XRDS About Us

XRDS: About Us

Editors-in-Chief	Diane Golay, Gierad Laupt
Departments Chief	Bryan Knowles
Feature Editors	Eliezer Bernart, Judeth Oden Choi, Henri Maxime Demoulin, Numair Khan, Talia Kohen, Gunnar Wolf, Jeremy Warner, Apoorva Bhalla
Department Editors	Abhishek Bhattacharya, Ankush Pathak, Oana Niculaescu, Daniela Zieba, Amari Lewis, Anshuman Majumdar, Parang Saraf, Sepideh Maleki
Digital Content Editor
Special Projects Editors	Darshit Patel, Johanna Schacht
Social Media Editor	Cori Faklaris
Web Editor	Travis Faas
News Editors	Ankush Pathak
Bloggers	David Guerra, Abdelrahman Hosny, Andrew J. Hunsucker, Vassilios Karakoidas, Wolfgang Richter, Abhineet Saxena, Gustavo Fortes Tondello, Gunnar Wolf
XRDS Alumni	Ophir Friedler, Andrew J. Hunsucker, Jennifer Jacobs, Okke Schrijvers, JHarsh Thakkar,Nidhi Rastogi, Yang Shen, Shefali Bhatnagar, Vasileios Kalantzis, Alok Pandey, Anirvana Mishra, Apoorvaa Singh, Asmaa Rabie, Billy Rathje, Chris Harrison, Daniel Gooch, Derek Bronish, Dmitry Batenkov, Doris Lee, Erin Carson, Fahad Khalid, Finn Kuusisto, Gideon Juve, Hanieh Moshki, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, Jason Thibodeau, Marinka Zitnik, Michael Bernstein, Poornima Kalyan Sundaram, Richard Gomer, Rob Simmons, Rohit Goyal, Roger Finnegan, Ryan K.L.Ko, Sean Follmer, Sergiy Bogomolov, Sumit Narayan, Shudong Hao, Suranga Nath Kasthurirathne, Tom Bartindale, Vaggelis Giannikas, Vicente Garcia Diaz, Peter Kinnaird, Derek Bronish, James Stanier, Malay Bhattacharyya, Marius-Tudor Benea, Anirban Basu, Jed Brubaker, Ben Deverett, Daniel Gooch, Debarka Sengupta, Jeffrey Tzu Kwan Valino Koh, Hannah Pileggi, Somdip Dey, Shawn Freeman, Luigi De Russis, John Kloosterman, Michael Zuba, Ryan Kelly, Virginie Lerays, Arka Bhattacharya, Shelby Solomon Darnell, Claudia Schulz, David Byrd, Jay Patel, Veronica Estrada-Galinanes, Soumya Jindal, Tejas Khot, Nur Al-Huda Hamdan, Adrian Scoica, Pedro Lopes, Dimitris Mitropoulos, Maria Kechagia, Norene Kelly, Prachi Kumar, Olivia Simpson, Udayan Umapathi,

	Diane Golay Uppsala University, Sweden Co-Editor-in-Chief Diane is a PhD student in Human-Computer Interaction at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her main research topic revolves around the impact of ICT use on employees’ work and psychosocial work environment. The focus of her current studies lies on nursing staff’s experience of computerized systems for patient care. She has a MSSc in Human-Computer Interaction and a BSc in Information Science. She is passionate about user-centered design and dreams of bringing together computer science and design students in order to foster the development and implementation of innovative technology fitted to the needs of its users.
	Gieard Laput Carnegie Mellon, USA Co-Editor-in-Chief Gierad is a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science, where he specializes in Human-Computer Interaction. His research explores the intersection of sensing and machine learning, enabling fluid, unobtrusive, and more human-centric applications. His research has been published at premiere venues in HCI, receiving multiple Best Paper awards. He is a Qualcomm, Adobe, Yahoo! and Disney Research Fellow, and is a recipient of the prestigious Fast Company Innovation by Design Award.
	Bryan Knowles University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA Departments Chief Bryan is a second year PhD student at UW-Madison, with a MS in Computer Science and an MA in English Rhetoric and Composition from Western Kentucky University. His current research is on ethics rhetoric in tech and tech education.
	Eliezer Bernart Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil Feature Editor Eliezer Bernart is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (Institute of Informatics). He holds an MSc in Computer Science from Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and a B.Eng (Hons) in Computer Engineering from the Universidade do Oeste de Santa Catarina. His main research interests are in image processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition. Currently, his research focus is in medical image processing and statistical textural modeling, however, he is passionate and curious about every aspect of Computer Science.
	Gunnar Wolf Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), Mexico Feature Editor, Blogger Gunnar Wolf recently obtained a MSc degree in Information Security at IPN (Escuela Superior de Ingeniería Mecánica y Eléctrica), and teaches at the undergraduate degree of UNAM (Facultad de Ingeniería). He is a free software advocate, and a developer in the Debian project. As a systems and network administrator for the Economics Research Institute (UNAM), he has had the opportunity to do research on topics that include the social aspects of free software projects.
