Robert A. Morris
Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science
The University of Massachusetts at Boston
Education
Ph.D., Mathematics, Cornell University, 1970
M.A., Mathematics, Cornell University, 1967
B.A., Mathematics, Reed College, 1965
Positions at University of Massachusetts –Boston
May 1997-present Director, UMASS-Boston Software Engineering Research Laboratory
1987-present. Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science
1978-1986 Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science
Previous Positions
1989 (Fall Quarter) Visiting Scholar, Eye Research Laboratories, University of Chicago
1975-1978 Associate Professor of Mathematics, Univ. of Oklahoma
1973-1975 Member, School of Mathematics, The Institute For Advanced Study, Princeton
1971-1975 Assistant Professor of Mathematics, State University of New York at Albany
1969-1971 Instructor of Mathematics, State University of New York at Albany
Grants
1998-2001, Co-PI with Robert Stevenson, Electronic Field Guide: An Object Oriented WWW Database to Identify Species & Record Ecological Observations, National Science Foundation Grant DBI-9808462
1998-2001 Consortium Investigator. "Low Vision Reading and Typeface Variables", SUNY Research Foundation, in consortium with SUNY College of Optometry, Dean Yager, PI funded by NIH.
1994- Principal Investigator (With George Lukas), Evaluation of Interleaf Software Tools for Internet Distributed Hypertext Publishing, preparation of documents for a public interest document server, funded by Interleaf, Inc. with UMB-CS Software Engineering Research Laboratory.
1993-94 Awarded $10,000 from University NIH Biological Sciences Research Grant for support of human vision and digital typography research
1988-1990 Principal Investigator, NSF Grant IRI 87-15960
1985-1988. Principal Investigator, NSF Grant DCR-85-03154
1976-77. Principal Investigator, NSF Grant MCS76-05859
1975-76. Principal Investigator, NSF Grant MPS75-07619
1973-74. Principal Investigator, NSF Grant P034003-1
1972-73. Principal Investigator, NSF Grant P034003
Related Experience
1989-1996, Consultant, Interleaf, Inc.
1982-1989, Senior Software Engineer, Interleaf Inc. (leave of absence from UMASS 1982-84, half time in both organizations thereafter)
1982 research at IBM Cambridge Scientific Center on text processing software
1981 Member, American Mathematical Society TEX development team and TEX User’s Group Steering Committee.
1981 Consultant to Strategic Information, Inc. Home energy audit software
Publications
COMPUTER SCIENCE PUBLICATIONS
Robert A. Morris, Roger Hersch and Alexander Coimbra, "Legibility of Condensed Perceptually-Tuned Grayscale Fonts", accepted for EP98, the 1998 Conference on Electronic Publishing, to be published in Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1998
E. Blachman, C. Meyer and R. Morris, "The UMB Intelligent ICE Markup Assistant", in Comparing English Worldwide, Sidney Greenbaum, Ed., Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 54-64
"A Constraint-based editor for linguistics scholars’’, with Edward Blachman, and Charles Meyer, to appear, Electronic Publishing—Origination, Dissemination and Design, 6(4), 349-360. (Proceedings of the 1994 Conference on Electronic Publishing, Darmstadt, 1994), John Wiley & Sons.1994
‘‘Can you see whose speech is overlapping’’, with Charles Meyer and Edward Blachman, Visible Language 28(2), 110-133, 1994
Robert A. Morris, ‘‘Fundamentals of Computer Image Processing’’, Microscopic and Spectroscopic Imaging of the Chemical State, Michael D. Morris, editor, Marcel Dekker, New York, 1993, pp. 109-130.
