Recent experiments in participatory democracy, such as Iceland’s 2013 Constitutional Reform process to Chicago’s annual participatory budgeting process, have empowered members of the public to directly make policy decisions. These new participatory democratic institutions depend on citizens having capacity to organize new institutions and the capacity to participate in them....
As our world is increasingly filled with data visualizations, having the skills to leverage data visualizations is essential for participation in society. Confident engagement with data visualizations is critical for being an educated member of society; however, research has shown that it is difficult for individuals to digest and gain...
This thesis presents a new self-assembling robotic system that diverges from traditional approaches by enabling robots to build structures not constrained to a lattice and formed based on environmental conditions, rather than on a priori blueprints. Robot self-assembly is a class of behavior in swarm robotics in which many robots...
Depression is a challenging mental illness that requires individuals to manage their moods and emotions over time. While past mental health literature describes how individuals seek and share support on social media and within online communities, the ways that offline and one-on-one supportive interactions unfold is less clear. To address...