email: mizzao@gmail.com
phone: +1 (302) 566-5456
I love building intelligent systems of people and computers, and working with multidisciplinary teams that make those systems possible. I draw from broad experience spanning entrepreneurship, product management, machine learning, data visualization, software engineering, human-computer interaction, experiment design, and economics.
Experience
Parsnip
2020—present
Co-founder and CEO
Parsnip (“Duolingo for cooking”) applies the same feeling of “leveling up” in a
video game to the real-life skill of cooking, so that anyone in the world can
conveniently cook any cuisine at home. Our long term goal is to create a
personalized AI companion for the home kitchen that teaches cooking and helps
you figure out what’s for dinner.
Parsnip gained over 35k organic downloads, reached 4.9⭐ on the App Store, and was featured by Apple. Our users loved us and we probably reached product-market fit. We raised $450k from angel investors including the co-founders of Duolingo and a James Beard laureate, and learned a ton from making many mistakes.
CTRL-labs (acquired by Facebook)
2017—2019
Research Scientist & Product Manager (New York, NY)
Designed a machine learning platform for organizing 1TB+ of time series datasets
& TensorFlow models, and automating model performance benchmarks on test data.
Prototyped 2D and 3D interaction applications for demonstrating user interface
control via machine learning from electromyography data.
Led a cross-team effort to build cloud infrastructure for training user-personalized machine learning models. Product manager for momentary event/signal detection from electromyography data, including R&D, data collection, accuracy metrics, user interface design, implementation, and product release.
Aarhus University
2017
Assistant Professor, tenure-track (Aarhus, Denmark)
Developed experiments and analyzed behavioral data on the ScienceAtHome
citizen science platform.
Microsoft Research
2015—2017
Postdoctoral Researcher, Computational Social Science (New York, NY)
Ran the longest experiment of iterated prisoner’s dilemma ever
conducted—lasting one month. Studied teamwork and collective problem
solving in groups of various size. Developed a web framework for
conducting real-time experiments of collective behavior using
participants from the Internet.
2013, 2014
Research Intern, Computational Social Science (New York, NY)
2012
Research Intern, Adaptive Systems and Interaction (Redmond, WA)
Developed improvements to crowdsourcing systems by building online predictive
models of user engagement and measuring the effects of
microeconomic and social incentives.
Goldman Sachs
2008
Summer Analyst, Equity Strategies (New York, NY)
2007
Summer Analyst, Fixed Income Strategies (London, UK)
Education
Harvard University
Ph.D., Computer Science
2015
Dissertation: Experimental Studies of Human Behavior in Social Computing Systems
S.M., Computer Science
2012
University of Pennsylvania
B.S., Economics, summa cum laude; The Wharton School
B.S.E., Computer Science, summa cum laude (GPA: 3.89 / 4.0)
2009
Qualifications
Programming: TypeScript, JavaScript (highly proficient); Go, Python (proficient); Java (prior experience).
Leadership: Technical product management, project planning, oral & written communication.
Scientific Research: 11 peer-reviewed publications with over 780 citations (h-index: 11) in top computer science conferences (AAAI, EC, HCOMP) and interdisciplinary journals (Nature Communications, PLoS ONE) spanning artificial intelligence, human computation, and computational social science. 31 invited talks at universities, research labs, and conferences worldwide. Program committee member for over 8 international conferences in computer science and computational social science, including WWW, IJCAI, AAAI, AAMAS, EC, HCOMP, and ICWSM. For details see my CV.
Open-source: TurkServer, a real-time web platform for conducting online experiments of collective behavior. CrowdMapper, a collaborative crisis mapping web app for studying teamwork and collective intelligence (see talk). Creator of several widely used software packages and active contributor in the OSS web development community. Top 1% contributor on StackOverflow.
Digital Fabrication: CAD/CAM CNC machining, microcontroller programming and circuit design, laser cutting, 3D printing, casting and composites. See my work from MIT’s How to Make (Almost) Anything.