Better Know a Classmate: Eugene Wu

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At only 26 years of age, Eugene Wu is already an expert in the design of computer databases. He’s a fifth-year PhD student at MIT’s world-renowned Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). Wu has published sixteen scholarly pieces (the first in 2004, when he was only 18), and has balanced his academic study with internships at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and IBM.

Yet Wu didn’t start using computers in any serious capacity until he took a computer class in high school. Computers weren’t easily accessible, outside of basic word processing and the occasional educational game in an elementary school classroom. Wu’s story underscores the power of advanced educational opportunities, and the long-term ramifications of these encounters early in a career.

Wu has wisely used his summers to advance his education and career. When he was still in high school in Berkeley, California, Wu spent his summers taking college classes at nearby UC Berkeley. By the time he graduated, he had finished the pre-requisites for Computer Science, which allowed him to get a running start his freshman year of college.

The summer after his freshman year also proved to be a pivotal time. After being turned down by Microsoft and a couple of other computer scientists he sought to work with, a Teaching Assistant from one of his classes recruited him to work on a database project. The project proved very successful, and spawned most of his following undergraduate research.

He’s a Teacher

Wu has rounded out his scholarship by actively teaching others. After finishing his Master’s degree, Wu traveled to the Middle East to coach Israeli and Palestinian students in a program called Middle East Education through Technology (MEET). He mentored teams of high school seniors as they worked together on technology projects. Wu’s also taught a course on introduction to Java, which is now listed in MIT’s Open Courseware. He also created a course on Data Literacy, which ended up training biologists, doctors, and other professionals across disciplines to better understand their professions’ data.

He’s an Athlete

In addition to his graduate and teaching work, Wu also appears to have a life outside of the academy. He’s traveled the West Coast playing in Ultimate Frisbee tournaments, and designed the jersey for MIT’s Ultimate team, the Grim Beavers.

He’s a Developer

For an earlier assignment in his Participatory News course, Wu built a Chrome browser extension called IdeaPrint to track his media diet, as measured by the major websites he visited most. Offline, though, he admits that he primarily reads comics, not books. His preferred genres are Japanese and Chinese manga and graphic novels. In the face of his workload, Wu struggles to keep up with popular culture and world news.

He’s an Artist

The comic books inform Wu’s artistic side. When he’s not using people to crowdsource database queries, he’s drawing. A housemate, who asked to remain anonymous because she lives with Wu, remarked that he has a talent for drawing and noticing the details: “Like, he’ll draw a monster and name it “Gregory” and everybody will be like “YES, that is a GREGORY.” Wu’s illustrations have been commissioned by a group at the Media Lab, for which he was compensated with an Xbox 360 and several videogames.

Other students at MIT admire Wu’s combination of technical and artistic talents. Classmate Travis Rich remembers being impressed by Wu’s sketchbook illustrations, only to walk into a Python course and find that Wu was the instructor. “He’s like Brad Pitt,” says Rich. “He’s got it all.”

He’s an Eater

“Every time he eats food, it looks like he’s never eaten before in his life,” says Wu’s anonymous housemate. “A lot of people call him Kobayashi. His favorite item is this green chopper thing that chops up onions by putting it underneath the thing and then pumping vigorously. He made me by one too because there was a buy one get one free deal.”

What Else Will He Be?

For someone with so much under his belt already, Wu’s not entirely sure what the future holds in store. His experience has informed the parameters for his next moves, though. He’d prefer to work in a consumer-facing organization rather than academia, and his experience with the giants of the internet has inspired him to work at a smaller organization. He’s considering possibilities involving the news and media worlds, either in the form of startup or nonprofit.

Future plans could involve Wu’s desire to improve the news media, and could specifically address reader and producer biases. Wu’s concerned that context is often missing in individual news pieces, where one data point is presented without the related trends and information. As a human, he says, we should really only have to read one or two articles per day, he says, rather than an entire Twitter stream.

But Most Importantly, Is He a Robot, Pirate, or Ninja?

