James W. Mickens is an American computer scientist and the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. [1] His research focuses on distributed systems,such as large-scale services and ways to make them more secure. [2] [3] [4] He is critical of machine learning as a boilerplate solution to most outstanding computational problems. [5]
James Mickens was raised in Atlanta. His father is physicist and mathematician Ronald E. Mickens. [6] [7]
Mickens earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2001,as well as a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Michigan in 2008. [8] [7]
Mickens worked as a member of the Distributed Systems group at Microsoft Research from 2009 through 2015. [9] [10] He spent one semester at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) through the MLK Visiting Professors program becoming a professor at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in 2015,where he was awarded tenure in 2019. [8] [10] [9] [11] In 2016,he was one of the researchers working on Polaris,a new system designed at MIT to decrease the loading time for webpages. [12]
In 2020,Mickens was appointed to the board of directors of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet &Society at Harvard University. [13] In 2021,he and Jonathan Zittrain began the Institute for Rebooting Social Media,a three-year-long BKC project to research and create new ideas to improve social media. [14]