Pei-Yu Chi
2nd-yr grad student
Software Agents Group
MIT Media Labpeggychi (attttt) media.mit.edu
http://web.media.mit.edu/~peggychi/
:: projects::
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At the Software Agents Group, MIT Media Lab:
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Raconteur: From Intent to Stories (2009-): When editing a story from a large collection of media, such as photos and video clips captured from daily life, it is not always easy to understand how particular scenes fit into the intent for the overall story. Especially for novice editors, there is often a lack of coherent connections between scenes, making it difficult for the viewers to follow the story. Raconteur is a story editing system that helps users assemble coherent stories from media elements, each annotated with a sentence or two in unrestricted natural language. It uses a Commonsense knowledge base, and the AnalogySpace Commonsense reasoning technique. Raconteur focuses on finding story analogies – different elements illustrating the same overall "point", or independent stories exhibiting similar narrative structures.
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Goal-Oriented Interfaces for Consumer Electronics (2008): Consumer electronics devices are becoming more complicated, intimidating users. These devices do not know anything about everyday life or human goals, and they show irrelevant menus and options. Using common-sense reasoning, we are building a system, Roadie, with knowledge about the user's intentions; this knowledge will help the device to display relevant information to reach the user's goal. For example, an amplifier should suggest a play option when a new instrument is connected, or a DVD player suggest a sound configuration based on the movie it is playing. This will lead to more human-like interactions with these devices. We are now constructing a Roadie interface to real consumer electronics devices: a television, set top box, and smart phone. The devices communicate over Wi-Fi, and use the UPnP protocols.
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Commonsense Inside: Pursuing the Vision of Smart Home with Commonsense Thinking (2009): Technology enables us to possess increasing numbers of functional devices at home, but also brings potential concern of resource overflow that decreases the usability. Can a home select proper Ways to Think for users based on the higher-level knowledge about the properties of different devices? This project suggests a framework design to make a home “think” and utilize home devices using commonsense reasoning. The proposed system includes a Difference-Networks to describe devices, and a Critic-Selector to react to user needs. |
At the MIT Media Lab:
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Slow Food Fast: a Connected Sustainable Kitchen Design to Promote Local Food Culture (2009): This project addresses cultural, social, and spatial concerns, and promotes sustainability and local food cultures in the social housing community. We take the advantages of Slow Food movement that preserves the cultural cuisines and food ingredients, and combine with the efficiency of food transportation and knowledge exchange. We believe sustainability starts at home and in simple, everyday tasks, thus propose a connected sustainable kitchen design that includes a Community Storage Box, an interactive learning system, in a dynamic market-based distributed network.
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Burn Your Memory Away: One-time Use Video Capture and Storage Device to Encourage Memory Appreciation (2009): Although modern ease of access to technology enables many of us to obsessively document our lives, much of the captured digital content is often disregarded and forgotten on storage devices, with no concerns of cost or decay. Can we design technology that helps people better appreciate captured memories? What would people do if they only had one more chance to relive past memories? In this paper, we present a prototype design, PY-ROM, a matchstick-like video recording and storage device that burns itself away after being used. This encourages designers to consider lifecycles and human-computer relationships by integrating physical properties into digitally augmenting everyday objects.
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Stress OutSourced: A Haptic Social Network via Crowdsourcing (2009): Stress OutSourced (SOS) is a peer-to-peer network that allows anonymous users to send each other therapeutic massages to relieve stress. By applying the emerging concept of crowdsourcing to haptic therapy, SOS brings physical and affective dimensions to our already networked lifestyle while preserving the privacy of its members. This paper first describes the system, its three unique design choices regarding privacy model, combining mobility and scalability, and affective communication for an impersonal crowd, and contrasts them with other efforts in their respective areas. Finally, this paper describes future work and opportunities in the area of haptic social networks. |
| At the UbiComp Lab, National Taiwan University: |
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Calorie-aware kitchen (2006-2008): During cooking process, family cooks are commonly unaware of how many calories go into their prepared meals. This work presents a smart kitchen with Ubicomp technology to improve home cooking by providing the number of calories of ingredients that are used in prepared meals. In doing so, family cooks can more effectively control the meal calories based on family needs. Our kitchen has sensors to track the number of calories in food ingredients, and then provides real-time feedback to users on these values. |
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Ubicomp technologies for play-based occupational therapy (2007-2008): Ubicomp technologies can assist parents and occupational therapists in modifying behaviors in young children. In occupational therapy, an effective mean to motivate child behavior change is by designing playful activities which leverages the desire of children to play to induce their behavioral change. By embedding digital technology into activities, Ubicomp technologies can be used to enhance the effectiveness of play-based occupational therapy. We demonstrated two playful activity designs targeting on slow eating and tooth brushing behaviors in young children. |
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Designing smart everyday objects (2007): We surveyed and classified smart everyday objects based on (1) the relation between the object’s digital (new) and its traditional functions, and (2) the relation between the object’s digital (new) object-human interaction and its traditional object-human interaction. Then, we attempted to map out a design space for digital function and interaction of smart everyday objects. * Findings were published in HCI International 07 [pdf]. * Teamwork with Jenhao Chen |
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Intelligent system of social network agents (2007): As technology enables new and faster modes of communication among people, it has become increasingly difficult to manage our social contacts effectively. Existing contact management tools lack the support for intelligent analysis of our social interactions. Thus, we developed an intelligent system of social network agents for managing and analyzing personal social contacts over the web. * This project was also the ImagineCup 2007 winner. * Teamwork with Chia-chuan Hung, Yi-Jing Huang, and Ting-Yen Lee |
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Being a food vendor in nightmarket (2006): By analyzing and transforming the processes into a simulating game, we developed a multi-modal, interactive and role-playing game for people to experience selling food in a disruptive night market environment. * The demo was shown in the Nightmarket2006 workshop * Video(news clip): [Youtube][avi], reported by Unique Business News TV in Taiwan, June 2006. * Teamwork with Denny Tsai and Jack Lin |