VIJAY KUMAR Dept. of Computer Science 408, H.R. Bright Bldg. Texas A&M University, College Station, TX email: vijayk@cs.tamu.edu (Phone (home): 512-833-6241) Objective: To seek a software development position in a company working on innovative and challenging software projects. Education: Ph.D. Computer Science, expected in December ’97 Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas. GPA 3.8 MS Computer Science, 1990 University of Alaska, Fairbanks, Alaska. GPA 3.71 B.Tech.Mining Engineering, 1985 Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India GPA 76%, Silver Medallist. Research Projects: Timelines as Interfaces to Information Systems. (Sept. 1995 - Present) Timeline are often used for visualizing chronologies. However, beyond sequences of events, interactive timelines provide basis for a useful model for visualizing temporal data. Interactive timelines can be used to explore histories and discover relationships among events. In my dissertation, I explored the many uses of timelines interfaces. Two taxonomies of timelines, one to define the content and the other, to define the presentation were created. Based on the taxonomies a framework was developed for generating interactive interfaces. A prototype of the framework was implemented in the Java language. An experimental evaluation of the prototype shows that interactive timelines are useful for getting overviews, and discovering implicit relationships. More information about the project and the prototype can be seen at the URL: http:/csdl.tamu.edu/~vijayk/timelines.html. Walden’s Paths. (May 1995 - June 1996) I was part of a team designing WWW navigation aids for school teachers. Walden’s path is a meta-structure that allows teachers to create trails of web pages related to a topic. The Path Authoring Tool incorporates OpenText and AltaVista search engines. Teachers can search a topic on the Web, choose interesting pages from the search result, order and annotate the pages, and store the links as a named path. Using their favorite Web browser students can access the named path and see the Web as a coherent source of information. Students can access pages on the path in any order. They can wander off the path and return to it easily. The user interface is implemented in Java, and the path server is implemented in C. More information on Walden’s Paths is available from the URL: http:/csdl.tamu.edu/walden. Nested transactions in relational databases. (Sept ‘90 -May ’92) Nested transactions provide a finer control on long-duration transactions, found typically in Computer Aided Design environment. As part of this MS project, I developed modified SQL statements to handle nested transactions. The implementation was in C on Sun OS. Distributed ray tracing. (Jan ’94 - May ’94) Parallel and distributed ray tracing programs are common. However, the existing approaches did not take unpredictable network and workstation load into account. My approach, being adaptive, provided reliability. Professional Experience: 8/96 - 6/97, Software Engineer, Metrowerks, Austin, TX. Designed and developed scripts for testing CodeWarrior for Java tools. Tested the Java compiler for conformance to Sun’s specifications. Developed applets to test the Java Virtual Machine, Abstract Windowing Toolkit, and the CodeWarrior debugger for Java. Created example code for using native methods, Java Generic Library, and JDBC. 4/95 - 9/95, Consultant, EDS Corporation, Houston, TX. Developed front-end component of a customer payment database. It involved use of MFC for developing the user interface, and the use of ODBC classes for exchanging data with a back-end Oracle RDBMS in HP/UX environment. 5/90 - 9/93, Software Engineer, LGL Research Associates, Anchorage, AK. Did X Windows programming on DECWindows and SunOS using 'C' and Tcl/TK. Gained familiarity with make, SCCS, yacc, lex, perl, awk, nawk, and grep utilities. Developed many C language and shell programming utilities for in-house use. Developed and administered an Oracle database containing over 20 million records. Used SQL*Loader and IMP to import data into the database. Developed data entry forms using SQL*Forms and SQL*Menu and used Pro*C to develop customized reports. 9/88 - 5/90, Teaching Assistant, Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks Graded and taught following undergraduate computer science courses: Systems Programming, Programming Languages, Pascal, and Fortran. Affiliations: Member ACM/SIG-CHI, SIG-MOD, SIG-LINK. Member IEEE. Founding member Austin Java Users Group. Programming Skills: Operating Systems: SunOS 4.0, HP/UX, VAX/VMS, Windows/NT, and MS-DOS. Programming Languages: Java, C, C++, PL/SQL, Perl, and various scripting languages. Databases: ObjectStore PSE, Poet, mg, Oracle, and RDB. Misc. Software: internet servers, Web development tools, CASE tools, and statistics tools. Relevant Courses: I have completed following graduate-level courses: Distributed Processing, Networks and Distributed Computing, Performance Evaluation, Software Engineering, Neural Networks, Database Systems, Computer Human Interaction, Information Retrieval, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Hypertext/Hypermedia Systems, Mathematical Software, Optimization, Management Information Systems, Statistics in Research, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Programming Languages and Compiler Design, Adv. Systems Architecture, and Analysis of Algorithms. Selected Publications: Kumar V., Furuta, R., "Modeling Historical Information", submitted, July, 1997. Shipman III, Frank M., Marshall, Catherine C., Furuta, Richard, Brenner, Donald A., Hsieh, Hao-Wei, and Kumar, Vijay, "Using Networked Information to Create Educational Guided Paths", International Journal of Education Telecommunications, to appear, 1997. Kumar V., Furuta, R., "Characterizing the Content and the Presentation of Interactive Timelines", presented at the Workshop on Visualizing Personal Histories, at the University of Maryland, College Park, July 21-22, 1997. Shipman III, F.M., Marshall, C.C., Furuta, R., Brenner, D.A., wei Hsieh, H., and Kumar, V., "Creating Educational Guided Paths over the World-Wide Web". In Educational Telecommunications, 1996: Proceedings of ED-TELECOM 96 (June 1996), P. Carlson and F. Makedon, Eds., Association fir the Advancement of Computing in Education, pp.326-331. Shipman III, F.M., Marshall, C.C., Furuta, R., Brenner, D.A., wei Hsieh, H., and Kumar, V., "Creating Educational Guided Paths over the World-Wide Web", in the proceedings of the Educational Media, October 1995. Also available as a Public Report from http://www.csdl.tamu.edu/walden/rptlist.html. Kumar, V., Furuta, R., Allen, R.B., "Interactive Interfaces for Knowledge-rich Domains", Electronic Publishing: Origination, Dissemination, and Design, Vol. 8, Issues 2 & 3, June and Sept. 1995. References: Dr. Richard Furuta Associate Prof., Dept. of Computer Science Texas A&M University College Station, TX-77843 email: furuta@csdl.tamu.edu Dr. John Leggett Professor, Dept. of Computer Science Texas A&M University College Station, TX-77843 email: leggett@csdl.tamu.edu John Cole Vice President, Engineering LGL Research Associates Bryan, TX-77801 Phone: (409) 775-2000