Scott A . Smolka Teaching Statement

Throughout my teaching career I have taught courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The undergraduate courses I have primarily offered are Database Systems, Operating Systems, and Undergraduate Concurrency. I am also the co-developer, along with Michael Kifer, of the OSP Operating System Project courseware for undergraduate Operating Systems. OSP has been used as the operating systems courseware in over 100 institutions. At the graduate level, I have mainly taught the Graduate Database Systems course and a course on Computer-Aided Verification that I co-designed with Rance Cleaveland. In each course I teach, I strive to create an interesting and challenging course project, so that students can see how the concepts and theory the course teaches them can be put into practice. The project usually involves a semester-long design and implementation effort, and the students typically work in groups of two or three in order to expose them to a team-project environment. In the case of the graduate Verification course, I ask the students in the course to apply an automated verification tool to a real-life application, or to develop a new verification technique of their own. As described below, a number of these efforts have resulted in conference and journal publications. I am also very interested in the computer science undergraduate curriculum in general. From 1994-1996, I was the Undergraduate Program Director for the Stony Brook Computer Science Department. Before that, from 1992-1995, I chaired the Department’s Committee on Undergraduate Computer Science Curriculum Reform, which implemented an extensive revision of the computer science undergraduate curriculum. The new curriculum, which featured a required two-course sequence in software engineering, took effect in Spring, 1995. In what follows, I summarize my approach to teaching the above-listed courses and, in the process, elaborate on my teaching philosophy.