Grad-News for Spring/Summer 1993

Hello and welcome back to another exciting year in the College of Computing.
>From the responses we received, it appears most folks had a very fun and
productive summer...lets hope that continues on through the year.

For you new folks, welcome to Tech! The purpose of this little news letter
is simple - to keep everyone informed of what's going on with the grad students.
Its a big department and visibility can sometimes be a problem...so we have
this news letter as a way to make others in the department aware of what we 
are doing. In addition, we like to keep up on the things going on with out 
fellow students - events such as weddings, engagements, births, etc are all
of interest to your fellow students.  So, read on...and, when you do 
something...no matter how small it may seem, send a note to grad-news@cc.


We were all saddened by the loss of friend and teacher William A. "gus" Baird
this summer. His life had an impact on many of us and his loss will be felt
for some time to come. Special thanks go out to VERNARD MARTIN for completing
gus's CS 1411 course this summer.
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ANNA ZACHERL and Eric Domeshek had their paper titled "Indexing Building
Evaluations to Aid Conceptual Design" accepted for presentation at
the AAAI-93 Workshop on Case-Based Reasoning.
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TODD GRIFFITH was co-author on a paper accepted to INTERCHI '93.
Noi Sukaviriya, J. Foley, T. Griffith, "A Second Generation User 
Interface Environment: The Model and the Runtime Architecture."
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BETH MYNATT had an accepted tutorial at INTERCHI '93.
Beth Mynatt, A. Edwards, "Enabling Technology for Users with Special
Needs." 
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MARTIN FRANK co-authored a short paper for INTERCHI '93.
Martin Frank and Jim Foley, "Model-based User Interface Design by Example
and by Answering Questions."
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TOM RODRIGUEZ interned at Sun Microsystems Labs, working in the
collaborative  work group.
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MARTIN DAVIS, who graduated under Kishore Ramachandran's tutelage in December, 
has recently been notified that his paper entitled "Using Optical Waveguides 
in General Purpose Parallel Computing" has been accepted for publication the 
Journal of Optical Processing and Computing.  Martin's paper was based upon 
his dissertation work.

Meanwhile, Martin is enjoying being out of school!, need he say more?  
So, yes, there is life after the dissertation!

Martin can be reached at the following address:
Martin H. Davis, Jr., Ph.D.
Sr. Member of the Technical Staff
SYSTRAN Corp.
4126 Linden Avenue
Dayton, OH  45432-3068
Ph:  513/252-5601 X209
Fax: 513/258-2729
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EILEEN KRAEMER succeeded in making a head in one on the first day that her 
golf class was held outdoors this spring.  A "head in one" is when you 
successfully hit the ball with a nine iron and the ball hits the golf coach 
right smack in the head!
----
EILEEN KRAEMER has received the Intel Foundation Graduate Fellowship 
Award for the 1993-94 academic year.
----
JEFF VETTER won a NASA Graduate Student Researcher Program fellowship, 
renewable until 1996.  His research will focus on interactive program steering 
of high performance parallel applications.
----
ALFRED WATKINS and his wife Jill are proud to announce the birth of their 
first born child, our son Jelani Fikile Roy Watkins. Born April 8th, 
7 lb. 11 oz., and 20 inches long, his name means "The Mighty One Arrived".
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GAUTAM SHAH (PhD student working with Kishore Ramachandran) presented a paper 
entitled "Techniques for Software-assisted Cache Coherence on Beehive", on 
May 15 at the Third Workshop on Scalable Shared Memory Multiprocessors, held 
in conjunction with the Federated computing research conference (FCRC), 
San Diego. Gautam received his Ph.D. this summer and is currently working at
the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center.
----
A paper entitled "Scalability Study of KSR-1" co-authored by graduate students
GAUTAM SHAH, S. RAVIKUMAR, and J. MUTHUKUMARASAMY with Kishore Ramachandran
was presented at the 22st Annual International Conference on Parallel 
Processing, St. Charles, IL, Aug 1993.
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WALTER B. LIGON (who is now an assistant professor at Clemson),
finished his PhD in the College of Computing in August 1992.
He has received a research grant of $150K over three years
from NASA/CESDIS HPCC I/O program.  Given the level
of competition for such research grants it is extremely creditable
that Walt has been able to achieve this in the very first year of his
academic career.
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Undergraduate student STACY JOHNSON, interned this summer at Silicon Graphics
in the Advanced Graphics Division. In the X Group she worked on shared X 
for SGI machines. Stacy is now back and working for the CoC Multimedia Group.
----
IAN SMITH was an intern at Xerox PARC, on the 'Where Were We?' real time, video 
indexing and browsing project. Ian lived in San Francisco and would love to
tell anyone who will listen about it.
----
AMAN SINGLA attended the DIMACS workshop on  Models, Architectures,
and Technologies for Parallel Computation, Sept 20-23, 1993, New Jersey.
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SREENIVAS GUKAL spent his summer as an intern at IBM Almaden Research working 
on the Starburst database project with Dr. Toby Lehman.
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Karsten Schwan and BODHISATTWA MUKHERJEE published the following conference 
papers (Karsten presented the 1st one, while bodhi presented the other three):

