Faculty Record

The category of the professor in the academic roster, the number of its office, its fields of interest, the telephone extension is indicated [ Tel. (787)832-4040 or (787)834-7620 for CID], email, and page of the Web.

Name: Thomas Noack
Title: Professor
Field of interest: Networks and Operating Systems, including Security Aspects
Office: S-405
Extension: 3652
Email: noack@ece.uprm.edu
Bio: I was born in Des Moines, Iowa during a record cold spell that might have been a vestige of the last ice age. Somewhat later I received the standard three degrees, all in electrical engineering, from Iowa State University. During graduate school I taught there, except for two years as a communications officer with the U. S. Navy in Japan, and several summers with what is now Rockwell International. After the Ph. D., I worked for Rockwell for two years full-time and then several summers, doing analyses of guidance and navigation systems. I came to UPRM in 1982; initially I taught control systems and communications, and then moved into software, which has really been a major interest all along, although I finished graduate school before formal computer science programs were offered. My primary research interests are in operating systems, distributed systems, and operating system and network security. My present teaching interests are in this area also; currently I am teaching operating systems and a new cryptography elective course; I also developed and taught an elective on system administration and cryptography, and have taught most of the courses in the ICOM software sequence. From 1987 to 2001 I directed the Department’s Unix (now Linux) laboratory. During this time I wrote proposals that resulted in the grant of two generations of equipment for this laboratory, one from AT&T, and one from Hewlett-Packard. I was one of the principal investigators for the first two NSF-CISE Infrastructure enhancement grants. More recently I participated in a Technological Corridor project sponsored jointly by the University and Hewlett-Packard. For ten years, I taught undergraduate and graduate control and systems courses (and some computer systems) at the University of Missouri-Rolla, and did research for NASA on synchronization and detection for satellite telemetry. Then came five years with Hewlett-Packard in Colorado, defining I/O architecture and writing system software for the predecessors of the HP300 workstations, and also instrument software. During this time I was an elected city council member (asambleista) in Loveland, Colorado and also taught flying part-time. During the summers of 1968 and 1988 I worked for AT&T. I was originally licensed as an engineer in Missouri in 1971 and now hold licenses in Puerto Rico and Colorado. I am a member of ACM and a senior member of IEEE.