Who is Your Advisor 1?

As stated in previous blog entries my advisor is Dr. Bernard J. Jansen, usually referred to as Jim Jansen (his personal website is: http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/index.html). Above is a picture of him. I don't know much about my advisor's personal life, perhaps because generally when I talk to him it is about research. Most of the information in this blog posting came from his website.

Dr. Jansen is an assistant professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University. He got a B.S. in Computer Science from the United States Military Academy in West Point, New York. He has a M.S. in International Relations from Troy State University, European Division and an M.CS. in Computer Science from Texas A&M University. He did his Ph.D. in Computer Science at Texas A&M University where his advisor was Dr. Udo Pooch and his dissertation was on "A Software Agent for Performance Improvement of an Existing Information Retrieval System."  Dr. Jansen was in the army from 1985- 2002 and has also taught at several different Universities. Currently Dr. Jansen lives in Charlottesville, Virginia with his family and commutes up to State College.

I will talk more about Dr. Jansen academic background, the different jobs he has held, and his research interests in the next weeks blog entry. But to close things up for this week I would like to share three things that I learned while writing the blog. First before doing this I had never heard of an M.CS. degree. Thus I had to look up the definition of it. For any one who like me is not familiar with this degree it is as Master of Computer Science. It is typically the non-thesis option in a graduate masters degree for computer science (definition taken from Wikipedia). In addition, I was interested to note that Dr. Jansen went to Texas A&M University because my father and many of his relatives went there as undergraduates. So it is a University I have heard of many times and every year my dad still watches the A&M football team on TV when he has the chance.  Lastly Dr. Jansen personal website has several pictures of him and his family under personal section of his website including pictures from State Colleges First Night Celebration and a live showing of the David Letterman Show.