Current Courses
I retired from UNC in July 2019 and have continued as an adjunct faculty. In my 15 years at UNC, I focused on undergraduate teaching, including courses for upperclassmen and for non-majors. I was the Director of Undergraduate Studies for 5 years and the adviser for the BS/MS program, which gave me the opportunity to work with students in both the undergraduate and graduate programs.
I received my Ph.D. from the Department of Computer Science at UNC in 1979 and have lived in Chapel Hill since then. I came back to UNC after retiring from IBM in June 2004. I focus on undergraduate teaching, including courses for upperclassmen and for non-majors. I am the adviser for the BS/MS program, which gives me the opportunity to work with students in both the undergraduate and graduate programs.
I also collaborated with Dr. Alex Tropsha from the School of Pharmacy building a web site, Chembench, that provides drug discovery tools for public use.
My work in software engineering has furthered my appreciation of Dr. Brooks's concept of the computer scientist as toolsmith. It has given me the opportunity to work with organizations across campus, non-profits in the area, and the entrepreneur community. It also heightened my awareness of the need for software engineers to understand the implications and ethical issues related to their work and lead to teach a course in that area. Most recently, I started teaching a course on user interfaces as I recognized this was a significant interest for students and missing in the department curriculum.
I worked for IBM for 25 years and was named an IBM Fellow in 1994. While at IBM I had the opportunity to work with international teams, create conferences for women, create an "intrapreneurship" within the company, and help govern the company's Academy of Technology. My work revolved around networking and software engineering, including
- developing networking protocols,
- deploying the network at the Nagano Olympics,
- product development,
- and advanced technology work in integration of calendar, telephony, and email.
My other professional interests include encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit and extending the reach of computer science to under-represented communities (including women)
Outside of work, I enjoy travel, reading, and animals. I've traveled to all seven continents and we're now working our way through the National Parks. My daughter works as an environemntal specialist for the federal government and my husband is happily retired from IBM. In July 2017, we welcomed a grandson into our family.
Honors Theses
- Luke Fernandez, Rendering an In-Browser, 360° Environment from Disjoint Live Camera Feeds (2017)
- Amanda Lohmann, An IMU-Enabled Camera Rig for Wide-Range Stereo Videography in the Field (2017)
- Bradley Davis, Congestion Avoidance on Road Networks through Adaptive Routing on Contracted Graphs (2016)
- Brian Gottfried, NoSQL, Neo4j, and Chemotext: A Primer on Picking the Right Database For Your Problem Space (2014)
- TJ Tkacik, Analysis and QSAR Modeling of Human Intestinal Transporter Database (2014)
- Nicholas Bartlett, Multi-Threading and Parallelization (2013)
- Samuel Gass, Improved Aprallelization in Job Management for Chembench (2013)
- Ian Kim, NoSQL Databases and Their Applications (2013)
- Wilson Liam, Heuristic-Based OCR Post-Correction for Smart Phone Applications (2009)
- James Uhing, Leveraging Ontologies to Enhance Recommendation Systems (2009)
- Paul Pucciarelli, Videowner: Fingerprint Based DigitalVideo Comparison (2008)
- Joel Sutherland, Object Resource Manager and its Application to a Sea Turtle Virtual Environment (2007)
- Adi Unnithan, Improving Search Relevancy through Human Indexing and Data Mining (2007)
Masters Papers
- Nick Bartlett, Web Applications, Architectures, and Frameworks: An Analysis of Web Applcations (2017)
- Federico Menozzi, An Overview of Coherent Noise Functions and Procedural Generation (2017)
- Mike Rooney, Decoupling Brains and Brawn: The Benefits of Offloading AI Computation from the Game Engine vis an API (2016)
- Jennifer Baulier, Procedural Generation in Games (2016)
- Jordan Reese, A SUrvey of Memory Management and its Challenges (2015)
- Yichen Song, A Survey on Distributed Storage Systems (2015)
- Shuang Lu, 3D UI Design and Implementation for PRISM System (2014)
- Samuel Gass, The State of Big Data: A Survey of Methods for Working with Large Datasets (2014)
- Zach Cross, Fault Tolerance and COnsensus in Distributed Systems (2014)
- Ameem Shaik, A Survey of Supervised Learning Algorithms (2014)
- Will Hipschmann, Fault-Tolerant Broadcasts (2013)
- David Idol, Performance Differences between HTTP Long Polling and Websockets (2013)
- Lavar Askew, Evaluation of Optical Character Recognition Software for Retail Receipts (2012)
- Kaiwen Qi, High-Precision Focus Control Using HRPWM of Micro Controller (2012)
- Eric LaForce, Search Engines (2009)
- Stefan Estrada, Virtualization (2007)
- Julia Grace, Virtual Worlds (2007)