Community

Alex Warth
principal investigator Alex Warth (PI) is a researcher whose interests include programming languages and environments, rapid prototyping, end-user programming, modularity, and education. With the Flex (“Fluidity of Expression”) group, he works on tools that help people think, understand, and create. Before joining HARC, Alex was a software engineer at Google, and before that, he was a researcher at VPRI where he worked on the STEPS project. Alex has a Ph.D. from UCLA, where he is now an adjunct professor, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Miami.

Andrea Hawksley
researcher Andrea Hawksley is a software developer and mathematical artist. Her research focuses on the use of virtual environments to expand our understanding of the world. She is particularly interested in using new technologies to visualize difficult mathematical concepts in potentially more intuitive ways. She is one of the earliest developers of webVR software, creating the first 3D 360 VR video player for the web before VR web browsers were even easily available - the eleVR Player.

Bret Victor
principal investigator Bret Victor (PI) wants scientists and citizens to be able to see, understand, and think what needs to be seen, understood, and thought in order for modern civilization to work out okay. His group is building a prototype environment for “dynamic spatial media”, in which conversation, presentation, reading, and writing are dynamic embodied activities – people physically together, dynamically modeling and simulating, thinking with their bodies and hands, seeing everything. In his free time, he enjoys working.

Chaim Gingold
researcher Chaim Gingold is a designer and theorist who creates and studies powerful representations for playing with, learning about, and reshaping the world. His design expertise and research interests encompass games, play, simulations, authoring tools, cities, and the history of technology. His Ph.D. research focused on SimCity, the history of computer simulation, software visualization, and principles of play design. He created a science book made of toys called Earth: A Primer (2015), and was the design lead for Spore’s Creature Creator (2008).

Dan Ingalls
principal investigator Dan Ingalls (PI) conceived the Lively Web live object system (http://lively-web.org/ ) which remains the vehicle for his research at HARC. He spent much of his youth studying and experimenting in physics, but in his last year of college discovered computers and programming. He was fortunate to join Alan Kay at Xerox PARC, and spent time at Xerox and Apple working out various schemes for message syntax, language interpretation and graphical display as they invented much of OOP.

Elijah Butterfield
researcher

Emily Eifler
researcher Emily Eifler, also known as BlinkPopShift, is an American artist and researcher who lives and works in San Francisco, California. Their work is equal parts sculpture, performance, video and immersive technology. It focuses on navigating back and forth between the physical and the virtual, kneading knowledge, embodiment and experience between these two modes in an effort to blur that boundary for people as well as our objects and ideas. They have published research on immersive capture, spherical cinematography and editing, hybrid reality environments and designing for embodied cognition and is currently creating performance structures for audience interaction with head mounted AR.

Evelyn Eastmond
researcher Evelyn Eastmond is a Venezuelan-born artist and researcher exploring the psychology of trauma through sculpture, performance and new media. She has been adjunct faculty in Digital+Media at RISD where she also received her MFA. She received MEng and BS degrees in Computer Science at MIT, where she helped develop open source frameworks for creative computation including Scratch, DesignBlocks and p5.js. She is currently at eleVR in the Human Advancement Research Community at YCR, researching embodied artistic experiences in virtual reality.

Jens Mönig
researcher Jens Mönig makes interactive programming environments. He is fanatical about visual coding blocks and stubbornly suspects that beyond drag & drop lies an Eldorado of a novel computing paradigm yet to be discovered by the intrepid. Jens is working with John Maloney and Yoshiki Ohshima on a new general purpose blocks language. In his spare time he develops UC Berkeley’s “Snap! Build Your Own Blocks” programming system, used in the introductory “Beauty and Joy of Computing” curriculum around the world.

John Maloney
principal investigator John Maloney (PI) creates live, interactive programming systems. His current project is a general purpose blocks programming language that attempts to span the space between novices and more experienced (but non-professional) programmers, ages 12 to adult. In his previous job, John was the lead programmer for Scratch, a blocks-based programming language created at the MIT Media Lab and now used by millions of children around the world. Scratch grew out of John’s work creating Squeak (a portable Smalltalk-80 system written in itself) and the Etoys blocks programming system with Alan Kay’s team, first at Apple and then at Walt Disney Imagineering R&D.

Joshua Horowitz
researcher Joshua Horowitz is a software developer and researcher. He believes that graphics and computation can make it vastly easier to understand and work with complex ideas. Toward this end, he is helping build Apparatus (a hybrid graphics editor and programming environment for creating interactive diagrams) and assisting in the design of a new environment for dynamic spatial media.

Kat Galas
researcher Kat Galas is a researcher interested in human learning, interaction design, and the design and implementation of learning environments, curricula, and instructional methods. Kat’s previous work at UCLA includes large-scale NSF design projects investigating math and science learning in digital learning environments and virtual worlds. She has worked in the academic private sector, creating math and science curriculum and interactive digital experiences. A former dancer, Kat is interested in the intersection between kinesthetic imagination and scientific ideas, and investigating learning and collaboration through the integration of physical and digital interactions.

Marko Röder
researcher Marko is a researcher interested in programming languages and (future) programming experiences. He recently started working with Alex Warth on Ohm and the Ohm Editor (to easily experiment with new programming languages and ideas) and likes to think about how to enable people to “program” that have not studied computer science (What does it mean to program in that regard?). Before, he was working with Dan Ingalls for a few years on the Lively Web with a focus on end-user programming and its powerful yet uncommon style of collaborative software development.

