As of right now I'll self define as a programmer, hacker, designer, scientist, and artist. One who's life seems to be governed by three elements; the longing for love, the quest for knowledge, and empathy for the failure of the world. I feel this is something true for almost everyone I admire. Love brings joy, denying our search for it as a driving force would be absurd. The search for knowledge, to me has always been encapsulated in the essence of a six year old with the power of recursion, able to ask why recursively ad infinitum, and I find that absolutely beautiful.

Love and knowledge are the pursuit of the platonic solids, but it is empathy that makes me an engineer and an artist, desiring to work with my hands and see change. The desire to understand the world is love, the power to change it is knowledge, and empathy is the spark that drives them to action.

Something that I have often longed for is to better understand the difference between wisdom and intelligence; what I mean is that if intelligence is a function of the rate at which we synthesize and can apply new experiences, and wisdom is the integration of that function over time,then research in understanding the synthesis of intelligence (how we integrate concepts and apply new experiences) is probably the most beneficial method for gleaning wisdom as a society. To extend human capability we need technology to act as a prosthesis in the ever extending human mind. Long ago cognition was bound to our own heads; then moved to cognition through symbolic vocalization; followed by physical external symbols and writing; our journey now is on tightening that feedback loop with our own minds while simultaneously expanding and easing the memetic passage of information throughout the system as a whole. If wisdom, as Bertrand Russell alludes to, is bound to the balancing of the sensory/emotional reaction to information at a given moment in time and space with its emancipation by analogous data in a remote time or space, can computational interfaces become wiser windows into the world by structuring the presentation of information not on a basis of pure relevance of content but combined with a value of its spatial or temporal disjointness from the given moment?

I am currently pursuing a PhD in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT under Professor Pattie Maes in the Fluid Interfaces Group. I received my Masters of Science in 2010 from MIT as well. I received a dual degree, a BS in Computer Science and a BFA in Fine Art, from Carnegie Mellon University working primarily with Golan Levin. Before MIT, I interned with the wonderful people in Martin Wattenberg’s group at IBM research, and worked full time at the Yahoo! Design Innovation Team in San Francisco.

My greatest love is when a project takes something immense and difficult to comprehend and makes it simple and familiar; as well as conversely when it takes the simple and familiar and makes you realize you can never really understand it in full. In other words, I tend to enjoy simplifying the complex and complexifing the simple, because in reality its all somewhere in the middle.

Anyway if you feel like emailing me you can do so at doug at dougfritz.

If you want a full resume you can get one here.