The Echo Nest has collected and analyzed data about over 2 million artists and 35 million songs. We've crawled billions of documents, parsed every phrase written about any band you can think of, and can tell you the pitch and timbre of every note in almost every song ever recorded. And all of that data in one way or another invisibly affects the music experience of over 150 million people every month through our friends and partners at MTV, Clear Channel, Rdio, Spotify, MOG, eMusic and many more.

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It is an open question how our day-to-day decisions will be affected by the always-on connection to our social networks via mobile devices. People have difficulty with choices that involve delayed utility. The immediacy effect of virtues and vices theorized by Daniel Read has shown that people value long-term and short-term utilities differently at the moment of decision making, with preferences for short-term choices that may end up costing in the long-term (vices).

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A system built on a layered reflective cognitive architecture presents many novel and difficult software engineering problems. Some of these problems can be ameliorated by erecting the system on a substrate that implicitly supports tracing of results and behavior of the system to the data and through the procedures that produced those results and that behavior. Good traces make the system accountable; it enables the analysis of success and failure, and thus enhances the ability to learn from mistakes.

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Storytelling is a pervasive part of the human experience—we as humans tell stories to communicate, inform, entertain, and to educate. Indeed there is evidence to suggest that narrative is a fundamental means by which we organize, understand, and explain the world. Regardless, computers are not known for their ability to create novel, fictional stories. What could a computational system do with narrative generation capabilities?

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This thesis presents TinkRBooks, interactive storybooks that support parent-child storytelling. TinkRBooks allow emergent readers to actively explore the abstract relationship between printed words and their meanings, even before this relationship is properly understood. Chang presents a new way of teaching the concept of reading, based on interactivity with story elements.

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An accomplished entrepreneur, executive, and angel investor, Reid Hoffman has played an integral part in building many of today’s leading consumer-technology businesses. Hoffman was a founding board member and executive at PayPal before he launched LinkedIn from his living room in 2003. By the end of the first month, LinkedIn had 4,500 members; today it has over 100 million. Hoffman was also an early investor in such successful enterprises as Facebook, Zynga, Digg, and Flickr.

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Every day, millions of people encounter strangers online. We read their medical advice, buy their products, and ask them out on dates. Yet our views of them are very limited; we see individual communication acts rather than the person(s) as a whole. This thesis contends that socially focused analysis and visualization of archived digital footprints can improve our perception of online strangers.

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We are exploring the design and creation of information markets with a goal of bringing an electronic, distributed market to a community or an organization to enhance knowledge sharing, innovation creation, and productivity. We apply innovative market mechanisms to construct incentives while still encouraging pro-social behaviors. A key advantage of this study will be a direct appeal to information economic theories and market principles on information markets design. A web-based software platform called Barter is developed and deployed at several sites.

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