University of Colorado and the Computer Systems Group at the Vrije University in
Amsterdam
Research Exchange Proposal
Evi Nemeth, February 2000
Overview
--------
We propose an exchange between Dan Crawl, a graduate student in the
Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado and the
Computer Systems Group headed by Andy Tanenbaum at the Vrije University
in Amsterdam.
Dan would work with Andy and Maarten van Steen on their Globe Research
project for 9 months beginning January, 2000 in particular on the location
service portion of Globe.
Description of the Sending Institute
------------------------------------
The Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado has about
25 faculty, 600 undergraduates, and 150 graduate students. The areas
of strength in the department are numerical and parallel computing,
artificial intelligence, and theory. The department is weaker in
systems and has been actively trying to hire in the broad areas of
software and systems for two years. We have so far been unsuccessful
at hiring faculty in networks and distributed systems; the job market in
the US for PhD faculty candidates is fierce right now. Candidates get
"stolen" by companies like Microsoft, sometimes even before they graduate.
Description of the Receiving Institute
--------------------------------------
The Computer Systems Group at the Vrije University is world reknown.
The Globe project is addressing the very real problem of the web
growing exponentially and not being designed with solid computer
science expertise to scale accordingly. It is building on the
web's universal interface and good usability features, but
redesigning the underlying engine to support distributed shared
objects that might be web pages or email messages or news articles.
The Vrije University also has strengths in artificial intelligence,
theory, and is building a software engineering group.
Description of the Student
--------------------------
Dan Crawl first came to the Computer Science Department while in high
school, at