Richard D. Schlichting
Rick received the B.A. degree in history and mathematics (computer science option) from the College of William and Mary in 1977, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer science from Cornell University in 1979 and 1982, respectively.
Since 1982, Rick has been in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Arizona , where he holds the rank of Professor. His research interests include distributed systems, fault-tolerant computing, and heterogeneous scientific applications. Current projects include Cactus, which aims to develop customizable fine-grain QoS for distributed systems, and Schooner, which provides software support for constructing scientific meta-computations across networks of heterogeneous machines. He works closely with Matti Hiltunen, an Assistant Research Scientist at Arizona, and supervises seven graduate students ( Melvin Cardozo , Rajsekhar Das, Vijaykumar Immanuel, Tarak Parekh, Sameer Verkhedjar, Shuangxi Xu and Don Waugaman ).
Rick is also active in promoting increased interaction between U.S. and Japanese computer scientists. He spent seven months in 1990 visiting the Katayama Laboratory at Tokyo Institute of Technology, where he worked on using an attribute-grammar formalism to implement fault-tolerant software. He spent academic 1996-97 at Hitachi Central Research Laboratory near Tokyo working on various software issues related to heterogeneous scientific computation. Both visits were supported by the NSF U.S.-Japan Cooperative Science Program.
Rick is a member of ACM, IEEE, and the IFIP Working Group 10.4 on Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerance. He is on the editorial boards of IEEE Transactions on Computers, IEEE Concurrency, and the Springer-Verlag series on Dependable Computing and Fault-Tolerant Systems. He is also current Vice-Chair of the IEEE Technical Committee on Fault-Tolerant Computing, and has served on numerous conference program committees in the areas of fault tolerance and distributed computing. He was General Chair of the Second IFIP Working Conference on Dependable Computing for Critical Applications in 1991, and Program Committee Chair of the Thirteenth IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Computing in 1994. He is currently Program Co-Chair for the Fourth International Conference on Configurable Distributed Systems.
As part of his Japan activities, Rick heads the JapanCS Project , and is founder and current moderator of the USENET newsgroup comp.research.japan , an electronic forum devoted to Japanese research developments in computing and computer science. He is also a member of the Association of Research Libraries Working Group on Japanese Scientific and Technical Information.
When not working, Rick likes to haunt local Japanese restaurants with his family. Their favorite is Samurai, which during the winter months serves the best miso ramen this side of Japan. Rick also follows the Arizona Wildcat sports teams.