George S. Avrunin

Professor, Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Adjunct Professor, Department of Computer Science
My official Department of Mathematics and Statistics web page:
http://www.math.umass.edu/People/avrunin
Address:
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
University of Massachusetts Amherst
710 N. Pleasant Street
Amherst, MA 01003-9305
USA
Office:
1335D Lederle Graduate Research Tower
Office hours:
MWTh 2-3 and by appointment.
Telephone:
413-545-4251 (Voice)
413-545-1801 (Fax)
Email:
avrunin at math dot umass dot edu
Public PGP key:
Click here to download my public GnuPG key (ASCII version)

Teaching:

In Fall 2013, I will be teaching Math 113 (Math for Elementary Teachers I) and Math 300 (Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics). The web pages for these courses will be set up before classes start in the fall.

Research interests:

Analysis and verification of concurrent and distributed computer systems; requirements engineering; applications of analysis and verification techniques to human-intensive systems such as medical processes and elections; verification methods for high-performance computing systems; software architecture; cohomology and representation theory of finite groups

Publications:

My publications are listed by topic (more or less) and chronologically in the links below, along with links to electronic versions of some of them. These online copies are made available as a means to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are maintained by the authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each copyright holder. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Publications by topic

Chronological list

My CV is available here. For additional information and pointers to some related publications, see the the Laboratory for Advanced Software Engineering Research page. The Specification Patterns home page is a repository of patterns for finite-state verification.

WMMP:

I am the lead Principal Investigator on project called the Western Massachusetts Mathematics Partnership. This is funded by a "START" planning grant from the National Science Foundation's Math and Science Partnerships program. The WMMP involves faculty from all the member institutions of the Five College Consortium (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith colleges and UMass Amherst), Springfield College, Holyoke Community College, Greenfield Community College and Western New England and Westfield State universities. The K-12 districts involved are Springfield, Holyoke, Amherst Regional, Easthampton, Hampden-Wilbraham, Mohawk Trail Regional, South Hadley, and Westfield, ranging from urban, mostly minority districts to rural ones. The project also includes the SummerMath for Teachers program at Mount Holyoke and the Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education. The co-PIs are Lenore Reilly Carlisle, who directs the teacher preparation program at Mount Holyoke (which include Amherst and Hampshire students); Victoria Gruneiro, the Director of Mathematics for the Springfield Public Schools; and Sue Thrasher, who directs the Five College Schools Partnership program.

The goal of the planning grant is to understand the particular problems of the western Massachusetts region, where the production of teachers licensed in mathematics is very low and where many move to the eastern part of the state. There is, however, a long history of interaction and cooperation among the colleges and universities in the region, and with local school districts. The first year of the project is intended to be spent largely studying the needs and opportunities, with the second year devoted to designing a large project that will make a difference in the teacher pipeline and in the teaching and learning of math. The project is organized around five working groups on various aspects of the issues, with all participants meeting in two Summer Institutes and occasional other sessions during the academic year.

In late December 2012, we submitted a proposal for a 5-year MSP Targeted Partnership grant. The PIs on that proposal, in addition to me, are Neal Abraham, the Executive Director of Five Colleges, Incorporated; Victoria Gruneiro; my colleague Farshid Hajir at UMass; and Lenore Reilly. Deborah Schifter (Education Development Center) and Harriet Pollatsek (Mount Holyoke) also play major roles in this project.

Current Professional Service:

I am a member of the Program Committees for the 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering in Health Care and the 2013 Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering (PASTE) .