I am an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who graduated with a Master’s Degree in Computer Engineering.

From 2013 to 2018, I worked in the PERFORM research group at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. One project I worked on was a framework for concurrent and parallel execution of discrete event simulations known as Remote Job Server. I was responsible for extending its C++-based implementation to fully support model simulations; this became the basis of my Master’s work.

Another project I worked on in the PERFORM research group was ADVISE (ADversary View Security Evaluation), a formalism for quantitatively evaluating effects of attacks on computer systems. I was responsible for developing quantitative metrics for the automatic generation of attack execution graphs (AEGs) from an arbitrary, user-defined network diagram using ontologies. Also, I collaborated with GE Global Research and Cyber Defense Agency to guide the implementation of the ontology-based attack modeling framework. Furthermore, I designed a framework for system reliability and security modeling that improves the performance of computing analytical solutions of multiple configurations of models and guides a user towards building better models.

Apart from my duties as a research assistant, I have participated in three hackathons, one of which I won a prize for an Android augmented reality application that 1) identifies objects through a device’s camera and 2) utilizes Clarifai for retrieving keywords corresponding to an object and a Myo armband for selecting the object’s keywords through gestures.

My desire in life was to pursue a PhD, but I realized that too much time had passed without any professional experience, so I decided to leave the PhD program to search for a job. Between 2019 and 2020, I worked as a Software Design Engineer at Cummins Allison (now Crane Payment Innovations). My responsibilities ranged from coordinating with test engineers in fixing issues in multi-threaded MM2 and JetSort LX software to meet customer needs to contributing to the migration of Cummins Allison software from Windows CE to Linux. Apart from those duties, I led in an effort to fix long-standing memory leaks in JetSort LX software, as well as reviewed code and organized technical documents outlining the details of my work.

The COVID-19 pandemic made life tough. My company was forced to make the difficult decision to lay off some of their employees, including myself, and I remained unemployed throughout most of 2020. I was faced with a lot of uncertainty, but I did not let my feelings of uncertainty stop me from keeping an eye out for opportunities for which I felt qualified. In late 2020, I was offered a position as a Camera Software Engineer at Motorola Mobility, a Chicago-based smartphone company owned by Lenovo. As of this writing (April 2021), I currently work on Motorola’s Common Camera Framework for their mobile devices.