Assignments
Piazza
We will be using Piazza for informal questions about homeworks or other class discussion. The system is highly catered to getting you help fast and efficiently from classmates and the instructors. Rather than emailing questions to the teaching staff, please be encouraged to post your questions on Piazza. If you have any problems or feedback for the developers, email team@piazza.com. http://piazza.com/mit/spring2019/mass60/home
Weekly assignments will (generally) be due 24 hours before class each week (Tuesdays at noon)
FINAL HWK10 (helping you finish your project and learning from each other):
HWK10p2 Due noon TUES May 7
Part (A) Send via an email to mas-s60@media.mit.edu an update on your individual "behavior change" activity - answer the same questions as last week.
Part (B) Upload a good first draft of your final report onto stellar or send it to mas-s60@media.mit.edu. If this is a group report, you submit one report. (Note it's fine if a subset of your group works more on the report, and others work more on other parts of the project; you'll just report who did what parts at the end.) This draft should be formatted to fit any conference paper you like -- e.g. ACM CHI format or another conference that interests you for future possible publication. Since conference papers are usually short and dense ~(4-8 pages), please plan to put any extra plots of data or screen shots or graphs in a "supplemental" section or appendix. For this draft, you should NOT have completed: Abstract, Results, Conclusions, Discussion, Future work. Those are due, both in a presentation and in a final report, on the last day of classes (May 15). However, you should provide completed (and proofread, and formatted nicely) sections describing: Introduction, Background (Prior works, what they showed, how they relate to this work), System/Experiment Design (with graphics showing user experience of participants in your studies) and References. For the Background/References, please use and expand upon the content that you already started generating in your earlier homework assignments, where we asked you to find and describe related articles. Each related work should have a good sentence or two (or more, if it's very pivotal to your work) describing its contributions.
HWK10p1 Due: 11am WED May 1
Part (A) Send via an email to mas-s60@media.mit.edu a report on your new habitual good-for-you activity (for the last two weeks). Have you kept it up? If so, what is helping you succeed? If not, what could you do (anything you learned from behavior change?) that might help you be more successful as the end-of-term stress is ramping up? This can include revising your plan, linking it to behaviors you already do routinely, cutting out something you're doing that is not a good use of your time, enlisting a friend to make it more fun, enhancing productivity through getting *more* sleep and eating *fresh fruits & vegetables,* (ironically, some things that take more time may actually net you more productivity). Reflect on this experience and let's share what helps each other do the hard work of behavior change (which is hardest as things get busier - but that is when it also can matter most what we do).
Part (B) Upload slides onto stellar or send a link of them to mas-s60@media.mit.edu. These slides should provide a "12 min presentation+3 min Q&A for 15min total time" to the class, going in depth, on a key publication that relates to your project that you think is good for everyone to learn from. Each person in a group should do a separate presentation (on a separate publication). Your goal is to explain the work done by the authors, what results they got, and how they analyzed their data to get their results, justifying them. You can show graphs/content from the paper in your slides, properly citing the paper in the slides. Note: It can be hard to explain a full paper clearly in such a short presentation. In this presentation, try to spend the most time explaining their results and how they justify them.
HWK9:
Due: 11am WED April 17
Part (A) send via an email to mas-s60@media.mit.edu.
Part (B) upload team slides onto stellar or send a link of them to mas-s60@media.mit.edu
(A) Report on your new habitual good-for-you activity from last week. Have you kept it up? If not, what could you do (anything you learned from behavior change?) that might help you be more successful this week, especially as the end-of-term stress is ramping up? This can include revising it, linking it to behaviors you already do routinely, cutting out something else you're doing, enlisting a friend for more support, etc.
(B) This week you are to work on your projects and final project presentation. You will give a "dry run" of your final presentation in class on Wed.
"How can I do this? I haven't run my experiment yet!" This exercise is designed to help you reduce the load at the end of the semester when you have finished running your experiment , you have to prepare a final report and presentation, and finish work due in your other classes, while wishing you had more time to analyze your project results and get sleep. Doing this part of the project well NOW will save you time and stress at the end of the term (and you can have fun analyzing your results and still get sleep!). It is possible and it will feel really great!
Prepare all of your "final project presentation" slides, including place-holder slides for the results and discussion and future work (you'll still have to make those the last week). Suggested format is:
0. Title slide, list your name(s)
1. Introduction: What is the problem you hope to solve? (1 slide)
2. What hypotheses/expectations do you hope to show? (1-2 slides)
3. What is the prior work that's been done that is most relevant? (1-3 slides of references and key sentences for now. Note: more detail on this will be due in an in-class presentation by you on May 1, which you can get a jump on now if you wish.)
