Jason Gao – http://jgao.org/
MIT CSAIL, LSP Group / PhD3

Experience
I've worked on various things involving EE, CS, and design. Some examples:

Interactive visualization of greenhouse gas emissions at Harvard (http://bit.ly/OZ9fcP).

Electronic and physical prototyping of a free-alignment urban EV charger (for MAS.552J). Circuit design and prototyping (sensor node modules, Arduino / other embedded dev, etc).

DIY hackery like adapting an analog telephone for Skype back before there were Skype telephones, a glass lantern with animated LED-lit glass beads, reverse engineering an ultrasonic parking sensor and building an Arduino-based decoder and wireless adapter for it.

Web stuff like nChooseTwo.com

Android apps and smartphone + hardware hacking for my research on building mobile distributed systems.

Why
I'm interested in cyberphysical systems and although I had not heard of tangible UI before, it seems to have the same aspirations of combining digital information and physical reality. Much current research is on sensing the physical world and turning it into digital information, but I would also like to work on the corollary: making digital information manifest itself in the physical world, and seamlessly manipulating entities through both physical and digital means. Some ideas: - allocating digital resources by redistributing water among glasses - manipulating clay with piezoelectrics and/or shape-memory alloys embedded to sense and apply stresses / transformations to a digital object, and vice-versa - mirroring physical objects in remote locations (color, movement, etc). Upon manipulating one, the other reflects those changes (representing "copies" of each other in a way / "quantum entanglement")

Art
Architecture
Craft/Fabrication
Design
DIY Electronics
Electrical Eng.
Mech. Eng.
Programming/CS

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