Alumni

Lisa Dusseault was a CommerceNet fellow 2007-2009.

Ms. Dusseault alternated between Internet protocol design and standardization, and startup software engineering. Her primary interests are in collaborative software, including Calendaring, Instant Messaging, and shared authoring.

In standards, Lisa served as Applications Area Director of the IETF, and co-chair of the IMAP Extensions, Calendar Simplifications, WebDAV and XMPP Working Groups. Ms. Dusseault is the first author of the CalDAV standard, and the author of the standard book on WebDAV, “WebDAV: Next-Generation Collaborative Web Authoring” (Prentice Hall, 2003).

In startup endeavours, while at CommerceNet, Ms. Dusseault prototyped an open Web service for visualizing epidemiological data. She also founded and served as CTO of ShareTheVisit, a Web service for teleconferencing between patients’ families and patients’ doctors. Prior to that she has been an Architect and Development manager at Linden Lab, at Open Source Applications Foundation and at Xythos, and as a Program Manager at Microsoft on a number of projects including Exchange and Microsoft Internet Chat Server. Ms. Dusseault holds a BASc in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.

Jeff Shrager, PhD, CommerceNet Fellow Emeritus and Consulting Professor, Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford. Jeff was a CommerceNet fellow since forever, and we wish he still was here.

Jeff has decades of experience in scientific computation, especially biocomputing and computational simulation. As director of engineering of Afferent Systems, a robotic combi-chem startup, he worked on the company’s symbolic reaction simulation engine. Dr. Shrager subsequently led the NASA/NSF-funded BioBike project at the Carnegie Inst. of Washington Dept. of Plant Biology. BioBike was the world’s first cloud-based omics computing platform, incorporating a rich network of biological and biochemical knowledge and a high performance reasoning engine, all accessible via a simple through-the-web programmable interface, allowing biologists with little computing background to conduct novel complex computations. Dr. Shrager also co-founded and served as CTO for CommerceNet-backed CollabRx, Inc. (NASDQ: CLRX), whose technology recommends clinical trials for cancer patients based upon a set of hybrid ranking methods. Dr. Shrager has published nearly 100 peer-reviewed papers in fields as diverse as non-linear mathematics, computational biology, molecular biology, computer science, machine learning, collaborative analytics, human-machine interaction, usable privacy, and cognitive neuroscience.

Rachna was a CommerceNet fellow 2007-2008.

Dr. Dhamija was founder and CEO of Usable Security Systems, a CommerceNet portfolio company purchased by Webroot Software in 2010. Dr. Dhamija is a pioneer in the movement to apply usability, psychology, and human behavior to computer security. Dr. Dhamija worked on electronic payment system privacy and security at CyberCash before receiving her Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley for her dissertation entitled “Authentication for Humans: The Design and Analysis of Usable Security Systems.” After Berkeley, Dr. Dhamija was appointed as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society, and later joined CommerceNet as an entrepreneurial fellow. Dr. Dhamija is frequently quoted in media coverage of security vulnerabilities, and her research results have been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and CNN.

Patti Amundsen served as Manager of Special Projects, Office of the Chairman, with prior title of Executive Assistant to the Chairman. Patti’s background includes special project research and implementation as well as executive assistance in corporate, start-up, and non-profit environments for biotechnology, oncology, investment, payment and mobile technology industries.

Jesse was a CommerceNet fellow in 2005.

Jesse worked on a number of projects, including Greasemonkey, Book Burro, and anti-phishing user interfaces. As a freelance developer, he continues to manage Greasemonkey and Book Burro in addition to numerous other Open Source and Web-related endeavors, most notably, OpenStack.

Aytek was an entrepreneur at CommerceNet in 2006-2008.

Aytek was an entrepreneur at CommerceNet in 2006-2008, applying Web 2.0 communication tools to projects in health care, medical research and personalized mapping tools. She went on to become VP of product development and marketing at CollabRx, a CommerceNet portfolio company. Aytek has also led multiple product teams at Yahoo! Inc. and served as VP of marketing at Videro. Currently, she is an independent consultant in product management, user design and strategic marketing for mobile, web and DOOH technology initiatives. Aytek holds a B.A. in Economics from Yale University.

Ian Fischer is CTO and co-founder of Apportable (apportable.com), a 60 person technology company in San Francisco that makes Objective-C apps run on Android and also produces the SpriteBuilder game engine. He took his leave from the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science Ph.D. program to start Apportable in 2011 with Collin Jackson. Prior to Berkeley, he was the founding engineer of Usable Security Systems (usable.com). Usable was incubated by CommerceNet and later sold to Webroot in 2010. Ian completed his M.S. in Computer Science at Harvard in 2007. He has been known to sing professionally, including the occasional opera in San Francisco.