"Towards quantification of the effects of typographic variation on readability", with Karl Berry and Kathryn Hargreave. Digest of Technical Papers, Volume XXIV, SID-93, Seattle, Washington, May 18-20, 1993, Special Session on Digital Typography and Legibility, pp. 64-67. Society for Information Display, 1993
"Classification of digital typefaces using spectral signatures", Pattern Recognition, 25(8), pp. 869-876, 1992
"A markup assistant for linguistic scholars", with Charles Meyer and Ed Blachman, software demonstration and presentation to 13th ICAME Conference, Nijmegan, June 1992
"Measuring how typeface variation and typographic scaling affects readability at small sizes", with Karl Berry, Kathryn Hargreaves, and Dimitrios Liarkopis", Proceedings of the IS&T’s Seventh International Congress on Advances in Non-impact Printing, Portland, OR, October 1991. Society for Imaging Science and Technology
Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Raster Image Processing and Digital Typography, edited with Jacques Andre, Cambridge University Press, 1991
"An extensible, object oriented system for active documents", with Paul M. English, Ethan Jacobson, Kimbo B. Mundy, Stephen D. Pelletier, Thomas A. Polucci and H. David Scarbro, Proceedings of EP90 Conference on Electronic Publishing, Gaithersburg, MD, 1990, published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 263-276
"Rendering Digital Type: A historical and economic view of technology", The Computer Journal, 32(6), 1989, pp. 524-531
"The role of phase in the spectra of type", with Guozhen Duan, Electronic Publishing, 2(1), pp. 47-59, April 1989
"An unorthodox approach to the teaching of undergraduate software engineering", Computing Systems, vol. 1(4), pp. 405-419, Fall 1988
"Image Processing Aspects of Type", invited address, in Proceedings of EP88 Conference on Electronic Publishing, Nice, 1988, published by Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 139-155, 1988
‘‘The UMASS-Boston Simplified Graphics Package’’, 1987 Academic Microcomputer Conference, Indiana University - Purdue University at Indianapolis, 1987. pp. 83–93. Indianapolis, April 20–27, 1987. (Also available as UMASS/Boston Computer Science Technical Report No. 3/86)
UMB-SGP User’s Manual, with Richard E. Hamm, UMASS/Boston Computer Science Technical Report, No. 2/86
‘‘The Interleaf User Interface’’, Protext III, Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Text Processing Systems, October 1986, Boole Press, Dublin, 1987, J.J.H. Miller, ed., pp. 20-29
"Is What You See Enough To Get? A Description of the Interleaf Publishing Software", Proceedings of ProText II, Boole Press, Dublin, 1985, J.J.H. Miller, ed., pp. 56-81
"Page Description Languages", in Short Course on Text Processing, Boole Press, Dublin, 1985, J.J.H. Miller, ed., pp. 56-66
"Workstation Requirements for Electronic Publishing" in Short Course on Text Processing, Boole Press, Dublin, 1985, J.J.H. Miller, ed., pp. 67-85
"Recursion and Side Effects in Pascal", jointly with J. Perchik, Byte, vol. 6 #6 (May 1981), pp. 316-324
"Comparison of Some High Level Programming Languages", Byte, February 1980
"An Overview of TEX", published in the Proceedings of Technical Documentation Workshop II, Graphics Computer Communication Association, 1979
READING AND HUMAN VISION PUBLICATIONS
Kathy Aquilante, Dean Yager, and Robert Morris, Are Low Vision Patients with Central Visual Field Loss More Sensitive to Changes in Luminance When Reading Than Are Age-Matched Normals?, preprint, September 1999.
Kathy Aquilante, Dean Yager, and Robert Morris, "Does RSVP Reading Take Practice To Reach Maximum Reading Rates?", Vision Science and Its Applications, pp. 38-41, Optical Society of America, 1999.
Kathy Aquilante, Dean Yager, and Robert Morris, Luminance Effects on Reading Rate with a video display: Normal and low vision subjects; Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, ARVO 1999.
Kathy Aquilante, Dean Yager, and Robert Morris, Does RSVP reading take practice to reach maximum reading rates? Vision Science and its Applications, Optical Society of America, 1998.
