A few recent graduates of our MCS and PhD programs share recollections of their time at Iowa, as well as what they are currently working on. More Senior alum as well as Bachelor's graduates may be featured. Below are some of their stories.

Shrisha Rao

Graduation Year: 2005
Major(s): PhD
Advisor: Sukumar Ghosh; Ted Herman
Q&A date: 2023

Can you tell us a little about the International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore (IIIT-B) and its mission?

It is a school of information technology that started 25 years ago when the software industry in India was taking off and the country suddenly needed many more software developers and computer scientists. (I have been here for close to 18 years, since getting my PhD.) So training students for good industry roles has always been a big part of our mission and continues to be so, but we are also working on translatable research that produces tangible real-world outcomes. One example of this is the MOSIP project run out of here, which has produced a large customizable national identity platform (inspired by India's biometric national ID system which has over a billion people enrolled). MOSIP is now used by several countries across the world for their national ID systems.

How did you transition from being a professor to becoming Dean of Faculty?

It's not a lifetime appointment; it's an administrative role assigned for a certain duration, on top of being a regular full professor. You could also ask my friend Alberto Segre how he transitioned from professor to CS department chair at Iowa! He'd probably tell you that he very much continues to be a professor and that being one is a major part of what he does; and that he was appointed chair because he was willing to do the administrative work that the position calls for, and because people thought that he'd be very good at it.

What does a typical day as Dean of Faculty at IIIT-B look like? How does this position fit into administration in Indian universities, and is it similar to that of US universities?

I don't think my days are any more special now than before; they are very much like an average professor's workdays—some classes and related work like grading, some local interactions with students and colleagues, e-mails and other remote interactions with peers and others elsewhere, occasionally some professional travel (though I travel less than some others), and some reading to stay current on my topics of interest. Perhaps the biggest plus of being a dean is that I get to meet a lot of young researchers—fresh PhDs and postdocs—and discuss their exciting new ideas. The role of a dean is mostly administrative (lots of meetings), with a big part of it having to do with managing processes for hiring and promotion decisions, including by scrutinizing dossiers of prospective or current professors. There are committees for various things connected to hiring and promotions (deans usually cannot call the shots on their own), but the relevant processes will not happen by themselves, so deans have to make sure the machinery is well-oiled and runs smoothly. There are people who do this kind of work in every reputable university in the US and elsewhere, though the titles and details of their roles may vary.

What is your perspective on achieving early but continued success in a computer science career?

The first thing, which I guess is obvious now, is that the field is changing too rapidly for anyone to remain relevant and successful with just their college education—no matter how good or complete at the time. A CS student at the point of graduation has to be grounded and have a solid grasp of the basic concepts, and must also have skills in whatever is hot and at the cutting edge right then, but later the student also has to keep learning, in terms of knowledge as well as skills, continually. CS majors, like most professionals these days, can get out of date and become effectively unsuitable for good jobs in a relatively short time, regardless of what classes they took, their grades, and their degrees, unless they are able to keep learning and adapting even later in their careers.

What advice do you have for students currently studying computer science?

Understand how people think and organizations function, and work on the ability to apply your CS knowledge in confusing and non-ideal practical settings rather than only in pure, theoretical ones. Many years ago, there was a very thought-provoking article by the late Fred Brooks, who said a computer scientist is a "toolsmith" (someone who builds artifacts, likened to tools, for others to use) and I think that's a valid notion even today. The computer scientists (in the US and elsewhere) who have made the most of their educations are typically those who can effectively use their skills and knowledge to solve problems for a group of real people.

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Umar Iqbal

Graduation Year: 2021
Major(s): PhD
Advisor: Zubair Shafiq
Q&A date: 2023

What were some of your favorite experiences as a student in the CS department at Iowa?  

I thoroughly enjoyed my 5 years at Iowa! Perhaps, some of my most memorable experiences were interacting with other students and the invited guests at the weekly colloquium receptions. I learned a lot during these sessions and made several connections with researchers from other universities.

Can you describe your dissertation research briefly and for a lay audience?  

It is becoming increasingly hard for users to use the internet without giving up their privacy — almost all online interactions involve personal data collection. Users do not have any other option but to trust that online services will respect their privacy. Unfortunately, protecting user privacy does not align well with the business model of online services, who often use data for undisclosed purposes and trade it with other services on the internet to make revenue. 

My research goal is to empower users so that they can protect their privacy on the internet. I pursue two complementary research themes to fulfill that goal. My first research theme focuses on bringing transparency by characterizing data collection and usage practices of online services. My second research theme focuses on bringing control to users by identifying and restricting privacy-invasive data collection and usage practices of online services. 

Why did you decide to study computer science and privacy? 

I never intended to pursue a degree in computer science but when I started, I really enjoyed it. In fact, I liked it so much that I pursued a PhD in it. I like working on privacy and security related problems because of their adversarial nature. Many computer security problems involve an active adversary who is continuously trying to break the defenses and as a defender your job is to build defenses that cannot be easily circumvented. 

Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew as a computer science student? 

A general piece of advice I can give is to not be afraid to ask questions and challenge assumptions. This lesson is particularly useful for learning new things and identifying gaps in existing knowledge. I have noticed it to be the case among many (especially junior) students that when they are presented with a new piece of information, especially from a known authority, they are tuned to believe it, even if they do not fully understand it. The worst outcome of asking a question in this situation would be that you will learn something new!  

Are there any projects that you’re currently working on? 

