By Regina Pynn, '11
Student Correspondent
Mark Sullivan, ‘02
Software Engineer, YouTube
“As I've gotten older, I've become a believer in the theory that it takes 10 years to do anything well.”
This is the personal philosophy of Mark Sullivan, '98. Mark, originally from New Milford, NJ, entered Stevens in 1993 to complete a degree in Computer Science. His life’s journey has taken him to YouTube, a part of Google, a dream job for many in the computer science field.
In his day-to-day activities, Mark encounters problems that test his creativity, programming skills, and problem solving ability. One problem Mark is currently working on is how best to filter out inappropriate videos from YouTube.
“YouTube's users upload far too many videos for anyone to manually review, so our users help us by ‘flagging’ inappropriate videos. But even that can create a backlog of work, so how can we decide a video's priority for our reviewers? Based on its total number of flags? Or how fast it's being flagged? Can we recognize written or spoken words from the video…And then how do we combine these different signals to get a single priority? And how do we make this run quickly enough? How can we adjust things when we get more reliable signals or when our users' behavior changes?”
There are interesting questions here, only some of which have well-known answers, and those can be difficult to scale…my days consist of some simple programming tasks, some design and discussion, some data analysis, the occasional interview, talks and seminars, and teaching my coworkers to unicycle.”
Stevens not only taught Mark world-class technical skills, but allowed him to work in groups outside of the classroom. As an undergraduate Mark participated in many extracurricular activities including Jazz Band, Dramatic Society, the Yacht Club, and several campus media groups including SIT-TV, WCPR, and The Stute.
Mark participated in the co-op program during his time at Stevens and he feels it put him well ahead of that 10 year curve by letting him “start doing well ahead of schedule. The series of short but full-time jobs gave me a chance to sample life across a wide variety of companies, make contacts, and motivate me for my academic studies.”
One part of the academic environment of Stevens that Mark appreciated were the frequent seminars hosted by the computer science department.
“The one-hour seminars each featured a professor's new research, a doctoral thesis, a potential hire's project results, or a visiting celebrity with something interesting to say. I could always understand the introduction, would usually be lost by the end, but I always learned about a field new to me. It was great exercise in approaching unknown problems, and it's been invaluable -- not only to be exposed to so many techniques of dealing with particular problems -- but to appreciate the variety of approaches.” He advises all students to attend seminars held by their department, “even if you can only understand the first half hour.”
To students considering a career in computer science Mark advises, “let yourself be fascinated…I’m still amazed at the tall stack of technologies necessary to make a computer work…I am a software engineer; software design is best viewed as an art. In both engineering and the arts, elegance is prized.”