Dr. Brad Cox http://virtualschool.edu

Dr. Cox recently resigned from his position as a faculty member of the George Mason University Program on Social and Organizational Learning (PSOL) in order to pursue interests in distance education and digital commerce more effectively.
PSOL is an interdisciplinary department that concentrates on overcoming socioeeconomic and technical obstacles to change, development and learning as firms transition to a global information-intensive economy. His educational interests are in applying internet, television, and groupware technology to expedite experiential and collaborative learning experiences in the academy, the home, the workplace and the world.
His courses include Taming the Electronic Frontier, Internet Literacy, and Advanced Object Technology. All involve distance education. He is presently developing a new course, Computational Modeling of Social Learning to explore agent-based simulations inspired by Michael Rothschild's book, Bionomics and work at the Santa Fe Institute and elsewhere.
He authored Object-oriented Programming, An Evolutionary Approach, a book that is generally credited with launching today's industry-wide enthusiasm for object technology. He has recently completed a second book, Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier, which proposes superdistribution as a technosocial solution to the problematics of buying, selling and owning property made of bits as distinct from the atoms from which goods have been composed since antiquity.
He founded the Coalition for Electronic Markets whose objective is to build and deploy a nationwide revenue collection infrastructure for commerce in electronic goods. He cofounded the Stepstone Corporation where he originated the Objective-C[TM] programming language and Software-IC[TM] libraries. At Schlumberger-Doll Research, he applied artificial intelligence, object-oriented, Unix, and workstation technologies to oil field wireline services.
At the Programming Technology Center at ITT, he applied Unix and object-oriented technologies in support of the development of a large, highly distributed telephone switching system, System 1240. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago for theoretical and experimental work in neurophysiology in an area that has since become known as neural networks. His post-graduate experimental studies were at the National Institutes of Health and at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratories.

Dr. Brad Cox bcox@virtualschool.edu (update your address book)
Phone: 703 361 4751 Fax: 703 995 0422 Cellular: 703 919-9623
http://virtualschool.edu A Project with Paradoxical Goals
PGP Signature: E194 C6E5 92D8 B8FB 20E8 8667 929A 95A0 FCB6 7C62

Keynote: Superdistribution - Objects as Property

The longstanding dream of assembling software from reusable components instead of fabricating it from first principles arises from everyday experience in this approach's benefits when applied to tangible industrial age goods. However software components are different from hardware components in the most fundamental way possible. Tangible goods are made of atoms, and these abide by physical laws that determine what it means to buy, sell and own them. Since software comonents are made of bits and not atoms, they are not governed by the physical laws that have underpinned commerce since antiquity. The presentation outlines the solution that was outlined in the speaker's book, "Superdistribution; Objects as Property". The solution involves relinguishing the habit of selling software as we've sold tangible goods in the past, by the copy. Superdistribution involves actively giving it away, with revenue collection occuring as it is used as distinct from when it is acquired.