Currently, I am conducting research to improve the security of large language mode (LLM) based computing systems. LLMs and LLM-based systems (e.g., ChatGPT) have taken the world by storm. I anticipate their effect to be long lasting and transformational on all of us. Considering their capabilities, I am concerned that if they are widely deployed without security, privacy, and safety as key considerations, they could have severe negative consequences, so I am working on understating and fixing security and privacy issues in them. 

Now: Assistant Professor; Washington University Prior: CI Fellow Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of Washington

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Tanmay Inamdar

Graduation Year: 2020
Major(s): PhD
Advisor: Kasturi Varadarajan
Q&A date: 2023

Can you tell us what you’ve been up to since graduating with a Ph.D. in 2020? Are you currently working on any projects?

I graduated in Summer 2020 and joined as a postdoctoral researcher at University of Bergen in Norway in December 2020. The focus of my research at Bergen---like that during my Ph.D.---is in Theoretical Computer Science. While Approximation Algorithms continues to be my main research interest, I have widened my research to other related areas, such as Parameterized Complexity and Graph Algorithms. I will finish my stint as a postdoc and will return to India (which is my home country) to join as an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur, starting from December 2023.

Can you describe your dissertation research briefly and for a lay audience? 

My dissertation was about designing efficient approximation algorithms for computationally hard problems that handle outliers in the data. It is a commonly known phenomenon in data analysis, that a small number of outliers can adversely affect the outcome. In my dissertation, I designed algorithms that are robust in the presence of outliers, i.e., they can find near-optimal solutions to the problem, after excluding the outliers. For many such problems, we showed theoretical guarantees on the performance of such algorithms that almost matched the guarantees for known algorithms that did not handle outliers.

Tell us about some of your favorite experiences as a student in the CS department at Iowa.   

The weekly colloquium helped increase my awareness about the areas outside of my research focus. In fact, I attended the colloquium series almost every single week throughout my Ph.D., long after I had already finished the mandatory requirement of four semesters. Some of the talks I distinctly remember include Prof. Doug Jones' talking ternary number system, as well as talks on advertising on social media websites, toxic culture on 4chan, and connection to politics. I also have fond memories from the CS:5980 'Computing Research Ethics' from Spring 2016, where we used to read, discuss and debate about contemporary issues and technologies in CS and their ethical implications. It helped me build a habit to always actively think about these issues.

Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew as a computer science student?

CS Department at Iowa is very closely-knit without artificial boundaries between different research groups. There is a culture of open communication, interaction and transfer of ideas between different groups. I believe this culture is rather rare, and seldom found in some of the larger departments. One can really take more advantage of this and broaden their horizons within CS as well as related fields.

Now: Postdoctoral Researcher; Department of Informatics; University of Bergen, Norway Starting Dec. 23: Assistant Professor; Indian Institute of Technology, Jodhpur, India

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Jeff Hajewski

Graduation Year: 2020
Major(s): PhD
Advisor: Suely Oliveira
Q&A date: 2023

Can you tell us what you’ve been up to since graduating?

Post-PhD I have worked at Salesforce, Noom, and now SAP. My work has focused around building distributed systems for machine learning. At Salesforce I built a system responsible for evaluating a few deep learning NLP models on customer email data. These models would alert the customer to things like questions being asked, scheduling requests being made, etc. At Noom I developed their machine learning platform. This platform enabled the data science team to scale out the number of models they were evaluating on Noom's massive data lake. At SAP I lead work on several systems related to generative AI. We leverage models like OpenAI's ChatGPT to provide insight to customers about their data.

Can you describe your dissertation research briefly and for a lay audience?

My research focused on techniques to do machine learning effectively and cheaply on many computers. Designing neural networks, which are the underlying technology of things like ChatGPT, requires a lot of knowledge, intuition, and experience. My work was centered around automating the design process through the use of evolution. I developed several efficient techniques for evolving these neural networks over many computers.

Tell us about some of your favorite experiences as a student in the CS department at Iowa.

Aside from the friendships I made with my peers and faculty, TAing for 400/500-level courses that I had never taken before are some of my favorite memories. It wasn't particularly pleasant at the time as I was constantly studying to make sure I was prepared to answer student questions, but looking back it was a great experience. I grew my general CS knowledge base rapidly over those semesters, for more rapidly than if I hadn't been a TA. I think that experience supercharged my self-learning and time management skills, which has proven quite valuable in industry.

Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew as a computer science student?

I wish I would have gotten more involved in open source. I contributed some patches to Firefox while at Iowa and that really propelled me as a software engineer. Getting more involved in that (and other open source projects) would have helped jumpstart my career. I also wish I would have spent more time launching actual projects, everything from backend to frontend.

Are you currently working on any projects?

I am currently working on a search engine for podcasts called trufflepig.fm. I am also working on a social media platform for female physicians with my wife. I guess my biggest project right now is raising two boys, which keeps both of us very busy (and tired).

Now: CX AI Engineer, SAP Formerly: Senior Software Engineer; Noom Inc.

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Yuanyuan Jiang

Graduation Year: 2018
Major(s): PhD
Advisor: Joe Kearney
Q&A date: 2023

After receiving her doctorate in computer science from the University of Iowa in 2018, Yuanyuan Jiang joined California State University – San Marcos (CSUSM) as an assistant professor.

Were there any experiences you had at Iowa that you feel helped shape your professional career or your teaching style at CSUSM?  

