Michael Hawley

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Previously at MIT’s Media Laboratory, Michael Hawley is an artist and researcher working in the field of digital media. He is the founder of several research programs and projects including MIT's GO Expeditions program, the cofounder of the Things That Think research program, and founder of the nonprofit organization Friendly Planet. His work has been featured in National Geographic, Time, the New York Times, and several major television networks. His work at MIT has, in his own words, “sought to creatively stretch digital infrastructures, embedding intelligence into all sorts of artifacts and advancing the web of communications.”

1 Biography
2 Notable works
3 Advisory and founding roles
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Biography

Hawley was born in November 1961 and grew up in a little suburb of New York. As a youngster he had a job at Bell Labs (Murray Hill, New Jersey), working in the linguistics department. He did his undergraduate work at Yale University in the areas of music and computer science; he went on to do his doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In the early 90's, while working at NeXT, he was key in the development of the world's first digital library, creating digital versions of Shakespeare and other classics. From 1993-2002, he was on the faculty at MIT as the Dreyfoos chair, and from there he became Director of Special Projects at MIT's Media Laboratory. His work and research have spanned the topics of psychology, computer music, digital video editing, human-computer interfaces, documentary photography, and more. Hawley is also an amateur pianist; he won the Van Cliburn Competition for Outstanding Amateurs in 2002. Notably, his competition pieces included his own piano arrangement of Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. He also accompanied cellist Yo-Yo Ma in performing the wedding march at the marriage of TV host and scientist Bill Nye and Blair Tindell at Richard Saul Wurman’s 2006 The Entertainment Gathering convention.