Dissertation title:

Scalable Cooperative Multiagent Reinforcement Learning in the Context of an Organization

Advisor:

Victor Lesser

Research interests:

Current Position:

Lecturer, British University in Dubai

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

shario@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://dis.cs.umass.edu/~shario/

Dissertation title:

Exploiting Structure in Decentralized Markov Decision Processes

Advisor:

Victor Lesser and Shlomo Zilberstein

Research interests:

AI: Multi-Agent Systems

Current Position:

Software Engineer, Google Inc.

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

raphen@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~raphen

Dissertation title:

Exploiting Structure: A Guided Approach to Sampling-Based Robot Motion Planning

Advisor:

Oliver Brock

Research interests:

Robotics and Machine Learning

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, Union College, NY

Graduation date:

May 2007

Email address:

bburns@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www-robotics.cs.umass.edu/~bburns/

Dissertation title:

An efficient and privacy-preserving framework for information dissemination among independent entities

Advisor:

James F. Kurose and Donald F. Towsley

Research interests:

Computer Networking, Privacy

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, John Jay College

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

chenwf@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~chenwf

Dissertation title:

Automating and Evaluating Assume-guarantee Reasoning

Advisor:

Lori A. Clarke

Research interests:

Software Engineering, Software Verification

Current Position:

Software Engineer, TheMathWorks

Graduation date:

February 2007

Email address:

jcobleig@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~jcobleig/

Dissertation title:

Planning and Learning for Weakly-Coupled Distributed Agents

Advisor:

Victor Lesser

Research interests:

AI

Current Position:

Self-Employed: investment software developer; publicist; art dealer

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

anyuan@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~anyuan

Dissertation title:

Improving Access to Organized Information

Advisor:

Micah Adler

Research interests:

Theory: Algorithms, complexity, hardness of approximation

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, Williams College

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

heeringa@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~heeringa

Dissertation title:

Quantifying and Improving the Performance of Garbage Collection

Advisor:

Emery Berger

Research interests:

Systems: Memory Management and Runtime Systems

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, Canisius College

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

hertz@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www-ali.cs.umass.edu/~hertz

Dissertation title:

Design Issues in Multi–tier Heterogeneous Sensor Networks

Advisor:

Prashant Shenoy & Deepak Ganesan

Research interests:

Sensor and Wireless Networks, Distributed Systems and Data Dissemination

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, I.I.T Bombay

Graduation date:

February 2007

Email address:

purukulk@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~purukulk/

Dissertation title:

Resource Management for Distributed Real-Time Systems

Advisor:

Prashant Shenoy & Krithi Ramamritham

Research interests:

Distributed Systems, Sensor Networks, Real-Time Systems, Wireless and Mobile Computing, Operating Systems, Database Technologies

Current Position:

Associate Professor, Beihang University

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

lihuan@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/~lihuan/

Dissertation title:

Sentence Level Information Patterns for Novelty Detection

Advisor:

W. Bruce Croft

Research interests:

Information Retrieval, Question Answering, Novelty Detection and Data Mining

Current Position:

Visiting Assistant Professor, Mount Holyoke College

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

xiaoyan@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~xiaoyan

Dissertation title:

System Support for Pervasive Multimedia Systems

Advisor:

Prashant Shenoy & Mark Corner

Research interests:

Sensor and wireless networks, multimedia systems, operating systems and distributed systems

Current Position:

Senior Research Scientist at EMC

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

xiaotaol@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://lass.cs.umass.edu/~xiaotaol/

Dissertation title:

Aspects of Sentence Retrieval

Advisor:

W. Bruce Croft

Research interests:

Information retrieval, machine learning, and natural language processing

Current Position:

Postdoctoral position at Yahoo! Research, Barcelona

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

vanessa@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/~vanessa/

Dissertation title:

The Smoothed Dirichlet Distribution: Understanding Cross-entropy ranking in Information Retrieval

Advisor:

James Allan

Research interests:

AI: Machine Learning for Information Retrieval and Extraction

Current Position:

Postdoctoral Fellow, Machine Learning Dept., Carnegie Mellon University

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

nmramesh@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~nmramesh/

Dissertation title:

Exploiting Autocorrelation to Improve Statistical Models of Relational Data

Advisor:

David Jensen

Research interests:

AI: Data Mining, Machine Learning

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, Purdue University

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

jneville@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~jneville

Dissertation title:

Generalized Robot Grasping and Manipulation

Advisor:

Roderic Grupen and Andrew Fagg

Research interests:

Robotics and Machine Learning

Current Employment:

Robotics Engineer, Dexterous Robotics Lab, Johnson Space Center, NASA

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

rplatt@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~rplatt

Dissertation title:

Tandem Learning: Learning on Both Features and Instances for Text

Advisor:

James Allan

Research interests:

Information Retrieval

Current Position:

Yahoo! Applied Research

Graduation date:

May 2007

Email address:

hema@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~hema

Dissertation title:

Communication Management in Distributed Sensor Interpretation

Advisor:

Victor Lesser

Research interests:

Multi-agent Systems and Machine Learning

Employment preference:

Computer Scientist, SRI International

Graduation date:

May 2007

Email address:

jyshen@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~jyshen

Dissertation title:

Multi-image surface reconstruction from aerial images and sequences

Advisor:

Allen R. Hanson

Research interests:

Computer Vision, Photogrammetry, 3D Reconstruction, Surface Models, Anytime Computation, Aerial and Satellite Remote Sensing.

Current Position:

Postdoctoral Research Associate, UMass Amherst

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

stolle@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/~stolle/

Dissertation title:

Scalable Learning in Many Layers

Advisor:

Paul E. Utgoff

Research interests:

Machine learning

Current Position:

Postdoctoral Research Scientist, CSLI, Stanford University

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

stracudj@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~stracudj/

Dissertation title:

Self-Organization in Large-Scale Wireless Networks

Advisor:

James F. Kurose and Donald F. Towsley

Research interests:

Wireless Networks

Current Position:

Director of Search Engine Research, Adverflex Inc.

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

svasu@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~svasu

Dissertation title:

Inference of Network Properties from Active and Passive Measurements on Wired/Wireless Networks: A Modeling Approach

Advisor:

James F. Kurose and Donald F. Towsley

Research interests:

Computer Networks

Current Position:

Senior Research Engineer, United Technology Research Center

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

weiwei@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www-net.cs.umass.edu/~weiwei/

Dissertation title:

On Routing Optimization in Wired and Wireless Networks

Advisor:

James F. Kurose and Donald F. Towsley

Research interests:

Computer Networks

Current Position:

Research Staff, IBM

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

czhang@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.cs.umass.edu/~czhang

Dissertation title:

Learning based organizational approach for Peer-to-Peer based Information Retrieval Systems

Advisor:

Victor Lesser

Research interests:

AI: Multiagent Systems

Current Position:

Postdoctoral Research Associate, Pennsylvania State University

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

hzhang@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www.haizhengzhang.com

Dissertation title:

On the Interactions among Self-interested Users of Network Resources

Advisor:

Donald F. Towsley

Research interests:

Computer Networks, Systems

Current Position:

Assistant Professor, Suffolk University

Graduation date:

September 2006

Email address:

honggang@cs.umass.edu

Home page:

http://www-net.cs.umass.edu/~honggang/