My faculty advisors Prof. Joseph Kearney and Prof. Jodie Plumert from the Hank [Virtual Environments] Lab greatly influenced me. They are wonderful researchers and teachers who taught me how to conduct virtual reality (VR) research and how to work with students effectively. The positive experience and solid foundation that I gained from the Hank Lab allows me to continue VR research and open VR related courses in CSUSM. Also, I found the UI Certificate in College Teaching very helpful and would encourage more computer science graduate students to benefit from this opportunity. The teaching skills, pedagogy, and educator mindset learned from this program are very helpful in classroom teaching and highly valued in teaching-focused or teaching-research balanced campuses like CSU. 

What were some of your favorite experiences as a student in the CS department at Iowa?  

I really enjoyed the friendly and encouraging atmosphere in the research lab. We have a lot of hard-working and caring professors in the department who go above and beyond in course design and make sure we understand the material. Also, I miss my friends from the graduate program, the union station with all the food options, and the convenient buses in town.  

Can you describe your dissertation research briefly and for a lay audience?  

During my Ph.D. study, I worked with faculties and fellow lab mates on designing and constructing 2 connected large-screen pedestrian VR simulators. Participants can walk across a single lane of traffic under different scenarios. We could capture participants' precise movement data using motion capture cameras to understand people's decision making and joint motion that are otherwise very difficult to capture and analyze in real life. My research plan involved 3 groups of studies to understand how pairs of pedestrians joint cross together differs from solo person crossing, how computer-generated agent characters influences pedestrian's joint motion, and how avatar-mediated joint action where two participants see each other's avatar representations affects joint road crossing.  

Why did you decide to study virtual reality technology and human-computer interaction (HCI)?  

It is an interdisciplinary field between cognitive psychology and computer science (CS). In my personal view, CS involves two major focuses: (1) how to develop faster and better computing hardware and software and (2) how to let users interact with computers easier. I became interested in the second focus after watching some HCI-related demo videos as an undergraduate, like gesture-controlled computer interaction. Later, I joined a computer graphics (CG) research group as undergraduate research assistant and discovered the beauty of the CG world and found VR field combines the graphical output of CG together with the psychology user studies. It is always very exciting to see a VR project being used by users and to discover how users are interacting in the virtual world. 

Looking back, is there anything you wish you knew as a computer science student?  

As a student back then, I thought people around me all knew what they wanted to do after graduation. I spent a good amount of time worrying about what I should do after graduation and whether I will be happy in the new job. Now, I know it is alright to have such confusion as our interest, knowledge, and ability change overtime. When I was a freshman in network engineering major, I did not even know VR field existed and never would I consider myself to become a professor one day. Keep taking courses and show up to opportunities that interests me gradually led my way to the current career.  

Are there any projects that you’re currently working on? 

In the past few years, I have been mainly working with computer science, chemistry, and education faculties in developing a VR/MR (mixed-reality) Bio-Chem lab simulation system. The system supports VR and MR modes. In VR mode, users interact with the chemistry lab content via controllers. In MR mode, the user can interact with motion-tracked physical lab tools and see the virtual lab tool moving in the simulation. Students can use the simulation to practice chemistry experiments in a safe environment and get real-time feedback to prepare for wet lab sessions. Chemistry faculties could use a programmed Excel template to easily modify the lab lesson steps to tailor the lesson plan. We conducted user studies to evaluate the system and user interaction methods. There are other smaller VR research projects that I work on along the lines of user behavior in VR.

Now: Assistant Professor, California State University - San Marcos, California

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Yelena Mejova

Graduation Year: 2012
Major(s): PhD
Advisor: Padmini Srinivasan | Web Mining
Q&A date: 2015

She had received a BS in Computer Science from Minnesota State University Moorhead in 2007. She recently co-edited "Twitter: A Digital Socioscope."

What are you doing now in a professional capacity?

I am a Scientist at the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI), living in Doha, Qatar. At QCRI I develop methods for linking the online social media world to the "real" world. We track dietary habits of social media users to estimate obesity and diabetes rates, and to discover the importance of social connections in health. We also attempt to expand the "filter bubble" of online users by personalizing recommendations of less-popular news items. As a researcher, I get to travel all over the world and meet amazing people -- I highly recommend it! Previously, I was a Postdoc at Yahoo! Labs in Barcelona.

Can you describe your dissertation research briefly and for a lay audience?

My PhD research was on opinion extraction and sentiment analysis of social media text.

Now: Senior Research Scientist, ISI Foundation, Turin, Italy - Click here for 2023 interview update!

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Fredrick Galoso

Graduation Year: 2013
Major(s): B.A.
Q&A date: 2018

When did you graduate from Iowa and what degree(s) did you get?

I graduated Fall 2012, B.B.A., Management Information Systems and Summer 2013, B.A., Computer Science.

What has kept you busy since you graduated and what are you up to now?

Soon after graduating from Iowa, I started working as a software developer for Dwolla, a venture backed, financial technology company in Des Moines, IA. For three years I helped build some of the core fraud, accounting, and data systems that moved billions of dollars through the payments network. In 2016, I joined Trello, where I continue to work today as a senior software engineer. I've had an opportunity to work on a product that has millions of users around the world, developing features as varied as enabling large organizations to use and manage Trello, helping develop an experimentation platform, and creating user experiences that educate and empower users to get organized and collaborate together. In early 2017, I was part of the Trello team that was acquired by Atlassian for $425 million, a NASDAQ traded collaboration software company [Now Principal Engineer, Trello at Atlassian].