Matt Hemmings
researcher Matthew Hemmings is a Computer Science graduate from the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He is interested in creating compelling, collaborative visualizations for educational and research purposes. Primarly, his interest is adapting the Lively Web for use by domain scientists and working with them to make tools useful for their specific disciplines in it. He has both taught and assisted on courses at the University level utilizing the Lively Web to teach novice students programming techniques.

Michael Nagle
researcher Michael Nagle is very interested in how people develop and learn. In the Boston area he created a series of educational programs for elementary aged children inspired by the works of constructionism and environment-as-learning-culture inspired by the works of Papert, Holt, and Montessori. That work lives on in an alternative school in the area. He also co-founded a scientifically focused community center that ran as an alternative community college for four years in the area.

Patrick Dubroy
researcher Patrick Dubroy is a programmer and art school dropout. As a member of the Flex group, his research focuses on powerful user interfaces for creation and understanding. Before joining VPRI and HARC, he worked at Google as a software engineer on Chrome and Android, and at BumpTop as a programmer and interaction designer. He has a master’s degree in Computer Science (Human-Computer Interaction) from the University of Toronto, where he was a member of the Dynamic Graphics Project.

Robert Krahn
researcher Robert is a software engineer and researcher focusing on software construction kits that facilitate liveness and interactivity. His areas of interest include everything that supports the former: Dynamic programming languages, self-sustaining system kernels, user interface kits, authoring mediums and tools. Based on the Lively Kernel system, Robert created Lively Wiki, a web-based collaborative programming environment that allows its users to create and share applications in a rich graphical environment. Previously, he was a software developer at Zendesk and researcher at the Software Architecture Group at HPI / University of Potsdam.

Robin Schreiber
researcher Robin is a software developer and researcher who tries to turn the computer into a platform for externalizing and reifying ideas. He wants to remove unnecessary complexity for the programmer and allow the idea behind a program to be expressed in a more simple, clear and concise manner. He believes that combining vastly different perspectives on the same problem can yield the most striking results in this problem domain. He has been contributing to the Lively Kernel over the last few years while also working as a software engineer at PlaytestCloud for a few months.

Sean McDirmid
researcher Sean is a researcher who focuses on live programming experiences that support “programming to think” rather than “thinking to program.” His current project is in creating a visual environment that allows users to “discover” new concepts, rather than just understand existing ones. Sean has a PhD from the U of Utah in CS advised by Wilson Hsieh. He previously worked at EPFL on the Scala IDE (forgive me), at Microsoft China as a UX design prototyper in a studio filled with just designers (some of that might have rubbed off on me), and at Microsoft Research Asia as a researcher working on programming experiences.

Shubham Joshi
researcher Shubham Joshi is a master’s student at USC and obtained his bachelor’s from UCLA, both in Computer Science. He is interested in game development and programming language design. Having taught programming to middle school students he gained an interest in how we reason about our code before and during writing. Before joining HARC he worked at The Coding School, Tensor Vision Technologies, Sen-Sei Technologies, and Ipomo Communications.

Trish Dickey
office manager Trish Dickey is the Office Manager for the HARC Los Angeles office. Trish’s background is in corporate human resources. Before moving to Los Angeles in 2004, she was the Disability Specialist for Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, as well as resident manager for an apartment building downtown. Trish was Alan Kay’s executive and personal assistant for 11 years before joining HARC.

Vi Hart
principal investigator Vi Hart (PI) is a mathemusician and philosopher known primarily for work in mathematical understanding, musical structure, and social justice. Hart has publications in the fields of computational geometry, mathematics and music, mathematical art, and math education, and speaks internationally on a variety of topics. Hart is best known for the film series “Doodling in Math Class”, the stand-alone philosophical work “Twelve Tones,” and as co-creator of “Parable of the Polygons.” Current research focuses on how virtual reality technology can impact human understanding and the human experience.

Yoshiki Ohshima
principal investigator Yoshiki Ohshima (PI) has research interests in interactive and educational computer systems, software architectures and programming languages. Yoshiki graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1994. He was awarded his PhD for the creation of “Kedama”, a massively parallel particle programming system, from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2006. Yoshiki worked on theme park related research project at Walt Disney Imagineering R&D from 2000 through 2002. In 2002, he joined Twin Sun, Inc.

Aran Lunzer 

Arthur Carabott  Arthur is a musician and designer who works with code. His current work is on musical user interfaces and tools for creating and practising music. After an undergrad in Music Informatics, he worked on interactive installations and buildings as well as teaching (music and programming) before starting a Masters in Design at the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. While interning at HARC with Alex Warth, he worked on making Konnakkol (the South Indian rhythm language) playable on the web using Ohm, and on new interfaces for synth design and audio processing…

Daniel Windham  Daniel works on ways people can better understand and communicate with their tools. He aims to extend programming capabilities to larger audiences and give people ownership over their tools. As an intern at HARC, he’s exploring environments that help programmers focus on their present goal amidst uncertainty. This centers on Mud, a programming-by-demonstration language that works in the presence of incompleteness and tracks unfinished tasks. Previously Daniel worked with dynamic physical shape displays at the MIT Media Lab.

Glen Chiacchieri 

Robert Ochshorn 

Tyler Smith Tyler is a master’s student at UCLA and a research intern at HARC contributing to the Lively project. His academic interests include programming languages and systems, artificial life, and computer security. Before starting at UCLA, he worked as a software developer in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego, building systems and tools in support of the department’s research and various contracted development projects.