Published Work

I've bylined several hundred articles, reviews, columns, news pieces, and departments, dating back to 1995 when I started working in publishing as an editor at eMedia in Cambridge, Massachusetts and became the magazine's de facto news writer for two years. In my next position, as an editor at Computer magazine, I wrote a monthly department on new technologies for several years. Since then, I've written for many other publishers and publications, both in-house and on a contract basis, mostly focusing on the impact of emerging technologies.

I've posted a few samples here of recent articles, plus a few older columns and technical pieces.

Engineering the Web's Third Decade
As Web technologies move beyond two-way interactive capabilities to facilitate more dynamic and pervasive experiences, the Web is quickly advancing toward its third major upgrade. (read the article)

Alternate Interface Technologies Emerge
Researchers working in human-computer interaction are developing new interfaces to produce greater efficiencies in personal computing and enhance miniaturization in mobile devices. (read the article)

Electronic Paper's Next Chapter
The technological challenge for researchers working on the next generation of electronic paper is to render color as brightly as traditional paper, without increasing power requirements or end-user costs. (read the article)

Medical Nanobots
Researchers working in medical nanorobotics are creating technologies that could lead to novel health-care applications, such as new ways of accessing areas of the human body that would otherwise be unreachable without invasive surgery. (read the article)

Face Recognition Breakthrough
By using sparse representation and compressed sensing, researchers have been able to demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy over traditional face-recognition techniques. (read the article)

Toward Native Web Execution
Several software projects are narrowing the performance gap between browser-based applications and their desktop counterparts. In the process, they’re creating new ways to improve the security of Web-based computing. (read the article)

Rethinking Signal Processing
Compressed sensing, which draws on information theory, probability theory, and other fields, has generated a great deal of excitement with its nontraditional approach to signal processing. (read the article)

The Evolution of Virtualization
Virtualization is moving out of the data center and making inroads with mobile computing, security, and software delivery. (read the article)

Photography's Bright Future
Researchers working in computational photography are using computer vision, computer graphics, and applied optics to bring a vast array of new capabilities to digital cameras. (read the article)

Living Machines
Researchers of molecular computing and communication are focusing on the type of breakthroughs needed to make the vision of ultrasmall, biocompatible computers a reality. (read the article)

Finding Diamonds in the Rough
Spectral graph theory has proven to be very useful for text search and retrieval and for refining predictive-analysis systems. (read the article)

Writing the Future: Computers in Science Fiction
Science fiction isn't all that different from spec sheets that chart the effects of a new technology on our lives. The main difference is the time it takes to move from product inception to production and adoption. (read the article)

Graphics and Security: Exploring Visual Biometrics
Biometrics is the science of recognizing a person on the basis of physical or behavioral characteristics. Biometric security relies on who you are—on one of any number of unique characteristics that you can’t lose or forget. (read the article)

Fracturing the Internet with Alternate Roots
Several companies run alternative root zone servers to provide domain registration services to consumers who want more options than the current set of top-level domains can provide. But domains that run under alternative roots can easily confuse consumers. (read the column)

Falling Prey to the VeriSign Beast
VeriSign arguably has gotten worse rather than better when it comes to dealing with consumers. The company has become known for shoddy business practices, incompetent tech support and overpriced services. (read the column)

Hackers Do Not Break, They Build
Setting aside the argument that categorical conflation works just fine for casual conversations, it irks me every time I hear the term "hacker" used solely to indicate a person who breaks into systems with malicious intent. (read the column)