1998-99 ACADEMIC ACTIVITIES REPORT
(dates covered: 4/1/98 - 3/31/99)

I. NAME AND DEPARTMENT

Timothy J. Hickey, Computer Science

II. INSTRUCTIONAL ACTIVITIES

  1. List courses taught throughout the year, (title, number, enrollments, hours per week). For team-taught courses, please provide details of your specific responsibilities. Please discuss, if applicable, new courses created, new pedagogical materials and techniques, and supervision of teaching assistants. You may wish to attach course syllabi and relevant course materials.

    Courses taught

    SCHEDULE: AUTUMN 1998 MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY FRIDAY 9:00 CS2a CS2a CS2a 9:30 CS2a CS2a CS2a 10:00 OH 10:30 OH 11:00 TYP Math TYP Math TYP Math 11:30 TYP Math TYP Math TYP Math 12:00 12:30 1:00 1:30 2:00 OH 2:30 OH 3:00 OH 3:30 OH 4:00 4:30 SCHEDULE: SPRING 1999 MONDAY TUESDAY WEDNESDAY THURSDAY FRIDAY 9:00 CS11 CS11 CS11 9:30 CS11 CS11 CS11 10:00 OH 10:30 OH 11:00 TYP Math TYP Math TYP Math 11:30 TYP Math TYP Math TYP Math 12:00 12:30 1:00 OH 1:30 OH OH 2:00 OH 2:30 3:00 3:30 4:00 4:30

    New Pedagogical Materials

  2. Please describe your involvement in the direction of reading courses, theses, dissertations, and other student research projects (undergraduate and graduate).

III. PUBLICATIONS, RESEARCH, AND ARTISTIC CREATIONS

  1. List publications that have appeared from March, 1998 to the present. In the creative arts, please list and describe artistic creations, performances or exhibitions.

    1. A Unified Framework for Interval Constraints and Interval Arithmetic, by T.J. Hickey, M.H. van Emden, H. Wu, in Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming -- CP98 Michael Maher and Jean-Francois Puget (eds.), Springer-Verlag, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, v. 1520, pp. 250-264, 1998. (Proceedings of CP'98, Oct. 1998, Pisa, Italy.)

    2. LISP - a Language for Internet Scripting and Programming
      by Timothy J. Hickey, Peter Norvig, and Ken Anderson,
      published in the Proceedings of the conference LUGM'98
      The 40th Anniversary of Lisp: Lisp in the Mainstream,
      Berkeley, California, Nov 16-18, 1998.
      also available online

  2. List manuscript(s) submitted or accepted for publication, specifying journal or publisher and anticipated publication date. For artistic work, please provide information about forthcoming exhibitions or performances.

    1. Interval Constraint Plotting for Interactive Visual Exploration of Implicitly Defined Relations
      by Timothy J. Hickey, Zhe Qiu, and Maarten H. van Emden,
      accepted for publication (1/99) in the Special Issue of Reliable Computing on Reliable Geometric Computations

    2. Reflecting Java into Scheme
      by Ken Anderson and Timothy J. Hickey,
      accepted (after minor revisions) for publication in the proceedings of the conference Reflection 99
      (current version is available online )

  3. For ongoing work, please describe progress made since the last activities report (e.g. chapters completed). Be as specific as possible.

    1. Interval Arithmetic: from Principles to Implementation
      by Timothy J. Hickey, Qun Ju, and Maarten H. van Emden,
      in preparation for submission to JACM. (This paper has gone through several rounds of revision and expansion in the last year and is nearing completion.)

    2. Constraint Compilation
      by Timothy J. Hickey and David Wittenberg
      in preparation for submission to CP'99 by 16 April 1999.

    3. Efficient Implementation of Interval Arithmetic Narrowing
      by Timothy J. Hickey and Qun Ju
      in preparation for submission to CP'99 by 16 April 1999.

IV. SERVICE

Please detail your participation in Departmental and University activities:
  1. Departmental: Service on committees, administrative tasks, etc.
    1. Undergraduate Advising Head
    2. Developed CS11 Curriculum website with course descriptions and proposed offerings for next four years.
  2. University: Involvement in student activities, panel presentations, fund-raising, etc.
    1. Faculty Wien Oversight Committee
    2. Faculty Committee on Student Affairs (chair)
    3. Provost and Dean's Advisory Committee
    4. CS Department Liason to the Admissions Department
    5. Freshman advisor

V. GRANTS

    Please list grant applications, renewals, and awards from March, 1998 to the present. Include granting agency, title of project, period of grant, and total amount.

