Cliff Shaffer's Research Projects

Here is information and pointers to websites for some of the research projects that I have been involved with.

Problem Solving Environments

Most of my present work is related to Problem Solving Environments (PSEs). For more information about PSE research in our Department, see the PSE Homepage. We have an active research group with many ongoing projects. We always need students to work with us as Independent Study students or volunteers.

My main research interest at the moment is the JigCell problem solving environment, a joint project with John Tyson in the Biology Department. We are developing tools and models related to cell cycle modeling, and more generally tools for modeling molecular regulatory networks. This is one of many project our CS Department is involved in related to Computational Biology and Bioinformatics.

The following are projects that are not currently active or I am not actively working with them now.

The S⁴W project is a PSE for wireless commications system design.
Sieve is a component-based collaborative workspace in Java that serves as the foundation for building PSEs.
One aspect of our PSE work is to support collaborative computing. An early effort for us in this area is JAMM: Java Applets Made Multiuser. More recently, we have been working on NetEdit, a prototype collaborative text editor.

See the PSE homepage for a list of other projects that we have worked on in the past.

Computer Aided Education

I have been involved in a number of projects related to computer aided education over the years.

Our most recent efforts involve algorithm visualizations. We are trying to understand the key factors that make for successful algorithm animations, and we are also maintaining a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art in algorithm and data structures visualization at our Data Structures and Algorithm Visualization Wiki.

See my recent papers at SIGCSE on the Algoviz Wiki, designing algorithm visualizations and bufferpool projects. There are opportunities for students to continue this work on algorithm visualizations.

Here are some descriptions of earlier projects that I have worked on. These projects are no longer active, however I am seeking an independent study student to work on some GeoSim simulations.

The first and most successful was Project GeoSim: Simulations for Geography Education. This software has been used by many thousands of students around the world, and is still actively used.

SABLE: Statistics Activity-Based Learning Environment is largely completed. However, I have reactivated this site, and am interested in extending this work.

Swan: A Data Structure Visualization System was our initial prototype system for supporting data structure visualization. We are not presently pursuing the Swan system, but we are actively creating new visualizations in Java.

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