Donald Acton

Professor Emeritus

acton@cs.ubc.ca

Office

ICCS

231

Office Phone #

604-822-1920

Academic Information

B.Sc., University of British Columbia (1982); Member of Technical Staff, Glenayre Electronics, (1982-1983); M.Sc., University of British Columbia (1985); Member of Technical Staff, Microtel Pacific Research, (1985-1987); Ph.D., University of British Columbia (1994); Sessional Lecturer (1994-1995, 2000, 2002) Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia; Founder NSG, Network Software Group, Inc., (1994-1996); Senior Software Architect, Open Text Corporation, (1996-2001).

Selected Publications

Donald Acton, Terry Coatta, Peter Phillips, and Mike Sample, "A Framework for building Fine-Grained CORBA Objects." Proceedings of the 2nd International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop, November 1998.

David Finkelstein, Donald Acton, Terry Coatta, Norman C. Hutchinson, Gerald W. Neufeld, "Object Properties in the Raven System." Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Distributed Systems, June 1994.

Donald Acton, and Gerald Neufeld, "Class and User Based Parrallelism in Raven." Proceedings Seventh International Parallel Processing Symposium, April 1993

Research Areas

computer science education

Interests

The proliferation of faster and cheaper computers combined with wide spread network availability presents some interesting challenges and opportunities in the distributed computing area. For example, what system support is needed to simplify the development of scalable distributed applications or to deal with communication or device failures between parts of a distributed system? What needs to be done when a wireless device enters or leaves an area of coverage? What should devices do when they are in coverage areas that overlap. or how is a roaming device contacted? These are just some of the areas that I have been working on and following with great interest over the last while. In particular, much of my work has focused on designing and building system infrastructure to support the development and deployment of reliable and scalable distributed applications.