Paul F. Reynolds, Jr.

Professor Emeritus of Computer Science

Quantum

Office: 212 Rice Hall

US Mail:

Department of Computer Science
Rice Hall, 85 Engineers Way
P.O. Box 400740
University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA 22904
USA
After 32 years on the UVa faculty I chose to leave at the end of August, 2012. 

If you're a new PhD thinking about going into academia, the parent of a soon to be college-bound student (or the student!) or a donor thinking about funding what you recall about academia, feel free to contact me at the email address above. I have some surprising stats for you, independent of what all of the glossies say. If I were the parent of a college-bound student I would seriously consider encouraging him/her to take as many courses (often free) as possible on the web and then seek independent accreditation.

Research Interests

Over the span of my 33 year academic career I worked on parallel and distributed computing, with a concentration on parallel and distributed simulation, simulation technologies in general, and message ordering guarantees in distributed networks (employing logical time systems --Isotach Networks).  My research led to the construction of two separate pieces of special purpose hardware. I conducted and published first known work on methods for creating multi-resolution models, and separately on concurrent writers in concurrent caches and distributed shared memory.  More recently I explored managing uncertainty in simulations, computing for the blind and the design of a domain specific language for describing and statically analyzing the observable behaviors of emitters. 

Student Supervision

I supervised 65 graduate degrees, including 16 PhD students. Some are employed by well known academic institutions, including CMU, and the Univ of Illinois, some have been or are chairs of their departments, and others have been or are CTOs for major corporations. Others have started their own companies. I published 100 refereed papers, many of them collaboratively with my students  I supervised and published with many of UVa's finest undergraduates on research as well, including a Computing Research Association national runner-up (second place), Erin Carson, on the employment of Dempster-Shafer techniques for uncertainty exploration in simulation.  Many of my undergraduate advisees were finalists in the Engineering School's undergraduate thesis competition (URDS) and there were two winners. I have a very strong record advising and graduating women and minorities over my career and I'm proud of it.

The bulk of my work was collaborative, because that's how I love to work.  I am forever grateful to the very talented and devoted students with whom I worked during my career at UVa.  My students, I bask in your successes.

What Now?

Officially UVa says I'm retired (includes gold parking pass to park anywhere on grounds and an office), but that's only from the university.  I'm hardly retired.  There's life after professoring.  My current CV reads: Professor Emeritus, Expert, Expert, Expert.  I continue to work part time as an expert with the Army on the topic of software analysis.  I am an expert for Shine S&T most recently identifying new intellectual property in M&S within the state of Virginia on a small business grant.  And I'm now an expert in identifying prior art and testifying about it in patent lawsuits.  (See some of my work on patents 6631449, 6918014 and 5825891 at the PTAB.)  On the side I keep advocating for passenger rail.  Someday I'll get to all of that wood I harvested from fallen trees around Albemarle County since the 90's, and make some more furniture.

Personal

Selected Publications 1997 through 2012: