Applying to Georgia Tech

Anthony Hannan ajh18 at cornell.edu
Fri Dec 13 20:25:56 UTC 2002


Here is my first draft of my Statement of Purpose for my PhD application
to Georgia Tech.  I would appreciate any feedback, especially from Dan,
Alan, and Georgia Techers.

Thanks,
Anthony

Statement of Purpose

My objective is a persistent world-wide-web of objects that concurrent
users can interact with directly, provided adequate permission.  The web
would be equivalent to a shared global Smalltalk image with security and
versions/perspectives.  Isolated "application programs" would not be
built, instead objects and behavior would be added.  The power and
flexibility of a simple and speakable programming language would not be
hidden from the user.  Instead, the user interface would organize
variables and contexts, present anticipated commands, and help the user
capture patterns to abstract and reuse.

To reach this goal, many areas have to be addressed including:
distributed processing, concurrency, persistence, security, language
design, and user interface design.  I have experience in all these areas
either through course work at school, industry employment, or personal
research.  While working for EDS and IBM I focused on persistence and
user interface frameworks for Smalltalk applications.  During my recent
two-year sabbatical, I added block closures and continuations to Squeak
Smalltalk, rewrote the compiler, the interpreter, and defined a new
faster bytecode instruction set.  I also explored "stateless" multiple
inheritance, "typed" selectors, secure layered environments, distributed
objects, and visual programming.

I've also been an active member on the Squeak mailing list, discussing
and debating many of the issues above.  I feel I've helped steer the
group's evolving knowledge and understanding and they have helped steer
me.  This will eventually lead to implementation in the right direction.

I want to do research at Georgia Tech because of its focus on the user
and its involvement with Squeak (Mark Guzdial's group).  I really
believe I can help advance the state of the art, turning the web into an
intelligent, knowledgeable, well-connected friend.  For more details
about my projects, see http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak/AnthonyHannan.



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