I have been working with Saleh Elmohamed on his research work for 
about two years. He has completed a substantial amount of good research
work, created a number of quite complex programs, and done an excellent job
of keeping up with the relevant literature. We are working on 2 journal
papers and one conference paper based on his work. I believe he is 
progressing well enough that he should be able to complete his PhD before 
the end of this year.

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 about 3 years 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, as well as a rule-based system. He has 
also been able to incorporate real academic scheduling data from Syracuse 
University into his program.

With the various improvements that have been made in the course of this work, 
the simulated annealing method has proven to work very well for this problem,
and I believe the results obtained are better than any previous work.

