2015-09-01: From Student To Researcher II

After successfully defending my Master's Thesis, I accepted a position as a Graduate Research Assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Library's Digital Library Research and Prototyping Team.  I now work directly for Herbert Van de Sompel, in collaboration with my advisor, Michael Nelson.

Up to this point, I worked for years as a software engineer, but then re-entered academia in 2010 to finish my Master's Degree.  I originally just wanted to be able to apply for jobs that required Master's Degrees in Computer Science, but during my time working on my thesis, I discovered that I had more of a passion for the research than I had expected, so I became a PhD student in Computer Science at Old Dominion University.  During the time of my Master's Degree, I had taken coursework that counts toward my PhD, so I am free to accept this current extended internship while I complete my PhD dissertation.

LANL is a fascinating place to work.  In my first week, we learned all about safety and security. We learned not only about office safety (don't trip over cables), but also nuclear and industrial safety (don't eat the radioactive material).  This was in preparation for the possibility that we might actually encounter an environment where these dangers existed. One of the more entertaining parts of the training was being aware of wildlife and natural dangers, such as rattlesnakes, falling rocks, flash floods, and tornadoes.  We also learned about the more mundane concepts like how to use our security badge and how to fill out timesheets.  I was fortunate to meet people from a variety of different disciplines.


We have nice, powerful computing equipment, good systems support, excellent collaboration areas, and very helpful staff. Everyone has been very conscientious and supportive as I have acquired access rights and equipment.

By the end of my first week, I had begun working with the Prototyping Team.  They shared their existing work with me, educating me on back-end technical aspects of Memento as well as other projects, such as Hiberlink. My team members Harihar Shankar and Lyudmila Balakireva have been nice enough to answer questions about the research work as well as general LANL processes.

I am already doing literature reviews and writing code for upcoming research projects.  We just released a new Python Memento Client library in collaboration with Wikipedia. I am also evaluating Jupyter for use in future data analysis and code collection.  I have learned so much in my first month here!

I know my friends and family miss me back in Virginia, but this time spent among some of the best and brightest in the world is already shaping up to be an enjoyable and exciting experience.

--Shawn M. Jones, Graduate Research Assistant, Los Alamos National Laboratory

2014-03-01: Starting my research internship at NUS

Well, I made it! I am finally on the green fine island. After a long trip from Norfolk international airport to Washington DC Dulles then 23 hours in the air except for a fueling pit-stop in Tokyo Narita airport I landed in Changi airport in Singapore.

To give you some context, I was invited to spend a semester at the National University of Singapore and work with Dr. Min Yen Kan in the WING research group. The purpose was to work in a common area of interest that helps me progress in the final leg of my PhD marathon and increase the collaboration between our WS-DL lab and WING yielding a reputable paper (or more?). In short, I am a WING this semester! So buckle up!

Due to jet lag being a miserable companion the first couple of days, I decided not to take the first day off to rest and settle and go directly to the university. Or maybe it was my excitement? I will never confess.

At NUS I did the regular paperwork and met my colleague and fellow research partner for the next couple of months miss Tao Chen. Tao showed me around the university and labs and gave me pointers on what to expect around here.

The next day I met with Dr. Kan and we discussed all the logistics of my arrival and the possible ideas to zero on the angle I am going to focus on. Also we discussed points of collaborations on side projects with Tao and Jun Ping, a fellow researcher at WING.

I will be working in the lab on the 5th floor of AS6 the building next to COM1 in the school of computing. My desk is next to a huge building spanning half of the wall and overlooking an adjacent forest with singing birds! I guess I am a very happy PhD student now!

The journey starts now, let's see what I can do in the next couple of months while working with Asia's finest. Wish me luck!

-- Hany M. SalahEldeen

2011-12-08: Summer Microsoft Internship

It all started in San Francisco airport while waiting to get my luggage on my way to the PDA2011 conference. The recruiter from Microsoft called me to inform me that I have been accepted to intern at Microsoft Silicon Valley this summer. I was ecstatic and after a couple of months of bureaucracy and a ton of documents I was ready to leave Norfolk by the end of May. Since I haven’t been on an adventure or a trip for a long time, and since I will definitely need a car in California for the three months of the summer, I decided to drive my car all across the continent. I have always wanted to make a road trip like that where I can stop in every city or town along the way, check out their attractions and eat from their authentic cuisines.

At the same time, our colleague and best friend Moustafa Aly managed to secure a job at Amazon’s engineering office in San Francisco. So when he knew I was going to drive all the way there he told me: “forget the plane, I will join you!”

