Sepandar Kamvar

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Sepandar David Kamvar (born August 6, 1977), also known as Sep Kamvar, is a Persian American computer scientist, artist, and entrepreneur based in San Francisco, CA. He is the technical lead of personalization at Google [1] and a consulting assistant professor of computational and mathematical engineering at Stanford University [2].

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[edit] Computer science

Kamvar's main contributions to computer science have been at the intersection between computer science and mathematics, particularly in the fields of personalized search and reputation management.

As a graduate student at Stanford University, he, with Taher Haveliwala and Glen Jeh, developed the mathematical fundamentals behind personalized search [3]. In early 2003, he dropped out of his Ph.D. program at the age of 25 to found Kaltix, a personalized search engine company which was acquired by Google later that year [4]. Since then, he has built and led the engineering efforts in personalization at Google, most notably Google Personalized Search and Google Personalized Homepage. He later finished his Ph.D. and is currently a consulting assistant professor at Stanford.

In addition to personalized search, Kamvar's other main contribution to computer science has been in reputation management. His 2003 paper, EigenTrust, is the most cited paper in the field [5], and was influential in that it predicted the trend in user-generated content and introduced the notion of reputation management in this context.

[edit] Art

Kamvar's most well-known art works have been the web-based pieces We Feel Fine [6] and Lovelines [7], both collaborations with Jonathan Harris. Both of these pieces use material found in blogs to illuminate human emotions and desires. We Feel Fine has been exhibited in San Francisco, New York, Seoul, and Prague, and was a Yahoo Pick of the Day [8].

In 2006, Kamvar founded the fashion line Distilled. Distilled is known for its art-meets-fashion aesthetic and its limited-run, hand-finished clothing [1] [2].

[edit] Education

Kamvar attended Princeton University, where he received a bachelors in Chemistry in 1999. He received his Ph.D. in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics at Stanford University in 2004.

[edit] External links


[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ Adam Sherrett, Nylon (November 2006), Up in Stitches.
  2. ^ Leilani Labong, 7x7 (March 2007), House of Spirits.