Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1996 22:13:07 GMT Server: Apache/1.1.1 Content-type: text/html Content-length: 7999 Last-modified: Wed, 02 Oct 1996 01:02:07 GMT Scott McCrickard's Home Page

D. Scott McCrickard

A picture of me


Background

Scott McCrickard is a PhD student in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a member of the Software Visualization Group in the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability Center at Tech. His advisor is John Stasko. The focus of Scott's research is on Internet information monitoring and display.

Scott received his undergraduate degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1992. His major was mathematical sciences with an emphasis in computer science. For his honors project he helped design and implement PGOMS, an interface for creating GOMS models.

Scott has worked at Oak Ridge National Laboratories (ORNL) with Tom Rowan as a member of the Visual and Information Sciences Group. While at ORNL, Scott built the first version of Irwin, an information resource monitoring and display tool, as part of the GO-NII Collaborative Tools project.

If you are interested, please examine Scott's resume.


Research

The focus of Scott's research is the area of information visualization. He has also done work in parallel and distributed computing. Below are listed some research areas of interest. If you wish to discuss any of these topics, please get in touch with Scott.

Internet Information Monitoring and Display is an important area considering the constantly growing and changing nature of the Internet. Resources such as Email, Usenet news, and the World Wide Web provide a continuous flow of information. While users can access this information using any of a number of readers and browsers, it is difficult to determine when and if a resource needs to be accessed. In addition, the large amounts of information that accumulate can be difficult to assimilate at a glance.

Visualizations are needed that will provide an overview of these resources with a detailed look at recent changes. As a result, information about the names and content of the messages and documents must be encoded in a small number of pixels through the use of color, intensity, size, and shape. These techniques are reflected in Irwin, a tool that monitors resources and provides various alerts when changes occur. A multi-layer view of the resources simultaneously provides a broad overview of all resources plus a narrow look at recent changes without losing context.

Recently, Scott was also part of a team that developed SQWID, a Java tool for visualizing the results from an Alta Vista search. SQWID provides a stress-based graph view of the search result sites that will hopefully help users identify interesting Web sites.

Program Visualization examines methods for visualizing information about a computer program. For years programmers have drawn pictures such as flowcharts or control-flow diagrams to help other programmers and users better understand their programs. Unfortunately, these pictures will not provide the exact desired perspective for every user. Clearly, methods are needed for automatically generating graphical representations of programs.

Existing code formatters, profilers, and analysis systems provide adequate static and post-mortem views of a program. However, debugging and understanding is aided if the program execution is shown in conjunction with the program code. By visually connecting the code and execution, the user can identify elements in the program that otherwise would not be visible. Scott is working on RunView, a runtime-based code analysis system that incorporates these and other ideas. He is also exploring how RunView can be used to decompose software architectures in a project with Gregory Abowd.

Software Visualization is the use of graphics, visualization, and animation as an aid in the understanding of algorithms, architectures, and software. Software visualizations can be constructed using toolkits like Tango and Polka. With these toolkits, a programmer creates objects and programs them with actions that occur over a number of frames.

With the advent of improved hardware, the number of frames displayed per second is sure to decrease. Thus, a natural evolution is to specify actions not in frames but in real time (seconds and milliseconds). This concept is central to Polka-RC (Polka Real-Clock), an evolution of the original Polka system with the added capability of time-based animation activations and durations. In addition, Polka-RC provides more natural ways to describe actions and their relationship to objects. Tech report GIT-GVU-95-21 discusses these ideas in detail.

Wait-Free Consensus reflects the ability of N distributed objects to ``agree'' in the presence of N-1 failures. A number of object parameters can impact on this ability to agree. See GIT-CC-94-04 for a discussion of these parameters and a look at the properties of some distributed objects.


Teaching

Scott has TAed a number of courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, including CS 6751 (Human-Computer Interaction), CS 1155 (Understanding and Constructing Proofs), CS 4753 (Human Factors in Software Development), and CS 6152 (Theory of Automata). His TA position has required that he create and grade homeworks and projects, assist students, maintain Web pages, and teach classes on occasion.


Personal

In his free time, Scott plays tennis for an ALTA team, with its best finishes city runner-up at B5 and division champs at A6. He also (less regularly) plays other sports, including softball, basketball, and fencing. He even took up golf recently in an effort to better understand his advisor. (It didn't work, and Scott sank still further into debt.) For the past two summers while in the Oak Ridge area, Scott got to ski, skurf, slalom, disk, and do other water activities since he had a lake in his backyard. He spends too much time on the Web, as evidenced by the size of his hotlist. Scott is tired of writing about himself in the third person.


Contact information

D. Scott McCrickard
College of Computing
801 Atlantic Drive
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
email: mccricks@cc.gatech.edu
phone: (404) 894-9390