Bradley T. Vander Zanden

Affiliation: Professor and Associate Head
             Computer Science Department
             University of Tennessee

Office:      Claxton 354
Address:     Department of Computer Science 
             The University of Tennessee 
             203 Claxton Complex 
             1122 Volunteer Blvd. 
             Knoxville, TN  37996-3450 

Phone:       865-974-8175
Fax:         865-974-4404
Email:       bvz@cs.utk.edu
Vita

Teaching

During Spring semester 2008 I am teaching a scripting languages course.

My Research

My research focuses on program language design and implementation, especially as it applies to graphical user interfaces. The current project I am involved with focuses on the development of computer aided drawing tools that make it easier for instructors and students to draw and animate data structures, such as trees and lists, that are commonly presented in undergraduate computer science courses. Such tools can provide presentation aids for instructors in the classroom, allow for the creation of animated notes that might accompany a course, distance course, or textbook, and allow either students or instructors to provide an animated set of homework solutions. An initial paper from this project can be found here.

Some of the research projects I have previously been involved in include:

Spreadsheet Programming: Techniques and algorithms that allow spreadsheet-style constraints to specify graphical interfaces.
Visual Debugging of Spreadsheet-style Constraints: Visualization techniques that make it easier to find and correct errors in spreadsheet-style formulas.
Optimizing Storage Use in Graphical Toolkits: Adaptive, profile-based compilation techniques for reducing the amount of storage required by applications created using rapid prototyping, graphical toolkits.
Pam Interface Toolkit: Interactive, interpreted front-end to the Amulet graphical interface development environment that allows a programmer to rapidly prototype applications by creating graphical objects and callback procedures in Python. Pam is an outgrowth of the adaptive, profile-based compilation project and is used to help us prototype our optimization ideas.
Whiteboard Environment: Visual programming environment for creating programs that manipulate arrays, lists, graphs, and trees.
Lapidary: Interface design tool that allows the graphics and run-time behaviors that go inside an application window to be specified pictorially. Lapidary is part of the Garnet toolkit developed at Carnegie Mellon University.

Effective Presentations

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