Luis Sarmenta is a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, leading research projects under the Living Labs program, the Center for Future Banking, and the Next Billion Network. Originally from the Philippines, he has personally experienced the revolutionary impact that mobile phones, and thus deeply believes in the enormous life-changing potential of mobile phone applications — in both developing and developed countries. In 2003, while Chair of the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science at Ateneo de Manila University, he founded and directed an R&D center within the University that worked with the largest mobile operator in the Philippines to produce 30 commercially released mobile phone applications and services with tens of thousands of users in its first two years. He then co-founded a for-profit corporation as a spin-off from this center. He returned to MIT as a Research Scientist at CSAIL in 2005, and then joined the Media Lab in 2008 after co-founding a course on ICT for Development, which has now become NextLab, the course component of the Next Billion Network initiative. Last Fall (2008), he co-taught NextLab, and another course on mobile applications, “6.087: Building Mobile Applications.” At present, he is continuing to be the lead director and advisor for the technology aspects of NextLab, and also continuing to advise and collaborate on several other mobile computing projects, including projects with Prof. Alex (Sandy) Pentland on human dynamics. This Spring (2009) he is also starting a research project on the theme of “personal collective intelligence”, i.e., collective intelligence emerging from personal applications.

Luis received his PhD in EECS from MIT in 2001, and has done research and consulting work in a variety of topics aside from mobile computing, including volunteer computing, grid/cloud computing, computer security, medical computing, educational computing, and others. He has received a number of international awards, including the ASEAN Young Scientists and Technologists Award in 2005.

Curriculum Vitae (Highlights)

• Publications

• Awards

Current Projects

• Project MEUS: Personal Collective Intelligence

• The Next Billion Network and NextLab: mobile technologies for the "next billion" newly connected people worldwide

  • So far, has produced over 15 projects in over 10 countries, including Moca mobile diagnostics, and NFC Interactive Alerts.

• Mobile Applications (6.087, MIT IAP mobile competition, and others)

Selected Other Projects

• Medi-SIM: Medical Tools and Applications using SIM cards

• Trusted Computing, under the MIT-Quanta T-Party Project

• MedGrid: Medical Grid Computing

• Lectix and EVES Lecture Viewing Systems (video)

• Bayanihan Computing: Volunteer and Grid Computing
  (including Ph.D. thesis, and award-winning subsequent work)

• VIR-X Plus anti-virus (1988-1993)

Last updated: April 2009