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 46)
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">Freenet</span> Peer-to-peer Internet platform for censorship-resistant communication

Freenet 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.

gnuplot Command-line and GUI plotting program

gnuplot is a command-line and GUI program that can generate two- and three-dimensional plots of functions, data, and data fits. The program runs on all major computers and operating systems . Originally released in 1986, its listed authors are Thomas Williams, Colin Kelley, Russell Lang, Dave Kotz, John Campbell, Gershon Elber, Alexander Woo "and many others." Despite its name, this software is not part of the GNU Project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Apache License</span> Free software license developed by the ASF

The Apache License is a permissive free software license written by the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It allows users to use the software for any purpose, to distribute it, to modify it, and to distribute modified versions of the software under the terms of the license, without concern for royalties. The ASF and its projects release their software products under the Apache License. The license is also used by many non-ASF projects.

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.

An application program is a computer program designed to carry out a specific task other than one relating to the operation of the computer itself, typically to be used by end-users. Word processors, media players, and accounting software are examples. The collective noun "application software" refers to all applications collectively. The other principal classifications of software are system software, relating to the operation of the computer, and utility software ("utilities").

A dark net or darknet is an overlay network within the Internet that can only be accessed with specific software, configurations, or authorization, and often uses a unique customized communication protocol. Two typical darknet types are social networks, and anonymity proxy networks such as Tor via an anonymized series of connections.

A friend-to-friend computer network is a type of peer-to-peer network in which users only make direct connections with people they know. Passwords or digital signatures can be used for authentication.

Randy Wigginton was Apple Computer's sixth employee, creator of MacWrite, Full Impact, and numerous other Mac applications. He used to work in development at eBay, Quigo, Inc and Move.com. In November 2010, he left his position as a "site reliability engineer" at Google Inc., purportedly after leaking news of a $1,000 holiday cash bonus to employees.

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.

nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows website authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.

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

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">Copyleft</span> Practice of mandating free use in all derivatives of a work

Copyleft is the legal technique of granting certain freedoms over copies of copyrighted works with the requirement that the same rights be preserved in derivative works. In this sense, freedoms refers to the use of the work for any purpose, and the ability to modify, copy, share, and redistribute the work, with or without a fee. Licenses which implement copyleft can be used to maintain copyright conditions for works ranging from computer software, to documents, art, scientific discoveries and even certain patents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">GNU General Public License</span> Series of free software licenses

The GNU General Public License is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was the first copyleft for general use and was originally written by the founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), Richard Stallman, for the GNU Project. The license grants the recipients of a computer program the rights of the Free Software Definition. These GPL series are all copyleft licenses, which means that any derivative work must be distributed under the same or equivalent license terms. It is more restrictive than the Lesser General Public License and even further distinct from the more widely used permissive software licenses BSD, MIT, and Apache.

<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.

Cemetech is a programming and hardware development group and developer community founded in 2000. Its primary software focus is calculator programming for TI and Casio graphing calculators, and its primary hardware focus is 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 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 since its early days, it has branched out to become one of the several major sites of the TI calculator hobbyist community and a source for hardware and programming development assistance. It has incubated many software and hardware projects beginning in the calculator community at its roots but including microprocessor development, general electrical engineering, desktop applications, and mobile/web applications.

Docker is a set of platform as a service (PaaS) products that use OS-level virtualization to deliver software in packages called containers. The service has both free and premium tiers. The software that hosts the containers is called Docker Engine. It was first started in 2013 and is developed by Docker, Inc.

References

  1. "About Ian - Locutus of Blog". Blog.locut.us. Retrieved 5 June 2016.
  2. "About Ian - Locutus of Blog". Blog.locut.us. 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. 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.