I'm a Ph.D. student at the University of Arizona in the Computer Science Department. I received my BS in 1994 at Mississippi State University from their Computer Science Department. For the past several years, I have been working with Rick Schlichting on configurable, adaptive systems. I've accepted an offer to take a faculty postion at the University of New Mexico in the coming academic year.
In addition to my research at the University of Arizona, I have in the past also been responsible for teaching courses over the summer term. The two classes I taught were CSc 430, a junior-senior level software engineering and object-oriented design course, and CSc342, a sophomore-junior level data structures and algorithms class. I really enjoy teaching, and hope to do more of it in the future, once I graduate. A postscript file describing my teaching philosphy is available for the curious.
Outside of school, I have a variety of interests, some of which I haven't had time to pursue much lately. I did manage to find time to get married in 1999, so one thing I work hard to do is find time to spend with my wife, Terese Rand Bridges. Terese is a doctoral student in the department of Language, Reading, and Culture, in the College of Education. She spent several years teaching English in Guatemala , so we make occasional trips to Latin America, and for our honeymoon, she managed to drag me off to Belize.
If you need to contact me, you might want to know my my address and phone numbers.
My research interests cover the range of systems software, including operating systems, mobile computing, and many other areas. A postscript file describing my research interests is available for the curious.
My recent research has focused on supporting adaptive composite
protocols in the Cactus
framework. This is an interesting problem, because we want to be
able to modularly change control policies independent of the control
mechanism, to support multiple adaptive behaviors in one
microprotocol, and to try to coordinate adaptative decision-making
between different system components. The result of this work is
In the past, I've worked on the Scout and Liquid Software research projects. I've done work on those projects work including porting the X11 server to Scout, working with conservative garbage collectors, optimizing an alpha instruction scheduler, writing a Java byte-code interpreter, and doing video-stream filtering on active networks. I've also done work on writing a wireless network emulator as a linux kernel module. Unfortunately the timing constraints of wireless MAC protocols appear to make an distributed, real-time emulator that is accurate under load infeasible.
As you can imagine, as a graduate student, I don't have a whole lot of spare time. What spare time I do have, I spend with my wife or doing a variety of hobbies. These hobbies include: Playing Go, both on a real board at the Tucson Go Club and on KGS. In addition to playing Go, I occasionally go hiking, practice Japanese swordsmanship, and generally goof off. I'm also a member of the infamous (and now-defunct) Geek Gods Softball Team. In addition, I like to snow ski and play poker, but rarely have the chance to do much of either. I do live in Arizona after all.
In the past, I have also been a representative of the College of Science on the Graduate and Professional Student Council. As part of this, I was the GPSC's representative to the University's Strategic Planning and Budgetary Advisory Committee. (SPBAC) I got to see all sorts of stuff about the University budget, the attitudes of legislators toward higher education, and other scary things. Trust me, you don't really want to know.
Believe it or not, despite the fact that I come from Mississippi, I'm an unabashed liberal. This means I'm a firm believer in progressive social policy, individual privacy, affirmative action where necessary, civil and human rights, and most of the other things that liberals are accused of believing in now and then. This means I usually vote for the Democrats, since they are are the lesser of three evils. (The Democrats, Republicans, and not voting.)
I (very rarely) maintain a list operating systems research projects. Unfortunately, I haven't updated this list in at least two years, and have a large pile of email from people that want me to update the web pages, so they're certainly woefully out of date. Frankly, your probably better going elsewhere, but if you're curious, feel free.
(The picture at the top of the page was taken at an overlook near the lodge at the north rim of the Grand Canyon in late September, 2001)