40th Anniversary of the Department of Computer Science

Ira A. “Gus” Hunt

Gus Hunt is the chief technology officer for the chief information officer of the Central Intelligence Agency. Previously, Hunt served as the director of applications services for the CIA. Prior to that, he served as director of architecture and systems engineering.

In addition to his roles in information services, Hunt also served as chief of research and development for the Director of Central Intelligences’s (DCI) Crime and Narcotics Center and as deputy chief of the operations support group in the DCI’s Non-Proliferation Center. He began his career in 1985 as a Directorate of Intelligence (DI) analyst in the Technology Transfer Assessment Center and was a branch chief in the Space Systems Division in the DI.

Before joining the agency, Hunt spent seven years in the private sector as an aerospace engineer, designing advanced manned space flight systems and satellite orbital transfer vehicles. He holds a master’s degree in civil and structural engineering from Vanderbilt University.

Ron Hochsprung (CS ’72)

Ron Hochsprung started at IIT in the fall of 1961 as a physics major. He took his first computer science course in 1962 and has been involved with computers ever since.

He suspended his academic career to become systems manager for the IIT Computer Center, where he was one of the implementors of the IITRAN compiler and implemented the IITROS remote access system to support Compu/TEL. He left IIT for Fermilab, where he was involved with the starting of computing services for visiting scientists. He finished his bachelor of science in literal arts (B.S.L.A.) in computer science at IIT in 1972, spent a year at Purdue graduate school and worked at Northwestern University Hospital supporting a National Institutes of Health grant before coming back to IIT as an instructor in the computer science department.

Hochsprung left IIT for California in 1978, where, after a short stint at National Semiconductor, he landed at a fledgling computer company called Apple, where he has spent the last 31-plus years. He has been involved in many of Apple's products over the years, including a major role in its new Thunderbolt technology.

Andrea L. Berry (CS ’84)

Andrea Berry is the senior vice president, Broadcast Operations, Fox Network Engineering & Operations in Los Angeles. Her team is responsible for all Fox broadcast operations and transmissions that support the Fox network and its cable entities. Previously, she was responsible for the remote technical operations of the live broadcasts of major sporting events for Fox and Fox Sports Net, including high-profile events such as the Super Bowl and World Series. Her teams have won Emmy awards for Outstanding Technical Team Remotes.

After graduating from IIT, Berry joined CBS as studio technical manager at its New York broadcast center. She later became a field technical manager, working on such events as presidential inaugurations, the Winter Olympics, and telecasts for the National Football League, National Basketball Association, Major League Baseball, and National Collegiate Athletic Association. In the early 1990s, she returned to Chicago for two years as director of technical operations at CBS owned-and-operated WBBM-TV Chicago before moving to Fox.

Berry is a member of the IIT Board of Trustees, the College of Science and Letters Board of Overseers, and the IIT Alumni Association Board. She helped organize IIT’s Nate Thomas Tribute Weekend, a gathering of African-American alumni and friends mentored by Thomas in the 1970s and 1980s.

Frederica Darema (M.S. PHYS ’72)

Frederica Darema is a member of the Senior Executive Service and serves as the Director, Mathematics, Information and Life Sciences, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Arlington, Va. She provides executive direction in the planning, conduct and coordination of broad, frequently large-scale, and critical basic research and development program activities. These include the areas of advanced mathematical and computational methods for dynamic systems; information and decision systems; bio-systems; human cognition and socio-cultural systems.

Darema is a graduate of the University of Athens, Greece; the Illinois Institute of Technology; and the University of California at Davis, where she attended as a Fulbright Scholar and a Distinguished Scholar. After physics research associate positions at the University of Pittsburgh and Brookhaven National Laboratory, she received an American Physics Society Industrial Postdoctoral Fellowship and became a technical staff member in the Nuclear Sciences Department at Schlumberger-Doll Research. Subsequently, she joined the T.J. Watson IBM Research Center as a research staff member and group manager. While at IBM, she also served in the IBM Corporate Strategy Group examining and helping to set corporate-wide strategies. From 1996 to 1998, she completed a two-year interagency assignment at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Martha W. Evens

Martha Evens, professor emerita of computer science, has been the adviser or co-adviser of more than 100 Ph.D. students. She is a prolific and well regarded scholar who continues to publish her research on artificial intelligence, intelligent tutoring systems, and computational lexicography. Her latest paper, “A Hybrid Arabic Text Summarization Technique Based on Text Structure and Topic Identification,” appears in the International Journal of Computer Processing of Languages (2011). Other current activities include serving as program committee reviewer for natural language processing for information retrieval at the 2011 Asian Information Retrieval Societies Conference, to be held in Dubai in December.

Evens helped to start the graduate program in computer science at IIT. She served as acting chair, ran the computer science employment fair starting in 1979, and offered decades of other service to the department, as well as her field and IIT.

Author of more than 350 published articles, she has made 76 research conference presentations and has had 46 research projects funded. She was honored as one of IIT's Early Pioneers of Computing in April 2011.

S. Christopher “Chris” Gladwin

Chris Gladwin is president and chief executive officer of Cleversafe Inc., a developer of dispersed cloud storage technology. Before Cleversafe, he was the founding chairman, president, and CEO of MusicNow, which was later acquired by Circuit City. Prior to MusicNow, he was the founding chairman, president, and CEO of Cruise Technologies, which became the dominant supplier of wireless thin client technology. Gladwin was the creator of the first workgroup storage server at Zenith Data Systems and was a manager of corporate storage standards at Lockheed Martin. He has created more than 300 issued and pending patents related to dispersed storage technology, wireless remote interface, and Internet service technology. Gladwin’s work has been recognized with 32 industry awards for the products, services, and companies he has created.

