Berkeley Center for New Media Research Summaries
Research summaries as of August 2008.
List is presented in random order each time you refresh the page.
Virtual Embodiment and Myths of Meaning in Second Life
Hubert Dreyfus, Philosophy
Second Life is a popular networked 3D virtual environment where millions of online visitors control avatars that interact with each other, build structures, visit shops, and engage in a variety of social and economic activities. Dreyfus analyzes Second Life from a philosophical perspective, exploring how thinkers such as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger would respond to the virtual embodiment enabled by such systems. Dreyfus argues that the explicit conscious indirectness inherent in how responses and emotions are conveyed in Second Life is distinctly Cartesian, dualistic, and fundamentally limited. Drawing from Existential Phenomenology, Dreyfus suggests that maximally meaningful human experiences require an intuitive shared sense of vulnerability, mood, and emotion that is currently lacking but may be possible with future technological advances that would directly link the bodies or brains of the residents of Second Life with their avatar bodies in the virtual world.
To appear in a forthcoming Routledge edition of Dreyfus' book, On the Internet.
How to Make Analogies in a Digital Age
Whitney Davis, History of Art
Conventional wisdom divides media into analog or digital. But these are not binary opposites: there are many representations that do not fit cleanly into these categories (e.g., natural language), and the categories themselves are not crisply defined. Davis considers how artists such as Ingrid Calame, Andreas Gursky, and Torben Giehler employ these digital modes of representation as metaphors for discontinuity, interchangeability, manipulability, and receding repleteness in contemporary experience--the horizons of experience that ordinarily have been captured by analogical modes of representation. At this point in history there is often no discernible difference between digital and analogical representations even if they have been produced in different ways. For this reason it is possible but has proven elusive to achieve what Davis calls a "New Analogy" in digital representation: a digital version of -- and meditation on -- the analogically represented world.
http://goldberg.berkeley.edu/bcnm/Analogies-in-a-Digital-Age.pdf
(from October 117, Summer 2006)
Using Participatory Media and Public Voice to Encourage Civic Engagement
Howard Rheingold, Sociology and School of Information
Teaching young people how to use digital media to convey their public voices could connect youthful interest in identity exploration and social interaction with direct experiences of civic engagement. Learning to use blogs wikis, and digital video as media of self-expression, with an emphasis on "public voice," should be considered a pillar - not just a component - of twenty-first-century civic curriculum. Introducing the use of these media in the context of the public sphere is an appropriate intervention for educators because the rhetoric of democratic participation is not necessarily learnable by self-guided point-and-click experimentation. A companion wiki provides an open-ended collection of resources for educators: https://www.socialtext.net/medialiteracy.
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/dmal.9780262524827.097
Why Youth (Heart) Social Network Sites: The Role of Networked Publics in Teenage Social Life
Danah Boyd, PhD Candidate, School of Information
Social network sites like MySpace and Facebook serve as "networked publics." As with unmediated publics like parks and malls, youth use networked publics to gather, socialize with their peers, and make sense of and help build the culture around them. This project examines American youth engagement in networked publics and considers how properties unique to such mediated environments (e.g., persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences) affect the ways in which youth interact with one another. Ethnographic data is used to analyze how youth recognize these structural properties and find innovative ways of making these systems serve their purposes. Issues like privacy and impression management are explored through the practices of teens and youth participation in social network sites is situated in a historical discussion of youth's freedom and mobility in the United States.
http://www.danah.org/papers/WhyYouthHeart.pdf
Remixing Catalhoyuk in Second Life
Ruth Tringham, Anthropology
Ruth Tringham's research involving New Media has theoretical underpinnings based in the concepts of Database Narratives and Recombinant History in which the original data of her archaeological research are remediated, repurposed, and represented to create a multitude of small intimate content-rich narratives from which the "history" of a place is built. This research is manifested in a number of concurrent projects, one of which is sharing the multisensorial experience of moving across a place using Second Life. Ruth Tringham and colleague Noah Wittman, leading a team of UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students, media specialists, and volunteers have developed in Second Life a virtual reconstruction of Catalhoyuk, a Neolithic settlement mound located in present-day Turkey. Okapi Island (named after our sponsor, the Open Knowledge and the Public Interest program) is accurately modeled after the East Mound at Catalhoyuk as it exists today, and as it may have looked in the past. We used archaeological evidence and a bit of poetic license to reconstruct excavation areas, videowalks, and multimedia exhibits featuring the investigations and discoveries of archaeologists at Catalhoyuk. Our goal is to provide a window into the work and interpretations of real archaeologists as an alternative to the theme-park narrative commonly presented in popular media.
