Biographies
Flavia Sparacino, PhD
Chief Technologist and Creative Director, Sensing Places
flavia@sensingplaces.com
Flavia Sparacino is an interactive space and experience designer from MIT. She designs interactive architectural environments using ambient and body sensors, statistical mathematical models, interactive multimedia, and 3-D graphics. Her emphasis is on natural man-machine interfaces, which use computer vision and sensor fusion techniques for object and body tracking. She has also developed Bayesian methods for user behavior modeling and consequently to personalize content delivery for museum visitors as a function of their estimated interests and preferences. Her scientific research finds applications in interactive museum space design, information-augmented interior architecture design, multimedia content orchestration, image processing driven special effects, information landscapes (3-D visualization for the Internet), and the interactive stage (dance and theater). Her research interests are currently expanding to include 3D computer vision for virtual sets capture, and interactive techniques for large scale public installations housed in outdoor urban settings.
Flavia has been a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab since 1994, and since 2002 is the founder and director of Sensing Places, a technology-oriented architecture firm that commercializes her inventions. Amongst her creations are: the Museum Wearable, Wearable Cinema/Wearable City, the interactive architecture table for the Louis Kahn/Unbuilt Ruins installation, City of News and Participative City of News (a body driven 3-D web browser which allows for collaborative Internet navigation), Virtual Studio (an advanced image processing technique for real time compositing of people inside 3-D sets without the use of blue screens or dedicated TV studios), Responsive Portraits, Dance Space and Improvisational Theater Space. In all these projects Flavia has had the dual role of artistic experience creator and engineer, working in computer vision interface mathematical modeling and software programming, multimedia programming, 3-D modeling and animation, video and photo content creation, and sensor transducers hardware design and implementation.
Flavia designed the first interactive table prototype for MOMA's Unprivate House exhibition (1999) based on her earlier prototype for Unbuilt Ruins, an interactive museum exhibit featured at the MIT Compton Gallery and UPenn. She designed the interactive prototypes for SFMOMA's Points of Departure museum exhibit (2001), and has recently been working with the MIT Museum on the museum wearable (2001/2002). Through her company, Sensing Places, she is also a technical consultant for various museums in the US and Europe. Flavia's work was also featured at Ars Electronica 97 and 98, ISEA 97 and 2000, SIGGRAPH 96 and 99, ICHIM 99, IMAGINA 99 and 2000, and MW 2002. She has held seminars and lectures in prestigious museums and institutions such as the Louvre Museum in Paris, the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, the Universities of MIT, Harvard, UCLA and UCI. Her interactive architecture installations and scientific research have been publicized by the international press and television in eight different languages. Relevant citations are from: The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Computer Zeitung, Berliner Zeitung, Le Monde, Liberation, La Repubblica. Her scientific contributions are acknowledged and cited by researchers worldwide, in the US, Canada, Europe, China, Korea, Japan and have become teaching material in numerous graduate level university classes.
Flavia holds five academic degrees plus an honorary one: a PhD in Media Technology and a Master in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT's Media Lab, a Master in Cognitive Sciences from Paris VI University, France, and M.Eng degrees in Electrical Engineering from Politecnico di Milano, and Mechanical Engineering from Ecole Centrale Paris, with special concentration respectively in artificial intelligence and robotics. She also received an honorary degree in Management, jointly from Ecole Centrale Paris, France, and Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Flavia received a number of scholarships, awards, and corporate sponsorship for her academic work and career from sources such as the European Community, the Italian Center for National Research, the French Center for National Research, Fulbright, Motorola, and Telecom Italia. She has studied filmmaking in a professional Film School in the US, has taken photography classes at the ICP in New York city, and has done travel photography in many countries around the world. An Italian born, she was nominated Knight of the Republic of Italy ("Cavaliere della Repubblica"), by the Italian president Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, in the year 2000, for her contributions to innovative communication of art and culture supported by new technologies.
