Grace Series Returns for the Fall Season with a Talk from the CS Department Head

For over eight years, the Grace Series has provided a platform for sharing experiences, knowledge, and inspiration. The Grace Series recognizes accomplishments of a diverse group of people from the computing field through empowering talks that aim to foster a sense of community, with a special focus on women in technology. These talks are intended to offer fresh perspectives and different approaches for women to navigate the technology field, whether in academia or industry. Since its inception, 41 speakers have given talks.

The Grace Series at UT Dallas talks bring career interests in computing to the forefront. They feature a wide range of speakers, including UT Dallas Computer Science and Software Engineering alumni, UT Dallas CS/SE professors, and other distinguished females and male technologists in the field. Drs. Pushpa Kumar, Janell Straach, and Linda Morales started the UT Dallas Grace Series after attending the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference (GHC). Through the years, additional faculty members have become involved with the series, including Drs. Bhavani Thuraisingham, Mehra Borazjany, Gity Karami, and Anjum Chida. The conference was fittingly named after the woman who helped pioneer computer programming, Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper. Every year, GHC brings together the community of female and male technologists, highlighting the best minds in computing and spotlighting the contributions of women to computing. The UT Dallas Computer Science Grace Series lectures follow the GHC Conference format.

The start of the Fall 2023 semester sequence of talks was inaugurated by Dr. Ovidiu Daescu. Dr. Daescu is a Professor and Department Head in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Texas at Dallas. He directs the research programs in the Laboratory of Algorithm Engineering and Development (LAED), examining various aspects of Computational Geometry, Algorithms and Optimization, and Bio-Medical Computing, including emerging computational fields, such as computational medicine and intelligent transportation. Dr. Daescu is a member of the ACM, ACM SIGBio, and IEEE-CS. His wisdom and guidance have played a significant role in the success of the Grace Series events.

Dr. Daescu’s Grace Series talk was titled “Random Events and a Lifelong Journey of Learning (and the people that helped along the way).” He spoke about his ongoing journey in pursuit of an academic career, and in particular, the random events that got him started in computer science, and the influencers along the path that led to where he is now. He shared the chance events that got him to the point where he is now and recounted the main drivers of his past and current research work, and the contribution of the amazing students with whom he has had the opportunity to work.

He began his presentation by talking about his early formative years growing up in Romania. He discussed how he came from a small town in Romania and how his parents and grandparents heavily influenced him and his strong work ethic. He noted that over time he became both an avid reader and learner. He loved math, history, and writing throughout his childhood. He set his goals high and was very ambitious. His path to where he is now begun at a local middle school. While there, he had big dreams. He planned a path involving aerospace engineering as a means to get to the moon and beyond. While there, several chance encounters led him to attend a school outside of where he lived.

A visit from an acquaintance brough to his attention a school that was much better than the local high school that he was meant to attend – this was Dr. Daescu’s first random event. This school, the Tudor Vladimirescu Military High School, accepted students by means of competitive entrance exams. After much study, Dr Daescu took the exam and placed 12^th out of about 200 admitted students. Supported by comments by a beloved teacher at his middle school, he convinced his reluctant parents that he should attend this STEM focused military school. His experiences at this school served to nourish his ambitions to excelled academically. One of the important life lessons he learned there was that no matter how clever you believe you are, there are always many others cleverer than you. But by hard work, you can rise above the rest.

The overarching lesson learned from his high school years was to be aware of one’s limits and capabilities. “Learning your limits and understanding what you can do and what you cannot do is very important in life. My personality had always informed me that the sky was the limit. But then I realized the sky is really, really far away and my limit was actually much closer to earth!” Upon graduating from military high school, Dr. Daescu went to the Technical Military Academy for his college education. It too had exam-based admissions and was highly selective. To be accepted for admission, he had to place well in geometry, algebra, and physics, which he ultimately did.

