Kyle Chard
Kyle Chard recently completed his PhD and having started work at the Computation Institute at the University of Chicago is excited about his future prospects. Coming from a family of computer scientists, Kyle was keen to explore other options and enrolled in a BSc at Victoria in maths and physics. However, Kyle was soon drawn into computers and ended up attaining a BSc with First Class Honours in Computer Science.
"I'm a logical person - I like taking things apart and seeing how they work. Computer science is about making things work in the real world. I am also a practical person about my career - I want a career where I get to develop real solutions to real problems."
A presentation at Victoria on overseas internships was the starting point for an 18-month internship at IBM's Silicon Valley Laboratory.
"The environment at IBM was very multicultural and I made friends with interns from all over the world. I've kept in regular contact with many of the others and it's interesting to see where our careers are leading us and how they are developing. It was also interesting to work in an environment that, while commercially orientated, also valued creativity.
A highlight for me was "Think Fridays" where staff got to develop prototypes and work on projects they were interested in. There's a great deal of flexibility and that's what I like about working in this field. You're expected to work hard and deliver, but you can work at any time of the day or night - it's not a regular nine to five job."
On returning to Victoria, Kyle decided to complete a PhD and is now in his final stages. He is researching economic meta-scheduling mechanisms for allocating tasks to specific resources in a Grid - a collection of networked computers which share resources in a dynamic organisation. Grids can be used to solve a diverse range of scientific problems as they can access large amounts of information and process it.
Kyle's research has taken him to top institutions around the world. He says his work at the University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory in the Globus Research Group stands out.
"Information is a valuable resource. Computer science gives scientists in other fields, such as cancer research, the chance to develop collaborative information networks. It is important that research, especially in the medical field, is shared as it accelerates the discovery of new approaches and hopefully cures.
"Central to this are distributed supercomputers that can link researchers working in different locations all over the world. The computers collect huge amounts of data, analyse and integrate the information and make it available to researchers incredibly quickly. In the near future I would like to work collaboratively with a group of researchers on large-scale scientific projects."
