Category Archives: Career

Quirky, which Brought us Pawcet and Hundreds of Other Products, Is No More

Quirky, an invention platform startup that created the magnificent Pawcet, a drinking fountain for dogs, is, alas, no more. After raising more than $180 million from investors and bringing more than 400 products to the market over its 6 years … Continue reading

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DARPA Project Experience and DARPA Project Leaders

Recent Wired Magazine profile of  Dr. Regina Dugan, formerly the director of Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and currently an executive at Google (Wired Magazine article available here) led me to a Harvard Business Review article by Dr. Dugan … Continue reading

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PM Candidates: Ask Questions, Please

All job candidates, for all jobs everywhere, should know to ask questions of their interviewers when prompted. The answer to “Do you have any questions for me?” ought to be never be “no“, for any position. But especially for PM … Continue reading

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Do not Call People “Resources”

Managers: if you call your people “resources”, they get to call you “overhead”. Calling people “resources” must be one of the worst habits of the different kinds of managers. Yeah, that is the terminology used in the Project Management Professional … Continue reading

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Data Empathy

I recently went to an amazing Data Science meetup which I highly recommend to all New York-based folk interested in all things data – Data Driven NYC, hosted (and generously catered) by Bloomberg in their beautiful 59th street office. Founder … Continue reading

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Post-Ph.D. Job Market: Timelines

I recently gave a talk at a WimNet group meeting regarding my post-Ph.D. job market experiences and lessons learned. A version of the slides that is not Columbia-specific and applicable to many EECS students is available below: Slides from the … Continue reading

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Visualizations: my CV and my Research Statement as Word Clouds

As far back as I remember, I was a fan of clear, catchy, and entertaining visual data representations. Like those that often appear in the National Geographic or the Economist – the engaging ways of presenting scientific facts and data. … Continue reading

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Beautiful Pervasive World: Wearable Devices

Having seen nothing but my dissertation in the last 6 months, I have been tremendously enjoying an opportunity to scale back on writing and to catch up with the state of the world of innovative pervasive and mobile technology. Oh, … Continue reading

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Convocation and Commencement

Our Columbia graduation ceremonies took a substantial part of this week and were amazing. I love graduating from Columbia. Growing up in the direst poverty and deprivation in the 1990s Russia, I could not dare to dream of getting to … Continue reading

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Proud Academic Heritage

Thanks to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, my labmates and I have recently compiled a chart of our academic ancestors, which traces Ph.D. advisor-advisee relationships back to the 1600s. We compiled the chart and got it framed for our advisor’s Gil Zussman‘s … Continue reading

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