Steve's Self-Aggrandizing Home Page

Steve, in black and white

Where I Am

I live in Cambridge, near Harvard Square. It's fantastic living in this city -- a few blocks from everything, including the best Indian restaurant and one of the better Thai restaurants in the Boston area. Plus, I can bike everywhere. Take that, Bay Area! There's nothing more exhilirating than passing cars stuck in traffic at rush hour.

What I Do

Recently I was working at ITA Software near Kendall Square in Cambridge. They're known as the brains behind Orbitz, and I was doing my level best to help revitalize the airline reservations industry. Now, however, I'm working for an Internet startup that you might have heard of.

Previously I was at MIT CSAIL, playing around with things in the AIRE Project, formerly known as the "Intelligent Room". We did neat things like hook up cameras, projectors, and microphones into an agent framework, allowing us to interact with an environment very much like a modern living room as if it were the computer system in front of you. Side projects include CD players that try to choose good songs, map systems that can answer questions like ``Does this country own ballistic missiles'', and an expert system that can play word games.

That work got me a doctorate, in which I extended the room's concepts into a service framework that would mediate between different people's competing interests to deliver information. If that makes no sense to you, you can always look at my thesis and be really confused.

In my not very copious free time, I occasionally do lots of stuff in musical theatre in the area. I've directed, acted, and even created orchestrations for a parody of Star Wars. I watch lots of theatre, too -- check out the miniature theatre reviews on this page. My wife and I spend lots of time traveling the world, and I like to tinker around with little projects, such as Qualm, my system for performing synthesizer patch changes in realtime, and play with The Accusations, a "musical geek humor" band with some friends. I've also been known to dabble in graphic design.

Publications

Here's the dry, boring stuff, for your perusal: