Conference and Journal Publications

• 2016 Dede, Ho, Mitros “Big Data Analysis in Higher Education: Promises and Pitfalls.” Educause Review.
• 2016 Mitros “Filters with Decreased Passband Error.” IEEE Transaction on Circuits and Systems II
• 2016 Sivaraman, Yoon, Mitros. “Simplified Audio Production in Asynchronous Voice-Based Discussions.” 34th ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• 2015 Li, Mitros. “Learnersourced Recommendations for Remediation.” IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
• 2015 Mitros. “Learnersourcing of Complex Assessments.” ACM Learning at Scale.
• 2014 Mitros, Sun. “Creating Educational Resources at Scale.” IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies
• 2014 Kim, Guo, Seaton, Mitros, Gajos, Miller. “Understanding In-Video Dropouts and Interaction Peaks in Online Lecture Videos.” ACM Learning at Scale.
• 2014 Mitros, Agarwal, Parachuri. “Assessment in Digital At-Scale Learning Environments”. ACM Ubiquity. (invited paper)
• 2013 Seaton, Bergner, Chuang, Mitros, Pritchard. “Who Does What in a Massive Open Online Course?” Communications of the ACM
• 2013 Mitros*, Parachuri*, Rogosic, Huang. “An Integrated Framework for the Grading of Freeform Responses.” Learning International Networks Consortium.
• 2013 Seaton, Bergner, Chaung, Mitros, Pritchard. “Massive Open Online Courses: a New Window on Education.” Learning International Networks Consortium.
• 2013 Mitros, Afridi, Sussman, Terman, White, Fischer, Agarwal “Teaching electronic circuits online: Lessons from MITx's 6.002x on edX.” IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems
• 2008 Mitros. “Constraint modules: An introduction.” IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems

Other Publications

• 2017 Nye, Mitros, Schunn, Foltz, Gasevic, Katz. “Why Assess: The Role of Assessment in Learning, Science, and Society.” Chapter in upcoming book Design Recommendations for Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Volume 5 - Assessment
• 2017 Baker, Mitros, Goldberg, Sottilare “Assessing Individual Learner Performance in MOOCs.” Chapter in upcoming book Design Recommendations for Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Volume 5 - Assessment
• 2017 Contributor to: “Big Data in Education: Balancing the Benefits of Educational Research and Student Privacy: Learning Process Data in Education.” National Academy of Education (final report)
• 2017 Brend, Littlejohn, Kern, Mitros, Shacklock, Blakemore. “Big data for monitoring educational systems.” Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union
• 2016 O Santos, J Boticario, C Romero, M Pechenizkiy, A Merceron, P Mitros, J Luna, C Mihaescu, P Moreno, A Hershkovitz, S Ventura, M Desmarais (Eds) “Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Educational Data Mining”
• 2015 Sections in “Data-Intensive Research in Education: Current Work and Next Steps” edited by Chris Dede. Computing Research Association.
• 2015 Yoon, Mitros “Multi-Modal Peer Discussion with RichReview on edX.” ACM User Interface and Technology Symposium.
• 2015 Mitros, Kim. “SPED: Taxonomy for Crowdsourcing in Education.” Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. Workshop on Designing Futures for Learning in the Crowd
• 2014 Cormier*, Mitros*, Pritchard*. “Teaching Physics at Scale.” Physics Education Research Conference. (poster)
• 2014 Kim, Guo, Seaton, Mitros, Gajos, Miller. “Interaction Peaks and Data-Driven Interfaces for Online Lecture Videos.” Quanta Workshop Poster.
• 2014 Sola, Mitros, Li. “The Crowd Sourced Hinter For edX Online Courses.” Proceedings of the Research Science Instititue.
• 2013 Seaton, Bergner, Chuang, Mitros. “Towards Real-Time Analytics in MOOCs.” IWTA@LAK.2013.
• 2007 Mitros. “\href{http://mitros.org/p/projects/phd-thesis.pdf}{Constraint Satisfaction Modules:
• 2004 Mitros. “A Framework for Analog Circuit Optimization.” MIT (M.Eng Thesis)

