ESaaS

Armando Fox (fox@berkeley.edu) is a Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department of the University of California at Berkeley. He is also the Faculty Advisor to the UC Berkeley MOOCLab and a recognized thought leader on MOOCs and online education, topics on which he has had the honor of addressing the California legislature, the China Ministry of Education, and the Japan Top Global University Project, as well as numerous US and international universities. He also serves on the Technical Advisory Committee of edX, helping to set the technical direction of their open MOOC platform, and the Google Online Education Advisory Council.

With his colleague David Patterson, Fox overhauled Berkeley’s software engineering course, focusing on agile projects with real customers and heavily guided by modern software practice. The reinvented course and accompanying textbook, “Engineering Software as a Service” (now available in several languages), influenced the ACM/IEEE 2013 Curriculum Guidelines for Software Engineering and the 2014 IEEE Software Engineering Competency Model (SWECOM). He has given numerous keynotes about these topics at SIGCSE, ICSE, CSEET, and other leading venues on computer science education. The book and course also form the basis of Berkeley’s first Massive Open Online Course on “Engineering Software as a Service”, offered through edX, through which over 10,000 students in over 120 countries have earned certificates of completion. Fox’s continued research on improving student engagement in blended courses and on novel forms of autograding, such as automatic hint generation to improve program style and conciseness, continues to improve the ESaaS SPOC.

Fox’s other computer science research in the Berkeley ASPIRE project focuses on highly productive parallel programming. While at Stanford he received teaching and mentoring awards from the Associated Students of Stanford University, the Society of Women Engineers, and Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society. He is an alumnus of MIT (BS in EECS), the University of Illinois (MS in EE), and UC Berkeley (PhD in CS). He is a classically-trained musician and performer, an avid musical theater fan and freelance Music Director, and bilingual/bicultural (Cuban-American) New Yorker living in San Francisco.

Recent praise from instructors using the ESaaS SPOC in their classrooms:

“I have students beating down my door to get into the course.” - Hank Walker, Texas A&M University
“I love this course so much. It’s such am amazing advancement to Software Engineering education, and I’ve been so proud to offer it for the past 2 years.” - Kristen Justice, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

RAD Lab/ParLab

Armando Fox (fox@cs.berkeley.edu) is a researcher in the the UC Berkeley Parallel Computing Laboratory (Par Lab) and a co-founder of the Berkeley RAD Lab (Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems), where he was a coauthor of the influential position paper “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing”. His 2003 collaboration with David Patterson on Recovery-Oriented Computing earned him the distinction of being included in the “Scientific American 50” top researchers and led to the formation of the RAD Lab. He is a Distinguished Member of the Association for Computing Machinery and the recipient of an NSF CAREER award and the Gilbreth Lectureship of the National Academy of Engineering. His industry experience includes helping to design the Intel Pentium Pro microprocessor and founding a successful startup to commercialize his UC Berkeley dissertation research on mobile computing. His research in the RAD Lab and Par Lab has influenced design and practice at Google, Amazon, eBay, and other prominent IT companies.

RAD Lab/start of Agile course

Armando Fox (fox@cs.berkeley.edu) is an Adjunct Associate Professor at UC Berkeley and a co-founder of the Berkeley RAD Lab (Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems) and AMP Lab (Algorithms, Machines and People). His 2003 collaboration with David Patterson on Recovery-Oriented Computing earned him the distinction of being included in the “Scientific American 50” top researchers and led to the formation of the RAD Lab, where he was a coauthor of the influential position paper “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing”. This paper was one of the first widely-read academic articles that outlined a cloud computing research agenda, and led to several successful collaborations with top machine learning researchers on the application of machine learning to operational problems in cloud computing datacenters.

In 2008, to support the RAD Lab’s research agenda, Prof. Fox initiated a new course to teach SaaS using Agile methods. The success of that pilot course led to the reinvention of the undergraduate Software Engineering course and the new textbook “Engineering Long-Lasting Software: An Agile Approach Using SaaS & Cloud Computing”, co-authored with renowned computer architect and Berkeley faculty colleague David Patterson and informed by the research and industrial partnerships of the RAD Lab.

Prior to joining Berkeley, he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, where he received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Robert Noyce Family Faculty Fellowship, the IBM Young Faculty Fellowship, and teaching awards from Stanford University (his former employer), the Society of Women Engineers, and Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society. In previous lives he helped design the Intel Pentium Pro microprocessor and founded a small company to commercialize his UC Berkeley dissertation research on mobile computing. He holds degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UC Berkeley.

Cloud Computing

Armando Fox (fox@cs.berkeley.edu) is an Adjunct Associate Professor at UC Berkeley and a co-founder of the Berkeley RAD Lab. Prior to that he was an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and received his PhD, MS and BS degrees at Berkeley, Illinois at MIT respectively. His current research interests include applied statistical machine learning and cloud computing; he is a co-author of the recently released position paper “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing” and has frequently lectured on this topic. He has published several papers in collaboration with top machine learning researchers on the application of machine learning to diagnosing, characterizing and identifying operational problems in datacenter-scale and cloud computing installations. His 2003 collaboration with David Patterson on Recovery-Oriented Computing earned him the distinction of being included in the “Scientific American 50” top researchers. In previous lives he helped design the Intel Pentium Pro microprocessor and founded a company to commercialize his UC Berkeley dissertation research on mobile computing.