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Aaron Zinman
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Co-Founder
Empirical Design LLC
http://azinman.com
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1170 Massachusetts Ave #7
Cambridge, MA 02138
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cell
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785-AZINMAN
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Education
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PhD, Media Arts and Sciences
Groups: Sociable Media Group (2006-2009); Fluid Interfaces (2009-2011)
GPA: 5.00 / 5.00
Thesis: Me, Myself, and My Hyperego: Understanding People Through the Aggregation of Their Digital Footprints
Thesis Advisors: Judith Donath & Pattie Maes, Ryan Rifkin, William (Bill) J. Mitchell
General Exams Committee: Judith Donath, Andrew McCallum, Jason Kaufman
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006 - 2011.
SM, Media Arts and Sciences
Group: Sociable Media Group
GPA: 5.00 / 5.00
Thesis: RadioActive: Enabling Large-Scale
Asynchronous Audio Discussions on Mobile Devices
Thesis Advisors: Judith Donath, Chris Schmandt, Walter Bender
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2004 - 2006.
BS, Cognitive Science with Specialization in Computation
Cognitive & Computer Science GPA: 3.59 / 4.00
Honors Thesis: Personal Metadata: Order from Clutter
Honors Thesis Advisors: David Kirsh, John Batali, and Dan Bauer
University of California, San Diego, 1999 - 2004.
Year abroad studying Computer Science,
University of Birmingham, England, 2001-2002.
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Employment
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Co-Founder, Empirical Design LLC, Boston, MA September 2011 - Present
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Co-founded a company with Greg Elliott to commercialize my PhD research in the social analytics and visualization space. We are in stealth-ish mode.
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Software Engineering Intern, Google, Cambridge, MA June - December 2008
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Worked with Ryan Rifkin to create a new way to browse blogs.
Conceptualized the product, investigated the requirements, submitted 30+ design visions, collaborated with multiple teams across Google, and built the main guts. In the process,
I contributed to a modern stochastic algorithm for natural language processing, working with extensively with collaborators in Beijing and Mountain View.
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Research Intern, IBM Research, T. J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, Summer 2007
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Worked with Chandra Narayanaswami and
Danny Soroker in the Technologies for
Next Generation Pervasive Services group as a part of the IBM Research summer internship program.
Realized multiple prototypes of a research project (OrgMaps) as described below.
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Research Staff, Interactive Cognition Lab, UC San Diego, 2001 - 2004
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Senior web engineer building dynamic web sites using ASP, IIS, and MS SQL
for E-Learning and distributed cognition research. Developed sophisticated multimedia tools
to facilitate experiments and ethnographic analysis.
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Computer Consultant, 1992 - 1999
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Created and installed systems and software,
computer repair, network administration, tutoring,
and dynamic web and database programming.
Clients include: Inter-America Development Bank, NovaTech, and many Bay Area residents and businesses.
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Autodesk Internship, San Rafael, CA, Summer 1998
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Created an in-house tool for organizing file/directory layout.
Contributed to preliminary development of Actrix Technical.
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Research Experience |
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Konbit, 2010-Present
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Konbit, a response to the Haitian earthquake, is a service that helps communities rebuild themselves
after a crisis by indexing the skillsets of local residents, allowing NGOs to find and employ them.
Haitians, their diaspora, and the international community can volunteer their skills via phone, SMS, or web. Skills can then be searched in
real-time and location by NGOs such as CHF International, Partners-in-Health, and others.
Konbit is possible due to key partners, such as the UN Development Program, the US State Department,
the Clinton Foundation, and Digicel. Konbit won the grand prize ($8,000) at the 2010 MIT IDEAS competition.
It is being created in collaboration with Greg Elliott.
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Defuse, 2009-2011
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Defuse is a new interface for online discussions. Using natural language processing and visualization, Defuse adds structural, social, and historical context in the form of top-down views, data portraiture, and dynamic surveys. It seeks to reinvent the medium so that it may scale to the thousands of messages and users popular sites are already receiving and beyond.