VI. AWARDS AND HONORS

  1. Please list awards and honors received since March, 1998.
      NONE.

VII. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

  1. List any inventions, patent applications, patents, copyright, software, maskworks, and any other intellectual property that is or may be patentable which you have conceived or reduced to practice, individually or jointly with others, during the course of your appointment, employment, or participation in Brandeis activities.

    1. JLIB (computer software) -- released under GNU General Public Licence
    2. JS (computer software) -- to be released under GNU General Public Licence

VIII. PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITY

  1. List and/or describe lectures given, involvement in professional societies, legislative testimony, etc. If none, indicate non-applicable.

    NONE

IX. WORK OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITY

  1. List courses taught at other institutions for which you received payment (March, 1998 to present). Please provide name of institution, term, course(s) taught, days and hours per week. If none, indicate non-applicable.

    NONE

  2. List any and all other employment, and/or consultant arrangements, that you have outside of Brandeis (March, 1998 to present). Please provide name of company, corporation or institution. Please append summaries of relevant parts of contracts, letters of appointment or consulting agreements. Do any of these arrangements provide present or future equity interest possibilities to you and do you receive any research support from any of these organizations? If none, indicate non-applicable.

    NONE

  3. List management or fiduciary activities in which you have a role as an officer, director, trustee, supervisor, or founder with respect to any organization or group. If none, indicate non-applicable.

    NONE

  4. List any inventions, patent applications, patents, copyright, software, maskworks, and any other intellectual property which you have conceived or reduced to practice, individually or jointly with others, which has been developed outside of Brandeis University and which has been developed during the course of your appointment, employment, or participation in Brandeis activities.

    NONE

X. GOALS -- OPTIONAL

  1. Please reflect upon what you hope to achieve in the coming year in terms of your ongoing work, new project you hope to begin, your teaching, professional development, and/or your role in the Brandeis community.

    1. Research Goals in Interval Arithmetic First, I plan on writing up and submitting for publication the results of several projects I have completed over the past few years. These include my foundational work on interval arithmetic (with van Emden and Ju), my work on parallel constraint solving and linear constraint solving (with Ju), work on partial evaluation and compilation of constraint systems, work on analytic constraint solving (including ODEs and sound integration), and finally work on fast, sound, and precise evaluation of interval arithmetic constraction operators. I also intend to begin a new systems building phase and implement a successor to my IAsolver interval arithmetic constraint solver. This new solver will incorporate the recent theoretical results mentioned above and will provide a testbed for exploring an entirely new approach to scientific computing based on programmable constraint contractions.

    2. Research Goals in Programming Languages This next year should be a very active and productive one for my project on declarative internet programming. My Ph.D. student Hao Xu and I are developing a small but powerful programming language which is designed to be both exceptionally practical (allowing unfettered access to all of the Java library packages) as well as semantically simple and hence highly amenable to powerful optimizing transformations (such as partial evaluation and other abstract interpretation based optimizations). We plan to come out with our first release of the fully featured system sometime this Spring and we should be able to start experimenting with optimizability this summer.

    3. Teaching -- Over the past two years I have refashioned the Intro. to Computers course so that the students have a 9 lecture session on programming in which they learn to write applets using Scheme. This year they will have access to the most powerful Scheme interpreter applet yet and I am considering writing a textbook for an "Introduction to Computers" course which would be based on exposing students to theoretical and practical aspects of computer science through a short introduction to Scheme and its use in writing applets which can run on the students' web pages.

    4. Role in the Brandeis community -- I plan on continuing to play an active role in the community through service on a number of committees. My interests are primarily in admissions and student affairs and so that is where I intend to focus my attention.

    5. Papers, Books, and Proposals in the planning stages

      1. Constraint Parallel Interval Arithmetic
        by Tim Hickey and Qun Ju
        research in progress to be submitted by 4 May 99 ICLP'99 (or here ) in Las Cruces, NM 11/29-12/4

      2. High Level Optimization of a Functional Language for Systems Programming
        by Tim Hickey and Hao Xu
        a paper on our experience with the JS language, in the planning stages.

      3. A text for the "Introduction to Computers" course.
        by Tim Hickey
        a book in preparation. The title is not yet determined.

      4. Interval Arithmetic Constraint Solving
        by Tim Hickey and Qun Ju
        a book in the planning stages,


        Possible future grant proposal submissions:

      5. Internet Programming
        (3 years) due 6/7/99 planned submission on 6/7/99 to NSF/EHR/DUE/CCLI
        Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement

    Please feel free to provide any other information relevant to your 1998-99 activities and contributions to the University.

    NONE

This file is available on line at http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~tim/Activity/98-99.html