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\address{Professor Geoffrey Fox\\
	 Northeast Parallel Architectures Center\\
         111 College Place, 3-228 CST\\
         Syracuse University\\
	 \\
         Phone:            (315) 443-2163\\
         FAX: {\hskip 5pt} (315) 443-1973\\
         Email: gcf@npac.syr.edu}

\signature{Geoffrey Fox\\
Director of NPAC \\
Professor of Physics and \\
\hspace*{0.8cm} Computer Science}

\begin{document}

\begin{letter}{
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The Graduate Committee \\
School of Computer and Information Science\\
Syracuse University\\
\bigskip
}

\opening{To whom it may concern,}

This is to confirm that Saleh Elmohamed is working on a research project 
with myself and Paul Coddington as his advisors.

Saleh is working on the problem of academic scheduling and timetabling.
Large scheduling problems such as this are very difficult combinatorial
optimization problems that occur in many industrial applications.
Saleh's project is concentrating on the application of scheduling teachers,
classes, classrooms, and students for Syracuse University, which is a very
complex problem that is currently done almost entirely by hand.
The methods used for this problem should be directly applicable to other 
complex scheduling and timetabling problems in many different fields.

Saleh has been working diligently on this problem for more than a year now.
He has developed a model incorporating the large number of variables in
the academic scheduling problem into a cost function that measures the
suitability of the schedule, with the ``optimal'' schedule being the one
that minimizes this cost function. He has also developed programs to 
find an optimal or near-optimal solution using both neural network and 
simulated annealing techniques. The simulated annealing method has proven
to work well for small test problems. Saleh is now in the process of 
incorporating real academic scheduling data from Syracuse University 
into his program.

If you have any more questions on Saleh's status, feel free to contact me
about this.

\closing{Yours sincerely,}

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