Rick Schlichting
Rick Schlichting is currently Head of the Software Systems Research Department at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, New Jersey. From 1982 to 2000, he was on the faculty of the Department of Computer Science at The University of Arizona, where he still holds the position of Adjunct Professor. Rick received the B.A. degree in history and mathematics (computer science option) from the College of William and Mary in 1977, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Cornell University in 1979 and 1982, respectively. Rick's research interests include distributed systems, highly dependable computing and fault tolerance, operating systems, and networks. Much of this work over the past ten years has focused on Cactus, a system for building highly configurable network protocols and services, and Cholla, a software architecture for supporting adaptive behavior in distributed systems. The Cactus project page (now somewhat out of date) can be found here. Publications reporting newer work can be found on the AT&T web site here.
Rick is also active in promoting increased interaction between U.S. and Japanese computer scientists. He spent seven months in 1990 visiting Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he worked on using an attribute-grammar formalism to implement fault-tolerant software. He spent academic 1996-97 at Hitachi Central Research Laboratory near Tokyo working on various software issues related to heterogeneous scientific computation. Both visits were supported by the NSF U.S.-Japan Cooperative Science Program. He continues to do collaborative research with scientists in Japan.
Rick is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and the current chair of IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerance. He is on the editorial board of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and has been active in the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing, serving as chair from 1998-99.
When in Tucson, check out Samurai (3912 N. Oracle Rd.) for authentic and inexpensive Japanese food. During the winter months, they serve the best miso ramen this side of Japan!