For the last two decades the Internet has served information and entertainment to the isolated computer screen at home. The movement seems to have triggered a counter-reaction, and brought the desire to go back into public spaces (museums, exhibitions, showrooms, operas, theaters) to experience information and entertainment in a physical form shared together with other people.

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Games are a type of performance activity, with the player becoming a performer while playing a videogame. In the case of story-based games, the player’s performance brings together story and game.

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The field of Computational Photography seeks to create new photographic functionalities and experiences that go beyond what is possible with traditional cameras and image processing tools.

Archived Webcast available (ML login required).

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For a timely answer to the problem of sustainability, or how to provide for future generations, there needs to be shared accounting of our social and physical resources. Global supply chains touch countless people, each a potential contributor to our collective understanding. Unleashing this information could engage many more people in the invention of long-term solutions, or sustainable design.

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The exposure to new information and opinions, and their diffusion within social networks, are important questions in education, business, and government. However until recently there has been no method to automatically capture fine-grained social interactions between people and use the data to better model the diffusion process. In this thesis, we describe the use of co-location and communication sensors in ‘socially aware’ mobile phones to measure and model the face-to-face interactions, opinions and behaviors of the residents of an undergraduate dormitory for an entire academic year.

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Humor and creativity both involve making non-obvious connections between seemingly unrelated things. Innovation, or creativity, is at the heart of product design.

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How can we reformat our cities and public spaces—and the architectures and technologies within them—as sites of collaboration and innovation? This presentation examines the ways in which WiFi enables the formation of networks of socio-technical spaces that reconfigure people, work, and forms of organizing based on a year-long empirical research project.

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It is not just that things are connected, but how they are connected that ultimately matters when trying to understand systems. In this presentation Hidalgos summarize some of his recent work in which connections among diseases, people, products, and countries, were mapped out to improve our understanding of illness, social interactions, human mobility, and economic development.

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