About Me

In addition to being actively involved in the design, development and maintenance of various community "dot-org" websites, I work with family and friends on home construction projects. My plumbing skills are getting rusty these days, but I still do a lot of carpentry-based work. My favorite is organizing almost any space, from garage to office.

My formal work experience is varied but focuses primarily on practical applications -- getting the product out the door -- even when the work is research-oriented. I have been Chief Technology Strategist at Emory University's Libraries (2008--2011), which comprises more than a dozen research facilities at the Atlanta campus, as well as libraries at Oxford College and Emory's teaching hospitals. An interview with me about my role, titled Joan Smith: Riding the Technology Wave", appeared in Key Words in 2009.

I have also served as an adjunct faculty member with Emory's Math & CS department (see department website) and the Center for Comprehensive Informatics. The Courses link gives additional details on some of my courses and lectures. While at Emory, I introduced a new graduate-level computer science course, Software Engineering which subsequently became a required course for several graduate degree programs.

As Principal Investigator on various grants, I have initiated and/or concluded a variety of research projects for The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Library of Congress, among others.

In 2008, I received a PhD in computer science at Old Dominion University, where I was a Graduate Research Assistant from 2004 to 2008. I currently hold an appointment as adjunct Assistant Professor of Computer Science at ODU. My advisor, Dr. Michael Nelson, has been awarded numerous grants, including an NSF Career Award.

During my time at ODU, I was also the main system administrator for several of our research computers (mostly Red-Hat/Fedora Core and Debian boxes), and webmaster for the modoai.org site, among many others. Thanks to support from my advisor and other professors, I was named the eighth recipient of the CLIR Zipf Fellowship, and in January 2006 attended the first Google Workshop for Women Engineers. My dissertation research focused on web architecture, particularly the accessibility of digital content and the preservation of web resources. I passed the Candidacy exam in 2006, and successfully defended my dissertation on 12 June 2008: "Integrating Preservation Functions into the Web Server." The department was kind enough to name me outstanding research assistant in May, 2008.

Prior to that, I spent over 15 years working at various roles in software engineering and management. I also taught a variety of computer classes at a small private tech school, and for a time designed and developed computer-based training modules for adult education centers.

I have lived, worked and studied in many countries around the world, including Belgium, Panama, Korea, and in many states in the good old USA. My educational background includes degrees in philosophy (U of Leuven, Belgium); chemistry, natural science (SUNY), and Computer Education (Hampton U).

As a software professional, my experience lies primarily in the design and development of information systems, and software engineering management. I was a key developer of an Apache 2 module, MODOAI which was released as open source in 2008.

Many years ago, in the early days of computer-based training, I wrote software for Army Education Center courses on Control Data Corporation mainframes which had one of the first touch-screen interfaces for end-users. My enthusiasm for computing in general, and networking in particular, led me to install a sophisticated smart home system in my own previous residence, with a master scheduler (to control lights, for example) and 64 wired cat-5 ports. The protocol is showing its age, though, and I had just decided to transition to the newer Insteon system when I took the position in Atlanta. So far, I've been kept too busy to install more than a few modules in the new house. It's a lot harder to re-wire an existing house than to build it in from scratch. Not everything is suitable for wireless implementations -- yet!