“Robots are kind of clunky, you don’t want to go with that,” Wu says. “Pirates are out of date, and they don’t really have any abilities, other than like, being dirty and shooting guns, right? Ninjas require actual skill.”

 

 

SuperPACs

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The key principles that must be followed in any election is that a large portion of the voters participate in the process, and that there is a lack of corruption. The 2012 Presidential Election has become a major turning point in the United States’ election process, in that both principles have disappeared from the radar. Despite the efforts of organizations such as rock the vote, voter apathy has only increased since the last election. When interviewed, many cited a lack of faith in the political system and the amount of corruption.

These complaints stem from the second change — the unprecedented emphasis on money. Money has always been a part of the process. Many experts argue that Obama won the 2008 election by spending a record shattering $700 million on his campaign, as opposed to McCain’s $100 million. Despite the campaign funding, here was still a limit on how much an individual could donate to a candidate. However, the birth of a new player — the SuperPAC — is poised to change completely change the election process by giving wealthy individuals and organizations the power to directly market and advertise on behalf (or against) candidiates all the way up until election day.

This issue was once again brought to light at a recent talk at MIT’s Media Lab by political activist and director of the Foundation for Ethics at Harvard University, Lawrence Lessig. Lessig has focused the past five years on battling political corruption and focused the discussion on systemic corruption in the current political system.

He emphasized SuperPACs as a poingnent example of corruption. The January 2010 ruling of Citizens United vs the FEC overturned a law that prohibited corporations and unions from spending on “electioneering communication”, which encompasses any television, radio or other communication that mentions a candidate close to election time. This was designed to limit the amount of influence third parties can have on the election. With the law overturned, any corporation can act a candidate’s third arm and effectively help fund the candidate’s marketing campaign throughout the election. Candidates are no longer

 

There has been a surge in the number and funding of SuperPACs. The following diagram depicts the number of (dashed line) and total funding of (solid line) SuperPACs over the past ten years. Although SuperPACs (otherwise called Individual Expenditures) have always existed, the number has doubled since the Citizens United ruling, while the total funding has increased 12 fold, from $9 million to $122 million.

Not only have the number and total funding of SuperPACs gone up, so has the disparity of the top PACs compared to smaller PACs. The following diagram is a cumulative plot of PAC funds. The x-axis show’s the size of a single PAC’s (let’s call it PACMan) funds in the millions, while the y-axis shows the cumulative amount of funds of all PACs the same size or smaller than PACMan. Each differently colored line is the data for a different year. We see a similar story, before 2010, the largest PAC only had $2.5 million. Now, the largest SuperPACs how command over $35 million, far more than some candidates’ entire budgets in the last election. This is money used to not only back candidates that support the SuperPAC’s policies, but to attack candidates that speak contrary to the SuperPac’s opinions.

Lawrence made a powerful point during his talk. The mere existance of SuperPACs with so much money and power will force politicans to buy political insurance. Politicans will cater to a SuperPac policies in fear that competitor comes along armed with a different SuperPAC. At what point will these politicans consider the public?

All data provided by the Federal Election Committee.

All source code available on github.

started 10PM Feb 21

ended 2AM Feb 22

 

Tracking a media diet

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I approached the Media Diet in two ways.  This post will discuss one of them, which is a tool called IdeaPrint.

In the current news environment, there are a small number of corporations and individuals that control the vast majority of media that is produced, and a vast number of smaller blogs and organizations that, in aggregate, provide balanced and far reaching reports of the news.   Despite so many choices, many people still adhere to a small number of news sources that will inevitably result in biased views.

The first component of my media diet is a tool called IdeaPrint.  The ultimate goal is a tool that can keep track of an individual’s “idea consumption” construct a unique “ideaprint”, similar to a fingerprint.  The ideaprint includes information about the biases that influence your idea sources.  For example, how much of your consumed ideas are owned by Rupert Murdoch?  This information can be further used to suggest additional articles and commentary to provide a more balanced view on topics.  Or can be used across your social circle to identify homogenous thought processes and enhance the variety of news content that you and your friends read.

