Personal

My internal structure

• If you are in the unfortunate position of trying to identify a skeleton and I am in the far more unfortunate postion of being a possible owner of the skeleton, you had better check my shoulder X-rays.

What Dave does professionally

I was a founder of AON Networks and the first employee of FreeSpace Communications.

In May 2001 I finished my Ph.D. in Computer Science at CMU working with Dave Johnson on Mobile IP and Ad Hoc Networking as part of the CMU Monarch project. Please note that Prof. Johnson is now an Associate Professor with tenure at Rice University, and the Monarch Project has relocated to Rice.

What Dave does

My collection of pointers to other pages may be of some use if you like Science, US government issues, maps, or certain types of outdoors recreation information (see also the MITOC pages for more information).

I love rock climbing. I used to hang out with and do admin stuff for the MIT Outing Club which has a reasonable amount of rock climbing, skiing, and weather information.

Since September 1995 I've been studing Aikido, which I heartily recommend as a fun way to exercise while improving one's balance and motion.

What Dave has done in the past

I graduated in May 1994 with a SB and SM in Computer Science from MIT.

My masters thesis (in postscript) is on collaborative information filtering for Usenet Net News. My advisors were David Goldberg of Xerox PARC and Karen Sollins of MIT's LCS. A rough version of it is also available in html (no figures).html

I worked with Kate Ehrlich at Lotus during summer 94 in Lotus' new research group. The project develops a notion of ``active collaborative filtering'' and is described in a paper at CHI '95 titled ``Pointing the Way: Active Collaborative Filtering.'' A preprint version of the paper under the ACM copyright rules is available in (postscript form). An early draft of the paper is also available in an ascii only version.

While at CMU, I continued to work on collaborative filtering, but this time with GroupLens team of Paul Resnick (ATT-Lucient), Joe Konstan, John Riedl, Brad Miller, and Jon Herlocker (UMN). The Grouplens effort led to the creation of a company, NetPerceptions, specializing in providing infrastructure and tools for collaborative filtering to web sites, direct sales companys, and user help-desks.

I taught for 4 years at the Experimental Studies Group (ESG) at MIT. I've taught undergraduate Physics/Mechanics, Mechanics with Lego Robotics (a course I helped design), and computer science.

I used to live at pika, an MIT Independent Living Group.

Some of my favorite quotes. I also have another 20K of jokes and stories accumulated over the years, which I will eventually put on the Web once I get permission from all parties involved.

I've served two terms at MIT as a 6.001 TA (The Struggle and Intimidation of Computer Programming):