His research profile has been preserved for historical interest.
Research interests
Professor Holt's research interests include visualizing software architecture. This work includes reverse engineering of legacy systems and repairing software architecture. His architectural visualizations have included Linux, Mozilla (Netscape), IBM's TOBEY code generator, and Apache. His work includes foundational work on deadlock, development of a number of compilers and compilation techniques and authoring a dozen books on programming and operating systems. He is one of the designers of the Turing programming language.
Degrees and awards
BEP, MS, PhD (Cornell)
IBM CAS Faculty Fellow (2005); NSERC/Nortel Networks Industrial Research Chair in Telecommunications Software Engineering (2001-2006)
Industrial and sabbatical experience
Professor Holt's seminal work on the theory of deadlock appears in many textbooks. He participated in the implementation of one of the first Unix clones (Tunis). His spin-off company Holt Software Associates for years distributed the Turing software and published textbooks on computing. Professor Holt is a founder of ConGESE (Consortium for Graduate Education in Software Engineering), which tailors graduate courses to professionals in industry. He helped launch the area of research called Mining Software Repositories.
Representative publications
DRACA: Decision Support for Root Cause Analysis and Change Impact Analysis for CMDBs, Sarah Nadi, Ric Holt, Ian Davis, and Serge Mankovskii, Proceedings of the 2009 Conference of the Center for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research (CASCON 2009), Best Paper, Toronto, Canada, Nov 2-5, 2009.
Grokking Software Architecture, Richard C. Holt, WCRE 2008: Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, Antwerp, Belgium, October 2008. (invited paper for Most Influential Paper Award).
GXL: A Graph-Based Standard Exchange Format for Reengineering, Ric Holt, Andy Schurr, Susan Elliott Sim, and Andreas Winter. Journal of Science of Computer Programming, Volume 60, Issue 2, April 2006, pages 149-170, Special Issue on Software Analysis, Evolution and Re-engineering.
Predicting Change Propagation in Software Systems, Ahmed E. Hassan and Richard C. Holt, Proceedings of ICSM 2004: International Conference on Software Maintenance, Chicago, Illinois, USA, September 11-17, 2004.