Two School of Information graduate students and three alumni presented at this week’s South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival in Austin, Texas.
Jess Hemerly, a second-year master’s student, was part of yesterday’s panel discussion “Music & Metadata: Do Songs Remain The Same?” in the SXSW Interactive festival. She was joined by Professor Jason Schultz, director of the Samuelson Law, Technology, & Public Policy Clinic at the UC Berkeley School of Law, and Larisa Mann, a Ph.D. candidate in Jurisprudence & Social Policy at the School of Law and a professional DJ (“DJ Ripley”).
Hemerly is a former research editor and manager at Palo Alto’s Institute for the Future; she is also a freelance writer and cultural critic whose writing has appeared in MAKE, The Onion, 7x7, and on Boing Boing, AlterNet, and several local music blogs.
Doctoral student Jennifer King also presented yesterday, as part of the panel discussion “How to Personalize Without Being Creepy”; she was joined by Hugo Liu (chief scientist of Hunch), Mat Harris (CEO of BizGreet), Noah Weiss (product manager at Foursquare), and Vijay Ravindran (chief digital officer of the Washington Post).
King is interested in how law and policy shape society, particularly in the areas of information privacy and surveillance; she advocates an interdisciplinary approach to these issues. In her doctoral studies, King tries to bridge the gap between legal analysis, technical approaches, policy-based solutions, and an understanding of the social implications of the challenges of privacy and surveillance.
King and Hemerly were joined at the festival by a number of I School alumni.
Saturday’s panel discussion “Time Traveling: Interfaces for Geotemporal Visualization” featured two I School alumni: Nick Rabinowitz (MIMS 2009), currently an Internet and information management consultant, and Ryan Shaw (MIMS 2005, Ph.D. 2010), now an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina.
Alumnus Mano Marks (MIMS 2006) participated in Sunday’s “League of Extraordinary Hackers” event, sponsored by Google; Marks is Google’s senior developer advocate.
SXSW Interactive features five days of presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology and a showcase of new digital works, video games and innovative ideas. The festival was held March 11–15, 2011, in Austin, Texas.
