In high school, I was awarded the Frank Hawkins Kenan Medal which is given to “a member of the senior class who demonstrates leadership and outstanding achievement in academics, athletics and the fine arts.” Ever since I can remember, I’ve had an uncontainable range of interests and always been very hesitant to sacrifice any of these interdisciplinary passions.

I knew going into my undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that I wanted to continue growing in all the different areas I cared about. This is why I decided to double major in computer science and philosophy, while also pursuing a minor in music and playing cello in the UNC Symphony Orchestra. When I left UNC, I had a plan: I wanted to work in tech for a few years to gain that experience, learn as much as I could, and stabilize that as a career option to potentially come back to. But, after a few years, I would branch out and continue exploring my other passions, namely in philosophy, social impact, and music. I didn’t know what that second phase would be, but I knew that I wouldn’t be satisfied with a life that was spent working in tech without pursuing these other paths that I had dreamed about since high school.

After UNC, I worked at IBM for a year in Austin, Texas. Ironically, this was a place where probably my passion for music grew more than my passion for tech. I enjoyed working at IBM, but it’s also where I first grew to love country western music and gain more ideas about the kinds of music I could make. For my career, I felt that at IBM I was not learning and growing as quickly as I wanted to, so I began looking for new opportunities after about 9 months there. This is when an old friend reached out saying they were looking for an engineer to join them at their startup in San Francisco.

When I moved to Hive AI in 2014, I was the third full time employee. During my time at Hive, I helped to grow the company from six employees to over 150. I transitioned from being a lead engineer to a manager of multiple cross-disciplinary teams spanning engineers, designers, and product managers. I learned an immense amount about how to manage teams in stressful environments, how to balance the need to move quickly with the goal of creating an enjoyable and healthy work environment. With the confidence of the founders, I was able to explore unique product ideas and grow my skills as a leader.

Despite this accelerated learning at Hive, after about four years there I began thinking about what was next. I still had my goal to exercise my other creative, philosophical, and impact-oriented passions, and the all-encompassing work of being at a start-up was not allowing me to pursue these alongside my professional work. It took me another two years to finally go part-time, partially because I needed that time to discover how I wanted to work towards those other goals, and partially because I needed to save up the money to exercise my equity with the company. The financial dream always was that if I could stop worrying about money one day (or at least worry less), I could focus 100% on the uniquely good work that I could do in all the different areas of my life.

As I prepared to go part-time at Hive, I re-examined what it was I loved about philosophy and what kind of impact I wanted to have with the rest of my career. I decided I need to do more experiments with my life. In 2020, I went part-time and worked on election canvassing in North Carolina and Georgia, looking for the highest-impact way to turn-out marginal voters in important districts for the election and the senate run-off. It was during these years that I also discovered how much I loved cities, and how much unrealized potential we have in so many of our urban environments. That is why I joined the durham bicycle and pedestrian advisory commission and was elected as chair in 2023. I wanted to see what local government could do to improve our built environment, and learn more about how these systems operate and how they might be improved.

It was these experiences that led me to MIT where I know am pursuing an MS in system design and management, and an MS in urban studies and planning.

This has been mostly a narrative of how I got to where I am today, but let describe a bit of how I think about the span of things I care about.

A few years ago, I began organizing my projects and ideas on a “ triangle of ends”. The three corners of this triangle are

I tend to move around this triangle, and whenever I spend too long on a project that is focused on only corner, I begin to crave work in the other areas. I have also organized my 12 favorite problems roughly into these three categories, though I do see them more as spectra than as discrete categories.

I will briefly go over some of the ideas and projects that I have felt most passionate about over the last few years.

friendly utilitarianism. I appreciate how Open Philanthropy and other impact-optimizing organizations think about these the variables of importance, neglectedness, and tractability to determine where they should focus resources for greatest marginal impact. How can we use utilitarian and consequentialist thinking to improve the way our institutions operate? Relatedly, how can I think about the way I proceed with my own work in this way? This thinking has led me to one of the core questions I try to ask about my work: can anyone else do what you do better than you?

joyful environments. I believe there is a type of joy that is unlocked in immersive, well-designed environments that is under-valued and under-realized. Often this joy is associated with playful, themed, or narrative environments (e.g. theme parks), but there’s also a lot of joy that is created in more subtle but still well-designed spaces. I believe we can do a lot better than we currently do in unlocking this joy for individuals, groups, and for families. I am extremely interested in understanding how to make this kind of joy more pervasive, This was the main reason I started my project mix, an augmented reality public art and creative experiences platform. I wanted to use what I was an expert in, building mobile experiences, to see if I could quickly bring to life a vision of a new way of interacting with our shared spaces and built environment.

Walkability and transit. Urban morphology plays an enormous role in our public health and safety, another phenomenon that I believe is under-appreciated (despite a seeming rise in interest in this area over the last few years). This to me is one of the most important truly political problems of our era that is not at the level of an existential crisis (ie climate risk, AI risk, nuclear risk, and disease prevention). Because of that, I believe it receives less focus than it should, and is also an avenue where so many lives can be saved (e.g. car deaths still leading killer of <25 year olds in the US).

Epistemology and category theory. Besides ethics, my philosophical interests have always lied in trying to find the underlying “physics” of how we think. This is partially why I always fascinated by computer science, and from there my interest in functional programming lead me to category theory. I am super interested in continuing to explore what fundamental concepts make up our thoughts, our language, and the systems that we build as humans. Additionally, I would consider myself a bayesian and believe we can do a lot to improve the way we think about the world by adopting a probabilistic, bayesian-oriented lens on reality. This interest has also been connected to my interest in synthesizing knowledge and knowledge graphs generally, and is why I have been publishing a subset of my personal notes on my website (denizaydemir.com).

Effortless action interfaces. Use just-in-time interfaces and ideas like spaced repetition to have technology truly feel like an extension of our minds, complementing the way we think naturally instead of requiring us to adapt to the technology. This is interesting for learning and productivity purposes, and especially so when we start considering what is possible with spatial interfaces blending with the natural spatial reasoning that our minds are already very good at.

Making music. I have a love and passion for so many different types of music, so while I’m still an amateur I’ve recorded multiple demos with a singer friend and we are planning to release our first couple tracks this summer.