Robert Uzgalis
(Serve Net's Webmaster)
© 2004 Copyright by Robert Uzgalis. All Rights Reserved.
First, let me introduce myself. Almost everyone calls me `BUZ'.
Just so you use the name properly note that the tag `BUZ' is derived from my
full name, Robert Uzgalis, by substitution and abbreviation:
Robert Uzgalis --> Bob
Uzgalis
Bob Uzgalis --> BUZ
So `BUZ' has only a single `Z', unlike Buzz Aldrin. And my name is not `BUZ Uzgalis', since the `UZ' of `BUZ' has already included the last name.
I was born in Chicago, educated by the mob, spent several months in Juvenal hall, where I learned to write satire, but not how to spell. By my 10th birthday my family escaped the mob and were hiding in Los Angeles, California. I spent most of my teens in Santa Monica and Palms; later the family moved down to the South Bay city of Lawndale, where I finished secondary school.
As I turned 20 the family again moved further south into Orange County and the city of Costa Mesa. I attended Orange Coast Junior College, and then went to the University of Southern California . I have always expected Orange Coast to name its Computer Center after me. The "Uzgalis Computer Center" has a nice ring to it, and as a pioneer of computing in 1960 at Orange Coast it only seems appropriate.
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While I was attending university at USC, majoring in English, I began working for the University of California as a computer programmer.
About the first twenty years of my working career was spent at the University of California, Los Angeles. The first three years were spent in the Sociology and Anatomy Departments and then the remainder of time was spent in the UCLA Computer Science Department . A summary of the research and teaching done in this period can be found in other places.
In 1988, I decided that a life of adventure coupled with living in various places around the world would suit me better than deteriorating in Los Angeles smog or even being dramatically killed on a sidewalk by some randomly pointed car driven by a precocious three year old.
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In 1989, I gave away most of my belongings and moved to Japan. I spent most of my time in Japan in Osaka. This area is known as the Kansai area, I like it much better than Tokyo. In Japan, I worked on my own research. At Sumitomo Metals I consulted and worked with scholars in their computer science research lab. I also gave a series of lectures on encryption, reviewing its history, and exploring its possibilities. I also participated in a group working on a new human-computer user interface with a group from ASTEM, a city sponsored research institute in Kyoto, and Sharp Electronics, based in Nara.
In September of 1990 I moved to Hong Kong, and took a lecturer
position with the Computer Science Department in the University of Hong
Kong. In Hong Kong, I taught the second
year programming languages survey course and a first year
introduction to computer principles for non-majors.
In Hong Kong I became interested in hashing and hash algorithms, not the searching, but the problem of randomizing data to create a hash function. After extensive empirical investigation I came to realize that most of the preconceptions about hash functions were wrong, and excellent, widely applicable, hash functions could indeed be created. I created one that comes close enough to being `general' that there is no point in not calling it a general hash function.
Two graduate students worked with me in Hong Kong: Bruce Cheung, a Ph.D. student working in automatic language recognition, and Matthew Tong, a MPhil student, who developed a temporal logic for checking the reliability of relational data where temporal implications can be inferred from the implied relationships.
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In November of 1993 I moved to New Zealand with a three year contract as a senior lecturer in the Computer Science Department of the University of Auckland . I taught a third year introductory course in computer graphics and portions of the first and second year required curricula. Matthew Tong, came with me from Hong Kong to do his Ph.D. in New Zealand. He finished his thesis showing many new ways of using general hash functions.
In January of 1997 I moved from Auckland back to Los Angeles to retire.
To augment my retirement income from the University of California, I am currently webmaster of Serve Net an ISP devoted to providing internet services to the entertainment industry. I already miss teaching and research, but there are many new adventures that will inspire me in the months ahead.
In particular Tigertail Associates, a California non-profit corporation, that provides technical and scientific support for the arts needed projects and direction. It needs to begin to assist arts organizations to use the internet, as well as begin to assist in arts education. To this end I created the Tigertail Virtual Museum. (http://www.tigtail.org)
Initially the virtual museum was to organize and archive the scans posted to the Fine Arts news group to reflect the history of art. But somewhere along the line of doing that I realized that most of the pictures needed restoration or cleaning and that digitally restoring art was a far better way of seeing how a picture should look than repainting it... which is what museums do. So I set out have a real VIRTUAL museum with virtually restored pictures in it. At this point the museum has about 6,000 virtually restored pictures. Ten thousand people a day visit the virtual museum.
The next project for 2004 is to explore the future of books in an electronic information age. The first book Tigertail Associates published is Lewis Carroll'sThe Hunting of the Snark. The Henry Holiday illustrations for the Snark were painfully restored and cleaned. Then they were colored to help make them easier to see on an electronic screen. This version of the Snark is available for download from the Library on the third floor of the Tigertail Virtual Museum. The next project is to add sounds to the book to see if that enhances it or not. To that end several volunteers are going to record a sound track to go with the book.
I have occasionnally written essays or editorials. I have collected them here as Acrobat format files or web pages.
2004/8: Review of the Musical: The Music Man.
1998/2: Intellectual Property Rights / Copyright and the Internet
1998/1: Intellectual Property Rights / Is Copyright Law Dead?
1997/12: Security is not Inconvenience
1997/11: Credit Card Transactions and the Web
This home page covers my background, positions and attitudes
toward computer studies, education, and personal interests. It is designed to
introduce you to me and my background. Several topics are covered; they are
listed below.
Sex: Male
Birth: 1940 September 29 -- Chicago, Illinois, USA
Citizenship: USA
Parents: Harriet Jones (from Scotland) and Charles John Uzgalis
(born in US) (both dead)
Origin of Surname: Lithuania (The Baltic country above
Poland and below Latvia and Estonia)
Robert Uzgalis
320 North Bundy Drive
Los Angeles, California, 90049
office: (1+310) 826-8634
phone: (1+310) 472-9767
email: buz--nospam--@zis.com
In over twenty years of teaching I have taught most undergraduate
computer studies courses at one time or another.
During my last three years of teaching I taught at the University
of Auckland and during the last year I also taught an external course for the
University of London (Hong Kong).
