Thiel Fellowship App

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Thiel Fellowship App

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 world didn't seem anything like work to me. In the process of implementing new ideas, I would happily plunge into whatever labyrinths of logic I stumbled upon. By the time I'd worked my way out, I would know significantly more not only about the specifics of the programming principles I'd encountered but about the general process of independently guiding myself through mazes. Elated by every success and educated by every difficulty, I was launched into a loop of positive feedback and my knowledge grew exponentially.
Every time I grasped an interesting new concept, I would build something from it – a design, a tool, a tutorial that I could use and share. Soon, people began to ask me questions and I could answer them, or at least direct them to a solution. I felt honored that they valued my opinion. Apparently through this process word got around that I could design fairly complicated websites. Towards the end of seventh grade, a friend's father offered me a job developing the site for his biotech startup, Biomatrica; I was surprised, but I knew the material so I accepted. The site got investors interested, and since then, they've done pretty well for themselves (this year they made finals for the ABBY Award in Bio-Technology and their products are being used by major universities). Without intending to, I had entered the world of business.
One client led to another; my freelance work grew. With it, slowly came experience, slowly understanding; slowly heavy reality set in. The jobs were still fun, but in an intense and more serious way. As I worked, I learned that in business, there are no excuses for lacking backups; in business, deadlines are truly dead; in business, anything you don't do properly you will have to do over. I learned all this about business because I had to learn it, because I knew that if I did not, I would soon be out of business. Thus my thinking was optimized – streamlined – by the unyielding razor of reality.
Meanwhile, I continued learning more about programming, mostly by playing with it, and as a result, I was able to take the AP Computer Science AB test as a freshman in high school. This was great, but sadly, it meant that there were no more CS classes left for me, and hence no venue in which to fool around with computers. Fortunately, there were others who wanted more of the subject than our school had to offer. Often these young computer scientists were masters in certain specialized areas but lacked the complete technical and business skill-set necessary to enter the professional world. This gave me an idea. They wanted to learn what I had learned and I implicitly possessed a curriculum to teach it: I simply had to retrace the steps of my own self-education, minus the stumbling blocks. Moreover, I wanted to absorb their rich and diverse knowledge. So, sophomore year, a friend and I co-founded the Torrey Pines Programming Club, a venue in which we could both teach this material and learn from others, in an atmosphere that appeared suspiciously like a bunch of nerds (and non-nerds) having a blast fiddling with technology. By mid-second semester, we had achieved success in numerous computer science competitions, and our members were fluent in JavaScript, PHP, AJAX, XHTML, and CSS – some of the most important Web languages.
All that edu-tainment turned out to be a godsend when, later that year, my schedule began to overload because I had too many clients, an alphabet soup of competitions (ACSL, USNCO, AIME, UCSD Math, SAIC, Botball, etc…), my black belt test in Karate, and 4 AP classes. The programming club offered a natural solution. I sent out an e-mail to several select members, offering to hire them. They responded with a resounding: "I'm in!"
Things progressed quickly. I matched programmers to projects, touched up their training, and developed a scalable, modular, server-side framework that would allow everybody's code to cleanly interface. Over the following months, we delivered several high-end websites and applications for excellent prices. As a result of one project, I even became Chief Technical Officer of a client's company, It's a Beauty! Inc. At the same time, my workload again became reasonable, and my friends gained employment that they found more fulfilling and lucrative than their former grocery-bagging jobs. We do business together to this day, now as InSource Digital Development.
But this material success is not what matters most. It's that the people I work with are now creating astounding projects of their own, on their own. It's that the clients we work for are better off for having hired us. It's that I get to share the joy of my work – which still doesn't feel like work – with the freshman coders who walk into room 114 each week. As I retrace the exhilarating steps of my own learning in order to bring them forward, I realize how much I miss the awe and enchantment of being a beginner, and how ready I am to become a freshman again myself.

Profiles (Links to LinkedIn, Github, AngelList, etc.)
http://github.com/tmad4000
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/jacob-cole/31/8b3/25b
https://www.facebook.com/jacob.cole.9615
https://twitter.com/jacobCole4000

What project(s) have you worked on? (Links to projects or videos.)

See my minimalist homepage http://jacobcole.net for more.

Social/Organizational
· Created and ran a first-of-its-kind intercontinental “tele-hackathon” that teamed students in Tanzania with students at MIT via video link. Now, working with edX to enable students to work on projects remotely with others as part of MOOCS, making online courses more than passive lectures.
Media coverage: http://allafrica.com/stories/201308190100.html

· Cofounder of HackSphere, an intercollegiate network of thinkers and engineers who hold intellectual discussions/”salons" and work together on mostly tech projects for fun/service/startups. Includes several Thiel Fellows. Members meeting through group regularly win major hackathons/venture funding. We share project ideas publically on our hackathonprojects.tk platform to include everyone in on the fun!

