Marc L. Smith

Assistant Professor
Computer Science Department
Vassar College

Office: OLB 122
Voice: 845 437 7497
E-mail: mlsmith@cs.vassar.edu

• Fall 2008:
  • CMPU-377 - Parallel Programming
    Lectures: Tue/Thu, 10:30am - 11:45am
  • CMPU-353 - Bioinformatics
    Lectures: Mon/Wed, 10:30am - 11:45am; Lab: Mon, 1:30pm - 3:00pm
  • Office Hours: Tue/Wed/Thu, 1:30-3pm; and by appointment
    

• Complete list of past courses taught

• Models of Parallel and Distributed Computation
• Bioinformatics (computational phylogeny)
• Programming Languages (semantics, paradigms, unifying theories)
  

• Dissertation:
  • Marc L. Smith. View-Centric Reasoning about Parallel and Distributed Computation. PhD thesis, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816-2362, December 2000. Postscript .

• Journal:
  • Marc L. Smith, Rebecca J. Parsons, and Charles E. Hughes. “View-Centric Reasoning for Linda and Tuple Space Computation,” IEE Proceedings-Software 150(2), pp 71-84. Special Issue on Communicating Process Architectures 2002. April 2003.

• Refereed Conference Proceedings:
  • Neil Brown and Marc L. Smith, “Representation and Implementation of CSP and VCR Traces,” in Concurrent Systems Engineering Series (Peter H. Welch, et al. Eds.) IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2008. Communicating Process Architectures (CPA 2008), University of York (York, England). September 7-10, 2008. pp. 329-345. PDF
    
    
  • Mark Burgin and Marc L. Smith, “Compositions of Concurrent Processes,” in Concurrent Systems Engineering Series (Frederick R. M. Barnes, Jon M. Kerridge, Peter H. Welch, Eds.) IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2006. Communicating Process Architectures (CPA 2006), Napier University (Edinburgh, Scotland). September 17-20, 2006. pp. 281-296. PDF
    
    
  • Tiffani L. Williams and Marc L. Smith, “The Role of Diverse Populations in Phylogenetic Analysis,” The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, (GECCO 2006). Seattle, WA, July 8-12, 2006. PDF
    
    
  • Mark Burgin and Marc L. Smith, “From Sequential Processes to Grid Computation,” in Proceedings of the 2006 International Conference on Foundations of Computer Science (FCS'06), Edited by Hamid R. Arabnia and Mark Burgin, CSREA Press, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 26-29 June 2006. pp. 10-16. PDF
    
    
  • Marc L. Smith and Tiffani L. Williams, “Phylospaces: Reconstructing Evolutionary Trees in Tuple Space,” Fifth IEEE International Workshop on High Performance Computational Biology (HiCOMB 2006), Rhodes Island, Greece, April 25, 2006. PDF.
    
    
  • Tiffani L. Williams and Marc L. Smith, “Cooperative Rec-I-DCM3: A Population-Based Approach for Reconstructing Phylogenies,” 2005 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (CIBCB'05). San Diego, CA. Nov. 14-15, 2005. PDF
    
    
  • Marc L. Smith. “A Unifying Theory of True Concurrency Based on CSP and Lazy Observation,” in Concurrent Systems Engineering Series (Roebbers, Welch, and Wood, Eds.) IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2005. Communicating Process Architectures (CPA 2005), Technische Universiteit Eindhoven (Eindhoven, the Netherlands. September 18-21, 2005. pp. 177-188. PDF
    
    
  • Marc L. Smith. “Unifying Theories of Programming: CSP + Lazy Observation = True Concurrency,” in (FCS'05), Edited by Hamid R. Arabnia and Rose Joshua, CSREA Press, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 27-30 June 2005. pp. 118-124. PDF
    
    
  • Marc L. Smith. “Focusing on Traces to Link VCR and CSP,” in Concurrent Systems Engineering Series (East, Martin, Welch, Duce, and Green, Eds.) IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004. (Presented at Communicating Process Architectures - 2004, Oxford Brookes University (Headington Campus, Oxford, UK). September 5-8, 2004. pp. 353-360. PDF .
    
    
  • Marc L. Smith, Charles E. Hughes, and Kyle W. Burke. “The Denotational Semantics of View-Centric Reasoning,” in Concurrent Systems Engineering Series (Broenink and Hilderink, Eds.) IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2003. (Presented at Communicating Process Architectures - 2003 . The University of Twente (Enschede, the Netherlands). September 7-10, 2003. PDF .
    
    
  • Marc L. Smith and Charles E. Hughes. “A Characterization of Lazy and Eager Semantic Solutions to the Linda Predicates Ambiguity Problem,” Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA’03), Edited by Hamid R. Arabnia, CSREA Press, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 23-26 June 2003. PDF
    
    
  • Charles E. Hughes and Marc L. Smith. “Teaching Java Concurrency to CS vs IT Students: A Matter of Emphasis,” Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Processing Techniques and Applications (PDPTA’03), Edited by Hamid R. Arabnia, CSREA Press, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, 23-26 June 2003. PDF
    
    
  • Marc L. Smith, Rebecca J. Parsons, and Charles E. Hughes. View-Centric Reasoning about Space-Based Middleware. IASTED International Conference on Information and Knowledge Sharing (IKS 2002). St. Thomas, US Virgin Islands. November 18-20, 2002. PDF .
    
    
  • Marc L. Smith, Rebecca J. Parsons, and Charles E. Hughes. " View-Centric Reasoning for Linda and Tuple Space Computation,” in Concurrent Systems Engineering Series (Pascoe, Loader and Sunderam, Eds.) IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2002. (Presented at Communicating Process Architectures 2002, The University of Reading (England). September 15-18, 2002.) PDF .
    
