Patricia R. Zablah

A workshop mentoring program focused on teaching media literacy to teenage girls. The girls combat sexist media by creating their own, new media that "hacks it back" and portrays more accurate representations of women.

http://www.hackitback.com

Description

Hack It Back is a program that teaches women and girls to decode sexist media messages through observation and critical analysis of media, its creators and its effects. In the workshops, which range from eight hours to a month, teens are paired with mentors to create their own media. They use digital and analog tools to break stereotypical gender roles. At the end of each workshop, teens strengthen their confidence by presenting their projects to an invited audience. The projects are published online and made available for download, if applicable. Ultimately, Hack It Back fosters a better image of women, becoming a catalyst for participants to see themselves as leaders who can break through societal and cultural barriers imposed on them.

Peter Terezakis

There are 435 civil nuclear power reactors around the world and 71 being built. 104 nuclear reactors in 31 states in the USA.  Number of existing military nuclear reactors is not known.
I am constructing an open-source wearable radiation detector.

http://www.mykrodot.com

Description

In 2010 US criminalized media coverage of BP oil spill. Obama supports Japan's new secrecy law and has extended scope of existing domestic secrecy acts. Existing radiation detectors are often expensive and vary both in accuracy and credibility.



Accidents happen; events occur. 

There is a current and growing need to be able to detect the presence of abnormal levels of radiation in the food which we consume, the water we drink, and the volumes through which we travel and inhabit.

I will design and fabricate an accessible, affordable, and reliable device based upon sound physics and available materials. The open source device will have repeatable results using readily available parts.
Multiple detectors will increase sensitivity.

Rafa Gross-Brown

I will create a series of connected web-based shorts to create a feeling of awareness about the local and intergenerational impact of climate change, with embedded information about local initiatives site visitors can pursue.

Description

My project will consist of a short about present local(city-specific) scenarios, created to be thought-provoking. I will develop a "pilot" video for my thesis, setting a programmatic & storytelling framework. The content will be tailored to a viewer's geolocation: visual and textual elements will set the story in the viewer's town, better contextualizing the narrative. A narrator reminds the viewer of how their town is subtly changing, and that change must happen.The theme "your town" will be supported by the theme"your kids". The subtext is climate change. The pilot will (ideally) be one of three shorts, each with a different theme: this one's theme is plastic. The experience ends with a list of geo-specific action-based initiatives.

Caroline Sinders

An interactive cross-device story built for mobile and web utilizing interaction design, story telling, and video game mechanics. This is about a real woman named Nadya Popva, a WWII female Russian fighter pilot in the 588th Night Bomber Regiment.

Description

Night Witches is an interactive transmedia and cross device story told through a mobile game and an interactive website laden with information and hidden easter eggs. NightWitches is based on a true story about a WWII Soviet Female fighter pilot named Nadya Popova. NightWitches is built in Unity for the mobile component. By combining game play, interactive video, and audio, I want to create a story that firmly places the user in the role of a NightWitch and explores where interactive story telling can go- beyond making slide shows. I aim to explore, and observe how users can follow the non linear story and the cross device mechanic as well as create an educational and factual but interesting and fun interactive story.

Harry (Chiu-Hao) Chen

Keigibo is a spherical device that captures motion data from the trace of its trajectory when people throw or drop it. Experiments include determining the best material for this "ball", testing the sensors, and visualizing the motion as animations.

http://keigibo.com/

Description

Keigibo is for everyone. It will be comprised of three major components: 1) motion sensor, 2) spherical object and 3) visualized data display. Keigibo will use a tiny Arduino-compatible Spark Core as a micro controller connecting with a motion sensor (MPU-6050). This motion sensor will be embedded in the spherical object to collect motion data as users throw or drop it. In form, the object will resemble a ball to make people feel more instinctively comfortable using it, but I will experiment with the material for this "ball", so it may not look and feel familiar. The relationship between human and nonhuman will be recorded, processed and augmented into a digitized visual representation.

Erika Hansen Miller

Soil for the Air helps regular people participate in co-developing a new approach to combat climate change by creating a platform for DIY soil biology experiments growing special carbon-sequestering fungi.

http://www.soilfortheair.org/

Description

Soil for the Air is a platform for a crowd-sourced research project, with a beautifully designed growing system and a community-building digital space for knowledge sharing. It invites citizen scientists to join me in continuing my experiments in cultivating a special kind of carbon-sequestering, soil-dwelling fungus in order to raise awareness of new solutions for climate change, and to help other people outside the science community feel empowered to make a difference. Soil for the Air is:

People harnessing the power of communal curiosity and knowledge sharing.

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Science performed at home to explore ways to combat climate change.

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Design that makes scientific inquiry beautiful.

Gal Sasson

ControlEase is a node-based graphical programming environment that provides an easy and intuitive way to control, interconnect and prototype programs by providing both textual and graphical programming elements in the same environment.

Description

ControlEase is the result of my own exploration of graphical node-based programming environments. This environment differentiates itself from other node-based environments by providing the required tools to easily connect to running programs, interactively set and change different parameters in those programs, and interconnect different programs. This environment enables the creation of nodes that are aware of other nodes on the canvas and can independently connect with them. This feature allows for greater interactivity when prototyping, and blurs the distinction between prototyping and performing. This tool also provides textual programming capabilities within the environment itself, allowing the creation of custom nodes on the fly.

Ge Ma

MonsterF is an Augmented Reality game run on Google glass. It use Google glass camera to take the video and then do face detection at real-time to track people's face and replace them into cute monsters. Also can use hand to play their monsters.

themonsterf.com

Description

MonsterF is an AR game run on Google glass. The whole process can divide in to several parts.

1) Realtime Video Taking. Video shot by google glass.

2) Real-time face detection. This game will use JAVA-CV, automatically get all the face in the video, and replace the face a different monster face

3) Users can finger squeeze, stretch, flick monster face, they all can active different effects.

4)Sound and music system

PS:

1) About UI: Because Monster is a game. So the interface will be design very cute and funny, also its very simple and easy to play

2)About UX: User Experience will designed Simplicity and compact, wonderful game and app always very easy to understand and play

Greg Dorsainville

DataFace: left_behind is an installation piece that captures the diversity of faces we see when we consume commercial media. Through the process of making, I will examine themes that include bias in algorithms and the nature of diversity.

Description

The installation is designed for a general audience in a space with walls for large projection. It is a series of data visualizations projected on objects and the wall. By using computer vision face detection (and in the process understanding and improving on its default irregularities), I will extract faces from a corpus of commercial media from broadcast television.

This data I am calling a face diet and the installation will show who makes up this diet. The data is projected on objects placed on a tabletop using projection mapping. Animation of this data will be used to demonstrate other themes of the project.

The projection scale of these large datasets gives an opportunity to explore the nature of diversity in broadcast media.

Alexandra Diracles

VidCode is a website designed to ignite girls' interest in computer programming through video art. Users can choose video filters, learn how they are built in JavaScript, edit them within a responsive code editor, and then share their creations.

http://vidcode.herokuapp.com/

Description

VidCode aims to create a conversation and a community of coders among teenage girls. The idea is to pair a medium in which they are already fluent—creating video content—with learning to program. VidCode also allows teenagers to be social as they learn about code: to take videos of their life, edit code with friends, and share information with each other. In my research I found that girls' interest in CS increases when they can pair programming with self expression. The experience begins by creating a video, uploading it to the site, then editing it by scrubbing values, mixing and matching filters such as "grain" or "blur". In the future, advanced video programming tracks will be available in algorithmic art, motion, and storytelling.