,913 in value. From this data we show that the additional transparency of supply and demand afforded by our design results in increased marketplace activity.Matthew Blackshaw.S.M

Discovering and evaluating research projects through peer-to-peer exchange

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. 62-63).Llifelog is a web platform for discovering, evaluating, and exchanging research projects among students and researchers from both academia and industry. The goal of Llifelog is foster a community of critique among students and researchers in a project market. Those who engage in the market answer the call "find out how your work, projects, and ideas are valued in the community." The unique contribution of the Llifelog system lies in designing market-based mechanisms that stimulate the project exchange while maintaining information confidentiality, and devising a peer-to-peer, direct communication channel between project creators and project viewers. In this thesis, I explain how such market mechanism results more objective evaluation compared to other existing rating mechanisms online. A virtual credit system, Truons, is used in this web platform to facilitate the project evaluation and exchange. The website was built using Java, MySQL, Apache Tomcat, HTML, CSS, and Javascript and hosted on an Ubuntu server. It also uses a Natural Language Processing engine, AlchemyAPI, and various image processing techniques. The platform was tested among about 305 users with 74 projects within 3 weeks. User feedback was also gathered after the testing to further understand the context and rationale for user behavior on the web platform.by Li Bian.S.M