I recently
completed my PhD
(September 2011) at MIT in the
Fluid Interfaces Group under
Pattie Maes. I spent a majority of my time at the
Media Lab in the
Sociable Media Group
under
Judith Donath. I am now commercializing a variant
of my research by starting a company with
Greg Elliott called
Empirical.
My professional talents surround conceptualization of new online social interactions, software engineering,
natural language processing, cultural modeling, and visualization.
My work has been used by millions in 185+ countries, been shown in over 7 musueums world-wide,
and has been covered by PBS, NPR, BBC, The Alantic, and more.
At MIT my research focused on
understanding
strangers
online. That might sound strange, but it's not in a creepy way. Social networking typically
focuses on who you already know - your so-called
"friends." But what about the other
2.2 billion
people online? In an academic/artsy/techy fashion, I explored ways that we can represent people
using the data that already exists online. Currently, when we come across strangers online it is
usually through looking at a so called 'communications act' - examples include a comment on the New
York Times, a blog entry, a craigslist posting, or a profile on a dating website
1.
But who are the people behind the act? And if we look at a collection of people -- the 2,300 people who collectively
comment on a given newspaper article -- what are they saying? In what proportion? Who are they, and
do I even care?
The main paradigm on the web right now is to show you fine-grained lists of
activity in reverse-chronological order. That's how the Facebook newsfeed works, give or take a little,
as do comments on websites. Just lists and lists of data. But compared to how we gain an impression
of individuals or crowds in real-life the current representation is just plain weak. It would appear
virtual reality -- the other extreme of representation by being literal to mimicking the physical world --
is not the answer. And that's because most of what computers can do is what cannot be done in the physical world,
so mimicking it isn't such a great idea. So what's the answer?
I spent my PhD puzzling and prototyping representation and interaction online, and now I am bringing
those lessons to the design of a new communications platform at Empirical.
Read my thesis if you'd like.
At the Media Lab I was on the
student committee,
and started the
Hacker Seminar Series
where MLers teach each other what they know. From 2005-2006 I was an
SAIC
Fellow.
During the summer of 2007, I enjoyed a summer internship at
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in
Hawthorne, NY under
Chandra Narayanaswami and
Danny Soroker of the Technologies for
Next Generation Pervasive Services group.
In 2008, I spent a summer and took off a semester to work at Google Cambridge working under the
most talented
Ryan Rifkin.
There I envisioned, prototype, and built a new way to browse blogs. Unfortunately after
I returned to MIT the Blogger product it was going to roll into got nixed when the financial markets collapsed.
I care a lot about the world and want to tangibly make it a better place. Aside from
being political in the side-lines, I always have done some level of social justice or volunteer work.
In high school I was a peer counselor on
LYRIC's queer youth state-wide talk line.
In college I was a TA in a
1st grade classroom and participated in student protests (largely a time waste). At MIT I
became a
Big Brother to an awesome kid named Remi, which is ongoing.
The largest social project came
after the Haitian earthquake where Greg Elliott and I built and successfully deployed a
voice-based
job board for disconnected illiterate populations in and around Port-au-Prince after the earthquake.
That project is also ongoing.
Before coming to MIT I was a
Cognitive Science major at UCSD
specializing in Computation (focusing on artificial intelligence crossed with neurobiology). While UCSD provided a
great education, I had an amazing secondary layer of college by working with
Prof. David Kirsh at the
Interactive Cognition Lab. In Prof. Kirsh's lab I developed e-learning systems, a group portal
for knowledge storage / collaboration, and tools to aid ethnographic studies. My honors thesis
(under Prof. David Kirsh, Prof. John Batali, Dr. Dan Bauer) explored how personal metadata could
extend the concept of desktop search in terms of social relations and physical activity. It set
the stage for my explorations of data. I owe a lot to Prof. Kirsh spending so much time with me
as an undergraduate.
At UCSD I was also a principal member of the
DJ and Vinylphiles Club (I spin
french disco house), creator of the Nerd Club (media lab artsy-tech in spirit) which died due to an
apathetic campus of the pre-med obsessed, and studied abroad in England & France where it was as
awesome as it sounds.
I was raised in Sausalito, California by my mother Millie and my father
Edwin Zinman, who is a
dental malpractice attorney
that I HIGHLY recommend. And not just because he's my father. He has made
significant contributions to dentistry.
My early years were fantastically nerdy as I've been on a computer daily
since I received my first Mac at age 5 in 1986. From a 1200 baud modem I learned about the world
via AOL, Prodigy, BBSes, and Usenet. Before the web, BMUG and 2600 meetings gave me physical networks.
I used my computer knowledge to form my first entrepreneurial venture at
age 12: advertising as a computer consultant in the local paper I acted like an early 90's
version of GeekSquad. Making $40/hr in 1995 was pretty awesome as a teenager. Before I was
16 my clients often picked me up. They'd get a discount if they'd stop by McDonalds on the
way back.