I'm a grad student in computer science at the University of Colorado. This is my fourth year as a Ph.D. student, and my second at C.U. I started out at the University of Oregon, where I worked with Dr. Jun Li. My research at Oregon was on security in large-scale networks, especially the detection and suppression of Internet worms. I moved from Oregon to Colorado in the fall of 2004, and now I'm working on wireless networking.
I graduated from Carleton College in 2001 with a degree in computer science. While there, I focused on machine learning, database systems and network protocol design. Though minors are not officially offered, I informally minored (or perhaps quasi-majored) in religious studies with a focus on South- and East-Asian religions, especially Mahayana Buddhist traditions. I'm generally interested in human language. I've studied German and Japanese; I claim to have an acceptable grasp of the former and a lamentable grasp of the latter. I've also studied A.I. natural language processing, and studying linguistics is somewhere on the list of alternate life paths that I thought about following, and might yet take some day.
Another one of those alternate paths is the study of technology law. I took the LSATs and came within a hair's breadth of applying to law school before deciding that the computer science Ph.D. was the route I preferred. The more I study computing systems, the more I am convinced that the most interesting and important issues have more to do with the societal than technological aspects. Computing, defined loosely as the ability to store, transport and analyze data, has a great potential to both benefit and harm society. The decisions we make about our communication media will surely impact the nature of future discourse, but policy makers don't seem to see this as a societal issue. It's being argued as business and technology, copyrights and tax models, but not as speech and human rights. It needs to be. I hope to bring a bit of concern for public policy concern to computing research, and some understanding of computing to public policy discussions.
I still don't really know which approach would be more important or necessary, but I think I'd rather have real expertise in computer science and a moderate grasp of the legal process than the other way around. This seems to be the minority decision: Several respectable law schools have programs focussed on computing and the Internet (notably Harvard's Berkman Center, Yale's Information Society Project, and the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society ) but there don't seem to be any analogous programs for computer scientists interested in law and policy. I'm part of a cabal working to change this by creating an interdisciplinary networking and public policy program at UO.
I'm almost all hat and no cattle, but not completely. Besides the above, I'm a member of ACM SIGCAS, and the CPSR voting technology working group and one of the programmers of the Election Incident Reporting System. I taught a seminar on e-voting in winter of 2004.
Resources for societal issues surrounding computing: