Gifts to the Computer Sciences Department Annual Fund allow us the flexibility to meet the departments most urgent needs.

By clicking on any of the links below, you can quickly and easily help sponsor undergraduate excellence initiatives, sponsor competitive graduate assistance packages, or provide support for alumni services.

Please remember that your employer may have a matching program that can double, or even triple, your gift to Computer Sciences.

Dina Bitton is an expert in the area of high-performance database management and a successful entrepreneur. She held faculty positions at Cornell University and at the University of Illinois in Chicago.

After achieving recognition in her academic career, she founded three successful software companies, where she defined new markets such as Data Profiling and Enterprise Information Integration. She recently sold her third startup, Callixa, to SAP, where she held the position of Vice President of Technology until 2007.

Dina serves on the advisory board of several technology startups. She was a founding member and Chairman of the Board of the Women's Technology Cluster in San Francisco, a business incubator for women-led technology companies. She is also Chairman of the Board of Digital Divide Data, an internationally acclaimed non-profit that uses a sustainable, private-sector business model to break the cycle of poverty in the developing world.

Dina holds B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Mathematics from the Technion Institute in Israel, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin.

Rakesh Agrawal is a Microsoft Technical Fellow at the newly founded Search Labs. He is the recipient of the ACM-SIGKDD First Innovation Award, ACM-SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award, ACM-SIGMOD Test of Time Award, VLDB 10-Yr Most Influential Paper Award, and the Computerworld First Horizon Award. He is a Member of the National Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of ACM, and a Fellow of IEEE. Scientific American named him to the list of 50 top scientists and technologists in 2003.

Prior to joining Microsoft in March 2006, Rakesh was an IBM Fellow and led the Quest group at the IBM Almaden Research Center. Earlier, he was with the Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill from 1983 to 1989. He also worked for 3 years at India's premier company, the Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd.

He received the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1983. He also holds a B.E. degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from IIT-Roorkee, and a two-year Post Graduate Diploma in Industrial Engineering from the National Institute of Industrial Engineering (NITIE), Bombay.

Rakesh is well-known for developing fundamental data mining concepts and technologies and pioneering key concepts in data privacy, including Hippocratic Database, Sovereign Information Sharing, and Privacy-Preserving Data Mining. IBM's commercial data mining product, Intelligent Miner, grew out of his work. His research has been incorporated into other IBM products, including DB2 Mining Extender, DB2 OLAP Server and WebSphere Commerce Server, and has influenced several other commercial and academic products, prototypes and applications. His other technical contributions include Polyglot object-oriented type system, Alert active database system, Ode (Object database and environment), Alpha (extension of relational databases with generalized transitive closure), Nest distributed system, transaction management, and database machines.

Rakesh has been granted more than 55 patents. He has published more than 150 research papers, many of them considered seminal. He has written the 1st as well as 2nd highest cited of all papers in the fields of databases and data mining (13th and 15th most cited across all computer science as of Februray 2007 in CiteSeer). Wikipedia lists one of his papers as one of the most influential database papers. His papers have been cited more than 6500 times, with more than 15 of them receiving more than 100 citations each. He is the most cited author in the field of database systems. His work has been featured in New York Times Year in Review, New York Times Science section, and several other publications.

Rakesh's new quest is to use Internet to bring the benefits of computing to the underserved.

Dr. Michael Carey is a Senior Engineering Director at BEA Systems, Inc., where he has worked since the Internet startup bubble burst in 2001. He is currently chief architect for BEA's AquaLogic Data Services Platform.

Prior to joining BEA, Dr. Carey spent a dozen years on the University of Wisconsin-Madison computer science faculty, five years as an IBM Almaden database researcher and research manager, and a year and a half at an e-commerce software startup called Propel Software. In addition to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he has taught graduate computer science classes at U.C. Berkeley and Stanford.

Dr. Carey is an ACM Fellow, a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a past recipient of the ACM SIGMOD Edgar F. Codd Innovations Award and ACM SIGMOD Contributions Award. He has co-authored numerous conference and journal articles on topics related to database management systems and middleware.