4. Experiment/system design (1-5 slides, live demo encouraged). This part of the presentation should make very clear the user experience: "If I were a participant in this study, what would I see/do/experience?" "What is the timeline of the study?" Make a nice figure illustrating what each participant does over time, including when any questionnaires are given and which ones, etc. Make it clear how many minutes/hours/days they spend in each part of the study. (e.g. Questionnaire 1: 3-4 minutes) Show your study design visually. If you built technology, show a live demo of it -- or at least videos of it working, screen shots, how it is used, etc. If you have crafted a robot interaction, show a short video illustrating a person interacting with it. If you don't have everything working yet, make a slide describing all the work that goes into building it, and be clear what capabilities are built so far, what is still to be done, and if you need any help. This section can also present methods you plan to use --- e.g. how do you plan to infer something about a person's state from how they type?
5. Results (Placeholder slide(s)with fake figure(s) only): Sometimes making figures takes many more hours than expected. Make sure you know how to make figures for the kinds of results you hope to get. If you make a figure here with fake data, LABEL IT FAKE, but otherwise label your axes with what you hope the data will be that will be plotted/graphed eventually. Obviously you don't have data yet, but practicing your figure-making tools now may save your sleep later.
6. Conclusions (Placeholder slide only): Leave this blank for now.
7. Future work (Placeholder slide only - up to you if it's still blank or not)
8. Who did what: If you are on a project team, you can list who has done what so far, but of course this will need updating later.
There is one presentation per project team. The presentation timing should be for a soloist: 10 mins + 5 mins discussion, for a duet: 20 mins + 10 mins discussion, and for a trio: 30 mins + 15 mins discussion. Thus, each person should plan content to present for ~10 mins on Wed.
HWK8:
Put your name INSIDE and OUTSIDE the file that you upload: HWK8-Lastname.pdf
Upload to Stellar or email your work to mas-s60@media.mit.edu and use the subject: MAS.s60 HWK8.
Due: Tues April 9 noon.
1. Project Updates: WRITE 1) your COUHES application progress - have you responded to all feedback from the COUHES office? 2) updates on your project progresses, 3) contributions- what are each member's contribution to the project to date? (if you're a solo person team, describe your contributions), 4) challenges - what components still have uncertainty? What are your plans for overcoming them, or would you like help?
2. READ B.J. Fogg (2003) "Persuasive Technology - Introduction" (on Stellar) and WATCH the first two of B.J. Fogg's videos (links below, third is optional). WRITE 1) Describe the Captology of your class project. 2) What advantages does your proposed technology have over human persuaders/intervention in regards to persuasiveness? (You need Media Lab credentials to view the videos.)
Part I https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/ac-fogg-2015-02-05/
Part II https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/ac-fogg-2015-02-19/
(OPTIONAL): Part III https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/ac-fogg-2015-03-05/
3. Food for the brain - WATCH John Ratey's talk on Exercise and Brain. DISCUSS 1) how physical movement helps the performance of your brain, and 2) brainstorm how AI could help embed exercise in people's busy packed daily life.
https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/ratey-2014-03-07/
4. Models of Wellbeing - we talked about the seven essential mental activities in class. The semester deliverables will ramp up in the upcoming weeks, and it would be wise to take steps now to better manage what could become a growing stress level. PROPOSE an achievable stress-reducing activity that you can implement in your daily life for the remainder of the semester. Tell us what it is and please be reasonable (it's probably too much to start running 2 miles/day, 5 days/week if you haven't been running at all, so pick something you can succeed at as your next weeks get busier). TELL us how you will plan to make it habitual (a la Fogg tips -- e.g., what regular activity will you anchor it to?) or what you will do to make it *easier* to do it (e.g. cooking/freezing healthy assorted small meals now, which you can grab later). TRACK your proposed activity for the rest of the semester and be ready to REPORT it for next week and up until your project is done.
5. Reading list: read 2 of the following articles (uploaded on Stellar), in preparation for next week's lecture. WRITE a few sentences about your learning for each.
- Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein "Nudge" (Ch 1 "Biases and Blunders + Ch 3 "Following the Herd"). 2007
- M. Kaptein, P. Markopoulos, B. De Ruyter, and E. Aarts. “Personalizing persuasive technologies: Explicit and implicit personalization using persuasion profiles”. International Journal of Human Computer Studies, Vol. 77, pp. 38–51, 2015.
- Baylor, A. L. (2009). Promoting motivation with virtual agents and avatars: Role of visual presence and appearance. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1535), 3559–3565.
