Peter Schachte
2 Ryan Street
Northcote, Victoria 3070
Australia
schachte@cs.mu.OZ.AU
+61 3 9482-1765

Personal
Born 6 October 1958, Boston, USA. US and Australian (dual) Citizen.

Education
Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science, the University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1999. Thesis title: Precise and Efficient Static Analysis of Logic Programs.

Master of Science, Computer Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA, 1982

Bachelor of Science, Computer Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY, USA, 1980

Professional Interests
Program Analysis, Programming Language Implementation, Logic Programming, Functional Programming, Object Oriented Programming, Implementation of Boolean Constraint Solvers, Declarative Software Engineering, and Programming Environments

Skills Summary
I have programmed in C, C++, Java, Prolog, Mercury, Lisp, Perl, FORTRAN, Bourne shell, awk, sed, PL/I, Pascal, APL, Basic, and have a passing knowledge of ML, Haskell/Miranda/Gofer, and COBOL. I have worked on PC, Sun, DEC Alpha, SGI Iris, Apollo, IBM mainframe, Xerox, DEC VAX, and Amiga computers, using various version of GNU/Linux, Unix, Windows NT, VMS, VM/CMS, Xerox Lisp, and Amiga OS. I have done graphics and GUI programming for the X Window System using Xlib, Xt (the X Toolkit), and OSF Motif, for the Java platform in Java, for Xerox workstations in Lisp, and for the Amiga in C. I have used the CVS, RCS, and SCCS source control systems, and have used the LaTeX, Scribe, Framemaker, and Star document preparation systems, and have written HTML documents (and have written several scripts to generate HTML).

Work History

Lecturer, January 1999 - Present
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

• Teaching software engineering and programming in C++ and Java at second and third year level to classes of around 150-300 students, and principles of programming languages to postgraduates. This includes developing one new subject and completely redeveloping another, preparing lecture materials, presenting lectures, setting and marking projects and exams, and collaborating with staff tutors in preparing and presenting tutorials and lab exercises.
• Supervised two summer students in developing an XML-based automated quizzing system which presents students with questions, accepts and marks their answers, and gives them feedback on what material they are having difficulty with. Used this system in the second year software design subject I teach. Automated quizzes provide students early feedback on their progress in the subject, and provide the lecturer insight into difficulties students are having, with little demand on staff (once the quizzes are written).
• Supervising two honours students in their research projects.
• Coordinating the department's seminar series.
• Carrying on research in program analysis, programming language implementation, and Boolean constraint solvers. See sections on publications and grants below.
• Consulting for the Swedish Institute of Computer Science.

PhD Student, July 1993 - December 1998
Department of Computer Science, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.

Senior Research Assistant, February 1997 - January 1998
Department of Computer Science, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Participated in a research project to design and implement HAL, a new, very efficient constraint logic programming language. The language will compile to Mercury, using that language's compilation technology to achieve high speed. I implemented the first HAL to Mercury translator, extended the Mercury language to add controlled support for impure programming constructs, and used this impurity facility to implement both backtrackable and non-backtrackable destructively modifiable references in Mercury.

Senior Software Engineer, October 1985 - July 1993
Quintus Corporation, Mountain View, California, USA (began as a Software Engineer). Quintus, a small software development company, at that time developed and marketed Quintus Prolog, one of the most popular commercial Prolog systems. (From February through July 1992, when Quintus was wholly owned by Intergraph corporation, I was assigned to Dazix corporation, an electronic design automation corporation, also a wholly owned subsidiary of Intergraph.)

• Designed, documented, and led the team responsible for implementing the Motif-based Quintus Prolog source-linked debugger. This debugger positions an arrow at the current call in a window showing your Prolog source code, showing variable binding, history, and call stack information in auxilliary windows. This debugger, unlike the previous debugger, works on compiled Prolog code, and does not require the source code to be specially loaded in order to debug it.
• (While assigned to Dazix) designed and implemented code to efficiently analyze an electronic printed circuit board layout looking for places where two parallel traces run close enough to each other for a long enough run to be subject to electrical cross-talk. Also wrote code to generate a SPICE input file from Dazix's proprietary file format.
• Designed and implemented an efficient object-oriented Prolog extension, used as the foundation of all user-interface components of Quintus Workpro. This system is described in chapter 7 of Logic Programming: Formal Methods and Practical Applications, edited by Christoph Beierle and Lutz Plümer.
• Designed and led the team that implemented the Report Writer component of Quintus Workpro, a Motif-based, client-server oriented information management system. The Report Writer is a flexible graphical tool which allows naive users to design, save, and run complex reports, including calculations and aggregations, all using an intuitive point-and-click interface.
• Designed and led the team responsible for implementing and documenting ProXL, the Quintus Prolog low-level X Window System interface. ProXL supports nearly all of the functionality of the X Window System directly from Prolog.
• Designed and implemented a package that gives Prolog programs direct, efficient access to C data structures.

