Dan Maynes-Aminzade

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Dan Maynes-Aminzade (aka Monzy) is a Nerdcore hip-hop artist, programmer and PhD student at Stanford.

1 Professional history
2 Nerdcore hip-hop
3 External links
4 Media coverage

[edit] Professional history

Dan received his Master's degree from MIT, where he was a member of the Tangible Media Group at the MIT Media Lab under the direction of Professor Hiroshi Ishii from 2001-2003. There he worked on the Actuated Workbench, a device that uses magnetic forces to move objects on a table around in two dimensions.

From 1997-2001 he was a member of Stage 3 Research Group, based at Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Computer Interaction Institute. There he worked on new techniques for interactive audience participation.

Maynes-Aminzade has interned at six companies during summer breaks from higher education. In 2000, he worked for Walt Disney Imagineering with Robert Swirsky where he helped to develop Enhanced TV for ABC and Go.com. The following year he was an intern at Adobe Systems where he assisted in the development of plugins for Adobe InDesign. In 2002, he was employed by Microsoft as a developer for MSN Messenger. He interned at Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab in the summer of 2003 and at FXPAL in the summer of 2004. Most recently in the summer of 2006 he worked as a software engineering intern at Google's New York office.[1]

[edit] Nerdcore hip-hop

Monzy made his hip-hop debut with Drama in the PhD which called out his musical rival MC Plus+. It gained large popularity after being described as "the best fucking thing I've ever heard" by LiveJournal creator Brad Fitzpatrick. It eventually made it into a Wired magazine article[2], and Monzy was interviewed for a segment on the German television program Taff. He was also mentioned in the February 2006 issue of EE Times, an academic and industry-oriented publication dedicated to issues in the field of Electrical Engineering.

On January 10th 2006, Monzy performed at the DivX, Inc. booth of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nevada, along with other nerdcore artists. With Karl Olson acting as a mediator, Monzy and MC Plus+ finally ended their rivalry and performed together on the same stage.