Entrepreneurial/Nonprofit/Work Projects:
Cofounder: IdeaFlow (2013-)
http://ideaflow.jacobcole.net Present project, see below sections for details .
Integrates research advised by MIT Prof. Tim Berners-Lee and Henry Lieberman designing AI algorithms based on MIT ConceptNet to enable automated matching of related ideas.

Co-Founder: AdmitSphere.org (2010-)
Started collaborative wiki for admits to share college application essays and advice to give all applicants equal access to this basic knowledge, regardless of financial situation. Used by >45,000 people in >5000 cities across >150 countries.

Co-creator: InstaDefine.com (2010-)
Conceived, designed, and pair-programmed instant, predictive dictionary to make word lookup real-time and effortless. Quite possibly the most user-friendly dictionary on the Web. Worked with optimized databases and server-side C modules.

Strategist and frontend designer/developer: Politify.us (2012-2013)
Co-imagined, designed, and built this beautiful “Government 2.0” tool that calculates how much you personally will have to pay in taxes under each candidate. Dovetailed work with research, and acquired a contract for the team with MA State government innovation office, which led to teammates’ acceptance into TechStars 2013 Winter Class. Site:
· Received >2.5 million hits (before election day!)
· Was featured in Forbes, CNBC and on national television
· Spawned an election impact study at UC Berkeley

Technology Development Leader: Bainbridge CapitalSphere.com (2011-2012)
Shaped/implemented company vision to create a platform to optimally allocate capital to further economic progress - “Match.com for investment” - from position on both software engineering and executive teams.
· Designed UX, built data mining scripts in Python, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript
· Coordinated efforts of 2 software engineers

Chief Technical Officer: It's a Beauty! Inc. (2009-2011)
Lead front and backend Web designer/programmer, and strategist
· Managed 3 subcontractors -- my former Web programming students at InSource

Founder: InSource Digital Development Group (2007-2011)
Inspired fellow high school students to start programming for fun, and subsequently hired them as web developers. To achieve this:
· Founded TPclubs.com, which provides affordable web hosting for student projects. One mentee’s hosted site EasyDefine.com made front page of reddit and is followed in >10,000 cities.
· Developed a scalable, modular, server-side framework to interface code from multiple contributors
· Managed 7 subcontractors

Freelance Web Design (2005-)
· Design, program, and/or administer dynamic, standards-compliant websites, such as shaolinkempoarts.com, biomatrica.com, carmelvalleytennis.net

Other
· 2011: Created cognitively efficient speech recognition interface for hands free computer access with the MIT Edgerton Center and Redstart Systems Inc.; deployed technology to The Boston Home, a center for adults with progressive neurological diseases, with the help of late Prof. Seth Teller.

· 2009: Designed novel parallel FPGA microarchitecture to efficiently solve single-source shortest path problem. Presented at International Mathematica User Conference 2009. See http://papers.jacobcole.net

· 2000: Built a working photocopier out of LEGOs at age 9. For many more LEGO projects, with one of which I won an international expert-level contest against adults when I was 9, see http://lego.jacobcole.net

What do you want to work on over the next 2 years? If you're not sure, tell us about your interests, or what problems you'd love to work on solving, or who you want to help.
http://ideaflow.jacobcole.net (about)
Demo (Political constituency use case) http://jcr.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/ideas/ (see Graph View too!)
I’m currently working with my longtime friend Malcolm Gilbert, described in cofounder section.

