Mark Galassi

Biographical Sketch

He returned to the United States in 1983 to attend Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he got his BA in physics (December 1986).

In September 1987 he moved to Long Island to study in the Institute for Theoretical Physics at Stony Brook under Martin Rocek.

He finished his PhD in September 1992, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to work in the Theoretical Astrophysics group in Los Alamos National Laboratory. In March 1993 he moved to the Space Data Systems (NIS-3) group in NIS division (now ISR division) in Los Alamos.

In ISR division, Mark happily worked on computer consulting and system administration, research in astrophysics and computer science, and software development.

In the spring of 1997 he left NIS-3 and had two jobs for a couple of years: working for Cygnus (now merged with Red Hat) writing software and books for eCos, and for the Space and Remote Sensing Sciences group (still in NIS division, Los Alamos), working on the HETE-2 satellite.

He then returned to full time research in Los Alamos, working on the HETE-2 satellite, and has since also worked on ISIS/Genie, the Raptor telescope, the Swift satellite, the background radiography project.

He also sits on the board of directors of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

A strong advocate of free software, Mark spends some of his spare time hacking on free software for the GNU project and doing research. Sometimes he plays folk music and blues with Mike Warren and others.

Research and Software Development

• I have worked on the HETE (High Energy Transient Explorer) satellite sine August 1993, and I am still involved with it. The original HETE satellite was launched on November 11 1996, and the Pegasus rocket did not release the satellite. Because of this rocket failure, NASA funded the HETE team to build HETE-2, which was launched on October 9 2000 and has been working very nicely since.

  For HETE and HETE-2 I was on the team that developed the WideField X-ray Camera (WXM) instrument. The WXM's role is to monitor the Gamma-ray and X-ray data looking for bursts, and then to figure out the location of that burst on the sky.

• The Swift satellite.
• The Raptor telescopes and pipeline processing system.
• The ISIS/Genie software to find features in remotely sensed images. On 2003-10-23 we released ISIS/Genie as free software. You can find download instructions here.
• I like to write papers and other documents on the topics I research, the software I write, and things I learn. Here is a pointer to documentation I have written
• Gnudl, the GNU Data Language (pronounced noodle or guhnoodle, i.e. with a silent or hard g, at your whim). See my documentation for more information about gnudl.

  The latest gnudl proto4 snapshot can be found on ftp.nis.lanl.gov by clicking here. It now compiles with the Cygnus guile-r0.3 snapshot (previous versions compile with guile-ii and guile-iii). Note that I did not go any further with the direct Gnudl application, so it is a very old effort.

• Gnudl proto4 is as far as I went with the Gnudl prototype. My efforts on Gnudl then turned to starting and maintaining the GNU Scientific Library, which will be necessary for any free software replacement of the proprietary scientific packages.
• General Relativity and Regge Calculus. See my Dissertation and the “it took so long to get it out” 6-person paper.
• The HETE satellite. Check out the design document and the flight manual for the WXM (xray) instrument on the satellite.

  NOTE: HETE was launched on November 11, 1996, and the Pegasus rocket failed to eject the two satellites. HETE is trapped in the rocket 3rd stage, and will almost certainly never speak to us or carry out its mission. HETE-2 has been launched (on October 9 2000) and is working nicely.

• I have been interested in Cellular Automata for a while, in the areas of both Regge Calculus and adaptive computation (see next entry).
• In the Winter of 1994/1995 I started working in my spare time on using Genetic Algorithms to evolve Cellular Automata to do useful computation. This is related to work being done by Melanie Mitchell and others on evolving CAs to do useful tasks (EVCA).
• In Los Alamos we have developed a cool advanced application of this idea of evolving useful algorithms. See the Genie web page for more information.
• Dominion , the dominion distribution is here (but for now it's easier to get it here).
• I have been doing UNIX system administration for fifteen years, and I treat it as an art. I still do it recreationally, although it is not part of my job right now.
• I have been using the scheme programming language for a while now, especially guile, the GNU Extension language which is based on scheme. There are nice WWW servers at MIT, and Indiana.
• Nelson Minar has put together a list of true hacking projects. I find most of them quite interesting.

I don't keep a list of friends with WWW pages anymore -- many people I know now have web pages, thus confirming my 1993 prediction that the pickup line of the latter day 1990s will be "what's your URL?"

The word dude in email: I somehow started using the word dude in email a lot, and it seems to have spread out to many people I work with, both in Los Alamos, Cygnus and MIT. I have been thinking about why it is such a good word to use in email, so I think I will at some point write a short essay about it. As it turns out, someone else wrote the essay :-).

     Space Physics and Remote Sensing group (NIS-2),
     Mail stop B244
     Los Alamos National Laboratory
     Los Alamos, New Mexico
     87545  USA

     email: mark_web@galassi.org

I have an anonymous ftp directory on ftp.nis.lanl.gov. It's mostly old stuff.

here is my GPG public key for mark at galassi.org:

The key id is C7017E7F and the fingerprint is:

4156 6752 362B F98F 3951  7752 A36D 2828 C701 7E7F

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Version: GnuPG v1.2.3 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Processed by Mailcrypt 3.5.8 

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