Sep Kamvar

Sepandar "Sep" Kamvar
Born	1977 (age 39–40)
Nationality	American
Education	Princeton University (AB) Stanford University (PhD)
Occupation	Professor at MIT

Sepandar David Kamvar (born 1977), also known as Sep Kamvar, is a computer scientist, artist, and entrepreneur. He is currently the LG Career Development Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at MIT, and he was director of the Social Computing group at the MIT Media Lab.

Kamvar's main contributions to computer science have been at the intersection of computer science and mathematics, particularly in the fields of personalized search, peer-to-peer networks, social search and data mining.

As a graduate student at Stanford University, Kamvar developed tools that made it possible to compute personalized PageRank. He also developed the first efficient algorithm for adding personal context to the internet search process.

In 2003, Kamvar dropped out of his Stanford Ph.D. program to co-found Kaltix, a personalized search engine company. He was the CEO of Kaltix until Google acquired the company in September 2003. After the acquisition of Kaltix, Kamvar joined Google, where he led the personalization efforts 2003 - 2007.

Kamvar's research and work in peer-to-peer networks focused on the social mechanisms that reward cooperation and punish adversarial behavior. His 2003 paper, EigenTrust, is one of the most highly cited papers in the field.

Dog is a high-level programming language created by Kamvar at MIT Media Lab.

It was announced in spring 2012, and stems from the frustration faced by Kamvar with other existing languages, such as Java, and felt they made it needlessly difficult to write code that handled social interactions. It is designed to facilitate easier creation of social computing applications, and is designed to facilitate programming in a natural language and allow newcomers the chance to learn programming more easily.

...
Wikipedia