Presentations

• 2017 “What Makes a Good Lawyer.” Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction Conference.
• 2017 “How the Scientific Establishment Generates Bad Science, and What We Can Do About It.” MIT Day of Action.
• 2017 “The Interactive Classroom.” ComSciCon.
• 2017 “Data Science in Education and the Social Sciences.” Xi'an Jiaotong University.
• 2016 “Implications of Privacy Concerns for Using Student Data for Research” National Academy of Education Workshop, Big Data: Balancing Research Needs and Student Privacy (Panel Discussion)
• 2015 “The Pedagogy Behind Open edX.” Learning with MOOCs II
• 2015 “The future of practical applications of EDM at scale.” Educational Datamining. (Panel Discussion)
• 2015 “Social Learning in edX.” DANCE talk series, invited inaugural talk
• 2015 “Big Data and Assessment of Complex Skills.” NSF/CRA Workshop: Data-Intensive Research in Education. (Panel Discussion+Paper)
• 2015 “Machine Learning and Qualitative Data in Education.” NFS/CRA Workshop on Big Data Science. (Invited talk)
• 2014 “MOOCs, Learning, and Pedagogy.” Open edX Conference. (Video)
• 2014 “Assessment at Scale.” Learning Innovations at Scale/CHI. (Invited workshop talk)
• 2014 “How Online Educational Resources and the Internet Can Facilitate Diverse Research-Practice and Cross-Disciplinary Collaborations.” AERA. (Panel)
• 2014 “MOOCs and Flipped Classrooms: Education Revolution or Passing Fad?”. IEEE IMS (Panel).
• 2013 “Learning Analytics and Learning at Scale.” LASI14 (Invited panel talk)
• 2014 “Effective MOOCs.” VII International GUIDE Conference (Closing Plenary)
• 2013 “Blue Sky Tools.” Learning Mode (Panel)
• 2013 “Effective MOOCs.” eMadrid 2013 (Invited talk)
• 2013“Building the Educational Data Scientist.” Learning Analytics Summer Institute (Panel talk)
• 2013 “Open Platforms for Pedagogical Innovation.” Learning Analytics Summer Institute (Invited talk)
• 2013 “Insights: An Open Framework for Educational Data Research” moocshop at Educational Datamining/Artificial Intelligence for Education (Invited workshop talk)
• 2013 “Can MOOCs Democratize Higher Education.” Worldwide Innovation Summit on Education (Panel)
• 2013 “How Platforms for Massive Open Online Courses can support research.” Association for Psychological Science Symposium (Invited workshop talk)

Service, Awards, Personal

• 2016 UM/ARL GIFT Advisory Board
• 2016 Chair industry track at Educational Datamining
• 2016 Blended track chair/coordinator at Learning@Scale
• 2015 Williams, et. al. “Connecting Collaborative \& Crowd Work with Online Education” CSCW workshop co-organizer.
• 2015 Co-chair industry track at Educational Datamining
• 2006 Total Fellowship

Selected Areas of Research

Improving Education with Economies of Scale I designed the Open edX platform and pedagogy to allow efficient application of evidence-based techniques in teaching-and-learning in blended classrooms. We've had tremendous results. In a randomized control trial at SJSU, we were able to bring course completion rates from 59% to over 91%, and later, we doubled the amount of material taught. In pure on-line settings, we were able to deliver learning gains between those of traditional classrooms and blended active learning classrooms. Community college students have been able to learn the MIT introductory computer science curriculum. We've had many similar results in less formal evaluations.

Crowdsourcing in Education I've had a number of success in finding ways to bring communities of people together to create educational materials. The core difference from traditional OER approaches is that OERs try to compile curricula from disprate resources. Instead, I bring communities together around a common curriculum. Probably the most significant result is that students can contribute very hints more effectively than in commercial intelligent tutoring systems where such content costs millions to make. Probably the most important (and underappreciate) result is that students can create high-quality assessments, if given appropriate scaffolding. Probably the most important area of continued research is bringing together communities including instructors, researchers, and industry practitioners around such courses.

Circuit Network Theory Recently, I put out a very nice paper showing we can have filters with much lower error than the traditional Butterworth/Chebyshev/Bessel/etc. designs. Prior to that, my Ph.D thesis solved a number of previously unsolved problems. It described a methodology for analog circuit design that used bidirectional flow of information. This methodology allows for the construction of complex, interconnected systems, guaranteeing their stability with what is mostly a local stability criterion. I applied it to three problems. First, I showed how it could be used to solve systems of equations. Second, I showed how it could be used to build models of systems by observation. Finally, I showed how it could be used to linearize a nonlinearity. The linearization is probably the most compelling application. The circuit is fairly simple: A linearizer that can model a nonlinearity as a quadratic Taylor approximation, and predistort to compensate for it, can be built with under a dozen major blocks (Gilbert cells or op-amps). It is independent of feedback linearization, so it can be used inside of a feedback loop without significantly affecting feedback linearization. More complex linearizers are also robust to a class of device failures. Ironically, because many such problems were considered closed, there wasn't much of a community to read my thesis.

