Amr Awadallah Blog

Or is that tweeting? not sure.

I will not use it for random status updates (e.g. “I am in bathroom shaving my beard”), rather I will post to it when I want to blog, but I am too lazy to sit down and do a thought-out spell-checked blog entry :), so follow at your own risk.

My twitter id is awadallah, and you can reach it at:

http://twitter.com/awadallah

The RSS is at:

http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/11263102.rss

I also added a twitter badge to the left column of this page.

Cheers,

— amr

It is official, last Sunday (June 17th, 2007) was the graduation ceremony at Stanford, my PhD degree is now conferred and I received the diploma.

You can see photos from the graduation ceremony on flickr at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/awadallah/sets/72157600384912352/

You can read my thesis abstract or download the full dissertation at:

http://vmatrix.awadallah.com

Here are some simple stats:

• 11.5 years from start to finish
• 3 research topics (i.e. changed topic 2 times)
• 6 years on research topic that lead to final thesis (while working at Yahoo)
• 3 great research advisers (Fouad Tobagi, Nick McKeown, and Mendel Rosenblum)
• 5 published papers (3 for final research topic, 2 on previous topics)
• 100 page dissertation
• 4.0 GPA for the course work
• 2 years leave of absence in middle (which is Stanford limit)
• 4 kids, all born during this period 🙂
• 1 startup (VivaSmart/Aptivia, acquired by Yahoo in 2000)
• 5 classes for which I was Teaching Assistant (some were pretty large)
• 50 pounds gained

When I came from Egypt to Stanford in Sept 1995, my goal was to get the PhD and return to my country to teach (I love teaching). That goal changed quickly though, as you can get spoiled very quickly in the Bay Area, it is truly a land of opportunity, cutting edge technology, natural beauty, and very hospitable for immigrants (folks here are from all corners of Earth). After joining Yahoo my career was flourishing, but I still had to get the PhD, it is like an Olympic medal, an achievement that I have to do for the sake of achieving it, more than anything else.

To all those that helped me achieve this goal, my deepest thanks from the bottom of my heart.

Cheers,

— amr

For the benefit of readers of my blog whom do not know, I maintain a link blog on Yahoo MyWeb to which I post interesting links that I come across with a short snippet of commentary (sometimes the commentary is just a key paragraph from within the article, other times it is me commenting).

I add links spanning multiple topics, but specifically tech, search, games, and virtual machines.

You can access my Yahoo! MyWeb Link Blog at:

http://myweb.yahoo.com/myweb?ei=UTF-8&dg=0&friendid=_yTCw2tm3OPXYc0-

and the RSS feed is at:

http://myweb.yahoo.com/mywebrss/user/_yTCw2tm3OPXYc0-/urls.xml

Cheers,

— amr