Sep Kamvar is a consulting professor of Computational Mathematics at Stanford University and chairman of Wildflower Capital, a seed-stage venture fund focused on technology and renewable energy.
His research focuses on information management in large-scale adaptive networks such as the web, peer-to-peer and social networks, and markets. He also is interested in using large amounts of data and accessible media in the study of human nature through art.
His fund focuses on very early stage investments in consumer web technologies, in particular in platform plays, and in renewable energy microutilities in emerging markets.
From 2003 to 2007, Sep was the engineering lead for personalization at Google, responsible for Personalized Search and iGoogle.
Prior to Google, he was the founder and CEO of Kaltix, a personalized search company that was acquired by Google in 2003.
Sep is the founder of Distilled, a premium men's fashion line and art collective, and has created a number of web-based art pieces, including We Feel Fine and I Want You To Want Me, a commission for the New York Museum of Modern Art exhibiting in February 2008.
My research focuses primarily on information management in large-scale networks. Here, my work fits broadly under three themes: personalization, platforms, and networks.
As the breadth of information available on the web increases, personalization of search becomes increasingly important in the ability to find information.
Query language is generally sparse and ambiguous, and like in human language, the context around the query often gives insight into a user's information need.
Personalized search is the use of not only the query, but the context around the query (such as the long or short-term interests, or the location, of the user issuing the query) in order to provide more relevant results. This is a main thrust of my work in personalization.
Another main theme is the notion that a lot of information will be consumed not only by querying, but rather by the personalized aggregation of information and content through personalized start pages.
Building platforms for such content and working on algorithms and social mechanisms for the organization and discovery of this content is a primary interest of mine.
The power of open platforms in enabling the easy generation of consumable content has been demonstrated repeatedly on the internet, not only with the web itself, but also with sub-platforms like Facebook, Flickr, Google Gadgets, among others.
I am interested in creating platforms that easily enable high-quality content creation for developers and provide a straightforward content consumption and navigation experience for users.
I am interested in human networks. My interest here started in peer-to-peer file-sharing networks around the time of Napster in particular, I was interested in using phenomenon from real-world communities and networks to develop algorithms to address the problems that arise in file-sharing networks.
My interest has evolved more towards social networks, especially towards social mechanisms of content discovery.
More recently, I have started a new non-web research theme, in financial markets. Primarily, I'm interested in constructing market mechanisms for altruistic behavior, and the pricing of such mechanisms.
Over the past few years, the internet has become a platform for self-expression. Through utilities such as blogs and social networks, people have the ability to express themselves more publicly and more lastingly than ever before.
The words and pictures that people leave on the web as they communicate their daily thoughts and emotions, provide opportunities for artists to create mosaics of humanity, to explore aspects of human nature through the eyes of millions of everyday people.
The web offers a second opportunity for artists, and that is as a new medium for art.
Historically, the early uses of any new media have been primarily utilitarian, and it is not until later that they have been adopted by the arts; photography, for example, was popularized by portraiture.
The web is no different. It's history as a medium has largely been as an information and communication-based medium and not as an art medium. As an art medium, it provides three properties that previous media do not; accessibility, dynamicism, and interactivity.
A work of art on the web can reach millions of people daily, has the ability to constantly change, and can interact with its audience in a more tangible way than other media, even to the point of allowing its audience to easily contribute to the art piece itself.
These two opportunities, the web as an information source for humanity, and the web as an accessible, dynamic, and interactive medium, are the basis for my work.
I seek to explore human nature through the lens of the web, and to use the web as well as other accessible media such as clothing or the street, as the frame for this exploration.
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