He has a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. His dissertation research on consistency maintenance for group development of diagrams included a usability study of groups developing Entity Relationship diagrams. He has a M.S. in Industrial Administration from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.A. from the University of Rochester. After seven years with Andersen Consulting, he started a PC consulting practice focused on small businesses. Prior research includes developing a visual language for authoring educational materials for the Internet as part of the Collaborative Multimedia Instructional Toolkit (CoMMIT) project. Other interests include computer supported cooperative learning, usability engineering for group applications and semantic correctness criteria for transactions. He co-chaired the Collaborative Editing Workshop at CSCW 2000.