Eleanor Cawthon

Education

• University of California - Berkeley (Berkeley, CA)

  • Doctoral student in computer science
  • Passed security preliminary exam
  • Coursework major: semi-cooperative behavior in multi-actor systems
  • Inside minor: Computer systems
  • Outside minor: Empirical social systems

• Pomona College (Claremont, CA)

  • Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science with Minor in Mathematics, May 2015
  • GPA: 3.6
  • Pomona College and Harvey Mudd College share a computer science department. I have taken a majority of my computer science and math classes at Harvey Mudd. Please see this document for additional information about grading at Harvey Mudd.

Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

• USENIX student grant to attend the 26th USENIX Security Symposium (2017) Departmental scholarship to attend the 2017 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (2017)

• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program (2016-2020)

• University of California- Berkeley Chancellor’s Fellowship for Graduate Study (2015-2019)

• UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department Excellence Award (2015)

• USENIX grant to attend the 11th USENIX Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (OSDI 2014)

• Pomona College student travel grant to attend OSDI 2014

• Ronald Tileston Prize for outstanding achievement in physics at all class levels (2011-2012)

• Declined:

  • Massechusetts Institute of Technology Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department Harold E. Edgerton Fellowship for Ph.D. students (2015-2016)
  • Columbia University Presidential Fellowship for Ph.D. students (2015-2019)
  • Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne fellowship for Ph.D. students (2015-2016)

Current Research

I am interested in improving agent-based modeling approaches to population simulations for use in improving algoritmic fairness. I supervised three Master’s of Engineering theses developing a reference simulation engine modeling the effects of affirmative action. I am now working on a benchmark for evaluating LLM performance at generating simulation code.

Talks, Posters, and Projects

• “Reversing the Microscope: Characterizing Personal Responses to Personal Information in the Data Broker Economy”. Master’s thesis, forthcoming.
• “Understanding the Space of Internet Censorship”, Lightning Talk at USENIX Security 2017.
• “Group Management with Anonymous Petitions”, senior thesis for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Computer Science. Advised by Tzu-Yi Chen (Pomona College) and Bryan Ford (Yale University). 2015.
• “Low-Latency Dissent”, poster presentation at OSDI 2014.

Service and Teaching

Graduate Student Instructor: Spring 2021 - Fall 2021, Spring 2025 UC Berkeley: Berkeley, CA

• Fall 2021: Taught both 45-student sections of CS 294-082 Experimental Design for Machine Learning, a graduate level seminar taught by Gerald Friedland on the information theoretic underpinnings of deep neural networks. Slides available here.
• Spring 2021: Taught one section of CS 162 Operating Systems and Systems Programming, an upper division undergraduate course.
• Ran weekly office hours and contributed to course discussion platforms (Piazza/bCourses/Canvas/Ed)
• Created exam questions and graded problem sets and exams
• Conducted design reviews with student project groups
• Organized and hosted a weekly coffee hour for underrepresented students

Graduate Student Researcher (GSR) Fall 2021 - Spring 2024 University of California: Berkeley, CA

• Assisted Gerald Friedland in the supervision and training of the Masters of Engineering thesis projects connected to my doctoral research.
• In 2021-2022, I mentored the Masters of Engineering projects of Team Attola (Angela Li, Kan Liu, and Jiaye Wang) and Team Chironex (Yi-Chu Chang, William Chen, and Po-Yu Chou).
• In 2022-2023, I mentored M.Eng. students Guohui Guan, Chaomin Li, Yunzhe Liu, and Ruihua Sui.
• In 2023-2024, mentored M.Eng. students Kasey Lee, Kaijie Jin, and Yihong Xu.

Network Manager: Summer 2017 - Summer 2020 Cloyne Court, a Berkeley Student Cooperative house: Berkeley, CA

• Managed the internet connection for 200 students across two buildings
• Expanded wireless mesh network to two additional buildings as redundant backup
• Maintained a DNS server, mail server (postfix + sympa), chat server, blog, and file server (GitHub), all self-hosted in Docker containers on physical servers I also managed
• Designed training materials for, taught, managed and mentored a rotating crew of 6 undergrads to help with this.

Computer Science Mentoring: Fall 2014 - Spring 2015 Pomona College Computer Science Department and Claremont ACM-W chapter: Claremont, CA

• Fall 2014: Involved in creating an inter-collegiate mentoring program for new and underrepresented students in computer science at the Claremont Colleges
• Beginning in Spring 2015, I met individually and in groups with these students to provide resources, advice, and camaraderie.

Computer Science Teaching Assistant: Fall 2013 - Spring 2015 Pomona College and Harvey Mudd Computer Science Departments: Claremont, CA

• Tutoring and grading for the Algorithms (3 semesters) and Computer Systems (1 semester) courses
• Conduct group tutoring sessions for three hours per week
• Graded 30 students’ proof-based problem sets per week

Other Research Experience

Yale University: Summer 2014 New Haven, CT

• Worked in Bryan Ford’s research group on Dissent, a distributed, anonymous, accountable communication protocol.
• Designed and implemented various accountability and performance mechanisms in a new low latency variation.
• Presented a poster documenting the work so far at OSDI ’14.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Joint Genome Institute: Summer 2013 Berkeley, CA and Walnut Creek, CA

• Researched gene sequence data formats optimized for massively parallel high performance computing.
• Worked with bioinformatics researchers to investigate HDF5-based alternatives to FAST* file formats.
• Modified the gene sequence alignment tool used internally at the JGI to support parallelized access to SeqDB files.
• Poster presentation

Inktank (now owned by Red Hat): Summer 2012 Los Angeles, CA

• Designed and implemented a fault-tolerant, distributed, multi-writer key-value store using the Ceph object store
• Tested and documented latency, throughput, and scalability
• Write-Up
• Code

University of Utah: Summer 2010 Salt Lake City, UT

• Worked with Ganesh Gopalakrishnan on concurrency and formal verification
• Used Microsoft CHESS to formally verify programs that used various synchronization objects in .NET 3.5
• Implemented and benchmarked parallel matrix multiplication algorithms using .NET 4.0’s Task Parallel Library
• Documented the research in a blog

Selected Class Projects

StackOverflow Closed Question Predictor (Fall 2013)

• Implemented two of the modified naïve Bayes algorithms described by Rennie et. al.’s 2003 paper “Tackling the Poor Assumptions of Naive Bayes Text Classifiers”
• Used the classifiers to predict whether and why StackOverflow questions were closed based on analysis of post titles
• Achieved results comparable to those reported in the closed Kaggle competition from which the dataset was drawn.

Arduino Color Sensor (Spring 2012)

• Created a color sensor that would light an RGB LED to match the color of an input card
• Video demonstration