Jonathan Robinson Lander College, USA

Jonathan Robinson has been creating software since he was 12 and started his first software company with a few high school friends at age 15. He continued to develop his software skills and apply his expertise to more complex problems as he completed his BA at Queens College, and his MS and PhD with a dissertation in the field of robotic vision and digital curve fitting while at the City University of New York. Jonathan conceived of using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk for participants before there was public academic discussion of its application to research. He designed and implemented the core CloudResearch.com (previously TurkPrime) system together with his coauthor, Leib Litman. CloudResearch was the first cloud-based participant management system that successfully adapted Mechanical Turk for research by designing the features researchers need and managing the complexity that may get in the way of collecting high-quality data.

Jonathan is the co-CEO and chief technology officer of CloudResearch. He is also currently an associate professor and chair of computer science at Lander College, a division of Touro College. In that capacity, he mentors, inspires, and educates the next generation of software engineers and introduces them to his passion for melding cutting-edge technologies with solving real-world problems in the areas of academic and corporate research, digital image computation, approximation, and web application engineering.