*Additional task below for 12-unit students* (Those who want 12 credit hours for this class instead of the default 9 credit hours)*
6. FIND AND READ another published paper of your choice that is related to your project. WRITE (a) the main or strongest hypothesis/contribution of the work as relates to your project: write this text so that it would fit logically (cut and paste) into your final project report background section, including (b) a few lines about how it was evaluated/justified. Also WRITE (c) a brief critique of what is weakest about the work. Make sure to include the full citation of the paper and a link to its pdf.
HWK7:
Put your name INSIDE and OUTSIDE the file that you upload: HWK7-Lastname.pdf
Upload to Stellar (NOTE you have an EXTRA WEEK due to spring break) or email your work to mas-s60@media.mit.edu and use the subject: MAS.s60 HWK7. Due: Tues April 2 noon.
1. Give a couple lines describing your project progress. Is there anything you need or want help with?
2. What are two different pieces of advice that you would recommend to other MIT/Harvard students this time of the semester? Keep both very short and enter them as "1 min tips" to share with students. You get a bonus point for any tips that are both rooted in science and elicit a smile or a laugh. These tips could address any topics expected to influence mental health, including sleep, diet, social, the IMPORTANCE of SPRING BREAK - enjoy it(!) etc.
3. READ VanderWeele, T (2017). On the promotion of human flourishing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. vol 114, no 31, pp. 8148-8156. WRITE a few sentences saying two things you think AI developers (making products) should do differently if they knew what was in this article.
4. READ VanderWeele, Tyler J., et al. "Association between religious service attendance and lower suicide rates among US women." JAMA psychiatry 73.8 (2016): 845-851. Belief that suicide is wrong, together with some kinds of religious practice, are well known to be associated with lower suicide rates, and good science has validated this. WRITE: (1) Do you feel comfortable or uncomfortable with people talking about the interaction between religion and mental health? (2) What do you think can be done to make people feel more comfortable about discussing this association?
5. The numbers in university surveys nationwide (e.g. HealthyMinds, with over 16,000 students responding) show that university students who say they are more religious have higher rates on measures of flourishing and lower rates on measures of mental health problems (including depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, probable eating disorders, and more). WRITE: (a) What do you think might be some of the benefits provided by regular religious practice? Name at least 3. (b) Comment on whether AI systems, as exist today, tend to support or detract from 3 of the ones you named. [If you are religious, this question is probably easy. If you are not, then we recommend you ask around and interview somebody who is, to learn about this.]
6. THINK & WRITE: What else other than religious practice do you think might be implemented in life to perhaps impact low suicidal rate and higher flourishing if someone is not religious? Do you think that what is at the core of being religious can be successfully taken into a different form in life (AI may be a possibility you use in your answer, but you can also come up with something that's not AI if you wish).
7. READ King, L. A., Heintzelman, S. J., & Ward, S. J. (2016). Beyond the search for meaning: A contemporary science of the experience of meaning in life. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(4), 211-216. Contemplate how your project, and AI technologies, could do more to promote deeper connections with things that promote meaning in life. Write one of your ideas here about how this might be done.
*Additional task below for 12-unit students* (Those who want 12 credit hours for this class instead of the default 9 credit hours)*
8. FIND AND READ another published paper of your choice that is related to your project. WRITE (a) the main or strongest hypothesis/contribution of the work as relates to your project and (b) how it was evaluated/justified. Also WRITE (c) a brief critique of what is weakest about the work and (d) some sentences of how you would reference this work in your final report. (Doing this now will save you time later.) Make sure to include the full citation of the paper and a link to its pdf.
HWK6:
Put your name INSIDE and OUTSIDE the file that you upload: COUHES-Names.zip or HWK6-Lastname.pdf
Upload to Stellar (NOTE DIFFERENT DATES THAN USUAL BELOW) or email your work to mas-s60@media.mit.edu and use the subject: MAS.s60 HWK6.
1. COUHES COUHES COUHES. Finish your COUHES proposal (make sure you did all the parts: consent forms, recruitment posters or emails, everything on their checklist!). It is not finished until you get Cynthia or Roz or your Principle Investigator (COUHES-certified faculty advisor) to sign off on it, then get the department head to sign off (or Linda Peterson in the MAS office) and then hand-deliver the two signed off copies to COUHES. If you want Roz to sign your COUHES form, you must email it to her by Monday March 18 at 10am. If you want Cynthia to sign, please coordinate w/her directly. If somebody else is signing, please mail us by Friday March 15 who that is and reassure us that they agreed to sign off (and that they have current CITI certificates, which are required.)
