Sponsors and technology partners of SETI@home include The Planetary Society, The University of California Digital Media Innovation Program, Sun Microsystems, Fuji Film Computer Products, Network Appliance, Quantum Corporation, Paramount Pictures, IBM developerWorks, Informix, The Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Intel, space.com, Engineering Design Team, and The SETI Institute. SETI@home is also supported by private donations. It is based at the University of California at Berkeley. Learn about other UC Berkeley SETI projects.

Press inquiries should be directed to David Anderson at "davea at ssl dot berkeley dot edu".

  Personnel

The members of the SETI@home team are:

Dr. David P. Anderson , Project Director. David specializes in operating systems and distributed computing. He designed the SETI@home software and data architecture, and leads the BOINC project.

Dr. Dan Werthimer, Chief Scientist. Dan has been involved in SETI for 20 years. He has published over 35 papers and books on SETI, and leads the SERENDIP project. He designed the SETI@home analysis algorithms and data collection hardware.

Jeff Cobb, Scientific Programmer.
Dr. Eric Korpela, Project Scientist.
Matt Lebofsky , Scientific Programmer.
Charlie Fenton, Macintosh UI/Graphics Programmer.
Jeff Mock, Engineering Director.
Aaron Parsons, Engineer.
Bob Bankay, Database Administrator.
Court Cannick, Systems Administrator.


The Planetary Society works with us on education, fundraising, and administration.

David Gedye. David founded the SETI@home project, and acted as its first Director from 1995 to 1997.

Dr. Woodruff T. Sullivan III. Woody is a Professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington, and has been an active member of the SETI community for more than 20 years.

The client analysis code was designed by Dan Werthimer, Mike Lampton, Charles Donnelly, Jeff Cobb, Eric Heien and Eric Korpela, and was implemented by Jeff Cobb. Other contributing programmers include David Anderson, James F. Causey, Ragnar Hojland Espinosa, Charlie Fenton, Kelly French, Kyle Granger, Patrick Keane, Eric Korpela, Matt Lebofsky, Michael Pfeiffer, Brian Pike, Stein Sandbech, Brad Silen, Ted Wright, Steffen Zahn, Charles Congdon, and Hiram Clawson.

Philippe Verdy and Ron Hipschman assisted in developing this web site. Bob Cowart helped with writing documentation.

Many thanks to Craig Kasnoff, who participated in the project's formative discussions and made key introductions. Ralph Derrickson has supported the project from its inception, and given much needed business advice.

A history and future schedule of SETI@home:

1996: David Gedye, along with Craig Kasnoff, conceived the idea for SETI@home and formed the initial project team. A scientific plan was developed that received widespread academic support at the 5th International Conference in Bioastronomy in July 1996. The presented paper: A new major SETI project based on Project Serendip data and 100,000 personal computers was published in 1997 in "Astronomical and Biochemical Origins and the Search for Life in the Universe", Proc. of the Fifth Intl. Conf. on Bioastronomy = IAU Colloq. No. 161, eds. C.B. Cosmovici, S. Bowyer, and D. Werthimer (Publisher: Editrice Compositori, Bologna, Italy).

1997: The signal analysis code and prototypes of the client and server software were developed.

1998: Most of this year has been devoted to fundraising. In 9/98 we began working on the data recording system and on the final version of the client software. In 11/98 we plan to begin recording data and to begin testing the client software.

1999: From 1/99 through 3/99 we tested and debugged the client software, developwd the final version of the server software, and prepared the web site for launch. The launch occurred on May 13. See the tech news for details of the many problems we experienced in 1999.

2000: The sky survey has been continuing. We've accumulated half a million years of CPU time and have half a million active volunteers crunching data. We've started the task of sorting through the 1.4 billion potential signals in our database to eliminate radio frequency interference (RFI), computer errors, and to search for signals that repeat. For more details of the analysis and the potential signals found see the Science Newsletters and What have we found?.

2001 and beyond: Due to the incredible response we will be able to extend SETI@home past its initial two year life span. We're planning for SETI@home II now. We may increase our radio band coverage at Arecibo by adding another recorder system. We may add a recording system to a telescope in the southern hemisphere so we can see an entirely different part of the sky. We'll also add new features to our web site showing more details of the process of the analysis process, and show in more detail your personal contribution to SETI@home.