Retired Professor, Computer Engineering and Computer Science
Ph.D., Computer Science, Colorado State University, 1988
Phone: 719 479 2297
Email: sroliver@csc.calpoly.edu or
sroliver@topgraphx.com
Surface
Mail:
938 Elk Lane
Guffey, CO 80820
Dr. Oliver has retired from Cal Poly and moved back to Colorado, where
he is in the process of building an Earthship and developing ways to be
independent of public utilities. Whenever possible, of course, he takes
advantage of the many opportunities for hiking, climbing, and cross country
skiing in the splendor of the Colorado Rockies. Dr. Oliver, and Mrs. Oliver are
also volunteer Fire Fighters. They have beeb trained as First Responders, Fire
Fighter I, and Wildland Fire Fighters. They are both Lieutenants in the
Guffey Fire Department.
Check out the latest developments with
caress Corporation and
The Oliver
Academy.
In particular, as of 1 Jan. 2001
Dr Oliver, via his company caress
Corporation, is proud to be affiliated with
Top Graph'X, a
French company that specializes in the development of High Quality Software
Components. This affiliation is an ideal match for Dr. Oliver's dedication to
fighting the war against sucky software!
With Top Graph'X, Dr. Oliver is looking for interesting opportunities to partner with software development groups doing or interested in doing Object Oriented Distributed Software Systems Development, specifically using CORBA.
See Dr. Oliver's Resume for details of his career in the software industry, including a mix of industrial and academic expereince.
Test guffey fire
training.
Professor Oliver's research interests while at Cal Poly were in Computer Communication Networks and Concurrent and Real Time Software Engineering (CRTS), including Embedded Systems. He also did extensive research in Object Oriented Design and Implementation (especially for CRTS), and Introductory Computer Science taught from a 'Programming in the Large' perspective. His most recent grant was in this latter area, with Dr. John Dalbey. It was awarded by the Defense Information Systems Agency. A summary of the product of that grant is available on the web. The complete package, in zip format, may be retrieved from ftp://statler.calpoly.edu/pub/disa/cs1_labs/cs1_labs.zip.
At the time he retired in 1997, Dr. Oliver had accumulated 29 years of experience in the Computing Profession. He has had considerable industrial experience in Communication Systems Engineering, Concurrent and Real Time Systems Engineering (including Embedded Systems), Software Engineering, and complex Systems Analysis, Performance Monitoring, and Simulation. During nine years on the faculty at Cal Poly he developed an aggressive undergraduate curriculum in Computer Communication Networks, specialized in student-driven research projects, and worked hard to bring about much-needed academic reform.
A major product of nine years of student-driven research projects was the development of a suite of programs that test and/or demonstrate many features of the Ada programming language, including some of the new features of Ada95. Most compilers come with test programs, but one advantage of Oliver's suite is that it contains many examples that exercise generics and tasks. These more 'advanced' features are often not exercised much by other test suites. There are also some simple but illustrative examples of polymorphism in Ada95. The suite is available at ftp://ftp.csc.calpoly.edu/pub/faculty/sroliver/Ada95_tests.
Dr. Oliver has returned to Colorado to regain a very high quality of life, and do some of those things for which there has never been enough time.
Oliver is a veteran mountaineer. By the end of the 1998 season he had climbed 89 of the highest 100 peaks in Colorado (the Centennials), plus several other mountains in Colorado, California, and Arizona. Naturally, one of the prime objectives of living in Colorado is to continue climbing mountains as much as possible. Of course, there are many other mountains in the world, just waiting to be experienced.
During the winter attention turns to cross country skiing and developing other Winter Mountaineering skills.
Although he often comes across as being a 'peak bagger', Oliver's primary objective in all this is simply to enjoy the beauty of the mountains and maintain good physical condition, as well emotional fitness and peace of mind.
If you are ever in Colorado, and want to do some serious hiking, be sure to look him up!
In younger days Oliver was an avid Amateur Astronomer. Long work hours and skies nearly obliterated by nearby city lights have kept this hobby on hold much too long. The wonderfully clear skies in the more remote areas of Colorado are a special complement to the mountainous grandeur.
