A team of CMU Ph.D. students garnered two
Google Gadget Awards for
MoodJam.org, a website where people express their moods through clever words and very cool bands of color, creating a daily record either on MoodJam’s site or on a homepage.
Ian Li, Scott Davidoff, and Karen Tang, Ph.D students in the School of Computer Science’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (
HCII), collaborated to bring MoodJam to life. Even though it was just a side project it was a winner, bringing in “prettiest” and “gadget most likely to help you get a date” in the Lifestyle category of the student competition sponsored by Google, Inc.
“What happens,” says Li, who led the team, “is it’s a way to start a conversation. You know, ‘I saw that you’re not happy today, what happened?’”
The team plans to update the software so mood information is easier to share in groups. Right now, however, you can see text in Russian, German, and French and users have climbed past 10,000.
Li’s research is focused on self-awareness but that isn’t where the project ended up going initially. “I was imagining people could become more self-aware of emotions, but the initial motivation is for people to update data and share it. The personal benefit doesn’t happen until after a week or a month, only when you can reflect back and see, ‘Over the past week I was very happy. Overall I was happy despite this big setback at the end.’”
As his prize, Li got a black beanbag chair that says “Google.” He says, “They only gave me one, even though we got two awards.” Might be mood-changing...
Writer: Sherrie Flick
Source: Ian Li, Aubrey Shick, research associate
Photograph copyright © Jonathan Greene