Julian Lombardi
Encyclopedia
Julian Lombardi is an American
inventor, author
, educator, and computer scientist
known for his work with socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world
technologies, and in the design and deployment of deeply collaborative virtual learning environment
s.
. 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 MA in 1980 and was granted a PhD in Zoology
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. 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. He served on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro until 1999. Lombardi also served as Director of the University's Analytical Visualization
Center from 1993 to 1999. From 2002 to 2005, Lombardi managed a research and development group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
that specialized in the design and development of open source virtual learning environments and digital media
technologies for learning and instruction. Currently Lombardi is an Assistant Vice President with Duke University
's Office of Information Technology. He is also a Senior Research Scholar with Duke University's program in Information Science + Information Studies, and an adjunct professor with Duke University's Department of Computer Science.
of complex
organismal function in vertebrates and the evolution of maternal-embryonic physiological relationships. An advocate of the use of imaging technologies and 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 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.
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 and his team 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 virtual environment - essentially a very large scale social software
system/3D
wiki
.
of the Croquet software developer's toolkit
and from 2006-2008 he served as Executive Director of the Croquet Consortium, a not-for-profit organization to promote the adoption of Croquet open source software technologies.
, an open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application and toolset to support the large scale visualization and simulation needs of educators and researchers. Open Cobalt
is being made available in the open source
as a way of fostering a viable community-based software development effort leading to open virtual world technologies supporting the needs of research and education.
Selected papers and articles
Patents:
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
inventor, author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...
, educator, and computer scientist
Computer scientist
A computer scientist is a scientist who has acquired knowledge of computer science, the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and their application in computer systems....
known for his work with socio-computational systems, scalable virtual world
Virtual world
A virtual world is an online community that takes the form of a computer-based simulated environment through which users can interact with one another and use and create objects. The term has become largely synonymous with interactive 3D virtual environments, where the users take the form of...
technologies, and in the design and deployment of deeply collaborative virtual learning environment
Virtual learning environment
Defined largely by usage, the term virtual learning environment has most, if not all, of the following salient properties:* It is Web-based* It uses Web 2.0 tools for rich 2-way interaction* It includes a content management system...
s.
Biography
Lombardi was born to a concert pianist and an Italian actress living in New York CityNew York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
. 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
Buckley Country Day School
Buckley Country Day School is an independent, coeducational day school providing elementary education to 330 students in grades toddler through eight in Roslyn, New York. Buckley was founded in 1923 and opened the doors of its first building in Great Neck to a class of twenty-three children...
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
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
major and Physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
minor in 1977. He attended Graduate School at Clemson University
Clemson University
Clemson University is an American public, coeducational, land-grant, sea-grant, research university located in Clemson, South Carolina, United States....
where he received his MA in 1980 and was granted a PhD in Zoology
Zoology
Zoology |zoölogy]]), is the branch of biology that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct...
in 1983.
Upon graduation, Lombardi accepted a postdoctoral appointment and lectureship in the biological sciences at the University of North Carolina
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...
which he held until 1986. In 1986, Lombardi was appointed an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
The University of North Carolina at Greensboro , also known as UNC Greensboro, is a public university in Greensboro, North Carolina, United States and is a constituent institution of the University of North Carolina system. The university offers more than 100 undergraduate, 61 master's and 26...
. In 1990, he received tenure and was named Director of Graduate Studies in Biology. He served on the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro until 1999. Lombardi also served as Director of the University's Analytical Visualization
Scientific visualization
Scientific visualization is an interdisciplinary branch of science according to Friendly "primarily concerned with the visualization of three-dimensional phenomena , where the emphasis is on realistic renderings of volumes, surfaces, illumination sources, and so forth, perhaps...
Center from 1993 to 1999. From 2002 to 2005, Lombardi managed a research and development group at the University of Wisconsin–Madison
University of Wisconsin–Madison
The University of Wisconsin–Madison is a public research university located in Madison, Wisconsin, United States. Founded in 1848, UW–Madison is the flagship campus of the University of Wisconsin System. It became a land-grant institution in 1866...
that specialized in the design and development of open source virtual learning environments and digital media
Digital media
Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital form. It can refer to the technical aspect of storage and transmission Digital media is a form of electronic media where data is stored in digital (as opposed to analog) form. It can refer to the technical aspect of...
technologies for learning and instruction. Currently Lombardi is an Assistant Vice President with Duke University
Duke University
Duke University is a private research university located in Durham, North Carolina, United States. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present day town of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco industrialist James B...
's Office of Information Technology. He is also a Senior Research Scholar with Duke University's program in Information Science + Information Studies, and an adjunct professor with Duke University's Department of Computer Science.
Work
Lombardi's early research program centered on the evolutionEvolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
of complex
Complexity
In general usage, complexity tends to be used to characterize something with many parts in intricate arrangement. The study of these complex linkages is the main goal of complex systems theory. In science there are at this time a number of approaches to characterizing complexity, many of which are...
organismal function in vertebrates and the evolution of maternal-embryonic physiological relationships. An advocate of the use of imaging technologies and early adopter of information technology
Information technology
Information technology is the acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination of vocal, pictorial, textual and numerical information by a microelectronics-based combination of computing and telecommunications...
in university teaching and learning, in 1987 Lombardi began writing HyperTalk
HyperTalk
HyperTalk is a high-level, procedural programming language created in 1987 by Dan Winkler and used in conjunction with Apple Computer's HyperCard hypermedia program by Bill Atkinson. The main target audience of HyperTalk was beginning programmers, hence HyperTalk programmers were usually called...
