- Viral Communications
I'm a second year PhD student in the Viral Communications Group. I had a background in Electrical Engineering (BSc & MSc from ETH Zurich) with an emphasis on VR/AR systems before joining the MIT Media Lab. During my Masters at the Media Lab, I mainly designed and built media technologies (mobile and web applications, video processing pipelines, cloud computing infrastructure, machine learning models) aimed to address the polarized media landscape of the United States of America, culminating in a thesis exploring whether short-form news videos can open people's minds and effectively expose them to alternate views and realities.
During my PhD, I am exploring symbiotic human-machine systems that make use of both online and offline machine learning. Given my background as a jazz pianist, I'm using jazz as a metaphor for complex systems with a large decision space. Currently, I'm building an intelligent musical companion that helps you becoming a better improviser by teaching and inspiring you as you are interacting with it in real-time. In the near future, I want to expand the architecture and apply it to other areas of life that involve real-time decision making.
Outside of research, I'm a jazz pianist who has performed with the MIT Festival Jazz Ensemble, MIT Jazz Combos, and has been an MIT Emerson/Harris Jazz Fellow and has been awarded by MIT Music Theater Arts "in recognition of exceptional talent and dedication to performance at MIT".
In the past, I've also been a competitive chess player (World Youth Chess Championship participant in 2005, in the same tournament with current Chess celebrities such as Hou Yifan, Wesley So, Parimarjan Negi) and competitive swimmer (U13 Swiss Champion 100m Breaststroke and I'm still holding two Swiss age records from more than 15 years ago!). More about me on: www.mikehaojiang.com