Hi, my name is

Aydan!

I build scalable systems for the future.

As a computer science student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I’m deeply passionate about distributed systems and cloud computing. Through my internships, research experiences, and projects, I’ve learned a lot about systems at all levels - I’m excited to continue exploring this field in the future!

Resume

About Me

My academic concentration in systems, networking, and security has allowed me to cultivate a strong foundation in these areas. Through my coursework and research, I’ve achieved proficiency in distributed systems, parallel programming, and systems programming. Outside the classroom, my internship with Microsoft Cloud Security has provided me valuable, hands-on experience in building real-world systems.

Furthermore, as a lead CA for Software Design Lab at UIUC, I facilitate communications between students and course staff, head the redesign of lecture content, and mitigate other logistical bottlenecks. Stay tuned for future updates!

Here are a few languages and technologies I am currently working with:
  • C/C++
  • Python
  • SQL
  • Tensorflow/PyTorch
  • CUDA
  • C#

Experience

Software Engineering Intern - Microsoft Azure Networking
May 2023 - August 2023

I also interned with the Azure Physical Networks Team, under Microsoft Azure Core.

  • Redesigned internal device acceptance service (running on 25 clusters and serving 1500+ network devices) by implementing Blob cache and converting service from stateless to stateful, reducing supplemental APIs workload by 91%.
  • Developed internal-facing Blob Storage handler, resulting in improved file processing and enhanced developer experience.
  • Wrote automated unit tests to achieve 100% coverage, enabling detection (and fixes) of repressed bugs within codebase.
Software Engineering Intern - Microsoft Cloud Security
May 2022 - August 2022

I interned with the Azure Anti-Fraud Team, under Microsoft Cloud Security in Redmond, WA.

  • Improved fraud detector performance by ~5% by building and deploying an end-to-end Azure Data Factory pipeline.
  • Implemented data ingestation scripts in U-SQL to periodically generate features for machine learning models.
  • Enhanced functionality of internal fraud detection tools to display more comprehensive fraud metrics, providing stronger fraud evidences.

Research

Research Assistant - Distributed Protocols Research Group
August 2022 - April 2023

I am currently working as a research assistant with the Distributed Protocols Research Group, at UIUC.

  • Designed fault-tolerant distributed ML training platforms for model and data parallelism across GPUs, minimizing training time for transformer-like deep learning models.
  • Enhanced functionality of internal memory allocators to analyze advantages of custom-placed operators (step time and memory), as opposed to Tensorflow’s native placement.
  • Conducted computational experiments to evaluate Tensorflow memory allocation at varying transformer model sizes.
Research - Digital Humanities Project
May 2021 - June 2022
Our Poster!

Working alongside two other undergraduate students, I developed a program to effectively analyze images and determine the skin color of lead actors - this would be used to perform social critiques of film.

  • Developed scripts to detect faces within moving and still images through computer vision algorithms in Google MediaPipe and OpenCV2.
  • Implemented non-negative matrix factorization and principal component analysis to extract skin colors from facial patches, which were used to calculate average skin color.
  • Wrote multithreaded Python webscrapers to generate testing/training datasets by batch-downloading sets of 1000+ images.

Education

2021 - 2024 (est)
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science (Systems, Networking, and Security)
Unviersity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
GPA: 3.9 out of 4.0

I presented the following poster at the Undergraduate Research Symposium:

Coursework:

  • Distributed Systems, Operating Systems, Computer Security, Cloud Storage Systems, Communication Networks, Database Systems, Parallel Programming, System Programming, Computer Architecture
  • Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Probability and Statistics
  • Algorithms and Models of Computation, String Algorithms, Data Structures and Algorithms
  • Linear Algebra with Computational Applications, Numerical Methods, Calculus III
  • Programming Languages and Compilers

Projects

Distributed Inference Platform
Python Tensorflow Distributed Systems
Distributed Inference Platform
A simple distributed inference platform, similar to Ray.
Distributed File System
Python Distributed Systems Operating Systems
Distributed File System
A simple distributed file system, similar to Hadoop's Distributed File System.
Hosted Trie
Python Javascript Full-Stack Flask Node.JS
Hosted Trie
A full-stack trie application, (previously) hosted online and allowing users to modify the trie globally, while preserving atomicity.
Named Entity Recognition
Python Natural Language Processing Web Scraping Data Cleansing
Named Entity Recognition
Source code for basic NER project - scrape Google and return types of entities found.
Assignment Aggregator App
Python Selenium Webscraping Data Cleansing
Assignment Aggregator App
A CLI-based tool, designed to assist UIUC students with managing deadlines across websites.
OpenInder
Python Javascript React Full-Stack
OpenInder
Combining Open Source and Tinder together to match people and open source projects.
Demo

Get in Touch

My inbox is always open. Whether you have a question, recruiting opportunity, or just want to say hi, I’ll try my best to get back to you ASAP!
Contact Me!