Births on May 7

Judith Donath, American computer scientist and academic

Judith Stefania Donath (born May 7, 1962) is a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and the founder of the Sociable Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. She has written papers on various aspects of the Internet and its social impact, such as Internet society and community, interfaces, virtual identity issues, and other forms of collaboration that have become manifest with the advent of connected computing.She combines concepts from evolutionary biology, architecture, ethnography, cognitive science, and various other disciplines, to develop methodologies for optimizing the design of mediated virtual cities on the internet and online virtual identities.She is a pioneer of online social media applications, including the first postcard application and the first interactive art show competition. Her work has been shown internationally in museums and galleries and recently at the MIT Museum as a major exhibit.Her research work includes issues centered on "identity and deception in online communities" and the creation of multiple virtual personae. In 1999 she researched the presence of deception in the online identities of Usenet users, as well as the reconstruction of the personality of an individual using data gathered from both online and offline encounters.