A component of the MIT Media Lab’s “Metropath(olgies)” installation, which looks at the non-stop flow of communication and information in the modern world,  Personas delivers a data portrait of your online identity by combining natural language processing and Internet search tools.
Enter your first and last name into the search box, and watch as Personas matches your name to a pre-existing set of categories created through an algorithmic method that references a vast body of data.
The philosophy behind the installation, according to the Personas site:
Personas demonstrates the computer’s uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the [...]

This weekend at the Renegade Craft Fair in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, we spotted an interesting line of jewelry generated from rapid prototyping technology. Named Nervous System, the pieces were created by Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenburg — both former students at MIT (appropriately enough) who studied in the fields of Architecture, Biology and Mathematics.

The jewelry — completely constructed using 3d printing technology, and titled with names such as lamina, dendrite and radiolaria — take inspiration from organic structures. Many of their pieces are generated from algorithmic processes and even allow you to customize your own pieces of jewelry through their website.

We were already aware that most big companies monitored their employees – checking up on their web-surfing habits and reading the occasional email – but with a newly developed algorithm, Google is attempting to take the idea of personal productivity to the level of personal psychology. In an effort to identify unhappy staff, Google’s program sorts through personnel files – appraisals, salary and promotion history – to determine who might be ready to leave. The algorithm operates under the assumption that employees who feel underutilized are the most likely candidates for seeking new jobs, giving management an opportunity to intervene [...]