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School of Computing Faculty and Their Research Interests

Erik Brunvand

Associate Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, 1991

Professor Brunvand joined the faculty in 1990. He has interests in computer architecture and VLSI systems in general, and self-timed and asynchronous systems in particular. One aspect of his research involves compiling concurrent communicating programs into asynchronous VLSI circuits. The current system allows programs written in a subset of Occam, a concurrent message-passing programming language based on CSP, to be automatically compiled into a set of self-timed circuit modules suitable for manufacture as an integrated circuit. He is also interested in investigating the effects of asynchrony on computer systems architecture at a higher level. To explore these ideas he is building a series of prototype asynchronous computer systems out of FPGA and custom VLSI chips.

John Carter

Associate Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Rice University, 1992

Professor Carter joined the faculty in January 1993. His research interests include computer architecture, operating systems, distributed systems, and computer networks. Of particular interest are novel memory system designs, both hardware and software. Dr. Carter is co-leading two research projects: the Impulse Adaptable Memory Systems project and the Khazana project. The goal of the Impulse project is to attack the primary problem limiting performance in future computer systems - the inability of conventional memory systems to supply data fast enough to avoid processing stalls - by developing a main memory controller and associated software that allows applications to dynamically change the way that the processor's memory hierarchy is managed. Khazana makes it easier for programmers to develop sophisticated distributed applications by addressing the shared state management problem faces by most such applications. Khazana exports the abstraction of a distributed secure persistent globally shared store that applications can use to store their shared state. It is responsible for performing many of the common operations needed by distributed applications, including replication, consistency management, and fault recovery.

Elaine Cohen

Professor, School of Computing
Adjunct Associate Professor of Mathematics
Ph.D., Syracuse University, 1974

Professor Cohen has held a faculty position since 1974. Currently she is co-head of the School's Computer-Aided Geometric Design Group. Present research is centered around representational and algorithmic problems associated with geometric modeling, graphics, scientific visualization physically based modeling, process planning, CAD/CAM and CAE. Dr. Cohen received a B.A. in Mathematics from Vassar College in 1968 and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from Syracuse University in 1970 and 1974, respectively.

Al Davis

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Utah, 1972

Professor Davis joined the faculty in 1993. His research interests involve high performance computer architectures and digital system design methodologies. More specifically he is interested in parallel processor architectures, high performance uniprocessor I/O architecture, VLSI, VLSI CAD, high performance communication, and asynchronous circuits. Prior to his joining the faculty in the fall of 1993, he spent the previous 12 years as a research scientist working on the design and implementation of parallel processing systems at Schlumberger Palo Alto Research and subsequently at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. Recent accomplishments include 1) the development of an automatic asynchronous circuit synthesis system called STETSON; 2) the design and implementation of an asynchronous scalable parallel communication fabric VLSI component called FEDEX which is capable of supporting 500 MB/sec sustained bandwidth on each of its 7 ports; and 3) the development of an extensible and scalable parallel processing system called MAYFLY and 4) the development of a very low latency message passing protocols called Direct Deposit. He is currently involved in the DARPA sponsored Impulse project (Prof. John Carter is the PI) which is developing an adaptive memory controller that is capable of dynamically organizing cache lines to suit the applications needs. During the 1999-2000 academic year, Professor Davis was on sabbatical at Intel in Austin, Texas where he lead the I/O and memory architecture efforts for the IA32 processor which is expected to be in production in 2003.

Matthew Flatt

Assistant Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Rice University, 1999

Professor Flatt's research interests cover all practical and theoretical aspects of programming languages, systems, and environments. As part of the Programming Languages Team (PLT), he is one of the principal architects of the DrScheme programming environment and a co-author of the How to Design Programs textbook. His current research topics include module languages for software components, object-oriented languages for classes and mixins, and high-level operating systems for cooperating applications.

Ganesh C. Gopalakrishnan

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1986

Professor Gopalakrishnan's primary research is in verification methods for concurrent systems such as shared memory systems, microprocessor busses, multithreaded software, and message passing networks. He also maintains active interest in self-timed design. Today's concurrent systems employ complex protocols that are expected to guarantee properties such as in-order arrival of messages, deadlock freedom, and liveness. In modern design approaches, these systems are subject to a battery of conventional tests, and when all these pass, model-checking methods are brought to bear to tracking down elusive bugs that may cripple the system well after field deployment. The effectiveness of conventional model-checking methods is limited by their inability to handle large state spaces, deal with parameterized designs, or provide guidelines for writing a comprehensive list of properties to check. Our group's recent efforts have addressed these problems using realistic driving problems such as generalized multi-level PCI I/O busses, the Intel Itanium Shared Memory Model, and the Java Shared Memory Model for Multithreading. Professor Gopalakrishnan was a general co-Chair of the Internal Symposium on Formal Methods in Computer-Aided Design (FMCAD) in November 1998, the International Symposium on Advanced Research in Asynchronous Circuits and Systems (Async) in November 1994. He organized the Workshop on Advances in Verification (WAVe) as well as the workshop on Formal Specification and Verification Methods for Shared Memory Systems, both in year 2000.

