Shahank Agrawal

I am a fourth year PhD student in the Theory and Algorithms group advised by Manoj Prabhakaran. I am primarily interested in Cryptography, Secure Multi-party Computation, and Privacy. I enjoy all kinds of outdoor activities like hiking, camping, biking, etc. I like to play table tennis, squash, tennis and frisbee. Find more about me at tinyurl.com/sagrawal.

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Tanvir Amin

Tanvir Amin is a 4th year Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He works in the fields of Social Sensing, Distributed Systems, Big Data Analytics, and Cloud Computing. He is advised by Prof. Tarek Abdelzaher. His thesis focuses on the systems, algorithms, and infrastructures for real-time crowd-sensing and summarization services in the cloud. Tanvir received the Chirag Foundation Graduate Fellowship in Computer Science from University of Illinois in 2011, and Travel Grant from IEEE in 2009. He has interned in Google, IBM Research, and Facebook. He received a Master’s degree in 2011, and a Bachelor’s degree in 2009, both in Computer Science and Engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Find more about him at tanviramin.com

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Mangesh Bendre

Mangesh Bendre is a 4th year PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Professor Kevin Chang advises him and his research interest is Databases. His PhD research, in particular, focuses on efficiently and interactive handling of Big Data by use of Databases.

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Amanda Bienz

I am a third year PhD student, studying Computer Science at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My research is focused on Scientific Computing, and I am advised under Luke Olson. I am investigating methods for improving the scalability of parallel linear solvers by reducing communication costs. Currently, I am using topology-aware methods to minimize the cost of communication in parallel algebraic multigrid.

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Jon Calhoun

Jon is in his fourth year of his PhD, and co-advised by Professors Luke Olson and
Marc Snir. His research interests lie in fault tolerance issues related to
high-performance computing systems. In particular, he is interested in silent data
corruption and its impact on HPC applications and runtimes. In his free time,
Jon enjoys hiking and camping.

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Chris Cervantes

Chris is a 3rd year PhD student working with Julia Hockenmaier in the Natural Language Processing group. His research interests involve the semantic representation of events, and in his free time he reads copious amounts of fiction.

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Shannon Chen

I joined CS@UIUC in 2012 as a PhD student. Before UIUC got my MS and BS in CS at National Taiwan University. My research interests include multimedia and networking. For more info you can visit my page at http://web.engr.illinois.edu/~cchen116/

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Robert Deloatch

Robert Deloatch is a 5th year PhD candidate in Human-Computer Interaction. He works with Alex Kirlik and Brian Bailey. His research interest include education, anxiety, and stress. In his free time he plays basketball with other computer science graduate students.

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Pranav Garg

Pranav Garg is a 6th year PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is advised by Professor Madhusudan Parthasarathy and his research interests span areas at the intersection of programming languages, formal methods, and software engineering. His PhD research, in particular, focuses on automating verification for building reliable and secure software systems. He received his B.Tech (2009) in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

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Casey Hanson

Casey Hanson is a 4th year Ph.D advised by Dr. Saurabh Sinha. He is currently researching methods for incorporating regulatory information with -omics data to predict disease and drug related phenotypes, with an emphasis on translational applicability.

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Muntasir Raihan Rahman

Muntasir Raihan Rahman is a 5th year PhD candidate working on distributed systems. He is a member of the Distributed Protocols Research Group (DPRG) led by his advisor Indranil Gupta. He is one of the four worldwide winners of the 2014-2015 VMware graduate fellowship, and the David Cheriton graduate scholarship from University of Waterloo. His dissertation is about adaptive control of cost-performance trade-offs for modern cloud systems like NoSQL key-value stores, graph processing engines, and cloud based disaster recovery systems. In the past he has worked on priority scheduling for map-reduce clusters, distributed run-time for actor programming models, and resource allocation algorithms for network virtualization. Right now, he is also working on formal verification for distributed key-value stores, and distributed infrastructure for social sensing. Muntasir has completed research internships at Microsoft Research, HP Labs, Xerox Labs, and Vmware Inc. He received a B.Sc. degree in computer science and engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in 2006, and the M. Math degree in computer science from the University of Waterloo in 2010.

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Pei-Chen Peng

I am currently a 3rd year PhD student in the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology group, advised by Prof. Saurabh Sinha. I am interested in computational approaches to problems in molecular biology. My research interest focuses on comparative and regulatory genomics. For more about me at peichenpeng.com.