At the Technical Military Academy, which he entered in 1985 ranked first amongst admitted students, he had to select a specialization. A chance conversation with a fellow student, who urged him to go into computer science as the field constituted the future, made him abandon aerospace engineering in favor of computer science and automation – this constituted Dr. Daescu’s second major random event. At this point, Dr. Daescu had not even heard of computers and computer programming. He subsequently spoke with a professor at the college who suggested that his selection of computer science was not wise, given that in this field one would have to keep learning for the rest of his life to keep up with the fast paced changes. But this was precisely why Dr. Daescu chose this field. When given this advice, Dr, Daescu responded along the line “I really like that because I’m not going to be bored. With computer science, I will be constantly learning, which is something I like. I want to be challenged. I want to go into a field that changes and is dynamic.” And he was right; there have been lots of changes in the world of computer science over the past 30 years. Consequently, Dr. Daescu had to evolve from math and physics into computer programming. It was not an easy transition for him, but he was very passionate about programming at the college level. He joined his school programming team and did very well in national programming competitions.

Dr. Daescu graduated from the Technical Military Academy in 1991. He noted that during his college years, he had great inspirational teachers who became his mentors, with some having remained lifelong friends. He noted “Even now, when I go back to my country, I still get in touch with those who are still alive. And sometimes I choose to just send an email to see how they are doing. They had a huge impact on me in more than academics but also in life. He went on to talk about three professors who were inspirational to him: Maria Batinetu Giurgiu, Victor Patriciu, and George Georgescu. Dr. Daescu’s thesis was in expert systems, which was a subfield of AI and now part of ML. He subsequently began his professional career as a lecturer at the Technical Military Academy (ATM) where he taught until 1995.

The third influential event of his life was in December 1989, when the Romanian revolution happened, which allowed him to consider leaving Romania for a higher level education in a western country. After learning to speak English, Dr. Daescu applied to several universities in the United States. In 1995, he entered the University of Notre Dame, where he enrolled in their Computer Science and Engineering PhD Program. In 1997, while student at Notre Dame, his family grew with the birth of his son. During his time studying for his PhD, his main area of research was computational geometry, and parallel algorithms and architectures. His time there was very stimulating. He was surrounded by great colleagues and a supportive faculty. He fondly remembers his teachers and their high research standards, including Danny Z. Chen, his PhD advisor, and Petter Kogge, who supported his research on parallel algorithms for processing in memory architectures. Dr. Daescu still has a still working toy prototype of the NASA Sojourner Mars rover, that Kogge gifted Daescu’s son after Sojourner’s landing on Mars.

The fourth influential event was joining UT Dallas in 2000. He chose UT Dallas because it was a growing university. Dr. Daescu noted “Growth Brings opportunities.”

He mentioned that throughout his career, wherever he went he had great colleagues, and UT Dallas was no exception. He also spoke about how amazing the UT Dallas students were.

In his early years at UT Dallas, he was supported by Drs. Gopal Gupta, B Prabhakaran, S.Q. Zhang, Klaus Truemper, and D.Z. Du. He also singled out Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham as an inspirational motivator for his academic life, and Dr. Gopal Gupta and the current ECS Dean, Dr. Stephanie Adams, as the main UT Dallas enablers in his academic career path. He stated that his research goal was to come up with the provable best results for the problems he studied. “I want to solve problems, but not just solve some problems and get some results. I want to prove in some way that you cannot do better than me. Or otherwise, make it so hard for you to do better than me.” He went on to say, “If I publish a result in a paper and somebody does better in six months, I don’t like it. If you beat me in 10 years, I will work on it to do better. That is my goal in research.” He noted that in recent years he has become more practical because “I want to see these theorems on which I have been working being put to work.” Dr, Daescu concluded his talk by sharing a life lesson that has served him well through the years: “Reach for the stars and see where that takes you.”

Since the inception of the UT Dallas Grace Series in the spring of 2015, a total of forty inspiring women and men have spoken, including:

