Christine Chung’s Research Students

		Tom Conlin ‘16 Tom is working on a project investigating Bitcoin and how its usability may be improved. He is implementing a prototype of a system that will allow point-of-sale Bitcoin transactions via credit card. He is also goalie for the Connecticut College Hockey Team.
		George Sarkar ‘17 George is working with me on an experimental evaluation of recent algorithms proposed for right-sizing data centers (switching machinese on and off to save energy) in the area of Green Computing. These algorithms have yielded provable worst-case guarantees for energy-savings, but the goal of our project is to experimentally compare the performance of these algorithms on real world data. George is also a triple major with math and physics.
		Tim Palmer ‘17 Tim is working with me on evaluating two algorithms for the problem of allocating m distinct items to n agents. He is comparing the standard Draft algorithm familiar from professional sports, where each agent has a ranking over the players and selects the remaining player/item who is highest on their list, with a Trading algorithm where the agents begin with an initial random endowment of the items and they proceed to make trades with each other as long as trading is mutually beneficial. He is comparing how these algorithms perform against an “optimal” assignment, as well as considering how they perform for the objective of “fairly” dividing the items among the agents. Tim is also a psychology major.
		Danya Al-Rawi ‘16 When she was a rising sophomore, Danya worked with me (along with fellow student Max Bender, see above) on a matching problem inspired by the goal of optimally matching classes to classrooms on campus. In 2014-2015 she did research in visualization with Prof James Lee. And she is again now working with myself and Dr. Barbara Anthony on a project analyzing Doodle’s effectiveness as a tool for scheduling meeting times.
		Max Bender, ‘16 Under a Keck research award, Max is working with me on an online matching problem in the area of algorithms analysis. Specifically he is looking at algorithms for minimum metric bipartite matching on a line. Max is a triple major in computer science, mathematics, and classics. One semester he took 8 classes (two full course loads), and, though he was very successful, I have asked that he promise not to do it again. He will be a TA for algorithms in the Spring 2015 semester.
		Virginia Gresham ’17, Rodrigo Rogel-Perez ’17, Tyler Wood ‘17 Summer and Fall 2015 Research Students Virginia is working on CamelTours.org. Last fall, she earned a scholarship to attend GHC 2014 and is on our CS department’s student advisory board. Rodrigo and Tyler are working on an experimental analysis of auction algorithms for the single-minded bidders setting. They are both double-majoring in CS and Economics. Rodrigo is also a CISLA scholar and Tyler sings a cappella.
		Julia Proft ‘16 Julia is working with me on CamelTours.org, an interdisciplinary project in collaboration with Prof Anthony Graesch of our Department of Anthropology. Julia is also a CAT student who is majoring in computer science and minoring in linguistics and mathematics. As a rising sophomore and rising junior she has done Google Summer of Code, and is currently also interning at the Anita Borg Institute. She is also one of our great CS TAs, and she is a TA for Computer Organization in Fall 2014.
	Ari Brenner ‘15 Ari worked on a Rubik's Cube simulator during the Fall 2014 semester. The program he created shows a user how to solve their scrambled cube using a 3-dimensional animation and explores questions related to the Rubik's Cube from a Group Theoretical perspective. In Spring 2015 he built a Rubik's Cube tutorial. Ari was a math and CS double major who was on the Conn College rowing team, and went to App Academy in NYC upon graduation.
	Lillie Schachter ‘15 Lillie is implementing algorithms for the minimum metric bipartite matching problem. She plans to experimentally evaluate various algorithms for the two objectives of minimizing the average matching distance as well as minimizing the bottleneck (maximum) matching distance. Lillie is also one of our department’s two amazing and wonderful head TAs and is co-founding the Women in Technology group at Conn Coll and started the Women in Technology common interest house on campus.
	Dillon Kerr ‘15 Dillon worked with me on CamelTours.org (along with Julia, above, and Amit, below). He is also a dedicated member of the Connecticut College soccer team, but never lets it interfere with his academics. In the Spring 2014 semester he studied abroad in New Zealand at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch.
	Erica Stockwell-Alpert ‘14 Based on frustrating experiences with her former employers having trouble effectively scheduling their employees, Erica proposed as her research project an employee timetabling problem. Her project resulted in a theory paper we co-authored called Fairness in employee scheduling, for which she won our 2014 CS department research award. She will be presenting the paper this summer in Prague at MISTA 2015. After graduation, she traveled for a week in Ireland before starting her new job as an Associate Consultant at NorthPoint Digital in Boston. At NorthPoint, she’s been working on a website for the New England Historic Genealogical Society. She finds her job fun and challenging, and she looks forward to many more interesting projects in the future.
