People

Frank Moss PhD

Director of the MIT Media Lab and Principal Investigator

Since 2006, Frank Moss has served as director of the MIT Media Lab and the Jerome B. Wiesner Professor of Media Arts and Sciences. An entrepreneur and 25-year veteran of the computer and biotech industries, Moss spent most of his career bringing innovative business technologies to market. As director of the Media Lab, he’s been seeking something different: how to use technology to address pressing social problems and to improve quality of life for people worldwide.

 

Moss and his colleagues at the Media Lab envision a globally connected digital society that makes people smarter, healthier, and more creative. The Lab is conducting research on technologies that extend and enhance people's physical, cognitive and social capabilities; robots that can relate to people in more human terms; and organically decentralized networks that unlock people’s creative, innovative and problem-solving powers. Under his direction the New Media Medicine group is exploring how these technologies and others can revolutionize health care through radical new collaborations between doctors, patients and communities.

 

Before joining MIT, Moss co-founded Infinity Pharmaceuticals, Inc., an early-stage cancer-drug discovery company doing innovative work at the intersection of technology and the life sciences; he remains on the board there. In addition, he chaired the advisory council for the creation of the Systems Biology Department at Harvard Medical School.

 

Previously, he was CEO and chairman of Tivoli Systems Inc., which he took public in 1995 and sold to IBM in 1996, and co-founder of several other technology companies. He began his career at IBM's scientific center in Haifa, Israel, and later held various research and management positions at IBM's Yorktown Heights (NY) Research Center. Moss is a 1971 graduate of Princeton University, where he currently serves as a member of the board of trustees; and received master’s and PhD degrees from MIT in 1972 and 1976, respectively.

 

Ian Eslick

Research Assistant

Ian Eslick is a PhD candidate at the Media Laboratory. His passion is finding ways to make the considerable power of computation more accessible to ordinary people so that individuals and communities can solve big societal problems. His technical research interests span artificial and collective intelligence, software engineering, data visualization, and human-computer interfaces.

 

Eslick's current work is developing a model for community-driven problem solving entitled Collective Discovery. The concrete goals of this work are identifying and validating hypotheses in patient-provided epidemiological data. His research looks at the role of knowledge representation in mediating communal hypotheses generation to compensate for both self-reporting and methodological error. He has partnered with the LAM Treatment Alliance in the development of LAMsight, a Collective Discovery platform for LAM patients, clinicians and researchers.

 

Eslick received his BS and MEng degrees from MIT in 1996. That year he co-founded Silicon Spice, a telecommunications company developing high-performance, multi-core digital signal processors, telephony software and reference designs for carrier-class voice-over- IP infrastructure. In late 2000, Silicon Spice was acquired by Broadcom, where Eslick became a director of software engineering. Under the Broadcom label, Silicon Spice's products became the market leader with significant penetration in the US, Europe and Asia. Eslick also helped form Broadcom's Mobile Handset Business Unit, which developed the first generation of 2.5G “EDGE” cellular devices. He remains an advisor to venture capital firms and startup companies in the semiconductor, telecommunications, software and consumer Internet sectors. He holds more than a dozen patents in semiconductor architecture, real-time software, and communications technology.

 

John Moore MD

Research Assistant

John Moore completed an internship in which he had significant experience in medicine, surgery, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, emergency medicine, and a number of specialties.

 

His current research aims to use his clinical knowledge to engineer systems for data-driven medicine that foster doctor-patient partnerships while not being intrusive in clinical workflow. He is especially interested in human-computer interfaces that focus on being more "hands-off" as well as more personal. As a result, his work makes use of speech recognition, natural language processing, conversational systems, and affective technologies.

 

Prior to his position at MIT and his medical training, Moore worked in biomedical engineering. He did research in electromyographic (EMG) signal processing and worked as a consultant in the field. He was also a Fulbright Scholar to Belgium, where he did clinical engineering studies in order to gain insight into neurological movement disorders.

Clark Freifeld

Research Assistant

Clark Freifeld is a master's candidate in the New Media Medicine group at the MIT Media Lab and the principal software architect of the HealthMap outbreak monitoring system.

 

Before joining the Media Lab, Freifeld was a research software developer at the Children's Hospital Informatics Program at Harvard Medical School, where, in addition to co-creating HealthMap, he contributed to the Indivo personally controlled health record, developed the MAMI microRNA target predictor, and created the Smoot systems modeling tool. Prior to his position at CHIP, Freifeld was principal software engineer at AlphaMetrics Capital Management, a hedge fund specializing in algorithmically driven futures trading. He studied computer science and mathematics at Yale University and his interests include Web-based user-interface design, data visualization, text mining, and technologies for developing countries. In his spare time he tutors eighth graders in math.