Sepandar David Kamvar, also known as Sep Kamvar, is a

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

artist An artist is a person engaged in an activity related to creating art, practicing the arts, or demonstrating the work of art. The most common usage (in both everyday speech and academic discourse) refers to a practitioner in the visual arts o ...

author In legal discourse, an author is the creator of an original work that has been published, whether that work exists in written, graphic, visual, or recorded form. The act of creating such a work is referred to as authorship. Therefore, a sculpt ...

and

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk (assumed by a traditional business), and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones. An entreprene ...

.The Decade's 14 Biggest Design Moments
''Fast Company''. December 28, 2009.
''I Want You To Want Me''. He is a cofounder of Mosaic, an AI-powered construction company, Celo, a cryptocurrency protocol, and Wildflower Schools, a decentralized network of

Montessori The Montessori method of education is a type of educational method that involves children's natural interests and activities rather than formal teaching methods. A Montessori classroom places an emphasis on hands-on learning and developing ...

microschools. He was previously a Professor of Media Arts and Sciences and LG Career Development Chair at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

, 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 MIT School of Architecture and Planning, School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fi ...

.About Page
. Kamvar's Official Website.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 Personalized search is a web search tailored specifically to an individual's interests by incorporating information about the individual beyond the specific query provided. There are two general approaches to Personalization, personalizing 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, forming a peer-to-peer network of Node ...

social search Social search is a behavior of retrieving and searching on a social searching engine that mainly searches user-generated content such as news, videos and images related search queries on social media like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram an ...

and

data mining Data mining is the process of extracting and finding patterns in massive data sets involving methods at the intersection of machine learning, statistics, and database systems. Data mining is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and ...

.New Faculty
. MIT SA+P Page. December 2011.
''MIT News''. December 21, 2011.

Personalized search

As a graduate student at

Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...

, 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. Accordin ...

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

algorithm In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of Rigour#Mathematics, mathematically rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific Computational problem, problems or to perform a computation. Algo ...

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, 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 chief executive or managing director, is the top-ranking corporate officer charged with the management of an organization, usually a company or a nonprofit organization. CEOs find roles in variou ...

of Kaltix until

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

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.Conference Program
''2003 IWWWC''. His 2003 paper, EigenTrust, is one of the most highly cited papers in the field.Sep Kamvar Scholar Page
scholar.google.com.

Dog programming language

Dog is a

high-level High-level and low-level, as technical terms, are used to classify, describe and point to specific goals of a systematic operation; and are applied in a wide range of contexts, such as, for instance, in domains as widely varied as computer scienc ...

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Programming languages are described in terms of their Syntax (programming languages), syntax (form) and semantics (computer science), semantics (meaning), usually def ...

created by Kamvar and Salman Ahmad at

. It was announced in spring 2012, and stems from the frustration faced by Kamvar with existing languages, 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 A natural language or ordinary language is a language that occurs naturally in a human community by a process of use, repetition, and change. It can take different forms, typically either a spoken language or a sign language. Natural languages ...

and allow newcomers the chance to learn programming more easily.

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 with

Jonathan Harris Jonathan Daniel Harris ( Charasuchin; November 6, 1914 – November 3, 2002) was an American character actor whose career included more than 500 television and film appearances, as well as Voice-over, voiceovers. Two of his best-known roles we ...

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 an American business magazine published monthly in print and online, focusing on technology, business, and design. It releases six print issues annually. History ''Fast Company'' was founded in November 1995 by Alan Webb ...

'' 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 We Feel Fine 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

in 2007.The Process Page
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. MoMA's collection spans the late 19th century to the present, a ...

(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 a Christian martyrs, martyr named Saint Valentine, Valentine, and ...

, February 14, 2008.

Education

Kamvar earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

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 American computer scientists Living people 1977 births Iranian expatriate academics in the United States