Dr. David Bakken’s Consulting Home Page

(last updated: mid-2005)

Welcome to bakken-middleware.com, the web pages for Dr. David Bakken’s consulting endeavors.  These web pages provide background information on Dr. Bakken for prospective clients.

Dr. Bakken is a pragmatic system builder who has lengthy experience in both industry and the academic world.  He has been directly involved with middleware R&D post-PhD for a dozen years years as a scientist and professor, and has been in a computing professional for over twenty years.  His research and experience background include distributed computing, middleware, fault-tolerant computing, and distributed quality of service.  He is very good at not only working with mechanisms in these technical areas, but higher-level architectural issues, questioning and validating underlying technical  assumptions, etc. for distributed computing systems.

Dr. Bakken is a professor at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.  He has consulted to a number of companies including Amazon.com, Network Associates Labs, and TriGeo Network Securuity.  Dr. Bakken has served as external voting member of Ph.D. committees from Carnegie Mellon University and Georgia Institute of Technology, and has been an Opponent (external questioner with voting rights) for a Ph.D. defense at Chalmers University in Göteborg, Sweden. 

New flash (2005): Dr. Bakken is one of the investigators on a new cybersecurity center, “Trustworthy Cyber Infrastructure for the Electric Power Grid”, funded by the CyberTrust program of the National Science Foundation.  This is only the 4^th such center funded in the history of CyberTrust, the main security research program for the NSF; for example, the only other university in the Pacific-10 league to be involved with such a center is UC Berkeley.  The press release from his college at WSU about this center can be found here, the center’s web site is here, and info on Dr. Bakken’s GridStat project for the electric power grid can be found here.

Dr Bakken’s university allows professors to consult up to an average of one day per week, not including vacations and summers. His consulting interests include very large and long-lived software for distributed computing systems.  Such software has many complicated and interlocking issues involving distribution, fault tolerance, security, programmability, maintainability, manageability, etc.  He is also interested in doing deeply-technical due diligence on areas of his expertise, including startup companies, and has served on the Board of Directors for a computer security startup.

More information can be found here:

• Dr. Bakken’s resume (pdf
, html)
• Dr. Bakken’s home page at Washington State University, where he is an Associate Professor of Computer Science.  It includes more background on his system builder impact; note especially the BBN QuO work and how it has been used by others.
• Deeply technical letters of recommendation concerning Dr. Bakken’s system builder qualifications from Amazon.com, Open Group, Network Associates Labs, HP Labs, and others.
• Dr. Bakken can be contacted by email at dave.bakken@gmail.com.

These web pages are fairly simple, designed to present Dr. Bakken’s qualifications rather than to be a flashy.  While he possesses significant savior faire, Dr. Bakken prefers not to consult to those who prefer style over substance, and suggests instead that they hire a consultant named Dogbert, a close colleague of Dilbert.