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NSF Statement of Purpose Describe any educational or personal experiences that you consider relevant to your long-range objectives and goals. Include: · volunteer & extracurricular activities · professional working experience · significant accomplishments · any other background information I work in a studio crammed with hacker paraphernalia, three workstations, four gigs, a fiber-optic Internet connection, and an extensive CS library, yet the most valuable design reference in this den of iniquity is hanging on the wall: Murphy's Computer Law. From Osborn's Law (ªVariables won't, constants aren'tº) to Nolan's Placebo (ªAn ounce of image is worth a pound of performanceº), it's an exceedingly clear indictment of the Software Crisis. You know, that threat to motherhood, apple pie, and baseball dressed in Capital Letters: software productivity seems to fall off faster than hardware efficiency escalates. Since hardware multiplies with the torrid licentiousness of Moore's Law, doubling every eighteen months, that's a pretty harsh statement. So what are we really going to do about it? Computer Science's latest contributions to the backlog have been relational databases, GUIs, and object-oriented design. Industry has been living off the fat of the land (a.k.a ªstuff done at Xerox PARC in the '70sº) for a decade. We know where CS is going: highly parallel, widely distributed, tightly connected, ubiquitous computing. With today's analysis and design technique, the tagline will be ªYou can't get there from here.º Perhaps if I'm a tad more bitter than those who have come before me, it is only because I have stood on the toes of giants. I am part of the first generation of software architects who have been weaned on OO tools; whose academic training has been predicated on distributed computation. My personal paradigm of computing is one of distributed objects Ð and I think that will be part of the solution. In parallel with my academic interests, I keep a close eye on the the computer industry; I also have a fairly significant business record myself. I enjoy the interplay between theory and practice, and I think that it's very important to move technologies out of the labs and onto desks. Certainly, the explosion of he Internet and the Web has affected several of my research areas, as I presented at an NII Summer Institute this year at Los Alamos. Object Technology is also close to my interests, and I have been particularly involved with NeXTSTEP, organizing user group activities at Caltech, for the LA region, and at the international level, where I helped found the international user group and annual conference program. Inspired by my journalism and graphic design interests from high-school, I have successfully worked as a freelance computer journalist for IDG Publications and others, covering object technology and multimedia events on both coasts. I have also developed a few pieces of commercial object technology, including an encryption tool and a complete email connectivity package for UNIX machines without Internet access. In many of these projects, I actually played the professional role of architect, as well as actual implementation, which directed my thinking very early on to organizing paradigms for the software-construction market in an age of OO component-ware. I also have an extensive background in economics, finance, and management, academic (Economics dual major) and practical, from managing our family business and my own software ventures. I have every intention of following through on my research career by moving the technology out to the market. I have played an active role in the founding of the Caltech Entrepreneur Club, and the SEDS GASCAN project, a Caltech student-built gamma-ray experiment that flew on the Space Shuttle. For more information: and
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Netfuture.ch.