It has been a long time since I’ve updated this blog, mostly due to frustration.

It took way too long, but I am finally finished. During most of last summer and early fall,  I was growing very frustrated with my co-directors. I was practically begging for a date to defend my dissertation, but they seemed to be dragging their feet for some reason. Then, in late October, they suddenly decided it was time for me to finish. (I think a faculty meeting had something to do with it — I suspect the provost lit a fire under them because I had been in the program ten years.)

So the fall became a mad scramble to align schedules to arrange a pre-defense and then a defense. Sadly, one of my committee members (Dr. Andrew Sage) had passed away in the fall. This made my scheduling easier as I only had to juggle the schedules of three remaining committee members plus the Dean. But one of my other committee members was out of the country for almost three weeks, so that didn’t help.

In the end, I could not arrange to do my defense before the deadline for a fall 2014 finish, but I was able to arrange it for the last day before the University closed for the year.

On December 18, 2014, I successfully defended my dissertation, Method and Models to Enable Automated Optimal Service Composition. Both my children were able to attend because their schools had let out for the winter, and my wife and her mother were also there as well as several friends and colleagues.

It’s good to finally be done. To finally, after 10 long years, to be “Dr. McDowall.”

So, now what? Well, there is still much to be done in my day job. But what about this site? I certainly don’t need to keep a dissertation journal any more. So I think I will follow in the footsteps of many others in this Internet age and convert it into a personal blog. Who knows, maybe some day it will lead to a paid writing gig.

I prepared yet another revised introduction section for my advisers to review. I sent it to both the senior adviser and the junior adviser to review. The senior said he’d wait until i had made any additional changes the junior wanted before he commented on it. This was last week. I was supposed to meet with the junior adviser on Friday, 3/7 before he left town for the week.

He never contacted me to confirm a meeting time, but when I pinged him he said he’d call me Monday in the afternoon or early evening. He didn’t call, which left me in an extraordinarily foul mood. By Wednesday I had calmed down enough to contact him and very politely point out that he had not called. He apologized and stated it was because he was busy. Well, cry me a frickin’ river–I’m pretty damned busy too, but I make time to meet with him at his convenience. Anyway, he said he’d be back the following week but would be at NIST through Wednesday, and we could either meet Thursday or by phone before that. I told him I would be available whenever he was back and at almost any time for a phone call.

I still haven’t heard from him.

At this point, the calendar is starting to drive events. If I don’t get a pre-defense scheduled soon, I will run out of time to complete the pre-defense and the public defense before the end of the semester. Hence the fact I was beyond irate at the junior adviser not calling when he was supposed to.

I am not sure what I will do if I do not make some very rapid progress very soon. I am giving very serious consideration to dropping out of the program if I cannot finish this semester. After nearly 10 years of work, and tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, that would be turning my back on a lot of hard work. But I feel like I’m being strung along with my professors having no regard for the amount of time and money I have sunk into this. They are used to dealing with graduate students who have to go through this entire gauntlet to meet the qualifications for getting a job as a professor. And that’s not what I’m doing this for.

I do know one thing: if I do leave the program, that leaving will go through the dean’s office and quite possibly the university president’s office. I want them to understand that it’s not that I couldn’t hack it, but rather that I think they’re deliberately trying to milk me for all the tuition they can get from me.

Having met with both of my advisors almost two weeks ago and convinced the younger one that I’ve done enough work to claim victory, I’ve begun working with him on yet another draft of my dissertation. I won’t be throwing away all of my old work, but I am starting with a new outline and going from there.

The young guy is very much a stickler for getting the introduction and first couple of sections right, with the goal of convincing readers that I’ve got all my crap together and what follows will be a genuine contribution to the field.

I’ve been trying to meet with him weekly, or bi-weekly if I can, because there’s a LOT to get done if I am to complete my pre-defense by early April. Two (or was it three?) meetings got snowed out in the past couple of weeks, but I finally got to meet with him this past Monday. He had a lot of changes, almost a complete re-write of the introduction section, but it sounds like a good way to structure things.

I scheduled another meeting with him for yesterday (Thursday) afternoon to go over the re-written introduction. He clearly liked it a lot better than the previous version, but he still had more changes for me to work on. It’s a pain in some respects, but Susan informs me it was worth it because she went through the same process with him and had zero changes between her pre-defense and final defense. Hopefully she’s right.

In the meantime, I still need to schedule a date for my pre-defense. I sent a request for open dates to my committee, but I only got one reply. I guess I’ll just pick a date and see who objects.

I haven’t updated this in a while, but it’s not because I haven’t been making progress.

I spent the fall semester continuing to meet weekly with the same committee member. We made a tremendous amount of progress, successfully developing a service composition optimization model in OPL. He devoted so much time to it that my adviser suggested I consider asking him to be a co-adviser for my dissertation. I gather that being a dissertation adviser is something of a feather in a professor’s cap, and he did help me a lot, so it seemed like the right thing to do.

