- Responsive Environments
Farita Tasnim is a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab in the Responsive Environments Group, where she works with Prof. Joe Paradiso, and graduate fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where she works with Prof. David Wolpert.
Living systems are far-from-equilibrium systems consisting of many components that interact and share information among each other in a highly constrained fashion. Farita's research aims to illuminate which properties (hypothesis: modularity, hierarchy, heterogeneity) of that network of component interactions explain the thermodynamic efficiency of the computations they perform. For example, a social network is a living system, for which polarization is a computation that transforms the states of the nodes from a collectively diverse distribution to an N-modal (e.g., bimodal) distribution.
In her past lives, Farita has conducted research in high school for alternative energy harvesting during the Research Science Institute (2014) held at MIT, received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from MIT (2019) (where she was a Putzen), as well as an M.S. in Biomedical Engineering from the MIT Media Lab (2021).