Current Research Areas: data visualization and statistical historiography; observational and representational practices in the sciences; epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty; numerical controversies in commodities/financial markets and legal/policy settings; expertise, exactitude, and entanglement in "The Brokered World”
Before his move to Cambridge, MA, George spent over a decade leading interdisciplinary research efforts for institutional investors and U.S. government mission owners. Now an MIT Presidential Fellow and Kenan E. Şahin SB’63/Ph. D.’69 Fund awardee in the Institute’s Doctoral Program in History, Anthropology, and Science, Technology, and Society, he holds an M.Sc. in Data Visualization from Parsons The New School’s Art, Media, and Technology faculty and a B.Sc. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Washington, DC.
George’s scholarly interests center on visual intelligence-sharing among allied governments over two decades of hot and cold interstate conflict from Gernika (1937) through Sputnik (1957). This research emphasizes the uneven production, representation, circulation, and sociomateriality of tacit and brokered knowledge in mid-twentieth-century media circuits, diplomatic channels, naval planning boards, and inter-sovereign scientific coordinating groups. As a historical social researcher interested in observational judgments, representations of uncertainty, data cascades, and numerical controversies in public life, he was one of two first-year students who participated in the Spring 2023 Verbal/Visual Evidence Workshop that cultural anthropologist Graham Jones organized with the MIT Language and Technology Lab.
George’s pre-doctoral technical projects (involving a diverse set of extramural coauthors) have appeared in the software engineering literature via the IEEE International Conference on Big Data, the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, as well as the C+J Computation and Journalism symposium that alternates annually between Northeastern and the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. In addition, both think tanks — incl. the GU Center for Security and Emerging Technology — and federal government working groups, like the authors of the U.S. Department of Commerce/National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) AI Risk Management Framework Playbook, have cited work from earlier in his research career. Finally, as a public interest technologist working before and during the pandemic, George has contributed to the peer-reviewed epidemiological and biomedical literature (e.g., Epidemics7: Infectious Disease Dynamics Conference in Charleston, SC, and Disaster Medicine and Public Health Preparedness, published by Cambridge University Press).
Photo credit: Alexander J. Laiman SB’24 (HASTS Portrait Series, 2023).