ASHOK ULLAL MALLYA
Veraz Networks Inc.,
926 Rock Avenue, Suite 20,
San Jose, CA 95131, USA

phone: (408) 750 9437

email: ashok dot mallya at Gmail

Objective

Research Interests
Multiagent systems and service-oriented computing. Particularly, agent communication and interaction, web services, and the semantic web. Convergence of these areas for novel applications in enterprise systems, business process modeling and enactment and software engineering.


Industrial Experience

Veraz Networks Inc.,
San Jose, CA

January 2006 - Present

Senior Engineer, Engineering R&D

Developing Service Oriented Architectures for Telecom

 Design and implementation of a Service-Oriented Architecture for telecommunication networks, the first of its kind in the industry.
IBM SmallTalk Group
Raleigh, NC

January 2002 - May 2002

Graduate Assistant
(Unpaid project; NCSU credits earned)

Middleware Integration for Web Services

Design and implementation of an MQSeries-based messaging system between a Smalltalk server and a WebSphere Application server using SOAP messages. This project demonstrated my understanding of Object-Oriented systems, Web Services, and the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). This was an improvement over the restrictive request-response communication allowed by the SOAP specification.
Glaxo SmithKline Chemoinformatics Group
Research Triangle Park, NC

June 2001 - August 2001
Summer Research Assistant
(Paid through NCSU as a graduate assistant)

Chemical Activity Prediction: Data Mining

Implementation of statistical and AI-based techniques for chemical activity prediction by mining large datasets using C++ and the Standard Template Library. This project required a good working knowledge of data structures to handle datasets too large to be processed using commercial software within the runtime and memory constraints.
Texas Instruments Asia R&D Center
Bangalore, India

June 1999 - August 1999
Summer Intern

Source Code Control Process Automation

Automating the check-in/out process for the source code repository of the Texas Instruments-India Raster Image Processing Group, using PERL script.

Education

Research Experience

North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC  
Graduate Research Assistant

May 2002 - present
  • Performed quality research, both collaborative and independent, at the MultiAgent Systems lab, North Carolina State University.
  • Authored papers published in journals, magazines, and several conferences and workshops. Reviewed papers for international journals and conferences.
  • Delivered effective presentations to large audiences at international conferences.
  • Architected and developed software prototypes for process enactment based on theoretical research in multiagent systems.
 Research Projects
Protocols for Processes

Funded by  the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Information  Exploitation Office.

February 2004 - September 2005

  • This project seeks to study protocols and commitment machines, capturing the kinds of reasoning needed in practical protocols, such as for e-commerce.

  • Built and utilized OWL ontologies and SWRL rules as part of the OWL-P project, a framework for modeling and enacting interaction processes using flexible, rule-based, modular protocols. Also designed and implemented an OWL-P process browser as a plugin for Protegé. This project was selected for demonstration at the Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems Conference (AAMAS 2005).
Principles of Commitment Protocols

Funded by  the National Science Foundation under its Digital Society and Technology Program in the Intelligent Information Systems  Division.

May 2002 - May 2006
Temporal Commitments

Funded by  the North Carolina State University as a Graduate Assistant

August 2000 - May 2002

  • Developed a language and semantics for specifying and reasoning about complex intervals and deadlines in contracts among autonomous agents.

Other projects

 

January 2001 - December 2001
  • Designed and implemented a Bayesian learner to help predict data values in certain medical datasets using Java.
  • Designed and implemented an agent-based service discovery and composition system using the Java Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE) and FIPA-compliant messages.
Graduate Teaching Assistant

August 2000 - May 2002

Assisting instructors of graduate and undergraduate level courses in Parallel Computer Architecture (Spring 2002), Distributed and Parallel Computing (Fall 2001), Computer Architecture (Spring 2001), and Database Management Systems (Fall 2000). Duties involved tutoring students, maintaining course website, and grading homework and tests. Demonstrated good communication and teaching skills.

Mentor for one masters student in Computer Science.
 

Publications

In Journals and Magazines

  1. Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. An Algebra for Commitment Protocols. In Rogier Van Eijk and Frank Dignum, editors, Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems,   Kluwer Academic Press, 2006.

  2. Nirmit Desai, Ashok U. Mallya, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Interaction Protocols as Design Abstractions for Business Processes. In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 31, no. 12, pp 1015-1027, December 2005.

  3. Ashok U. Mallya and Michael N. Huhns. Commitments Among Agents. IEEE Internet Computing, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 90-93, IEEE Computer Society, July-August 2003.

In Conferences

  1. Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. Specifying and Resolving Preferences Among Agent Interaction Patterns. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems. Hakodate, May 2006.

  2. Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. Modeling Exceptions via Commitment Protocols. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems.  Utrecht, July 2005.

  3. Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. A Semantic Approach for Designing E-Business Protocols. In Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Web Services, pp. 742-745, IEEE Computer Society, July 2004.

  4. Munindar P. Singh, Amit K. Chopra, Nirmit V. Desai, and Ashok U. Mallya. Protocols for Processes: Programming in the Large for Open Systems (extended abstract). In OOPSLA Companion, pp. 120-123, 2004.