http://chimeraspider.wordpress.com/2007/09/19/remediated-places-final-draft/
Oakland Blues. Virtual Preservation of Seventh Street's 1950s Jazz Scene
Yehuda E. Kalay, Architecture
Paul Grabowicz, School of Journalism
The seemingly limitless applications of digital technologies make them an ideal vehicle for the recreation and dissemination of cultural heritage. Digital media can be used to recreate cultural content through modelling buildings, people, and their activities; sophisticated video game engines can be used to let people virtually "inhabit" the digitally recreated world; and the experience can be made accessible via the Internet, opening it up to people who otherwise would never be exposed to these cultural sites. Yet, like every medium ever used to preserve cultural heritage, digital media is not neutral: it impacts the represented content and the ways the audience interprets it. Perhaps more than any older technology, it has the potential to affect the very meaning of the represented content in terms of the cultural image it creates. This project examines the applications and implications of digital media for the recreation and communication of cultural heritage, drawing specifically on the lessons learned from a virtual reality project to recreate the thriving jazz and blues club scene in West Oakland, California, in the 1940s and 1950s.
http://3dvisa.cch.kcl.ac.uk/paper_kalay.html
Game Based Learning of Balance and Posture
Greg Niemeyer, Art Practice
The Balance Game allows a player to tilt a board in the game by shifting his or her weight from one foot to another, or lean forward and backward, perhaps like a Segway without the wheels. Our custom designed force plate is extremely precise: it can tell very subtle shifts in a player's body, such as moving a hand slightly. The point of the game is to improve the player's sense of balance over time. The critical question is how fast a player can change his or her balance in response to a stimulus. This can be used to address real world challenges and translate into health benefits, especially for seniors. Together with Metitur, a Finnish Physical Therapy company, which has licensed the "Balance Game" we are designing a clinical study to assess the health benefits of this game formally. Greg developed with Joe McKay, Nik Hanselman and Jay Garg.
http://www.gregniemeyer.com/?p=4
Screening Sex in a New Media Era
Linda Williams, Rhetoric and Film Studies
Screening sex in a new media era means no longer luxuriating before the magnified projections of the big screen. It means getting busy: pointing, clicking, typing, choosing, playing and interacting with highly manipulatable and "converged" media on often much smaller screens. This chapter of the forthcoming book, Screening Sex, asks about the differences between screening sex on the large movies screen in a relatively public place versus the small television or computer screen at home or wherever we now take our increasingly portable screens. This chapter considers what is new and what remains the same now that we no longer lose ourselves in the engulfment by the big screen.
"Conclusion: Screening Sex on Small Screens," from Screening Sex. Forthcoming, Fall 2008 Duke University Press.
Unblinking: New Perspectives on Visual Privacy in the 21st Century
Deirdre Mulligan, Law
Ken Goldberg, Engineering
Pam Samuelson, Law and School of Information
Surveillance, sousveillance (watching from underneath), and co-veillance (watching each other) are becoming ubiquitous: we are watched by the government, corporations, institutions and private individuals. In a rapidly evolving environment of unblinking eyes, technologically perfected recollections, and permanent visual records, what will it mean to have privacy? How will the introduction of unblinking eyes alter how we experience and behave in public and private spaces? This cross-disciplinary symposium addressed "visual privacy," a subset of the much broader topic of data privacy, bringing together experts from a range of perspectives: art, law, engineering, public policy, psychology, architecture, urban planning, sociology, human rights and others.
https://www.law.berkeley.edu/bclt/events/unblinking/
Objects of Wonderment
Eric Paulos, Tom Jenkins, August Joki, Parul Vora, Intel-Berkeley Laboratory
While we should celebrate our success at evolving many vital aspects of the human-technology interactive experience, we question the scope of this progress. Step back with us for a moment. What really matters? Everyday life spans a wide range of emotions and experiences - from improving productivity and efficiency to promoting wonderment and daydreaming. But our research and designs do not reflect this important life balance. The research we undertake and the applications we build employ technology primarily for improving tasks and solving problems. Our claim is that our successful future technological tools, the one we really want to cohabitate with, will be those that incorporate the full range of life experiences. In this paper we present wonderment as a design concept, introduce a novel toolkit based on mobile phone technology for promoting non-experts to participate in the creating of new objects of wonderment, and finally describe probe style interventions used to inform the design of a specific object of wonderment based on urban sounds and ringtones called Hullabaloo.
