Contact Information

EMail: richards at cs dot umass dot edu
Phone: (413) 545-5229
Office: 320A
LinkedIn: tim richards @ linkedin
Office Hours: Tu 3pm-4:30pm

Summer Courses!

I will be teaching CS390WP Web Programming and CS187 Programming with Data Structures online this summer through UMass Continuing Ed. & Professional Ed.  Don’t wait – reserve your seat today!

Honors Program Director

I have been chosen as the new Honors Program Director (HPD) in the Department of Computer Science at UMass Amherst.  Technically I was the HPD last semester but it took me a semester to actually post this.  I look forward to working with and guiding the many wonderful students that are pursuing departmental honors in Computer Science!

Thinking in Parallel: Hardware to Software

My proposal submitted to the NSF/TCPP Curriculum Initiative on Parallel and Distributed Computing entitled Thinking in Parallel: Hardware to Software – Adopting the TCPP Core Curriculum in Computer Systems Principles was accepted. Out of 45 submissions only 13 proposals were accepted from US-based institutions. The goal of this work is to enhance the current CS230 Computer Systems Principles at UMass Amherst with additional material that emphasizes parallel and distributed computing. This course already covers several aspects of this curriculum, however, the focus is not necessarily on parallel and distributed systems per se. This Spring semester I have made changes to the content of this course to emphasize the pervasiveness of parallelism. We spend more time on superscalar architectures and instruction level parallelism, pipelines, data and control hazards, out-of-order execution, GPUs, Amdahl’s and Gustafson’s law, and multicore. I will also extend current material on parallel programming with additional languages and models.

Accepted UMass Position

I accepted a position in the Computer Science Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For the past two years I was a visiting assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Trinity College in Hartford, CT spending much of my time teaching many of their systems courses. At the same time, I maintained my research relationship with the architecture and language implementation laboratory during this time. An opportunity to teach some cool classes at UMass CS and be involved in some interesting research prompted my move.

I will be teaching two courses next semester: CMPSCI 230 Computer Systems Principles and CMPSCI 445 Information Systems. My official start date is September 1, but I am hoping to have an office before that time. I can be contacted by email until that time.

Student Research Program Award

My proposal, Accelerating JavaScript with Safety and Reliability, submitted to the Student Research Program at Trinity College was accepted.  This award will be used to fund a single undergraduate student from June 2011 – July 2011 to do research in compilers and code generation related to the JavaScript programming language in V8, SpiderMonkey, and WebKit.

Tablet Technology Proposal Accepted

My proposal involving the exploration of tablet technology for enhancing/facilitating course presentation of linked content and the development of a new Computer Science course was approved. The Information Technology in Education Committee (ITEC) at Trinity College provided the iPad for participating in this pilot study to explore educational applications of tablet technology. (Trinity College)