Gladwin has a B.S. in mechanical engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a former member of the IIT Stuart School of Business Board of Overseers.

Vijay Gurbani (Ph.D. CS ’04)

Vijay K. Gurbani works for the Security Technology Research Group at Bell Laboratories, the research arm of Alcatel-Lucent. He holds a B.S. in computer science with a minor in mathematics and an M.S. in computer science, both from Bradley University, and a Ph.D. in computer science from Illinois Institute of Technology. Vijay's current work focuses on security aspects of Internet multimedia session protocols and peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. He is the author of over 45 journal papers and conference proceedings, five books, and 12 Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Requests for Comments. He is currently the co-chair of the Application Layer Traffic Optimization Working Group in the IETF, which is designing a protocol to enable efficient communications between peers in a peer-to-peer system. Vijay's research interests are Internet telephony services, Internet telephony signaling protocols, security of Internet telephony protocols and services, and P2P networks and their application to various domains. Vijay holds four patents and has nine applications pending with the U.S. Patent Office. He is a senior member of the Association for Computing Machinery and a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Computer Society.

Cheryl Hyman (CS ’96)

As chancellor of City Colleges of Chicago, Cheryl Hyman is responsible for managing a budget of more than $650 million and 5,800 employees, as well as ensuring the success of more than 120,000 students annually. Hyman is a graduate of Olive-Harvey College, one of the City Colleges of Chicago. She holds an Executive M.B.A. from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, an M.A. in community development from North Park University and a B.S. in computer science from IIT.

Prior to her appointment as chancellor, Hyman served as vice president, Operations Strategy and Business Intelligence, ComEd, an Exelon company. She joined ComEd in 1996 and held positions in various departments of the company, including Community Relations, Information Technology, and Transmission and Distribution.

Timothy Koschmann (Ph.D. CS ’87)

Timothy Koschmann is a professor of medical education at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine. He holds a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Missouri-Kansas City and an M.S. in experimental psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. After becoming interested in artificial intelligence, he earned a Ph.D. in computer science from IIT in 1987.

Over the course of his long career, his interests have changed from an initial concern with how technology might be used to augment collaborative forms of instruction to more foundational inquiry into how understanding itself is displayed and negotiated within interaction. His disciplinary orientation has been similarly transformed, from a solely cognitive perspective to one informed by the social and communicative sciences. His current work is particularly influenced by the policies of ethnomethodological inquiry and often employs methods and insights from conversation analysis. He conducts fieldwork in instructional settings related to the professional training of physicians and surgeons. Focusing on naturally occurring interaction, he utilizes audio and video recordings and other collected materials as aids in fixing and later reconstructing events of interest.

Roger Liew

Roger Liew is the chief technology officer of Orbitz, LLC, recently promoted from vice president of technology in November 2010. This is Liew’s second stint at Orbitz, having worked there from 2000–04. Between 2004 and 2010, Liew was chief technology officer of G2 Switchworks, a provider of travel distribution solutions, and Milestro, a leisure, travel, and tourism company. Earlier in his career, he was a lead developer for Neoglyphics Media Corporation and a software engineer for Motorola’s Cellular Subscriber Group.

Liew studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Chicago.

Sairam Rangachari (M.S. CS ’02)

Sairam Rangachari is founder and CEO of BeeBillion.com. Formerly he served as chief innovation officer and senior vice president at optionsXpress, Inc. Under his leadership, the company launched several products that solidified the world-class optionsXpress trading platform, which won several awards from Barron’s, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance, SmartMoney, and other leading industry publications. Part of the original team that built the optionsXpress platform, he played a key role through its IPO in acquiring and executing the integration of XpressTrade, a futures brokerage. Charles Schwab acquired optionsXPress for $1 billion.

In addition to his IIT degree, he has a bachelor’s degree in engineering and computer science from the University of Madras.

Tim Stojka

Tim Stojka is chief executive officer of Chicago-based Agentis Energy, an energy technology company delivering wireless energy-management systems for commercial and industrial applications. In addition to Agentis Energy, Stojka has served as the CEO of Fast Heat, a designer and manufacturer of heating elements, sensors, and controls. Prior to his position at Fast Heat, he served as co-founder/chairman and CEO of Commerx™. A pioneer in the development of Internet eCommerce systems, Stojka was responsible for helping to direct and communicate the vision and growth strategies of Commerx.

Stojka has been featured in a variety of top business publications including BusinessWeek, Fortune, Forbes, Crain’s Chicago Business, and Business 2.0, and is a frequent guest speaker at tech industry conferences. In early 2000, he was named one of 25 “E-Champions” by BtoB magazine and was a top 10 finalist for the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.

He has a B.S. in industrial engineering from Northwestern University and has attended the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. Stojka serves on the IIT Board of Trustees and the CSL Board of Overseers.

Bob Tobey

Bob Tobey served as the founding chair of the Department of Computer Science. At the time, he was a leading figure in the research on symbolic computation, the stream of research that led to Mathematica, Maple, Excel, and many other vital utilities that we all use every day. He began this work at IBM and it became the focus of his Ph.D. dissertation in applied mathematics from Harvard. When the IIT administration, prodded by Peter Lykos and the success of the M.S. program in information science based at the computing center, decided to develop a Department of Computer Science, they lured Bob away from Argonne National Laboratory, where he was continuing this research.

Some 30-plus years ago, his life took a totally new direction — he founded Break-throughs in 2000 - look at the website at http://www.break-throughs.com to find more about what he is doing now. He took a new name “Haas” to symbolize this change but has agreed to let us call him “Bob” during this trip back in time, so as not to confuse too many of his old friends.