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Personas & Metropath(ologies), 2009
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Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit by the Sociable Media Group. It was last on display at the MIT Museum. It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you. The online version of Personas has been used over a million and a half times in its first month of usage alone, and has been written about extensively in news sources ranging from TechCrunch and New Scientist to the UTNE Reader.
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Signs Instant Messaging, 2007 - 2008
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Signs is an instant messenger design philosophy and implementation. It aims to reduce confusion while increasing expressive power through
novel mutation of persistent discussion places. The design facilitates repair of sequencing problems, reduces ambiguity, and functions as
a proxy for new communication acts.
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Blogger Disco, 2008
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Prototyped and implemented a system for browsing blogs. Worked with a diverse team on challenges from user interaction design,
production software engineering of back-end support systems, to language modeling. Exact specifications are confidential.
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Typecasting, 2007 - 2008
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Exploration of alternative designs for social networking sites by using aggregated statistics of language use to segment user base
within larger cultural contexts and topic affinities. Current models make use of hierarchical Bayesian techniques to achieve segmentation.
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Eye Tracking Experiments for new HCI, 2007 - 2008
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Prototyping novel interaction techniques where eye trackers are treated as primary input devices to desktop computers. Research heavily motivated by medical purposes
for relieving Repetitive Stress Injury and Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
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OrgMaps, Summer 2007
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Designed and prototyped multiple versions of an interactive visualization to allow enterprise workers to quickly "mash-up" arbitrary
data streams against corporate job hierarchies using novel interaction techniques. Tool will likely be integrated into a major Lotus product.
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MySpace Spam Filter, 2007
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Build computational model for machine-based estimation of 'humanness' given a MySpace profile. The
project uses behavior outside of conventional models to determine typical behavior within social networking sites, which can be used
to filter out friend-based advertising or scams.
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RadioActive, 2004 - 2006
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RadioActive, my masters thesis project, is a novel communication interface
that enables persistent public conversations on mobile devices. The principal
focus is to enable asynchronous conversations in a medium that is natural to the design of the phone: audio.
The design overcomes the slow,
serial nature of audio and permits effective navigation of large chat persistent
spaces. Chat spaces may be created through dynamic communities or recognizing a topology-based data matrix.
Communities are dynamically created through profiling users using bluetooth and GPS tracking, facilitating
communities to be automatically linked together. It has been successfully user tested in high school and museum contexts.
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eLens, 2005 - 2006
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Member of the technology team of the eLens project, which under the direction
of MIT's Prof. Bill Mitchell attempts to integrate mobile devices into the
urban landscape. Influenced the direction of the group towards an integrated
open platform of services. RadioActive is the communication support in eLens,
enabling context-aware creation of chat spaces.
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Paris Bus Project, 2005
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Participated in Prof. Bill Mitchell's design studio working with Paris's
transport authority, RATP, to redesign the bus system inside-out. Lead a group
towards removing the static system with dynamic bus routing that addressed
transportation needs on-demand. The system used a range of information, from
a priori traffic conditions and planned rides to current demand and congestion.
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Open Sources, 2004 - 2005
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Open Sources is a visualization that depicts the social story of open source
development communities. By looking at issues of shifting code ownership and
communication, Open Sources paints a picture of the development process, enabling
developers and managers to better understand and information flow and roles.
Open Sources is other big project at the Media Lab.
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Nitester, 2003 - 2004
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Created under the supervision of Prof. William Griswold at UCSD, Nitester
enables social groups to collectively plan their nights. Groups can track,
create, and vote against plans over SMS and AIM. It uses multiple strategies
to match the apathy or enthusiasm of the group or planner.
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Undergraduate Honors Thesis: Personal Metadata, 2002-2003.
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Explored how to digitally augment office environments by tracking
how users create and manipulate resources. I developed a theory of personal
metadata and tested it by building an expert system that answered questions
such as "What documents did Mike and I work on last week?". Personal metadata
proved to be a powerful basis for generating ad hoc classifications of contexts.
Such classifications were useful in facilitating informational searches in a
complex environment.
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Towards Complex Cell Modeling by Evolution, 2003.
