Gary Robinson, Date of Birth, Place of Birth
TweetGary Robinson
American software engineer
Date of Birth: 06-Feb-1956
Place of Birth: Bronxville, New York, United States
Profession: engineer
Nationality: United States
Zodiac Sign: Aquarius 
About Gary Robinson
- Gary Robinson is an American software engineer and mathematician and inventor notable for his mathematical algorithms to fight spam.
- In addition, he patented a method to use web browser cookies to track consumers across different web sites, allowing marketers to better match advertisements with consumers.
- The patent was bought by DoubleClick, and then DoubleClick was bought by Google.
- He is credited as being one of the first to use automated collaborative filtering technologies to turn word-of-mouth recommendations into useful data.In 2003, Robinson's article in Linux Journal detailed a new approach to computer programming perhaps best described as a general purpose classifier which expanded on the usefulness of Bayesian filtering.
- Robinson's method used math-intensive algorithms combined with Chi-square statistical testing to enable computers to examine an unknown file and make intelligent guesses about what was in it.
- The technique had wide applicability; for example, Robinson's method enabled computers to examine a file and guess, with much greater accuracy, whether it contained pornography, or whether an incoming email to a corporation was a technical question or a sales-related question.
- The method became the basis for anti-spam techniques used by Tim Peters and Rob Hooft of the influential SpamBayes project.
- Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to send unsolicited, undesired bulk messages.
- SpamBayes assigned probability scores to both spam and ham (useful emails) to guess intelligently whether an incoming email was spam; the scoring system enabled the program to return a value of unsure if both the spam and ham scores were high.
- Robinson's method was used in other anti-spam projects such as SpamAssassin.
- Robinson commented in Linux Journal on how fighting spam was a collaborative effort: The approach described here truly has been a distributed effort in the best open-source tradition.
- Paul Graham, an author of books on Lisp, suggested an approach to filtering spam in his on-line article, "A Plan for Spam".
- I took his approach for generating probabilities associated with words, altered it slightly and proposed a Bayesian calculation for dealing with words that hadn't appeared very often ...
- an approach based on the chi-square distribution for combining the individual word probabilities into a combined probability (actually a pair of probabilities—see below) representing an e-mail.
- Finally, Tim Peters of the Spambayes Project proposed a way of generating a particularly useful spamminess indicator based on the combined probabilities.
- All along the way the work was guided by ongoing testing of embodiments written in Python by Tim Peters for Spambayes and in C by Greg Louis of the Bogofilter Project.
- The testing was done by a number of people involved with those projects. In 1996, Robinson patented a method to help marketers focus their online advertisements to consumers.
- He explained: As far as I have been able to tell, it's the very first patent ...
- to mention using web browser cookies to track consumers across different web sites and build a profile of their interests in order to determine what ads to show them ...
- There was an aspect in the way browser cookies were implemented that allowed them to be used ...
- I hired programmers to do the programming to actually test it ...
- the hypothesis turned out to be correct. In 2010, Robinson was the chief technology officer at FlyFi, an online music service owned by Maine-based Emergent Discovery which uses his anti-spam programming techniques along with collaborative filtering technologies to help make music recommendations to web users.
- His blog Gary Robinson's Rants has been quoted by others in the computer and online music industries and cited by academic papers.
- Robinson helped develop recommendation engine technology which applies high-power mathematical techniques using software algorithms to have a computer guess intelligently about what a consumer might like.
- For example, if a consumer likes music by artists such as the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan and the Talking Heads, the computer software will match these preferences with a much larger dataset of other consumers who also like those three artists but which cumulatively has much greater musical knowledge than the single consumer.
- Accordingly, the computer will find music that the user might like but hasn't been exposed to, and therefore hopefully offer intelligent recommendations, in a process which has come to be called knowledge management.
- But the mathematics behind such comparisons can become quite complex and involved.
- Robinson studied mathematics at Bard College and graduated in 1979 and studied further at the Courant Institute of New York University.
- In the 1980s, Robinson worked on an entrepreneurial start-up dating service called 212-Romance which used similar computer algorithms to match singles romantically.
- The New York City-based voice mail dating service created community-based automated recommendations and used collaborative filtering technologies which Robinson developed further in other capacities.
Read more at Wikipedia