2. REGULAR SLEEP. Our data keep showing that regular sleep, (try to go to bed about the same time each night -- don't deviate more than an hour or two) and sleeping long enough that you wake up naturally, without having to use an alarm, is good practice. Locate a friend or family member who will commit to tracking their sleep while you track yours, and keeping you accountable for honestly tracking your sleep. Both of you track your sleep for this week -- you can keep a diary manually or you can use a wearable or one of many phone apps - you can work out between the two of you what works best for you. (i) Plot how regular your sleep timing is from day to day and make a sketch of it -- give it to your friend. Have it show your average sleep duration and the #minutes deviation in bedtime from night to night. Have your friend email mas-s60@media.mit.edu your name, your sketch, and a statement of honesty from you to them (send it to them) that you have been honest and accountable to them. This homework will be graded as follows: If you sleep an average of >=7 hours/night for five nights and go to bed within 1.5 hours of the same time each night, you will get ten points. If your average duration is <=6.5 hours, or if your bedtime variance is >=2 hours, you will get seven points. (ii) Tell us a few lines about your experience trying to do this. If it was hard, tell us what helped the most to succeed. Please submit this part by Tuesday March 19 at noon.
**Additional task for 12-credit students* (Those who want 12 credit hours for this class instead of the default 9 credit hours)* (Submit by Tues Mar 19 noon)
5. FIND AND READ another published paper of your choice that is related to your team's project idea . WRITE (a) the main hypotheses/contributions of the work and (b) how it was evaluated/justified. Also WRITE (c) any insight you've gained that you can apply to your project. Make sure to include the full citation of the paper and a link to its pdf. Note: This content can be re-used when you later write up your project report -- doing this carefully now should save you time at the end of the semester.
HWK5:
Put your name INSIDE and OUTSIDE the file that you upload: HWK5-Lastname.pdf.
Upload to Stellar by Tuesday Mar 12 at noon (Please note Policy on Lateness: -1 point out of 10 total, for each hour late)
(Alternatively email your answers to mas-s60@media.mit.edu and use the subject: MAS.s60 HWK5. )
1. Mobile technology and wellbeing forecasting. Please read the paper (on STELLAR/materials) Probabilistic Latent Variable Modeling for Assessing Behavioral Influences on Well-Being which summarizes recent work by Ehi Nosakhare as part of her PhD work at MIT identifying changeable sets of behaviors that can help college students understand what might be related to their mental health. Record a question here for Ehi that shows you have read and tried to understand the paper. This can be a clarification question if part of this write-up is not clear (as it won't be for most of you, as you have different backgrounds). She will be joining us to present on and discuss this style of work on Mar 13.
2. RAK week fun! March 11-15 is "Random Acts of Kindness Week" at MIT . Read the Mental Health Foundation's Doing Good Report (on STELLAR/Materials). (i) What was something you learned from this that you didn't know before, or haven't tried before, and that you might like to try? (ii) Do two random acts of kindness before this homework is due. For one of the two, follow the principle of "sincerely give something of yourself, not expecting anything in return" For the other, you can be perfunctory. Describe what happened with both, and whether or not you think the state of mind mattered in your two cases.
3. Make project progress. (i) Describe in a paragraph or two what you plan to do/build/study/test and who will do which parts (it's fine to involve listeners or other helpers). (ii) What "dream result" do you wish you could show? What do you think you will find? Sketch a hypothetical outcome graph or plot of a result (perhaps with improving mental health scores showing...?) (iv.) How will you demonstrate that -- what kind of study or evaluation do you propose to carry out? Please feel free to book time with Picard and team to discuss different study designs.
4. Take care of yourself and a friend or family member. Locate a friend or family member who is willing and get them to watch the brilliant Bob Stickgold's talk on sleep and how it impacts your brain, ideally watching it with you at the same time. (This is a 1.5 hour commitment -- you might want to provide food or popcorn.) If you can't watch it at the same time and place, pick a time when you can chat to discuss it, even for 15mins, and promise each other you'll watch it before that time, and keep your promise. Bob Stickgold - Sleep and Mental Health https://www.media.mit.edu/videos/stickgold-2014-02-14/. What is your favorite thing you learned from it? State this using a few sentences that could be used to teach somebody else what you learned. [FUTURE: have the person who watched it with you email mas-s60@media.mit.edu with a note saying they watched it with you and a sentence about how it has impacted your thinking about sleep.]
