I was born in Chicago, in 1964, and grew up in the Edison Park neighborhood on the North Side. I am a survivor of the Chicago Public School system, attending Stock (seven grades/five teachers) and Ebinger elementary schools. When I was in seventh grade, my family moved north to Deerfield, where I attended Wilmot Junior High School (now Caruso) and Deerfield High School, graduating in 1982.
After eighteen years in the Midwest, I came out here to California to go to school at Stanford University. As a sophomore, I untied the shoelaces of a naive freshman housemate, Susan Slater, and we've been together ever since. While at Stanford, I had chorus parts in Hair as a freshman and The Rocky Horror Show as a sophomore. (I'll scan some pics.) Most of my time early on was spent hacking at LOTS (the Low Overhead Timesharing System), and I later was a research assistant at the Center for Integrated Systems (CIS), first under Brian Reid and later under Byron Davies. I graduated with an AB in Linguistics and an MS in Computer Science, both in 1987, majoring in languages both natural and computerish.
Following Stanford, I went to work for Ivan Sag and Martin Kay at the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI).
I joined Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in 1989, just after the demise of their natural language program, but finding a home in the Measurement Systems Department, mainly, I suspect for my unusual perspective and my tendency to poke holes in other people's ideas. From 1994 through 1996, I was co-architect and implementer (with Keith Moore) of ORBlite, a distributed object infrastructure that allowed programs to communicate with one another without worrying about the fact that they used different object models or underlying protocols. (We got sick of people asking "Should we use COM or CORBA or wait for something else?") The project was a wild success, so why have you never heard about it...? Ask me over a beer sometime. During that project, we moved from the Measurement Systems Department to the Software Technology Lab, having gotten sick of people asking "So just what does this have to do with instrumentation?", thus ensuring that we stayed with HP when our old haunts went to Agilent Labs. After ORBlite, I spent a year working on multi-category quality-of-service negotiation, and have spent my time since working on genetic programming and developing a really neat genetic programming system called GPLab. I've also gotten the opportunity to learn far more than I ever would have cared to about the process of writing patent applications. I currently (10/1/02) have ten patents awarded, another seventeen pending, and fourteen in the queue.
On the personal front, Susan and I took the plunge and moved in together (finally officially) in 1987 and got an apartment by ourselves in 1989 (just in time for the earthquake). We really took the plunge and got married in July, 1990, and for our honeymoon took a cruise to Alaska. We then really took the plunge and bought a house in 1993, and then really took the plunge and enlarged our family in 1998 with the birth of Josh.
This page last modified Thursday, January 19, 2006 .