Andrew passes the quals exam!

["Lawrence A. Rowe" <Rowe@bmrc.berkeley.edu>]

hi -

most of you probably already know, but i want to send this message out
to the larger community so everyone knows.  andrew swan took and passed
his quals exam on tuesday of this week.  for those of you unfamiliar
with the Berkeley graduate program, this exam is at the beginning of the
student's dissertation research.  it tests his preparation for doing a
dissertation and often includes a specific dissertation proposal.

in andrew's case, his proposal involves the development of a framework
and middleware for supporting multicast services for applications. 
there are two key ideas: i) provide a better multicast service model
that allows an application to express communication requirements
explicitly and ii) simplify the deployment of multicast apps on the
internet.  the first idea is based on our observation that current
multicast service models do not allow an application to specify what
they want, rather the existing protocols (e.g., ASM, SSM, etc.) 
implement services that meet some set of application requirements.  it
makes more sense to provide middleware that will mediate between the
requirements expressed by an application developer than to force the
developer to code against service models that may, or more likely may
not, provide the required functionality.  

the second idea is to develop algorithms so that an application can run
anywhere and be able to access the required multicast services.  the
idea is to map application calls to the middleware onto calls to lower
level services (e.g., LAN broadcast, ASM, SSM, ALM, etc.) so that no
matter where you run the application it works -- no diagnosing problems
with network level multicast services. moreover, the middleware should
be self-aware of service quality so that it can dynamically modify the
mapping if the network is not working, the needs of the application
change, or the application scales to larger numbers of participants.

andrew is already well-started on the design and implementation of a
prototype for testing the models and algorithms. this system will be
prototyped with the Open Mash framework, for obvious reasons.

i probably should get him to give a public lecture of his quals talk so
that others can see/understand what he is doing. 

anyway, join me in congradulating andrew on this magnificant
accomplishment.  let see, shall we know call him "ABD Swan"  :)!
	Larry
-- 
Professor Lawrence A. Rowe          Internet:  Rowe@BMRC.Berkeley.EDU
Computer Science Division - EECS       Phone: 510-642-5117
University of California, Berkeley       Fax: 510-642-5615
Berkeley, CA 94720-1776            URL: http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/~larry