**Additional task for 12-credit students* (Those who want 12 credit hours for this class instead of the default 9 credit hours)*
5. FIND AND READ another published paper of your choice that is related to your team's project idea - ideally one that does a nice job evaluating something so you can examine how it conducted a study, and carried out an evaluation/analysis. WRITE (a) the main hypotheses of the work and (b) how they were evaluated (approach and evaluation method). Also WRITE (c) any insight you've gained that you can apply to your project. Make sure to include the full citation of the paper and a link to it. Note: This content can be re-used when you later write up your project report -- doing this carefully now should save you time at the end of the semester.
HWK4:
Put your name in the filename that you upload as follows: HWK4-Lastname.pdf. Also put your name inside the doc.
Upload to Stellar by Tuesday Mar 5 at noon (Please note Policy on Lateness: -1 point out of 10 total, for each hour late)
If you can't upload on Stellar, then email your answers to mas-s60@media.mit.edu and use the subject: MAS.s60 HWK4.
1. COUHES. Please remember that the deadline to submit human study protocol for review to COUHES is Mar 21. There has been a change to the overall IRB review, and now you also have to complete Good Clinical Practice (GCP) training through the CITI-Program. Please complete this training and report.
2. Try examples yourself. Download 2 apps from Intellicare, try it, and WRITE (a) which you tried and why (what did you expect it'd do for you?), (b) what features were helpful and what weren't, and (c) what you learned. You can also try other applications.
3. Example project. Belen will present on her experience next week. Please READ her project report as an example of a past project that fits the theme of this course. Fyi, this was a 12-hour course project. The paper is uploaded on Piazza.
4. Reading list: read 2 of the following articles, in preparation for next week's lecture.
- Jacqueline M. Kory Westlund, Hae Won Park, Randi Williams, and Cynthia L. Breazeal. “Measuring Young Children’s Long-Term Relationships with Social Robots.” In ACM Interaction Design and Children (IDC) Conference, 2018.
- Anastasia Ostrowski, Daniella DiPaola, Erin Partridge, Hae Won Park and Cynthia Breazeal. "Long-term Community Social Robots to Promote Social Connectedness Among Older Adults." IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 2019 (to appear).
- Gratch, J., Wang, N., Gerten, J., Fast, E., & Duffy, R. (2007, September). "Creating rapport with virtual agents." In International workshop on intelligent virtual agents (pp. 125-138). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
- Palumbo et al., "Interpersonal Autonomic Physiology: A Systematic Review of the Literature," Personality and Social Psychology Review 2016.
- Saunders-Wilder, O., Chapter 2 of PhD dissertation "Quantitative Assessment of Socio-affective Dynamics in Autism using Interpersonal Physiology", August 2017
5. Project Progress! Teams are good for you! Remember what we're learning about not doing things alone. We STRONGLY URGE you to partner with somebody this week and SUBMIT here your (a) team members and (b) a short description of a "merger" of your project ideas. You can also list listeners as your team member, but make sure they are onboard with the idea. (c) DISCUSS the main hypotheses of your project with your team members and REPORT here.
6. Download the COUHES template and start filling out the parts that you can. Refer to the following examples. These are uploaded on Piazza:
- Belen's (note the form now has been slightly updated - use the latest from the link above)
- Oliver's (uses sensors)
**Additional task for 12-credit students* (Those who want 12 credit hours for this class instead of the default 9 credit hours)*
7. READ a paper of your choice that is related to your team's project idea - e.g., using similar sensing system, methodology, evaluation method, etc. WRITE (a) the main hypotheses of the work and (b) how they were evaluated (approach and evaluation method). Also WRITE (c) any insight you've gained that you can apply to your project.
HWK3:
Put your name in the filename that you upload as follows: HWK3-Lastname.pdf.
Upload to Stellar by Tuesday Feb 26 at noon (Please note Policy on Lateness: -1 point out of 10 total, for each hour late)
If you can't upload on Stellar, then email your answers to mas-s60@media.mit.edu and use the subject: MAS.s60 HWK3.
1. Fun exploration!
(a) This week your main goal is to do background research on topics that interest you for your project. This helps you get a big chunk of your project work done early in the semester. For example, search scholar.google.com for studies that address the topics that interest you. Things to think about are "Has anybody done anything like this?" "If so, how did they do it, and what are the limitations of what they did?" There is probably a lot out there, but all work has limitations. Even if something you want to do has been "done" doesn't mean we can't do it better, or implement/test the idea differently and learn something important and new. Enjoy reading A LOT of good stuff! Jot a few lines to tell us about your search experience. If you can't read everything that interests you, set up a folder where you collect things you want to read later.
