9/9/2015 By Tom Moone, CS @ ILLINOIS
Written by By Tom Moone, CS @ ILLINOIS
Five students in CS @ ILLINOIS have been named 2015 Siebel Scholars: Amirhossein Aleyasen , Lamyaa Eloussi, Gourav Khanejai, Jereme Lamps, and Mayank Pundir.
“Every year the Siebel Scholars Program recognizes the top students in the top graduate programs in the world,” said Andreas Cangellaris, dean of the College of Engineering. “We join them in applauding these students’ dedication and achievements. They remind us that our institution’s place as a world leader of research and innovation is secure.”
Amirhossein Aleyasen is completing his master’s degree working with Professor Emerita Marianne Winslett and Jana Diesner of GSLIS (Diesner was herself a Siebel Scholar, class of 2011, from Carnegie Mellon University). His research brings an integrated perspective to the analysis of unstructured and semi-structured data from three disciplinary points of view: data management, text mining and social network analysis. While still an undergraduate, Amirhossein was co-founder a successful startup that provides real-time location-based analytics for public transportation in a large city of over three million habitants.
Aleyasen received his bachelor’s degree from Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, Iran. In 2013 he was a finalist in the SignalFire University Hacker Olympics held in San Francisco, and received honorable mention at the Facebook Midwest Regional Hackathon held at the University of Illinois.
Lamyaa Eloussi is pursuing a master’s degree under the direction of Associate Professor Darko Marinov group on software testing and published two papers on test selection and test non-determinism. Her work focuses on making the process of regression testing faster and more reliable. She also works with Vikram Adve’s group on making deterministic parallelism more usable.
Eloussi received her bachelor’s degree from Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane, Morocco, in 2013, graduating at the top of her class. In 2011, she spent a semester abroad at the Claremont Colleges in California. In 2013, she did a six-month internship at ST Microelectronics in Brussels, Belgium where she developed a security module for a smart meter gateway.
Gourav Khaneja is working on self-adaptable cluster management and scheduling strategies for multitenant cloud computing platforms, shared by a wide variety of applications and services. Working in Brighten Godfrey’s research group, Khaneja is actively contributing to open source cluster management framework. His goal is to build a pluggable scheduling and resource allocation system for popular cluster management frameworks. His research focuses on the scalability, reliability, availability and performance guarantees of cloud computing components.
Khaneja received his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur in 2010. He worked as a Senior Software Engineer in Yahoo for two years and spent a year working as a Quantitative Researcher in WorldQuant LLC.
In addition to being a grad student, Jereme Lamps is also a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in the Critical Infrastructure Systems group. A member of Matthew Caesar’s research group, Lamps has a strong interest in computer security. As part of his research work he has developed a tool that performs rootkit detection for systems in a cloud environment. This tool allows for added data integrity and privacy. Currently, he is working on bringing virtual time to the Linux kernel. When integrated with a network simulator (such as ns-3), this tool will allow for more advanced and complex network simulations with existing equipment.
Lamps received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Illinois in 2012. In 2012 he received first place at the Tracer Fire Training and Competition and second place in the Illinois Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition.
Mayank Pundir works on distributed compute and storage systems under the direction of Roy Campbell and Indranil Gupta. He has been involved in research covering a variety of topics including distributed systems, information retrieval and location privacy. He is currently a software engineer intern at Facebook working on the core data infrastructure group in Menlo Park, California.
Pundir received his bachelor’s degree from Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, where he received the Chancellors Gold Medal for best academic record.
About Siebel Scholars
The Siebel Scholars program was established by the Siebel Foundation in 2000 to recognize the most talented students at the world’s leading graduate schools of business, computer science, and bioengineering. Each year, 85 exceptional students receive a $35,000 award during their final year of studies based on outstanding academic performance and leadership. Today, an active community of over 950 Siebel Scholars serves as advisors to the Siebel Foundation and works collaboratively to find solutions to society’s most pressing problems.
This exceptional group has the unique opportunity to directly influence the technologies, policies, and economic and social decisions that shape the future. Siebel Scholars serve as key advisors to the Siebel Foundation, guiding the development of innovative programs the Foundation initiates. The Siebel Scholars community is also integral to a highly outcome-driven Siebel Scholars conference held regularly to explore critical social issues.