Pattie Maes and the foundations of social networks

Maybe it's just my bubble, yet I would not consider her a "hidden" hero ... She's a celebrity in the research areas of Human Computer Interaction and Augmented Humans. She's a Prof at MIT with an impressive research career. https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=r81Ss1cAAAAJ&hl=en...

Yes, she's not as famous as a Mark Zuckerberg, yet for me definitely not a hidden hero.

I love Pattie's work, nice to see it mentioned on Hackernews. Looking forward to a Dagstuhl Seminar we hopefully will co-organize: https://www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=224...

> WHY HAVE HER CONTRIBUTIONS BEEN NEGLECTED?

Because she hasn’t built a social network and I doubt anyone building social networks is familiar with her work.

She also worked on reflection in programming languages. Also, her work (with her students) on "interface agents", i.e. programs that learn what to do by observing and imitating the user, was the inspiration for my own PhD thesis way back when (I took her idea and tried to adapt it to network supervision). They used some kind of k-nearest neighbor algorithm (machine learning wasn't as sophisticated as it is these days!) then added a social dimension by having agents help each other. Lots of cool stuff came out of MIT Medialab back then.

I love her work. I was first aware of her stuff near Rodney Brooks, then her paper (MIT AI Memo-1180) "How To Do The Right Thing" really blew me away. Her "agents" papers really twisted (in a good way) my reasoning.

Later, through her work, I came across Luc Steels' work (I always liked the 'Introduction' part of his papers).

Really, Pattie Maes always seemed under-rated to me. Bummer. Such a great mind!

> We had all these marriages that came out of Firefly actually, because people were so excited to find other people that were into the same obscure stuff.

Her PhD work on reflection and Smalltalk is one of the most insightful papers I have read.

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy