Hi, I’m Brian. I write this site and take the photos that you see here.
I’m currently a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab. I’m interested in exploring the interaction between computers and the physical world, especially outside the realm of traditional computer interfaces (keyboards, mice, monitors, etc.) I think computers should be able to be aware of their environments through sensing and be able to affect the environment through actuation. I’m also very interested in the blurring of the lines between general purpose computing and embedded computing.
Before coming to the Media Lab, I worked for two years at Intel Labs Seattle, where I researched novel sensing technologies in the context of personal robotics. I worked extensively with the idea of using electric field sensing to improve robotic manipulation, which I successfully demonstrated at several events around the world, including to Chancellor Angela Merkel and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. I also helped build a mid-cost robot arm capable of playing chess with arbitrary boards and pieces, using prototype hardware that would later become the Microsoft Kinect for perception.
I’m a hardware hacker. I enjoy figuring out how things work and building cool things. I like taking ideas and turning them into working hardware implementations.
As you can tell by the rest of this site, I enjoy photography. I mostly stick to non-human subjects not too far from where I live, but occasionally I branch out a bit.
Another of my hobbies is high-end headphone audio. I’ve constructed several high-quality audio components and enjoy listening to them in my spare time. Building audio components also fits in well with my affinity for hardware hacking.
