Curriculum Vitae
Last Updated: January 2024;
Kenneth Mark Anderson
Department of Computer Science
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ken.anderson@colorado.edu
/faculty/anderson-ken/
Education
- Ph.D., Information & Computer Science(1997)
University of California, Irvine
Advisor: Professor Richard N. Taylor - M.S., Information & Computer Science(1992)
University of California, Irvine - B.S., Information & Computer Science(1990)
University of California, Irvine
Research Interests
Software Engineering, Software Architecture, Crisis Informatics, Hypermedia, Web Engineering, Web Application Infrastructure, Software Process, Scientific Workflow & Data Management
Administrative Duties & Strategic Activities
- Department Chair (Summer 2019—Present):As Chair, Prof. Anderson provides vision and leadership for the Department of Computer Science as well as coordination and support for department operations. He leads the Department's work on Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (JEDI) via multiple activities including the development of the department's diversity and inclusion statement, the creation of an NSF BPC (Broadening Participation in Computing) plan for the department, creating an Associate Chair for Inclusive Excellence position, supporting the creation of the department’s DEI committee, and reviewing, updating, and influencing department practices and culture. He created training for instructors and TAs for improving classroom culture. He oversaw the integration of the Technology, Cybersecurity, and Policy program into the department in Summer and Fall 2020 and led the process for allowing the department to offer a new Professional Masters program in Network Engineering and ten new Bachelor’s Accelerated Master’s programs for Fall 2021. He successfully recruited 16 new faculty members to the department in Spring 2022 including six new tenure-track faculty members and ten new teaching professors and/or scholars in residence. Eleven of these faculty joined in Fall 2023 and the remaining five are joining the department in the next few years. In 2023, he led the effort to get the department’s BS in CS degree reaccredited by ABET; this effort was successful and will result in the degree being accredited until Fall 2030. In AY 2022-2023 and AY 2023-2024, he led and assisted with processes that led to the creation of new criteria for tenure-track reappointment, promotion, and tenure cases; a new rubric for evaluating teaching; a new ICR return policy for the department; and a new strategic plan for the department.
- Member of CU’s Faculty Salary Procedures Working Group (Spring 2022-Fall 2023): Provided feedback on and participated in discussions related to annual merit reviews and the annual merit raise process. Contributed to the draft of the committee's report/recommendations and presented the results of the committees work to the CEAS Admin Council in Fall 2023.
- Member of CU's Google Storage Steering Committee (Spring 2022—Fall 2023): Participated in the campus response to the significant change imposed by Google by ending its support for unlimited free storage for higher education. As a member of the steering committee, I worked to understand use cases, set policy, and provide guidance to the technical project team assembled to help CU Boulder through this transition.
- Member of CEAS Online Executive Committee (Fall 2021—Fall 2023): Participated in the college's executive committee for online education, helping to shape the direction and approach that CEAS is taking in expanding its online degreeprograms.
- Work Stream Lead for the Retention Work Stream of CU’s Financial Futures Strategic Initiative (December 2018—Summer 2022):As the work stream lead for the retention work stream of CU Boulder’s Financial Futures Strategic Initiative, Prof. Anderson provided vision, leadership, and oversight of the activities of the work stream including the development of project ideas, the evaluation of projects, and the recommendation of projects for funding. Prof. Anderson initially managed the work stream in collaboration with the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs to support a broad array of projects with the goal of boosting retention and student success and now works with staff in Financial Futures, Student Affairs, and the Office of Undergraduate Education to do the same. Funded projects included expanded funding for CU’s Writing Center; increased support for academic advising, including new front-line advising positions as well as administrative support for advising; increased support for health and wellness staff across the campus including embedded councilors for schools and colleges; new funds for bringing predictive analytics software to CU Boulder and integrating it into CU’s standard work practice; as well as a few additional, smaller and more focused student success projects across campus.
- Member of CEAS Dean’s Search Committee (Fall 2019—Spring 2021): Participated on the search committee for a new Dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science.
- Member of CU Boulder’s Graduate School’s Strategic Planning Committee (Fall 2019—Fall 2021): Contributed to the development of a new strategic vision and strategic plan for CU’s Graduate School.
- Associate Dean for Education (January 2016—Fall 2019):As the Associate Dean for Education, Prof. Anderson provides vision and leadership for placing CU Boulder’s College of Engineering & Applied Science at the forefront of engineering education, including curriculum modernization, undergraduate student programs, enhanced-student success initiatives, and program assessment. During his tenure as Associate Dean, he and his team were responsible for the creation of the CEAS internship for credit program, the engineering math pilot, new options for H&SS courses for CEAS students, new pathways for transfer students, improvements to the CEAS pre-engineering program, a new model for undergraduate advising in the college, the reaccreditation of all CEAS accredited degree programs and initial accreditation for engineering plus, a rebooted orientation experience—known as Engineering Launch—that is showing success in student retention and belonging, a new scholarship program, a campus-wide grade replacement policy, more flexible sessions for classes within a term, new academic standing policies, a new Change Your Major policy, and an early alert process that started in CEAS and has since spread to include many other units on campus. He led the most recent ABET accreditation process (along with the college’s Director of Analytics, Assessment and Accreditation) for the entire college that led up to the Fall 2017 ABET site visit and culminated in all ABET-accredited programs receiving a “next general review” result (the best possible result) and one new program receiving full accreditation for the first time. This was the first time that in the college’s history that such a result was achieved and all accredited programs now have accreditation until Summer 2024. Prof. Andersonalso managed the the academic review process related to the creation of three Biomedical Engineering degrees (BS, MS, and PhD) ensuring that these programs passed review at college, campus, and system levels and presented these degrees to the Regent's University Affairs committee for approval before they were finally approved by the Regents in the Summer of 2019.
