Autobiography: As Problems Arise

I was quite introverted and asocial growing up (ok, this is an understatement) and the idea of being able to cherry-pick friends based on the types of conversations I liked to have and being able to leave a conversation at any time (and for this to be commonplace and socially acceptable) were attractive to me.

But what I really loved was the idea of chat rooms. Watching how people interacted, what conversations worked, which caused people to get upset, which caused people to laugh.

For any who remember how AIM's early chat feature worked, you clicked a button to start a chat, it pre-populated a unique room ID, and you had the option either to rename the room, or enter the chat. I remember thinking this was odd and vividly remember one (entire) day making it a priority to type in all the common room names I could think of to see what happened. One of the first I tried was "friends". Low and behold, I was in a room with a handful of people who were very confused as to why I had just intruded on their private chat. But amazingly, it seemed almost okay. Some thought it was weird and bailed. But many others were intrigued to meet a digital pen-pal. It's almost as if we were occupying public domain together. After a great conversation, I had suggested we keep the chat open and check back every few days.

But nothing as exciting as when I saw the first “scrambler bot” -- an AIM account controlled by a robot -- which initiated a game of word unscramble in the "friends" chat room. I had been learning qbasic, html, and introductory java at the time and I immediately asked the chat how the thing was working and who programmed it.

The whole scene exploded into a massive game of augmentation and creativity. People who write bots to flood chat rooms and take them over so people couldn't organize with their friends. People who write tools to ban users. Instead of video games, it was its own version of war games. I remember being especially inspired by a friend "Mike311211" (a Disturbed (band) fan) who created his own complete instant message client called Disturbed AIM.

Around middle school, it became instantly obvious to me that there was an unparalleled opportunity to bend and augment the very fabric of the medium through which communication was occurring. There was a "magic" middleware in between me and them and an opportunity to optimize the very idea of communication, to enhance it.

Up to this point, programming had mostly been a curiosity to me, but this got me serious about programming. I wanted the ability to protect the chat rooms I was in. To enhance them with features. To fundamentally push communication to the limit and redefine the paradigm beyond chat messages. AIM, Google, and then Wikipedia quickly became my favorite tools on the web and I started learning how to write bots to combine them using the TOC/2 protocol, which I learned from others in AIM chat rooms. I started writing a bot (much like the ones on IRC) to automatically save logs of various chat rooms so I could read them later. There was an "ego" log which listened to all the chats for when my name or screen name was mentioned. The bot responded to simple queries, like, "when was I last mentioned". It was like social network notifications before such a feature was mainstream. Of course the bot allowed me to evaluate simple math expressions and programs by forwarding them to Java.

Every summer for years, I would spend weeks at a time at Fairfield University for National Computer Camp to learn how to use new programming languages. I met all sorts of interesting and smart people like Katherine McCusker, this awesome dude named Tal (someone should help me re-discover) who had a shaved head but for an epic front-facing rat tail. I spent my next five or so summers this way, learning c++, Unix, A+ certification type hardware stuff.

I quickly became infatuated with the ideas of chat systems, search engines, human-computer interfaces, computer-assisted experiences (e.g. artificial intelligence), free software & hacker culture, and platforms for mass-collaboration. Around this time I learned of IRC and was becoming aware of what others were programming bots to do in more sophisticated settings and what was possible. What I wanted was a bot which could enable advanced search. The ability to research collaboratively with friends and to integrate chat with search. To create something like IBMs Watson.

By freshman year of high school, I was convinced I wanted to try two things: to do graduate research at a university and to try starting a company.

GNUAsk

I began turning my chat bot scripts into a conversational search engine called GNUAsk. GNUAsk was intended to be a free, open & privacy-centric, experimental/alternative search engine (like Duck Duck Go). One could GNUAsk questions like, “When did Michael Jackson die?” and then (kind of like clippy) GNUAsk would provide answers but also ask/predict clarifying questions based on how similar conversations had proceeded, like: “I think you mean Michael Jackson the singer, who died on June 25, 2009. Did you mean Michael Jackson the actor?”. It excelled at helping one refine the accuracy of one’s current search (during a time when people had to be “good at Googling”) and even guide one deeper in new unexpected directions. The path of your conversation would then help strengthen the path, experience, and recommendations of other researchers. In its simplest form, GNUAsk was a question answer system like Quora.

