He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in cognitive psychology and did his undergraduate work at Princeton University in psychology and computer science. His research focuses on understanding and augmenting how humans make sense of large amounts of information. At the group level he studies the dynamics of social collaborative systems such as Wikipedia and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and how visualization and machine learning tools can increase their effectiveness. At the individual level, his research interests center on human information processing in categorization and memory. His research employs multiple complementary techniques, including empirical experiments, statistical and computational modeling, visualization, data mining, and machine learning.