From Croquet Consortium
Croquet represents the combined visions of its architects: Alan Kay, Julian Lombardi, Mark P. McCahill, Andreas Raab, David P. Reed, and its lead system architect David A. Smith - all of whom believed that the time was right to fully bring to bear the underlying power of modern computers and network connectivities. Through the public release of this software, they intend to harness the creative power of thousands of software developers and seed the development of technologies that will transform the way we use computers.
Alan Kay
Alan Kay, President of Viewpoints Research Institute, Inc., is best known for the ideas of personal computing, the intimate laptop computer, and the inventions of the now ubiquitous overlapping-window interface and modern object-oriented programming. His deep interests in children and education were the catalysts for these ideas, and they continue to be a source of inspiration to him. One of the founders of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, (PARC) he led one of the several groups that together developed modern workstations (and the forerunners of the Macintosh), Smalltalk, the overlapping window interface, Desktop Publishing, the Ethernet, Laser printing, and network "client-servers." Prior to his work at Xerox, Dr. Kay was a member of the University of Utah ARPA research team that developed 3-D graphics. There he earned a doctorate (with distinction) in 1969 for the development of the first graphical object-oriented personal computer. He holds undergraduate degrees in mathematics and molecular biology from the University of Colorado. Kay also participated in the original design of the ARPANet, which later became the Internet. After Xerox PARC, Kay was Chief Scientist of Atari, a Fellow of Apple Computer for 12 years, 5 years as Vice President of Research and Development at The Walt Disney Company and 3 years as Sr. Fellow at the Hewlett-Packard Company. In 2001 he founded Viewpoints Research Institute, a non-profit organization located in Glendale, CA, and continues as the organization’s President. Dr. Kay has received numerous honors, including the ACM Software Systems Award, the ACM Outstanding Educator Award, the ACM Turing Award (2003), the J-D Warnier Prix D'Informatique and the NEC C&C Prize 2001. He has been elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Royal Society of Arts, and the Computer Museum History Center. He is a recipient of the ZeroOne Award from the University of Berlin, and recently received an honorary doctorate degree from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). He was inducted into the Utah Information Technology Association (UITA) as a “Hall of Fame Member, November 2003. He was awarded the Draper Prize by the National Academy of Engineering in February 2004. Most recently he was designated laureate (in Advanced Technology) by the Inamori Foundation and was awarded the 2004 Kyoto Prize.
David A. Smith
"David A. Smith, Croquet's Lead System Architect"
David A. Smith is the chief system architect for Croquet. The Croquet project is the culmination of David's work on 3D component-based architectures for the development and deployment of complex peer-to-peer environments including interactive entertainment. His first experiments in multi-user systems and interactive environments laid the groundwork for much of the architecture and user interface of Croquet. David is a co-founder and CTO of Qwaq, Inc., a Croquet Internet services company. He is also co-founder and CTO of 3Dsolve, Inc., the Simulation and Learning company. David created a number of ground-breaking interactive 3D applications including: “The Colony”, the very first 3D interactive game and precursor to today's "first person shooters" like Quake... except Colony ran on a Macintosh in 1987. "The Colony" won the "Best Adventure Game of the Year" award from MacWorld Magazine and was declared one of the "Top 10 Mac Gaming Thingies of the Past 1,000 Years". In 1989, David used the technologies developed for the game to create a virtual set and virtual camera system that was used by Jim Cameron for the movie “The Abyss”. Based upon this experience, David founded Virtus Corporation in 1990 and developed Virtus Walkthrough, the first real-time 3D design application for personal computers. Walkthrough won the very first "Breakthrough Product of the Year" from MacUser Magazine, and Best Drawing Package from PC Computing Magazine. David co-founded Red Storm Entertainment with Tom Clancy, and Timeline Computer Entertainment with Michael Crichton. He also co-founded Neomar, a wireless enterprise infrastructure company.
