Education: undergraduate degree at UO, Masters and PhD, UC Urvine
Oregon native: Grew up around Roseburg, in a very rural area.
Message to kids like me: "Be open to new directions. And don’t sell yourself short."
A latecomer to computer science: "I actually was well into my college career. My first love was creative writing and was studying to be an English teacher in high schools. I was exposed to computers through a math course an interactive program and was intrigued so took off from there. I credit getting into computer science to a John Dos Pasos novel I was studying which was not interesting me. Meanwhile I was taking a computer graphics course and having a great time. It was a hard decision and I was within a year of graduating in English but I completely changed direction." Listen to Michal Young on being a latecomer to CS
Back in the days: "I used to go down and watch people use software that I had written and that was such a kick in the pants; I built that and these guys were using it!"
Research focus: "A lot of my research has been a fairly technical area of analyzing programs that have more than one thing going on at once, we call it concurrency. Recently, I started working with somebody in geography who specializes in tactile maps for blind people. Blind people need maps maybe even more than sighted people; they can’t just look around at signs and figure out where to go, but there are really challenges. Obviously print won’t do. I am working with her on maps that are served by computers and get used with sound and touch feedback. Quite frankly, we don’t know how to do this yet; it’s very experimental." Listen to Michal Young on mapping software for the blind
Author, artist, computer scientist? "To me running software is an inherently creative task. I don’t see a big difference between writing a short story and writing a program. We think of science as running an experiment but a lot of it is finding the right way to think about things. It’s about finding the structure that works and hangs together."
A different kind of math: "With the computer the problem solving and the feedback you get is much harder to get from other kinds of math. It does something and you see it work and you can think of practical applications. That is such a great combination. I was just one of those kids for whom nothing could be more rewarding."
Free time=cycling time: "I’m an avid bicyclist. I’m into century rides which are 100 mile bicycle rides. Right now, I’m a little over 6,000 miles for the year."
Major misperceptions: "There is a widespread perception that programmers only interact with machines and that’s wrong. Programmers interact mostly with other people."
How does going to grad school affect your options? "The difference between a BA and a Masters is largely the sophistication of the work. You really learn a lot in the masters that allows you to take on interesting kinds of projects. A PhD is really about setting your own direction."