Member of Technical Staff, September 1984 - October 1985
ITT Advanced Technology Center, Shelton, Connecticut, USA.

• Designed an object-oriented ``Finder/Explainer,'' a tool to assist programmers in searching an object-oriented class hierarchy for a class that will fit their need by explaining to them what the class is for and how it works. The tool uses animation to demonstrate these things to the programmer. The implementor of each class only needs to show the tool how to display the state of the object and specify several usage examples of the class as ``lessons'' to show the user of the class what it does and how it works.
• Participated in the scripting and production of a videotape presentation and dramatization of the ideas behind knowledge-based object-oriented reusability tools, in particular the ``Finder/Explainer.'' Also co-produced the software that demonstrated the planned abilities of the reusability software system.
• Wrote SQL database code to support defect tracking for the development of ITT's newest generation of central office Electronic Telephone Switch.

Assoc. Member Professional Staff, October 1982 - September 1984
Schlumberger-Doll Research, Ridgefield, Connecticut, USA.

• Implemented most of the functionality of an Evans and Sutherland vector graphics display processor on a raster display Artificial Intelligence workstation.
• Implemented a few object-oriented graphical classes for displaying graphs and charts.

Other Experience
19 September - 12 October 1995: Guest lecturer for ``optimization'' part of 3rd year programming language implementation class based on Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools by Aho, Sethi, and Ullman.

Grants
2000: Z. Somogyi, H. Søndergaard, P. Schachte. Making high-level programming practical. Australian Research Council small grant.

2001-2003: H. Søndergaard, P. Schachte, P. Stuckey, M. Sultzmann. Constraint-Based Program Analysis. Australian Research Council large grant.

2001: P. Schachte, M. Sultzmann. Security Analysis for Java. Melbourne Research Development Grants Scheme Early Career Researcher Program (application submitted).

Awards and Scholarships
January 1995 - July 1998: Australian Postgraduate Award Scholarship

July 1993 - December 1994: Melbourne University Postgraduate Scholarship

May 1980: cum laude graduate of Syracuse University

Journal Refereeing
Referee for: ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems, Journal of Logic Programming, and Information Processing Letters.

Refereed Publications

References

1

Peter Schachte. Precise goal-independent abstract interpretation of constraint logic programs. In Colin Fidge, editor, Computing: The Australasian Theory Symposium (CATS 2001), number 42 in Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science. Elsevier Science B. V., 2001. (to appear).

2

Roberto Bagnara and Peter Schachte. Factorizing equivalent variable pairs in ROBDD-based implementations of Pos. In A. M. Haeberer, editor, Proceedings of the ``Seventh International Conference on Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology (AMAST'98)'', volume 1548 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 471-485, Amazonia, Brazil, 1999. Springer, Berlin.

3

Tania Armstrong, Kim Marriott, Peter Schachte, and Harald Søndergaard. Two classes of Boolean functions for dependency analysis. Science of Computer Programming, 31(1):3-45, May 1998.

4

Peter Schachte. Global variables in logic programming. In Lee Naish, editor, Logic Programming: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Logic Programming., pages 3-17, Cambridge, USA, July 1997. MIT Press.

5

Peter Schachte. Efficient ROBDD operations for program analysis. In Kotagiri Ramamohanarao, editor, ACSC'96: Proceedings of the 19 Australasian Computer Science Conference, pages 347-356. Australian Computer Science Communications, 1996.

6

Peter Schachte and Georges Saab. Efficient object-oriented programming in Prolog. In Christoph Beierle and Lutz Plümer, editors, Logic Programming: Formal Methods and Practical Applications, number 11 in Studies in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, chapter 7, pages 205-243. Elsevier Science B.V./North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1995.

References
Available upon request.