# Charles Petrie (fan site) > 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. This is an independent fan and tribute site, not his official site and not affiliated with him, Stanford, the IEEE or Burning Man Project. His own pages: http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~petrie/bio.html (bio), http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~petrie/ (home), http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/~petrie/vita.pdf (CV). LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/charles-petrie/0/7b4/a8a. Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=6Uvy4NYAAAAJ. No personal contact details are published here. ## Timeline - 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. - 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. - 1970: US Army, 142nd Military Police. Sergeant, 1970 to 1971, per the CV. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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). - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 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. - 2021: A New AI. IEEE Internet Computing 25(2), March/April 2021, his most recent listed paper. ## Books - Web Service Composition. Springer, 2016. ISBN 978-3-319-32831-7. - Automated Configuration Problem Solving. SpringerBriefs in Computer Science, 2012. DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-4532-6. - Semantic Web Services Challenge: Results from the First Year. Springer, Semantic Web and Beyond vol. 8, 2009. Edited with Tiziana Margaria, Holger Lausen and Michal Zaremba. ISBN 978-0-387-72495-9. - Enterprise Integration Modeling. MIT Press, October 1992. Editor. - Ten Years Off-Grid: Don't Try This At Home. Self-published (Lulu). ## Pages - https://charlespetrie.com/biography/ Year-by-year timeline with sources - https://charlespetrie.com/ideas/ Five essays: Proteus and truth maintenance; agents and virtual enterprises; IEEE Internet Computing; the Coordinated Internet; 88NV - https://charlespetrie.com/publications/ Books, 30 selected papers, every Peering column 2005-2017 - https://charlespetrie.com/classic/ Archived tag-for-tag copy of his original Stanford bio page (also /classic/home/ and /classic/proteus/) - https://charlespetrie.com/videos/ Two verified talks by him; context footage labeled as such - https://charlespetrie.com/links/ His own profiles and pages - https://charlespetrie.com/faq/ and https://charlespetrie.com/sources/ ## Machine-readable - https://charlespetrie.com/api/person.json, https://charlespetrie.com/api/faq.json, https://charlespetrie.com/openapi.json, https://charlespetrie.com/.well-known/mcp-server-card.json, https://charlespetrie.com/.well-known/ai-plugin.json - https://charlespetrie.com/AGENTS.md, https://charlespetrie.com/llms-full.txt; every page has a Markdown twin at index.md ## Related fan sites - https://firth.com/ (Colin Firth) - https://austen.com/ (Jane Austen) - https://ryanholidayfans.com/ (Ryan Holiday) - https://toscagruber.com/ (Tosca Gruber)