At the core, IdeaFlow is a website that enables individuals or groups of people to create smart “ideation boards” on which they can post partially or fully formed ideas/projects and share connections they see between them or external ideas/projects. To help users find more related ideas and identify patterns, IdeaFlow has machine learning/natural language processing algorithms to automatically suggest connections between ideas, and an interface to visualize networks of related ideas. Because finding relationships between ideas is such a fundamental operation of cognition, this platform is applicable across fields, from identifying clusters of suggestions from a political constituency to organizing and exploring ideas/projects within a company or research group. Ultimately, IdeaFlow has the goal of realizing Sir Tim Berners-Lee's (my research advisor) vision of creating a unified Giant Global Graph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Global_Graph of ideas which exhibits emergent intelligent properties. To understand the platform better, let’s consider the specific use case of political bodies, where the platform has gained traction (below).
IdeaFlow as a suggestion box platform for governments:
Right now, people make suggestions to politicians by writing letters. But we rarely know when, or if, our letters have been read, nor do we know if our suggestions have been acted upon or merely forgotten. We also don't have a way to find or support others who have written similar letters. Thirdly, there's no central place we can go online to see all of the initiatives government has actually passed in a certain time period, which is the core of transparency.
These were problems faced by MIT student government, and, in Sep. 2012, Jacob began a project (advised by former White House CTO for Internet policy Danny Weitzner, and now Sir Tim Berners-Lee) to attempt to solve them all at once. It takes the form of a high-tech suggestion box website, and is a new medium for citizens and governments to communicate, and for transparency.
The website allows students to post complaints, ideas, and suggestions to be acted upon by the undergraduate student government and see whether they've been acknowledged, if they're in progress, if they're done, or rejected. The most recent iteration of the website, (which Jacob, supported by collegemates, launched while studying abroad at St. Catherine's College, Oxford in 2014), became so popular that a motion was passed requiring the VP of the college student government to weekly review suggestions submitted, mark them as acknowledged, in progress, or done as appropriate, and, where reasonable, take the next step to turn them into a motion. Passed motions are presented as completed suggestions.
Most importantly, as users type in suggestions, the existing list of suggestions is searched in real-time to find related suggestions. A Graph view enables users to visualize how suggestions cluster and note relationships between suggestions they find (Refresh the page once after loading). The more relationships people note manually on the graph, the better the automatic relationships-finding algorithm can function. Loading the relations between ideas that users have separately in their own heads into a giant global graph enables people who hold the pieces to each other's puzzles to find each other. Additionally, clustering related suggestions helps users to identify and address the root cause behind them, and to come up with more creative solutions.
As an example, consider the following suggestions which were submitted separately:
1) Leftover foods given to students rather than [waste] bins
2) Leftover food donated to homeless shelters
3) Less Hall waste #eco
4) Leftover food composted
5) Make online hall sign-up include dietary requirements (i.e. dairy/gluten-free)
A user of the system noted the connection between 1, 2. Another user noted the connection between 2 and 4. The matching algorithm suggested to another user that “Less Hall waste #eco” should be connected to this cluster as well, and a user confirmed the connection. Aggregating the ideas strengthened and deepened the discussion by helping students with similar causes come together and promoting them to ponder the deeper root cause behind these related issues. This provided a basis for them to produce creative ideas that address it, such as: “Make online hall sign-up include dietary requirements (i.e. dairy/gluten-free)”
To go up a level of abstraction:
The bulk of meaningful content we write, not just suggestions and complaints, but articles, academic papers, etc. entail expressing the relationships we've discovered between ideas. But right now these connections sit in unstructured text. Thus:
Alice might have a connection between idea A and Idea B in her head
Bob might have a connection between idea B and idea C in his head
But right now, the transitive connection between ideas A, B, and C can only be discovered if Alice and Bob happen to have a conversation, or stumble upon another’s writings!
Creating a platform that encourages users to contribute connections between ideas in a way that’s explicit enables us to load connections between ideas that are in everyone's separate notes/writings into a central graph. This enables users to discover all the ideas related to their ideas from among an entire group of people. Moreover, the more connections humans make, the better the recommendation algorithm can suggest new connections. Facebook’s “People you may know” feature, which is based largely on mutual friends, is the very tip of this much larger iceberg of graph-based recommendation algorithms. IdeaFlow, seeks to be Facebook for ideas themselves to socialize with each other.
Thus, the the core paradigm of IdeaFlow, providing a platform to facilitate people collaboratively building graphs of ideas, can be applied not just to political bodies, but to any group trying pool insights efficiently.
Idea boards for large companies and academic institutions:
Upon understanding this, one of our advisers, billionaire Nicolas Berggruen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Berggruen ), suggested an easier path-to-market than selling to our ultimate customer of governments (which, as the founder of the Berggruen Institute on Governance http://berggruen.org/ he cares about as well): create an instance of the platform optimized for sharing ideas and projects in large organizations, such as those he owns, and sell to him. He has agreed to become a customer himself.
IdeaFlow can be applied to a large organization to create a central, graph-structured dashboard of all the projects and ideas present within that organization. Large businesses and academic institutions have many projects going on within. Often, people in different parts of these organizations have related or synergistic ideas/projects, and yet are not aware of each other. Currently, there is no standard software to build databases of projects within companies, much less ideas. Present partial solutions consist of central wikis (for instance, within Palantir) and quarterly lists (for instance, within the MIT Media Lab). However, these are often too large for an individual user to thoroughly scan for related projects. Moreover, when users discover connections between projects or with external projects, they have no the structured way to note and share them. Additionally, they lack an interface optimized for submitting small, possibly half-formed ideas. IdeaFlow provides the following fundamental improvements over currently-used wiki software:
a) an interface for users to manually note connections they discover between ideas/projects (critically, existing hyperlinks are fundamentally not sufficient for noting connections between projects, as they do not create backlinks)
b) algorithms to automatically suggest related projects; confirmed by users à la “add connections” on LinkedIn
c) a central listing of all pages on the wiki (sometimes present in wikis)
d) an interface for submitting small, half-formed ideas. The barrier for this is too high with existing wiki software. Our Thoughtstream smart text editor enables personal notes to to be added seamlessly to to the wiki. IdeaFlow blurs the line between personal notetaking and idea sharing. In fact, IdeaFlow can be equivalently thought of as a structured wiki of all the notes taken within a company.
e) a graph interface for visualizing how ideas and projects cluster; a "mind map" with an automatic layout algorithm and that is optimized for step by step exploration of large data sets
In 2011, Tim Berners-Lee said "We have a huge amount of data," he said. "There are millions of scientists trying to cure the likes of AIDS and Alzheimer's. Maybe the cure is currently separated in different people's heads. How can we design the web so that these half-formed solutions can come together? How can we build a really creative space for scientists?" <http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-04/19/tim-berners-lee-science-w3c> Finding overlapping, synergistic, or otherwise related ideas is particularly important in organizations focused on research.
Even in organizations that are not research oriented, understanding the clusterings of projects and goals that constitute a company’s vision is significant; it enables leadership to discover the unifying principles behind their own actions, and provides a center point from which all members of the company can work together as a team to efficiently approach those goals.

