Archive: Class Updates
Winter 2010-2011
Aniket Mokashi (MS20) was praised in a blog entry about Yahoo's recent release of Apache Pig 0.8, which acknowledged his summer's work on new features. Read the Cloudera article by Dmitry Ryaboy.
Matt Karr (MS16) is the proud new father of Isabella Kinsley Kaar, born December 16.
Summer 2010
Servio Lima (MS11) was speaker in the first Metro Ethernet Event (MEF) for Latin America in Sao Paulo, Brasil. MEF is the world organization for the accelerated adoption of Carrier Ethernet for Mobile backhaul networks. In addition, he was invited to participate in the World Congress in Warsaw, Poland in September.
Spring 2010
Rituparna Banerjee (MS19) is happy to share the news of her marriage to Malay Duggar (CMU ECE) on June 20-21, 2010 in India. Ritu moved back to India in May.
Karthik Suresh (MS18): I am happy to inform you that I recently changed jobs and moved to Deutsche Bank as Assistant Vice President of Algorithmic Trading. Algo trading is one of the most talked about fields in Wall Street and this is a big career move for me in a short period of time. Carnegie Mellon brand name and the courses taken as a part of MSIN have always helped me throughout my career and am sure they will continue to help me in the future to succeed in my career. Hope to see you all during the 20th year anniversary!
Ralf Hoelzer (MS15): After graduation I joined Deloitte and am still with the firm at the Silicon Valley offices in San Jose, CA. I am a manager/technical specialist with a focus on vulnerability assessments & penetration tests. I hope everything is going well at the INI. It looks like the MSISTM program has really taken off. That forensics track makes me want to come back!
Winter 2009-2010
Mario Ferreira sends holiday wishes and says he's happy to see the INI growing: "I still hold good memories."
Summer 2009
Karthik Suresh (MS18) began a new job this summer at Knight Capital Group, just over a month after getting laid off from Morgan Stanley. "It was definitely a life experience to get laid off during one of the worst recessions in history, and also being a foreign worker, it almost seemed impossible to land a job especially in the financial sector," he reported. He now enjoys his job even more than the last: "I work on Knight Direct EMS which is the Electronic/Algorithmic Trading System of Knight. It provides direct market access, through its broker-neutral trading platform, to multiple asset classes and offers industry leading algorithms. I specifically work on the order routing team and this is definitely something better than what I was doing."
Ramu Panayappan (MS18): "It has been a year since I graduated and looking back, it has been an eventful one. Started to work for a startup as a researcher in Pittsburgh. The crumbling economy had its say on the startup and within months I had to look for other opportunities. Now, I am happy to be part of one of the intellectual teams within Riverbed in sunny California."
Cohon Proclaims "2nd Age of Carnegie Mellon in Silicon Valley," Khosla Envisions "Crown Jewel" for College of Engineering. CyLab reports from the Carnegie Mellon alumni event for the Bay Area in June 2009.
Winter 2008-2009
Sundar Sridharan (MS18) is a Member of Technical Staff at Oracle in Mountain View, California. He is working on cabling topologies for Infiniband private networks.
Happily married for one year, Dan Owens (MS14) is working towards a Ph.D. in the field of optics at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Vishakha Gupta (MS16) is a graduate research assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology, where she is in her third year towards her Ph.D. with Professor Karsten Schwan. "The interest that I developed at the INI for systems after my OS and embedded systems course has been responsible for my Ph.D., and I am enjoying it and learning much more," she said.
Siddharth Dhar (MS18): "I have had a fair amount of excitement in my life this year. After graduation, I decided to join Lehman Brothers in NY. Even though, I did get an offer from Barclays (which acquired parts of Lehman), I decided to move to an Australian IB called Macquarie. I am currently based in LA. I guess I really didn't want to experience the harsh winter of the East coast again ;-)"
Fall 2008
Ameya Sharad Gujar (MS16): "I joined Google in June 2006, as a part of the Platforms team, which works on both hardware and systems software that is used in the data centers that serve search queries. After having worked for close to two years in Platforms and being one of the main contributors to a wide variety of projects including customizations to the linux kernel for use in our datacenters, kernel test infrastructures and a system for collecting and analyzing kernel crash information, I moved to Google Ads. I'm currently working on Google Ad Manager, which is a hosted ad management solution that can help you sell, schedule, deliver, and measure all of your directly-sold and network-based inventory."
