Author: Carlyn Chatfield

25+ years in higher education, focusing on business analysis, marketing & communications.

Myeongjae “MJ” Jeon

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Myeongjae "MJ" Jeon, CS alumnus and Asst Professor at UNIST.

Myeongjae “MJ” Jeon (Ph.D. ’14) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at UNIST, South Korea. Prior to joining UNIST, he spent several years in industry with the Systems Research Group in Microsoft Research Redmond and the R&D group at ARM Semiconductors.

MJ’s research interests span distributed systems, data analytics engines, computer architecture, and applied machine learning. His research goal is to advance the state of the art in emerging large-scale computing platforms by making them more efficient, responsive, intelligent and programmable. Currently at UNIST, he attempts to realize such goal in the context of distributed processing of deep learning workloads, real-time stream data analytics at cloud-IoT scale, and blockchain architectures.

MJ also values real-world impacts systems research can bring out. Thus far, his prior research work has been deployed in production systems in Microsoft, including Bing search engine, Open Platform for AI (OpenPAI), and Azure telemetry monitoring system.

Moshe Vardi

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Moshe Vardi.

Moshe Y. Vardi (Ph.D. ’81, Hebrew University of Jerusalem) is the Karen Ostrum George Distinguished Service Professor in Computational Engineering and was recently promoted to University Professor, Rice’s highest academic title.

His interests focus on automated reasoning, a branch of Artificial Intelligence with broad applications to computer science, including database theory, computational-complexity theory, knowledge in multi-agent systems, computer-aided verification, and teaching logic across the curriculum.

He is a member of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering, an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a recipient of the Fulbright Award.

At Rice, he is leading a new campuswide Initiative on Technology, Culture, and Society.

Follow him on Twitter at @vardi.

 

 

 

Monica Trilokekar Pal

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Rice University Computer Science alumna Monica Trilokekar Pal is the CEO of 4iQ.

Monica Trilokekar Pal (B.A. ’84) started her career as an engineer in Apple R&D working on pioneering secure mail and messaging products. Since then, she has led start-up organizations from the product development phase through go-to-market campaigns. She blends technical expertise with business acumen and her roles in the executive suite have included Co-Founder, CEO and CMO. Currently, she is CEO for 4iQ, a Cyber Intelligence company that operationalizes the Intelligence cycle from open source collection and data fusion to secure collaboration on complex ongoing investigations.

Follow her on Twitter at @Raydiate.

Michael “Fuzzy” Mauldin

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Photo of Michael "Fuzzy" Mauldin by Daniel Longmire of BattleBots, Inc

Photo of Michael “Fuzzy” Mauldin by Daniel Longmire of BattleBots, Inc.

The Rice University Computer Science alumnus and inventor of Lycos only went to college to get a good job.

Michael “Fuzzy” Mauldin (Sid Rich, 1981) said, “That was my goal and my parental directive. In high school, I was good at three things: math, physics, and debate, and that suggested becoming a mathematician, a physicist, or a lawyer.

“When I got to Rice, I took CS classes and Math classes. I almost failed Calculus because I was having more fun –and was too busy– in my compiler class. At that point, I had no future agenda, I just got caught up in the idea of computers talking with humans in English, like the movie Space Odyssey: 2001 and ELIZA, the natural-language computer processing program published in 1964.”

He went on to earn his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University and retired before reaching age 40, after inventing both Lycos and Julia–an early chatterbot.

These days, Mauldin spends his time ranching and exploring the wilds of Utah in his Jeep. He also designs fighting robots.

“Everything about the Internet is more complicated than when I learned it. Now I’m more concerned about speed control for my robot. Should I be considering the move from brushed to brushless motors?”

Read the rest of his Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/fuzzy

 

For the Innovation Today and Tomorrow session on Friday, October 11, Fuzzy will be showing off TreadBot. TreadBot photographs by Michael “Fuzzy” Mauldin.

Mitchell Koch

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Rice CS Alumnus Mitchell Koch is a Manager and Sr. Data Scientist at DoorDash.

Mitchell Koch (BS ’11) is a Manager and Senior Data Scientist for Machine Learning at DoorDash. He was part of the initial team focusing on the core logistics problem including time prediction and vehicle routing and now leads machine learning initiatives including for personalized recommendations and marketing optimization.

He worked on Devika Subramanian’s research team the entire time he was at Rice, focusing on the application of Bayesian network learning methods to the T-cell signaling network and to differential equations models for validation. He wrote Bayesian network learning software using dynamic programming methods, and applied texture analysis features and supervised learning to the problem of identifying four types of mucosal patterns in Barrett’s Esophagus.

