Jonathan A. Rees

What I do (a sampling):

Philosophy

• I have an ongoing interest in reference, compositionality, meaning, and identity in artificial languages, following on from earlier "semantic web", robotics, and taxonomy work

Biology

• Research Affiliate, Taxonomic Intelligence project (Arizona State University School of Life Sciences)
• I worked on Open Tree of Life, an aggregator of phylogenetic trees
• I worked for Millennium Pharmaceuticals on drug target discovery
• I scanned Psyche: A Journal of Entomology, which started publishing in 1874, and found it a new home
• Here is a figure from Collett and Rees 1997, showing how Vespula wasps return repeatedly to a food source

Interoperation

• Contributed to Scientific names of organisms: attribution, rights, and licensing by Patterson et al., BMC Research Notes 2014, 7:79
• I worked for Science Commons where among other things I was involved in the genesis of CC0 (see here for impact)
• Wrote Addressing the technical friction points in open science for Workshop on Research and Resource Commons in Scientific Research, Washington College of Law, American University, 17 November 2011.
• I served on the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) for a while
• I edited a report ('standard') on the Scheme programming language

Software

• MIT Probabilistic Computing Laboratory, 2017-20
• I had some fun trying to understand mobile robots
• Helped design and write Scheme 48
• Helped design and write Yale Scheme a.k.a. 'T'
• Worked for three software startups and for DEC

Security

• Chair of OCapN working group (object-capability transport protocol) (current 2023)
• A short memo on security prepared for the W3C TAG, 2009
• A security kernel based on the lamdba-calculus

Publication lists:

• ORCID record
• Google Scholar profile
• CV

Antisocial media:

• Pinboard
• Email:
• Blog
• PGP public key

Things on this web site:

• Allan Schreiber. Earthworks, Ann Arbor's first alternative high school: A personal history. 2006.
• Preston C. Hammer
• Pi and e frieze, 2000