Industrial Advisory Board

The CSE Industrial Advisory Board consists of industrial representatives selected by the Department Chairperson. The primary mission of the Board is to insure the world is aware of the quality of research and teaching done in CSE. A three part action plan has been devised for accomplishing this plan.

  1. Through the members’ prominent corporate positions or via interaction with their extensive network connections, they will watch for internships, jobs, and grant situations for CSE students and assist them in attaining those goals. Board members will also aid faculty members with collaboration opportunities as well new funding sources.

  2. As leaders in their respective areas, they will inform the Department of changes and new trends within the computing field and suggest adjustments in strategic planning to meet these shifts. Their guidance will be a vital component in raising the Department of Computer Science and Engineering to its greater level of recognition.

  3. During these challenging economic times, the Board will give direction for organizing individual and major donation activities. They will watch for and develop relationship with substantive donors affecting large endowments for increased research funding and expansion as well scholarship funds.

The Board members are:

  • James Cates, MS ’71, is currently CIO of Altera, Corp., the world’s pioneer of system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions, and is a keen advocate of converging IT to business goals. Jim draws on more that 30 years of executive leadership in software development, IT deployment and corporate management in leading companies including Brocade, Information Technology Solutions, Synopsys, Silicon Graphics and IBM. He serves on several university advisory boards.

  • Wayne Clark, BS ’73, is currently an architect within the CTO office of the Network Management Technology Group at Cisco Systems. In his current role at Cisco, he is focusing on the next generation network management infrastructure, autonomic computing, and intelligent networking. Prior to his work in network management, he was the founding engineer of the Interworks Business Unit at Cisco which focused on the transformation of traditional IBM corporate enterprise networks into IP-based internetworks. He served as Cisco’s SNA Architect from 1991 through 1998 and was one of the leading advocates within Cisco for establishing its east coast headquarters in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

  • David Cohen, Ph.D ‘77, has over 30 years of experience in software development and systems engineering. He is the co-founder and president of sente.com, Inc.   sente deployed a requirements validation toolkit to significantly improve return on software investments (ROI).   sente also deployed the validation platform to extend the life cycle of legacy systems. He has authored many publications in the area of database security, distributed database management for new network services, software reliability, software development and operations center productivity. Currently, David is managing investments and exploring planet earth for fun, adventure and photography.

  • Steve Dritz, BS ’76, is Vice President of Infrastructure at Exel, a supply chain analysis, design and management company. He received his BS in computer science and engineering at Ohio State, and he also had a MBA from University Dayton.
     

  • Jim Escoe, MS’91, is a High Performance Computing Strategist at the Procter & Gamble Company.  He was CAD and CAE program manager and a senior software engineer from 1991 to 1998 at the Structural Dynamics Research Corporation (SDRC).  He received his MS degree in computer science and engineering at Ohio State, and BS in Civil Engineering from University of Pittsburgh.


  • Mike Fortin, MS `87, Ph.D `91, is a Microsoft Distinguished Engineer in the Windows division and serves as the Mulit-core Champion for Microsoft and is the Director of Development for the REliability, Security, Performance, Telemetry, Licensing & Deployment, and Ecosystem Fundamentals teams. He has management and architectural oversight responsibilities for disciplines such as performance, reliability, feedback, application compatibility, and diagnosis. GBefore joining Microsoft in 1997, Mike worked at IBM Austin as a performance analyst and architect on a variety of operating systems. He resides in Redmond, Washington with his wife, fellow OSU and alum Marta, and their four daughters.

  • Ray Harishankar, MS `90, is an IBM Fellow and CTO of Global Solutions and Asset Management within IBM Global Business Services in Dublin, OH. In tha trole, Ray defines and operationalizes strategies for GBS to have strong portfolio of Business Solutions and SOA based assets. Having had a long and distinguished industry career, Ray is an information technology professional with substantive and versatile skills and experience in the design, delivery and support of complex solutions integrating many leading technology and process elements and in technical leadership. He was named the Asian American Engineer of the year in 2009 by the Chinese Institute of Engineers USA.

