Interests
The Importance of SoftwareI have a keen interest in all-things-software ranging from the design and construction to impact on society. Although many of us have talked about being in the Information Age for a while now, I believe that we've only started to explore a true Computational Age that will supercede previous notions of information technology. Specifically, I hope for a time when knowing how to program becomes as common as reading. Some recommended reading: |
The Importance of Other Scientific FieldsI am interested in the relationship of computation with other scientific fields. Specifically, I think that computation can help automate and simplify tasks, help perform complex analysis, and perhaps even help generate models and hypotheses. Although many fields (including high-energy physics, material science, and molecular biology), have already successfully exploited high-performance computing, there are still some scientific fields that not yet fully exploited existing computer technologies. To help contribute in this area, I have started exploring Geographic Information Systems in my spare time. I've written some simple spatial analysis plugins for Quantum GIS to simplify some of my wife's ecology research. In the near future, I will begin exploring the scalability of these algorithms with the intent that my software scales well with respect to the number of processing cores (on a single machine) and the number of machines (in a cluster). Hopefully someday my wife and her reseach collegues will be able to exploit both high-performance computing and sensor networks in their research. |
The Importance of Eating (Well)I am interested in nearly all aspects of eating (including production, preparation, and consumption). Although we all engage in these activities every day, many of these steps have recently become opaque (i.e: do you know all the ingredients in the food you eat?). I believe that by becoming conscious and reconnecting with these steps, we can collectively improve our health, community, and ultimately our planet. Some recommended reading and viewing: |