Team

Ryan O'Toole ~ Lead

Ryan is a graduate student and research assistant at the MIT Media Lab in the Computing Culture Group and Center for Future Civic Media.

Ryan has a B.A. from U.C. San Diego in Interdisciplinary Computing in the Arts and a minor in Computer Science & Engineering focused on computational imaging.

Ryan is currently interested in social engineering.

Big Shots

Chris Csikszentmihályi

Chris Csikszentmihályi directs the Media Lab's Computing Culture group, which works to create unique media technologies for cultural applications. He also directs the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, which develops new technologies and techniques to strengthen geographic communities. He has worked in the intersection of new technologies, media, and the arts for 13 years, lecturing, showing new media work, and presenting installations in both Europe and North America. He is a 2005 Rockefeller New Media Fellow, and recently finished a solo exhibition at the Location One Gallery in New York's Soho. Csikszentmihályi has taught at the University of California at San Diego, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and at Turku University. He toured museums and nightclubs with his mechanical hip hop device, DJ I, Robot, which was nominated for the Best Artistic Software award at Berlin's Transmediale, while a previous piece, Natural Language Processor, was commissioned by the KIASMA Museum in Helsinki, Finland. The catalog for his installations Skin and Control is published by Charta and distributed by DAP, and he served on the National Academy of Science's IT and Creativity panel. Csikszentmihályi received an MFA from the University of California at San Diego, and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Csikszentmihályi is currently David and Roberta Loge Fellow at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Sandy Pentland

Professor Alex "Sandy" Pentland is a pioneer in organizational engineering, mobile information systems, and computational social science. Pentland's focus is on the development of human-centered technology, and the creation of ventures that take this technology into the real world. His work provides people with a clearer picture of their social environments, and helps companies and communities to reinvent themselves to be both more human and more productive.

Pentland oversees the Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program, including the EPROM entrepreneurship program in Africa. He is among the most-cited computer scientists in the world, and in 1997 Newsweek magazine named him one of the 100 Americans likely to shape this century. His book, Honest Signals: How They Shape Our World was published in 2008 by the MIT Press.

David Reed

David P. Reed's research focuses on designing systems that manage, communicate, and manipulate information shared among people. He is best known for co-developing the Internet design principle known as the "end-to-end argument" (with MIT professors J.H. Saltzer and David D. Clark), and "Reed's Law," which describes the economics of group formation in networks. Reed, with Andrew Lippman, developed the Lab's Viral Communications program; with Lippman, David D. Clark, and Charles Fine he helped to create the Communications Futures Program.

Reed's career spans both computing R&D and academia. As a vice president of R&D and chief scientist at two pioneering personal computer software companies—Software Arts, Inc. and Lotus Development Corporation—he led new product innovations and strategic technology efforts; in addition, he was a senior scientist at Interval Research Corporation, and advisor to major companies and startup ventures on their technology and business strategy. Throughout this time he also pursued personal research in radio networking, distributed computing architecture, and Internet business economics. In the academic world, Reed was a faculty member in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and worked in the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). He also earned his BS, MS, EE, and PhD degrees in EECS while conducting research at LCS and its predecessor, Project MAC.

Tom Malone

Thomas W. Malone is the Patrick J. McGovern Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the founding director of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. He was also the founding director of the MIT Center for Coordination Science and one of the two founding co-directors of the MIT Initiative on "Inventing the Organizations of the 21st Century". Professor Malone teaches classes on leadership and information technology, and his research focuses on how new organizations can be designed to take advantage of the possibilities provided by information technology.

Developers

Britton O'Toole

Britton has a B.S. in Mangement Science & a B.S. in Economics from Southern Methodist University. As a Web Developer he has 10+ years of experience working with web sites. Britton currently resides in Irvine, CA with his cat, Chester, and tortoises, Lewis & J.R. When not furiously programming themes, websites and games, Britton enjoys maintaining his aquariums and adding to his vinyl collection.

Matthew Hockenberry

Mathew Hockenberry is a Visiting Scientist at the Center for Future Civic Media, where he works on GoodApp, SourceMap, Landman Report Card, and Red Ink.

Matt has a S.M. in Media Arts & Sciences from the Media Lab and is the Director of the Creative Synthesis Collaborative Inc.

Melva James

Melva has a S.M. in Chemistry from MIT, and will shortly be leaving the frigid north for warmer climates, and a Ph.D. in Human Centered Computing at Clemson University.