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Project for Dr. Martin Sereno's graduate course on computational modeling of the
visual cortex. Modeled the functional development of a human's V2 using
an artificial neural network which relied on an evolutionary algorithm for
its learning mechanism. To model the responses of V2's non-linear complex cells,
corresponding simple cell inputs were generated using a series of adjacent segments
taken from a natural image. Simple cell data was calculated by convolving each
segment from the image with a Gabor kernel. Target (model) output was calculated
by the squared sum of the corresponding simple cells.
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Interactive Cognition Lab, 2001 - 2004
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Primarily developed a web application designed to promote distributed, remote
collaboration for lab intranet and E-Learning. Capabilities include sharing and
managing tasks, files, contact information, messages via email and web, and
image galleries with full annotative and communicative abilities.
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Teaching Experience |
Mentored through the Big Brothers Big Sisters Association, 2008 - 2010
Started, contributed, and run to the Media Lab Hacker Seminar Series, 2007 - 2010
Mentored nine different MIT undergraduates within an undergraduate research program, 2006 - 2011
Volunteer Teacher Assistant, Bayview Terrance Elementary, San Diego, CA, 2001
Taught computer skills as a consultant to local businesses and residents, 1992-1999
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Publications |
Donath J., Dragulescu, A., Zinman A., Viégas, F., and Xiong, R. "Data Portraits." Leonardo 43.4 (2010): 375-383. Project MUSE.
Zinman A., and Fritz, D. Topic Modeling and Data Portraiture. In Proceedings of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS 2009), Workshop on Applications for Topic Models: Text and Beyond. Whistler, BC, Canada. December 11th, 2009.
Coffman, D., Soroker, D., Narayanaswami, C., and Zinman, A. A Client-Server Architecture for State-Dependent Dynamic Visualizations on the Web. Submitted for review to the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010), Raleigh, NC.
Zinman A., and Donath, J. Signs: Increasing Expression and Clarity in Instant Messaging. In Proceedings of HICSS 2009.
Soroker, D., Zinman, A., Narayanaswami, C. Organizational Maps and Mashups. IBM Technical Report RC24551, Watson, 05/09/2008.
Zinman, A., Donath, J. "Is Britney Spears Spam?" In Proceedings of Fourth Conference on Email and Anti-Spam, Mountain View, California, August 2-3, 2007.
Zinman, A., RadioActive: Enabling Large-Scale Asynchronous Audio Discussions on Mobile Devices. MS Thesis, MIT, 2006.
Zinman, A., Donath, J. Navigating Persistent Audio. In Proceedings of CHI 2006.
Zinman, A., Donath, J. RadioActive: enabling mobile-based audio forums. Workshop, CHI 2005.
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Peer Reviewer |
ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications and Applications, 2009
ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, 2009
IEEE Conference on Pervasive Computing, 2008
ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2008
ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction, 2007
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Languages |
| Natural: |
English, French |
| Artificial: |
C, C++, ActionScript 3, Objective-C, Java, Scala, JavaScript, HTML, SQL, Python, Matlab |
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Awards |
Grand Prize MIT IDEAS Competition for Konbit, 2010
SAIC Fellowship, 2005-2006
UCSD Cognitive Science Honors Society, 2003-2004
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Select Technologies
and Skills |
UI: Quartz, Cocoa, AWT/Swing, Flash Builder/Flex, RESTful Web
Data: XML, PostgreSQL + GIS Extensions, MSSQL, NOSQL (Cassandra, Tokyo Cabinet, BigTable), Map-Reduce
Web: Tornado, CherryPy, Apache, Jetty, jQuery, HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, SVG, AJAX, Web Sockets
Media: VoIP (Asterisk + Fast-AGI, SIP), Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, QuickTime, SIML, SVG, OmniGraffle
Mathy/Analytics: Matlab, Graphviz, Pattern Recognition / Machine Learning, Neural Networks, Hierarchical Bayesian Networks, Natural Language Processing, Topic Modeling, Social Network Analysis, Visualization
Misc: Computer Networks, Computer Security, Linux Administration, TCP/IP
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