I was born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the 50's. My background includes intense pursuit of a rag-tag fugitive fleet of interests. I began my education with four years at the North Carolina School of the Arts, where I was a major in bassoon and contrabassoon performance. I went from there to MIT where I graduated with a degree in Architecture, concentrating on Visual Design, Filmmaking, and Computer Music.
While at MIT, I worked on one of the first digital music synthesis computers, programmed a Disco lighting control computer, and in association with the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, my senior project was to write the control program the first viable microprocessor controlled laser scan machine for drawing laser images on buildings, etc. Its control program consisted of 4000 lines of machine language, coded in hexadecimal. Microcomputers of the time didn't even have assemblers.
After MIT I got a job as a systems programmer at Harvard Medical School, working for Dr. Claude Lechene in what is now called the `National Biotechnology Resource for the Analysis of Cells' (NEPRAC). My duties were to maintain and update 8000 lines of Fortran-66 running on a Hewlett-Packard 2100A computer with 32 kilobytes of main memory and a 5 megabyte hard drive. The Fortran programs were responsible for controlling and analyzing data from an electron probe, whose task was in turn to measure concentrations of various elements very precisely in red blood cells and other cells. While there I completely rewrote the control program and developed a high-level language parser (in Fortran!) to aid in specifying statistical analyses.
I came to Tufts in the spring of 1982 as a graduate student in Mathematics. After three years working my way through school teaching Math 5, 6, and 11, I became a research assistant to Prof. George Cybenko and completed a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1988, whereupon I immediately began work as a professor in the then Computer Science department. Two department moves, one merger, and one split later I ended up in the Computer Science department where I am today.
I have a reputation as a coding madman. I've been known to write 3000 lines of new C++ for a single Data Structures assignment, in three days. I estimate that I've written a total of over 100,000 lines of C++ and over 40,000 lines of Perl (the practical extraction and report language). Rest assured that in my classes, my students aren't the only people spending long times at the terminal. Add to this my historical records of 4000 lines of assembler, 4000 lines of Fortran-66, etc.
My personal interests other than Computer Science include science education, networking and information infrastructure, computers and personal privacy, ethics of technical professions, and general political issues of the Democratic party. I am a member of my city's Democratic Committee and a frequent delegate to the Massachusetts Democratic Convention.
I am interested in most every hobby known to humankind, and participate at any given time in as many hobbies as I can manage and afford! Recent interests include:
I and my spouse Elizabeth Cavicchi (married for 23 years in August 2002) are avid tandem bicyclists, and have for the past 18 years gone on a two week tour of New England every summer, taking along only our tandem and camping gear. In 2002 we took the Noreaster train from Boston to Portland and used that as a jumping-off point for touring Maine, New Hampshire to the Vermont border, and back home.
On the hot and lazy days of summer, my spouse Elizabeth and I can often be found kayaking local rivers, including the Ipswitch, Sudbury, and Nashua. We can also commonly be found kayaking NH lakes such as Wentworth and Winnipesakee.
We own and paddle every conceivable kind of kayak, including singles, tandems, sit-on-top, and foldable. My principal boat dealer is Joel Thomas of New England Small Craft in Rowley MA. Always the best deal in New England IMHO!
Very recently (Summer 2001) I decided to expand my kayaking horizons to canoeing. This is not "as serious" an interest as kayaking, and we only own a couple of boats, a single and a double.
What intrigues me the most about canoeing is the art of "Freestyle Canoeing" (as well as "Canadian Style Paddling") which is, in essence, a "dance with the canoe". I've been practicing the moves with excellent guidance from several canoeing books.
I am also an avid kite flyer, member of the "American Kite Flyers' Association" and the local club "Kites over New England". Of late, I've "specialized" in single line maneuverables such as fighters, as well as dual and quadline parafoils of all shapes and sizes. I've even practiced kite buggying a few times (and have the injuries to prove it).
In whatever time is left over from all this, I enjoy keeping up with current Science Fiction, as encompassed by books, TV, and movies. Star Trek Lives.