[n.b.: new years resolution is to convert this into something dynamic, highly visual and awesome instead of this outdated assortment. Doing a startup is kind of all consuming so....]

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.



RANDOM ASSORTED FACTS:
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.

At the Media Lab I'm on 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 the prestigious IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne under Chandra Narayanaswami and Danny Soroker of the Technologies for Next Generation Pervasive Services group. In 2008, I spent 6 months at Google Cambridge working under the most talented Ryan Rifkin to realize a vision that would fundamentally change how we browse blogs.

I'm also a Big Brother to an amazing kid named Remi! He's going to go far in architecture or industrial design, I just know it!

Before coming to MIT I was a Cognitive Science major at UCSD, where I worked with David Kirsh at the Interactive Cognition Lab. In David's lab I developed e-learning systems, a group portal for knowledge storage / collaboration, and tools to aid ethnographic studies. My honors thesis (under David, John Batali, Dan Bauer) explored how personal metadata could extend the concept of desktop search in terms of social relations and physical activity. I'd recommend against reading it :)

Before I left UCSD (2004), I hacked up a neat social networking service that allowed you to plan your night out with your friends on your mobile phone and the web called Nitester. It used SMS to allow ad-hoc groups to form, groups to vote, hosts invite, and make open non-committed suggestions.

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, and TA'd 1st grade in a nearby elementary school.