David Pope Anderson (born 1955) is a Research Scientist at the Space Sciences Laboratory, at the University of California, Berkeley, and an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at the University of Houston. Anderson leads the SETI@home, BOINC, Bossa and Bolt software projects.
Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC), became useful as a platform for several distributed applications in areas as diverse as mathematics, medicine, molecular biology, climatology, and astrophysics. Anderson received a BA in Mathematics from Wesleyan University, and MS and PhD degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. From 1985 to 1992 he was an Assistant Professor in the UC Berkeley Computer Science Department, where he received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator and IBM Faculty Development awards. His research focused on distributed systems for handling digital audio and video in real time. He later worked at Sonic Solutions, where he developed the first distributed system for digital audio editing, and at Tunes.com, where he developed web-based systems for music discovery based on psychometrics, acoustics, and other models. In 1995 he joined David Gedye and Dan Werthimer in creating SETI@home, which he continues to direct. From 2000 to 2002, he served as CTO of United Devices.
In 2002 he created the BOINC software, which develops an open-source software platform for volunteer computing. The software is funded by NSF and is based at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. BOINC is used by about 100 projects, including SETI@home, Einstein@home, Rosetta@home, Climateprediction.net, and the IBM World Community Grid.
Anderson was involved in Stardust@home, which used 23,000 volunteers to identify interstellar dust particles via the Web - an approach called distributed thinking. In 2007 Anderson launched two new software projects: Bossa (middleware for distributed thinking), and Bolt (a framework for web-based training and education in the context of volunteer computing and distributed thinking).
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