Geoffrey Fox: Summary of Interests and Expertise
Fox received his undergraduate degree in mathematics at Cambridge University where he 
was awarded the honor of Senior Wrangler as the head of his class. Postdoctoral positions 
and a faculty position at Caltech followed his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at Cambridge. 
His work always stressed practical applications of mathematics and computation to 
physical problems. He was one of four faculty who set up the program in CNS 
(Computation and Neural Systems) linking Biology, Computer Science, and Physics. 
Here he focused on the analysis and parallel simulation of artificial and biological neural 
networks. In 1980 Fox increasingly concentrated on computer science starting with his 
work on parallel computers with the hypercube architecture. He built multidisciplinary 
teams to exploit these new machines and was a pioneer in showing how to design 
efficient parallel algorithms and software in several scientific and engineering disciplines. 
Over the last four years, his major activity has been the use of Object Web technologies 
to build collaboration systems and their application in an integrated approach to 
synchronous and asynchronous distance education. He has led activities to develop 
prototype high performance Java and Fortran compilers and their runtime support. His 
research group has pioneered use of CORBA and Java for both collaboration and 
distributed computing. He helped set up an industry-academic partnership, the Java 
Grande forum, to encourage use of Java in large-scale computations. He was cofounder 
of two companies WebWisdom.com and Anabas in the area of Internet technology. Fox 
is a proponent for the development of computational science and its follow on 
"Internetics" as an academic discipline and a scientific method. These are the academic 
underpinning of the new school CSIT (Computational Science and Information 
Technology) at Florida State University. As the associate director of CSIT, he leads the 
Computational Science Laboratory which has installed an IBM SP parallel computer, 
which will have nearly 700 CPU’s and a peak performance over 2 Teraflops. This 
laboratory also has a network of Sun and PC servers to support database, collaboration 
and web-based education. Fox is a member of the ACES international collaboration to 
develop the computational environment for earthquake simulation techniques including 
both classic simulations and sophisticated pattern analysis methods. 
	Fox's role in IMS will be in leading the collaboratory where he will both design 
install and support the electronic collaboration system. His background in computer 
science, physics and mathematics will allow him to interact with the other participants 
and design and build new tools that are state of the art in both IMS functionality and 
information technology research.