I recently finished a M.S. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. From 2015 to 2017, I specialized in Interactive Intelligence, studying the intersection of human-computer interaction and artificial intelligence.

I've had an opportunity to work as an early employee at not just one, but multiple ambitious and industry changing companies. It has been an exhilarating ride and I've thoroughly enjoyed working to build products that have had a substantial impact in such a short amount of time.

What does Trello do?

Trello is the easy, free, flexible, and visual way to manage projects and organize anything, trusted by millions of people from all over the world. Whether it is an individual, team, or large organization like Pixar, Google, or UNICEF, we help people work more collaboratively and get more done.

How has working remotely factored into your time at Trello/Atlassian?

It has enabled me to continue to live in Iowa while working for a large multinational technology company. It's also let me experience what appears to be a way of working that will continue to become more prevalent into the future. Thanks to tools like Trello, chat, video conferencing, and other productivity applications more and more organizations are making distributed teamwork an effective and productive way of working that greatly expands the talent pool for companies.

Tell us about some of your favorite experiences as a student in the CS dept at Iowa?

I remember fondly many late nights working with my fellow classmates in MacLean Hall on assignments and projects. I enjoyed my CS classes, especially taking classes taught by Dr. Doug Jones, Dr. Aaron Stump, and Dr. Teodor Rus and being engaged in discussion about the applications of computing in greater society. Finally, I enjoyed attending and learning from interesting colloquium speakers.

What advice do you have for our students?

While in school, engage with your fellow students and instructors. Go to office hours, make connections, and be as active as you can be in your learning. As with many things, what you get out of something is proportional to what what you put into it. Many of the things I learned and remember the most came from interactions that were not directly in the classroom.

Another thing I would encourage students is to seek opportunities to apply what they are learning to interests or projects outside of class. This could be a job, a club, an organization, open source, research, or volunteering - computing is ubiquitous and there are many opportunities to reinforce and apply your learning. This will also give you a body of work that you can point to, something that will be invaluable when you're seeking your next opportunity, whether it's a job in industry or continued education.

Finally, take measured risks, be entrepreneurial, and be prepare yourself for opportunities. Risk taking enables you to go for challenges and take initiative on problems that you may not normally have worked on. Entrepreneurial thinking will enable you to find ways to solve problems creatively. You may not know what you will work on next, but if an opportunity presents itself, if you're prepared, you can actually seize it.

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Geoffrey Fairchild

Graduation Year: 2014
Major(s): PhD 
Advisor: Alberto Segre | comp|epi
Q&A date: 2015

He had earned his MS in 2011, and a BS in Mathematics and Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin in 2008. His advisor was Alberto Segre and he was a member of the comp|epi group.

Can you describe your dissertation research briefly and for a lay audience?

My dissertation research is focused on disease surveillance, a key aspect of public health and epidemiology. The core problem I address is this: data are gathered on people infected with certain diseases so that epidemiologists can understand disease dynamics and public health officials can make decisions such as what vaccines to produce, where to allocate vaccines, where to allocate funds, etc. Traditionally, most data are gathered from primary care facilities (e.g., doctors’ offices, hospitals) and laboratories. The first project in my dissertation focused on how to use computational techniques to improve on the location of primary care facilities from which public health data is gathered. Traditional disease surveillance networks have some problems, though; there’s often a lag of a few weeks before data are available to the public, and many regions of the world lack the infrastructure to maintain such networks. To address these concerns, there’s been a recent push to use publicly available internet data to aid in disease surveillance. The rest of my dissertation focused on using Wikipedia for this purpose.

What are you doing now in a professional capacity?

Upon finishing my PhD, I accepted an offer for a staff scientist position at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, where I interned as a grad student for several years. I am continuing to work on disease surveillance and modeling problems. A lot of my research is still focused on using Wikipedia to enhance disease surveillance efforts. I’ve also spent significant time working with a large-scale agent-based simulation of human movement and disease spread to understand potential mitigations during an epidemic or pandemic (e.g., wearing face masks, closing schools). Unrelated to my disease surveillance and modeling research, I am also working on a large operations research project studying optimal design of water distribution networks.

A few months ago, one of your papers received a lot of press. Can you tell us about that and where we can read more about that research?

Our Wikipedia work has received quite a bit of press! Our initial paper, "Global Disease Monitoring and Forecasting with Wikipedia," was published in PLOS Computational Biology and is available at journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003892. In that paper, we showed that statistical models built using time series of publicly available Wikipedia article access logs can accurately nowcast and forecast disease incidence in many regions of the world. A follow-up paper to this study, "Eliciting Disease Data from Wikipedia Articles," uses natural language processing and machine learning techniques to pull disease data from the actual article content. This paper was accepted to be presented at the 2015 9th International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) Wikipedia workshop. A pre-print is available on arXiv at arxiv.org/abs/1504.00657.

Now: Group Leader at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) - Click here for 2023 interview update!

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Andy Berns

Graduation Year: 2012
Major(s): PhD
Advisors: Sukumar Ghosh, Sriram Pemmaraju
Q&A date: 2017

Andy Berns is a 2012 PhD graduate. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at University of Northern Iowa, Cedar Falls, Iowa. He also manages the Department's Real-Time Embedded Systems Lab. As a PhD student, Berns was a UI Presidential Scholar.

Can you tell us what you've been up to since graduating with a PhD in 2012?

