David P. Anderson

Research Scientist
U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory
7 Gauss Way
Berkeley, CA 94720

email: davea [at] berkeley.edu

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I received an MA in Mathematics and Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. From 1985 to 1992 I was on the faculty of the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Department.

My research interests include volunteer computing, distributed systems, operating systems, multimedia systems, computer graphics, computer music, music discovery, human computing, and adaptively personalized web-based education.

Current projects:

BOINC, a middleware system for volunteer computing (since 2002).
Science United, a framework for BOINC-based volunteer computing (since 2016).
Music Match, a web-based system that lets classical musicians discover one another and communicate (since 2021).
Numula, a Python-based system for generating nuanced musical performances (since 2021).
Classical Music Index, an index of classical music meta-data with advanced search capabilities.

Past projects:

PanoSETI, an all-sky telescope that detects extremely short and faint optical flashes (2021-2022).
I directed SETI@home, a pioneering volunteer computing project (1998-2020).
Nebula, SETI@home's back-end data analysis system (2016-2020).
Bossa, a system for "distributed thinking".
Bolt, a system for adaptive teaching.
In the late 90s I developed Tunes.com, a web site for music discovery and CD sales.
In the mid-90s I developed RARE (Rating and Recommendation Engine), a system for recommending movies to individuals and groups based on collaborative filtering.
I received a patent for Virtual Reality Television. It was never implemented but maybe someday it will be.
In 1993-95 I worked on the Sonic System, the first distributed system for digital audio editing; it was used for music and movie sound-track production.
In the 80s Ron Kuivila and I developed FORMULA, a programming language for computer music. FORMULA pioneered the use of separate process to generate variations of dynamics, tempo, and articulation. FORMULA was used by projects described here and here.