Congratulations Dr. Dasarath Weeratunge!

It gives me great pleasure to post extremely belated (he completed in December last year!) congratulations to Dr. Dasarath Weeratunge on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana (where I got my Ph.D. too). Dasarath's Ph.D. was in compiler optimization (don't have the exact topic) and was co-advised by Suresh Jagannathan and Xiangyu Zhang. Dasarath is now working in Intel Labs.

I advised Dasarath's final year project when he was an undergrad at Univ. of Moratuwa - he worked on what became Apache Kandula, a WS-Atomic Transactions implementation for Apache Axis. Later he also contributed to Apache Axis2 and worked on making Kandula work with Axis2. He joined Purdue in August 2005 IIRC.

Congratulations Dr. Malinda Kaushalye Kapuruge!

It gives me great pleasure to post extremely belated (he completed in October last year!) congratulations to Dr. Malinda Kaushalye Kapuruge on his completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Swinburne University in Australia. Kau's thesis topic was "Orchestration as Organization: Using an organisational paradim to achieve adaptable business process modelling and enactment in service compositions" and was supervised by Prof. Jun Han and Dr. Alan Colman. Kau's going to stay on in Swinburne as a Research Scientist for some time.

Kaushalye worked in WSO2 for 2 years from 2006 to 2008 before going to grad school to pursue his Ph.D. work. Congratulations and good luck!

(I'm going to post a few catch up congratulations so I can be up to date :-).)

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.

Congratulations Dr. Nabeel Mohamed!

It gives me great pleasure to post belated congratulations to Dr. Nabeel Mohamed on completing his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Purdue University.

Nabeel was an employee in WSO2 for a short time before he left to pursue Ph.D. work and is the first of many who have worked in WSO2 and gone onto doing Ph.Ds to complete the degree. Nabeel's Ph.D. thesis topic was "Privacy Preserving Access Control for Third-Party Data Management Systems" and his advisor was Prof. Elisa Bertino. The topic is of immense applicability for cloud data protection. Nabeel is staying on in Purdue as a Post-Doctoral Researcher right now.

Congratulations Dr. Jaliya Ekanayake!

It gives me great personal pleasure to congratulate Jaliya on completing his Ph.D.in Computer Science from Indiana University in late December. His PhD work was on extending the applicability of Map Reduce to a larger class of problems. The software he developed as part of his work is available at http://iterativemapreduce.org/. Jaliya was a student of Prof. Geoffrey Fox.

Jaliya has already started work at Microsoft Research and works on applying map-reduce and other approaches to solve large scale systems problems.

Jaliya is the second person from the original Apache Axis2 team to complete his Ph.D. after Srinath. Jaliya is the original father of Apache Sandesha, the WS-Reliable Messaging implementation for Apache Axis. He, along with the rest of the original Axis2 crew, laid the foundation for a lot of the technology that WSO2 is built on. The remaining original Axis2 team members (and about 20+ others who have been at WSO2 at one point) are now in the pipeline to complete their Ph.D.'s over the next few years!

Congratulations and best wishes Jaliya for a bright future!

Congratulations Dr. Srinath Perera!

It gives me great personal thrill to congratulate Srinath on successfully defending his PhD thesis in Computer Science in the area of management of large scale systems at Indiana University a few hours ago! I'm also a member of his phd committee and it was great to part of this historic occasion in his life!

Srinath is the root of WSO2 in many ways. As an intern at the Lanka Software Foundation (LSF), along with Dimuthu Leelaratne (who's currently in WSO2 and is one of our security experts) and 2 others, were the ones who created AxisMora, a prototype re-write of Apache Axis1 to show that a pull-parser based SOAP engine could do wonders. In fact they got it to go 10x faster than Axis1. Srinath went on to lead the Axis2 effort that LSF ran in 2004/05 and then went to grad school in August 2005.

So, if not for Srinath .. no AxisMora .. no Axis2 and probably no WSO2; at least certainly not in the form we're in today! The seeds Srinath and company planted in 2003 have dramatically changed the world as we know it :-).

In fact, ALL 6 of the people who originally worked on Axis2/Java are now in the US working on PhDs in Computer Science! Going beyond that group, a total of more than 20 people who've gone thru WSO2 are now in computer science grad school all over the world (primarily US). That's part of the long term impact I wanted to have when LSF and later WSO2 was set up .. Srinath is proof of it working well :).

Srinath is the first to graduate from that group of people. Now we have a pipeline :). He's planning on returning to Sri Lanka soon, where I hope he will join WSO2 and help us compete even better in the world! (And also lead some projects in LSF to help others follow in his footsteps.)

Congratulations Dr. Srinath Perera! Its been an honor and privledge to have worked with you and I look forward to many more years together as colleagues!

Sri Lankan CS PhD graduate: Tharaka Devaditya

Ever since I returned home to Sri Lanka in 2001 I've been actively trying to get top local students to go out for grad school (primarily in the US as I'm convinced its the best place for CS graduate work). Many brilliant local graduates end up as programmers (working on off-shored 2nd classs work to moot) and never get the opportunity to have greater impact in the world.

To me, going to grad school and getting that extra nudge is crucial to really get ahead and be able to better compete in an amazingly competitive world. That was my formula .. so I'm trying hard to get others to have the same advantage and opportunity I had. Its incredible to me how people are not aware of the process of going to grad school in the US .. especially the idea that it is possible to get funding and hence to be able to go to grad school without "being rich."

The first person I helped get to grad school, Tharaka Devaditya, recently completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Indiana University. Here's what he worked on:

Title: A Graph Based Cache System for Efficient Querying in Distributed Triplestores
Abstract:

Predefining structures for data preclude the ability to describe certain details effectively, as data is dynamically structured by nature and can be highly diverse and multifaceted. Conventional datastores, such as relational databases, do not conveniently accommodate dynamically varying structures, as frequently modifying database schemas is not feasible. Although, XML databases have been proposed as suitable for such dynamic structured data, these databases suffer from update anomalies. RDF triplestores offer a flexible solution for handling such data, where any property about an entity can be described by a triple consisting of a subject, a predicate, and an object. Data is inherently distributed due to origination points, ownership, and many other reasons.

In this dissertation, we develop a distributed triplestore while investigating different approaches for improving the efficiency of query processing. We implement several index structures at a Mediator where each index structure helps to minimize unproductive communications. We show how the addition of each index structure reduces the query response time. We make use of graph-based caches at the Mediator and at individual triplestores to store triples that correspond to the most frequent set of queries. The Mediator cache enables the Mediator to respond to certain queries, while the triplestore caches avoid the need to perform joins between partial results from different triplestores. Sub-graph isomorphism is used to determine whether a cache has sufficient triples to answer a given query. We show how these caches significantly improve querying efficiency.

Dr. Devaditya is going to be working for Microsoft in Redmond, WA in the Live Search group. CONGRATULTIONS and good luck to you in your career!

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By August this year there will be nearly 20 other Sri Lankan grad students in the pipeline working on PhDs in the US. (This is only people I know of who've gone from here .. there are a lot more overall Sri Lankan students doing CS PhDs for sure.) As people graduate and go on to bigger and better things in life I'll try to keep track of them in my blog, at least past their first job :).

The only request I have of them is to never forget their home country and to always do what you can to help. It is no longer necessary to be physically in Sri Lanka to do anything (really) .. so its not even necessary to "return home" to become a key contributor to Sri Lanka's future. If your plans land you back here, awesome, but that's not an excuse for forgetting your roots and not figuring out ways to help! :-)