[2] From 1985 to 1992 he was an assistant professor in the UC Berkeley Computer Science Department, where he received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator and IBM Faculty Development awards.

[8] From 1995 to 1998 he was chief technical officer of Tunes.com, where he developed web-based systems for music discovery based on collaborative filtering, acoustics, and other models.

[citation needed] In 1995 he joined David Gedye and Dan Werthimer in creating SETI@home, an early volunteer computing project.

[10] Anderson was involved in Stardust@home, which used 23,000 volunteers to identify interstellar dust particles via the Web – an approach called distributed thinking.

In 2007 Anderson developed BOSSA a software framework for distributed thinking,[11] using volunteers on the Internet to perform tasks that require human intelligence, knowledge, or cognitive skills.