Dave Thau

I'm a third year graduate student working with Bertram Ludäscher, and part of the Database and Information Systems Group.

My research currently focuses on reasoning about taxonomies and articulations between them.

Publications, Installations and Presentations

• CleanTAX: A Framework and System for Automated Reasoining with Taxonomies and Articulations. D. Thau, S. Bao and B. Ludäscher, (2007). Talk presented in the Fourth Workshop on Data Integration in the Life Sciences.
• Reasoning about Taxonomies in First-Order Logic. Accepted pending minor revisions, Ecological Informatics, 2007.
• GUIDs and LSIDs: An invited presentation to the Taxonomic Data Working Group. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, 2004.
• Data Procurement for Enabling Scientific Workflows: On Exploring Inter-Ant Parasitism. Bowers, S., Thau, D., Williams, R., and Ludäscher, B., (2004). Presented at the second International Semantic Web and Databases Workshop.
• OWL and SDD: An invited presentation to the Taxonomic Data Working Group subgroup on the Structure of Descriptive Data. Federal Biological Research Centre for Agriculture and Forestry, Berlin, 2004.
• Globally Unique Identifiers for Taxonomists: An invited presentation at the eScience GRID Environments conference. Napier University, Edinburgh, 2004.
• Flexible image comparisons in AntWeb: An invited presentation at A Workshop on Establishing a Comprehensive Database for Plant Systematics. University of Florida, Gainesville, 2004.
• Panelist in a Roundtable Discussion and Workshop on a "Biological Names Server". In the Trends and Developments in Biodiversity Informatics meeting sponsored by CRIA. Campinas, Brazil, 2003.
• Cross-Browser Animation. The O'Reilly Network, 2002.
• Timelocator - Commissioned work for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, with Eric Adigard. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2001.
• The Book of JavaScript: A Practical Guide for Interactive Web Pages. No Starch Press, 2000, 2006.
• Numerous articles on Webmonkey. 1996-2001.
• Thau, D.M., (1992). Primacy effects and selective attention in incremental clustering. Paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
• Thau, D.M., (1992). Of mice and machines: Selective attention in incremental clustering. Paper presented at the First Annual University of Michigan Cognitive Science Conference.
• Medin, D.L., and Thau, D.M., (1991). Theories, constraints, and cognition. In The Study of Cognition: Conceptual and Methodological Issues. Herb Pick (Ed.).

Education

• Masters of Science, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1993.
• Masters of Science, Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1991.
• Bachelors of Science, Cognitive Science, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989.

Employment History

• University of Kansas Natural History Museum, Programming/Research, 2003 - 2004.
• California Academy of Sciences, Programming/Research, 2003 - Present.
• All Species Foundation, Director of Engineering, 2002 - 2003.
• Wired Digital/HotWired, 1995 - 1999.
  • Senior Scientist, 1997 - 1999.
  • Director of Software Engineering, 1996 - 1997.
  • Senior Software Engineer, 1995 - 1996.
• Apollo Derivatives, Software Developer and Director of User Training, 1995.
• Streams Online Media Development, Director of Software Development, 1994 - 1995.

Teaching Experience

• Database Management Systems, Mills College, 2003.
• XML and Related Technologies, San Francisco State University, 2003.
• Numerous JavaScript Courses at San Francisco State University, San Jose State University, and conferences 1998-2003.
• Building Online Communities, San Francisco State University, 1999-2000.
• Introduction CGI and Perl Programming, San Jose State University, 1998-1999.
• Computational Decision Making Algorithms, Northwestern University, 1994