2001 CRA Undergraduate Award Runner-up

Russell Cox (Runner-Up) is a fourth-year student majoring in computer science at Harvard University. He expects to receive both Bachelor's and Master's degrees in June 2001.

Russell is interested in the use of file system abstractions to simplify programs and the interfaces between them. He has worked at Bell Labs for four summers. His accomplishments there include creating the first demonstrations of what is now AT&T's "instant answers" service. He has also worked on several aspects of the Plan 9 operating system, including graphics subsystems, terminal emulators, and installation software. His senior thesis is exploring ways to improve the performance of the Plan 9 graphics subsystem. At Harvard he has worked on the implementation of concurrent languages and systems, and he has helped to revise a programming languages textbook.

Russell has been a teaching fellow for introduction to theory of computing (three times) and survey of programming languages (once). For the past two years he has also been a coach for the US Computing Olympiad for high-school students.