Name: Jonathan Schull
Title: Faculty
URL: http://it.rit.edu/~jis/
Blog:http://jonschull.blogspot.com
Most Mesmerizing Social Computing project:MultiChat
Blurb: Jonathan Schull received a BS in psychology from Reed College in1975, and a Ph.D. in Biological Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980. He taught at Haverford College until 1992, when he gave up tenure, wrote some seminal patents on digital rights management, and founded an internet-based digital commerce company called SoftLock Services, aka DigitalGoods. The company peaked during "The Great E-book boom of March 2000" when Steven King published his e-novella Riding the Bullet, at which time the company numbered 75 employees, received 25 million dollars in investment, and was listed on NASDAQ. Two years later, the "internet bubble" burst and the company closed its doors and sold its patents to a major media company, for whom Schull now consults. In 2003, Schull joined the faculty in Information Technology at RIT where he teaches Interface Design.
Throughout this period Schull has been concerned with the co-evolution of biological and informational social ecologies. Past research efforts have concerned metacognition in human, animal, and artificial systems, the application of evolutionary theory to the design of digital rights management systems, and authorship of the Open Ebook Forum's ontology document "Framework for an E-publishing Ecology". His current research has to do with self- organizing computer networks, and communication systems that augment human abilities, with special attention to deafness and information visualization.