Shobit Dayal (MS18) is developing next generation storage solutions, specifically in the backup space, at Data Domain, Inc.
As president of JAMM Consulting, Inc., Neil Aggarwal (MS4) builds e-commerce storefronts for merchants.
Grace Im (formerly Yeh) (MS3) married and is working for Telcordia Technologies.
Weiyi Yang (MS11) celebrated the first birthday of her baby girl in November.
Michelle Duncan (MS10) and her husband Brian welcomed their first child, Margaret Sophia, into the world on July 26, 2008.
Keith Hawkins (MS1) sends word that he and wife Sin-Kuen (Ko) Hawkins (also MS1) have two kids, Eric (6) and Matthew(10). They enjoy watching/coaching the kids’ various sporting events, as well as power boating on the Navesink River. They remain close friends with other INI classmates: Chi To Lin, Doug Nortz, Bob Kenny, Brian Waller, Sharon Ringel, and Alicia Roselli, and they would love to hear from other MS1 classmates. "One of my fondest memories of INI 1 (besides meeting my future wife) was playing on the intramural softball team. Go gINI Pigs! Have yet to put to use the knowledge acquired at INI regarding how to perform Fourier transforms, but I remain optimistic."
Since graduating, Benicio Miguel Sanchez Fuentes (MS11) has been involved in all aspects of software quality at Grupo Empresarial EISEI. He led the CMMI initiative that led to the accreditation of EISEI, and he later became a PSP Certified Developer and Candidate TSP Coach as part of EISEI's TSP initiative. He currently heads the Software Testing business unit of the company, overseeing every aspect of the operation. On the personal side, he has had three kids since graduating: Benny (7), Camila (2) and Emmanuel (6 mo), and he spends most of his freetime with them, watching them grow.
Jorge Noyola-Picazzo (MS9) started a new job with the Power Generation business unit of Cummins, Inc. in September of this year and has started his move to Minneapolis, where the role is based, along with his wife and two daughters. In this new job he is responsible for all IT operations in the U.S. and Mexico for the alternators business, as well as IT Functional Excellence, IT Planning and IT Internal Controls worldwide for this same business.
Servio Lima (MS11) just started to work as CTO at Millicom-Navega (NASDAQ: MICC), leading a multinational operation for six countries: Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala.
María Lucía Ferro Herrán (MS7) and her husband went together to the INI to earn their master's degrees. Since, they have returned to their country (Colombia) and have been working for the Central Bank of Colombia.
Andrew Werth (MS3) reports that he is no longer working in the fields of software engineering or information networking. These days, Andrew is an artist focusing primarily on abstract paintings, whose subjects are drawn from his interests in cognitive science and philosophy of mind. He is a member of Artists’ Gallery, an artist-run co-op gallery space in Lambertville, New Jersey. Details about his work, including an art-related blog, can be found on his website, http://www.andrewwerth.com/.
Jamar Parris (MS17) has been working for Bank of New York Mellon for about one and a half years. He says: "It's really been an amazing experience. I'm in the final few months of my rotational training program within the company, and during the program I've had the chance to work on assignments in Pittsburgh, New York and now London. I'm actually the first employee in the program to do an assignment overseas in the UK so that's pretty cool. I've been here about a month now and have three more months to go. It's flying by so quickly. At the end of the program, I figure out which role and location from all of my rotations I'd like to join on a long-term basis. I get all of the perks of being a full-time employee but with the chance to experience various facets of the technology department and figure out which one I like best. It's awesome! It's so hard to believe that I graduated almost two years ago! Congrats on the INI reaching 20!"
James Ying (MS9) is married and has a four year-old son and a two year-old daughter. He is working in the Yahoo! Taipei office as a product manager for some search products of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Korea.
Frank Villavicencio (MS7) has over 10 years of experience in Identity Management, spanning consulting, business development, sales, product management; including awarded patents, published papers and presented at various conferences. In June 2007, he joined Citigroup's Managed Identity Services product team focusing on strategic partnerships, industry standards and business development at a global level. Mr. Villavicencio is a co-chair of Liberty Alliance's Identity Assurance Expert Group, collaborating on the definition of a common framework for identity assurance. Prior to Citi, Mr. Villavicencio was at Oracle, leading a product team responsible for Access Management and Identity Federation products.
Robert Winter (MS5) married in 2002 and has two children, Ellie (4) and Cole (2).
