Tell us a bit about yourself (essay or link to video)
Hi! I’m an exuberant Web entrepreneur and MIT undergraduate studying Electrical Engineering/Computer Science and English Literature (2015). I’m passionate, above all, about the practice and philosophy of tai chi, which I see as inextricable from the enterprise of understanding, facilitating, and ultimately automating, intelligence. Furthermore, I see building systems to facilitate intelligent governance/collaborative creativity as laying the groundwork for strong AI. In 2012, just after I turned 20 and was made ineligible for the past Thiel Fellowship, these observations crystallized into an actionable vision, which I’ve been since building out, through the medium of research advised by MIT Prof. Tim Berners-Lee and Henry Lieberman. This past year, while I was studying abroad Oxford University (in their program in Computer Science and Philosophy), the first face of the project acquired a dedicated user base, and billionaire Nicolas Berggruen committed to invest.
Something I know to be true that few others believe is that Facebook is the tip of the much larger iceberg that is the yet unrealized original vision of the World Wide Web, (particularly, the Giant Global Graph en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Global_Graph). I explain more of my recent story in later sections.
To share some of my more personal background, I’ve included a college essay, with forms of which I was accepted to MIT, Harvard, and Stanford, among other schools. (This essay can also be found posted under the pseudonym “John Smith” on the website admitsphere.org, which I started with my MIT roommate, a popular collaborative wiki of college essays and advice.)
Please briefly elaborate on one of your extracurricular activities or work experiences in the space below or on an attached sheet (150 words or fewer).
Every weekend after my karate class, I volunteer for an hour and a half teaching kids ages 3-12. The first class is the "Little Ninjas," who are just 3-5 years old. These are among my favorites to teach because they have no preconceptions or attitude. They look at you unjudgmentally and listen to what you have to say, and they will try out whatever you suggest. Sometimes they're timid at the beginning, but mostly they're just enthusiastic. Even though they are not usually all that skilled at doing the moves the first time around, I am always amazed to see what they can do after just a couple of weeks: they slide into shoulder rolls and throw spinning kicks more naturally than I do! It's refreshing to teach these little guys; their unbridled innocence makes it impossible for me to become frustrated or lose my smile.
Personal Essay
"Evaluate a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken, or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you."
I never intended to hire anybody. In fact, I never sought to obtain employment myself. I was too busy having fun with computers to be bothered with any of that. But as soon as you know how to hit "ctrl-alt-delete," it seems everyone wants tech support, and one thing leads to another.
All I'd done was befriend the shy, thick-spectacled, computer wizard in my seventh grade multimedia class. He spent most of his time furiously typing cryptic symbols (like "preg_grep('/^[\.a-z0-9]+@/i',$r)") into his dinosaur workstation, bewitching it to run with blazing speed, perform complex calculations, and produce slick graphics. Boggled but intrigued, I asked him to teach me how to do this. He pointed me to a few tutorials on the programming language PHP and showed me how to host files on a server, and I was on my way.
It turned out to be a lot like magic: you typed commands in an arcane language and shazam! The computer would produce seemingly supernatural effects, like finding all the answers to your wordsearch homework. Amazing. Sure, it took more effort to write the programs than to just do the work by hand, but then again, exploring the frontiers of this miraculous w