I miss Amir profoundly. I was really enthused about his intellectual interests and so happy when he joined us at Stanford. He was my student, in his first year, and he had already become so esconced here in research projects, plans for new studies and software systems, our DIVER project. His wit was ever present, his intellectual passions sparked great discussions. His constant quizzicalness was so refreshing, he always wanted to get to the heart of a matter, question assumptions, to deeply understand what it was he was thinking about. He had a remarkably individual way of slightly turning his head and asking a question with his eyes before he even spoke. He and I had many talks about where he might best focus his intense energies of inquiry – just a few of his many considered topics were children learning to program with robots, medical education using scientific visualizations, improving studying with multimedia note taking and search technologies, fostering meta-cognition with software hints, and most recently, how one could create information visualizations of many different people’s pathways in analyzing video records with creative new techniques he was developing. He was going to change the world and make it a better place with computing. I had no doubt he would. I was honored to help him see his way to new literatures, his expanding ideas, and his ambitious plans . Amir, Amir, we will miss you so badly. Your future was so bright and you leave us with such an empty space.
— Roy Pea, LSTD Professor and Advisor, DIVER Project director