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title: About
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    <p>I try to governed my life by three elements; <em>the longing for love</em>,
        <em>the quest for knowledge</em>, and <em>empathy for the failure of
            the world</em>. I feel this is something true for almost everyone I
        admire. Love brings joy, denying our search for it as a driving force
        would be absurd. The search for knowledge, to me has always been
        encapsulated in the essence of a six year old with the power of
        recursion, able to ask why recursively ad infinitum, and I find that
        absolutely beautiful.</p>

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    <p>Love and knowledge are the pursuit of the
        platonic solids, but it is empathy that makes me an engineer and an
        artist, desiring to work with my hands and see change. The desire to
        understand the world is love, the power to change it is knowledge, and
        empathy is the spark that drives them to action.</p>

    <p>Something that I have often longed for is to better understand the
        difference between wisdom and intelligence; what I mean is that if
        intelligence is a function of the rate at which we synthesize and can apply
        new experiences, and wisdom is the integration of that function over
        time, then research in understanding the synthesis of intelligence (how we
        integrate concepts and apply new experiences) is probably the most
        beneficial method for gleaning wisdom as a society. To extend human
        capability we need technology to act as a prosthesis in the ever extending
        human mind. Long ago cognition was bound to our own heads; then moved to
        cognition through symbolic vocalization; followed by physical external
        symbols and writing; our journey now is on tightening that feedback loop
        with our own minds while simultaneously expanding and easing the memetic
        passage of information throughout the system as a whole. If wisdom, as
        Bertrand Russell alludes to, is bound to the balancing of the
        sensory/emotional reaction to information at a given moment in time and
        space with its emancipation by analogous data in a remote time or space,
        can computational interfaces become <em>wiser</em> windows into the world
        by structuring the presentation of information not on a basis of pure
        relevance of content but combined with a value of its spatial or temporal
        disjointness from the given moment?</p>

    <p>I am currently pursuing a <a href="http://media.mit.edu/">PhD in Media
            Arts and Sciences at MIT</a> under Professor <a
            href="http://web.media.mit.edu/~pattie/">Pattie Maes</a> in the <a
            href="http://fluid.media.mit.edu/">Fluid Interfaces Group</a>. I
        received my Masters of Science in 2010 from MIT as well. I
        received a dual degree, a BS in Computer Science and a BFA in Fine Art,
        from <a href="http://www.cmu.edu/">Carnegie Mellon University</a> working
        primarily with <a href="http://www.flong.com/">Golan Levin</a>. Before MIT,
        I interned with the wonderful people in <a
            href="http://www.bewitched.com/">Martin Wattenberg&#8217;s</a> group at
        <a
            href="http://domino.watson.ibm.com/cambridge/research.nsf/pages/cue.html">IBM
            research</a>, and worked full time at the <a
            href="http://research.yahoo.com/">Yahoo! Design Innovation Team</a> in
        San Francisco. </p>

    <p>My greatest love is when a project takes something immense and difficult to
        comprehend and makes it simple and familiar; as well as conversely when it
        takes the simple and familiar and makes you realize you can never really
        understand it in full. In other words, I tend to enjoy simplifying the
        complex and complexifing the simple, because in reality its all somewhere
        in the middle.</p>

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    <p>Anyway if you feel like emailing me you can do so at <em>doug at dougfritz</em>. </p>
    <p>If you want a full resume you can get one <a href="/resume" title="Resume">here</a>.</p>
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