Barbara Barry Projects

Barbara Barry MIT Media Lab barbara symbol dot media dot mit dot edu Selected Research Projects
Recasting Autobiography, 2007-Present	Recasting Autobiography is a collaborative process of recreating oral histories in relationship to fictional and non-fictional texts. I interview a participant and we choose salient stories from the participant’s past, present, or imagined future. I then process the transcribed texts using story generation software I built. The software indexes events from the participant’s story into a collection of related folklore tales and commonsense story resources. The participant and I then collaborate to recast this life story by inserting events and knowledge from the connected texts. Sometimes the reprocessed stories are fanciful, and at other times they starkly confront difficult passages in life, turning points that moved the storyteller in one direction or another. In process of recasting the story we agree, collide, and face the struggle of understanding how another person shapes the events of one’s life into a coherent narrative. Please contact me if you'd like to be a participant.

Neuroscience of Narrative, 2007-Present	Recent clinical findings show startling effects of talk-therapies on brain function. In the course of a therapeutic intervention, such as cognitive behavioral therapy, entrenched beliefs are rewritten causing long-lasting, circuit-specific changes in brain activity. These advances in psychiatry and neuroscience offer a glimpse into the possibility of mapping the neural circuitry of mental processes such as suspension of disbelief, character allegiance, and emotional responses. My preliminary work in this area, narrative software to help patients assuage their pain, provides a way to systematically study how story customization based on personality measures can influence the experience of self-reported pain.

Mindful Documentary , 2002-Present	As part of my PhD work, I invented a video camera as a brainstorming partner for documentary storytellers. Knowledge is solicited from the videographer at the point of capture; it is used to generate narrative or contextual shot suggestions, which provide alternative recording path ideas for the videographer. The system encourages the videographer to reflect on the story possibilities of a documentary collection during real-time capture. The camera has rudimentary story understanding capabilities in the form of a very large database of commonsense facts and algorithms for reasoning.. My inspirations were: making a step toward capture for multiple stories from one shoot, helping observe the world from a viewpoint of another person, and in developing the commonsense capabilities of the camera, advancing story understanding in artificial intelligence.

Story Net, 2004-Present	How can we represent stories to a computer in natural language to support better interactive storytelling applications, and applications for learning and health? The StoryNet project is a long-term project that is part of the MIT Media Lab's Commonsense Computing effort. Until now, computer programmers and researchers had to painstakingly encode all the knowledge needed to understand a particular story into a system, limiting the domain of reasoning to making inferences about or summarizing a single story. I am in the process of building knowledge-base of ten million stories be used for commonsense reasoning by computers. This project is the back-end knowledge base for a few interactive knowledge acquisition projects, such as Comic Kit.

Openmind Experiences, 2002-2003	Openmind Experiences was our first effort to expand the work of OMCS to more complex storytelling. Users were given story templates to fill in, to gather information about people's goals, plans, and the explanation patters for actions we take in life. This was a small pilot propjet, tested and published, then used to inform other work.

Openmind Commonsense, 2000-2006	Openmind Commonsense (OMCS) was the first online site for collection of commonsense knowledge from the general public for the advancement of AI. I was an advisor for Human Computer Interaction, and collaborated on the design of the knowledge representation for the contributed concepts. The Principal Investigator and inventor of the site is Push Singh, of the MIT Media Lab's Commonsense Computing Effort. The latest version of the work, by Catherine Havasi, Rob Speer, and Jason Alonso is called Openmind Commons. Terrific work!

Storybeads, 1998-2000	StoryBeads are wearable computers developed as a tool for constructing image-based stories by allowing users to sequence and trade story pieces of image and text. StoryBeads are modular, wearable computer necklaces made of tiny computer “beads” capable of storing or displaying images and text. Beads communicate by infrared light, allowing the trade of digital images by beaming from bead to bead or by trade of a physical bead containing images. A person can bean an image to another's necklace, or simply give them a bead, which automatically incorporates into the new necklace. The projected also yielded a novel route discovery algorithm for organizing personal area networks. The casings of the beads were designed and vacuum formed by the master casters at the LEGO company in Denmark. The work was featured in I.D Magazine and Discover Magazine in 1999. The optical display was donated by Motorola, my research team and I turned the display from a 10" by 8" board connected to an optical to a 2" x 2", wearable display. I plan to redesign the beads using current technology, such as Bluetooth and SD cards, enabling further miniaturization and to in order to move closer to my vision for the work.

Maine Youth Center Project, Fall 2000	As part of Seymour Papert's Maine Youth Center Project, I co-designed a workshop that encouraged imprisoned youth to tell stories about their experiences, thoughts and concerns. The learners constructed multiple viewpoint stories in digital video based on their own everyday life experiences then shared them with their community. They learned storytelling, acting, and video production skills.
	For more research information please see my publications page.