This 10-20p Masters thesis project will involve designing an interface with music files for a mobile media application called Push!Music. In this program each music file is an agent, having different behaviours, belonging to a group of other music files etc. The challenge is to design the interface so that the users understand and can take advantage of the agent-like behaviours of their music collection. You need to be experienced with interface design and have good knowledge of HCI. The interface is intended to be implemented on a PDA or equivalent.
Overall, the
Push!Music project investigates how mobile music players can exchange music
files wirelessly with other devices in the proximity. This can be done manually by the user,
who chooses which song to send and to whom, or it can happen automatically. The automatic
exchange of music files is controlled by the music files, which in
Push!Music are represented
as music agents. The purpose of the agents is to transfer itself to devices where it is most
likely to be appreciated by the user. In the current PDA prototype, the agents are only visible
to the user in the shape of music files (as in ordinary players). The aim with the Masters
thesis is to design a new interface, so that Future Applications Lab further can investigate
if the users can get more aware of the agents, and maybe explain why they go from one device
to another, by representing them differently on screen.
This 20p Masters Thesis project involves software programming for the
E-puck robot platform.
The platform is a small mobile robot developed by EPFL intended for education prototyping.
The aim with the thesis is to use sensors such as IR-receiver, accelerometer and microphones
together with for example IR as communication to produce visual patterns on the robots displays.
The programming for the display will involve e.g.
game of life representation based on the
sensor input. You should have experience in programming software with C/C++. Most of the
libraries for sensors and actuators already exist.
The thesis is conducted for
ECAgents, a European project on language and communication for
autonomous agents. Our role in this project is to investigate how
communicating agents could become a natural part of our
everyday environment. We
are investigating possible scenarios for communication and
appearance of agents in such
environments. The aim with the thesis is to develop a prototype that can illustrate how
patterns can be presented and communicated, based on the agents perception of their environment
and interaction with each other.
Jeffrey Knurek has started to work on this project as a masters thesis.
This 10-20 p Masters Thesis project involves designing complex visual patterns, based on photographs.
Each pattern should have high resolution and evolve over time and have different starting points
(depending on positioning information). A related project has been developed at
I/O brush, where
patterns and colors are picked up with camera technology and used to paint with.
The thesis will be part of a project where
Future Applications Lab investigates autonomous interior design for everyday environments.
Currently this project is under investigation by our intern, Marcus Forsmoo.
This 10-20p Masters Thesis aims to explore
tagging and semiotic dynamics on mobile devices.
You should have a suitable background in linguistics, computer science or equivalent,
with knowledge of mobile platforms.
In tomorrows ubiquitous mobile society it will become more and more important to provide
information in order to actually get something back. One recent way of providing
information is so called tagging. This phenomenon is currently revolutionizing the new
generation of the web as we know it (e.g. flickr,
del.icio.us, etc) and gives
visions
of what to come. Tagging today thus allows us to categorize and search for content.
Another important aspect is feedback mechanisms that allow users to react and interact
with previous tags and their relationships. In e.g. del.icio.us the user will get
recommendations of common tags for a particular object. Is a system then “teaching”
the user about the semantic meaning between tags and objects?
This project aims for exploring how to enable a mobile system with tagging properties.
One common problem with mobile devices is the limitations due to narrow user interfaces.
Tagging should thus feel easy enough so that the user does not become frustrated but of
course also rewarding and somehow worth the effort. The central issue here is then to
investigate how the exchange of object-tags constellations in this ad-hoc mobile
distributed fashion would contribute to both the learning and perceived reward. The thesis
work is about modeling, design and exploration of this concept.
This project has started and is under investigation by the ISD-students Rakesh Tanange and Malik Ammar.