Sepandar Kamvar

Sepandar Kamvar is a computer scientist, entrepreneur, and the founder of the company cLabs and its platform Celo. He is also an artist. Kamvar has contributed much information to the technical field, especially in the field of personalized searches.

Kamvar earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry at Princeton University in 1999. In 2004, he earned a PhD in scientific computing and computational mathematics from Stanford University.

In June 2003 Kamvar founded Kaltix, a company that created technology for personalized web search results. He was also the company's CEO until September of the same year, when Google acquired the company. Kamvar then joined Google to be on the company team, and was in charge of the personalization efforts of the search engine until 2007.

In December 2011, Kamvar was appointed an associate professor in media arts and sciences at MIT School of Architecture and Planning, beginning January 1, 2012.

cLabs is the company behind Celo, a mobile-first cryptocurrency platform. The company was co-founded in 2017 by Kamvar, Rene Reinsberg, and Marek Olszewski. Celo makes cryptocurrency payments and financial dApps available to any mobile phone user.

Kamvar and Salman Ahmad co-founded Mosaic, a technology centered homebuilding company, in 2017.

While attending Stanford, Kamvar was a part of the Stanford Personalized PageRank Project, in which he developed tools that later helped render it possible to compute advanced personalized PageRank. Its algorithm used web linkage structures to calculate what it called "global importance scores," which influence how search results are ranked. This project did not develop the feature in its entirety, but began the structure of its basic algorithms with the goal of scalable and personalized search results.

Kamvar has also performed work in peer-to-peer networking. In 2003, he published a paper titled The EigenTrust Algorithm for Reputation Management in P2P Networks, about a reputation mechanism that computes the level of trust for individuals in peer-to-peer networks so that more reliable and trustworthy sources can be given higher rankings in search results. It has become a highly referenced paper in the social computing field.

Kamvar created a simplified programming language called Dog in 2012, due to his dislike and frustration of existing languages like Java, which he called "unnecessarily complicated."

In 2005, Kamvar began developing the project We Feel Fine with Jonathan Harris. We Feel Fine is an interactive website that analyzes and collects user web posts that contain emotions based on emotive words and phrases such as "I feel." In 2009, Kamvar and Harris took findings from the site and created a book titled We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion.

Harris and Kamvar also developed an interactive art installation titled I Want You to Want Me. The project used text from user profiles on various dating websites, pulled and analyzed in the same manner as We Feel Fine. The analyzed and chosen texts were displayed on virtual thought bubbles coming from blue and pink balloons on an interactive electronic screen. It was commissioned by New York's MoMA and installed on February 14, 2008.

Kamvar is the author of three books: Numerical Algorithms for Personalized Search in Self-Organizing Information Networks (2010), Syntax & Sage: Reflections on Software and Nature (2015), and We Feel Fine: An Almanac of Human Emotion (2009).