Thing #1: there are about 150 students and 200 “other” people spread across 25 research groups, 3 floors, and 2 buildings. In other words it is possible for any given individual to completely ignore at least half of the lab. In an attempt to fight against anti-socialism, our community has a tradition called Friday Tea. A different group hosts the entire lab for an hour long hangout every Friday afternoon. This usually involves snacks such as cookies, chips, or whatever the group finds on foodcam that morning. Sometimes there are activities, but mostly there is tea.

Thing #2: my group, Information Ecology, is notorious for being completely filled with lovable trolls. This reputation is deserved, which is reflected by the fact that when we host Friday Tea we use the opportunity to run social experiments on our peers.

Experiment A: The Occupy BTea (Lab)

It was November 4th and the world was protesting all around us. Our group’s crusty old PhD, Matt Hirsch, had just sent out an announcement for the Media Lab community:

The Information Ecology group is hosting tea this afternoon in the BT lab. Come occupy space with us at 4pm.

There will be 99% value brand plain vanilla duplex cookies, and 1% cake, which will be taken by the guest with the most expensive lobbyists.

The cake is not a lie.

Matt had taken the lead on this week’s ML Tea, and instead of doing something normal like buying a bunch of delicious cookies, chips, and popcorn, he picked up some off brand vanilla Oreos (the kind that sucks all the moisture out of your mouth) and a single, tiny, personal-sized cake.

Only a few people would be able to eat something they enjoyed; everyone else would have to subsist on the horrible cookies. Since I unfortunately couldn’t attend, I asked Matt for some reflections. Below are a few of his insightful comments about the experience:

Q: What inspired the occupy tea?
A: I think it was Ron Paul who said, “let them eat cake.” As good as that sounds, we weren’t sure they deserved cake. So we bought some really cheap cookies.

Q: What do you think the result of the occupy tea says about our world?
A: It gives me hope that the cream really does rise to the top. Eventually, someone was bold enough to take the cake. She hoarded it all for herself and her friends, so the person with the best business acumen was rewarded, in tea as in life.

Q: What were the best reactions?
A: Of course, the aforementioned conquering of the cake was the most rewarding to witness. But I also took a lot of pleasure from watching the shame — real visible shame — from the cookie eaters. It was their own pitiful inaction that sealed their cake-less fate, and you could tell that they only blamed themselves. Perhaps this will serve as some sort of object lesson for them.

And so the experience was a perfect success. After some awkward confusion and pained cookie-eating someone took the cake and had a delicious feast among close friends in front of everyone.

The Occupy BTea (Lab) (Tea) took place on November 4th, 2011. A day that will live in infamy.

Experiment B: The Bubble Tea Bubble

The next semester rolled around and it was our turn to host tea again. We needed a theme. Our group loves bubble tea (sweet iced tea with tapioca pearls, also known as “Boba” in some strange places), and we wanted to share it with the lab. Unfortunately that stuff is expensive, so we couldn’t possibly buy enough for everyone. Luckily we also love puns and mischief. That stuff is cheap.

There was some email back and forth:

Me:
Hey everyone!

Turns out we’re hosting tea tomorrow, I knew that was coming up… Anyone want to do anything special? Honestly we *should* be hosting bubble tea, but that’s expensive so I assume we won’t. We could buy some actual bubbles though (as in, people would spend all of tea blowing bubbles)

Matt:
Can we host a bubble tea in the sense that everyone invests heavily in tea, driving the market to unrealistic levels, and then crashing, thus forcing all attendees to take a second mortgage on their mugs just to leave the lab space?

Me:
Yes.  We need to brainstorm on this.

Matt may not have been entirely serious in his suggestion, but it didn’t matter. The high level theme had been decided. After some deliberation we hatched a plan. That plan became official soon after with the following announcement:

Hello Media Lab and Friends,

Remember when we left the gold standard?  That was a great time to invest.  Same goes for the Internet in 1998 and 2012.

Anyway, we have some great real estate we’re trying to get rid of in the BT lab this afternoon at 4:00.  Come join everyone for Media Lab Tea in the Information Ecology space.

There will be FREE BUBBLE TEA, delicious snacks, and a wonderful activities!

Hugs, Kisses, and Bubbles,
 – Information Ecology

This looks totally legitimate!

Thus we set the groundwork for an economic bubble, creating a market based on goods whose implied value was not necessarily related to actual value

Our group’s advisor, Henry Holtzman, presented the tickets to students, staff, and faculty as they trickled in. The rules were printed on the ticket and no additional instructions were given, so people had to figure things out for themselves. “In tea as in life.”

Within minutes our lab was converted into a busy marketplace bubbling with capitalist energy. Conversations were occurring left and right, people were making trades and striking deals. Some, who either didn’t care about bubble tea or simply didn’t trust in their ability to get tickets, just gave them up for nothing. Others made demands. It didn’t take long for someone to shout out “I’ll pay $1 for a ticket!” Matt and I just lurked on the sidelines and watched in awe.

Not everyone played by the traditional rules, of course. There were threats of ticket counterfeit from students who scanned the tickets and warned us of their capacity to flood the market with fakes. One person went so far as to physically steal the tickets from Henry. All is fair on the tea market!

