Pete co-founded MAYA Design, and currently serves as the principal investigator for MAYA’s research into the future of computing. He has dedicated his career to solving many of the hard problems outlined in Trillions for the public good. Along with a small research and development team at MAYA Design, Pete is currently developing the Information Commons, an architecture for unifying the world’s knowledge; VIA (Visage Information Architecture), the theoretical basis and design patterns required to manage a network of a trillion devices; and IDA, the technical backbone of a massively distributed peer-to-peer network. He continues to insist that it’s not complicated.
Peter holds 15 patents and has co-authored a book on letter and word perception. He was the founding chair of Three Rivers Connect — an initiative of senior business and civic leaders that promotes the development of civic computing in the Pittsburgh region. Peter was also a member of the Networked Systems of Embedded Computing study committee, part of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board (CSTB) of the National Research Council. He coauthored their seminal book on the topic of pervasive computing entitled, Embedded, Everywhere: A Research Agenda for Networked Systems of Embedded Computers.
He received his Ph.D. degree in 1981 from Cornell University, where he studied educational and cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. He did postdoctoral research at the University of Wisconsin and was a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow in Cognitive Science at Carnegie Mellon University. Since 2000, he has been an Adjunct Professor at the CMU HCII Institute.
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