I'm a M.S. student in Human-Computer Interaction in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am working on a handful of projects. These are Social Fabric Fitness with Jon Froehlich, ScienceKit with Tammy Clegg (an evolution of my previous work on SINQ with June Ahn), and a cloud-based virtual computer lab with Erik Mitchell.
There's a tune to the things I do. To me, our magic, the magic of people, emerges from our ability to create tools, play with them, and break them, to communicate and organize using them to achieve creativity, productivity, play, learning, etc. I want to find out what many hands, thousands, hundreds of thousands, and their driving minds can do to a material when they can simultaneously change it, in real time (together, across time and space). Interactivity a la "social sculpture". My particular tendency is toward their interaction design. They can be built. How can they be made exceptionally well? I build tools to manipulate time and space collaboratively. Some recent examples are ScienceKit and SINQ (check my Projects page).
I use my additional volts of energy to help kindle the HCIL Hackerspace set up recently in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab and explore thoughts with others in the lab. I recently established a mailing list for the HCIL for playful, creative lab buzz.
Last summer, I was a User Experience Research Intern at Google mentored by Daniel Russell. I helped design and launch Google's first Power Searching with Google MOOC that reached over a hundred thousand students across the globe. I also helped run a series of pilot deployments of SearchParty with Daniel Russell, Ben Bederson, and Anne Rose.