Additionally, Bainbridge Capital, Harvard CTO Jim Waldo, and Wolfram Technologies are ready to become beta users of our software when ready at scale.

Current status:
We are currently in semi private beta, scaling the system through small communities we are a part of.

We have investment committed from billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, who runs the Berggruen Institute on Governance, members of which include Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, and Reid Hoffman. MIT Professor Mechanical Engineering Anette (Peko) Hosoi has agreed to become a customer for the organizational knowledge management variant of the system, as has Nicolas himself. At their advice, we have, since September, focused on developing a custom variant of the application for large organizations.
If
Our previous focus, the political science application of the project gained significant traction and continues:
2 Oxford colleges (St. Catherine's College and St. Edmund Hall) amended student government constitutions to require VP to respond to suggestions in the system weekly. University-wide student government has proposed a similar motion to be voted on this month.

Following the platform's success at Oxford, Oxford alumnus and member of UK House of Lords Lord Nat Wei, who currently uses nationbuilder.com to gather feedback from constituents, is interested in adopting Ideaflow when ready at scale. See user statistics below.

Project statistics:
~8,000 Lines of code written

User statistics:
Total unique users grew by roughly 25% per month from Jan 1 2013 to Sep 30 2014 . Users were primarily at Oxford University.
Total unique users
(45 Dec)
348 Jan
480 Feb
734 Mar
960 Apr
1312 May
1920 Jun
2198 Jul
2451 Aug
2822 Sep
(2987 Oct 14)

By Sep 17, 2014
4232 contributions
318 Ideation Boxes Created, 1240 ideas, 577 connections between suggestions/Ideas, 2097 Upvotes

Why spend your time on this? Or what about this is important to you?
What motivates us right now is that we see the most fundamental pressing problem in the world is that human activity is scattered:
People with synergistic ideas in research groups, big companies, and society aren't aware of each other (Tim Berners-Lee says "There are millions of scientists trying to cure the likes of AIDS and Alzheimer's. Maybe the cure is currently separated in different people's heads. How can we design the web so that these half-formed solutions can come together How can we build a really creative space for scientists?" in
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-04/19/tim-berners-lee-science-w3c). Talented people start redundant or non meaningful startups even when there are many great ideas available low-hanging.
News media has a short attention span; we hear about bombings in Syria and earthquakes in Haiti one week and something else the next, even if the problems aren't resolved. Resultingly, the well-being of suffering people is at the mercy of what entertains the first world.
This isn't okay.

Minsky teaches us that a mind is a system to meditate between a collection of little agents, and that society is a mind. This mind is currently scatterbrained.

In the abstract, the goal of this project is to build a "gestalt processing system for society" (ref: link on http://ideaflow.jacobcole.net) so that everyone, everywhere can be included in the circle of humanity. It is to lift the fog of non connection that sits on the world between people and their ideas, and build the giant global graph. It is to create a system to relate ideas - a rudimentary intelligence able to, for fundamental reasons, make broader connections than any single brain - which, as a side effect, produces a new paradigm for conducting Internet research that is better informed than Google for many tasks (ref: http://researchlists.jacobcole.net). In the same breath, it also incidentally produces a new type of smart text document not trapped in the paradigm of static paper.

The data collected from this system is vast and hopes to lay the groundwork for strong AI that produces new ideas autonomously.

In parallel, a second problem we see is that many of the smartest people we know spend their days working to improve the ad recommendation system on Facebook instead of curing cancer or building strong AI. We are, ultimately, striving to give these people a materially equally appealing or more appealing alternative option that also gives them an opportunity to directly help people!

Do you have any collaborators or cofounders? If yes, who are they?

Malcolm Gilbert, who is a web developer and currently a Masters student at MIT studying artificial intelligence
www.linkedin.com/in/malcomgilbert

Potentially, Roger Zurawicki, who is a junior at Harvard and friend since 2012 whose ideas (and taste for Meteor JS) resonate much with my own
https://github.com/rzurawicki

Malcolm and I have known each other since Fall 2010. We were in the same acting class, and worked together in the adaptive technology lab configuring and improving voice-recognition interfaces for hands-free computer operation.

