Alumni News
M.S. and Ph.D. Alumni
Rodger Blair (M.S. 1969) and his wife, Charlene, retired from their respective jobs at McKesson Corporation and Shady Side Academy on June 10, 2011. They then packed up their goods and moved 1900 miles to Las Cruces, N.M., where they had previously purchased a home in 2010. Rodger reports that they love it there. He is currently writing the business plan for his new business, SofTechMetrics, LLC, a software process management consulting company. He says they have found a great church in their new city, Sierra Vista Community Church, and that Charlene will be teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) at the church to Spanish-speaking adults. Rodger is keeping busy with his own volunteer work as a mentor to two men: a 29-year-old man who served two tours of duty in Iraq on the front lines and a 56-year-old Lakota Sioux Native American man. He says that the mentoring is most enjoyable.
Steve Bellovin (Ph.D. 1982) recently published a paper on cryptologic history titled, “Frank Miller: Inventor of the One-Time Pad.” (Cryptologia, 2011, vol. 35, issue 3, pp. 203-222) An article about his research was published in the New York Times in July and can be read at http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/26/science/26code.html.
Chuck Mosher (M.S. 1987) was recently promoted to Manager, Public Sector Middleware and Cloud Solutions Architects at Red Hat. He joined Red Hat when his former company, MetaMatrix, was acquired in May 2007. The industry-leading data integration technology pioneered by MetaMatrix has now been released as an open source-based product, the JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform.
Ray Van Dyke, J.D., (M.S. 1989) has been appointed the Chair of the Professionalism and Ethics Committee of the American Intellectual Property Law Association, and recently published an article on patent reform entitled “Patents Shrugged Redux.” His wife Diana was the recipient of a 2011 Golden Heart Award for her novel Spy in the Mirror.
Randy Brown (M.S. 1990) was recently promoted to Director, Virtual Heroes Division, of Applied Research Associates. Randy has been with Virtual Heroes since its inception in 2004 and through its acquisition by ARA in 2009. Virtual Heroes creates real-time, immersive, interactive 3D training and education environments using the Epic Unreal game engine. He is still happily married to Alli who has supported him through all of this.
Yen-Ping Shan (Ph.D. 1990) has created a golf training aid (a hobby project of his). He says he would be happy to send any department faculty, staff, student or alumnus a free one. To take him up on his offer, contact Shan via the “Contact Us” link at the bottom of the www.surewrist.com page and indicate that you are affiliated with the department.
Thomas Lassanske (M.S. 2002) is now serving as Technical Producer for id Software’s next “Doom” title.
Mark R. Lindsey (M.S. 2003) presented the paper “What Went Wrong? Negative Results from VoIP Service Providers” at the ACM IPTComm 2011 conference. Mark is an engineer at ECG, a consulting firm focused on supporting telephone companies as they build VoIP networks. He and his family live in Raleigh, N.C.
Shelby Funk (Ph.D. 2004) was recently promoted to associate professor with tenure at the University of Georgia, Department of Computer Science.
Miguel Otaduy (Ph.D. 2004) and his students received the Best Student Paper Award at the World Haptics Conference 2011. The paper, titled “Haptic Navigation Along Filiform Neural Structures,” was also among the finalists for the Best Paper Award for the conference. Miguel also recently received a highly competitive ERC Starting Grant from the European Union for his project Animetrics. The award totals €1.3 M over five years.
Theodore (Ted) Kim (Ph.D. 2006) recently moved from Canada where he was a faculty member at the University of Saskatchewan to join the University of California at Santa Barbara as an assistant professor in the Media Arts and Technology Program.
Eric Bennett (Ph.D. 2007) and his team at Microsoft released Photosynth for iPhone in April 2011. Photosynth is a mobile panorama capture and sharing app. Eric was the lead program manager for the entire project. Since its release, there have been more than 4 million downloads of the app, which is the highest rated panorama app in the iTunes App Store.
Aaron Block (Ph.D. 2008) is an assistant professor at Austin College in Texas. Last school year, he taught a class on making iPhone Apps for Austin College, and as a final project, his students constructed and released an Austin College iPhone App to the iTunes App Store. You can read more about the project at http://www.austincollege.edu/39171/college-releases-student-made/
Marc Macenko (M.S. 2009) recently started his second year of law school at UNC. He is planning to be a patent attorney focusing on software patents and trying to help innovators in academia. He will graduate with his J.D. in 2013.
Paul Merrell (Ph.D. 2009) worked as a postdoc at Stanford University since graduating from UNC, but recently started a job at Google. He also recently presented a paper at SIGGRAPH Asia and SIGGRAPH.
Mark Neyer (M.S. 2009) is now the CTO of a company called Popover Games. The company makes multiplayer card games for the web with iPhone and Android versions soon to follow. He is currently living in Kiev, Ukraine, where the company’s outsourcing firm is based.
Undergraduate Alumni
Michael White (B.S.M.Sci. 1988) was recently promoted to associate professor with tenure in the Department of Linguistics at the Ohio State University, where he works on language technology.
Steve Cotton (B.S.M.Sci. 1997) has worked in the video gaming industry since graduating from UNC, first for Red Storm Entertainment, then for Microsoft, and most recently (since 2004) for Bungie in Seattle. (www.bungie.net) He reports that he is happy to talk to any future grads or alumni who might be interested in learning more about working in the booming video gaming industry.
Paul Suh (B.S.M.Sci. 2000) will be presenting at the National Institute of Science and Technology’s 7th Annual Security Automation Conference in Arlington, Va., October 31 – November 2, 2011. Paul will be covering “Emerging Trends in Automated Continuous Monitoring Operations Research” as part of the Continuous Monitoring Track. Please refer to http://scap.nist.gov/events/index.html for more information on registration and the latest conference details.
Charles Campbell (B.S.M.Sci. 2001) recently joined the startup company Socialvest (www.socialvest.us) as full-time CTO. The founder of Socialvest is UNC Computer Science alum Adam Ross (B.S.M.Sci. 2001). Socialvest allows shoppers to donate a portion of the money they spend to charities of their choosing. The company recently raised $1 million in Series A funding.
Michael Jay Manalo (B.S.M.Sci. 2001) graduated with his Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Georgia on August 6, 2011. He is now working as a postdoctoral fellow at a psychology private practice in Athens, Ga.
Nick Carr (B.S. 2002) is finishing his clerkship with Chief Justice Parker of the N.C. Supreme Court, and will be moving to Greensboro to become a patent attorney with Patterson & Sheridan, LLP, where he will be focusing on software and technology patents.
Mark Huntington Snyder (B.S. 2004) completed his Ph.D. in Computer Science in July 2011 at the University of Kansas. He recently started work as a Term Assistant Professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. He says it sure is nice getting back to the east coast!
Friends of the Department
Liyun Yu, a postdoctoral fellow in 1994-1996 working with Steve Pizer, was promoted as a senior member of ACM in 2010 and a senior member of IEEE in 2011. He was also elected as a board member and second vice president of the InfraGard East Carolina Chapter from 2010-2011. He is currently a systems specialist working in the Department of Radiation Oncology at UNC.