Who are we?
Nadav Aharony
Dr. Nadav Aharony completed his PhD at the MIT Media Lab's Human Dynamics group, where he investigated the use of mobile phones as social and behavioral sensors, conducted one of the largest mobile data experiments done in academia, and initiated the open source mobile sensing platform that became funf.org. Nadav was also a Fellow at the MIT Center for Civic Media for 3 years, since its inception, where he worked on topics of mobile and social activism.
Previously, Nadav worked at Google as a product manager in the Android team. He has over 10 years of industry experience in engineering, product management, and business development roles, in organizations ranging from startups to corporate environments. He holds a PhD and MS degrees from the MIT Media Lab, and a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering cum-laude from the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology.
Nadav holds multiple patents in areas of social mobile networking, machine learning, network algorithms, and sensor technologies. His work has been featured in both academic and popular press (Technology Review, Businessweek.com, Wall Street Journal, Wired UK, and The Associated Press, among others), and received awards of recognition (including Best and Distinguished Paper awards, Knight News Challenge, SXSW Accelerator, IPSN Extreme Sensing Competition, and three Google Research Awards).
Alan Gardner
Alan Gardner has spent the last 7 years as an entrepreneur, software engineer, and consultant on big data, distributed systems, web development, and mobile applications (iOS and Android). After receiving his bachelors in Physics from MIT, he spent his early career engineering enterprise search applications at Endeca (now Oracle).
Since the launch of the App Store in 2008, he has been active in mobile development, including holding the #2 Medical iPhone app spot. As the technical co-founder of Smoopa, he created a system for real-time analytics on over 50 million price changes across the web, as well as a user friendly mobile application to scan barcodes and view price summaries. Most recently Alan has worked at the MIT Media Lab to build technologies that capture the power of personal and sensor data from mobile devices (funf.org) which won in the 2012 SXSW Accelerator.
Cody Sumter
Cody Sumter received his Masters from the MIT Media Lab and MIT's Technology Policy Program, where he worked on using cellphones as a sensor platform to study social dynamics and human behavior, and served as the Events and Design Lead for the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, one of the largest student-run startup competitions in the world.
With a computer science degree from Truman State University, he spent time prior to MIT working with large scale data visualizations, analytics, and web development for projects from bot detection in social networks to a hospital sensor analytics dashboard. While at Truman, Cody was involved in their astrophysics research program, working on and leading several projects at both the Truman Observatory and Lowell Observatory (studying both Near Earth Asteroids and delta Scuti stars in eclipsing binary systems).
In addition, he served for 3 years as a member of Truman State University's Board of Governors and as part of the legislative staff of a Missouri senator. Oh, and he also used to run this: humansvszombies.org