	Henri Maxime Demoulin University of Pennsylvania, USA Feature Editor Henri Maxime Demoulin is a PhD student at University of Pennsylvania, member of the Distributed Systems Laboratory and working with Prof. Boon Thau Loo. His interests range from Distributed System to Machine Learning. In a previous life, he was an engineer in a French start-up. He likes Latin dances and free-diving when not busy with some obscure programming problem.
	Judeth Oden Choi Carnegie Mellon University, USA Feature Editor Judeth Oden Choi is a Ph.D. student at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. With a background in theatre, publishing, and community arts, she now studies games, the game design process and other interactive, participatory digital experiences. She is also co-editor and founder of Writ Large Press, experimenting with publishing in a networked world.
	Numair Khan Brown University, USA Feature Editor Numair Khan did his masters in computer science from New York University and is currently engaged in research on the use of graphics processing units for ray tracing. His interests also include augmented reality systems and procedural modeling. A Fulbright scholar, Numair holds a bachelors degree in computer science from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in Pakistan and spends his leisure time playing squash and reading history.
	Talia Kohen Bar Ilan University,Israel Feature Editor Talia Kohen is a masters student in Bar Ilan University studying Computer Science and focusing on Natural Language Processing. She is looking at automatically detecting trends in the historical evolution of words leveraging the Google Books Corpus. Talia was one out of a total of ten Israeli women selected as Google Anita Borg Finalists, and she is a recipient a Bar Ilan scholarship for her studies. She was a member of the Microsoft Women of Excellence program. Previously, she worked as a systems engineer at Raytheon on their tracking and discrimination system after graduating Cornell in Electrical and Computer Engineering with honors. She hopes one day to be the CEO of her own tech company.
	Apoorva Bhalla IIIT, Bangalore, India Feature Editor Apoorva is a masters student at International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Bangalore, India where she is studying Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICTD). She specializes in UX Research and Design for underserved communities in emerging markets such as India. With her knowledge and experience, she wants to build products that will improve the experience of technology for people in resource-constrained environments in developing regions. In the past, she has worked at IIT Delhi, NTU Singapore, and RWTH Aachen, Germany in the field of ICTD, Deep Learning, and Computer Vision respectively. At XRDS, she works as a Feature Editor.
	Jeremy Warner UC Berkely, USA Feature Editor Jeremy Warner is a third-year Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley in the EECS department, advised by Björn Hartmann. He studies human-computer interaction and computing education systems, exploring novel collaboration methods, prototyping tools, and teaching platforms. He works in the Berkeley Institute of Design (BiD) and the Algorithms and Computing for Education (ACE) Lab. He also worked as a PhD Research Intern at Autodesk in the User Interface Research group. In undergrad, he worked with Wendi Heinzelman and Philip Guo at the University of Rochester, graduating with an MS in Computer Science and a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering with honors.
	Abhishek Bhattacharya Amity University, Noida,India Department Editor Abhishek Bhattacharya is a second-year Computer Science and Engineering student at Amity University, Noida, India. His primary interests include Artificial Intelligence, Web Development, Big Data, Operating Systems et al.
	Oana Niculaescu University of Massachusetts Boston, USA Department Editor Oana is a PhD Candidate at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from the University Politehnica of Bucharest. Her main area of research is differential privacy and database security. However, she is interested in how technology can shape and influence policy making and curious about Machine Learning, Data Analytics and AI.
	Daniela Zieba University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA Department Editor Daniela Zieba is an undergraduate studying computer science in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign College of Engineering. Her research interests currently include machine learning and software engineering. In her free time, Daniela enjoys fencing and science fiction.
	Amari Lewis University of California Irvine, USA Department Editor Amari Lewis is a Ph.D. student at the University of California Irvine, studying Computer Science in the Donald Bren school of Information and Computer Science. She earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Computer science with minors in Mathematics and French from Winston-Salem State University located in Winston-Salem, NC. She is a 2018 recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship Program (NSF-GRFP). Her research is related to increasing the accessibility and suitability of paratransit through the incorporation of low-cost microprocessor and microcontroller technologies for the paratransit vehicles and its users.
	Anshuman Majumdar International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India Department Editor Anshuman Majumdar is a senior year undergrad pursuing Bachelor of Technology (BTech) in Computer Science and Engineering at IIIT Hyderabad, India. He is currently involved in Computer Vision and Machine Learning research in Centre for Visual Information Technology (CVIT), and Robotics Research Center (RRC), both of which are research centres at IIIT Hyderabad. His research focuses on object detection and classification, and segmentation of natural scenes using Deep Learning algorithms. In his leisure time, he likes to write technical articles on Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and related Mathematics, for his blog named Visual Perception (https://visperception.wordpress.com/)
	Parang Saraf Virginia Tech, USA Department Editor Parang Saraf is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. His area of specialization is Applied Machine Learning and Data Visualization with special focus on Information Extraction, Text Mining, NLP, and Deep Learning. His current research focuses on Event Detection and Prediction using Open Source Indicators under the umbrella of $20M IARPA funded EMBERS project. He is the winner of 2014 VAST visualization challenge and has been a recipient of 2016 Youden Award from the American Society for Quality and 2013 Pratt Fellowship for being an outstanding graduate student. He completed his undergraduate studies in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
	Sepideh Maleki The University of Texas at Austin,USA Department Editor Sepideh is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interest is programming languages, systems, and high performance computing. She is currently working on developing tools to improve quality of modern VLSI systems and overcome chip design challenges.
