People

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We're an interdisciplinary group at Northwestern University and the University of Washington. Faculty, postdocs, graduate students, affiliates, and alumni are listed below (in alphabetical order within each section).

Faculty

Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)

Unedited picture of Mako in Berlin (2016).

After contributing peer production communities in various ways since I was a teenager, I began to realized (the hard way) that peer production rarely works and that getting it to work remained much more art than science. After being talked into the idea that academia was the right place to fix this by Eric von Hippel, I've devoted the last decade of my life to trying to contribute to an emerging science of Internet-based collaborative production. I've been told I'm a "big data" person although I still itch a little bit when I hear the term.

In the more boring accounting (which I've copied and pasted from elsewhere): I am an Assistant Professor in the University of Washington Department of Communication and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Human-Centered Design and Engineering. At UW, I am also Affiliate Faculty in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences, the eScience Institute, and the "Design Use Build" (DUB) group that supports research on on human computer interaction. I am also a Faculty Affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and an affiliate of the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard.

Much more information is on my academic homepage. If you need to find me, I have put more detailed information online that I probably should.

Postdocs

Sayamindu Dasgupta (University of Washington)

Sayamindu Dasgupta

I grew up in the city of Kolkata, India. At some point in school I wanted to study Physics, but then soon after, I came across computers, which messed up my plans considerably. Roughly 9 years after I had my first encounter with a com­puter, I read Sey­mour Papert’s Mind­storms: Chil­dren, Com­put­ers and Pow­er­ful Ideas, and a year after that, I found myself at the MIT Media Lab, as a grad­u­ate stu­dent in a research group that, among other things, continue the work Sey­mour had started many years ago.

After getting a PhD from MIT, I am now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Washington's eScience Institute, where I study, design, and build pathways that engage young people in learning with data. I also do a considerable amount of learning with data myself, where I use (mostly) quantitative methods to study how children and youth learn in large-scale informal online communities.

You can find more about my work on my homepage.