Academic. Those more accustomed to the standard academic rundown of Degrees-Publications-Teaching-Awards may wish to see my curriculum vitae.
Professional. For those of the Objective-Experience-Skills sort, I have a somewhat complete LinkedIn profile.
Personal. And finally if you prefer to see a person summarized in terms of Birthdate-Favorite Books-Overused Quotations-Photo from Last Social Event Attended, I also have an occasionally updated Facebook profile.
Bio by Bullet
As of September 2007:
- Los Altos and Santa Barbara are the two Californian cities I divide my time between. The first being the former apricot fields at the core of Silicon Valley and the latter popularly known as "the American Riviera," at least to the sunburnt tourists.
- I want to understand how people move through built environments (places like buildings, neighborhoods, college campuses, shopping malls, and cities), why certain places are more lively and liveable and attractive than others, and how (and why) people pick up on all of these aspects of their surroundings. And with that knowledge, I'd like to be able to help improve existing environments and design new places with these human factors in mind. More details in the Research section.
- At the University of California, Santa Barbara, I am studying such topics on my way toward a M.A. in the Cognition, Perception, and Cognition Neuroscience area of the psychology department and a Ph.D. in the geography department. My work is supported by the National Science Foundation—thank you U.S. taxpayers!
- Also at UCSB, I serve as program manager for the Cognitive Science Program, collaborate with others in the Hegarty Spatial Thinking Lab, and participate in the NSF IGERT in Interactive Digital Multimedia. (That stands for Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship, a mouthful of an acronym.)
- Publishing of the print and on-line varieties have long intrigued me. As the chair of the UCSB Press Council, I help direct the university's daily paper and yearbook. Occasionally I assist with The Next American City, a quarterly magazine, as a contributing editor and writer. As a senior editor, I previously edited a special issue on the future of suburbia.
- And last but not least, in Los Altos, TellaNote is the business that my mom and I have co-founded. As chief technical officer, I direct the design of communication devices to help seniors stay in contact with their family, friends, and others in their support network. Tweens have cell phones, text messaging, on-line calendars, social networks, and the like. Why can't older adults take advantage of the same technology? Minus all the advertising clutter and the celebrity "news" that numbs your brain, of course.
In years gone by :
- I graduated from Carleton College (Northfield, Minn., where the town motto is "Cows, Colleges, and Contentment") with a Bachelor in Arts degree in Cognitive Studies. For more information on that program, you can see the Web site I put together.
- Rather than attending high school (well, I did put in one year and six weeks of time in those salt mines), I graduated from Foothill College (Los Altos Hills, Calif.) in June 2002 with an Associate of Science degree in Computer Science along with a Certificate of Written Communication from the Language Arts Division.
- At Foothill, I was the editor in chief of the student newspaper, The Sentinel (which I and a team of students revived), for two years.
- I co-authored two computer science textbooks for Prentice-Hall:
- You'll learn some semi-correct things about me in Newsweek, on the Associated Press wire, and in some other random magazines. (For example, a story in the Daily Telegraph says my name is "Drew Bara-Adams," I live in Palo Alto, and I went to a technical college, all incorrect. A story on the AP wire quotes me as dismissing college when in fact I was dismissing high school.) I'll leave the searching to you.
- See more on my family at our Web site, which is appropriately at www.dara-abrams.com. And my sister, Cassie, can be found at cassie.dara-abrams.com.
- Also of interest is www.brainjolt.com, my mom's work on personalized on-line learning, multiple intelligence theory, and other neat computer science/educational psychology theory and application..
- And some patent numbers. Note that these are not mine—they are my parents'.
- 4,900,256
- 5,566,180
- 5,586,305
- 6,259,707
- 6,456,892
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