Max Van Kleek, M.Eng.

Max Van Kleek, M.Eng., aka “electronic Max”, is Ph.D. Candidate, Haystack Group MIT CSAIL, W3C WSRI, and IAM group, ECS U. Southampton.
 
Max is working on making computers more personal for the purpose of being able to help us more effectively in our work and personal lives. His research focuses on personal information tools, and how they could be better designed to support individuals’ needs through a better understanding of people, their lives and situations. His approach has been a mix of three efforts: primary work on understanding users and how they use existing tools to manage information, user modeling work on learning and representing individuals’ characteristics, and the design of interfaces and applications that take advantage of these models.
 
Max is primarily affiliated with the Haystack directed by David Karger. He is jointly advised between David and monica (mc) schraefel, Howard Shrobe, and Rob C. Miller. His other mentors include Ora Lassila, Jamey Hicks, Wendy Mackay, and Paul Robertson.
 
He has most recently collaborated with: Michael Bernstein, Mikko Perttunen, Paul André, and Greg Vargas.
 
While an undergrad at MIT, Max worked at the MIT Media Lab under John Maeda at the Aesthetics and Computation Group. Max helped develop a piece for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) called Atmosphere for the Workspheres exhibit in 2001.
 
Max grew up in Tokyo, Japan and his family hails from Boise, Idaho.
 
Late every Friday night (1–3am), he spins a show on WMBR 88.1FM Cambridge called DarkBOT Radio: Music for your Lonely Robot.
 
Max coauthored Examining Personal Information Keeping in a Lightweight Note-Taking Tool, Information Scraps: How and Why Information Eludes our Personal Information Management Tools, AtomsMasher: Personal Reactive Automation for the Web, Auditory Context Recognition Using SVMs, Inky: A Sloppy Command Line for the Web with Rich Visual Feedback, Simplifying knowledge creation and access for end users on the SW, GUI — Phooey! The Case for Text Input, and Getting to Know You Gradually: Personal Lifetime User Modeling (PLUM). Read the full list of his publications!
 
Max earned his B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering at MIT in 2001, and his M.S. in Computer Science and Engineering at MIT in 2003. He is currently finishing up his Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence with Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at MIT.
 
Watch Show & Tell Spring 2007 – UIDWiki. Read Digging out from piles of sticky notes: Computer scientists devise ways to organize details of everyday life.