James Mickens | |
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Board member of | Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society |
Academic background | |
Education |
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Academic work | |
Discipline | Computer science |
Sub-discipline | Cybersecurity, distributed computing |
Institutions | Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences |
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 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]
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]