Peter Denning - Curriculum Vitae#

Publication list and CV

(13 books, 459 articles)

Denning's homemade pinball-machine-parts computer won high-school science-fair grand prize 1958. He went on to study computers in electrical engineering:

• PhD, MIT, 1968
  
• MS, MIT, 1965
  
• BEE, Manhattan College 1964

He became professional academic, teaching computing at MIT, Princeton, Purdue, George Mason, and Naval Postgraduate School.

In his 1960s PhD studies at MIT, he discovered principle of locality and invented "working set model for program behavior", which solved serious performance problems of early virtual memory and became the universal reference model for memory management in operating systems. In 1970s he collaborated with Jeffrey Buzen on the development of "operational analysis of queueing network models", which made queueing network models effective for performance evaluation of real computing systems.

In 1980s, he was one of four founder PIs of CSNET, the world's first government supported community network, which grew to 50,000 users and over 200 institutions by 1989. Denning's Purdue team built a version of TCP over commercial packet networks. He was founding director of RIACS at NASA-Ames, one of the world's first computational science institutes.

In 1990s, his Great Principles of Computing project, endorsed by ACM Education Board, laid ground for principles-based first courses and led to the 2015 book of same name. This grew into contributions to education in Computational Thinking in education and 2019 book of same name.

In 2000s, he started Innovation Leadership project, teaching skills for generating technology adoption of in communities, leading to 2010 book "The Innovator's Way" book.

In 2010s, he entered AI field, motivated to eliminate hype and expose the fundamental principles and limitations of AI.

Since 1968, Denning held leadership positions in ACM including President, three board chairs, and three editor-in-chief roles.