Social sensing and its display

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2007.Includes bibliographical references (p. 87-90).This thesis proposes a public interface that functions as a social catalyst in public spaces. Like a smart mirror, it intends to reflect the social identity of the environment and increase sensibility towards the place and among others in the environment by highlighting a particular aspect of it. Here, our particular use of the medium is to raise awareness of the boundaries among the residents; highlighting their differences and similarities of mobility, displacement and geographical limits. The medium is designed as a custom, multimodal interface, which functions as a tangible, interactive sculpture that senses ambient sound, records deliberate user input and displays interactive graphics as its output. The design explores the utility of sound and physical interaction for envisioning new social, cultural and entertainment uses of public places and help us shape our relationships with each other with new social interfaces embedded in urban settings.by Orkan Telhan.S.M

Emotions, behaviour and belief regulation in an intelligent guide with attitude

Abstract unavailable please refer to PD

Virtual environments for stroke rehabilitation: examining a novel technology against end-user, clinical and management demands with reference to UK care provision

In the field of post-stroke rehabilitation, there appears to be growing interest in the use of virtual reality (VR)-based systems as adjunct technologies to standard therapeutic practices. The limitations and the potentials of this technology are not, however, generally well understood. The present study thus seeks to determine the value of the technology with reference to end-user requirements by surveying and evaluating its application against a variety of parameters: user focus, clinical effectiveness, marketability and contextual meaningfulness, etc. A key theme in the research considers how a technology developed internationally might interface with care provision demands and cultures specific to the United Kingdom. The barriers to innovation entry in this context are thus examined. Further practical study has been conducted in the field with a small sample of post-stroke rehabilitation patients. The data garnered from these enquiries have informed a detailed system analysis, a strategy for innovation and a broad theoretical discussion as to the effectiveness of the technology in delivering VR environments by which the patient can undertake ‘meaningful’ therapeutic activities. The data reveal that there does appear to be clinical value in using this technology, yet establishing its maximal value necessitates greater integrity among clinicians and engineers, and the furthering of progressive channels for innovation by public health administrators

Trauma Of Empire: Violence, Minor Affect, And The Cold War Transpacific

This dissertation turns to contemporary Asian American literature to examine how the aftereffects of U.S. Cold War violence and trauma manifest themselves in minor subjectivities. In the texts I explore, peripheral subjects, whose physical and psychic dislocations stem from Cold War dynamics between Asia and the United States, develop affective modes of reciprocity and intimacy and thereby collectively act out and work through historical damage. In these sites of wounded sociality, trauma appears not just as catastrophic but also as ordinary; rather than displaying itself as an individual psychic pathology, trauma is reconfigured as a collective affective labor that produces a set of minor historiographies. In rewriting the dominant U.S. Cold War historiography through a traumatic genealogy of American empire in Asia, the cultural productions this project discusses create an aesthetics of the periphery and reveal the forgotten historical sites that the progressive temporality of U.S. imperialism has occluded. The writers I explore, including Jessica Hagedorn, Jane Jeong Trenka, Aimee Phan, and Ruth Ozeki, engage multiple historical scenes of the Cold War across the Pacific, from the metropolitanization of Manila and the refugees and transnational adoptees produced by the Cold War\u27s hot wars in Korea and Vietnam to the economic alliance between Japan and the United States. This dissertation proposes that these historically, geographically broad and diverse sites are interlinked not simply through the shared experience of U.S. Cold War dominance and neoliberal governance, but also through literary mediations establishing an affective transnational zone: an alternative historical space that at once reveals the contradictions of liberal empire and produces an eccentric temporality disrupting its linear forms of progress

