Java creator
James Gosling has left Google to become chief software architect at Liquid Robotics.
In a message
to eWEEK, Gosling said leaving Google
was a difficult decision, but the opportunity to work with a former Sun
Microsystems colleague on some new and interesting projects was just too much
to turn down.
Moreover,
joining Liquid Robotics means Gosling will not have to remain so close to the
ongoing legal battle between Google and Oracle over the use of Java in the
Android operating system.
“Deciding to
leave Google was pretty tough; it's a pile of great people doing interesting
things,” Gosling said. “But when my friend Bill Vass [the CEO of Liquid
Robotics] described what he was doing, he blew the top off the coolness chart.”
Vass spent 10 years at Sun where he held several titles, including chief
security officer and chief information officer.
In a press
release on the news, Liquid Robotics said Gosling has joined the company at a
time when it is experiencing rapid growth in its customer base, adding
strategic new hires and expanding company operations. In June, Liquid Robotics
closed a Series D $22 million financing round led by VantagePoint Capital
Partners, the company’s first institutional investor, together with
participation by oilfield services provider Schlumberger.
“Liquid
Robotics tackles a rocket science problem that does good for the world and is
incurably cool,” Gosling said in a statement. “Liquid Robotics can totally
change the way we look at oceans. We'll be able to get a wide variety of
detailed data more cheaply and pervasively than any other way. It involves a
large data problem and a large-scale control problem, both of which are
fascinating to me and have been passions of mine for years.”
With interests
in several areas, Liquid Robotics produces the Wave Glider unmanned ocean vehicle and provides cloud-based
data services.
“Liquid
Robotics has autonomous vehicles that rove the oceans measuring everything from
water chemistry in the Gulf of Mexico to radioactivity off the coast of Japan,”
Gosling told eWEEK. “They've got a
lot of on-board intelligence, which is connected via satellite to the
cloud. I'm their new chief software architect. It's quite a career
change, but it'll be a huge amount of fun.”
The Wave
Glider is a self-propelled marine robotic drone employing a multi-patented
design that taps into the ocean’s inexhaustible supply of wave energy to “swim”
indefinitely—no refueling, no emissions and no manpower. It can collect and
transmit worldwide oceanic data in real time on a continuous basis on missions
that can last years and cover thousands of miles. Previous robotic ocean
platforms spend the majority of their power on propulsion, yet the Wave Glider
gets its propulsion directly from wave energy, thus all its power can be
dedicated to sensing and significant computation. In addition to providing Wave
Gliders as a product, Liquid Robotics has also set up a data as a service
(DaaS) cloud that provides direct access in real time to ocean information, the
company said.
“Liquid
Robotics is changing the economics of ocean operations,” Vass said in a
statement. “As we move to provide integrated data services using autonomous
fleets of seafaring robots to explore the world’s vast oceans, software is
critical to unlocking the potential of what is possible. James is one of the
best software engineers in the industry and will help us revolutionize global
oceanic knowledge on a scale and dimension unknown in history.”
Currently, in long-term
deployment around the globe, Wave Gliders are being used for scientific
research by the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National
Data Buoy Center and Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory, as well as
several premier oceanographic facilities such as the Woods Hole Oceanographic
Institution, the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, Scripps Institution
of Oceanography and the University of Hawaii. The craft are also being deployed
for commercial operations such as in offshore oil and gas exploration, and for
a variety of government and defense uses.
Gosling joined Google in March after a short
stint with Oracle (following Oracle’s acquisition of Sun). Gosling resigned
from Oracle in April 2010 and later spoke with eWEEK about
several reasons why he left.
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