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 through a touch screen display 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 and its relationships 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 model's development, the integration of AI into an HCI interface, and the use of the GI during the lab's peak visitor periods. We show that the GI is used repeatedly by lab visitors and provides a window into the workings of the organization.