Tom M. Kroeger, Reseach Fellow

Thomas M. Kroeger
Research Fellow, Computer Engineering
Baskin School of Engineering
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95064
tmk@cse.ucsc.edu

This homepage offers information about my:

Background
Current Research
Publications
Work Experiences
Use of Voice Recognition
....and....
Finding me.

Background

I grew up in Shoreham NY a small town on the east end of Long Island NY. I received my B.S.E degree in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan. While an undergraduate at Michigan I worked as a research assistant for Dr. Peter Honeyman at the Center for Information Technology Integration After graduation I was commissioned as an officer in the The US Navy and spent a year in San Diego at the Navy's Surface Warfare School (How to drive a war ship school). From there I reported to the USS LEFTWICH (DD-984), a navy destroyer based out of Pearl Harbor where I served for 3 years. After the Navy I worked for the University of Hawaii's Office of Information Technology Services, managing Unix system security.

In 1994 I moved from Hawaii to Santa Cruz, California to pursue a PhD in Computer Engineering. After defending my dissertation in 2000 I took a position with Network-Alchemy, a local start up. There we built network security devices (highly reliable VPNs). We were eventually purchased by Nokia. In 2002 I left Nokia and spent almost a year traveling Australia and the US. In November of 2002 some friends from Network-Alchemy and I founded Validus Medical System. We are developing a Computerized Physician Order Entry system.

Current Research and Interests

I defended my Ph.D. in March of 2000 in Computer Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz. My advisor was (and still is ;-) Professor Darrell D. E. Long . My thesis focused on on-line models to predict I/O system actions, and the use of such models to improve I/O performance. Complete details on my research can be found at the web page I have put together for this project. The Concurrent Systems Laboratory is where we are doing this work.

In order to get more extensive file trace data I spent the Fall of 1998 working for Professor Satyanarayanan as a visting graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. My time there was spent working with The Coda Project Traces, traces of system call activity on 33 different machines for the time span ranging from February 1991 to March 1993. Complete details of these traces are available at http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/projects/DFSTrace.

In general my research interests include reference pattern modeling, performance analysis, I/O systems and WWW caching, mobile computing, security, and networking.

Publications

My publications include:

The Case for Efficient File Access Pattern Modeling presented at the Seventh workshop on Hot Topics in Operating Systems (HotOS VII). ps, pdf
Exploring the Bounds of Web Latency Reduction from Caching and Prefetching presented at the Usenix Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems. ps, pdf
My masters thesis which extends on previous work with modeling event reference patterns and using these models to improve cache performance. ps, pdf
Predicting File-System Actions from Prior Events. Presented at Usenix 96. ps, pdf
A revision and conversion to HTML format (with Braden W. Carter) of my article entitled How to Improve Security on a Newly Installed SunOS 4.1.3 System now available from UnixWorld Online Magazine.

Work Experiences

I have made a habit of spending summers away for my thesis research and involved with some interesting project. I'm extremely fortunate in having had the privilege of working with several wonderful groups:

Summer 98, I spent working as a consultant with a Santa Cruz startup Dascom Inc.. My work for them involved prototyping a system for secure file transfer.
Summer 97, I worked at JavaSoft within the server group. My work there focused on the performance analysis of the Java Web Server. Additionally, I designed and implemented a prototype web proxy and a web cache frame-work.
Summer 96, I worked at Digital's Western Research Laboratory. Working with Jeff Mogul I collected and processed traces of WWW proxy activity. We then used these traces to investigate the abilities of prefetching and caching to reduce latency, and eventually published the results in the Usenix Symposium on Internet Technologies and Systems.
Summer 95, I worked as a Security Engineer for Taligent Inc..

My résumé in postscript, pdf or ascii offers more details of my previous work experiences.

Voice Recognition

Around winter '96 I ran into some difficulties with repetitive strain injuries from typing. A voice dictation product for the PC called DragonDictate enabled me to continue working while my hands heal. I used this product from June of 96 until December of 98, when I upgraded to the more current continuous speech recognition product NaturallySpeaking, also from Dragon Systems. Using DragonDictate, I was able to produce a successful NSF grant proposal, a research paper (including coding and running many simulations and statistical tests) and a masters thesis. In short, voice dictation worked quite well and at times can even be better than typing. Several of my macro sets and configuration files are publicly available.

I recently put in a bit of time to upgrade to the latest continuous speech recognition product NaturallySpeaking, which if you take the time to tune correctly is extremely impressive. I currently do all of my work from a Windows machine that is running NaturallySpeaking. From this machine I use either a telnet window (SecureCRT from Van Dyke Technologies Inc.) or Hummingbird's Exceed X server, to interact with the various other machines. Additionally, NT Emacs and Emacs on these remote machines is extremely helpful for the voice control. My NaturallySpeaking macros are available here.

Finding Me

You can usually find me inSanta Cruz. I've gotten a few complaints that you can't recognize me from the picture on my home page so here are some more pictures, to help find me in and out of the water. I can be best contacted through the e-mail tmk@cse.ucsc.edu.