|
|
|
|
| plans | introduction | references |
|---|
Our most direct contribution to education and human resources comes in the form of graduate students. Students Galen Hunt and Mohammed Zaki are finishing their doctorates this year. Galen's thesis is in the area of component-based distributed applications, and is not directly related to the grant. Outside the scope of his thesis research, however, he has been a major contributor to the Cashmere project. Zaki's thesis is in the area of data mining; he has been a key player in our applications studies. Galen has accepted a position at Microsoft research; Zaki is currently interviewing for academic positions. Undergraduate Elliot Barnett, who worked on the project for several months this past year, has accepted a job with Frontier Communications.
Current graduate students on the project include Rob Stets, Srinivasan Parthasarathy, Sotiris Ioannidis, and Umit Rencuzogulari. Rob's thesis is on core Cashmere material, mainly coherence protocol implementation. Srini is working on systems support for client-server data-mining applications. Sotiris and Umit are working on compiler-runtime integration. Rob and Srini should finish in the year 2000, Sotiris in 2001, and Umit in 2002. Amit Singhal, a computer vision student working with Prof. Chris Brown, is working with us part-time on applications.
Research funded under this grant played a major role in our first-year "immigration" course for graduate students. Each of three teams of students from this year's incoming class ported a new application to TreadMarks and to Cashmere. In addition, first-year student Umit Rencuzogulari was introduced to the group via his individual project in the course.
Sandhya Dwarkadas is a co-investigator (no salary support) on a proposal about to be submitted to the NSF Educational Innovation program in the area of Computational Biology. This proposal would help fund a major new curricular initiative. Sandhya would be one of a half dozen faculty members (in Computer Science, Biology, Chemistry, and other fields) participating in an interdisciplinary course in the application of computing technology to biological research.