Code on Github

I am perhaps best known as the creator of Open edX, a widely used platform for education. Other assorted free software I've been involved with includes (automatically generated with github's API, but a little more organized and readable):

Projects

Utilities

Libraries

edX and Education

Mostly Older and Obsolete

Other Projects

I've also:

• Built scientific software to process data from oil wells for Landmark Graphics Corporation (as a high school student)
• Built the software for a web startup for Boston Consulting Group (to cover tuition)
• Built a bunch of numerical algorithms for Rhythmia Medical (now Boston Scientific) primarily around things like compensation for signal issues and calibration of hardware.
• Built software to automatically optimize (and to some extent design) analog circuits based on gradient descent (for component values) and simulated annealing (for both component values and circuit topologies), primarily to assist with design of 3D integrated circuits. My master's thesis talks more about it.
• Built an early web application in the late nineties which allowed an elderly community to publish a newspaper easily and with good workflow (as a high school student, at the MIT Media Lab)
• Made significant contributions to a project to allow students in developing nations to remotely control laboratory equipment (MIT iLabs project)
• Developed plug-ins for Internet Explorer (ATL / COM / MFC / Visual C++) and high-performance Apache extensions in C
• Done a fair amount of low-level development, much of it in assembly, some of it on oddball platforms (e.g. handcoding assembly for a 4x4 grid processor)
• And, when I was a freshman, I spent a large amount of time designing algorithms to localized and separated sound sources using a microphone array, relying on approaches such as modifications of aperture synthesis, as well as phased array approaches. It never worked especially well.

Rhythmia Analog Front End

I designed almost all of the analog electronics for a new medical imaging modality — from blank slate all the way through human trials. It allows doctors to make physical and electrical maps of the heart in a fraction of the time and with much higher accuracy than existing techniques. The system took measurements on a large number of electrodes on a catheter inside the heart (nearly 100), and extrapolated the signals on the heart's surface. The system continued to work during cardiac ablation with no visible signal degradation (maintaining sub-microvolt RMS noise floors in the cardiac band in the presence of 300V peak-to-peak interferer at 500kHz). Some patients are defibrillated many times during the procedure, so we had to survive a 5kV spike for about 3ms. The catheter went into the heart through an incision in the leg, and was threaded up into the heart. All the signals were cross-coupled, and we had to make sense of all of that. It's been used in a few thousand surgical procedures at this point, and has saved a fair number of lives. The system included what was likely the world's highest-performance surface ECG as well, which is surprisingly easy to do (design of ECGs has advanced surprisingly little in the past few decades). Minor footnote: If you look on Boston Scientific's web page, they'll rate the noise a good deal higher. This is mostly because of the funky way in which medical devices rate noise (which is based on 98th percentile peaks, rather than RMS).

Bicycle with Custom Handlebars

I made myself a bicycle. Or specifically, I bought parts, and assembled it myself. It's got an internally geared hub, a Shimano Biopace eccentric crankset, tandem wheels (lacing up and truing wheels is a Zen kind of relaxing), front and rear rack, carries an infant, and is generally the toughest, burliest bicycle you'll see. For better ergonomics, I also welded the handlebars myself — I held out my hands, and put rods of metal where my hands most comfortably went. I'm pretty proud of how nice the TiG welds came out. The inside of the frame is lined with linseed oil, as are most of the nuts and bolts. The nice thing about that, and choice of other parts, is I can leave it out in the winter, in deep snow, in the rain, and all sorts of other conditions, and it does fine. I can ride on almost flat tires. I don't need to worry about it. It's spent winters outside, and it's done just fine (although recently, I did sew a nice cover for it).

