MATHIAS GUENTER RICKEN 6100 Main Street MS-132 Houston, TX 77005-1892 EDUCATION mgricken@rice.edu (713) 835-2446 Ph.D. in Computer Science expected May 2010 Rice University, Houston, TX. GGPA 3.98/4.00 Research Area: Programming Languages. Advisor: Dr. Robert Cartwright M.S. in Computer Science October 2007 Rice University, Houston, TX Thesis: “A Framework for Testing Concurrent Programs” Republished 2009 by VDM Verlag (ISBN 978-3-639-15074-2) B.S. in Computer Science May 2004, magna cum laude Rice University, Houston, TX. GPA 3.89/4.00 Abitur 1999. Average 1.0/1.0. Ranked 4th in the state of Bremen Hermann Boese Gymnasium, Bremen, Germany Computer skills: C, C++, C#, Java, Promela/SPIN, Assembly, Scheme, OCaml PUBLICATIONS ConcJUnit: Unit Testing for Concurrent Programs Ricken, M., and Cartwright, R. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on the Principles and Practice of Programming in Java (PPPJ 2009) ACM International Conference Proceeding Series, ACM, 2009 “We present ConcJUnit, an extension of the popular unit testing framework JUnit that simplifies the task of writing tests for concurrent programs by handling uncaught exceptions and failed assertions in all threads, and by detecting child threads that were not forced to terminate before the main thread ends.” A Framework for Testing Concurrent Programs M.S. Thesis, October 2007 Republished 2009 by VDM Verlag (ISBN 978-3-639-15074-2) “To facilitate the development of concurrent programs, we are developing: (1) An extension of the JUnit framework that actively supports the developer by treating tests that could silently ignore failures in auxiliary threads as test errors; (2) A lightweight Java annotation language that can be used to specify and check the threading invariants of both existing and new code; (3) A testing framework that can record and analyze the schedules of unit tests, detect deadlocks, and run the tests using modified schedules, increasing the likelihood that concurrency problems are discovered.” Ricken – Page 1 of 5 PUBLICATIONS (continued) Nifty Assignment: Temperature Calculator – Programming for Change Nguyen, D., and Ricken, M. Proceedings of the Fifteenth OOPSLA Educators’ Symposium. ACM, 2006 “Programming for change is a continual process in which software is designed over many iterations to capture the problem’s essence and express. At the heart of this process is the effort to identify those elements that can vary (variants) and delineate them from those that do not – the invariants. A properly designed software system should strive to decouple the variants from the invariants in order to facilitate the reuse of the invariants and allow modifications to the variants with minimal perturbation to the existing code.” Design Patterns for Parsing Nguyen, D., Ricken, M., and Wong, S. Proceedings of the Thirty-Sixth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. ACM, 2005 “We provide a systematic transformation of an LL(1) grammar to an object model that consists of (1) an object structure representing the non-terminal symbols and their corresponding grammar production rules; and (2) a union of classes representing the terminal symbols (tokens). We present a variant form of the visitor pattern and apply it to the above union of token classes to model a predictive recursive descent parser on the given grammar. Parsing a non-terminal is represented by a visitor to the tokens. For non-terminals that have more than one production rule, the corresponding visitors are chained together according to the chain of responsibility pattern in order to be processed correctly by a valid token. The abstract factory pattern, where each concrete factory corresponds to a non-terminal symbol, is used to manufacture appropriate parsing visitors. Our object-oriented formulation for predictive recursive descent parsing eliminates the traditional construction of the predictive parsing table and yields a parser that is declarative and has minimal conditionals. It not only serves to teach standard techniques in parsing but also as a non-trivial exercise of object modeling for objectsfirst introductory courses.” Nifty Assignment: Marine Biology Simulation Cheng, E., Nguyen, D., Ricken, M., and Wong, S. Proceedings of the Thirteenth OOPSLA Educators’ Symposium. ACM, 2004 “The Marine Biology Simulation is designed as a final project in an objects-first CS2 course. It provides an entertaining setting that serves as compelling example of the powers of object-oriented design and programming.” Nifty Assignment: Abstract Factories and the Shape Calculator Cheng, E., Nguyen, D., Ricken, M., and Wong, S. Proceedings of the Thirteenth OOPSLA Educators’ Symposium. ACM, 2004 “The Shape Calculator is an assignment targeted at CS1 students in an objects-first curriculum. It can serve as a powerful yet entertaining example of the advantages of object-orientation.” Ricken – Page 2 of 5 PUBLICATIONS (continued) Design Patterns for Marine Biology Simulation Nguyen, D., Ricken, M., and Wong, S. Proceedings of the Thirty-Fifth SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. ACM, 2004 “We specify and implement a GUI application that simulates marine biological