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.US 5918014 A, Application number US 08/774,180, Publication date Jun 29, 1999, Filing date Dec 26, 1996, Automated collaborative filtering in world wide web advertising, "... This invention combines techniques for: determining the subject's community, and determining which ads to show ... to determine whether a given individual should be in the subject's community is gleaned from the individual's activities ... Means are provided to track a consumer's activities ... e.g. by means of "cookies"..."Patent Buddy, Gary B Robinson Inventor, Patent years: 1999, 2001, "... Automated collaborative filtering in world wide web advertising ..." The patent was bought by DoubleClick, and then DoubleClick was bought by Google.TechCrunch, Apr 13, 2007 by Michael Arrington, Breaking: Google Spends $3.1 Billion To Acquire DoubleClick, Accessed March 12, 2014, "... About 20 minutes ago Google announced that they have agreed to acquired DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash ..."Bill Slawski, Apr 14, 2007, SEO by the Sea, Doubleclick + Google: Looking at Some of the Doubleclick Patent Filings, Accessed March 12, 2014, "... smart ad box showing on a page that displays different advertisements to users over time, based upon a recommendations system. ..." He is credited as being one of the first to use automated collaborative filtering technologies to turn word-of-mouth recommendations into useful data.Matthew French, May 20, 2002, Boston Business Journal, Romantic beginnings have worldwide effect, Retrieved August 6, 2016, "... Gary Robinson ... a mathematician by training ... first automated collaborative filtering applications ..."
Algorithms to identify spam 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.Ben Kamens, Fog Creek Publishing, Bayesian Filtering: Beyond Binary Classification , Retrieved February 7, 2015, "... Of these, Robinson's technique ... borrowed from R.A. Fischer's combination of probabilities into a chi-squared distribution, has been extensively tested and is used by the most successful filters, including SpamBayes. Robinson provides ample theoretical justification for this improvement in practical accuracy over the original filters ..." 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."Sharpen your pencils, this is the mathematical background (such as it is). The paper that started the ball rolling: Paul Graham's A Plan for Spam. Gary Robinson has an interesting essay suggesting some improvements to Graham's original approach. Gary Robinson's Linux Journal article discussed using the chi squared distribution." 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:
In 1996, Robinson patented a method to help marketers focus their online advertisements to consumers. He explained:
Entrepreneurial activity 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 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.
References
External links Gary Robinson's Rants blog Automated collaborative filtering patent