The Desert of My Dreams

One of the benefits of attending SI is the school’s strong alumni network. You can find alums working at some of the hottest companies and in almost every industry. This aspect of the school was a major draw for me when I was applying to grad schools. If others who attended the […]

It’s hard to believe but it has been almost two years since we submitted Fitster to the CHI Student Design Competition. As much work as it turned out to be, it was a really fun and rewarding experience, especially given how awesome our team was :). Since our team was the first team […]

“Don’t tell me you went to the University of Michigan just to do this?”
Yes, I did participant 5, yes I did.  Not only did I attend the University of Michigan “just to do this,” I’m still paying for it!

A few weeks ago, I came upon the SI is Broken blog, through another SIer’s (Andrea?) del.icio.us feed. Like an ill-conceived SI student project, the anonymous blog starts off with an overly ambitious goal but then miserably fails to deliver on its objectives. With only three bad posts and no follow-up on any […]

A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to speak at a private two-day conference (entitled the Conference on Blogs and Democracy) sponsored by the U.S. State Department. I am honored to have been selected and am very grateful for getting the opportunity to hear some of the most influential people in this area […]

I spent most of last week (with a side trip to D.C.) in Ann Arbor, coordinating and finalizing my move. All of my stuff (including my car) got packed and shipped this past Monday and should be in Mountain View in a couple of weeks. My move went pretty smoothly (well, as smoothly […]

Since posting a condensed version of my thesis online, a few people have asked some questions or left feedback about it. I’ve been a bit busy as of late so I haven’t responded as quickly as I usually do to such matters. Apologies and excuses aside, here are my responses to the feedback/questions […]

For anyone who might be interested, I have posted a condensed online version of my master’s thesis, which was a study of relationship formation in three blog communities (Kuwait Blogs, UAE Blogs, and DFW Blogs).
Comments and questions (whether about the results, the experience of doing a master’s thesis at SI, or the online presentation) are […]

SAA has created a centralized aggregator of all decentralized bottom-up things created by SIers - blog posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Flickr photos. The aggregator is the closest thing that SI has to a formal knowledge base/Intranet (the lack of which has been a huge pet peeve of mine). Nonetheless, as exciting as a […]

Since we were at CHI for the Student Design Competition and as student volunteers, we didn’t really get a chance to explore Montreal. Our hotel was several blocks from the Palais des Congres so I saw a little bit of Montreal every day as I walked to the Palais. On our last day […]