  • Julie Hartigan,MS `89, Ph.D `94, is the Chief Technology Officer for North America at Darktrace. Darktrace is a new technological approach to cyber defense. This new approach is delivered by cutting-edge technology that is capable of learning ‘self’ within an organization in real time – enabling it to detect emerging threats that bypass other security controls.  In 2010, Dr. Hartigan received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from OSU’s College of Engineering. Prior to joining Darktrace, Dr. Hartigan served as Chief Technology Officer at Expert Systems and Chief Technology Officer over Government Systems at Teradata.

  • Shivnandan (Shiv) Kaushik (MS, '91; Ph.D. '95) excels as the Director of the Systems Software and a member of the Solutions Group where he directs work on the definition and optimization of platform and firmware interfaces to operating systems and core virtualization software. Recently named an Intel Fellow (see page 9), Kaushik holds 12 patents with 29 patents pending in the areas of system software and platform architecture. He has received three Intel Achievement Awards.

  • Jai Menon (MS, '78; PhD. '81) has been with IBM Research in San Jose, California, since 1982 and currently leads as the Functional Manager in CS Storage Systems.  Also, he is the co-director of the Storage Systems Institute, a virtual organization/joint program between IBM Research and the Storage Systems Group aimed at speeding the incorporation of scientific and technological advances into IBM storage systems products.  An IEEE Fellow and member of the IBM Academy of Technology, Menon has received numerous IBM technical awards, published 31 refereed papers and 46 technical reports and is contributing author to three books on database and storage systems. He holds 42 U.S. Patents and has 20 additional patent applications on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He received the 2002 W. Wallace McDowell Award from the IEEE for "Leading Contributions to the Architecture and Design of Data Storage Systems and RAID Technology."
     
  • Michael Morell (BS '93) Upon graduation, Michael was commissioned and served on active duty with the US Air Force.  In 2002, he founded Riviera Partners, a search firm focused on placing senior software executives in Silicon Valley, New York and Los Angeles.  Michael is an active investor and advisor to technology companies.  He and his family reside in San Francisco, California

  • Conleth O’Connell (PhD. ’90) is the Chief Technology Officer for Vignette Corporation in Texas. Dr. O’Connell started with Vignette at its inception and helped develop the company’s initial product offering. Con (as he is known) joined Vignette from HaL Computer Systems where he led product development efforts and participated in the Davenport Group. Prior to that, he spent time as a director of an Industrial Consortium, where he supervised graduate students who produced an integrated software architecture and later co-authored a book on the architectural design of the project. Dr. O'Connell holds several patents for innovation in content management and delivery.

  • Doug Roble, PhD'92, at Digital Domain, is the Creative Director of Software. He has received two technical awards from the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences. In service to the greater graphics technology community, he is Chief Editor of the Journal of Graphics Tools and is on several panels and committees of SIGRAPH, the most prestigious computer graphics conference, including its Advisory Board. In 2002, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from OSU’s College of Engineering. Dr. Roble was a student of Dr. Rick Parent and received his Ph.D. in 1992 after receiving his Masters in 1987. Doug resides in California with his wife, and fellow alum, Dr. Deborah Shands.
     
  • Vinay Sharma, PhD’08, is a computer vision researcher at Apple. From 2008 to 2013, he was a research engineer at Texas Instrument.  His research and development efforts focus on developing algorithms and prototypes for vision applications on embedded devices.
     

  • Dana Vantrease, BS’02 is a hardware engineer at Amazon Web Services, where she works on custom silicon solutions for the cloud. She is a Qualcomm Innovation Finalist, NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and holds patents in Silicon Photonics and Computer Architecture. She received her PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2010.

  • Rosi Wyan, BS’12, is an Associate of JPMorgan Chase after she received her CSE degree at Ohio State in 2012. She also had a Bachelor degree in Finance from University of Texas at Austin. She has been actively involved in various student activities since she was a student at Ohio State.

Several members of the Board have received the Distinguished Alumni from the College of Engineering. They are:

  • James Cates - 1989
  • Doug Roble - 2002
  • Bruce Flinchbaugh - 2003
  • Jai Menon - 2004
  • Conleth O'Connell - 2006
  • Wayne Clark - 2007
  • Matt Desch - 2009
  • Julie Hartigan - 2010
  • Mike Fortin - 2012
  • Ray Harishankar - 2013

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