CSE PhD students Guoqing (Harry) Xu and Joe Bolinger have been awarded an IBM PhD Fellowship for the 2010 - 2011 academic year.
Joe Bolinger is a true Buckeye having received his BS in Computer Science from Ohio State in 2005, graduating Magna Cum Laude. Striving towards his PhD under the tutelage of Jay Ramanathan and Rajiv Ramnath, his primary research interests are in design methodologies for collaborative tools that support service organizations. More generally, he is interested in human computer interaction, service and management science, software engineering, and anything that might help people work together and socialize more enjoyably online.
Joe has worked with local IT organizations to study the management and governance processes that these groups use to manage increasingly complex collections of computational resources, which enable critical business services. His research has lead to the development of new tools that can better support and monitor these kinds of highly unstable and ad-hoc work processes. Such tools can help prevent the costly errors that result from unplanned downtime or resource mismanagement, and can support broader organizational improvement and learning strategies.
Joe is a member of the CETI NSF-IUCRC Program at The Ohio State University, whose mission is to uniquely integrate research, practice, and education to provide varied opportunities for students, professionals and industry collaborators.
Guoqing Xu, known to everyone as Harry, is a PhD candidate under the supervision of Dr. Atanas Rountev. His primary research interests are static and dynamic program analyses for compiler optimizations and software engineering tasks; more generally, he is interested in approaches to help programmers write and maintain reliable and reusable software. He has published several papers in top programming language and software engineering conferences including PLDI, ECOOP, FSE, and ICSE. In 2008, he received the Distinguished Paper Award in the International Conference on Software Engineering for his paper entitled Precise Memory Leak Detection for Java Software Using Container Profiling.
During the past two summers, Harry interned at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center. He has worked closely with IBM researchers on performance optimization for large-scale and long-running Java programs. For example, he has developed JVM-based tools that can detect inefficient operations by finding high-cost-low-benefit data structures and by profiling copy activities. Many performance problems in real-world applications have been revealed using these tools. Significant performance improvement can be seen after optimizing away these detected problems. Harry was honored this year by the CSE Department with a Departmental Graduate Research Award. Harry received both his MS and BS degrees with distinction in Computer Science from East China Normal University, Shanghai, China.
According to IBM, their PhD Fellowship Awards Program is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional PhD students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study.