Playset

My (2.5-3.5 year old) son and I made a playset! And he really could help! He did a lot of the painting. He'd place a square, I'd adjust it and draw a line, he'd centerpunch a hole, I'd drill it, he'd put a screw in, and I'd screw it. At 2.5, he could center punch a whole with RMS error of under a millimeter. Little guy's got a good attention span. It's held together by structural screws. I actually didn't know those existed before — I found out when looking for good fasteners to use which wouldn't corrode in pressure treated wood. Most screws sheer very easily (and just pull wood together — for sheer, we use nails or fancy joinery). In contrast, good structural screws will hold around a thousand pounds each. I aim for about 10x weight for dynamic vs. static loading, and that's pretty easy with structural screws. I have large diameter bolts in just a few places where there may be more extreme stresses. It's got a swing where we can read books together, a punching bag (he really wanted after using one regularly at the gym with his mom), a few climbing structures, and a band set (including a wooden xylophone).

Wooden Bed with Adjustable Legs and Head

This is my bed. I made two of them, but an ex has the other one. It's super-sturdy, and the head and feet go up and down. It also has outlets, so you don't need to run wires all over the place to power your laptop, cell phone, iPad, etc. in bed. The frame is 4x4, with 1x4 slats, and a second folding frame on top of that. It's a bit over-engineered, but that way, (1) it doesn't shake or squeak at night (2) it has plenty of room underneath it to vacuum (or for storage) since the legs don't need additional cross-braces.

Optical Encoder

I redesigned the reflective optical encoders for MASLab. They were fully differential (they pattern had two strips for each phase instead of one — when one was black, the other was white, and the circuit compared the two). As a result, they did not rely on any absolute threshold, and could be used in a variety of lighting conditions, and with the reflective surface anywhere from several millimeters to several inches from the sensor. Perhaps ironically, this is one of the highest-impact projects I've worked on. It was a very quick project, but for a long time, it was one of the very few (and the best) DIY optical encoder designs on-line, and was quite widely adopted, in all sorts of oddball places (like Hollywood productions). I've even been asked to review IEEE journal publication on optical encoders as a result of this — a field where I'm clearly no expert. The project included a custom printed circuit board, laser-cut wheel, and pattern.

Autonomous Robot

I was on a four-person team for the Mobile Autonomous System Laboratory at MIT. It is a month-long contest to develop an autonomous robot capable of completing a task that varies from year to year. Our year, the goal was to bring back a series of beacons in an unknown environment. Our robot was the only one to successfully bring back a target beacon.

Metal+MDF Sewing Machine Table

I made a sewing machine table for my sewing machine. The table top is MDF covered with sheet aluminum. The legs are oxy-acetylene welded steel. There's also a structure for raising/lowering the sewing machine, so it sits flush with the table.

Welded Monitor Stand

I made my monitor stand by welding a bunch of steel pipes together with a $100 Harbor Freight flux core welder. Welds are ugly, by a welder's aesthetic (which also means they wouldn't hold up hundreds of pounds), but they gets the job done, and they're not aesthetically displeasing unless you know what a technically proper weld should look like. There's a 4k monitors in the middle, surrounded by 1080p monitors, two portrait and two landscape. It has a little bit of support for clean cable routing too.

Speakers

After I took an acoustics class from Bose (the same Bose who ran the speaker company also taught at MIT), I wanted to apply what I learned, so I made a pair of speakers. It's a pretty standard design, except for the external crossover (seen on top). Using an external crossover lets me (in abstract) put the crossover before amplification, using lower voltage (and more linear) components in the crossover.

Classical Breadboarded DC-DC Converter

Ever wondered where the term breadboard came from? As it turns out, people used to prototype electronics by sticking brass tacks into an actual breadboard and welding to them. This is a demo of a boost converter made using a modern take on the same technique. It's for students, so I laser etched the circuit schematic into the breadboard below the components. After I made one, a student made another, with a less subtle etching.

Sewing Iron Bag

I was given an iron for keeping my clothing creased. I made this little padded bag for my iron to keep it safe. It's a simple padded bag. I've made many much like it for my other tools too. The little robot was CNC-cut.

Signal Acquisition Package for African Universities

I once made a board very similar to an Arduino, sometime before the Arduino existed. It has a little more signal functionality in terms of ADC/DAC. It was designed to be used as a (low speed) power supply, function generator, and oscilloscope at a university in Africa.

