Interests

My main interests in research are in the field of computer science. I am mainly interested in business process modeling (BPM) which is sometimes referred to as workflow. I have been interested in the automation of work from the time I began working with computers at the age of 10. I believe that the modern database is now a mature technology and it is now time to focus on how that data is used to manage work in cooperation with humans in an intelligent way.

Additionally, I find Software Engineering to be a facinating subject both as a purely academic excercise as well as in actual practice. I have been an active software engineer for nearly 15 years and continue to pursue learning, understanding, analyzing, critiquing and in some cases practicing different techniques in the software engineering field. I believe that software engineering is much like other engineering practices in that it requires a planned effort by trained individuals to be successful on a large scale.

A blend of these two interests was the subject of my PhD dissertation. I created a new graphical modeling language for designing software which has a direct algebraic representation. Additionally, a business process - modeled in the same language - can be mathematically checked to see if the desired business process can be performed by the software model. I have not had time to attempt an actual implementation of it, but the research is sound.

I am also interested in how to extend the usability of systems through the use of 3D Graphic user interfaces. While 3D graphics have been around for a while, they have yet to be adopted in a business setting. Yet, 3D graphics have the ability to convey more information in a way that is easily understandable and identifiable by humans. After all we live in a 3-dimensional world. Thus, my research in this extends from understanding human perception as it relates to 3D graphics, to finding new ways to dispay information in 3D to aid in user understanding. I am still working on some visualization research on a part time basis with Georgia State

In addition, to these primary research areas, I have written several research papers on other topics of immediate or passing interest to me.

What is Computer Science?

Computer Science as a discipline was predated by Physics by only a few hundred years. In fact, Charles Babbage who some consider one of the founders of computer science began work on his Analytic Engine in 1833. Of course, Blaise Pascal developed the first mechanical adding machine some 180 years before that. The intense development of computers in the early and middle twentieth century began to foster questions about what one could and couldn't do with a computer. In order to understand the limits of computation, we have to collect facts about how problems are modeled and how computers can work. One of the best definitions for computer science can be found in the Wikipedia:

The discipline of computing is the systematic study of algorithmic processes that describe and transform information: their theory, analysis, design, efficiency, implementation, and application. The fundamental question underlying all the computing is 'What can be (efficiently) automated?'

Thus, in much the same way a physicist studies what the physical world allows us to do, a computer scientist studies and pushes the boundaries of what we are capable of doing with computation.