Phinished, now at Santa Cruz

It gives me great pleasure to report that on September 6, 2000, I submitted
my Ph.D.
dissertation to the archivist at the Science Library of the University of
California, Irvine, thus completing the last formal requirement for my
Doctorate of Philosohpy in Information and Computer Science.

My dissertation with entitled, "An Analysis of the Hypertext Versioning
Domain" and is available at:
http://www.ics.uci.edu/~ejw/papers/whitehead_diss.pdf

The very next day the moving van arrived to whisk me off to my new job, as
an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of California,
Santa Cruz, located in Santa Cruz, California, about an hour south of San
Jose, in the San Francisco Bay Area. I am the first hire in a new Software
Engineering group at UCSC, part of the Baskin School of Engineering.  I'm
excited about this job: as the University of California expands over the
next decade to accommodate the demographic bulge of college age students
caused by the baby boom echo, there are many prospects for growth,
especially in Computer Science.  The Software Engineering group is expected
to grow to 5-7 faculty by 2005, and I'm thrilled to be in on the ground
floor.

What does this all mean for WebDAV?  One of the nice qualities of this job
is that it allows me to continue as the Chair of WebDAV, while also being
able to perform research.  Now that the dissertation is done, I'm looking
forward to completing the access control protocol, finally finishing the
advanced collections work, and moving RFC 2518 to Draft Standard status. I
also plan to work on DASL, to complete this needed protocol, as well as
continuing to contribute to DeltaV, and thus completing the original goals
of WebDAV.  Look for increased WebDAV WG activity in the coming days and
weeks.

I'm also interested in doing WebDAV-related research.  What innovative
clients can be built on the WebDAV infrastructure?  How should groups
performing Web authoring be made aware of each other's activities?  What
Software Engineering principles can be applied to the development and
verification of application layer network protocols such as WebDAV and
DeltaV? Additionally, a quick look at the future work section of my
dissertation highlights a number of areas I'd like to explore in hypertext
versioning and configuration management as well.  There are many avenues to
explore here (and yes, I am looking for good students).

As a Professor I'm also teaching; my first course is a graduate level
introduction to Software Engineering.  If you're interested, my syllabus is
on the Web:
http://www.cse.ucsc.edu/~ejw/courses/276/

So, I'm looking forward to working with you to finish the tasks in front of
the WebDAV working group, from my new location .... in Santa Cruz.

- Jim Whitehead
Chair, WebDAV Working Group
Assistant Professor, U.C. Santa Cruz
ejw@cse.ucsc.edu

Received on Thursday, 28 September 2000 21:12:56 UTC