The MIT Media Laboratory is launching a Social Health Initiative, and a series of inaugural keynote lectures. Our goal is to create a network of organizations and tools that help people thrive, staying healthy and happy during their entire lives. Because social health is intimately intertwined with social support, adequate wealth, self-determination, and security, a successful social health system must take a holistic view of life. This initiative is supported by Humana, Telmex, P&G, BT, and Best Buy, as well as grants from the US and Canadian governments.

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Networks and graphs have become essential for understanding the online world, with applications ranging from the Web to Facebook. We will discuss building such networks in the offline real world by using mobile call and location data. By gathering long-term data from millions of mobile devices it becomes possible to track movement trends in real time in cities, learn networks of real places, and learn real social networks of people. We build graphs from this data using generalized matching algorithms and also apply novel visualization, clustering, and classification tools to them.

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Context-awareness has emerged as a key area of research in ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction. The context of a person is typically defined as a combination of different personal and environmental aspects. To get at the personal context, human physical activity is widely considered to be one of the most important contextual cues. Important advances in activity recognition were achieved using sensing modalities such as body movement and posture, sound, or interactions between people.

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This second civic media forum will center on several of the Center for Future Civic Media’s most promising new projects. Advanced researchers from the Center will describe their work and offer live demonstrations of their computing wizardry. The forum will be moderated by Chris Csikszentmihályi, director of the Center. Free and open to the public.

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Kelly Dobson is an artist and engineer who works in the realms of technology, medicine, art, and culture. Her projects involve the parapraxis of machine design—what machines do and mean for people other than the purposes for which they were consciously designed. She is currently working with machines that call into question our shiftable notions of being and care. Currently a visiting artist and assistant professor in Digital+Media at RISD, she is a research affiliate at the CAVS, and received a SMVisS from the MIT Visual Arts Program and a PhD from the Media Lab.

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Amanda Parkes is a media designer whose work focuses on how digital technologies and smart materials can expand our relationship with natural phenomena to facilitate a more intuitive connection between technology and the natural world.

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