At 4:30 it was time to open the doors to the Information Ecology Bubble Tea Room. We invited anyone with three tickets to the entrance, and a motley crew of about 20 people filtered from the crowd. Some had partnered together, pooling their tickets and agreeing to share whatever tangible rewards might come (of course only one would be allowed in). Others had fought and scraped their way to the top, achieving the status of three-ticket-holder through blood sweat and tears.

This was the finale. The bubble was about to pop, and Matt and I needed to make sure we wouldn’t be nearby when it did. We opened the door and rushed away as the investors began to enter (Matt was on crutches at the time, but he managed to move faster than me).

Inside the room, perched on a standing table, was a lone bubble tea. This was done for effect, as there were 9 more in the refrigerator of assorted flavors and sizes. The extra stash was found almost immediately, but it quickly began to sink in that there were still limited resources. Only about half of the VIPs would see a payoff on their effort.

Nobody was shocked by the market crash — like I said, we have a reputation — but we hope that everyone learned a valuable lesson about bubble economies. I think Henry felt a little bit bad about the whole thing.

Later, in the name of closure, we emailed the Media Lab community:

Thank you all for experiencing an economic tea bubble with us. We sympathize with those who have been affected in this unforeseeable market adjustment. Due to extreme supply shortages, a threatened glut of counterfeit certificates, and ongoing physical security concerns, we cannot offer compensation for community members left with unfulfilled holdings. Additionally, the bubble tea room has been closed to further community access.

Take heart in the fact that Information Ecology is too big to fail, and in anticipation of a bail out will have its own private bubble tea outing in the near future.

God Bless.
-Information Ecology

The reason I’m explaining all this is to give background for why I’ve been extra busy for the past three weeks — preparing for and participating in sponsor week.  This is a bi-annual celebration where all the sponsors come in to see what sorts of insanity have been going on.  As a first year grad student I was encouraged but not necessarily expected to have any demos of my own to show off, but I ended up getting involved with two projects that ultimately yielded something worth showing.

Exhibit A: Glass Infrastructure

The new building has a network of giant touch screens which are located outside of each lab-space.  Each screen is set up to display information about whatever research groups are located nearby, which allows visitors to explore the projects being worked on inside.  The screens are ALSO wired up with RFID readers — which means if a person has an RFID card the reader can tell who they are, and the interface can change itself based on their interests.

The screen outside of my lab space

It turns out that these screens are actually a research project!  They were set up earlier in the year for the previous sponsor week as a joint effort between four groups at the lab.  My adviser suggested I get involved in the creation of “version 2” which turned out to be a complete redesign of the interface.  The team consisted of about 7 people, and I helped design and implement the new front end (i.e. the part that actually gets used).

The OLD interface was pretty much two interfaces in one.  The first interface was a mini directory, which listed the research groups in that space and had a quick description of the group along with a rotating display of the projects being worked on by whichever group was being highlighted at that moment.  From there the user could navigate to the second interface by selecting one of those projects.

The second interface simply showed 5 projects at once — the primary project was whatever the user picked, and the other 4 projects were “similar projects” which the system would select.  Users with RFID tags could also “charm” projects (i.e. favorite them), which meant that whenever they walked to a screen they could share favorites with other people or quickly jump to learn more.

There were several problems with the old interface.  The first was that people were not really part of it — you didn’t know who was in the group or who was working on a given project.  The second was that you didn’t know WHY other projects were being suggested, you pretty much had to guess.  For the new design we wanted to try to create an experience that provided this extra information, but also somehow combined the two “views” into one consistent view.

The redesign process was exhausting!  There were many intense discussions between the more front-end focused people on how to achieve everything we wanted in the UI, and after about two weeks of mockups and prototypes we finally had something that we actually felt had some real potential.  The projects are now clustered together based on the “ideas” that they share, and we have a completely new way of navigating the people, projects, and research groups at the lab.

My group's screen

Exhibit B: Wall Paper

The second project I worked on was a solo project (although I got a lot of help and advice from my fellow grad students!)  My group once had an installment called the “octo display” which was 8 identical HD screens all connected to one computer.  This display was dismantled when my group moved into the new building, and since then the screens have been sitting around gathering dust.

Rather than let them go to waste, though, we decided that it would be interesting to put them up in a long line and use proximity sensors to detect where people were standing in front of them.  The idea was that eventually there will be a lot of surfaces with the ability to display information, but that will get noisy fast if all of the displays are constantly rendering things.  I volunteered to give it a shot, and I’m glad I did!

Building the thing was pretty rewarding.  For one thing I learned how to use sensors, and for another I learned how difficult it is to mount 8 screens in a straight and level line.  You can read more about the construction of the wall here — I ended up using a giant robot to carve out the mount boards and drill holes in exactly the right locations.

The sensor part of it is also pretty cool: there are these devices which you feed power into and it uses IR to detect the distance of objects in front of them.  Depending on the distance, the devices output a sliding voltage (when you walk closer, the voltage goes up).  This means that you can write some code to analyze the voltage and, if you put one of them in front of each monitor, write a program that knows where people are standing.