Fabric Games

I have a fabric cutter at home. A family member wanted to make a few puzzles out of wood. I made the same puzzles out of fabric. One is a connect four style game, where pieces four properties (hollow/full, color, shape, whole/half). In the other, you try to find a path which passes through each node once. I make a lot of things on my fabric cutter. What's need is a project like this takes something like an hour start to finish. What's not so neat is that all the fabric cutters have locked-down proprietary file formats and interfaces.

Sheet Metal Speaker Stand

I made some speaker stands out of sheet metal. They're for a pair of old speakers someone gave me when I was in college.

3d Video Game on an FPGA

Balkentrol is a 3d racing video game I designed and built. It's implemented entirely in hardware (no microprocessor or computer of any sort; just an FPGA (programmed in VHDL), some DACs, op amps, solder, wire wrap, resistors, etc.). I implemented this while I was in 6.111, and turned it into my final project. Later, I was joined by a partner who built a fancy sound system for the game. To do this, I had to overclock the FPGA to run at the VGA dot clock, so the VHDL had to be pretty highly optimized. This project was nominated by the professors for an award as the top MIT EECS lab project that semester.

Laser Cutter Art

I used to do a fair bit of artwork using a laser cutter. The above is a picture of my father with his wife cut into a slice of a tree.

Assorted Nifty Circuits: Power Converter

Power converter In Roberge's Advanced Circuit Techniques course, I designed a fairly novel power converter. It added an idle state to move a zero in the right half plane into the left half plane, allowing for very high performance. The initial design, aside from this change, was over-ambitious in a few other ways (self powering, etc.), and as a result, I ran out of time, so I ended up implementing a different design at around the deadline, and finishing the original design a bit later. A design identical to mine was later independently published by IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics. I wish I'd thought to publish it — it Would have been a nice to have a very early career paper!

Assorted Nifty Circuits: Line Driver

Line driver In Roberge's Advanced Circuit Techniques, I designed a high speed line driver. It was a one-shot design (components were chosen to match each other, and it would not work with randomly chosen parts), but it had a small signal bandwidth of 60-70MHz, on a protoboard (about 5x the speed of the fastest project people were aware of from current and past semesters, and if I recall correctly, and 30x faster than spec). Of course, for large signals, it slew-rate limited as well (although the slew rate was still very, very significantly above spec).

Garden

I have a garden! Successes this year include tomatoes, radishes, mint, chives, lettuce, strawberries, mulberries, black raspberries, and peas.

Conclusion

And I'll finish up with a picture of glassworking:

Cultures are a bit of a hobby of mine. At this point, I've visited Jordan, Korea, Mongolia, China, Sweden, Qatar, Israel, Mexico, France, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Canada, Guatamala, Greece, Scotland, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Costa Rica, Panama, Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, India, Nigeria, and the United States. I don't travel much for tourism — I try to find ways whereby I can embed myself in the cultures, which mostly means traveling for work, on collaborations, or to visit friend/family.

At some point, perhaps, I'll take the time to write up all of these, but for now, I'll give a few highlights.

Nigeria

As a graduate student (although not related to my thesis work), I spent a few years working on MIT iLabs, a project to develop laboratories which could be teleoperated from the developing world. Before my time, this had started as a way to save MIT students the bother of having to walk all the way from their dorm rooms to MIT's labs. This may sound frivolous, but it was not. In electrical engineering, it is important to build intuition for how mathematical models relate to real-world behavior. Consequently, engineering students could work with real-world data on virtually all problem sets, rather than a few times per semester. At some point, someone noticed such labs could also be used in parts of the developing world where such equipment was simply not available. I joined the project and worked closely with Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. This gave an opportunity to explore the education system there (often, in way unrelated to iLabs, such as visiting K-12 schools there), and it's actually where the idea for edX came from.

OAU was a fascinating place. Just to give a little bit of context, it's the second best school in a country of more than half of the population of the US. Nigeria has a reputation as a rough country — the State Department manages a list of around 30 of the world's most dangerous countries, many being active warzones, but Nigeria always somehow makes it there. My guidebook on Sub-Saharan Africa listed, as one of the highlights for Nigeria, "Making it out alive," and I had my share of adventures. The students cared about learning, and many of the faculty were skilled, passionate, and hard-working, but many constraints — from student-faculty ratio, to availability of equipment, to curriculum, to student's prior knowledge — meant students didn't do very well. At the time I visted, and ex-par from Europe or the US would earn about 50 times as much as an OAU graduate with a similar degree. As with much of the developing world, each time I visited, the country was visibly better than before — better economy, less corruption, and less crime.

