Page type: student

Vivek Ratan's Home Page; Vivek Ratan;;Particulars;;I'm a graduate student in the;computer science department at the;University of Washington.;I'm currently on academic leave from UW and working as a research scientist;at Bellcore in Morristown, NJ.;;Researchwork;;At Bellcore:;I'm interested in distributed computing issues - distributed OO systems,;application/system development, high availability. I currently work with;the distributed systems group in Bellcore on high availability in distributed;software systems. [Very simply, a highly available system is one that;continues to run in the presence of failures.] Our group is developing a;toolset, Anatidae, that provides high availability mechanisms for;distributed applications that adhere to the CORBA standard.;We have also looked at active replication schemes for high availability in;DCE applications. A recent effort has focussed on enhancing the;availability and fault tolerance of the Cell Directory Service (CDS);of DCE.;Details about these projects can be found;here.;I'm also interested in high availability issues for the Web and integration;of distributed OO technology with Web servers.;At UW:;At the University of Washington, I worked on the Murphy project;(software safety methodologies) with the software safety group headed by;Dr. Nancy Leveson. Details on safety research at UW can be found at the;UW safety page. Much of my work involved looking into automatic fault;tree generation from;requirements specifications written in RSML, as well as working on the;RSML language simulator.;Publications:;A list of some recent publications can be found here.;; Personal information;;I was born and brought up in;India, but have been in the US for the last eight years. As an;undergraduate, I attended;Angelo State University (San Angelo, TX), and then,;Wesleyan University;(Middletown, CT), where I received a B.A. in Physics and;Math(Computer Science). Right after, I came to the University of Washington;in Seattle to puruse graduate studies in Computer Science.;I like to play tennis whenever I can. Squash, and to a lesser;extent racquetball, suffice when I can't. I ardently folow the game of;cricket. I've been participating in; Ultra Cricket,;a play-by-email cricket simulation game, for many years. I also follow the;exploits of the Supersonics, the Mariners, and the Cowboys.;Over the last year and a half, I have taken a keen interest in;learning ballroom dancing - the Waltz, Foxtrot, ChaCha, Rhumba, Tango,;and Swing (no West Coast please), and some occasional dabbles in Mambo.;The NY/NJ area has some of the best places for learning and dancing. The;Seattle Center used to have a big-band session every Saturday.;At UW, I was involved with the Model United Nations (MUN) chapter.;Model United Nations (MUN) is an international, educational organization;which simulates the workings of the UN. Conferences are held throughout;the year on current topics - restructuring and reforming parts of the;UN like the Security Council, ECOSOC, the IMF and the World Bank, rapid;population growth, nuclear proliferation, etc.; Here is the home page for the MUN chapter;of UW.;My other interests are in reading the poetry of Mirza Ghalib, a 19th century;Indian poet. I'm also interested in English literature, especially the;Romantic and Victorian periods.; Web links;; Here is the obligatory collection of Web sites;that I tend to visit often.;;Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Box 352350,;University of Washington,;Seattle, WA 98195 USA; vivek@cs.washington.edu; Last modified: Oct 2, 1996;;