Let's see, something fun about myself, well,
one thing that people find unusual is that I'm kind of obsessed with Legos.
So, every time I accomplish a big work task, like for example, submitting a grant,
which is something that professors have to do a lot of, I buy myself a Lego set,
because I think that's really the best reward for
a task done, is a new Lego set to explore.
How about you, Brent?
Something fun about yourself?
>> I'll start out with where I was born, like you.
So a much more boring origin story.
I grew up in the San Francisco Bay area, right outside of Berkeley.
It's been interesting to see that area shift a lot as I've grown older.
In terms of fun stuff about me, as you can see,
I have a somewhat alternative appearance.
There are seven of these.
I often get that question.
There used to be a lot more.
Maybe try to find some pictures of that on the internet.
And let's see. I like to travel a lot, and
hopefully I've been to your home country.
And Loren this is my latest fun thing, Loren and I recently did some research on emoji
that was featured both on National Public Radio which is our very distinguished
public radio network as well as in Teen Vogue which is a magazine for
I think young women between 14 and 18 so that's definitely a first for me.
[LAUGH] >> Good, good.
Well, I guess I get to do my origin story now.
I was born in South Dakota, a small rural town, actually.
And I grew up on a farm, and that's where I lived until I went to college.
And what else?
More origin story stuff.
What do I like to do?
I guess a couple things I like to do.
My family and I like to watch Marvel movies.
So the ones with Iron Man, Captain America, all those people and
so we watch those a lot.
And take pictures of my cats, believe it or not, and post them on the internet.
>> [LAUGH] >> About my story, I grew up in China.
My home town is Sujo, it's a city near Shanghai.
One fun fact about myself, so while we are collectively preparing for
the birth to this specialization, I'm also preparing for my first baby.
>> Which is quite a specialization in and of itself.
So I grew up in New York, New York.
And actually was born in the hospital across the street from where I went
to high school.
Two sort of interesting pieces of trivia.
One, I'm an avid poker player.
And so if I come to your hometown and there's a place you can play poker,
the odds are you'll find me there some free evening.
The other is I own an almost limitless collection
of blue shirts, which in the first MOOC that I did,
was apparently a topic of great discussion as to does he own any other shirt?
And I had to clarify that yes I do I own 12 of this exact shirt.
And I'm very happy buying in bulk because I have no sense of fashion.
But really, the one thing I want to make sure to close with is,
I have about the world's greatest job.
I work with an amazing team of people that is just incredibly accomplished.
You will see, as we go through, that the name GroupLens either as
GroupLens Research or the GroupLens Center For Social and
Human-Centered Computing, they all refer to the lab that we lead
together where we have about two dozen of students and a handful of staff
to work in areas of social computing and human-computer interaction.
And it’s just been amazing over the more than 20 years of this lab
to see the work that we've done featured on the evening news,
the New York Times, public radio, to see the people involved
interviewed in in all of the places you can imagine, radio,
book tours, start up companies and some really impressive software systems.
I'm not going to brag about all of the things.
If you want to know what we do, you can go to grouplens.org and
see a glimpse of that.
But I will brag for
a moment about the quality of people we've been able to attract.
We have some phenomenal students, but really,
more than anything else, I have a bunch of phenomenal colleagues.