Biographical sketches of authors

Mark Brodie   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: mbrodie@us.ibm.com). Dr. Brodie is a research staff member in the Machine Learning for Systems group at the T. J. Watson Research Center and an adjunct professor at Columbia University. He did his undergraduate work at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa. After coming to the United States, he received his Ph.D. degree in computer science in 2000 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, working with Gerald DeJong on explanation-based learning, and has been at IBM since then. His research interests include machine learning, data mining, and intrusion detection.

Irina Rish   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: rish@us.ibm.com). Dr. Rish is a research staff member at the T. J. Watson Research Center, working in the Machine Learning for Systems group. She received her M.S. degree in applied mathematics in 1992 at the Moscow Gubkin Institute, Russia, and her Ph.D. degree in computer science in 1999 at the University of California, Irvine, working with Rina Dechter on efficient reasoning techniques for constraint networks and Bayesian networks. Her primary interests are probabilistic inference and learning using Bayesian networks and other statistical machine-learning techniques. She is also working on approximation algorithms for efficient inference in large networks. She currently leads the Intelligent Probing project, which aims at developing tools for cost-efficient, real-time diagnosis and prediction in distributed computer systems using probing technology.

Sheng Ma   IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, New York 10598 (electronic mail: shengma@us.ibm.com). Dr. Ma received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Tsinghua University, China, in 1992. He received M.S. and Ph.D. (with honors) degrees in electrical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1995 and 1998, respectively. He joined the T. J. Watson Research Center as a research staff member in 1998, where he is now manager of the Machine Learning for Systems Department. His current research interests include network and computer system management, machine learning, data mining, and network traffic modeling and control.