Charles Petriea fan site for a Stanford computer scientist

Thirty-odd dependencies, 1948 to 2021.

Every entry is from his own bio, his CV, his columns, the 2007 Stanford release or the 2018 IEEE Spectrum profile, and says which. Where two of his own documents give different years, both are noted.

The short version

Charles J. Petrie, Ph.D., is a retired Senior Research Scientist of the Stanford Computer Science Department's Logic Group. He was the first person hired into the AI Lab that Woody Bledsoe founded at MCC in Austin in 1984, and led Proteus, the first MCC technology to reach a commercial product. He was the founding editor-in-chief of IEEE Internet Computing, which he put online by hand-coding every article into HTML so that a magazine called Internet Computing would exist on the Internet. He was one of the early editors of the WWW Virtual Library, the founding executive director of the Stanford Networking Research Center, and the founding chair of the Semantic Web Services Challenge. From 2013 to 2017 he managed Black Rock City Municipal Airport, the temporary airport at Burning Man.

Education
B.S. Mathematics, LSU, 1969. M.S. Computer Science, UT Austin, 1986. Ph.D. Computer Science, UT Austin, 1991 (advisor Robert Simmons).
MCC
Senior Member of Technical Staff and Project Leader, April 1984 to September 1993. First hire of Woody Bledsoe's AI Lab; worked for Elaine Rich; led Proteus.
Stanford
Center for Design Research 1993-1999 (and 2005-2007 as Consulting Associate Professor); Networking Research Center founding Executive Director 1999-2004, Staff Scientist 2004-2005; Logic Group Senior Research Scientist 2002-2011. Official retiree.
Editing
Founding Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Internet Computing, 1996-1998; Peering columnist and editor 2005-2017; five special issues. Editorial board, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems.
Founded or chaired
ICEIMT (1992), Semantic Web Services Challenge (2006-2010), ICSOC-03 liaison chair, WET ICE general chair 1996 and 1998, IATA-98 and -99, RuleML 2011 Challenge.
Europe
Guest Professor, KIT Karlsruhe and University of St. Gallen, 2012; HSG technical staff 2013-2016; Fraunhofer FOKUS consultant 2018-2019.
Airport
Black Rock City Municipal Airport (88NV) manager, January 2013 to January 2017; volunteer there since 1999.
Memberships
IEEE Computer Society, AAAI, ACM.
Patent
US 5,509,071, with Wayne Allen, filed by MCC on 1 April 1994: cryptographic non-repudiation of software delivery over the Internet.

Year by year

  1. 1948

    Born in September

    His own page of 1948 events opens with the line that Charles Petrie was born on 14 September, alongside the transistor, the Manchester Baby and Shannon's theory of communication. Source: his 1948 page.

  2. 1969

    B.S. in Mathematics, Louisiana State University

    The CV lists the degree; the bio adds that his M.S. and Ph.D. would both come from the University of Texas at Austin. Source: his CV.

  3. 1970

    US Army, 142nd Military Police

    Sergeant, 1970 to 1971, per the CV. Source: his CV.

  4. 1974

    Solar Research Inc., Austin

    Engineer and programmer until 1978. His later book on ten years of living off-grid on solar power suggests the interest never left. Source: his CV.

  5. 1978

    Sperry Corporation

    Systems analyst, manager and sales through 1984: mainframe performance analysis, seismic-processing benchmarks and custom software. The bio calls him a project manager for Sperry Univac. Source: his CV.

  6. 1984

    First hire of the MCC AI Lab

    In April 1984 he joined the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in Austin as the first person hired by Prof. Woody Bledsoe for its AI Lab. MCC was the first large US computer-industry research consortium, formed in 1982 under Admiral Bobby Inman as a response to Japan's Fifth Generation project. Source: his Stanford bio.

  7. 1985

    Proteus

    Project Leader of Proteus, a hybrid reasoning and representation system: frames with inheritance, forward and backward chaining rules, a truth maintenance system and dependency-directed backtracking with fix rules. Version 1 shipped as MCC document AI/TR-0101-05 in 1985; David Russinoff was principal architect and Donald Steiner the third original member. Source: his Proteus page.

