My Name is Reza Shiftehfar. I am a PhD candidate and Research Assistant in Computer Science department of Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
  My undergraduate degree is in Civil Engineering and I am having 3 Masters degrees in Computer Science, Construction Management and Earthquake Engineering. My current research is focused on Cloud Computing and Mobile Devices. I love programming and am enthusiastic about home automation and context awarenesss in order to make life more comfortable.
    Here below you can find my biography:

Reza Shiftehfar

ACADEMIC EDUCATION

 

      PhD in Computer Science
Advisor: Prof. Gul Agha
August 2010-Current (In progress)
 
      Research Area: Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the data centers that provide those services. What makes it interesting is the provided infrastructure where both the data storage and the data processing happen outside the local devices. On the other hand, mobile devices such as smartphones are becoming ubiquitous and we are using them as part of our daily lives. However, the extents to which we use these devices are mainly restricted by their computational power, limited available battery power and storage spaces. As a result, cloud seems to be an ideal solution to extend smartphones boundaries as it provides almost infinite computational power and storage space without consuming much local power. Nowadays, there are more and more companies offering Cloud services. However, there will always be some sensitive or confidential data that companies will never put on public Cloud.
In my research, I am focusing on the possibility of combining public Clouds with local in-house servers to form a Hybric Cloud in order to support cellphone applications. My goal is to be able to combine the power of public Cloud with local private Cloud while respecting a specific arbitrary policy in terms of storing data, accessing data, and performing computations.
 
      MCS in Computer Science
Advisors: Prof. Karrie G. Karahalios and Prof. Feniosky Pena-Mora
January 2009- Ausgust 2010
 
      Research Area: Excessive man-made GreenHouse Gases (GHG) are altering the process in which sun's heat is naturally kept in the atmosphere and immediate actions needed to be taken to reduce the amount of these GHG emissions. On the other hand, Mobile computing systems are becomming ubiquitous. My research focused on using these mobile devices, such as Cellphones and PDAs, to bring social awareness toward excessive man-made GreenHouse Gas emissions. I developed system for tracking products' GreenHouse Gas emissions resulted from their transportation using cell phones and I used visualization techniques to visualize the result in real time. some early results of the system can be viewed at here.
 
      MSc in Civil Engineering-Construction Management
Advisor: Prof. Frank Boukamp
September 2007- May 2009
 
      Dissertation: A Framework for Leveraging Random RFID Clouds for On-site Location Sensing

Abstract:With the increased interest in Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the construction industry and related research efforts, future construction sites can be expected to carry an abundance of RFID tags. These RFID tags at site have the potential to be leveraged for indoor location tracking, thereby replacing expensive infrastructure required by current indoor location tracking systems. This thesis studies the problem of location tracking of a mobile RFID reader on a construction site based on the available RFID tags. The proposed algorithm uses initial recorded data to predict the location of a mobile reader based on the availability of RFID tags in the area and the received signal strength of each tag. The study then evaluates the performance of the proposed system in both computer simulation and real case studies in different types of constructions ranging from office buildings to typical residential structures. Different possible scenarios including failure or removal of several tags, addition of new tags and finally displacement of some of the existing tags are considered during the test cases. The results indicate that the system is not only able to identify the location of the mobile reader but also is adaptive to the mentioned possible alterations in the configuration and location of tags within an RFID tag cloud.
 
      M.Sc. in Civil Engineering- Earthquake Engineering
Advisor: Prof. Abdoreza S. Moghadam
September 2002- September 2006
      Dissertation: "Near-failur Behavior of Fixed Jacket-type Offshore Platforms"
 
      B.Sc. in Civil Engineering
September 1997- September 2002
 
  • Alborz High School:
  • Diploma, Math & Physics Concentrations, September 1993-September 1997

 

Reza Shiftehfar

CERTIFICATES & AWARDS

 

