One of the things I love about where I live is that there is constant opportunity to learn interesting new things. My town has several universities that pull in interesting lecturers on a variety of topics, as well as an engaged and intellectually generous business culture.

Last week I had the opportunity to hear Sep Kamvar, director of the social computing group at MIT’s Media Lab, speak at seminar hosted by the University of Vermont’s Complex Systems Center.

Kamvar discussed a number of topics, including Dog-Lang, a computer language he is creating that assumes programs will be social, require connecting to a wide variety of APIs, and utilize asynchronous state management. He also provided some insight into the guts of Google’s personalized search ranking algorithm, which he helped create while at Stanford. Unless you love linear algebra as much as I do, this discussion would make your eyes glaze over.

The topic Kamvar approached that I want to dig into today is data and humanness.