He agreed to be a co-adviser, which was the easy part. Now comes the hard part: getting two professors to agree that I A) have done enough to graduate, and B) agree on the content and format of my dissertation. I had already spoken to the more senior adviser at the end of the fall semester, and he agreed that I had enough work done. So we hashed out a dissertation outline and over the break I started filling it in. After meeting with him again at the start of this semester, I got a confirmation that I can finish this semester. (Frankly, I told him that this was my last semester one way or another. I’ve been at this for 10 years, and I’m broke and tired.)

I let the co-adviser know about this at the start of this semester, and his immediate comment was that we need to discuss how much I’ve done to see if I have made enough of a contribution for a dissertation. Let the fun begin.

Over the summer I’ve been meeting weekly with one of my committee members who is an expert on the subject of decision guidance systems. That is, helping someone make the best choice from among complex alternatives. I’m working with him to devise a way to select the best possible combination of services to complete a task when there are several valid combinations available. I’m basing the selection on a Quality of Service model I’ve developed that includes factors such as the cost to invoke a service, the time the service will take to complete, etc.

It’s been quite an interesting experience, though frustrating at times. The problem is that selecting the best combination of services is an NP-hard problem. In order to make an accurate selection in a reasonable time, we will be using an optimization engine developed by IBM that uses a language called OPL (Optimization Programming Language). To make use of that language, we need a precise model of the problem space.

So over the summer we have been working to define precisely what is meant by a “process model” and a “service composition.” And this is precise in the mathematical sense meaning rigorously defined in such a way that the definition can be queried for exact results. The difficulty is that any given service that is used in a process may be a “virtual service” — that is, a composition of services that is offered up as a pre-made package. (This is different from an atomic service, which is an offering that cannot be broken down into any smaller unit.)

In order to accurately calculate the quality of service for a given composition, we have to calculate the QoS for every constituent atomic service within all of the virtual services, and this must be decomposed recursively for all virtual services that may be invoked.

So we’ve had to create recursive definitions for a process and a service (as is turns out, any process is itself just a virtual service, so that simplified the problem a tiny bit). Once that was done, we have to develop recursive definitions for calculating the QoS of each service and rolling those up. Cost is easy, in that it’s a sum of the costs of each constituent service. But things like duration are more difficult, as some services may run in parallel.

It’s been interesting and enlightening, but it has certainly been tedious. I am generally good about paying attention to details, but this has been a whole new kind of detail-oriented for me.

I’ve been in a bit of a holding pattern for a month or so. I met with one of my committee members to discuss how to select an optimal service composition from among those available. As it turns out, that selection of this type is an NP-complete problem. Given that this committee member specializes in decision guidance systems, asking him for help on this task is a good idea.

I met with him and explained the sort of problem to him. I don’t think he realized how far along in my research I am (having an operating prototype and all), but after bringing my advisor into the discussion he seemed to get the idea that I was a little beyond the planning stages. Ultimately he asked for some formal definitions of the problem space (e.g., how I define a “business process”). So I produced those definitions and ran them by my advisor, who liked them.

Unfortunately, the decision guidance expert has been very busy lately. Heck, it seems like he’s always busy. He’s the committee chair for a friend, and she has a bear of a time cornering him and getting substantive feedback.

After a month of trying, I finally managed to get on his schedule for this Friday (he’s been out of the country for almost two weeks, so I can understand some of the delay). Hopefully, it being the summertime, he won’t have any other students clobbering his time when I get there for my 11 AM appointment. More importantly, hopefully he’ll have more for me that “refine these definitions blah blah blah.” I need some concrete direction so I can get this show on the road.

I met with my advisor this past Wednesday. The meeting went well enough, and I got some solid feedback from him on my dissertation draft. But overall, it was a decidedly mixed bag.

The Good: My advisor finally read my whole dissertation. One would think he might have read the whole thing at some point during the previous semester, where I gave him no fewer than half a dozen drafts. But no, apparently that was a bridge too far. Still, having evidence he has finally read the whole thing from end to end  is good (I had strong suspicions all last semester that he hadn’t read it that closely).

The Bad: Aside from apparently wasting most of last semester writing things that weren’t really being read, there is the fact that he crapped all over what I had written. Not that he called it bad, but it is all apparently way too shallow. Which would have been very nice to know last semester.

The Ugly: I’m now back to square one, starting with a blank sheet of paper and working up a new outline. I sent him the draft of the new outline on Friday. He told me he’d have comments to me on Monday, but then I’ve heard that before. Here’s hoping he’ll come through.

The bottom line is that I still have a fighting chance at finishing up this semester, but that chance just got a lot smaller. It’s going to be one damn hard semester.