About Me

I am, currently, an associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, U.S.A. If you came here in a puzzle – the last step is to email me the 4 digit code.

Why I Do This

My why is simple: “to help students learn and find their life’s work.” My guiding curious question is “how will human growth via innovation in automation be done and impact us?” Together, they’re the lens I use for teaching, research, and service — and they keep my own ego out of the way.

My research lives at the intersection of Games, Computing, and Education. My top three current questions: How do board games elicit faculty development? How does the DarkFactory impact engineering educationally and professionally — as explored through my own DarkFactory Games and projects like the Urban Games? How do we collect and use spatio-temporal data from sports events for strategic improvement?

On teaching: I don’t believe there’s a “good” or “bad” teacher — a teacher provides an opportunity for the learner to think and engage. The learner needs to do to improve their doing, since that’s what generates value and builds autonomy.

My research interests at present are in a number of areas that complement one another, and interested colleagues can take a look at my current ideas for research and entrepreneurial projects. The general topics I’m interested in include: Genetic Algorithms, Agent Based Simulation – Acceleration, FPGA CAD and Architecture, Games, and Higher Education.

To see recent topics that I’ve published, take a look at my publications. In many of these efforts, I’ve collaborated with a number of other great colleagues (not comprehensive – Ahmad Patooghy, Abdel-Hameed Badawy, Bryan Van Scoy, Giancarlo Corti, Jose Augusto Nacif, Ricardo Ferreira, Martin Herbordt, Michel Kinsy, Lindsay Grace, Tobias Becker).

In the academic year 2017/18, I took a research leave at Boston University to collaborate with Martin Herbordt and Michel Kinsy and their respective labs.

verilogTown — the FPGA/Verilog learning game I built as a professor.

In 2008 and 2009, I was a Research Associate at Imperial College working with Wayne Luk and George Constantinides. I also worked with Nokia on benchmarking FPGAs and reconfigurable architectures targeting the mobile domain — the benchmark suite is called GroundHog.

I received my PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto in 2007 under the wing of Jonathan Rose. That work focused on improving Heterogeneous FPGAs. I continued a post doctoral position at the University of Toronto to help manage the release of version 5.0 of the Versatile Place and Route (VPR) CAD system — VPR 5.0, now part of VTR, the current academic FPGA software suite to consult. I also received my Master’s at the same University researching in cluster computing with Angelos Bilas. My undergraduate was from the University of Ottawa.

Connect with me on LinkedIn — note that I don’t add people to my network unless we’ve worked together in some capacity.

You can take a look at my first book on college education and advice at: College Questions and Answers.

I am the 4,178,713,591st human on earth and the 78,606,956,287th person to live as of history beginning (link).

Projects & Games

Three things worth a look, and where the rest of the games live — the full Projects & Games page has more.

Away from Research

Lexi Marsh is my counterpart, and you can read some of her musings at: one of her online portals. My past times are wide and varied and include MMA, hockey, board games, and Taekwondo [DEAD-link] to name a few. In the past, I played Ultimate for many years with GOAT [DEAD-link], Grand Trunk [DEAD-link], and Torontula, and you can see my blog at: The Cultimate Opinion.