Flavia Sparacino

Ph.D. candidate in Media Arts and Sciences

Research interests:

Perceptive Media

with application to:

Augmented Performance, Information Architecture, Interactive Exhibit and Museum Design.

Advisors: Glorianna Davenport , Sandy Pentland

Education

Master in Media Arts and Sciences
MIT Media Lab

Master in Cognitive Sciences ("DEA")
Ecole Polytechnique & Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes & Universite' Paris VI-Jussieu,
Paris, France

Degree ("Diplome") in Industrial Engineering
(Major : Robotics), Ecole Centrale Paris, France

Degree ("Laurea") in EE (Major:Mathematics, minor:AI)
(some credits with the french degree)
"Politecnico di Milano" (Polytecnical School of Milan), Italy

Secondary School Graduation Certificate in the Humanities

Experience

Visiting researcher, trajectory planning for intelligent robots
ETL Laboratory, Tsukuba, Japan, 9/92 to 12/92

Research affiliate, cognitive engineering
URIA (Artificial Intelligence Research Unit), Milan, Italy, 4/88 to 7/90

Consulting, image storage and retrieval system
BOTEK Company, RI, USA, 9/87 to 3/88

Research Description

DanceSpace is an interactive performance space where both professional and non-professional dancers can generate music and graphics through their body movements ( movie clip). For this project I collaborated with Chris Wren , Chloe Chao and Akira Kotani .

NetSpace allows people to surf the web by feeling immersed in a 3D graphical landscape made out of web objects, like text, photographs and movie clips. NetSpace was done in collaboration with Michal Hlavac .

NetSpace later expanded in City of News which was featured at Ars Electronica 1997 . For this project I collaborated with Mary Obelnicki and Kerstin Hoeger.

For my Masters thesis I developed dynamic and expressive behavioral media creatures that the audience can interact with.
This let to an interactive Improvisational Theater Space in which a human actor plays a short story with a "text actor". This work is continuing under the label of "Augmented Theater" and comprises a Digital Circus, a networked performance component and "Wearable Performance" (interactive performance which uses wearable computers)
(web pages under construction...)

This project was inspired by my previous work with HyperPlex .

Publications

Wearable Performance

Flavia Sparacino, Alex Pentland, Glorianna Davenport
International Symposium on Wearable Computers, Cambridge, Massachusetts, October 13 - 14, 1997.

Responsive Portraits

Flavia Sparacino, Nuria Oliver, Alex Pentland, Glorianna Davenport
The Eighth International Symposium on Electronic Art, Chicago, IL, September 22-27, 1997.

City of News

Flavia Sparacino, Alex Pentland, Glorianna Davenport, Michal Hlavac, Mary Obelnicki
Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria, 8-13 September 1997.

Optical Tracking for Music and Dance Performance

J.A. Paradiso and F. Sparacino
Fourth Conference on Optical 3-D Measurement Techniques, Zurich Switzerland, September 29-October 2, 1997.

Improvisational Theater Space

Flavia Sparacino, Kristin Hall, Christopher Wren, Glorianna Davenport, Alex Pentland
The Sixth Biennal Symposium for Arts and Technology, Connecticut College, New London, CT, February 27 - March 2, 1997.

Encounters in DreamWorld: A Work in Progress

Davenport, G., Agamanolis, S., Bradley, B., Sparacino, F.
Consciousness Reframed, 1st International CAiiA Research Conference, University of Wales College, Newport, Wales, July 1997.

DirectIVE: Choreographing Media for Interactive Virtual Environments

Flavia Sparacino
Master Thesis, MIT Media Lab, 1996

Perceptive Spaces for Performance and Entertainment:
Untethered Interaction using Computer Vision and Audition

Christopher R. Wren, Flavia Sparacino, et al.
Applied Artificial Intelligence (AAI) Journal, June 1996
view html version / download postscript file

HyperPlex: a World of 3D Interactive Digital Movies

F. Sparacino, C. Wren, A. Pentland, G. Davenport
IJCAI'95 Workshop on Entertainment and AI/Alife, Montreal, August 1995
view html version / download postscript file

Synthesis of Parallel Manipulators Using Lie Groups

F. Sparacino and J.M. Herve'
IEEE-Tsukuba International Workshop on Advanced Robotics, Japan, November 8-9, 1993

STAR: a new Concept in Robotics

J.M. Herve' and F. Sparacino
International Conference 3K-ARK, Ferrara, Italy, September 7-9, 1992

Structural Synthesis of Parallel Robots Generating Spatial Translation

J.M. Herve' and F. Sparacino
ICAR '91, Pise, Italy, June 19-22, 1991 special prize ICAR and SIRI for the high scientific value of the research work

Snake: a computational experiment in everyday reasoning

B. Bara, A. Carassa, M. Colombetti, G. Geminiani and F. Sparacino
Third Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology, New Hall, Cambridge, September 9-12, 1988

Interests

Cinema, museums, literature, traveling

Birthplace

Palermo, Italy

A favorite book

Boris Pasternak : Doctor Zhivago

Most wishes to have dinner with

Leo Tolstoj

Personal Web Page

Vismod Home Page