The Architecture of Soft Machines

This thesis speculates about the possibility of softening architecture through machines. In deviating from traditional mechanical conceptions of machines based on autonomous, functional and purely operational notions, the thesis proposes to conceive of machines as corporeal media in co-constituting relationships with human bodies. As machines become corporeal (robots) and human bodies take on qualities of machines (cyborgs) the thesis investigates their relations to architecture through readings of William S. Burroughs’ proto-cyborgian novel The Soft Machine (1961) and Georges Teyssot’s essay ‘Hybrid Architecture: An Environment for the Prosthetic Body’ (2005) arguing for a revision of architecture’s anthropocentric mandate in favour of technologically co-constituting body ideas. The conceptual shift in man-machine relations is also demonstrated by discussion of two installations shown at the Venice Biennale, Daniel Libeskind’s mechanical Three Lessons in Architecture (1985) and Philip Beesely’s responsive Hylozoic Ground (2010). As the purely mechanical model has been superseded by a model that incorporates digital sensing and embedded actuation, as well as soft and compliant materiality, the promise of softer, more sensitive and corporeal conceptions of technology shines onto architecture. Following Nicholas Negroponte’s ambition for a ‘humanism through machines,’ stated in his groundbreaking work, Soft Architecture Machines (1975), and inspired by recent developments in the emerging field of soft robotics, I have developed a series of practical design experiments, ranging from soft mechanical hybrids to soft machines made entirely from silicone and actuated by embedded pneumatics, to speculate about architectural environments capable of interacting with humans. In a radical departure from traditional mechanical conceptions based on modalities of assembly, the design of these types of soft machines is derived from soft organisms such as molluscs (octopi, snails, jellyfish) in order to infuse them with notions of flexibility, compliance, sensitivity, passive dynamics and spatial variability. Challenging architecture’s alliance with notions of permanence and monumentality, the thesis finally formulates a critique of static typologisation of space with walls, floors, columns or windows. In proposing an embodied architecture the thesis concludes by speculating about architecture as a capacitated, sensitive and sensual body informed by reciprocal conditioning of constituent systems, materials, morphologies and behaviours

Site, Data, Materials: Artistic approaches to rendering self-tracking data

This practice-led research project examines the role of site specificity in self-tracking data artworks and installations. I argue that the site-specific contexts of materials and devices used in the physicalisation of self-tracking data (whether in art works or data visualisations) are timely objects of inquiry. In contemporary site-specific installation art, the artwork emerges as a response to complex contexts. Similarly, self-tracking data itself is shaped by a relationship to site – for example, the data recording a specific running route through a neighbourhood. This research proposes that site-specific art practice serves as a way of bringing the contextual aspects of self-tracking data physicalisation into explicit focus. As such, I propose the term data installation for describing an approach to rendering self-tracking that brings into relation data, the exhibition site and materials within installation-based artworks. Through the exhibition of self-tracking data in data installations and artworks, my practice-based research analyses the aesthetic choices of data physicalisation, the relation between physical sites and data, and the site-specific and historical aspects of materials. The project asks how specific exhibition sites and institutional contexts shape the production and display of self-tracking data artworks and installations in response to rapidly changing context of contemporary art. Drawing from feminist critiques of the assumed neutrality and objectivity of technology, my practice-based research focusses on the site-specific aspects of materials within artistic data physicalisation. Feminist critiques of technology emphasise the embodied aspects of knowledge production and the historical, social, cultural contexts that shape the use and production of emerging technologies. The central claim of this project, made through a body of nine artworks across five exhibitions and this accompanying thesis, is that site-specific installation practice serves as a way of situating self-tracking data artworks within the contexts of critical data studies and contemporary art. By bringing materials from a specific site into contact with data from the same site, the project demonstrates how data is situated within specific (and contingent) geographic, historical and temporal conditions. This situated approach to the rendering of self-tracking data acknowledges the relation between site and data, foregrounding the specific aesthetic choices and point of view embedded within self-tracking data art, and in the practice of data physicalisation more broadly

Looking for c(l)ues. How visual cues can help predict personality traits in video interviews.