  Bodhisattwa Mukherjee and Karsten Schwan, "Improving Performance by Use of 
  Adaptive Objects: Experimentation with a Configurable Multiprocessor Thread 
  Package", Proc. of the Second International Symposium on High Performance 
  Distributed Computing, July 1993

  Bodhisattwa Mukherjee and Karsten Schwan, "Experiments with a Configurable 
  Lock for Multiprocessors", Proc. of the International Conference on Parallel 
  Processing, August 1993

  Bodhisattwa Mukherjee and Karsten Schwan, "Experimentation with a 
  Reconfigurable Micro-Kernel", Proc. of the Second workshop on Microkernels 
  and Other Kernel Architectures, Sep 1993

  Christian Clemencon and Bodhisattwa Mukherjee and Karsten Schwan, "Distributed
  Shared Abstractions (DSA) on Large-Scale Multiprocessors", Proc. of the 4th 
  Symposium on Experiences with Distributed and Multiprocessor Systems, Sep
  1993 

Their group also have finished the following TRs (might be useful for the
college community)

  Bodhisattwa Mukherjee and Karsten Schwan, "Survey of Real-Time Operating 
  Systems", TR# GIT-CC-93/18

  KAUSHIK GHOSH and Bodhisattwa Mukherjee and Karsten Schwan, "Experimentation 
  with Configurable, Lightweight Threads on a KSR Multiprocessor", TR# GIT-CC-
  93/37

  Bodhisattwa Mukherjee and GREG EISENHAUER and Kaushik Ghosh, "O/S Support for 
  Portable Lightweight Threads", TR# GIT-CC-93-53
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JEFF STEINBERG (A Winter MS graduate) has taken a job with Motorola World Wide 
Paging Division in Boynton Beach, FL. He will be getting married to Lisa Joy 
on Oct. 16, 1993 in Boca Raton, FL.

Jeff is enjoying South Florida: playing tennis, waterskiing, and roller blading 
on South Beach.  His work at Motorola involves building Executive Information
Systems which intend to help manage the explosive business information demands 
which are occurring. 

