People

Matthew McKeon

Research Developer

Matt joined the Visual Communication Lab in August, 2006. His interests include building usable platforms for social data analysis, designing tools to support network-enabled communities, and moving information off of the screen and into the world around us.

Matt graduated from Carnegie Mellon in 1998 with a BS in Computer Science and Creative Writing, specializing in graphics and media computation. He then joined a startup with two CMU researchers, MAYA Viz (now owned by General Dynamics), that built collaborative visualization systems. In his work as a developer, he created community analysis platforms for finance, health care, and military customers. His efforts included travel to Iraq in 2004 to study and support the use of such systems among military personnel in the field. Matt earned his master's degree in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech in 2006; his thesis project (with advisor Keith Edwards) was the development and study of ambient visualization of socially-relevant system activity in augmented conference rooms.

Matt is originally from Washington DC, and as such labors under the possibly mistaken perception that politics really matter. He is married to a Harvard sociologist who is in a completely different field; nevertheless, they are determined to someday coauthor a paper. He also enjoys biking, cooking, making art with electricity, and travel to places where he can neither speak the language nor read local signage.