Amelia Verden is a 33- year old PhD candidate in the Tangible
Media Group at the MIT Media Lab, interested in the relationship of
gesture, form, materiality and computation in the context of
hybrid physical - digital objects. Before joining the Media Lab,
Amelia developed exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco,
freelanced internationally in multi - media design, and developed
installations and programs for the Science Museum in London and
the the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. She holds a B.S. in Mechanical
Engineering (Product Design) and B.A. in Art History from Stanford University.

Amelia Verden
PhD Candidate - MIT Media Lab, Tangible Media Group
She thinks of computer use in terms of what students use computer s for,
differentiating the kind of skills, for example:
• coder /programmer / h acker,
• designer /creative media
• humanities researcher /writer
She fits into design/creative media category with a small piece of coder and
researcher.
Her goals for a Visual Data Bank:
• general image searching - by artist, subject, date - - all the basics
• searching by 'genre' of image - could be everything from image that are
mostly 'red' (purely visual tagging), to searching by image "concept,"
(conceptual tagging e.g. 'democracy'); Amelia says: “creating the
metatags is the most tricking part of getting this to work well but it
is very helpful for designers and when working on graphic design
projects. I use the search itself as inspiration (concept searching
brings up totally unexpected juxtapositions); the photodisc image
library available online has done this relatively successfully.”
• searching by other people's personal collections or personal image
histories, (as with the internal media lab system called lapnap – you
can see who is logged on, click on them to find their listening
history, and use it to gauge their mood! Also, each song/ album has
the last person who downloaded / listened to it as part of its data
when you're searching.)
On the subject of “affinity” searches, Amelia concludes: “there are all sorts of
privacy issues associated with this but i think some of them could be avoided
through multiple identity issues (having a public, semi - public, and totally private
ID)”