Languages for Social Computation
Speaker: Sep Kamvar , MIT Media Lab
Date: May 18 2012
Time: 2:00PM to 3:00PM
Location: Patil/Kiva Seminar Room (32-G449)
Host: Rob Miller, MIT CSAIL
Contact: Juho Kim, juhokim@mit.edu
Relevant URL: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/seminar.shtmlAbstract:
Some of the most interesting and useful technologies in the past few years have involved the large-scale coordination of people and machines. Programming languages, however, tend to focus on the machines.
Traditional programming language design assumes that people play one of two roles: programmers or end-users, not members of a decentralized computing system. As a result, programming -- or even thinking about -- such human-machine systems is awkward and laborious.
In this talk, I will discuss the challenges in developing a language that is intended to be executed by both computers and people. I'll present Dog, an instance of such a language, and Jabberwocky, the development stack in which it resides. And finally, I'll show some applications that are written simply in Dog, but would be difficult to write in other existing languages.
Bio:
Sep Kamvar is the LG Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and Director of the Social Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab. His research focuses on social computing and information management.
Prior to MIT, Sep was the head of personalization at Google and a consulting professor of Computational and Mathematical Engineering at Stanford University. Prior to that, he was founder and CEO of Kaltix, a personalized search company that was acquired by Google in 2003.
Sep is the author of two books and over 40 technical publications and patents in the fields of search and social computing. He is on the technical advisory boards of several companies, including Clever Sense and Etsy. His artwork has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Musem in London, and the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens.
Sep received his Ph.D. in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics from Stanford University and his A.B. in Chemistry from Princeton University.
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