Muskingum College

Ralph G. Hollingsworth, Ph.D. Professor, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Office Location :   Boyd Science Center 225 Current Office Hours: MWF 2-4 pm, Tu 9-11, 2-4 Email: ralph@muskingum.edu Phone: (740) 826-8307 Fax:     (740) 826-8404 Surface Mail: Muskingum College                      Math and Computer Science Department 164 Stormont Street                      New Concord, OH 43762

Philosophy and Background

Since high school, I’ve been intrigued with the computational aspects of life forms and feel we are entering a special era in the relationship between Computer Science and Molecular Biology. We are at a point where CS is providing key paradigms that are supporting a convergence of computation, manufacturing, and information storage that all revolve around the machinery found in biological cells. Indeed, we will soon see a time when computing machines and biological machines are identical. 

Students who wish to be part of this era need to be part of a learning environment that encourages breadth of course content and breadth of imagination. I hope that such education helps to provide the infrastructure for developing societies that provide the most benefits for the most people. To do this, we must remember that the currency of education is ideas rather than dollars, and we also must be prepared to help students that have a broad collection of inherent learning strengths.

As an undergraduate student, I was lucky to be in a cooperative education program at the University of Cincinnati, and got to “coop” with Battelle Memorial Institute, in Columbus, Ohio. One of my assignments involved creating artificial red cells by non-biological techniques; we may have been the first group in the world to do so. My PhD and postdoctoral work at the University of Michigan involved building mathematical models of the human cardiovascular system and running them as simulations on various computer systems. The simulations were used to optimize the control of blood pressure during artificial kidney treatment and to help prevent shock in patients at a local hospital. John Holland was at Michigan during that period, and Professor Holland was a young faculty member, just beginning to publish his seminal work on genetic algorithms.

In the late 1970's, I worked in Advanced Development at NCR. A colleague, Douglas Harms, and I developed a protoype system that included a number of the features found in the Java system, later developed by Sun. After that time, I began teaching at Muskingum College, and my interests turned to computer graphics and languages. One outcome of this period was a language in which the syntactic elements were colored shapes, rather than textual identifiers. Others later worked on such language systems, and today, these approaches are termed "visual languages." In the late 1980's, I became interested in neural networks and spent a sabbatical year at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After this, I collaborated with Eric Law, a colleague in Geology, to use neural networks to analyze sandstone formations, and I think we were one of the first groups to do this type of analysis, in Geology.

More recently, I've become interested in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics, and spent a year at the University of Akron, working in these areas. This has lead to a current project that seeks to develop a 3-dimensional language based on the interactions of virtual 3-D objects. My current implementation of this idea uses the Second Life metaverse as a means for testing the concepts related to the project.

Research Interests and Professional Activities

Computational Biology

Bioinformatics

Immersive Environments and Metaverses

Robotics