William H. Turkett, Jr.
I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Wake Forest University. I received my Ph.D. (August 2004) from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of South Carolina, where my research was in the area of probabilistic reasoning.
Teaching
I am on research leave for the 2008-2009 academic year and will not be teaching courses in the CS department until the Fall of 2009.I am finding blogs to be great content aggregators for my course websites. Check an example out here: CSC 231 Spring 2008
In the Fall of 2009, I am slated to teach CSC 112, Fundamentals of Computer Science, and CSC 391/691, Special Topics: Algorithms on Strings and Sequences. The textbook for 112 will be Savitch's Absolute C++. The textbook for 391/691 will be Gusfield's Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology. In addition to CSC majors, advanced non-CSC majors in fields such as Biology or Linguistics are invited to take this course and should stop by and talk to me!
Research
Background: My thesis advisor was Dr. John Rose, who directed my dissertation work on Robust Multiagent Plan Generation and Execution with Decision-Theoretic Planners [PDF, ~1.0MB].Interests: At Wake Forest, I am actively involved in teaching and research in the broad field of Computational Biosciences, including active collaboration with computational biophysicist Jacque Fetrow. My interests are in applications of machine learning, with current foci on reverse-engineering of cellular signaling networks and predicting properties of proteins from amino acid sequence analysis. I have also recently begun exploring collaborations with the Network Security Group, led by Errin Fulp. Much of my work deals with datasets that are sequential or temporal in nature.
Students: I currently am working with four graduate (or former graduate) students on Masters level research. These students and their areas of interest are:
- Jason Fye - Probabilistic approaches to clustering and motif analysis [Finished in May 2008]
- Andrew Karode - Applications of support vector machine learning to computer security, particularly traffic classification [Finished in December 2008] This work will be extended in the summer of 2009 by a undergraduate WFU student, Michael Crouse.
- Santiago Saldana - The effectiveness of social plan sharing in online planning in POMDP-type domains [Expected Summer 2009]
- Dustin White - Agent role recognition through behavior and social analysis, with application to multi-player games [Expected May 2009]
Current Work: Most recent paper submission: ICCCN 2009: Improving the Performance of In-The-Dark Network Application Identification, with Errin Fulp and Andrew Karode, Status: Pending.
Study Abroad
I have been actively involved in the Wake Forest University sponsored EuroTour summer study abroad program during the 2007-2009 academic terms. I teach a modified version of CSC 101 while abroad on this trip.As a Computer Scientist, I support Saving Bletchley Park, and require my EuroTour students to visit the Bletchley Park site with me during our trip to gain an understanding of its significance.