After spending the spring of 2013 teaching at the University of Iowa, I became an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse (UWL) in the fall of 2013. At UWL, I had the chance to work with some great faculty members and students, I taught a variety of courses from introductory computer science to algorithms to software engineering, I supervised several Masters of Software Engineering projects, and I helped advise students groups like the cybersecurity club. In the fall of 2016 I moved to my undergraduate alma mater, University of Northern Iowa (UNI) and became an assistant professor there. Here also, I  have the pleasure of teaching a variety of courses, as well as managing the Real-Time Embedded Systems Laboratory. I really enjoy working at a regional comprehensive university where I have the opportunity to teach a variety of courses while still performing my own research with the assistance of our students.

Can you tell us a bit about your dissertation?

My dissertation (Self-Stabilizing Overlay Networks) looked at how we can build overlay networks (networks built using logical links) that are capable of eventually operating correctly no matter what transient fault occurs, or what arbitrary initial state the distributed system is in. Common examples of overlay networks include BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer file sharing programs. With the growth of the Internet, many overlay networks now consist of a large number of computers, and these computers are of course prone to failure and lack a central point of control. Self-stabilizing overlay networks aim to give systems such as these a way to quickly form a correct network to allow, for instance, efficient communication or resource discovery. My dissertation presented a generic framework for self-stabilizing overlay network creation, as well as a time- and space-efficient algorithm for creating a particular network.

What advice can you give current graduate students in the CS department?

My first piece of advice is to start thinking about your goals early on in your graduate school career and work at tailoring your experience towards these goals. For instance, many regional comprehensive universities would like to see evidence that you can be a good teacher and also evidence that you have a growing research agenda that can involve the students at their institution. Some other types of schools may look for more evidence of a strong research agenda, or may care more about evidence of good teaching. My advice is to think about what you want to do, and then talk with your advisors to help them guide you in reaching those goals!

My second piece of advice, though, would be to be open to other opportunities that you may not have thought about! While in graduate school you may find your goals change. While you are searching for jobs, you may find openings from a variety of institutions in a variety of places, and might even find industry jobs that sound more appealing to you than academic jobs. Don't hesitate to explore these opportunities, even if they aren't exactly what you were planning on earlier.

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Tyler Jensen

Graduation Year: 2011
Major(s): MCS
Q&A date: 2017

Tyler Jensen is a 2011 MCS graduate. He is the Co-Founder & CTO at SpareChange Inc.

When did you graduate from Iowa and what degree(s) did you get?

I graduated from the University of Iowa with a BS/MCS in Computer Science in the winter of 2011. I took advantage of the combined 5 year MCS program but ended up completing it in 4 ½ years.

What has kept you busy since you graduated and what are you up to now?

After graduating I spent an amazing 4 years at Microsoft in Seattle, Washington working on 1st party mobile apps for Windows Phone and then switching to hyper-scale cloud services across Xbox Live and finally Microsoft Azure. Eventually I decided I wanted to travel and focus my skills on making a more positive impact on the world. I jumped at the chance to start my own company, SpareChange, after hearing an idea from a former colleague while we were at a computing conference at Twitter. Rather spontaneously I quit my job and moved to Chiang Mai, Thailand which is a popular spot for “digital nomads” who run various sorts of businesses remotely while taking advantage of Thailand’s low cost of living and excellent internet infrastructure. This was my first time leaving North America and it was quite the experience! If you ever have the chance to immerse yourself in a different culture, absolutely seize it. After a half year of developing an initial version of my app and traveling around Southeast Asia, I moved back to Seattle to be closer to my business partner and find networking opportunities to promote our app and raise funding. In April of 2017 we launched publicly on the Apple App Store and Google Play Store and will begin looking for investors shortly. It has been a wild ride, and I could not have done it without the opportunities the CS department afforded me.

What does SpareChange do?

SpareChange (gosparechange.com) [Note: acquired by Roundit Financial Technologies in 2017] lets you make tax-deductible donations to any of the 1.9+ million registered non-profits in the United States. Specifically, you can attach micro-donations to different types of transactions so you don’t even have to think about giving back to your community. For example, you can donate $1.00 every time you take an Uber, or $2.00 every time you buy gas. We noticed it’s difficult to navigate the world of non-profits. If you want to make a donation to someone, often times you have to sign up with them individually, enter in your payment info, etc. for every single one. Even worse, a majority of donations today are made by cash or check. With our platform, you can donate to any non-profit using modern payment solutions such as your credit card, bank account, and eventually Apple Pay, Google Wallet and Paypal. I like to describe it as the Venmo of non-profit donations.

Tell us about some of your favorite experiences as a student in the CS dept at Iowa?

Most of my favorite experiences as a CS student were in extra-curricular activities. I was Vice-President of the ACM for 2 years and had a blast meeting other students interested in computing, planning events and organizing the University of Iowa Computing Conference where I got to design and run the annual coding competition. When I was in grad school I absolutely loved being a teaching assistant and helping new students learn the basics of programming. Being a TA was probably one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. I also had the pleasure of being a research assistant for Professor Stump and Tinelli where I got hands on experience designing and implementing the initial version of StarExec.

What advice do you have for our students?

Take risks. If you’re young and in technology, the world is your oyster. Do bold things while you don’t have a family to support or anyone who relies on you. If you fail who cares, there is a massive shortage of good tech workers out there and jobs really aren’t that difficult to come by. I think a lot of people just assume that you get a job, work until you’re 65, then retire and die. There’s way more to life than that, but it’s up to you to truly live it.

