James Waldo

Jim Waldo is Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, where he teaches courses in distributed systems and privacy; the Chief Technology Officer for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; and a Professor of Policy teaching on topics of technology and policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Jim designed clouds at VMware; was a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he investigated next-generation large-scale distributed systems; and got his start in distributed systems at Apollo Computer. While at Sun, he was the technical lead of Project Darkstar, a multi-threaded, distributed infrastructure for massive multi-player on-line games and virtual worlds; the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java; and an early member of the Java software organization.

Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification.

Jim is the author of "Java: the Good Parts" (O'Reilly) and co-authored "The Jini Specifications" (Addison-Wesley). He edited "The Evolution of C++: Language Design in the Marketplace of Ideas" (MIT Press). He co-chaired a National Academies study on privacy, and co-edited the report "Engaging Privacy and Information Technology in a Digital Age." He is the author of numerous journal and conference proceedings articles, and holds over 50 patents.

Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in linguistics and philosophy from the University of Utah. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.