Biography
I’ve been in the software business for a long time.
Based on the evidence I am almost certainly the first person to have figured out how to create the tracking cookie. My patent that discloses the concept, as I conceptualized it in October of 1995, is now owned by Google. It fully described the tracking cookie, but only claimed patent rights in the context of my own specific algorithms for recommending ads. The patent has expired, but even in 2021, Google and Twitter were using it as prior art to defend themselves in a frivolous patent lawsuit; in their brief, they refer to the concept of using cookies for tracking people as “Robinson’s ‘Cookie’.” (https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/ptab-filings/IPR2021-00485/3 page 25).
Here’s the patent:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c3/d4/40/239073914fa7fc/US5918014.pdf.
In the mid-1980’s I founded Microvox Systems, Inc., to create a voice mail-based dating service. As far as I know, it was the earliest such service to go into development, and was one of the earliest voice mail services of any type.
Also as far as I can tell, this dating service was the first instance of a technology now known as “collaborative filtering”, which powers most current recommendation engines. It was used to help the service match people together. But soon I noticed that the same basic idea could also be used to do things like match music to people, so I started working on some better mathematics to run it. (CF, though not my own version, now powers, for example, Amazon recommendations, Spotify, Apple’s iTunes Radio, and many other services.)
Later, I continued working on the mathematics related to collaborative filtering. A spin-off algorithm turned out to be useful for spam filtering. My suggestions for spam filtering are included in a number of spam filters, including SpamAssassin (PC Magazine Editor’s Choice), SpamSieve (MacWorld Software Product of the Year), Mozilla, AGMSBayesianSpam, Bogofilter, DSPAM, Eudora, Hexamail, Popf, and Spambayes. Over time I’ve noticed links to my posts on spam math on websites in Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, Japanese, German, Russian, and Spanish, which was fun. At that time, I was also a part-time Research Director at ActiveState, advising them on spam technology.
Somewhere in there I co-founded Athenium, LLC, which created learning software, and was acquired and merged with Weather Analytics, resulting in the company Athenium Analytics.
I did some database consulting with clients like NY Telephone in the 1980s.
I have a B.A. in Mathematics from Bard College (1978). While working as a database consultant, I started coursework at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences with the idea of becoming a math professor, but quickly became more immersed in the then-emerging world of computers, and never looked back.
Other interests
Family, music (as a listener whose most enthusiasm recently is for jazz and 20th- and 21st-century chamber music, and as a songwriter), and hiking.