XRDS About Us

XRDS: About Us

Editors-in-Chief	Inbal Talgam-Cohen, Peter Kinnaird
Departments Chief	Vaggelis Giannikas
Feature Editors	Erin Carson, Ryan Kelly, Michael Zuba, Jed Brubaker, Hannah Pileggi, Richard Gomer
Department Editors	Shawn Freeman, Ben Deverett, Daniel Gooch, Debarka Sengupta, Marinka Zitnik, Finn Kuusisto, Jeffrey Tzu Kwan Valino Koh, John Kloosterman, Arka Bhattacharya, Luigi De Russis, Adrian Scoica
Web Editor	Shelby Solomon Darnell
XRDS Alumni	Chris Harrison, Derek Bronish, James Stanier, Malay Bhattacharyya, Rob Simmons, Anirban Basu

	Inbal Talgam-Cohen Stanford University, USA co-Editor in Chief Inbal Talgam-Cohen is a PhD student at Stanford's theory group. She holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Weizmann Institute and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Law from Tel-Aviv University. Her research focuses on algorithmic game theory.
	Peter Kinnaird Carnegie Mellon University, USA co-Editor in Chief Peter Kinnaird is a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon's Human Computer Interaction Institute. He holds a Masters in HCI and a BS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech. His research focuses on social computing, crowdsourcing, and civic participation.
	Vaggelis Giannikas University of Cambridge, UK Departments Chief Vaggelis Giannikas is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge looking at Intelligent Products and RFID. He holds a BSc in Management Science and Technology from the Athens University of Economics and Business. He has worked as a research associate in Greek research groups and an IT solution provider. His research interests include knowledge-based information systems, supply chain information systems and open source software. Vaggelis also teaches music theory and plays classical guitar.
	Erin Carson University of California - Berkeley, USA Feature Editor Erin Carson is a Ph.D. student in the EECS Department at University of California- Berkeley. Her interests include parallel, scientific, and high performance computing. Erin joined the Crossroads team in Fall 2009 as Chief Copy Editor, and is currently working as a Features Editor.
	Ryan Kelly University of Bath, United Kingdom Feature Editor Ryan Kelly is a PhD student in the HCI group at the University of Bath. He holds a Masters in HCI and a BSc in Applied Psychology & Computing. His current research explores how people divide work and remain aware of joint progress during computer-mediated collaboration.
	Michael Zuba University of Connecticut, USA Feature Editor Michael Zuba is a third-year Ph.D. student in the Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSN) Lab at the University of Connecticut. His research is in autonomous vehicle networks, underwater acoustic communication and networking, computer security and biomedical informatics. He earned his B.S. from UConn.
	Jed Brubaker UC Irvine, USA Feature Editor Jed Brubaker is a PhD candidate in Informatics at the School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine. His research focuses on digital identity, social computing, social media. He previously earned his M.A. at Georgetown University in Communication, Culture and Technology, and his B.S. at the University of Utah in Psychology.
	Hannah Pileggi Georgia Institute of Technology, USA Feature Editor Hannah Pileggi is a second-year Ph.D. student working jointly in the Information Interfaces (ii) Lab and Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her research is in designing, implementing, and evaluating interactive visualization systems that aid in insight-gathering for collaborative groups of people, most recently in working to motivate the bystanders of cyberbullying. She earned her B.Sc. from Carnegie Mellon in statistics.
	Richard Gomer University of Southampton, UK Feature Editor Richard Gomer is a PhD student in the Web and Internet Science group at the University of Southampton, in the UK. He holds a BSc in Computer Science and MSc in Web Science, both from Southampton. His main research interests are around choice architecture and subconscious decision making in online environments, particularly related to productivity and privacy.
	Shawn Freeman University of Waterloo, Canada Department Editor Shawn Freeman is currently a Masters student at University of Waterloo. He is studying Management Science in the Department of Engineering alongside his employment in the Energy industry. Shawn has a passion for travel and has studied in Australia. When he is not traveling the globe you can find him enjoying intense games of squash, relaxing jogs with his dog and adventures in the nearby mountains. His technical interests are data structures, knowledge management and business process management.
	Ben Deverett McGill University, Canada Department Editor Ben Deverett is a third year undergraduate student at McGill University studying neuroscience and computer science. He has an interest in neural computation. He enjoys playing music, acting, snowboarding, and the outdoors.
	Daniel Gooch University of Bath, UK Department Editor Daniel is a Ph.D. student at the University of Bath where he also completed his B.Sc. and M.Sc. His interests lie within the HCI field, most specifically in Tangible Interaction and Social Presence although anything else which is interesting may gather some attention... Outside university, his interests include karate, scouting and most outdoor activities. When not studying he can be found at people.bath.ac.uk/~dg216 or in the dojo.
	Debarka Sengupta Indian Statistical Institute, India Department Editor Debarka Sengupta is currently a research fellow in the Machine Intelligence Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. He is an early third year PhD candidate with interest in computational biology. His current research focuses on modeling of the miRNA mediated regulations in human. His research interest also covers some specific domains of the classical electoral theories of Economics. This software engineer turned researcher likes to sing when he is not in front of a computer. He is a gold medalist in North Indian classical music.