http://www.paulos.net/papers/2008/Objects%20of%20Wonderment%20(DIS%202008).pdf
Weaving Memories into Handcrafted Artifacts
Daniela Rosner, School of Information
Kimiko Ryokai, School of Information and Berkeley Center for New Media
Handcrafted objects, such as knit scarves or sweaters, subtly signify the time and skill involved in their creation. Yet a handcraft artifact itself cannot convey the experience of its creation. We present the design, implementation, and preliminary evaluation of Spyn, a system for knitters to virtually weave stories into their creations. Using Spyn, a knitter can record, playback and share information involved in the creation of handknit products. Spyn uses patterns of infrared ink printed on yarn in combination with computer vision techniques to correlate locations in knit fabric with events recorded during the knitting process. Using Spyn, knitters can capture their activities as audio, image, video, and spatio-temporal data. When users photograph the knit material, the Spyn system analyzes the ink patterns on the material and visualizes events over the photograph of the knit. In the design of Spyn, we investigate the role that technology can play in preserving and sharing the handcraft process over space and time.
Respectful Cameras
Ken Goldberg, EECS, IEOR, School of Information
Deirdre Mulligan, Pam Samuelson, Law School
Shankar Sastry, College of Engineering
Jeremy Schiff, Marci Meingast, PhD Candidates, EECS
Emerging digital security cameras provide unprecedented ability to zoom in and capture high-resolution video.. Such high-resolution scrutiny raises significant privacy concerns. We're investigating a new approach to providing a measure of visual privacy by masking identities while allowing observation of physical actions and other motion in the scene. Our objective is to develop "Respectful Cameras." We introduce wearable "markers" such as inexpensive hats of a particular color that can be made available (similar to the respectful hats or leg-coverings that are made available at the entrance to churches or synagogues). We are developing real-time tracking and color classification methods based on Adaptive Boosting and Particle Filtering.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jschiff/RespectfulCameras/
TEEVE (Tele-immersion for Everybody): A Cyber Infrastructure to Study Physical Movement
Ruzena Bajcsy, EECS
Lisa Wymore, Theater, Dance and Performance Studies
Klara Nahrstedt, Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Tele-immersion is an emerging technology that enables interaction of users, engaged in activities such as training of tai-chi movements, dancing, or assistance in physical therapy, between geographically distributed sites. This is achieved through realistic video and sound reconstruction of the activities in three dimensional (3D) space in real time. Several components of these teleimmersive environments have been put in place to achieve seamless immersive experience: (a) set of cameras covering the 360 degree space in which the activity is taking place, hence creating 3D data sets, (b) sound system recovering sound from 360 degrees without echo, (c) broadband networking technology that enables throughput of large data sets across geographically distributed sites (end-to-end) with minimal latency and synchronous delivery, and (d) display technologies to display data from different sites in a consistent fashion. We are performing experiments between the two geographically distributed sites, UC Berkeley and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois.
http://tele-immersion.citris-uc.org/video/
Event-Oriented Semantic Tools for Finding and Navigating Among Historical Documents
Ryan Shaw, PhD Candidate, School of Information
The digitization of books, images, audio, video, data sets, and 3-D models is opening new possibilities for utilizing these resources by linking them in novel ways. Shaw's dissertation research seeks to enhance historical understanding of such resources through the development of tools that can place them in the context of their relationships to people, places, times, artifacts, and events. The tools identify and disambiguate historical events, enabling collocation of resources that relate to a specific event. The tools support two main categories of semantic relations: factual and colligatory. The first category includes the "what, where, when, and who" relations that position events in a basic factual context. The second category includes relations that are intended to situate events within an explanatory narrative structure. The tools will be evaluated on the basis of their usefulness for searching and navigating a large collection of Irish books, journals, and manuscripts being digitized by Queen's University, Belfast.
Design and Implementation of CNMAT's Pedagogical Software
Michael Zbyszynski, Matthew Wright, Edmund Campion, Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT), Music
We are developing pedagogical software resources at the CNMAT. We describe the Max/MSP/Jitter Depot: an organized system where software can be stored and shared. The Depot offers a wide range of support and includes basic programming tips, modular programming units for copy and paste, interactive tutorials on all aspects of computer music, and functioning musical works with commentary and criticism.
http://cnmat.berkeley.edu/publication/design_and_implementation_cnmats_pedagogical_software
The Digital Film Event
Trinh T. Minh-ha, Gender and Women's Studies
Everything is going wireless, faster, smaller and lighter. Smallness, which remains an important quality of tradition, was what modernization despised as it equated prosperity and development with expansion in size and in scale (bigger, taller, the more the better). What its grand-scale, universalizing enterprise and colonialism is here a grand example sought to achieve was to make a clean sweep of all traditions and to raise everything anew from the ground. Today, in post-modern times, it is the return of smallness and portability that one witnesses, albeit a return that promotes not convivial tools but self-destruction at ever-faster speed. Whenever one hits an impasse, that impasse tells volumes about oneself: having nowhere to go, one is entirely in time, here, now, at the beginning of something new happening. The way technology uses us while we use them, the way we frame while being framed are mutually transforming processes. It is in creating with the rituals of new technology that one works at shifting perceptions, letting reality speak anew to oneself and to others.
