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 interact physically through a touchscreen 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 commonsense knowledge that 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 a human-computer interaction (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.

Then we add some world knowledge, in the form of commonsense statements, to help in the text understanding. The result combines this knowledge to form a multidimensional space where concepts, people, groups, and projects are all represented as vectors. From that space we retrieve information relevant to lab visitors--dynamically creating their presence in the vector space by creating a vector from the projects they have chosen as favorites. We then use the vector space to determine the relevance of objects in the space to each other--determining which projects are similar, which projects would be good fits for a lab visitor, and which projects fit which lab themes. Additionally, we have designed a user interface that makes this system easy and social to interact with. The following subections discuss our approach to interface design, our methods for extracting semantic information from the text base, and for assessing similarity of user interests with that knowledge.

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 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.