The Glass Infrastructure — Using Common Sense to Create a Dynamic, Place‐Based Social‐Information System

Abstract

Most organizations have a wealth of knowledge about themselves available online, but little for a visitor to interact with on-site. At the MIT Media Lab, we have designed and deployed a novel intelligent signage system, the Glass Infrastructure (GI) that enables small groups of users to physically interact with this data and to discover the latent connections between people, projects, and ideas. The displays are built on an adaptive, unsupervised model of the organization developed using dimensionality reduction and common sense knowledge which automatically classifies and organizes the information. The GI is currently in daily use at the lab. We discuss the AI models development, the integration of AI into an HCI interface, and the use of the GI during the labs peak visitor periods. We show that the GI is used repeatedly by lab visitors and provides a window into the workings of the organization.

Computing Semantic Association: Comparing Spreading Activation and Spectral Association for Ontology Learning

“…The Glass Infrastructure [10] allows the discovery of latent connections between people, projects, and ideas in an organisation. The system uses spectral association to generate a "semantic space" from project information, where closeness in the space signifies similarity of people, projects and ideas.…”

A Prototype for Automating Ontology Learning and Ontology Evolution

“…• To improve the run-time performance of the spreading activation algorithms we experiment with an approximation technique called spectral association (Havasi et al, 2012). …”