CISE Alumni Brings Industry Experience, Guidance to Students
Tiansheng Zhang was the invited speaker at the Fall 2018 CISE Industry Roundtable. Zhang received his PhD degree from Boston University in Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2017. He is currently a senior software engineer at Akamai Technologies, the world’s biggest provider of content delivery network, or CDN, services.
Ayse K. Coskun, CISE faculty and ECE Associate Professor, introduced Zhang to Roundtable student attendees. Zhang’s mentor at Boston University, Professor Coskun praised Zhang’s reliability and his impact as a mentor to graduate students through technical and social activities. “He is smart and hardworking,” Coskun said. Noting him as one of her first students, she added, “Tiansheng helped build my lab culture, and the community here.”
Zhang spoke about his transition from academia to industry, sharing experiences and insights. During his PhD career, Zhang’s research interests focused on memory system design, silicon-photonic network-on-chip, and system-level thermal/resource management. Now at Akamai, Zhang is responsible for estimating the real-time network traffic and available network capacity of the servers. He works alongside a team to develop software that monitors Akamai CDN’s status and help makes decisions in capacity planning and future server deployments.
Though Zhang transitioned from chip optimization to networks after he graduated, he told students that he still finds similarities. More specifically, Zhang noted, is “how you approach a problem and how you solve it, [by] using optimization techniques and data analysis.”
Zhang also tied problem-solving skillset to the job search. During his experience interviewing, Zhang said that he found it important to learn from each interview, examine what worked and what didn’t, and prepare for the next one well.
Zhang received his B.S. in microelectronics from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, in 2010. He also worked at Advanced SoC and Integrated System Research Center as an undergraduate for two years. Prior to receiving his PhD degree, Zhang held internships at EPFL in Switzerland, MediaTek Inc. in Woburn, as well as Oracle Corp. in California.
CISE Industry Roundtables are a forum to connect CISE students with CISE alumni to facilitate sharing information, insights, and experiences about post-graduation experiences and opportunities in an informal, dynamic atmosphere.