Media Lab Projects Are Semi-Finalists in $100K Contest
Congratulations to five groups with Media Lab members who have made it to the finals in The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition.
The projects include:
All Cows Eat Grass (Mihir Sarkar, Robin Bose, Sean Leow), an online platform for real-time private music lessons. The system connects music instructors and students using a low-latency audio and video link, provides motivational support to practice between lessons, and lowers the barrier to learn music.
Barter (Dawei Shen, Marshall Van Alstyne, Joe Milton, Neel Madhvani), an information market for addressing organizational challenges, such as knowledge sharing and innovation creation.
BiDi Screen (Matt Hirsch, Tiago Wright), an example of a new type of I/O device that possesses the ability to both capture images and display them.
Convexic (Roarke Horstmeyer, Otkrist Gupta, Kamran Khan, Cameron Levy), a unique recommendation algorithm to help people find jobs where they are most likely to be happy and successful.
VisualizeMe (Matt Blackshaw, Tony DeVincenzi, Dávid Lakatos), a new perspective on your social life. By presenting your social graph as a moving picture, VisualizeMe breaks free from the text-centric interfaces of today's social networks by offering a fresh, holistic perspective. Unseen trends, before lost in mountains of text, can be better understood, providing an organic and evolving view of your relationships.
Media Lab Research at White House Conference on Bullying Prevention
On Thursday, March 10, 2011 Henry Lieberman, head of the Media Lab's Software Agents research group, along with Karthik Dinakar and Birago Jones, first-year master's students working with Lieberman, joined President and Mrs. Obama, Secretary of Health & Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan at The White House for a Conference on Bullying Prevention.
The conference brought together students, parents, teachers, and others from communities from across the nation who have been affected by bullying, as well as those who are taking action to address it. Participants had the opportunity to talk with the President and representatives from the highest levels of his Administration about how all communities can work together to prevent bullying.
Dinakar, Jones, and Lieberman have created a project, "Computational Empathy: Tackling Cyberbullying" to address the scourge of cyberbullying, which has assumed worrisome proportions with an ever-increasing number of adolescents admitting to having dealt with it either as a victim or bystander. Anonymity and the lack of meaningful supervision in the electronic medium are two factors that have exacerbated this social menace. The project explores computational methods from natural language processing and reflective user interfaces to alleviate this problem. The project is in collaboration with Formspring, a social networking website used by a primarily teenage audience.
Death and the Powers: US Premiere March 18
Death and the Powers is a new opera by composer Tod Machover and developed at the MIT Media Lab, in collaboration with the American Repertory Theater and Chicago Opera Theater. It is a one-act, full evening work that tells the story of Simon Powers, a successful and powerful businessman and inventor, who wants to go beyond the bounds of humanity. Reaching the end of his life, Powers faces the question of his legacy: “When I die, what remains? What will I leave behind? What can I control? What can I perpetuate?” He is now conducting the last experiment of his life, passing from one form of existence to another in an effort to project himself into the future. Whether or not he is actually alive is a question. Simon Powers is himself now a System. His family, friends and associates must decide what this means, how it affects them, and whether to follow.
Read more:
- Machover’s “robot opera” to kick off Chicago Opera Theater season (Chicago Classical Review, March 27, 2011)
- MIT Robots Take Stage In New Opera (PCWorld, March 21, 2011)
- Death and the Powers: The robots' opera (NewScientist, March 21, 2011)
- Second Life: Death and the Powers from ART
- DEATH AND THE POWERS: The Robots' Opera (MIT Admissions website, March 17, 2011)
- Preview: Love and Robots in Death and the Powers: The Robots' Opera (The Boston Phoenix, March 16, 2011)
- Interview: Tod Machover, creator of The Death and the Powers (Time Out Boston, March 15, 2011)
- Machover, Touching with Sound (The Boston Musical Intelligencer, March 15, 2011)
- Tod Machover on BBC's The Strand (March 13, 2011) [Machover portion is Chapter 3]
- Powered up and programmed to perform (Boston Globe, March 13, 2011)
- Robotic and music combo gives audience something new (Variety, March 12, 2011)
- High-Tech Opera Features Robots as Stars (NPR Science Friday, March 11, 2011)
- Robot Opera and Immortality (WBUR's On Point, March 7, 2011)
- A thoroughly modern opera (Christian Science Monitor, March 4, 2011)
- Guitar Hero Goes to the Opera (The Atlantic, April 2011)
(The Boston Globe, March 21, 2011)