Work we’ve done together also includes building a clean, custom platform in Meteor to to replace the existing undergraduate research projects listing system at MIT, which is in the process of being officially adopted by the MIT mechanical engineering department.
http://mituropsystem.jacobcole.net

This solves the following problem:
Right now, there are thousands of students and faculty within MIT who, collectively, are working on thousands of projects and have even more ideas. Many of these projects tare similar synergistic, and yet the people working on them often only end up meeting one another by chance, if at all. As a result, many end up being abortive, undermanned, or redundant.

Ubiquitous undergraduate research opportunities is are one of MIT's most vaunted distinguishing characteristics. Yet these projects are listed across a hodgepodge of department-specific WordPress blogs, poorly formatted web systems a decade old, and email lists.

We didn't build this system idly. Our platform can be scaled to other departments, with interest already in electrical engineering/computer science. Moreover, creating a database of all the undergraduate research project opportunities and active projects going on in the mechanical engineering department at MIT is a first step towards making making a database of all the projects going on at MIT, the goal of ideaflow. Thirdly, replacing the existing undergraduate research project listing system immediately onboards a whole cohort of top-notch faculty and student users onto our future platform.

Do you know anyone in our community? If yes, who? Have you participated in any incubators or other programs to further your project?

Yes
Jeff Lim, a 2011 Thiel Fellow, is my "big brother" in our fraternity at MIT, Alpha Delta Phi
Riley Drake, Ishaan Gulrajani, Laura Deming, Zach Hamed, Omar Rizwan, Eliana Lorch, Xinyi Chen, Delian Asparahourov, Diwank Tomer,
I also know mentors/former mentors David Dalrymple, Juan Benet and Danielle Fong

I have not yet participated in any incubators.

# Thiel Fellowship App

Tell us a bit about yourself (essay or link to video)

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).

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 world didn't seem anything like work to me. In the process of implementing new ideas, I would happily plunge into whatever labyrinths of logic I stumbled upon. By the time I'd worked my way out, I would know significantly more not only about the specifics of the programming principles I'd encountered but about the general process of independently guiding myself through mazes. Elated by every success and educated by every difficulty, I was launched into a loop of positive feedback and my knowledge grew exponentially.
Every time I grasped an interesting new concept, I would build something from it – a design, a tool, a tutorial that I could use and share. Soon, people began to ask me questions and I could answer them, or at least direct them to a solution. I felt honored that they valued my opinion. Apparently through this process word got around that I could design fairly complicated websites. Towards the end of seventh grade, a friend's father offered me a job developing the site for his biotech startup, Biomatrica; I was surprised, but I knew the material so I accepted. The site got investors interested, and since then, they've done pretty well for themselves (this year they made finals for the ABBY Award in Bio-Technology and their products are being used by major universities). Without intending to, I had entered the world of business.
One client led to another; my freelance work grew. With it, slowly came experience, slowly understanding; slowly heavy reality set in. The jobs were still fun, but in an intense and more serious way. As I worked, I learned that in business, there are no excuses for lacking backups; in business, deadlines are truly dead; in business, anything you don't do properly you will have to do over. I learned all this about business because I had to learn it, because I knew that if I did not, I would soon be out of business. Thus my thinking was optimized – streamlined – by the unyielding razor of reality.
Meanwhile, I continued learning more about programming, mostly by playing with it, and as a result, I was able to take the AP Computer Science AB test as a freshman in high school. This was great, but sadly, it meant that there were no more CS classes left for me, and hence no venue in which to fool around with computers. Fortunately, there were others who wanted more of the subject than our school had to offer. Often these young computer scientists were masters in certain specialized areas but lacked the complete technical and business skill-set necessary to enter the professional world. This gave me an idea. They wanted to learn what I had learned and I implicitly possessed a curriculum to teach it: I simply had to retrace the steps of my own self-education, minus the stumbling blocks. Moreover, I wanted to absorb their rich and diverse knowledge. So, sophomore year, a friend and I co-founded the Torrey Pines Programming Club, a venue in which we could both teach this material and learn from others, in an atmosphere that appeared suspiciously like a bunch of nerds (and non-nerds) having a blast fiddling with technology. By mid-second semester, we had achieved success in numerous computer science competitions, and our members were fluent in JavaScript, PHP, AJAX, XHTML, and CSS – some of the most important Web languages.
All that edu-tainment turned out to be a godsend when, later that year, my schedule began to overload because I had too many clients, an alphabet soup of competitions (ACSL, USNCO, AIME, UCSD Math, SAIC, Botball, etc…), my black belt test in Karate, and 4 AP classes. The programming club offered a natural solution. I sent out an e-mail to several select members, offering to hire them. They responded with a resounding: "I'm in!"
Things progressed quickly. I matched programmers to projects, touched up their training, and developed a scalable, modular, server-side framework that would allow everybody's code to cleanly interface. Over the following months, we delivered several high-end websites and applications for excellent prices. As a result of one project, I even became Chief Technical Officer of a client's company, It's a Beauty! Inc. At the same time, my workload again became reasonable, and my friends gained employment that they found more fulfilling and lucrative than their former grocery-bagging jobs. We do business together to this day, now as InSource Digital Development.
But this material success is not what matters most. It's that the people I work with are now creating astounding projects of their own, on their own. It's that the clients we work for are better off for having hired us. It's that I get to share the joy of my work – which still doesn't feel like work – with the freshman coders who walk into room 114 each week. As I retrace the exhilarating steps of my own learning in order to bring them forward, I realize how much I miss the awe and enchantment of being a beginner, and how ready I am to become a freshman again myself.

