Media X Fall 2009 Seminars LIVE

Streamed at Noon PST .QuickTime player required, may need to click twice to launch.

November 19 - The HP Phenomenon
Chuck House, Media X

December 3 - Total Engagement: Using Games and Virtual Worlds to Change the Way People Work and Businesses Compete
Byron Reeves, HSTAR

Networking and Insights
The Summer Institute at Wallenberg Hall

Media X again sponsors the Summer Institute at Wallenberg Hall, a selection of workshops on topics that address new opportunities at the intersection of people and advanced communication technologies. In one and two-day formats, these workshops are designed to provide working professionals with access to Stanford thought leaders and their colleagues in a hands-on, skill-based retreat setting.

STAP funds may be used by Stanford employees.
Coming workshops include:
August 3-4 Social Media Collaboratory
August 5-6 New Metrics for New Media: Analytics for Social Media and Virtual Worlds
August 7 Building Media and Management Bridges for Head-Heart Impact
August 10-11 Data Visualization: Theory and Practice
August 12 Technology Transfer for Silicon Valley Outposts
August 12-14 Visualization for Collective, Connective and Distributed Intelligence

Social Connectedness in Ambient Intelligent Environments

Connectedness, that feeling of staying in touch with another person, can be facilitated with technologies. Media X research teams studying mediated emotions, touch and presence met with corporate partners to review recent experimental results and explore opportunities to translate research insights into business objectives. Visiting corporate researchers, working at Stanford Labs, transfer the knoweldge to their companies' labs, a reminder that the finesse of knoweldge relies on people's minds and depends on context.

Media Multitasking:
Implications for Learning and Development in Youth

The LIFE Center and the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, with support from the NSF and the Spencer Foundation, hosted a seminar on "Media Multitasking: Implications for Learning and Development in Youth," on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009, in the Wallenberg Hall Learning Theater. More details.

Places & Spaces Exhibit At Media X
Wallenberg Hall

Cartographic maps of physical places have guided mankind’s explorations for centuries. They enabled the discovery of new worlds while also marking territories inhabited by the unknown. Domain maps of abstract semantic spaces aim to serve today’s explorers navigating the world of science. These maps are generated through a scientific analysis of large-scale scholarly datasets in an effort to connect and make sense of the bits and pieces of knowledge they contain. The Places & Spaces exhibit, at Wallenberg Hall has two components. The physical component is available for display and allows for close visual inspection through high-quality prints. It is meant to inspire cross-disciplinary discussion on how best to track and communicate human activity and scientific progress on a global scale. It includes hand-on science maps for children. The online counterpart provides links to a selected series of maps and their makers along with detailed explanations of why these maps work.

Open reception following the May 18 Seminar will include Jeff Heer and students, Katy Borner (virtual presence) and other mapmakers of the Places & Spaces exhibit.

Media X Remembers Internet2 Sociotechnical Summit

The Internet2 Sociotechnical Summit was held in Ann Arbor in 1999 to create a research agenda in high bandwidth communications for the social sciences. Sponsored by Cisco and the John D. Evans Foundation, the meeting was organized by Martha Russell, then at The University of Texas at Austin, with a steering committee including Ellen Wartella, Barbara O’Keefe, and Byron Reeves.

Each Internet2 organization sent an engineer and a social scientist to the meeting. Chuck House, then at Intel, presented the keynote address to nearly 200 attendees. The monograph of the I2 Sociotechnical Summit identified five major themes for social science research: Collaboration, Education, Presence, Technology Transfer, and Policy. Several university centers focused on these themes, including Media X, were created subsequently.

In the 10 years since the Internet2 Summit, the greater part of that research agenda has been accomplished. A new research agenda is now emerging for the social sciences and technology in advanced communications technologies. John D. Evans and Doug van Houweling presented a seminar on April 20.

Building Effective Virtual Teams

For the 2007 Wallenberg Summer Institute, Media X sponsored a Workshop, "Building Effective Virtual Teams: Tools, Techniques, Best Practices and Gotcha’s for Creating and Leading Distributed Teams".

This intensive workshop featured leading-edge research answers for companies using teams in multiple locations, especially off-shored or outsourced teams. New tools and methodologies as well as key research conclusions for what works and, importantly, what has been awkward, difficult or even disastrous were covered. Participants were expected to share their own approaches, results, and current concerns. Discussion was wide-ranging.

The monograph of the workshop (1.7MB pdf) is available for download here.