Home Page for Jennifer Lundelius Welch

Home Page for Jennifer Lundelius Welch | Parasol Laboratory

Jennifer Lundelius Welch
Professor
Distributed Computing Group

Parasol Laboratory	url:	http://parasol.tamu.edu/~welch/
Department of Computer Science and Engineering	email:
Texas A&M University	office:	425G HRBB
College Station, TX 77843-3112	tel:	(979) 845-5076
USA	fax:	(979) 458-0718

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Teaching

Textbook:

Distributed Computing: Fundamentals, Simulations and Advanced Topics, Second Edition, John Wiley & Sons, 2004, by Hagit Attiya and Jennifer Welch.

Spring 2010 Course:

CSCE 181, Introduction to Computer Science

Some Previous Undergraduate Courses:

Some Previous Graduate Courses:

I am interested in distributed computing systems, especially loosely-coupled, heterogeneous and failure-prone ones. My research approach encompasses formal models, algorithm design and analysis, and lower bounds and impossibility proofs. I am interested in problems that arise in a wide variety of contexts, whose common thread is the difficulties that arise from concurrency and uncertainty, especially that due to asynchrony and/or failures. The problems I have studied generally arise in providing infrastructure services (or "middleware") that can be used by end-user distributed applications, as opposed to the applications themselves. In more theoretical language, I have focused on ways to simulate more powerful (or better-behaved) systems on top of less powerful (or more poorly-behaved) systems. My papers can be divided (a little arbitrarily) into the following categories:

providing clock synchronization and understanding the differences in computational power between different timing models;
providing more reliable message-passing communication in networks;
providing more powerful kinds of shared objects on top of weaker kinds of shared object or on top of message passing; and
using modularity in the design and analysis of distributed algorithms.

Recently I have been applying some of these ideas and approaches in new situations:

mobile ad hoc networks,
metamorphic robot systems, and
randomized distributed data structures.

List of papers available here.

My work has been supported by

National Science Foundation, "Collaborative Research: Randomized Distributed Data Structures for Product Design," PI: Jennifer Welch, collaborating PI: Deborah Thurston (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), 2005-2008.
Texas Advanced Research Program, "Programming Distributed Systems with Randomized Shared Objects", PI: Jennifer Welch. 2002-2003.
National Science Foundation, "Self-Stabilizing Group Communication for Mobile Environments," PI: Jennifer Welch, co-PI: Nancy Lynch (MIT), collaborating researcher: Shlomi Dolev (Ben-Gurion University). 2001-2005.
National Science Foundation, "Distributed Algorithms for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks," PI: Jennifer Welch, co-PI: Nitin Vaidya. 1999-2001.
(Fellowships) U.S. Department of Education, "GAANN: Fellowships for Research in Robotics, Training, Mobile Computing, and High-Performance Computing," PI: Richard Volz, co-PIs: Louis Everett, Jennifer Welch, Nancy Amato. 1998-2001.
(Equipment) National Science Foundation, "CISE Research Instrumentation: Distributed Computing and Real-Time Networking Research," PI: Nitin Vaidya, co-PIs: Wei Zhao, Jennifer Welch, Nancy Amato. 1995.
National Science Foundation, Presidential Young Investigator Award, "The Impact of Time on Distributed Computing," 1991-1997. Matching funds from Texas Instruments (1995-1996, 1994-1995), Shell Oil Company Foundation (1993-1994, 1992-1993), IBM (1991-1992), and Dazix Intergraph Corporation (1991-1992).
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Foundation Fund Award, "The Impact of Time on Distributed Computing," PI: Jennifer L. Welch. 1991.
IBM Faculty Development Award, "Partially Synchronous Models of Distributed Systems," PI: Jennifer L. Welch. 1990-1992.
National Science Foundation Research Initiation Award, "The Impact of Time on Distributed Computing," PI: Jennifer L. Welch. 1990-1992.

My CV: in PDF.

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People

Current Group Members

Hyun-Chul Chung, PhD Student
Gautam Roy, MS Student
Srikanth Sastry, PhD Student
Saira Viqar, PhD Student

Former Group Members

Evelyn Pierce, post-doc
Shlomi Dolev, post-doc
Soma Chaudhuri, post-doc
Guangtong Cao, PhD
Yu Chen, PhD
Hyunyoung Lee, PhD
Jennifer Walter, PhD
Injong Rhee, PhD (graduated from UNC)
Martha Kosa, PhD (graduated from UNC),
Siva Subramanian, MS
Nicholas Neumann, MS
Sangeeta Bhattacharya, MS
Navneet Malpani, MS
Jennifer Walter, MS
Joseph Koothrappally, MS
Jiantian Yang, MS
Sundarrajan Kanthadai, MS
Julio Rivera, MS
Michael Kate, MS
Prasad Nagaraja, MCS
Saritha Goli, MCS
Utkarsh Dhond, MCS
James Tobaben, MCS
Rebecca Ingram, summer undergrad research
Joshua Nasman, summer undergrad research
Sharlita Stevenson, summer undergrad research
Ricardo Suzuki, summer undergrad research
Vijay Balasubramanian, undergrad research
Allen Parish, undergrad research
Todd Venhaus, undergrad research
Marianne Manglicmot, undergrad research
Rajan Chandra, Senior Honors Thesis
Sherwin Abraham, undergrad research
Sybil Calvillo, undergrad research
Richard Li, undergrad research
Dustin Kirkland, Senior Honors Thesis
Delayne Vaughn, undergrad research
Kera Alexander, undergrad research
Christopher Wurtz, undergrad research

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