One of my favorite movies growing up was Disney Channel’s Smart House. Pat, the Smart House AI, could play the best music, make you a better dancer, and even kick out the bully when he started causing trouble at the party she organized for the kids without them even asking!

Today’s voice activated “assistants” like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa have been on the market for years now, but still seem to fall short of capturing the imagination like the voice-activated assistants inhabiting cultural masterpieces like Smart House and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Serving more as voice-controlled UI translators, today’s assistants match trigger words and phrases to fairly specific actions. Sometimes machine learning helps make these queries more flexible, but in the end we’re still asking a device to complete an action.

I’ve lived in Boston almost my entire life. I was born in the city, went to public school in my hometown and then studied at Tufts University in Medford/Somerville, only 15 miles from home (perfectly in line with data from the NYTimes).

I’d entertained the thought of moving away to live somewhere new, but it’s never been a major priority. During college I struggled with this feeling of loving my home and my city, but also wondering if maybe I was missing out by not being somewhere new. Objectively Boston is a great place, a city where thousands of people come to study, many of whom stay after graduating. But there was always a question hanging in the air – is it really this great or is it just because it’s what I know?

My shoe shining kit just arrived from Amazon. Until this afternoon I had never shined a pair of shoes in my life. I’ve worn plenty of shoes, but shining them never seemed like something that was worth the time or effort. Sure, shoes look nice when they’re bright and shiny, but they just end up … →

I always feel a little lost during the first few weeks back on campus after break. There’s that thing called homework that I’d tried to forget about and the strange transformation in my schedule that fills up all my free time with poorly timed blocks of class. But while all this is par for the … →

With Apple’s launch of the iPhone 4S last month, the paradigm of human-computer interaction saw what will become the largest shift since the original iPhone brought capacitive touch screens to the masses. In a single decade we have gone from typing on a set of static keys on a phone, to interacting with an adaptive … →

This past summer the Gordon Institute at Tufts sponsored my internship with 1Minute40Seconds, a startup founded by alum Blade Kotelly and based in Cambridge. Three of the recipients were interviewed to highlight their experiences. For me, working at a startup, applying the skills I’ve acquired throughout my life, and embedding myself in the entrepreneurial scene … →

Most places won’t serve this to you for a few very good reasons,” Will said to me as he delicately placed a raw egg yolk into a small shooter glass on the bar before me, sliding it along a spoon into the awaiting layered liqueurs. As instructed, I sipped on the egg whites and bitters … →

This week I’m starting a new category called “Lesson Learned” to catalogue some of the important and probably obvious lessons I’ve learned recently and throughout my life. While I hope that some people might benefit from these posts, their true intent is to create a mental backup for me in case I forget them! Back … →