pchapin's Home Page

Fall 2025

My schedule.

For the courses I have taught in the past, see the bottom of this page.

Links

Here are some additional resources of potential interest to my students.

Student Resources. If you are a student taking one of my classes, you may find the links here useful.
The XNetwork is a testbed of physical (not simulated) devices that support the CIS program's networking classes.
Tutorial on C. A semester-long course in C for first time programmers. This tutorial also covers some advanced topics. GitHub repository.
Tutorial on C++. This is a work in progress. This tutorial assumes C experience. GitHub repository.
Tutorial on Ada. Source files for the various sample programs used in the tutorial. This is a work in progress. GitHub repository.
Unix Overview. This is a description of Unix that applies, more or less, to any Unix-like system. GitHub repository.
Tutorial on POSIX threads. This tutorial covers both POSIX threads specifically and some thread programming topics in general. GitHub repository.
In some classes, I use the Open Watcom C/C++ compilers. Here I provide a snapshot of the development version. To install, unpack the snapshot in some suitable location (avoid paths with spaces). To use, open a console and run the useOW script in the root of the distribution to set up the environment of that console.
My Curriculum Vitae.

Projects

Links to projects I'm working on:

pchapin's GitHub. Use this as a starting point to access the various open source projects I'm contributing to or maintaining.
Open Watcom. An open source C, C++, and Fortran compiler suite with tools. I have been an active contributor to this project in the past.
Astronomical Observations. Various observations made by me and the home for "Astronomical Observation Markup Language."
Waterfalls of the New England Region. A page showcasing waterfalls around New England that I have visited.
100 Highest. A list of the 100 highest mountains in New England along with climbing notes.
Technically Rambling is my blog about various technical things I sometimes think about.

Links to projects I have worked on in the past:

CubeSat Laboratory is a group of VTC students, faculty, and staff working on CubeSat technology spacecraft. See also the Flying SPARKs blog for updates about their work. Although I was very involved in this project for a number of years, I am no longer actively participating.

Publications

Work done at Vermont Technical College

CubedOS: A Verified CubeSat Operating System by Carl Brandon, Peter Chapin, Chris Farnsworth, and Sean Klink. Ada User Journal; 38(3), September 2017.
The Use of SPARK in a Complex Spacecraft by Carl Brandon and Peter Chapin. Proceedings of the High Integrity Language Technology workshop (HILT-2016); October 6–7, 2016, Pittsburgh, PA, USA. (slides)
High Integrity Software for CubeSats and Other Space Missions by Carl Brandon and Peter Chapin. Proceedings of the 66^th International Astronautical Congress; October 12--16, 2015 (Jerusalem, Israel).
Building High Integrity Applications with SPARK by John W. McCormick and Peter C. Chapin. August 2015 (Cambridge University Press).
A SPARK/Ada CubeSat Control Program by Carl Brandon and Peter Chapin. Proceedings of Ada Europe 2013; June 10--14, 2013 (Berlin, Germany); LNCS 7896, pages 51--64.
Use of SPARK in a Resource Constrained Embedded System by Chad Loseby, Peter Chapin, and Carl Brandon. Proceedings of the ACM International Conference on Ada and Related Technologies; November 1--5, 2009 (Saint Petersburg, Florida, USA); pages 87–90. Slides used for the presentation.

Work done at the University of Vermont

SpartanRPC: Remote Procedure Call Authorization in Wireless Sensor Networks by Peter Chapin and Christian Skalka. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security; to appear.
Trust Management in Distributed Resource Constrained Embedded Systems. A Ph.D. dissertation by Peter Chapin. January 2014.
Scalaness/nesT: Type Specialized Staged Programming for Sensor Networks by Peter Chapin, Christian Skalka, Scott Smith, and Michael Watson. Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on Generative Programming Concepts & Experiences; October 27–28, 2013 (Indianapolis Indiana, USA). Slides used for the presentation.
SpartanRPC: Secure WSN Middleware for Cooperating Domains by Peter Chapin and Christian Skalka. Proceedings of the Seventh IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems; November 8–12, 2010 (San Francisco, California, USA). Slides used for the presentation.
Authorization in Trust Management: Features and Foundations by Peter Chapin, Christian Skalka, and X. Sean Wang. ACM Computing Surveys; 40(3), pages 1–48. August 2008. (citation)
Risk Management for Distributed Authorization by Christian Skalka, X. Sean Wang, and Peter Chapin. Journal of Computer Security; 15(4), 2007.
Risk Assessment in Distributed Authorization by Peter Chapin, Christian Skalka, and X. Sean Wang. Proceedings of the Workshop on Formal Methods in Security Engineering; November 11, 2005; Fairfax, Virgina; pages x--y. Slides used for the presentation.

Work done at the University of Illinois

Experimental Study of the Frequency Limits of a Resonant Tunneling Oscillator by Paul D. Coleman, Steven Goedeke, Thomas J. Shewchuk, Peter C. Chapin, Joseph M. Gering, Hadis Morkoc. Applied Physics Letters; 48(6). pages 422–424. February 1986.
Stable and Unstable Current-Voltage Measurements of a Resonant Tunneling Heterostructure Oscillator by T. J. Shewchuck, J. M. Gering, P. C. Chapin, P. D. Coleman, W. Kopp, C. K. Peng, and H Morkoc. Applied Physics Letters; 47(9), pages 986–988. November 1985.
Microwave Admittance Characterization of GaAs-Al_xGa_1-xAs Resonant Tunneling Heterostructures by W. Kopp, H. Morkoc, T. J. Shewchuck, P. C. Chapin, J. M. Gering, P. D. Coleman. Proceedings of the Sixth Biennial Conference on High Speed Semiconductor Devices; July 1985 (Cornell University, Ithaca, New York)
Resonant Tunneling Oscillations in a GaAs-Al_xGa_1-xAs Heterostructure at Room Temperature by T. J. Shewchuck, P. C. Chapin, P. D. Coleman, W. Kopp, R. Fischer, and H. Morkoc. 46. pages 508--510. March 1985.

Other Courses

The following is a list of courses I have taught in the past along with the semester when I last taught them.

The following courses are indexable by search engines (the courses above are not). This allows their content to be more easily found via traditional searches and, hopefully, more useful to the larger Internet community.

Contacting Me

Email: peter.chapin@vermontstate.edu. I will usually respond to email within 24 hours, not including weekends or holidays. Email is the best way to contact me. I am sometimes on the Libera IRC network under the nickname pcc, or on the OFTC IRC network under the nickname owpeter. I can also be found on the CIS Classes Discord server as pchapin.