David Pope Anderson (born 1955) is an American research scientist at the
Space Sciences Laboratory
The Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) is an Organized Research Unit (ORU) of the University of California, Berkeley. Founded in 1959, the laboratory is located in the Berkeley Hills above the university campus. It has developed and continues t ...
, at the
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...
, and an adjunct professor of computer science at the
University of Houston
The University of Houston (UH) is a Public university, public research university in Houston, Texas. Founded in 1927, UH is a member of the University of Houston System and the List of universities in Texas by enrollment, university in Texas ...
. Anderson leads the
SETI@home,
BOINC
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced – rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it beca ...
, Bossa and
Bolt software projects.
Education
Anderson received a BA in mathematics from
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University ( ) is a Private university, private liberal arts college, liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut. Founded in 1831 as a Men's colleges in the United States, men's college under the auspices of the Methodist Epis ...
, and MS and PhD degrees in mathematics and computer science from the
University of Wisconsin–Madison
A university () is an educational institution, institution of higher education, higher (or Tertiary education, tertiary) education and research which awards academic degrees in several Discipline (academia), academic disciplines. Universities ty ...
. While in graduate school he published four research papers in computer graphics. His PhD research involved using enhanced attribute grammars to specify and implement communication protocols.
Career
From 1985 to 1992 he was an assistant professor in the UC Berkeley Computer Science Department, where he received the NSF
Presidential Young Investigator and IBM Faculty Development awards. During this period he conducted several research projects:
* FORMULA (Forth Music Language), a parallel programming language and runtime system for computer music based on Forth.
* MOOD (Musical Object-Oriented Dialect), a parallel programming language and runtime system for computer music based on C++. A port for
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few ope ...
also exists.
* DASH, a distributed operating system with support for digital audio and video.
* Continuous Media File System (CMFS), a file system for digital audio and video
* Comet, an I/O server for digital audio and video.
From 1992 to 1994 he worked at
Sonic Solutions
Sonic Solutions was an American computer software company headquartered in Novato, California. In addition to having a number of offices in the U.S., the company also maintained offices in Europe and Asia. It was acquired by Rovi Corporation in 201 ...
, where he developed Sonic System, the first distributed system for professional digital audio editing.
Inventions
In 1994 he invented "Virtual Reality Television", a television system allowing viewers to control their virtual position and orientation. He was awarded a patent for this invention in 1996.
In 1994 he developed one of the first systems for
collaborative filtering
Collaborative filtering (CF) is a technique used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook Recommender Systems Handbook, Springer, 2011, pp. 1-35 Collaborative filtering ...
, and developed a web site, rare.com, that provided movie recommendations based on the user's movie ratings.
From 1995 to 1998 he was chief technical officer of Tunes.com, where he developed web-based systems for music discovery based on collaborative filtering, acoustics, and other models.
In 1995 he joined
David Gedye
David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". w ...
and
Dan Werthimer
Dan Werthimer is co-founder and chief scientist of the SETI@home project and directs other UC Berkeley SETI searches at radio, infrared and visible wavelengths, including the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Int ...
in creating
SETI@home, an early volunteer computing project. Anderson continues to direct SETI@home.
From 2000 to 2002, he served as
CTO of
United Devices
United Devices, Inc. was a privately held, commercial volunteer computing company that focused on the use of grid computing to manage high-performance computing systems and Computer cluster, enterprise cluster management. Its products and servic ...
, a company that developed software for distributed computing.
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
In 2002 he created the
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing
The Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC, pronounced – rhymes with "oink") is an open-source middleware system for volunteer computing (a type of distributed computing). Developed originally to support SETI@home, it beca ...
project, which develops an open-source software platform for
volunteer computing
Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which people donate their computers' unused resources to a research-oriented project, and sometimes in exchange for credit points. The fundamental idea behind it is that a modern desktop co ...
. The project is funded by NSF and is based at the UC Berkeley
Space Sciences Laboratory
The Space Sciences Laboratory (SSL) is an Organized Research Unit (ORU) of the University of California, Berkeley. Founded in 1959, the laboratory is located in the Berkeley Hills above the university campus. It has developed and continues t ...
. BOINC is used by about 100 projects, including
SETI@home,
Einstein@home
Einstein@Home is a volunteer computing project that searches for signals from spinning neutron stars in data from gravitational-wave detectors, from large radio telescopes, and from a gamma-ray telescope. Neutron stars are detected by their pulse ...
,
Rosetta@home
Rosetta@home is a volunteer computing project researching protein structure prediction on the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) platform, run by the Baker laboratory at the University of Washington. Rosetta@home aims to ...
,
Climateprediction.net
climate''prediction''.net (CPDN) is a volunteer computing project to investigate and reduce uncertainties in climate modelling. It aims to do this by running hundreds of thousands of different models (a large climate ensemble) using the donated ...
, and the IBM
World Community Grid
World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to tackle scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and adding ...
. It is used as a platform for several distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics.
Anderson was involved in
Stardust@home
Stardust@home is a citizen science project that encourages volunteers to search images for tiny interstellar dust impacts. The project began providing data for analysis on August 1, 2006.
From February to May 2000 and from August to December 200 ...
, which used 23,000 volunteers to identify interstellar dust particles via the Web – an approach called
distributed thinking. In 2007 Anderson launched two new software projects: Bossa (middleware for distributed thinking), and Bolt (a framework for web-based training and education in the context of volunteer computing and distributed thinking).
Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation
The Berkeley Open System for Skill Aggregation (BOSSA) is a
software framework
In computer programming, a software framework is an abstraction in which software, providing generic functionality, can be selectively changed by additional user-written code, thus providing application-specific software. It provides a standard ...
for
distributed thinking,
[ p.39 (September 6, 2007)] using volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that require human intelligence, knowledge, or cognitive skills.
References
External links
Profile of David Anderson
{{DEFAULTSORT:Anderson, David P.
1955 births
Researchers in distributed computing
Living people
Search for extraterrestrial intelligence
Wesleyan University alumni
University of Wisconsin–Madison College of Letters and Science alumni
University of Houston faculty
University of California, Berkeley staff