Meredith L Patterson

Early life

Patterson spent her first 24 years living in and around Houston, before moving to Iowa City, Iowa, to pursue her Master's degree in Linguistics and PhD in Computer Science. Patterson attended Kingwood High School from 1990 to 1994. She supported herself doing odd-jobs from website designer, technical writer, math teacher and professional restaurant critic to reporter for the Houston Press, She served as the Treasurer of the Mars Society Houston branch in 1999. That same year, at age 22, she traveled above the Arctic Circle as a NASA correspondent for a Mars simulation mission.

Computer science and academic career

Patterson is known for her work in computational linguistics and its applications to computer security. In 2005, she presented the first parse tree validation technique for stopping SQL injection attacks at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas.

She has integrated her support vector machine datamining library inside of PostgreSQL to provide a "query-by-example" extension to the SQL language, allowing DBAs to quickly and easily form complex datamining requests based on example positive and negative inputs. While this work was initially funded by Google's Summer of Code program, Patterson's datamining work now forms the basis of her startup, Osogato, which couples the datamining database with acoustic feature extractors allowing users to create playlists from their own music collections and find new music based on the inherent properties of the music they provide as sample inputs. Osogato was launched at SuperHappyDevHouse.

Prior to founding Osogato, Patterson worked for Mu Security (now Mu Dynamics). Before that, she was a PhD student at the University of Iowa. She did her undergrad in linguistics at the University of Houston and received her Masters in linguistics from the University of Iowa.

Patterson has contributed to multiple open-source database software projects, including SciTools, Klein, QBE, and written patches to PostgreSQL. Her "Dejector" library integrates with PostgreSQL to implement the SQL injection approach taken in her Black Hat paper. Patterson is also credited with contributing to the Summer of Code project Firekeeper, which her husband mentored.

In 2009 at BlackHat, Dan Kaminsky presented joint work with Patterson and Sassaman, revealing pervasive flaws in the Internet's certificate authority infrastructure. Their work revealed that existing web browsers could be fooled into accepting fraudulent X.509 certificates.

Writing career

As a science fiction author, Patterson has published numerous short stories in such magazines as Fortean Bureau and Strange Horizons and in compilations such as The Doom of Camelot and The Children of Cthulhu, and is credited with contributing to the Steve Jackson Games game GURPS Villains. Her poetry has been influenced by her scientific research; for example, her poem "Leaving Devon Island" is in reference to the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station on Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada.

Blogger

Patterson frequently discusses such issues as copyright reform, biohacking, the Military Commissions Act, Proposition 8 and civil rights issues, and programming languages on her personal blog. Patterson has also contributed multiple articles to the popular blog BoingBoing.

In spring of 2008, she published a paper with David Chaum and Len Sassaman in a USENIX workshop criticizing the lack of attention paid to user-privacy in the OLPC (One Laptop per Child) computer.

Personal

A two-time CodeCon presenter, Patterson married the co-organizer of the event, Len Sassaman, after a public proposal at CodeCon 2006. As Sassaman was famous among the geek community in his own right, their marriage was held up as an example of a geek power couple. They were together until Sassman's death in 2011.

Patterson, who was diagnosed with autism in adulthood, has stated that "a single-minded focus" has helped her to have an "overwhelmingly positive relationship" with the male-dominated technology community. Although acknowledging that other women have experienced discrimination or sexual assault, she has urged advocacy groups not to minimize the experiences of women who feel welcome, and prefers the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology over the Ada Initiative on these grounds.