Biography

I’ve been in the software business for a long time. Some highlights:

1986/Early 1987: Independently invented and first to place collaborative filtering into public, commercial use. It used passive data collection; the next earliest commercial use of that concept I can find was in 1997. It is now key to such services as Spotify.

1995: First to create the tracking cookie; Google owns my patent that taught the concept.

1998-2000: On the 4-person startup team for News Village, LLC in Cambridge, MA, eventually renamed to Athenium, LLC. Managed software development of its first successful product. Athenium eventually had a successful exit via an acquisition by Weather Analytics, creating Athenium Analytics.

2002-2003: Invented a statistical approach to spam filtering that was implemented in a number of prominent spam filters.

While living in Maine because of my wife’s independent retinal surgery practice there, I tried a couple of times to launch internet businesses using local resources. Those efforts didn’t work out.

Since then, I’ve been exploring opportunities, most recently focused on Hedgecoin and PoPCoin, which are technically related concepts based on a new way of achieving security for blockchains that involves neither stake nor cryptographic work.

Some Details

Collaborative Filtering

In the mid-1980’s I founded Microvox Systems, Inc., to create a voice mail-based dating service. As far as I know, its product, 212-ROMANCE was the earliest such service to go into development, and was one of the earliest voice mail services of any type.

This dating service was also, according to all available evidence, the first publicly available instance of a technology now known as “collaborative filtering“ (CF), which powers most current recommendation engines. This was in early 1987; work on it began in 1986, contemporaneously with, but independent of, the earliest known academic work I’ve found which discussed the concept. In 212-ROMANCE, CF was used to help the service match people together, by monitoring which records personals ads were skipped over, responded to, saved, etc. Such an approach eventually become known as “passive data collection”.

That same technique is now used in services like Spotify, etc. But the earliest published mention of the concept of CF based on the passive collegction of data I can find was in 1990, 3 years later than my 1987 active commercial use. The first independent commercial use I can find evidence of is the Alexa Internet toolbar, from 1997, 10 years later.

Based on available evidence, I am the first creator of the tracking cookie. My patent that discloses the concept, as I had it implemented in code by November 18, 1995, was eventiually owned by Google. 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”. (See, for example, the first line at the top of page 40 in the brief).

The patent’s 1995 priority date is earlier than any mention of the term or the concept I’ve been able to find with search engines or AI.

I had an amusing incident once. While searching the USPTO’s patent database for earlier patents containing “advertising”, “internet”, and “cookie”, I came up with one from Qualcomm, which was a modem manufacturer. I figured they were first, but when I looked at it, the “cookie” mention was a reference to advertisements for chocolate chip cookies.

Here’s my patent:
https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/c3/d4/40/239073914fa7fc/US5918014.pdf.

Spam Filtering

Over the years, 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; see their “Thanks, Gary!” ), 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.

Other interests

Family, music (both as a songwriter and as an enthusastic listener to jazz and 20th- and 21st-century chamber music), and hiking. Long ago, with my then to-be wife Deborah, I was part of a group that climbed Kala Patthar in Nepal, about 18,500 ft. A very enjoyable experience. From the top, we looked almost straight down at Everest Base Camp far below, and I was extremely lucky: I was able to take a photo of a avalanche on Everest that happened to occur while I was looking. Now I live in Sedona, AZ, largely because it’s so beautiful and there are many trails.