There is an ongoing trend that asynchronous video interviews are used more and more frequently for their efficiency gain (Brenner, 2019), especially in large scale selection processes (Brandt, Justenhoven & Schöffel, 2020). Visual cues that are present during those video recordings are not yet systematically processed and used, which is a miss under the argument of further efficiency gain (e.g. to measure personality traits). However, in a first step, a framework as well as a systematic visual cue analyses needs to be completed to establish the available data source that can – in a second step – be further used in an automatic scoring process. The purpose of the present study exactly that first step: to outline an approach to capture, categorize and systematically process visual cues to then link them to personality traits which are captured in various other forms as well. As an approach to this topic, the work from Gosling and colleagues (2005) is leveraged and with it Brunswik’s lens model (1956). Ultimately, and postulated as a research question, the aim of this body of research is to find functional achievement between self-rated and observer rated personality traits using the visual cues as elements of the lens. The body of research is structured in three steps. In step 1 visual cues present in research are catalogued, enriched with visual cues captured through various studies with asynchronous video interview data and categorized in five categories: Face, Body, Appearance, Media Properties, and Environment. In step 2 a visual cue inventory is developed that allows a manual systematic cue coding process of the 236 visual cues that are used in this work. In step 3, a dataset with n = 99 participants is generated that includes coding for all of the visual cues, as well as self and observer ratings on the video respondee’ s personality traits. Contrary to the hypotheses, however, little evidence is found that suggest visual cues can be linked both to self-ratings and observer ratings of personality traits. The cues seem to be either valid (i.e. linked to self-ratings) or used (i.e. linked to observer ratings) but generally the results show a very confound picture. Given the present results, it is not recommended to proceed further with the approach to leverage visual cues as a predictor for personality traits in asynchronous video interviews.Es gibt einen anhaltenden Trend, dass asynchrone Videointerviews wegen ihres Effizienzgewinns immer häufiger eingesetzt werden (Brenner, 2019), insbesondere in groß angelegten Auswahlverfahren (Brandt, Justenhoven & Schöffel, 2020). Visuelle Hinweisreize, die während dieser Videoaufnahmen vorhanden sind, werden noch nicht systematisch verarbeitet und verwendet, was unter dem Argument der weiteren Effizienzsteigerung (z. B. zur Messung von Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen) ein Versäumnis ist. In einem ersten Schritt muss jedoch ein Rahmenwerk sowie eine systematische Analyse der visuellen Hinweise geschaffen werden, um die verfügbare Datenquelle zu ermitteln, die in einem zweiten Schritt in einem automatischen Scoring-Prozess weiterverwendet werden kann. Das Ziel der vorliegenden Studie ist genau dieser erste Schritt: einen Ansatz zur Erfassung, Kategorisierung und systematischen Verarbeitung visueller Hinweise zu skizzieren, um diese dann mit Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen zu verknüpfen, die auch in verschiedenen anderen Formen erfasst werden. Als Grundlage zu diesem Thema wird die Arbeit von Gosling und Kollegen (2005) genutzt und damit das Linsenmodell von Brunswik (1956). Letztlich, und als Forschungsfrage postuliert, ist das Ziel der vorliegenden Forschung, die funktionale Leistung zwischen selbst- und beobachterbewerteten Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen – unter Verwendung der visuellen Hinweise als Elemente der Linse – zu finden. Die Forschungsarbeit ist in drei Schritte gegliedert. In Schritt 1 werden die in der Forschung vorhandenen visuellen Anhaltspunkte katalogisiert, mit visuellen Anhaltspunkten angereichert, die in verschiedenen Studien mit asynchronen Videointerviewdaten erfasst wurden, und in fünf Kategorien kategorisiert: Gesicht, Körper, Erscheinungsbild, Medieneigenschaften und Umgebung. In Schritt 2 wird ein Inventar visueller Hinweisreize entwickelt, das einen manuellen systematischen Kodierungsprozess der 236 visuellen Hinweisreize ermöglicht, die in dieser Arbeit verwendet werden. In Schritt 3 wird ein Datensatz mit n = 99 Teilnehmern generiert, der die Kodierung aller visuellen Hinweisreize sowie Selbst- und Beobachtereinschätzungen zu den Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen des Video-Respondenten enthält. Im Gegensatz zu den Hypothesen finden sich jedoch nur wenige Hinweise darauf, dass visuelle Hinweisreize sowohl mit Selbst- als auch mit Fremdeinschätzungen von Persönlichkeitsmerkmalen verknüpft werden können. Die Hinweisreize scheinen entweder gültig zu sein (d. h. mit Selbsteinschätzungen korrelierend) oder verwendet zu werden (d. h. mit Beobachtereinschätzungen korrelierend), aber im Allgemeinen zeigen die Ergebnisse ein sehr diffuses Bild auf. In Anbetracht der vorliegenden Ergebnisse wird nicht empfohlen, den Ansatz weiter zu verfolgen, visuelle Hinweise als Prädiktor für Persönlichkeitsmerkmale in asynchronen Videointerviews zu nutzen