  1. Feng Chen Memorial Award for achievements as a graduate student, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2013
  2. Best Paper Award from IEEE SECON 2012 Conference, Sensor, Mesh, and Adhoc Communications and Networks, 2012
  3. Winner of Illinois Technology Association Programming Challenge at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011
  4. Silver Award in International Sustainable E-Waste Design Competition, 2010
  5. Bronze Award in Sustainable E-Waste Design Competition at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009
  6. Construction Management Association of America (CMAA) Chicago Chapter Award for Achievements as a graduate student, 3 consecutive years: 2008, 2009 and 2010 awards
  7. Global Innovation Tournament Award, Technology Entrepreneur Center, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2008
  8. Certificate in Peta-Scale Programming, National Center for Supercomputing, 2011
  9. Certificate in Proven Algorithmic Techniques for Many-Core Processors (GPU Programming), Virtual school of computational science and engineering, National Center for Science Education (NCSE), Urbana, Illinois, August 6, 2010
  10. Multi-Core Programming Certificate, Universal Parallel Computing Research Centers (UPCRC) Center at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009
  11. Certificate in Foundations of Teaching, Center for Teaching Excellence, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2011

Reza Shiftehfar

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

 

      2013
      Search & Relevance Team Intern
  • Expert Search: Improving Twitter's User Search by introducing Expert Search that was developed based on external knowledge collected from other user's Lists data representing what each users is really known for
  • Quality Control: developing quality metrics to calculate the contribution weight of every user's List in order to prevent outsiders from manipulating the Twitter's User Search results by injecting fake data
      2012
      iOS Team Intern
  • Geo Team: Improving Performance of Apple Maps for iOS
  • Spatial data and Spatial Indexing: Storing spatial data in the Cloud space
  • Cloud Computing: Spatial query execution on Hadoop
      2011
      Software Development Intern
  • Tagin! Engine: An open-source indoor location tracking engine based on existing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth Cloud
  • 3D Tag Cloud: The first interactive 3D Tag cloud for Android devices
      2000- 2007
      Engineering Management & Leadership:
  • Managed the Information Modelling team consisting of 8 engineers
  • Built the infrastructure & provided Building Information Modeling (BIM) as a service
  • Led the team to develop the company’s efficiency & productivity monitoring system
Software Development:
  • Developed the company-wide document management system for designs & drawings
  • Developed the weight-distribution control system for the design of offshore structures
ISO 9001:2000 Internal Auditing

Reza Shiftehfar

MEDIA COVERAGE

 

  1. "Cell phone app can save your life" , WCIA 3 channel, News at 10:00, 10.09.2012
  2. "Smartphone app can aid post-disaster rescue", Engineering at Illinois, 10.04.2012
  3. "Smart Phone App Will Aid Post-Disaster Rescue" , Civil & Environmental Engineering Magazine, 10.04.2012
  4. "Electric Waste Produces Algae for Biofuel", Discovery Channel, Tech News, 05.02.2010
  5. "Student teams score high in International E-Waste Design Competition" ,News Bureaus of Illinois, by Sharita Forrest, 06.08.2010
  6. "Students devise new, creative ways to reuse electronics" ,Daily Illini, The independent Student Newspaper at the University of Illinois since 1871, volume 138, Issue 138, 04.17.2009,
  7. “Algae gworth device made from computer parts” BIOMASS Magazine, by Lisa Gibson, 05.20.2010

Reza Shiftehfar

COMPUTER SKILLS

 

Programming Languages:
  • Object Oriented Languages:
        Java (Android, Hadoop, VTK & Processing), C++, Turbo Pascal
  • Functional Programming:
        OCAML
  • Others:
        C, Visual Basic, SQL

  • Project Control software:
        Microsoft Project, Primavera Project Planner for the enterprise (P3e), Expedition

    Others:
        Hadoop, Pig Latin, HBase, PostgreSQL, PostGIS, MySQL, ArcGIS, Mathematica, Matlab, Linux/Windows/Mac OS, Android/iOS, ANSYS, HTML, CSS, AutoCAD & REVIT Architecture

Reza Shiftehfar

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

 

Academic Training Courses:
  1. Teaching Assistant for CS241 - System Programming, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Fall 2013
  2. Teaching Assistant for CS423 - Operating System Design, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Fall 2012
  3. Teaching Assistant for CS411 - Database Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Fall 2011 - Spring 2012
  4. Teaching Assistant for CS425- Distributed Systems, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Summer 2011
  5. Lab Instructor and Session Moderator for Universal Parallel Computing Research Center Summer School on Multicore Programming, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Summer 2010 & Summer 2011
  6. Lab Instructor and Teaching Assistant for CS101 - Introduction to Computing for Engineers and Physical Scientists, Department of Computer Science, University of Illinois, Spring 2010

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