Currently Principal Software Architect - Microsoft

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Xiaoli Yang and Shenzhi Zhang

Graduation Year: 1989
Major(s): MS
Q&A date: 2018

When did you graduate from CS at UI? With what degrees?

We both graduated in 1989 with MS in CS.

What have you been doing professionally since then?

Xiaoli had worked for Microsoft since graduation for over a decade, worked as a software developer on programming language tools such as compiler, debugger etc., also worked on photo editing products for many years.

Shenzhi had worked for Microsoft for 5 years and then left and started his own company working on music software and game engine development. Later he joined a Startup called Syntrillium working on audio editing and Adobe bought Syntrillium in 2003 and since then he has been working on audio editing, video editing and Virtual Reality.

What memories do you have of the courses you took or the professors you interacted with in CS at UI?

We had so many fond memories of the department. We are very grateful for the chance to do graduate study there. Professor Kearney was our academic adviser. He guided our research work on computer vision, reviewed our paper and sponsored us going to conference. He also helped us find our first job at Microsoft. We are forever very grateful to him for all his help.

We also became close friend with Professor Hantao Zhang who taught Shenzhi Graph Theory. Xiaoli also worked as TA for Professor Slonneger, who was a very kind and dedicated in teaching. Shenzhi had great time in Professor Bruell’s seminar, he was always very encouraging so Shenzhi didn't feel very nervous when doing presentation.

Can you describe some of the ways in which being a Computer Science professional has changed since you started your careers?

The software industry has certainly changed a lot over the years. For a software professional, there are two major changes. First is that you need have strong communication skills. In early days the projects were small in general, machine was slow and developer just need to dive into algorithm to make the code smaller or faster and sometimes both while tester just do black box testing.  We didn't even have "program manager" job title back then. Now the projects usually are huge. A lot of times you need to coordinate with people from different groups within your organization and work with people from other organizations.

Another change is the software development method change. We used to do a planning → design → implementation → testing → release cycle, we call it waterfall model. Nowadays an agile model or scrum model is widely adopted. These two changes are related. The agile development model satisfies the communication requirement needed for huge projects.

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Kelsey Huebner

Graduation Year: 2012
Major(s): Informatics and Art BAs; Computer Science minor
Q&A date: 2015

While at Iowa, she took part in Prof. Juan Pablo Hourcade's HCI research; including work on his Open Autism Software project.

What was your favorite class in the computer science department?

HCI (Human-Computer Interaction). It was the first opportunity I had to come up with an application idea and work on it with a team. I learned how to prototype and think through usability from a designer and a developer approach. The class really prepared me for conceptualizing, designing and developing websites and eventually applications.

What did you get out of your research experiences?

I really began to understand empathy from the field work we did. My role was to work with children that the studies revolved around. I documented what they were doing and saying. It allowed me a glimpse into their lives and what their thought processes were. Then to prepare it all into a research paper I had to step back and understand how our applications could positively affect their lives. We also presented at CHI where I got to travel to Austin, TX and Paris! The critical thinking involved in the research paper and having to present and meet other professionals resonates even now with my current job.

What are you doing now in a professional capacity?

I moved to Seattle last summer and began working on the Xbox Developer Support Team at Microsoft. This past April I began a new position as a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft. I get to spread the word to developers about programming for Windows 10! Specifically I work with Microsoft's top developer partners to create the best Windows applications. It's really fun because I still program and work in application code but I also get to travel and host 'hack' events.

Can you tell us about an interesting project that you are currently working on?

Well, every month we host a Hack event or 'Hackfest'. I reach out to Microsoft specialists to present and work hands-on with our third party developers and publishers. For me it's really cool because I get to meet the Microsoft people creating the product and learn from them. We used to focus on Xbox but now it's all about Windows 10. Our goal is to have the top applications, like Hulu, released with all of the best features Windows 10 has to offer. I also get to travel for the events, we just returned from London two weeks ago and will be going to China soon!

Where do you hope to be in 10 years?

Microsoft CEO. Or at least a senior level program manager here. :) I really like the organization I am in because we are programmers but also get the opportunity to speak and present to other developers. If you watched the //build/ event, that was mostly people from my larger team presenting. I would really like to present at //build/ someday.

Currently Senior Technical Program Manager - Microsoft

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Chris Hlady

Graduation Year: 2011
Major(s): PhD
Q&A date: 2015

He had earned his MS in 2009, also at the University of Iowa. In 2006 he had received a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Chris is a native of Moline, IL.

Can you describe your dissertation research briefly and for a lay audience

My PhD research involved modeling healthcare workers, patients, and infectious diseases and building a realistic simulation of a hospital to answer questions about efficient use of resources and the spread of hospital-acquired infections.

What are you doing now in a professional capacity?

I work as a software development engineer at Amazon.com. My team designs, builds and maintains the AmazonLocal website, and the Scalable, redundant back-end service used by the website and out mobile applications.

Currently AI/ML - iOS Engineer at Apple

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Valerie (Galluzzi) Liptak, PhD 2015

Q&A date: 2016

Can you tell us what you've been up to since you graduated with a PhD in Computer Science in 2015?

I have been working as an Assistant Professor in the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. So far the first year of working as a faculty member has been a roller coaster ride, but I am very happy to be working at the top undergraduate engineering school in the country. I had always wanted to go to a faculty position in a small teaching school, and it is great to be in a place where I can get to know top-quality students. In my first year here I was able to help students start WOLFPAC (Women Of Like Fields Passionate About Computing), a club for women in computing that got national press. I was also able to start a multi-disciplinary course on the Internet of Things, which I will teach again this winter.