His new internet address is jeffs@pts.mot.com.  
----
SAMBASIVA BHATTA was married to Radhamadhavi in Machallipatnam, India
this summer - congratulations! Both Sam and Radha are now back in
Atlanta.
----
TOM GALE, PhD student, won the Annual Harvard Town Tennis Championships
the weekend of September 27-28.  He won the B level singles competition.
Tom claims to be in terrible pain due to having played 8 sets in two days.
But we all know he'll be out on the court or out on the course in know
time at all!  Congratulations Tom!
----
TODD GRIFFITH and ANNA ZACHERL tied the knot on September the 4th.  
Congratulations to you both!
----
GREG EISENHAUER and Peggy Simpson are getting married on the October the
30th.
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KHALED ALI attended the National Artificial Intelligence Conference at
Washington, D.C. this summer. He was a member of a Georgia Tech team
that participated in the Robotics competition held at the conference.
----
SAMBASIVA BHATTA participated in the Cognitive Science Conference at
Boulder, Colorado, and the National Artificial Intelligence Conference
at Washington, D.C. this summer. At the Cognitive Science conference,
he presented a paper based on his work on the Ideal project
(analogical design and learning), and recently has been invited to
write a journal version of the paper.
----
ANDRES GOMEZ participated in the Cognitive Science Conference at
Boulder, Colorado, and the National Artificial Intelligence Conference
at Washington, D.C. this summer. At the Cognitive Science conference,
he presented a paper on the Router project (experience-based robot
planning and learning). Several former and present CoC students - TODD
CALLANTINE, MICHAEL DONELLAN, and JUAN SANTAMARIA - also contributed
to the paper.
----
JEFF PITTGES participated in the Cognitive Science Conference at
Boulder, Colorado this summer, and presented a poster paper to the
conference based on the KA project (integrating natural language
understanding, device knowledge acquisition, and design problem
solving). Several CoC students - ANDRES GOMES, KAVI MAHESH, and 
JUSTIN PETERSON - also contributed to the paper.
----
ELENI STROULIA participated the National Artificial Intelligence
Conference at Washington, D.C., and the International Conference on
Artificial Intelligence at Chamberry, France, this summer. She
presented several papers to the workshops related to these
conferences, and recently has been invited to write a journal paper
based on her work on the Autognostic project (reflective reasoning and
learning).
----
ED GALLANT is playing defense for the Georgia Tech Ice Hockey Team
which will kick off its 93-94 season on Saturday, October 9th at the
Omni. Tickets are available at the Student Center. Come on out and
watch Ed and the rest of the team pound the Bulldogs into the ice!
Other home games this season include an unusual assortment of southerners
on skates: GSU, Duke, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, and UNC.

Ed has also requested help learning to spell the names of several 
southern states, especially Tennese (sic).
  
"The team needs your support!  and all that garbage." - Ed.
----
SATYAJEET DODIA, winter MS graduate, is now with Oracle Corporation in
Redwood Shores, CA. (Corporate HQ even!) 

His email address is sdodia@us.oracle.com
----
SCOTT HOLT, summer MS graduate, is now with Bell South Worldwide Wireless in
Atlanta. His email address is sch@netcom.com.
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GEORGE ROUSKAS attended the Photonics '93 Workshop held in
Atlanta from Sep. 26-29, and  gave a poster presentation
of his paper entitled ``On the Design of Dynamic Configuration
Policies for Multihop Lightwave WDM Networks'', co-authored by
M. Ammar.
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JEFF VETTER interned this summer with Intel in Portland, Oregon.
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DREW KESSLER was married to Aimee Newsom this summer. Aimee is a recent 
graduate of Jeff's undergraduate institution: UVA. 
graduate of the University of Virginia (my undergraduate institution).
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KURT STIREWALT is on a 2 quarter internship with Mitre Corp in Washington, DC.
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ROSS D'SOUZA interned at Intel Corp in Chandler, Arizona this summer. Ross
assisted in the testing of a distributed, object-oriented system that will be 
used for configuration management of the manufacturing processes used by
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JASJIT SINGH interned at Intel in Santa Clara, CA. JASJIT was working on
porting of a distributed transactions product called Encina (from Transarc)
to Intel X86 machines.  Among the benefits Jasjit received were great pay
and a rental car for the summer. Jasjit put over 15,000 miles on the car
visiting such places as San Francisco, Berkeley, Stanford, San Jose, L.A.,
San Diego and many others. Jasjit expects to find school much more peaceful
and relaxing (and compared to driving around in southern California, it should
be -ed.).
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AMMO GOETTSCH spent 3 months at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA. 
Ammo worked on digital audio output synchronized to graphical events. 
----
WEIMING GU spent the summer working for Schlumberger Laboratory for Computer
Science at Austin, Texas. It was a wonderful summer although the weather is
very hot and dry -- 12 continuous days with temperature in three digits and 68
continuous days without rain. During the three month period, in addition to
going out to a nearby lake and having fun with other summer students, Weiming 
also designed and implemented a user interface for a seismic data visualizer on
a CM5, measured performance of typical seismic analysis code on a KSR1 for the
company.
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JUAN CARLOS SANTAMARIA has been very productive...he:

