David R. Karger is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. David earned his Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1994 and has since contributed to many areas of computer science, publishing over 180 papers in algorithms, machine learning, information retrieval, personal information management, networking, peer to peer systems, coding theory, the semantic web, and human-computer interaction.

An ongoing interest has been to make it easier for people to create, find, organize, manipulate, and share information. He formed and leads the Haystack group to investigate the topic. A major theme has been to free people from the straightjacket of existing applications by giving them the ability to define and manage their own information schema and visualizations on the desktop and on the web. He co-led MIT's SIMILE project, a collaboration with MIT Libraries and the World Wide Web consortium developing Semantic-Web tools to improve the management and retrieval of information at the institutional level.

Professor Karger co-chaired the 2009 International Semantic Web Conference and has served on the program committees for CHI, WWW, STOC, FOCS, and SODA. He is a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.