A nice picture of Ken Haase

I grew up in the future, surrounded by a real explosion of scientific knowledge and the thoughtful evocations of science fiction. I came to expect a world where our deepening scientific understanding distilled mystery into awe (with a fraction of mystery left behind) and where that understanding offered a power tempered with wisdom. Fueled by visionary writers and an age of technological exploration (of space, earth, and sea), my childhood universe was a planet and cosmos open for exploration and a global (at the least!) culture where technology, hitched to compassion, transformed the human condition, freeing bodies, minds, and hearts to continually shape a better world.

Ever since I grew up, I've been trying to return home to that future, finding traction through understanding, imagination, and invention.

As a technologist, I've tried to make tools which amplify and connect human minds; as a scientist, I've tried to understand the way that representations or models -- as a natural phenomenon -- connect minds (of many sorts) to the world; as a faithful skeptic, I've tried to understand how we understand God, and how trying to understand God can make us smarter, kinder, and wiser; as a mentor and "manager", I've tried to enable and amplify the genius of others; and as a human being, I've tried to listen, care, and continually learn.

My current top projects are: creating a large knowledge base to enable automatic understanding and inference; a social tagging site which leverages that knowledge base to create sustainable social metadata; refining and proselytizing a very broad model of representation which grew out of my PhD thesis; and helping a Boston-based startup, clearmethods, invent and deploy a language which painlessly makes many more people into programmers.