Dr. Michael VanHilst
A Brief Biography
Dr. VanHilst received his PhD from the University of Washington in
1997. He has spent the past five years working with Martin Griss
in the software technology group at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories.
While at HP, he worked on such diverse projects as natural language
and speech, intelligent agents, network services, workflow, model
integration, and wireless mobile appliances. Prior to getting his
PhD., Dr. VanHilst worked for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
(located at Harvard University), where he was the chief software
architect for the Chandra Space Telescope mirror test system and
wrote the SAOimage application included in the GNU open source
distribution for the last 14 years. He has also worked for the
French CNRS, on signal processing, and at IBM TJ Watson Research Labs,
where he wrote major portions of the user interface for IBM's Data
Explorer high end visualization system.
Dr. VanHilst published two widely cited papers at ACM OOPSLA and
ACM SIGSOFT/Foundations of Software Engineering, and can be found
in the acknowledgements of Nancy Leveson's book on Software Safety,
and Krzysztof Czarnecki's book on Generative Programming.
Dr. VanHilst got his undergraduate education at MIT, where he received
two BS degrees (in architecture and urban studies) and the Master of
City Planning. He worked for a couple years in Grinnell, Iowa, as the
Community Development Director, administering federal grants and
rehabilitating low income housing, before switching careers.