(b) Identify at least four publications of work that really interest you, either because they are similar to what you want to do, or because they support or motivate some piece of what you would like to do. For each of the four publications, I, II, III, and IV, send us (i) The full citation, formatted properly for any conference/venue that you might want to submit your results to. If you don't have one, then use the American Psychological Association (APA) style. On scholar.google.com where the paper is listed, just click on the quotation symbol and it will take you to the APA and other citation formats you can cut and paste into your homework. (ii) PDF link to the document or dropbox link to the document (iii) A short description (2-4 sentences) of the key contributions of the work relative to your interests, showing that you understand the main contributions of the paper. For example, "Author-Spongebob et al. (2002) conducted a 6-week study showing that students boosted their mental health when they turned on music during breaks and tried dancing in their chairs in synch with a partner in the room. In a group of 45 undergraduates, given PHQ-9 surveys on enrollment, and again after 6 weeks, significant drops were observed in the PHQ-9 scores of the dancing group (n=23) compared to the control group (n=22), the latter who were asked to just spin their chairs around 3 times." (iv) A short description (1-2 sentences) of the limitations of the work, showing what you could or want to improve upon. For example, "The work was limited in that the music used in the study was the-world's-funniest-song, and the design of the control group did not eliminate the effect of the music. Also, the dancing sessions were held during fixed break times, versus detecting the best timing to hold the session, e.g., when the students are most stressed during class."
2. Present! Let's discuss your ideas as a class - so we can help each other develop great projects!
(a) Upload slides to Stellar for two project ideas. YOU CAN UPLOAD THESE BY 11am WED. These can be very different ideas, or two different variations of one idea. If you are doing a group project, then name the file HWK3-Project-Lastname1-Lastname2.{pdf,pptx,key}. You will have 5 mins per group-member to present each idea to our class. For each project slide, put your name(s) at the bottom of the slide. One-two slides should illustrate the idea and what you might build/deploy/test/... A couple additional slides should talk about two different related works (~1 slide/work, but if it's easier to explain with 2 slides per work, you can do that). These can be the same works as in part 1 above. One final slide should state what skills or resources you/your team does NOT have that you think you would need to do the project (e.g. "Need 100 giant Sponge Bob robots", "need machine learning support" etc.). Note: We expect to be able to get up to ~$750 funding per project to pay for human participation fees if you need to pay participants. We will take ~5 mins as a class to discuss each idea. If you are two people on a team presenting the idea, you get 10 mins per idea, but you need to present 4 references describing prior work (2 references per person on the team).
3. Step out of your comfort zone -- can you make a stranger smile?
(a) WATCH under The Science of Wellbeing Lectures by Laurie Santos, Coursera link (choose the no certificate option for free access to videos)
under "Week 5 Stuff that Makes us Happy" the video (12 min) on Social Connection and the video (22 min) Interview with Nicholas Epley. Summarize your key take-away thoughts in two sentences. (b) Try this! On a bus, train, elevator, or other public place, initiate a short polite interaction with a stranger. (c) WRITE Tell us where and when it happened, and how you felt before and after. Also tell us: Did you see the stranger smile or look more pleasant at any time during the interaction? Do you think it helped improve your mood or his/hers?
(d) WRITE Can you think of any ways to incorporate greater human connection in your project? Try to jot a variation here that increases this factor..
4. OPTIONAL: review the ideas on Piazza - offer help, offer references that are related, add on to them, ask for help, etc. .
5. Optional: Add 1 or more encouraging or informative "Nuggets" or "1 min tips" to share with students
6. **Additional task for 12-credit students* (Those who want 12 credit hours for this class instead of the default 9 credit hours)*
(a) WATCH Barbara Fredrickson's recent talk at MIT (1:20 mins with Q&A):
Positivity Resonates: Effects of face-to-face social connection on human well-being
Are the moments of positive interpersonal connection we experience positive health behaviors? Positivity resonance is a momentary affective state co-experienced by two or more people simultaneously, marked by the amplifying trio of: shared positive affect; mutual care and concern; and cross-person synchrony in behavioral and biological dynamics. Dr. Fredrickson will share her most recent empirical evidence that positivity resonance – whether indexed by self-report, behavior, or biology – predicts mental and physical health, measured concurrently or prospectively.
Barbara Fredrickson is a Kenan Distinguished Professor and Director of Positive Emotions and Psychopsychology Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the recipient of numerous honors for her research in positive emotions, including the American Psychological Association's inaugural Templeton Prize in positive psychology and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology's Career Trajectory Award. A pioneer in the field of positive psychology, Dr. Fredrickson's research illuminates the vital impact of positive social connection on psychological and physical well-being, and offers important implications for the fields of psychology, technology, and business as well as our personal physical and mental health. She is also the author of Love 2.0 (2013).Mark two time segments during her video that were real learning experiences for you - what was she saying in these moments that made you think?
