EDUCATION

• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

6/96 - 3/00
Ph.D. Degree  - Media Laboratory
• Research Assistant, Software Agents and Machine Understanding Groups.
• Primary research activities: social agents, information agents, text analysis, evolution in natural language, language change, analysis of Internet communities, technologies

for social and economic development.
• Thesis advisor: Prof. Pattie Maes. Thesis title: Microevolutionary Language Theory
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology

9/94 - 6/96
Master of Science Degree - Media Laboratory
• Thesis title: An Ecology of the Net: Message Morphology and Evolution in NetNews
• Cumulative GPA: 4.0/4.0
• University of California, Los Angeles

10/84 - 6/89
Bachelor of Science Degree - Computer Science and Engineering
• Course work includes: Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Data Structures, Operating Systems, Computer System Architecture, On-Line Systems, Computational Theory, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing.

• European Media Laboratory, Heidelberg Germany

6/97 - 12/97
Visiting Scholar
• Santa Fe Institute

Summer 1995
Complex Systems Summer School Student

• Research Scientist

3/00 - present
MIT Media Laboratory
• A research faculty position. Responsibilities include advising students, teaching classes, developing and sustaining sponsor relationships, and conducting original research.
• Primary research in technologies for international social and economic development, in particular e-commerce and communication systems. Ongoing research in microevolutionary models of human natural language.

 
• Research Fellow

1/00 - present
Center for International Development at Harvard University
• Conduct policy, strategy, and technical research in information and communication technologies for social and economic development.

 
• Consulting Research Engineer

9/96 - 9/97
Open Software Foundation Research Institute
• Architect and implement kernel PC sampling for new object oriented micro-kernel operating system.

• Software Engineer

6/92 - 6/94
Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA
• Chief architect of node-based IO and Unix services for the CM-5 supercomputer message passing library. Considerable work on optimal routes for co-operative I/O operations.
• Architecture and simulation of future filesystem, I/O, and network designs.
• Research on parallel I/O workloads.
• Port of large commercial relational database and development of distributed lock manager.
• Applications Engineer

8/89 - 6/92
Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA
• Development within compiler group of C* communication runtime library.
• Principal support engineer for C*, Connection Machine data parallel C language.

• Principal Programmer

6/86-9/87
Office of Computer and Communication Resources, The California State University
• Design and implement a major communications package on DOS based platform; system responsible for administration, reporting, and security of digital port selectors at all campuses of the California State University.
• Supervise installation and integration of system on a variety of networks throughout California.
• Congressional Intern

Summer 1984
U.S. House of Representatives, Washington D.C.
• Primary responsibilities were constituent letters, case work, and legislative research.
• Staff Programmer

6/83-6/84
The California State University Coordination Center for Computer Assisted Instruction
• Team programmed educational courseware on Apple microcomputers for marketing at the university level nationwide.

M.L. Best. Adaptive Value Within Natural Language Discourse. To appear Evolution of Communication Journal.

M.L. Best. How culture can guide evolution: An inquiry into gene/meme enhancement and opposition. Journal of Adaptive Behavior, 7(3), 281-298, 1999.

M.L. Best & R. Pocklington. Meaning as use: Transmission fidelity and evolution in NetNews. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 196(3), 389-395, 1999.

M.L. Best. Memes on memes: A critique of memetic models. Journal of Memetics, 2(1), 1998.

M.L. Best. Corporal ecologies and population fitness on the net. Journal of Artificial Life, 3(4), 1998.

M.L. Best. Models for interacting populations of memes. Journal of Memetics, 1(2), 1997.

R. Pocklington & M.L. Best. Cultural evolution and units of selection in replicating text. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 188(1), 1997.

 N. Nieuwejaar, D. Kotz, A. Purakayastha, C.S. Ellis & M.L. Best. File-access characteristics of parallel scientific workloads. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Processing, 7(10), 1996.
 

M.L. Best. Coevolving mutualists guide simulated evolution. In M.A. Bedau, J.S. McCaskill, N.H. Packard & S. Rasmussen  (Eds.), Artificial Life VII: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 2000.

M.U. Bers & M.L. Best. Rural connected communitites: A project in online collaborative journalism. In C Hoadley & J. Roschelle (Eds.), Computer Support for Collaborative Learning (CSCL'99) (pp. 41-47). 1999.

M.L. Best.   Coevolving mutualists guide simulated evolution. In W. Banzhaf, J. Daida, A.E. Eiben, M.H. Garzon, V. Honavar, M. Jakiela & R.E. Smith (Eds.) Proceedings of the genetic and evolutionary computation conference (p. 941). San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers. 1999.

M.L. Best. Memes and genetic opposition. In Proceedings of the 15th International Congress on Cybernetics (Association Internat. de Cybernetique, Namur), 1998.

M.L. Best. Models for interacting populations of memes: Competition and niche behavior. In Proceedings of the Fourth European Conference on Artificial Life, 1997.

M. L. Best. CHARISMA: A smart look at parallel file access patterns. In Proceedings of the Fifth Annual MIT Student Workshop on Scalable Computing, 1995.

A. Purakayastha, C. Ellis, D. Kotz, N. Nieuwejaar & M.L. Best. Characterizing parallel file-access patterns on a large-scale multiprocessor. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Parallel Processing Symposium, 1995.

M.L. Best, A. Greenberg, C. Stanfill & L.W. Tucker. CMMD I/O: A parallel Unix I/O. In IEEE Seventh International Parallel Processing Symposium, 1993.

J.L. Frankel, M.L. Best, et.al. System for compiling parallel communications instructions including their embedded data transfer information. United States Patent Number 5,335,491, 1994.

 Genes, individual learning, and social learning. Napoli Social Learning Conference, Napoli, Italy, 1998.

Models for interacting populations of memes: Competition and niche behavior. MIT AI Lab, 1997.

Models for interacting populations of memes: Competition and niche behavior. Stanford University, Department of Anthropology Seminar, 1997.

Universal Darwinism. European Media Lab, Heidelberg, Germany, 1997.

Agents and evolution. University of Aarhus, Department of Computer Science, 1997.

Life on the internet: The corporal ecology. University of Warwick, Computer Science Department Seminar, 1996.

Life on the internet: The corporal ecology. University of Sussex, COGS Allergic Seminar, 1996.

Corporal ecologies and population fitness on the net. Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology Labs, 1996.

Association for Computing Machinery

IEEE and IEEE Computer Society