- Leader of the Colorado Affiliate of the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Award (Fall 2010—Spring 2018):Organized the Colorado Affiliate of the NCWIT Aspirations in Computing Award and hostedthe awards ceremony for this award at CU Boulder each Spring. This award recognizes the computing achievements of female high school students across Colorado and encourages these students to major in computing in college and pursue computing as a career. Hosted this award nine times and recognized over 450 young women (~275 winners; ~127 runners up) in that time. Worked with local tech companies to underwrite the costs of the awards event (and purchase prizes for the winners) bringing in nearly 95K in support of this important program since Fall 2010.
- Associate Chair (January 2010—June 2013):Directly supervised department staff. Assisted Chair with strategic activities and management. Member of Executive Committee. Director, Undergraduate Studies.
- Computer Science B.A. Degree Proposal, Review, and Implementation (Summer 2010—June 2013):Successfully led an effort to grow the Department’s undergraduate program by creating a new B.A. degree in Computer Science for Fall 2013. The proposal received strong positive support from campus administration and was formally approved by the College of Engineering and Applied Science in Fall 2010; it was approved by the College of Arts and Sciences in May 2012 and was approved by the Regents of the University of Colorado in November 2012. Participated in the work to implement the degree program during the Spring 2013 semester. This degree program is incredibly popular. Its first class in Fall 2013 opened with ~240 students; this number grew to ~450 students in Fall 2014 and ~600 students in Fall 2015 and ultimately hit its high point with 1100 students in Fall 2019.
- Director of Undergraduate Studies (Fall 2008—Spring 2013):Chair of Undergraduate Committee.
- Co-Chair of ABET Accreditation Effort (Fall 2008—Fall 2009):Led a comprehensive curriculum review of the undergraduate program, made adjustments to undergraduate policy, and contributed to the creation of the Department's ABET self-study report submitted in May 2009. Led process to create display materials (course profiles, course dossiers, coverage of program outcomes and objectives, assessment workflows, etc.) for the ABET site visit in September 2009.The Department received full accreditation in August 2010, backdated to October 2008, valid until September 2016.
- Lead NCWIT (National Center for Women & IT) Pacesetters effort at CU Boulder (Fall 2009—Fall 2012):Founded CU Boulder's NCWIT Pacesetters team in order to join the first cohort of NCWIT Pacesetters in Fall 2009. Pacesetters is an effort to accelerate organizational change that leads to increased recruiting and retention of women in information technology programs such as computer science and ATLAS's Technology Arts & Media certificate. Pacesetter activities include increasing the integration of the computer science and ATLAS curricula, participating in the redesign of CS intro courses, and the creation of the B.A. in CS degree proposal.At the time, these efforts doubled the number of women enrolled in our BS degree program from 8% of majors in 2007 to 16% of majors in 2011.
- Chair of CS Diversity Task Force (Fall 2006—Fall 2008):Founding Chair of the Department's Diversity Task Force. Led creation of high-quality recruiting materials for the B.S. degree program. Promoted the adoption of NCWIT best practices in undergraduate courses.
Keynotes
- “Towards Next-Generation Software Infrastructure for Crisis Informatics Research” Invited Keynote for the 3rd International Workshop on Social Web for Disaster Management, part of the 2015 World Wide Web Conference. May 2015
Publications
Authors marked with an asterisk below were PhD student collaborators at the time of publication.
