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Michael VanHilst;Michael VanHilst;vanhilst@cs.washington.edu;mvh@cfa.harvard.edu;Personal,;Research;Computer Science & Engineering Department;University of Washington;Box 352350;Seattle, WA 98195-2350 USA;Click here to send an email message to Mike VanHilst.;Personal;Mike is starting his 7th year as a graduate student at the University of;Washington. Hopefully, with a little luck he will be finished around the;end of the winter quarter.;;Immediately prior to coming to UDub Mike worked as a contractor at;IBM Research;where he wrote;Motif;widgets for the user unterface of IBM's;Data Explorer.;Mike got his start as a programmer in 1981 while fixing and maintaining;computer hardware for the;Smithsonian;Astrophysical Observatory, which is part of the;Smithsonian, but located within;Harvard.;Learning to debug software was the only way Mike could convince the;programmers that the hardware really was working correctly.;Mike stayed at the Smithsonian for 8 years, during which time he wrote a;program called;SAOimage;which is used by lots of astronomers to look at images. SAOimage is now;part of the;GNU;distribution. (Mike would like to thank Bill Wyatt,;Eric Mandel,;Joe Schwarz, and;Doug Mink;for starting, guiding, and continuing the project,;not to mention countless others who contributed).;In 1986, Mike took a year off to work with a group of;seismologists;in Paris, France, doing data acquisition, calibration, and analysis.;He had a truly wonderful time in;Paris.;He met his wife, Luz Angela, in a French language class at the;Alliance Francaise.;Luz Angela had come to Paris that year from her native;Colombia;in South America.;In the summer of 1994, Mike wrote a front end to let students;browse the University's time schedule data base through UWIN.;He had fun working with the very talented staff at;pine.);Special thanks to Bill Shirey, who did most of the design, and;Tracy Stenvik, who wrote the UWIN screen library.;(If you are on a UW machine, you can run;UWIN here.);In between working on the time schedule Mike also taught beginning;programming, through the UW Extension, to a very motivated group from;Microsoft product support who sacrificed their summer to learn C.;Recently Mike has presented papers at the;International Symposium on Object Technologies for Advanced Software;(ISOTAS'96),;ACM Conference on Object Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and;Applications (OOPSLA'96), and the;ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE'96);He also presented a poster at OOPSLA'95, made presentations at the;Subjectivity Workshops at OOPSLA'94 and OOPSLA'96, participated in the;Doctoral Symposium at OOPSLA'95, and participated in a demo at;UIST'96 (thanks Steve).;In an earlier life Mike earned BS and MCP degrees in;architecture;(the wooden kind) and;city planning;from;MIT;and worked as the Community Development Director for;the city of Grinnell,;Iowa.;While the things he works on are different now, the skills in visual;design and problem solving continue to be of value - and he still;gets to talk about;Chris;Alexander.;Here in Seattle, Mike has been active in the student chapter of the;Washington Software Association,;improving ties between students and large and small software;companies in the area. He enjoys hiking, cross-country skiing,;sailing, and;kayaking.;He also enjoys swimming at Lake Bronson.;More recently, Mike's "free" time has been taken up by;Marco Harold Sebastien Van Hilst, who was born on May 10, 1996.;Mike will post pictures as soon as he locates another photo scanner.; visits since 8 November 1996.;;Michael VanHilst;Last modified:;Friday, November 8, 1996;