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Jaime Spacco

Associate Professor of Computer Science

Jaime Spacco

Meet Professor Spacco

Years at Knox: 2010 to present

"I am interested in collecting and analyzing data to better understand how people build good software, from the process and techniques used to build large systems down to the short but often intense experiences novices have while learning to program."

Education

Ph.D., 2006, University of Maryland.
M.S., 2002, University of Maryland.
B.A., 1998, Haverford College.

Selected Professional Accomplishments


Honors/Grants

  • Knox Faculty Research / Creative Work Grant: KnoxCraft 2.0 - 2016-2017.
  • Knox Mellon Faculty Career Enhancement Grant - Immersion Term Development: Start-Up Term, with John Dooley and John Spittell - $5000.
  • AAC&U TIDES Program, with Andrew Civettini: Pedagogy Matters: TIDES at Knox College, May 2014 - $34,278.
  • Association for Computer Machinery Grant from the SIGCSE Board and the Special Projects Grant Committee, 2012.
  • University of Maryland Innovation in Teaching with Technology (UMITT) Award, 2006.


Publications

"Lightweight techniques for tracking unique program statements," with Chadd Williams, in Proceedings of the Ninth International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, Edmonton, AB, 2009.

"Dcer: sharing empirical computer science education data," Kate, S., Brad, R., Jan, E. M., Vicki, A., Stephen, E., Sally, F., Kat, G., Mark, H., Brian, H., Stephen, L., Robert, M., Briana, M., Jaime, S., & Lynda, T., in ICER '08: Proceedings of the Fourth International Computing Education Research Workshop, 2008.

"Szz revisited: Verifying when changes induce xes," with Chad Williams, in DEFECTS '08: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Software Defects, Seattle, WA, 2008.

"Branching and merging in the repository," with Chad Williams, in MSR '08: Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories, Leipzig, Germany, 2008.

"Inferring use cases from unit testing," Jaime, S., Titus, W., & Tom, P, in AAAI Workshop on Educational Data Mining, New York, NY, 2006.

"Experiences with marmoset," Jaime, S., David, H., William, P., Fawzi, E., Je rey, K. H., & Nelson, P. P., in 11th Annual SIGCSE/SIGCUE Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education, Universita di Bologna, Bologna, Italy, 2006.

"Tracking defect warnings across versions," Jaime, S., David, H., William, P., in Proceedings of the Mining Software Repositories Workshop, Shanghai, China, 2006.

"Evaluating and tuning a static analysis to nd null pointer bugs," David, H., Jaime, S., & Bill, P., in ACM SIGPLAN/SIGSOFT Workshop on Program Analysis for Software Tools and Engineering, ed. Michael D. Ernst and Thomas Jensen, Lisbon, Portugal, 2005.

"Software repository mining with Marmoset: An automated programming project snapshot and testing system," Jaime, S., Jaymie, S., David, H., & William, P., in Proceedings of the Mining Software Repositories Workshop, St. Louis, Missouri, 2005.

"Transparent proxies for java futures," Polyvios, P., Jaime, S., & Michael, H, in OOPSLA '04: Proceedings of the 19th annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-oriented programming, systems, languages, and applications, New York, NY, 2004.

"Rubis revisited: why j2ee benchmarking is hard," with William Pugh, in Companion to the 19th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, ed. John M. Vlissides and Douglas C. Schmidt, Vancouver, BC, 2004.

"An eclipse-based course project snapshot and submission system," Jaime, S., David, H., & William, P., in 3rd Eclipse Technology Exchange Workshop (eTX), Vancouver, BC, 2004.

"Evaluating the impact of programming language features on the performance of parallel applications on cluster architectures," Konstantin, B., Jun, H., Mary, J., Garima, K., Jan, P., William, P., P. Sadayappan, Jaime, S., & Chau-Wen, T., in LCPC '03: Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, 16th International Conference, ed. Lawrence Rauchwerger, vol. 2958 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer), 194-208, 2003.

"Mpjava: High-performance message passing in java using java.nio," with William Pugh, in LCPC '03: Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing, 16th International Conference, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (Springer), ed. Lawrence Rauchwerger, 323-339, 2003.

"Atomic instructions in java," David H., William P., & Jaime, S., in ECOOP '02: Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (Springer-Verlag), 133-154, London, UK, 2002.

Presentations

With David Hovemeyer, Arto Hellas, & Andrew Petersen. 2016. "Control-Flow-Only Abstract Syntax Trees for Analyzing Students' Programming Progress," In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research, ACM, New York, NY, (2016): 63-72.

Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) March 2 - 5, 2016 and March 8 - 11, 2017.

"Marmoset: An automated snapshot, submission and testing system." William, P., David, H., & Jaime, S. Poster presented at SigCSE Poster Session, St. Louis, Missouri, 2005.

"RUBiS Revisited: Why J2EE Benchmarking is Hard." Poster presented at the OOPSLA Poster Session, Vancouver, BC, Canada, 2004.

"Using Java.nio for High-Performance Message Passing." With William Pugh. Poster presented at the Java-Grande Poster Session, Seattle, Washington, 2002.

Campus & Community Involvement

  • Curriculum contributor, University of Kabul, Afghanistan.
  • Teacher, High School Seminar Program, 2008.
  • Member, Executive Council of CS Graduate Students, 1999-2004.
  • Organizer and Volunteer, SCORE Study Groups.
  • President, Executive Council, 2002-2003. 
  • Department Representative, Graduate Student Government, 2002-2003.
  • Graduate Representative, Education Committee, 2002-2003.

what students say

  • Jaime has a way of interacting in the classroom that makes whatever he's talking about fun and approachable by everyone. Outside of class, his door is always open; he is always ready for a meeting, many of which will turn into multi-hour talks about computer science in the real world. His classes are the ones I make sure not to miss because I know I'll always learn more than I expected and walk away with a smile on my face.

    Cody Sehl

    Computer Science Major and Art Minor

  • Jaime Spacco is the kind of professor who truly loves what he teaches and --most importantly-- clearly loves and knows how to teach it. His quirky sense of humor makes him approachable to both the novice student just learning Java and the experienced programmer working out bugs in a PHP-based project. His dedication to his students makes him a reliable resource for help with those more obscure bugs and to those still getting a hold of the basics. But Computer Science is not all that Professor Spacco is, making it is easy to expect any meeting with him to bounce off the walls of liberal arts. Professor Spacco genuinely wants students to succeed.

    Jean-Christophe Weinberg

    Computer Science Major and History Minor

  • Jaime's excitement is infectious; he's a fantastic evangelist for CS. Jaime's also great about not losing sight of the big picture. While students spend plenty of time in his classes coding, we also step back to explore, for example, the public policy implications of information management and intellectual property. The heavy emphasis on projects in his classes means students get to implement and work with the ideas we're learning about and tackle real life problems with computer science magic in lab.

    Anna Novikova

    Political Science Major and Computer Science Minor