Now a Distinguished Engineer at Google, Tushar Chandra, PhD’93, says his second project at Google was closely related to his thesis work on failure detectors. “I couldn’t have succeeded as well as I did at Google without my Cornell experience,” he said. “I was very proud of my thesis since it took me right to the edge of my capabilities.” Chandra presented his thesis work at two major computing conferences and later was awarded the Edsger W. Dijkstra Prize in Distributed Computing for his research, along with his advisor Sam Toueg and his collaborator Vassos Hadzilacos.
“I learned how to be a researcher as a graduate student – how to do focused thinking on solving interesting problems. I knew Cornell was one of the best graduate programs in computer science in the world but in addition to acquiring technical skills I also learned "soft" skills like writing,” Chandra said.
Chandra is now working in the intersection of machine learning and natural language processing. He started working on machine learning in 2007 and was one of the creators of Sibyl, a large-scale machine learning system widely used within Google. Prior to his work on machine learning, Chandra worked on large-scale distributed systems such as Google’s Bigtable and a fault-tolerant distributed consensus system that is widely used inside Google.
Chandra recently presented as part of the Department of Computer Science’s AI Seminar Lecture and held a Career Conversation with CIS students.