Volume 4 Number 4 - Software Agents
Tom Bannon is a Senior Member of the technical staff at Object Services and Consulting Inc. (OBJS). He is currently working on a survivability project, where OBJS is developing technology to allow graceful reorganization and restoration of threatened or failed pieces of distributed object systems. It can be described as fault tolerance growing into the distributed object world (such as engendered with Corba), with dynamic resource, situation, threat, and failure models. Tom also has a strong interest in visual design, and specifically 3D.
Prior to OBJS, Tom worked in various corporate research labs at Texas Instruments over the last 8 years. His main projects were in the areas of object-oriented databases, virtual reality game systems, people tracking vision and mapping systems, and video codecs (H.263 and MPEG4). Before that, he worked for 2.5 years in the defense area of TI, primarily building a database system for a board-level ECAD system. Immediately prior to joining OBJS he spent 6 months as a contractor to a large telecom company building web and Java-based GUIs for a network management testing system.
Tom received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University in 1984, and a M.S. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Dallas in 1991.
At OBJS, Steve Ford researches, develops, and administers software and hardware. He is currently working on eGents, an agent system that communicates over E-mail. Past projects at OBJS include developing techniques to improve the Survivability of CORBA-based systems and a survey of programming languages and environments for development of Internet-based applications.
Prior to joining OBJS, Steve worked on the DARPA Open OODB and its predecessor projects at Texas Instruments' Computer Science Laboratory. He was involved in the design and implementation of virtually all components of those systems, but was primarily interested in issues related to programming language API, storage and memory management, communications, object representation and translation, namespace management, performance, and the application of OODBs to image understanding environments.
Before that, Steve developed system software for the TI Explorer Lisp Machine from 1983 to 1988. His primary duties were fixing bugs and fleshing out Richard Stallman's Lisp Machine code.
Prior work includes the first Common Lisp implementation for the Sun workstation and a few years of business application development in both commercial and academic environments.
Steve received an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.A in Biological Sciences from Indiana University.
Dr. Craig Thompson is the President of Object Services and Consulting, Inc. Craig's background spans compositional middleware architectures, federation, web and object integration, virtual office and virtual enterprise, annotations, query architectures, object database systems, and natural language interfaces.
He taught database and AI at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, from 1977 to 1981. He joined the Central Research Laboratory at Texas Instruments (TI) in 1981 and was elected Senior Member of Technical Staff in 1985. At TI, he co-invented menu-based natural language interfaces, deployed in the DARPA/USN FRESH program in the mid-1980s; productized an extensible object-relational DBMS on the TI Explorer Lisp Machine in 1985; led TI research projects in hypermedia and engineering databases in 1987-89.
From 1990 to 1995 Craig was program manager and co-principal investigator on the DARPA Open Object-Oriented Database System (Open OODB). The project was an important influence on the computing industry move toward component software, influential in leading to the Object Management Architecture (OMA) of the Object Management Group (OMG).
In 1995 Craig Thompson, David Wells, and Steve Ford founded Object Services and Consulting, Inc. (OBJS). Craig won and served as principal investigator on the DARPA contract Scaling Object Services Architectures to the Internet (1995-1998) and Agility: Agent -Ility Architecture (1998-2002). Thompson provided architectural consulting and review for the DARPA TRP National Industrial Information Infrastructure Protocols (NIIIP) Consortium (1995-1997), the MCC Object Infrastructure Project (OIP) (1997), and the DARPA ISO Advanced Information Technology Services (AITS) Architecture (1997-1998). He is organizer and co-chair of the OMG Internet Platform Special Interest Group, chartered to merge the OMG OMA architecture with Internet and Web standards to enable large-scale Internet-enabled object-based distributed computing, and also the OMG Agent Platform Special Interest Group, chartered to meld distributed object and multi-agent systems.
Craig holds six patents, is an IEEE Senior Member, has published over 30 papers in journals and conferences. He is a nationally recognized leader in object technology standards. He co-organized the Application
Integration Architectures Workshop (1993) which convened principals from over 20 standards groups on the theme of standards convergence for enterprise computing. He also co-organized the Joint W3C/OMG Workshop on Distributed Objects and Mobile Code (1996) and organized the OMG-DARPA Workshop on Compositional Software Architectures (1998).
Craig received a B.A. in Mathematics from Stanford University in 1971. He received an M.A., and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin, in 1977 and 1984 respectively.
David Wells is the OBJS Vice President, and head of software research.
He was an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science Department at Southern Methodist University from 1980 to 1986 where he conducted research in databases, computer security, and computer graphics. He joined Texas Instruments in 1986 and until 1995 was principal software architect and Co-Principal Investigator for the DARPA Open OODB, which was deployed at 25 government approved alpha sites and is currently licensable as a research product from TI. Wells developed the open systems principles and mechanisms that make Open OODB extensible by third parties. The Open OODB meta architecture served as one of the bases for the Object Management Group's (OMG) Object Services Architecture, which has been adopted by over 500 computer vendors and object-oriented software companies as the basis for developing interoperable systems. David is experienced in leading large research and development projects, having been PI of four research contracts with total funding of $10.7M. He holds three patents and two patent applications in the areas of database software techniques and data security, has authored five journal articles, twelve conference proceedings, and twenty-four invited external presentations and panels. He is reviewer for various journals and conferences including the International Conferences on Very Large Databases, the VLDB Journal, ACM Transactions on Databases, IEEE Computer, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and SIGMOD Conferences.
David received his D. Eng. degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 1980.