Matt Korn is an industry veteran with over 25 years of experience building and operating critical portions of the Internet for consumers, businesses, government, and academia.

From 1993 to 2006, Korn served as Executive Vice President, Network and Data Center Operations at America Online, with responsibility for the operation of the network and systems that supported AOL's interactive media products. Korn led the scaling of AOL service operations from 2,000 concurrent users to more than 3.3 million concurrent users. He recruited and managed a staff of over 1,200 network engineers and programmers worldwide who managed the data centers, systems, and network operations underlying AOL, CompuServe, AIM, ICQ, AOL.com, Netscape, and MapQuest, as well as most of the Time Warner web properties.

Korn attended the Bronx High School of Science. He earned a bachelor of arts in computer science at Yale University in 1980. He began his career at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center as a systems engineer and was awarded an IBM Resident Study Fellowship in 1982 to pursue a graduate education in the Computer Sciences department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In addition to his dissertation research in 3-D computer vision, Korn also became heavily involved in the development of early Internet e-mail systems. Korn was awarded a master of science degree in 1984.

Korn returned to the IBM Research Division in 1987 and held a variety of management positions in which he was responsible for the development and operations of NSFnet, which was the major U.S. Internet backbone.

In 1992, he was elected to the Board of Trustees of CREN, the not-for-profit Corporation for Research and Educational Networking, which operated the national BITNET network. From 2001 to 2006 he served on the Board of Directors of the Greater Reston (Virginia) Chamber of Commerce, and also served on the Board of IneedMD, a medical start-up looking to facilitate physician-patient interactions through the Internet.

Korn was pleased to return to the University of Wisconsin in 2005 as a Distinguished Fellow of the E-Business Institute. In 2006 he was invited to join the newly formed Board of Visitors of the Computer Sciences department, and is enjoying the opportunity to reconnect with faculty, alumni, and to meet with new students.

Korn lives in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC with his wife, Cindy, and their three children (when they are not away at college). Their son is studying Psychology at the University of Miami (in Florida) and their oldest daughter is studying Psychology at Virginia Tech. Cindy received a PhD in Molecular Biology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987.

Rick LeFaivre is a Venture Partner at OVP Venture Partners, working out of the firm’s Kirkland, Washington office. His investment focus spans traditional information technology ventures as well as companies working at the intersection of computer science, biology and nanotechnology – the developing field of “Digital Biology.”

Rick has over thirty years of accomplishment as a computer scientist, professor, R&D executive and venture advisor working at leading universities, high-technology companies and venture firms. He has served as VP of the Advanced Technology Group at Apple Computer, as SVP of R&D and CTO at Borland International, and held R&D management positions at Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems and Tektronix. He was a founding Partner of IdeaEdge Ventures, a San Diego-based venture development organization, and the Software Patent Institute, which advises the government on issues related to software patentability. He started his career as a professor in the computer science department at Rutgers University, teaching and carrying out research in artificial intelligence and advanced programming technology, and later served as Executive Director of the Von Liebig Center for Entrepreneurism and Technology Advancement at the University of California, San Diego, focused on the effective commercialization of university-developed technology.

Rick serves as a board advisor to a number of OVP portfolio companies, chairs the University of Wisconsin Computer Sciences Board of Visitors, is a Founding Board Member of the University of Washington Information School, and is a member of the Board of Visitors of the University of Washington College of Engineering. He has published extensively in the computer science literature, has served on a number of industry and academic advisory boards, and has testified before the Congress of the United States on matters of technology policy. Dr. LeFaivre received his A.B. in mathematics from the University of Missouri, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer sciences from the University of Wisconsin.

Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President, Corporate Resources Mike Lehman holds management responsibilities for Sun's finance, information technology, and global business services functions. He also oversees Sun's real-estate functions, Sun's corporate planning and strategy group, and its public policy efforts. He reports directly to Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's chief executive officer and president.

