Jim Gast
jgast@cs.wisc.edu
2014
For full curriculum
vitae see: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jgast/cv.html
For Publications, see http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~jgast/papers/
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Ph.D, Computer Science,
- Publications and presentations at IEEE Global Internet Globecom, IEEE Compcon, NetWorld, and the popular press. See http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jgast for presentations on network topology, data migration, hierarchical storage management, file replication, and file interchange.
- 25 years of industry experience designing networking and packet switching products, managing product development, forming industry associations, advancing industry standards through international standardization bodies, and having fun pushing the state of the art and the state of the industry.
- Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, Palindrome Corporation, 1987 to 1995. Designer and Principal Architect of storage management tools for local area networks including backup, archiving, data migration, and disaster preparedness. The company's flagship product, The Network Archivist, has won numerous awards including NetWare Users International Product of the Year, Byte Magazine's Award of Excellence for innovation, and Network Computing's Paradigm Award for Leadership for changing the way LAN Administrators think about bulk storage problems. Managed 30 developers. Jim led the effort to enhance Novell's data format and facilitated the successful campaign among 14 vendors to get the new data format (SIDF) adopted by ECMA and ISO. See http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jgast/sidf.htm. Palindrome was acquired in 1994 by Seagate.
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Corporate Architect, Office of the CTO, Novell, 1995 to 1998. Responsible for all storage products. Formed Corporate Architecture Team. New products in development or brought to
market were the 64-bit distributed file system and replication services.
- The Open Group, Architecture Board -, 1996-1998. Represented Novell at the Technical Managers Forum and on the Architecture Board of The Open Group defining UNIX/98 and overseeing branding and compatibility testing. This was the first year after X/Open merged with OSF to form the Open Group.
- Secretary, SIDF Association, 1992-2002. Industry Association of the 14 major vendors of tape and optical disk products. The SIDF format, http://www.sidf.org, was adopted by ECMA and ISO as the international standards for network backup. This standard was the first major improvement in tape formats in over 10 years.
- Founding Member - Storage Networking Industry Association, 1996-1998 - Hosted the formation meeting of this 65-member association, http://www.snia.org, of Network Attached Storage and SAN (Server Area Network) Attached Storage vendors.
- Chairman of the Professionalism and
Ethics Committee, Network Professionals Association (NPA), 1994-1997. NPA (formerly CNEPA, Certified NetWare
Engineers Professional Association) has 10,000 members spread over 5
continents. The Ethics committee has responsibility for informing the members
of the standards expected. The ethics committee publishes standards and best
practices, and can be called on to hear cases of customer complaints.
Chronological Resume
- Network Architecture, TDS Telecom, Madison, WI, 2007-present. Responsible for IP Telephony and protocols. Tracking VoIP standards, Streaming Media, and Caching.
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Assistant Professor, University of
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Ph.D Student, Instructor and Visiting Faculty,
- Corporate Architect, Office of the CTO, Novell, 1995 to 1998.
- Co-founder and Chief Technical Officer, Palindrome Corporation, 1987 to 1995.
Product Development Manager, Tellabs, Inc., 1984-1987, responsible for multiplexing and packet switching products <http://www.tellabs.com/solutions/300s.html> and managing the team of 7 developers. The products were sold essentially unchanged until at least 1996.
Consultant,
Systems and Programming Resources, 1981 to 1984. On assignment at Bell Labs
for the entire time, working on host to host heterogeneous networking. Bell
Labs Network (BLN), connected mainframes to minis using a 7 layer architecture
patterned after the ISO model, built on top of a processor-independent
operating system.
Consultant,
Urbana Applied Mathematics, 1977 to 1981. Management and technical consulting on Tandem computers and other
fail-safe and fail-soft environments.
Senior
Research Programmer, Center for Advanced Computation, University of Illinois,
1971 - 1977. Programmer and
later Principal Investigator on various projects ranging from compiler design
to ARPAnet protocols and applications. Early work was
originally intended for the Illiac IV computer. After
Illiac IV was moved off-campus, Jim had to build
access to it across the ARPAnet (precursor to the
current Internet). Later work on UNIX and MULTICS included remote job protocols.
Outgrowths of the ARPAnet protocols became TCP/IP.
Computer-based
Education Research Lab (PLATO), University of Illinois, 1969 to
1971. One of the 4 authors of TUTOR, a
language still in wide use in 1995 in Computer Assisted Education.