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 to ...

, at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, and an adjunct professor of computer science at the

University of Houston The University of Houston (; ) is a Public university, public research university in Houston, Texas, United States. It was established in 1927 as Houston Junior College, a coeducational institution and one of multiple junior colleges formed in ...

. Anderson leads the

SETI@home SETI@home ("SETI at home") is a project of the Berkeley SETI Research Center to analyze radio signals with the aim of Search for extraterrestrial intelligence, searching for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. Until March 2020, it was run ...

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 became the ...

, 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, United States. It was founded in 1831 as a Men's colleges in the United States, men's college under the Methodi ...

, and MS and PhD degrees in mathematics and computer science from the

University of Wisconsin–Madison The University of Wisconsin–Madison (University of Wisconsin, Wisconsin, UW, UW–Madison, or simply Madison) is a public land-grant research university in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. It was founded in 1848 when Wisconsin achieved st ...

. 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 op ...

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 2 ...

, where he developed Sonic System, the first distributed system for professional digital audio editing. 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 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 Inte ...

in creating

, 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 enterprise cluster management. Its products and services allowed users t ...

, a company that developed software for distributed 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 became ...

(BOINC) 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 ...

. The project is funded by NSF and is based at the UC Berkeley

. BOINC has been used by about 100 projects, including

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 puls ...

, Rosetta@home, Climateprediction.net, and the IBM

World Community Grid World Community Grid (WCG) is an effort to create the world's largest volunteer computing platform to perform scientific research that benefits humanity. Launched on November 16, 2004, with proprietary Grid MP client from United Devices and add ...

, in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. Anderson was involved in Stardust@home, which used 23,000 volunteers to identify interstellar dust particles via the Web – an approach called distributed thinking. In 2007 Anderson developed BOSSA a

software framework In computer programming, a software framework is a software abstraction that provides generic functionality which developers can extend with custom code to create applications. It establishes a standard foundation for building and deploying soft ...

for distributed thinking, p.39 (September 6, 2007) using volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that require human intelligence, knowledge, or cognitive skills. He also developed BOLT, a framework for web-based training and education in the context of volunteer computing and distributed thinking.

Music

Since 2020 Anderson has been involved in software projects related to classical music: * Music Match is a social site where performers and composers can meet and communicate with each other. * Classical Music Index is an offshoot of

IMSLP The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), also known as the Petrucci Music Library after publisher Ottaviano Petrucci, is a subscription-based digital library of public domain, public-domain sheet music, music scores. The project use ...

in which users can rate and review compositions, and can discover compositions likely to appeal to their taste. * Numula is a Python library for computer rendition of music with complex variations in dynamics, timing, articulation and pedaling, as are typical in human performance.

Inventions

In 1994 Anderson 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, besides content-based filtering, one of two major techniques used by recommender systems.Francesco Ricci and Lior Rokach and Bracha ShapiraIntroduction to Recommender Systems Handbook, Recommender Systems Handbo ...

, and developed a web site, rare.com, that provided movie recommendations based on the user's movie ratings.

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