    
  • Marc L. Smith, Rebecca J. Parsons, and Charles E. Hughes. View-Centric Reasoning in Modern Computing Systems. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Communications in Computing . Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. June 24-27, 2002. PDF .
    
    
  • Charles E. Hughes, J.Michael Moshell, Sean G. Hughes, and Marc L. Smith. “Cooperative Problem Solving among K-12 Students: The ExploreNet Project,” Proceedings of Frontiers in Education ‘92, Nov. 1992, pp. 522-526.

• Abstracts:
  • Mark Burgin and Marc L. Smith, “Algebras of Actions in Concurrent Processes,” in Concurrent Systems Engineering Series (Alistair A. McEwan, Steve Schneider, Wilson Ifill, and Peter H. Welch, Eds.) IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2007. Communicating Process Architectures 2007 (CPA 2007), University of Surrey (Guildford, UK). July 8-11, 2007. p. 505. PDF

• Workshop papers:
  • Marc L. Smith. “TeachScheme! Lite: A Recipe for Teaching EoPL Without Prerequisites,” Proceedings of the TeachScheme! Anniversary Workshop, Brown University, Providence, RI, June 11-12, 2005. Edited by Richard Cobbe, NU-CCIS-05-05. College of Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA. pp. 200-203.

• Preprints:
  • Mark Burgin and Marc L. Smith, “Concurrent Composition and Algebras of Events, Actions, and Processes,” arXiv.org, arXiv:0803.3099v1, March 2008.

• Book Review:
  • Mark Burgin, Super-Recursive Algorithms. Series: Monographs in Computer Science. Springer Verlag (2005). ISBN 0-387-95569-0. $79.95/{pound}61.50/{euro}79.95. 304 pp. Hardbound.
    Marc L. Smith, The Computer Journal 2006 49(6):762-763; doi: 10.1093/comjnl/bxl050. Online article.
    

• Ph.D., Computer Science (2000); University of Central Florida ( UCF ), Orlando, FL.
• M.S., Computer Science (1993); UCF.
• B.S., Computer Science (1986); UCF.

• Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP) Links:
  
  • WoTUG - The place for Communicating Processes
  • The classic text: Communicating Sequential Processes (Hoare)
  • The modern text: Theory and Practice of Concurrency (Roscoe)
  • Unifying Theories of Programming book, by Hoare and He: (email me for more information)
  • JCSP - CSP for Java
  • occam-pi - blending the best of CSP and the pi-calculus
• Other parallel and distributed computing links
  
  • Scientific Computing Associates, Inc. - TCP Linda, Paradise, NetworkSpaces
    
  • Berkeley UPC - Unified Parallel C
    
  • RocketCalc - Linux cluster resources and wiki
• Teaching first-year computer science:
  
  • TeachScheme, ReachJava! - The silent revolution changing computer science education!
    
  • How to Design Programs - An Introduction to Programming and Computing - online textbook!
  • DrScheme - programming environment with language levels for Scheme and Java!
    

My Erdös number (of the second kind) is: 4.
Here’s how: me –> Charles E. Hughes –> Narsingh Deo –> Frank Harary –> Paul Erdös
In other words,

• I published with someone
  • who published with someone
    • who published with someone
      • who published a paper with Paul Erdös.

Yes, many people have their own Erdös number, but it was still fun finding mine!

• My Ph.D. advisors were Rebecca J. Parsons and Charles E. Hughes
• Rebecca’s advisor was
  • Matthias Felleisen, whose advisor was
    • Daniel P. Friedman, whose advisor was
      • Terrence W. Pratt, whose advisor was
        • Robert K. Lindsey, whose advisor was
          • Herbert A. Simon, the father of Artificial Intelligence and too much else to list!
            
• Charlie’s advisor was
  • Wilson E. (Gene) Singletary, whose advisor was
    • William Werner Boone, whose advisor was
      • Alonzo Church, of Church-Turing thesis fame:
        • All computable functions are computable by a Turing machine
        • yes, one of Church’s (many) famous students was my “uncle” Alan M. Turing
        • Church was also the inventor of the Lambda Calculus
          
• If you’re interested in tracing academic genealogy, look at these websites:
  • The SIGACT Theoretical Computer Science Genealogy
  • The Mathematics Genealogy Project
    

• Here is my PGP Key (in case anyone needs to send me something securely)
  
• And here is my key fingerprint: “F3BA F7FC 851E 0098 EA61 F980 D6A2 5D7C CE7C 218B”
  

• Before joining Vassar in Fall 2006, I was an assistant professor at Colby College for five (5) years, beginning Fall 2001. Prior to my transition to academia, I worked for AT&T for fifteen (15) years, in several different internal IT capacities, including applications and systems development and support, and IT infrastructure systems engineering. One of the very special opportunities I had while working for AT&T was to be sponsored in its Doctoral Support Program, which enabled me to go back to school full-time to earn my Ph.D.
• The AT&T I worked for no longer exists. Here’s a brief history of what happened (for more details, look it up in Wikipedia!):
  • I joined American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) just two years after the Jan. 1, 1984 divestiture that broke up the Bell System monopoly (aka, Ma Bell).
  • The company officially changed its name to AT&T Corp. during the time I worked for them.
  • AT&T spun off Lucent Technologies (and the Bell Labs name). Lucent has since been acquired by Alcatel, forming the current Alcatel-Lucent.
  • AT&T also spun off AT&T Wireless, who later merged with Cingular Wireless, a company owned by SBC Communications.
  • AT&T Corp. has since “merged” with SBC Communications, forming the current AT&T Inc.