Effective Framing in Design
Jono Hey, PhD Candidate, Berkeley Institute of Design
Designers of innovative new products, services and experiences face two critical challenges during the design process. First, design teams must negotiate a complex interaction of social and technical constraints, as well as hidden user needs and perceptions to find something worth designing. To work with this uncertain and ambiguous information designers frame the situation by selecting the most relevant features and hiding the unimportant. Framing is the selection of a point of view by the design team, one that must be aligned with the needs and values of the people they're designing for. Yet, designing in a team is different than designing by yourself. A design team made up of engineers, business experts, industrial designers and marketers and bringing different perspectives have to come to a shared frame together - they have to get on the same page about what it is they're designing. My research seeks to untangle these two dimensions in the path of a design team to help create new products, services and experiences that people want. The outcome includes principles, pitfalls and tools to help design teams effectively frame a design situation and get on the same page.
http://www.palojono.com/research.php
The Role of Sound in Creating a Sense of Place
Gokce Kinayoglu, PhD Candidate, Architecture
My interests lie predominantly in the research and development of representational potentials of new media for the purposes of design, presentation, documentation and visualization. My masters thesis titled "Re-Interpreting Depth: Architectural Representation and Virtual Reality" was a theoretical discussion of the phenomenon of depth and its re-conceptualization in computerized media, specifically the Virtual Reality Markup Language (VRML), as compared to traditional modes of representation such as perspective drawings and physical models. My doctoral dissertation is on the use of sonic cues in engendering a "sense of place" through immersive media. Technically speaking, I utilize a sonification technology named "Ambisonics" to generate virtual soundscapes for the purpose of enhancing immersivity in VR simulations. Theoretically, my research invokes a critical discussion of architectural representation from a phenomenological standpoint. By challenging the ocular-centric approach that is dominant within contemporary architectural theory and practice, my research emphasizes the importance of embodied, multi-sensory experience of place.
http://www.terrasound.org/soundtrack
Becoming a Creative Practitioner
Dan Perkel, PhD Candidate, School of Information
In this dissertation, I explore how young people come to think of themselves as creative practitioners in relation to their participation in online artistic and creative communities. The Internet is an integral part of the lives of most American youth. Many use it to share original media products, such as artwork, writing, videos, or photography. Thus, participation online seems to open up the opportunity for young people to find new and dispersed audiences, resources, and outlets for the production of their ordinary, everyday work with media. Interest-driven online communities support many of these opportunities. Just as participation in interest-driven activities offline may lead young people to assume an identity as a creative practitioner, participation in online communities may play a critical role in a similar transformation. In order to answer my research questions, I am conducting an ethnography of young people's engagement in these communities and its relation to the other aspects of their everyday lives.
In Videophone Surround
Jeremy Hunt, PhD Candidate, Music and New Media
As a new media practitioner, my research and experimentation is concerned with exploring the possibilities of digitally expanded performance spaces. Recently I have become interested in the visual gestures of musical performance. This piece makes an analogy between microphone and video camera. Microphones are an instrument meant to amplify, magnify, and record sound. In this piece the video camera becomes a musical instrument used to magnify and amplify the visual elements of music making. The movements and music of a pianist are captured in real-time via multiple video streams and microphones and then processed using my own custom designed and coded dataflow algorithms. The results are then projected live into the performance space using screens and speakers.
http://jeremyhunt.net/intermedia/in_videophone_surround.php
Interleaving and Facilitating Semantics for Multi-Disciplinary Collaborative Design
Yongwook Jeong, PhD Candidate, Architecture
In contrast to the failed centralized CAD database model, we propose to develop a distributed model, where each domain of expertise retains its own data in the form most appropriate for its needs, and where "intelligent" filters translate data into and from a neutral data structure. The proposed model and its process are intended to reflect the characteristics of multidisciplinary collaborative design without sacrificing human-centered aspects, and to solve real-world collaboration problems by focusing on a semantically-rich representational method at three different levels that are mediated by intelligent filters.
