Thomas M. Kroeger
Assistant Adjunct Professor, Computer Science
Baskin School of Engineering
University of California
Santa Cruz, CA 95064

This homepage offers information about my:


Current Research and Interests

As a principal member of technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories I work as principal investigator (PI) of research projects involving large scale computer systems. Specific projects included; Percival the design of a secure and robust long term data archive based on secret splitting; RESAR the design and emulation of a two failure tolerant, self-adjusting multi-million disk storage cluster; Horus a method for fine grained encryption based security for large-scale computing. Current research interests include storage systems, IDS, network security, mobile computing and large scale virtualization. In addition to research, I serve as part of the operational cyber security and incident response team at Sandia and am a member of the executive steering committee for the DOE Network Security Monitoring professional group. I defended my Ph.D. in March of 2000 in Computer Engineering at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Dissertation focused on on-line models to predict I/O system actions, and improve I/O performance. We developed and patented efficient and adaptable models to track file access patterns. These models were prototyped in the linux kernel for use in prefetching. My advisor was (and still is ;-) Professor Darrell D. E. Long .

Background

I grew up in Shoreham NY a small town on the east end of Long Island NY. I received my B.S.E degree in Computer Engineering from The University of Michigan. While an undergraduate at Michigan I worked as a research assistant for Dr. Peter Honeyman at the Center for Information Technology Integration After graduation I was commissioned as an officer in the The US Navy and spent a year in San Diego at the Navy's Surface Warfare School (How to drive a war ship school). From there I reported to the USS LEFTWICH (DD-984), a navy destroyer based out of Pearl Harbor where I served for 3 years. After the Navy I worked for the University of Hawaii's Office of Information Technology Services, managing Unix system security.

In 1994 I moved from Hawaii to Santa Cruz, California to pursue a PhD in Computer Engineering. After defending my dissertation in 2000 I took a position with Network-Alchemy, a local start up. There we built network security devices (highly reliable VPNs). We were eventually purchased by Nokia. In 2002 I left Nokia and spent almost a year traveling Australia and the US. In November of 2002 some friends from Network-Alchemy and I founded Validus Medical System. We are developing a Computerized Physician Order Entry system.

In order to get more extensive file trace data I spent the Fall of 1998 working for Professor Satyanarayanan as a visting graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University. My time there was spent working with The Coda Project Traces, traces of system call activity on 33 different machines for the time span ranging from February 1991 to March 1993. Complete details of these traces are available at http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/projects/DFSTrace.

Publications

My publications include:

Voice Recognition

Around winter '96 I ran into some difficulties with repetitive strain injuries from typing. A voice dictation product for the PC called DragonDictate enabled me to continue working while my hands heal. I used this product from June of 96 until December of 98, when I upgraded to the more current continuous speech recognition product NaturallySpeaking, also from Dragon Systems. Using DragonDictate, I was able to produce a successful NSF grant proposal, a research paper (including coding and running many simulations and statistical tests) and a masters thesis. In short, voice dictation worked quite well and at times can even be better than typing. Several of my macro sets and configuration files are publicly available.

I recently put in a bit of time to upgrade to the latest continuous speech recognition product NaturallySpeaking, which if you take the time to tune correctly is extremely impressive. I currently do all of my work from a Windows machine that is running NaturallySpeaking. From this machine I use either a telnet window (SecureCRT from Van Dyke Technologies Inc.) or Hummingbird's Exceed X server, to interact with the various other machines. Additionally, NT Emacs and Emacs on these remote machines is extremely helpful for the voice control. My NaturallySpeaking macros are available here.