About the Author

Jim Waldo is a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he investigates next-generation large-scale distributed systems. He is currently the technical lead of Project Darkstar, a multi-threaded, distributed infrastructure for massive multi-player on-line games and virtual worlds. Prior to his current assignment with Sun Labs, he was the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java. Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification. Jim is a Professor of the Practice at Harvard University, where he teaches distributed computing and topics in the intersection of policy and technology in the department of computer science. Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in both linguistics and philosophy from the University of Utah. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.