Sociology of agents
I'm interested in the sociology of people's use of agents, and used Julia,
an agent that inhabits certain MUDs,
as both an example of where agents might be headed,
and as a sociological case study.
Judging from the statistics from our Web server, this paper is one of our group's most
popular papers; it is requested quite a bit more than the next runner up. It's nice to
see so many people interested in this question.
Artificial synesthesia
This is a small project I've been working on for the last few years, completely
independently of my main research. In
short, it is a wearable, headmounted spectrometer, which can image up to 256 wavelengths
simultaneously and translate that information into sound. Exteneded wear can lead to a
sort of artificial synesthesia and, given the difference between visual and acoustic
perception, can be used as a superset of normal human color vision.
Power dynamics and civil liberties in cyberspace
If you're interested in more politics, you might like to check out a brief analysis of certain civil-liberties issues in cyberspace,
which I put together as part of a project for a recent Media Lab course entitled The Political Economy of
the Digital Infrastructure.
And if you like that sort of essay, you might like to check out some others.
Focus of attention in machine learning
For my master's thesis, also here at the Media Lab, I investigated how to make a
particular kind of machine learning more efficient by using focus of
attention. Check out this paper (in
Postscript or
PDF),
or this thesis,
with included code.)
Lenny Foner Last modified: Fri Jan 22 02:58:08 EST 1999