Ian
My Background
I graduated from Bard College with a BA in Environmental and Urban Studies and Anthropology. Most recently I have worked as a TA for an intensive C++ course at the Harvard Summer School and as the Community Manager of a co-working space where I coordinated events, networking, sales, accounts, and facilities. As an undergraduate I conducted original research on applied pedagogy in higher education. I continue to collaborate with researchers studying social media political movements. Seeing that the future of all research will be computational and building on previous coursework in programing, I decided I wanted dive head first into a master’s program in CS!
My Future
I am studying in the Align program in hopes of launching a career in human-focused machine learning. While attending a public lecture series at MIT on Deep Learning for Self-Driving Cars by Dr. Lex Fridman, I was inspired by the notion that, long before we reach the level of autonomy required to replace drivers, we will need to engineer machine learning that collaborates with and even learns from its human users. I see an important role for researchers with a strong background and expertise in both social and computer science, a role that I dream to pursue.