Ian Clarke (computer scientist)

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Ian Clarke
Ian Clarke.jpg
Ian Clarke in October, 2019
Born (1977-02-16) 16 February 1977 (age 47)
CitizenshipIreland, United States [1]
Alma materUniversity of Edinburgh, Scotland
Known for Freenet peer to peer software, Revver
Awards2003 Technology Review Young Innovator
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science, artificial intelligence

Ian Clarke (born 16 February 1977) is the original designer and lead developer of Freenet.

Contents

Early life

Clarke grew up in Navan, County Meath, Ireland. [2] He was educated at Dundalk Grammar School and while there, he came first twice in the Senior Chemical, Physical, and Mathematical section of the Young Scientist Exhibition. The first time, in 1993, was with a project entitled "The C Neural Network Construction Kit". The second time, the following year, was with a project entitled "Mapping Internal Variations in Translucency within a Translucent Object using Beams of Light". [3]

Freenet

In 1995, Clarke left Dundalk to study Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. While at Edinburgh, he became president of the then dormant Artificial Intelligence Society, resulting in its revival. [4] In Clarke's final year at Edinburgh, he completed his final year project, entitled "A Distributed, Decentralised Information Storage and Retrieval System". In July 1999, after receiving a 'B' grade for his paper, he decided to release it to the Internet and invited volunteers to help implement his design. The resulting free software project became known as Freenet, and attracted significant attention from the mainstream and technology media. [5] [6] [7]

In August 1999, Clarke began his first full-time job as a software developer in the Space Division of Logica plc, a London-based software consulting company. In February 2000, he left Logica to join a small software start-up called Instil Ltd. [4] In August 2000, he left London for Santa Monica, California, where he co-founded Uprizer, Inc. with the intent of commercializing some of his Freenet-related ideas. [8] In January 2001, Uprizer Inc. successfully raised $4 million in Series A round venture funding from investors including Intel Capital. [9]

In March 2001, Clarke published an article describing FairShare, developed in collaboration with Uprizer's co-founders, Steven Starr and Rob Kramer. Clarke was concerned that copyright would become increasingly difficult to enforce in the Internet age, the goal of Fairshare was to provide an alternative to copyright as a way to compensate creators. [10]

Professional career

In September 2002, after leaving Uprizer, Clarke formed Cematics LLC to explore a variety of new ideas and opportunities. Cematics LLC developed a number of products including Locutus - a P2P search application for the enterprise, WhittleBit - a search engine that learns from user feedback, [11] and 3D17, a web-based collaborative editing tool. [12]

In October 2003, Clarke decided to leave the United States to return to Edinburgh, Scotland. In December 2004, he began work on Dijjer, a distributed P2P web cache, and Indy, a collaborative music discovery system, both in conjunction with ChangeTv, a company founded by his long-time collaborator, Steven Starr, who later brought in Clarke and Oliver Luckett as co-founders. In 2003, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35. [13]

ChangeTv changed its name to Revver Inc. and unveiled a new website in November 2005 that strove to let creators of short videos earn revenue from their work. [14] Revver was one of several user-created video websites unveiled in late 2005, but was the first such website to financially compensate video creators, and is reminiscent of Fairshare.

In December 2006, Clarke left Revver and moved to Austin, Texas. [15] There, Clarke founded a new company, SenseArray, which is a drop-in ad targeting engine based on a proprietary algorithm developed by Clarke. [16] In October 2009, he released Swarm, [17] [18] [19] [20] a novel approach to distributing computation across multiple computers in a manner largely transparent to the programmer.

In January 2012, Clarke co-founded OneSpot, with the goal of creating "ads that don't suck". Over the next 3 years, he designed a real-time bidding engine capable of consistently outperforming Google Adwords. [21] In March 2012, he open sourced LastCalc, [22] an online calculator he intended to provide an open and more flexible alternative to tools like Google Calculator. [23]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hyphanet</span> Peer-to-peer Internet platform for censorship-resistant communication

Hyphanet is a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication. It uses a decentralized distributed data store to keep and deliver information, and has a suite of free software for publishing and communicating on the Web without fear of censorship. Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke, who defined Freenet's goal as providing freedom of speech on the Internet with strong anonymity protection.

