Assaf Biderman

Assaf Biderman is a technology inventor, author, and entrepreneur. He is the founder and CEO of Superpedestrian, Inc., and the Associate Director and founding member of the MIT Senseable City Lab.
== Early career ==
Biderman obtained his undergraduate degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He joined the MIT Media Lab in 2002, where he collaborated with Professor Hiroshi Ishii (computer scientist)|Hiroshi Ishii in the Tangible Media Group to develop projects such as SandScape, a tangible interface that uses sand to design and understand landscapes through a variety of computational simulations.
== MIT Senseable City Lab ==
In 2004, Biderman and Carlo Ratti founded the MIT Senseable City Lab - a research lab dedicated to studying smart cities. In 2009, Biderman and Ratti co-invented the Copenhagen Wheel, which Biderman later spun-off into a company, Superpedestrian. Biderman remains the Associate Director of the MIT Senseable City Lab.
== Superpedestrian ==
Biderman founded Superpedestrian, Inc. in 2012 to commercialize the Copenhagen Wheel. The Copenhagen Wheel is a self-contained rear wheel electric bicycle system which transforms a traditional bicycle into a hybrid e-bike. In 2020, the company debuted its LINK shared e-scooter, which is now deployed in 41 cities worldwide.
== Scientific contributions and writing ==
Biderman has authored many publications, including an article in Scientific American titled "How Driverless Cars Will Transform Cities" co-authored with Carlo Ratti, , which investigated the ways in which sensor-laden vehicles and smart intersections will transform urban mobility. Biderman also authored "Quantifying urban attractiveness from the distribution and density of digital footprints" for The International Journal of Spatial Data Infrastructures Research, , which explores the capacity to quantify the evolution of the attractiveness of urban spaces through the study of aggregated digital footprints. 
In a seminal paper, "Taxi-Aware Map: Identifying and Predicting Vacant Taxis in the City", Biderman presents a predictive model for the number of vacant taxis in a given area based on time and weather factors. The model uses an inference engine which is based on the Bayesian classifier. The paper was co-written with Santi Phithakkitnukoon, Marco Veloso, Carlos Bento, and Carlo Ratti for the International Joint Conference on Ambient Intelligence. 
Biderman has also written for the IBM Journal of Research and Development, investigating the waste-removal chain through pervasive computing. The paper was co-written with A. Boustani; L. Girod; D. Offenhuber; R. Britter; M. I. Wolf; D. Lee; S. Miles; and C. Ratti and explores how new pervasive sensor technologies can be used to transform and understand cities.
== Exhibitions ==
Biderman is an exhibited artist, with works Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects and Design and the Elastic Mind appearing at Museum of Modern Art|The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also worked on the MIT Real Time Rome project, which debuted at Venice Biennale in 2016
== Patents ==
Biderman has been granted several Utility and Design patents in the United States, as well as internationally in Canada, Japan, and Europe, most notably relating to vehicle controls for the Copenhagen Wheel. For example, Biderman holds the patents for Single speed motorized wheel hub, and User interface for an electrically motorized vehicle, both foundational to the micromobility devices. 
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Category:Entrepreneurs