The Nexus of 2024

My new bio-in-progress, 2.0

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by

jon
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It’s amusingly difficult for me to write professional biographies, especially for print publications. Not only do I have a hard time reducing my career to the paragraph you’re usually allowed, at some level it feels like it forces me to reify my identity. Nonetheless, it has to be done; right now, I’m on the hook for bios both for the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy program committee and an upcoming book chapter on computer science as a social science.

So here’s a stab at it … feedback, please!

Update, 3/27: revised substantially after great feedback. Original version in the comments. Thanks all!  Additional minor edits on 3/29.

Jon Pincus’ current professional projects include Tales from the Net (a book on social networks co-authored with Deborah Pierce), starting a strategy consulting practice, and blogging at Liminal States and elsewhere. Previous work includes leading the Ad Astra project as General Manger for Strategy Development in Microsoft’s Online Services Group; creating the static analysis tools PREfix and PREfast (now available in Visual Studio) at his startup Intrinsa and then at Microsoft Research; security planning with the Windows Security Push and XPSP2 task forces; and the National Academies/CSTB panel “Sufficient Evidence?” His primary research interests relate to recasting the field of computer science as a social science. In addition to the applications of this lens to security discussed here, other social science approaches embodied in Ad Astra and the earlier Project Fabulous include asset-based thinking, narratology, cognitive diversity, intersectionality, philosophy of technoscience, oppression theory, and hot pink beanbag chairs.

(Note: that’s the version for the computer security paper; the other one will have slight differences in the last sentence.)

Comments

5 responses to “My new bio-in-progress, 2.0”

  1. jon Avatar
    jon

    Ah, the wonders of the web: 7 min after I had posted, I already had two suggested improvements …

    Reply
  2. jon Avatar
    jon

    I got amazing feedback — via IM, email, and Facebook, which is interesting in its own right. So I’m about to rev it.

    Here’s the nearly-original version (incorporating two small-but-important changes from the first two pieces of feedback).

    Jon Pincus is an interdisciplinary consultant and researcher. After spending a decade working on computer-assisted design technologies and document management at UC Berkeley, GE Calma, EDA Systems, and Digital Equipment Corporation, he shifted his focus to software engineering and in 1995 was one of the founders of Intrinsa, creator of the breakthrough PREfix static analysis tool. At Microsoft Research, following their 1999 acquisition of PREfix, he was architect for PREfix and its followon PREfast (available since 2005 in Visual Studio), worked on the Sledgehammer task force planning Windows XP SP2, and focused increasingly on computer science as a social science. As General Manger for Strategy Development in Microsoft’s Online Services Group, he led the Ad Astra project (investigating game-changing strategies, innovation, and culture change, and incorporating approaches based in psychology, narratology, cognitive diversity, philosophy of technoscience, gender and communications, and oppression theory) before leaving in November 2007. He is currently starting a strategy consulting business, blogging at Liminal States and elsewhere, and working on Tales from the Net, a book about social networking co-authored with Deborah Pierce.

    Reply
  3. Kelly Ireland Avatar
    Kelly Ireland

    looks good!

    “blogging at Liminal States” needs a link so people can find it easily, in text you can include the link parenthetically.

    “His primary research interest is the implications” awkward, could be “interests are the implications of” or rewritten to avoid the problem.

    “include asset-based thinking, narratology, cognitive diversity, intersectionality, psychology, gender and communications, philosophy of technoscience, oppression theory, and hot pink beanbag chairs”

    remove psychology as a large non-specific term.
    try “gender-based communication styles” or something else to avoid the premature ‘and’

    Reply
  4. jon Avatar
    jon

    great feedback, Kelly, thanks much! i was having a hard time with “gender and communications” — i had been thinking about “gendered communication theory”, but didn’t want to repeat “theory”. good suggestions all around. i’ll make the edits.

    Reply
  5. jon Avatar
    jon

    Edited. I couldn’t ever come up with a good term for the intersections of gender and communication that I’m so interested in; it’s more than the different styles (blue/pink in Rona Lichtenberg’s terms) because it also takes into account the technologies and how they influence and advantage different styles and people. So I wound up taking it out of the list, which was kinda long anyhow.

    The version I posted on the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy wiki has a couple more links, and an informal introduction from me from the CFP blog.

    Thanks once again to everybody for all the great feedback!

    Reply

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