Gnutella is a peer-to-peer network protocol. Founded in 2000, it was the first decentralized peer-to-peer network of its kind, leading to other, later networks adopting the model.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peer-to-peer</span> Type of decentralized and distributed network architecture

Peer-to-peer (P2P) computing or networking is a distributed application architecture that partitions tasks or workloads between peers. Peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the network, forming a peer-to-peer network of nodes. In addition, a personal area network (PAN) is also in nature a type of decentralized peer-to-peer network typically between two devices.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Distributed hash table</span> Decentralized distributed system with lookup service

A distributed hash table (DHT) is a distributed system that provides a lookup service similar to a hash table. Key–value pairs are stored in a DHT, and any participating node can efficiently retrieve the value associated with a given key. The main advantage of a DHT is that nodes can be added or removed with minimum work around re-distributing keys. Keys are unique identifiers which map to particular values, which in turn can be anything from addresses, to documents, to arbitrary data. Responsibility for maintaining the mapping from keys to values is distributed among the nodes, in such a way that a change in the set of participants causes a minimal amount of disruption. This allows a DHT to scale to extremely large numbers of nodes and to handle continual node arrivals, departures, and failures.

Winny is a Japanese peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing program developed by Isamu Kaneko, a research assistant at the University of Tokyo in 2002. Like Freenet, a user must add an encrypted node list in order to connect to other nodes on the network. Users choose three cluster words which symbolize their interests, and then Winny connects to other nodes which share these cluster words, downloading and storing encrypted data from cache of these neighbors in a distributed data store. If users want a particular file, they set up triggers (keywords), and Winny will download files marked by these triggers. The encryption was meant to provide anonymity, but Winny also included bulletin boards where users would announce uploads, and the IP address of posters could be discovered through these boards. While Freenet was implemented in Java, Winny was implemented as a Windows C++ application.

An anonymous P2P communication system is a peer-to-peer distributed application in which the nodes, which are used to share resources, or participants are anonymous or pseudonymous. Anonymity of participants is usually achieved by special routing overlay networks that hide the physical location of each node from other participants.

The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is an anonymous network layer that allows for censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication. Anonymous connections are achieved by encrypting the user's traffic, and sending it through a volunteer-run network of roughly 55,000 computers distributed around the world. Given the high number of possible paths the traffic can transit, a third party watching a full connection is unlikely. The software that implements this layer is called an "I2P router", and a computer running I2P is called an "I2P node". I2P is free and open sourced, and is published under multiple licenses.

This is a timeline of events in the history of networked file sharing.

Oskar Sandberg is a key contributor to the Freenet Project, and a PhD graduate of the Chalmers Technical University in Gothenburg, Sweden. Oskar collaborated with Ian Clarke to design the new "darknet" model employed in Freenet 0.7, work which was presented at the DEF CON security conference in July 2005. Oskar recently completed a Ph.D. about the mathematics of complex networks, especially with regard to the small world phenomenon. Besides this he has an active interest in distributed computer networks and network security, and has been an active contributor to the Freenet Project since 1999. Oskar now works at Google.

This is a list of blogging terms. Blogging, like any hobby, has developed something of a specialized vocabulary. The following is an attempt to explain a few of the more common phrases and words, including etymologies when not obvious.

Steven Starr is the producer of FLOW: For Love Of Water, and the founder of Revver.

A distributed search engine is a search engine where there is no central server. Unlike traditional centralized search engines, work such as crawling, data mining, indexing, and query processing is distributed among several peers in a decentralized manner where there is no single point of control.

Apache Mahout is a project of the Apache Software Foundation to produce free implementations of distributed or otherwise scalable machine learning algorithms focused primarily on linear algebra. In the past, many of the implementations use the Apache Hadoop platform, however today it is primarily focused on Apache Spark. Mahout also provides Java/Scala libraries for common math operations and primitive Java collections. Mahout is a work in progress; a number of algorithms have been implemented.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Etherpad</span> Open-source web-based collaborative real-time editor

Etherpad is an open-source, web-based collaborative real-time editor, allowing authors to simultaneously edit a text document, and see all of the participants' edits in real-time, with the ability to display each author's text in their own color. There is also a chat box in the sidebar to allow meta communication.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Play Framework</span> Open-source web framework written in Scala

Play Framework is an open-source web application framework which follows the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. It is written in Scala and usable from other programming languages that are compiled to JVM bytecode, e.g. Java. It aims to optimize developer productivity by using convention over configuration, hot code reloading and display of errors in the browser.

