Apr 08 2009
Media Tech Tonic #9: “Connections” and the work of the Sociable Media Group, April 15, 2009
Our next speaker in our Spring Speaker Series is Judith Donath, Director of the Sociable Media research group at the MIT Media Lab and a Faculty Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
The Sociable Media Group investigates issues concerning society and identity in the technologically mediated world. Their emphasis is on design: they build experimental interfaces and installations that explore new forms of social interaction in the mediated world. The group currently has an exhibition at the MIT Museum called “Connections”; this talk will focus on three research areas featured in it:
- new interfaces for communication
- data portraits
- interactive art as social critique
Using examples from their body of work over the last 10 years, Judith Donath will discuss how we perceive and portray identity in the online world and how we construct privacy and public space.
Event Details:
Free and and open to the public, however, registration is required.
Location: MassArt, 621 Huntington Avenue, Boston
Room: Trustees Room, Tower Building (note different location this month)
Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Time:6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.
Directions: By car | By T | Campus map (PDF)
Parking Information: at the end of this post
Speaker Biography
Judith Donath is the director of the Sociable Media research group at the MIT Media Lab and a Faculty Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her work focuses on the social side of computing, and she is known internationally for pioneering research in social visualization, interface design, and computer mediated interaction. She created several of the early social applications for the web, including the first postcard service and the first interactive juried art show. Her work with the Sociable Media Group has been shown in Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art, in several New York galleries and is now the subject of a major exhibition at the MIT Museum. Her current research focuses on creating expressive visualizations of social interactions and on building experimental environments that mix real and virtual experiences. She has a book in progress about how we signal identity in both mediated and face-to-face interactions. Dr. Donath received her doctoral and master’s degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT, her bachelor’s degree in History from Yale University, and has worked professionally as a designer and builder of educational software and experimental media.
Parking and Driving Directions
Parking will be available to attendees who drive in the Ward Street lot if you enter the lot between 5:45pm and 6:45pm. If you’re driving, take a close look at a Google Map of the area, finding the Ward Street Lot can be tricky the first time.
If you’re traveling west on Huntington Avenue from Downtown, as you pass the main campus on your right, take a left at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, crossing over the trolley tracks. Go straight to the stop sign and turn left, then immediately turn right onto Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.
If you’re traveling east on Huntington Avenue from Bringham Circle, take a right at the light at the Longwood Avenue intersection, then a quick left and right and you’re on Ward Street. MassArt’s parking lot is short distance ahead on the left.
We are witnessing the dawn of a ubiquitous networked sensor infrastructure, leveraged by the increasingly low cost of microelectronics, sensors, and wireless technologies. As these now independent application-silo systems begin to converge through common standards, the world becomes covered by a seamless electronic “nervous system,” that extends across things, places, and people. One of the biggest challenges facing researchers is how to appropriately interface humans with this wealth of real-time information. Immediate applications of such an augmented awareness are readily evident in areas like supply chain and logistics management, urban optimization (e.g., transportation and energy), factory & plant operation, etc. Taking a broad perspective, however, this transition is profound - one’s interface into this environment can be envisioned as an extension of human perception, augmenting our five senses well beyond the canonical “here and now” and redefining the meaning of presence. 
Joseph Paradiso is the Sony Career Development Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Laboratory, where he directs the Responsive Environments group, which explores how sensor networks augment and mediate human experience, interaction and perception, and co-directs the Things That Think Consortium, a group of industry sponsors and Media Lab researchers who explore the extreme fringe of embedded computation, communication, and sensing. After receiving a BS in Electrical Engineering and Physics summa cum laude from Tufts University in 1977, Paradiso became a K.T. Compton fellow at the Lab for Nuclear Science at MIT, receiving his PhD in physics there in 1981 for research conducted at CERN in Geneva. After two years developing precision drift chambers at the Lab for High Energy Physics at ETH in Zurich, he joined the Draper Laboratory in Cambridge, MA in 1984, where his research encompassed spacecraft control systems, image processing algorithms, underwater sonar, and precision alignment sensors for large high-energy physics detectors. He joined the Media Lab in 1994, where his current research interests include embedded sensing systems and sensor networks, wearable and body sensor networks, energy harvesting and power management for embedded sensors, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, localization systems, passive and RFID sensor architectures, human-computer interfaces, and interactive media. His honors include the 2000 Discover Magazine Award for Technological Innovation, and he has authored 200 articles and technical reports on topics ranging from computer music to power scavenging.