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 ( ...

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, t ...

author An author is the writer of a book, article, play, mostly written work. A broader definition of the word "author" states: "''An author is "the person who originated or gave existence to anything" and whose authorship determines responsibility f ...

and

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

.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 The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

.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, 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, Kamvar developed tools that made it possible to compute personalized

PageRank PageRank (PR) is an algorithm used by Google Search to rank web pages in their search engine results. It is named after both the term "web page" and co-founder Larry Page. PageRank is a way of measuring the importance of website pages. Accordi ...

.Personalized Search
. Kamvar.org. He also developed the first efficient

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...

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 especiall ...

of Kaltix until

Google Google LLC () is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company focusing on Search Engine, search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, software, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, ar ...

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 peer-to-peer networks 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 A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming l ...

created by Kamvar at

. It was announced in spring 2012, and stems from the frustration faced by Kamvar with other existing languages, such as

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

, and felt they made it needlessly difficult to write code that handled social interactions. It is designed to facilitate easier creation of

social computing Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and tech ...

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 languag ...

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 Abstraction in its main sense is a conceptual process wherein general rules and concepts are derived from the usage and classification of specific examples, literal ("real" or " concrete") signifiers, first principles, or other methods. "An a ...

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 ''Fast Company'' is a monthly American business magazine published in print and online that focuses on technology, business, and design. It publishes six print issues per year. History ''Fast Company'' was launched in November 1995 by Alan We ...

'' 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 The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street (Manhattan), 53rd Street between Fifth Avenue, Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, ...

(MoMA) for their "Design and the Elastic Mind" exhibition.Design and the Elastic Mind
MoMA. It was installed on

Valentine's Day Valentine's Day, also called Saint Valentine's Day or the Feast of Saint Valentine, is celebrated annually on February 14. It originated as a Christian feast day honoring one or two early Christian martyrs named Saint Valentine and, throu ...

, February 14, 2008.

Education

Kamvar earned a bachelor's degree in Chemistry from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and one of the n ...

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