Alumni In The News

Adm. William Fallon Chosen As Head Of Central Command

Adm. William J. Fallon, the Navy’s top-ranking officer in the Pacific and a master’s graduate of Old Dominion, was confirmed by the Senate Feb. 7 as the next leader of the U.S. Central Command, which includes troops in the Middle East.

Fallon received his master’s in international studies in 1981 and was named a Distinguished Alumnus in 1999. He was in Norfolk as commander of the U.S. Atlantic Fleet before becoming commander of the Pacific Command in 2005.

News media reported in January that the Pentagon would name Fallon to succeed Army Gen. John Abizaid as commander of the Central Command. Fallon would be the first naval officer to lead the command, which has responsibility for all U.S. military operations in South and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.

Fallon began his Navy career in 1967 after graduating through the Naval ROTC program at Villanova University. His first assignment was flying RA-5C Vigilantes in Vietnam. He flew with attack squadrons and carrier air wings for 24 years.

A graduate of the Naval War College and the National War College, Fallon is a recipient of the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit and Bronze Star.

He served in Operation Desert Storm and during NATO’s combat operation in Bosnia. He served as the 31st vice chief of naval operations in Washington, D.C., from October 2000 to August 2003 before taking command of the Atlantic Fleet.

In a spring 2004 Old Dominion University magazine story, Fallon spoke about the value of international studies:

“Education, hopefully, will serve as a catalyst to get us interested in what goes on in other parts of the world and to realize how interconnected and interdependent the economies, nations and people of the world are. The more we learn about people and the more we understand what motivates them, the better chance we have to get ahead of some of the world’s problems.”

Michael Nelson Awarded NSF Career Grant
Out-of-the-box thinking similar to the ever more ingenious Internet strategies used to disseminate spam e-mails may someday be employed to preserve digital data, according to the hypothesis of Old Dominion computer scientist and alumnus Michael Nelson.

If the researcher is on to something – and the National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a $541,000 bet that he is – our present-day practices for protecting digital information will be augmented by quite different approaches.

Nelson’s idea calls to mind the maritime practice to send ships to sea in advance of a storm. The reasoning is that a passive ship tied up in port will be more vulnerable to the storm than a ship under way in the open sea.

Instead of ships, Nelson is trying to protect bundles of information called digital objects. He was informed in December that he is the recipient of an NSF Career Grant that will fund his work over the next five years on “self-preserving digital objects.” Career grants are awarded to promote the work of extraordinarily promising young scientific researchers.

Nelson said that e-mail spam and viral videos are the best current examples of the approach he proposes. Mischievous e-mail or a humorous video clip can “live in the Web infrastructure with minimal hierarchical control,” he said, and that is precisely how he plans to preserve digital objects containing data for technical papers, historical documents, Web pages and the like.

“I’m going to investigate if these properties can be applied to content other than pop culture ephemera,” he said.

Nelson’s project will make use of “flocking” rules created by a cinema scene programmer in the 1980s. These rules state that if you give minimal direction to a few digital agents within a bunch, such as “stay close but not too close to your neighbors,” the behavior of the entire bunch will be a random but mostly predictable flocking. (Flocking is often used in animated films to create realistic-looking crowd behavior, such as the wildebeest stampede in “The Lion King.”)

Nelson was a computer engineer at NASA Langley Research Center from 1991-2002, and during that period he earned a master’s degree and doctorate in computer science from ODU. He joined the faculty in 2002.

In just a few years, Nelson has become an internationally recognized expert in the areas of digital libraries and digital preservation, said Kurt Maly, chair of the ODU computer science department.

Notes Maly: “Today’s students have iPods, digital cameras, laptops and nearly unlimited capacity to create, store and share content. Computer science provides training in many applied areas such as Web programming, networking and databases. The field must now also teach stewardship of large, personal data collections.”