	Luigi De Russis Politecnico di Torino, Italy Department Editor Luigi De Russis is a Ph.D. student at the Department of Computer Science and Automation of Politecnico di Torino. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Politecnico di Torino in 2010. His current research focuses on Human-Computer Interaction, with a particular interest on distributed user interfaces and interaction techniques applied to smart environments and intelligent domotic systems.
	Marinka Zitnik University of Ljubljana, Slovenia Department Editor Marinka Žitnik is a senior undergraduate student at University of Ljubljana studying mathematics and computer science. Her interests comprise machine learning, numerical analysis and bioinformatics.
	Finn Kuusisto University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Department Editor Finn Kuusisto is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at University of Wisconsin - Madison. His research is in machine learning, focusing on automatic translation of natural language into formal language and advice-taking learners.
	Jeffrey Tzu Kwan Valino Koh National University of Singapore, Singapore Department Editor Jef is a PhD Candidate at the National University of Singapore, where his research interests focus on various topics regarding interactivity and experiential design. Before pursuing his PhD he worked as a catwalk designer for PRADA as well as an exhibition designer for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. He has also exhibited as an artist at venues such as the Barbican and Southbank Centre in London, UK and for festivals such as the Singapore Design Festival in 2009.
	John Kloosterman Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, USA Department Editor John Kloosterman is a student at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, United States. His interests include programming languages and compilers, computing and society, and the application of computing to the humanities.
	Arka Bhattacharya National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India Department Editor Arka Bhattacharya is a third year undergraduate student at the Electrical and Electronics Engg. Department of NIT, Trichy, India. He has authored 8 papers, of which 4 are published, 2 are submitted and 2 are in preparation all in journals and conferences recognized by ACM, IEEE, AMS and Elsevier. His research focuses on all aspects of Algorithms and Theoretical Computer Science.
	Adrian Scoica University of Cambridge, United Kingdom Department Editor Adrian Scoica is currently an MPhil student in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Cambridge. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from the Politechnica University of Bucharest, and has worked as a Software Engineer on i18n and Natural Language Processing problems at Google. His current research interests include Language Acquisition and cross-lingual knowledge transfer, and in his spare time, he enjoys reading, studying foreign languages, and mountain hiking.
	Shelby Solomon Darnell Clemson University, USA Web Editor Shelby Solomon Darnell is a Ph.D. student in Clemson University's School of Computing in the Interpersonal Technologies Lab. From January 2006 to July 2009 he worked for L-3 Communications Mission Integration Division as a Software Engineer. He finished a Masters degree at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. His Master's focus was Artificial Intelligence. Shelby's Ph.D. focus is affectively intelligent systems.
XRDS Alumni
	Chris Harrison Carnegie Mellon University, USA Former Editor-in-Chief Chris Harrison is a Ph.D. student in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. His research focuses on novel interaction techniques and input technologies - especially those that enable (small) mobile devices to appropriate (large) everyday surfaces for interaction. Chris Joined XRDS in the Summer of 2009 as Editor-in-Chief. Chris left XRDS to focus on writing his dissertation.
	Derek Bronish Ohio State University, USA Department Editor Derek Bronish is a Ph.D. student at the Ohio State University. Derek received his undergraduate and Master's degrees at Ohio State, majoring in Computer Science & Engineering and minoring in Philosophy and Linguistics. His research concerns automated verification of functional programming languages. He enjoys teaching, playing guitar, and collecting fountain pens.
	James Stanier University of Sussex, UK Departments Chief 2009-2011 James served as Departments Chief of XRDS from 2009 to 2011. During this time he was completing his doctorate at the University of Sussex, where he was exploring ways to compile programs using data flow information to make them smaller and faster. Now, James currently works at Brandwatch as a researcher and developer. Some of the projects that he has worked on recently include influence metrics for web pages, discovering Twitter trends automatically, and prototyping quick ways of finding similar web pages.
	Malay Bhattacharyya Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India Feature Editor Malay Bhattacharyya is a Ph.D. student at the Machine Intelligence Unit of Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata, India since 2007. He encompasses the broad domains of graph theory, soft computing, computational biology, and bioinformatics in his research. He also enjoys sketching and writing songs. He has about thirty research publications in peer-reviewed journals, book chapters and proceedings of international conferences. Malay is with XRDS since the beginning of 2009.
	Rob Simmons Carnegie Mellon University, USA Department Editor Rob Simmons is a fifth-year graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Science Department. He research is aimed at using computers to prove that concurrent programs and distributed systems work the way their designers intended.
	Dr. Anirban Basu Tokai University, Japan Department Editor Anirban is a Post-doctoral Researcher at Kikuchi lab at Tokai University working on a Japanese Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications funded project in collaboration with Waseda University, Hitachi, NEC and KDDI. He is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Sussex working with the Foundations of Software Systems group.