	Darshit Patel Pimpri Chinchwad College of Engineering, India Department Editor A final Year undergraduate student studying Computer Engineering at Pimpri Chinchwad College of Engineering, Pune, India. He has been the Secretary of the college's ACM Student Chapter. His topics of interest include web development, algorithms and competitive programming. When not studying, he's usually found in the company of books.
	Johanna Schacht Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Germany Department Editor Johanna Schacht is currently pursuing her MSc in industrial engineering and management and holds a BSc in computer science and management. Her studies focus on Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning and Knowledge Discovery and her current work concentrates on Knowledge Discovery and Artificial Intelligence in medical applications. In her spare time she enjoys drawing, photographing and hiking tours.
	Cori Faklaris Carnegie Mellon University, USA Social Media Editor Cori Faklaris is a PhD student at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is working on social and playful interventions to strengthen end-user cybersecurity practices. Her other research interests include legal and ethical issues in social computing, human-centered AI and machine learning, and broadening diversity in STEM education and employment. A longtime journalist and social media enthusiast, she returned to academia after a career in both technology-based and public-facing roles for Gannett/Indy Star Media. Follow her (as “@heycori”) on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
	Ankush Pathak Pimpri Chinchwad College of Engineering, Pune, India Department Editor, News Editor A third year computer undergraduate studying Computer Engineering at Pimpri Chinchwad College of Engineering, Pune, India. He is the incumbent co-secretary of the PCCOE ACM chapter. His fields of interest include Internet of Things, Algorithms and societal impacts of advances in computing. He enjoys amateur astronomy, reading books and competitive coding.
	David Guerra Universitat de Lleida, Spain Blogger David Guerra is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Computer Science and industrial Engineering Department. He holds a M.Sc. in Software Engineering and a a B.Sc. in Computing from Universitat Rovira i Virgili. He had participated in spanish founding R&D projects. David’s research focuses on mobile HCI but has also worked on mobile solutions for archaeology and archaeological data visualization.
	Abdelrahman Hosny University of Connecticut, USA Blogger Abdelrahman is a Master student in Computer Science and Engineering, University of Connecticut - USA. His topic of research interest is 'Science Reproducibility' with special focus on computational science and algorithms. He also works on research projects that engage data analysis, learning algorithms and mobile applications.
	Gustavo Fortes Tondello University of Waterloo, Canada Blogger Gustavo is a Ph.D. student under the supervision of Dr. Lennart Nacke and Dr. Daniel Vogel. His main interests include gamification and games for health and learning. His research focuses on the design of gameful applications. He earned his M.Sc. in Computer Science and his B.Sc. in Information Systems from the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil. His M.Sc. thesis in Software Engineering focused on the semantic specification of Quality of Service for Semantic Web Services. His B.Sc. thesis focused on configuration management of Embedded Operating Systems using Application Oriented System Design. Before coming to Canada, he worked for several years as a Software Engineer in Brazil. Gustavo is also a researcher of the Logosophical Science affiliated to the Logosophical Foundation of Brazil.
	Vassilios Karakoidas Athens University of Economics and Business Blogger Vassilios Karakoidas is a Ph.D. candidate at Athens University of Economics and Business, Department of Management Science and Technology. He holds a B.Sc. in Informatics (University of Piraeus) and a M.Sc. in Information Systems (Athens of Economics and Business). He is now a member of ISTLab/SENSE and a former member of the Health Informatics Laboratory at University of Piraeus. He has been involved in various research projects. In 2008, he co-founded Wizhut, a software company that was involved with various research and development projects. He was leading the design and the implementation effort of warp.ly marketing platform. He is now working part-time with the Total Eclipse development team and he is the lead software architect at Emaginal AG. He is the author of a number of open-source and public-domain software packages and tools. His research interests include Software Engineering, Programming Languages, Operating Systems and Networking. He has published more than 20 scientific articles in refereed scientific journals and conferences.
	Wolfgang Richter Carnegie Mellon University Blogger Wolfgang Richter is a 5th-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science. He has won research and teaching awards at both Carnegie Mellon and the University of Virginia where he received his BS in Computer Science with Highest Honors. During his tenure as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon he has been supported by an NSF Fellowship and an IBM Research Fellowship. His research interests lie in distributed systems and cloud computing. He has collaborated predominantly with researchers at Carnegie Mellon, IBM Research, Intel Research, and the Georgia Institute of Technology. His thesis work was proposed in February 2014, and a publication related to this work received the best paper award at IC2E'14. He plans on defending his thesis and graduating in December 2014.
	Abhineet Saxena Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS) Pilani, India Blogger, Former Web Editor Abhineet Saxena is a Master of Engineering (M.E.) in Computer Science (CS), postgraduate student at BITS Pilani, India. His topics of interest include Machine Learning with special emphasis on Cluster Analysis and Neural Networks. He enjoys programming in Python, blogging and composing poetry in leisure time.