Thomas Horton

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Software engineering, computer science education, text processing, humanities computing

Thomas Horton received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland in 1987. He joined the Department of Computer Science at the University of Virginia in the spring of 2001. In 1991 and 1998 he won an Award for Excellence and Innovation in Undergraduate Teaching at Florida Atlantic University, and in 1994 he won an Award for Outstanding Service. His leadership in national software engineering education activities includes chairing the IEEE-CS TCSE�s Software Engineering Education Community (SEECo), and serving as General Chair of the 2004 Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training Tom has been an ABET program evaluator for computer science programs since 2001, and he leads the development of assessment process for state technology skills requirement at Virginia.

Horton's research interests include software engineering, computer science education, text processing, and humanities computing. His research in software engineering focuses on requirements engineering and modeling, domain engineering for developing reusable components (requirements models, architectures, and code), and tools and environments for software development. In computer science education, his interests include designing labs and exercises for programming and software engineering courses. He is also interested in extending the use of the Web in course delivery. An NSF ILI grant in 1991 led to work in teaching undergraduates software design using Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools, and he developed closed-lab CS courses at Florida Atlantic University. He is a lead investigator on the Nora Project a multi-institution research project funded by the Mellon Foundation to explore data mining and visualization in literary digital libraries.

• Evaluating A Software Engineering Project Course Model Based On Studio Presentations, Thomas B. Horton and John C. Knight. Proceedings of the 2005 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Indianapolis, IN, October 2005.
• Re-examining Closed Laboratories in Computer Science Courses, Thomas B. Horton, Ruth E. Anderson, and Christopher M. Milner, Proceedings of the 2004 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Savannah, GA, November 2004.
• A Software Engineering Project Course Model based on Studio Presentations, Thomas B. Horton and John C. Knight, Proceedings of the 2003 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference, Boulder, CO, November 2003.
• Using Commercial CASE Environments to Teach Software Design, Thomas B. Horton, Software Engineering Education, pp. 97-115, Proceedings of the 7th SEI CSEE Conference, January 1994, Springer-Verlag, Berlin.
• From Domain Models to Architecture Frameworks, Jacques Meekel, Thomas B. Horton, Robert B. France, Charlie Mellone, and Sajid Dalvi, Proceedings of the ACM-SIGSOFT Symposium on Software Reusability (SSR'97), May 1997, Boston, MA.