  8. 1986

    M.S. in Computer Science, UT Austin

    Master's thesis: New Algorithms for Dependency-Directed Backtracking. The next year his AAAI-87 paper revised dependency-directed backtracking for default reasoning. Source: his CV.

  9. 1989

    The first MCC technology in a product

    NCR's Design Advisor, an integrated-circuit design critic built on Proteus and presented at IAAI-89, became the first commercial product based on MCC technology. Petrie later became the subject of the case study Technology Transfer and MCC in R&D Collaboration on Trial (Harvard Business School Press, 1994). Source: his Proteus page.

  10. 1991

    Ph.D. in Computer Science, UT Austin

    Dissertation: Planning and Replanning with Reason Maintenance, advised by Prof. Robert Simmons. The same year, his AAAI-91 paper Context Maintenance. Source: his CV.

  11. 1992

    ICEIMT and Enterprise Integration Modeling

    Program chair of the first International Conference on Enterprise Integration Modeling Technology and editor of the MIT Press volume that came out of it. He also chaired the AAAI-92 workshop on AI in enterprise integration and published Constrained Decision Revision at AAAI-92. Source: his Stanford bio.

  12. 1993

    Stanford, Mosaic and the WWW Virtual Library

    Joined Stanford's Center for Design Research as a Senior Research Scientist in September 1993 and, by his own account, had everyone throw away paper and put everything on the Web using Mosaic. He carried a Sun SPARC in his luggage to give a DARPA presentation from its web server that year, and started the Mechanical Engineering section of the WWW Virtual Library, the volunteer-edited index that predates Wikipedia. Source: Internet Computing Begins, 2017.

  13. 1994

    Redux', ProcessLink and a patent

    At CDR he implemented Redux', a process-coordination server that became the basis of ProcessLink, an agent-based framework for coordinating engineering design tools, first applied to aircraft electrical cable design. In April 1994 MCC filed his patent (5,509,071, with Wayne Allen) on using cryptography to guarantee delivery of software over the Internet. Source: his Stanford bio.

  14. 1996

    Asked to start an Internet magazine

    Ted Lewis approached him in early 1996 about a new IEEE Computer Society magazine about the Internet. The first editorial board met in the third quarter of 1996, against naysayers who thought ATM would replace packet switching and a press office that wanted the title Edgeware. He was also general chair of IEEE WET ICE that year. Source: Internet Computing Begins, 2017.

  15. 1997

    IEEE Internet Computing, volume 1, number 1

    Founding editor-in-chief. His first column, The New Engineering Computer, asked whether the Internet was the CB radio of the 90s or the Los Angeles of the 40s, an urban frontier where anyone could create something new. He hand-coded the whole magazine into HTML so it was free and online, the first Computer Society magazine to be so. Source: The New Engineering Computer, 1997.

  16. 1998

    First burn

    His first Burning Man, the year after a motorcycle rally took him past it, according to IEEE Spectrum. His last column as editor-in-chief, A Brief History, ran in November 1998. Source: IEEE Spectrum, 2018.

  17. 1999

    Stanford Networking Research Center

    Founding executive director. He ran it as a start-up and within the year it was the largest research center in the Stanford School of Engineering. The same year Lissa Shoun established the Black Rock City airport, and he joined her. Source: his Stanford bio.

  18. 2000

    JATLite

    JATLite: A Java Agent Infrastructure with Message Routing, with Jeon and Cutkosky, in IEEE Internet Computing. The agent infrastructure was the major result of the CDR engineering work. Source: his Stanford bio.

  19. 2002

    The Stanford Logic Group

    Senior Research Scientist working with Prof. Michael Genesereth in the Computer Science Department, on projects with DARPA, NEC, HP and SAP. Source: his CV.

  20. 2003

    Service agents and virtual enterprises

    International liaison chair of ICSOC-03, the first International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, and co-author with Christoph Bussler of the IEEE Internet Computing survey Service Agents and Virtual Enterprises. Source: his Stanford bio.

  21. 2005

    Peering, and the World Wide Wizard

    Began writing and editing the Peering column in IEEE Internet Computing (it ran until 2017). Keynote at the Montreal Conference on e-Technologies on the World Wide Wizard, software that would let computers negotiate with each other to get people's tasks done. Source: his Stanford bio.