(b) READ/SKIM the publication (pdf is on stellar and here): Major, B. C., Le Nguyen, K. D., Lundberg, K. B., & Fredrickson, B. L. (2018). Well-Being Correlates of Perceived Positivity Resonance: Evidence From Trait and Episode-Level Assessments. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 44(12), 1631-1647.
(c) WRITE Are there any methods in this paper that you might want to consider in your own project?
HWK2:
Upload to Stellar by Tuesday Feb 17 at noon (Please note Policy on Lateness: -1 point out of 10 total, for each hour late)
If you can't upload on Stellar yet, then email your answers to mas-s60@media.mit.edu and use the subject: MAS.s60 HWK2. Please put your lastname in the filename that you upload, e.g. HWK2-Lastname.pdf.
1. Authentic Happiness
TAKE the Authentic Happiness Inventory test from UPenn's Positive Psychology Center (Martin E. P. Seligman).
WRITE (a) if you were surprised or not about the result and why. (b) Try to name something that you think the inventory might be skipping about authentic happiness - can you think of anything it missed?
2. The Science of Wellbeing Lectures by Laurie Santos
Coursera link (choose the no certificate option for free access to videos)
WATCH "week 2: Misconceptions About Happiness"
• Watch three videos under “Things we think make us happy (but don’t)”
• Watch video under “Why we have misconceptions”
WRITE reflect upon each video - mark a time in each video when you found you learned something that you would like to share with others. List the time and a key sentence about what you learned.
3. Choose 5 videos to WATCH under "Week 5 Stuff that Makes us Happy: Better Wanting Parts1-3".
3.1 Gratitude letter
WRITE a gratitude letter. You don't have to submit the actual letter to our class, but write it and (a) report the name of the person you are writing to, and when you will deliver it. (b) Do you already write gratitude letters regularly? (c) Can you make it part of your life practice? If not, what prevents you from doing so?
3.2 Pick 2 things from “better wanting: parts 1-3” to put into practice in your life.
WRITE (a) Write up which 2 you did and how you felt afterwards. (b) Do you already do any of these regularly? (c) Can you make them part of your life practice? If not, what prevents you from doing so?
4. Project Ideas
POST one or two project ideas in Piazza as a new discussion. Mention what your strengths are and specific helps you would need from others.
READ others' ideas, discuss, and leave comments if you can help on the things mentioned.
GOAL: be thinking how you might team up with somebody else on a 2-person project. Larger teams are also possible, but generally "<=3 people/team" is easier to manage.
**Additional task for 12-credit students**
READ one of the papers in the Week 2 or Week 5 lectures.
WRITE (a) report which paper you've read. (b) discuss the paper by reflecting on what was interesting, surprising, and how any of the videos or the papers have informed their project ideas.
HWK1: Prevalence and Classic Measures of Depression in College Students
Upload to Stellar by Tuesday Feb 12 at noon (Please note Policy on Lateness: -1 point out of 10 total, for each hour late)
If you can't upload on Stellar yet, then email your answers & CITI completion to mas-s60@media.mit.edu and use the subject: MAS.s60 HWK1.
READ:
MIT HealthyMinds Survey and Results http://chancellor.mit.edu/2015-healthy-minds-study-results
ACHA College Student Data for Graduate Students 2018 https://www.acha.org/NCHA/ACHA-NCHA_Data/Publications_and_Reports/NCHA/Data/Reports_ACHA-NCHAIIc.aspx
IF you haven't gotten CITI certified, follow the steps online to do so at https://couhes.mit.edu/training-research-involving-human-subjects.
WRITE:
- (a) Pick two examples from the MIT HealthyMinds data that surprise you most, or bother you most. Explain the statistics so that we see that you understand what they are based on (b) If you could improve only one of these in the coming year, which one would you want to focus on?
- (a) Take the PHQ-9 and score your own mental health. (There are many versions of it online). You do not have to report what you scored. However, write here that you took it and tell us IF you were to need mental health support, would you be willing to get it - yes or no? (b) If not, please explain the stigma or other factors that would prevent you from seeking expert help if you needed it. (otherwise skip this part). (c) Name two things you think we can do better at MIT to enable people to feel more comfortable getting help when they might be depressed.
- (a) What two things struck you as most surprising in the college graduate student (ACHA) data? (b) If you could improve only one of these in the coming year, which one would you want to focus on?
- Send us your completed up-to-date CITI certificates.
- Jot three project ideas related to how you dream of AI or technology helping people stay well and prevent becoming depressed. Each should have about a paragraph of description. Feel free to brainstorm with others in the class (and use Piazza if you wish.)
