Emails we weave: MIT's Immersion shows big picture
(Phys.org) —Suddenly metadata expands from a marketing buzzword heard years ago at think tank seminars about the next information age to mainstream political headlines in 2013. The NSA firestorm has popularized the term and planted it in most people's minds. MIT's César Hidalgo, professor of media arts and sciences at the MIT Media Lab, has an intense technology focus on that term and is prepared to enlighten people about their own metadata. If knowledge is power, then Hidalgo and his team have a project in mind that may empower people to leverage the chance to see their email information in a different way. The team's underlying question is fetching enough: What if people have control over their own metadata, able to view it, learn from it, and even delete it? For Hidalgo and his colleagues, Daniel Smilknov and Deepak Jagdish, their online project, dubbed Immersion, is about...