David Atkins, Assistant Professor

office: +20 2 797 5305
email: datkins@aucegypt.edu

After teaching Computer Science for several years at the University of Oregon, in fall of 2004 I moved to Egypt to teach at AUC for a year. Prior to returning to academia in 2001, I worked in software research and development at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories for nearly 20 years as well as a few years of teaching programming and Unix classes at companies throughout the US and the world. My degrees are in mathematics (BA, College of Wooster and PhD in Ring Theory, University of Kansas).

My current interests include programming languages and compilers, collaboration tools, and version management. Projects in my previous life at Bell Labs included the Product Development Collaboratory - a research project in distributed development, Mawl - a web programming language, and software visualization. My favorite and best work at Bell Labs was the Version Editor.

The year at AUC was exciting, challenging, and rewarding. The Computer Science Department at AUC is first rate as is the University in general. Egyptians are kind and friendly, and made us feel welcome during our year's stay. While at AUC, I taught the following courses:

• CSCI 325 Concepts of Programming Languages
• CSCI 447 Compiler Design

Recent Publications and Patents

Collaboration Tools - Lessons Learned, invited talk at Oracle, September, 2002.

Using Version Control Data to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Software Tools: A Case Study of the Version Editor, with Ball, Graves, Mockus, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, July 2002.

Introducing Instant Messaging and Chat in the Workplace, with Boyer, Finholt, Handel, and Herbsleb, accepted for Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Minneapolis, April 20-25, 2002.

Global Software Development: The Bell Labs Collaboratory, with Handel, Herbsleb, Perry, and Wills, Invited presentation, International Conference on Software Engineering, Toronto, May 12-19, 2001.

Achieving Speed in Globally Distributed Project Work, with Handel, Herbsleb, and Wills, Human Computer Interaction Consortium, February 4-7, 2001, Frazer Colorado.

Apparatus and Method for Displaying Characteristics of Data Base Records, with Ball, Eick, Wills, patent issued September 2000.

Measuring Technology Effects on Software Change Cost, with Mockus and Siy, Bell Labs Technical Journal, 5-2, April-June 2000.

Mawl: A Domain-Specific Language for Form-Based Services, with Ball, Bruns, and Cox, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, May/June 1999.

Using Version Control Data to Evaluate the Effectiveness of Software Tools, with Ball, Graves, Mockus, International Conference on Software Engineering Proceedings, 1999.

Version Sensitive Editing: Change History as a Programming Tool, Proceedings of the 8th Conference on Software Configuration Management, 1998.

Apparatus for Visualizing Program Slices, with Ball, Eick, Wills, patent issued August 1998.

Integrated Web and Telephone Service Creation, with T.Ball et. al., Bell Labs Technical Journal, Winter 1997.

Experience with a Domain-Specific Language for Form-Based Services, with T.Ball et. al., USENIX Conference on DSLs, 1997.

Last updated 2005/09/15