Draft Reading List
(subject to change, and also students will be asked to find additional readings related to their chosen projects):
Amores, J., Hernandez, J., Dementyev, A., Wang, X., Maes, P. "BioEssence: A Wearable Olfactory Display that Monitors Cardio-respiratory Information to Support Mental Wellbeing," Proceedings of the International Conference of IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), Honolulu, Hawaii, July 2018 PDF
Breazeal, C, A. Ostrowski, HW Park, N. Singh (2019). Designing Social Robots for Older Adults. National Academy of Sciences: The Bridge (in review).
Calvo, R. A., & Peters, D. (2014). Positive computing: technology for wellbeing and human potential. MIT Press.
Cheng, P., Luik, A. I., Fellman-Couture, C., Peterson, E., Joseph, C. L., Tallent, G., ... & Drake, C. L. (2019). Efficacy of digital CBT for insomnia to reduce depression across demographic groups: a randomized trial. Psychological medicine, 49(3), 491-500.
Dore, B. P., Morris, R. R., Burr, D. A., Picard, R. W., & Ochsner, K. N. "Helping others regulate emotion predicts increased regulation of one's own emotions and decreased symptoms of depression." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 37(10), 1-11. First published March 2017.
Espie, Colin A., et al. "A randomized, placebo-controlled trial of online cognitive behavioral therapy for chronic insomnia disorder delivered via an automated media-rich web application." Sleep 35.6 (2012): 769-781.
Freeman, Daniel, et al. "The effects of improving sleep on mental health (OASIS): a randomised controlled trial with mediation analysis." The Lancet Psychiatry 4.10 (2017): 749-758.
Ghandeharioun, A., Fedor, S., Sangermano, L., Ionescu, D., Alpert, J., Dale, C., Sontag, D., Picard, R. "Objective assessment of depressive symptoms with machine learning and wearable sensors data," International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), San Antonio, Texas, October 2017. PDF
Ghandeharioun, A., Picard, R."BrightBeat: Effortlessly Influencing Breathing for Cultivating Calmness and Focus," Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, Denver, May 2017. PDF
Jaques, N., Rudovic, O., Taylor, S., Sano, A., and Picard, R. "Predicting Tomorrow's Mood, Health, and Stress Level using Personalized Multitask Learning and Domain Adaptation," Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, 48, 17-33. August 2017.
Li, S., Stampfer, M. J., Williams, D. R., & VanderWeele, T. J. (2016). Association of religious service attendance with mortality among women. JAMA internal medicine, 176(6), 777-785.
Maes, P. (2019) Wearable Therapy. Wired magazine (to appear)
Major, BC, Nguyen, KD, Lundberg KB, and Fredrickson, BL (2018) "Well-Being Correlates of Perceived Positivity Resonance: Evidence From Trait and Episode-Level Assessments" Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 1-17.
Peng F., LaBelle V., Yue E., and Picard R.. "A Trip to the Moon: Personalized Animated Movies for Self-reflection." Proceedings of Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2018.
Phillips AJ, Clerx WM, Sano A, Barger LK, Picard RW, Lockley WE, Klerman EB, Czeisler CA, "Irregular sleep/wake patterns are associated with poorer academic performance and delayed circadian and sleep/wake timing," Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 3216 (2017).
Sano, A., Taylor, S., McHill, A. W., Phillips, A. J. K., Barger, L. K., Klerman, E., and Picard, R., "Identifying objective physiological markers and modifiable behaviors for self-reported stress and mental health status using wearable sensors and mobile phones: Observational Study", Journal of Medical Internet Research, June 2018
Seligman, M. (2012). Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being. Atria Books. ISBN13: 9781439190760
S. Taylor, C. Ferguson, F Peng, M Schoeneich, R W Picard, "Use of In-Game Rewards to Motivate Daily Self-Report Compliance: Randomized Controlled Trial"; JMIR Jan 2019.
Taylor, S.*, Sano, A.*, Ferguson, C., Mohan, A., Picard, R. "QuantifyMe: An Open-Source Automated Single-Case Experimental Design Platform," Sensors, April 2018. (*equal contribution)
VanderWeele, T (2017). On the promotion of human flourishing. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. vol 114, no 31, pp. 8148-8156. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1702996114
VanderWeele, Tyler J., et al. "Association between religious service attendance and lower suicide rates among US women." JAMA psychiatry 73.8 (2016): 845-851.
Wilson, Kelly G., et al. "The Valued Living Questionnaire: Defining and measuring valued action within a behavioral framework." The Psychological Record 60.2 (2010): 249-272.