Mark Bao
mark+fwaofjowiaz@ax0xiz0amarkbao.com
San Francisco, CA

I’m primarily motivated by two problems:

  • How can we apply machine learning to help scientists do research better?
  • How can we better understand how people think about goals and incentives, and use that to help people improve their lives?

I left college at 19, started a technology company in New York, and then went on a round-the-world trip. Afterwards, I graduated summa cum laude from Columbia University in 2017 in Computer Science concentrating in Intelligent Systems.

At Columbia, I worked as a research assistant in David Blei’s lab working on machine learning tools to improve scientific literature search, and previously at the Center for Decision Sciences working on research tools for experiments on decision-making.

Currently, I live in San Francisco, working on personal projects and doing design, engineering, and product as the co-founder and CTO of Goody.

Feel free to contact me if you have any common interests, wish to reply to an article, or just want to chat.

Current interests

  • The intersection of behavioral science and system dynamics
  • Incentive structures and mismatched incentives
  • Expectation framing: anchoring judgments of outcomes to expectations
  • Knowledge management systems for organizing personal knowledge
  • Artificial intelligence in general; machine learning for improving science and literature search

Three Inflection Points

One — I got my kicks in computer programming in elementary school, and since then I’ve been developing, designing, and creating products.

Two — My fascination with thinking and cognition turned into a devotion to advancing the understanding of behavior and its expression in complex systems.

Three — Early idealism sustained by a round-the-world trip compelled me to work on important and fundamental problems, using behavioral science, technology, and machine learning.