His research interest shifted at the University of Washington, where he completed his  M.S. in 2014. There, he focused on problems in natural language processing and information extraction.

Merziyah Poonawala

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Product Manager Merziyah Poonawala is a Rice Computer Science alumna.

Merziyah Poonawala (BA ’04) Senior Product Manager at Def Method where she helps drive execution on initial MVP builds for startups, working closely with the product owner and engineers. Over the course of working with numerous clients on products varying from B2B to B2C to Enterprise she has gained experience in implementing agile methodologies among different teams. In particular she is passionate about honing in on the question: “why build this?” and on improving the collaboration and effectiveness between all stakeholders on her teams through small experimentations.

Read her CS Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/merziyah

 

Matt Cohen

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Entrepreneur, VC investor, and Rice CS alumnus Matt Cohen.

Matt Cohen is a Venture Partner at the Capital Factory Fund – the most active early stage technology venture capital fund in in Texas and the investment arm of Capital Factory, Texas’ largest startup community.  He’s also an independent consultant, focusing on technology and business strategy, product ideation and design, and practical application of machine learning.

Matt has been working with digital technology for over 30 years; Matt founded his own startup, OneSpot, and was previously Partner at G-51 Capital, an Austin-based early-stage venture capital firm.  He started his career at the Houston Chronicle after an internship he found in the Rice Engineering Alumni summer job book, where he co-founded HoustonChronicle.com in 1994, and registered the world’s first newspaper domain (chron.com) in 1988.

He’s is a proud Rice CS alumnus (BA, Honors Program in Computer Science, Baker ’89), and has been a judge at the Rice Business Plan Competition for nearly 15 years. He lives in Austin and visits Houston as often as he can.

Mary Hall

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University of Utah CS professor Mary Hall is a Rice CS alumna.

Mary Hall (B.A. ’85, Ph.D. ’91) is a Professor in the School of Computing at the University of Utah. Her research focuses on compiler-based approaches to obtaining high performance on state-of-the-art and experimental architectures, including multi-cores, GPUs and petascale platforms.

Her research team is developing auto-tuning compiler technology to systematically map application code to make efficient use of these diverse architectures. An auto-tuning compiler generates a set of alternative implementations of a computation, and uses empirical measurement to select the best-performing solution. The team’s compiler can work automatically or collaboratively with application programmers to accelerate their performance tuning and in some cases, produce results far better than is possible with manual tuning. Her group has access to DOE Leadership Class computing facilities, the University of Utah Center for High Performance Computing systems, and an Nvidia Tesla system with over 30,000 cores.

She is also an advocate for improving cultural and gender balance in CS academic programs and industry roles.

“There are times when you doubt yourself,” she said. “We all have. Just remind yourself that you can do it and go find someone who will encourage you. I still need that. Everywhere I’ve worked, I built a network [of people like me] and we help each other.”

Hall talked about reaching into other groups or departments to find and build her network. “Sometimes you have to look a little farther. You look around and you are just surrounded by all these guys – or if you are minority – all these Caucasians and Asians –and you think, ‘no one understands me or what I’m going through’ and it is nice to find those people who you can talk to about that. You help each other.”

Read her Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/maryhall

Mark Kilgard

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Rice CS alumnus Mark Kilgard is a software graphics engineer at Nvidia.

Mark J. Kilgard is a Principal System Software Engineer and an NVIDIA Distinguished Inventor based in Austin, Texas. Mark researches new user experiences based on vector graphics, virtual reality, and web browser rendering. Mark co-authored “The Cg Tutorial” and authored the book “Programming OpenGL for the X Window System” and implemented thr popular OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT) for developing portable OpenGL examples and demos. Prior to NVIDIA, Mark worked at Silicon Graphics.

Mark graduated Rice University (Wiess ’91) majoring in both Computer Science and Mathematical Sciences (now Computational And Applied Mathematics).

Marie Chatfield

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Rice Computer Science alumna Marie Chatfield is a software engineer at Pingboard in Austin, TX.

Marie Chatfield (B.A. ’15) writes code and poetry, sometimes at the same time. As a front-end engineering enthusiast, she’s currently helping Pingboard build the world’s best org chart software. She is passionate about creating inclusive experiences and understanding foundational web technologies at a deeper level.