China

I taught a short 6-week computer science course at Dalian University of Technology, and later at Zhejiang University. I also made a whirlwind tour of much of the country, mostly by train, where I went as far south as spending a week in village near Xiamen (which has just installed pipes to bring in water from a nearby river), and going as far west as Urumuqi (mostly by trains, usually in the least expensive class, which gives the greatest cultural exposure).

And a map...

And an obligatory map showing the places I've been:

Since graduation, I've been involved with three organizations:

edX, Chief Scientist and Co-Founder (or, Research Scientist, MIT). Accomplishments:

• Developed one of the top learning platforms in the world. Platform is free software/open source. Platform has around 10 million users, 200 deployments, 300 contributors, 1000 courses, and is quickly becoming the predominant education research platform
• Crafted core pedagogy, together with Sussman, Terman, and Agarwal, which has since lead to very large learning gains in rigorous evaluations, in both in-person and on-line settings.
• Since, I've lead research and development initiatives around topics such as educational data mining, learning analytics, learnersoucing, automated essay grading, peer grading, and intelligent tutoring systems.

Director of Education, Know Labs (now Udacity). I (briefly) helped get Udacity off the ground when they were still Know Labs. Udacity is currently valued at over $1 billion.

Senior Research and Development Engineer, Rhythmia Medical. My first job after graduation, I was one of their earlier employees. I developed all of their analog hardware for a new medical imaging modality from conception to human surgical trials, including highest-performance ECG circuit in the world. I also helped with some of the numerical algorithms. Rhythmia sold to Boston Scientific for around $200 million.

Pre-graduation

Prior to graduation, I worked on voltage-controlled oscillator design for Texas Instruments/India, on photodetector design for Talking Lights in Cambridge, MA. In addition, I did consulting work to BCG, helping them incubate a startup, and later, to that startup. I was saddened when that startup pivoted, sometime after I left, to become one of the largest spyware vendors in the world. Otherwise, I had a lot of oddball research jobs for assorted MIT professors.

In high school, I developed scientific software for Landmark Graphics Corporation used by petroleum engineers to help analyze data. I also had an internship in high school at the MIT Media Lab.

In 2013, I ran a short on-line course known as Maker Physics. The course focused on on-line pedagogy and physics education research for physics instructors. These instructors, in turn, were asked to work together to apply the materials to create open, reusable digital resources for use in physics courses. This was together with David Cormier of cMOOC fame. This was one of my many attempts to crowdsource educational resources.

In 2012, I co-taught MITx 6.002x with Jerry Sussman, Chris Terman, and Anant Agarwal. This was the first MITx/Open edX MOOC, and the fourth xMOOC. It was based on active learning, constructive learning, authentic assessment, immediate feedback, and rapid remediation of misconceptions. We had 154,763 registrants, of whom 69,221 looked at the first problem set, 26,349 got at least one point on it, 13,569 looked at the midterm, and 7,157 earned the first certificate awarded by MITx. The course was also used — extremely successfully — in places from state schools to high schools in Mongolia to on-campus at MIT. 96% of students who finished (note the sample bias -- but on the upside, reporting rate was in the nineties) reported it was as good as or better as a normal residential university course. In a randomized control trial at SJSU, the course used in a blended setting brought completion rates from 59% to over 90% (and in future semesters, allowed SJSU students to master the full MIT course).

In 2011, I helped out with the Stanford AI Course. This was the first xMOOC.

In 2006, through CETI, I co-taught an abridged version of 6.001, MIT's famous introductory computer science course, at Dalian University of Technology and Zhejiang University (China).

From 2005-2007, I worked on the MIT iLabs project, where we developed on-line laboratories for use in the developing world in close collaboration with Obafemi Awolowo University in Nigeria. I went to Nigeria three times, as a result, and saw a few other parts of Africa. I also developed some very low cost hardware for use in such laboratories, in many ways similar to the modern Arduino, but with more signal acquistion/generation capacity.

In 2003, I helped Hal Abelson and Jerry Sussman make 6.002ex, a radical revamp of the electronic engineering introductory course 6.002 where students learned circuits and electronics by working on design projects in small groups under mentors from industry.

I was also involved in assorted teaching-and-learning initatives in high school, and was a TA for MIT 6.071 and 6.101 as a graduate student.

