College award recognizes a career dedicated to service

Prof. Emeritus Kevin Compton has been selected to receive the 2018-19 Herbert Kopf Service Excellence Award from the College of Engineering, in recognition of his significant service contributions to the College and University. Throughout his career, Compton has been committed to service in his work that has enhanced the student experience and the operation of the CSE Division.

Compton served as head coach and mentor for U-M student programming teams from 2001 to 2018, and during that period coached eight teams that advanced to the very competitive ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals. In 2011, the Michigan team placed second in the world, and in 2014 Compton was recognized with the ACM-ICPC Coach Award for having at that time brought five teams to the world finals competition.

In addition, Compton is known for his dedication to department service. He was a long-standing member of the CS Program Committee and Curriculum Committee, where he has dedicated many hours to the administration of changes and adjustments in order to evolve these aspects of CSE education.

As a member of the Theory Lab, Compton’s research interests are in the areas of complexity of combinatorial and logical problems, analysis of algorithms, and automata theory. His research with students covered a number of different areas including compiler synthesis, formal verification of programs and software engineering tools, cryptographic protocol verification, and development of probabilistic methods for the analysis of algorithms.

Compton retired from the department in December, 2018. The date marked 34 years as a CSE faculty member. He joined in 1984, the same year the department of Computer and Communication Sciences merged with Electrical and Computer Engineering to form the modern-day Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department.