| Carleton University | August, 1997-continues |
| Nortel | November, 1986-April, 1999 |
| Technetronic | August, 1984-November, 1986 |
| Ferranti Computer Systems | June, 1983-July,1984 |
| John Bell Technical Systems | March, 1982-June, 1983 |
| Sperry Gyroscope | December, 1979-March, 1982 |
Personal Information
Name: Tony White
Address: 325 Ferndale Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario,
CANADA K1Z 6P9
Telephone:
(613) 725-2708 (Home)
(613) 520-2600 x5595 (Office)
(613) 520-5727 (FAX)
Email: tony@sce.carleton.ca
Age: 43
Marital Status: married
Born: England
Children: 2 boys, Colin and Andrew
Residency: Permanent
resident of Canada
Pictures of my family can be found here.
M.C.S. thesis area of specialization: Genetic Algorithms.
Course work included: Expert Systems, NLP, Foundations of Programming Languages, Mathematical Methods for Optimization, Performance Analysis of Queuing Systems and Computational Geometry.
I am currently studying for a Ph.D. in Systems Engineering at Carleton University. My area of specialization is the application of Swarm Intelligence to problems in communications. I am part of the Perpetuum Mobile Procura project. My supervisor is Professor Bernard Pagurek.
Awards/Scholarships
1975-1977 Open Exhibition, Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge
University.
1978 Caldwell Scholarship, Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge University.
1977 Corpus
Christi College Essay Prize for, "Patterns of Labelling in IsotopicallyLabelled
Organic Molecules."
1978 Corpus
Christi College Essay Prize for, "The Identity of Man."
1991 Nortel
Postgraduate
Scholarship.
Computer Language Expertise
C, C++, Smalltalk, Java, Prolog, Scheme. I have
8 years of C programming experience, 3 of Prolog programming experience
and 5 of programming in Smalltalk. I have 2 years of Java experience. Scheme
was used as part of a university course. I am currently working in Prolog,
Smalltalk and Java. I have extensive knowledge of making these languages
inter-work.
The majority of the work that I have been doing in the last 6 years has been on the PC and on Sun workstations. The last two years have been exclusively devoted to work on the PC, under Windows NT.
Aug.1997-continues:
Systems
and Computer Engineering Department, Carleton
University, Ottawa, Canada
I am currently a senior researcher within the Perpetuum
Mobile Procura group, a group that is researching the application of
mobile agents in the area of network management. I participate in student
supervision, review group paper and report output, and provide technical
program input regarding aspects of the program's research direction. I
have lectured on mobile agents, aspects of network management and data
structures when asked to do so. I am the technical prime on the architectural
evolution of the mobility toolkit and provide support for the existing
implementation. I formally co-supervise four graduate students in the areas
of: mobile agents for IP telephony advanced services, plug-and-play networks
and hot swapping technologies for next generation applications.
My principal role is in research of mobile agent technology; specifically, how mobile agent activities can be coordinated by exploitation of the behaviour of societies of simple agents. In the systems that I consider, problem solving is considered an emergent property of the system; i.e. the interactions of many agents with their environment solve the problem but no one agent has an overall view of the system or problem to be solved. Local, rather than global, interactions determine the behaviour of the system.
Upon completing my Ph.D., I have been invited to become an adjunct professor within the department.
Nov. 1986-April, 1999: Nortel Technology, Ottawa, Canada
January, 1995-December, 1996
I was on secondment to the Harlow U.K. laboratory,
working within the Software and System Engineering (S&SE) Department.
Approximately 50% of the secondment was devoted to the exploration of the
use of Genetic Algorithms (GAs) in problems in Telecommunications. This
included the generation of several prototypical applications for ring design
and community of interest visualization (essentially a clustering problem).
A number of papers
were written concerning this work. I was also involved in the continued
development of RouteFinder - a router that uses GAs in order to provide
balanced routing solutions in networks and have embedded all of these applications
in a Smalltalk framework for demonstration purposes. An agent-based solution
of a routing problem in SONET/SDH networks was also built.
