Sepandar David Kamvar (born 1977), also known as Sep Kamvar, is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse refers to a practitioner in the visual arts only. However, th ...

, author and entrepreneur.The Decade's 14 Biggest Design Moments
''Fast Company''. December 28, 2009.About Page
. Kamvar's Official Website.
''I Want You To Want Me''. He is currently the founder of Celo, a cryptocurrency startup. He was previously the LG Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and director of the Social Computing group at the MIT Media Lab.Faculty Page
''MIT Media Lab''. He left MIT in 2016.

Computer science

Kamvar's main contributions to computer science have been at the intersection of computer science and mathematics, particularly in the fields of personalized search,

peer-to-peer networks Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network. They are said to form a peer-to-peer n ...

, social search and data mining.New Faculty
. MIT SA+P Page. December 2011.
''MIT News''. December 21, 2011.Social Data Mining Page
kamvar.org/social_text_mining.Social Search Page
. kamvar.org/social_search.

Personalized search

As a graduate student at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

, Kamvar developed tools that made it possible to compute personalized PageRank.Personalized Search
. Kamvar.org. He also developed the first efficient algorithm for adding personal context to the internet search process.Researchers Develop Techniques for Computing Google-Style Web Rankings Up to Five Times Faster
NSF.gov. May 13, 2003.NLP Publications
Stanford NLP Page.
Princeton University Press. File created April 17. 2012. In 2003, Kamvar co-founded

Kaltix Kaltix Corporation was a personalized search engine company founded at Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies ...

, a personalized search engine company.Olson, Stefani
Searching for the Personal Touch
CNET News. August 11, 2003. He was the

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

of Kaltix until Google acquired the company in September 2003.Google Acquires Kaltix
''Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal''. September 30, 2003.
''San Francisco Business Times''. September 30, 2003.Moore, Cathleen
Google Grabs Search Start-Up
''InfoWorld''. September 30, 2003. After the acquisition of Kaltix, Kamvar joined Google, where he led the personalization efforts between 2003 and 2007.Calburn, Thomas
Google Gets Personal with iGoogle
''Information Week''. May 1, 2007.Auchard, Eric
Google Steps up Personalised Web Search Push
''Reuters''. April 30, 2007.

Peer-to-peer networks

Kamvar's research and work in

focused on the social mechanisms that reward cooperation and punish adversarial behavior.Peer to Peer Search
. kamvar.org.
''2003 IWWWC''. His 2003 paper, EigenTrust, is one of the most highly cited papers in the field.List of Sep Kamvar's Publications
. kamvar.org/publications.Sep Kamvar Scholar Page
scholar.google.com.

"Dog" programming language

Dog is a high-level programming language created by Kamvar at MIT Media Lab. It was announced in spring 2012, and stems from the frustration faced by Kamvar with other existing languages, such as Java, and felt they made it needlessly difficult to write code that handled social interactions. It is designed to facilitate easier creation of social computing applications, and is designed to facilitate programming in a

natural language In neuropsychology, linguistics, and philosophy of language, a natural language or ordinary language is any language that has evolved naturally in humans through use and repetition without conscious planning or premeditation. Natural languages ...

and allow newcomers the chance to learn programming more easily. About Dog, Kamvar said "I had to write code at a lower level of abstraction than I had to think about the interactions. And so I thought it would be interesting to start writing a programming language that allowed me to write at the same level of abstraction that I think."

Art

Kamvar is an advocate for using the web as a medium for artistic expression. He believes the ability to constantly change and be viewed by millions of people simultaneously makes the web an opportune medium for art.

We Feel Fine

Kamvar created

We Feel Fine We Feel Fine is an interactive website, artwork, and book created by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar that searches the internet every 10 minutes for expressions of human emotion on blogs and then displays the results in several visually-rich dynami ...

with Jonathan Harris in 2005.We Feel Fine FAQ
wefeelfine.org. Debuting in 2006, it is an interactive experience using more than 12 million human feelings collected over three years by scouring blog posts every 10 minutes for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling".
wefeelfine.org. Since its debut, We Feel Fine has been exhibited all over the world, with '' Fast Company'' naming the project one of the "Decade's 14 Biggest Design Moments."List of Exhibitions
. kamvar.og. In 2009, Kamvar and Harris took the findings from the four years since

was launched in 2006 and turned them into a book called "We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion".The Book
wefeelfine.org.Popova, Maria
The Sum of All Emotions
''wired.co.uk''. December 2, 2009.Whelan, Christine

''The Huffington Post''. December 1, 2009.

I Want You To Want Me

Kamvar created "I Want You To Want Me" with Jonathan Harris in 2007.
iwantyoutowantme.org. It is an interactive installation that searches online dating sites for certain phrases and displays them in blue and pink balloons that float and bump into each other.Baldwin, Rosecrans
Picturing the Future
''The Digital Ramble Blog''. April 23, 2008.
iwantyoutowantme.org.I Want You To Want Me
YouTube. Uploaded April 17, 2008. The project was commissioned by the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition.Design and the Elastic Mind
MoMA. It was installed on Valentine's Day, February 14, 2008.

Education

Kamvar earned a bachelor's degree in Chemistry from Princeton University in 1999. He received his Ph.D. in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics at Stanford University in 2004 under the guidance of Christopher Manning.

Bibliography

* ''We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion'' (2009) * ''Numerical Algorithms for Personalized Search in Self-organizing Information Networks'' (2010) *''Syntax & Sage: Reflections on Software and Nature'' (2015)

References

External links

Kamvar.org
��Official Website {{DEFAULTSORT:Kamvar, Sepandar Iranian computer scientists Living people 1977 births Iranian expatriate academics