A Conversation with Ali Mazalek 
by Aileen Li
September 2007

If you're into gaming, Ali Mazalek's research should fascinate you (check out the interactive board game video at the end of this article for a tantalizing taste). We sat down with her to chat about her educational background and to wrap our heads around the wonderfully bizarre world of interactive media she works in.

Q - "Mazalek" is not an American name, is it?

A - No. I'm Canadian. My parents are of Czech origin and they came to Canada in '68. I was born there.

Q - So you went to school in Canada?

A - I did elementary, middle school, and most of high school in Canada. Then I spent two years (of high school) in Europe and did my undergraduate in Canada at the University of Toronto. Eventually I came to the U.S. for graduate school.

Q - What was it like living in Toronto?

A - It's a great city; it's really cool. It's very multi-cultural, very big. The downtown area is thriving; it has lots of little places to go to, shops and restaurants. A lot of arts and culture.

Q - What did you study as an undergrad?

A - I started off planning to do a double major in theoretical math and history. Then I gave up history in favor of computer science. So my degree ended up being in theoretical math and computer science. I also did a minor in film studies. Yeah, that is an odd combination. (Laughs)

Q - It is not that unusual to double major in math and computer science. But why the minor in film studies?

A - I was always trying to combine arts and humanities with science and technologies. I started working for a faculty member, Ron Baecker, who ran a group called the Collaborative Multi-Media Research Group. I was always very interested in film-making, specifically in making digital movies. In high school I had been playing around on my computer doing experimental films.

Q - What inspired those high school film experiments?

A - My father is an architect and my mother is an artist, so they had studios at home. So I've always been really interested in the arts. I'm a creative person—I like to build things and create things. But I can't paint, or do anything like my mom does. So film-making was my media of choice.

In college I met [Baecker] when I took a computer science class he taught. It was called "Software: Design, Creation, Use and Impact." It was to fulfill a breadth requirement--you had to take certain number of credits that were not in your major. So I took that class and it became one of my main interests.

He actually hired me to work with his research group from that class. They were building movie-making software, so it fit with my interests.

Q - You also majored in math. What's the intersection between that and these other fields?

A - I really like abstract thinking. Physics and chemistry were of some interest to me, but it was, at that stage in my life, a bit too grounded in the real world. Math lets you think about concepts and ideas without necessarily attaching them to the things around you, in the same way experimenting with materials or photographs or films can free you to do things that are not constrained by the requirements of the real world. The same kind of creativity applies in math, especially in theoretical math. So I took classes like abstract algebra and complex analysis. I always wanted to combine that with the humanities side—the more artistically creative side.

Q - It's great that you knew what you wanted so early in life.

A - I don't know if I knew exactly what I wanted, but I certainly knew what my interests were. I was just searching for ways to combine them that would fit and feel right.

I think I'm still searching. I'm always trying out new things and combining things that were a little different than what I was doing before. I don't like it when what I do every day gets too repetitive. I prefer to be always exploring and creating new things, constructing new ideas and having new perspectives on life. I guess that's what research is all about.

Q - How did you like the MIT media lab experience?

A - I liked it a lot. I worked with two different research groups. First, I joined the Tangible Media Group. One of the things I knew coming out of undergrad was that I'm interested in interactive story-telling and multimedia technologies. I'm also sick of sitting at my computer all the time and always interacting through this type of interface [GUI with screen/keyboard/mouse]. The Tangible Media Group offered the possibility of digital technology that can break out from the computer box and provide tangible computer experiences.

I joined [Hiroshi Ishii]'s group with the interest of combining interactive story-telling systems and these tangible technologies and worked on a couple of prototypes. At the end of that, well, at this point I was kind of bridging Hiroshi's and Gloriana Davenport's research; she ran a group called "Interactive Cinema" at the time which, when I was doing my Ph.D., changed to "Media Fabrics." So I worked with her as well during my master's and transitioned into her research group for my Ph.D.

Q - Can you explain your research to me? I got lost trying to understand it!

A - I should probably show you some visuals to make things a bit clearer.

One of the earlier projects that I worked on at MIT was a set of "music bottles," where if you open the bottles, they play music. Releasing music from bottles created a beautiful and magical sort of art piece. But I always felt like bottles should really contain genies and that by opening the bottles I could release them and have them tell me stories. So I put genies in the bottles and turned it into an interactive story-telling system. When you release a genie from a bottle, it talks to you. When you release another genie from a second bottle, the two will launch into conversation together. Underlying this is a simple state transition system. When you open the second bottle, the genies have to notice that there are now two of them in the same space, and so you transition from a single-genie monologue to a conversation between the two. Releasing a third genie will bring that one into the conversation, and closing a bottle will cut a genie out from the conversation. And through all these state transitions, you have to keep the story moving forward. It was a question of how to design an algorithm as well as how to create a story that would fit into those parameters.



Q - That is amazing. How does it work?

A - It uses a magnetic sensing system that was built by another professor at the Media Lab, Joe Paradiso. There's a tag around the neck of each bottle, and then an antenna inside the table. Each cork was loaded with a magnetic material so that when you uncork the bottle it would shift the resonant frequency of that antenna a little bit, so you could detect if the bottle is opened or closed.

We tried to hide the technology so that it was just the gesture of opening the bottle that seemingly caused it to release the audio.

