Thomas Gschwind

Thomas Gschwind received his doctoral degree from Technische Universität Wien in March 2002. The title of his thesis is "Adaptation and Composition Techniques for Component-Based Software Engineering". The thesis presents type-based adaptation a novel adaptation technique for the adaptation of software components. The general idea of type-based adaptation is the use of a pool of adapters plus a description of the transformations performed by the adapters. Adapters in this pool can be used to build up more complex adapters, hence enabling (semi-)transparent adaptation of software components. For a more detailed discussion of this approach please have a look at the thesis itself.

Thomas Gschwind received his Master of Science in computer science from Technische Universität Wien in June 1997. The thesis focuses on the improvement of USENET's distribution infrastructure. Traditionally, articles on USENET are replicated to a large number of servers. Not every server, however, is connected via a high bandwidth link. The thesis explains that these servers could be more efficiently connected to USENET by using cache servers. Caching reduces the I/O-load of the news servers employed within the distribution infrastructure and the required network bandwidth. The thesis is available at the NewsCache homepage.

Contact Information:

Address:	Technische Universität Wien Distributed Systems Group Argentinierstraße 8 A-1040 Wien, Austria
Email:	tom at infosys.tuwien.ac.at
PGP Key:	click here.

I am currently working on event correlation with IBM. If you are interested in more details, please contact me at my above email address.

Previous projects:

• EASYCOMP: The goal of this project was the simplification of the adaptation and composition of software components. A part of this project was my PhD thesis "Adaptation and Composition Techniques for Component-Based Software Engineering" and my work on Architectural Composition Languages (ACLs).
• WebMon: I was key-architect of the WebMon project during two research visits at Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. The goal of WebMon was to monitor the quality of service perceived by web clients. The results of this project were integrated into the Web Transaction Observer, a product sold by HP OpenView. Papers describing WebMon can be found on my publications page.
• ADK: This was a joint project with IBM Research Division, Zurich Research Laboratory. In this project we investigated how the construction of Mobile Agents can be simplified by the use of software components. A detailed description of the project can be found at the ADK homepage.
• NewsCache: In my spare time, I am also working on NewsCache, a high performance cache server for Usenet News. Good news (November 1999), our group will receive a grant from USENIX (The Advanced Computing Systems Association) for porting NewsCache's news database to INN to be able to make a direct comparison between different news database organizations.
• rmi64: rmi64 is a simple mobile agent system consisting of just 3 java classes. The whole purpose of the system was to show how simple it is to write a mobile agent system with Java. rmi64 does not provide any kind of security, however.
• Reverse Engineering of the Sharp PC E500 Pocket Computer. Provides lots of information about the Sharp PC E500. There was even a prototype of an emulator for X windows.
• WienTour, an interactive tour through the city of Vienna. This tour won the eigth place at EUNet's cyberspace competition in spring 1995. Sadly, however, this tour was lost.

The complete list of publications can be found here. This list is also available in BibTeX format. A good overview of the work I am doing and I am interested in can be obtained by reading the following publications:

• Improving Dynamic Data Analysis with Aspect-Oriented Programming [.ps.gz|.pdf]
  Thomas Gschwind <tom at infosys.tuwien.ac.at>
  Johann Oberleitner <joe at infosys.tuwien.ac.at>
  To be published in Proccedings of the 7th European Conference on Software Maintenance and Reengineering, March 26--28, 2003, Benevento, Italy, Europe.

• WebMon: A Performance Profiler for Web Transactions [.pdf]
  Thomas Gschwind <tom at infosys.tuwien.ac.at>
  Kave Eshghi <kave at hpl.hp.com>
  Pankaj K. Garg <garg at hpl.hp.com>
  Klaus Wurster
  In Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Workshop on Advanced Issues of E-Commerce and Web-Based Information Systems, June 26--28, 2002, Newport Beach, California, USA.

• Type Based Adaptation: An Adaptation Approach for Dynamic Distributed Systems [.ps.gz|.pdf]
  Thomas Gschwind <tom at infosys.tuwien.ac.at>
  Presented at the 3rd International Workshop on Software Engineering and Middleware (colocated with the 24th International Conference on Software Engineering), May 20--21, 2002, Orlando, Florida, USA.

• PSTL---The Persistent Standard Template Library for C++ [.ps.gz|.pdf]
  Thomas Gschwind <tom at infosys.tuwien.ac.at>
  In Proceedings of the 6th USENIX Conference on Object-Oriented Technology Systems, January 29-February 2, 2001, San Antonio, Texas, USA.

I am teaching the following lecture at Universität Zürich:

• Component-Based Software-Engineering

If you are interested in the courses that I have been teaching at Technische Universität Wien, please do not hesitate to contact me. There's also an invited talk available held at a lecture of another group at our university.

I have also written some small utilities and help pages. The most interesting ones are:

• The SiS 7012 audio device driver for Linux
• instructions on installing Linux on an HP Omnibook 4150 notebook computer.
• ppp-manager (download, screenshot)
• Want to crash your Windows 95/98 box? More infos can be found right here.
• A tcp-proxy (gone with the wind)

I am also maintaining a list of resources for programs and tools which I use and other interesting stuff. Primarily, this serves as my starting point, when I am looking for help or a new version of some software.

At the distributed systems group, I was also responsible for the management of the library service. Feel free to look for your favorite book.

Thomas Gschwind