Dr. Ulrich Stern (Uli)

Uli wrote his first computer program in 5th grade on AWEN,
the 32-bit 0.5MHz computer his math teacher Heinrich Weber
had built out of 74xx chips.  For college, he chose EE over
CS since "he could program already, but could not design RF
receivers" and, in turn, he is now weak in theoretical CS.
Three days after submitting his first paper on an analytical 
approximation of a priority queueing model, he discovered that 
Russian mathematicians had solved the very model accurately 
twenty years earlier.  Fortunately, the paper was rejected from
the conference as "too theoretical."
 
Uli completed his PhD work in David Dill's group at Stanford in
three years.  Surprising to him, his paper with the smallest 
scientific contribution seems to get cited the most.  He is
proud that he was right in an argument with Don Knuth about
a probabilistic algorithm employing ordered hashing.  After
finishing his PhD he stayed at Stanford as Research Associate,
aiming for academia.  But the lure of "financial independence"
was too strong and he got involved in start-ups, two of which
have survived to date (ePocrates and Blue Wireless).  Like Mark
Mitchell and Amit Patel, he takes pride in developing quality
software (aiming to become as good as they are).  He has turned
to the dark side, however, and a 2.5-month stint as a regular
employee of Sanera Systems resulted in three patent
applications.