Remzi Arpaci-dusseau Rate My Professor

[Erminia Scharnberg]

VijayChidambaram is an Assistant Professor in the Computer Science department at the University of Texas at Austin. He joined UT Austin in Fall 2016, after completing a post-doc at the VMware Research Group in Palo Alto, California. He did his PhD with Prof. Remzi and Andrea Arpaci-Dusseau at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He did his undergraduate work at the College of Engineering, Guindy in Chennai. His work has resulted in patent applications with Microsoft, Samsung, and VMware. His paper in FAST 2017 was awarded one of the two Best Paper Awards. He was awarded the SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Dissertation Award in 2016, the Microsoft Research Fellowship in 2014, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Alumni Scholarship in 2009. He has published in top OS conferences such as SOSP, OSDI, FAST, and NSDI.

Extracurriculars do not affect admission decisions. Admissions to Masters and PhD programs are based purely on your potential for learning advanced material (Masters), or research (PhD). Extracurriculars such as sports, quizzing, dancing, organizing events, etc. do not affect the decision.

While it is important to spell-check and grammar check your SOP (so that it looks professional), minor grammatical mistakes are okay. Professors will ignore such errors, as long as the meaning is clear.

A handful of indian institutions are known in the US: the IITs, the NITs, and perhaps IIITs. Professors have worked with students from these institutions, and hence they are able to gauge the quality of their students. For students from other institutions, professors on the admissions committee will not be able to judge how good they are based on just their academic credentials, since grades may be inflated; students should demonstrate their potential via other more standard mechanisms such as the GRE or an internship with Google Summer of Code.

Q5 - Students begin their SOP with a quote or an incident - is this an obsolete hook now? Is there any particular way professors expect the students to start? Students are most confused with the beginning.

I would typically look for signs the student can handle our tough Masters courses. If the student has done well in advanced courses, that is a good sign. If the student has done well in research, that is also a good sign. Advanced technical projects outside of university also help. If the student has worked in industry, I look at what they worked on in industry: the more technically challenging the work is, the better.

Note that the list above does not include things such as leadership, extracurriculars, or passion. While those are all good things, fundamentally the admissions committee is only looking for one thing: can you learn advanced material (for Masters), can you do research (for PhD)?

Q7 - What is the best way to convey reasons for average/poor performance in undergraduate courses? For example, does offering an example of improvisation in work/professional life work?

This is pretty tough. If the student had health problems that resulted in a low score for one semester, they should explain in the SOP. Admissions committees do tend to take the whole picture into account, so one bad semester in an otherwise stellar academic career would not sink your application.

You can also check out the original Twitter thread where some Dos and Donts are highlightd by the Professor. Prof. Vijay regularly interacts with students and tech enthusiasts. Find his interesting ideas on twitter @vj_chidambaram

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Prof Dude in Computer Engineering Department

i work in distributed systems, cloud, big data, networking, storage, and operating systems. i often get asked about reading lists and blogs, so i started collecting some. i love working with grads/undergrads on projects in the area of operating systems and distributed systems. if you want to work with me, please watch a great talk by remzi arpaci-dusseau. it has great advice for doing research. you can find out more information about projects that we are working on at -group/ (i do not work with students during the summer. internships are too important. if you can't get an internship, try engaging with an open source project. both are more valuable to you than working with a professor during the summer.) i'm also looking for good undergraduate programmers to participate in our programming team!

i'm also passionate about broadening participation in CS/SE/CE. i'm working with SJSU and Milpitas Unified School District on TECHcellence to provide a pathway from highschool to SJSU CS/SE/CE.

checkout the experimental classes i have taught.

you can also watch some videos that i have found interesting in terms of operating systems or university studies.

office hours end early if there is no one waiting 10 minutes before the end of the office hour. you do not need an appointment for office hours. they are first come/first serve. since i am no longer in the CS department, i don't do CS advising.

if you take my class or work on a project with me, i'll connect with you on linkedin. i only connect with students on facebook after they graduate, since it is only then that they realize if they really want to be friends with me :) i don't really use twitter and instagram very occasionally. snap what? i always have discord going, so you can find me there as well.

once upon a time a little boy who was born in arizona moved with his family to ohio. he was excited to see snow. after a couple of days waiting for the bus in the snow, his excitement turned to misery. to this day he doesn't like snow. while not suffering in the snow he dreamed of living in "silicon valley" and becoming a professor.

he went to miami university in ohio, spent a brief 2 years in spain, and got his masters at depaul in chicago. fortunately, tuition reimbursement while working in IT at sears and motorola paid for his education at depaul. he loved the midwest and considered himself to be a midwesterner.

he was accepted to UCSC to work on his PhD. he was excited to see the ocean and go to the beach. after arriving in santa cruz, his excitement turned to disappointment when his first trip to the beach consisted of freezing cold water, stinky seaweed, and a naked guy running around. he loved the program at UCSC and ended up getting a position at IBM almaden research center, after an awesome internship there, while he was still finishing up his PhD.

after many years at IBM, he left for yahoo research. it was hard to leave yahoo until they shut down the research division, so it was time for the boy to move on. he saw the things facebook was doing to connect the world, and he wanted to be part of that mission, but ended up going to osmeta, a little startup with some really cool tech and people. as chance would have it, facebook acquired osmeta, and the boy was able to work on really cool stuff at a really cool company that he felt was making the world a better place.

Newmark, currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studies a freshwater flatworm called a planarian, a remarkable creature capable of regenerating its entire body from scratch. The model organism offers a way to better understand stem cell-driven regeneration processes, an important step in regenerative medicine and the promise of therapies to repair or replace damaged human tissue.

Planarians are an ideal model for determining why some organisms are capable of regenerating lost body parts, Newmark says, because of both their simplicity and the rapid rate at which they regenerate. This ability is driven by a population of stem cells that is maintained throughout their lives.

After observing important similarities between planarians and their disease-causing cousins, Newmark and former postdoctoral fellow Jim Collins (now a professor at UT Southwestern) took the radical step of applying their knowledge of planarians to studying schistosome biology.

Featuring seven world-class storage experts, this discussion is the first in a new series of CTO Roundtable forums focusing on the near-term challenges and opportunities facing the commercial computing community. Overseen by the ACM Professions Board, this series has as its goal to provide working IT managers with expert advice so they can make better decisions when investing in new architectures and technologies. This is the first installment of the discussion, with a second installment slated for publication in a later issue.

MARGO SELTZER Herchel Smith Professor of Computer Science, professor in the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University; Sleepycat Software founder (acquired by Oracle Corporation); architect at Oracle Corporation

CREEGER Welcome to you all. Today we're talking about storage issues that are specific to what people are coming into contact with now and what they can expect in the near term. Why don't we start with energy consumption and see where that takes us?

BREWER Recently I decided to rebuild my Microsoft Windows XP PC from scratch and for the first time tried to use a 32-gigabyte flash card instead of a hard drive. I'm already using network-attached storage for everything important, and information on local disk is easily re-created from the distribution CD. Flash consumes less energy and is much quieter.

Although this seemed like a good idea, it didn't work out that well because XP apparently does a great deal of writing to its C drive during boot. Writing to flash is not a good idea, as the device is limited in the number and bandwidth of writes. Even though the read time for flash is great, I found the boot time on the Windows machine to be remarkably poor. It was slower than the drive I was replacing, so I'm going to have to go back to a disk in my system. But I still like the idea and feel that the thing that I need to boot my PC should be a low-power flash device with around 32 gigabytes of storage.

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