Some of Marie’s areas of expertise include incrementally migrating legacy front-end applications from legacy to modern technologies; designing and implementing full-stack features with complex visual requirements; and building tools and infrastructure to improve developer experience and efficiency. She is also an experienced conference speaker and specializes in technical deep dives that are accessible for beginners and illuminating for experts.

Lynn Wang

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Dr. Lynn Wang, Rice CS alumna and Assistant Professor at UT Health Science Center.

Lynn Wang (B.A. ’02) received her medical degree from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons and completed her internship and residency in internal medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. Thereafter, she received fellowship training at Beth Israel Hospital in lower Manhattan. 

She currently practices gastroenterology and hepatology at MD Anderson in the Houston medical center. She speaks Mandarin Chinese fluently and is conversant in medical Spanish.

Wang said her CS training has been beneficial to her career as a doctor, but her first two years in medical school were rough because she had focused on solving complex problems rather than practicing large volume knowledge acquisition.

She drew a parallel between solving software and patient problems. Wang said both start with broad and abstract problems. Software is usually designed in broad strokes and finalized with minutiae. Wang feels a good engineer can see all the levels of detail at the same time and is adept at going back and forth between the perspectives.

Read her Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/lynnwang.

Lydia Kavraki

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Lydia Kavraki, Rice University CS professor.

Lydia Kavraki (Ph.D. ’95, Stanford) is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science, professor of bioengineering, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering at Rice University.

She was elected as a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Athens, the premier scientific society in Greece and the world’s oldest academy. She is also a member of the National Academy of Medicine, as well as an ACM Fellow, IEEE Fellow, and Sloan Fellow.

She is known for her work in bioinformatics and has been a leader in the development of motion planning algorithms. Her team is also working with the NASA Johnson Space in Houston to augment the capabilities of robots for space missions.

She has served as the faculty sponsor for CSters, the club supporting women interested in Computer Science at Rice, since is inception, and she has been recognized as a leader in her field with prizes like the ACM Grace Hopper Murray Award and the Anita Borg ABIE Technical Leadership Award.

 

Luay Nakhleh

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CS Department Chair Luay Nakhleh.

Computer Science professor and department chair Luay Nakhleh‘s passion for educating students was recognized in April 2019. The Brown Prize, Rice’s highest teaching award, is given annually based upon a survey of alumni who graduated within the past two to five years. He is the first professor from the Computer Science Department to win the prize.

Nakhleh became chair of the department in January 2017 and his priorities included growing the graduate student programs and improving their environment, launching an alumni initiative, and increasing the number of faculty members in what had become the largest academic department on campus.

He earned his M.S. in 1998 from Texas A&M University and his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 2004.

Konstantinos Mamouras

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Kostas Mamouras is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Rice University.

Konstantinos Mamouras is currently working on the design of programming abstractions for processing data streams. Several real-time decision making applications rely on the computation of quantitative summaries of very large streams of data. He has proposed StreamQRE, a declarative query language that combines regular expressions, quantitative aggregation, and relational features. A compilation algorithm translates the high-level query into a streaming algorithm with precise guarantees for resource usage. He is also interested in program semantics and logics for program verification. In particular, this includes equational theories of programs based on the framework of Kleene Algebra with Tests.

His areas of Interest include: Programming languages, formal methods, type theory and logic.

Keith Cooper

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Keith Cooper is a Rice University alumnus and the L. John and Ann H. Doerr Chair in Computational Engineering Professor of Computer Science and of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

Keith Cooper is the L. John and Ann H. Doerr Chair in Computational Engineering, professor of computer science and of electrical and computer engineering. His primary research area has been program analysis and optimization. He was one of the founding members of the compiler group at Rice, has published more than 75 articles and advised 18 doctoral students. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, and teaches several courses in compiler construction and was recently named chair of the computational and applied mathematics (CAAM) department at Rice University.

In April 2019, Cooper’s passion for training up the next generation of students was recognized with a George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching.

Keith Cooper served as chief marshall at Rice University Commencement for over a decade.Fun fact: For over a decade, students and their families also recognized Cooper as the man behind the mace.

 

Kathryn McKinley

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Rice University CS alumna and Google Senior Research Staff Scientist Kathryn McKinley.

Kathryn McKinley (B.A. ’85, M.S. ’90, Ph.D. ’92) is a Senior Staff Research Scientist at Google, but she launched her career as a Computer Science professor at the University of Massachusets at Amherst and the University of Texas at Austin.

