Mark Snyder

Biography

Much of my career has been working in the travel industry, starting with high-transaction, mainframe airline reservation systems. While in the Consumer Division at Microsoft, I also helped create the first (and still prominent) online reservation system, Expedia. As part of that effort I got to develop some of the first Internet testing tools. Later, as part of the Expedia Corporation, I built the Expedia Rewards system, and architected new Trip Insurance and Cruise Reservation systems. At one point, I was on a Microsoft Research team that created a game that combines first-person, 3D space combat with squad-based, real-time strategy elements called Allegiance, which is still played over two decades later. As a consultant, I designed and wrote location aware services and navigation software for passengers of cruise ships used in Princess Cruise Lines ships. My teaching focuses on early career and vocational rehabilitation students, helping enable people to master the skills required to be competitive, life-long learners who can find successful and rewarding careers in software development. At various other times, I have been a cattle farmer, fireman, and sailor.

Education (Degrees and Certifications)

• Phd, Computer Science, 2014, Missouri University of Science & Technology.
• Masters, Computer Science, 2008, Missouri University of Science & Technology.
• BS, Computer Science, 1987, Central Missouri State University (now University of Central Missouri).

Research (Publications, Presentations, and Other Projects)

• "Medallion Class." Presented at Consumer Electronics Show, Las Vegas, NV, January 5-8, 2017.
• Foundations of Coverage Algorithms in Autonomic Mobile Sensor Networks, PhD Dissertation, May 2014.
• Distributed Exploratory Coverage with Limited Mobility, International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing (IJSSC), Spring 2014.
• Fault Tolerance in Area Coverage Algorithms for Limited Mobility Sensor Networks, Proc. of the 13th International Conference on Networks (ICN), Nice, France, February 2014.
• Exploratory Coverage in Limited Mobility Sensor Networks, Proc. of The 16th International Conference on Network-Based Information Systems (NBIS), Gwangju, Korea, September 2013.
• Event Coverage in Sparse Mobile Sensor Networks, Proc. of The 12th International Conference on Network-Based Information Systems (NBIS), Indianapolis, Indiana, August 2009.
• Critical Infrastructure Protection and the Domain Name Service, Master’s Thesis, May 2008.
• Preprocessing DNS Log Data for Effective Data Mining, Proc. of IEEE Conference on Communications (ICC), Dresden, Germany, June 2009.
• A Game-Theoretic Approach to Bandwidth Attacks and Statistical Defenses, Proc. of The 32nd IEEE Conference on Local Computer Networks (LCN), Dublin, Ireland, October 2007.
• "Allegiance." Microsoft Research, Allegiance, 2000. Video game.
• Microsoft, Orville, Internet Information Services (IIS) 4.0 Resource Kit, 1999. Internet testing tool.

Courses (Classes Taught Regularly)

COP 1000, COP 1822, COP 2360, COP 2362, COP 2700, CGS 1100, CIS 2321, CTS 1131, CTS 1133