What project(s) have you worked on? (Links to projects or videos.)

[See my minimalist homepage http://jacobcole.net](http://jacobcole.net) for more.

Social/Organizational
·         Created and ran a first-of-its-kind intercontinental “tele-hackathon” that teamed students in Tanzania with students at MIT via video link.  Now, working with edX to enable students to work on projects remotely with others as part of MOOCS, making online courses more than passive lectures.
[Media coverage: http://allafrica.com/stories/201308190100.html](http://allafrica.com/stories/201308190100.html)

·         Cofounder of HackSphere, an intercollegiate network of thinkers and engineers who hold intellectual discussions/”salons" and work together on mostly tech projects for fun/service/startups. Includes several Thiel Fellows. Members meeting through group regularly win major hackathons/venture funding. We share project ideas publically on our hackathonprojects.tk platform to include everyone in on the fun!

Entrepreneurial/Nonprofit/Work Projects:
Cofounder: IdeaFlow (2013-)
http://ideaflow.jacobcole.net Present project, see below sections for details .
Integrates research advised by MIT Prof. Tim Berners-Lee and Henry Lieberman designing AI algorithms based on MIT ConceptNet to enable automated matching of related ideas.

Strategist and frontend designer/developer: Politify.us (2012-2013)
Co-imagined, designed, and built this beautiful “Government 2.0” tool that calculates how much you personally will have to pay in taxes under each candidate.  Dovetailed work with research, and acquired a contract for the team with MA State government innovation office, which led to teammates’ acceptance into TechStars 2013 Winter Class. Site:
·         Received >2.5 million hits (before election day!)
·         Was featured in Forbes, CNBC and on national television
·         Spawned an election impact study at UC Berkeley

Technology Development Leader: Bainbridge CapitalSphere.com (2011-2012)
Shaped/implemented company vision to create a platform to optimally allocate capital to further economic progress - “Match.com for investment” - from position on both software engineering and executive teams.
·         Designed UX, built data mining scripts in Python, PHP, MySQL, JavaScript
·         Coordinated efforts of 2 software engineers

Chief Technical Officer: It's a Beauty! Inc. (2009-2011)
Lead front and backend Web designer/programmer, and strategist
·         Managed 3 subcontractors -- my former Web programming students at InSource

Founder: InSource Digital Development Group (2007-2011)
Inspired fellow high school students to start programming for fun, and subsequently hired them as web developers. To achieve this:
·         Founded TPclubs.com, which provides affordable web hosting for student projects. One mentee’s hosted site EasyDefine.com made front page of reddit and is followed in >10,000 cities.
·         Developed a scalable, modular, server-side framework to interface code from multiple contributors
·         Managed 7 subcontractors

Freelance Web Design (2005-)
·         Design, program, and/or administer dynamic, standards-compliant websites, such as shaolinkempoarts.com, biomatrica.com, carmelvalleytennis.net

Other
·        2011: Created cognitively efficient speech recognition interface for hands free computer access with the MIT Edgerton Center and Redstart Systems Inc.; deployed technology to The Boston Home, a center for adults with progressive neurological diseases, with the help of late Prof. Seth Teller.

·        2009: Designed novel parallel FPGA microarchitecture to efficiently solve single-source shortest path problem. Presented at International Mathematica User Conference 2009.  See http://papers.jacobcole.net

·         2000: Built a working photocopier out of LEGOs at age 9.  For many more LEGO projects, with one of which I won an international expert-level contest against adults when I was 9, see http://lego.jacobcole.net

What do you want to work on over the next 2 years? If you're not sure, tell us about your interests, or what problems you'd love to work on solving, or who you want to help.
[http://ideaflow.jacobcole.net](http://ideaflow.jacobcole.net/) (about)
[Demo (Political constituency use case) http://jcr.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/ideas/](http://jcr.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/ideas/) (see Graph View too!)
I’m currently working with my longtime friend Malcolm Gilbert, described in cofounder section.

