Faculty

Alan Borning is Professor Emeritus in the Paul G Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington, where he was a faculty member from 1980 to 2016. He was also an adjunct professor in the Information School, and a member of the Interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in Urban Design and Planning.

For the first half of his time at UW, Borning’s research was primarily in constraint-based languages and systems. During this period he was also a founding member of Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, served on the board of directors for four years, and wrote and spoke on topics around computers and nuclear war (see for example Computer System Reliability and Nuclear War from CACM in February 1987).

Later, Borning turned from programming languages to various research topics generally in the area of human computer interaction. This included work on OneBusAway, a set of tools to make public transportation more accessible, easier, and more fun to use (including work on tools for blind and low vision riders such as StopInfo); on systems to support civic engagement and deliberation; on using and evolving value sensitive design, and on UrbanSim, a modeling system for simulating the development of urban areas over periods of 20-30 years to inform public decision-making about major transportation and land use decisions and their environmental impacts. In the last few years he again did some work on constraint-based languages and systems with funding from Viewpoints Research Institute.

Borning is not yet totally serious about retirement — among other projects, he is on the board of directors of the Open Transit Software Foundation, a nonprofit organization that is now the home for OneBusAway. The programming language research is currently on hold (the funding dried up), but it would be nice to get back to it at some point.

Sabbatical visits included Xerox EuroPARC in Cambridge, England (1989-1990); Monash University and University of Melbourne in Australia (1997); University of Hamburg in Germany (2003); Ashesi University College in Accra, Ghana (2004); and Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany (2010-2011). He subsequently continued to work with the Software Architecture Group at Hasso Plattner Institute on the constraint language projects.

Borning earned his B.A. in Mathematics from Reed College (1971), and a M.Sc. (1974) and Ph.D. (1979) in Computer Science from Stanford University. He is the recipient of a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award (1997) and a Fellow of the Association Computing Machinery (2001).