David H. Hanscom

Clinical Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Case Western Reserve University, 1970

Professor Hanscom's background is in the field of communications processor design at Sperry Univac, where he worked from 1970 to 1982. Since then he has been responsible for administering the undergraduate Computer Science and Computer Engineering programs at the University of Utah. In that capacity he teaches core computer science classes, serves as faculty advisor for individual students and for the Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, participates in student recruiting activities, and serves as director of the High School Computing Institute. His interests are in the areas of undergraduate education, computer architecture, and data communications.

Charles Hansen

Associate Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Utah, 1987

Professor Hansen joined the faculty in 1998. His research interests span scientific visualization, computer graphics, and high performance computing. Scientific visualization of large scale problems is of key interest and recent work involves taking into consideration time-varying data and exploiting this for speeding up the visualization process. Other methods for visualizing large amounts of data are multiresolution models and view dependent algorithms. The interest in computer graphics is driven from the scientific visualization perspective but includes parallel algorithms for speeding up global illumination.

Thomas C. Henderson

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Texas, 1979

Professor Henderson's professional interests include autonomous agents, multisensor systems, and simulation. Major areas of current research are robot behavior specification, simulation, multisensor integration, and bio-based computational models. Prior to his arrival at Utah, he was a visiting professor at the Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), France, and a Research Associate at the Institut fuer Nachrichtentechnik, Deutsche Forschungs und Versuchsanstalt fuer Luft und Raumfahrt (DFVLR), Germany.

Lee A. Hollaar

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1975

Professor Hollaar's primary interest is in legal issues regarding computers, particularly the intellectual property protection of software and information. As a Fellow with the Committee on the Judiciary, he has advised the United States Senate on computer-related issues such as encryption, copyright and patent, and regulation of the internet. He was one of the drafters of the Utah Digital Signature Act, the first law in the world to legally recognize digital signatures, and is active in the implementation of the required infrastructure. He directed the Utah Retrieval System Architecture (URSA) project, which developed hardware and software systems to support large information retrieval systems, including a special-purpose VLSI processor for the rapid searching of text and one of the first workstation-based client-server distributed systems for information retrieval. He was also the University's director of campus networking, and continues to work in communications networks and distributed systems.

John M. Hollerbach

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978

Professor Hollerbach's interests include robotics and virtual reality. The focus in virtual reality is on improving the transparency and sense of immersion through better mechanical interfaces and their control, better visual and auditory displays, and sensorimotor integration. Haptic interfaces are being employed for virtual manipulation of mechanical CAD models and for scientific visualization. The Treadport locomotion interface is being employed for walk-through synthetic environments such as outdoor terrain.

Wilson C. Hsieh

Assistant Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1995

Professor Hsieh joined the faculty in September 1997. His research interests are in compilers and programming languages, operating systems, and architecture.

Christopher R. Johnson

Professor, School of Computing
Research Associate Professor of Physics and Bioengineering
Ph.D., University of Utah, 1989

Professor Johnson's research interests are in the area of scientific computing. Particular interests include inverse and imaging problems, adaptive methods for partial differential equations, numerical analysis, problem solving environments, computational problems in medicine, and scientific visualization. In 1992, Professor Johnson was awarded a Young Investigator's Award from the NIH, in 1994 he was awarded the National Young Investigator (NYI) Award from the NSF, and in 1995 he was awarded the Presidential Faculty Fellow (PFF) Award from the NSF. In 1996 he received a DOE Computational Science Award and in 1997 received the Par Excellence Award from the University of Utah Alumni Association and the Presidential Teaching Scholar Award. In 1999, Professor Johnson was Awarded the Governor's Medal for Science and Technology from Utah Governor Michael Leavitt. He directs the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute.

Robert Kessler

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Utah, 1981

Professor Kessler's current research interests are in agents, software engineering, distributed systems, and visual programming. In the early 90's, he founded the Center for Software Science, a state of Utah Center of Excellence. He has also founded several startup companies and is currently involved with an Internet startup company, emWare, as a member of the board. He has served as member-at-large of ACM SIGPLAN and Vice Chairman for Conferences for SIGPLAN. He recently completed a seven year assignment as co-editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Lisp and Symbolic Computation.

