Rate My Professor Douglas Jones

Douglas W. Jones is an Associate Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Iowa, where he began his academic career as an Assistant Professor in 1980, advanced to Associate Professor in 1988, and retired in 2021. Earlier, he served as a research assistant in the University of Illinois Medical Computing Laboratory from 1973 to 1980, a resident visitor at Bell Telephone Laboratories Acoustics Research Department from 1973 to 1974, and held other technical positions. Jones earned his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1980, an MS in Computer Science from the same university in 1976, and a BS in Physics from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1973. His research specializations and academic interests include electronic voting systems, security, and transparency; computer organization, operating systems, and compiler construction; priority queues, data compression, and discrete-event simulation; ternary logic and arithmetic; stepping motor control and small electric motors; and historical computing, exemplified by his documentation of the University of Iowa's DEC PDP-8 restoration project.

Jones has produced key publications such as the book Broken Ballots: Will Your Vote Count? co-authored with Barbara Simons (Center for the Study of Language and Information, 2012); chapters including 'On Optical Mark-Sense Scanning' in Towards Trustworthy Elections (Springer, 2010) and 'Evaluation of Voting Technologies' in Secure Electronic Voting (Kluwer, 2002); and articles like 'Douglas Jones on Today's Voting Machines' (IEEE Computer, 2016), 'Internet Voting in the U.S.' (Communications of the ACM, 2012), 'Auditing Elections' (Communications of the ACM, 2004), 'Application of Splay Trees to Data Compression' (Communications of the ACM, 1988), and 'Concurrent Operations on Priority Queues' (Communications of the ACM, 1989). His contributions extend to non-refereed works and web resources on voting testing and motor control. Awards include the Election Verification Network Award (2015), University of Iowa Office of Services for the Handicapped Certificate of Recognition (1980), Tau Beta Pi, and Phi Kappa Phi. Jones held significant roles such as Chair of the Liberal Arts and Sciences Faculty Assembly (2002–2003), Associate Chairman of the Computer Science Department (1989–1990), Chair of the Undergraduate Committee (1999–2003), and member of various departmental, college, and university committees including the Advanced Computing Facilities Committee (1990–1996). He has refereed for journals like Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Computers, and ACM Transactions, reviewed NSF grant proposals, and provided expert testimony on voting systems.