Meredith L. Patterson is an American technologist, science fiction writer, and journalist. She has spoken at numerous industry conferences on a wide range of topics. She is also a blogger and software developer, and a leading figure in the biopunk movement.
Patterson is known for her work in computational linguistics and its applications to computer security. In 2005, she presented the first parse treevalidation technique for stopping SQL injection attacks at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. She has integrated her support vector machinedatamining 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 properties of the music they provide as sample inputs. Osogato was launched at SuperHappyDevHouse. Prior to founding Osogato, Patterson worked for Mu Security. Before that, she was a PhD student at the University of Iowa. She did her undergrad work 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, and 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, Len Sassaman, 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.
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 also famous among the geek community, 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.
