Kristin Stephens

About Me

I am a Computer Science PhD student at UC Berkeley, started August 2010. My Master's research work is in Computer Networking with Vern Paxson. My PhD research interest is in Online Learning, advised by Armando Fox and Marti Hearst. Specifically I want to find ways to best utilize Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) data and then create tools for professors to also best utilize it to improve education. I sit in the Berkeley institute of Design (BiD) lab.

I volunteer as a role model at Techbridge, an after school program to inspire girls in technology, science, and engineering. This year I am also serving as the computer science co-president for WICSE.

I graduated summa cum laude from University of Maryland (UMD) receiving my B.S. in Computer Science. I dabbled in various research areas while at Maryland including: software engineering with FindBugs, artificial intelligence by applying genetic algorithms to swarm intelligence, and networking.

Publications

• Kristin Stephens, Shaddi Hasan, and Yahel Ben-David. 2012. MultiWAN: WAN Aggregation for Developing Regions. In ACM DEV 2nd Annual Symposium on Computing for Development. ACM DEV '12.
• Brian Cole, Dan Hakim, Dave Hovemeyer, Reuven Lazarus, William Pugh, and Kristin Stephens. 2006. Improving your software using static analysis to find bugs. In Companion To the 21st ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Object-Oriented Programming Systems, Languages, and Applications. OOPSLA '06.

Teaching

• University of CA, Berkeley
  • CS194-25 Special topics: Building Your Next Generation Education Technologies (Fall 2012, Teaching Assistant/Co-Instructor)
  • EE122 Introduction to Communication Networks (Fall 2011, Teaching Assistant)
• University of MD, College Park
  • CMSC198K The Science Behind Computing (Fall 2009, Teaching Assistant)
  • CMSC131 Object Oriented Programming I (Spring 2008, Teaching Assistant)
  • CMSC106 Intro to C Programming (Fall 2007, Teaching Assistant)

Affiliations

• Association for Computing Machinery

Honors and Awards

• National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
• UC Berkeley Chancellor's fellowship
• Outstanding Undergraduate of 2009 for The College of Computational, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences (UMD)
• UMD CS Department Teaching Excellence Award for an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

Misc

I post articles and interesting stuff I find on the Internet to my Google plus account.

I have several hobbies to balance out my grad school life. I make origami earrings (that can be seen here) and crochet. I also swing dance. Great dance venues include: Lindy on Sproul and Dancer's Den.

My craft stuff and other hobbies can also be seen on my blog Hobby Sanity.