Gautam Kedia (MS16) is currently a developer in the Windows Home Server team at Microsoft. He has been working on storage and backup technologies for that product. Besides putting in long hours at work, he has recently learned to scuba dive and has been playing a lot of squash.
Currently, Karthik Suresh (MS18) is working for the Equity Derivatives team as an IT Associate at Morgan Stanley. He completed a three-month technology training program and is working on developing trading applications used by Morgan Stanley traders to trade financial instruments, such as equity options, swaps and futures.
For the three last years, Guillermo Ortiz (MS14) has been working in Wireless Application Development. Recently his team launched two new products for Verizon Wireless customers. The first is Visual Voice Mail, which is an application that allows customers to view and listen to their voice messages using a simple graphical user interface and is already available in five handsets with more coming next year. The second is FiOS TV Remote DVR, which allows FiOS TV customers to access all the TV listings, Pay Per View, and Video On Demand content from their phone and even remotely record shows on the DVR. This application is currently available in three handsets.
Steve Hoberman (MS1), self-employed, is currently teaching and consulting on data modeling - check out www.stevehoberman.com!
Hideaki Tanabe (MS11) is Director of Global Network, Global Solution Department, for NTT Communications Corporation. He and his wife Megumi live in Japan with their four year-old daughter Reiko.
Pratik Dhebri (MS13) has switched jobs to a Device Architect role in MediaFLO USA (A Qualcomm Subsidiary) in San Diego, California, where he is responsible for conceptualizing and realizing various mobile entertainment products and service offerings based on FLO Standard for Mobile Television.
Yoshisato Takeda (MS13) reports that his job with Mitsubishi Electric Corporation is "pretty stable in spite of the recent worldwide economic turmoil." His first daughter, Una, is four years old now and will be a kindergartener in the upcoming spring. His second daughter, Rina, became two years old in October and started to speak some simple words.
Summer 2008
On a recent vacation to California, Pittsburgh resident Bob Mowry (MS5) got together with three MS5 alumni in Silicon Valley.
Front (left to right): Amit Zavery and Wendy Liau. Back: Dave Lowe and Bob Mowry.
Fall 2007
Alex Nizhner (MS15) announces the birth of his son Kai, who was born at 6:23 pm on Sunday, September 23, 2007 at NYU Medical Center in New York City, weighing in at 7 pounds 6 ounces, and measuring 20.5 inches head to toe. Alex reports that he and his wife Nozomi are in a state of "exhausted sleep-deprived happiness."
Summer 2007
Abhijit Deshmukh (MS16) writes happily to announce his engagement to Ankini Shah (MS17). Abhijit went to great heights, literally, to pop the question via an air banner and coordinated the making of a scrapbook from family and friends in honor of important events in her life. The couple first met at the INI in 2005 when Abhijit was a senior and Ankini a junior, and they later dated. Both were recruited by Microsoft upon their respective graduations. The two INI alumni became engaged on October 20, 2007 in Redmond, Washington.
The INI wishes the couple much happiness for this new chapter of their lives!
2006
Sriram Subramanian (MS14), with wife Smriti.
Rudolph Araujo (MS14) was recently awarded a Microsoft Visual Developer - Security MVP designation. The award recognizes Rudolph's thought leadership and contribution to the application development and software security communities.
Rudolph is a Senior Software Security Consultant and trainer at Foundstone. At Foundstone, Rudolph is responsible for creating and delivering the threat modeling and security code review service lines. Rudolph is also responsible for content creation and training delivery for Foundstone's Building Secure Software and Writing Secure Code – ASP.NET class. Rudolph has many years of software development experience on both UNIX and Windows environments. Prior to Foundstone, Rudolph led the checks development team at BindView. He has also worked as a software developer at Morgan Stanley. Most recently, Rudolph has worked as a researcher at Carnegie Mellon CyLab investigating virus and worm threats over peer-to-peer networks. Rudolph holds a Masters Degree from Carnegie Mellon University with a focus on information security. He is the author of Foundstone's .NET Security Toolkit, SSLDigger and Hacme Bank tools.
2005
Yoshisato Takeda (MS13) with daughter Una, now 1 year and 6 months old
Chris Lord (MS13) and Trudi Lord of Natick, Massachusetts welcome Nathaniel Leone Lord, born June 1st, 2005 at 4:34pm at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. Nathaniel was 8 lbs, 9 oz and 23 inches long. Everyone is happy, healthy and doing well. Pictures are available at www.chrisandtrudi.com .
