time to read:
The details: Alex enrolled in the UF CISE computer science Ph.D. program in 2014, and joined my research lab shortly after that. After completing his undergraduate degree at Auburn University, where he contributed to C library OpenRefactory/C, Alex was interested in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. He joined my lab to work on gesture recognition and pattern matching algorithms. Alex graduated from the Ph.D. program in 2020.
Dissertation project/topic: As a junior Ph.D. student, Alex assisted on the POSE project, characterizing how children’s and adults’ body gestures or movements differed from each other. His dissertation was based on extending the MTAGIC project and focused on examining how children’s touchscreen gestures differed from adults’, and how this difference could affect automatic recognition of their gestures.
Committee members (besides me): Dr. Jaime Ruiz (co-chair), Dr. Eakta Jain, Dr. Damon Woodard, and Dr. Pavel Antonenko.
Where are they now: Alex is now a Senior Software Development Engineer at Yahoo, having joined Verizon Media after graduation and then staying with Yahoo after the split in 2021. He lives in New York City.
Top publications: Alex’s top-cited paper from his time in the INIT Lab is for his work on the POSE project, published in ACM Transactions on Applied Perception in 2016, with 36 citations so far. (This is also tied with his top-cited first-author paper on C buffer overflows from his undergraduate days in 2014!)
Proud advisor moment: Being there in person when Alex received the “Best Student Paper award” for his first-author paper at the ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI) in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, in 2017!
Congratulations to Alex and best wishes in his career as a software engineer! ❤️
Leave a Reply