Navigating both our personal and professional life has evolved into a knowledge-intensive task that is greatly assisted by online social networks (OSN) and other online tools. However, OSNs fail to capture the dynamic affinity groups that arise when people are looking to exchange products and services, engage in some joint activity, or pool resources together.

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Since the time of the first philosophers, logic and observed human behavior have stood somewhat in contradiction. More recently, scientists have started to delve into decision- and choice-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 take the knowledge gleaned about human cognition and design systems that can augment cognition in helping us reach our goals.

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's surfaces are static and can neither adapt to our changing needs, nor communicate dynamic information and sense user input.

This thesis examines the environmental benefits created by the manufacture, distribution, and consumer use of products that are mass customized (MC) or produced “on-demand” and tailored to individual end-user preferences. Traditional mass production (MP) models take advantage of economies of scale by efficiently producing multiple copies of the same standard product. However, this also creates waste throughout the product life cycle.

Growing populations, an increasing middle-class, and rapid urbanization are all escalating factors contributing to urban problems such as excessive energy use, road congestion, pollution due to carbon emissions, and inefficient personal transit. Considering that the average vehicle in a city weighs thousands of pounds, usually carries only one person per trip, and expends a significant amount of its gasoline simply searching for resources such as parking, it is clear that we need new efficient and intelligent modes of transportation.

We're hosting the first of many regional alumni gatherings on August 27 in San Francisco. We hope you (and a guest) will join Media Lab Director Joi Ito, several Media Lab faculty members and researchers, and some of your fellow alumni from 7-9pm for a casual get-together at San Francisco's Bluxome Street Winery. This should be a great chance to catch up with old friends and meet new ones.

We envision a public space that is populated with active visual surfaces. Where there is a sign, there can be a display. Similarly, we assume an equally dense population of normal cameras. The work of this thesis is to use that ensemble of equipment, both personal and environmentally deployed, to build rich information exchanges where the visual data is simultaneously useful to human observers and camera devices. The screens are both displays and data transmitters.

In this dissertation research, we explore ways of using audio on AR applications, as it is especially suitable for mobile users when their eyes and hands are not necessarily available and they have limited attention capacity. While most previous mobile AR audio systems were mostly tested in sparse audio maps, we want to create a system that can be challenged by a city load of information.