THE BIG PICTURE

The following narrative describes my underlying philosophy, professorial activities, and long term plans that I have developed over the past five years. The three main components research, teaching, and service are addressed separately with the hope that a coherent total picture of my past, present, and future planned activities will be more easily discerned here then in the previously stated individual items.

RESEARCH

Over the past five years I have engaged in numerous activities all designed to establish and further develop my research program. Starting with my first summer here, during which I had received support from the University, a conference article was produced that I presented at a Fuzzy Conference in Israel. At the same time I was conducting interdisciplinary research with a group of industrial engineering professors both here, at other U.S. institutions, and in Italy. This work resulted in an NSF grant proposal, a book chapter, a number conference articles, and a paper presentation at a conference in Nimes, France, in the fall of 1997. During my second summer I spend ten week at an Air Force base in Texas attempting to establish a working relationship that I hoped would lead to funding of an expert system related research project. An interesting knowledge representation problem was identified as well as other AI related problems that I am using to produce a number of journal articles that will be submitted to the Journal of Electronic Testing: Theory and Applications. This work will also form the foundation for the work of a current Ph.D. graduate student that I am supervising. I am currently working on attempting to apply some knowledge based AI techniques to the real time scheduling domain and plan to publish those results in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. In the summer of 1998 I applied for the NASA Summer Faculty Program in yet another attempt to attract external funding. At this point I became involved with the AMISS project, funded by Los Alamos National Lab. This project dominated the past two years and was funded at $300,000 for that period. The main supervision of this project and the closeout of a number of other Los Alamos projects, became my responsibility. A number of conference and journal papers came out of this effort along with important experience that I gained in the management and creation of budgets. Currently I am involved in a number of joint grant projects with in the department and individual projects that I have submitted. It is hoped that new external funding is just around the corner. In summary, I consider my main research area to be applied AI focusing on hybrid knowledge base systems applied to job-shop type scheduling problems. With in this area I have also directed the modernization of a software program that is capable of scheduling and displaying complex Allen temporal relationships and interfacing with an expert system for flexible conflict resolution. I’m using this software project as the basis of a number of master's student projects. Recently I have been exploring the AI component of the computer security domain. A number of the joint grant proposals are in this area. It is my hope that these activities, along with consulting work that I have been doing over the past two years with ESI International, will result in obtaining external funding for research projects.

TEACHING

All of the courses that I have taught here, expect for one, have been directly related to my area of research interest. This has made it easy for me to attract students and to broaden my own knowledge of related areas. I have found the teaching and student interaction to be very enjoyable and I feel that I have learned and grown from the experience almost as much as my student have. I view each new teaching assignment as a multi-level challenge, how can I relate this to my research, how can I reach and motivate the most students, and how can I improve as an instructor. I feel that in most cases I have successfully met these challenges and I look forward to continuing to meet them in the future.

SERVICE

University related service assignments have provided me with a deeper understanding of the inner workings of a major University on all levels. Having never attended a large University I was very interested in learning the ins and outs of such and institution. I feel that I have made some contributions but on whole I think I have taken more then I have given in these assignments. I look forward to a time (post-tenure) when I will be in a position to make more significant contributions. My service activities in the local community have been particularly gratifying. As Chair of the Tallahassee Coalition Center of Excellence Advisory Committee, I have had an opportunity to be a role model to a large number of African-American children and hopefully have inspired at least a few to become computer scientist. In addition I have had the opportunity to serve as session chair at two international conferences and as associate editor of the proceedings for one. This activity combined with numerous journal article reviews, as started the long process of establishing a name in this field.