Ramierez named Outstanding Graduate Student

The College of Engineering held its Graduate Student Awards reception on Wednesday, March 20, 2013. As part of the reception, an award was presented to the most outstanding graduate student in each program as selected by the faculty within the department. Representing the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, doctoral student Andres Ramirez was named the 2013 Computer Science and Engineering Outstanding Graduate Student. CSE Professor Betty Cheng is his advisor.

Andres Ramirez is a doctoral candidate at MSU, where he is enrolled in the Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) program. Andres conducts research at the cross-section of software engineering, self-adaptive systems, and evolutionary algorithms. His particular focus is on harnessing evolutionary algorithms to identify and address sources of run-time uncertainty in self-adaptive systems. His paper describing the application of genetic algorithms to online and on-demand decision-making in self-adaptive systems won a Best Paper Award at the 2009 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing, June 2009. In addition, his co-authored paper describing the evolution of robust data distribution techniques was also nominated for a Best Paper Award at the 2009 IEEE Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, July 2009. Thus far, Andres has published 18 research papers on his work while at MSU. In the past year, Andres interned at both Citadel Investment Group and at Google, where he applied his software engineering and evolutionary algorithm knowledge to address challenging industry problems such as improving assurance in financial market analysis tools and clustering related offer promotions based on aggregated user engagements, respectively. Andres has also been elected as a graduate representative to several different faculty committees, such as advisory committee and graduate studies research committee, serving some multiple times over a total of three years. In addition, Andres has also volunteered for recruiting and administrative duties, including serving as student chair for two years in the MSU Alfred P. Sloan engineering program focused on recruiting and guiding minority graduate students in various engineering disciplines.

(Date Posted: 2013-03-25)