	Amanda Crawford ‘14 Amanda created a design framework for building mobile apps for teaching computer science to underrepresented middle school girls from disadvantaged communities. She is now an Associate Applications Developer in AT&T’s Emerging Technologies department under the Technology Development Program.
	Amit Kinha ‘14 Amit worked on the back end for CamelTours, a collaborative, interdisciplinary mobile app project with Prof Anthony Graesch in the Anthropology Department. Amit presented a preliminary version of this work in a poster titled Exploring Cultural Heritage with Digital Strata: An Application of Open-Source Mediated Reality (MR) in Southwestern British Columbia, Canada at the Society for American Archaeology 78th Annual Meetings in Honolulu. He is now working in Manhattan as a Software Developer for Goldman Sachs, and has seen first-hand some of the connections between the exciting world of finance and the topics we studied in our Algorithms class!
	Junhee Lee ‘14 Junhee did one semester of research with me, working with Talha Mohsin ’14 to study the bottleneck objective (minimizing maximum cost to any player) in a network formation game. He was also the pioneer of our new department career-development workshop series, having interned at Amazon and Blackberry as an undergrad, and is a Software Development Engineer for Microsoft now.
	Shiva Lingala ‘14 Shiva designed and ran experiments to simulate the use of imitation dynamics by network endpoints to see how such behavior would affect congestion at bottleneck routers on the internet, when compared with the AIMD (additive increase multiplicative decrease) behavior of traditional TCP endpoints. Shiva is now starting a new job as a Network Analyst at NTT Communications.
	Talha Mohsin ‘14 Talha Mohsin graduated from Connecticut College in 2014 with a double major in Computer Science and Philosophy. His research interests include Algorithmic Design and Analysis, as well as Algorithmic Game Theory. Talha worked under the Keck undergraduate research program over the summer of 2013 on scheduling problems, and also did research on network design games as part of the year-long CS senior research seminar. Since graduation, Talha has been working as a Software Developer with Epic Systems, Inc. in Madison, WI.
	Mert Mihci ‘14 Mert studied the impact of algorithmic trading by creating a simulated asset market (continuing work that started with Bo Xiong ’13 and Tim Walsh ’12), co-advised by Economics professors Purba Mukerji and Yongjin Park. He is now a Senior Software Developer at Bloomberg LP.
	Jennifer Blagg ‘13 Jennifer worked to develop an early version of www.cameltours.org. She was a Winthrop Scholar and is now a Interface Engineer at Flatiron Health.
	Peter Glennon ‘13 In the context of minimizing walking distances in a parking assignment problem, Peter implemented and compared the performance of various online matching algorithms, demonstrating that simple algorithms that have poor worst-case performance are actually quite good in practice and much simpler and faster than the algorithms with optimal worst-case performance. He is now in NYC working as a Software Engineer at Homepolish.
	Evan Gray ‘13 Evan was the pioneering student to work on an early version of www.cameltours.org. He was our head TA and is now a Software Developer at Epic Systems.
	Bo Xiong ‘13 Earning a Keck research award as a rising sophomore, Bo worked with me on a long-standing open problem in the area of scheduling algorithms. We published his hard-won results in a theory paper called Completion time scheduling and the WSRPT algorithm. As an undergrad, he also worked with Professor Izmirli on research in computer vision. Bo had a summer internship at CMU when he was a rising senior, and won our CS department research award. He is now a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin (one of the top 10 CS grad programs in the country). His research interests are in computer vision and machine learning and in Summer 2014 he interned at Disney Research.
	Tim Walsh ‘12 Tim (along with Bo Xiong ’13), co-advised by myself and Prof Purba Mukerji of Economics, studied the impact of algorithmic trading by creating a simulated asset market. The results of our work were presented by Tim at the 2012 International Computing in Economics and Finance Conference in Prague. Tim was a competitive swimmer and a CS and Econ double major. He is now working as a financial analyst for AMG National Trust Bank in the wealth management group. His position involves working with excel based models as well as communicating directly with clients. He is also a candidate in the CFA (Chartered Financial Analyst) program.