I read John Battelle’s Sarch Blog regularly, and today saw John’s blog entry about my PhD thesis advisor, David Tennenhouse, becoming the new CEO of A9 Search. David left MIT to run DARPA’s ITO office prior to many of us graduating – I have (ahem) fond memories of flying down to DARPA to have him review drafts of my thesis. David was at Intel as VP of the Corporate Technology Group and Director of Research prior to joining A9.
We had a great group (Telemedia, Networks, and Systems), and its alumni have gone on to do some interesting things. Of the PhD students, Chris Lindblad managed to graduate first, joining Infoseek and architecting is Ultraseek intranet search server. Chris is now founder and chief architect at MarkLogic, an vendor of XML Content Servers. Bill Stasior was next to finish, and Bill is now Director of Search and Navigation at Amazon/A9. After I made it out, Vanu Bose went on to found Vanu, Inc., which delivered the first FCC-approved software radio to the market. David Wetherall was the last of the PhD students, and is now an associate professor of computer science at University of Washington. Starting in July this year, David will be Director of Intel Research Seattle.
Not bad for a group that got heavily distracted by the web and Doom! We set up some of the earliest web sites, put up the world’s first web-initiated live video streamed over the net, and put up the first remote-controlled car on the net, which even Al Gore drove.
