About Me
Biography
My primary interests lie in modeling and manipulating complex systems. I’m currently a PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab finishing my second academic career. This started back in 2003 when I began working on computational systems inspired by human intelligence with Patrick Winston, Push Singh and Marvin Minsky. In 2008 I started digging into problems related to health and healthcare with advisor Frank Moss. My PhD research in the New Media Medicine group at the MIT Media Laboratory focuses on the practical and clinical value of aggregated self-experiments and how communities can use this to create virtuous feedback loops that inform their decision making and influence clinical research and practice.
I’m a Research Fellow at Lybba and a lead architect of the C3N Project where I learn and contribute to revolutionizing health and healthcare processes. In particular, we focus on the execution and impact of N:1 trials of patient-initiated interventions.
I’m also an active co-founder at Compass Labs where I work on commerical interest and intent detection technology, a commercial application of some of the techniques I’ve been applying in my academic research. Compass Lab’s lead investor New Enterprise Associates (NEA) has given me a home base for conducting research when I’m not in Boston or at our San Jose office.
Prior to returning to MIT, I was the founding President of Silicon Spice, a telecommunications semiconductor startup (also an NEA company). I hired the management team, served on the board and held multiple individual and operational roles culminating in management of our software engineering organization. Silicon Spice was acquired by Broadcom Corporation in late 2000. I continued at Broadcom as Director of Software Engineering in the newly-formed Carrier Access Business Unit. Under the Broadcom label, the company’s products became the market leader in carrier-class voice telephony with significant penetration in the US, Europe and Asia. I helped form Broadcom’s Mobile Handset Business Unit 2001-2003 while working on an MIT-affiliated project to spark a revolution in secure computing infrastructure.
I was an undergraduate and graduate researcher on high-performance parallel computing projects in Tom Knight’s lab at the MIT AI Laboratory in the early 90s; I picked up a BS and ME along the way. One of our projects, brain child of my mentor Andre DeHon and worked out by co-founder Ethan Mirsky, led to the formation of Silicon Spice in 1996 along with former Knight student Rob French.
I love outdoor activities, especially when shared with my wife and twin daughters. I put in some miles on my road bike when I can and occasionally dream of being a competitive amateur again one day (though I am finally mixing it up again). My work often involves various open source software projects which I continue to support as I can in my spare time.
Press
There has been some interesting press about my research work or projects I collaborate on at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Discover Magazine, Proto Magazine, Technology Review, and even the Minn Post. I give a few talks at conferences or other forums each year which are usually covered in my health posts.
Publications
- Nurok M, Eslick I, et al. The International LAM Registry: A Component of an Innovative Web-Based Clinician, Researcher, and Patient-Driven Rare Disease Research Platform. Lymphatic Research and Biology. 2010 Mar;8(1):81-7.
- Ian Eslick (2008), “ScratchTalk and Social Computation: Towards a natural language scripting model““. IUI 2008 Workshop on Common Sense Knowledge and Goal-Oriented User Interfaces (CSKGOI’08).
- Ian S. Eslick (2006), “Searching for Commonsense“. Master of Science Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2 006.
- Winston, et. al. (2006) “CHIP: A Cognitive Architecture for Comprehensive Human Intelligence and Performance”, DARPA IPTO Phase I Architecture Report.
- deLorimier, et. al. (2006) “GraphStep: A System Architecture for Sparse-Graph Algorithms“. Proceedings of the 14th Annual IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM’06), Vol 00:143-151.
- Ian Eslick and Hugo Liu (2005), “Langutils: A Fast Natural Language Toolkit for Commmon Lisp“, In procee dings of the International Lisp Conference (ILC’05).
- Push Singh, Marvin Minsky, and Ian Eslick (2004). “Computing commonsense“. BT Technology Journal, 22(4):201-210.
- Ian S. Eslick (1996), “Quasistatic Computing Environments” MIT Master of Engineering Thesis.
- Jeremy Brown and Ian Eslick (1996). “Implementing continuous, profile-based optimizations in SUIF”, The First SUIF Compiler Workshop, January 1996.
- Edward Tau, Ian Eslick, Derrick Chen, Jeremy Brown, and Andre DeHon (1995). “A First Generation DPGA Implementation”. In Proceedings of the Third Canadian Workshop on Field-Programmable Devices, pages 138-143, May 1995.
- Andre DeHon and Ian Eslick (1995, technical note), “Computational Quasistatics”, Transit Note #103, MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
- Andre DeHon, Jeremy Brown, Ian Eslick, Jake Harris, Lara Karbiner, and Thomas F. Knight, Jr. (1994), “Global Cooperative Computing”, Second International World-Wide Web Conference, October 1994.
- Jeremy Brown, Jake Harris, Lara Karbiner, Massimiliano Poletto, Andre DeHon, Ian Eslick, and Thomas F. Knight Jr (1994). “HyperCode”, Second International World Wide Web Conference, October 1994.
- Ian Eslick, Andre DeHon and Thomas F. Knight, Jr. (1994), MIT “Guaranteeing Idempotence for Tightly-Coupled, Fault-Tolerant Networks”, In Proceedings of the Parallel Computer Routing and Communications Workshop, 215-225, June 1994.
- Issued US Patents: 7,266,672, 7,249,351, 7,188,192, 7,032,103, 6,990,566, 6,751,722, 6,745,317, 6,675,289, 6,553,479, 6,526,498, 6,457,116, 6,122,719, 6,108,760, 5,915,123 and 5,742,180.
