Very good internet nonsense

This Person Exists

Generate a face that looks like you. Try it here; more info here. Shown at Gray Area, San Francisco, 2022.

Pokémon NØ

Buying stuff is great! But what if you don’t want any more stuff? Enter Pokémon NØ: bring your own barcode scanner and collect pokémon by scanning anything in the store. Created at NØ School Nevers, 2021.

Rectangles

wooosh 2021

Swot Perderder

These memes are very funny. I don’t know why. So I made a Twitter bot that makes a lot more of them. 2014. code

Radiohead or Horse_Ebooks?

Alas, @horse_ebooks is no longer a seller of equine .epubs, but for a while it was one of the most wonderfully cryptic things on the internet. This is my little tribute to both the old horse and an equally cryptic band. 2012. Test your own knowledge.

Serious Data Science

Most of this is proprietary! But here’s whatever I can talk about more publicly:

Color detection

At Stitch Fix, we have lots of images of merch. Knowing what color they are is important. Here’s a two part blog post (one, two) about how we framed the problem and solved it.

Neighborhoods and cities

Closeness to Things

If you’re considering moving somewhere, first plot out all the things you’ll want to go to around it, and see what you’ll be walking/biking/driving to. Maybe even put in how often you’ll be going to each one and then you can calculate your total travel time.

Generating neighborhood guides from social media data

Imagine you’re traveling to a new city and trying to rent a place to stay. What neighborhood will you stay in? What area feels right for you? I built neighborhood guides based on the social media that people are posting there already. PhD Thesis, proposal, the much more interesting talk, and the ICWSM 2016 Citylab workshop paper.

Why do people geotag?

People post their locations on their tweets, checkins, photos - why? We went to investigate that, and ended up finding some other weird nuggets in the world of geotagging today. ICWSM 2017 - pdf

Our House, in the Middle of Our Tweets

If you have someone’s geotagged tweet stream, how well can you find their home? About 80% of people within 1km. ICWSM 2016 -
pdf

Others

• Using Social Media Data to Understand Cities, from the Big Data and Urban Informatics Workshop, 2014.

• Finding a City’s Activity Bubbles in Geotagged Social Media, HCOMP “Citizen+X” Workshop, 2014.

Other projects I should mention, I guess

• Getting Users’ Attention in Web Apps in Likable, Minimally Annoying Ways. CHI 2016 - pdf

• Mailing Archived Emails as Postcards
  Why do people save and treasure their old letters but not their old emails? CHI 2016 - pdf

• Gimlets: making machine learning easier for sensor data ACM TIIS 2017 - pdf

• PVT: Android app to assess sleepiness (I just wrote code for this one.) Pervasive Health 2013 -
  pdf

• Sour Cream - semantic parsing for cooking recipes
  Undergraduate thesis, advised by Noah A. Smith. 2008. pdf