[At the core, IdeaFlow is a website that enables individuals or groups of people to create smart “ideation boards” on which they can post partially or fully formed ideas/projects and share connections they see between them or external ideas/projects. To help users find more related ideas and identify patterns, IdeaFlow has machine learning/natural language processing algorithms to automatically suggest connections between ideas, and an interface to visualize networks of related ideas. Because finding relationships between ideas is such a fundamental operation of cognition, this platform is applicable across fields, from identifying clusters of suggestions from a political constituency to organizing and exploring ideas/projects within a company or research group. Ultimately, IdeaFlow has the goal of realizing Sir Tim Berners-Lee's (my research advisor) vision of creating a unified Giant Global Graph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Global_Graph](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Global_Graph) of ideas which exhibits emergent intelligent properties. To understand the platform better, let’s consider the specific use case of political bodies, where the platform has gained traction (below).
IdeaFlow as a suggestion box platform for governments:
Right now, people make suggestions to politicians by writing letters. But we rarely know when, or if, our letters have been read, nor do we know if our suggestions have been acted upon or merely forgotten. We also don't have a way to find or support others who have written similar letters. Thirdly, there's no central place we can go online to see all of the initiatives government has actually passed in a certain time period, which is the core of transparency.
These were problems faced by MIT student government, and, in Sep. 2012, Jacob began a project (advised by former White House CTO for Internet policy Danny Weitzner, and now Sir Tim Berners-Lee) to attempt to solve them all at once. It takes the form of a high-tech suggestion box website, and is a new medium for citizens and governments to communicate, and for transparency.
The website allows students to post complaints, ideas, and suggestions to be acted upon by the undergraduate student government and see whether they've been acknowledged, if they're in progress, if they're done, or rejected. The most recent iteration of the website, (which Jacob, supported by collegemates, launched while studying abroad at St. Catherine's College, Oxford in 2014), became so popular that a motion was passed requiring the VP of the college student government to weekly review suggestions submitted, mark them as acknowledged, in progress, or done as appropriate, and, where reasonable, take the next step to turn them into a motion. Passed motions are presented as completed suggestions.
Most importantly, as users type in suggestions, the existing list of suggestions is searched in real-time to find related suggestions. A Graph view enables users to visualize how suggestions cluster and note relationships between suggestions they find (Refresh the page once after loading). The more relationships people note manually on the graph, the better the automatic relationships-finding algorithm can function. Loading the relations between ideas that users have separately in their own heads into a giant global graph enables people who hold the pieces to each other's puzzles to find each other. Additionally, clustering related suggestions helps users to identify and address the root cause behind them, and to come up with more creative solutions.
As an example, consider the following suggestions which were submitted separately:
1) Leftover foods given to students rather than [waste] bins
2) Leftover food donated to homeless shelters
3) Less Hall waste #eco
4) Leftover food composted
5) Make online hall sign-up include dietary requirements (i.e. dairy/gluten-free)
A user of the system noted the connection between 1, 2. Another user noted the connection between 2 and 4. The matching algorithm suggested to another user that “Less Hall waste #eco” should be connected to this cluster as well, and a user confirmed the connection. Aggregating the ideas strengthened and deepened the discussion by helping students with similar causes come together and promoting them to ponder the deeper root cause behind these related issues. This provided a basis for them to produce creative ideas that address it, such as: “Make online hall sign-up include dietary requirements (i.e. dairy/gluten-free)”
To go up a level of abstraction:
The bulk of meaningful content we write, not just suggestions and complaints, but articles, academic papers, etc. entail expressing the relationships we've discovered between ideas. But right now these connections sit in unstructured text. Thus:
Alice might have a connection between idea A and Idea B in her head
Bob might have a connection between idea B and idea C in his head
But right now, the transitive connection between ideas A, B, and C can only be discovered if Alice and Bob happen to have a conversation, or stumble upon another’s writings!
Creating a platform that encourages users to contribute connections between ideas in a way that’s explicit enables us to load connections between ideas that are in everyone's separate notes/writings into a central graph. This enables users to discover all the ideas related to their ideas from among an entire group of people. Moreover, the more connections humans make, the better the recommendation algorithm can suggest new connections. Facebook’s “People you may know” feature, which is based largely on mutual friends, is the very tip of this much larger iceberg of graph-based recommendation algorithms. IdeaFlow, seeks to be Facebook for ideas themselves to socialize with each other.
Thus, the the core paradigm of IdeaFlow, providing a platform to facilitate people collaboratively building graphs of ideas, can be applied not just to political bodies, but to any group trying pool insights efficiently.
Idea boards for large companies and academic institutions:
[Upon understanding this, one of our advisers, billionaire Nicolas Berggruen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Berggruen ), suggested an easier path-to-market than selling to our ultimate customer of governments (which, as the founder of the Berggruen Institute on Governance http://berggruen.org/](http://berggruen.org/) he cares about as well): create an instance of the platform optimized for sharing ideas and projects in large organizations, such as those he owns, and sell to him. He has agreed to become a customer himself.
IdeaFlow can be applied to a large organization to create a central, graph-structured dashboard of all the projects and ideas present within that organization. Large businesses and academic institutions have many projects going on within. Often, people in different parts of these organizations have related or synergistic ideas/projects, and yet are not aware of each other. Currently, there is no standard software to build databases of projects within companies, much less ideas. Present partial solutions consist of central wikis (for instance, within Palantir) and quarterly lists (for instance, within the MIT Media Lab). However, these are often too large for an individual user to thoroughly scan for related projects. Moreover, when users discover connections between projects or with external projects, they have no the structured way to note and share them. Additionally, they lack an interface optimized for submitting small, possibly half-formed ideas. IdeaFlow provides the following fundamental improvements over currently-used wiki software:
a) an interface for users to manually note connections they discover between ideas/projects (critically, existing hyperlinks are fundamentally not sufficient for noting connections between projects, as they do not create backlinks)
b) algorithms to automatically suggest related projects; confirmed by users à la “add connections” on LinkedIn
c) a central listing of all pages on the wiki (sometimes present in wikis)
d) an interface for submitting small, half-formed ideas. The barrier for this is too high with existing wiki software. Our Thoughtstream smart text editor enables personal notes to to be added seamlessly to to the wiki. IdeaFlow blurs the line between personal notetaking and idea sharing. In fact, IdeaFlow can be equivalently thought of as a structured wiki of all the notes taken within a company.
e) a graph interface for visualizing how ideas and projects cluster; a "mind map" with an automatic layout algorithm and that is optimized for step by step exploration of large data sets
[In 2011, Tim Berners-Lee said "We have a huge amount of data," he said. "There are millions of scientists trying to cure the likes of AIDS and Alzheimer's. Maybe the cure is currently separated in different people's heads. How can we design the web so that these half-formed solutions can come together? How can we build a really creative space for scientists?" <http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-04/19/tim-berners-lee-science-w3c](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-04/19/tim-berners-lee-science-w3c)> Finding overlapping, synergistic, or otherwise related ideas is particularly important in organizations focused on research.
Even in organizations that are not research oriented, understanding the clusterings of projects and goals that constitute a company’s vision is significant; it enables leadership to discover the unifying principles behind their own actions, and provides a center point from which all members of the company can work together as a team to efficiently approach those goals.

