Current Affiliation
 Previous Affiliations
       Patrick Wagstrom's Academic Home PageWelcome to my home page and aggregator for academic information related to me. This is that place if you're looking for information on my research on software engineering, open source software development, and social network analysis. If you're looking for information on technology policy, MythTV and HDTV, or my random rants about using Linux as a desktop operating system, you probably want to see my personal home page, or my weblog. If you're wondering about where I've worked in the past and business type stuff, you should probably check out my LinkedIn profile. If you're a friend, I finally gave in and created a Facebook profile.Primary Academic InterestsI'm interested in the complex interactions required to make distributed software development and engineering processes work. There isn't any magical pixie dust that allows Open Source communities to create high quality software, rather its a blend of norms and processes that allow developers to collaborate effectively with minimal amounts of communication. When firms and individuals start to enter these communities, dramatic shifts in the organization of the community occur, sometimes with disastrous consequences -- so we must learn more about these interactions. Particularly, I take a hierarchical view to distributed Open Source communities, looking at the foundations, firms, and individuals in each community and how they collaborate. As I've researched these topics more and more, I've realized that many of these same challenges are inherent in any distributed team, so I also seek to bridge the knowledge about the Open Source world to the other realms.Academic BackgroundLike many students at Carnegie Mellon, I have a fairly interdisciplinary background. When I arrived at Carnegie Mellon, I joined the Department of Engineering and Public Policy in the College of Engineering. Later, when the new program in Computation, Organizations, and Society was created within the Institute for Software Research in the School of Computer Science, I joined that program, where I now pursue a joint Ph.D. between the two programs. I am currently affiliated with two different research groups at Carnegie Mellon, the Center for the Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems and the Carnegie Mellon Software Industry Center. Trust me, it all works out and makes me a well rounded researcher. It also gives me a lot of flair to put on my home page and business cards.Before arriving at Carnegie Mellon, I obtained a master's degree in computer science from Illinois Institute of Technology. I also have three undergraduate degrees, in computer science, computer engineering, and electrical engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology. PublicationsPlease see the publications section of my CV for a list of my publications.Research CollaboratorsOver the course of my academic career I've had the privilege of collaborating with lots of extremely talented and gifted individuals. Here's a small selection of great folks I've worked with and a little blurb of what I'm doing or did with them. If you're someone I've worked with and I've forgotten you, please let me know and I'll try to remedy the situation.Current Collaborators
Past Collaborators
Teaching and Research Supervision
While at Illinois Institute of Technology I served for three years as a teaching assistant - working as a lab TA, then lab manager, and finally working with Dr. Xian-He Sun to implement a graduate level course on pervasive computing. In addition, I proposed and managed an Interprofessional Project on applications of pervasive computing. This project had me working and managing 12 of the brightest undergraduates on an innovative project to utilize wireless technology in the classroom, at a time when wireless networks were far from common. This project continued as an in-depth research project over the summer where I supervised three undergraduates on their first research experience: Tyler Butler (now at Microsoft), Andrei Makhanov (on leave from the Ph.D. program in electrical engineering at Northwestern to work at Powerset), and Brent Lagesse (received a Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Arlington, now at Oak Ridge National Laboratory). |