My name is Dawei Shen ( 沈大嵬 in simplified Chinese characters). I am a Ph.D. student and a research assistant in the Viral Spaces group at MIT Media Lab. My supervisor is Dr. Andrew Lippman. I was also co-supervised by Dr. David P. Reed while he was an adjunct professor here. I have wide research interests. Currently, I strive to design a complete and robust framework for information markets. I am designing and developing Barter, a market-incented wisdom exchange in collaboration with Prof. Marshall Van Alstyne. In 2010, I co-founded the media lab China initiative with other Chinese students.

Contact

The best way to contact me is to e-mail

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My office is E14-464H in the media lab building.

Education

I obtained my bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. I subsequently earned master's degrees in High Performance Computation (HPCES) and Electrical Engineering from Singapore MIT Alliance (SMA) program and University of Notre Dame respectively. I joined the MIT Media Lab in 2006, and unfortunately, I was required to complete my 3rd master's degree, M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences (MAS), before I could move on to the Ph.D. program.

I received rigorous training in numerical simulation and optimization while I was studying in the SMA program. I completed my master's thesis in Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), Singapore, working on modeling and optimization of UWB antennas. At Notre Dame, I was with Prof. J. Nicholas Laneman's research group. My research then was focused on software-defined radio.

Trivia

I was born in Harbin, the capital and largest city of Heilongjiang Province in China. Harbin is nicknamed the "Ice City" with a temperature often below -20°C during winter time, which makes Boston appear like a warm place. I deeply love my hometown though it's imperfect ... Want to know where it is?

Volleyball is my favorite sport. I captained the departmental volleyball team of Tsinghua EE in my senior year. I also played in the MIT IVC club before I was "devastated" by my MIT workload. I still organize regular volleyball practice and games among Chinese students in the Boston area. Contact me if you want to join.

The media lab has a cool mysterious ping-pong table in the open space on the 3rd floor. You can find me there when I escape from work and need some workout.

About this site

Eddie Cao, my college classmate and one of my best friends, helped me design this page. Many thanks to him.

I enjoy experimenting with new web design technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, etc. For instance, this site utilizes Google Fonts API to render texts.