Changing the World, One Day at a Time

Convocation and Commencement

Posted on May 26, 2013 by admin

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 this amazing day. It feels truly extraordinarily; my heart is filled with deep gratitude to everybody who helped me get to this amazing day.

With my adviser Gil Zussman and close collaborator John Sarik.

With mom and dad.

Now, with the ceremonies behind me, I am in full swing of exploring the paths to my next adventure. The adventure needs to be big, no, HUGE — something that seems as insurmountable to me now as a Columbia University Ph.D. seemed mere years before this week.

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Proud Academic Heritage

Posted on May 15, 2013 by admin

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 birthday – had a lot of fun with that.

Here it is: the pdf of my academic genealogy tree. Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Data visualization, Graduate school, Ph.D. | Comments Off

WimNet’s Columbia University Electrical Engineering Department Awards

Posted on May 10, 2013 by admin

My research group (that is, professor Gil Zussman‘s WimNet lab) has had a very good day today, at the Columbia University Electrical Engineering Department BBQ where this year’s graduate student awards were announced.

Saleh Soltan received the Armstrong Memorial Award, an award for an outstanding M.S. student. This is the highest award for an M.S. student in the department.
Jelena Marasevic received the Millman Award for the Outstanding TA (which Berk Birand received in 2010), and an M.S. Award of Excellence, given to less than top 3% of the M.S. students in the department (and which Rob Margolies received last year).
I received the Jury Award, an award for outstanding achievement by a graduate student in the areas of system communication or signal processing. This is the highest award for a Ph.D. student in the department. I sincerely thank the department for this award — I am really honored by the recognition.

WimNet rocks! It feels incredible to be a part of such an awesome group.

Continue reading →

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Mentoring Students

Posted on May 8, 2013 by admin

While much is written about various approaches and activities grad students can use to keep engaged and motivated and to succeed (such as wonderful advice provided here, here, here, here, and in many other articles and posts), one particular useful activity that is often overlooked is mentoring junior students.

Nearly always, there are undergrads (and professional Masters students) looking for research experience. Nearly always, a graduate student can define a research project within their own larger-scale research that is perfectly suitable for an undergrad to play with. A graduate student that takes on this challenge does a lot of good not only for the undergraduates, PIs, school (and the society in general), they also stand to gain much from it themselves.

There are many obvious benefits to mentoring students: Continue reading →

Posted in Academia, Career and Leadership, Graduate school, Management, Ph.D., Skills, Tips and tricks | Comments Off

My favorite collection: running countries and states

Posted on May 6, 2013 by admin

When I was in grad school, I started a bit of a game with myself, keeping track of countries, states, and provinces where I went running. The rules of this game are simple: a country, a state, or a province gets added to this collection if I go running there, and run at least 1 mile. The current collection of countries and states, for the most part accumulated over the years of the Ph.D. program, is here:

My most prized item in the current collection is China, where I ran a few kilometers in the Olympic Complex one smoggy morning while visiting for the ACM MobiCom’09. Expanding the collection is on the to-do list for the next few years.

Posted in Achievement, Data visualization, Ph.D., Running, Sports, Travel | Comments Off

Ph.D. Dissertation Defended

Posted on April 25, 2013 by admin

Yes, I did it!

Wednesday April 24th, 4pm EST, following a presentation attended by many of my fellow WimNet group members and coauthors from other groups, and following an intense and engaged period of questioning by the committee, I was pronounced Dr. Gorlatova. It was exhilarating. An exciting culmination of a 5-year Ph.D. journey and a wonderful ending of a brutal semester with a relentless series of deadlines.

Many thanks to my committee members, Professors Chaintreau, Kymissis, Maxemchuk, and Mitra. Unending thanks to my adviser, Professor Zussman, for all his support throughout the last 5 years. Many thanks to all my coauthors and colleagues throughout the years, with very special thanks to John Sarik, Aya Wallwater, Andrey Bernstein, Robert Margolies, Baradwaj Vigraham, Jianxun Zhu, Marcin Szczodrak, Mina Cong, and Sonal Shetkar.

To all the Ph.D. students out there — keep reaching for that rainbow!

Posted in Academia, Achievement, Career and Leadership, Energy harvesting, Highlights, Ph.D. | Comments Off

Why are we Doing This? (1) Learning, (2) Growth.

Posted on April 10, 2013 by admin

Rob Margolies, a Ph.D. student in my research group, has recently written a great blog post about why Ph.D. students push themselves so hard. In short, it is because we really feel that we are learning and growing, in many different, partially self-selected, ways.

Rob’s blog post
A mandatory Ph.D. comics on the subject of “why we are doing this”

Posted in Academia, Career and Leadership, Good reads, Graduate school, Humor, Ph.D., Skills | Comments Off

Microsoft Research Presentation Video

Posted on April 5, 2013 by admin

A video of a talk I recently gave at Microsoft Research Seattle is now available online. In this talk I introduced the Energy Harvesting Active Networked Tags Project and talked about my contributions to the project and to the overall space of networking ultra-low-power energy harvesting nodes: environmental energy characterizations, energy harvesting adaptive algorithms, and testbed design and development.

Talk video

Posted in Achievement, Energy harvesting, Graduate school, Highlights, Ph.D. | Comments Off

From Mobile Ads to Revenue

Posted on March 21, 2013 by admin

MIT Technology Review has recently published an interesting article on why mobile ads do not (yet) lead to high revenues. As a reason, they are citing advertisers’ troubles with identifying whether the ads are working. Specifically, they trace these troubles to lack of unique user identification, especially across different devices, and instances of people seeing an ad on a mobile phone, but buying the advertised object using a computer. It is very interesting how seemingly minute technical issues lead to the under-use of such promising technologies.

Posted in Consumer technology, Industry, Mobile computing, Technology | Comments Off

Top 10 Reasons Students Fail A Ph.D.

Posted on January 14, 2013 by admin

I found a lovely summary of the typical reasons Ph.D. students struggle and fail. Well worth reading over for inspiration and reflection.

My favorite part: “A Ph.D. is not the final undertaking. It’s the start of a scientific career. A Ph.D. does not have to cure cancer or enable cold fusion. At best a handful of chemists remember what Einstein’s Ph.D. was in. Einstein’s Ph.D. dissertation was a principled calculation meant to estimate Avogadro’s number. He got it wrong. By a factor of 3.
He still got a Ph.D. “

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