She is interested in creating systems (programming languages, compilers, runtimes, and architectures) that make programming easy and the resulting programs correct and efficient. She and her collaborators have produced several widely used tools: the DaCapo Java Benchmarks (30,000+ downloads), the TRIPS Compiler, Hoard memory manager, MMTk memory management toolkit, and the Immix garbage collector.

Her awards include the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Software Award; ACM SIGPLAN Distinguished Service Award; and Best and Test-of-Time paper awards from ASPLOS, OOPSLA, ICS, SIGMETRICS, IEEE Micro Top Picks, SIGPLAN Research Highlights, and CACM Research Highlights. She served as program chair for ASPLOS, PACT, PLDI, ISMM, and CGO. She is currently a CRA and CRA-W Board member. She is an IEEE Fellow and an ACM Fellow and has graduated 22 Ph.D. students.

She is also an advocate for gender parity across technology-related programs and careers in academia and industry. Her February 2018 SIGARCH blog post, “What Happens to Us Does Not Happen to Most of You,” helped start deeper conversations and subsequent action in the CS academic community.

Read her Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/mckinley.

Karan Thakker

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ExtraHop software engineer Karan Thakker is a Rice CS alumnus.

Karan Thakker (BA ’16) is a software engineer with ExtraHop Networks. His interest in world-class software engineering and his math background make him something of a utility player. He initially began his work with the backend team working on the appliances ExtraHop ships to data centers. His areas of ownership were distributed licensing and building and maintaining a RESTful API. “As the business focus switched to security, I moved to the data science team to help them scale up the product to keep up with the demand,” he said. “I wrote many ML detectors, built the investigation steps workflow, and brought an emphasis to infrastructure and scaling.”

Julia Hossu

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Rice CS alumna Julia Hossu is a technical program manager at TargetX.

Julia Hossu (B.S. ’15) is a technical program manager for TargetX, a company providing technology solutions that help higher education professionals focus on their students rather than their systems. Her focus is bringing the worlds of user centered design and software engineering closer together, and she began her work as a liaison and translator for both users and engineers as a Google student ambassador at Rice.

Read her thoughts about working for a startup in her Rice CS Alumni profile.

Joe Warren

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Rice CS professor Joe Warren's research focuses on computer graphics.

Joe Warren is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Rice University. His main area of research interest is computer graphics and geometric modeling, where he has published extensively. He is the author of the book Subdivision Methods for Geometric Design. He also has a love for computer gaming, both playing games and teaching students how to build them. He has taught the Department’s introduction to game creation course as well as its senior-level game design course in collaboration with Houston game professionals for over a decade. Joe was an undergraduate at Rice from 1979-1983 and received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1986. He has been a professor at Rice ever since and served as the Chair of the Department from 2008 to 2013.

He is serving as the moderator for the Animation, Graphics and User Interface panel.

Jaspal Subhlok

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Rice CS alumnus and UH CS department chair Jaspal Subhlok.

Jaspal Subhlok (Ph.D. ’91) is a Professor and the Chair of the Computer Science Department at the University of Houston. Although he’s had several high points over his academic and research career, he finds the greatest pride in what his department has accomplished since he began serving as its chair. He said the role is an interesting and challenging combination of working with diverse groups like the university’s administration and friends in industry, all the while making sure that  the needs of students and faculty members are served.

Read his Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/jaspal

Jesse Peirce

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Square information security engineer Jesse Peirce is a Rice CS alumna.

Jesse Kimery Peirce (BA ’16) is an information security engineer at Square. She builds and and maintains internal tools for protecting customer data and distributing secrets to other applications in Square. This includes Keywhiz, Square’s open-source secrets management tool, and internal tools to automate secret management for other teams. She also reviews the security of third-party services with which Square shares data.

Janell Straach

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Janell Straach teaches machine learning and cyber security courses in Rice's online master of CS program.

Dr. Janell Straach has a diverse background including academic and industry experience. She holds a Bachelor of Science in CS degree from Angelo State University, a Master of Computer Science degree from Texas A&M University, an MBA from The University of Dallas and a Masters and PhD from UT Dallas.  Her PhD research was in intelligent systems and recent work has focused on CyberSecurity.  Prior to her current assignment with Rice University, she was a member of the faculty at UT Dallas in Richardson, TX.  Before her academic assignments, she worked in industry for IBM and a large electric/gas utility organization. She has taught at the college, university and corporate level.  Janell’s passion is recruiting and retaining females into technology careers.

Jake Rosenberg

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Entrepreneur Jake Rosenberg is a Rice CS alumnus.