We left Norfolk on the 24th, set the odometer of the car to 0 and having in mind since we are information retrieval and social networking people we will make our status updates and check-ins on Facebook our trip’s record keeper. We picked the route, filled up the car and drove. From Norfolk, stopping at Richmond and Nashville we drove through a tornado passing Tennessee, almost ran out of gas in Texas in the middle of no where, changed the clock twice in one day, eating the best steak I have ever had in Texas and the best burritos on earth in Las Cruses, playing with rockets in White sands missile range, passing over the Hoover dam and the burning the car’s AC compressor in the desert of Nevada we finally made it to Las Vegas where we wanted to spend an entire day relaxing. Next day we started driving and after 9 more hours we made it to San Francisco finishing 3559.6 miles in 5.5 days.

Working at Microsoft Silicon Valley definitely has its perks. The location was amazing and the engineers there are really incredible. I joined the office 365 server-side team for PowerPoint where I shared my office with another intern from UC Berkeley. Working with this team I had the most liberty I had in years working for companies. We sat together and set the goals I need to reach for this internship and they gave me the entire freedom to pick the way I was going to build it, which is more my style in working. I was supposed to start the implementation of a certain fraction of the distribution and investigate two other things but to my surprise they liked what I did with the first task so they decided to modify my internship goals to finish this project completely, reach ship quality and release it in the next version. With this I passed all the phases of software development from meeting with managers, architects and program managers to setting the design to development to finally quality and integration testing. Finally I had to demo my work to the three department managers to see if this could be incorporated in the next shipping release, and to my delight they were fascinated by it and it will be shipped!

The first day I attended the orientation and they gave us an overview to what we will be doing this summer and how are we going to be evaluated. Our mentors then came and took us and I was introduced to my team, the PowerPoint team. Immediately after that I was introduced to the available projects and I choose the one that was more appealing to me. Immediately after that I was granted permissions to access the codebase. Imagine having the source code of both PowerPoint and the server cloud back-end, it felt awesome! for the next two weeks I tried to break in the thousands of lines of code and produced a prototype proof of concept that I was on the right track. By the end of the first week I set my internship goals with my mentor but after the fast prototype I produced I was called to a meeting with both the test and the product management team, I was representing the development team. They decided to change my goals completely to actually build the entire feature and its backend support from scratch and have the opportunity to ship it. Knowing the task in hand of rebuilding the PowerPoint backend on the cloud with the appropriate interface to match the latest award-wining rich-client application I had to go back to the basics. I had several one-on-ones with the development team of PowerPoint client-side to understand piece by piece the functionality of each module of the application. The problem with a project like PowerPoint that it is fairly old and fairly stable with more than 20+ years of development and thousands of legacy code. I was completely lost in the beginning but my mentor didn't let me stumble much, I was practically staying in his office the first couple of weeks. We used C++ and C in the backend with javascript and C# for the matching interface. This was the trickiest part, the ability to match functionalities between two very different frameworks. At a certain point I found a severe gap in the design document related to the functionality. I talked with my manager and he told me a change like the one you want in the design document needs to be escalated. A couple of hours later I was sitting in a room full of Microsoft's elite developers, testers, PMs and managers, the least of which has 7 years work experience under his belt,...and me! That what I loved about Microsoft, even though I was just an intern I owned the project and they appreciated that. I explained my case and it was approved and the design document was changed! I was so proud of myself that day.

The atmosphere within the office was relaxing, cool, upbeat and always challenging. I can fairly say I was spoiled this summer. I was residing in the corporate housing complexes where I got a spacious studio apartment fully furnished with maid service that come clean weekly! Courts, swimming pool and a huge hot tub all provided for free within the apartment complex. Every other week the recruiters and the PR managers created an event, party or outing for all the interns on campus. We went hiking, bowling, watching movies and they even flew us to Seattle to visit the headquarters for the summer intern event. They paid flight tickets, the luxury hotel and even a car rental. Steven Sinofsky gave us a wonderful presentation where they show us classified sneak peeks to the all-new amazing Windows 8 and I was genuinely impressed. At the company store we got lots of t-shirts, games and gadgets with our employee discount. After that they rented the Zoo for us since we were about 1000 interns from all over the country and they got us the “Dave Matthews” band and gave each one of us a brand new xbox360 with Kinect!


It was definitely unique and rewarding to work with all those interns from the top universities all over the country: MIT, UC Berkeley, Stanford, …etc. I asked around and I found that I was the only representative from ODU so I was definitely proud and tried to behave. Me and the other interns became friends and since most of us are residing on the same apartment complex we gathered almost every night and on the weekends we went and discovered the city and the surrounding area. Unfortunately I didn’t join them in the Yosemite hiking/camping trip, as I was sick that day. One day we all decided to wear suits and sunglasses all day at work and call it "Brogramming" day. Someone took a photo of us and it gone viral on twitter and facebook!

