The beginning... I grew up in a small town in Illinois named New Lenox. It's a southwest suburb of Chicago, so we weren't too far removed from the rest of the world. My family consisted of my parents, my older sister Kerry, my younger brother Jon, and an Old English sheepdog named Max. My dad was the editor of a local newspaper, but now he's their web manager. My mom stayed at home to raise us, which was a full-time job. As for my siblings, even though we were very different, Kerry, Jon, and I managed not to kill one another growing up, which is probably a good thing. Kerry's married now and even has a son named Benjamin -- making me an uncle, which I'm very excited about. She works in marketing, managing ad campaigns. As for Jon, he did a stint in the Marines, finishing as a Sergeant, and now resides in San Diego, CA, working on his college degree. As for me, I worked my way through high school, participating in a bunch of activities like environmental action clubs, cross country, and math teams. I even managed to win some awards for computer programming contests. I had some good friends and good times there. At the end of it all, I managed to get into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
	The East Coast... Going to MIT was exciting -- being surrounded by brilliant people is like that. Even with the pressures of the academic life, I managed to enjoy it and have a lot of fun in Boston. This was mainly due to me finding a great group of friends in my fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. I'm still very close to my pledge class, hanging out with them often even though many of us are spread all over the country. At MIT, I found my calling as a computer geek, and dived into "Course Six" as the computer science major is called there. I participated and TA'ed robotic contests, helped run the local IEEE chapter, and even won a digital electronics design competition. Like I said, it was great fun. While I was there, I worked for BBN (now owned by GTE last time I looked) as an intern. My department specialized in submarine detection work for the government-- allowing me to work on some very interesting problems. In later years, we changed focus to using genetic algorithms to perform scheduling tasks. With them, I wrote my Master's thesis on applying genetic alogirthms to the Job Shop problem (a more difficult version of the the traveling salesman problem). After five years, I finally left MIT with my Bachelor's and Master's of Engineering in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. But, my schooling was not over -- I had decided to apply to graduate schools to pursue my Ph.D. I was very fortunate to get into the Computer Science graduate program at the University of California at Berkeley
The West Coast... At Berkeley, I changed my focus from Artificial Intelligence to Systems. I fell into a great research group, and began to work on mobile computing problems. At various points, I was associated with several different projects -- ranging from Ninja, to Iceberg, to Oceanstore. Currently, I'm working on my dissertation, under the direction of Professor Anthony Joseph. My dissertation will discuss how to use mobile code and data to build next generation Internet services, with automatic placement of these mobile objects through introspection. When I'm not working on research, I do get time to go out and enjoy the Bay Area. My hobbies include snow boarding, hanging out at bars in San Fransisco, reading (a lot), working out, and swimming.