Bhavani Thuraisingham, Louis A. Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor, UT Dallas CS Professor, and Executive Director of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) (click here for her story)
Lily Wu, UT Dallas CS Professor and Director of the Data Communication and Data Management (DCDM) Laboratory (click here for her story)
I-Ling Yen, UT Dallas CS Professor (click here for her story)
Ranran Feng, UT Dallas CS Professor (click here for her story)
Sanda Harabagiu, UT Dallas CS Professor, Erik Jonsson School Research Initiation Chair, and Director of the UT Dallas Human Language Technology Research Institute (HLTRI) (click here for her story)
Rym Zalila-Wenkstern, UT Dallas CS Professor and Director of the Multi-Agent and Visualization Systems lab (click here for her story)
Inga H. Musselman, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost for The University of Texas at Dallas (click here for her story)
Jo Zhang of Fujitsu Laboratories of America (click here to read her story),
Farokh Bastani, UT Dallas CS Professor, Excellence in Education Chair, and Director of the UT Dallas site of the NSF Net-centric and Cloud Software and Systems Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (NSF NCSS I/UCRC) (click here to read his story)
Peggy Shadduck, Director of both the Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) STEM Institute and the Dallas/North Texas STEM Degree Accelerator Program (click here to read her story)
Lymari Ames of Cisco Systems (click here to read her story)
Romelia Flores, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor (click here to read her story)
Jill Blanchar, a Bank of America Information Security Executive (click here to read her story)
Lisa Frey, State Farm Scrum Master (click here to read her story)
Kimberly Snipes, USAA, VP, Chief Information Officer (click here to read her story)
Catherine Walsh, Senior Vice President and General Manager of Loss Prevention for Johnson Controls’ Tyco Retail Solutions
Nimmi Kannankutty, Deputy Division Director in the Division of Graduate Education (DGE) at the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Karen Mazidi, UT Dallas CS Professor (click here to view her slides from her Grace Series Talk titled “Discovering Your Strengths”)
Grace Kaldawi, Senior Software Engineer for Capital One Auto Finance, Amazon Web Services Certified Solutions Architect, and UT Dallas CS Alumnus (click here to read more)
Sydeaka Watson, Senior Data Scientist at Korelasi Data Insights, LLC, an independent analytics consulting company (click here to read more)
Ewa Musial, Senior Software Engineer at Blackhawk Network (click here to read more or click here to view slides from her presentation)
Janell Straach, Rice University CS Professor, former UT Dallas CS professor, and one of the Grace Series founders (click here to read more or click here to view slides from her presentation)
Uni Yost, CEO/Founder of GoAskJay (click here to read more or click here to view slides from her presentation)
Smita Bakshi, President and Co-Founder of zyBooks (click here to read more or click here to view slides from her presentation)
Bhavani Thuraisingham, Louis A. Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor, UT Dallas CS Professor, and Executive Director of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) (click here to watch her talk)
Betty Stewart, Provost, Executive Vice-President for Academic Affairs, and tenured Professor of Chemistry at the University of North Texas at Dallas (click here to watch her talk)
Neeti Khaitan Gupta, President, and CEO of Accelerate Consulting Inc. (click here to watch her talk)
Juliet G. Odima, CSM, CSPO, Executive Director, STEAM Achievers Associate Vice President, and Director, School of Data Science and Analytics, Colaberry Inc. (click here to watch her talk)
Seda Mauer, Digital Accessibility Consultant at Seda Maurer Consulting (click here to watch her talk)
Shobana Radhakrishnan, Director of Engineering for Android TV at Google (click here to watch her talk)
Stephanie Adams, UT Dallas Erik Jonsson School Dean and Lars Magnus Ericsson Chair at The University of Texas at Dallas (click here to watch her talk)
Elisa Bertino, a Samuel D. Conte Professor of Computer Science Cyber2Slab at Purdue University (click here to watch her talk)
Fanny Dunagan, CEO & LinkedIn Content Strategist at Pathlynks (click here to watch her talk)
Tamara Bassam, Program Committee member for the DFW Alliance of Technology and Women (Click here to watch her talk)
Daphne Yao, Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, Elizabeth and James E. Turner Jr. ’56 Faculty Fellow and CACI Faculty Fellow (click here to watch her talk)
Maral Mesmakhosroshahi, Deep Learning Researcher at Microsoft, and Founder and President of Iranian Women in Computing, a nonprofit organization supporting Iranian women in tech in the United States (click here to watch her talk)
Bhavani Thuraisingham, Louis A. Beecherl Jr. Distinguished Professor, UT Dallas CS Professor, and Executive Director of the UT Dallas Cyber Security Research and Education Institute (CSI) (Click here to watch her talk)
Dr. Ling Liu, Professor in the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology (click here to watch her talk)
Saritha Reddy, Cybersecurity Leader and Director, Product Security at Capital One (click here to view her talk)
Pallabi Parveen, Principal-Big Data Software Engineer at AT&T (click here to watch her talk)
Dr. Ovidiu Daescu, UT Dallas Computer Science Department Head (click here to watch his talk)