Class Notes

Started with 6 yrs tech service Union Carbide Plastics, independent since then, mostly in plastics industry, especially food/bev packaging, agriculture and construction, wrote books and worked at factory level in plastics manufacture and processing.  No ownership, investment, sales or money stuff.  Married (twice), three children (construction manager, househusband, and life-coach); 2 grands (i-padders, little true interaction).  Traveled very widely,  Seven years grad school at Columbia in Anthropology, including living in Argentina.and Bolivia. Basedin East, moved 2007 to Sun Francisco (East Bay).  Current big interest is understanding worldwide negative image of plastics despite their nontoxicity and enviropositive contributions (has to do with fear of science and related need to believe impossible).  Kept up music activity (singing, choral compositions), hundreds of poems (most neoformal) and one short story, and art work (oil, watercolor).   

Shaun D'Souza completed his BS from Cornell University with a Double Major in Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Cum Laude Honors in 2003. He completed his MSE in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department in 2005. Shaun has over 12 years experience in AI, ML, Software Engineering, R&D, Business. He has a varied experience in Computer Science and Engineering. Shaun has worked in Software/Business researching machine learning, compilers, algorithms and systems. He has published papers and been granted a patent.

Shaun has developed ML algorithms for supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. He has designed and implemented a compiler for an object-oriented language similar to Java. Shaun is exploring a broader sandbox ecosystems enabling for AI. He is investigating ML algorithms on unstructured content form on the web. He is evaluating the intersection of Software and Business in the context of AI, Globalization, CSR and the Last mile with an emphasis on ML algorithms in the broader web.

As part of his Graduate research, Shaun worked in the Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. They developed a full-system architectural simulator called M5 in C++ and Python. Their research on PicoServer was published in the Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) conference. Additionally, he worked on developing pronunciation scores for phoneme, word and phrase using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) and statistical language models (Ngram) based on textual data from the Gutenberg project for speech recognition on CMU Sphinx. Shaun has developed ML Algorithms in Matlab for supervised learning (neural networks, naive bayes, decision trees, support vector machines), unsupervised learning (k-means clustering, dimensionality reduction) and reinforcement learning.

Cornell’s Computer Science curriculum is primarily taught in the Java programming language. As part of their CS project course, they developed a compiler for an object-oriented language similar to Java called Irish Coffee. The Compiler was developed in Java with more than 15K LOC to support lexical analysis, parsing, type checking, optimizations and code generation. Shaun has completed coursework in Machine Learning, Advanced Compilers, Algorithms, Graphics and Operating Systems. He is a recipient of the Gates Millennium Scholarship from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Shaun has worked with some of the top companies in the Software industry including, Accenture, Wipro, Tata Group, Intel and IBM. On graduation, he interned with IBM in the Sony Toshiba IBM Design Center. At Intel, he worked in the Ultra Mobility Group. At Wipro, he worked in the CTO Office on HOLMES. Shaun has published papers and been granted a patent on Information Extraction and Syntactic Parsing. The Granted Patent in AI, ML (NLP) is on a System and method for extracting information from unstructured text. He received Best Pragati at Wipro for his poster presentation on Eclipse CDT code analysis and unit testing. The paper was PeerJ’s Top 5 most viewed article in Programming Languages, 2018. His papers on Evolving system bottlenecks in the as a service cloud, Cognitive Architecture for a Connected World and Parser extraction of triples in unstructured text are published in arXiv.

Shaun has published a paper on Holistic generational offsets: fostering a primitive online abstraction for human vs. machine cognition in arXiv. He has filed patents on Sentence phrase generation, Textual entailment and an Artificial intelligence and machine learning based conversational agent. His paper on Defining a Sandbox for Responsible AI was in SSRN’s Top 100 in CompSciRN: Artificial Intelligence, 2018. His paper on LSTM neural network for textual ngramswas SSRN’s Top Ten download list for CompSciRN: Artificial Intelligence, Dec, 2018. He has presented in Knowledge Sharing Sessions, Expert Talks and Brown Bag sessions on AI and ML.

I am a Professor of Research at Weill Cornell in Genetic Medicine and the Associate Director of the Belfer Gene Therapy Core Facility. I manage multiple projects ranging from gene therapies for metabolic disorders, eye disease and coronary function to vaccines for addictive drugs and infectious agents, each with the goal of clinical development. My current projects include clinical trials for a vaccine to treat cocaine addiction and a gene therapy for Alzheimer's disease. I share direction of the GMP manufacturing facility at Weill Cornell where we produce our clinical trial drugs. In prior positions I directed a lab for the design and development of several candidate prophylactic and therapeutic HIV vaccines as well as a candidate prostate cancer therapeutic vaccine, each of which went to clinical trial. Needless to say we still have a ways to go for many of these targets.

I am married to my grad school sweetheart, Lisa Wilson, who is a PhD patent attorney and we have 3 science loving kids, two went to Cornell and the third works in a lab at Cornell.

Fernando Correa Sevilla

Quito, 1976

     An innovative leader with extensive experience mainly in the construction industry as well as in different business sectors. Fernando has high skills as a civil engineer primarily in construction and sustainable design industry, as a LEED green associate and president of the Ecuadorian Green Building Council, he demonstrates his engagement with the environment and implementing sustainable practice to fight climate change, always pushing for a conscious and sustainable construction industry in Ecuador, his home country.

Fernando is a proud alumnus of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute where he obtained his undergrad degree in civil engineering. In Cornell University he attended grad school, specializing in project management and engineering systems. Followed by an MBA in the San Francisco University of Quito. On 2017 he finished the General Management Program on Harvard Business School.

He has achieved notorious positions in companies as president of Servialimentos a bamboo product company, director of Texsa textiles, Enkador, Inmosint, the three companies on the textile industry, he is the general manager of Gonzyola a real estate company and executive president of URGENPRO a project management company. In addition to this, he was a member of Nexgen of the Family Bussines Network (FBN) Quito-chapter, member as well of “Por Manabí” project of the NGO ayuda directa created to support the reconstruction of the villages damaged in the earthquake of 2016 that occurred in Ecuador.

Therefore, for his extensive construction and managing experience, he was appointed CEO of Sevilla y Martínez SEMAICA, on April of 2019. After working for more than 18 years in the company and learning the process from the beginning to the end, he was finally prepared to assume leadership of the most important construction company in Ecuador.

SEMAICA began operations in 1956 and for 63 years has maintained its leadership in the industry due to the wise combination of a modern vision of service and a strict work philosophy. From small scale family residences to huge hydro powers, the company has constructed all kinds of high-quality buildings and works that endure through the pass of time in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. Fernando engaged with these lifelong principles of hard work and innovation assure a new era of growth and development to the company.

The 3rd edition of my book "Fundamentals of Photonics", coauthored with Bahaa Saleh, has just been published.

At 1370 pages, it is printed in two volumes: Vol. 1: Optics  &  Vol. 2: Photonics.

The 1st edition appeared in 1991 and the second edition appeared in 2007.