Dan Atkins
Professor, School of Information
Executive Director, Alliance for Community Technology
University of Michigan

Daniel E. Atkins earned a B.S. in electrical engineering from Bucknell University in 1965, and an MSEE and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1967 and 1970, respectively.

Dr. Atkins joined the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) as an assistant professor in 1972. He built a research program and taught in the area of high-performance computer architecture. He participated in or led the design and construction of 7 experimental machines and pioneered high-speed arithmetic algorithms now used, for example, in the Intel Pentium processor. In May of 1981, Dr. Atkins was promoted to the rank of full professor and in September of that year, in response to extraordinary opportunities in the College of Engineering, he joined the leadership team of the College as Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies. He encouraged multi-investigator, group/center-scale research activities, and built significant research partnerships with industry. His research in computer architecture shifted from a focus on numeric computation to the architecture of advanced knowledge-work infrastructure. He was the principal architect of a large, distributed, inter-operable computing environment, the Computer Aided Engineering Network (CAEN), which became widely regarded as a model infrastructure for engineering teaching and research. From January 1989 through July 1990, Dr. Atkins served as interim Dean of the College of Engineering.

In 1990, Dr. Atkins created a research and development consortium to realize a prototype of a "collaboratory," a vision around which a large and interdisciplinary group of faculty and administrators have coalesced their interests. The collaboratory vision links people, computer-based tools, electronic information, and facilities to support remote, distributed intellectual teamwork.

Since the mid 1980s, Dr. Atkins has provided research leadership in the use of distributed computing/communication to support distributed forms for team-based knowledge work. He was the principal investigator of the NSF EXPRES project that focused on experimental research to create tools to support remote collaborative multi-media authoring. He served on the NSF panel to define the "Collaboratory" and is currently Project Director of the NSF Upper Atmospheric Research Collaboratory Project which is now continuing with support from the NSF Knowledge and Distributed Intelligence (KDI) initiative. He was Project Director for the NSF/DARPA/NASA University of Michigan Digital Library Project. He led a workshop to help define the future digital library research.

Dr. Atkins became founding Dean of the new School of Information in July 1992, and held that position until September 1998. With major support of the University and the W.K.Kellogg Foundation, Dr. Atkins led the School of Information in providing international leadership to create a graduate research and educational program to produce leaders and change agents in the design, use, and evaluation of new knowledge work environments. The perspective is from a socio-technical, multidisciplinary perspective. Current research projects at the School of Information are intrinsically both collaborative and multidisciplinary. He is also director of the Alliance for Community Technology, a strategic partnership between the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and the University of Michigan to explore the application of information and collaboration technologies to non-profit organizations and under-served communities. Dr. Atkins has chaired numerous doctoral committees, is widely published, and serves as a consultant to industry, foundations, educational institutions, and government.

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