This is a chart of my academic genealogy (showing thesis supervisor/supervisee relations). The data is primarily from the American Mathematical Society's Mathematics Genealogy Project. The chart was made with Graphviz, although I had to rescale the image map with a perl script. Note that it is an image map -- click on the people, and you'll go to their Wikipedia pages. The mystery is Seymour Papert. As far as I can tell, there is no record of who his advisor(s) in South Africa was/were.

Degrees

• 2007 Ph.D Electrical Engineering, MIT. Advisors: Gerald Sussman and Tom Knight
• 2004 M.Eng Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT
• 2004 B.S. Electrical Science and Engineering, MIT
• 2004 B.S. Mathematics, MIT

As a bit geneaology, Jerry Sussman was co-advised by Seymour Papert. Based on my work on Open edX, I tend to get lumped with instructivist educational technology, but Papert's ideas on education inspire my work at least as much, as do many technology-free social constructivist concepts.

Other Certifications

• MOR Associates Advanced Leadership Program
• Scrum.org Professional Scrum Product Owner I
• SSI Open Water Diver
• NauticEd: Qualified Crew Member (Navigation Rules Clinic, Skipper Course, Anchoring a Sailboat Clinic, Basic Sail Trim Course)
• MIT Sailing: Swim, Provisional, Firefly.
• Community Boating: Kayak, Mercury, Windsurfing. NauticEd:
• United Nations: Basic Security in the Field, Advanced Security in the Field

MOOCs on Teaching and Learning

• Applying Principles of Behavior in the K-12 Classroom (Coursera)
• Coaching Teachers: Promoting Changes that Stick (Coursera)
• Early Childhood Education (Open2Study)
• Foundations of Teaching for Learning 3: Learners and Learning (Coursera)
• Foundations of Teaching for Learning 6: Introduction to Student Assessment (Coursera)
• HarvardX GOV1368.1x: Saving Schools, Mini-Course I: History and Politics of U.S. Education (edX)
• HarvardX GOV1368.3x: Saving Schools Mini-Course 3: Accountability and National Standards (edX)
• HarvardX GOV1368.4x: Saving Schools Mini-Course 4: School Choice (edX)
• HarvardX GSE2x: Leaders of Learning (edX)
• ICT in Primary Education: Transforming children's learning across the curriculum (Coursera)
• Instructional Methods in Health Professions Education (Coursera)
• Surviving Your Rookie Year of Teaching: 3 Key Ideas & High Leverage Techniques (Coursera)
• Teaching Character and Creating Positive Classrooms (Coursera)

MOOCs on Business and Law

• HarvardX HLS2x: From Trust to Promise to Contract (edX)
• Human Resources (Open2Study)
• MITx Entrepreneurship 101: Who is your customer? (edX)
• Management for a Competitive Edge (Open2Study)
• Managing People: Engaging Your Workforce (FutureLearn)
• Negotiation and Conflict Resolution (Open2Study)
• Principles of Project Management (Open2Study)
• Strategic Management (Open2Study)
• Subsistence Marketplaces (Coursera)

MOOCs on Engineering

• Pattern Discovery in Data Mining (Coursera)
• Sports and Building Aerodynamics (Coursera)
• TUMx AUTONAVx: Autonomous Navigation for Flying Robots (edX)
• Tenaris Steel101x: Introduction to Steel (edX)
• UPValenciaX: Dynamics and Control (edX)

Other MOOCs

• HarvardX SW12.1X: China (Part 1) - The Political and Intellectual Foundations of China (edX)
• Ideas from the History of Graphic Design (Coursera)
• Questionnaire Design for Social Surveys (Coursera)
• The Emergence of the Modern Middle East - Part I (Coursera)
• The Horse Course: Introduction to Basic Care and Management (Coursera)

More Interesting Classes

EE: Advanced Circuit Techniques (6.331), Subthreshold Analog VLSI (6.973), Analysis and Design of Digital Integrated Circuits (6.374), Design of Analog MOS LSI (6.775), Integrated Microelectronic Devices (6.720), Solid State Circuits (6.301), Computer Architectures (6.823), Unusual Computer Architectures (6.911). (Undergrad coursework not listed)

Graduate signals, systems, and controls coursework: Feedback Systems (6.302), Wavelets and Filterbanks (18.327), Dynamic Systems and Control (6.241) (Undergrad coursework not listed)

