Graduating PhDs in 2011-2012

Mohammad Al-Fares

Advisor: Amin Vahdat
Dissertation Title: A Scalable, Adaptive, and Extensible Data Center Network Architecture
Current Employment:  Google; Mountain View, California; Software Engineer
Email: malfares at cs dot ucsd dot edu


Raid Ayoub

Advisor: Tajana Rosing 
Dissertation Title: Temperature and Cooling Management in Computing Systems
Current Employment: Intel; Hillboro, Oregon; Research Scientist
home page   Email: rzayoub at gmail dot com


Boris Babenko

Advisor: Serge Belongie 
Dissertation Title: Training Discriminative Computer Vision Models with Weak Supervision
Current Employment: Anchovi Labs, Inc.; San Diego, CA; President
home page   Email: bbabenko at cs dot ucsd dot edu


Natalie Castellana

Advisor: Vineet Bafna
Dissertation Title: Proteogenomics: Applications of Mass Spectrometry at the Interface of Genomics and Proteomics
Current Employment: Digital Proteomics; San Diego, CA; Chief Technology Officer
home page   Email: ncastell at ucsd dot edu


Stephen Checkoway

Advisor: Hovav Shacham
Dissertation Title: Low-Level Software Security: Exploiting Memory Safety Vulnerabilities and Assumptions
Current Employment: John Hopkins University; Baltimore, MD; Asst. Research Professor
home page   Email: checkoway at jhu dot edu 


Youngmin Cho

Advisor: Lawrence Saul
Dissertation Title: Kernel Methods for Deep Learning
Current Employment: Google; Mountain View, CA; Researcher
home page   Email: ymc dot cho at gmail dot com


Joel Coburn

Advisor: Rajesh Gupta & Steven Swanson
Dissertation Title: Providing Fast and Safe Access to Next-Generation, Non-Volatile Memories
Current Employment: Google; Mountain View, CA; Software Engineer
home page   Email: joel at ucsd dot edu


Elio Damaggio

Advisor: Alin Deutsch & Victor VianuAlin Deutsch
Dissertation Title: Verification of Business Process Specifications with Arithmetic and Data Dependencies
Current Employment:  Microsoft; Seattle, WA; Program Manager
home page   Email: elio at cs dot ucsd dot edu


Matt DeVuyst

Advisor: Dean Tullsen
Dissertation Title: Efficient Use of Execution Resources in Multicore Processor Architectures
Current Employment: Microsoft; Seattle, WA; Software Engineer
home page   Email: mdevuyst at gmail dot com


Peng Du

Advisor: Chung Kuan Cheng
Dissertation Title: Power Network Verification and Optimization at Planning Stages
Current Employment: Uber; Palo Alto CA; Software Engineer  
Email: pedu at ucsd dot edu


Toshiya Hachisuka

Advisor: Henrik Wann Jensen
Dissertation Title: Robust Light Transport Simulation Using Progressive Density Estimation
Current Employment: Aarhus University; Denmark; Assistant Professor
home page   Email: toshiya at cs dot au dot dk


Diane Hu

Advisor: Lawrence Saul
Dissertation Title: Probabilistic Topic Models for Automatic Harmonic Analysis of Music
Current Employment: Etsy; Brooklyn, NY; Senior Data Scientist 
home page   Email: diane dot hu at gmail dot com


Chris Kanich

Advisor: Geoff Voelker & Stefan Savage
Dissertation Title: Characterizing Internet Scams through Underground Infrastructure Infiltration
Current Employment: University of Illinois; Chicago; Assistant Professor
home page   Email: ckanich at uic dot edu


Han Suk Kim  

Advisor: Jurgen Schulze
Dissertation Title: Visual Exploration in Volume Rendering for Multi-Channel Data
Current Employment: Apple Inc.; Cupertino, CA; Software Engineer
home page   Email: hskim at cs dot ucsd dot edu


Sangtae Kim

Advisor: Pavel Pevzner
Dissertation Title: Generating Functions of Tandem Mass Spectra and Their Applications for Peptide Identifications
Current Employment: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Richland, WA; Staff Scientist
home page   Email: sak008 at ucsd dot edu


Kaisen Lin

Advisor: Rajesh Gupta
Dissertation Title: Toward a Sensor-Actuation Software Platform
Current Employment: Cisco Systems; Santa Clara, CA; Software Engineer
home page Email: kal004 at ucsd dot edu


Wan-Yen Lo

Advisor: Henrik Jensen & Matthias Zwicker
Dissertation Title:  Interactive Motion Planning with Motion Capture Data
Current Employment: Google Switzerland; Zurich, Switzerland; Software Engineer
Email: walo at ucsd dot edu