Chris was a principal investigator on Zocalo while at CommerceNet from March 2005 – July 2006.

He worked full time on Zocalo, which is hosted at SourceForge.net, through 2009, and subsequently worked at Google.

Rohit was director of research from February 2004 – September 2006.

Rohit supported CommerceNet’s engineering entrepreneurship and investment activities, working on microformats, and recruiting an R&D team that focused on decentralized commerce. Rohit sold his company, Angstro (a CommerceNet portfolio company) to Google and subsequently took a job at the Internet giant.

Ryan was at CommerceNet during 2006 and focused on Zocalo.

He went on to become an associate professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the associate director of the EBEL laboratory.

Joyce focused on Dojo and Mod-PubSub while at CommerceNet in 200.

She went on to co-found Renkoo with Adam Rifkin as the company’s chief technology officer.

Adam joined CommerceNet in 2004 as the director of Open Source initiatives.

Adam collaborated on several projects, including microformats and Mod-PubSub. He left in 2005 to start Renkoo, as CEO.

Kragen was at CommerceNet from August 2004 – January 2006.

Kragen worked on a number of projects, including Wowbar and microformats.

Michael was a visiting scientist during 2007 – 2008.

Michael designed and building prototypes for CollabRx, a Web-based software platform that supports collaboration among scientists working on therapy development.

Mike went on to become Principal Software Engineer and Lead Ontologist at Quixey. Prior to joining Quixey, he had a lead role in a variety of software companies building tools for knowledge management in the life sciences. He was a member of SRI’s Bioinformatics Research Group where he worked on tools for for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology tools. He likes to work in the intersection of complex knowledge representation and user interface design.

He holds degrees in Mathematics and Media Arts and Sciences from MIT, where he did research on artificial life, learning environments, and agent-based computing at the Media Laboratory. His work focuses on the intersection of knowledge representation, visualization, and discovery. An experienced interaction designer, he has exhibited interactive installations at the SIGGRAPH Art Show and the Boston Computer Museum. He has held research positions at MIT AI Laboratory, IBM, and the Centre Mondial in Paris.

Yang was at CommerceNet in 2005.

Yang collaborated with Kragen Sitaker on a Web-based, decentralized personalization engine with a built-in privacy protection mechanism based on bloom filters. Yang went on to become an Assistant Professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies. He has also been an affiliated faculty member in the Institute of Software Research (ISR) at the University of California, Irvine.

Mike went on to become Principal Software Engineer and Lead Ontologist at Quixey. Prior to joining Quixey, he had a lead role in a variety of software companies building tools for knowledge management in the life sciences. He was a member of SRI’s Bioinformatics Research Group where he worked on tools for for metabolic engineering and synthetic biology tools. He likes to work in the intersection of complex knowledge representation and user interface design.

He holds degrees in Mathematics and Media Arts and Sciences from MIT, where he did research on artificial life, learning environments, and agent-based computing at the Media Laboratory. His work focuses on the intersection of knowledge representation, visualization, and discovery. An experienced interaction designer, he has exhibited interactive installations at the SIGGRAPH Art Show and the Boston Computer Museum. He has held research positions at MIT AI Laboratory, IBM, and the Centre Mondial in Paris.

Alegria was a CommerceNet Intern in 2012.

She worked with Allan Schiffman on data privacy project: “Blend-me-in: privacy-preserving techniques for personalized information services.”

She went on to become a PhD candidate at the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine and a member of the Institute of Software Research. Her advisor is Professor Richard N. Taylor.

Alegria research interests have been in Software Architecture and Design, specifically in the evolving and decentralized architecture of Web applications, with focus in the e-commerce domain. Her work is on the qualitative evaluation of e-commerce architectures, on the integration of e-commerce components—negotiation, contracts, and workflow—and to follow, the experimentation with the COAST infrastructure for implementing application prototypes.

Yuan Kang has been a PhD student in the Intrusion Detection Systems Lab at Columbia University. His research involved a variety of topics in security including anonymity, embedded system security and insider attack detection.

At CommerceNet (Summer 2013), he was working with Allan Schiffman and Jeff Shrager on maintaining the privacy of patients who share sensitive medical information, without impeding the health care providers’ ability to use the data to perform their duties.

During her tenure as Director of Operations, Anne oversaw all of CommerceNet’s administration, finance, human resources, and facilities.

Prior to CommerceNet, Ms. Ferris worked for BENS (Business Executives for National Security) as a regional director. She also had her own consulting company which was launched from an Executive Director role at SoftBank Expos.

Ms. Ferris holds a BA in Communications from Marquette University.