Name: Craig Partridge
Title: Chief Scientist
Company: BBN Technologies
Contact Info: craig@bbn.com
How I arrived at my present job (academic and other influences): A few months after I got my undergraduate degree, I joined BBN to work on a networking project. I thought networking sounded like a fun problem to work on. It turned out I'd joined BBN a few months after the Internet was officially turned on. BBN was operating much of the Internet in those days, and so I accidentally joined the Internet revolution at its start. A lot of where I am now can be traced to that simple decision -- finding a job that focussed on a technical topic that I turned out to love.
How I organize my day: I start work early (somewhere between 6 and 8AM) and try to get a lot of my vital but long-term work done before noon, when I'm fresh and before the day is old enough to have last minute crises. That leaves the afternoon free to deal with pressing problems that inevitably crop up in a given day.
Amount of time spent working daily (at home and office): Various studies have shown that one has remarkably few good thinking hours in a day. My goal is to make sure those hours occur during my typical work day and that I give myself enough off-work time to be fresh at work most days. So I've found I'm most effective working between 40 and 50 hours a week. Unlike many colleagues who seem to thrive on late nights and little sleep, I'm handicapped by the fact that I need ten hours of sleep a night.
What I do to get myself thinking creatively: It is always intriguing to see how other people generate their ideas. My methods are pretty simple: I force myself to be exposed to the work of others (as a journal editor, program committee member or colleague on a project) and I also look for technical trends likely to cause interesting challenges 5 to 10 years in the future.
My problem-solving strategy: Play with a problem until a potential solution emerges. Pursue that solution until it fails, then step back look for new solutions that don't have the problems that caused the previous solution to fail. (I.e., experiment repeatedly and use the information from the last experiment to drive the next one).
What I do to relieve stress: Walking, yoga, and reading. I also find that playing classical music in my office is a great way to reduce office stress.
My hero, mentor, or person I most admire and why: I find that I learn different things from different people I work with. So I've had lots of mentors. A few examples are: Prof. Harry Lewis, (now Dean at Harvard) who taught me how to teach a well-organized and exciting technical course; Vint Cerf, (now Sr VP at MCI) and George Conrades (now CEO of Akami) who helped me learn how to lead technical organizations; and my college roommate, Charlie Hurd, who forced me to be a far better programmer than I would otherwise have been.
What I do to mentor those who work for me: Mentoring, to my mind, is giving people opportunities to improve themselves. I'm a strong believer in learning by doing. So I focus on trying to give people get opportunities to do new things, be it arranging for them to be on a program committee, or trying to help them get through writer's block to write a thesis chapter.
How a negative event changed my life in a positive way: As a brash undergraduate with a degree in Medieval History, I applied to PhD programs at four of the top schools in Computer Science. All four turned me down. In retrospect, that was a good thing, since none of those universities had a program in networking at the time -- to become a networking researcher I really had to craft a research path outside academia.
One event or decision in my life I wish I could go back and change: There are lots of decisions I could have made better and people I should have been nicer to. But I cannot think of one particular decision or event that, if I'd made differently, the world would be a better place or (more selfishly) I would be happier.
What values are the most important to me and what I value in others: Integrity, a willingness to sacrifice one's own interests for the interests of the community (at least some of the time), candor and a genuine enthusiasm for working on hard problems.
What inspires, motivates, or gets me excited about my job on a daily basis: On a daily basis, the fun comes from solving interesting problems with friends. On a longer term basis, the fun comes from seeing ideas that you worked hard to solve actually having an impact on people outside computer science. One of the joys of Internet research is that if you solve a problem right, millions of people may benefit from the solution.
Biography: Craig Partridge received his A.B. (Medieval History), M.Sc. and Ph.D. (Computer Science) degrees from Harvard University. Shortly after receiving his A.B., Craig joined BBN Technologies. But for a sabbatical year at the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, he's worked at BBN ever since. Craig is now a Chief Scientist at BBN and works primarily on problems of building ever faster or better performing networks. Craig is also a Consulting Associate Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he helps supervise a few Ph.D. candidates. He is the Chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Data Communication (SIGCOMM). Craig is co-consulting editor for the Addison Wesley Professional Computing Series and the former editor-in-chief of IEEE Network Magazine and ACM Computer Communication Review. He is an IEEE Fellow.
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Location: www.acm.org/crossroads/dayinlife/bios/craig_partridge.html