"I love Mike Travers Quality Assortment"

2022-05-14 12:14:30

This is the personal site of Mike Travers. I'm a software engineer, designer, writer, and researcher in the San Francisco area. I'm interested in tools to make programming easier and more expressive, for children, scientists, and others. I got a PhD from the MIT Media Laboratory in this area in 1996, focusing on the role of agency as a concept and metaphor in programming environments. More recently I've worked on a wide variety of systems for scientific and medical computation. These application areas tend to have the hardest knowledge management tasks, and there is a huge potential for better software to support this. My work tends to have one foot in knowledge representation (ontologies, graph databases) and the other in user interface design. I work mostly in Lisp languages because they are the best for this sort of thing.ContactTwitter: @mtravenEmail: mt[at]alum.mit.eduGithubLinkedInI live in beautiful Pacifica, CA, south of San Francisco.ProfessionalRésumé with links to publications (pdf).Portfolio of user interface work (out of date).Unprofessional Agency Made Me Do It is my new Roam-based evolving open-notebook writing project; a successor to my old blog Omniorthogonal. Topics are varied and tend towards the impractical. I contributed the introduction to Inventive Minds, a collections of Marvin Minsky's essays on education.Assorted Projects and Hacksstatic-roam, a tool to generate static sites (aka personal wikis or digital gardens) from Roam.Enflame, a Scratch-like visual query builder for a scientific graph knowledge base. Parts of this have been released as the open-sourc library Blockoid.SmartTables (article) is a public working version of a semantic spreadsheet.Visualizing the relationship between population density and politics with d3.Some small hacks to make the web work better LinkBack, a Chrome extension for automatic backlinking (pushing the web an iota closer to real hypertext) (out of service) Librium, a Chrome extension that detects ISBNs and DOIs on web pages and generates useful links. The Embobulator, a slack concentrator and self-metaprogramming tool.Various Common Lisp packages. These are mostly pretty old and not maintained: A Heroku buildpackWuWei, a toolkit for creating modern websites.SWFrames, a semantic-web backed frame system BioBike, a web-based programmable knowledge environment for computational biology. See the this paper in Bioinformatics.I designed the original knowledge representation framework and visual programing language. Older projects in Artificial Life and Visual Programming from previous life at MIT Media Lab.