Duncan A. Buell Chair Emeritus -- NCR Chair of Computer Science and Engineering Dept. of Computer Science and E University of South Carolina Columbia, SC 29208 buell@cse.sc.edu

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Research Digital humanities Electronic voting systems Nonnumeric computations Computational number theory Parallel computing Information retrieval

Education

Ph.D., 1976, Mathematics, University of Illinois Chicago
M.A., 1972, Mathematics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
B.S., 1971, Mathematics, University of Arizona, Tucson

Complete resume (pdf)

My Status

I retired from the University of South Carolina as of 1 January 2021, although I continue to maintain some interest in what transpires at the university.

I also am trying to continue my intellectual involvement in areas in which I was involved prior to my retirement.

This includes publishing: my cryptography textbook has come out recently.

Fundamentals of Cryptography .

I continue work in matters of election integrity and in digital humanities.

In election integrity:

• I continue to oppose the use of voting computers as the only option for all voters, and I support instead the use of hand-marked paper ballots. Software is hard to get right, and elections pose two significant problems that make the use of technology unwise: The actually correct "answer" (viz., who got the most votes) is not something that can ever be known in advance; and the fact that individual votes are not tied to voters means that there really is no way to determine if what the software produces as "the answer" is in fact the correct answer.

• I also continue to analyze data from the elections, including the 2020 election. Much has been alleged about fraud; no evidence has been put forth to demonstrate that the results that should have been reported are different from the results that were reported. As a scientist, I draw conclusions based on evidence, and there is no evidence to support the allegations that are even now still being made.

• Finally, I continue to be hugely skeptical of the True Believer types who think it is feasible to run reliable elections over the internet. Running elections over the internet has been deprecated by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, the U. S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, the for Evidence in Public Issues of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the U. S. Technology Policy Committee of the Association for Computing Machinery, among others.

  I am especially skeptical of those who want to use this year's shiny new neologism ("blockchain") as the panacea for making it possible to run reliable elections over the internet. Although the arguments are aging, they are still valid, and I don't know that anyone has been able successfully to refute what is presented at the blockchain papers site that I maintain.

My two focus areas in digital humanities are:

• the analysis of student writing;

• the presentation on mobile platforms of information and surveillance (by the mobile platform) of what transpires as the interactor goes back and forth with the software on the platform.