Two CSE grad students selected for Rising Stars in EECS Workshop

Akshitha Sriraman and Xintong Wang have been selected to participate in the 2019 Rising Stars in EECS Workshop held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from Oct. 30-Nov. 1, 2019. The workshop brings together outstanding women from all over the world who are graduate students or postdocs pursuing academic careers in electrical engineering and computer science.

This year’s workshop will offer a variety of professional development resources that will run in tandem with workshop sessions. With a focus on one-to-one mentoring, the Rising Stars Career Center will allow participants to personalize their workshop experience to best meet their professional and career needs.

The program was launched by MIT in 2012 with the goal of improving mentorship and providing resources for women navigating the early stages of careers in academia. This year boasts the largest class of participants with over 90 expected attendees.

Akshitha Sriraman
Sriraman is a Ph.D. candidate advised by Prof. Tom Wenisch on her research in computer architecture and systems. She works on enabling hyperscale web services, bridging computer architecture and software systems. Her projects demonstrate the importance of this bridge in improving the performance and cost efficiency of modern hyperscale data center systems.

Sriraman has influenced the design of server architectures both via hardware analysis of production data center systems and her subsequent software design that uses data center hardware more efficiently; she was nominated as a 2019 Facebook Fellowship Finalist for this work. Additionally, Sriraman has developed a novel software system that improves data center performance by minimizing tail latency in large-scale systems; she was awarded the Rakham Merit Ph.D. Fellowship to help fund this work.

See her research abstract here.

Xintong Wang
Wang is a Ph.D. candidate advised by Prof. Michael Wellman. Her research lies in the intersection of computer science and economics. She is particularly interested in market mechanism design and the modeling/understanding of strategic interactions among agents. She was a research intern at Microsoft Research NYC in summer 2018 and J.P. Morgan AI Research in summer 2019.

See her research abstract here.