[2][3][4] Working in the areas of ICT4D, he is co-founder and editor-in-chief emeritus of journal Information Technologies and International Development and leads the "Global Computing" column for Communications of the ACM.

[7] His work has done much to promote ICT4D as an academic discipline having founded the area's most significant journal (ITID) and helped to lead its largest conference (ICTD).

He attended UCLA for undergraduate studies in computer science and engineering, where for his senior thesis he developed, on a Connection Machine, a massively parallel algorithm for the graph coloring problem.

After graduating with a BS in 1989 he joined Thinking Machines Corp in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he worked on various projects, including parallel programming languages, message passing I/O,[8] and network simulation for the CM 5 supercomputer.

He is the founding editor-in-chief, with Ernest J. Wilson III, of the field's highest-rated journal,[11] Information Technologies and International Development (ITID).