Rate My Professor Laurie King

Laurie Smith King is a Professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at the College of the Holy Cross. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in August 1992, with a dissertation titled Code Generation Using a Backtracking LR Parser under advisor R.E. Noonan. She also earned an M.S. in Computer Science from the College of William and Mary in June 1983, a B.A. in Art from Virginia Tech in June 1980, and a Collegiate Professional Teaching Certificate in art and mathematics. Her research specializations include programming languages and hardware-software co-design. She has undertaken several full-time research leaves as a Visiting Scientist at Professor Miriam Leeser's Reconfigurable and GPU Computing Laboratory at Northeastern University. Areas of expertise encompass hardware/software co-design, programming languages, and ethics. She has been involved with computing education concerns for decades.

Key publications in hardware-software co-design include Kernel Specialization Provides Adaptable GPU Code for Particle Image Velocimetry, published in IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (2015, with Nicholas Moore and Miriam Leeser); Kernel Specialization for Improved Adaptability and Performance on Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), presented at the 27th IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (2013); VForce: An Environment for Portable Applications on High Performance Systems with Accelerators, in Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing (2012); and Adaptable Two-Dimension Sliding Windows on NVIDIA GPUs with Runtime Compilation, which received the Best Paper award on the use of GPUs for Scientific Computing at the Symposium on Application Accelerators in High Performance Computing (2011). Smith King served as Co-Editor-in-Chief of ACM Inroads from 2016 to 2019 with Professor Renée McCauley Bailey of Hamilton College. She has contributed to multiple Program Committees for the ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium, serving as Program co-Chair, Conference co-Chair, and most recently site-selection Chair. She holds lifetime memberships in ACM, SIGCSE, and SIGCAS.