Perception-Action Loop in the Experience of Virtual Environments
Seung Wook Kim, PhD Candidate, Architecture
To bridge the gap between perception (by our physical body) and action (through digital mediation) in experiencing virtual environments, this work establishes an interaction framework based on proxemic behavior model, given that recognizing and exhibiting interpersonal space is the most critical, yet difficult ability to achieve in social inhabitation of virtual environments. He proposes the interactive chair as a 3D user interface that takes advantage of sensory-motor skills. By detecting and interpreting transitional sitting postures, the system enables users to control their gaze, body orientation and interpersonal distance, so that they can increase the degree of embodiment in the mediated space. His study makes clear distinction between cognitive acts and motor-intentional acts, each of which needs to serve different purpose in the design of natural user interface.
Situated Networks: Reality and Representation in Online Social Spaces
Therese Tierney, Architecture and Planning
Online social spaces are now the most heavily accessed sites on the Internet, having surpassed pornography in mid-2006. The aim of this dissertation is to develop a theoretical framework to understand the importance of online social spaces and their relative functioning within society and the built environment. I am studying online social relations win the context of a larger social experience building on the work of Arnheim (1954), Gombrich (1961), and Lewin (1951).
HydroNet: Design for an Environmentally Conscious City of the Future
Lisa Iwamoto, Architecture and IwamotoScott Architects
HydroNet is a connective network under the city in which people, hydrogen fueled hover-cars, fresh water from existing aquifers, and algae generated hydrogen fuel flow. This design for San Francisco in 2100 was created for the History Channel's competition: 'City of the Future: A Design and Engineering Challenge' Architectsin three cities: San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington D.C., were selected to consider issues of infrastructure, transportation, demographics, housing, leisure, environment, security, technology and communication in a design for their city in 100 years.. Professor Lisa Iwamoto and her firm IwamotoScott Architecture took the prize for San Francisco for their entry HydroNet.
http://www.history.com/minisites/cityofthefuture/
The Infrastructural Politics of Performance
Shannon Jackson, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies and Rhetoric
The history of performance is embedded in a history of technology. From the techne of the oratory in classical Greece to the Verfremsdungeffekt of Bertolt Brecht's theatre, artists and critics have reflected on the role of technology as both content and support of performance aesthetics. Inside a larger project that reconsiders the role of support and service in a contemporary art world preoccupied with the social, Shannon Jackson is researching projects that join performance and new media innovation. In her chapter on the intermedia theatre company The Builders Association, Jackson shows how this group stages a conversation between so-called old media and so-called new media, exposing the forms of labor and support necessary to maintain the supposedly "free" spaces of the digital age. By juxtaposing the live and fettered time-space of the theatre with the digitized spaces of our contemporary world, The Builders Association encourages complex reflection on the media of sociality.
Nation on the Move
Minoo Moallem, Gender and Women's Studies
In Nation on the Move Persian carpets function as both literal objects of textual analysis and also as metaphors for how objects of transnational exchange are produced, marketed and consumed. The simultaneity, juxtaposition and dispersion of voices and sites create a surface which connects many points and intersects in many junctures exposing the complex circuits of labor, ideology and imagination. The interface for the project, designed by Erik Loyer, mobilizes a playful metaphor for the weaving process itself, as users are invited to make connections between nodes of information, artifacts and analysis by stretching a string across the surface of an image.
http://www.vectorsjournal.org/index.php?page=7&projectId=83
Seeing Chance: Design-Based Research of Mathematical Learning (Probability)
Dor Abrahamson, Graduate School of Education
Probability is notoriously difficult to learn. In fact, popular wisdom-based on empirical studies and student achievement-has it that the content is inherently counterintuitive. Yet neither these canonical studies nor extant curricula, by and large, have catered to humans' viable probabilistic intuitions. In the Seeing Chance project, I am developing a suite of mixed-media activities engineered to elicit and work with students' natural judgments that do align with normative mathematical inferences. Results have challenged classical interpretations of heuristics and biases in human judgments. At a meta level, the research has implications for reconciling vying theoretical models of human learning. In particular, I problematize media as inevitably double-edged swords in the learning process: Media can "a.c.e." intuition (accommodate, corroborate, elaborate), but in so formulating pre-articulated notions, media necessarily transform them. However, coping reflectively with this obduracy of media is the stuff that learning is-or at least could be-made of.
http://edrl.berkeley.edu/design.shtml
Collaborative Visual Analysis Tools
Maneesh Agrawala, EECS
We are developing web-based collaborative visualization tools to help people work together to analyze large data sets.
http://vis.berkeley.edu/papers/design_collab_vis/
Black Cloud: an Environmental Studies Game
Greg Niemeyer, Art Practice and Film Studies
Black Cloud is an environmental studies game that mixes the physical with the virtual to engage high school students in Los Angeles and Cairo, Egypt. Teams role-play as either real estate developers or environmentalists using actual air quality sensors hidden through the city to monitor neighborhood pollution. Their goal is to select good sites for either additional development or conservation. Combining scientific data with human experiences, students collaborate, share and analyze their findings, including working cross-culturally between cities. This project is funded by a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and is in collaboration with Antero Garcia of Manuel Arts High School.