Mike Kirby

Assistant Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Brown University, 2002

Professor Kirby joined the faculty in 2002. His research focus is on large-scale scientific computation and visualization, with an emphasis on the scientific cycle of mathematical modeling, computation, visualization, evaluation, and understanding. His primary research interests include computational science and engineering, high-order numerical methods, concurrent programming, scientific visualization, and high performance computing.

Arthur H. Lee

Clinical Associate Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Utah, 1992

Professor Lee joined the faculty in 2001. His interests revolve around object-oriented programming. Of particular interest are software design, software architecture, and software evolution. These are being experimented in areas such as programming languages, database systems, and distributed systems. He is also interested in improving computer science curricula. He tries to bring emerging ideas from research and industry into the classroom, always looking for new ones to incorporate into the CS curricula. Some of the emerging ideas that Professor Lee is investigating include aspect-oriented programming, web programming, and embedded programming. He is also interested in finding innovative and effective ways to use computers and other technologies in teaching.

Jay Lepreau

Research Associate Professor, School of Computing
B.S., University of Utah, 1983

Professor Lepreau's research interests focus on operating systems, but expand into many other areas including security, networking, component software, programming and domain-specific languages, compilers, distributed systems, and software assurance. As head of the Flux Research Group, he currently leads three DARPA and NSF-sponsored research projects. The ``Alchemy'' project is developing a new model of component programming for embedded and other low-level systems. Utah's Active Networks effort is attempting to develop a router OS that can safely and speedily ``execute'' Java bytecode-carrying packets. Finally, in a related effort his group is constructing a unique research instrument: a remotely configurable 1000-node network testbed and emulation facility. In these efforts, his group has developed much software, including the ``Janos'' active network OS, the ``Knit'' component composition language, the OSKit, the Flick IDL compiler, the Fluke/Flask OS, and the ``Alta'' and ``KaffeOS'' Java operating systems. In 1994 he founded the prestigious Usenix/ACM/IEEE Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI) conference series, and served as its first program chair.

Gary E. Lindstrom

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Carnegie-Mellon University, 1971

Professor Lindstrom's research interests include programming languages, databases, and scientific data management. He is on the editorial board of International Journal of Parallel Programming, and was Editor-in-Chief from its founding until 1993. With Doug DeGroot, he co-edited the book Logic Programming: Functions, Relations and Equations published by Prentice-Hall. Professor Lindstrom has been a member of the National Science Foundation Computer and Computation Research Advisory Committee, and served as a Distinguished Visitor of the IEEE Computer Society. In 1981 he received the College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award.

Emil Praun

Assistant Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Princeton University, 2002

Professor Praun joined the faculty in 2002. His main interests are in computer graphics. In particular, he has been working on applications of local parameterizations of triangle meshes: dividing 3D-embedded surfaces into collections of patches and ?unfolding? each of the patches into the plane. He is also interested in combining direct acquisition of 3D surfaces with procedural detail generation methods. He is a recipient of the John E. and Marva M. Warnock Presidential Endowed Chair for Faculty Innovation in Computer Science.

Richard F. Riesenfeld

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Syracuse University, 1973

Professor Riesenfeld has been involved in research in the areas of computer graphics, animation, computer aided geometric design and CAD/CAM since joining the faculty in 1972. Recently he has been investigating a broad spectrum of research problems in computer graphics, geometric modeling, and manufacturing within an integrated experimental testbed system motivated by the unifying principles of spline theory.

Ellen M. Riloff

Associate Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1994

Professor Riloff joined the faculty in 1994. Her research interests are in natural language processing, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. She is particularly interested in techniques for automatically generating dictionaries and knowledge bases for natural language processing. Most of her work revolves around the task of information extraction, which involves extracting information from text. The NLP research group at Utah has built its own NLP system called Sundance, which is a partial parser that activates and instantiates case frames for information extraction. Current research projects include bootstrapping techniques for learning extraction patterns, corpus-based techniques for learning semantic dictionaries, and corpus-based methods for coreference resolution.

Peter Shirley

Associate Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Illinois, 1991

Professor Shirley joined the faculty in 1996. He is interested in creating highly realistic images of virtual environments, and visualization of complex data. The former involves explicit and procedural generation of geometric models with realistic optical characteristics, light transport simulation to determine the outgoing light distribution from surfaces, and tone reproduction to create images displayable on low dynamic range media such as paper and CRTs. The latter involves issues of visual representation of complex data, as well as strategies for navigation and interaction that help the user extract local and global information about the data. In 2000 Professor Shirley received the University of Utah Student's Choice Teaching Award and in 1998 he received the College of Engineering Outstanding Teacher Award.

