My new company has a very generous tuition reimburse program, which led me to think about what courses I want to take again.
MIT Media Lab is the definite choice in Boston area if I want to take a course part-time.
There are well over 20 different groups in the lab, and the admission page indicated that applicants must specify three interested groups.
These are the ones I am interested in and I’d like to list them on my own blog so I can remedy the gaps between my current experience and the desired.
Human Dynamics
Human communities are increasingly a mixture of people and machines, with technologies like cell phones and email strongly influencing how we interact and even who we are. We focus on inventing technologies that can produce qualitatively better lives and societies, both by augmenting an individual’s capabilities and by providing better mediation for human networks. Example applications include: wearable devices for support of elderly in their homes, for coordinating emergency workers, or for coordinating health care in developing nations.
Fluid Interface
The Fluid Interfaces research group is radically rethinking the ways we interact with digital information and applications. We design interfaces that are more intuitive and better integrated in our daily lives. We investigate ways to augment the everyday objects and spaces around us, making them responsive to our attention and actions. The resulting augmented environments offer opportunities for learning and interaction and ultimately for enrich our lives.
Applicants who ideally:
- are interested in inventing new interfaces for people to interact with information and with others
- are creative, inventive, and full of (radical) ideas
- are “hackers”, not afraid to pick up the new skills they need to implement their visions
- are good team players
- have strong technical expertise (with backgrounds in programming and sensors/hardware)
- have prior expertise in relevant areas.
- accepting only Masters students for the 2010/11 academic year.
A background/interest in human computer interaction, artificial
intelligence, cognitive science, design, arts, or entertainment is a plus.
Please include a URL with additional information at the bottom on your “statement of research interests”. Your web pages should document the different projects you have worked on: what they are, what your role was in each of them, what was interesting or innovative about each of them, and finally, some documentation of the results and/or relevant publications.
Affective Computing
How new technologies can help people better communicate, understand, and respond to affective information.We pioneer technologies that help measure and communicate affective information such as emotion, attention, and motivation. Our primary interest is in helping people who face challenges in these areas, especially people with nonverbal learning disabilities or autism diagnoses. The same technology also has applications in medical research, health/fitness behavior change, learning technologies, robotics, customer experience measurement, call centers, customer service, and more. We work on many platforms, including but not limited to, wearable sensors, mobile devices or cell phones, and robots.
Students with skills in computer vision, machine learning and pattern recognition, emotional intelligence, sensor and interface design. Applicants should be open to working with and learning from people with disabilities and should have a strong desire to build technologies to make people’s lives better.
Tangible Media
We explore innovative ways to design seamless interfaces between people, digital information, and physical environments. These “tangible bits” give physical form to digital information and computation so that users can directly manipulate information with their hands. We are designing tangible user interfaces that employ physical objects, surfaces, and spaces as tangible embodiments of digital information and computation, exploiting the human senses of touch and kinesthesia. We also explore ambient media as reflections of digital activity at the periphery of human awareness.
Creative, technically competent, hard-working, and team-oriented graduate students. Successful applicants possess varied skills in computer programming, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering. Industrial/product design and architectural/environmental design skills are also valuable assets. Skills to evaluate interaction design based on cognitive science and ethnography are also strong plus. Oral and written communication skills are essential, as work is regularly presented to visitors and submitted to major conferences and journals. Applicants are expected to have a strong interest in HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) research, and experience in research publication.
A full application should include URLs to an online portfolio of past work (designs, publications, patents), a full resume, and a description of technical skills and research experience.