Jim Waldo is Gordon McKay Professor of the Practice of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard, where he teaches courses in distributed systems and privacy; the Chief Technology Officer for the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; and a Professor of Policy teaching on topics of technology and policy at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Jim was a Distinguished Engineer with Sun Microsystems Laboratories, where he investigated next-generation large-scale distributed systems; and got his start in distributed systems at Apollo Computer. While at Sun, he was the technical lead of Project Darkstar, a multi-threaded, distributed infrastructure for massive multiplayer online games and virtual worlds; the lead architect for Jini, a distributed programming system based on Java; and an early member of the Java software organization.
Jim is the author of three books, numerous journal and conference proceedings articles, and holds over 50 patents.
