website title image article_title education name occupation
-lsb- http://www.garyrobinson.net/ garyrobinson.net -rsb- chief technology officer gary robinson.jpg gary robinson
 bard college ; courant institute gary robinson computer programmer
gary robinson

gary robinson is an american software engineer 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 .
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 '' -lrb- useful emails -rrb- 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 had n't appeared very often ... an approach based on the chi-square distribution for combining the individual word probabilities into a combined probability -lrb- actually a pair of probabilities -- see below -rrb- 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 .
-- gary robinson , 2003 .
in 1996 , robinson patented a method to help marketers focus their online advertisements to consumers .
he explained : 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 has n't been exposed to , and therefore hopefully offer intelligent recommendations .
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 .
