Today we were thrilled to host Bobby Simidcheiva (PhD ‘15) and Vicky Manfredi (PhD ‘09) from Raytheon BBN! They gave a presentation about their work with BBN and held an open Q&A with students after the event.

Raytheon BBN kindly sponsored this lunch. In addition two our two guests and a recruiter, 16 graduate students, 2 undergraduates, and one staff member attended. After the event ended, some of the students who attended graciously stepped outside for a photo in the wind:

Abstract

Have you been wondering about what life is like after school? We are here to help. We are two recent PhD computer science graduates from UMass Amherst now working as researchers at Raytheon BBN Technologies. In this talk, we will give you some background about BBN, share with you how we found jobs there, describe what working at BBN is like, and answer your questions about networking for jobs and transitioning to a non-academic environment.

Raytheon BBN Technologies has been providing advanced technology research and development for over 60 years. From the ARPANET, to the first email, to the first stereo digital mammography system, through the first metro network protected by quantum cryptography, BBN has consistently transitioned advanced research to produce innovative, practical technology solutions for our customers. Today, BBN’s innovations allow for ubiquitous networking and speech understanding in any language or format. BBN scientists and engineers continue to take risks and challenge conventions to create new and fundamentally better solutions.

Bios

Vicky Manfredi is Network Scientist at BBN Technologies. Her current work focuses on designing efficient and secure communication protocols for ad hoc and heterogeneous networks. She also works on problems at the frontier between computer networks and machine learning. Her prior work has looked at the trade-off between incurring some cost (such as control packets or energy) to obtain updated information about the network as conditions change, versus the utility of that information for informing behavior. Vicky received a Ph.D and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and a B.A. in Computer Science and Neuroscience from Smith College. Prior to BBN, Vicky was a Computing Innovation Fellow at Boston University.

Bobby Simidchieva is a research scientist in the the Distributed Systems group at BBN. Since joining BBN last year, she has primarily been working on quantifying and characterizing cyber security risks. Through modeling distributed systems and the defenses available for deployment, as well as the various attacks that adversaries could execute, we can predict what attacks are feasible and attach metrics such as cost and security to different defenses. In previous work, Bobby has worked on the modeling and analysis of complex human-intensive systems. Her dissertation focused on the explicit specification of variation in families of human-intensive systems to make their modeling more precise and facilitate their subsequent analysis. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and holds dual B.S. degrees in computer science and computational science from the State University of New York, College at Brockport.