Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Congratulations Dr. Ajith Ranabahu!

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Ajith Ranbahu on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. Ajith's Ph.D. topic was Abstraction Driven Application and Data Portability in Cloud Computing and his advisor was Prof. Amith Sheth. You can watch his Ph.D. defense on YouTube ... a sign of the times!

Ajith is of course one of the 6 founding members of the Apache Axis2 team and the 5th to finish his Ph.D.! Now only Deepal (at Georgia Tech) is left to finish and it'll be an amazing record when he completes too :-). Ajith also worked inWSO2 for an year before leaving for grad school where he continued to work on Axis2 and WSO2 Tungsten (now WSO2 App Server) and where he was championing building developer tools (which I used to dismiss ;-)). He initially went to University of Georgia but moved to Dayton when Amith moved to Dayton. Ajith plans to stay on at Dayton for a while and is looking towards a research career.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Congratulations Dr. Ajith Ranabahu.

Aj said...

Thanks for the nice note. Indeed, when I look back, I see that tooling has been an important part of what I did, during my professional life as well as the research life.

Some of my research work, although not strictly intended for tools, were wrapped around tooling components to show their real value. The philosophy was to have startup quality so that these tools are usable, attractive and able to flawlessly cover their intended use cases (Max played an important role in defining the quality of the outcomes. In fact, the term 'startup quality' came from him)

I should say thank you once again for showing me the way, both to higher education as well as the world of open source software. I still remember the long discussion we had 7 years ago about pros and cons of going for higher ed. Looking back, those were the seeds of what became fruits now.

Kamal said...

Congratulations Ranabahu ayya...