Can you tell us a bit about your dissertation?

My dissertation, Automatic Recognition of Healthcare Worker Hand Hygiene, focused on automatically recognizing whether healthcare workers were washing their hands. As part of my work, healthcare workers in intensive care units would wear wristbands with accelerometers in them during their normal hospital shift. I designed machine learning methods that could determine when they washed their hands during that time period and for how long. I also did work on finding out whether we could recognize correct hand hygiene technique.

Now that you are a professor yourself, do you have any advice for graduate students who might be interested in taking the academic career route?

The most important thing is to figure out whether you would like to focus on teaching or research. A professor at a teaching-intensive school is judged heavily on the quality of their teaching and pedagogy, while a professor at a research-intensive school will be judged heavily on the number of grants they receive and publications they write, as well as their work with graduate students. If you are interested in working in a teaching-intensive position, I would recommend that you pursue working as an in-class teaching assistant during your graduate studies. If you can have a “sole responsibility” course where you put together all course materials that is an excellent opportunity to take. When applying for academic positions at teaching-intensive schools the hiring committee will be very interested in your teaching experience and your teaching statement, which talks about your teaching philosophy. A teaching philosophy is not easy to get overnight—it is something you will build through experiences in class.

If you are interested in working in a research-intensive position, I would still recommend gaining experience as an in-class teaching assistant because classroom teaching is an important part of those positions. However, I would recommend focusing more on research as you will have to figure out what your research agenda will be after graduation—after all, you will be expected to lead a research lab! If possible I recommend helping your advisor to write grants and finding a way to lead a group within the lab. You should also focus on publishing in as many high quality venues as possible since your publication history will be very important to the hiring committee. You may also consider doing postdoctoral work with another lab after graduation to increase your number of publications and widen your scientific network.

Above all you must make sure that your advisor is supportive of your decision. I was fortunate as the first question my advisor, Ted Herman, asked me was “Where do you want to go after graduation?”. I was able to work towards my goal of a position at a teaching-intensive institution from the start because he was supporting me and giving me the right opportunities. If you haven’t told your advisor or they don’t support this choice it will be difficult to get the opportunities you need (e.g., teaching assistantships) to fill out your resume. The preparation for a research scientist at an industry lab is far different from the preparation necessary for academia.

Advisor: Ted Herman | CompEpi

Currently Applied Scientist at Amazon Last Mile Machine Learning

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Donald Curtis, PhD 2011

Q&A date: 2015

Can you describe your dissertation research briefly and for a lay audience?

My dissertation research was on the spread of diseases that can happen as a result of interactions between healthcare workers in a hospital. I used anonymized computer login data for actual healthcare workers to build graphs to represent interactions that could allow disease spread. Using simulations I studied how disease spread on the graphs and compared it with popular disease graphs proposed by other researchers. I also studied targeted vaccination policies, where you want minimize disease spread by "targeting" a small set of individuals to vaccinate. This problem is important for cases of limited vaccine supply or where the cost of vaccination is high.

What are you doing now in a professional capacity?

Currently I work at Google as a [now Senior] Software Engineer. My work entails a lot of programming on a topic that is quite a bit different from my dissertation research, but I use the the critical thinking and communication skills I learned while researching everyday. And there have been a few times when my research has been quite handy.

Can you tell us a little bit about a problem/project that you are currently working on?

I'm currently working on WebRTC (webrtc.org) which is an open-source project supported by Google that makes it remarkably easy to do real-time audio/video communication. Our team works on the open-source implementation of WebRTC which is part of Google Chrome and enables real-time communication on the web. Google Hangouts uses WebRTC and there are lots of other projects outside of Google that also build on top of the technology.

Advisor: Sriram Pemmaraju | CompEpi

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Jason Fries, PhD 2015

Q&A date: 2016

What are you working on now?

I'm working on 2 primary projects (1) developing tools and methods using a new formalism for distant supervision called "data programming" and (2) modeling outcomes associated with joint replacement surgeries.

Chris Re's group is developing a well-known system called DeepDive (deepdive.stanford.edu), a new type of data processing system that extracts entities and relations from unstructured "dark data" like text, tables, images, and figures. DeepDive is used in several high-impact applications including monitoring human trafficking on the "dark" web, automatically constructing databases of paleontological data, and extracting gene-phenotype and other biological relationships from scientific literature.

DeepDive scales nicely as a system, but development cycles can be long as users iterate on distant supervision rules for labeling input data. This has motivated some interesting theoretical work in Chris's lab on programmatically supervising and de-noising data, a machine learning paradigm called "data programming" (arxiv.org/abs/1605.07723). I've been collaborating on building their next generation data processing system Snorkel and developing lightweight NLP systems for extracting biomedical relations from clinical text.

My second project focuses on osteoarthritis (OA). A common clinical endpoint of OA is total joint replacement so we’re looking at how to use electronic medical record (EMR) data to better predict post-operative recovery. Unstructured patient notes are quite useful in this capacity, so it's a great use case for data programming. Ultimately these models help lay the foundation for a more ambitious goal of deploying a near real-time implant surveillance system, where medical devices can be monitored and scored quantitatively using patient EMR data.