The remaining 50% of my time was spent working on agent-based Alarm Correlation. The result of this work has been a design and implementation of an Alarm Correlation engine used for the Concorde switch product. This work was performed exclusively in Smalltalk and involved embedding a production rule environment seamlessly into Smalltalk (based upon NéOpus). A rule compiler was written a part of this activity.
Several patents resulted from this work.
I reported to John Turner. I am currently a level 7 individual contributor.
July, 1993-December, 1994
Member of the Computer Research Laboratory (CRL).
I worked on a configuration problem relating to network design and built
a costing and provisioning system for ATM networks (along with Innes Ferguson,
recently of the NRC). I also built a Smalltalk
system for network design called DesignMate which was useful in my work
at the Harlow laboratory.
My manager during this time was Bill Williams.
August, 1992-July, 1993
I worked as part of the Data Packet Network Network
Management (DPN NMS) group. I wrote a proposal for an engineering design
and analysis system for DPN-100 networks and provided consulting for the
Expert Advisor. I also added an optimization feature for a routing package
used in engineering DPN-100 networks. A genetic algorithm solution to the
same optimization problem was proposed but not implemented.
My manager during this time was Naren Shah.
August, 1991-August, 1992
On sabbatical at Carleton undertaking research
in the area of Artificial Life and Evolutionary Computation. I worked with
Professor
F. Oppacher during this time.
November, 1988-August, 1991
Principal Architect for the Expert Advisor. The
Expert Advisor is an alarm correlation engine used for diagnosing problems
in a DPN-100 network. The expert system is large, consisting of greater
than 18,000 rules and problem structures. Considerable work went into a
number of prototypes in order to arrive at the current knowledge representation.
A novel solution to the common problem of complex rule interaction was
designed and implemented through a use of message passing techniques. The
system is currently deployed in a large number of sites. Several papers
have been published describing this system and references to them can be
found on my publications
page.
A full customization environment has been implemented for this system in order to allow end users to modify the delivered expert system and prove the changes in a simulated environment before integration into the operational network management system.
This system was the subject of a Canadian A.I. magazine article on Canadian A.I. success stories written by Dr. Suhayya Abu-Hakima of the NRC. A number of papers relating to this work can be found on my publications page.
My manager during this time was Sameh Rabie.
November, 1986-November, 1988
I worked on DMSpulse - an application which charted
performance measurements from a DMS 100. This application was written in
C on a PC. I also worked on SysPlan - a configuration engine built in Prolog
on a PC. This system was used to configure software systems.
My managers were Bill Riddick and Tom Taylor.
July, 1984-November,
1986: Technetronic Inc., Ottawa,
Canada
I managed the Modelling Research Group, being
responsible for the generation of PC-based software for the modelling of
IBM mainframe performance. This position required a knowledge of Queuing
Theory, Probability and Statistics. I managed a group of two other Capacity
Planning staff. As a major part of my work, I was responsible for the research
into algorithms that could be used to model a complex mainframe computer
system accurately while still being able to run on a PC. Prior to my departure,
work began on an expert system product to be used in the tuning of the
IBM MVS operating system. This expert system prototyping began using the
TIMM expert system shell.
June, 1983-July,
1984: Consultant working for Ferranti, Bracknell, England
During my year as a consultant, I developed signal
processing software (based upon alpha-beta filters) for a gun fire control
system. I also developed a package which was used in fitting curves to
experimentally-derived shell trajectory data. This software was written
in Pascal on a VAX running VMS.
March,
1982-June, 1983: John Bell Technical Systems, Fleet, England
I wrote small software packages, in Pascal, for
various John Bell clients. The biggest project was for a defence contractor
where a trials data base was designed.
December, 1979-March, 1982: Sperry Gyroscope, Bracknell, England