James Mickens

James W. Mickens is an American computer scientist and the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University.[1] His research focuses on distributed systems, such as large-scale services and ways to make them more secure.[2][3][4] He is critical of machine learning as a boilerplate solution to most outstanding computational problems.[5]

James Mickens
Mickens in 2020
Board member ofBerkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Academic background
Education
Academic work
DisciplineComputer science
Sub-disciplineCybersecurity, distributed computing
InstitutionsHarvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences

Early life and education

James Mickens was raised in Atlanta. His father is physicist and mathematician Ronald E. Mickens.[6][7]

Mickens earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001, as well as a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan in 2008.[8][7]

Career

Mickens worked as a member of the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research from 2009 through 2015.[9][10] He spent one semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) through the MLK Visiting Professors program becoming a professor at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2015, where he was awarded tenure in 2019.[8][10][9][11] In 2016, he was one of the researchers working on Polaris, a new system designed at MIT to decrease the loading time for webpages.[12]

In 2020, Mickens was appointed to the board of directors of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.[13] In 2021, he and Jonathan Zittrain began the Institute for Rebooting Social Media, a three-year-long BKC project to research and create new ideas to improve social media.[14]

Publications
  • Mickens, James W.; Noble, Brian D. (May 2006). EECS Department, University of Michigan. "Exploiting Availability Prediction in Distributed Systems". NSDI'06: Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Networked Systems Design & Implementation. Berkeley, California: USENIX Association. 3: 73–86 – via ACM Digital Library, Association for Computing Machinery.
  • Netravali, Ravi; Goyal, Ameesh; Mickens, James; Balakrishnan, Hari (March 2016). "Polaris: Faster Page Loads Using Fine-grained Dependency Tracking". NSDI'16: Proceedings of the 13th Usenix Conference on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. Berkeley, California: USENIX Association: 123–136. ISBN 978-1-931971-29-4 – via ACM Digital Library, Association for Computing Machinery.

References
  1. Dizikes, Peter (December 8, 2020). "Straight Talk about Race in Academia". MIT News, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Retrieved 2021-01-15. ...said James Mickens, the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard University.
  2. Clarke, Richard A.; Knake, Robert K. (2020-09-15). The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats. Penguin. pp. 43–45. ISBN 978-0-525-56198-9.
  3. Milano, Brett (October 7, 2020). "'We need to be more imaginative about cybersecurity than we are right now'". Harvard Law Today. Retrieved 2023-01-10.
  4. "Harvard's Jonathan Zittrain and James Mickens Discuss Cybersecurity". www.techpolicy.com. November 6, 2020. Retrieved 2021-01-15.
  5. Doctorow, Cory (August 20, 2018). "Here's the funniest, most scathing, most informative and most useful talk on AI and security". BoingBoing.net.
  6. Gibson, Lydialyle (2016-02-19). "James Mickens". Harvard Magazine. Retrieved 2021-01-15.
  7. "James Mickens and his father, Ronald Mickens, after James received his PhD in Computer Science Mickens Ronald G4". Ronald E. Mickens Collection, American Institute of Physics. 2016-03-07. Retrieved 2021-01-15.
  8. "James Mickens | Berkman Klein Center". cyber.harvard.edu. 2020-09-02. Retrieved 2021-02-22.
  9. "#BlackInTheIvory: Academia's Role in Institutional Racism". MLK Visiting Professors and Scholars Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
  10. "Harvard man gets tenure! "I want to thank all of the enemies that I had to destroy to achieve this great honor."". The Book Haven. Stanford University. November 2019. Retrieved 2021-01-15.
  11. Kohli, Sonali (January 20, 2015). "An MIT professor and Microsoft researcher's advice for black computer scientists". Quartz. Retrieved 2021-01-15.
  12. Wang, Shan (March 9, 2016). "MIT researchers have designed a system that decreases loading time for websites by 34 percent". Nieman Lab. Retrieved 2021-01-15.
  13. "Berkman Klein Center's Board of Directors Warmly Welcomes James Mickens | Berkman Klein Center". Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. September 25, 2020. Retrieved May 6, 2022.
  14. "Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society to launch a three-year multidisciplinary Institute to "reboot social media" | Berkman Klein Center". Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. July 21, 2021. Retrieved May 6, 2022.
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