Dionysios Logothetis

Advisor: Kenneth Yocum
Dissertation Title: Architectures for Stateful Data- intensive Analytics
Current Employment: Telefonica Research; Barcelona, Spain; Associate Researcher
home page   Email: dlogothetis at cs dot ucsd dot edu


William Matthews

Advisor: Russell Impagliazzo & Mohan Paturi
Dissertation Title: A Satisfiability Algorithm for Constant Depth Boolean Circuits with Unbounded Fan-In Gates
Current Employment: Google; Mountain View, California; Software Engineer
home page   Email: wgmatthews at cs dot ucsd dot edu


Brian McFee

Advisor: Gert Lanckriet & Sanjoy Dasgupta
Dissertation Title: More like this: Machine Learning Approaches to Music Similarity
Current Employment: New York University; New York, NY; Research Fellow.
Email: brian do mcfee at nyu dot edu 


Marti Motoyama

Advisor: Stefan Savage, George Varghese, & Geoffery M. Voelker
Dissertation Title: Understanding the Role of Outsourced Labor in Web Service Abuse
Current Employment: Fitbit; San Francisco, CA; Software Engineer
home page   Email: mmotoyama at gmail dot com


Catherine Olschanowsky

Advisor: Allan Snavely & Scott Baden 
Dissertation Title: HPC Application Address Stream Compression, Replay and Scaling
Current Employment: Colorado State University; Fort Collins, CO; Assistant Professor
Email: cathie dot olschanowsky at colostate dot edu


Shengjun Pan

Advisor:  Alon Orlitsky (ECE)
Dissertation Title: On the Theory and Application of Pattern Maximum Likelihood 
Current Employment: Google; San Diego, CA; Software Engineer
home page   Email: s1pan at cs dot ucsd dot edu


Qian Peng

Advisor:  Pavel Pevzner
Dissertation Title: Computational Methods and Analyses in Comparative Genomics and Epigenomics 
Current Employment:  Research Associate, Scripps Research Institutue, San Diego CA
home page   Email: qpeng at cs dot ucsd dot edu


Leo Porter

Advisor: Dean M. Tullsen
Dissertation Title: Single Thread Performance in the Multi-core Era
Current Employment: UCSD CSE Dept.; La Jolla, CA; Lecturer 
home page   Email: leporter at ucsd dot edu 


Shervin Sharifi

Advisor:  Tajana Rosing
Dissertation Title:  Accurate Temperature Sensing and Efficient Dynamic Thermal Management in MPSoCs
Current Employment: SoC Architect Qualcomm; San Diego, CA; Staff Engineer
home page   Email: shsharif at cs dot ucsd dot edu


Amirali Shayan Arani

Advisor:  Chung Cheng
Dissertation Title: System Level Design of Power Distribution Network for Mobile Computing Platforms
Current Employment:  Qualcomm; San Diego, CA; Staff Engineer
Email: ashayana at ucsd dot edu


Michael Benjamin Stepp

Advisor: Sorin Lerner
Dissertation Title: Equality Saturation: Engineering Challenges and Applications
Current Employment: Google; Mountain View, CA; Software Engineer,
Email: mstepp at ucsd dot edu


Cynthia Taylor

Advisor: Joe Pasquale
Dissertation Title: The Networked Device Driver Architecture: A Solution for Remote I/O
Current Employment: Oberlin College; Oberlin, OH; Assistant Professor
home page   Email: ctaylor at oberlin dot edu


Alexander Tsiatas

Advisor: Fan Chung Graham
Dissertation Title: Diffusion and Clustering on Large Graphs
Current Employment: Google; Mountain View, CA; Software Engineer
home page   Email: atsiatas at gmail dot com


Didem Unat

Advisor: Scott B. Baden
Dissertation Title: Domain-Specific Translator and Optimizer for Massive On-Chip Parallelism
Current Employment: Koc Univ.; Istanbul, Turkey; Assitant Professor
home page   Email: dunat at ku dot edu dot tr


Avinash Vyas

Advisor: Alin Deutsch
Dissertation Title: Policy- Aware Sender Anonymity in Location-Based Services
Current Employment: Alcatel-Lucent; Member of Technical Staff at Bell Labs
home page   Email: avyas at cs dot ucsd dot edu


So Yamaoka

Advisor: Falso Kuester
Dissertation Title: Visual Analytics in Scalable Visualization Environments
Current Employment: Apple Inc.; Cupertino, CA; Software Engineer
Email: syamaoka at ucsd dot edu


Wenbo Zhao

Advisor: Fan Chung Graham
Dissertation Title: Ranking and Sparsifying Edges of a Graph
Current Employment: Two Sigma Investments, LLC; New York; Software Engineer
home page   Email: w3zhao at eng dot ucsd dot edu