William B. Frakes

Associate Professor, Computer Science Department,

Virginia Tech

William B. Frakes received the B.L.S. degree in Liberal Studies in 1978 from the University of Louisville, the M.S. in Library Science in 1979 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and M.S. in Statistics, Measurement and Evaluation and the Ph.D. in Information Transfer in 1982 from Syracuse University. He is currently a tenured associate professor in the Computer Science Department at Virginia Tech. His current research focuses on software reuse and domain engineering, empirical research methods, quality techniques, and information retrieval.

Previously he was the Manager of Software Reuse Research at the Software Productivity Consortium, a consortium of 14 large U.S. aerospace companies, where he carried out research on reuse libraries, reuse metrics, and domain engineering. Before that he was Supervisor of the Intelligent Systems Research Group at Bell Labs, where he was also made a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff for his work on information systems design and development, software engineering methodology, and intelligent systems. While at Bell Labs, Dr. Frakes taught courses on software engineering and intelligent systems in the Computer Science Departments at Rutgers University and Columbia University.

Dr. Frakes' principal research interests are in the areas of software engineering and information retrieval, particularly in software reuse and domain engineering, software engineering research methods, and software quality. He is best known for his work on information retrieval algorithms, his experimental work on software reuse libraries, software reuse metrics and models, and as co-developer of DARE, a method and tool for domain analysis. He is an associate editor of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, has guest edited special issue of IEEE Software, Communications of the ACM, and the Annals of Software Engineering, and was editor of ACM SIGIR Forum from 1987-1993. He also edits ReNews, a website on software reuse and domain analysis.