Personal
Bio Sketch
I provide this section on my web site to give those who might have interest some background into who I am. I am an Associate Professor, that's true, but I also am many other things. It is my philosophy to get to know the people I work with, regardless of the capacity in which I interact with them. In this way, we are all able to extend our humanity and compassion for one another.
I was born and raised in North Carolina. I came to Columbia during the 70s. I did my undergraduate and graduate studies here at USC. While working at NCR here in Columbia, I also pursued a Ph.D. in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. This was not a common practice at the time, and I had to work very hard to convince the "powers that be" that allowing me to undertake this pursuit was a good thing for the department, and that I could do the work. I taught classes, wrote papers, did the research and wrote the dissertation. All in all, it took me about 8 years after my masters to complete this work.
During that time, I had the opportunity to get involved with some really interesting projects in academia and industry, as a result of my leadership position within the Advanced Development organization at NCR. At the time, during the mid- to late-80s, NCR was a good place to be. We had built the NCR Tower platform--a highly successful departmental midrange Unix server machine--and there was much interest in developing advanced applications and forward-thinking business opportunities within the organization to extend our success in that arena. In addition, NCR was a founding contributor to MCC in Austin, TX, and there was much technology to direct and to transfer into the company. As a result of these experiences (in addition to various stints working on overseas projects), I was able to get a education above and beyond the traditional doctoral program of study.
Curriculum Vitae/Resume (if you're interested). See here for list of publications here and on Research page
After completing my Ph.D. work, I was recruited to join a small high-tech company in Boston, which was purchased by Mitsubishi Electric of Japan. Horizon Research was building special purpose computer systems for Mitsubishi at the time, and they wanted to branch into software R&D. I was recruited to start an R&D group, subsequently staffed by US and Japanese researchers and engineers. Our areas of focus were: knowledge systems engines (to run on Mitsubishi workstations) based on porting CLIPS (written in C++); knowledge systems applications for manufacturing domains (production scheduling being the main focus); knowledge acquisition for customized knowledge-based applications (focus in scheduling problems); and, analysis of hybrid parallel computing architectures employing conventional processors and special-purpose AI processor engines, built around Mitsubishi's Unix workstation product line. Horizon Research later became part of MERL (see this link for more details.)
I returned to Columbia several years later to join Knowledge Based Silicon Corp., a start-up involved in the development of specialized AI engines in silicon for Japanese customers. We were involved in developing both analog and digital design CAD tools for these companies, in addition to developing an family of VLSI chip architectures for special-purpose CPUs that could do very fast AI-oriented rule processing (implementing versions of the RETE forward-chaining rule engine in silicon). KBS was awarded a number of patents for both its chip technology and its CAD tool technology. I ended up running the company for about 5 years until late 1995, when the company was acquired. I continued to be involved with the company from time to time, assisting it in its transition from an R&D and CAD tool company to becoming a design services company today (under a new name, at this link) doing most of its work in Japan and China. See the write up on KBS (source, The State Newspaper, October 13, 1991).
I subsequently moved into the client-server and web segment of computing, by doing some work for my friends at The Computer Group, a network and application services company based here in Columbia. We built applications for Fleet Mortgage, Sonoco and Charlotte Board of Realtors, among others. I served as a consulting architect and business analyst for the real estate project, and managed this and some other start-up project opportunities during my year with TCG. The company was acquired by Ikon Office Solutions (see this link) for TCG's network services business. The applications development business spun out to another company in the Columbia area (see this link).
Late in 1996, I joined former NCR colleagues at the e-Health start-up HealthMagic, whose mission was two-fold: to deliver consumer-oriented e-Health applications built on a lifelong electronic, web-enabled health record; and, to deliver a suite of clinical and financial workflow applications to the post-acute healthcare market. During the course of my 4-year tenure with the company, I worked on both product families--doing database architecture for the health record and clinical databases, business and requirements analysis for the clinical applications, project management for the clinical products, and R&D in the use of intelligent Java-based agents for managing patient treatment compliance using a web-enabled electronic health record. The consumer-oriented health record, and its supporting middleware infrastructure, was selected by www.drkoop.com as their platform for delivering their consumer health-record based services over the Internet, building on the name and reputation of Dr. C. Everett Koop, former Surgeon General under the Reagan administration. The clinical applications built by HealthMagic were ultimately installed in Home Health facilities across the southern U.S., processing upwards of 10,000 OASIS-based patient visits per month (see this link for the spin-off company that has this product). HealthMagic is now defunct, and so doesn't have a web presence; however, this article link covers the mission of HealthMagic, and its role in the delivery of e-Health technology as part of Disney's planned Celebration community healthcare outreach in conjunction with Florida Hospital, from Healthcare Informatics, July 1998.
As with most of the Internet economy, things hit a "meltdown" in 2000. I left HealthMagic with a number of other executives and staff to form Global Health Technology, a consulting and e-Health platform company, which was later picked up by Covansys (see this link if you're interested) in late 2000. This turned out not to be a good move for me, so I eventually went solo in early 2001, expanding my own consulting practice, based on a number of consulting contacts I'd made in years past. This led me to consulting engagements in Malaysia, Italy and Japan for most of 2001, where I subsequently spent most of my time working out of Japan, returning to the east coast U.S. every 4-6 weeks. This pace of travel was grueling, and it became difficult to sustain, given a number of personal issues which required attention in the U.S.
Throughout the years since my doctoral work at USC, I continued to maintain contact with colleagues in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, doing research and teaching courses. During 2001, I was in discussions with the newly formed Department of Computer Science and Engineering about joining the faculty, as I had been an Adjunct Faculty member in the College of Engineering for some number of years. I have recently joined the faculty on a full-time, tenure-track basis, where I am overseeing the teaching and research programs in VLSI design. See my Teaching page to look at courses I have taught, or will be teaching soon. See my Research page to check out research interests, publications, and my current research agenda. Check out my Students page to get some insight into what I am looking for in students I select to work with and train under me, and what they might expect to obtain through the experience (as well as what I would obtain).
