Lewis Wiley Tucker (born April 24, 1950) is an American computer scientist, open source advocate, and industry executive spanning several decades of technology innovation. As an early proponent of internet technologies, he held executive-level positions at

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

Salesforce.com Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...

, and

Cisco Systems Cisco Systems, Inc., commonly known as Cisco, is an American-based multinational corporation, multinational digital communications technology conglomerate (company), conglomerate corporation headquartered in San Jose, California. Cisco develo ...

contributing to the advancement of the Java programming language and platform, the AppExchange on-demand application marketplace, and the OpenStack cloud computing platform.

Early life and education

The son of big band Leader Tommy Tucker, he grew up in the West Allenhurst section of

Ocean Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey Ocean Township is a township located in east central Monmouth County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. It is located on the Jersey Shore. The township is a bedroom suburb of New York City. Ocean Township consists of three main unincorporated c ...

and attended the

Peddie School The Peddie School is a college preparatory school in Hightstown, in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It is a non-denominational, coeducational boarding school located on a campus, and serves students in the ninth through twelfth gr ...

in Hightstown, New Jersey for high school. He graduated from

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

with a B.A. in Biology.

Career

Having interests in neurobiology and computer science, in 1976 Tucker started as a laboratory technician at the Laboratory of Neurobiology at

Cornell University Medical College The Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University is Cornell University's biomedical research unit and medical school located in Upper East Side, Manhattan, New York City, New York. Weill Cornell Medicine is affiliated with New ...

. He later become an assistant research scientist bringing computing to medical imaging and contributing to several research papers on neurogenic control of hypertension. He completed a Masters and

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...

in computer science from

Polytechnic Institute of New York The New York University Tandon School of Engineering (commonly referred to as Tandon) is the engineering and applied sciences school of New York University. Tandon is the second oldest private engineering and technology school in the United Sta ...

in 1984. His dissertation spanned both computer vision and parallel machine architectures for biomedical image analysis. Upon completing his Ph.D., Tucker joined a new startup,

Thinking Machines Thinking Machines Corporation was a supercomputer manufacturer and artificial intelligence (AI) company, founded in Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1983 by Sheryl Handler and W. Daniel "Danny" Hillis to turn Hillis's doctoral work at the Massachuse ...

, in Cambridge, MA. Thinking Machines was founded by

Daniel Hillis William Daniel "Danny" Hillis (born September 25, 1956) is an American inventor, entrepreneur, and computer scientist, who pioneered parallel computers and their use in artificial intelligence. He founded Thinking Machines Corporation, a parall ...

to develop technology for artificial intelligence using parallel computing. As research director for computer vision, Tucker contributed to the software and architecture of the

Connection Machine A Connection Machine (CM) is a member of a series of massively parallel supercomputers that grew out of doctoral research on alternatives to the traditional von Neumann architecture of computers by Danny Hillis at Massachusetts Institute of Techno ...

, an early commercial massively parallel machine containing over 65,000 processors that was used by national laboratories working on supercomputing grand challenges. In 1994 Thinking Machines was acquired by

. Tucker joined Sun to lead an engineering team brought in from Thinking Machines in Chelmsford, MA. A year later, he moved to California as part of an initial team of developers and executives behind

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...

, a new programming language and platform designed for the emerging web. Tucker became Director of ISV Relations, evangelizing the use of Java technology by large corporations and startups alike. He was a frequent speaker on how the growing internet would become a force in the industry and was featured alongside other internet pioneers in "Digerati: encounters with the cyber elite". In 2000, at Sun Microsystems, Tucker became VP of Internet Services responsible fo
www.sun.com
an
java.sun.com
In 2004, Tucker left Sun to join

where he create
the AppExchange
one of the first online marketplaces for software-as-a-service applications. He left Salesforce.com to join

Radar Networks Radar is a detection system that uses radio waves to determine the distance (''ranging''), angle, and radial velocity of objects relative to the site. It can be used to detect aircraft, ships, spacecraft, guided missiles, motor vehicles, ...

, to advance a new semantic web platform, Twine.com, based on RDF. With the emergence of Amazon’s Web Services (AWS) cloud platform, Tucker returned to Sun Microsystems in 2008 as Vice President and CTO to develop Sun’s platform for cloud computing. Just prior to launching Sun Cloud, the company was acquired by

Oracle An oracle is a person or agency considered to provide wise and insightful counsel or prophetic predictions, most notably including precognition of the future, inspired by deities. As such, it is a form of divination. Description The word '' ...

in 2010 shutting down the effort. Tucker left to join Cisco Systems, Inc., as the company’s first VP and Chief Technology Officer for cloud computing. As Cloud CTO, Tucker moved Cisco into becoming a major contributor to the open source developer community being built around

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software plat ...

. He served as vice-chairman of the OpenStack Foundation, and board member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and Cloud Foundry Foundation.

Select articles and presentations

* Tucker, L.W.
"OpenStack and the Power of Community-Developed Software"
OpenStack Austin Summit, April 2016. * Hillis, W. D., and L.W. Tucker, "The CM-5 Connection Machine: A scalable Supercomputer", Communications of the ACM, pp. 31–40, Nov. 1993. * Tucker, L.W., "Data Parallelism: Image Understanding and the Connection Machine System", in "Parallel Architectures and Algorithms for Image Understanding, ed. V.P. Kumar, Academic Press, 1991. * Tucker, L.W. and G. Robertson, "Architecture and Applications of the Connection Machine," IEEE Computer, pp 26–38, Aug. 1988. * L. Tucker, C. Feynman and D. Fritzsche, "Object recognition using the Connection Machine," in Proceedings CVPR '88: The Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Ann Arbor, MI, USA, 1988 pp. 871–878. * Tucker, Lewis W. "Labeling connected components on a massively parallel tree machine." In Proc. IEEE Conf. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 124–129. 1986 * Tucker, Lewis W. "Control strategy for an expert vision system using quadtree refinement." In Proceedings of the IEEE workshop on Computer vision: Representation and control, Annapolis, MD, USA, pg, pp. 214–218. 1984.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Tucker, Lew American computer scientists Cornell University alumni Sun Microsystems people Cisco people Open source people 1950 births Living people Peddie School alumni People from Ocean Township, Monmouth County, New Jersey Thinking Machines Corporation