That's one of the core ideas of the "tangible interface" - you couple the control and representation of digital information within physical objects, surfaces or spaces. Instead of having keyboards or mice that act as controls for a whole lot of things that are represented elsewhere, for example on the screen, you provide physical interfaces that are both input and output at once. Like regular, non-digital objects in the physical world, tangible interfaces have a certain physical form and certain affordances that indicate how they should be used. When you do things to them, they immediately give you feedback through the same artifact you're manipulating. This can bring digital information off the screen and into real spaces, which helps to create more seamless interactions between the physical and digital worlds.

Q - What are some practical applications of this research?

A - The musicBottles and genieBottles were artistic pieces, so I wouldn't say there's much "practical use," except to provide an engaging musical or story experience. More broadly for tangible interfaces, the goal is to find new metaphors for our interactions with digital information and to rethink how we can access the digital space in ways that are appropriate to the particular tasks at hand.

So far, since the mouse and the basic set up of GUIs with windows and menus was created, the interface really hasn't changed a lot. We've had a keyboard, a mouse and a screen, and that's how we interact with the information space. If we want to interact with friends and family we move away from the information space and interact with the physical world—but we're not connected to the information space at the same time.

Researchers in human-computer interaction technologies have been looking for different ways to provide a connection to the information space that makes sense within the physical world. Efforts like ubiquitous computing, mobile computing, and tangible interfaces all take different approaches to that. Whereas mobile computing lets you have the information with you at all times as you move around, ubiquitous computing hides it in the objects in our everyday environment. Tangible computing is more about making digital information accessible and explicitly manipulable in the physical world, and thus brings it out through surfaces, through spaces, through physical objects in a way that is more obvious.

One of the greatest things about tangible interfaces is that you can interact with digital information with many people together. With most of the interfaces we have [currently], people usually interact with digital information while sitting at a desk by themselves. They might be interacting with many people, but they're usually remotely networked so they're not seeing the other people; it's not face-to-face. Tangible interfaces can bring people together to have face-to-face interaction around digital information.

[The video below shows how people can interact in a physical space with the information space. The vehicle is a super-cool board game.]

Q - What would you say to high school students today who are struggling with certain classes and are still trying to decide what they're interested in?

A - Just try different things and find what interests you. If you find something and you're not really enjoying it, perhaps that's not the right thing. Don't be scared to try many different options, and don't worry too much about not fitting in the expectations other people might have for you. There are so many different paths and options you can take. The most important thing is to find the right one for you. Find the thing that you're passionate about. It'll feel right when you find it—you'll find that you're enjoying it a lot, and it's sort of consuming you. You're thinking about it all the time.

Q - What if you're already on one path, you've already taken so many classes for that path, put in much effort for that path, but you realize that you're not enjoying it but are afraid of start over and waste all the effort you've already put in?

A - I don't think starting over is ever a waste. Everything you gain up to any point is always valuable in some way. If you discover that's not right anymore, it's never too late to start something completely new and different.

I had one close friend who started off doing his first year in civil engineering, and that wasn't right. Then he tried computer engineering, did that for the next three years. Then he started a company and said, "Well, the part of this I'm really interested in is the business aspect of things." He wasn't so interested in writing the code and developing the technology. So after two years out of school, he went back and did business school, and now he's an investment banker in New York and he loves it. So it took him three tries, but he got there eventually!

I'd say the same thing happened to me. I tried history for a year, and thought "OK, I'm bored to tears in most of my classes," and sure, I could keep doing it just because I already had enough credits to complete half the major, but there wouldn't be much point if I wasn't going to enjoy myself with it down the line. Instead, I found something I was interested in and followed that. Even if I had to change again, I would. I kind of fell into a path that works for me, but that doesn't always happen.

You shouldn't be afraid to make a change and leap into something you think you might enjoy.

Q - How do you like teaching?

A - I enjoy it, though I'm finding that I'm definitely more of a researcher than I am a teacher, mostly because I like to face new material and new topics all the time. So what I find to be the biggest challenge is teaching the same class repeatedly. When you first build up the course material and create the syllabus, everything feels as new to you as it does to the students. So you're really excited to convey all this information because you're going through it for the first time, the same as [the students] are. When you teach a class for the second or third time, you've seen all the material before and you have to make a real effort to slow down and make sure not to skim over the things that have become second nature to you, since it is still new to the students. That definitely takes some effort!

The part I really enjoy about teaching is seeing what the students come up with. Every class is somewhat different. I've had some undergrad classes that were less talkative, but this semester I have a great class that talks a lot, so we have really great discussions. They always bring new perspectives that I might not have thought about.

Q - How do you teach students with various learning styles?

A - You have to adjust, realize that not every student learns the same way, and provide room for that. Some students need to go off in a room and think it out, whereas others learn better if you sit next to them and explain it to them. It can be challenging if you have a large class to accommodate different learning styles, but it is definitely possible.

Q - What is your current research?

A - I'm building on the past work that I did at MIT. I started a research group here about two years ago called the Synaesthetic Media Lab. The basic goal for this group is to explore the emerging modalities in new media.

Q - The what?

A - (laughs) Those new interfaces that I was talking about: tangible interfaces, reactive surfaces, and interactive rooms—my group thinks about how we can bring digital information into our physical space, mostly for creative and artistic purposes.