umbrant

I want to change the world for the better, as clichéd and idealistic as it sounds. I want to do something that has real world relevance and tangibly affects people's lives. Fortunately, computer science offers this possibility, especially with the increasing presence of computers in today's world.

Perhaps even more pertinent is my bucket list, which essentially enumerates my life goals. I just started adding to the list, but I take it pretty seriously. It's a way of putting everything in perspective and doing things that are worthwhile.

Currently, I am a Berkeley graduate student within the department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in pursuit of a PhD. I'm still working out the details, but I'm primarily interested in multicore operating systems and distributed computing and am working in the Par Lab under Prof. John Kubiatowicz. I really enjoy the collaborative and friendly environment here at Berkeley, and look forward to developing myself as a researcher and a person over the next five years.

I attended UVa for my undergraduate degree in computer science, having been involved with UVa's ACM chapter and ICPC programming team. I also worked with Professor John Knight on Helix, a self-healing, dynamic approach to network and application security. It requires a mix of low and high level programming with a grounding in operating systems, networking, statistics, and cryptography.

We successfully submitted two papers that resulted in publication: "Component-Oriented Monitoring of Binaries for Security", to appear at HICSS-44, and "On the Effectiveness of the Metamorphic Shield", to appear at ECSA '10. The first proposes and implements a novel form of flexible, extensible security policy enforcement at the system call level, and the second models the effectiveness of dynamically changing metamorphic shields in thwarting incremental cryptography attacks.

I have to give credit to my high school, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, for shaping me into who I am today. My four years at TJ were likely the most influential of my life. Being around so many smart, focused individuals was a great motivator, and I'm still close with many of the friends I made there. This is where I first discovered computers, made a website, and wrote my first big project: an all-in-one Bittorrent publishing package.

The summer of 2010, I interned with the Extreme Wireless lab (Code 55180), helping with construction, testing, and improvement of the Navy's next-generation SPAWN and RT wireless communication systems. The key idea of both systems is to combine existing radio hardware with novel, inexpensive directional antennas to achieve long-range, high bandwidth, high availability, point-to-point links to replace satellite communication in most carrier group situations. I got to ride aboard a New Zealand Navy ship for a good bit of our 2.5 weeks of testing, and also developed a Linux kernel module that theoretically increases the bandwidth of the RT system by 2-4x by synchronizing antenna beam switching with the radio and antenna controller.

During the summers of 2007 and 2008, I interned at NavigationArts, an enterprise web development firm based in McLean, Virginia. It was a great experience, and I have endless respect for the talented IAs, designers, and developers at NavArts. I developed a customized Sharepoint intranet for internal use, as well as doing client work for The Greater Washington Board of Trade, Wolf Trap, The Association of American Medical Colleges, and most significantly The Sacramento Bee, for which I did all the front end HTML/CSS/JS templates.

I have a few interests outside of computers as well. I love jazz and classical music, partially stemming from my own experiences playing piano and clarinet. I try to take advantage of the excellent music scene here in Charlottesville, and for any UVa student I highly recommend the History of Jazz class taught by Scott DeVeaux, by far the best non-CS course I've taken.

I also enjoy rowing, something I picked up from four years on the Occoquan with TJ's crew team. It's gotten a bit harder to jump in an eight with a big group of guys and go for a row, but I still manage to go occasionally by myself or with my dad at Thompson Boat Center on the Potomac. It's a very zen experience, and it's one of my favorite ways of spending a morning.