James Mickens is explaining how comedians Hannibal Buress and Louis C.K. get their laughs: Buress’s high “joke density” versus Louis C.K.’s slow-build storytelling. For Mickens, an associate professor of computer science known for his snappy, engaging, and laugh-out-loud funny PowerPoint presentations on computer security (many viewable online), YouTube comedy clips are research. “A lot of people don’t realize that even the sciences are a social field,” he says. “When you can explain your work well and create a narrative, you are building a universe for people to inhabit with you.” He approaches teaching the same way. Mickens joined Harvard’s faculty last fall, after six years with Microsoft Research and a one-year visiting professorship at MIT. He tries to give his students a “deeper sense of the work,” he says, beyond money and prestige and Silicon Valley. Growing up in Atlanta as a physicist’s son (and a serious heavy metal fan; he owns a formidable record collection and plays in two one-man bands), he was drawn to computer science and the potential to “build things with your mind, without needing a backhoe. There’s a lot of architectural thought, and yet at a certain level you’re in a different reality.” After Georgia Tech, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, he now studies security—or the lack of it—in distributed systems (multiple computers connected to a network). A lot of his research, he says, “is thinking about failure scenarios.” It also addresses the fundamental tension between privacy and profit in Web services like Facebook and Gmail. He’s working on a data-storage system that would allow users to retain control of their online content—and a whole new ecosystem of Web services to go with it. Building without a backhoe.
James Mickens
Photograph by Jim Harrison
You might also like
Harvard Students form Pro-Palestine Encampment
Protesters set up camp in Harvard Yard.
Artificial Intelligence in the Academy
Harvard symposium assesses the new technology.
How Does Hate Spread?
Harvard symposium probes antisemitic, Islamophobic sentiments
Most popular
More to explore
How is Artificial Intelligence Being Taught at Harvard?
A new Harvard course on artificial intelligence teaches students how to use the tool responsibly.
Civil War American Writer and Abolitionist John Greenleaf Whittier
Homes of the poet and abolitionist, whose verses were said to have inspired Abraham Lincoln.