Graduate CS coursework: Seminar in Theoretical CS (18.419), Approximation Algorithms (6.891) (Undergrad coursework not listed)

Mathematics: Discrete Math (18.062), Analysis I (18.100), Analysis II (18.101), Fourier Analysis (18.103), Linear Algebra (18.700), Algebra I (18.701), Algebra II (18.702), Topology (18.901), Grad Probability (6.431) (Common calculus classes not listed)

Physics: Waves (8.03), Statistical Mechanics (8.044), Introductory Special Relativity (8.20), Advanced Classical Mechanics (8.351J), Quantum Computation (18.435J) (Intro physics not listed)

In addition, I have taken a number of classes in economics, a couple in business and technology law, and a couple on crosscultural communications.

Expired Certifications

I was asked why I don't have more personal information on my web page. I do have quite a bit, actually. You just need to find it. For the most part, my life consists of writing code, starting businesses, making things, traveling, trying to make the world a better place, and spending time with my friends and family. I don't say too much about my friends and family (I respect their privacy), but otherwise, all of that is pretty well represented here. And in many cases, where I went, what I built, and why does tell a lot of my story and who I am.

And to keep in mind I have a dry sense of humor. To the best of my knowledge, all parts of this page are true. However, a few are not quite serious (and indeed, one or two as social commentary). A few of the not-so-serious ones only come out on a close reading or a very close reading. Which, I suspect, no one will ever do. But then, it is my personal web page, not yours.

I do consulting, talks, and assorted freelance work. Areas of past services have included:

• Learning engineering, blended learning models, online learning, evidence-based education, and educational technology
• Electronics engineering including medical device design
• Programming services
• Applied mathematics of different sorts (e.g. machine vision, signal processing, control systems, and machine learning)
• Business consulting, especially focused on disruptive business models in areas like education
• In the past, I've provided limited photographic and audiovisual services

A fair amount of my consulting work has been international. In particular, I have experience working in developing settings (e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle Eastern refugee camps, India, etc.).

I prefer work which is free, open, and makes the world a better place, and where I can talk about my work and to see it broadly adopted. I also don't protracted negotiations, discussion, or complex logistics. As a result, my rates depend on:

1. How intellectually interesting the project is
2. Social impact
3. Openness and transparency
4. Visibility
5. How much I'll learn
6. Overhead

So far, I've balanced low-paid, open work with high social impact (for example, education in refugee camps) and high-paid proprietary work (mostly in applied mathematics; machine vision, machine learning, and similar areas are in high demand these days).

If you have an interesting project, please get in touch!

Ah, you're looking at the HTML of this page? Fine choice. A person of style.

This page is intentionally a very simple web page. It uses just CSS and HTML5. Much of it is auto-generated (mostly from my CV, my github repos, as well as projects from older pages). It has just three lines of JavaScript, so if you go to the page with a non-existent anchor, it will take you to the bio page. My previous page was HTML2. I find HTML2/HTML5 more elegant to work with than 3/4 or JavaScript.

(I do permit a little bit of JavaScript for the country map; not mine own)

And a lot of the page, also intentionally, follows SGML rather than XML, a la HTML2. In particular, SGML specifies rules — which browsers seem to follow — about omitted closing tags for elements such as paragraphs and list items. That just makes for cleaner, more human-friendly text.

Right now, it needs styling. It's very, very ugly, unfortunately. I went with defaults of:

• The serif font is Merriweather. The san-serif is OpenSans. Both (approximately) match. They have a similar x-height (Merriweather is, unfortunately, a little bit higher). Merriweather is mch more modulated, and a little bit heavier. I'd like a slightly lower x-height. Even though it's for display use, the high x-height takes away from the refinement of the page. If I have a chance, I'll find better matching fonts. The look I want would be best suited to a transitional serif such as Baskerville or Caslon, to give a more academic look, with a matching sans serif.
• The colors are from a generic color matching tool. I'd like classic colors -- very sapia, or old document looking. That's not quite what I have, but it's the best the tool could do. If I went into old parchment colors, the tool would spit out pretty wild ones for complements.
• The autogeneration also leads to some style inconsistency. It's not fundamental — it could be fixed with more/better logic in the autogeneration.
• And there is still a11y, responsiveness, etc. fixes possible

I should also sort out a lot of the obsolete/undergrad stuff from the current more interesting things.