The current tool is built as a Google Chrome extension that simply aggregates the number of visits to major websites (those that have wikipedia articles) and displays the top 9 as a bar chart.  In contrast to tools such as RescueTime, the goal is to enhance the list of visited sites with information about the site owners, the amount of time spent reading an article and provide a simple API for custom analyses.

The current implementation is a very hacked up prototype.  You can check out the source code at: https://github.com/sirrice/ideaprint

Boko Haram divides US security experts, lawmakers

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As gunfire and bomb explosions continue to ravage parts of Nigeria’s north including this morning’s six huge explosions reported in a Kano suburb, the debate in the United States is whether or not the world’s only super-power should consider Boko Haram a terrorist group.
Even as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the 25 year old Nigerian, who was last week handed a life sentence for attempting to blow up a US airline on Christmas Day in 2009 in a suicide mission for al-Qaeda, contends the ruling in court, the submission of some security analysts whom this reporter monitored in a youtube debate this morning, is that the Boko Haram situation in remains a domestic problem with no potential threat to the United States.
The U.S. State Department currently designates 49 extremist groups as foreign terrorist organizations. Al-Shabaab, the Somalian extremist group, is the only sub-Saharan African group on the list. The US Congress House Committee on Homeland Security last November debated a motion to include Boko Haram on the list of foreign terrorist organisations, but some security experts kicked against it.
Jean Herskovits, a New York-based history professor, who is one of those opposed to the move, opined in a New York Times oped article last month that such an action will make Nigeria’s muslim north see the US as biased against it.
“The United States should not allow itself to be drawn into this quicksand by focusing on Boko Haram alone. Washington is already seen by many northern Muslims — including a large number of longtime admirers of America — as biased toward a Christian president from the south,” she noted.
“The United States must work to avoid a self-fulfilling prophecy that makes us into their enemy. Placing Boko Haram on the foreign terrorist list would cement such views and make more Nigerians fear and distrust America,” she added.
In her testimony before the Congress Committee on Homeland Security in November, Jessica Cooke, the Africa Program Director at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington-based think tank, expressed similar views stating that “Boko Haram poses little immediate threat to the U.S. homeland, although U.S. citizens and assets in Nigeria may well be vulnerable as the group seeks high-profile, high-impact targets.”
The more imminent threat, she says the potential of the group destabilizing Nigeria, “an important energy supplier, security partner, and regional and continental powerhouse and one of the United States’ most strategically important allies in Africa.”
Howard Jeter, a former US ambassador to Nigeria, however, holds an opposing view. He believes Boko Haram deserves to be on America’s list of terrorist organisations. “It is really a terrorist group. And Peter said let us not designate it [as such]. I would like to hear your explanation as to why. It is a terrorist group. If you kill 28 innocent people worshipping in a church, it is a terrorist group,” he said.
John Campbell, another former US ambassador to Nigeria whose views on the matter is not well defined, however, believes the US should take seriously the threat posed to Nigeria’s continued existence by the militant group. According to him, the right policy response to the situation in Nigeria is critical to the US’s abiding goal of promoting democracy and sustainable development in Africa.
It remains to be seen whether Boko Haram would eventually make the terrorist list. So far, there is no consensus as the Congress security committee continues its consultations on the issue.

Occupy Harvard at Lamont Library

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This week’s assignment requested us to report on a story within a 4-hour interval. I chose to report on Occupy Harvard at Lamont Library. The method I used was to create a timeline of articles that reported on the event. For each article, a short description is available. The articles I used were taken from the Google search and Google News search of the event. I attempted to include most articles that I found and I managed to include most of them. It took me 3 hours and 15 minutes to put the information together, but most of the technical work of setting up the timeline was done before that.

You can see the final outcome below. The timeline below shows the articles that covered the Occupy Library events at Harvard. They appear in the chronological order in which they were published. Clicking on the image or the title will show you more details about the article itself. Scroll left and right to see more articles.

Occupy Harvard at Lamont Library Timeline
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