Lehman's credentials include a long and successful association with Sun, both as an executive and, most recently, as a board member. He served on Sun's board in various capacities from 2002 until rejoining the company as CFO in February 2006.

Prior to serving on the board of directors, Lehman was an employee of Sun for 15 years. He was vice president and corporate controller of Sun, responsible for the preparation of the company's public financial information, overseeing Sun's financial staff, and coordinating the company's outlook and budgeting processes. Before this, Lehman was the director of finance and administration for Sun's Asian subsidiaries based in Hong Kong.

Before his career at Sun, Lehman was a certified public accountant with Price Waterhouse and worked in the Milwaukee and San Francisco offices. Lehman serves on the board of directors of the University of Wisconsin Foundation and is former chair of the Dean's Advisory Board of the school of business at Madison. He is also on the board of MGIC Investment Corporation.

Lehman holds a bachelor's degree in business administration, with a major in accounting from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

As a Vice President of Engineering, Udi is responsible for core search. Before joining Google early in 2006, Udi was CEO of A9.com, a Senior VP at Amazon.com, and Yahoo's Chief Scientist. He started working on search algorithms in 1989 with the invention of Suffix Arrays (with Gene Myers) while he was a professor at the University of Arizona, and he was a co-developer of several search packages, including Agrep, Glimpse, WebGlimpse, and Harvest.

He started developing search and other software tools for the web 2 months after Mosaic was announced in 1993, and has continued ever since. He began his academic career at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, where he won a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1985 for his work in the areas of theoretical computer science, computer security, distributed systems, and networks.

Udi holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Washington.

Viggy is the Executive Vice President of Sales and Client Services for the Enterprise Business Unit of Envestnet Asset Management, Inc. Envestnet, a privately-held firm, is a leading provider of wealth management solutions for fee-based advisors and financial institutions. Viggy was one of the co-founders of Oberon Financial Technology, Inc., a firm that used emerging web technologies to efficiently scale the delivery of financial advice to investors.

Prior to Oberon, Viggy was with SpecialtyMD.com, a firm that specialized in helping specialty physicians with the complex process of competitive materials and device procurement using rational data-based selection processes.

Viggy received his MS in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in December 1983. His undergraduate degree, BE (Hons), was in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, India. After completing his MS, Viggy worked at Hewlett Packard, on the then emerging Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture. Subsequently, he worked in various business management roles at Silicon Graphics, Inc., where was the product line manager for high-end computer systems.

During his free time, Viggy likes to read and stay abreast of global news and politics, and tries to stay fit by distance running. Viggy and his family live in Los Altos Hills, CA.

Most recently, Pavan Nigam was the Chairman and CEO of Cendura Corporation which he co-founded in 2002. He grew the company into one of the market leaders for data center automation software and with an installed base that included several Fortune 2000 companies. Cendura was acquired by CA (formerly Computer Associates) in 2006.

Prior to that, he co-founded Healtheon (now HLTH Corporation [HLTH] and WebMD [WBMD] ) in 1996 along with Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics & Netscape Communications, and served as its Chief Technology Officer and General Manager/EVP of its Internet Operations. In his General Management role, he was responsible for Healtheon’s entire suite of products including its Internet-based ehealth services. During his tenure, Mr. Nigam led the company’s transformation from a concept to the world’s largest e-health company approaching a billion dollars in annual revenues, over eight thousand employees and several billions in market capitalization. Mr. Nigam’s role was extensively profiled in the bestseller “The New New Thing” by Michael Lewis.

Prior to Healtheon, Mr. Nigam worked at Silicon Graphics from 1989 to 1996, where he was the General Manager for Silicon Graphic's Interactive Media Group and was responsible for deploying Time Warner, Inc.'s Interactive TV project in Orlando, Florida. The Time Warner Project is widely recognized as the most prominent and sophisticated ITV system ever created and has been the foundation of several advanced technologies being utilized in the Internet era. From 1989 to 1993 he was director of Silicon Graphics' Casevision products. Prior to 1989, Mr. Nigam was employed by Intel Corporation where he led several microprocessor software teams.

