Alan L. Davis
American computer scientist (PhD 1972, Utah) / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alan "Al" Lynn Davis is an American computer scientist and researcher, a professor of computer science at the University of Utah, and served as the associate director of the University of Utah School of Computing.
Al Davis | |
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Born | |
Alma mater | MIT University of Utah |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science |
Institutions | University of Utah Schlumberger Palo Alto Research Hewlett-Packard |
Thesis | SPL: A Structured Programming Language (1972) |
Doctoral advisor | Robert S. Barton |
Davis was raised in Salt Lake City, Utah. He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at MIT in 1969, and a Ph.D. in computer science under Bob Barton at Utah in 1972.[1]
With Bob Barton, in cooperation between Burroughs Corporation and Utah, Davis built the first operational dataflow or "data driven" computing machine, the DDM-1, between 1972 and 1976.[2]
In the early 1980s, Davis left his tenured professor position at Utah to work for Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, where he headed the computer architecture group and developed the "FAIM-1" architecture.[3] In 1988 he joined Hewlett-Packard labs in Palo Alto, where with Ken Stevens and Bill Coates he developed the "post office" switching architecture, a widely cited project.[4]
He returned to the University of Utah School of Computing where he served as director of graduate studies in 2001[5] and as associate director since 2003,[6] and has continued to do research with companies such as Intel[7] and Hewlett-Packard.[8]
Davis is mainly known for his work in computer architecture and asynchronous circuits, including influential work on arbiters.[9] He has numerous technical publications and has supervised numerous Ph.D. dissertations.