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CAII Undergraduates Graduate December 2022

December was the time for holidays, food, snow and and although many don’t usually think of it – Graduation!

We would like to offer congratulations to two CAII undergrads who wrote their senior theses with Volodymyr Kindratenko, Director of NCSA Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation,  as their advisor.  Their achievements are made even more remarkable by the challenges faced over the past couple of years.

Here are some highlights about them:

Joseph Rejive

Fall 2022 Graduate

  • Bachelor of Science – Electrical and Electronics Engineering
  • ML and Speech Recognition Intern at NCSA
  • Senior Thesis:  Implementing Sparse CNNs on FPGAs

Plans After Graduation:

I’ll be working full time as a GPU Architect Engineer at Nvidia. After a few years, I plan on pursuing my Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering, before returning to work in industry. 

What has been your biggest achievement at University of Illinois: 

My biggest achievement at UIUC is being able to financially support my three and a half years of study by participating in paid research positions, including the NCSA SPIN internship. 

What is your favorite memory at NCSA:

My favorite memory at NCSA was being able to meet a variety of people during the ice-cream social during my first year as a SPIN intern!


William Eustis

Fall 2022 Graduate

  • Bachelor of Science – Computer Engineering
  • Deep Learning Intern at NCSA
  • Senior Thesis: Exploring Sparse and Novel Computer Vision Architectures

Plans After Graduation:

I’m starting as a Hardware Engineering at Jump Trading in Chicago later in 2023. I’ll be doing FPGA design for low latency networking. 

What has been your biggest achievement at University of Illinois:

I was the course lead for several of the introductory ECE and CS honors courses (ECE 110 Honors, ECE 120 Honors, CS196, CS 124 Honors, CS 128 Honors, and ECE 210 Honors). I’ve had the amazing opportunity to design courses to support the supervised personal projects, special topic instruction, and general education of over just 1000 students across two years. The courses now have new leads, but I’m proud of the students I taught during my time as lead and the amazing communities that exist after my departure. 

What is your favorite memory at NCSA:

Professor Kindratenko’s mentorship has been a never-ending source of support. I’m extremely thankful to him as well as the entire NCSA community for organizing and allowing me to participate in such a wonderful opportunity. I can’t quite pin down a single favorite memory but my mentor, fellow students, and other researchers and staff at NCSA has made my experience one to cherish.