Cemetech is a programming and hardware development group and developer community founded in 2000. Its primary focus is developing third-party software for TI and Casio graphing calculators, along with a focus on mobile and wearable computing hardware. Among its most notable projects are the Doors CS shell for the TI-83+ series of graphing calculators, the Clove 2 dataglove, the Ultimate Calculator, and the CALCnet / globalCALCnet system for networking graphing calculators and connecting them to the Internet. The Cemetech website also hosts tools for calculator programmers, including the SourceCoder TI-BASIC IDE and the jsTIfied TI-83+/84+ emulator. The founder of the site, Dr. Christopher Mitchell, began the site to showcase his personal projects, but it has since branched out to become one of several major sites in the TI calculator hobbyist community and a source for hardware and programming development assistance. It has incubated many software and hardware projects which began in the calculator community but included microprocessor development, general electrical engineering, desktop applications, and mobile/web applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elasticsearch</span> Search engine

Elasticsearch is a search engine based on the Lucene library. It provides a distributed, multitenant-capable full-text search engine with an HTTP web interface and schema-free JSON documents. Elasticsearch is developed in Java and is triple-licensed under the (source-available) Server Side Public License, the Elastic license, and the Affero General Public License, while other parts fall under the proprietary (source-available) Elastic License. Official clients are available in Java, .NET (C#), PHP, Python, Ruby and many other languages. According to the DB-Engines ranking, Elasticsearch is the most popular enterprise search engine.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Python Conference</span> Annual programming language convention

The Python Conference is the largest annual convention for the discussion and promotion of the Python programming language. It originated in the United States but is also held in more than 40 other countries. It was one of the first computer programming conferences to develop and adhere to a code of conduct. The conference hosts tutorials, demonstrations and training sessions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Twister (software)</span> Blog software

Twister is a decentralized, experimental peer-to-peer microblogging program which uses end-to-end encryption to safeguard communications. Based on BitTorrent- and Bitcoin-like protocols, it has been likened to a distributed version of Twitter.

SwellRT was a free and open-source backend-as-a-service and API focused to ease development of apps featuring real-time collaboration. It supported the building of mobile and web apps, and aims to facilitate interoperability and federation.

References

  1. "About Ian - Locutus of Blog". Blog.locut.us. Archived from the original on 12 February 2019. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  2. "About Ian - Locutus of Blog". Blog.locut.us. Archived from the original on 12 February 2019. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  3. Ian Clarke, I.Clarke@dynamicblue.com. "Ian Clarke's Homepage: Projects: Cloud Maps". Archived from the original on 20 April 2010. Retrieved 5 June 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: unfit URL (link)
  4. 1 2 "Ian Clarke". LinkedIn. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  5. John Markoff (10 May 2000). "Cyberspace Programmers Confront Copyright Laws". The New York Times.
  6. "Coders prepare son of Napster". BBC News. 12 March 2001.
  7. "Fighting for free speech on the Net". CNN. 19 December 2005.
  8. Markoff, John (18 June 2007). "Another Attempt to Match Readers and Relevant News". The New York Times.
  9. "Latest Topics". ZDNet.com.au. 30 June 2015. Archived from the original on 27 May 2007. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  10. "The Freenet Project - /Fairshare - beginner". Archived from the original on 14 March 2007. Retrieved 23 October 2006.
  11. "Search Engine Learns From User Feedback". Slashdot.
  12. "Large Scale Collaborative Editing". Slashdot.
  13. "2003 Young Innovators Under 35". Technology Review. 2003. Retrieved 16 August 2011.
  14. Gentile, Gary (30 October 2005). "Start-up aims to make online video profitable". USA Today.
  15. "Two Revver founders leave". Archived from the original on 17 September 2009. Retrieved 7 September 2009.
  16. "Sense Array : Welcome". Archived from the original on 30 July 2008. Retrieved 29 July 2008.
  17. "Google Code Archive - Long-term storage for Google Code Project Hosting". Code.google.com. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  18. "Swarm — a New Approach To Distributed Computation". Slashdot.
  19. "Interview with Ian Clarke – Luminary and Freenet Creator". Archived from the original on 30 July 2010. Retrieved 12 July 2010.
  20. "Swarm - Concurrency with Scala Continuations | The Scala Programming Language". Scala-lang.org. 28 September 2009. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  21. "Realtime Bidding: Predicting the future, 10,000 times per second". Vimeo. Retrieved 22 August 2016.
  22. "LastCalc". Lastcalc.com. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  23. "LastCalc Is Open Sourced". Slashdot.