http://studio.berkeley.edu/oski/
Automated, Scalable, Airborne Only, 3D Modeling
Avideh Zakhor, EECS
We are developing a system for automated, 3D model construction of large scale environments using airborne laser and cameras. An example of a 3D textured model generated from airborne data for the city of Berkeley can be downloaded from:
http://www-video.eecs.berkeley.edu/~avz/aironly.htm
http://www-video.eecs.berkeley.edu/~avz/3d/3d.html
Fluid Simulation on Tetrahedral Meshes
We are developing methods for simulating fluids on dynamically generated tetrahedral meshes.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Chentanez-2007-LSL/index.html
Generating Surface Crack Patterns
James O'Brien, EECS
We have developed a method for generating and simulating surface crack patterns that appear in materials such as mud, ceramic glaze, and glass.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Iben-2006-GSC/index.html
Simultaneous Coupling of Fluids and Solid Materials
James O'Brien, EECS
We have developed a method for simulating the two-way interaction between fluids and solids.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Chentanez-2006-SCF/index.html
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Klingner-2006-FAD/index.html
Refolding Planar Polygons
James O'Brien, EECS
This work focuses on algorithms for generating a guaranteed intersection-free interpolation sequence between any pair of compatible polygons.
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/b-cam/Papers/Iben-2006-RPP/index.html
Networked Robotic "Observatories" to Monitor Natural Environments
Ken Goldberg, EECS, IEOR, School of Information
This project is a collaborative effort by computer scientists and engineers consulting with natural scientists. The goal is to advance the fundamental understanding of automated and collaborative systems that combine sensors, actuators, and human input to observe and record detailed natural behavior in remote settings. (joint work with Prof. Dezhen Song, Texas A&M)
CONE-Welder is an online tele-robotic game that combines standard techniques of field biology with a new class of telerobotic "observatories" that can engage thousands of citizens from around the world, including students from local and non-local schools, to systematically photograph and collect data on the daily and seasonal occurrence of subtropical birds. This study is relevant to larger questions regarding the proximate and ultimate causes for such shifts, which may include global effects such as climate change.
http://cone.berkeley.edu/welder
Eigentaste Collaborative Filtering Algorithms
Ken Goldberg, EECS, IEOR, School of Information
We're developing new collaborative filtering algorithms to recommend items based on user ratings of a set of sample items. Eigentaste runs in constant online time and makes recommendations using principle component analysis, clustering, and b-tree data structures. Jester, a test application recommending jokes, has collected over 4 million user ratings.
http://eigentaste.berkeley.edu/
Statistical Analysis of Online News
Laurent El Ghaoui, EECS
Each day we are inundated with an avalanche of online news. Yet it is currently hard to obtain a global view of this information. What are the dynamics of news events across news networks? I am developing tools based on machine learning and optimization for analyzing large amounts of text with a focus on online news and voting records, where online learning and sparsity-inducing methods arise as key ingredients.
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~elghaoui/
MILLEE: Game Based Language Learning on Cell Phones
John Canny, EECS
Literacy remains one of the toughest challenges in developing countries and formal education has struggled to meet it. The MILLEE project takes a very different approach, bringing literacy tools directly to children in India. MILLEE uses learning games on cell phones - the "PCs of the developing world". Graduate student Matt Kam and Professor John Canny have been developing MILLEE for the past four years, and are gearing up for a large multi-school field test in Fall 2008. Games immerse children in rich narratives where they can learn language naturally. They challenge and stimulate, and provide social as well and individual incentives. Most recently MILLEE has been adapting traditional children's games to electronic form. MILLEE was developed in the Berkeley Institute of Design, a unique interdiscplinary research lab spanning engineering, social science and art.
Open Source Toolkit for Teaching Social Media Literacy
Howard Rheingold, Sociology
I propose creating an online social media classroom, detailed syllabi for teaching participatory media theory and practice, and a series of instructional videos detailing how and why to use social media to learn about social media.
I plan to grow a comprehensive, integrated set of syllabi, online communication fora, knowledge repositories, and instructional video - a tutorial on creating online social media classrooms and what to teach in them; videos and wikis on how to produce and make use of blogs, wikis, RSS, podcasts, video, digital storytelling, citizen journalism, media-sharing services, social bookmarking, virtual communities, and online social networks. In addition, I will work with a programmer to add group discussion functionality to Drupal; together with a group blog, chat room, and wiki, truly effective asynchronous discussion media will comprise a free and open source social media online classroom. Together, the online classroom, syllabi, and videos constitute a free, self-documented, globally available social media curriculum.