Whereas the time has come to cut back to working half time, or less, Dr. Oliver cannot imagine not continuing to be involved in some aspect of computing technology - probably well beyond 'normal' retirement age, should he be fortunate to live that long. He will continue to take on interesting projects, primarily on a consulting basis. He has already established the caress Corporation, incorporated in Colorado, as a home for this work.
Whether doing funded projects, or just fun 'personal' projects, Dr. Oliver will continue to be the perennial student. Many students and colleagues have expressed some concern that he will no longer be serving students as a teacher. At Cal Poly students learn by doing. This was a major attraction for Dr. Oliver to join the faculty there in the first place. During this next phase of life, the emphasis will be to teach by doing. The caress Corporation sponsors The Oliver Academy, a not-for-profit Corporation to educate the public regarding the need for, and ways to achieve, improved Software quality, and to conduct scientific research and development to help bring about improved Software quality, including means of providing higher education for Software Engineers in a context radically different from the traditional University system.
(No, not another version of the Dining Philosophers. See the Ada95 Test Suite for that.)
With an undergraduate major, and considerable graduate work, in
Philosophy, Dr. Oliver has maintained an active interest in the Philosophy of
Science, specifically the Philosophy of Computer Science, and the Social and
Ethical Issues in Computing Technology. Now, perhaps, time will permit him to
actually do something besides maintain interest. Writing and publishing
software sucks!, a book documenting the utterly deplorable
quality of virtually all contemporary software, and explaining how the status
quo has come to be, will be a priority.
Dr. Oliver was an active volunteer in ACM (the Association for Computing
Machinery) for well over 10 years. At the end of his term as Vice President, in
1992, he took a much-needed sabbatical from ACM volunteer work. He just
completed a four year term as Vice Chair for Liaison of SIGAda, the Special
Interest Group for the Ada programming language. In the late '80s and early
'90s Dr. Oliver was active in the ACM Distinguished Lectureship program,
delivering more than 50 lectures, mostly to Student Chapters of the ACM. When
he bcame Vice President the "volunteer workload" increased to a level that Dr.
Oliver chose to drop out of the Lectureship program. As of Spring 2002,
however, he is once again on the circuit.
Several people have asked what will become of certain key courses taught by Dr. Oliver over the past few years.
Nine years of effort went into developing a new curriculum and the laboratory component for Computer Communication Networks I, formerly CSc/CPE404. All lecture notes, as well as the lab and homework assignments used during the Winter 1997 quarter, are still available via the web. Other faculty members will continue to teach this course. The web documents will remain available for some time yet, so they may use the material, as they see fit. Naturally, each individual instructor will develop her or his own course and style. During the '96-'97 academic year a series of 15 video tapes were recorded, documenting (nearly completely) the lecture material, as presented in class. These are not 'Hollywood-class' productions. However, if viewed with hard copy of the corresponding lecture notes in hand, they may serve to substantially improve understanding of the material. The tapes will be available in the CSc Department office.
Computer Communication Networks II, formerly CSc/CPE405, was designed, developed, and has only been taught by Dr. Oliver. It is a project course in which students are expected to do an industrial-strength development effort. It is run more like a corporation than a college classroom, and has been very successful from the students' perspective. They spend a whole quarter struggling to use real-world engineering methods, learning how very inadequate has been their preparation (their previous educational experiences) to do serious engineering work. The course is now one option for satisfying a requirement for the CSc degree, so there will be considerable pressure for it to continue to be taught. However, the nature of the course will likely change quite a bit, since few faculty have had sufficient industrial background to follow Oliver's model.
Concurrent and Real Time Software Engineering, formerly CSc401,
was also designed, developed, and only taught by Dr. Oliver. The course may be
offered by others in the Computer Science or Computer Engineering Programs.
However, CSc401 is only an elective, and pressures to teach other required
courses may limit the frequency with which it can be offered.
Last Updated: August 1998. CopyRight © 1998 by S. Ron Oliver. All rights reserved. Permission to use or disseminate any information you find via this home page is explicitly granted ONLY for not-for-profit educational and research uses. If you use any of this information to develop new curricular material or for interesting research, please give proper credit and provide details of your results to S. Ron Oliver, via the above email and/or surface mail addresses. If you have a strong desire to incorporate some of this information in a for-profit venture, please contact Dr. Oliver for permission and proper release.