To the left is a picture of the view from my old office in the Media Lab, changing to reflect the seasons. I have taken five Media Lab classes:

• Speech Interfaces for Mobile Devices -
  This course was taught by my advisor, Chris Schmandt. We learned about speech processing, speech recognition, text-to-speech processing, interactive voice response, and also had a crash course in telephony.
• Common Sense Reasoning for Interactive Applications -
  This course was taught by Henry Lieberman. We learned about the Open Mind Common Sense project and how it can be used to build applications that have common sense. My officemate, Jae-woo Chung, and I worked on the Translation Assistant research project as our final project for this class.
• Techno-Identity Seminar -
  This seminar was taught by Judith Donath. We learned about signalling theory, and how it can be applied to gossip, reputation systems, social networks, fashion, and online dating, among other things. You can read all my class assignments online. My final paper was a discussion of honesty in online dating, and what some websites have done to encourage online daters to represent themselves accurately.
• Affective Computing -
  This course was taught by Roz Picard. It covered topics such as the interaction of emotion with cognition, perception, and learning, the role of emotion in human-computer interaction, construction of computers that can recognize and respond intelligently to human emotional expression, the development of computers that "have" emotion, and other areas of current research interest in affective computing. For my final project in this class, I expanded my EMotoPhone project into GalvaPhone.
• Tangible Interfaces -
  This course was taught by Hiroshi Ishii. It focused on the physicality of media, explored the design issues of interfaces that can be directly manipulated through touch, and aimed to make digital bits accessible through interaction with everyday physical surfaces, such as walls, doors, and windows. I really enjoyed it. For our first project, my group worked on making a digitally augmented version of a talking stick. For our second project, we created a Responsive Room. You can read our final paper about the Responsive Room here. We also created this video about our user study of the Responsive Room.