Working on Products in Big Tech
Bill Pugh, Larry Davis, David Jacobs, Mike Hicks
IRB 0318 (Gannon) or https://umd.zoom.us/j/97919102992?pwd=LbSBM2MZy4QpVfnj92ukT5AIqyTYaO.1#success
Friday, October 25, 2024, 11:00 am-12:00 pm 
Abstract
As computer science and AI have become an increasingly larger part of the economy, several faculty members in our department conduct research with their counterparts in industry, or pursue research in industrial labs. In this panel discussion we will hear from four faculty members who have worked at Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta, and discuss their experiences both in academia and industry.
Bio
Larry Davis, professor emeritus in our department, is currently a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon. He is best known for his research in computer vision. He is a fellow of IAPR, IEEE and ACM.
Mike Hicks is a Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland; he was an active professor from 2002-2021. His research explores programming languages and security. He is a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), Editor-in-Chief of Proceedings of the ACM on Programming Languages, and prior Chair of ACM's Special Interest Group on Programming Languages. He has just started a new AWS science team focusing on automated test generation; before that he co-led the development of Cedar, the open-source authorization policy language underpinning the Amazon Verified Permissions service.
David Jacobs, professor of computer science at UMD, was on leave from 2022 to 2024 to work at Meta, where he led a team developing foundational vision models. His research specializes in computer vision and machine learning, with an emphasis on visual object recognition challenges.
Bill Pugh is an emeritus professor of Computer Science at UMD, where he developed Skip Lists and The Omega Test and Project, worked on the Java Memory Model, developed FindBugs, a static analysis tool for finding mistakes in Java programs, and Marmoset, a tool that managed student project submissions and testing, with a design that encouraged students to understand unit tests and avoid last-minute all-nighters to do their projects. He worked with Fortify Software to integrate FindBugs into Fortify’s security static analysis tool chain, and at Google to scale FindBugs to handle the entire Java codebase at Google. He retired from UMD in 2012 when they selected Jayanth Banavar as dean of CMPS, but got involved again with UMD after Brendan said, “You could use a new building”. During the pandemic, he worked for Apple on GAEN, the Google-Apple Exposure Notification framework, and also as an independent expert helping state health authorities interpret and understand the analytics produced by ENPA (Exposure Notification Privacy-preserving Analytics).
This talk is organized by Samuel Malede Zewdu