Dr.. Norm Matloff is a professor of computer science at the University of California at Davis, and was formerly a professor of mathematics and statistics at that university. He is a former database software developer in Silicon Valley, and has been a statistical consultant for firms such as the Kaiser Permanente Health Plan.
In addition, he writes frequently about social issues, such as affirmative action, immigration and age discrimination. A speaker of Chinese, he is active in the Chinese-American community, and has served as an invited speaker at a number of Asian-American public forums.
Dr. Matloff was born in Los Angeles, and grew up in East Los Angeles and the San Gabriel Valley. He has a PhD in theoretical mathematics from UCLA, specializing in probability and statistics.
Dr. Matloff has published numerous research papers in computer science and in theoretical and applied statistics, in fields such as parallel processing, data security, data mining, random networks, computer networks, and statistical regression analysis. He is the author of several books in computer science and in statistics.
Prof. Matloff is a former appointed member of IFIP Working Group 11.3, an international committee concerned with database software security, established under UNESCO. His work on optical multiprocessor computers was awarded a U.S. patent. He was a founding member of the UC Davis Department of Statistics, and participated in the formation of the UCD Computer Science Department as well.
He has been a recipient of the UC Davis Distinguished Public Service Award, in recognition of his work on social issues such as immigration and age discrimination (especially in the computer industry), his work in support of affirmative action, and his defense of Asian-American scientists who have been discriminated against in our national laboratories. He also has been the recipient of the university's Distinguished Teaching Award and Outstanding Faculty Adviser Award.
Professor Matloff is also the author of several popular software
packages, such as: 
KuaiXue, a
Chinese-language instructional system, and MulSim, a
multiprocessor simulator. He is the author of two published textbooks,
and of a number of widely-used Web tutorials on computer topics, such as
the Linux
operating system and the Python programming
language. He and Dr. Peter Salzman are authors of The Art of
Debugging with GDB, DDD, and Eclipse. Prof. Matloff's book on
the R programming language, The Art of R Programming,
is due to be published in 2010.
Dr. Matloff also writes about social issues such as immigration, affirmative action, and age discrimination. He has served as an expert witness in litigation regarding age and racial discrimination in the software industry. He has presented invited testimony to the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on a number of occasions, and his advice has been solicited by the U.S. Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and the U.S. State Department, as well as the State of California Little Hoover Commission. His writings on immigration have been used as course materials at Stanford and Cornell Universities, and he has taught a well-received freshman seminar on immigration at UCD. He has served as a program proposal reviewer on immigration issues for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the main funder of PBS.
Prof. Matloff is particularly interested in the use of foreign labor in the U.S. computer industry. His article in the University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform on the H-1B work visa, written at the invitation of the journal, is the most comprehensive (99 pages, 300+ footnotes) academic work published on the H-1B issue. Another invited article concerning the relation of H-1B to age discrimination in the computer industry appeared in the California Labor and Employment Law Review, a publication of the California State Bar Association; click here to download the article.
The H-1B visa enables U.S. employers to import foreign engineers. The opposite side of the coin, offshoring, involves export of engineering work to other countries. Again, Dr. Matloff's work in this field has been recognized by invitations to write articles in major publications. His article on the impact of globalism on American programmers and engineers was published in the Communications of the ACM, the flagship journal of the main professional society in computer science, the Association for Computing Machinery. He has also written a companion article on advice for firms considering offshoring , in a publication of IEEE, the main professional society in electrical engineering. Again, both articles were written at the invitation of the publications.
Dr. Matloff frequently serves as an invited panelist on computer industry hiring practices, in forums sponsored by industry, academia, government and public-affairs groups, such as the ITAA/Dept. of Commerce Convocation, the California Governor's Older Worker and Exemplary Employer Conference, the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, the Stanford University Computer Project Conference, the Harvard University Law School Asian Pacific American Conference on Law and Public Policy, the Boston University Workshop on Migration of Foreign Scientists and Engineers to the United States, the Gartner Group Application Development Summit, the IS Associates group in UCLA Anderson School of Management, MEPTECH, Silicon Valley Power Breakfast, Software Development Expo, etc.
His recommendations on careers in the computer field is often sought by writers of career-advice columns, and syndicated columnist Joyce Lain Kennedy features Dr. Matloff's e-newsletter on career issues in her books, Resumes for Dummies, Job Hunting for Dummies and Cover Letters for Dummies.
Prof. Matloff also is often invited to speak to student groups, such as at UC Berkeley, the Stanford University Law School and the Asian-American Out of the Silence Conference at Stanford. He has also given invited speeches at the high school level, such as "testifying" on the issues of immigration and affirmative action at the Berkeley High School Mock Congress.
Dr. Matloff has written articles (in many cases by invitation of the magazine or newspaper) for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Forbes Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, the Public Interest, the New Democrat (a publication of the Democratic Leadership Council), and so on. He has also served as an invited panelist in the New York Times' Room for Debate online discussion site, on the H-1B visa (here and here) and also on the Chinese language.
Professor Matloff has been interviewed or cited by virtually every national news outlet in the electronic and print media, such as the NBC Nightly News, ABC's World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, CNN, NPR's All Things Considered, the PBS Newshour, CNBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, the New Republic, Time Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes Magazine, Investor's Business Daily, Business Week, US News and World Report, Science Magazine, Computerworld, and numerous others at local levels. He has been the subject of profile articles in BusinessWeek, Salon Magazine, Computerworld, and the official UCD magazine. (See Dr. Matloff's e-newsletter commentary on these profiles here, here, here, and here.)
Professor Matloff has had a lifelong commitment to improving conditions for people of color and the impoverished. He is a former chair of the faculty affirmative action committee at UC Davis (click here for their annual report for that year), as well as a member of the corresponding statewide UC committee. He has been active in minority-oriented programs such as MAP, MORE and the Graduate Minority Forum.
He has been active in Chinese communities ever since graduate school. His wife is a Chinese immigrant, and they raised their daughter to be bilingual in Chinese and English. He has also served as an instructor in adult ESL programs in San Francisco's Chinatown, both as a volunteer and as an employee. In 1995 former University of California Regent Lester Hsin-Pei Lee appointed him to the Committee for Rational Relations with China. In 1999 Dr. Matloff was invited to join the Steering Committee of the Dr. Wen Ho Lee Defense Fund; the committee, whose members included the late former UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien and UCLA Asian-American Studies Center Director Don Nakanishi, was concerned that racial factors may have been involved in Dr. Lee's being terminated from his position at Los Alamos National Laboratories. Prof. Matloff has been outspoken in defense of Chinese-Americans who are victims of discrimination; see for instance his 1995 article on Dr. Raymond Luh, an immigrant engineer from Taiwan who suffered racial discrimination when he was fired from his job at NASA Ames.
A speaker of Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin), Dr. Matloff has been
interviewed by the two main Chinese-language newspapers in North
America, 
(Sing Tao Daily) and 
(World Journal). He also conducted a reader survey
for Sing Tao, and has been a guest on Bay Area Chinese-language TV and radio
programs. He has been quoted on Chinese-American community issues by
the New Republic, the San Jose Mercury News, AsianWeek, and so on.
Prof. Matloff has proposed a novel system for UC admissions. See his Los Angeles Times op-ed, and his op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle, presenting the case of Lowell High School, a highly selective public "magnet school" in San Francisco, as an illustration of the need for, and potential benefit of, his proposed admissions policy. His ideas in those articles have been used by Urban League president Hugh Price, civil rights advocate Lani Guinier and UC Berkeley ethnic studies professors Ling-Chi Wang and the late Ronald Takaki.