Kathy Aquilante, Dean Yager, and Robert Morris, "Reading Rates for MNREAD and RSVP Text Presentation with a Video Projection System in Patients With Central Field Loss", Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, vol. 39(4), 1998, p. S176 (ARVO 1998, #837-B760)
Dean Yager, Kathy Aquilante, and Robert Morris, Comparison of Reading Rates With RSVP and an Untested Method— ‘FLASHCARD’—in Normally Sighted Subjects", Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Science, vol. 39(4), 1998, p. S177 (ARVO 1998, #841-B764)
Kathy Aquilante, Dean Yager, and Robert Morris, "How big must letters be for patients with central field loss to read RSVP text at their maximum rate?", Vision Science and Its Applications, Santa Fe, NM 1998, annual symposium of the Optical Society of America, pp. 88-91
Contrast Reduction Accounts for Phase Noise, Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology, 1995, Invest. Ophth. and Visual Sci. 36(4), page S463, 1995. ARVO 1995
"Effects of phase noise on a recognition task", poster session, 1994 annual meeting of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology
"Effects of masking on spatial frequency discrimination", with Hugh R. Wilson, presented, annual meeting of the Optical Society of America, 1990
MATHEMATICS PUBLICATIONS
Hopf Algebras and Combinatorics, editor, American Mathematical Society, 1982
A Jacobian Criterion for Smoothness, jointly with Stuart Wang, Journal of Algebra, 69(2), 1981, pp. 483-486
Frobenius Endomorphisms in Umbral Calculus, MIT Studies in Applied Math., 62, 1980, 85-92
Reciprocity Isomorphisms for Separable Field Extensions, Rocky Mountain J. Math., 9, (4), 1979, pp. 707-719
Derivations of Witt Vectors, with Applications to K2 of Truncated Polynomial Rings and Laurent Series, J. Pure and Applied Algebra, 18, 1980, pp 91-96
Ring Theory II, Proceedings of the Second Oklahoma Conference, ed. with B. R. McDonald, Dekker, 1977
Curves on Formal Groups, with B. Pareigis, Trans. A.M.S., 233, 1977, pp. 113-129
Representing Co-Semi-Simple Hopf Algebras, Houston J. Math., 3 No. 1., 1977, pp. 113-129
Formal Groups and Hopf Algebras over Discrete Rings, with B. Pareigis, Trans. A.M.S., 197, 1974, pp. 113-129
Cohomology of Inseparable Field Extensions, Illinois J. Math, 17(4), 1973, pp. 571-578
Formal Groups Over Discrete Rings, with B. Pareigis, Bull. A.M.S., 79(2), 1973, pp. 449-453
The Inflation Restriction Theorem for Amitsur Cohomology, Pac. J. Math. 41(3), 1972, pp. 791-797
On the Brauer Group of Z, Pac. J. Math. 39(3), 1971, pp. 619-630
Reciprocity Isomorphisms of Class Field Theory for Separable Field Extensions, Ph.D. Thesis, Cornell University, 1970
Entry Points to the Fibonnacci Series, Computer generated tables, jointly with D. Lind and L. Shapiro; The Fibonnacci Association, 1965
Professional societies
Association for Computing Machinery
IEEE Computer Society
Recent Invited Addresses
Invited speaker, annual meeting of the Swiss Information Processing Society, October 1993.
French national science ministry, program for lectures by distinguished foreign scientists. Lectures in Paris and Rennes, October 1992
Lectures on document processing at the Computer Science Institute, Peking University, Beijing, May 1992
Address to British Computer Society workshop on document quality March 1990
‘‘Document Exchange’’, NSF-Express workshop on ODA and document interchange, IBM Almaden Research Center, June 1989
‘‘Image Processing Aspects of Type’’, EP88 conference on electronic publishing, Nice, 1988
Service
Reviewer for Oxford University Press of Spikes, Decisions and Actions, an Introduction to Dynamical Systems for Neuroscientists, by Hugh R. Wilson
Member, editorial board, Electronic Publishing, Organization, Dissemination, and Design, scholarly journal published by John Wiley &Son
Software reviewer, IEEE Computer Magazine.
Member, Program Committees, EP97 and RIDT97, international Electronic Publishing conference and conference on Raster Imaging and Digital Typography, St. Malo, 1997
Member, Program Committees, EP94 and RIDT94, international Electronic Publishing conference and conference on Raster Imaging and Digital Typography, Darmstadt, 1994
Member, Program Committee, EP92, international electronic publishing conference, Lausanne, 1992
Chair, Second International Workshop in Raster Imaging and Digital Typography, RIDT-91, jointly sponsored by UMASS/Boston and the IEEE Computer Society, Boston October 1991
Member, Organizing Committee, EP90, international electronic publishing conference, Washington, D.C., October 1990
Director or Co-director, UMASS-Boston Computer Science Lab, 1978-present
Member, Program Committee, ACM Document Processing Conference, Santa Fe, N.M. December 1988
Member, Organizing Committee, EP88, international electronic publishing conference, Nice, April 1988
Member, Organizing Committee, ProText IV international text processing conference, Boston, October 1987
Founding Secretary, TeX Users Group, 1979
Reviewer, Mathematical Reviews Contributed many reviews, including reviews of several major books, 1970-80
Proposal reviewer, National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Division. Have reviewed proposals from scholars at Rutgers, Illinois, Tennessee, Ohio State, 1972-78