Andrew Sabisch was a Dance major at the University of California, Irvine for the first two years of his undergraduate studies (Fall 2003 until Winter 2005), and an Information and Computer Sciences major for the second two years (Spring 2005 until graduation at the end of Spring 2007). He had been taking computer science courses since high school and had been tremendously interested in programming since the young age of 14. While a young teenager, he wrote several small programs in his spare time and built a great intuition for programming at an early age. This made the transition from a Dance to an ICS major much smoother and much less of a shock during his undergraduate studies.
Perhaps most importantly, during his junior year, Bill Tomlinson showed up in his classroom to recruit students for his research group, the Social Code Group. Bill's pitch piqued Andrew's interest greatly, so after applying for a position, Bill accepted Andrew into the group. They went on to work on several projects, including FoG (a successor to The EcoRaft Project) and MDSE: Multi-Device Software Engineering (the topic of Andrew's undergraduate thesis).
After receiving his degree from UCI, Andrew started as a graduate student at MIT. While there, he received both Masters and Doctoral degrees at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. For his doctoral dissertation, he investigated interactive conversational techniques on a smart whiteboard involving bi-directional speaking and drawing. His Master's work entailed designing and creating the user interface to an autonomous robotic forklift. Echos of many of the ideas and interface elements in his masters work can be seen in modern autonomous vehicle interfaces, including at Waymo and Tesla. To read more about these projects, check out the Projects page.
During Andrew's tenure at MIT, he was advised by Randall Davis. As any of his students will be quick to tell you, Randy is a great adviser. His insights into research, its community, and publications were invaluable to Andrew as he navigated through academia and his career. Randy is also a gifted teacher. Andrew had the pleasure of sitting in on several of Randy's lectures, and can attest to Randy's ability to make complex topics accessible to students. Randy is also a generous mentor, and Andrew has benefited greatly from Randy's advice and guidance over the years. Andrew is grateful to Randy for his support and advice, and is proud to count Randy among his mentors.
After finishing his education, Andrew began work at a San Francisco startup, Twice Clothes, that was purchased by eBay. During his time at eBay, he worked as system, infrastructure, and A.I. engineers, working on several parts of several projects. After eBay, he worked at another startup, Silo, for one year before founding his own startup, Vassar AI along with fellow MIT alumn and close friend, Ali Mohammad. If you could benefit from any artificial intelligence or systems work, please don't hesitate to reach out!