This course focuses on Ambient Intelligence, and how it envisions a world where people are surrounded by intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in the everyday objects around them. These interfaces recognize and respond to the presence and behavior of an individual in a personalized and relevant way. Students are required to do extensive literary research on the subject and participate in class discussions.

This course will provide an overview of a new vision for Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in which people are surrounded by intelligent and intuitive interfaces embedded in the everyday objects around them. It will focus on understanding enabling technologies and studying applications and experiments, and, to a lesser extent, it will address the socio-cultural impact. Students will read and discuss the most relevant articles in related areas: smart environments, smart networked objects, augmented and mixed realities, ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, tangible computing, intelligent interfaces and wearable computing. Finally, they will be asked to come up with new ideas and start innovative projects in this area.

Supplementary work on individual or group basis. Registration subject to prior arrangement for subject matter and supervision by staff. Common Sense Reasoning for Interactive Applications This course will explore the state of the art in common sense knowledge, and class projects will design and build interfaces that can exploit this knowledge to make more usable and helpful interfaces. Course requirements will consist of critiques of class readings [about 2 papers/week], and a final project [paper or computer implementation project]. Grades will be based primarily on the projects, as well as a small component for class and online participation.

This course is about social life in the on-line world. Its focus is on how the design of the interface influences people's interactions with each other and shapes the cultural mores and structures they develop. We will examine the ways social cues are communicated in the real and the virtual world, discuss the limits imposed upon on-line communities by their mediated nature, and explore directions that virtual societies can take that are impossible for physical ones. Readings range from classic papers in cognitive science, anthropology and urban studies to recent studies in the sociology of online communities. The work for this class includes reading articles, analyzing existing systems and designing innovative interfaces. From the course home page: The instructor's own web site for this course is available at http://smg.media.mit.edu/classes/SociableDesign2001/.

This class surveys developmental entrepreneurship via case examples of both successful and failed businesses and generally grapples with deploying and diffusing products and services through entrepreneurial action. By drawing on live and historical cases, especially from South Asia, Africa, Latin America as well as Eastern Europe, China, and other developing regions, we seek to cover the broad spectrum of challenges and opportunities facing developmental entrepreneurs. Finally, we explore a range of established and emerging business models as well as new business opportunities enabled by developmental technologies developed in MIT labs and beyond.

Digital Anthropology is a Spring 2003 applied social science and media arts seminar, surveying the blossoming arena of digital-artifact enabled experimental sociology/anthropology. We will emphasize on both (a) Technology Testbeds – systematically deploying research lab prototypes and corporate pre-production products in a sample human organizational population and carefully observing the social consequences, and (b) Sociometrics – using digital artifacts to better observe and measure the complex social reality of interesting human systems.

This class introduces studies in the algorithmic manipulation of type as word, symbol, and form. Problems covered will include semantic filtering, inherently unstable letterforms, and spoken letters. The history and traditions of typography, and their entry into the digital age, will be studied. Weekly problem sets using Java will explore new ways of looking at and manipulating type.

Introduces principles of analysis and synthesis in the computational medium. Expressive examples that illustrate the intersection of computation with the traditional arts are developed on a weekly basis. Hands-on design exercises are continually framed and examined in the larger context of contemporary digital art.

A laboratory-based exploration of the principles, techniques, and applications of holography as a 3-D imaging communication medium. Begins with interference and diffraction, and proceeds through laser off-axis holography to white-light "rainbow" and reflection holography. Term project required, with oral presentation and written report. MAS.450 is a laboratory course about holography and holographic imaging. This course teaches holography from a scientific and analytical point of view, moving from interference and diffraction to imaging of single points to the display of three-dimensional images. Using a "hands-on" approach, students explore the underlying physical phenomena that make holograms work, as well as designing laboratory setups to make their own images. The course also teaches mathematical techniques that allow the behavior of holography to be understood, predicted, and harnessed. Holography today brings together the fields of optics, chemistry, computer science, electrical engineering, visualization, three-dimensional display, and human perception in a unique and comprehensive way. As such, MAS.450 offers interesting and useful exposure to a wide range of principles and ideas. As a course satisfying the Institute Laboratory Requirement, MAS.450 teaches about science, scientific research, and the scientific method through observation and exploration, hinting at the excitement that inventors feel before they put their final equations to paper.

