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Dan McClary
Computer science doctoral candidate
Dan McClary took an unconventional route to his computer science studies. He was raised in Concho, Ariz., a town that currently has a population of 1,200. To illustrate, Dan explained, “For the first five or six years of my life, my family had a party line.” Dan began his academic career at ASU as a creative writing major with a concentration in poetry. Now working towards a Ph.D. in computer science, Dan believes, “You bring the brunt of all your experiences and interests to bear on whatever problem that you’re solving.”
The change in career direction has worked out well for Dan. “To be a computer scientist no longer means living solely within discrete mathematics, formal language theory and all the other touchstones of the field. Instead, it means that we can take these monstrously powerful fundamentals, these tools of invention, and apply them to whatever domain our creativity wishes.” Dan’s perspective combines his enjoyment of cultural anthropology with his technological savvy. Discussing the immensely popular Facebook and MySpace Web sites, he noted, “Everyone’s becoming more and more the star of their own lives. Does that cheapen content?”
The computer science program at ASU has helped Dan apply his talents to various endeavors. Currently, he’s a research assistant for the Mobile Ad Hoc Research (MARS) lab. “Experimental design, and this comes from the statistician in me, is a huge passion for me. How and where we collect data, for anything, is both incredibly important and notoriously overlooked,” Dan said. “Poor experimental design, in part, is what often relegates statistics to a position underneath ‘damned dirty lies.’ What's interesting and exciting to me, though, is that there are all manner of designs we can come up with for different kinds of studies.”
As a master’s student, his work was a collaborative venture with Boeing. The project that he and ASU faculty Yann-Hang Lee and James Collofello worked on included an investigation into using Real-Time Specification for Java as a framework for replacing certain current technologies. “We held meetings between Boeing staff and our group at ASU both on-campus and at Boeing's Mesa facility,” Dan said. “The last year or so of the project I maintained an office at Boeing and was essentially a member of their development team.”
The volunteer work that Dan does has contributed greatly to his dynamic, multi-faceted experience. On campus, he has worked with CEDAR (Center for Engineering Diversity & Retention) and ASU’s chapter of Engineers Without Borders. Currently, he’s devoting his time to his micro-newspaper concept. He recently created “The Vision,” which is a newspaper for Liberian refugees living in Ghana. “I ended up building them a small Web-based ‘newsroom’ that they could work from via any computer connected to the Internet.” www.thevisiononline.net.
“When I come right down to it, the most enjoyable thing about my program is that we've reached an age in which our discipline touches most others,” Dan said. “So, yes, the most enjoyable thing about the computer science program is that it is, in fact, a ticket to all the things a person may ever wish to consider.”