Leaving Newcastle 1

Given that I am to depart in a couple of weeks time, I decided to submit to this blog a small chronicle of my life here at NCL. I will submit it in parts pointing out successes and failures along the way. Consider this my public acknowledgment of some of the great people I met here. Here it goes.

I came to Newcastle in 1998 to pursue a Ph.D. in the area of distributed computing. Prof. Santosh -the local expert and head of the distributed computing group- pointed me to Prof. John E. Dobson who was looking for Ph.D. students at the time. I remember getting on very well with JED since the first time i met him. I liked the fact that he was very knowledgeable with a big reputation in the area and interested in 'actively' helping me and supervising my research studies.

I say actively because there are many supervisors these days that have just a very superficial interest in their students. I remember he had asked me to write a paper so that he could assess my writing/research skills. Upon receipt of my paper or within a day or two he informed of this decision to award me the Ph.D. scholarship. John's interests were not purely technical. He was mostly interested on how the technical side of computing affected the structural and organizational side of a domain/enterprise/company. This was interesting to me especially at that young age as it was a new window or point of view to look at things. He told me that when we design distributed computing systems the first thing we need to understand is the extend of cross-organizational links that may exist and having understood that, we need to establish an agreed 'Distribution of Responsibilities' by all stakeholders.

This was really interesting and it stills affects my judgement when I look at distributed systems. John was working at the time at Organizational Theories and he introduced me to his work on 'Responsibility Driven Analysis'. Some of my early pubs are heavily influenced by these theories. I understood that distributed computing 'like any form of business process distribution' is about management rather than infrastructure. I had a chance to see this in projects that investigated several re-incarnations of distributed computing such as Systems of Systems, Virtual Organizations, Grid and even Cloud. The core genome remains the same. I was inspired by John's zest for his work and this motivated me to work tirelessly at a high rate of speed. I submitted my Ph.D. just shy of 3 years of research.

I remember the examiner walking into the exam room holding my thesis and saying to me "There is work here for 2 or even 3 theses Why did you do that much :)" I knew I had passed then. I am glad my Ph.D. subject was not strictly technical specially since most of my jobs after the Ph.D. have been on the technical side of things. I always thought I should have studies more business along my career. I knew that I should cherish the opportunity to listen, argue and understand JED rather than delve into CORBA, Java and Web Services. It worked out well as I did quite a lot of that later on. i finished my Ph.D. with 7-8 published papers and 1 journal. I am grateful to JED.