Current
Research


[ Patterns | Publications | Other Links ]

A Short Research Description

I am interested in how people design and build things. As a child, I wanted to be an architect and design cool buildings. After studying architecture for a year, though, my interests drew me into computer science. I didn't know it at the time, but this was the perfect place for someone who likes to study design to be. Not only are computer programs fun and difficult to build, but computing provides a metaphor and set of tools for studying the design of any sort of thing.

After graduating with undergraduate degrees in computer science and accounting, I pursued a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence. My doctoral research focused on how tax accountants construct legal arguments. This problem wedded traditional work in knowledge-based systems with the need to retrieve relevant cases from a large memory and integrate them into the reasoning process.

In the last decade, I have shifted much of my attention to the design of computer programs. This has led me into areas such as object-oriented design, functional programming, and intelligent teaching and learning systems. Building such systems is quite difficult, in part because we don't have a very good understanding of how people design programs, or even understand very well the structure of non-trivial programs. For this reason, my interests have increasingly moved toward the human side of the design of programs. This has led me to the study of software patterns.

If you are interested, you can read more about my work with patterns.



Publications

Some of my recent papers can be found on-line. I hope to add more as time permits.



Other Links

For a while at the advent of the world wide web, I collected links of interest to me related to AI and computer science. You can see these links (which are somewhat out-of-date now):



Eugene Wallingford ==== wallingf@cs.uni.edu ==== February 20, 2012