Professor
Academic Degrees
Stephen Davies, Associate Professor of Computer Science, earned a Ph.D. (2005) in Computer Science from the University of Colorado, Boulder, after having received an M.S. (1995) in Electrical Engineering from Colorado and a B.S. (1992) in Electrical Engineering from Rice University. He joined the UMW faculty in 2006, and has taught courses in database schema theory, Web application development, computational science, data mining, and object-oriented analysis & design, among other topics.
Dr. Davies performed pioneering research in the development of Personal Knowledge Bases (PKBs), electronic tools that help users express and persist mental impressions. Tied in with this work was his investigative development of user interfaces to the Semantic Web, which is an extension of the World Wide Web that enables machines to reach automated conclusions about user-generated content.
Currently, Dr. Davies works in the field of modeling and simulation, building and analyzing virtual replicas of real-world phenomena in order to understand their emergent complex behavior. Two of his recent projects in this interdisciplinary area involve an agent-based model of racial diversity on college campuses, and an intergenerational simulation of wealth distribution in the United States. He is also developing an ecological simulation of a rare Virginia tidal wetlands plant, to understand the factors that may lead to its being endangered.
Dr. Davies’s work has appeared in Communications of the ACM and IEEE Computer, the flagship publications of the two premier academic and professional societies in computer science. He has presented at numerous academic conferences, including the International Conference on Database and Expert Systems Applications, the ACM Symposium on Computer Science Education, and the International Conference on Semantic Systems.