Metreo

Currently I am chief software architect at Metreo, a pricing optimization company in Palo Alto.

AltaVista Research

I spent most of 2000 at AltaVista Research. I did a little project management, system design, programming, intellectual property generation, consultation, and technology evaluation.

Web Archeology

In 1996 I found together with Krishna Bharat the Web Archeology project at Compaq SRC. The group has been a victim of its success, and many of the initial group members have been hired away from Compaq. The group had a wide variety of interests ranging from mining the web, improving web clients to doing empirical studies.

WebL

From 1997 to 1999 I spent my time on WebL (recently renamed to Compaq Web Language), a programming language I designed with Thomas Kistler and Tom Rodeheffer for automating tasks on the web. See my presentations, publications, and videos pages for more details. The WebL home page is the place to get more information about WebL. Unfortunately since I left Compaq, WebL has become an orphan step-child, even though there are still are many enthusiastic users out there.

A few lucky people have WebL T-shirts with the logo on the left - sorry, none are available anymore.

Search Engine Log Analysis

Over the summer of 1998 I spent time with Craig Silverstein and Monika Henzinger on performing the largest analysis so far on search engine query logs (nearly 1 Billion AltaVista queries !). A Compaq SRC technical note summarizes the results - the note was republished in the SIGIR Forum newsletter, and I am happy to say is very well cited these days.

Vistabar

In 1996 while at Compaq SRC I constructed one of the first desktop web surfing assistants for popular web browsers (now most search companies provide similar toolbars, and in the case of Internet Explorere, the concept has become part of the browser). The idea was to create a tool that observes a user surfing the web, automates tasks, remembers and suggests things, etc. I divided the functionality into features that help the surfer, and those that support groups of surfers. A paper about the system was published at the UIST'97 conference (see publications). Many of the ideas I explored have been incorporated into AltaVista Discovery.

Oberon & Gadgets

From 1992 to 1996 I built the Gadgets document-based user interface for Oberon System 3 (my thesis work). It has had some moderate success, and is still in use at the ETH. I am not involved with the system anymore, although I recently wrote a book about the system together with Andre Fischer. More details about the book and Oberon can be found here.

Professional Activities

I was vice-chair of the Browsers & Tools track at the World Wide Web 8 conference (WWW8) and World Wide Web 9 (WWW9) conferences. I am serving again on the program committee for WWW10 in Hong Kong. I am a member of the ACM and SIGIR interest group.