Camera Ludica: From Photorealism to Candy Colors
Irene Chien, PhD Candidate, Film Studies and Rhetoric
Although they dominate popular and academic game discourse, games based on photo-realist exploration and combat are only one kind of gaming. This paper examines a different paradigm of video gaming represented by Nintendo that self-reflexively calls attention to screen aesthetics and requires players to remain curious about the paradoxes of immersion in digital space.
http://caliber.ucpress.net/doi/pdfplus/10.1525/fq.2007.61.1.58
StatNews Project
Laurent El Ghaoui, Associate Professor, EECS
The project intends to explore how modern statistical analyses can help shed light on the dynamics of online media, and on representations of various concepts as they vary over time and across news sources. The project involves many challenging issues, ranging from efficient database design for statistical learning tasks, online (ie, sequential) learning, large-scale optimization, sparse statistics and compressed sensing, and visualization. One application of such tools is to find statistical associations between words or phrases as they appear in given large corpora of online texts, so that one can associate to a given keyword a short list of other words or phrases, and see, in a movie-like fashion, how that graph evolves over time. My team is building a web site that implements these statistical tools and uses databases collected online (New York Times, Reuters, etc) to perform such analyses in real-time. We hope that this web-based tools will be helpful to social scientists across campus and beyond.
http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~elghaoui/
Unbundling Fair Uses
Pamela Samuelson, Professor, Berkeley Law School
Fair use is a limitation on the rights of authors to control unauthorized uses of their works. Fair use is a flexible doctrine that has been applied to many uses, such as parodies of popular works, quoting from earlier works in critical commentary, making time-shift copies of television programs, reverse engineering software, just to name a few. Its very flexibility, however, has caused many to conclude that fair use is too unpredictable to be helpful to most users. This research project identifies several different clusters of fair uses based on the policy values they serve with the goal of discerning patterns of fair and unfair uses within each cluster and identifying factors that are particularly salient in each cluster. First amendment values in favor of free speech and freedom of expression, for example, are very relevant in cases involving parodies and other critical commentaries, but not relevant in the cluster that enables the development of competing but noninfringing works. The goal of the article is to articulate a positive and a normative conception of fair uses that recognizes its broad scope, but that offers greater guidance to prospective fair users than current law is widely perceived to do.
http://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam
Participatory Democracy and Hillary Clinton's Marginalized Fandom
Abigail De Kosnik, Assistant Professor, Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies
After the drawn-out, heated contest for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, and Senator Obama's victory over Senator Clinton, a segment of Clinton’s supporters are threatening to leave the party rather than fall in line behind the nominee. This essay argues that the battle between Clinton's and Obama's followers is best understood as a war between fanbases, with Obama enthusiasts constituting as the "dominant fandom" and Clinton voters occupying the position of "marginalized fandom." Marginalized fandoms tend to blame the opposing fanbase, intermediaries, and The Powers That Be for their fan campaigns' losses, and Clinton's fans are adhering to this pattern. However, the Clinton marginalized fandom's complaints can be regarded as valuable critiques that, if they are noted rather than dismissed, could greatly strengthen participatory democracy in the U.S.
http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/47/59
Denoting Danger, Connoting Freedom: Everyday life in the [post]global network
Marina Levina, Lecturer, Media Studies
The new millennium began with the Y2K scare, and shortly after, the 9/11 terrorist attacks introduced a new concern into our milieu of cultural narratives, serving as a coming out for an enemy that is said to be just as globally networked and invisible as the system we depend upon for our daily sustenance. Network itself became configured as an enemy. However, even while fighting 'the terrorist network', new Web 2.0 technologies and ever-increasing levels of global economic and cultural networks have continued to proliferate. Network has come into its own as a state of mind and a way of life �in sum, a cultural norm. As a result, it is no longer fitting to examine the network as an external force, but rather as a somewhat banal aspect of our everyday environment. Network has become an always-already condition--we ARE the network, and as such are living in a state of post-global network. This collection - co-edited by Marina Levina (UC Berkeley) and Grant Kien (Cal State, East Bay) - explores everyday life in the new world order of global network. The collection will provide analysis of case studies that illustrate new - and old - ways in which everyday life is lived within network.
