Brian R. Toone
Assistant Professor
Howard College of Arts and Sciences
Mathematics and Computer Science
320 Russell Hall
brtoone@samford.edu
205-726-2960

Hoover, Ala. native Brian Toone received his BS degree in Computer Engineering from Clemson University, and his MS and PhD degrees in Computer Science from the University of California. He has worked as a Software Consultant, a Software Developer for Mercy Ships International, and as an Instructor/Teaching Assistant while completing his doctorate.

The opportunity to teach in a small school setting in a vibrant and growing computer science program brought Toone to Samford, and he especially enjoys one-on-one interaction with students who are eager to learn about computer science.

Toone's research interests include web engineering, software engineering, trust and security, programming languages, database applications and theory, mediation, the semantic web, domain-specific languages and parallel processing.

Outside the classroom, Toon is a competitive cyclist, and writes a blog about his passion for the sport ( http://toonecycling.wordpress.com). He has been a member of USA Cycling since 1993, and placed in recent state and national championships.

Favorite quote/verse: "Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize." 1 Corinthians 9:24

Degrees and Certifications

  • BS, Clemson University
  • MS, University of California-Davis
  • PhD, University of California-Davis

Publications

  • William Skinner (Birmingham-Southern College) and Brian Toone. A framework for migrating web application functionality using Ajax. 19th Annual Argonne Symposium For Undergraduates in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, 2008
  • Michael Johnston (Birmingham-Southern College) and Brian Toone. Accessible visualization of global statistics. 19th Annual Argonne Symposium For Undergraduates in Science, Engineering, and Mathematics, 2008
  • Brian Toone. Trust-enhanced mediation for distributed information systems, Dissertation. UMI Microform Publishers, 2005.
  • Premkumar T. Devanbu, Michael Gertz, and Brian Toone. "Static type-inference for trust in distributed information systems." Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Cooperative Information Systems (COOPIS), 2003. (Acceptance rate: 23%)
  • Brian Toone, Michael Gertz, Premkumar T. Devanbu. "Trust mediation for distributed information systems." Proceedings of the 18th International Information Security Conference: Security and Privacy in the Age of Uncertainty, 2003. (Acceptance rate: 27%)
  • Brian Toone, Manoj Franklin. "Control flow prediction with unbalanced tree-like subgraphs" Proceedings of the 5th Int'l Conf. on High Performance Computing, IEEE, 1998. (Acceptance rate: 18%)

Presentations

  • Brian Toone. Investigating the impact of Ajax on server load in a web 2.0 application. Presentation to the ACM Mid-Southeast Chapter Fall Conference, 2008. (Refereed)
  • Brian Toone. MySQL spatial indexing for GIS data in a web 2.0 internet application, Presentation to the Alabama Academy of Science, 2007.
  • Brian Toone. Designing a professor's blog. Presentation to the ACM Mid-Southeast Chapter Fall Conference, 2006. (Refereed)
  • Laurel Matherly and Brian Toone. A genetic algorithm approach to course scheduling optimization. Presentation to the ACM Mid-Southeast Chapter Fall Conference, 2006. (Refereed)
  • Brian Toone. A probabilistic approach to modeling trustworthiness in mediated query systems. Invited talk given to the Alabama Chapter of the IEEE Computer Society, UAB, 2005. (Invited talk)
  • Brian Toone. "Trust models for distributed information systems." University of California, Davis Security Lab, 2003.
  • Brian Toone. "Trust mediation for enhanced information security." UC Davis Student Workshop on Computing, 2002. (Refereed)
  • Eric Wohlstadter, Brian Toone, Premkumar T. Devanbu. "A framework for flexible evolution in distributed heterogeneous systems" Proceedings of the International Workshop on Principles of Software Evolution, ACM Press, 2002. (Refereed)

Research

  • My current research topic of interest is web engineering. I am interested in studying new ways of applying the concepts of software engineering to the web application development and optimization for performance and security. I also have an interest in parallel computation and studying ways to bring the power of parallel computation to web applications. I am currently in the process of building a virtual supercomputer for use across campus. The virtual supercomputer is in reality a non-dedicated cluster of computers networked together to donate idle processing cycles to tasks scheduled to run on the virtual supercomputer. Initially, the computers used in the cluster will consist of department computers located in one of our classrooms. The goal is to expand the project to include computers in labs all across campus.

Involvement

  • ACM (Association for Computing Machinery)
  • IEEE (Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers)