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Kristy Gardner
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science Department
Amherst College
Amherst, MA 01002
Email: kgardner@amherst.edu
Office: C215 Science Center
Phone: 413-542-5428
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Teaching
COSC-111: Introduction to Computer Science I (Fall 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2020, Spring 2023)
COSC-121: Thinking Like a Computer Scientist (Spring 2022)
COSC-211: Data Structures (Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2021, Fall 2022, Spring 2024)
COSC-223: Probability and Computing (Spring 2019, Spring 2021)
COSC-311: Algorithms (Fall 2017, Fall 2018, Fall 2019, Fall 2020, Fall 2023)
COSC-450: Analytical Performance Modeling (Fall 2019)
Slides on TA responsibilities (from 2/1/18 TA training session)
Research
My research focuses on performance modeling: developing mathematical solutions that predict system performance and inform system design. While my work is largely theoretical, I draw my research topics from the problems that arise in practice in computer systems. One common performance metric is latency---the time from when a job arrives to the system until it completes service---and providing low latency is a key goal of most systems. To do this, we need to answer questions such as "how many servers does our system need?", "how should we dispatch jobs to servers?", and "in what order should we schedule jobs to run?" My work involves designing dispatching and scheduling policies and mathematically analyzing these policies to predict their performance. One of my particular interests is in developing theoretical models of computer systems that accurately capture important features of real systems without sacrificing analytical tractability.
My publications
Slides from INFORMS APS 2019 tutorial on "Product (Re)forms" (with Rhonda Righter):
Part 1
Part 2
Education
Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, 2017
M.S., Carnegie Mellon University, 2015
B.A., Amherst College, 2012