Kris Sikorski

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Utah, 1982

Professor Sikorski's current research interests are in the areas of distributed parallel scientific computation and computational complexity with emphasis on information based complexity. Of specific interest are applied problems in geophysics (3-D modeling of earthquakes), combustion (fluid mechanics), and electromagnetic wave propagation (Maxwell equations). Various parallel explicit and implicit algorithms are being studied and implemented on massively parallel machines. Information based complexity is a study of optimal algorithms for problems which are approximately solved, because of partial and contaminated information. Optimal algorithms for solving nonlinear problems with use of various error criteria are of special interest to Professor Sikorski.

Konrad Slind

Assistant Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., TU Munich, 1999

Professor Slind joined the faculty in 2001. His research interests are in logic and functional programming. He is particularly interested in higher order logic, its implementation, and its application to deductive verification of system properties. Recent research has investigated the modeling of generic and functional programming. Before coming to Utah, he participated in a European project that developed middleware for applications that require a theorem proving component.

Frank Stenger

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Alberta, 1965

Professor Stenger's research interests include the development of new methods of computation and the computer solution of computationally difficult problems from science and engineering, such as inverse problems, crack problems, flow problems and heat problems. He developed the Sinc methods, which provide optimal algorithms in all areas of engineering computation. He is currently writing, jointly with Michael O'Reilly and Tao Zhang, a Sinc Tool Box computer-based tutorial package to make these methods accessible to users. One of his students (Kenneth Parker) has recently completed his Ph.D. dissertation PTOLEMY: A Sinc-Collocation Mapping Sub-System, which is a computer sub-package of Maple that automates the solution of partial differential equations. Several of his students have recently written or are presently writing computer packages for solving a broad range of difficult engineering problem--such as Navier-Stokes equations (Barkey and Vakili, Narasimhan), Maxwell equations (Naghsh-Nilchi) based on his recently discovered Sinc method of approximating indefinite convolutions, which leads to a unified approach for solving elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic differential equations. Another student (Ross Schmittlein) is writing a package based on Sinc, constructing conformal maps. Stenger and his former student O'Reilly have been developing methods which make it possible to invert the Helmholtz equation without computing the forward solution. During the next few academic years he expects to extend these inversion methods so that they can be applied to rendering, to visualization, to the determination of paths for robots, and to the inversion of heat and electromagnetic problems for medical and geophysical applications. Seven of his papers have been accepted for publications during this past academic year.

Cynthia A. Thompson

Assistant Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Texas, 1998

Professor Thompson joined the faculty in 2000. Her research interests are in machine learning, natural language processing, and artificial intelligence. She is especially interested in applying machine learning to complex, relational tasks such as language processing and adaptive interfaces. After receiving her Ph.D., she spent two years at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University, building and studying conversational interfaces that adapt themselves over the course of several interactions with a user.

William B. Thompson

Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of Southern California, 1975

Professor Thompson's primary research interest is in the area of visual perception. Currently, he is exploring how an understanding of computational vision can aid in improving the spatial information conveyed by graphical displays. He is also active in the exploration of techniques for analyzing visual motion, sensing for manufacturing, and vision-based navigation. Professor Thompson joined the faculty in 1991 after 16 years in the Computer Science Department at the University of Minnesota.

Ross Whitaker

Assistant Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., University of North Carolina, 1993

Professor Whitaker joined the faculty in 2000. He has interests in computer vision, visualization, and image processing. In the area of medical image processing, Dr. Whitaker is a codeveloper of the "Insight" toolkit for segmenting and visualization the 3D color data associated with the Visible Human Project. Dr. Whitaker is also working on new, statistics-based methods for building surface models from noisy range measurements, such as those from laser radar and ultrasound. In the area of visualization, Dr. Whitaker is developing new methods for visualizing biological volume datasets and for processing the surface models that are derived from these datasets.

Joseph L. Zachary

Clinical Professor, School of Computing
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1987

Professor Zachary joined the faculty in 1987. He is interested in finding ways to use computers in teaching science and engineering in general, and computer science in particular. He is currently developing Web-based tools and curricula for teaching introductory programming, computer science, and scientific computing courses. The author of two textbooks in scientific programming, Professor Zachary received the 1999 IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award, won the University of Utah Distinguished Teaching Award in 1997, was named a Department of Energy Undergraduate Computational Science Education Award winner in 1996, was a University of Utah Presidential Teaching Scholar in 1995, and received the College of Engineering Outstanding Teaching Award in 1990.

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