A quick demo program I wrote -- the number reflects the voltage and the screen turns green when someone is standing in front of it.

For anyone interested in more of the details, I used an Arduino for the first time to collect the raw voltage information (I’ll explain more about what that means in a future post), and then I wrote a quick python script to pull that information off of the Arduino and drop it into a file accessible to the web, and then I had a web page which read that data and responded appropriately when someone walked up to a screen.

Erek using an almost finished version the night before.

For the final demo I tied the screens into the New York Times API.  Each screen displayed a word or phrase (i.e. “Healthcare” or “MIT Media Lab”) and when you walked up to a screen it would pull up an article from the NYT relevant to that topic.  It turned out pretty nicely, although there was a very slight amount of lag.

Food cam is a webcam located on the 3rd floor of E15 — conveniently placed almost immediately outside of my lab.  It is mounted to the ceiling and is pointed down onto a counter, and can be viewed by anyone in the world.  People put free food underneath it whenever there are leftovers, which means that no food goes to waste in the entire lab! Together we consume it all!

Foodcam in an empty state (it's on the top)

The best part about foodcam, aside from the free food it helps distribute, is the fact that there is a “dinner bell.”  Apparently not everyone looks at the live feed at all times (I do…).  For people like this, there’s a mailing list.  When someone places food under the foodcam they hit the button mounted to the wall, labeled “dinner bell”.  This causes the foodcam to take a picture of whatever is under it, and to email that picture to the rest of the lab.

Here are some recent “Come and get it!” emails:

Mmmm bagels with indian food!

And, my favorite announcement to date:

This announcement was made at 1:00 AM on a Saturday, so only the truly dedicated could reap the benefits (I was not dedicated enough)

• The Proverbial Wallet — a wallet that is linked into your bank accounts via bluetooth and your cell phone, and which becomes more difficult to open when you have a high credit card balance.  The idea is that this naturally allows you to get a sense of your digital finances without having to check online.
• The BiDi Screen — this is a monitor that not only displays photons, but also collects them.  In other words, each pixel is also a camera, which means the computer can take low resolution 3d images.  Using this technology computers can easily detect gestures in front of it.  (Check out this video)
• The Home Fabratory — this is basically a $100 “fabrication” set.  Fabrication is the act of creating something in physical space; so, for instance, a sculpture, or a circuit board.  This thing is one step closer towards making it so people can start building stuff in their own homes without having to spend a fortune.  The ultimate goal is the Star Trek replicator!  (the project’s web site)

There are dozens of other projects, but I’ll let you guys check them out if you want to since they are all listed and described on the group website.

On Tuesday morning I took the “T” (the Boston subway system) down to The Media Lab.  The lab itself is actually two buildings: the new one (which was first opened this past summer), and the “classic” one.  The new building is pretty much made of glass, which means all the walls are transparent and you can look into the lab space from outside.  The main rooms are very large and host about 4 research groups.  Our group happens to be located next to a glass wall on the 3rd floor that overlooks the lobby!

My first day was pretty low key, and it mostly involved meeting the other group members and cleaning up / reorganizing our lab space.  We came up with a really great design, which we call “the armada.” It’s a giant semi circle of desks that overlooks the rest of the “New” Media Lab.  It also creates a corridor to Henry’s office which means that anyone who wants to visit Henry has to walk in front of the entire armada.  Oh, and it also feels like the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.  We plan on setting up a heads up display against the glass to simulate battles with Klingon warships.

An inside view of the armada (my desk is the far right)

An outside view of the armada (we're in the middle -- my desk is the far left computer)

I want to end with a message that I found on the walls of one of the offices in my lab space:

A computer without Cobol and Fortran is like a piece of chocolate cake without ketchup and mustard.

It was great fun, and it brought me back to my Undergraduate days because I got to eat free pizza. As of now I am signed up for three courses, although I will only end up taking two of them:

• How to Make (Almost) Anything – Yes, that’s the real name; Yes, they teach you how to make almost anything; Yes, everyone wants to take it.  I’m not sure what my odds are but I feel like it is something I should try to do.  Creating things in the physical world is not something I have experience in and this will take me out of my comfort zone.  We will learn to use fancy expensive tools like the 3D printer and the water cutter and other things I have no clue about.  If I get in, though, I am told there will be many a sleepless night.
• Tangible Media – This one is also popular and there is a chance I won’t be able to get in, but it seems like a pretty interesting course.  The focus appears to be designing and creating interfaces that involve physical interaction.  This means the computer physically changes something about the world, or that the computer responds somehow to other people physically changing the world.
• Pattern Analysis and Recognition – This would be a much more theoretical course but is one that I think would be able to help me create things that intelligently analyze and organize data that isn’t explicitly organized.  I get the impression that it is more focused on signals (i.e. sound or visualizations) but there may be some theory that could apply to more semantic-type-patterns.  We’ll find out!

I’m exhausted.  I wanted to include pictures of the apartment so far (which is still in shambles because we are waiting for the landlord to repaint a bunch of the walls) but that will have to wait until tomorrow.