Chris is an engineering manager with Softricity in Boston where he leads a team developing application streaming and virtualization software for Windows. He received his Masters in Information Networking from Carnegie Mellon in 2003. His thesis, An Emergent Model of Immune Cognition, explored reinforcement learning and associative memory in an agent-based model employing property-based types. Trudi is a researcher at the Concord Consortium where she studies the use of modeling software to teach science to high school students. She received her Masters in Education from Harvard in 2000.
Benicio Sanchez (MS11) and his wife are expecting a baby girl, Camila, around the end of October. This picture shows his son Benny.
A paper that Benicio wrote at the INI with Michelle Berger, Servio Lima, Alexandros Manoussakis and Juan Pulgarin titled "A Performance Comparison of TCP Protocols over Mobile Ad Hoc Wireless Networks" was just approved for publishing at the 2006 Electronics, Robotics and Automotive Mechanics Conference (CERMA 2006). They are currently looking for sponsorship to allow Servio to travel from Ecuador to present at the conference. The paper will be published in IEEExplorer.
Bohan Chen (MS10) graduated from the INI with an MSIN in 1999. He is currently a Senior Member of Technical Staff at Oracle. Bohan recently passed the Oracle certified master practicum and has become an Oracle Certified Master (OCM) . The OCM is the highest certification/honor an Oracle database expert can obtain, and there are currently only a handful of people worldwide who have achieved this certification.
2004
Javier Macchi (MS09) is currently working at IBM Business Consulting Services after IBM acquired PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting. Javier has been doing consultant work for the past five years since graduating from the INI. Javier got married last August and currently resides in Santiago de Chile.
Michael G. Bruce (MS06) is the President and CEO of inScope Technologies, a technology services firm targeting the government and commercial sectors. inScope is selectively acquiring small and mid-sized IT companies that possess innovative solutions but need strong sales and marketing leadership.
Mike began his career at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore) in seventh grade and continued through high school as Bellcore's youngest full-time intern. As an undergraduate, Mike attended both MIT and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he graduated with honors in Computer Science. In 1995, he received a Master's degree from the Information Networking Institute of Carnegie Mellon University where he serves as Chair of the Dean's Leadership Council.
Mike is an energetic entrepreneur and an active member of the local and regional community, where he sits on various academic,economic, and social boards. Mike and his wife Sarah live in Leesburg, Virginia with their four children.
Michael Spartz (MS03) is a senior engineer at Qualcomm . He joined Qualcomm in late 1994 and was involved in the system design and development of the Globalstar satellite system. Globalstar is a low-earth orbit satellite system using 48 satellites to provide coverage to almost all parts of the globe. Michael started working on the switching system design and later was responsible for leading a large team to develop the switching subsystem. Michael was also involved in Qualcomm's efforts to use Globalstar to provide voice and high speed data to commercial and corporate aircraft, including to support improved safety capabilities following 9/11/01.
In 2001, Michael moved into the chip division, Qualcomm CDMA Technologies (QCT), where he began working on the system design for the WCDMA/GSM/GPRS modem chips for mobile phones. WCDMA offers efficient voice and high speed mobile data capabilities and is just beginning to reach commercial maturity in several parts of the world (Japan, Europe). Prior to Qualcomm, Michael spent three years at Bell Communications Research (Bellcore - now Telcordia ) in Red Bank, NJ. His responsibilities were to assist in developing network element requirements for the Advanced Intelligent Network (AIN), including developing a lab AIN network with features such as voice activated dialing, for demonstration to Bellcore clients and to validate the requirements development. Michael spent the last year at Bellcore applying AIN capabilities to the wireless subsidiaries of the regional Bell companies.
After graduating from the INI in 1991 and working for Bellcore (Telcordia ) for a number of years, Michael Souryal (MS02) spent a year in Cairo, Egypt on a language fellowship to study Arabic. Upon returning to the U.S., Michael enrolled in doctoral studies at The George Washington University and graduated with his Doctor of Science in electrical engineering in May 2003.
In March of this year Michael was awarded a National Research Council postdoctoral research associateship at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. During this two-year associateship, he will be conducting research on wireless ad hoc networks in NIST's Wireless Communication Technologies Group.