Julian Lombardi
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Julian Lombardi (born November 11, 1956) is an American inventor, author, educator, and computer scientist known for his work in information architecture, user interface design and in the design of computer systems that support collaboration between large numbers of users. Lombardi currently serves as Duke University's Assistant Vice President of Academic Services and Technology Support. He is also a Senior Research Scholar with Duke University's program in Information Science + Information Studies, an adjunct professor with Duke University's Department of Computer Science, and one of the six principal architects of the Croquet Project (along with Alan Kay, David P. Reed, Andreas Raab, David A. Smith, and Mark McCahill). Lombardi also serves as Chairman of the Board of the Croquet Consortium, a not-for-profit organization to promote the continued development and adoption of Croquet, an open source software platform for creating deeply collaborative multi-user online simulations.
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[edit] Early life and education
Lombardi was born to a concert pianist and an Italian actress living in New York City. His family soon moved back to Rome, Italy where he lived until the age of six. He went on to attend Buckley Country Day School and public schools in Great Neck, New York and elsewhere on Long Island. In 1974 Lombardi began his undergraduate studies at Dowling College and graduated cum laude in the Biology major and Physics minor in 1977. He attended Graduate School at Clemson University where he received his Master's Degree in 1980 and was granted a Ph.D. in Zoology (Developmental Biology) in 1983. Upon graduation, Lombardi accepted a postdoctoral appointment and lectureship in the biological sciences at The University of North Carolina which he held until 1986.
[edit] Early career
In 1986, Lombardi was appointed an Assistant Professor of Biology at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In 1990, he received tenure and was named Director of Graduate Studies in Biology. Lombardi also served as Director of the University's Analytical Visualization Center from 1993-1999. Lombardi's research program centered on the evolution of complex organismal function in vertebrates and the evolution of maternal-embryonic relationships. An early adopter of information technology in university teaching and learning, in 1987 Lombardi began writing HyperTalk-based software applications in support of learning and instruction in anatomy and physiology. In 1989 he developed and marketed The Bone Box, a commercial 3D auto-tutorial program for use in learning human skeletal anatomy with the early Macintosh computer. He served on the faculty at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro until 1999.
In the mid-1990s, Lombardi combined his interests in information technology, complex systems, and the phenomenon of emergence in biological systems to begin designing and developing computer-supported collaboration systems involving self-optimizing massively multiuser online 3D environments. Lombardi eventually founded ViOS, Inc. where, during the period from 1999-2001, he served as the venture capital-backed company's first CEO and then Chief Creative Officer/Software architect. There, he designed and implemented ViOS, a client-server technology that enabled the first 3D user interface to network deliverable resources (including the Internet) in the form of a highly customizable and massively multi-user online environment - essentially a very large scale social software system/3D wiki. From 2002-2005, Lombardi led a Madison, Wisconsin-based software research and development group developing innovative open source software technologies in advancement of learning and instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and beyond.
[edit] Selected papers and articles
- Stearns, H., J. Gargus, M. Schuetze, and J. Lombardi. 2006. A language supporting direct manipulation of component-based object construction and deconstruction in collaborative Croquet spaces. In: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing, Edited by K. Tanaka, and K. Rose. IEEE. January 26-28, 2006, Berkeley, California.
- Stearns, H., J. Gargus, M. Schuetze, and J. Lombardi. 2006. Simplified distributed authoring via component-based object construction and deconstruction in collaborative Croquet spaces. In: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing, Edited by K. Tanaka, and K. Rose. IEEE. January 26-28, 2006, Berkeley, California.
- Lombardi, J., R. Kadobayashi, M. P. McCahill, H. Stearns, K. Tanaka, and A. Kay. 2005. Annotation authoring in 3D collaborative virtual environments. 2005. In: 15th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (ICAT 2005). December 5th-8th, 2005, Christchurch, New Zealand.
- Lombardi, J. and M. P. McCahill. 2004. Enabling social dimensions of learning through a persistent, unified, massively multi-user, and self-organizing virtual environment. In: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing, Edited by Y. Kambayashi, K. Tanaka, and K. Rose. IEEE. January 29-30, 2004, Keihanna Plaza, Kyoto, Japan.
- McCahill, M. P. and J. Lombardi. 2004. Design for an extensible Croquet-based framework to deliver a persistent, unified, massively multi-user, and self-organizing virtual environment. In: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing, Edited by Y. Kambayashi, K. Tanaka, and K. Rose. IEEE. January 29-30, 2004, Keihanna Plaza, Kyoto, Japan.
[edit] Books
- Lombardi, J. 1998. Comparative Vertebrate Reproduction. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston Mass. 469 pp.
[edit] Patents
- Lombardi, J. 1999. U.S. Patent 5889951 — Systems, methods, and computer program products for accessing, leasing, relocating, constructing and modifying internet sites within a multi-dimensional virtual reality environment
[edit] External links
- Croquet Consortium website
- Croquet Project website
- Julian Lombardi's Croquet Blog
- Duke University
- Duke Digital Initiative website
- Howstuffworks article about ViOS
- A G4 TechTV review of ViOS
- Accenture Tech Watch briefing on ViOS (in Japanese)
- A user review of ViOS
- DBLP bibliography entries for Julian Lombardi
