University of Kentucky Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship

   Editorial Board Member

Raphael A. Finkel (Computer Science)

228 James F. Hardymon 0495
(859) 257-3885
raphael@cs.engr.uky.edu
web: http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael/

Raphael Finkel was born in Chicago, where he attended the University of
Chicago, earning a Bachelors in Mathematics and a Masters of Arts in Teaching.
He received a PhD from Stanford University in the area of Robotics. He
was a faculty member of the University of Wisconsin - Madison from 1976 to
1987. He has been a professor of computer science at the University of
Kentucky in Lexington since 1987.

His research involves distributed data structures, distributed algorithms, and
distributed operating systems. Dr. Finkel was associated with the first work
on quad trees, k-d trees, quotient networks, and the Roscoe/Arachne, Charlotte,
Yackos, and Unify operating systems. He was involved in developing DIB, a
package for distributing tree-structured computations in a dynamic fashion on
an arbitrary number of computers. His current research includes tools for Unix
system administration (SAT: a distributed database used by each host to build
its own specific configuration files; Pulsar: a monitoring tool that receives
regular reports from each host and displays them), databases (Qddb:
arbitrary-length attributes with replication and subattributes, a graphical
user interface; Dexter: conversion of data to human-readable form specific to
the user), operating systems (Unify: distributed shared memory with relaxed
consistency in both temporaral and spatial dimensions), and distributed
algorithms (DIB: distributed backtracking, especially applied to
constraint-satisfaction problems). Many of these projects can be found via
http://www.cs.uky.edu/~raphael.

Dr. Finkel has published over 50 articles in refereed journals and conferences
and has produced over 50 technical reports. He has written two textbooks:
(Prentice-Hall, 1988), and (Benjamin- Cummings, 1996). He is also a co-author
of (Harper and Row, 1983). Dr. Finkel has received several teaching awards.
He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE Computer Society. He is a past editor
of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems.