David Pope Anderson (born 1955) is a 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 and BOINC projects. SETI@home is a large volunteer computing project and BOINC is an open-source software system for creating volunteer computing projects.
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 in creating SETI@home. From 2000 to 2002, he served as CTO of United Devices. In 2002 he created the BOINC project, which develops an open-source software platform for volunteer computing. The project is funded by NSF and is based at the UC Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory. BOINC is used by about 40 projects, including SETI@home, Einstein@home, Rosetta@home, and Climateprediction.net.
