Dr. Frank Walks on Water
Photo credit: William Doyle

Dr. Michael P. Frank, Ph.D.

Associate in Engineering
Dept. of Electrical & Computer Eng., FAMU-FSU College of Engineering
mpf@eng.fsu.edu, cell (850) 510-7276

NOTE: Since August 2015, I have been in a new position at Sandia National Laboratories, so some of the information below is out of date.

Hello! Since the start of Fall 2014, I have been a member of the teaching faculty (level II) in the ECE department at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, appointed under the FITC grant from the State of Florida. Before that, since start of Fall 2012, I was an Associate in Engineering in the position of Instructor & Coordinator of Engineering Retention, appointed through the Dean’s office in. Before that, starting Fall 2010, I had a half-time appointment as a non-tenure track faculty member in the ECE dept. I am presently (in 2014-2015) in my fourth year of teaching & coordinating the ECE Senior Design Project course.

From late 2008 through Spring 2012, I was also helping develop custom data acquisition electronics for a novel low-cost, distributed cosmic-ray detection system in the Astroparticle & Cosmic Radiation Detector Research & Development Laboratory in the Department of Physics at Florida A&M University under an NSF CREST grant. In Fall 2008-Spring 2009, I was a Postdoctoral Associate working under Dr. Uwe-Meyer Baese, also in the ECE department.  We developed a novel quantum computer simulator that uses only linear space (most existing ones require exponential space).

From 2004-2007, I was a tenure-track faculty member (assistant professor) in the ECE department, teaching computer engineering courses in subjects such as digital logic, microprocessors and computer architecture.   From 1999-2004, I was an assistant professor in the CISE department in the University of Florida’s College of Engineering, where I taught discrete math, computer organization, and computer architecture.  At both schools, I have occasionally also taught my own unique research survey course (technical elective) on the physical limits of computing. My graduate degrees (M.S. and Ph.D.) in Electrical & Computer Engineering are from MIT, and my B.S. is in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University.

Since 1996, my primary research interests have been in the areas of (1) the fundamental physics of computing (with an emphasis on the study of fundamental physical limits on computing), (2) novel nanoelectronic and quantum-electronic technologies for digital logic, and (3) fundamental new computing paradigms that will be important for efficient computing at the nanoscale, including reversible computing and quantum computing.  I also have an interest in computational methods for multi-domain physical simulation of nanoelectronic devices (in support of the aforementioned goals), and in technologies and infrastructures for high-performance computing that are suitable for supporting such applications.  Finally, I have an interest in the development of new secure electronic voting methods, and in digital currencies such as Bitcoin and other applications of distributed consensus technology (see my recent talks).

In case you would like to HIRE ME to do academic research or applied R&D for commerce or government, my CV and a short research biography are available.

For more information, click one:
Current Projects	Recent Publications

Here are some miscellaneous other links of mine, until I get time to better organize the content on this site:

Research & teaching-related links:

• Web pages of the 2013-14 and 2014-15 Senior Design projects involving ECE students.
• Talk slides from my Bitcoin talk at the ECE graduate seminar, Jan. 14, 2014.
• Photos from the ECE Senior Design Fair, April 5^th, 2012.
• RC’05 – 1^st International Workshop on Reversible Computing, a special session I organized at the ACM Computing Frontiers conference, held in Ischia, Italy, in May 2005.
• Syllabus and Lecture slides for the most recent (Spr. ’06) edition of my Physical Limits of Computing course.
• Course materials from the Spring 2007 edition of my Digital Logic course. (No longer the most recent edition; needs updating.)

Miscellaneous other links:

• Be a responsible citizen of the world, and educate yourself about Global Warming, which is by far the gravest threat facing our planet today.  Here’s how.
• Addendum: For me, one of the biggest motivations for the study and teaching of engineering is that humanity needs good engineers to survive the challenges of the coming century (including challenges posed by global warming). For a summary of this argument, and recent evidence about global warming, see this talk which I prepared in Summer 2013 (PowerPoint slides, PDF handouts).
• According to the Mathematics Genealogy Project’s database, I’m academically descended from a number of famous mathematicians including Leibniz, Bernoulli, Euler, Lagrange, Fourier, Gauss, Ohm, Poisson, Jacobi, Dirichet, and Klein.
• Here are a couple of short memos written by me (mostly for fun) discussing (new) graphical representations of (old) normative meanings of the nonprintable ASCII characters.
• Old home page at UF (still available but no longer being actively updated)
• Another new homepage just barely under construction at HCS.
• Join the Range Voting movement!  Help to promote improved decision-making by our democracy!  Range Voting, a.k.a. “Score them all” voting, used e.g. in the Olympics, has been mathematically proven to yield lower expected “Bayesian regret”—and on average better overall electoral decisions—than any other voting system.  It also offers many other benefits.   See the website for more details.