Lecturer III
Computer Science and Engineering
University of Michigan
2649 Beyster
2260 Hayward Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2121
Office: 734-615-2691
Cell: 425-765-9574
nham@umich.edu
Fall 2019 office hours:
Mon/Wed 1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
Tue/Thu 5:00 pm to 6:00 pm
This is my third year at the University of Michigan. Before this, I was at the University of Washington Bothell for four years in the electrical engineering department.
Fall 2019 and Winter 2020, I'll be teaching EECS 280, C++ and Object-Oriented Programming. We typically have around 1000 students in 5 sections taught by 3 or 4 instructors working together, plus a large and incredibly valuable student staff.
Fall only, I will also be teaching EECS 398, System Design of a Search Engine. EECS398 is an experimental course I've created where students work in teams of six to build complete internet search engines from scratch in C++. This will be the third time for the course. Last time, I had 61 students on 10 teams; I'll probably have a similar number this time.
This year, I'll also be serving on our program committee and as our ABET coordinator. Past years, I've also served as an undergraduate advisor.
I have a BS and MS EE from Stanford (1973) and an MBA valedictorian from Boston University (1987). I am a life senior member of the IEEE and a registered professional engineer in Texas and Massachusetts. In 2014, I was inducted as an eminent engineer by the Stanford chapter of Tau Beta Pi.
I have 11 issued patents and my publications have received over 2500 citations. A paper on search engine ranking I co-authored at Microsoft won a 10-year test-of-time award at the 2015 International Conference on Machine Learning.
I have spent my career as a designer, most of that as an entrepreneur. Every design project I can think of that I have ever worked on has always started as a blank sheet of paper. This is what I think I can teach.
I started my career in gate-level chip design at IBM in the 1970s building a reliable serial communications chip, a display processor and various other hardware devices. But most of my work has been in software.
I'm the author of Hamilton C shell, now a little over 250K lines of C. In December 1988, my C shell became the first multithreaded third-party application to ship on a PC. It remains the only multithreaded Unix shell in existence on any OS.
I was also the 9th member of the team at Microsoft that created the Bing search engine. I personally wrote the query language (the compiler) and ranker for our first release, which went live in January 2005. My code, roughly 30K lines of C++ out of a little over 300K in the backend, decided what our users were looking for, searched our index and then ordered the results. This was both the best and the worst job I have ever had.
I fell into teaching by accident in 2013. I thought I was retired and volunteering to act as a free advisor to seniors in electrical engineering on their Capstone projects at the University of Washington Bothell. I was surprised to find it paid and even more so, that they would pay me. Without a PhD, it was never on my radar that I would someday be teaching at a university. For the next four years, I taught digital design and Verilog, entrepreneurship, circuits and transistors and advised perhaps a dozen Capstone teams. I love teaching and feel honored and delighted every day that I get to do this. I love working with my students. It makes me feel young.
The move to Michigan also began quite by accident when I went offline at Wikipedia to discuss an article on flip-flops that another editor and I had been working on. Most people use pseudonyms on Wikipedia but when we went offline and introduced each other, it was Mark Brehob, who insisted I should come to Michigan. I wasn't looking forward to moving but decided that my advice to students applied to me: If you care about your career, you need to go where the opportunity is. University of Michigan has the #7 undergraduate computer engineering program in the country, so after a visit and teaching demo and when it finally came down to an offer, it was clearly an offer I couldn't refuse. I mothballed my house in Redmond, rented a townhouse here without ever seeing it, shipped only what I needed and drove here with my cat in the back seat of my aging BMW.
My impression so far: This is super cool. My students are smart and interesting, I really like my colleagues, who also are very smart and interesting, and I'm really enjoying the way we do things as teams here. The move was definitely worth it.
I'm an Amateur Extra, callsign KD1UJ, though I confess I haven't been on the air in years. I've been an avid bicyclist all my life. I'm liberal and I care deeply about civil rights, especially for LGBT.
