Teaching Faculty Candidate Seminar: Alan Weide

Zoom link, Passcode: 655799 (if attending remotely)

“Understanding Recursion Without First Understanding Recursion: A Client-View-First Approach”

Abstract: Conventional wisdom states that “to understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.” But is that really true? This seminar explores recursion from a client-view-first perspective and examines a sound methodology to develop and reason about recursive algorithms without a need to understand the execution model of the programming language under discussion. The seminar begins with a discussion of design-by-contract principles and a formal approach to specifying and reasoning about the behavior of operations before proceeding to a conversation about using such specifications to analyze the behavior of elegant recursive solutions to a variety of problems.

Bio: Alan Weide will receive his PhD in Computer Science and Engineering from The Ohio State University in December 2021, where he also earned his Master’s degree in 2020 and Bachelor’s in 2015. Alan’s dissertation was completed under the supervision of Dr. Paolo Sivilotti and explores ways to apply the principles of modularity and data abstraction to parallel and concurrent programs, and how to reason formally about such programs. As a graduate student, he has taught a course on object-oriented programming and software engineering in Java and was awarded the Eleanor Quinlan Graduate Teaching Award in 2019 for his service. His teaching interests span a variety of topics including introductory computer science, software engineering, programming languages, algorithms, and theoretical computer science. Beyond research and teaching, Alan enjoys playing trombone (he was a member of the OSU Marching Band from 2013–2018), exploring world cuisines, and—despite growing up in flat, landlocked Columbus, OH—outdoor activities such as hiking, kayaking, and skiing.