-based software applications in support of learning and instruction in anatomy and physiology. In the mid-1990s, Lombardi combined his interests in information technology, complex systems, and the phenomenon of emergence
Emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....
in biological systems
Biological process
A biological process is a process of a living organism. Biological processes are made up of any number of chemical reactions or other events that results in a transformation....
to begin designing and developing computer-supported collaboration
Computer-supported collaboration
Computer-supported collaboration research focuses on technology that affects groups, organizations, communities and societies, e.g., voice mail and text chat. It grew from cooperative work study of supporting people's work activities and working relationships...
systems involving self-optimizing massively multiuser online 3D
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
environments.
The Bone Box
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.ViOS
Lombardi eventually founded ViOS, Inc.ViOS
ViOS was a client-server software system designed by Julian Lombardi in the mid-1990s and built by a team he led at ViOS Inc. from 1999-2001 as a way of spatially organizing all Internet-deliverable resources into a massively scaled multiuser 3D environment with users of the system represented as...
where, during the period from 1999–2001, he served as the venture capital
Venture capital
Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...
-backed company
Company
A company is a form of business organization. It is an association or collection of individual real persons and/or other companies, who each provide some form of capital. This group has a common purpose or focus and an aim of gaining profits. This collection, group or association of persons can be...
's first CEO and then Chief Creative Officer/Software architect
Software architect
Software architect is a general term with many accepted definitions, which refers to a broad range of roles. Generally accepted terminology and certifications began appearing in connection with this role near the beginning of the 21st century.-History:...
. There, he and his team designed and implemented ViOS
ViOS
ViOS was a client-server software system designed by Julian Lombardi in the mid-1990s and built by a team he led at ViOS Inc. from 1999-2001 as a way of spatially organizing all Internet-deliverable resources into a massively scaled multiuser 3D environment with users of the system represented as...
, a client–server technology that enabled the first 3D
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
user interface
User interface
The user interface, in the industrial design field of human–machine interaction, is the space where interaction between humans and machines occurs. The goal of interaction between a human and a machine at the user interface is effective operation and control of the machine, and feedback from the...
to network deliverable resources (including the Internet
Internet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
) in the form of a highly customizable and massively multi-user online virtual environment - essentially a very large scale social software
Social software
Social software applications include communication tools and interactive tools. Communication tools typically handle the capturing, storing and presentation of communication, usually written but increasingly including audio and video as well. Interactive tools handle mediated interactions between a...
system/3D
3D computer graphics
3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...
wiki
Wiki
A wiki is a website that allows the creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser using a simplified markup language or a WYSIWYG text editor. Wikis are typically powered by wiki software and are often used collaboratively by multiple users. Examples include...
.
Croquet Project
Lombardi is one of the six principal architectsSoftware architecture
The software architecture of a system is the set of structures needed to reason about the system, which comprise software elements, relations among them, and properties of both...
of the Croquet software developer's toolkit
Croquet Project
The Croquet Project was an international effort to promote the continued development of the Croquet open source software development kit for creating and delivering deeply collaborative multi-user online applications....
and from 2006-2008 he served as Executive Director of the Croquet Consortium, a not-for-profit organization to promote the adoption of Croquet open source software technologies.
Open Cobalt
Lombardi is presently leading a National Science Foundation funded effort to develop Open CobaltOpen Cobalt
Open Cobalt is a free and open source software platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual world both on local area networks or across the Internet, without any requirement for centralized servers....
, an open source and multi-platform metaverse browser and toolkit application and toolset to support the large scale visualization and simulation needs of educators and researchers. Open Cobalt
Open Cobalt
Open Cobalt is a free and open source software platform for constructing, accessing, and sharing virtual world both on local area networks or across the Internet, without any requirement for centralized servers....
is being made available in the open source
Open source
The term open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it a pragmatic methodology...
as a way of fostering a viable community-based software development effort leading to open virtual world technologies supporting the needs of research and education.
Publications
Books:- 1998. Comparative Vertebrate Reproduction. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston Mass.
Selected papers and articles
- 2004. "Design for an extensible Croquet-based framework to deliver a persistent, unified, massively multi-user, and self-organizing virtual environment". With Mark P. McCahillMark P. McCahillMark P. McCahill is an American programmer who has been involved in developing and popularizing a number of Internet technologies since the late 1980s....
. In: Proceedings of the Second Annual Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing. Edited by Y. Kambayashi, K. Tanaka, and K. Rose. - 2005. "Annotation authoring in 3D collaborative virtual environments". With others. In: 15th International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (ICAT 2005).
- 2006. "3D model annotation from multiple viewpoints for Croquet". With others. In: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference on Creating, Connecting, and Collaborating through Computing, Edited by K. Tanaka, and K. Rose. IEEE.
- 2010. "Opening the Metaverse". With Marilyn Lombardi. In: Online Worlds: Convergence of the Real and the Virtual. Edited by W. S. Bainbridge. Springer-Verlag, New York, NY. 318 pp.
Patents:
- Lombardi, J. 1999. — Systems, methods, and computer program products for accessing, leasing, relocating, constructing and modifying internet sites within a multi-dimensional virtual reality environment
External links
- Julian Lombardi's Blog
- Open Cobalt website
- Croquet Consortium website
- A video tour of ViOS
- DBLP bibliography entries for Julian Lombardi