Venkata Sai Sriram Pillutla
MS Spring 2017
Venkata Sai Sriram Pillutla, was a current masters student and a research member of the DACHB lab in the department of Computer Science, at Northern Illinois University. Previously, he was a software Engineer at Virtusa Software Services. He has one year of strong development experience in handling Big Data using Hadoop MapReduce, Pig, Hive and Sqoop. Venkata Sai completed his undergraduate degree in Computer Science at Acharya Nagarjuna University, India. He has strong application development skills in Java (EJB/JSP), Apache Spring, Hibernate and Maven. He has won several prizes and awards for presenting his projects during his undergraduate degree. He is keenly interested in Big Data and text analytics.
Masters Thesis: Helping users learn about social processes while learning from users: developing a positive feedback in social computing.
Jacqueline Salim
Reearch Rookie 2016-2017
Jacqueline Salim is a second year student in the Department of Computer Science at Northern Illinois University. She is working in the DACHB lab through the NIU Research Rookies research program. Although she had no computer science experience before coming to university, she is now familiar with C++. She has come to enjoy programming and learning about new technologies and techniques. She is also in the Honors Program and is a Presidential Scholar. Her goal is to become more familiar with research and to further develop her skills in the Computer Science field.
Tanner Verigin
MS Summer 2015
Tanner Verigin graduated in 2015, with both a Master in System Dynamics and a Master in Business Administration. He was co-supervised by Dr Philippe J. Giabbanelli (right; then at the University of Cambridge) and Dr Pal I. Davidsen (at the University of Bergen, Norway). Tanner's thesis, consisted of developing a new system dynamics model for the population of British Columbia (Canada). His thesis looked beyond generally accepted drivers of weight such as diet and exercise. It provided a comprehensive simulation model, showing how feedbacks between individual and environmental factor can impede one's ability to maintain a healthy weight. Results from his thesis were published as Supporting a systems approach to healthy weight interventions in British Columbia by modeling weight and well-being, at the 49th Annual Simulation Symposium in 2016. Following his degree, Tanner became team lead at Danske Bank, the largest bank in Denmark and a Fortune Global 500 company.
Masters Thesis: Beyond diet and exercise: A system dynamics approach to understanding the relationships between weight and well-being.