Research Systems
- EPIC Cloud: Data Collection and Analysis Infrastructure on Google Cloud, version 1.0
Contributing Designer (with Gerard Casas Saez, T. Jennings Anderson, and Ryan Loi). This system is the current incarnation of Project EPIC’s data collection and analysis infrastructure migrated to Google Cloud. It currently stores and processes more than 300M tweets/month on projects related to natural disasters, COVID-19, and the 2020 Presidential Election. - FixrDB: Data Processing Pipeline for Android-Related GitHub Repositories, version 1.0-2.0
Principal Designer and Developer; This system is used to process tens of thousands of GitHub repositories containing millions of files across hundreds of thousands of commits and extracting features that enable bug detection and relevant code search. Implemented first as a set of programs on top of Apache Spark; Reimplemented for incremental processing in Elixir. Fall 2015—Present. - epic-osm: Framework for OpenStreetMap Analysis, version 1.0
Contributing Designer (with Ph.D. students T. Jennings Anderson, Robert Soden, and Marina Kogan). This framework is in active use by the OpenStreetMap Community; It has been released on GitHub under an open source license: <>. Fall 2014—Present. - EPIC Analyze: Twitter Data Analytics Environment, version 1.0
Contributing Designer (with Ph.D. students Ahmet Arif Aydin, Mario Barrenechea, Adam Cardenas, Mazin Hakeem, and Sahar Jambi). This analysis environment for large Twitter data sets is in active use internally at Project EPIC. Fall 2013—Present. - Facebook Data Collection System, version 1.0
Principal Designer and Developer. This system is used internally by Project EPIC to collect the posts of public Facebook pages/groups. Fall 2013—Present. - EPIC Collect: Twitter Data Collection System, versions 1.0–2.0
Contributing Designer (with Ph.D. student Aaron Schram). This system is used internally by Project EPIC to collect billions of tweets for crisis informatics research. Spring 2010—Present. - , versions 1.0–3.0
Principal designer and developer. Design environment for geoscientists who perform research on cosmogenic nuclide dating. Released as open source at: <>. ACE was used by that research community for many years after research project ended. Spring 2003—Summer 2008. - Metis Workflow Management System (for Digital Libraries), version 1.0
Principal designer and developer. Prototype software developed for NSF; used internally for research and experimentation. Fall 2003-Summer 2005. - InfiniTe: Information Integration Environment, version 1.0
Principal designer. Prototype software used internally for research and experimentation; Spring 2002-Summer 2005. - Themis Structural Computing Environment, version 1.0
Principal designer. Prototype software used internally for research and experimentation; Spring 2002-Summer 2005. - Chimera Open Hypermedia System, versions 1.0–4.0
Principal designer and developer. Prototype software developed for DARPA and NSF; used internally for research and experimentation; deployed briefly at Northrop Grumman as part of the evaluation work of my PhD dissertation. Summer 1993—Summer 2005. - C2 Architectural Style
Participated in design of the C2 architectural style; work performed as graduate student at UCI.
Helped implement Ada components in initial C2 demo. 1990-1993. - Chiron-1 User Interface Development System
Participated in design of client architecture; work performed as undergraduate and graduate student at UCI.
Implemented several Chiron-1 development tools and artists. 1989-1993.
Panels
Exploiting “Big Data” in Collaboration Initiatives Panel at the 2012 International Conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS 12). May 23, 2012.
Dissertation
“Pervasive Hypermedia”June, 1997
Dr. Pedro Szekely, USC/ISI
Dr. Jonathan Grudin, UCI
Dr. Richard N. Taylor (Chair), UCI
Abstract
The heterogeneity of modern computing environments contributes to the information overload experienced by users. Relationships within and between applications, documents, and processes are often implicit and must be managed and tracked by the user. Hypermedia has been put forward as one approach to organizing these relationships, making them explicit so they can be managed. One approach to providing environment-wide hypermedia services is through the use of open hypermedia systems (OHSs). OHSs are open with respect to the set of systems and information over which hypermedia services can be provided. This research area contrasts with the original approach to hypermedia services which involved developing monolithic systems with a closed set of supported data types (e.g. HyperCard). Given the existence of OHSs, another area of research is developing integration techniques such that applications which existed before the introduction of an OHS can take advantage of the hypermedia services provided by the OHS. This dissertation provides contributions in both of these research fields.
In particular, this work demonstrates techniques which enable OHSs to address the heterogeneity of their computing environments, to leverage the strengths of the World Wide Web (while providing the Web with improved hypermedia services), and to integrate large classes of applications at once. Handling heterogeneity is addressed via a set of flexible abstract hypermedia concepts, application program interfaces in multiple programming languages, support for multiple operating systems, and a low entry barrier to use provided by an architecture designed to reduce the responsibilities of client applications. Integration with the Web is enabled via a scalable architecture for OHSs which is compatible with the Web's architecture and takes advantage of the strengths of the Web's protocols and the familiarity of Web interaction styles. The integration of multiple applications occurs via a technique for making user-interface toolkits (and hence their constructed applications) clients of an OHS.
The dissertation is validated by examining the characteristics of the clients integrated with the exploratory systems developed during the course of this research. The dissertation concludes by positioning this work within the context of large-scale information environments.
Professional Associations
- Association of Computing Machinery
- ACM Special Interest Group on Software (SIGSOFT)
- ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI)
- ACM Special Interest Group on Hypertext/Hypermedia (SIGWEB)
Honors and Awards
- 2018 Equity and Excellence Faculty Award from CU Boulder’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement
- 2016-2017 Max S. Peters Faculty Service Award for the College of Engineering and Applied Science
- Member of CU’s College of Engineering Faculty Leadership Advancement Group (FLAG); Spring 2012–Fall 2014
- Fellow of the Excellence in Leadership Program hosted by CU's University Leadership Development Institute for the 2011-2012 academic year
- Recipient of the Engelbart Best Paper Award at ACM Hypertext 2006