  5. Amit K. Chopra, Nirmit V. Desai, Ashok U. Mallya, Leena V. Wagle, and Munindar P. Singh. A Semantic Protocol-Based Approach for Developing Business Processes. In The Second International Conference on Service-Oriented Computing, IBM Research Report RA221(W0411-084), pp. 99-107, November 2004.

In Workshops

  1. Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. Introducing Preferences into Commitment Protocols. In Proceedings of the AAMAS 2005 Workshop on Agent Communication (AC 20o5), Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 2005.

  2. Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. Incorporating Commitment Protocols into Tropos. In  Proceedings of the AAMAS 2005 Workshop on Agent Oriented Software Engineering (AOSE 2005), Utrecht, The Netherlands, July 2005.

  3. OWL-P: A Methodology for Business Process Modeling and Enactment. Nirmit Desai, Ashok U. Mallya, Amit K. Chopra, Munindar P. Singh. In Proceedings of the AAMAS 2005 Workshop on Agent Oriented Information Systems (AOIS 2005), July 2005. To appear.

  4. Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. A Semantic Approach for Designing E-Business Protocols. In Jorge Cardoso and Amith Sheth, editors, Semantic Web Process: Powering Next Generation of Processes with Semantics and Web Services, Volume 3387 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 111-123, Springer, Berlin, 2005.

  5. Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. A Semantic Approach for Designing Commitment Protocols. In Rogier Van Eijk, editor, Developments in Agent Communication, Volume 3396 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 37 - 51, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2005.

  6. Ashok U. Mallya, Pinar Yolum, and Munindar P. Singh. Resolving Commitments Among Autonomous Agents. In Frank Dignum, editor,  Advances in Agent Communication , Volume 2922 of Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 166 - 182, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 2004.

  7. Amit K. Chopra, Ashok U. Mallya, Nirmit V. Desai, and Munindar P. Singh. Modeling Flexible Business Processes. In  Proceedings of the Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies at AAMAS 2004.

Theses

  • Ashok U. Mallya, Modeling and Enacting Business Processes via Commitments among Agents. PhD Thesis, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, November 2005.

  • Ashok U. Mallya. Specifying and Resolving Temporal Commitments. Master's thesis, Department of Computer Science, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, November 2002.

Technical Reports &  Posters

  • Ashok U. Mallya, Nirmit Desai, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. OWL-P: OWL for Protocols and Processes. In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (Industrial track & Demos), pp. 139 - 140, ACM Press, July 2005.

  • Nirmit Desai, Ashok U. Mallya, Amit K. Chopra, and Munindar P. Singh. Processes = Protocols + Policies: A Methodology for Business Process Development. Technical Report, North Carolina State University, TR 2004-34.

  • Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. A Semantic Approach for Designing Business Protocols. In Proceedings of the 13th International WWW Conference (Alternate Track Posters & Papers), pp. 308-309, May 2004.  

  • Ashok U. Mallya and Munindar P. Singh. A Semantic Approach for Designing Commitment Protocols. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, pp. 1362-1363, IEEE Computer Society, July 2004.

SOFTWARE SKILLS

Languages Currently use Java for programming. 
Have worked with C, C++, and SmallTalk in the past.
Familiar with Perl, Prolog, SQL, Visual C++ programming, UML and OO-design patterns.
Development Tools Eclipse, Microsoft Visual Studio, HAHT web development suite, Eclipse plugin development, and Java Agent DEvelopment Framework (JADE).
Technologies Web service and semantic web standards: WSDL, SOAP, RDF and OWL.
Understanding of latest web service choreography and orchestration specs BPEL and WS-CDL.
Middleware: The Java Messaging System and IBM MQ Series.
Web Development: HTML, XML, XSLT, PHP, JavaScript.
Operating Systems Unix, Linux and Windows. Shell scripts.

Honors and Awards
  • Student scholarship, International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS) 2004  (New York, NY) and 2005 (Utrecht, The Netherlands).
  • Teaching Assistantship, Department of Computer Science, NCSU, 2000-2002.
  • Student paper award for "Randomized Bit-Plane Encoding for Digital Watermarking of Bitmaps", IEEE (Bangalore) student paper contest, May 1999.
  • National Talent Search Scholarship (State Award),  Karnataka,  India, 1996-1998.

COURSEWORK PROJECTS

  • Service discovery: Design and implementation of an agent-based service discovery and composition system using the Java Agent DEvelopment framework (JADE), with FIPA-compliant messages and interaction protocols.

  • Software development/E-commerce: Part of a team that engineered a complete, requirements-to-deployment cycle for a prototype of an enhanced website for Newton Instruments, NC, with an intelligent product search service. Enhanced the look, feel, and usability of the website.

  • AI: Design and implementation of a Bayesian learner to help predict data values in certain medical datasets using Java.

  • Steganography: Development and implementation of algorithms for watermarking digital images (IEEE Bangalore chapter student paper award winner, 1999). Bitmaps, GIFs and JPEG images were used to hide and retrieve data using C++.

  • Operating Systems: Development of a thread library and an object linker and loader on Solaris. Design and implementation of a cache-miss classification application to profile program traces.

  • Systems Programming: Implementation of a C compiler using LEX and YACC to generate assembly instructions for the PDP-11, an assembler to generate machine code for the PDP-11 system using C++, and a graphical simulator for the PDP-11 using C++.


July 17, 2007