Jake Rosenberg (B.A. ’02) worked for global and startup technology employers before before launching his own company. He has over twenty years experience developing high-performance, scalable, global-ready web applications used daily by millions of people, and he is committed to improving diversity across the tech industry. He readily shares his CTO and startup expertise with other founders and – as part of the Founders Pledge community – pledged to contribute a substantial portion of his future proceeds to charitable causes.

Read his Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://csweb.rice.edu/jake

 

Heidi Hunter

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Rice CS alumna Heidi Hunter.

Heidi Hunter (B.A. ’02) is interested in how humans and technology interact.  As the Internet became more prevalent in her early career, she watched it become integrated with an increasing number of day-to-day activities.

She said, “I was interested in how people use systems. If something isn’t working, don’t blame your users. Blame your system, and then fix it to better fit the users.”

With a career that has spanned Europe and the United States, she is an experienced developer, systems architect, and tech lead with experience in the public and private sectors. She prefers to work in mission-driven enterprises with a goal to change political and economic systems for the public good. This, combined with an interest in international development, led to several years working at the United Nations. She is currently working as a tech lead or advisor for a few East Coast startups including equity crowdfunding, medical communications, and human services resource management.

Read her Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/heidi.

Heaven Chen

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MCS alumna Heaven Chen is a software engineer with Spectrum..

Yujing “Heaven” Chen (BA ’12, MCS ’13) is a software engineer with Second Spectrum, Inc., a company that utilizes machine intelligence to improve sports experiences for players, coaches, and fans. Her experience and expertise in Javascript (JS) spans several platforms, including Elm and React. Prior to joining Second Spectrum, she worked for Salesforce for five years as a software engineer and a software engineering manager.

 

Gaurav Banga

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Rice CS alumnus and serial entrepreneur Gaurav Banga.

Gaura Banga (Ph.D. ’98) explored several roles in various technology employers and decided he preferred spending his energy on innovation, building and working with motivated teams to create new solutions, while aligned with investors with similar goals. He has launched three companies: PDAApps (acquired by Intellisync Corp), Bromium, and Balbix.

Read his Rice CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/banga.

Fushan Chen

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Rice CS alumnus Fushan Chen is a software engineer at Indeed.

Fushan Chen (MCS ’17) is a software engineer at Indeed, a job search company headquartered in Austin, TX. He works on projects like the internal DBaaS (Database as a Service) product that enables developers at Indeed to self-service the provisioning of databases.

Frank Salinas

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Rice CS alumnus Frank Salinas is a senior software developer for Tavour.

Frank Salinas, former CS Club President and creator of the CS Club Beer Debates has just signed on to be one of the CS 35 Alumni Beer Debaters!

The CS alumnus (B.S. ’13) spent over three years at Microsoft and then joined Tavour as a senior software developer. He’s handling full-stack web and mobile development using React-Native, Vuejs, Node.js, and Ruby on Rails.

Note: Tavour is an app that delivers the best craft beers from around the world to your door step. How could we NOT invite him back for Beer Debates?

Felix Lin

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Rice University alumnus Felix Lin is an Assistant Professor at Purdue.

Felix Xiaozhu Lin (Ph.D. ’14) is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University.

His research expertise is in computer systems software, as exemplified by operating systems and runtime. He investigates the question of how to build energy-efficient, heterogeneous, and low-latency systems. One of his ongoing efforts is re-examining the principle of operating systems design for Internet-of-Things (IoT). As IoT becomes a key part of the everyday infrastructure, the traditional methods of managing resources, handling inputs, and detecting failures are not long applicable. One of his group’s recent research projects overcomes obstacles in handling colossal IoT data.

His research has drawn wide attention of various domains. His research is being supported by NSF (including a CAREER award) and industrial colleagues such as Google.

Eric Salituro

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Rice CS Alumnus Eric Salituro has worked on several animated feature films.

Eric Salituro (B.A. ’86) is a versatile and creative Technical Director & Senior Software Developer with longstanding accomplishments in pipeline development, render farm management, and enterprise technical support.  He is an expert in computer graphics film production, production pipelines, system administration, and high-profile strategic initiatives. Collaborative leader and consummate team player able to bring cross-functional teams together to solve problems, bridge technical and non-technical groups.

His areas of expertise include:

Software Development Lifecycles | Accelerated Turnaround Times | Streamlined Processes | Coaching & Mentoring | 24/7 Reliability & Availability | Product Development | Workflow Creation | Documentation & Training | Scripting | Feature Film Production | Visual Effects Production

CS Alumni Profile: https://www.cs.rice.edu/salituro