[bobosha]

Our time there overlapped—I was a student of TimBL from 2004 to 2006, researching the Semantic Web initiative. CSAIL was, and still is, a truly magical place. I had the privilege of working alongside some of the greatest minds of our time: David Karger, Manolis Kellis, Regina Barzilay, et al an incredible assembly of brilliance.

[losvedir]

I was there around that time, too, as an undergrad doing a UROP with Karger. It was truly a wonderful time.

That said, my favorite memory of the time is a little more low brow. One time I was waiting outside one of the single occupancy bathrooms in CSAIL for my turn to do my business. After a minute, who should come out but Tim Berners Lee himself. We carefully avoided looking at each other, as one does in this situation, and I went in and sat down.

The seat was warm! I remember sitting there grinning like an idiot thinking that my cheeks were being comforted by the residual heat of those of the creator of the world wide web.

Ah, MIT, what a magical place.

[qzw]

In a similar low brow vein, I once took a wizz next to RMS in the old LCS building. When we were washing hands he tried to talk me into contributing to OpenJDK because we had previously talk a bit about a Java project I was working on for my UROP.

Karger's Randomized Algorithms class remains the only class I ever dropped at MIT. Still have PTSD from the psets for that class. Although I might have made it if it weren't for the fact that I was taking Compilers that semester, and 2 out of the 4 people in my group dropped the class. So my friend Dave and I basically had to do double the work for the final compiler implementation project.

[Tetraslam]

Huh. I suppose I should see if I can join Manolis Kellis' lab; I got invited to one of the salons he hosts at his house on the quantum basis of reality and it was really fun! He also demoed a tool his lab is building for genomics knowledge graphing, and I was struck by how incredibly well-designed and empirical the whole project was.