Examines how new computational tools and activities can help people learn new things in new ways. Discusses theories of learning and education underlying the design and use of these tools, and explores how new tools can change the ways people think about learning and education. Special emphasis on "constructionist" approaches to learning (represented by tools such as StarLogo and programmable LEGO bricks). Final project involves the design and observation of learning activities. As the digital revolution brings with it radical changes in how and what we learn, people must continue to learn all the time. New technologies make possible new approaches to learning, new contexts for learning, new tools to support learning, and new ideas of what can be learned. This course will explore these new opportunities for learning with a special focus on what can be learned through immersive, hands-on activities. Students will participate in (and reflect on) a variety of learning situations, and will use Media Lab technologies to develop new workshops, iteratively run and refine the workshops, and analyze how and what the workshop participants learn.

Provides a hands-on introduction to the resources for designing and fabricating smart systems, including CAD/CAM/CAE; NC machining, 3-D printing, injection molding, laser cutting; PCB layout and fabrication; sensors and actuators; analog instrumentation; embedded digital processing; wired and wireless communications. Emphasis on learning how to use the tools as well as understand how they work.

Subject applies cognitive science and technology to the industrial design process. Introduces prototyping techniques and approaches for objective evaluation as part of the design process. Students practice evaluating products with mechanical and electronic aspects. Evaluation process is applied to creating functioning smart product prototypes. Project oriented subject that draws upon engineering, aesthetic, and creative skills. Subject is geared towards students interested in creating physical products which encompass electronics and computers in order to include them in smart scenarios. Students present readings, learn prototyping skills, create a product prototype, and complete a publication style paper.

This course examines the philosophical and theoretical foundations of constructionism as a paradigm for formulating and evaluating new theories for learning and approaches to education. One of the goals of this course is to help new learning researchers situate their work within the constructionist framework through readings and projects that will focus on the rich interplay between the process of knowledge construction and the development and co-evolution of ideas, learners, tools, and contexts.

The aim of the students from the Numeric Photography class at the MIT Media Laboratory was to present an exhibition of digital artworks which blend photography and computation, in the context of scene-capture, image-play, and interaction. Equipped with low-end digital cameras, students created weekly software projects to explore aesthetic issues in signal processing and interaction design. The results are more than a hundred Java applets -- many of which are interactive -- that suggest new avenues for image-play on the computer. These weekly exercises led to the final product, an exhibition of the student work.

Theory and practice of optical methods in engineering and system design. Emphasis on diffraction, statistical optics, holography, and imaging. Provides engineering methodology skills necessary to incorporate optical components in systems serving diverse areas such as precision engineering and metrology, bio-imaging, and computing (sensors, data storage, communication in multi-processor systems). Experimental demonstrations and a design project are included.

This course examines the issues, principles, and challenges toward building relational machines through a combination of studio-style design and critique along with lecture, lively discussion of course readings, and assignments. Insights from social psychology, human-computer interaction, and design will be examined, as well as how these ideas are manifest in a broad range of applications for software agents and robots.

Innovation in expression -- as realized in media, tangible objects, and performance, and more -- generates new questions and new potentials for human engagement. When and how does expression engage us deeply? While "deep engagement" seems fundamental to the human psyche, it is hard to define, difficult to reliably design for, and hard to critically measure or assess. Are there principles we can articulate? Are there evaluation metrics we can use to insure quality of experience? Many personal stories confirm the hypothesis that once we experience deep engagement, it is a state we long for, remember, and want to repeat. We need to better understand these principles and innovate methods that can insure higher-quality products (artifacts, experiences, environments, performances, etc.) that appeal to a broad audience and that have lasting value over the long term.

Seminar explores approaches to representation for very distributed cinematic storytelling. The relationship between story creation and story appreciation is analyzed. Readings are drawn from literary, cinematic criticism, as well as from artist's descriptions of interactive, distributed works. Students analyze a range of storytelling techniques, develop a previsualization, story construction, or audience participation model. Individual or group final projects.

How do words get their meanings? How can word meanings be represented and used by machines? We will explore three families of approaches to these questions from a computational perspective. Relational / structural methods such as semantic networks represent the meaning of words in terms of their relations to other words. Knowledge of the world through perception and action leads to the notion of external grounding, a process by which word meanings are 'attached' to the world. How an agent theorizes about, and conceptualizes its world provides yet another foundation for word meanings. We will examine each of these perspectives, and consider ways to integrate them.