David P. Reed
David P. Reed's research focuses on designing systems that manage, communicate, and manipulate information shared among people. He is well known as a pioneer in the design and construction of the Internet protocols, distributed data storage, and PC software systems and applications. He is best known for co-developing the Internet design principle known as the "end-to-end argument" (with MIT Professors J.H. Saltzer and David D. Clark), and "Reed's Law," which describes the economics of group formation in networks. Dr. Reed splits his working time between HP Laboratories, where he is an HP Fellow, and the MIT Media Laboratory, where he is an adjunct professor. His research at HP Labs is focused on highly scalable, decentralized, interactive computing systems built as a loose federation of end-user resources. In particular, his research involves the concepts underlying Croquet as a computing platform based on temporal reflection and replication of computation. At the Media Lab, he co-leads the Lab's Viral Communications Program, exploring new approaches to achieve adaptive, scalable, and evolving wireless network architectures, and is a founder of the MIT Communications Futures Program, which explores the technical and business disruptions that are driven by fundamental changes in the basic communications technologies. He has consulted widely to the computer industry, and has served as senior research scientist at Interval Research Corporation and as vice president and chief scientist for Lotus Development Corporation. Previously he was vice president of research and development and chief scientist at Software Arts. Dr. Reed was a faculty member in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from 1978 to 1983, working in the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS). He also earned his BS, MS, EE, and PhD degrees in EECS while conducting research at LCS and its predecessor, Project MAC. During his early academic career at MIT, he helped to shape the early design of LANs and their communication protocols. He participated in the design of the protocol suite now used in the Internet and also worked on systems architectures for confederated networks of interconnected personal computers. As a student at MIT, Dr. Reed also was involved in developing commercial implementations of MACLISP and MACSYMA. As a teacher, he helped develop undergraduate and graduate courses in computer and communication systems design, and programming language implementation and design.
Andreas Raab
Andreas Raab attended the University of Magdeburg (Germany) where in 1994 he received a Diplom-Informatiker (equivalent to a M.S in Computer Science) and in 1998 a Ph.D. in Computer Science. His main background is in Computer Graphics and Interactive Systems. During his doctoral research he developed various new techniques for analyzing geometric models (global shape estimation operators), visualizing 3D models (based on real-time non-photorealistic techniques), as well as new interaction metaphors for 3D models (e.g., using zoom techniques for inplace interaction and emphasis in 3D models). While at Disney he concentrated on implementing real-time graphics capabilities into Squeak, including support for real-time vector graphics (Flash), real-time 3D graphics, advanced 3D modelling techniques (Teddy), as well as integrating these components into the "eToy" environment (the kids scripting environment). Besides the work done in the area of Computer Graphics, Dr. Raab also developed an extensive expertise in the area of designing and implementing object-oriented systems. Until recently, Dr. Raab was working at HP-Labs in the above areas. He is now working on Croquet with Qwaq Inc., a Croquet platform company based in Palo Alto, California.
Julian Lombardi
Julian Lombardi is a software designer, author, and former biology professor with an interest in developing simulation-based social software systems. He brings his background in developmental and evolutionary biology, complexity theory, and in the study of emergent properties in biological systems to his work in information technology. Dr. Lombardi has long been fascinated by the transformative potential of new interface technologies. In the late 1980s, and while at The University of North Carolina, he developed instructional software for biological and medical education. In 1995, he combined his interests in information technology and evolutionary/developmental biology and developed systems and methods for enabling representations of network-deliverable resources to self organize and optimize within the framework of social computing systems. In 1999, he founded ViOS, Inc. and served as ViOS's first CEO and then Chief Creative Officer/Chief Software Architect. Over an eighteen-month period, he oversaw the successful completion of the company's core technology leading to the launch of a user-friendly knowledge management and social computing platform with an industry award-winning interface. Dr. Lombardi has also provided executive management and consulting services for emerging IT companies and from 2002-2005 he managed a software R&D group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Since 2005, Dr. Lombardi has been serving as Duke University’s Assistant Vice President of Academic Services and Technology Support. He is also a Senior Research Scholar with Duke University’s program in Information Science + Information Studies and an adjunct professor with Duke University’s Department of Computer Science.
Mark P. McCahill
Mark McCahill got his start in computing in the early 1970s when the first teletype terminals and timesharing systems accessible to students arrived at his junior high school. After staying after school for several weeks to teach himself how to program applications in BASIC, he was presented with the delightful opportunity to be the programming instructor for a few days in math class, because the math teacher was unsure how to program. After receiving a B.A. in Chemistry at the University of Minnesota, Mark took a job doing analytical chemistry and analyzing the results on the campus mainframe with the unfortunate result of some shockingly large computer time bills. Others on the project forcefully suggested moving the data analysis to a newly acquired Apple ][. This experience ultimately lead to a programming position at the University computer center specializing in early microcomputers. In 1989, Mark lead a team at the University of Minnesota that developed one of the first popular Internet e-mail clients (POPmail) for the Macintosh (and later the PC). In 1991, Mark led the original Internet Gopher development team and helped invent a simple way to navigate distributed information resources on the Internet. Internet Gopher's menu-based hypermedia paved the way for the popularization of the Web and was the de-facto standard for Internet information systems in the early to mid 1990s. In 1994-95 Mark's team developed GopherVR, a 3D user interface to Internet Gopherspace. Mark's current interest is in applying the lessons learned from the first generation Internet information systems to Croquet. Mark is an assistant director at the Office of Information Technology/University of Minnesota and leads a group of developers supporting online instructional software systems.