  Got 6 papers in 4 conferences.

  Participated in the Autonomous Robotic Competition in 
  AAAI-93 Washington. July 1993.

  Participated as co-instructor in the Seminar "Playing and Inventing"
  dictated in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico. July 1993.

Papers included:

  1.- A Multistrategy Case-Based and Reinforcement Learning Approach to
      Self-Improve Reactive Control for Autonomous Robotic Navigation.
      Ashwin Ram and Juan Carlos Santamaria.
      International Workshop on Multistrategy Learning.
      Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, May 1993. (participated)
  2.- Knowledge Compilation and Speedup Learning in Continuous Task Domains.
      Juan Carlos Santamaria and Ashwin Ram.
      Workshop in Speedup Learning, Machine Learning Conference 1993.
      Amherst, Massachussets, June 1993. (participated)
  3.- From Models to Cases: Where Do Cases Come From and What Happens When
      a Case is Not Available?
      Ashok Goel, Todd Callantine, Michael Donnellan, Andres Gomes De Silva, 
      Juan Carlos Santamaria.
      Workshop in Case Based Reasoning, AAAI-93.
      Washington, July 1993.  (participated)
  4.- Continuous Case-Based Reasoning.
      Ashwin Ram and Juan Carlos Santamaria.
      Workshop in Case Based Reasoning, AAAI-93.
      Washington, July 1993 (participated)
  5.- Learning Continuous Perception-Action Models Through Experience.
      Ashwin Ram and Juan Carlos Santamaria.
      Workshop on Learning Action Models, AAAI-93.
      Washington, July 1993 (participated)
  6.- From Models to Cases: Where Do Cases Come From and What Happens When
      a Case is Not Available?
      Ashok Goel, Todd Callantine, Michael Donnellan, Andres Gomes De Silva, 
      Juan Carlos Santamaria.
      Cognitive Science Conference 1993
      Boulder, June 1993.
      
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MARK GRAY was an intern with Aqua Terra Consultants in Decatur.  Over
the summer he and Al Badre worked with Aqua Terra to discover what
advantages a graphical, windowed user interface offers over their
text-based one for groundwater modeling software currently in use by
the Environmental Protection Agency.  A prototype demonstrating
several advantages was shown to the EPA at the end of the summer.
----
Moving on...the following students received their walking papers...we
wish them all luck:

MS - Spring 1993

Rajagopal Asha 			Mavis Compagno
Rodney Cox			Sabrina Diaz
Troy Halverson 			Reginald Hobbs
Nell Huntley 			Chris Hutto
Srinivas Kareenhalli 		Terry Kane
Brian Knauff 			Xiaoyuan Li
Stanley Neel 			Heather Pritchett
Dean Ptaszynski 		Jerome Solomon
Robert Steinbach 		Kazuko Wakayama
Anna Zacheral

Ph.D.

Andrew Czuchry 			Anurag Gupta
Mark Pearson

MS - Summer 1993

David Burgess 			Shih-Chang Chuang
Steve Cover 			Kenneth Haigh
Scott Holt 			Jeffrey Humphries
Balakrishnan Lakshmanan 	Mingzhi Lu

Ph.D.

Stephen Adelson 		Mariano Garcia
Andrea Lawrence 		Ajay Mohindra
Michael Polen 			Joe Wehrli
Wangxing Wu 			Limin Zhang
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As always, send your news items to grad-news@cc.