User:Tpryor

Your attention is your most valuable possession, and it's an honor to be in the lens of your loupe.

I'm Tony Pryor, and I'm working on a few projects here in the lab. I originally became involved with the MIT community through an expermental school called arsDigita University, where 35 lucky students completed the MIT EECS curriculum in one year, working 12+ hours a day, 6+ days a week.

Recently I've been working with Nathan Eagle on his proximity computing project Serendipity, which is part of his PhD research topic, Reality Mining, which offers to introduce large scale empirical stochastic models of human behavior patterns such as location changes and casual social contact to social network analysis. Examining cell tower ID's signal strengths over time using a probablistic model can help to pinpoint mobile phone users' positions in those areas which are dense in cell towers. This can be helpful with a variety of applications, but I'm immediately interested in seeing this used for "radial sms" mobs. Internet dating (for example) has proven that proximity circles leverage Reed's Law by eliminating the noise of outliers from an otherwise useable local network.

I'm working with Matt Mankins on an urban navigation project called Ariadne.

On a location based projects related note, my friend Adam Holt and I have been principly involved in starting something called the MIT Collaborative Mapping Initiative. Right now there are about 120 people from the MIT community involved in it in some way, and about 25 who are committal. If you are doing any sort of location based work I recommend coming to a meeting. We've had consistently amazing speakers, and some of the discussions have inspired new projects at MIT.

I'm also developing a tool called Hallways, a deep link menuing system to enable enfiladic hypertext within wikipedia.

Here are some less recent software related things I've done. I used to have the patience of a schoolteacher, but also felt my students needed more of the dyadic informality of Plato & Socrates, and less of the structured one-to-manyness of Aristotle's academy. Prior to that I was an antique dealer who specialized in the unique remnants of old Hollywood.

I am interested in examining the nature of creativity, and in making things that enable it's process. (Aside- for example, I think that a nodal graphing toy, a visible flexible tinkerable medium with N connectable replacable lego-like parts, would help meet this need. I want to use my hands to play with representations of the flows of daily events, the qualities of personal relationships, the connectedness between ideas, and any form of reducible emergence. I don't want to press keys or load software just to be able to manipulate it. I want a fun malleable toy that moves visible currents or tides of "water" (or maybe just LEDs, plastic tubes, bluetooth chips, and circuit connectors) and can perpetuate flows, cycles, games, game theory, diplomacy, protocol, and algorithmic search traversals in a simple and friendly way.)

And now for some paperless origami.