To set the stage, at the time Google search didn’t have zero-click Now cards powered by its Knowledge Graph or contextual hysteresis (i.e. you had to be good at searching because Google couldn’t yet predict your intent from previous queries). That is to say, Google search didn't have hysteresis/context-sensitivity, so one had to tune searches dozens of times in order to get a right answer. Also, searching only seemed to happen on a single website. I believed web searching should happen anywhere – within a microsoft document, in a chat with a friend, even in a text file or the command line. I believed that everyone’s search history should be able to be anonymously combined to help carve paths through the information landscape like a stream corrodes paths through bedrock. I also believed that searching shouldn’t be a discrete 1-off event, but a process, a trail, or a conversation that builds understanding over time. And that everyone’s conversations or paths through knowledge should work together to help beat trails and navigate problems as we think together. I didn’t want someone to share a website or a google search term which dumps me into a sprawling list of unvetted websites, I wanted someone to share a journey with me (which I called a GNUrl) which showed which directed route they took, which questions they asked, which landmarks/pages they stopped at, which were most useful, and what conclusions they reached. That is to say, I found (and still find) dozens of aspects inadequate about Google’s search experience. 

How did it work? GNUAsk (the aspirational, mostly unreleased search engine UI) relied on hundreds of bots, running as daemons, and listening in on conversations within AOL AIM, IRC, Skype, and Yahoo public chat rooms and recording all the textual conversations. The bots listened for questions, tried to provide answers when asked, and even inferred answers from other participants in the chat room. It relied heavily on dozens of APIs or scraping web pages like Answers.com, Wikipedia, (eventually Duck Duck Go).

I started to write primitive algorithms to determine which sentences typed by users were questions and, much trickier, if users were writing answers in the chat room. The approach that seemed most reasonable to me was prompting chat room users with additional validation questions like, "did what user X say answer your question Y, Z?". Of course this was abused and error prone.

I loved my college experience. Because I spent so much of my high school learning independently and avoiding the people in my school, my grades were quite average. I went to the University of Vermont (UVM), a lower-stress school which I didn’t find super demanding. This was perfect for me because I learned when I feel free, I love rising to the occasion and feeling like a big fish in a smaller pond, gobbling up unconventional ways of learning. I helped Peter Hurd write a Lego Mindstorm Robot called BRIAN (Basic Reconnaissance Independent Accurate Navigator) which uses genetic algorithms to find and pick-up trash. I took a special topics class with Jeanne Douglas where I saw this tech talk by Luis Von Ahn (co-creator of recaptcha) and learned about the idea of harnessing human computation, which completely changed how I thought about computer science. I participated in a team which helped build a UVMonopoly game. I did independent basic neural net research with one of my favorite researchers, Dr. Josh Bongard. I learned a lot in classes, and learned even more outside of classes from world class graduate students like my mentor Dr. Gary Johnson and professors who I’d spend time with during office hours. I even helped create this incredibly embarrassing UVM hacker spoof of Lord of the Rings.

I spent the vast majority of my time helping build a hackerspace with Robin Wilke, Jonathan Godbout, Dillan, Chris Tucci, Andrew Guertin, Gary Johnson (who has been a life long mentor of mine, and one of the most brilliant people I know), Stephen Balaban, Alex Munkelwitz, Abe Barth-Werb, Jacob Beauregard, Evan Yandell, Zack Ney, Evan Flynn, Tenzin, Phelan Vendeville, Ethan Eldridge, Mike Torchio, Leif K-Brooks, and a handful of other amazing personalities. Our student-run hackerspace, the CSSA (Computer Science Student Association), became so popular (~10% of the department) that students began skipping classes to hear grad students talk or to work on independent projects in our lab (building beowulf clusters, debugging x11 intel graphics chip problems, linux from scratch). The department ended up letting me and Dr. Gary Johnson co-teach a class for 3 semesters (we donated our proceeds to buy pizza for every class and it was insanely popular) and we arranged guest speakers from industry, had professors and grad students talk about their research, arranged hands-on projects, and taught less covered material, like version control, tail call optimization, and recursive trampolining in clojure. During my summers I worked for a small wireless sensor company called Microstrain, building configuration web dashboards using Aaron Swartz’s web.py and helping design secure initialization/pairing handshake sequences between devices. I met quite a few local people from the industry. Throughout my four years at UVM I learned a lot, felt like we were helping the community, and got positive feedback from professors (I received the department ACM faculty award some 3 times and was asked to be part of a committee which helps inform the university’s curriculum).

I did almost get expelled on five separate occasions, by accidentally kicking Xindong Wu the head of the CS department off his static IP (what are the chances), accidentally taking down uvm.edu’s edora web server by using a grad student’s directory permissibly set to 777, getting caught up in another CSSA (Computer Science Student Association) member’s rainbow table experiment (he was taking Ling’s security class with me) which discovered a network on campus was truncating DES CBC passwords to 8-characters, noticing that local make alt-installs were allowing students to bypass many of the university’s security policies, and helping reverse engineering the business school’s Trans-Lux stock ticker to print, “Zombie alert in effect”. In each of these cases I worked incredibly hard with an abundance of good will to remedy the situations, detail vulnerabilities, propose solutions, and offer apologies. Thank you for these learning experiences and letting me graduate.