Additionally, Bainbridge Capital, Harvard CTO Jim Waldo, and Wolfram Technologies are ready to become beta users of our software when ready at scale.

Current status:
We are currently in semi private beta, scaling the system through small communities we are a part of.

Project statistics:
~8,000 Lines of code written

By Sep 17, 2014
4232 contributions
 318 Ideation Boxes Created, 1240 ideas, 577 connections between suggestions/Ideas, 2097 Upvotes

Minsky teaches us that a mind is a system to meditate between a collection of little agents, and that society is a mind. This mind is currently scatterbrained.

In the abstract, the goal of this project is to build a "gestalt processing system for society" (ref: link on http://ideaflow.jacobcole.net) so that everyone, everywhere can be included in the circle of humanity. It is to lift the fog of non connection that sits on the world between people and their ideas,  and build the giant global graph. It is to create a system to relate ideas - a rudimentary intelligence able to, for fundamental reasons, make broader connections than any single brain - which, as a side effect, produces a new paradigm for conducting Internet research that is better informed than Google for many tasks (ref: http://researchlists.jacobcole.net). In the same breath, it also incidentally produces a new type of smart text document not trapped in the paradigm of static paper.

The data collected from this system is vast and hopes to lay the groundwork for strong AI that produces new ideas autonomously.

Do you have any collaborators or cofounders? If yes, who are they?

Malcolm Gilbert, who is a web developer and currently a Masters student at MIT studying artificial intelligence
[www.linkedin.com/in/malcomgilbert](http://www.linkedin.com/in/malcomgilbert)

Potentially, Roger Zurawicki, who is a junior at Harvard and friend since 2012 whose ideas (and taste for Meteor JS) resonate much with my own
https://github.com/rzurawicki

This solves the following problem:
Right now, there are thousands of students and faculty within MIT who, collectively, are working on thousands of projects and have even more ideas.  Many of these projects tare similar synergistic, and yet the people working on them often only end up meeting one another by chance, if at all. As a result, many end up being  abortive, undermanned, or redundant.

Ubiquitous undergraduate research opportunities is are one of MIT's most vaunted distinguishing characteristics.  Yet these projects are listed across a hodgepodge of department-specific WordPress blogs, poorly formatted web systems a decade old, and email lists.

We didn't build this system idly. Our platform can be scaled to other departments, with interest already in electrical engineering/computer science. Moreover, creating a database of all the undergraduate research project opportunities and active projects going on in the mechanical engineering department at MIT is a first step towards making making a database of all the projects going on at MIT, the goal of ideaflow. Thirdly,  replacing the existing undergraduate research project listing system immediately onboards a whole cohort of top-notch faculty and student users onto our future platform.

Do you know anyone in our community? If yes, who? Have you participated in any incubators or other programs to further your project?

I have not yet participated in any incubators.