systems by making extensive use of object-oriented design patterns. The key design patterns are model-view-control, observer/observable, visitor, command, factory method and decorator. These design patterns help delineate the roles and responsibilities of the objects in the system, establish loose coupling between objects and arrange for the objects to communicate and cooperate with one another at the highest level of abstraction. The result is an application that exhibits minimal control flow, yet is powerful, robust, flexible and easy to maintain. Our work entails a non-trivial redesign of the current AP Computer Science Marine Biology Simulation case study and may serve as a case study for an introductory ‘object-first’ curriculum.” PRESENTATIONS Object-Oriented Design Festival Workshop Cheng, E., Nguyen, D., Ricken, M., and Wong, S. Thirty-Seventh SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education. ACM, 2006 “Object-oriented (OO) programming begins with analysis and design that produce a model describing the objects in the problem domain, their relationships, creation and interactions. The workshop covers fundamentals of OO analysis and design such as abstraction, separation of variants from invariants and decoupling of system components, via appropriate applications of composition, inheritance, polymorphism, and design patterns. The workshop will progress from a small design example illustrating the principles to a larger design problem to be solved by small teams of participants. Their solutions will be discussed in terms of design goals and compared against a solution provided by the presenters.” TEACHING Supervisor, Independent Study, Fall 2009 Rice University, Houston, TX Will provide advice and supervision to undergraduate computer science students for an independent studies concerned with (1) extending the DrJava development environment, and (2) multi-stage programming. Instructor, Production Programming, Spring 2009 Teaching Assistant, Production Programming, 2 semesters Rice University, Houston, TX Held all class lectures, designed the curriculum, chose projects for student groups, and assigned final grades. As teaching assistant, maintained website and solutions, helped students with Ant and Subversion, administered SourceForge accounts. Ricken – Page 3 of 5 TEACHING (continued) Instructor, Principles of Object-Oriented Programming II, Fall 2008 Rice University, Houston, TX Held all class lectures and laboratory tutorials, modified and designed the curriculum, supervised teaching assistants, graded exams and homework assignments, and assigned final grades. Teaching Assistant, Programming Languages, 3 semesters Rice University, Houston, TX Held several class lectures, consulted undergraduate and graduate students, and graded their exams and homework assignments. Assisted in conversion of lectures and assignments to OCaml. Maintained website and solutions, improved grading scripts. Advisors: Dr. Cartwright and Dr. Taha Teaching Assistant, Intermediate Programming, 9 semesters Rice University, Houston, TX Held several class lectures. Presented weekly tutorials on Unix, Java, design patterns, and tools; consulted college students and graded their exams and homework assignments. Maintained website and grade database. Advisors: Dr. Cox, Dr. Nguyen and Dr. Wong EXPERIENCE Research Assistant, Programming Languages Team, May 2004 – Rice University, Houston, TX Investigated and implemented testing tools for concurrent Java programs. Implemented a multi-stage programming extension of Java. Extended and maintained DrJava, an open-source cross-platform Java development environment, and made it suitable for use on large software projects. Designed and developed course material for computer science courses in objectoriented programming and concurrent programming. R & D Intern, Real-Time and Embedded Systems, May 2003 – August 2003 National Instruments, Austin, TX Modified the LabVIEW Embedded environment to generate multi-threaded C source code for different operating systems and hardware platforms. Supervisor: Andrew Dove Software Developer, Programming Languages Team, August 2002 – May 2003 Rice University, Houston, TX Developed the programming environment DrC#. Advisor: Dr. Cartwright Research Assistant, Computer Graphics, May 2002 – December 2002 Rice University, Houston, TX Independently researched and implemented texture and geometry synthesis algorithms in computer graphics; developed applications for a haptic input device. Advisor: Dr. Warren Ricken – Page 4 of 5 HONORS Dean’s Teaching Assistant (2008 – 2009) Doctoral Fellowship (2004 – 2010) Sid Richardson Fellow Rice Undergraduate Scholar Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society (Officer 2003 – 2004) Louis J. Walsh Merit Scholarship in Engineering 2001 – 2004 Rice University President’s Honor Roll Fall 2000, 2002, 2003; Spring 2002, 2003 ACTIVITIES Rice Ambassador, Corps of Special Aides to the Governor of Texas (2001 – 2004) Rice Computer Science Club (Vice President, 2003 – 2004) Rice Engineering Society Council (Secretary/Treasurer, 2003 – 2004) Rice Wine Society (Secretary/Treasurer, 2004 – 2006) Ricken – Page 5 of 5