Michael Van Hilst Email & Phone Number

Madison, Wisconsin And Prescott, Arizona

When I was 17, I took a career assessment that matched my answers to a series of questions to people in in a variety of careers. My closest match was a retired 65 year old male. Although a little late, I have now achieved my ideal career.

Prescott Az

Teach courses in Software, Computer, and General Engineering.This is an amazing place. Everyone here is focused on helping each other do the best job they can possibly do, and I mean everyone - faculty, staff, administrators, and even students. I love coming to work every day.

College Of Engineering And Computing

Farquhar College Of Arts And Sciences

Oversaw undergraduate degree programs in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Computer Information Systems, Software Engineering, and Information Technology. Fostered good team collaboration among faculty in all 5 programs - thank guys!

Farquhar College Of Arts And Sciences

My job is to make students successful. Took the introductory programming course failure rate from 40% down to 10% by moving away from lectures to a lot more practice and tutoring.

Also taught at FAU and Keiser, while taking care of my mother in her final years. I used the time staying with my mother to become much more deeply immersed in the philosophy behind theories of process improvement. You can see some of that in my patterns for PLoP 2010 available at http://hillside.net/plop/2010/papers/ACMVersions/papers/hilst.pdf.

Taught graduate and undergraduate courses. Also taught the multidisciplinary engineering senior capstone courses every year, with teams that combined students from mechanical, computer, and electrical engineering. Consulted with Motorola on software engineering metrics and process improvement as part of a project called "One Pass to Production" lead by Ravi Shankar from FAU and Jaime Borras, their CTO. Using fine grained event data I was able to reconstruct daily activities and identify numerous sources of inefficiency and delay, (see publications section)My position "downsized" when the Davie campus engineering program closed under state budget cuts.

Palo Alto, California

HP Labs - Software Technology Lab (STL) with Mary Loomis and Martin Griss. Worked on workflow and medical record system with Mayo Clinic, application management, business intelligence, speech and agent systems. Wrote technology tracking white papers distributed within HP. Early research on fine-grained distributed architecture with "tasklets". Ported the JADE software agent platform to WindowsCE devices. One patent on the speech work. (See my "Christmas Decorations" article under publications).

Hawthorne, New York

Contractor to IBM Research. Ported the OS2 GUI library to AIX/X11 (in 2 weeks using pair programming with Joe Kesselman, their OS2 guy!), for Expo'92. Member of the "dirty dozen" team that built the IBM Data Visualization Explorer product. Did most of the front end user interface features. You can see a lot of my handiwork in the second picture at the link below. (IBM has since released the software to opensource as OpenDX.) Left to start PhD.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Mostly work for NASA. Wrote instrument control, data collection, data analysis and image processing software. Diagnosed and fixed all manner of mechanical and electronic hardware - printers, tape drives, mini-computers, memory boards, image processors (we did that in those days). That circuit design course I took at MIT proved to be very useful.As chief architect, I built test systems for the Chandra space telescope mirrors. The system moved instruments behind the mirror with a series of stepping motors, with high precision measuring engines for calibration - all within a huge vacuum chamber with no windows at NASA MSFC. The software then collected, analyzed, and displayed the data in real time. (John Roll and Steve Murray picked up the work when I left for IBM.) While working on Chandra, I learned Project Management and PERT from veterans of the Apollo project at NASA. (You can read about the final mirror tests here: http://cxc.harvard.edu/newsletters/news_03/node8.html).Wrote the SAOimage display program (based on X10 work by Bill Wyatt), and took it open source in GNU (at Richard Stallman's suggestion). Digital Equipment gave a live demo of my software at SIGGRAPH '89. Many features in the SAOimage GUI served as models for the X11 toolkit. SAOimage became a standard tool for astronomers world-wide for almost a decade. It was used for "quick look" on the Hubble Space Telescope (see video below). Eric Mandel has since written 2 replacements (DS9 and JS9).

Université Pierre Et Marie Curie, Paris, France

Wrote signal processing and calibration software for a network of seismometers, while living in Paris. On leave from Harvard. Phenomenal experience, and the cultural differences taught me a lot about myself, as well.

Grinnell, Iowa

Oversaw low income housing rehab programs under HUD grants. Successfully applied for and received follow on grant. Supervised contractors fixing 21 houses. Worked on 5 year plans for city and county. (My brief career in public service as a city planner before politics changed and funding ended.) My consensus building style paid off in working with the city council and a citizens' oversight board.Took control of a troubled federal grant program in need of direction and made it win-win for the city. I repair roofs, foundations, heating, and wiring and add insulation and poor families or older couples stay safe in their homes for years to come without needing subsidies (our other housing program). The city got back its investment when the house was sold (or rolled it over for another poor family). At the end, I got permission from HUD to replace another half dozen furnaces in dangerous condition with the money that was left.

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Installed, maintained, and repaired computer hardware under Greg Madejski (who I replaced in 1981, when he left to do his PhD). Also designed and built custom high-speed interface boards on the side for Control Data and NASA to make extra cash.

Peabody, Massachusetts

Inspected, trouble shot, and repaired voltage reference and other instrument hardware. The circuit design class and problem solving skills from MIT lead to much higher paying contract jobs to pay for my education. Did the same thing the previous summer for rail car bar code scanners at the Pullman Railroad Company. (I trained several Wellesley students to do the same thing in following summers.)

Arlington, Massachusetts

Coordinator for citizens committee meetings. Writer and Photographer for the community news letter. We took a contentious situation with little trust and built public support for new initiatives. I developed my consensus building style of leadership under the guidance and supervision of Lawrence Susskind and I learned how to write from the editor of the newsletter who was a retired Chicago Tribune editor - who patiently turned my mush into readable articles.There was a March 1975 report on this activity, called: "Enhancing Public ServiceProductivity: New Approaches to Citizen Involvement in the Formation of Community Development Policy and the Evaluation of Public Services." If anyone has a copy, I would love to get my hands on this.

Greater Minneapolis-St. Paul Area

Summer job making gears for snow mobile transmissions at Apex Gear - which was then being bought by Link-Belt. Operated gear hob and broach, with my hands in oil all day long.

Hamburg Area, Germany

Updated the official charts and maps of underground cables for the electric power utility in Hamburg Germany (HEW). My first job.

Phd, Computer Science, Software Engineering

Activities and Societies: Washington Software Association, Sailing Club Teaching assistant in Software Engineering for David Notkin.

Ms, Computer Science

Mcp, Urban Studies And Planning

Activities and Societies: Participated in the Technology and Society Program's series of seminars. Master's work focused on environmental.

Bs, Urban Studies And Planning

Environmental Design might seem a strange path to Software Engineering, but it introduced me to GIS, Project Management, Participatory.

Bs, Architecture

Activities and Societies: Intramural ice hockey and water polo, Theta Xi, Independent Studies Group

Education record

Activities and Societies: President of the soccer club, Co-Editor of the literary magazine, debate and chess teams