Cognitive ethnography
Helene Mialet, Assistant Professor, Anthropology
Today, there exists a scientist whose neuro-motor functions, such as speech, writing and body movements, have been partly made possible owing to the mediation of a machine: a computer. People say ?as they did formally of Einstein? that he is a genius. His name is Stephen Hawking, and it is partly through the study of his mode of functioning (which I investigated through interviews with Professor Hawking, his colleagues and his staff) that I?m trying to explore larger questions having to do with distributed agency, subjectivity, corporeality (and/or the mind/body problem), socio-technical networks, scientific practice, language, cognition, creativity, expertise and the frontiers of humanity.
http://anthropology.berkeley.edu/mialet.html
New Media Working Group
Alenda Chang, PhD Candidate, Rhetoric
Ryan Shaw, PhD Candidate, School of Information
The New Media Working Group seeks to foster interest in new media on a variety of levels, both by encouraging traditional scholars to consider and potentially incorporate new media concerns in their work and by providing avenues for those already committed to new media scholarship to improve their knowledge of the field and create connections with like-minded colleagues. In large part, our focus lies in reading and discussing contemporary new media scholarship, though we also aim to provide more practical assistance for our members-for instance, by exploring the many challenges and benefits of professionalization within such a nascent and thoroughly interdisciplinary field.
Our hope, above all, is to bring students together from a diversity of backgrounds, even with broadly different levels of competence within new media, in order to develop a common language with which to share perspectives, articulate concerns, and facilitate interdepartmental collaboration. The New Media Working Group also continues to serve as a valuable intermediary between Berkeley students interested in new media and resources both internal and external to our academic home-from new media art exhibitions and performances in the San Francisco Bay Area to thought-provoking conversations with scholars and artists at an array of other institutions.
http://ucbnewmedia.blogspot.com/
Waking the Dead: The Digital Composites of Ken Jacobs
Jeffrey Skoller, Associate Professor, Film Studies
This paper explores the recent digital art of the seminal US avant-garde filmmaker Ken Jacobs. Long known for his materialist manipulations of early film and photography, Jacobs created new experiences of cinematic time, perception and history by reworking these archaic materials through re-photography, magnification, fragmentation and variable motion. Jacobs whose works include Tom, Tom, The Piper's Son, Opening the Nineteenth Century 1895 and Perfect Film is at once an artist and historiographer working to re-awaken the latent energies and meanings of the discarded, outmoded beginnings of cinema and photography for the present. His active working on and through these artifacts can be seen as a form of dialectical image-making that produces multiple temporalities in which the filmic materials exist simultaneously as a phenomenon of both past and present.
This study focuses on the aesthetic shifts and theoretical implications of Jacobs' transition to digitally-based filmmaking, as he re-works his early photographic artifacts through the most recent digital compositing technologies. His series, CAPITALISM is a set of digital works based upon stereoscopic photographs from the 1890s. It uses new digital technology to (re)animate politically charged still photographs depicting 19th century forms of slavery and child labor. I explore the ways in which digitalization can complicate the notion of photographic indexicality as historical trace. Unlike his earlier analog rephotography in which the physical traces of one strip of film are inscribed onto another, thus maintaining the same material basis of the image, this current transformation into digital code dematerializes the image, allowing other kinds of spatial relationships within the image to emerge. Using digital technology to disrupt the quiet verisimilitude of these arcane stereoscopic views-once the epitome of bourgeois novelty--Jacobs re-vivifies the images, blasting these seemingly inert traces into the present moment bringing with it the specter of contemporary exploitation.
Thinking about Walter Benjamin's notion of the dialectical image in the digital age, in what ways does the convergence of photographic and digital technologies (re)shape the "optical unconscious" of the photographic trace? Jacobs' extraordinary new digital filmmaking creates an important continuum between the materialist investigations of modernist cinematic avant-garde--in the ways a new medium often reveals new ways of understanding an older one--and possibilities for a new digital historiographic imagination.
Local Code : Tools for Site-specific Intelligence in Digital Design
Nicholas de Monchaux, Architecture
Kimiko Ryokai, School of Information
A mere fraction of our nation's buildings are designed for the place in which they are built. Our research seeks to fundamentally alter this state of affairs, and address its precarious implications for our profession, communities, and ecologies. We propose a new paradigm in architectural design, systematically bringing place-based data to bear on automatic digital modeling and manufacturing, in order to leverage architectural intelligence to multiple, local settings.
Building on both long-standing and recent research at UC Berkeley, we will assemble and distribute a set of open-source tools for architects to systematically connect a range of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to architectural modeling and Building Information Management (BIM) Software. We propose to refine and publish these tools electronically to expand the current confines of digital design methods, and ensure the continued centrality of place to architectural design. In this current crisis our proposal offers an important possibility for design, as well as the places, and planet, it serves.