Bio

Jim Waldo is a Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, where he teaches courses in distributed systems and privacy. He is also the Chief Technology Officer for SEAS, and a professor of technology policy in the Harvard Kennedy School, where he is associated with the Belfer Center, the Shorenstein Center, and the Carr Center. Prior to being the CTO at SEAS, Jim was the first Chief Technology Officer for Harvard University.

Jim was a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems, where he was best known for being the technical architect for Jinitm, a distributed system based on the Java programming langauge and environment.  He was also instrumental in the development of the Javatm programming language and environment. Jim spent most of his time at Sun as a principal investigator in Sun Labs, where he did research and product development in the areas of medical sensing, object-oriented programming and systems, distributed computing, and user environments. His last project at Sun Labs was Darkstar, a multi-threaded and distributed infrastructure for on-line games and virtual worlds.

Before joining Sun, Jim spent eight years at Apollo Computer and Hewlett Packard working in the areas of distributed object systems, user interfaces, class libraries, text and internationalization. While at HP, he led the design and development of the first Object Request Broker, and was instrumental in getting that technology incorporated into the first OMG CORBA specification. He edited the book The Evolution of C++: Language Design in the Marketplace of Ideas (MIT Press), and was one of the authors of The Jini Specification (Addison Wesley). He is also the author of Java: The Good Parts.

Jim received his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). He also holds M.A. degrees in both linguistics and philosophy from the University of Utah. He is a member of the IEEE and ACM.