Amittai F. Aviram

Boston, Massachusetts, USA

amittai dot aviram at gmail dot com

I am an Associate Professor of the Practice of Computer Science at Boston College, where I teach courses in systems and other areas of computing, including compilers and databases. I am currently involved in a new research project to build a computer simulation model of an economic system based on democratically worker-managed enterprises, decentralized and democratic planning, and the use of labor time, rather than money, as the unit of exchange. This work is related to the projects of the Initiative Demokratische Arbeitszeitrechnung (IDA) and of the International Network for Democratic Economic Planning (INDEP).

In 2012, I finished my second PhD, in Computer Science, at Yale University, In my studies, I specialized in systems and contributed to research on deterministic parallel computing under Professor Bryan Ford. Before Yale, I studied computer science at Columbia University's School of General Studies. And, before that, until 2004, I was a professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina.

The Prose section has links to a few small CS-related projects, including my B-plus tree implementations in C and in C++ and my Huffman Code Implementation in C++. In addition, there are links to several of my academic essays on poetry and philosophy, which represent what was my main intellectual project while I was a literature professor: to define the difference between the fictive and communicative functions of human language and the consequences of that distinction to education and society.

Also posted are many of my poems, a few of which have appeared elsewhere in major print and online venues.