César A. Hidalgo

Asahi Broadcast Corporation Career Development Professor

Assistant Professor in Media Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

César A. Hidalgo is an assistant professor and the Asahi Broadcast Corporation Career Development Professor at the MIT Media Lab. Before joining MIT, César worked as an Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Research Fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Development.

Professor Hidalgo’s work focuses on improving the understanding of systems using and developing concepts of complexity, evolution and network science. His areas of application include (i) economic development, where he has pioneered the use of networks to quantify the productive structure of countries and its evolution, (ii) systems biology where he has published work on disease co-morbidity and genetic regulation, and (iii), social systems, where he has worked on human mobility and social network analysis using mobile phone data. Dr. Hidalgo is also a graphic art enthusiast and has published and exhibited artwork that uses data collected originally for scientific purposes. César A. Hidalgo holds a PhD in physics from the University of Notre Dame and a bachelor’s in physics from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.

Other Affiliations: Faculty Associate, Center for International Development, Harvard University

César Hidalgo’s Personal Website

Deepak Jagdish

Master’s Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Deepak Jagdish is a designer and developer interested in creating breakthrough representations of systems ranging from behavioral patterns to cities to biological systems. His undergrad background at DAIICT was a mixture of computer science, signal processing and arts, followed by a Master’s degree in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) from Georgia Tech. He then worked for a couple of years at Nokia Research building interactive visualizations using large-scale real-time data sets. He is most happy working on multi-disciplinary projects, and usually likes to pick up necessary skills for any project along the way.

At the Media Lab, he hopes to delve deeper (beyond the visual layer) into some new territories like the human mind, or motion of planetary bodies, or digital democracy, or new design patterns for cities. His goal is to understand and share knowledge about such data-rich domains by way of crafting creative models using multiple media.

Deepak is a two-time national winner & world finalist of the Microsoft Imagine Cup (a global software design competition for students), and also a winner of the Texas Instruments DSP Product Design Challenge.

Deepak Jagdish’s Website

Daniel Smilkov

Master’s Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Daniel Smilkov received his BSc and MSc in computer science from the University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje. While completing his master’s degree, he had an unusual 8-month internship at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center where he worked on routing algorithms for P2P video-conferencing. Later, he took a more interdisciplinary path in the field of network science shifting his interests to mining, modeling and designing algorithms for large real-world social, technological and biological networks.

He is always looking for innovative ways of visualizing the highly dimensional real-world data on a piece of paper without losing valuable information. Before coming to the Media Lab, he worked at the Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, co-authoring 7 peer-reviewed articles in the field of network science.

Shahar Ronen

Master’s Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Shahar Ronen is a graduate student and research assistant in the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab. Before joining the Media Lab, Shahar researched and developed solutions for long-term digital preservation and cloud storage as a Research Staff Member at IBM Research. He also led the software testing team of the Philips Brilliance 16 CAT scanner, and worked as programmer and technologist at Harvard Business School.

Shahar is currently researching inter-cultural and inter-lingual connections. Using large datasets of digital and real-life activity, he aims to draw the paths through which ideas disseminate among cultures and identify common denominators and differences. Shahar is also an enthusiast of history and classics and develops tools and methodologies to facilitate the use of large datasets and network approach by historians.

Shahar holds a B.S. in computer science and an M.A. in ancient history, both from the University of Haifa. His master’s thesis examined the manipulation of divine cults according to propaganda needs in late-republican Rome.

Shahar Ronen’s Personal Website

Amy Zhao Yu

Master’s Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Amy Yu’s research interests focus on utilizing digital data and network science to understand social phenomena and inform decisions that affect innovation, business, and public policy. Before MIT, Amy was a research associate at Harvard Business School and a consultant at Synthosys, working with the National Science Foundation on the STAR METRICS initiative.

She has also worked as an analyst in the Index, Portfolio and Risk Solutions group within Global Research at Barclays Capital. Amy graduated from the Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Economics with concentrations in Finance and Operations and Information Management.

Amy Zhao Yu’s Personal Website

Alexander Simoes

MIT Alumni, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Alex graduated from the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University in Boston MA. He is a creative minded person and appreciates art in many forms, especially those that engage the user or viewer. For that reason, Alex is particularly interested in the use of technology with creative design.

As Josef Albers, a famous designer and Bauhaus professor once said “In design, sometimes one plus one equals three.” In other words, the juxtaposition of applied sciences and artistic expression will often make for radically new compositions that have a certain hand-made aesthetic in a computer age. Growing up in a time when so many different technologies are readily available, Alex has tried to take advantage of as many tools and mediums as he could get his hands on, and for that reason, his portfolio may seem a bit eclectic.

Alexander Simoes’ Personal Website

Phil Salesses

Master’s Candidate, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Phil played lacrosse for the Naval Academy in Annapolis, MD, where he studied for two years before transferring to George Mason University. While at GMU, he worked full-time for Apple, Inc. as a business consultant and later for Marriott International as a technology analyst. Phil transferred one last time, this time to James Madison University, where he completed his B.S. in geographic science while doing some research for the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE).

While working for the USACE within their Topographic Engineering Center, a federal research laboratory focused on geospatial research, he served as a Principal Investigator, exploring methods of autonomously classifying vegetation from unmanned ground vehicles. He also moonlighted as a programmer for the US Army Geospatial Center where he helped develop a web application capable of serving up high-resolution, 360°, street-level imagery, similar to Google’s Street View™.

Phil Salesses’ Personal Website

Daniel Stock

Research Assistant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Daniel Stock is currently a research assistant at the MIT Media Lab’s Macro Connections group where he is developing a predictive model of international industry locations. Before joining MIT, Daniel was a Santo Domingo Growth Lab Research Fellow at Harvard University’s Center for International Development (CID), and a Research Intern at the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Santiago, Chile. Daniel studied as an undergraduate at Tufts University, majoring in Quantitative Economics and International Relations.

Tiffany Lu

UROP, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Tiffany is a sophomore at MIT from Newton, MA. She is majoring in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Comparative Media Studies. Tiffany worked on the cultural exports project with the Macro Connections group, using Wikipedia data to measure the popularity and cultural impact different people have on the world. Outside of academic work, she is a big basketball fan, and enjoys music. Tiffany also sings in an a cappella group.

Dana Y. Lee

UROP, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Dana Lee is currently a senior at Wellesley College, double majoring in Economics and Psychology with an Engineering Design Certificate. She enjoys working at the Media Lab because of her interest in world economies, data science and networks as well as all the fun toys in the lab. Dana aspires to be a game changer and hopes to help developing countries through her research and work.

Kevin Hu

UROP, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Kevin is a senior at MIT studying physics and is interested in using data and network science to understand systems. He is currently working on the Language Group Network project, which aims to gain a quantitative understanding of the connections between languages and the diffusion of information from one to another. He has previously researched ultracold atoms at the University of Michigan, worked on music intelligence at The Echo Nest, and studied for two years at Bard College at Simon’s Rock.