9/10/2019 David Mercer, Illinois Computer Science 3 min read
Written by David Mercer, Illinois Computer Science
Five Illinois Computer Science students have been selected to attend the annual Heidelberg Laureate Forum, a gathering of the world’s top young researchers in math and computer science and a chance for them to learn from some of the recipients of the top awards in mathematics and computer science.
The Heidelberg Laureate Forum will take place in late September at Heidelberg University in Germany. This year’s laureates include, among many others, 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio, 2008 Turing Award winner Barbara Liskov, and 1999 Turing Award winner Frederick Brooks.
The Illinois CS students who will participate are:
Wajih Ul Hassan
Hassan is a fifth-year PhD student whose research focuses on cyber-attack detection and investigation in large organizations and hopes to pursue an academic career.
He calls being chosen for the forum an honor.
“This forum will be an opportunity to interact with the scholars that produced some of the most important computer security primitives that I use in my research daily,” Hassan said. “I am very excited to spend a week with these stars and hear their stories in their own words.”
Sangeetha Abdu Jyothi
Jyothi’s research is focused on networking and systems, with a goal of reducing the Internet’s latency. She graduated this summer with a PhD and has accepted a tenure-track faculty position at the University of California-Irvine, starting in Fall 2020. She plans to spend the next year at VMware Research.
She hopes the forum provides the opportunity to learn from what she calls pioneering CS researchers.
“I believe that these interactions will broaden my perspective on research and inspire me to pursue impactful work in the future,” she said.
Abdulrahman Mahmoud
Mahmoud focuses on computer architecture, and sees the forum as, in part, an opportunity to share his work combining software testing and hardware reliability and get feedback from some of the brightest mind in his field and others.
“I've come to realize through my graduate studies that a lot of great insights from one field of CS can be fine-tuned and finessed to help explain things in a very different field,” he said.
Mahmoud plans to pursue an academic career after completing his PhD.
Doris Xin
Xin focuses her research energy on software infrastructure solutions for machine learning and data analytics. She is inspired by her work developing large-scale machine learning models while working at LinkedIn, as well as the work of researchers such as the Heidelberg laureates.
“Their visions for the future of computer science and mathematics inspire my own research goals,” she said.
Xin just completed her fifth year as a PhD student and plans, after completing her degree, to pursue startup opportunities in data management and machine learning.
Mengjia Yan
Yan’s research is broad, including computer architecture, security and machine learning. She hopes to learn from the laureates in ways that will help expand her own research vision.
“I would also like to have discussions with my peers to explore collaboration opportunities,” she said.
Yan has just completed her PhD and will soon join the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an assistant professor.