The goal of the candidacy exam will be to assist the candidate in establishing depth of scholarship in the literature related to his research area. Although the main application of this research will be in network management, the non-architectural core research issues require a background in language design, constraint languages and systems, as well as transaction processing systems. Given the breadth of the material covered, and the candidate's previous experience in network management it is desirable to narrow the focus of the exam to those other areas.
For that purpose, the candidate has selected references that cover the area that can be broadly characterized as ``computational models of change propagation''. In accordance to the requirements outlined in the departmental candidacy exam requirements, the candidate will prepare a 30 minute oral presentation based on the selected references, followed by a 90 minute question and answer session.