Amr Awadallah Blog

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 me, it feels like Halo 2, just better, which is good actually.

I like the new equipment stuff, especially the bubble shield, not only does it look good, but it has very tactical uses. I saw this guy drop off the bubble shield and wait inside it with a shotgun, as soon as somebody steps in he drops them.

I also like the man canon, and the 3rd person view while carrying large weapons. I don’t like that weapon pickup and reload is not X any more, I keep doing that by mistake, similarly I don’t like that Y is not what you use for vehicle/turret entry (both are the right bumper now). That will take some time to get used to.

The graphics are much crisper than Halo 2, but still not what I expected, I expected it to look better than this, especially after the nice trailers they had released. Only the water looks good, but other textures seem low res to me, not what I expect from a next gen console. The under water sounds are just perfect and I love that.

— amr

This happened to me, and to many other students (at Stanford at least).

Facebook’s initial growth seed was based on an unsolicited spam campaign that they did in fall of 2005. What they did is crawl the university for email addresses of students then registered them en mass and sent them unsolicited registration emails like this one below:

Subject: confirmation email
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 2005 05:27:57 -0700
From: facebook.com
To: aaa@stanford.edu

Aaaa Aaaa,

You are receiving this email because you just registered at facebook.com. To complete your registration, please follow the link printed below:

http://stanford.facebook.com/confirmation.php?id=216914&code=164252308

Thanks!
the facebook team

Notice that the URL in the email is stanford.facebook.com, this tricked me into believing they were affiliated with Stanford, so when I saw that my name was wrong in the email (it is says “Aaaa Aaaa”), I went to the site and completed the registration to fix my name.

Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a very nice service and I love their UI, but last time I checked SPAM was illegal in the US, so they gotta pay up. Let me know if you can help :).

— amr