Spotlight: Interns to Staff Members - The Metamorphosis

SETH PROCTOR

Seth Proctor, Member Technical Staff, and Principal Investigator for a new project on usable security and privacy, received his ScB in Computer Science (Honors) from Brown University.

Seth wanted to work on interesting networking problems in a place with interesting people, so he came to Sun for his internship. While here, he liked how work was balanced with interesting talks and fun events. His most interesting project was working on scalable security for dynamic multicast groups. Seth's end-of-summer talk, which gave him a chance to present the work he'd done in front of a "remarkable collection of people," was his most memorable internship experience.

Since becoming a staff member, Seth has created, among other innovations, an open source project that has thousands of users around the world and has created a new community. His most unforgettable conference was the ACM CCS (Computer Communications Security) 2003 Conference, where he presented a paper co-written with external collaborators and got to meet many of the people he'd been working with for a long time. Among his achievements: a patent, a number of published papers, and his being listed as an author on two open standards.

Seth lives in Massachusetts and enjoys its culture and history, and the change in seasons. Besides supporting the Red Sox, his favorite pastime is tending the grapes in his vineyard.

MATTHEW SEIDL

Matt Seidl, Member Technical Staff, obtained his BS in EECS from UC, Berkeley; and both his MS and PhD degrees from the University of Colorado in Boulder, in Computer Science.

He came to Sun as an intern partially because Mario Wolczko (his intern mentor and current manager) asked, and partially because it was a chance to work at a company he'd always admired. Throughout his college and graduate career, Matt used various Sun workstations and servers, and the chance to come work at Sun was, in his words, a big plus.

"During my internship I took what was a fairly basic JavaVM for Palm Pilots (called Spotless), and augmented it with a fairly advanced garbage collector. Then, in conjunction with another intern, implemented process persistence, and even process migration." When asked to describe the highlight of his internship, he said, "It was probably the first time we managed to take a running application on one Palm Pilot, stop it, beam it to a second Palm Pilot over the IR link, and restart both of them. Just watching the two apps start up in sync was one of my proudest programming moments."

Since becoming a staff member, Matt offered, "My best achievement is probably our simulator - a large and complex piece of Java code that over the course of our project managed to continually improve both in efficiency and in the quality of results produced."

Matt further told us that, "Without my intern experience, I don't think I would have gotten the job I hold now. As an intern, I got to make a bunch of connections with various parts of Sun, which made both getting my job, and doing my job, that much easier."

He has three patents to his name, plus fourteen others in various stages, and is co-author of a recent technical report.

DOUG SIMON

Doug Simon, Member Technical Staff, Sun Labs, received his Bachelor of Information Technology from the University of Queensland, Australia.

"It was a great opportunity offered by my then honours' thesis supervisor, Cristina Cifuentes," he said, "to come and experience working in an industrial setting that differed from the standard graduate opportunities in Australia at the time."

His most memorable internship experience was presenting a demo of the Spotless VM at a Sun Labs Open House; he had been working on it, one of the first Java virtual machines for the PDA/cell phone space.

When he was an intern at Sun Labs, Doug liked "Just about everything: the flexible work hours, the Friday Bashes, the intern lecture series at other research campuses in the valley (Summer Intern Research Series with IBM, Microsoft, and PARC), meeting and talking with some world leaders in their field etc... It's hard to say what was the singular greatest highlight, but I certainly enjoyed the weekly lunches with the Kanban group. They were both intellectually and gastronomically stimulating!"

Since becoming a staff member, he is proud of co-filing three patents and having received great interest when presenting the Squawk technology at external forums, such as the Java Card Forum meetings. Because of his internship, Doug "knew where to get good food on Friday afternoons ... and knowing a bunch of familiar faces here made it easy to come back and get help when needed."

Living in California suits Doug just fine, especially the "weather, accessibility of outdoor activities, and the multi-cultural population!" What he does when not working: mountain biking and watching cult/classic movies. When working, he manages to file several patents and publish a few technical reports as well.

THERESA SZE

When she met Howard Davidson at the IEEE Workshop on High Speed Interconnects, where they worked together on the workshop problem, she was impressed with his breadth and depth of knowledge, and when he mentioned the possibility of an internship at Sun, she "jumped at the opportunity to work with him."

"Although this might sound odd," Theresa continued, "I loved eating lunch with that team. The group pretty consistently had 10-15 people who would go to lunch together, and talk about very diverse topics, from processor design, to the competition, to bio or politics (but never sports). It was uniquely life with a top notch team in Silicon Valley."

Reflecting on the quality of life at Sun Labs, Theresa enjoyed Sun's work hard/play hard environment. "There were many interns that summer, and we put in a lot of hours. But then there was also Jeanie Treichel, and her dedication to make the intern program fun. She arranged many intern programs, including tours of Sun's manufacturing facility, 3D holographic demo, and tours of other interesting locations. The Angel Island picnic has always been a very special time for me. I love the venue, the people, the activities - everything about it comes together in a magical way."

Since becoming a Senior Manager at Sun, Theresa has been "helping Sun make money: shipping products, developing the latest technologies, and enabling new capabilities."

Continue to Page 5: Chris Tsilipounidakis, David Vengerov, & Rich Zimering >>

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