My overall goals during my postdoctoral fellowship are to (a) closely integrate research discoveries and tools into clinical settings and (b) develop a strong, empirical argument why structured data systems are important, even in the age of deep learning and automatic feature engineering. Both of these goals are a continuation of what I started during my PhD in CS at Iowa. My ultimate goal is to transition into an academic position or a research scientist in the hospital/healthcare field within the next 2 years.

Can you tell us a bit about your dissertation?

My dissertation looked at information extraction methods for population health surveillance. While some aspects of human health are reasonably well captured by primary care systems (e.g., hospitals, clinics), examining the ways in which behavior and everyday life impact health requires analyzing alternate data streams like social media or wearables and smartphones. For example, in endemic sexually transmitted infections it's useful to know prevalence rates of behaviors like safe sex practices, illegal drug use, etc. in order to tailor public health interventions. This information is hard to collect and definitely not a standard component of the EMR. The first part of my dissertation looked at sexual behavior surveillance of individuals using Craigslist to find anonymous sexual partners. I presented ways of algorithmically collecting survey-like information on risk behaviors, population demographic data, and travel patterns in near real-time and at city-level geographic resolution. The last part of my dissertation looked at a collection of 15 million clinical notes from the UIHC's EMR system, where I worked on representation learning and recurrent neural network methods for named entity recognition.

Do you have any advice for our current graduate students?

Take as many statistics courses as you can, as early as you can. Also, definitely take Calculus III! I skipped the advanced math courses and really regretted it later in grad school where my time and choices were more constrained. From the CS side, probabilistic graphical models and more generally probabilistic approaches to AI (e.g., Bayesian networks) are extremely useful in many different fields. Finally don't shy away from building toy distributed systems on Amazon EC2 or other compute infrastructures. Being able to quickly analyze large datasets is immensely valuable and the norm in any "data scientist" type of job.

Advisor: Alberto Segre | CompEpi

Currently Research Scientist at Stanford University

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Andrew Reynolds, PhD 2013

Q&A date: 2015

Can you describe your dissertation research briefly and for a lay audience?

My dissertation focused primarily on automatically discovering bugs in software and hardware systems. This technology was used by the Intel Corporation for testing the correctness of prototypes of hardware designs.

What are you doing now in a professional capacity?

I am currently a post-doctoral researcher at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland working on the Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) solver CVC4.

Can you tell us about an interesting problem that you are currently working on?

I have recently worked on techniques for automating inductive reasoning. While computers are typically very good at deductive reasoning tasks such as solving Sudoku puzzles, they lack support for tasks where inductive reasoning (and hence, some form of creativity) is required. The techniques I have developed for automating induction in CVC4 are being used to prove non-trivial properties of functional programs, and to assist users of interactive theorem proving environments.

Advisor: Cesare Tinelli | Computational Logic Center

Currently Associate Research Scientist at The University of Iowa

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Harley Eades, PhD 2014

Q&A date: 2014

"My dissertation explored the design and mathematical analysis of dependently typed functional programming languages. These are programming languages of the future because they come equipped with the ability to verify the correctness of programs using mathematical logic. Verifying the correctness of software is important especially for software that controls safety critical devices like cars, planes, and nuclear power plants."

"I am now an assistant associate [as of July 2020]professor of computer science in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences  at Georgia Regents University Augusta (GRU). At GRU I teach all of the theoretical computer science courses, and work on research applying logic and category theory to various areas of computer science."

Advisor: Aaron Stump | Computational Logic Center

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Austin Laugesen, MCS 2012

Q&A date: 2014

"I work for the [Microsoft Windows Phone Services] Engineering team doing program management. It is my responsibility to determine what gets built and why. I manage projects and also connections between different teams. I don’t manage people.

I don’t do a whole lot of coding currently. But, the stronger I am technically the easier it gets to do my job.

My most useful experiences as an MCS student were the guided independent research projects I did with Prof. Stump on compiler construction and with Prof. Chipara on sensor networks."

Currently Principal Program Manager at Microsoft

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Duckki Oe, PhD 2012

Q&A date: 2014

“I developed optimized automated reasoning software (namely, SAT/SMT solvers), and verified its correctness using formal theorem provers based on type theory.”

“I'm a postdoctoral associate at MIT. I'm working as a member of a 3-institution (Princeton, Yale, MIT) team on a DARPA-commissioned project, developing verified operating system and applications for a remotely controlled unmanned vehicle.”

Advisor: Aaron Stump | Computational Logic Center

Currently Software Engineer at CertiK

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Imran Pirwani, PhD 2008

Q&A date: 2014

"My PhD research focused on approximation algorithms for various optimization problems inspired by applications on wireless sensor networks.

I work at Apple Inc., in Cupertino, CA, as a software engineer in the Maps Team. I am involved in research and development spanning aspects of mapping such as search, data processing and mining, geometry, traffic and more broadly, optimization.

The algorithmic tools and skills which I learned as a graduate student have been extremely useful to me as a professional at Apple Inc."

Advisor: Sriram Pemmaraju | Algorithms Research Group

Currently Software Engineer at Google

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Charan Varadan, MCS 2006

Q&A date: 2014

"I work as a Portfolio Risk and Margin Analyst working with hedge fund clients and asset managers investing in Asia.

A significant amount of my work involves working with large amounts of data. I use concepts I learned in Software Engineering, Database Systems, and Algorithms in my daily work.

The MCS program was flexible enough that I was able to concurrently take outside-the-department courses in Numerical Analysis, Economics, and Statistics. This helped me in pursuing a degree in quantitative finance, subsequently."

Currently Head of APAC Equities In-Business Risk at Citi

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