Since the first GASP meeting in mid-August 1994, Scot Dyer, an undergraduate student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) has been working on a number of GASP related projects. Originally, it had been intended to hire Scot for the time period September 1994 through August 1995 with funds provided by the Geometry Center. However there was considerable delay in getting approval from the NSF to allow UNL to be a subcontractor for the Geometry Center contract. Funds at UNL did not become available until late May 1995. By this time Scot had been awarded a 2 month summer Research Experience for Undergraduates fellowship to work with Charles Sims at Dimacs on computational projects related to restricted Burnside groups. His experience both in algebra and in computing with GAP will be invaluable for his continued work with GASP. The Geometry Center funding will actually be used to pay Scot for work from September 1, 1995-August 31, 1996. This will involve 20 hours a week during the academic year and 40 hours per week in the summer of 1996.
In order to keep Scot working on GASP, the Center for Communication and Information Science (CCIS) at UNL funded Scot for his work from September 1, 1994 through May 31, 1995. During this time period, some features were added to the Automate system, and a rewrite of the system to make it available as a class library and from the standard Unix shells was begun.