Bob Walker's Home Page
 

Robert A. Walker

Department Chair,
Computer Science Department,
Kent State University

SGB Rep, ACM Council
Past Chair, ACM SIG Governing Board & ACM/SIGDA
Contact Info
Abridged CV & Publications List

My Spring 2008 Masters / Doctoral Seminar class
Current Graduate Students:    Ken Atchinson, Ken Batcher, and Kevin Schaffer
Real Life: I enjoy taking photos and spending time with my wife, Dr. Ellen Walker.
Photos of recent trips / events:    Christmas    Munich (DATE'08)    Miami (IPDPS'08)
Robert A. Walker received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1988. He joined the faculty of in the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1989, and moved to the Computer Science Department at Kent State University in 1996, where is currently serving as Department Chair. He has a strong interest in teaching, and received the Lilly Endowment Teaching Fellowship in 1990 and the Rensselaer Distinguished Teaching Fellowship in 1992. He is a Distinguished Member of the ACM, a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of ACM/SIGDA, ACM/SIGARCH, ACM/SIGCSE, IEEE Computer Society, IEEE Circuits and Systems Society, and Sigma Xi.

His early research interests were in the field of high-level synthesis, in particular the scheduling and design space exploration problems. He wrote two dozen papers on these topics, and was the co-author of Algorithmic and Register-Transfer Level Synthesis: The System Architect's Workbench and A Survey of High-Level Synthesis Systems. Much of this work was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards MIP-9211323, MIP-9423953, and MIP-9796085.

His more recent work has focused on novel architectures for embedded systems. Building on the KSU CS Department's historical strength in parallel computing, he and many of his students have explored the use of associative SIMD computing techniques on FPGAs, demonstrating their suitablity for embedded systems running such applications as data mining, image processing, etc. With another student, he is exploring techniques for improving instruction cache performance in embedded systems.

Dr. Walker is very active in the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the first educational and scientific computing society, where he is currently serving as the Past Chair of the ACM SIG Governing Board and as SIG Governing Board Representative to the ACM Council. He has been active with the ACM Special Interest Group on Design Automation (ACM/SIGDA) since 1992, serving on the ACM/SIGDA Advisory Board, as Secretary / Treasurer and Newsletter Editor, as Chair from 2001-2005, and currently as Past Chair. He received the SIGDA Meritorious Service Award in 1997 and the SIGDA Distinguished Service Award in 2006.

Dr. Walker has served on approximately 50 conference steering, organizing, and program committees, including 7 years on the the ICCAD Executive Committee and 4 years on the DAC Executive Committee.