February 22, 2005 - Aameek Singh, a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech's College of Computing, has been selected for the IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, a highly competitive worldwide competition. He is one of 54 recipients in academic disciplines such as computer science, chemistry, physics, electrical and computer engineering.

The IBM PhD Fellowship Program is intended to honor exceptional PhD students in disciplines of mutual interest, as well as emerging technical fields such as autonomic computing, nanotechnology, Grid computing, e-business on demand, and the fertile intersections of biology, computation and economics. IBM Ph.D. Fellows are awarded

tuition, fees, an IBM thinkpad, and a stipend of $17,500 (US) for one nine-month academic year. Recipients also receive an internship designed to strengthen and broaden their technical experience and contacts. Fellows are selected based on "their overall potential for research excellence, the degree to which their technical interests align with those of IBM, and their academic progress to-date as evidenced by publications and endorsements from their faculty advisor and department head."

Singh was nominated by his advisor Ling Liu, associate professor of computing at Georgia Tech and then endorsed by Professor Kishore Ramachandran, Core Computing Division Chair at Tech's College of Computing.

Aameek Singh's dissertation research focuses on security and privacy aspects of large scale decentralized storage systems. Last summer, Singh had the opportunity to work with Dr Kaladhar Voruganti, Sandeep Gopisetty and Norm Pass of the Storage Systems Department at IBM's Almaden Research Center. During this IBM internship, Singh architected a resource planner for enterprise storage area network file systems. He also helped design a framework for automated compliance-checking in large enterprises, utilizing the research experience gained from his PhD research at Georgia Tech. "Enterprises have to continuously ensure that their storage solutions do not violate any laws like those required by medical privacy acts. Our framework automated the whole process, and a patent application is being filed with the U.S. Patents Office regarding this work." This internship experience not only helped Singh to expand his research agenda in wide area storage systems but also expedited his research results in this area.

"The internships at IBM have been a great experience because it gives me the opportunity to work on large real-world projects," Singh said. "The IBM PhD fellowship award will provide an opportunity for me to be involved with IBM researchers and engineers, to better understand the real world problems, and to apply my research to solving practical problems."

At Georgia Tech, Singh is currently working on solutions regarding the issue of data privacy in multi-user operating systems. "In this work, we will show that present access control mechanisms fall short of meeting user expectations of data privacy and can lead to information being leaked to other users."

Singh is currently a member of the Distributed Data Intensive Systems research group at the College of Computing, a program directed by his advisor Dr. Ling Liu. Singh and the DiSL research group work on various aspects of distributed data intensive systems, ranging from decentralized overlay networks, exemplified by peer to peer computing and grid computing, to mobile information management systems, sensor network systems, and enterprise computing technology. The research at DiSL is being supported in part by NSF, DoE, DARPA, IBM, and HP and the center for Experimental Computer Systems Research (CERCS) at Georgia Tech.

For more information, contact:
Joy Weaks, Media Relations
404-544-5517
joyweaks@cc.gatech.edu