In conclusion I feel honored and blessed for being able to work at this wonderful fascinating place with all those extremely intelligent colleagues. My manager/team lead told me on my first day one thing that I believe it changed everything. He said you were only an intern during the 2-hour orientation session, now consider yourself a full time software engineer and own your work. This definitely helped me to shine, participate, own my work, suggest enhancements, which actually were considered, and we changed the design document. Now, I can proudly say that my product is being used currently by millions of users; probably you are using it right now!

-- Hany SalahEldeen

2010-12-27: Google Summer Internship, Zürich Switzerland

"Hello Hany!...We are glad to inform you that you have been accepted in the summer internship program this year in Google Zürich GmBH!". Call me a geek but these were the best words I have ever heard! I now work for Google, well in one way or another!

After struggling with the visa issues I finally got my Swiss Schengen visa and the work permit. The Swiss people are very strict and precise, they thought I was 2 persons, one named Hany Khalil, and the other Hany SalahEldeen! Well I don't blame
them (fyi, in Egypt we don't have the concept of family name, your name is a concatenation of your ancestors names, my name then my father's, then his father's...etc). All my life I have been called Hany SalahEldeen but for some reason the American embassy in Cairo decided that my grandfather's name Khalil suits me better.

"Ich spreche kein Deutsch!" or "I don't speak German" Was the sentence I was repeating to my self on the plane to Zürich, you will never know when it could become handy sometimes! I was brushing up my old French as well, which seemed useless after I arrived to Zürich to realize that French is the main language in Geneva not Zürich. But I didn't care...I was in Google!....I am a Googler!...I even got an email address with my first name @google.com!

On the 6th of July I landed in Geneva, then I took the train to Zürich Hauptbahnhof (which means main station, try to keep up with the German words, or should I say Swiss-German words?). The Swiss really fascinate me, they know the real concept of time (well, they have the best clocks in the world). If you want to call something really punctual or accurate you say it's Swiss, or clock-work which also implies... Swiss. I was dragging my bag from the station, still can barely walk from my leg surgery I reached the tram station. When they say it will arrive 6:43 they actually mean it. I arrived to the student residence of ETH University where I sublet a room for the next 3 months, settled my stuff and fell asleep.

At 9 am next morning I was in the Google Zürich GmBH lobby. I met other interns and after an introductory session we were taken on a tour through all the huge 3 buildings (I used to lose my way for the first 3 days, well but maps were every where). I met there some fellow interns who became my great friends later on. The first two weeks were scheduled to be the training phase, including sessions and tutorials. I got to say when you get access to all these foods, candies, games and entertainment facilities (fussball tables, ping-pong tables, xbox, ps3, rockband, pool, musical instruments, they even got a massage and meditation room!) You get really distracted at the beginning, but that was trivial the following weeks and I loved the idea, if you spoil your employees and make them happy they will feel ownership to the company and commitment thus they will produce amazing work, that was the motto.

My host and manager was very excited and eager to start, so was I. I was the first intern to work under his supervision. He was a mentor, always there to help and give good advice, give me room to work, create and think outside the box and above all he was a good friend. Mostly that's the theme within all employees there, lieght weight, informal but respectful of course. later that week I had a standup coffee meeting with a guy who I later knew that he invented the automated language detection in Google translate! I was working in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) team on a project allied with the Google translate team. I wish I was able to describe my project but the NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) I signed with Google prevents me as it is a new cool project and by the end of the three months I built successfully a huge portion of it. When it is released I will let you know!

Transparency and trust, that's what I was thinking of when I was working. You have access to all the resources and individuals, all available to help you proceed in your project. You can mail anyone and say hey I wanna ask you something! He/She will answer immediately. If you are stuck with a certain program or library you can ask, there experts in it on the mailing list. Maybe you can find the guy who actually invented it and wrote the whole thing! (Like the case in Vim, also you can find Sergey, Page and Cerf on the mailing list too!). Development process is totally different in Google, yes it is Agile and standup meetings are more common than coffee in Italy but there are other considerations. You want to meet deadlines and race to be innovative but also you have to produce code that is extremely scalable, dependable, throughly tested, following style convention and very readable. Handover time to another engineer shouldn't take a long time. I had to throw all most of what I know in C++ and adapt to the new framework of libraries, bigtables, mapreduces ...etc. If you required a functionality someone probably wrote it before so go directly to Code search and acess the code base.

TGIF (Thank Google It's Friday!) are the best weekly gatherings ever! You meet people from different teams in a social manner, relax, laugh, have fun and even karaoke which was a bad idea for me to participate! Every Friday night me and the other interns used to go discover the city and dine in a new place serving a new cuisine, ranging from Swiss cheese fondue to flaming duck Phad Thai. It was delicious and enlightening!

