W. Richards (Rick) Adrion

Founder of the Applied Computing Systems Institute of Massachusetts, Adrion has served as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

He served as PI for an NSF REU Site, PI for the NSF CISE BPC Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education (CAITE), Co-Director of the Commonwealth Information Technology Initiative (CITI), and Co-Director of the RIPPLES Multimedia Teaching and Learning Research Group. He received his B.S. degree in 1966 and his M.E.(E) degree in 1967 from Cornell University, and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1971.

He served as Program Director of Theoretical Computer Science for the National Science Foundation (NSF) from 1976–1978. After a brief period with the National Bureau of Standards, he returned to NSF in 1980 as Program Director of Special Projects in Computer Science. From 1982 until 1985 Adrion served as Program Director of Coordinated Experimental Research, and then as Deputy Division Director of Computer Research.

He founded the Applied Computing Systems Institute of Massachusetts, a corporation designed to transfer technology developed at the University of Massachusetts, and from 1988–2000 he served as its President and Chairman of the Board. Adrion joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1986 as Professor and Chair, serving as Chair of the Department of Computer Science from 1986–1994. He has also served several times as a Senior Manager at the National Science Foundation, most recently as a Division Director and Senior Advisor in CISE from 1999–2003, and previously held NSF positions including Senior Scientist, Deputy Division Director, and Program Manager.

He also held permanent and visiting positions with The University of Texas at Austin, Oregon State University, and the National Bureau of Standards, as well as adjunct, visiting, and/or sabbatical positions at American University, Georgetown University, the University of California Berkeley, and the Université de Paris-Sud Laboratoire de Recherche en Informatique. Adrion founded and has served as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. He has served on the organizing and program committees for numerous conferences, including as General Chair of the IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering and the ACM Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.

He has served on several federal advisory committees and boards, including NSF/CISE, NSF/CDA, NSF/NCRI, NIH/NLM, NIH/NINDS, NASA/CESDIS, NRC/COSEPUP, and the National Superconducting Supercollider. Adrion was a founding member of the Computing Research Association (CRA) Board of Directors. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and received distinguished service awards from the University of Massachusetts, ACM-SIGSOFT, and the Computing Research Association.

In recognition of his leadership and achievements, Adrion was honored with the 2010 President's Public Service Award for his role in developing, broadening, expanding, and improving computing and information technology activities for students in K–12 and higher education throughout the Commonwealth. His dedication to providing access to women and minorities in the field of computer technology and sciences is legendary. This commitment was exhibited through his work in establishing the Commonwealth Information Technology Initiative and the Commonwealth Alliance for Information Technology Education.

His research interests are in the areas of multimedia technology for teaching and learning, analysis and verification of concurrent real-time computing systems, and models for technology transfer and diffusion. His interests in pedagogy and technologies for learning include automatic capture and indexing of active classroom activities, multimedia authoring tools, and constructivist learning environments. Adrion has focused on pedagogy for incorporating technology in the classroom and distance education.

His research in the testing, analysis, and verification of complex software systems centered around the definition of a new model of concurrency, development of representations of concurrent and real-time behavior based on this model, and use of the model to guide the modification, combination, and application of sequential testing techniques, as well as extending the models, representations, and techniques to systems under real-time constraints. In the area of technology transfer, he investigated various models related to university–industry collaboration.