Mr. Nigam holds a B.S.E.E. from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur) and an M.S.C.S. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Mr. Nigam serves on several Corporate Boards and Advisory Boards and is also very active in many entrepreneurial initiatives in Silicon Valley and in India. He was a recipient of the Silicon India Leadership Award for 1999. He is currently on the Board of the US India Business Council, and the Board Of Visitors of the University of Wisconsin CS Department.

Peter Spiro is a Technical Fellow working in the Platforms and Services Division at Microsoft. He is currently focused on defining Microsoft's future storage platform, spanning from devices to desktops to enterprises to cloud storage. He is considered one of the world's foremost experts in database internals.

Spiro joined Microsoft in 1994 as a change agent targeted at expanding Microsoft's presence in the commercial database industry. He was one of the principal architects of SQL Server 7.0, which required significant re-architecture to implement its major advances in ease-of-use and automatic tuning. Spiro was also the leader for the WinFS effort, which has evolved into the Integrated Storage vision for the database group.

Spiro worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, as the Technical Director for DEC Rdb and DEC DBMS before coming to Microsoft. He was one of the key contributors to a unique database kernel used as the storage platform for relational database, and Codasyl database systems. He was also a key contributor to the cross-company transition to the Alpha architecture at DEC.

Spiro has a bachelor's degree in Natural Resources Management from Colorado State University and two Master's degrees--Forestry and Computer Science--from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He holds a number of patents related to storage technology.

Before he went to graduate school, Spiro worked for the Peace Corps as a charcoal maker in Mali, West Africa. An avid traveler and hiker, Spiro also serves on the board of the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust.

Steve Scott is the Chief Technology Officer and SVP at Cray Inc., where he has been since 1992 (originally with Cray Research and SGI). Steve was one of the architects of the groundbreaking Cray T3E multiprocessor, focussing on the interconnect and on synchronization and communication mechanisms. He was the chief archtiect of the GigaRing system area network used in all Cray systems in the late 1990s. More recently, Steve was the chief architect of the Cray X1/X1E supercomputers, which combined high performance vector processors with a scalable, globally-addressable system architecture. He was also the chief architect of the next generation Cray “BlackWidow” system, and the architect of the router used in Cray XT3 MPP and the follow-on Baker system. Steve is currently leading the Cray Cascade project, which is part of the DARPA High Productivity Computing Systems program targeting productive, trans-petaflop systems in the 2010 timeframe.

Steve received his PhD in computer architecture from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1992, where he was a Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and Hertz Foundation Fellow. He holds seventeen US patents, has served on numerous program committees, and has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Steve’s interests lie in the areas of procesor architecture, memory system design, synchronization and communication mechanisms, and interconnection networks. Steve was the recipient of the 2005 Maurice Wilkes Award, given by the Association for Computing Machinery, and the 2005 Seymour Cray Computer Engineering Award, given by the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Gifts to the Computer Sciences Department Annual Fund allow us the flexibility to meet the departments most urgent needs.

By clicking on any of the links below, you can quickly and easily help sponsor undergraduate excellence initiatives, sponsor competitive graduate assistance packages, or provide support for alumni services.

Please remember that your employer may have a matching program that can double, or even triple, your gift to Computer Sciences.

Gifts to the Computer Sciences Department Annual Fund allow us the flexibility to meet the departments most urgent needs.

By clicking on any of the links below, you can quickly and easily help sponsor undergraduate excellence initiatives, sponsor competitive graduate assistance packages, or provide support for alumni services.

Please remember that your employer may have a matching program that can double, or even triple, your gift to Computer Sciences.

Gifts to the Computer Sciences Department Annual Fund allow us the flexibility to meet the departments most urgent needs.

By clicking on any of the links below, you can quickly and easily help sponsor undergraduate excellence initiatives, sponsor competitive graduate assistance packages, or provide support for alumni services.

Please remember that your employer may have a matching program that can double, or even triple, your gift to Computer Sciences.