  22. 2006

    Semantic Web Services Challenge

    Founding chair, with STI Innsbruck and DERI Galway, of the first initiative to test semantic web service technologies against common scenarios. He chaired it through 2010 and co-edited the first year's results for Springer. Source: his CV.

  23. 2007

    POEM with SAP

    Stanford News described the POEM project, Policy-Oriented Enterprise Management, with Genesereth, Kassoff and SAP scientists, and his World Wide Wizard vision. He was also a Consulting Associate Professor at CDR, working with the Volkswagen AutoUni. Source: Stanford News, 2007.

  24. 2009

    Practical web services

    Keynote at the IEEE Semantic Web Services in Practice workshop in Singapore; the book Semantic Web Services Challenge: Results from the First Year; and Semantic Email Addressing: The Killer App? in IEEE Internet Computing. Source: his Stanford bio.

  25. 2010

    The future of the Internet is coordination

    Paper and talk at the first Future Enterprise Systems workshop in Berlin: a Coordinated Internet that watches what people do, correlates their activities and tells them when their work affects someone else's. Expanded in Future Internet in 2011. Source: The Future of the Internet is Coordination, 2010.

  26. 2011

    Retires from Stanford

    Now, as his bio puts it, an official Stanford retiree. He kept the Peering column, the editorial board of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, and the Semantic Web Services Challenge. Source: his Stanford bio.

  27. 2012

    Karlsruhe, St. Gallen, TEDx, Munich

    Guest professor at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Service-Oriented Computing, summer semester) and the University of St. Gallen. Keynote on the future of the Internet at Strategic IT-Management in Munich in January; TEDxUHowest in Kortrijk on emergent collectives for disaster relief; Automated Configuration Problem Solving published by Springer. After the 2012 event he became manager of the Burning Man airport. Source: his CV.

  28. 2013

    Black Rock City Municipal Airport, 88NV

    Airport manager, January 2013 to January 2017, of a temporary FAA- and Nevada DOT-inspected airport that for a few days ranks around 68th in the country by traffic and doubles as a second gate into the event. About 300 volunteers, a Ministry of Customs he initiated, and the first manuals defining every airport role. Source: his Stanford bio.

  29. 2016

    Web Service Composition

    Springer published Web Service Composition, based on his Karlsruhe lectures. The same year, the MIS Quarterly Executive case on how Deutsche Bank's IT division used design thinking, from his years on the technical staff at St. Gallen. Source: his CV.

  30. 2017

    Twenty years of Internet Computing

    His Peering column Internet Computing Begins told the founding story on the magazine's twentieth anniversary. He handed the airport to Meg Kosowski and stayed on as mentor. Source: Internet Computing Begins, 2017.

  31. 2018

    IEEE Spectrum, and Fraunhofer FOKUS

    Susan Karlin's Spectrum profile, Giving Burning Man Its Wings. Consultant to Fraunhofer FOKUS on the SANCTUM project, which produced AI Planning Applied to GIS-based Disaster Response at ACM MGIS'19 with Agnes Voisard. Source: IEEE Spectrum, 2018.

  32. 2021

    A New AI

    IEEE Internet Computing 25(2), March/April 2021, his most recent listed paper. Source: his Stanford bio.

Two discrepancies in his own documents, left as they are: the bio's opening sentence dates the Networking Research Center directorship 2000-2007 while the CV and the bio's work history say 1999-2004; the bio dates the Semantic Web Services Challenge chair 2006-2010 in one place and 2006-2009 in another.

The places

The former MCC headquarters in Austin, Texas, 2005
The former MCC headquarters in Austin, where he was the AI Lab's first hire in 1984. MCC closed in 2000. Photo: Larry D. Moore (CC BY 4.0).
The Main Building and tower of the University of Texas at Austin, 2014
The University of Texas at Austin, his M.S. (1986) and Ph.D. (1991). Photo: Larry D. Moore (CC BY 4.0).
The Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford, 2025
The Gates Computer Science Building at Stanford; his old office address was Gates 222. Photo: Frank Schulenburg (CC BY-SA 4.0).
On final approach to Black Rock City, Burning Man 2019
On final approach to Black Rock City. He managed the airport below from 2013 to 2017. Photo: Steve Jurvetson (CC BY 2.0).