DR. ROHIT KHARE

CommerceNet Labs

Mountain View, CA

Director of a new electronic-commerce research laboratory.

CommerceNet is a ten-year-old nonprofit organizations dedicating to advancing commerce on the Internet. From its earliest days working on Web security and credit-card payment prototcols to its success spinning out XML technologies, CommerceNet has been a unique neutral meeting place for users, vendors, and entrepreneurs. In the latter capacity, CommerceNet also spins out startup companies. One of those became CommerceOne, which funded the endowment CommerceNet is investing in Labs today.

As Director, I am working with our Board to recruit an R&D team focused on the new challenges of decentralized commerce; as well as supporting our interests in engineering entrepreneurship and investment activity. As of the launch of zLab in December 2004, we have hired half a dozen Fellows, Members of Technical Staff, and Associates; and produced as many technical reports for our website, http://zLab.Commerce.Net/.

KnowNow

Sunnyvale, CA

Co-founder, CEO, and CTO of a successful venture-backed startup.

The KnowNow LiveServer is a simple and flexible way to distribute real-time information across the Internet. Its core innovation is a way to use the Web in a peer-to-peer mode that enables developers to publish and subscribe to events across Web browsers, Excel spreadsheets, and custom applications written in a half-dozen different programming languages.

At KnowNow, I raised $22.5M in venture capital, led by Kleiner, Perkins and several other angels and professional investors over three rounds. I managed the research and development team of several full-time employees and dozens of contractors that produced the original release, which led to the open-source Mod_PubSub project as well as a pending patent. I also recruited a complete management team in order to focus on my role as CTO to represent customers' interests to Engineering and Marketing. Later, I took a sabbatical to complete my PhD after my original leave-of-absence from UC Irvine expired.

MCI Communications

Boston, MA

Internet Architect, working with the standards policy and security teams.

MCI's Internet Architecture Group, headed up by Vint Cerf, provided the technical leadership behind the world's largest IP carrier. We participated in the standards-setting and interoperability-testing processes, particularly around security and internationalization.

With John Klensin, I designed a patent-pending content-filtering service for helping families select appropriate policy providers and supervising Web access for each child.

4K Associates

Irvine, CA

Founder and president of an Internet standards strategy consultancy.

Provided market research, standards analysis, and training in technologies ranging from Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) to Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) for clients such as Bain & Co., Canon, Sun Microsystems, the US Department of Justice, Nextel, Jabber, and Microsoft.

At 4K Associates, I managed a team of ten principals over the years, bridging the worlds of academia and industry. I also wrote the industry's first public report criticizing WAP as needlessly incompatible with Web standards -- now seen as conventional wisdom -- as part of due diligence on Microsoft's $600M investment in Nextel.

World Wide Web Consortium (MIT)

Cambridge, MA

Technical lead for Security, Electronic Commerce, and HTTP Extension activities.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), headed up by Tim Berners-Lee, brings together the world's leading research organizations, technology vendors, and user organizations to lead the continuing evolution of open standards for the Web. As one of the very first employees beyond the original team that invented the Web at CERN, we pioneered the processes and organizational structure that still guide W3C today.

Analysis, protocol development, and implementation support for the Technology & Society and Web Architecture Domains. I wrote and edited technical specifications, position papers, and the W3C Newsletter.I also organized and spoke at dozens of W3C, IETF, IW3C2, and DARPA meetings and invited workshops.

O'Reilly & Associates

Sebastopol, CA

Editor-in-Chief of the World Wide Web Journal.

Along the lines of its Perl Journal and The X Resource, O'Reilly & Associates joined with W3C and International WWW Conference Committee (IW3C2) to publish the quarterly W3J.

I solicited, edited, and contributed to seven books in the series, totaling 1,500pp. Together with other ORA editors and key conferences and workshops, we brought subscribers the latest standards, research, and previews of upcoming books on Web technology.

Rohit Khare Software

Pasadena, CA

Development of custom & commercial NeXTstep applications.

Designed, implemented, and tested novel email connectivity protocols and secure encryption of multimedia email for clients such as the LA Sheriff's Department, BOSS Logic, and SHL Systemhouse.

Journalist & Author

Various

Correspondent, product reviewer, and columnist for the software industry.

Reported for several IDG publications, including NeXTworld Magazine. Software reviews for McGraw-Hill's Byte Magazine. Regular columnist for IEEE Internet Computing.

I researched the history of several application-layer protocols in great detail to produce a dozen Seventh Heaven columns over the years. In addition, I've contributed to many conference progeedings and ACM SIG newsletters.

Envirosystems, Inc.

Columbia, MD

Chemist & programmer for an environmental testing laboratory.

Envirosystems is a US EPA Superfund Contract Laboratory Program (CLP) certified analytical testing facility. Since its inception in 1989, it has remained at or near the top of all performance evaluation rankings for its GC, GC/MS, AA, and other facilities.

As a family business, I have been involved in all aspects, from wet chemistry to planning and budgeting. My primary responsibility is the Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS) for data collection, analysis, review, and reporting. This includes development of a secure extranet for Y2K-conformance and client communications.

University of California, Irvine

Irvine, CA

Graduate student in software architecture.

UC Irvine's School of Information and Computer Science is one of the fastest-growing in America, and rapidly rising up the CRA's ranking into the top 30. The Department of Informatics and the Institute for Software Research, both headed by ACM Fellow Dr. Richard N. Taylor, are specifically focused on the design and impact of software technology.

My research into Web protocols, markup languages, event notification, and standards policy was underwritten in part by the Chancellor's Fellowship, the department's highest level of support; as well as a variety of National Science Foundation (NSF) and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) research grants.

2000 2003

Master's thesis on achitectural impact of message-oriented middleware. Doctoral dissertation on architectural styles for coping with decentralization.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Cambridge, MA

Special graduate student in computer science.

California Institute of Technology

Pasadena, CA

Undergraduate student and research assistant.

In addition to my studies, I was funded as Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) for projects as diverse as parallelizing planar graph coloring algorithms to surveying the depiction of the Cold War in bestselling novels of the '60s. More significantly, I was sponsored by the NSF Center for Research in Parallel Computing (CRPC) to develop an electronic hypermedia textbook for distributed programming, the eText Engine.

1995	Bachelor's (with Honors) in Engineering & Applied Science and Economics.

Harvard University

Cambridge, MA

Summer student and research assistant.

Studied undergraduate-level econometrics and systems programming. Also worked as systems administrator for the Chemistry department's UNIX supercomputing cluster.