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

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.