You can view my resume and publications on line. I've also written some informal articles about technology. There's a small photo-tour of my old neighborhood in Highland Park, MI.
For the last 20 years or so I've been working
in one way or another with the creation of software for systems infrastructure,
internet applications, and scientific research.
For seven years before that, I was the CTO
of Perceptual Robotics, a company I founded with
Prior to Perceptual Robotics, I was a Research Scientist in the Computer Science Department at the University of Chicago, working in the Animate Agent lab. Here we worked on the entire spectrum of mobile robotics - low-level control, task planning, computer vision, navigation, distributed algorithms, hand-eye co-ordination, tracking, and human-robot interaction. You can see selected publications on line. The high-performance distributed computer vision system I developed, Gargoyle, lives on in a new incarnation under the leadership of Josh Flachsbart at Northwestern University .
While I was at the robotics lab in Chicago,
the web came into being, and I launched a start-up with Michael Swain, a
colleague at Chicago. We created NetHomes, one of the earliest do-it-yourself
web publishing sites. At the time, it wasn't easy to get your own home page.
AOL and other ISPs didn't include web space, and registering a domain name was
complex. At NetHomes, our customers got a chunk of web space under the
nethomes.com domain, and could upload and edit content through the browser. It
was growing nicely, because we charged only $5 per month and it was easy to
use. Unfortunately, we did not come up with the idea of charging nothing, which
as it turned out was the key to success on the internet in almost all areas.
Geocities, with the same service but no charge, came along later and was
eventually bought by Yahoo for billions.
It was at the University of Chicago that I built the first controllable internet camera, LabCam, in 1994. It attracted over a million visits in less than a year, which was a lot in the days of the Mosaic browser.
Before Chicago, I was a PhD
student at the Institute for Learning Sciences in the computer science
department of Northwestern University.
Before starting my PhD program, I worked for several years at AT&T, in the Networking Technology Department of Bell Laboratories. That was from 1985 to 1989, when Bell Labs was just getting into TCP-IP; we were still very circuit-oriented back then. One project that I developed was a Unix kernel module that routed IP across Datakit virtual circuits, setting up and tearing down the circuits as needed. I also developed a network service that published an acronym dictionary on the internal Bell Labs network, allowing people to search or add to the database.
Before that, I did my undergraduate and master's
work at the University of Michigan. I spent some time as an intern for Merit,
Inc., which was building and running some of the first internet gateways in
the state at the time. I helped developed the ICMP portion of the protocol
stack, written in PDP-11 assembler.