Fellow Profile: Rasmi Elasmar

| MSNY Staff

Rasmi ElasmarWhere are you from?: I’m from Long Beach, California.

Where do you study? When will you graduate?: Columbia University.I’m studying some mix of computer science, math, physics, and statistics, and I’m starting my third year this fall.

What’s your favorite technology at Microsoft?: A lot of the projects to come out of Microsoft Research are exciting — HoloLens and Kinect are especially fun in how they rethink the way we interact with computers, and some of the machine-learning based projects like Translator make me think that the future is already here.

What projects have you been working on for the Microsoft Civic Tech team?: I spent the first two months of the summer rebuilding the Civic Graph to allow it to scale up to a wider audience. Recently, I’ve been working on translation tools that would be useful for the city. I just finished working in collaboration with the Translator team on a browser extension that live captions and translates any audio or video on the web. I’m also working with the Mayor’s office to get their videos captioned and translated. Machine translation on a large scale would allow people to understand and access resources online even if they don’t speak English, so I’m excited to help break down language barriers on the internet.

How did you end up with the Civic Tech team?: I’ve been working on projects in the civic tech scene independently and with groups like BetaNYC since I came to New York. A friend of mine met John at New York Tech Meetup and suggested I reach out to him because of the similarity of our work. I joined the team because I was excited by the idea of using technology to have meaningful impact in our city.

What issues are you most passionate about?: I like solving difficult problems, and there is no shortage of them in New York. Education, income, and social inequality are all issues people are facing in cities across the country. I think what makes New York different is that everything is done on a scale unlike any other city in the US. We have resources and initiatives that are changing the possibilities of what a few people can do for their cities with technology. For example, our Open Data initiatives have created all sorts of useful tools for citizens that range from helping ensure government accountability, to making it easier to access and navigate historically difficult and bureaucratic government processes. We’re only just beginning to explore the applications, so I’m excited for what’s to come. With the technology now available to us, our ability to tackle difficult problems is growing faster than the problems themselves, so I’m optimistic for the future.

What will you do next then?: Learn as much as I can in school, and be as helpful as I can outside of school.

What is a wild “Mad-scientist idea” you’ve had? It’s not my idea, but I’ve thought about it a lot recently because of the work we’ve been doing in exploring Blockchain applications in society. Imagine this: a self-driving car with enough intelligence to also manage its own Bitcoin wallet. You could summon it from your smartphone, it would drive you to where you want to go, and you’d pay that car itself Bitcoin, and that car could use that currency to pay people to maintain and improve itself. The car would own itself, meaning no company or individual would need to own the car. Eventually (in theory), no people or companies would need to own any cars. They would just exist among us like the individualistic robots of the future.

What has been your funniest experience on the team so far? It’s amusing to hear people’s reactions when I talk about the open source work we do. Microsoft has made some huge strides in promoting open source projects in recent years, and I’m glad to be a part of that.

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