Welcome to the home page of

Stephen Wong

A Rogue River (MI) Chinook salmon and I

Lecturer, Rice Computer Science Department

Office: Duncan Hall, 3102

Phone: 713-348-3814
e-mail: swong at rice.edu (replace the "at" with "@")
fax: 713-348-5930

Office hours: Please check my current schedule for official times or contact me to make an appointment.

Click here to see my current schedule

Address: Computer Science Program, MS 132, Rice University, 6100 Main St., Houston, TX 77005-1892

Picture Galleries

Life Story (slightly edited):

Born and raised in Oberlin, Ohio (no kidding).
Swarthmore College, B.A. with Honors, majored in Physics with minors in Physical Chemistry and Digital Electronics, 1981.
Bell Telephone Laboratories (Lucent) (Murray Hill), Senior Technical Assistant, 1981-1982. Worked on linear pulse propagation in absorbing media, exciton diffusion in semiconductors, and 1^S-2^Stransitions in positronium with the not-yet Nobel laureate Steven Chu.
M.I.T., Ph.D. in Physics, 1988. Thesis: "Magnetotransport Studies of the Magnetic Field Induced, Metal-Insulator Transition in Hg_1-xMn_xTe." under Prof. Peter A. Wolff. Howard Hughes Doctoral Fellow .
Hughes Research Laboratories, Member of Technical Staff, 1989-1992. Researched high temperature superconductors and multi-quantum well infrared detector materials.
California Lutheran University, Assistant Professor of Physics, 1992-1996. Taught all levels of physics, plus mathematics and computer science.
Kodak Research Laboratories, Consultant, Scientific Computing Team, 1995-2001. Developed software for chemical kinetics simulation and parameter estimating, and quantativie structure-activity relationship (QSAR) modeling.
Oberlin College, Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics, 1996-1998. Teaching all levels of physics.
Oberlin College, Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science, 1998-1999. Teaching Internet and programming courses.
Oberlin College, Assistant Professor of Computer Science/Computer Science Program Systems Administrator, 1999-2001. Teaching programming courses and administering the program's Alpha mainframe, NT servers and dual-boot NT/Linux PC labs.
Innovatech Consulting Group, Co-Director, 1998-2002. Internet web server management, site authoring, electronic commerce, and training.
Rice University, Lecturer in Computer Science , 2001-present. Teaching all levels computer science classes and laboratories.

Interests:

Professional:

Virtual machine architectures
Software design patterns, especially as they
relate to computer science pedagogy.
Recursive data structures and algorithms
Scientific computing.
Distributed computing using Jini and JavaSpaces technologies
Computer networking and client-server databases.
Object-oriented programming.
Electro-optical processes in semiconductors.
High Temperature superconductors.
Solid solution semiconductor materials.
Quantum heterostructures in semiconductors.
Science and Mathematics education.

Personal:

My children Rachel and Calvin.
Fishing, esp. fly fishing and fly tying.
Keeping native fish in my aquariums .
Camping.
Canoeing, esp. wilderness tripping.
Playing the piano.
Photography.
Playing squash.
Cooking.
Writing poetry

Current Research Projects:

High fidelity, scalable, generalized simulation systems (more info)
Design patterns for self-balancing trees. (More info)
Design patterns for games. (More info)
OOP in Introductory CS (More info)
Design patterns for sorting. (More info )
Design patterns for lazy evaluation of recursive data structures. (More info)
Object-oriented virtual machine architectures. See work towards this by my Oberlin College Honors student, Kyle Lomeli .
Design patterns for recursive data structures and algorithms. (More info )
Web-based database connectivity.
The physics and computer science of unit conversions.
Structure-encoded indexing schemes for recursive data structures.

I have numerous students who are/have done research, private readings and Winter Term projects with me. Please visit their sites and see what they've been doing!

Click here for research and project opportunities with Prof. Wong and other Computer Science Program faculty

Previous Research Projects:

Modulated Trapping Effects in Photovoltaic Transport in Semiconductors (Optoelectronic Modulation Spectroscopy).
Automation of Quantative Structure-Activity Relationships (QSAR) modeling processes.

This semester's classes include:

Comp201: Principles of Object-Oriented Programming I (Syllabus and class information)
Comp415, "Real World Software Development" (Syllabus and class information)

Previous semesters classes include:

Comp100: Introduction to Computing and Information Systems (Syllabus and class information)
Comp202: Principles of Object-Oriented Programming II (Syllabus and class information)
Comp210: Principles of Computing and Programming (Syllabus and class information)
Comp212: Intermediate Programming (Syllabus and class information)
Comp410: Software Construction Methodology (Syllabus and class information)

Classes I taught at Oberlin College :

CS100, "The Internet and Beyond"
CS150, "Principles of Computer Science I"
CS151, "Principles of Computer Science II"
CS235, "Computer Applications Development"
CS275 (lab), "Algorithms, Structures and Abstractions"
Physics 60, "How the World Works": See the Oberlin Alumni Magazine article on this course (including a picture available only on-line)!
Physics 104: Elementary Physics II
Physics 240: Computational Physics
Physics 242: Electronics
Physics 314, "Intermediate Laboratory"

Interesting places:

Java home page	UML resources site	Fractint, a great program for making beautiful fractals
How the World Works	Human spaceflight center	The Exploratorium's ExploraNet