Much to my surprise and excitement, I found out in mid-February that I received an IBM Ph.D. Fellowship. For my mentor, I've been assigned to Paul Maglio in the Almaden Services Research Group. I will be spending time over the next year in San Jose, California researching the emerging field of SSME (Service Science, Management, and Engineering).
Three years down - it's difficult to believe. I'm officially done with coursework, and in January, successfully defended my field preliminary exam. I hit candidacy in January, and my dissertation committee was approved in March. I'm exceptionally lucky to be working with some outstanding scholars. The full committee is:
All that's left now is the dissertation proposal, and then the dissertation itself.
This past semester, I was the teaching assistant for a new course - SI 631: Content Management Systems - with Professors Paul Resnick and Mark Ackerman. The general topic and goals for the class were to learn about open source software models and content management systems in the context of helping non-profit organizations build and deploy the community-building Drupal system. Teams of students worked with external clients to build a web presence for the benefit of users, and strengthen community participation in the non-profits' activities. The student projects turned out quite well, and I know that we all (teaching staff included) learned quite a bit from each other.
In 2006 , I had the pleasure of making some trips to work with the students and faculty of the Department of Economics and Business Administration at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. This relationship is a direct result of my advisor, John King, visiting the university in the summer of 2005 as the Fulbright Distinguished Chair of American Studies. For the past year, I have been looking at second-order infrastructure effects of the new electronic toll collection system (die Maut) on the German Autobahn. Unfortunately, the system, as it turns out, is too new to detect or measure the types of changes I am wanting to research. As a result, this line of inquiry has been put on the back burner indefinitely. Still, there is much research yet to be done with these excellent colleagues in Frankfurt, and I am looking forward to more trips, and many years of a productive research partnership. I will be returning to Frankfurt this summer for some other business, but will certainly enjoy reconnecting with my friends and colleagues at Uni-Frankfurt.
Upcoming trips and events:
The traveling seems to be ramping up. Good thing that I love it!
Last updated June 20, 2007