Speaker Bios

Josh Diaz

Josh Diaz is a graduate student in MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program, where he studies video games, cognition and literacy education.  He is currently writing a thesis on collaborative storytelling, complexity and dwarven engineering. He works as a gradute researcher for the Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, where he helped produce the game GumBeat. He is a good listener and is deeply interested in what you have to say.

Kevin Driscoll

Kevin Driscoll is a graduate student in Comparative Media Studies at MIT where he is concerned with issues of freedom, empowerment, authorship, and identity in hip-hop, K-12 education, SMS/text messaging, and music video. In addition, he is a teacher, DJ, and exhibiting artist.

Diana Kimball

Diana is a history student at Harvard who fell in love with the Internet.

She collects memories and has been doing so for as long as she can remember.

Mac Cowell

I am passionate about amateur biotechnology and more generally what is called Citizen Science.  After graduating with a degree in Biology from Davidson College, I worked at MIT coordinating the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition (igem.org).  Since then I’ve founded diybio.org – an institution for the amateur biotechnologist.

I am interested in Synthetic Biology and making biological systems easier to understand and engineer. Lets make the engineering cycle faster, cheaper, easier, simpler, and more reliable. And lets do it with cheap off-the-shelf tools. And in a sexy, fun way.  Why isn’t scientific research more like playing Rock Band?  I believe it can and should be.  Some of my favorite groups are: http://igem.org, http://biobricks.org, and http://openwetware.org.

AJ Mazur

AJ is a graduate of Southern Connecticut State University and is currently working as a freelance video editor and consultant. You may know him as the co-creator of the Cooking by the Book Remix video on YouTube and as a result has also dabbled in fair use advocacy. He also plays way too many video games then most normal people should.

photo courtesy Dave Fisher CC BY SA NC

Angela Sawyer

After finishing a philosophy degree specializing in Husserlian phenomenology in the mid-1990s, Angela Sawyer felt fully prepared to start horrifying scattered audiences around the Boston area using her mouth, some broken electronics, toys & noisemakers. Changing the names of her projects to suit her every whim, she’s racked up a list of them longer than the litanies of the saints. The current active roster includes Preggy Peggy & the Lazy Babymakers, the Human Hairs, Moshi Moshi I Am the Decider, Exusamwa, and more. Angela has also been selling vinyl for more than 15 years at local area stores, & runs the one & only Weirdo Records. She owns what she considers a ‘medium size’ record collection, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 thousand titles, but she hasn’t really counted them lately.

Colin McSwiggen

Colin studies math and physics at MIT, and wants to find out what those fields can tell us about computation, language and cognition. His other goals include learning to do a back flip.