I have been to several parts of Switzerland, learned a little German,one of my friends at Google actually taught me the Blues Harp (AKA. Harmonica) and we used to practice three times a week. I travelled back to Spain to see friends, did water skiing on the lake in Zürich and was scheduled to do a sky-dive on top of the Alps but it was cancelled for bad weather, I was pissed!

Walking through the city was a pleasure itself. Enjoying a cup of coffee down one of the curling streets was amazing. Reading a book by the lake was a quality time. The only bad thing about Zürich is its prices!...I saw a suit in a shop and I kept looking for its price tag because I thought the numbers on the tag in front of it were the serial number not price!

The student residence I used to live in was amazing. Imagine living in a place where 100 different students live from more than 35 countries. We laughed together, we watched World-cup together and cheered for all teams! we cooked, watched movies and partied together too. It was friendly, brotherly and definitely educating. I met there people who definitely left a mark on my life.

In conclusion it was an amazing summer, educating, life changing experience. Working for the best company, living in an amazing city and meeting great people, what more can one ask for?!

2010-10-11: A Blast from the past: My road to Ws-Dl!

Hello everyone, I am Hany SalahEldeen, a PhD student in my first year and I am honored to be a new member of the Ws-Dl group at Old Dominion University and supervised by Dr. Michael Nelson.

I have been in the group for a couple of months now so I thought I should introduce myself and give a background summary on my career before Ws-Dl because I believe if you didn't know where you were, you will never know where you are going.

I received my BSc. in Computer Systems Engineering at Alexandria University, Egypt in 2008. My graduation project entitled "VOID: The web-based integrated development environment" was selected to win the first prize in the graduation projects competition in the University for year 2008. For the last 2 years of my degree I was working in a software company back home called eSpace technologies, I worked in developing systems using Ruby on Rails, and was one of the members who developed Neverblock (an open source project to enable easy development of non-blocking concurrent code.) along with fellow student and friend Mostafa Aly who is also in the Ws-Dl group.

I started my masters program in Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Spain. I worked in CVC (the Computer vision center) in the colour group under the supervision of Robert Benavente, Maria Vanrell and Joost Van de Weijer, and on July 2009 I defended my thesis entitled "Colour naming Using Context-Based learning through a Perceptual Model", published a paper and the second is still under development. In a nutshell we were able to create a parametric model for the Lab color space based on psychophysical experiments using real life images in the machine learning process to reach a better model near to human perception of color in context. In August 2008 I participated in the CVC team competing in PASCAL VOC2009 image classification world challenge in Kyoto, Japan and won 2 gold medals.



In September 2009 I started my internship at Cairo Microsoft Innovation center "CMIC" working on creating recommendation systems based on social networks with Nayer Wanas and wrote a paper which is under review. Also performed a study that the research center presented by CMIC's director Tarek Alabady to the minister of communication and information technology Tarek Kamel in December 2009.

In January 2010 I arrived Norfolk and started my first semester at ODU. Later in the same month I was invited by Google to attend the 2010 Google Grad CS Forum. An all-paid trip from Norfolk to San Fransisco including two day stay at Hilton downtown, who can say no?! Hanah Kim the University Programs Specialist contacted me giving me the details and the agenda.

On the 21 I was with 82 other fellow PhD students from all over the states attending the opening reception hosted by Alfred Spector, Google's VP of Research and Special Initiatives. He discussed with us several topics and answered all our questions. Surrounded by all these brilliant minds. I was so proud to represent old Dominion University in this prestigious event. Early next day a shuttle came to take us to the GooglePlex. There, Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience welcomed us and gave along with Kevin McCurley, Research Scientist an amazing keynote and answered all our questions in regards to research in Google, publishing, research in the industry in general. After that we were taken on a tour around the humongous GooglePlex campus. The tour took more than an hour and yet we just skimmed some of the public areas (some areas are restricted to outsiders and guests).

After lunch, some of the students in their final years of their PhD were selected to give presentations about their work, which was definitely enlightening. After that we had two Tech-Talks, the first was by Hector Gonzalez, Research Scientist, in which he described to us new briefly techniques in extremely Large Scale data collaboration and integration. The second was by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist, which I think was the most amazing talk I attended in a long time. T.V. is blind, but he leads one of the biggest accessibility teams at Google and he specializes in auditory user interfaces and structured electronic documents.

Finally there were some round tables with scientists from different fields who gladly answered our questions. Andrea frome which leads one of the teams in Google Maps specialized in Street View described to us her work and answered all our questions. Later that day we had dinner in an amazing Italian restaurant in the heart of San Fransisco named Palio d'Asti. The next day I flew back to Norfolk.

That was a quick snapshot of the highlights in my career before Ws-Dl, I joined in february of 2010. I hope this post wasn't too long!

For more details check out my Blog and Website.

--Hany